Tall, with a mound of curls spilling onto her face, Barbara Simon seems just like the preschool and elementary faculty substitute trainer she is now.
But behind the silver wire-rimmed glasses and glowing equipment is a hard-nosed ex-cop with a repute as “The Closer” – a powerful interrogator recognized for her uncanny potential to elicit confessions in homicide circumstances.
Simon, 78, solved – or closed – lots of of homicide circumstances through the 20 years she spent as a homicide investigator with the Detroit Police Department.
Now, she is on the middle of at the very least six homicide convictions which have been overturned or vacated — two as lately as final month — after state courts discovered proof that the confessions and eyewitness statements she helped acquire have been tainted by misconduct starting from coercion to falsification, leading to harmless Black males being imprisoned for years earlier than they have been absolved.
Simon’s actions inflicted deep and lasting emotional wounds, the former prisoners and their attorneys say.
Her alleged techniques, which have been first reported by the Detroit Metro Times in 2024, have additionally led to millions of dollars in settlements at Detroit taxpayers’ expense, with no acknowledgment of wrongdoing by the town or police division.
Although Simon has by no means been charged with a criminal offense, many of her former circumstances are underneath evaluate and extra exonerations are anticipated, attorneys with the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic informed NCS.
Simon has repeatedly denied the allegations in previous testimony and declined NCS’s requests for remark for this story; the Detroit Police Department by no means disciplined her over the claims. Attorneys who represented Simon in earlier lawsuits didn’t reply to NCS’s requests for remark. The Detroit Police Department and the town of Detroit additionally didn’t reply.
Mark Craighead sat earlier than Simon in an interrogation room in 2000, when Detroit cops introduced the husband and father to the previous police headquarters, telling him it was about “a three-year-old case that we need to close.”
Craighead had been questioned twice earlier than for the homicide of his shut good friend Chole Pruett, however he insisted he didn’t do it and was at work in a locked warehouse 20 miles away on the time of the capturing.
He was held in a single day in a jail cell crawling with roaches and mice and his repeated requests to name his spouse and an lawyer have been ignored.
When Craighead met with Simon, “She tells me that my wife is going to find herself a new husband and my kids are going to be calling somebody else daddy if I didn’t tell her what I had done because I am going to jail for the rest of my life,” Craighead mentioned, in keeping with courtroom paperwork from a 2001 evidentiary listening to to find out if his confession was made voluntarily.
Craighead was pressured to take a polygraph check, which he was informed he failed.
“She told me that if I don’t start cooperating with her and tell her what really happened, that she would use the polygraph and the witness statement to place me at the scene of the crime,” Craighead mentioned. “And that would convict me, convict me and then send me to jail for the rest of my life.”
But, Craighead mentioned Simon informed him, there “must have been a reason for the shooting.”
“She told me I didn’t seem like the kind of person that would kill and rob my best friend so I must have had a reason.”
Craighead mentioned Simon gave him an instance, “like an argument that turned into a fight … and it was an accident that the gun went off and did something like that happen, if it happened like that, that I should tell her.”
Only then, she informed him, might she assist him get his prices decreased, get an lawyer and get bond and “fight this thing on the outside,” he testified.
“They called her ‘The Closer,’” Craighead mentioned in an interview with NCS. The police “knew what tactics she was using.”
If he didn’t cooperate, then Simon mentioned she would “use what she got and send me to jail for the rest of my life.”
Craighead didn’t see a manner out, so he admitted to the capturing and signed a confession written by Simon.
He was convicted of manslaughter for his good friend’s loss of life, a sentence which he fought even after his parole in 2009.
His break got here when Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Shannon Walker vacated the conviction in February 2021 and ordered a brand new trial, citing Simon’s “history of falsifying confessions and lying under oath.”
“This new evidence establishes a common scheme of misconduct,” Walker wrote within the order. “This impeachment evidence demonstrates that Simon has repeatedly lied as part of her misconduct, which would allow a jury to evaluate whether to trust her testimony in light of information demonstrating a character for truthfulness.”
The Michigan Court of Appeals later affirmed the decision, writing that the “newly discovered evidence also indicates that Investigator Simon’s interrogation tactics demonstrated a scheme, plan, or system to obtain false confessions.”
Later, the prosecution dismissed Craighead’s charges and he was exonerated.
The manner the choices unfolded in circumstances involving Simon was “groundbreaking,” mentioned Imran Syed, a law professor and co-director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic.
“In Michigan, that sort of pattern-and-practice-based exoneration wasn’t really a thing until Craighead,” he mentioned.
“That finding, that (Simon’s) credibility is diminished to the point where a conviction that was based on a confession she obtained should be overturned just opened up a whole bunch of possibilities.”
The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office declined to remark about Craighead’s case or any of the others dealt with by Simon. But Prosecutor Kym Worthy mentioned in a statement final month that her workplace’s “systematic review of Investigator Simon’s cases” is “exhaustive and ongoing.” Worthy added that the conviction integrity unit has “been consistently working on these cases and more involving other DPD Homicide detectives.”
Justly Johnson and Kendrick Scott every spent practically twenty years in jail for a killing they didn’t commit in a case Simon investigated.
The males have been arrested for the brutal homicide of Lisa Kindred in entrance of her youngsters on Mother’s Day 1999, based mostly on witness testimony that was recanted.
“It was a very high-profile case. And the Detroit police felt the pressure. Somebody in that neighborhood was going to prison. They didn’t care who it was,” Johnson, now 52, informed NCS. “The whole agenda was they were going to put that murder on somebody, and we were the suspects, and we were going to take that case.”
“Basically, our lives were destroyed,” he mentioned.
The pair filed quite a few unsuccessful appeals till new proof emerged 12 years later: the eyewitness account from Charmous Skinner Jr., Kindred’s son, who was 8 on the time of the homicide, and testified that Johnson and Scott weren’t the killers.
The Michigan Supreme Court remanded the cases for brand spanking new trials and the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office later dismissed the costs. Johnson and Scott have been exonerated in 2018.
At a deposition in 2019, Skinner mentioned the Detroit Police Department by no means interviewed him – despite the fact that he was sitting proper subsequent to his mom within the minivan when she was shot.
Simon informed Johnson she was underneath strain to shut the case when she interrogated him, in keeping with an affidavit from Johnson.
“Investigator Simon then told me that investigators did talk to my alibi witnesses but it didn’t matter because the mayor was on her boss, and her boss was on them (homicide investigators) and they were going to charge me with the murder whether I was innocent or not,” Johnson mentioned within the affidavit.
She mentioned, “they were going to charge me with murder, and that there wasn’t a jury in America that wouldn’t convict me for killing a white woman,” Johnson mentioned, earlier than she “stormed out of the room.”
In a 2020 deposition concerning the Kindred case, Simon mentioned she didn’t bear in mind the case and mentioned she wasn’t concerned with interrogating the witnesses, who recanted their statements.
She additionally denied being “under any pressure” to shut homicide circumstances.
“I did my job. I did the best that I could,” she mentioned on the deposition.
Simon graduated from the police academy in 1977 and labored her manner up from a patrol officer and member of the intercourse crimes unit to turn into a homicide investigator with the Detroit Police Department round 1990.
She has “become the poster child” of “Detroit police misconduct in the 1990s, 2000s,” Syed mentioned, however she was “not the only bad actor.”
“She comes from a culture where what she did was at least tolerated. And some of our clients would say it was more that it was encouraged. It was a whole cultural problem.”
That tradition was the topic of a Department of Justice investigation discovering that the Detroit Police Department’s homicide part within the Nineties was infamous for casting a large internet over whole neighborhoods and unlawfully arresting folks they believed knew a couple of homicide.
In 1998, Detroit police arrested greater than three folks for each homicide however solved fewer than half of them, in keeping with FBI statistics cited by the DOJ. The metropolis averaged more than 500 homicides a year that decade.
Detroit’s homicide part had a “practice of regularly arresting and detaining persons they believed to have information concerning a homicide-related offense, including suspects’ family members and individuals who lived in the vicinity of the crime,” the DOJ report mentioned.
“When there was a high-profile murder in the neighborhood, they were happy to violate the rights of every single person in that community,” Syed, who was lead counsel on the Johnson and Scott circumstances, mentioned concerning the homicide unit. “They were just going to arrest any random young Black man who was in the vicinity.”
With time and consciousness, the tradition on the Detroit Police Department has slowly modified.
“Once that kind of conduct starts to be revealed, I think, thankfully, the community kind of wakes up and understands there should be a limit to what police can do,” Syed mentioned.
In 2003, the DOJ and Detroit agreed to a monitor to oversee reforms at the police department, together with use of pressure, illegal detention practices and different misconduct. The oversight resulted in 2014, when the DOJ mentioned the division had successfully resolved many of the unconstitutional practices that prompted federal intervention.
Meanwhile, the state passed a law in 2013 requiring police to make video and audio recordings of statements from folks arrested for major crimes.
There have been different penalties for the town too – just like the hefty settlement funds Detroit doled out to the exonerated males in Simon’s circumstances. Johnson and Scott every obtained $8 million settlements.
“I will say it would appear with the new police department leadership in the last several years, they want to make themselves more accountable,” mentioned lawyer Wolfgang Mueller, who represented Johnson, Scott and Craighead in authorized motion. “And for selfish reasons, the city’s paying out too much money, and it gives the good cops a black eye.”
During Simon’s time with the police division, interrogations befell on the gritty previous police headquarters constructing at 1300 Beaubien Street, a hulking nine-story monolith that occupied an entire city block in downtown Detroit. Witnesses and suspects have been typically held for hours and even days with out possible trigger, transferring between small interrogation rooms and filthy, vermin-infested holding cells, in keeping with the DOJ report and accounts from the exonerated males and their attorneys.
“Barbara Simon was involved in scores, probably hundreds, of interrogations over a long career, and we just don’t know how many of those cases are bogus, are tainted, but surely there’s more,” mentioned David Moran, who co-founded the Michigan Innocence Clinic on the University of Michigan Law School and was lead counsel on two main circumstances involving the homicide investigator.
The Michigan Court of Appeals described “striking” similarities in how Simon interrogated three of her circumstances.
She “was seen as one of the police department’s best interrogators, with a reputation for getting suspects to confess and witnesses to name names,” in keeping with the National Registry of Exonerations, which tracks exonerations by way of publicly accessible data.
Simon acknowledged her repute throughout a deposition in 2023.
“You were considered a very good interrogator, right?”
“That’s what they say,” she answered.
“And you were very good at getting confessions, right?” requested Mueller.
“I did my job. So, I am not going to say I was a pro.”
DNA and preserved proof result in reversals in decades-old circumstances
Police typically concluded homicide investigations after getting signed confessions.
“I had a detective tell me, ‘A case is closed if we get an arrest warrant signed, or if there’s a confession, and whatever happens at trial happens, but we closed our case,’” Mueller mentioned.
George Calicut Jr. is one such instance. He had admitted stealing a cellphone in 1999, however prosecutors and his attorneys say he later signed a false confession written by Simon claiming he killed a girl and left with “$5 and a cell phone.”
Calicut had no prior interactions with police and at his trial, “there were no eyewitnesses or physical evidence linking” him “to the crime. DNA testing was ordered but not performed.”
An agreement dismissing the case says Simon informed Calicut she might assist him by drafting a press release that would cut back the cost to manslaughter — and warned that if he contacted a lawyer, he’d be charged with first-degree homicide.
After the Michigan Innocence Clinic requested the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office to evaluate the case, it was found that DNA proof excluded Calicut from the scene and he was freed final month after practically 30 years behind bars.
“I’m still trying to figure out what it means to be free,” he informed NCS.
Preserved proof from the crime scene additionally led to Lamarr Monson’s homicide conviction being vacated after he served 20 years in jail.
Monson was convicted in 1997 based mostly on what he says was a false confession after Simon interrogated him.
“You could say she was aggressive. I would say she was mean,” Monson mentioned of Simon. “I was in a state of shock, and she tried to take advantage of that.”
He mentioned she wrote a press release omitting his alibi and falsely mentioned he stabbed a woman – regardless of a medical expert’s testimony that the kid was possible overwhelmed with a bathroom tank lid discovered on the scene, in keeping with courtroom information.
“She just began to twist my words and twist things in a way you could say she was answering her own questions. And in doing so, she falsified (the) statement,” Monson informed NCS.
“As I complained about me wanting a lawyer, or me wanting to use the phone, she would just kind of shut down, leave the room, maybe leave me in there about an hour or so, then come back in and begin to continue the questions,” he mentioned. “She was actively piecing together what she wanted things to look like.”
Moran, Monson’s lawyer, examined the bathroom tank lid in 2016 – and found fingerprints embedded within the blood stains.
“The toilet tank lid was sitting in a Detroit police warehouse,” Moran recalled. “They brought it out for us and unwrapped it, and it was still covered in dried blood. And in the dried blood were fingerprints they had never bothered to run because they had obtained a false confession from Lamarr Monson within hours.”
The prints matched one other man who had confessed to his ex-girlfriend, and Monson was launched.
Monson’s case was settled with the city for $8.5 million, in keeping with the National Registry of Exonerations.
“I do want (Simon) to be held accountable for her actions,” Monson informed NCS. “She’s made a career of doing this to young Black men in particular. I just have a real disdain about that.”
A number of weeks after Calicut’s launch, one other man convicted of second-degree homicide based mostly on a press release obtained by Simon was additionally freed.
In the case towards Roy Blackmon, two witnesses later testified their statements have been coerced. They mentioned Simon threatened to cost them as equipment to homicide until they implicated Blackmon in a deadly capturing.
Blackmon is now pursuing a bachelor’s diploma and hopes to turn into a social employee and mentor younger folks, in keeping with the Innocence Clinic.
He joins Johnson, Scott, Craighead, Monson and Calicut in attempting to rebuild their lives after years behind bars – and so they share a perception that justice gained’t be full till Simon solutions for what she did.
“I pray for her,” Johnson mentioned. “I can’t say I forgive her. She needs to be punished. She hasn’t apologized to nobody. You know what, it’s probably better. She’s probably tormented every day.”
As the boys await accountability, Simon stays within the Detroit space. Last 12 months, she testified in a deposition that she has been working as an alternative trainer for college kids from preschool by way of fourth grade, nevertheless it’s not clear which faculty district. An organization that contracts substitute lecturers for colleges within the Detroit space didn’t reply to repeated requests for remark. Before that, after retiring from the police division, she labored as a particular agent for the Michigan Attorney General’s Child Support Division.
Simon “worked exclusively on matters related to nonpayment in child support cases,” Michigan Attorney General spokesperson Danny Wimmer mentioned in a press release.
“In her position at this department it would not have been possible for Ms. Simon to engage in the type of misconduct she is now alleged to have committed at other agencies, and we are aware of no issues concerning her investigations into parents who refused to pay child support,” the assertion mentioned.