Philadelphia Weekly

Bill Barnes served his time. Until Walter Barclay died. Now he's back in prison.

With a penchant for robbery, prison escape attempts, parole violations and a general inability to abide by the law, Bill Barnes has spent much of his 73 years behind bars. He and his family readily concede he’s no angel.

But what they can’t accept is the homicide charge that’s led to Barnes’ current incarceration at SCI Greene, a maximum-
security penitentiary in Waynesburg, Pa.

It all started in 1966, when Barnes shot rookie police officer Walter Barclay, then 21, who interrupted an attempted burglary. Barclay was paralyzed, and Barnes—also known as the East Germantown Cowboy—served more than two decades in prison for the shooting. It seemed like the end of the story.

But when Barclay died from a urinary tract infection in 2007, District Attorney Lynne Abraham brought charges against Barnes for homicide—claiming that Barclay’s death was a direct result of the shooting in 1966.

The homicide charge shocked Barnes’ family members.

“My brother doesn’t make excuses for serving 52 years in jail. He made bad choices and he paid the price for that,” said Barnes’ younger sibling Jimmy a couple days before the FOP dedicated a plaque to Barclay’s memory. “But it seems like someone was laying in wait to bring these homicide charges. Since when does justice served end with vengeance?”

The Barnes family says the skinny white-haired senior was arrested from the Roxborough Shop-Rite where he worked as a janitor. (He also gave talks about his life to visitors to Eastern State Penitentiary, where he’d served a stint for robbery and for the Barclay shooting.)

Barnes’ niece Diane, who got People magazine to cover her uncle last fall, says, “They’re just cherry-picking a case because it involves a cop.”

Meanwhile, Officer Barclay’s loved ones and extended law-enforcement family disagree with a recent Inquirer editorial, “Delayed Charge,” that demands Barnes’ release on bail from SCI Greene. (It questioned the “dubious murder charge” and called the situation a “waste of taxpayers’ money.”) Barclay’s supporters say that the case involves a killing of a cop, and that cop killers should receive life behind bars or the death penalty.

“We feel very strongly,” Barclay’s sister Rosalyn Harrison told People magazine, that “they should pursue the murder charge.”

That pursuit has moved slowly. Barnes has been incarcerated for almost two years, and the case isn’t scheduled to go to trial until 2010. On Thursday there will be a Municipal Court hearing on whether to grant bail, but no one on Barnes’ side is optimistic.

“[My uncle] doesn’t think he’ll make bail,” says Diane. “The parole board just threw the evidence he brought to his hearing back at him.”

In fact, Barnes’ family thinks prosecutors are content to wait for the defendant to die behind bars rather than roll the dice with a charge that will be, at best, tricky to prove.

Controversy and added scrutiny will surround this case in the coming months, due to the fact that the primary motivator behind the case—D.A. Lynne Abraham—is set to retire. Five Democrats are vying to face the lone Republican candidate to succeed Abraham’s 19-year career, and how they consider the issue of the high-profile case is pertinent to both sides of the philosophically heated matter.

Most of the candidates agree wholeheartedly with what Abraham did, including Brian Grady, 40, of Roxborough.

“This case has a very unusual circumstance only in the extreme length of time,” he says. “If the officer’s death were a day, two weeks or six months after the crime, and had Barclay not been the fighter he was, Barnes would have received life or death at that time. The fact that the coroner says the death directly resulted from the gunshot wound at the hands of the defendant makes it a cop killing. There are no easy answers in this case, but there are no easy answers as DA.”

Dan McCaffery, 44—whose brother Seamus, of Eagles’ court fame, is a state Supreme Court Justice—concurs.

“As I said in my announcement speech, I will create a hostile environment for any person who commits a crime against children, the elderly or … against our first-responders—the police, the firefighters and our teachers. We must protect those who protect us,” he says. “As a former prosecutor who convicted more than 1,000 violent criminals, I offer no sympathy to a violent criminal who shot, eventually killing, Barclay. District Attorney Abraham was right to throw the book at him. I certainly would have done the same thing.”

Seth Williams, 42, was the city’s inspector general for three years and garnered 46 percent of the vote in his 2005 primary run against Abraham. Some considered him the front-runner in the race but on March 27, a Common Pleas Court judge’s decision removed his name from the ballot on failure-to-report-income grounds. Williams’ appeal will be heard this week.