Well-known Dallas criminal attorney Arch McColl took on Jolly's case for free after the young man passed a lie detector test. Photo by Mark Graham

A Morning News reporter set the scene: "Words painted on a boarded-up doorway across the street read, 'Stop the Violence,' but the killings told another tale of the dilapidated Rochester Park neighborhood, where residents and police say drug dealing and neglect are apparent."

Certainly the case Dark presented to the grand jury was based on the same cultural assumptions that informed the Morning News' coverage: This was a scene from the black inferno — a tale of monsters killing their own kind.

Now, with the Jolly case in shards at their feet, in a week when they had been forced to send Nick Jolly home after more than a year in jail, the authorities were making it obvious this was another chapter in the same sordid history. This is what you get. They won't even stand up for their own dead. What can we do?

What was entirely missing from the DA's version and barely visible in the coverage of the News was the other distinct possibility: that the case against Nick Jolly had been stupid from the beginning, that Norm Kinne and Robert Dark had been either foolish or without conscience in pursuing it, and that the real reason Kinne and Dark had been forced to fold their cards and send Nick Jolly home was that Nick Jolly finally got lucky and got himself a good lawyer.

Nick Jolly's mother, Vickie Goodson, lives in the Oak Hollow apartment complex near the intersection of Elam Road and the Hawn Freeway in southeast Dallas. If there is a spectrum in southern Dallas County, the Oak Hollow apartment complex, called "New Jack City" by its residents, is at the bad end. A sprawling, battered two-story complex with mansard roofs and dirty brick walls, its architecture might be described as Early-'70s Gone-to-Hell.

It's a free country, and there are a lot of choices in Dallas for places to live, even for cheap apartments. Vickie Goodson, like most of the residents of the Oak Hollow Apartments, has her reasons for being here.

On a recent weekday afternoon, several places that looked very much from the outside like drug houses were in open operation. Surly "good eyes" stood at the stoops with arms cloaked inside baggy overcoats, scanning the busy action in the parking lots. Cars pulled in and out of parking spots like traffic in front of a 7-Eleven store. A majority of the wary customers rushing in and out between the guards were black, but many were white and suburban-looking. A frequent visitor said, "Last time I came here, I had to wait to get back out to my car because these guys were out on the parking lot having an AK fight." It doesn't really matter where you're from: This is where serious IV drug use brings you.

Whatever her own struggles may be, Vickie Goodson is intense about her hopes for her sons. She insists all of her three sons are headed toward the other end of life's possibilities. "Both of my older boys graduated high school, and my baby is still at Lincoln, just about to finish," she says.

The other end of the spectrum in southern Dallas is the home of Vickie's sister, Phyllis. It's a small, tidy, frame house on Scott Street in Rochester Park, just a few blocks from where the murders occurred. Phyllis is a beauty operator with a good job and seniority. Most of the time, Nick and his younger brother, Stanley, 17, who is still in high school, live with Phyllis, their aunt.

In the living room of her house, Phyllis leans forward and speaks clearly to make a point: "I'm not going to tell you that Nick is a saint. He will admit that he has sold a little marijuana. He's gotten into small trouble, like any kid his age in South Dallas. But he's not a killer."

She asked him. He told her he had nothing to do with the murders on St. Clair Street and could think of no reason why he had been named.

She believed him, and she made up her mind to try to persuade prominent Dallas criminal attorney Arch McColl to represent him. McColl, who does not seek or need court-appointed cases, got to know Phyllis several years ago when she worked for him to pay off a legal fee.

She says, "If I thought he was guilty, I probably would have tried to get Arch to represent him anyway, just so that I could be sure he would have a fair trial. But I believed he was innocent, and I knew he really needed help. Big help."

Normally the attorney's fees, investigative fees, and other costs in a case like Nick's would come to at least $40,000 before trial. McColl did it for free — pro bono. Over lunch at an elegant private club on the top floor of a downtown office tower, he tried to explain why.

McColl, an Ivy League lawyer with a roster of famous clients and high-profile cases behind him, wasn't looking for work. But something in this case stirred him.

"I asked Phyllis, 'Did he do it?' And she said he was innocent."

But are lawyers supposed to ask that question? Between the soup course and the arrival of the salad, he ponders.

"Well, normally what I ask a client is more along the lines of, 'What do the police think?' or 'What do they know?'" He shrugs and smiles. "But I was being asked to do this for free."

Jolly had been provided with a court-appointed attorney. McColl thinks the appointed lawyer was already doing a good job for Nick Jolly. Phyllis Jolly has a different take.

"The court-appointed lawyer was OK. He was a nice guy and all like that. But I knew Nickiolas needed a fighter."

After being assured on Phyllis Jolly's solemn vow that her nephew was an innocent man, McColl went to the jail and met with Nick himself. "I liked him," he says over the salad course. "Seemed like a nice kid."

With the aunt's vow and his own opinion now in hand, McColl decided next to bring in Eric Holden, one of the nation's top polygraph operators. Nick got on the box and swore he was innocent. According to Holden, he passed.

"So I had three things, none of which necessarily meant anything at all," McColl says over coffee. "His aunt said he was innocent. I liked him. And he passed the polygraph."

He took the case.