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Rick Walker
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Watch "Not Guilty" - 15:02 (20 MB) (Requires Apple Quicktime.) |
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View Final Sale – a SoundSlide piece on Transom |
About “Not Guilty: Life After Exoneration”
Rick Walker was a self-employed auto mechanic living in East Palo
Alto. A single father, Walker spent much of his time with his
extended family. Many of them called him ‘Mr. Fix-it’ or ‘The
trouble-shooter.’ But in January of ’91, Walkers work-a-day life
changed forever. The body of his ex-girlfriend Lisa Hopewell was
found bound, gagged and mutilated. Fingerprints on the duct tape
led to Rahsson Bowers, a 21 year old East Palo Alto drug dealer.
Rahsson Bowers fingered Walker as an accomplice. Walker had worked
on his car in the past. The two stood as co-defendants throughout
a trial for 1st-degree murder. Walker was convicted in December of
1991. He served the next 12 years in maximum security prisons around
California. But new DNA and eye witness testimony proving Rick was
factually innocent resulted in his exoneration in 2003.
The Walkers document every fish they pull out of the water with a
Polaroid, and tack it on “Wall of Fame.” Here is Rick with his catch,
just a few days after his release from prison.
In February 2005, we spoke with Cookie Ridolfi, Executive Director
of the Innocence Project at Santa Clara University. We were
interested in documenting the stories of a few exonorees and how
their lives, and their families lives, were impacted by wrongful
convictions. We met with and documented three exonorees: Gloria
Killian, Pete Rose, and Rick Walker. This video details Rick Walker’s
story. Over a period of six months, we spent time with Rick and
his family, including a July Fourth weekend stay at the family’s
Clearlake home.
Telling Rick’s story with photography and audio allowed us to package
the media in different ways to reach a wider audience. Portions of
this project have been aired on public radio, as well as exhibited
in a gallery. We’re also interested in putting together an audio
portion for future gallery exhibits, much like the audio tours you
see at museums.
Collaborating as a team required lots of communication both in the
field and out. In the field, there were moments when we needed both
audio and photo for a specific scene. A microphone in the shot or
the shutter clicking over good audio were constant concerns and
required in-the-moment negotiating to avoid. Matching the audio and
images together was probably our greatest challenge.
A portion of Rick’s story was aired on KALW in April 2007.
Rick lost almost 15 years of industry knowledge while he was in prison.
Tech Info
Vance photographed with a Canon EOS 20D. Evan recorded with a Sony
MZ-R70 mini disc and a crappy Radio Shack microphone that he just
recently threw away and replaced with a Shure SM58. He edited all
in Pro Tools and put together this video presentation in iMovie.
About Evan Roberts
Evan is a freelance audio producer living in San Francisco.
He is a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.
About Vance Jacobs
Vance began his career as a photojournalist for news publications.
His clients include Nike, The New York Times, Hewlett-Packard,
Yahoo!, USA Today, Accenture, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
among others. Vance’s work has been honored in the Communication
Arts Photography Annual and the Pictures of the Year (POY) competition,
as well as being exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the
world.
Additional support for this work provided by
with funding from
Evan and Vance,
This is a great piece. Thank you for sharing Rick Walker’s story with us. He is an impressive man, and his story, and the way you and he tell it, is subtly powerful and moving. I hope you can get this story out to the broadest audience possible. It deserves to be heard for all those wrongfully convicted and incarcerated. This is a beautiful story about a beautiful man and family beautifully told. Thanks,
Bill Slammon
Evan and Vance,
I think your timing is on: just as I was thinking to myself, isn’t Rick angry? His brother answered that question for me when he said that Rick is not bitter. The thing is, I’m not sure I buy it. In the end Rick talks about not wanting to live unhappily, but in the beginning I think I hear some anger in his voice – though that could just be my own projection – I’m angry for Rick. I would have liked to hear more from Rick about the experience (both physical and psychological) of being in jail for 13 years. I think that might have given more insight into the following question: is he really as resolved about this as he says he is, and if so, what was the process that he went through to get him to that place?
~Ibby
Vance and Evan, thanks for sharing your work. This is a great project- it’s so important to put faces and families behind names and numbers.
In your introduction you mentioned that you documented two other exonorees, Gloria Killian and Pete Rose, do you plan to present their stories in audio/visual pieces as well (or are they already out there for us to hear/see)?
Did your desire to have images illustrate specific pieces of tape and vice versa keep you from including tape about Mr. Walker’s time in prison, which you obviously couldn’t go back and document visually? Did you consider using close ups or more abstracted images to go with audio you couldn’t capture visually?
Why black and white? I find that black and white has a formalizing and distancing effect, which seems at odds with what you’re trying to do.
Thanks again for putting Not Guilty up here, I’m looking forward to hearing more about the process of making the piece.
Vance is on assignment in Africa, so I’ll do my best to answer people’s questions here without him until he has access to the internet.
Thanks for all the responses so far!
Bill, I hope to get Rick’s piece aired on more stations. Perhaps a longer piece that includes the stories of Gloria and Pete, our other subjects, as well.
Ibby, you were curious about Rick’s psychological process in resolving his anger. I have tape of Rick discussing this. I think you may be right- it could be useful to hear more about how Rick came to this emotional resolution. Perhaps this can be added to the radio piece.
Ibby and Lisa both were curious about Rick’s back story, and the decision not to include it in this piece. From the beginning, Vance and I worked with Cookie Ridolfi and her team of undergraduates at Santa Clara University on plans to make the interviews and photographs into a book of oral histories, which unfortunately never got funding. So I do have tape from Rick (and also Gloria & Pete) about how they became to be wrongfully convicted, their time in prison, etc. And as much as those stories are so valuable to hear, I felt in terms of pairing the audio with images, the story should really begin in the present day. Also, we were all interested in the impact wrongful convictions had not just on the exonoree, but on the families as well. So Vance and I focused on illustrating the consequences of his incarceration and his 13 years away from his family.
Lisa, I do hope to get Gloria and Pete’s story produced and aired somewhere. Both stories are in different stages of completion. I hope Vance and I have the opportunity to flesh them out further.
Lisa: “Did you consider using close ups or more abstracted images to go with audio you couldn’t capture visually?”
Evan: I can imagine what you mean, but I don’t think I had any such images like that to work with. From the final images selected, Vance had shot only a few close-ups etc. that Rick wasn’t featured in (for example, the photo of the Polaroid wall that’s on this feature’s home page) but I did not find a place for it in the final piece. Vance’s style is also more magazine/newspaper photojournalism, so less abstract.
Lisa: “Why black and white?”
Evan: That’s a question for Vance. All these images were shot in color, which I mostly prefer.
Great job. I liked how you started on the portraits (the one of his mother is incredible). From there, the piece is a sequence of "scenes" in different locations, and each scene brings a new character: Rick at his work, the son at his work, the nieces at Rick’s home, the little brother moving the frige, and then all together for the party — I thought that was a really excellent way to structure the story.
My favorite piece of tape was Rick talking about how he appreciates being able to go to the refrigerator, open it, and decide he doesn’t want anything. It’s so mundane and profound at the same time!
A few technical issues: Can you make the player any bigger? — it’s pretty tiny (which may have contributed to the "distantness" that Lisa T. felt). Also, because it was so small, I had trouble reading the text slides with the smallest fonts. I sort of wanted the font to be uniform in size, although I realize that would have made you spill over to a second line and I liked how there was never more than one line of text: a trade-off, I suppose. Also, are you able to adjust how long the transition between slides is? It sometimes felt a little fast.
Overall, super – thanks.
Elizabeth White
Woods Hole, MA
Hi Elizabeth. Thanks for your thoughtful response.
Throughout the project, Vance and I would brainstorm about what “vignettes” would illustrate the different ways Rick and his family dealt with his absence: helping his nieces get ready for school, his son’s second job, the annual Fourth of July gathering (which began the year he was released.) It was our way of constructing a story out of thin air. I mean, compared to "Final Sale," for example, the narrative here isn’t built in. So, I definitely appreciate your comment about structure, because that was definitely a challenge for us.
I just found out about SoundSlides recently. Putting all this together with iMovie was somewhat of a headache. I agree with you on all points regarding the text and size. I just didn’t have the control I wanted.
I really love that refrigerator quote, too. Thank you, Radio Gods!
Really, really lovely work. It’s so great how the emotion creeps on you, but never hits you over the head. I was caught off-guard by tears (mine) near the end. And, while I’m normally quite skeptical about music in such pieces, what you’ve chosen has a marking-time feel that really works here.
I’m wondering- how did you feel when you were making this…like a journalist? an activist? Did you feel like you had a specific mandate to live up to for The Innocence Project? And how did that play out for you— was there anything you left out that might have complicated our view of Rick or his family? (For instance- why are his nieces living with him?)
Hi Evan,
If you do get Soundslides, there’s an easy way to create text slides that took me a while to discover. You might know it, but I thought I’d share anyway.
You create the slides in PowerPoint, hit "save as", and then for "format" select JPEG — that creates a folder of images, so to speak, that you can import into Soundslides just like you would a photo.
Elizabeth
Woods Hole, MA
that’s an interesting question melissa. i’m not sure what word to use, but the responsibility i felt in telling the story here was much greater than anything i’ve done before in radio.
there was a lot i left out, whether because i thought it was too complicated to explain (his nieces stay with him so they can attend a private school in the area. the visit their parents on the weekends, but rick sometimes felt like their primary guardian) or …. vance and i just didn’t have photos to go with it. for example, rick’s father was a tireless advocate for his son up until his death a few years before rick’s release. his father was so obsessed with proving rick’s innocence, he followed up on leads the police didn’t persue. he even found people in the neighborhood who knew the real identity of the killer. in his efforts, he uncovered more information than rick’s lawyer ever did. he also got sick because of it. both rick and myrtle said his grief ‘ate him up from the inside out’ and that’s what killed him.
had vance and i chosen this story as a ‘scene’ to depict both visually and with audio, i would have included more of that. unfortunately, we didn’t. and this was sometimes my frustration with the decision to have the final product use visuals- i often neglected to go after parts of the story because we couldn’t get a photo of it. i felt a bit overwhelmed, actually, in the field- because i had to wear two different hats. i was always thinking "this will be used only in the video" or "this will be only used in the radio piece" or "this is for both" etc. in the end, this might have been pointless, as i used only the audio that could be visually represented. and i worked backwards from there to put together the piece for the radio. had i started with just a radio piece in mind, the entire structure and narrative would have been different.
elizabeth- thanks for the info. i only have the demo version right now, planning on upgrading soon.
My comments are mostly about the content of this production: a gut-wrenching story, made moreso by what wasn’t included.
The music was a perfect accompaniment, I thought, suggesting a controlled tension.
Very memorable, and so unfortunate,
Bob
There is something very real and engaging about his story about staring into the fridge. Especially after we just heard him load the fridge into the house. The ordinary moments of life make very good stories when told so well like this. I love this piece. I think it would work just as well without the slides.
The music "How it Ends" by Devotchka is a perfect choice; even the title of it has some connection. Is that why you picked it? Also why didn’t you credit them for the music in the end titles?