julia.reischel@exhibitAnews.com
Lining the walls of Jack and Josephine Wallace’s garage in Milton are more than 40 boxes full of paper they have cried over. Documents fill folders in their bedroom and next to their dining room table where Jack, weakened by skin cancer, can easily reach them. Consulting them regularly, he spends his days making calls and writing memos on behalf of his stepson, Alfred W. Trenkler, who was convicted of building a bomb that killed a police officer and maimed another in Roslindale almost two decades ago.
The case has become a part of Boston infamy. In the summer of 1991, Trenkler, an electrical engineer, met Thomas A. Shay, a young delinquent and on-again-off-again male prostitute. Tommy Shay’s abusive and distant father, Thomas L. Shay, was expecting a windfall from a lawsuit.
In the fall of 1991, police and prosecutors say, the young Shay and Trenkler built a bomb and planted it under the elder Shay’s Buick. The bomb did not go off when the senior Shay found it, but it exploded in the faces of two bomb squad officers, Francis X. Foley and Jeremiah J. Hurley Jr., while they inspected it. Hurley was killed, and Foley was badly injured.
Two years after the blast, juries found Tommy Shay and Trenkler responsible for the crime. Ever since, they have been widely loathed and branded as gay “cop killers” by the Boston media. When they appear in court, uniformed Boston police officers show up by the hundreds to protest.
‘Sacrificial lamb’?
Trenkler has always insisted he is innocent. At his sentencing hearing in 1994, he told the court he was “a sacrificial lamb who has been wrongly accused of committing a heinous crime that another is responsible for.”
Today, from a minimum-security prison at the Devens Federal Medical Center in Ayer, he reiterates his innocence: “They never proved my guilt.”
As many prisoners do, Trenkler describes the flaws in the case against him to anyone who will listen, and he has taught himself enough law to file lengthy handwritten motions from captivity. But unlike many prisoners, he has managed to convince others that he is telling the truth.
Family members have long believed that Trenkler is innocent. They have pored over every document in the case and have investigated — and, they claim, disproved — much of the evidence themselves. In 2006, they founded a group called the Alfred Trenkler Innocent Committee and launched a website, alfredtrenklerinnocent.org. Three family members and three friends sit on the board, which sends regular newsletters to more than 60 supporters across the country.
People outside Trenkler’s family also believe in his innocence.
The lawyer who represented Tommy Shay, Trenkler’s alleged lover and co-conspirator, calls the case a “witch hunt.”
Meanwhile, a respected appellate attorney who knew the Wallaces growing up in Milton will not say that Trenkler is innocent, but he contends “there’s a problem with this case.”
And finally, Morrison M. Bonpasse, a onetime Boston lawyer, has become so convinced of Trenkler’s innocence that he has written and self-published a 727-page book about the case called “Perfectly Innocent.” He has sent copies to everyone ever involved with the case, including judges, lawyers, members of the jury and even the victims’ families.
These efforts have begun to bear fruit. In 2005, with most of his options exhausted and without a lawyer, Trenkler wrote to the judge who sentenced him, arguing that she had misapplied the sentencing laws in his case and given him an illegal life sentence.
After years of denying Trenkler’s various legal motions, U.S. District Court Judge Rya W. Zobel accepted this one and appointed a lawyer for Trenkler, Joan M. Griffin, who is fighting to win him a shorter sentence. If Trenkler is lucky, his new sentence could be less than the time he has already served, and soon he could be free.
Researching it ‘up and down’
But Trenkler says he will not be satisfied with an early release. He wants to clear his name and bring the real bomb-builder to justice.
“It is up to someone, either in the government or the Boston Police [Department], to demand they reinvestigate this case,” he says. “They were on the right track. They got five sets of prints under Shay’s car. … Whose prints might those be?”
In 2006, Jack Wallace filed a motion asking to be allowed to examine all the evidence in the case with the help of a fingerprint expert. When the government recently revealed that it had already destroyed all the evidence, Trenkler and his parents were emboldened.
According to Brighton defense lawyer Jefferson W. Boone, the law prohibits the destruction of evidence in a case when there is an opportunity for further appeals. Trenkler has had motions pending before the court almost continuously since his conviction.
“I’ve researched it up and down, and I can’t find where they had permission to destroy it,” Trenkler says.
Looking up from the dining room table covered with papers, Jack Wallace smiles and says, “I think that might be good for our case.”
‘Innuendo and gay-bashing’
After the bomb blast, the investigation soon focused in on Trenkler because his name was in Tommy Shay’s address book. Trenkler was an electrical engineer, and, damningly, he had been previously charged with building a bomb in Quincy in 1986.
Also, Trenkler’s relationship with the younger Shay, which began as a chance meeting near a notorious Boston gay bar, furnished a motive. Prosecutors decided that love drove him to help Tommy Shay plant the bomb in the older Shay’s car.
The two were tried separately. Shay, who went first, was represented by then-Boston attorney Nancy Gertner, who went on to become a U.S. District Court judge. During the trial, Gertner argued that the real bomber was Shay’s father, who, she suggested, had set the bomb under his own car in order to bolster his claim that he was being harassed by the opposing party in a lawsuit. But the jury found the young Shay guilty. With that verdict for Tommy Shay, Trenkler’s lawyer faced an uphill battle.
Arguing that Trenkler had conspired with Tommy Shay to buy components of the bomb at RadioShack, the prosecution produced receipts, bomb remnants and a videotape of Shay confessing his role to a reporter.
But the prosecution zeroed in on a witness and a criminal record to prove its case: a witness named William David Lindholm, who testified that Trenkler had admitted the crime to him while they were both in prison; and the 1986 bombing Trenkler already had on his record.
Trenkler was found guilty, and Judge Zobel sentenced him to two life terms in prison, much more than the 15 years she had imposed on Shay for the same crime.
Lawyers involved in the two trials now say that the case against Trenkler was unfair. It was “all innuendo and gay bashing and ‘he’s a terrible guy,’” says Boone, who, along with Gertner, represented Tommy Shay.
“It’s a case that’s troubled me for years,” says Terry P. Segal of Boston, Trenkler’s lawyer. “I feel very badly that somebody is sitting in jail for all these years for something that I felt there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him on.”
Former prosecutors Paul V. Kelly and Frank A. Libby Jr. could not be reached for comment before press time.
‘Basically a stink bomb’
Neither piece of the government’s key evidence against Trenkler seems particularly solid now. A police report made during the investigation of the 1986 bombing identifies Trenkler’s “bomb” not as an explosive but as an “artillery simulator,” a training device used in the military that is essentially a noisemaker.
The 1986 police report also notes that Trenkler’s device did not injure anyone or damage the truck when it detonated.
The 1991 bomb, meanwhile, was made with sticks of dynamite. Although the prosecution had initially convinced the jury that the two bombs were similar, the 1st U.S. Circuit of Appeals ruled in 1995 that the lower court had erred in admitting some of the testimony that led to that conclusion.
Trenkler says that the 1986 bomb was a prank that he pulled for a friend, a drug dealer who wanted to get back at an employer. Both Segal and Boone fought hard but unsuccessfully to exclude that prank from the trials of Shay and Trenkler.
“They weren’t similar,” says Boone.
“The prior incident was basically a stink bomb,” Segal says now. “But a jury isn’t going to make that distinction.”
The government’s second piece of evidence, Lindholm’s jailhouse testimony, may also be less than convincing. Although prosecutors at the trial promised that Lindholm would not ask for any rewards for coming forward, he did just that within a year of Trenkler’s conviction and was released early from prison because of his help with the case.
In 1998, another jailhouse witness came forward to testify that Lindholm’s jailhouse testimony was false. An inmate named John J. Bowden, who encountered Lindholm in prison during the Trenkler case, says that Lindholm told him he was lying in Trenkler’s trial to get a reduced sentence. That year, Trenkler’s lawyer asked for a new trial based on an affidavit signed by Bowden but then forgot to submit the affidavit to the court. The motion for a new trial was denied.
“In the closing, I talked about this fellow Lindholm,” Segal says. “He never had a deal? Please. I don’t think the jury believed Lindholm. But put that with the prior incident, and I think that’s what did it.”
‘Uncontrollable urge’
Another problem with the case against Trenkler is his co-defendant, Tommy Shay.
Shay had been officially diagnosed as a pathological liar at the time his videotaped confession was used against Trenkler at trial. In a letter to his lawyer, a doctor who examined Shay said that a symptom of his personality disorder was “an uncontrollable urge to spin out webs of lies,” which “serve to place him in the center of attention.”
Boone, Shay’s lawyer, says that Shay made up the story of the bombing to get attention.
“Do I think Tommy Shay did it?” he asks. “Hell, no. He’s an idiot, a monumental liar, a manipulator, a jerk, and if you speak to him for more than about 10 to 15 minutes, you know he’s a jerk, you know he’s a liar, you know he’s an opportunist, you know he’s not that bright, you know that he’s got a big huge mouth. You know that you wouldn’t dream of conspiring with him to jaywalking, because you couldn’t get halfway out in the street without him yelling, ‘Look at us jaywalking! Score one for justice!’”
Although Shay was convicted of the same crime as Trenkler, he is already free. In 1998, he won a new trial after the 1st Circuit court found that Judge Zobel had erred when she barred the doctor from testifying about his lying disorder. Shay pleaded guilty and received 12 years, six of which he had already served. He was released from prison in 2002 and has since made headlines for violating his parole, brawling with his family and cross-dressing.
Since being freed, Shay has recanted all his claims against Trenkler. Now he ardently proclaims Trenkler’s innocence and frequently contacts Trenkler’s family and the press, offering to talk about his change of heart.
Trenkler, meanwhile, was unlucky with lawyers. In the 1990s, his family hired then-prominent Boston attorney Morris M. Goldings to handle his case. But while he was working on getting a new trial for Trenkler, Goldings was caught embezzling $17 million of his clients’ money. He checked himself into a mental hospital and subsequently did time in the same prison in which Trenkler is now incarcerated.
Boston appellate attorney Dana A. Curhan, who helped Trenkler construct his illegal-sentence argument, says that the disparity between Shay’s and Trenkler’s sentences is troubling.
“I’m hoping that somebody recognizes that there’s a problem with this case,” he says. “Not only did Trenkler get an illegal life sentence, but the guy who actually planted the bomb has gotten out. If we had been litigating this 20 years ago, there would’ve been an easy procedural step to get in front of the judge and say, ‘Look, you have to do something.’”
Curhan, who grew up with Trenkler’s family in Milton, believes that Trenkler now has a good case for getting out soon on a reduced sentence.
“There is precedent that says if you correct an illegal life sentence, you can’t give the person something that is in substance a life sentence,” he says.
But Curhan stops short of saying whether he thinks Trenkler is innocent.
“My job when I was in the case was to try to do something about the legal sentence,” he says. “If we had been able to cut it down substantially, we would’ve been able to do something good for him, innocent or not.”
“There’s something here,” Segal agrees, “but whether [he] can ever get relief is another issue. He shouldn’t be sitting there, I know that.” {EXA}
