When 18-year-old Nickiolas Jolly denied he was a killer, his aunt Phyllis Jolly believed him. Then she found a high-powered lawyer to shoot holes in the state's shaky capital murder case against her nephew. Photo by Mark Graham

"I asked them if they had a warrant," she says.

They did. They arrested Nick for outstanding traffic tickets.

While they were handcuffing him, another detective who had helped coach Nick on a Lincoln High School football team came to the door of the house. "I called out to him, 'Hey, look what they're doing to me,'" Nick says. "'Tell 'em! You know I didn't do nothing like this!' But he just dropped his head."

Phyllis Jolly, who had been Nick's surrogate mother during much of his life, followed her handcuffed nephew out to the squad car, then raced back into the house and got busy on the telephone.

From that moment until the case against him finally collapsed, Nick Jolly remained a police prisoner, first in the city jail and then in the Lew Sterrett county jail — for 14 months. Those 14 months behind bars were not an especially unusual amount of time for a prisoner in a capital murder case to wait, without a chance of making bail, for his case to come to trial. Under the current interpretation of the constitutional guarantee of a "speedy trial," some prisoners wait in the Dallas County jail as long as three years.

If there is a difference in the Jolly case, it is that the case against him was so obviously weak so early on. Within a month of his arrest, all of the basic facts that eventually destroyed the case against him already had been established by his Dallas attorney, Arch McColl. But even McColl says the refusal of the Dallas County District Attorney's Office to back away from a patently lousy case was far from unusual. Instead, McColl says, it's a posture that was typical of then-District Attorney John Vance, who decided not to run for another term in the November election.

Henry Wade, the legendary prosecutor who preceded Vance, culled his cases carefully — an important factor in his famously high conviction rates. But McColl and other criminal lawyers say Vance took a lazier, politically safer, and much crueler route. Abetted by his hands-off chief assistant Norm Kinne (Kinne announced he would resign after Vance decided not to run), Vance told his staff to indict anything and everything in the in-box. That way, no one could accuse him of being soft on crime.

"When Hugh Lucas used to be in charge of the grand jury under Henry Wade," McColl says, "he was directed by Wade to get rid of questionable cases or to recommend at least to the grand jury that they not indict cases. It seemed John Vance's philosophy was to try almost everything. It was much more difficult under his regime to get a fair hearing in the grand jury."

After his arrest, Nick Jolly spent the next year and two months in a two-bunk cell in a 30-man tank in the North Tower of the Lew Sterrett Justice Center, in a high-security area where they keep the home-invasion killers, rapists, armed robbers, and other dangerous prisoners. For most of those 14 months, he either talked on the pay phone to his family or lay on his bunk trying to control the pounding pressure inside his head. He tried not to get drawn into conversations, not even to hear the jail-house nonsense around him — the crazies who would just make him crazy too, if he talked to them, the snitches who only wanted to sell him out.

"I only talked to one guy," he says. "The rest of the time, I just stayed up in my bunk and read my newspaper or read my Bible. I didn't talk to nobody — just stayed to myself. There's so much pressure on you, hearing all this stuff in jail. People are telling you about your case or your family, and you can't get out and do nothing about it. I just stayed to myself. It just hurts to be locked up. It's like when your mamma gives you a whupping. You can take it, but you don't want to."

"If I was guilty of a crime, I could accept being locked up, because I know every man has to accept the consequences of his actions. But I wasn't guilty."

For those 14 months, the Dallas District Attorney's Office steadfastly insisted that Nick Jolly was a liar and a killer. This was their version of events:

The prosecutor told the grand jury that just after 3:45 a.m. on August 20, 1997, Nick Jolly and two other men kicked in the front door of a home at 2521 St. Clair Street in Rochester Park and rushed inside to rob the inhabitants.

The three robbers came in with guns pointed and white nylon panty hose pulled down over their heads bandit-style. They rounded up the six people inside — a middle-aged mother, her two teenage sons, her teenage daughter, her daughter's boyfriend, and her daughter's infant daughter — and ordered them to sit on the floor in the living room.

The robbers dragged the daughter, 18-year-old Helena Ceaser, into another part of the house and put a gun to her baby's head. By that time, prosecutors claimed, Helena and her brother, James Ceaser, 16, had recognized two of the robbers as their lifelong acquaintances, Nick Jolly and Tim Garrett. In spite of the disguises, according to prosecutors, Helena and James were able to positively identify the men by their voices and body language.

The robbers ordered the older Ceaser son, Corey, 19, and the boyfriend, Russell Dixon, 23, into a bedroom. Police investigators said the two young men may have tried to fight back in some way when they were hustled off to the bedroom. When they resisted, the robbers opened fire on them with a revolver and a semi-automatic. There is some suggestion in various police accounts that Dixon, the baby's father, may have seen one of the robbers putting a gun to his baby's head and may have tried to break out of the bedroom just then. Nick Jolly, according to the police version, pumped bullets into the bedroom, riddling Dixon and Corey Ceaser with holes.

The mother, Linda Banks, 41, leapt up and tried to run for it. She made it into the bathroom and was able to lock the door and jump into the bathtub for cover, but according to police, one of the robbers, either Jolly or his alleged accomplice, Garrett, fired multiple shots through the door and through the tub, slaughtering Mrs. Banks where she lay crouched for cover.

Mrs. Banks and her son were dead on the scene. Russell Dixon died hours later at Parkland hospital.

That left three people unscathed. Helena Ceaser said she had pleaded with the killers to spare her and her baby. She said Jolly had signaled to her that she and her daughter would not be killed. Her younger brother, James, also was spared. He said he had been able to wriggle out of the killer's view before the shooting began.

Certain beyond any doubt that Nick Jolly and Tim Garrett were two of the three intruders who slaughtered her family, Helena Ceaser identified them to police, according to the DA. The next morning, detectives went to the house of Phyllis Jolly and arrested Nick for traffic tickets. Later that week, he was charged with multiple capital murder. Garrett, a parole violator, fled Dallas when he learned he was wanted in the killings and remained at large for several months before finally returning to Dallas and turning himself in. Nick Jolly was then and remains convinced that Tim Garrett is as innocent as he.

In the first week of December 1998, after Nick Jolly had been in jail for 14 months, on the day his trial was to begin, he was called out of his cell and informed he would be going home. There would be no trial. The charges against him and Garrett had been dropped.

Garrett was not so lucky. By fleeing, he had violated his parole. He went back to state prison.

In the days after the cases against Garrett and Jolly were dropped, the local media engaged in a typical news-business tango. KDFW-Channel 4 did some hard-hitting pieces on the case, pointing out that, after more than a year of saying he had the killers behind bars, the DA had suddenly folded his hand.

Soon after, The Dallas Morning News weighed in with some thinly disguised versions of the official cover story. First Assistant District Attorney Norm Kinne gave an interview to the Morning News that seemed to suggest he had been forced to release two murderers because the chief witness against them, Helena Ceaser, had inexplicably refused at the last moment to cooperate with the prosecution. Assistant prosecutor Robert Dark, whose case it was, then gave his own angry, confusing interview to the News, in which he accused Ceaser of being involved in the murders of her own mother, brother, and boyfriend and vowed some day to bring her to justice.