one such shell in the police property envelope that the department still kept. If that weren’t enough, it took five days for the bullet and shell that were allegedly found in Carter’s car to be vouchered into the police property book.
After a stop at the crime scene, the car and Carter and Artis were taken to the police station, where they were interrogated separately. Their hands were not checked for traces of gunpowder, and there were no weapons in the car. One was shown the bullet, the other the shell. Both men said they had nothing to do with the crime and had not seen any bullets or shells. Still in custody, Carter and Artis were then taken to local hospitals and shown to two survivors from the bar. After neither victim identified them as the killers, they were taken back to police headquarters and again placed in separate rooms. Both agreed to take lie detector tests, which were administered by a police sergeant. A few hours later they were released.
According to Raab, there was a dispute as to whether Carter and Artis had passed the lie detector tests, which wasn’t going to be resolved because the Paterson police department claimed that the tapes were destroyed in a flood. But the fact that two black murder suspects were released in an investigation of a triple homicide where all the victims were white was pretty good proof that Carter and Artis passed the tests. Had a matching bullet and shell actually been found in the car, and/or if either man had failed the lie detector tests, the police would have found some way to keep them in custody.
There were many other discrepancies. The white car that left the crime scene had out-of-state plates, as did Carter’s car, but only two black men fled, speeding off in the getaway vehicle. In the Carter car, however, a third black man, John Royster, was sitting in the front passenger seat, next to Artis, who was driving normally and immediately pulled over when flagged down by a police cruiser. Carter was in the back when they were stopped. Seeing three men inside, all acting calmly, the officer asked Carter, whom he recognized, where they were going. Satisfied with Carter’s answer, the cop resumed his search. After dropping off Royster, Carter and Artis were stopped a second time by the same officer in the same squad car—only this time he called for backup and drove Carter and Artis to the crime scene so that a young woman named Patricia Valentine, who lived above the Lafayette Bar and Grill, where the crime occurred, could identify them. Valentine said she went to her window after hearing the gunshots. There she saw two black men wearing sports jackets run out of the bar and jump into a white car with out-of-state plates.
When Carter and Artis, neither of whom was wearing a sports jacket, were put in front of her, Valentine didn’t recognize them as the men she had seen from her window, but she said that the car looked similar to the one that sped away. As time passed, the differences between the car that Valentine had seen speeding away after the shooting and Carter’s car dwindled. Also, the two survivors of the shooting said both the killers were about six feet tall, light skinned, and one had a mustache, but neither Carter nor Artis had a mustache and their height disparity—one short and the other tall—was striking. Equally telling, Carter was a well-known middleweight contender who lived in a white Paterson residential neighborhood. With three hometown witnesses, it seems unlikely that no one would have recognized him. But even if they hadn’t, Carter’s baldness, his very dark skin, and his prominent goatee were standout features. At police headquarters neither Carter, who knew the value of lawyers from his past street crimes, or Artis, asked for an attorney. Instead they had continued to cooperate with the police. Finally Hurricane left the country for a boxing match, returning afterward.
Four months later two small-time criminals named Al Bello and Arthur Bradley claimed they had been outside the Lafayette Bar. After they heard shots, they saw two black men run out, and they ran inside where they saw the dead and wounded sprawled all over the place.
Bello and Bradley had burglarized a building down the street from the bar just before the shooting. Arrested for the burglary, they fingered Carter and Artis and went free. Based on their say-so, the Passaic County