The Naked Truth

The man in the doorway was naked, and extraordinarily calm. Bereft, I thought. In shock, maybe.

He stood there, his hand on the handle, taut and toned. A dancer’s body. Lithe, even standing stock still.

“Come in,” he said.

The motel room was standard fare — a bed, a nightstand, a lamp. A straight-backed chair pulled out from a flimsy desk.

“Sit, please,” he said, pointing to the chair. He had pale eyes and auburn hair, both tinged with flecks of gold. He sat on the bed, legs spread comfortably. I looked him in the eyes.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” he began.

I knew some already. That’s what brought me to his door.

His girlfriend had been shot and killed in what appeared to be a botched robbery. An all-too-common occurrence in Miami at the time. Late ‘80s. A Sunday. A week before Halloween. The Twins won the World Series. Fatal Attraction topped the box office. Miami was a dazzling and dangerous place, fueled by drugs, dollars, and dark desires.

Miami Vice painted a caricature that was all the more vivid because it was all too real — flashy clothes, fast cars, fat jewels, and enough cocaine to powder the Rockies. And people from all walks of life wanted a cut of the action, including street sharks preying on tourists in rented cars.

I was a reporter with the Miami Herald. I’d seen too many crimes like these. I’d spoken to so many victims I’d lost track of their names. But I’d never spoken to one naked.

He was German. Dieter by name. He said he’d brought his girlfriend to Miami to propose. They’d gone to dinner. Then they’d gone for a drive. Got lost. Saw a man standing by some parked cars, stopped for directions.

“I asked, ‘Where is Biscayne Boulevard?’” Dieter told me. “I know if I stay on Biscayne Boulevard I find my home. He says he wants to give help.”

His girlfriend rolled down the passenger side window. The man pulled out a gun.

“I see him, he had something in his hand and he said something, but I don’t understand.”

Dieter got scared. He stomped on the gas. He heard a gunshot. By the time he spotted a police car and stopped to ask for help, his girlfriend was dead.

He picked his wallet off a night table, opened it to show me a photograph of her. She was naked, too. Beautiful, with a stunning body. She could have been a model.

“She loved Miami, you can see her smiling in the videotapes I made, so happy,” Dieter said.

He lowered his head.

“Why do I earn this, coming here?”

I went back to the office, wrote up my story, the carjacking victim’s first-person account of the tragedy that took his girlfriend.

The next morning, my phone rang. It was a homicide detective I knew.

“Oh, Carlos,” he said. “What have you done?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you know about blood spatters?”

“Oh, no.” It’s all I could muster, barely a gasp.

In fact, police said, the girlfriend was a prostitute. Dieter, they contended, was her pimp.

She wanted out, they said. He didn’t want her to go. He took out close to a million dollars in life insurance on her, including one that paid double if she was murdered, and one just days before, when he rented the car.

They arrested him two days later. They found bullets that matched the one that killed his girlfriend in his motel room, along with three handguns. The bullets were rare. They could only be fired from three specific gun models in the world. Two of those guns were in Dieter’s room.

Forensic evidence was even more damning. They had questioned him the night of the murder, and found gunpowder residue on his hands. And they found blood spatters inside the driver’s side door, but not on Dieter’s clothes.

That, the cops insisted, proved Dieter was not in the driver’s seat like he said he was when his girlfriend was shot.

Dieter, though, swore he was innocent. To police. To me. On the stand at trial.

A defense expert claimed the residue on his hands could have come from someone else firing a gun close by. Another said the blood spatters proved nothing. They could have swirled around Dieter and landed on the door. Plus, the prosecution had to admit, ballistics tests showed that none of the guns in Dieter’s room was the murder weapon.

The jury found him guilty. The judge sent him to death row.

Dieter kept fighting, proclaiming his innocence again and again. He appealed. Lost. Appealed again.

And again.

His attorneys claimed evidence had been mishandled, past convictions improperly introduced, exculpatory character testimony suppressed.

The case gained notoriety in Dieter’s homeland, where prostitution is legal and the death penalty isn’t.

Germany filed an amicus brief on his behalf, against the death sentence. A German filmmaker made a documentary about the case, attempting to prove his innocence with a convoluted theory that he had been sentenced to die for a lie.

It contended Dieter was caught up in a drug deal gone sour. The dealer killed his girlfriend. Dieter lied to cover his true crime, and wound up paying for a crime he didn’t commit.

In 2010, twenty-two years after his conviction, a court vacated Dieter’s death sentence. He left death row for a new cell and a new sentence, life without possibility of parole.

Dieter’s still in prison. He’s 77 years old, spent nearly half his life behind bars. He lost another appeal two years ago, still proclaiming his innocence.

All these years later, he’s still fighting. And I’m still wondering. Is Dieter guilty? I honestly don’t know.

They say that in war, the first casualty is truth. After years of covering crime and courts, I wonder if that’s true in murder trials, too.