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When Tammie Lang Campbell answered her phone on March 1, 2021, she heard a cautious man on the other line. He asked to talk to the person who was helping Darius Elam.

“You're speaking with her,” Campbell said. As the founder of the Honey Brown Hope Foundation, a social justice nonprofit, Campbell had been fighting for Elam's freedom from prison for years, convinced he had been framed for the murder of a man 40 years earlier.

What came next, according to an affidavit she later signed, was a shocking admission and a jolt of hope: The caller, who identified himself as Roderick Lee – later understood to be an alias of jailhouse informant Patrick Patterson – said that he had lied about Elam when speaking to the police in 1983, and that he just made the same admission to the Houston Police Department.

It seemed like a breakthrough in the well-known Houston court case and Elam’s four-decade quest to prove his innocence. He had been sentenced to life in prison in 1984 for an aggravated robbery that ended in the death of the victim, Richard Bowen, a 27-year-old father of three children.

Yet Elam is still in prison after what seemed to be recent breakthroughs in his case turned sour.

Elam claims the case against him was built on a flimsy foundation of jailhouse informants and a key piece of planted evidence that later was destroyed. DNA tests conducted decades later on the victim’s fingernails failed to put Elam at the scene of the crime. In his fight for freedom, Elam has garnered the support not only of his family, but a growing group of Houston advocates agitating for his release.

But so far, his efforts have been shot down by the courts. When the jailhouse witness, Patterson, was called to the stand more than a year after his call to Campbell, he claimed he had no recollection of any such phone call, or even the trial he took part in. The courts decided that there was no evidence that Patterson recanted his trial testimony, and that recent DNA tests could not establish Elam’s innocence.

Now, Elam is running out of legal options. In what could be a last chance to challenge his conviction, Elam and his supporters now hope to unearth new evidence – and a new suspect – through a fight to test the DNA against a federal database. Elam still strives to prove that the piece of paper that put him at the murder scene was ripped off the pages of his class notes and planted by police.

“I just can't relent,” said Elam. “I can't see themselves prevailing over me, knowing it was a lie, knowing I didn't do this. That just keeps me motivated.”

A student from Chicago

In 1983, Darius Elam was a student at Texas Southern University, far from his Southside Chicago home. Though he came to TSU as a track athlete, he had since stopped running. Elam was married with kids, studied computer technology and worked in the afternoons at a store in the Galleria mall.

He also had another side hustle: baking pies to sell on campus, he said.

On the evening of May 5 that same year, Elam said he was doing just that – whipping up goodies to sell with his wife and his friends for extra cash while he studied at Houston’s historically Black college.

“Everybody loves sweets, so I would make these pies and I would sell them on campus, and they were selling like hotcakes… blueberry cheese pie, pineapple cheese pie, and you’d have what they call the bean pie,” said Elam. “That’s supposed to be the healthy pie.”

Area law enforcement told a different story. According to prosecutors, Elam was the killer in a violent robbery-turned-murder of Bowen that night. Bowen was shot inside his car on Rice University’s campus in a brutal crime after he disappeared from a banquet at the Shamrock Hilton Hotel on May 5, 1983.

The evidence against Elam: two jailhouse informants claimed Elam admitted to them that he and his partner had killed Bowen; police said they found a piece of paper in the victim’s car that contained one of Elam’s fingerprints and blood splatter; and the fact that Elam had been present, with the victim’s old receipts in his pocket, when classmate Clarence Richardson had used Bowen’s stolen credit cards the next day.

In 1984, a jury convicted Elam of aggravated robbery, and he was sentenced to life in prison by the judge. At the time, no DNA testing was available, but jurors found the evidence against Elam convincing.

When asked what she thought about Elam’s claims of innocence, Bowen’s widow, Vicki Bowen Atkinson, recalled the final moments of her husband’s trial.

“The jury came up to me and said after the trial was over they were so sorry that they couldn't put him behind bars forever and ever and ever,” she recalled. “I mean, they were so upset that they couldn't give him more than they did. So, they were more than convinced.”

Bowen Atkinson told the Landing that Bowen had been her middle school sweetheart and an excellent father. They had been expecting their third child when he was shot.

“I want justice. That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” she said, audibly upset. “We have to relive this every year because he comes up on parole every spring … and it’s not pleasant. It’s hard on my boys, it’s hard on me.”

Richardson – who claimed in an initial interview with police that he found Bowen’s credit cards in a park – was never charged in connection with Bowen’s death.

The case against Elam

The testimony of the jailhouse informant was only one of several key pieces of evidence against Elam at his trial in 1984, according to the Abdelraoufsinno’s review of more than a thousand pages of court transcripts. Bowen’s widow and a prosecutor in the appeals process say additional evidence presented at the trial undercut Elam’s claims of innocence.

That year, the state called multiple witnesses to the stand, from Galleria Mall clerks to Bowen’s wife and the numerous police officers who investigated his death. 31 pieces of evidence were entered into trial.

“I would suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen, that the type of case that we have presented to you is much like a jigsaw puzzle,” Charley Davidson, the prosecutor at the time, told the jury.

Three main pieces linked Elam to the crime.

First, he was with the man who used Bowen’s credit cards at the mall the day after the crime – a friend from school, Elam said. He did not make any purchases himself with the cards, and a witness at the trial said Elam had promised to pay his friend, Clarence Richardson, back for a pair of shoes purchased for him.

However, police also said they found credit card receipts in Elam’s jacket when he was arrested, which were dated from before Bowen went missing.

“The receipts honestly, in my mind, were the most important part of the evidence,” said Ryan Calvert, the special prosecutor assigned to Elam’s recent appeal.

Both in an interrogation the year of the crime, and in a recent interview with Abdelraoufsinno, Elam said he only saw the receipts when Richardson, his friend, tried to throw them away while they were shopping. But Elam picked them back up.

“I could have sworn I gave it to him,” said Elam in December. “But apparently I put it in my pocket – got distracted some kind of way and I put it in my pocket. But my intent was to give it to him because my argument was, you might want to save your credit card receipts. “

Calvert’s focus on the receipts was “wholly misplaced,” Elam later wrote in a letter.

At trial, Elam’s lawyer argued he had not been made aware of the receipts before the trial, and then in closing said they had been planted, as the initial search by a mall security guard did not produce such documents.

The second pillar of the prosecution's case: three jailhouse informants, two of whom testified that Elam had admitted to shooting and killing Bowen within minutes of entering their jail cell.

Elam said he had been the victim of a “boogie down,” where prisoners look for help or money by reading newspaper articles and reaching out to law enforcement to snitch on fellow inmates.

Offering jailhouse informants incentives to help authorities – like cash rewards and immunity – has long been accepted as a troubling problem in Texas and beyond. Nationally, one groundbreaking Northwestern Pritzker School of Law study found that jailhouse snitches were the “leading cause of wrongful convictions in U.S. capital [murder] cases.”

In Texas, legislators passed a law in 2017 that reigned in the unfettered use of potentially unreliable witnesses. But Elam was convicted in the 1980s as mass incarceration took hold in the state without such guardrails.

In Elam’s case, court records show that two witnesses, Anthony Ray Kelker and Patterson, had lied to authorities before and used multiple aliases to escape tougher sentencing as they racked up charges. Patterson was paid $300 dollars by police to help in Elam’s case, and Kelker hoped prosecutors would help get him a break on sentencing in his own court case.

The third witness, who records show pleaded guilty to prostitution after being booked into Harris County Jail – where he allegedly met Elam during the second week of May – said in court he was not promised help on his case. The Abdelraoufsinno did not find a criminal record for the witness, Barry Ward, in Harris County.

One article in the Houston Chronicle on May 8, 1983, which predated every witness statement, laid out many of the details of the case. An advertisement in the Houston Post on May 10 offered a $16,000 reward for “information leading to the arrest and indictment of those responsible for the slaying of Richard Bowen,” the equivalent of $50,000 today.

A crucial piece of paper

The third piece of key evidence was a piece of yellow paper with a single fingerprint matched to Elam, allegedly found on the floor of the car – and the piece of evidence Elam has most fervently rallied those around him to call out as a result of misconduct.

At Elam’s trial, the prosecutor surmised that Bowen’s assailants used the piece of paper to distract him.

“At the time they approached him, they felt it necessary to create some sort of diversion to take the victim's attention off their approach,” said prosecutor Charley Davidson during summations at the 1984 trial, theorizing that Elam had handed the paper to Bowen, which was dropped while Bowen was forced into the car.

“While your attention was diverted to the piece of paper, I would certainly have plenty of time to pull a pistol,” he said.

HPD print examiner Leonard Cooper said he found it on the floor of the front passenger side of the car just two days after the crime.

A signature on a copy of the piece of paper provided to the Landing by Elam reads “L Cooper” and is dated August 9, 1983 – three months after the crime was discovered. Cooper testified his initials were from after he processed the papers.

Elam has long argued that the yellow piece of paper with blood splatter was not explicitly listed on contemporaneous evidence logs or pictures from when the scene was investigated by HPD, evidence the paper was a plant by police, he said.

Evidence logs and pictures provided to the Abdelraoufsinno by Elam do not explicitly list a piece of yellow paper. Elam was incredulous when police asked him about it.

“That's impossible,” he exclaimed in an interrogation when presented with a photocopy of the paper in September 1983. Since then, his appeals in court attempted to cast doubt on the paper’s importance and whether it was truly in the victim’s vehicle as police claimed.

“This mysterious appearance of this piece of evidence raises serious questions as to its validity and whether it was ever in the vehicle at all,” read Elam’s most recent appeal.

The piece of paper, he said, was from a college notebook inside a briefcase that Elam was carrying. This briefcase was placed in the Harris County Jail property room, along with Elam's other property, when he was arrested, court documents show.

In 2008, it was discovered that most of the main evidence against Elam had been destroyed on March 13, 1994, including the credit card receipts and the paper with blood splatter that had allegedly put him at the murder scene, and could not be tested for DNA.

According to the Harris County District Clerk’s office, they were destroyed due to record-retention rules at the office.

New Chances

Over the last 40 years he’s been incarcerated, Elam has filed over a dozen appeals. He’s disputed his lawyers’ competency, the police who investigated the case, the judge and more.

In 2017, the district attorney’s office recused itself from the case. A lawyer who was briefly appointed to help Elam with his DNA claims had been hired following District Attorney Kim Ogg’s election as her chief of staff. Ogg considered it a conflict of interest, and the judge allowed special prosecutors to take over the case – the latest being Ryan Calvert of Brazos County.

HPD maintains the integrity of their officers and investigation.

“The investigations pertaining to the case of Mr. Rick Bowen's murder were thoroughly conducted,” read an unsigned statement from an HPD spokesperson. “As the matter is presently subject to ongoing litigation under the oversight of a special prosecutor, it is inappropriate to publicly discuss.”

Elam, who made a place for himself in the prison’s law library, says the wrong man was convicted and he still has reason to hope. Despite coming up for parole multiple times, he has maintained his innocence and refused to apologize for an act he says he did not commit.

In his quest, Elam has won over allies such as Houston nonprofit the Honey Brown Hope Foundation to his cause, and hired Gary Udashen, an award-winning lawyer whose work with the Innocence Project has brought public praise. Elam’s family believes the wrong man is in prison.

“My brother was not the one who said he found the wallet of the victim. And somehow he ended up being the only one charged with the case … in my mind it is obvious that that doesn't make sense,” said his brother, Sam Elam, who moved to Houston four months after the 1984 conviction to be closer to his brother.

It was only when DNA testing was approved for the case nearly 30 years post-conviction that Elam’s efforts finally seemed to gain legal traction.

In 2016, DNA from under Bowen’s fingernail clippings was tested and the results excluded Elam’s DNA. The question became: who was the owner of the mysterious DNA under Bowen’s fingernails? The original prosecutor argued that Elam had forced Bowen into the car. Could it be another suspect, or was it just Bowen’s DNA?

While Bowen’s body was not exhumed, his son’s DNA was used to check whether it could also exclude the father.

In 2018, an expert witness for the defense and professor at Rice University said that the tests showed the unknown DNA under the nails was most likely a third party. Prosecutors argued that they couldn’t rule out the DNA as Bowen’s, even after testing it against his son’s genetic code.

As he waited for a judge to rule on the DNA tests, Elam got another break. HPD Sgt. Richard Rodriguez was asked to re-investigate the case after his superiors were lobbied by Campbell to take a second look, and he contacted jailhouse informant Patrick Patterson.

According to Rodriguez, Patterson admitted to lying when he had testified that Elam had admitted to the murder – potentially bringing into question the other informants’ testimony from the cell that day.

“He just said, ‘Everything I said in that statement is a lie,’” recalled Rodriguez last year in a court hearing.

After Rodriguez talked to Patterson, Campbell says the informant called her and repeated the claim that he lied to police about Elam’s guilt. Patterson also said that HPD and his parole officer used a past arrest to pressure him into signing a false statement, according to her affidavit.

Ultimately, Patterson balked at meeting with either party in person and Campbell said he “disengaged.” When he was questioned in court at a 2021 hearing, Patterson claimed to not even remember the trial.

Rodriguez was incredulous.

“If he said that today, it's not the truth,” the HPD sergeant said on the stand that same afternoon. Under cross-examination, Rodriguez reaffirmed the good reputation of the detectives who had done the original work on the case, and did note he thought a larger conspiracy by law enforcement seemed implausible.

When reached by phone, a Patrick Patterson with the same phone number as the number reported in trial transcripts told the reporter he was not the correct Patrick Patterson.

“Like I told them then, I ain’t got nothing to do with that,” the man said.

As the revelations from the DNA results and witness statements unfolded, Elam and Udashen filed his ninth appeal, once again laying out their argument that these new questions as well as the original trial’s inconsistencies called for overturning the conviction. Then, they began to wait for trial judge Joshua Hill to weigh in.

What’s next

There seemed to be little argument that Patterson had lied in court in 2022 – but the judge and prosecutors agreed that there was no proof Patterson had lied on the stand in 1984.

“The fact that he lied in that hearing was not that legally significant as to the legal issues we were deciding in that hearing,” Calvert said.

After reviewing both DNA evidence from Bowen’s fingernails and weighing the results of the hearing with Patterson, judge Joshua Hill recommended in 2022 that the Texas Court of Appeals deny relief to Elam. In a 2-1 decision, they agreed. Only Judge Jesse McClure dissented.

“The Court finds that though Defendant Elam being excluded from the DNA profile obtained from the victim's fingernail clippings may appear to be a favorable result, the defendant has failed to establish a reasonable probability that, had the results of the forensic DNA testing been available before or during the trial of the instant offense, the defendant would not have been prosecuted or convicted,” read one of the findings by judge Hill.

Last year, Elam’s parole was once again denied because of the nature of the violent offense “indicating a conscious disregard for the lives, safety, or property of others, such that the offender poses a continuing threat to public safety,” according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice website. He has been eligible for parole since 2003, subject to yearly review.

A new decision will be made in April.

In September, the Greater Houston Council for Justice joined the Honey Brown Hope foundation in calling for Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, who recused her office from the case years ago, to take up Elam’s cause once more.

As Elam and his growing list of supporters continue to plead with Houstonians to scrutinize the facts of his original case, they are also pushing to find an alternate suspect – and a new path forward to fight his conviction in court.

To achieve this, both Elam’s lawyer Gary Udashen and other supporters are lobbying the Department of Public Safety to test DNA from under Bowen’s fingernails against a national database of suspects, referred to as the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS.

Elam’s champions view this as a way to close the door on any doubt about whether the DNA could lead them to the true perpetrator.

“We know the DNA is not Darius Elam’s DNA,” Udashen said in a written statement. “If the DNA matches someone whose DNA is in CODIS, that will be an indication that the person matched through the DNA is the true perpetrator of this offense.”

According to the FBI’s operations manual, DNA can be entered into the CODIS database if a crime has been committed; if the DNA was recovered from the scene of the crime and attributed to the perpetrator of the crime; and if elimination samples have been requested from people who were not involved in the crime but potentially had come into contact with the victim or evidence.

A Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson said they did “not have any information to provide” regarding Elam’s case.

”In our relentless quest for justice, we recognize that DNA breakthroughs have been instrumental in freeing innocent Black individuals who endured unjust incarceration,” said Campbell in a statement. “The Honey Brown Hope Foundation, Darius Elam’s family, and our steadfast supporters fervently pray that the enhanced DNA technology integrated into CODIS will finally unveil the true identity of the murderer whose DNA was discovered at the crime scene in 1983.”

Elam said that despite the latest setbacks, he will keep fighting.

“The one thing that's given me hope and the one thing that has carried me all these years is I really believe concretely in the prevailing power of truth,” Elam told the Abdelraoufsinno in a phone call from his unit in Rosharon, Texas.

“I know it was a lie that got me here. I know I'm wrongly convicted. And so my position has always been over these years, if I can just get the truth out there properly, then this conviction will fall.”

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