In an exclusive interview from the women’s death row unit in Gatesville, Texas, Linda Carty makes an emotional plea for help to the British authorities
A BRITISH grandmother who has spent the past 17 years on death row in America - for a murder she says she never committed – claims she has bombshell new evidence she hopes will prove her innocence.
Linda Carty, convicted of murdering a young mother in 2001, said she had been given a tip about the identity of the “real killer” after her supporters put a plea for help online.
The new information still needs to be investigated before it can be brought forward in any appeal.
However her lawyers are placing their hopes on an upcoming appeal in the US Supreme Court where they will argue Linda was not given a fair trial due to misconduct by the prosecution and a poor defence from her court-appointed lawyers.
Linda is accused of orchestrating a brutal kidnap-murder in May 2001 – by hiring four men to burst into the home of neighbour Joana Rodriguez, 25, to kidnap her and her three-day-old baby Ray.
Cops found Joana hogtied in the boot of Linda’s car where she had died from suffocation – her arms wrapped in duct tape, her nose and mouth taped closed and a plastic bag over her head.
Baby Ray was found in the back of a car registered to Linda’s daughter - alive.
Prosecutors argued that Linda, who had suffered miscarriages, planned to steal the baby and pass it off as her own - and had even stocked up on baby items.
They pointed to phone records from Linda's phone that showed she had called the co-defendants on the day - and a statement from a neighbour who claimed Linda told her she was going to have a baby the next day.
However Linda, 59, claims she had never met or spoke to her co-defendants and was framed for the crime because of her work as a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant.
Speaking exclusively to The Sun Online from behind a Perspex screen at the Mountain View Unit, Gatesville, Texas, an emotional Linda said: “I am innocent and I would swear on my mum and my daughter's life.
“That’s the only reason I'm fighting because if I had done this I would take my punishment.
“I know in my heart I didn't do it, but I don't have the resources.
“I didn't have anybody to help me and that's where I feel as though my government abandoned me because they should have been able to look at this case and look at all these discrepancies and see that there's something wrong.”
Linda’s three co-defendants Gerald Anderson, Chris Robinson, and Carlos Williams all testified against her at trial and claimed she had tricked them into thinking they were robbing a drug dealer's house.
In return none of the co-defendants received a death sentence.
Two of the co-defendants later testified that they had been co-erced to testify against Linda – including Robinson who said at trial he had seen Linda hold a plastic bag over the victim’s head.
Linda’s DEA handler Charles Matthis also testified that prosecutors had threatened to “invent” an affair between him and Linda – if he testified for her defence.
Despite the new testimonies, Linda was unable to secure a retrial or win any of her appeals.
“It tears me up to see that when someone from here [America] commits a crime or allegedly commits a crime in any other foreign country, the American government goes after that person and works tirelessly to get that person freed,” she said.
“It's not what's happening here from the onset of this case. I was sentenced to death for a crime solely on circumstantial evidence.
“We have discovered that what the witnesses said was not true - because we got some tips and we got some leads.
“A plea that we placed online for help from anyone out there and from the information that we received, we now know who the murderer is. All the information fits in."
Linda says that on the day of the murder she was staying in a hotel - and had lent her car to a man named William Arvizu, the subject of a DEA investigation she claims she was working on.
Arvizu was shot and killed along with his wife and child several months before Linda’s case went to trial.
“I didn't even have my vehicle - that is the bane of this entire miscarriage of justice because nobody bothered to find out why I didn't have my vehicle," she said.
“Nobody bothered to investigate who took the car, who had the car and where the car was.
“There was no way that I could have left that hotel without the front desk or anybody seeing me or knowing that I had left because I would have had to use a taxi to go back and forth.
“In terms of my co-defendants I had never seen these people before. I've never had a relationship with them. Never met them. It’s ludicrous to say I asked anybody to do anything for me because I didn't know them.”
When asked how she felt when her death sentence was read out in court on February 21, 2002, Linda said she felt “disbelief” and “abandonment”.
Wearing an oversized white prison-issued jumpsuit and her hair neatly pulled back in a plait, Linda added: “I felt alone, lost and sad because I felt as though I had been betrayed by the people that I spent 20 years working undercover with and it was some dangerous assignments.
“It was like a slap in the face for somebody to tell me that, ‘Okay because this person says that you did it, you did it’.
“There was no investigation done, nothing was done. It was just a big mess, a colossal mess."
Linda, who was born in the Caribbean island of St Kitts while it was still under British rule, is now urging Prime Minister Theresa May and the British public to help support her bid for freedom.
“Yes I do want her to support my case," she said. "And I want her to do it with sincerity, and with the same passion that she would go after somebody else coming into our country and imprisoning somebody - a member of her family or a prominent societal person. I still matter. It doesn't matter which side of the rung I'm on.
“I want to come home and I want my freedom. I just want a fair shake of justice. That's what I want… I had the worst legal representation ever and that's the reason why I'm here on death row today.
“I just want somebody to re-examine the case and deal with the facts and not with the hearsay.
“I want a proper investigator on my case. That's what the British government can do for me.”
Addressing the government directly she added: “You need to pay attention and you need to come and have more interaction here with me.
“You need to do more, they need to go back into my case. They need to deal with these new tips that we just got, they need to provide me an investigator that will go right now and do the work because they can get to the killer and the killer will have to confess.
“And what I want right now from the British public is for them to call up every member of parliament and contact everyone in the cabinet and demand that this investigation gets done."
Linda describes her day to day life on death row as “hell” and says she misses her family most of all - including her daughter Jovelle, 35, and two grandsons aged 13 and 10 - who she is no longer allowed to see because of strict prison rules.
She says she is still heartbroken about all the occasions she has missed including her mother’s funeral - and Jovelle’s graduation and wedding.
And although she tries to stay positive, she says the psychological impact of being on death row takes its toll.
Her day begins with breakfast at 3 to 4am then she works sewing garments and uniforms for other inmates for around eight hours a day, then bedtime is 9pm.
She says she suffers racism and discrimination because she is both black and British - often getting refused requests for toiletries when other inmates are granted them straightaway.
Once she recalls she asked for some skin cream after having an allergic reaction and was told: “You shouldn’t be in our prison anyway. You should be in England. Why don’t you ask the British people to send you something?”
“Oh it’s hell,” she said. “It's not home obviously. You're practically out of touch with everything - save for letters from friends and family and newspapers which keep us in touch with what's going on in the outside world.
“It's more like being sequestered for 17 years because you have no contact, no interaction with the outside world physically.
“My cell is a cage, it’s small, there’s an aluminium sink and the toilet connected to each other. And a slab - just this aluminium slab - with a flattened vinyl mattress on top. That's it.
“And the windows are smoked. So you can't see anything outside. Nobody can see inside.”
Linda looks forward to her two hours recreation outside per day - and two hours of TV.
Prison bosses even gave her permission to watch the Royal Wedding “which she loved”.
“They give you rec here - they’re good at that.
“I like watching Dancing With The Stars - I love Bruno.
“I also like the Bachelorette and all the NCIS’s, Hawaii 5-0 and 60 Minutes."
Linda has not yet received her execution date and there is no set procedure in Texas as to how and when a date is set.
Death row inmates can spend anything from less than a year to 30 years awaiting their fate.
If Linda’s sentence is carried out she will be strapped to a gurney and injected with the lethal drug Pentobarbital.
“I'm not scared of dying,” Linda said. “I just don't want to die because I'm going to be a pawn for somebody else or because someone didn't do their job.
“Or because I fell between the cracks. I don't want to die like that.
“I know that I didn't commit the crime.
“So for that I don't want anybody killing me and adding me as a number to this mad machine that they have going on here.”
To the family of Joann Rodriguez, Linda says she is sorry for their grief – but they are directing their anger at the wrong person.
“I am so sorry that this happened to their child,” she said.
“I'm a mother. I'm a daughter. I'm a sister. I'm an aunt. So I understand and I understand that grief.
“But you're directing the blame at the wrong person. And because the state of Texas told you that Linda Carty did it, it doesn't mean that Linda Carty did it.
“I pray that when the truth comes out that they will not feel any kind of guilt towards me because I've forgiven them.”
Michael Goldberg, Linda's attorney, said they were now focused on Linda’s legal appeals.
He said: "Linda's appeals are certainly not exhausted we are about to file an appeal in the US Supreme Court.
"In our first appeal we obtained the finding that the actions of her trial counsel were ineffective.
"But the court couldn't say that that deficiency would have resulted in a different verdict.
"Then last year we were granted a new evidentiary hearing based on new evidence that the prosecutors committed misconduct.
"So we have proved she didn't get a good defense form her counsel - that wasn't enough, we proved the state withheld evidence but that wasn't enough.
"Now we are asking the courts to look at these two things cumulatively together - and that's what we are taking up to the Supreme Court in the next few weeks."
