Bungled crime led to the legal decision that produced the Brady rule

This book was finalist for the 2024 Colorado Book Award for General Nonfiction.

Author’s note: The legal concept of the “Brady rule,” named after a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision, requires that prosecutors divulge all evidence favorable to the defendant — though the rule has often been ignored, making such violations the single leading cause of wrongful convictions. This excerpt recounts the bungled crime that led to the case behind the eventual ruling.

Love, death, and the birth of the Brady rule

John Leo Brady was in love. In early June 1958, he was also in some trouble. His sweetheart, Nancy Boblit McGowan, had just told him she was pregnant with his baby. Nancy was only 19 and married to another man. Brady was 25 and broke.

He’d never had an easy life. He grew up poor in southern Maryland. His young parents, scraping their living from a small tobacco farm, couldn’t cope with a fussy baby. They gave him to his paternal grandparents and his Aunt Celeste, who raised him. From infancy through his late teens, Brady suffered from serious otitis media. His ears regularly oozed a thick, vile-smelling pus. At school, his classmates called him “Stinkears.”

Brady gladly dropped out during the eighth grade to work fulltime on his uncle’s farm. At 19, in 1951, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served as a military policeman at bases in Washington State and Greenland. Over the next four years, his otitis stopped, he got married, left the service, earned his high school equivalency, got divorced, and returned home to Maryland.

In March 1958, Brady met Nancy and her brother, Charles Donald Boblit. Their parents were good friends with Aunt Celeste. Donald Boblit was 25, gawky, lonely, and barely literate. 

In the pre-feminist jargon of the 1950s, a friend of Nancy’s called her “just a dumb good-looking blonde.” Both Nancy and her husband Slim were living with her parents, and the couple hardly spoke. She let everyone know she intended to do whatever she wanted.  Brady and the two Boblit siblings soon became close. Nancy fell for Brady’s “sulky blond good looks,” as a biographer later put it. Before long she was pregnant. 

Brady was working at a local tobacco packing company for $1.50 an hour. He had recently bought a used 1947 Ford and was behind on his bills. But he wanted Nancy to know he was committed to her. She had planned a trip to New York to visit family, leaving on Monday, June 23. Brady spent that Sunday with her. They drove around in his car and parked by the Patuxent River.

Sometime in the afternoon he impulsively wrote her a check for $35,000, post-dated to July 6. This was a dream sum—a huge number pulled out of the air. If he could make it real, Brady guessed the money would solve all their problems. 

Nancy asked no questions. She put the check in her purse. Brady reminded her to wait, saying, “Somehow, in two weeks it’ll be in the bank.”

He saw only one way to get that kind of cash—stick up a bank. He knew he could get Boblit to help. Over the next few days, Brady and Nancy’s brother hashed out a sort of plan. Nearby big cities like Baltimore and D.C. had too many cops and guards. They settled on the one bank in tiny Stevensville, Maryland, 30 miles away just over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. They’d do it on Saturday morning. Folks would have deposited their weekly pay on Friday afternoon.

Even though he’d bought it recently, Brady worried his Ford was too old to be reliable. Especially if they got in a chase. For a successful getaway, they needed a more dependable car.

William Brooks had one.

“When Innocence Is Not Enough”

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Brooks, 53, had known Brady for most of his life. He’d been a hired hand on Brady’s grandfather’s farm. He’d recently stayed with Brady and Aunt Celeste for a week while recovering from surgery. The two men had shared a room and played checkers. Now Brooks had a good job working the late shift at a small plastics factory in Odenton, about 20 miles southwest of Baltimore. He was living in a shack in the woods, not far from the plant. His landlady, Mary Elliott, had a house nearby. She worked at the same factory. 

Less than two weeks earlier, Brooks had gotten his first new car: a blue, two-tone Ford Fairlane. When Brady dropped by to visit, he’d looked it over—and coveted it. Elliott had driven past and seen the two men together. 

Brady and Boblit decided to waylay Brooks as he came home from work after midnight. Boblit would blindfold Brooks, since he would recognize Brady. They would tie him up, then stow him in a vacant house Boblit knew about. When the robbery was done, they’d let him go and give him his car back. 

Brady was adamant Brooks not be harmed. “I don’t want him hurt, not at all,” he said repeatedly. “He was good to me when I was a kid.”

Late that Friday night, June 27, the two men put a log across the narrow dirt road that led from the highway to Brooks’ home. He would have to move it to get by. They waited in the dark.

Things went awry from the start. When Brooks stopped for the log, Boblit stepped out of the shadows with a double-barrel shotgun. He ordered Brooks to get in the rear seat of his Ford. 

Brooks seemed confused and started to get back into the front seat. He kept pleading: “Please don’t kill me. Please.” He wouldn’t shut up. 

Boblit hit him in the back of the head with the shotgun, knocking Brooks woozy. He forgot about the blindfold. The men laid Brooks on the back seat of the Fairlane and drove away. Brady, improvising, wanted to find dense woods where they might leave Brooks unnoticed. 

Boblit had a different thought. “We got to kill him,” he said. “He seen me.”

“Put that goddamn gun away,” Brady replied. “Someone might hear a shot.”

When they parked near a stand of trees, Brooks started to wake up. They got him out of the car. He was wobbly. Together, Brady and Boblit walked him into the small forest. He was holding his lunch pail from work. They stopped in a clearing. 

Brady walked off a little, trying to think. He knew Brooks had recognized him.

Boblit didn’t hesitate. He took off his red plaid shirt. He twisted the sleeves until they were tight. He used it to strangle Brooks, who was too frail to resist. When Brady turned and saw what was happening, he ran back and pushed Boblit away. It was too late.

“He’s dead,” Brady said, staring at Boblit.

“Let’s get out of here, John.”

The men carried Brooks’ body a little deeper into the woods. Before they left, Brady put a few branches over his face and head. On the way back to the car, he picked up Brooks’ lunch box and threw it as far as he could.

Their escape plan was no better than their robbery plot. The two drove to Chestertown. But when dawn came they decided not to hit the bank. 

“I just can’t do it,” Brady said. “Done enough.” They had gotten $255.30 from Brooks’ wallet. Brady figured they should head for Washington State; the only other place in the U.S. where he’d lived.

They made it to Lynchburg, Virginia, about 200 miles southwest. Already Boblit was asking to go home. Brady didn’t want to fight. They parked Brooks’ Fairlane on a downtown street, walked to the bus station, and caught a Trailways. They were in D.C. by late Saturday afternoon. From there they took a cab up to Glen Burnie, a suburb of Baltimore, where Brady had left his car. 

Both men thought nobody would miss Brooks for at least a few days. But Elliott, his landlady, reported him missing when he didn’t show up for work at 4 p.m. on Saturday. She also told police she’d seen him with Brady, and they might be together. 

Meantime, Brady, dreamer of crazy dreams, had been toying with the idea of going to Cuba and joining Fidel Castro’s rebels in the mountains. He had met a few Cubans during his time in the air force. They had talked up their revolution. He had even helped them move small shipments of guns intended for Castro. That Sunday morning, he drove down to D.C. He stopped by an aunt’s place just after noon. 

When she told him two officers had been there a little while earlier, looking for him, his heart nearly stopped. The police must already be on to him and Boblit. After a short pause, Brady handed his keys to his aunt and pointed to his car. “I’m going out of the country,” he said. 

With his share of the robbery money, Brady bought a ticket to Cuba on a flight leaving early Monday. He was in Havana before noon. After a good sleep, he walked around the old city, wondering how to contact someone connected to Castro. 

At about the same time, Nancy went to the bank in Maryland to cash his check. She hadn’t waited two weeks. It wouldn’t have mattered. There was no money in Brady’s account. She felt humiliated when the teller laughed at her.

But Brady kept thinking about Nancy and her brother. Somehow he convinced himself he was only guilty of a minor crime: stealing Brooks’ car. He loved Nancy. Their child was on the way. If he turned himself in, he could say they just hit Brooks and left him by the road and didn’t know where he was now. That might get Boblit off the hook. Maybe he could still work things out with Nancy. 

That Tuesday afternoon, rather than heading off to the Sierra Maestra mountains to seek out Castro, he walked into the American Embassy in Havana. A few hours later he was in a Miami jail cell, talking to two FBI agents. Brady said he knocked Brooks out, and he and Boblit had stolen Brooks’ car. He told them where to find it. Sure enough, an agent in Virginia found the Ford. 

Brady said nothing about any killing.

On Wednesday afternoon Brady was formally charged with transporting a stolen car in interstate commerce. Bail was set at $25,000. The next morning, he told the agents he was ready to plead guilty. As a first-time offender, he was hoping for a short sentence, maybe even parole. 

Two hours later, the FBI men returned. “Your friend Boblit’s been picked up,” one of them said shortly. “He took us to where the body was.”

Brady thought Boblit had been in jail since Sunday, when the police were in D.C. looking for him. And that he had kept his mouth shut. But Boblit had not been arrested until Wednesday, and only after Brady said his name to the legal counsellor in Havana. Three officers had come to Boblit’s house late in the afternoon.

In an interrogation room, they started asking Boblit about Brady and the stolen car. They’d hardly begun when he looked at the floor and blurted out: “Well, I might as well tell you. You’re going to find out anyway. …The man’s dead.” He didn’t even know Brooks’ name.

Suddenly he said: “Brady did it. It wasn’t me. I didn’t do nothing … It was all his idea, and he done it all.” 

Boblit told the officers Brooks had not been killed near his home, but in the woods close to the Patuxent River. He said he could show them where, and he did. Back at the station, in barely legible handwriting, he wrote a brief statement of what had happened: 

[O]n the 27 day to help Jhon B to rob one W M B and to take his body to the river bridge and I sow Jhon B kill hin. I did not no that he was gorin to kill hin. Jhon B say that he was gorin to let him stay a alive just knok W M B out and leve hin. 

Boblit signed the document, and two officers wrote their names as witnesses. 

Over the next six hours, three detectives questioned Boblit in detail. A transcript of the interview shows he again told them Brady had strangled Brooks. He said he’d tried to stop Brady: “I told him not to do it.” He hadn’t reported the crime because he was “[s]cared to.”

The next day, in Florida, FBI agents told Brady what his friend had said. At first, he wouldn’t believe Boblit had put it all on him. The agents pointed out that what Boblit said fit with what Brady himself told them earlier. 

Brady gave his own statement, saying Boblit hit Brooks with a shotgun and later strangled him. When he’d said before that he was the one who struck Brooks, he was just trying to protect Boblit. When the two men parted, he said he told Boblit “to go back to his home, that I would take the blame and for him not to admit anything.”

That night, the front-page, banner headline in the Annapolis Evening Capital was “Police Charge Two with Slaying of Severn Man.” The story reported that “an odd, almost senseless series of events” had led to the murder charge. It said that “astute police work was not needed” to solve the case, because the two men “seemed pathetically anxious to be caught.”

Brady waived extradition and was taken back to Maryland. He soon learned Nancy and her family blamed him for what had happened. She wanted nothing more to do with him. He talked to her just once more, when she came to visit her brother at the Annapolis jail. She stopped by his cell, and asked: “Did you kill that man?” 

“No.” 

Nancy began to cry, then turned and left forever. Brady never spoke to their son.