Lawyer and former state District Judge Larry Baraka handled the defense for Tim Garrett, Jolly's alleged accomplice. Baraka noted a major discrepancy in police accounts of the murders: The initial report describes the attackers as "unknown suspects." Photo by Mark Graham

"I told the Jolly family, 'If your man is innocent, I'll find out. But if he's guilty, I'll find that out too,'" Wells says.

One of the first things Wells did — something the police almost never do in South Dallas — was walk around Rochester Park and ask people if Nickiolas Jolly was the kind of person capable of kicking in a door and filling a family full of bullets.

"Everybody said no," Wells says in the back office of his bond agency.

Rap videos are playing softly on a television set at the far end of the room. A framed portrait of a black Jesus rests on the floor, propped against the wall.

If people in the 'hood say no, that means something to Wells. "Usually, if it's a bad guy, sooner or later somebody's going to take you aside and say, 'Hey, I saw this guy do this or that,' or, 'Yeah, he's into some bad things.' But everybody who knew Nick Jolly just said no, that's not him. That's not Jolly."

Wells, for one, doesn't see racism, necessarily, in the fact that Nick Jolly got locked up for 14 months. "Anytime you have three people dead and the witness IDs the guy as the one who did it, he's going to be in jail. That's just how it is."

But he's willing to concede that there probably is a split, a divergence, a difference in the way the police and the DA approach a case when the defendant is an African-American male from South Dallas, and the way they deal with it if the defendant is a socially connected white kid. "It's probably easier to get a doubt in their minds if it's not the black kid," he says.

Wells did more than gather personal impressions. By that point Helena Ceaser was the only ID witness against Jolly. Her younger brother, James, had been dropped by the police and the DA for unexplained reasons.

In the early versions of the crime, police had down-played the suggestion that people in the Banks-Ceaser house might have been drug dealers. Helena Ceaser was described as having a "clean" record. But Wells turned up a very different picture. Nick Jolly was the one with the clean record, with no prior history of anything more serious than traffic tickets. Helena Ceaser and her dead brother, on the other hand, had a reputation in the neighborhood as mid-level drug dealers.

Certainly there was an obvious question that might have leapt to the minds of the investigators, including assistant DA Robert Dark: If Helena Ceaser was a drug dealer of some kind, and if the people who broke into her house and murdered her loved ones were drug dealers, and if she did, in fact, have some notion who they might be, why on earth would she name them to the police? Or, more to the point, why would she give the right names?

Why wouldn't an investigator assume that Helena Ceaser would be a whole lot more afraid of the killers than anything or anyone else? Why would an investigator take Helena Ceaser's word at face value for anything?

But the plain appearance of the case is that the DA and the police not only took her word at face value: They probably squeezed it out of her. The minute the case fell apart, when Dark finally was forced to send Nick Jolly home, he told a reporter for the Morning News he thought she was in on the murder and he was going to find a way to prosecute her. If it was that easy for Dark to make a very serious allegation about a person who'd never been charged with a crime in the incident, then isn't it possible the same kind of accusation probably got going almost as soon as the police arrived on the scene?

Come on, Helena. Why are you alive, and they're dead? You know something about this. This is about drugs. This is about you. Give us somebody. Or we'll take you.

So she gave them someone. Nick Jolly. The person she feared least.

The point is, a name was enough. Some black guy from the neighborhood. She named him. Case made. File closed. Lock him up. It was a case made by foreigners — cops and DAs who couldn't walk up and down the street and find out from people what the real deal was. The only people they could talk to were the ones on whom they had official leverage.

Dark angrily denies that's what happened. He insists Helena Ceaser's word and her word alone — that she had recognized this man by voice through white panty hose pulled down over his head — was all the case he needed.

But the other side of Dark's coin, now, is his argument that his case fell apart because Helena Ceaser is a sick killer — as he alleges — involved in her own mom's murder. Isn't there an element here of having it both ways?

"I've talked about this case, and I'm tired of talking about it," he shouts on the telephone. He says the case fell apart because Helena Ceaser and others in the house "were in on it."

"I'm convinced," he says, gaining composure. "I wasn't at the time, but now I'm convinced they were in on it. And if the days come when we are able to gather the evidence, we'll argue that in court."

The day the case fell apart, Channel 4 got to Helena Ceaser, once in the courthouse and once in a friend's back yard in South Dallas. She angrily denied in both interviews that she was in on the killings and called Dark a liar. Dark said she had failed to show up for numerous appointments and was unwilling to testify against Nick Jolly in court. In both interviews, she insisted she was ready to go to court and testify against Jolly anytime Dark wanted her to.

Since then — perhaps unsurprisingly, after Dark accused her of murder on TV — Helena Ceaser has vanished. Friends in the projects and people at New Jack City, where she sometimes hung out, said just before Christmas that nobody had seen her in weeks.

The same street talk that said Nick Jolly wasn't the killer paints Helena Ceaser as a very unlikely suspect as well. Gossip and her own arrest for drug-dealing months after the murders indicate that she and her brother and boyfriend probably did sell marijuana. Jolly's mother, Vickie Goodson, points out that in that trade lots of bad things can happen, especially if a person comes up short. But a conspirator in her own mother's murder? Goodson thinks the much more likely story is that Helena was as much a victim as anyone.