Background: WRIC YouTube footage shows the James River in Richmond, Virginia where the body of a 3-year-old boy was found in 1975. Inset: Marvin Grimm, after his recent exoneration for that boy’s murder. Photo courtesy of the Innocence Project.
After spending 44 years in prison for the abduction, murder and rape of a 3-year-old boy in 1975, Marvin Grimm has been exonerated by the Virginia Court of Appeals this week and granted a writ of innocence after scrutiny of DNA evidence proved, as the state’s attorney general advocated, that “no rational fact finder would have convicted him” of the heinous crime.
“Indeed, when considered as a whole, there remains no inculpatory evidence by which Grimm would be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” the court’s June 18 ruling stated. Grimm, as the New York Times noted this week, is among a rare group of Americans who has served some of the longest sentences in prison before exoneration. The only sentence longer is 48 years.
The story of Grimm’s exoneration begins with the child long considered to be his victim.
Identified in court records only as C.H., the 3-year-old was seen wandering into the woods behind his family’s Richmond, Virginia apartment in November 1975, and within an hour his mother reported him missing. A search party of nearly 300 people combed the area for four days until the boy was finally found on the banks of the James River less than 10 miles from his home. He was face up in shallow water with his arms folded across his chest.
Grimm, then a 20-year-old husband, new father and Navy veteran who lived in an apartment across the hall from the boy’s parents, was interviewed by police, the Court of Appeals recounted, as the search was underway already for two days. Grimm volunteered to police that there had been arguments between him and the boy’s parents about him “running his lawnmower over children’s toys left in the front yard of the apartment and second, in response to C.H. playing outside in his underwear.”
The child’s mother told police Grimm was “odd” and by December, as the investigation was still only unfolding, the FBI received a letter naming Grimm as a possible suspect in the murder “due to previous arguments and encounters with [C.H.’s] family prior to killing,” the appeals court noted.
Less than two weeks after that letter, Grimm was stopped by police as he was getting off a nine-hour shift from work. He was questioned for four hours that evening before he told police he had “blacked out” the day the boy went missing but had also seen him more than two hours after police said the child had disappeared. Now deeming Grimm a suspect, the police continued the interview and, as the appeals court described this week, Grimm “purportedly told police ‘what happened’ and guided officers as they retraced the steps of C.H.’s abduction, murder, and disposal.”
It was nine hours into the interview all told — and 18 hours after Grimm first showed up to work that day — when he gave his “recorded statement” to police for the first time and confessed to a murder and horrifying rape that DNA evidence would take decades to prove he did not commit.
In 1975, Grimm told officers he awoke to the sounds of the missing child and what he believed was another child throwing something at cars outside. After waking up, he told police he went to his mother’s house to pick up food and when he passed the children outside, both of the boys asked if there was “food in the bag for them” but Grimm headed indoors watched a football game in his apartment and blacked out. Then, he told police, he awoke, left his home, picked C.H. up at a “little laundry mat,” put him in his car and when the 3-year-old asked to go a 7-Eleven, Grimm refused.
Instead, Grimm said in his confession, he drove the child to a nearby motel and “forced sexual assault on him.”
He told police he dumped the child’s body in the river and “took off” back to his apartment until a neighbor came by and told him C.H. was missing. Then he said he joined the search party.
Police elicited details from Grimm about the disturbing manner in which he assaulted the child and how he had threatened him with a knife; they asked Grimm about how he slipped on the embankment of the river where he dumped the body and how he had torn his shoes or got his socks wet. In his confession, he told policed he was panicked as he looked for somewhere to get rid of the body.
But, as the writ of innocence pointedly states, despite all of this it is “worth noting this recorded confession makes no reference to the alcohol or drugs found in C.H.’s system, nor did it provide any new geographic information to police.”
Ultimately, Grimm pleaded guilty to murder, sodomy by force, and abduction with intent to defile in a deal struck with prosecutors because he was told if he pleaded guilty, it would keep him from facing the death penalty.
The only issue with that, however, was the crimes he agreed to plead guilty to were not yet crimes that were punishable by death in Virginia.
Grimm’s plea was accepted and he was sentenced to life in prison plus 10 years on the sodomy charge. He was denied parole more than two dozen times and was not released from prison until 2020.
Forensic experts at the time of C.H.’s death told police they found seminal fluid in the back of the boy’s throat and that he also had drugs in his body, namely, a muscle relaxer. They said they found alcohol too.
When Grimm was prosecuted this toxicology evidence was used against him. Prosecutors also introduced as evidence swabs from the child’s mouth and throat plus eight hairs that investigators said they found in Grimm’s coat and in his car. A child’s sock was introduced into evidence and separately, a towel was also introduced, allegedly stained with semen. Police said they found both objects in Grimm’s car.
In 1975, the Virginia Court of Appeals ruling explains, analysts said the hairs from the car, as well as a hair found inside the child’s sock from the car, were a match to C.H.’s hairs. But in 2011, they were tested with DNA analysis and it was determined none of the hairs belonged to C.H.
The swabs that reportedly contained semen and the fluid reportedly found on the towel were also phantoms. DNA testing done in 2002 and then again in 2017 determined not only that Grimm was not a match for biological material found in C.H.’s mouth, but that in fact, there had never been any seminal fluid in the child’s mouth at all.
The towel itself also never contain a trace of human DNA, let alone Grimm’s semen, analysts discovered in 2003.
DNA testing was not scientifically possible in 1976 and further, wasn’t recognized in Virginia courts as reliable or admissible until 1989 and attorneys representing Grimm argued that much of what led to his conviction was the result of conclusions from a now-dead Virginia crime lab analyst, Mary Jane Burton.
As the Times noted, though Burton was revered for her work throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it has been claimed by whistleblowers in more recent years that Burton’s work was incomplete, shoddy and that she was perceived as being biased against defendants. An investigation into 4,800 of her cases is explored by journalist Tessa Kramer in “Admissible: Shreds of Evidence.”
As Grimm worked to exonerate himself, he also pointed to research about coerced or false confessions. When he was first prosecuted, very little information or study existed on the record about forced or faked confessions, and in its ruling, the court of appeals acknowledged this deficiency.
Grimm, now 69 years old, first filed his petition seeking his exoneration in May 2023.
He told the Times after he was exonerated that he may try to finally see his own son again: Grimm had not seen his own child since the day he was arrested.
An attorney for Grimm issued a statement to local ABC affiliate WRIC it was a “bittersweet” victory for Grimm.
“Working to exonerate Marvin was truly a team effort involving not only our A&P team, but also multiple attorneys over the years from the Innocence Project — and could never have been accomplished without the unwavering support of Marvin’s sisters and entire family,” attorney Jeffrey Horowitz of the law firm Arnold & Porter said.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
