The Wrong Guy

"I think the McKinney police panicked," says attorney King, a former Dallas County felony judge. "They were trying to make sure that no one left the area who might be a suspect. That's good police work, but it's not constitutionally sound."

On May 18 McKinney police obtained an arrest warrant for Wooley. Searching his home in McKinney, detectives found it suspicious that his computer had been destroyed. They found no stockpiles of weapons or food, but rather a video series titled The Men Who Shot Kennedy. Since police were investigating what appeared to be "a sniper shooting," they seized the tapes.

The following day, three McKinney detectives retrieved Wooley from Amarillo and escorted him first to McKinney police headquarters then to the Collin County jail, where he was placed under a suicide watch. At police headquarters, King met with his client, then with detectives. "They told me they would sure like to talk with Paul and polygraph him," he says. "I told them they had the wrong guy."

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McKinney police headquarters, May 21, 2002, 2 p.m.

When the McKinney police announced they had charged Wooley with murder and attempted murder, their "media release" sounded as weak as the circumstantial evidence on which they built their case: "Paul Wooley is one of several suspects identified by the McKinney Police Department in connection with these offenses," the release stated. "The department, working in conjunction with the Texas Rangers, will continue to look at other possible suspects."

If the police were tentative about their freshly arraigned assailant, the media held no similar compunction. Cameras captured his "perp walk" and broadcast Wooley in blue jail togs, shamefully hiding his face from view. Reporters were handed the arrest affidavit, which gave them full license to write about Wooley's mental condition. Neighbors were solicited and offered stock responses: He lived alone; he kept to himself; he was a complainer.

Yet even in their media release, the police maintained that their investigation was not closed. Evidence had been submitted to laboratories for forensic analysis, and the results, they said, would take several days to complete.

Deposition testimony and police records suggest that the preliminary results of these tests had already exonerated Wooley. On May 20, the day before the press release, a McKinney detective brought the bullet fragments recovered at the crime scene to the Department of Public Safety laboratory in Tyler and, according to a police affidavit, "Firearms Examiner Wade Thomas advised that the projectile was not a .223-caliber [the caliber of the rifle seized from Wooley] but was more consistent with a .270 or a 7mm."

While the lack of a ballistics match created doubt about Wooley's guilt, intelligence gathered by McKinney Detective Terry Morrison absolved him. Morrison analyzed Wooley's cell phone records, which revealed the time of his calls, their duration and location. Within 10 minutes of the murder, Wooley phoned co-worker Jill Smith from somewhere "right around the Red River...proving that it would have been impossible for Paul Wooley to be in McKinney at the time of the shooting," according to police reports.

Exactly when the police determined this remains a point of contention. Wooley's civil attorney, Jeff Lynch, believes the police had this information as early as Sunday, May 19, three days before his release, and chose not to act on it, using his client's continued incarceration to flush out the real killer. In his deposition, Chief Kowalski admitted his department had "preliminary information that indicated he [Wooley] may have been at a different location." While detectives were awaiting final confirmation of this information, they were stunned by a dramatic breakthrough.

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McKinney police headquarters, May 22, 2002, 12:30 p.m.

It had been a week since the shootings, and Raymond Wingfield had yet to provide police with a complete accounting of his whereabouts on the day of his wife's murder. Detectives never ruled him out as a suspect, and their interviews with friends, family and others revealed a man whose business and marriage were failing and whose honesty was in question. An avid hunter, an expert marksman and an ex-Marine--if anyone were stockpiling weapons, it was Wingfield.

When Corporal Drew Caudell interrogated Wingfield in the early afternoon of May 22, it was obvious he had no alibi. Rather than working as a firefighter on May 16, he dropped his two children at day care and ran errands for his home-building business. He spoke to his wife, Amy, several times that day, both before and after lunch. According to police records, he recalled being on Highway 289 driving from Frisco to Celina when he got a call from his wife's office telling him she had been hurt.

At the close of the interview, Caudell asked Wingfield if he would take a polygraph. Although Wingfield agreed to be tested the next day, the officer noticed "he dropped his head" and "his hands started to shake."