Memorial For Bruce Charles Jacobs

Executed May 15, 2003

Dear Friends,

I hope this e-mail reaches each of you having an exceptionally good day.

I'm as well as my situation and this cruel place will allow. Needless to say, I could be
much better, but considering the fact that I am an innocent man condemned to the
ultimate injustice,.punishment of death, I am blessed.

I regret that this e-mail will be bad news. Actually, it will be quite disturbing news.
There are no words to describe the absolute depression and helplessness I am feeling
right now, but I'm sure my feelings are by far overshadowed by those of Bruce Charles
Jacobs. Bruce is a mentally ill man that, barring a miracle, will be strapped to the Texas
killing machine on May 15th. Just another mentally ill and probably mentally retarded
person to be exterminated by the State of Texas!

I'm writing this with the permission of Bruce, who according to his court appointed
attorney is not mentally retarded but is incompetent to make decisions or give anyone
permission to do anything. This same attorney, James Volberding, refuses to pursue a
stay of execution on the basis of mental retardation. Voberding seems to have an
unhealthy, bizarre desire for him and his assistant to watch his client, Bruce, be killed.
Hopefully, Bruce refuses his ineffective lawyer's request to be present.

Let me tell you just a little bit about Bruce so you have an idea what kind of human
beings the state is killing. He was a forceps baby, which is a practice no longer used,
because it often killed the baby or caused severe trauma and brain damage. His mother
immediately after birth said, I couldn't have given birth to something like that.

Throughout Bruce's life his mother refused to accept him as her son. His father said, "His
head looked like a lopsided watermelon." Both his brother and father describe Bruce as
mentally retarded and not quite right in the head." His father said, "When Bruce was
a child we had to keep him fenced in the yard so that he wouldn't hurt any other kids." He
further stated, "Bruce had many health problems other than the mental illness and he's a
dwarf because of a glandular problem."

Bruce Jacobs is a 56-year old man, who weighs about one hundred and twenty-five
pounds and can barely walk due to a "degenerative bone disease" that has completely
destroyed one of his hips. In addition to barely being able to walk, he is nearly blind. I
ask you, could a man like this be a "continuing threat to society" or to a "prison society?"
What is the purpose of killing him? Is it vengeance or justice?
Bruce was convicted of stabbing a 16-year old boy to death, but there is reason to suspect
that he may very well be innocent of the crime. There is no physical evidence linking him
to the murder, although Bruce admits he was there when it happened and says, "I was
having a relationship with the boy's mother and was invited there for a party." The
victim's mother denied all of this. She has reason to lie! She's a married woman! When
Bruce was asked how he could prove he knew the woman and was having a relationship
with her he said, "There's a birthmark in her genital area," and went on to describe the
birthmark. Bruce described it perfectly, but as always the prosecution maneuvered around
that by saying, "He guessed she had a birthmark there." That's amazing! How could
anyone guess something like that? Even if Bruce did commit this crime, he cannot
remember it. As his father said, "I doubt Bruce is capable of knowing whether he did it or
not."

When I asked Bruce about his life, he became very emotional and said, "They didn"t love
me or want anything to do with me. They used to drop me off with other family members
for months at a time, but they didn't want me either."

Because he was worried that his attorney wouldn't do anything to save him, Bruce asked
for my help in filing a last minute appeal raising the issue of mental retardation. When I
asked Bruce what his IQ is, he told me, "It's 50. " I told him if he has something that
documents an IQ of 50, there shouldn't be any problem getting a stay of execution. But a
few days ago I reviewed all the documents pertaining to Bruce and they show his IQ to
be 77, which is seven points above what is required to get a stay of execution. Does that
make him any less mentally retarded? I don't think so! He thought his IQ was 50,
because he saw a global assessment score of 50.

The attorney, James Voberding, did file a "clemency petition," but it was obviously a last
minute thing with no effort put into it at all. It's full of errors, spelling errors and
misstatements. In describing Bruce
s many medical problems, the attorney lists
"degenerative bond disease." Maybe the lawyer concocted this term himself, meaning
Bruce does not bond with others well, but I think he meant "degenerative bone disease."
Obviously the attorney sees the clemency petition as the futile effort it is. After all,
according to the court and our wonderful, compassionate, conservative governor, "there
ain't no mentally retarded folks in Texas."

Bruce wasn't wanted or loved (as a baby, as a child or as an adult), because he is a

mentally ill, undesirable person. Now the State of Texas will extinguish the life of this
poor undesirable man. Where's the MERCY?

Obviously our hard earned tax dollars are efficient at eliminating undesirable Iraqis, oh
I'm sorry, liberating Iraqis and removing undesirable, mentally ill human beings from the
gene pool.

MERCY IS THE HIGHEST ATTRIBUTE OF MANKIND. But our ignorance is holding

up the evolving standards of human decency.
PLEASE FORWARD THIS E-MAIL TO ANYONE INTERESTED.

Sincerely,

Michael Toney

Vision Statement: MichaelToney.com is dedicated to the memory of Michael Toney

and the exoneration of his name by the discovery of the Blount's murderers.

COWBOY MICHAEL ROY TONEY

December 29, 1965 to October 3, 2009

My name is Michael Roy Toney. In May of 1999, I was convicted of

capital murder and sentenced to death for a very horrible crime that
was committed on Thursday November 28, 1985.

On the evening of Thanksgiving Day 1985 in the Fort Worth, Texas

suburb of Lake Worth, three members of the Blount family were
murdered. Joe Blount, his daughter Angela and Angela's cousin,
Michael Columbus, were killed when a bomb that was contained in a
briefcase exploded. The briefcase was reportedly found on or near the
steps of their home.

I was convicted of this horrendous crime despite the fact that I did not
even hear of the crime until 1997 when a man by the name of Bennie
Joe Toole told me about it. I have never in my life been to the place
the crime was committed and I am in no way whatsoever connected to
the crime. I was convicted without a shred of evidence.

I have known since my so-called trial that the BATF and the State of
Texas investigators had to have somehow told my ex-wife, Kim and
my old friend and business partner, Chris Meeks what to testify to.
However, we could not find evidence to prove it until 2006 by what
can only truly be described as a miracle—my defense team found
exculpatory evidence that had been illegally withheld by Michael
Parrish, the Tarrant County prosecutor at my trial!

I now know that my greedy, vengeful ex-wife and Chris Meeks were
manipulated and coerced into providing the false testimony that
caused me to be convicted of a terrible crime that I am completely
innocent of and sentenced to death.
The testimony that caused my conviction was totally fabricated,
coerced and perjured.

I do not make these assertions without being able to provide evidence

to support them. The proof is contained here on this site, but in order
to understand the case and how an innocent man was convicted, one
must be intimate with details and facts of the case.

Michael was released from prison September 2, 2009 and he

died in a tragic auto accident near Rusk on October 3, 2009.

On October 6, 2009 the Texas attorney general stated they will

continue to investigate the 1985 bombing falsely attributed to Michael
Toney.

The Case Story

On Thanksgiving evening, November 28, 1985, an explosion rocked
the Hilltop Mobile Home Park at 7800 Jacksboro Highway between
Lake Worth and Azle, Texas. The horrendous explosion and fireball
instantly killed three members of the Blount family: Joe Blount, his
daughter Angela, and Angela’s cousin, Michael Columbus.

To this day, no one has been able to say why.

Like waves of others, the Blount’s came to North Texas seeking a fresh
start and respite from tough times. They had driven from the Seattle,
Washington area in July 1985, four of them in the family’s station
wagon without air conditioning. Their clothes, dishes, blankets, and
assorted personal effects bounced behind them in a U-Haul trailer.

Forty-four year old Joe Blount did most of the driving. He was a big
guy, an amiable man and a skilled mechanic, who had trouble holding
a steady job. He drank too much beer.

Fifteen-year-old Angela Blount and her thirteen-year-old brother

Robert rode in the back seat. She was happy and talkative with long
brown hair and freckles. He was quiet and withdrawn, slow to warm to
others. His sister was his best friend.

Susan Blount, devout Mormon, precise and strict with her kids, sat in
the front passenger seat, watching the landscape fly by, not certain at
all about this move to Texas. The marriage was plagued with rough
spots and they were trying to patch it together after a yearlong
separation.

The Blount family rented a trailer at lot number 8 of the Hilltop Mobile
Home Park in Lake Worth, a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas. They had no
furniture, so they slept on the floor. Mr. Blount got work at a nearby
auto transmission shop. He said, “I’ve finally found a home. I want to
work for these guys forever,” Mrs. Blount now recalls. “This was the
most wonderful sound I had ever heard.” She desired only one thing,
she says: “I just wanted life to be stable.”

Thanksgiving day dinner, she hoped would create some of that

stability. One of the guests was Mr. Blount’s brother, Carl “Ray”
Blount, whom Mrs. Blount strongly disliked. “Ray had been a sore spot
in the marriage for a long time,” she says. But he was family, so she
vowed to make the best of it for the holiday. Another Thanksgiving
guest was Ray’s long-estranged son, Michael Columbus, an 18-year
old studying airplane mechanics in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His mother had
worried about him making the trip to North Texas. Mrs. Blount
promised her that nothing bad would happen.

The Blount’s had managed to rent some furniture but still didn’t have
enough for a big gathering, so Joe Blount borrowed some chairs from
the transmission shop waiting room. They ate turkey and dressing off
plates balanced on their knees. The day passed pleasantly. Ray Blount
and his son even had reconciliation. Mr. Columbus was so pleased
about it that after dinner, he called his mother to tell her how happy
he was. Ray Blount left to go home around 5 P.M. Around 9 P.M. Mrs.
Blount went to her bedroom to lie down for a nap.

Robert, Angela and Michael Columbus piled into the station wagon,
and Joe Blount drove them to a convenience store about a half a mile
away. They bought snacks and he bought beer. While they were
gone, Mrs. Blount heard a knock at the front door. “I got up and
looked out the window and saw no one,” she said. It was the last act
of her normal life.

When the rest of the family returned, they found a black briefcase.
Angela said it might have jewels in it. Robert thought maybe it had
money in it. They brought it inside. The three teenagers bubbled with
excitement. Not Joe, who had been around long enough to know that
you didn’t just come home one night and find a treasure chest, but he
went along with the fun.
Angela sat on the couch and tripped the latches. What happened next
took milliseconds.

The explosion sent parts of the briefcase and its contents flying 2,000
feet a second, about twice as fast as a bullet from a handgun. The
same blast simultaneously ignited a container of gasoline in the
briefcase, creating a fireball. One neighbor said it sounded like a
cannon.

A government explosives expert would later testify, “an extremely

violent weapon designed to kill human beings and it worked to
perfection.”

The noise startled Mrs. Blount from her sleep in the back bedroom.
She thought it was another B-52 making a low approach for nearby
Carswell Air Force Base. Sometimes they roared overhead all night
long. She opened the bedroom door and was met with smoke. She
walked down the hallway, the floor so hot it burned her feet. She
peered toward the living room. “I could see Joe’s body,” she recalls
now. “It was lying on the floor in front of the TV, burning.” The heat
drove her back. She escaped through the trailer’s back door. The
night was bitterly cold. She struggled to the front yard in her
underwear and found neighbors watching in horror as fire consumed
the trailer. “I begged them to go inside and help,” Mrs. Blount says.
No one could do anything.

At a neighbor’s house, Mrs. Blount phoned her other daughter, Sheri

Godwin, in Washington. “Everybody’s dead,” she said into the phone.
“Joe, Angela, Robert and Michael. They’re all dead.“ She wasn’t
entirely correct. Fire crews arrived and an officer directed Mrs. Blount
to an ambulance. There she found Robert lying on a stretcher. His
hair was burned off, his flesh scorched, and his clothes and shoes
melted to his skin. But he was alive. The blast had blown him out the
door of the trailer. The other three never had a chance.

Why, investigators wanted to know, would someone bomb a family?

The first place they searched for answers was the family itself.

Federal Agents pored over Joe Blount’s checkered background. Their

conclusion, a memo reported: “He made no enemies and was
considered more or less harmless.”

Agents scoured Carl Blount’s past. They found plenty of unseemly

behavior but nothing that would link him to the bombing.
Detectives also took a hard look at Mrs. Blount. “Every time I turned
around, they were pointing fingers at me,” she said. “I had every kind
of question thrown at me. Had I made a bomb? Did I help anyone
make a bomb? They always taped everything I said to see if I changed
my story.” A Sheriff’s Detective asked her whether she had life
insurance policies on her daughter and husband. “I said, yes, I had,”
Mrs. Blount recalls.“ He looks at me with a look that says, ’I have you
dead to rights, lady.’ He says, ‘How much was the policy?’ He just
knows; ‘now we’ve got the murderer.’” The policy on her husband was
for $2,000, and for her daughter $1,000. “I told him it won’t even pay
to bury them,” she says.

Investigators traced the family’s phone calls in the days before the
bombing. The records showed calls to friends and relatives but little
else. The Fort Worth office of the ATF sent a query to the agency’s
Seattle office: “Does any evidence exist regarding possible
extramarital affairs on the part of Susan Maureen Blount?” The
Seattle office responded: “No known evidence exists in the Seattle
area of any indiscretions.”

Still, Mrs. Blount believed she remained the prime suspect. “Every
night, I thought, ‘They’re going to take you in and lock you up.’ I
thought, ‘what is your defense going to be?’ I thought, ‘I have no
defense whatsoever.” Only after she passed a polygraph did the
investigative pressure seem to ease. That left her with grief and fear
to manage. “Robert was the sole purpose of me keeping on,” she
says.

Mrs. Blount and her son moved into an apartment in Azle. They put
their beds next to each other’s. “We were afraid of every sound,” she
recalls. Robert still recovering from skin grafts for his burns had
continual nightmares. They were sure that the bomber, whoever he
was, would come back to finish the job. If a car followed her for more
than two blocks, Mrs. Blount pulled over and let it pass, then made a
U-turn, she recalls. That Christmas, less than a month after the
bombing, she and Robert came home to find a box outside their front
door. Just like the briefcase, they thought. They phoned the police.

It was fudge from church.

Detectives also considered another theory about the bomb; that

maybe it had been intended for someone other than the Blount’s.
Maybe the killer simply got the wrong address. Maybe the bomber
was really after Wayland Tim Tortella, a jeweler who operated a
thriving methamphetamine business from home. He sold automatic
weapons to drug dealers and he was having an affair with a married
woman. Because of that, Mr. Tortella later testified, he believed the
bomb was meant for him. Much later, he would write in a letter: “For
14 years I’ve felt that it was my fault that those 3 people died. There
is a possibility that if I wasn’t doing what I was doing back then, they
would still be alive.” It might have looked intriguing to investigators,
but the lead went nowhere.

Federal and State agents could not establish a solid motive. Nor could
they find a promising suspect in an assortment of felons, bomb
makers, misfits, satanists and narcotic peddlers whom they
interviewed.

In March of 1986, there was an interesting development. A

businessman and member of the Optimist and Bass Clubs in nearby
Azle, Douglas Raymond Brown, a former candidate for mayor and
owner of Azle Business Machine Products, a man described as an
outstanding machinery repairman, was arrested. He had sold an
undercover agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
(BATF) the second of two explosive devices, both delivered in a form
they hadn’t requested, a briefcase. The bombs were similar to the one
that killed the Blount’s. Firearms experts said detonation would have
caused an explosion, then a fire. Explosives and chemicals were also
discovered in Brown’s office and home.

In a concurrent drug investigation, ten people were arrested for drug

trafficking, which was why Azle Police had been watching Brown for
five months prior to his arrest. They were unaware that ATF agents
had also been investigating Brown for firearm violations. The police
believed his business served as an exchange for guns and drugs.
However, Police Chief Richard Wilhelm told the Fort Worth Star
Telegram that Brown, who was being held without bail at the Tarrant
County Jail, was “one of the last persons I’d suspect…” The Tarrant
County Sheriff said he was “floored” by the “coincidence.” Brown was
never charged with the bombing. Two days after his arrest for
possessing and delivering and explosive device, he was freed on
$10,000 bond.

The ATF raided the Bowie, Texas residence of a man with a history of
trading in explosives. They found grenades, gunpowder and electronic
devices used in bomb making. “Among these items was a roll of gray
and white seven-strand copper wire similar to that used in the
construction of the device used in the Blount bombing,” an ATF report
said. But agents could find no connection between the man and the
Blount’s. He was dismissed after being given a polygraph exam.

One neighbor of the Blount’s, an admitted drug dealer named Darrin

Ervin, appeared on the detectives’ radar early on. ATF agents picked
him up at a biker bar in Lake Worth less than a month after the
bombing. Mr. Ervin, then 22, had rented a trailer at lot 2 of the Hilltop
- six spaces from the Blount’s – where he sold methamphetamine.
What’s more, he allegedly had a fight with his wife the afternoon of the
Blount’ bombing and had fled the scene. “She done knocked the
windshield out of my truck,” Mr. Ervin recalls now. “So, there are
bullets all over the yard. The front door of my trailer was wide open.
You look in the house it’s ransacked. No wonder they wanted to talk to
me.” Agents took him to the ATF office in downtown Fort Worth and
showed him crime scene photos of the burned corpses. “They were
real hard-asses at first. They really thought I had something to do with
it,” he says. “They told me they didn’t care if I did it or not.
They needed to arrest somebody.” He was released, after a
polygraph exam. If he wasn’t the killer, had his drug business made
him the bombing target? “I can’t see why,” says Mr. Ervin, who is now
in prison for theft. “I did have a connection that I was doing business
with in Arkansas. But the last time I seen him, he gave me a sack of
dope. I didn’t owe him any money.”

Perhaps the most promising suspect was 15 year old Mikey Huff of
Azle, who had been a classmate of Angela Blount. There were rumors
that Angela had angered him by spurning advances. Friends said he
was a violent hothead who boasted of worshipping Satan. He was
burglar and drug user.

Anonymous callers told ATF agents that Mr. Huff had bragged of
detonating the bomb. His stepfather had found pieces of a bomb in his
bedroom. The stepfather also said that two victor mousetraps – the
same kind as the one that triggered the Blount bomb had been stolen
from his kitchen. But once again, investigators could not make a case.

Eleven years passed. Susan and Robert Blount left Texas and headed
back to the Seattle area, believing that the murders would never be
solved. Federal authorities weren’t admitting it in public, but their
private reports showed that the case was, for all practical purposes,
dead. Each quarterly ATF report on the Blount bombing said the same
thing: “No further progress has been made on this investigation,”
In 1996, the Oklahoma City bombing prompted a re-investigation of all
unsolved domestic bombings and officials decided to take another try
at what was one of the biggest unsolved bombings in the country. A
task force of Federal, State and local authorities was assembled. The
classic cold-case investigation in which every piece of evidence was
examined as if for the first time. “I thought it would go nowhere,”
says Mike Parrish, a Tarrant County prosecutor assigned to the Task
Force. “Most of these cold cases do.” A $25,000 reward offer
triggered some tipsters, many of whom told investigators to take
another look at Mikey Floyd Huff. Task Force members questioned him
repeatedly. He denied any role in the bombing, he says, but they
didn’t seem to believe him. “It was looking pretty bad there at
the end, Mr. Huff says now. “They told me I needed to be
spending a lot of time with my kids because I wouldn’t be
seeing them for awhile.”

In 1997, the ATF saying Mr. Huff had “emerged as a primary suspect,”
tapped his phone. The FBI’s criminal profiling experts were asked to
assemble a “personality assessment” of Mr. Huff. A grand jury began
hearing testimony from his friends. “I considered him a psycho,” one
woman told the Grand Jury. “He said he had a friend that knew how
to make homemade bombs…he said, ‘it blew the (Blount) house up.’”

Despite a lengthy investigation, the Grand Jury never indicted Mr.

Huff, who today lives in North Texas with his wife and children.

While the Blount’s hoped for a miracle, the task force hoped for a lucky
break. They got it when Michael Toney made the biggest mistake of
his life.

Mr. Toney, 41, now finds himself at the end of the line, Death Row in
Texas. He was convicted of using a briefcase bomb in 1985 to murder
Joe Blount, Angela Blount and Michael Columbus.

“I’m not a bomber,” he insists. “I’ve been a bad person, but I’ve never
murdered anyone.”

He has an unlined face and neatly combed brown hair.

Is he lying?

If he is not untruthful about the Blount bombing, he’s not alone. Two
witnesses crucial to his conviction now admit they lied. One of them
has changed his story many times. Another says he implicated Mr.
Toney simply to save his own life.

Despite an extensive investigation, investigators never found any

connection between Mr. Toney and the victims or anyone else in the
area. They found not one piece of evidence linking him to the crime.
No one saw Mr. Toney deliver a bomb.

He grew up in Cottonwood, California, a small town about 90 miles

north of Sacramento. His father deserted the family early on, and his
mother hit the local taverns. She brought home a succession of men,
who beat her and her sons. Young Michael often escaped by bedding
down outdoors or in a shed.

One of his mother’s boyfriends made him sit in a lawn chair and duct-
taped his wrists to the armrests, Mr. Toney recalls. The man then
sprayed lighter fluid on the boy’s hands and lit them. “I must have
been 9 or 10 at that time,” he says. “It didn’t burn but a second
before he put it out with a towel, but it still hurt like hell. He went back
and forth on my hands lighting them and putting it out. The whole
time I was screaming and trying to get out of the chair, and he was
laughing like the devil himself.”

As a pre-teen he was profoundly affected by the 1978 murder of his

friend Annette Selix of Cottonwood. “For twenty years, I carried the
burden of hate on my shoulders,” he said. “The hate was so strong
that I can only describe it as rivaling any love you ever had or can
imagine.”

Darrell Keith Rich, of Cottonwood was convicted of murdering Selix

and three other young women during the summer of 1978. He was
executed at San Quentin on March 15, 2000.

Mr. Toney and his family were touched by violence again in 1990 when
his Aunt, (his father’s twin sister) forty-seven year old Donna Rae
Toney Branson of Cottonwood was raped and murdered. Her killer,
James Tulk of Redding, California was convicted of first-degree murder
in 1992 and sentenced to death at San Quentin’s death chamber.

When he was 15, Mr. Toney says, another one of his mother’s
boyfriend’s attacked him with a fishing gaff, gouging a huge hole in his
hip. It was time to get away, he decided. He quit school before the
10th grade, and left for Texas.
Eventually, after working in Texas for a time, then Alaska and Hawaii,
Mr. Toney settled in the Hurst-Euless, Bedford area of Tarrant County,
Texas. He worked construction and lived in a series of apartments
with a revolving cast of women. He was handsome, the women say
now, and the sex was great.

But the slightest provocation would send him into violent rages.
Tammy Reil says he played Russian roulette with her. She was
terrified, she says, but he - like his mother’s boyfriend with the lighter
fluid - was laughing.

Mr. Toney left her for the woman he later married. Kim Toney, 38,
lives now in Wisconsin.

Mr. Toney fancied himself a jailhouse lawyer, helping others concoct

schemes for special privileges or release. For example, he showed one
inmate how to fake a suicide attempt by hanging. “It got the inmate,
Darryl Gilbreath of Azle, out of jail, because he wasn’t supposed to be
there in the first place,“ he says.

In June of 1997, Mr. Toney in jail awaiting a hearing on a 1993

burglary charge – chatted with Charles “Jack” Ferris in the Parker
County Jail in Weatherford. Mr. Ferris, now 52, and Mr. Toney got to
talking about the Blount bombing.

Mr. Ferris won his release from jail by telling Parker County authorities
that Mr. Toney had confessed murders to him. “I did my best to make
the story seem impressive,” Mr. Ferris says. It was impressive enough
to launch the task force investigation into Mr. Toney. The
investigators eventually led them to his ex-wife. Initially, questions
about the bombing made no sense to her.

“She told us, ‘Michael killing people in a bombing? You’re nuts,’” recalls
prosecutor Parrish.

But Ms. Toney decided to do some research.

“I’m not dumb – I ran for the library,” she says. She looked up
newspaper accounts of the Blount bombing. It was then, she says, she
knew she had been there that night. “When I realized what took
place,” she says, “It’s almost like death to yourself.” Ms. Toney called
federal agents and told her story. Her ex-husband was soon under
indictment for capital murder.
Within months, however, Mr. Ferris recanted his account of the
jailhouse confession. He said Mr. Toney had come up with the story
about the Blount bombing as a ruse to get Mr. Ferris out of jail. Mr.
Ferris, says, “I implicated Mr. Toney in a number of murders in hope
one of them would get me out of jail.”

“Toney and me made up the entire thing,” Mr. Ferris told investigators.

The trial started in May of 1999 in Fort Worth.

Susan Blount testified, telling her story of escaping from the burning
trailer out of the back door. Her son Robert told of finding the
briefcase, and his sister taking it inside.

“Angela flipped the latches and it exploded, and that’s the last I
remember,” Mr. Blount testified. “There isn’t a day that goes by,” Mr.
Blount said in court, “that I don’t think about that day.”

For Mr. Toney, the most damaging testimony came from his ex-wife,
his ex-best friend and another cellmate.

Ms. Toney said that on Thanksgiving night 1985, she went with Mr.
Toney and his best friend, Chris Meeks, to the parking lot of a propane
supply shop on Jacksboro Highway near Lake Worth. The propane
shop was adjacent to the Hilltop Mobile Home Park, where the Blount’s
lived.

She testified that Mr. Toney got out of his truck, took a brown
briefcase from the truck bed and disappeared into the darkness.
Several minutes later, she said, he returned without the briefcase,
They then went to the Nature Center a few miles away, she said,
where they stayed for several hours. While they were there, she said,
Mr. Toney shot a beaver with a rifle. Ms. Toney testified that she didn’t
hear an explosion or sirens and didn’t see anything.

Mr. Meeks also testified that the three of them were near the trailer
park that night, but his testimony contradicted Ms. Toney’s account in
many ways.

Finis Blankenship, a cellmate, testified that Mr. Toney told him he was
paid $5,000 for the murders. Mr. Blankenship said Mr. Toney told him
that they were part of a drug-related hit, but that he put the
explosives on the wrong doorstep.
Mr. Toney took the stand and testified that he learned the details of
the Blount bombing in prison from an inmate named Bennie Joe
Toole. Mr. Toole, of Azle, who was a friend of Mikey Huff, had at one
time been a suspect but had passed a polygraph exam. Mr. Toole
testified, confirming Mr. Toney’s account of events.

As for his former best friend and his ex-wife, Mr. Toney testified, “I
believe Chris is lying, and I believe Kim is mistaken.”

Despite the inconsistencies and the complete lack of evidence or

motive, the jury convicted Mr. Toney and sentenced him to death.

Television shows to the contrary, no criminal trial answers every

question and solves every mystery. The Toney case has more than it’s
share of puzzles, contradictions and repudiations.

Prosecutors said Ms. Toney was the most important witness. “The
person the jury really had to buy to make the case was Kim Toney,”
Prosecutor Parrish said.

Ms. Toney has since remarried, though she sometimes still uses her
former name. Now studying to be an accountant, she says she stands
by her trial testimony. “If I had any doubt in my mind, I would have
contacted somebody,” she says. “You hate the thought that he is
going to die; I don’t wish death on anybody. But I can’t change what
he did. He has to pay for what he did.”

Ms. Toney, an army veteran served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. She
says exposure to toxic chemicals in Kuwait caused her to suffer
memory loss. “Your long term memory is very good,” she says, “but
short term memory is very bad.”

Mr. Meeks provided important corroboration of some of her testimony.

But his and Ms. Toney’s accounts of Thanksgiving night differ
markedly. Ms. Toney had said they went to the Nature Center after
Mr. Toney delivered the briefcase, but Mr. Meeks testified that they
actually went to the center several days before.

Even prosecutors acknowledge that Mr. Meeks was not much of a

witness, in large part because of his drinking. “His Budweiser intake
was 18 to 24 cans a day,” Mr. Parrish says.

Perhaps most important, Mr. Meeks has now changed his story for the
fourth time.
He originally told investigators he knew nothing about the bombing.
Then he told the Grand Jury he knew nothing. After allegedly failing a
polygraph exam, he began implicating Mr. Toney.

In 2001, after a visit from an investigator working on Mr. Toney’s

appeal, he signed an affidavit recanting his trial testimony. “My
testimony about the events that happened on Thanksgiving day, 1985,
may not have happened on that day,” that affidavit said. He added
that, “To my knowledge, Mr. Toney’s briefcase never had any bombing
material inside.”

Finally, there is former cellmate Blankenship’s story regarding the

$5000.00 contract hit. It came in the second phase of the trial, in
which the jury had to decide whether Mr. Toney deserved to be
executed. Prosecutor Parrish said Mr. Blankenship’s testimony was
crucial to the death penalty, because it showed jurors a motive for the
crime. “If they don’t know the motive, that bothers them like hell,”
Mr. Parrish says. “I thought that (testimony) removed any potential
residual doubt that anyone might have.”

Mr. Blankenship, a convicted robber, had a long history of criminal

involvement and of acting as a police informant. A Dallas fire marshal
wrote of him in a 1967 testimonial letter: “Due to his helping us, he
has had an attempted castration on him by four men. He has had
three sticks of dynamite put in his car and had been shot at.”

When he met Mr. Toney in jail, Mr. Blankenship was facing two counts
of indecency with a child and habitual-criminal charges. He believed
that if he went back to prison, he would die there. So in exchange for
having those charges dropped, Mr. Blankenship says, he agreed to
testify against Mr. Toney. Prosecutor Parrish denies that he made any
such deal. If he had, he says, “the jury would have thrown rocks at
me.” Nonetheless, Mr. Blankenship told his story about Mr. Toney to
the court. The charges against him were later reduced to a
misdemeanor assault.

Mr. Blankenship now says this about his story implicating Mr. Toney.

IT WAS A LIE.

At 73, he lives in a shabby three-room house north of Fort Worth

Stockyards. Skinny chickens peck the dirt out front. On the walls of
his living room hang framed photos of Roy Rogers and Hopalong
Cassidy. He uses a walker to move around. He is missing most of his
teeth and he stutters. “I’ve had a stroke and a heart attack,” he
says. ”If I go back to prison, I’ll die there.”

He takes out a black leather bound Bible and opens it to his favorite
verse, Luke 11:52: “Woe unto you lawyers.” The lawyers had him
in a corner,
Mr. Blankenship says, and he had no choice but to fabricate a story
about Mr. Toney. “I’m an old man,” he says. “I’d hate to see an
innocent man die. Am I wrong? Am I wrong?”

He begins to sob, the tears dropping into the open Bible in his lap. I
only done it because I was scared I was gonna die,” he says. “I can’t
tell you the things you will do if you think you’re gonna die.”

“There is no (physical) evidence,” Mr. Toney says. “All there is is a

theory. A ridiculous theory. The reason there is no evidence is - I am
innocent. I have never even been to the Hilltop Mobile Home Park and
didn’t even hear about this crime until Toole told me about it.”

Now 41, he spends 23 hours a day in his cell, swinging from anger, to
cold calculation to despair. “I’m tired if this,” he says. “I’m tired of
this place. I’m tired of everything.”

A private detective continues to work in Mr. Toney’s case. Despite

many hours of effort, detective Tena Francis has this far failed to find
the one piece of evidence that Mr. Toney believes is the key to setting
him free:

The title history to a pickup.

Ms. Toney and Mr. Meeks said he was driving a truck on the night of
the bombing. Mr. Toney says he didn’t purchase the truck until Friday,
December 13, 1985. If they can be proven wrong about the truck, Mr.
Toney believes all their testimony will be disproven.

One of Mr. Toney’s former girlfriends, Tammy Reil, now says that she
saw Mr. Toney the night of the murders and she’s sure he was driving
a compact car.

The Texas Innocence Network at the University of Houston agreed this

year to take Mr. Toney’s case. Lawyer David Dow said this in a filing
with the U.S. District Court in Fort Worth: “Since the trial, the state’s
evidence of Toney’s guilt, as frail as it already was, has entirely
crumbled.”
Mr. Dow says inconsistencies in witness’ accounts demolish the case
against Mr. Toney. He also charges that authorities coerced Mr.
Toney’s best friend, Chris Meeks, into testifying against him.

In September 2006, Mr. Toney made another attempt to reach out to

the Blount’s; despite having been told that they believed his conviction
was justified. He says this revelation surprised him. “I thought they
would have just as many questions as I do.” Mr. Toney said. “I have
been trying for the last 6 years to contact you.” He wrote, “Learning
that you believe I am guilty and don’t even question it has hit me very
hard.” Mr. Toney’s three-page single spaced letter repeated his
contentions that he had never been to the Hilltop Mobile Home Park,
where the bombing occurred, and that new evidence might exonerate
him.

“Having the answers probably won’t save my life because that’s not
the way the law works, but I am hoping and praying that it will
somehow cause the murders of your loved ones to get the justice they
deserve,” Mr. Toney wrote. “True Justice will be done when they go
before the only True Judge.”

On that last point, and only on that, he and the Blount’s finally meet
one another.

(The Case Story has been compiled from newspapers, other media
coverage, trial records and other legal documents.)

AND NOW A WORD FROM MICHAEL TONEY:

Now that you have read the story concerning this terrible crime, I
invite – urge you to read the current Writ Application that contains the
newly discovered exculpatory evidence that was hidden from the
defense prior to and after trial. The discovery of this evidence is
nothing short of a miracle.

I believe you will see that I have told the truth from the very
beginning and that I was correct when I testified that I believe Kim
Toney is mistaken and Chris Meeks is lying. I believe any intelligent
person will see just how easy a miscarriage of justice can occur and
that one has occurred in this case. It is absolutely transparent that
the misconduct of the prosecution team (including the investigators)
resulted in the conviction of an innocent man.
I have learned through the many cases I have studied that the
prosecution often resorts to unethical and often illegal acts to obtain a
conviction. They will use every dirty trick in the book to get a
conviction and then defend their actions on appeal because they know
how reluctant the courts are to overturn a conviction.

I am unequivocally innocent of this crime. I have never in my life

been to the Hilltop Mobile Home Park and I am in no way whatsoever
connected to the crime, the victims or anyone else in that area. I
have never been there! I didn’t even know the place existed until just
prior to my trial. The reason there is no evidence is that I am
completely innocent.
Bruce Jacobs

Bruce Charles Jacobs, 56, was executed by lethal injection on 15 May 2003 in Huntsville,
Texas for the murder of a teenage boy during a home burglary.

At approximately 6:30 a.m. on 22 July 1986, an intruder broke into the residence of Hugh
Harris and Holly Kuper. Peering into their bedroom and seeing that they were asleep, the
intruder went into the kitchen and picked up a butcher knife. He then entered the
bedroom where Mr. Harris's 16-year-old son, Conrad, was sleeping. The intruder stabbed
Conrad repeatedly. Hearing Conrad's screams, Hugh Harris went to his room and saw a
man standing over him with the knife in his hand. The intruder pointed the knife at Mr.
Harris, who backed away, and then he ran out the back door. Conrad died from more than
24 stab wounds.

Upon hearing Mr. Harris describe the suspect to the police, Kuper told police that a man
matching that description had come to their house the previous day and tried to force his
way into the back door, after she opened it to let the dog out. She said that she managed
to close and lock the door, and the intruder ran away.

Kuper also told police that the intruder emptied her purse and that $100 was missing.

The murder weapon was recovered from outside the Harris home. It was covered in
Conrad's blood, but had no useable fingerprints. However, police did take five
fingerprints from a dinner knife in the kitchen.

Harris and Kuper independently made composite drawings for the police. They both said
that the intruder wore a beard and a panama hat. The story of the murder and the suspect's
description were broadcast by the local media. Three witnesses came forward and told
police that they saw a man matching the description -- including the beard and panama
hat -- in the area of the murder between 6:45 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. All three described the
man's behavior as unusual and evasive. One of these witnesses was a cab driver who told
police that he gave the man a ride that morning. Two days after the murder, while the
police and the cabbie were on a drive together, retracing the suspect's route, the cab
driver pointed to a man who looked like the suspect, including the Panama hat, except
that the beard was missing. The police followed the man briefly, then arrested him. This
man was Bruce Jacobs, 39.

In Jacobs' home, police found beard hairs and a pair of blue jeans with traces of blood.
They also found $800 in cash. The fingerprints taken from the dinner knife were matched
to Jacobs.

Jacobs had a history of assaulting teenagers with blades, going back to his own teens. He
stabbed a 12-year-old girl in 1963 with a steak knife. He spent some time in a boys'
reformatory school in 1965 and 1966 and was placed in maximum security twice for
assaults. He robbed a teenage girl in 1967, using a razor blade as a weapon. Jacobs also
had a conviction in Oregon for assault with intent to commit robbery and was in prison
there from 1967 to 1972.

At his capital murder trial, Jacobs pleaded not guilty. He pointed out that the Harrises
originally identified a different suspect, John Muldune, from a photographic lineup. He
said that the Harrises did not identify him as the murderer until the police arrested him,
told them that they caught the murderer, and showed them his picture.

Numerous relatives, co-workers, and strangers testified that Jacobs had stalked or
harassed them, had loitered around their homes, and/or had entered their homes without
their consent. Shirley Reynolds, Jacobs' aunt, testified that on the day after the murder,
her estranged nephew had called her, asking where she worked, how old her daughters
were, and what they did during the day. The following day, Jacobs was detained by
police after Reynolds' 15-year-old daughter reported that someone was loitering around
her house and ringing the doorbell. He had pried off two window screens and broke a
window, but he told police that he only wanted to visit his aunt and cousins.

A jury convicted Jacobs of capital murder in June 1987 and sentenced him to death. The
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence in March 1994.
All of his subsequent appeals in state and federal court were denied.

"I'm going to get executed for something I didn't do," Jacobs said in an interview from
death row. Jacobs admitted to breaking into the Harrises' house the morning that Conrad
was murdered, but he said that a second, unknown intruder was responsible for the
killing. "Somebody jumped me from behind ... I left and went home. I didn't know there
was a murder until three days later."

Jacobs' lawyer claimed that his client was mentally ill and had a subnormal IQ, but he
could not prove that he was mentally retarded.

At his execution, Jacobs recited Psalm 23. He then expressed love and thanks to his
friends. "I want to thank the media for being nice to me all this time," he also said. He
was pronounced dead at 6:17 p.m.

By David Carson. Posted on 19 May 2003.

Sources: Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Texas Attorney General's Office,
Associated Press.