The murder of Joyce Goodener

The murder of Joyce Goodener was solved not by a scientific breakthrough but by two corrections officers who heard James Murray Washington confess and came forward with what he had said. From the start, the physical evidence had been largely destroyed. When her body was discovered on July 5, 1995, in an abandoned house at 4522 Ashland City Highway in Nashville, it had been rolled in a rug, weighed down by a bloodstained cinder block resting on her head, doused with an accelerant and set on fire. The autopsy found two stab wounds to the left side of her neck and a series of blunt-force injuries to the head, and determined the cause of death was blunt force trauma with stab wounds and the manner of death homicide; testing showed no carbon monoxide in her blood, indicating she had been killed before the fire was lit, which had then consumed potential evidence. Metro-Nashville investigators Grady Eleam and Sergeant Anna Marie Williams worked the case from the day the body was found. The victim's boyfriend, Luther Winn, who had an alibi because he was at work, told officers that Washington may have been with Goodener on the day she died. A passerby named Lisa Cowell contacted police on July 6, 1995, after hearing about the murder, reporting that she had driven past the abandoned house the previous morning and seen a dirty black Camaro in the driveway and the silhouette of a person inside; she later said a photograph of Washington's brother's Camaro was consistent with the car she had seen. Washington, who had borrowed that Camaro, voluntarily came to police headquarters on July 10, 1995, and gave a written statement admitting he had been with Goodener and had sex with her that day but claiming he left her alive. Despite the suspicion, the police found no evidence in the abandoned house or the Camaro that connected Washington to the murder, and the case stalled. It stayed cold with no new developments for nearly fourteen years. Then, on March 3, 2009, Washington, by then incarcerated at the Turney Center for an unrelated offense, was transported to Nashville General Hospital after reporting seizures. Officer James Tomlinson and Corporal Homer Lee Carey supervised the transport. At the hospital, Washington gestured for Tomlinson to come into his room and said he had something he needed to get off his conscience, that he had killed somebody, and that he had beaten her to death. Tomlinson called Carey into the room, and Washington repeated that he wanted to confess to killing a girl, naming her as Joyce and giving a last name the officers recorded as Goodner or Goodman, near Ashland City. Both officers made written notes of what he said. They testified that when he confessed he seemed calm, showed no signs of agitation, and did not appear to be hallucinating; Carey believed Washington confessed because he thought he was seriously ill and wanted to clear his conscience. That confession, recounted by the two officers, transformed a dormant 1995 file into a prosecutable case. Washington was charged with first-degree murder in 2009. He survived his medical crisis and sought to suppress and disown the confession, with the defense arguing it had been made while he was hospitalized, in custody, without Miranda warnings, and under the influence of blood-pressure and anti-psychotic medications that could cause hallucinations. A pharmacist testified about possible side effects, and a psychiatrist who had evaluated Washington at a special-needs facility could not say whether his statement was accurate, a delusion, or malingering, but acknowledged that the specificity of his confession differed from typical hallucinations and read more as matter-of-fact. The trial court denied the motion to suppress, holding the statement was voluntary and not the product of state involvement. At trial the appellant did not testify. On the strength of the officers' accounts of his confession, together with the 1995 investigative testimony placing him with the victim and his brother's Camaro at the scene, the Davidson County jury found James Murray Washington guilty of first-degree murder, and the trial court sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He appealed, challenging the sufficiency of the evidence, the denial of his motion to suppress, and the autopsy testimony. On March 31, 2015, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the judgment in full. Seventeen years after Joyce Goodener was killed, the case had been resolved because the people who heard the killer admit what he had done chose to report it.