Who Daniel Was
Before June 18, 2014, Daniel was a 27-year-old patrol officer his supervisors described as eager, liked by all, and outstanding at his job. He had a girlfriend of several years, a habit of texting her a daily scripture, and nothing on his phone or his work computer that the State could use. When two detectives sat him down and accused him of rape, he gave them his DNA, his pants, and a standing offer to take a polygraph, and told them to go test everything.
“Liked by all on the shift.” “No complaints on him.” “He will be a fine officer.”
Daniel joined the Oklahoma City Police Department in 2012 and was assigned to the Springlake Division, one of the busiest patrol areas in the city. In February 2013, at the end of his probationary year, his lieutenant wrote his review board evaluation: use-of-force incidents, zero. Complaints, zero. “Holtzclaw makes good decisions and calls if he has questions.” “Holtzclaw is liked by all on the shift and gets along with all officers.” “Holtzclaw has no problems communicating with the public. I have had no complaints on him.” “Holtzclaw makes good reports.” His activity ranked second on the shift: 40 felony arrests and 26 DUI arrests in six months. In the cover note to the division commander, the lieutenant added: “Holtzclaw is a little slow but does good work and eager. He is eager to learn all aspects of our job. He will be a fine officer.” Lt. Aven Bull, probationary review board evaluation and cover email, Feb. 17, 2013 (OKC 6592, 6596–98).
The division commander, Major Brian Jennings, sent him notes with his monthly activity sheets. May 2013: “Daniel, great month of activity. Keep up the outstanding work. It makes a difference.” February 2014: “Daniel, outstanding activity! Keep up the hard work. It is appreciated.” On June 11, 2014, one week before the Ligons stop, reviewing a use-of-force file, Jennings told his captain: “Tell Holtzclaw he did an outstanding job and to keep up the hard work.” When Daniel’s hometown paper ran a profile that March, “Enid Football Standout Now Chasing Felons as OKC Police Officer,” a gang-unit sergeant sent it up the chain and Jennings forwarded it to the deputy chief. OKC 6463, 6465, 6996, 4678–87.
That activity had a cost, and the file shows it. In April 2014 Daniel searched a man for marijuana on the side of the road and pulled the man’s pants off doing it; it made the local news, and his major told the deputy chief he probably hadn’t followed the right search procedure. The deputy chief’s answer to the chief the next morning: “Officer Holtclaw is cut from the same cloth as Vontungeln. Big ex-football player who lives for the high activity, but has a good heart. We will correct his mistakes.” His use-of-force reports, six in a year, also tripped the department’s Early Intervention Program review twice, in February and March 2014. That is the review an officer gets for making more arrests than the officers around him. It is not discipline, and it produced none. OKC 4688 (Jennings to Jester, Apr. 30, 2014; Jester to Citty, May 1, 2014); OKC 4651, 4652, 6214, 6221.
Nobody who worked with him, before or after, described anything like the man the State would later put in front of a jury. The detectives who built the case went back to his high school and his college looking for one. Asked on camera what they found, Davis said the worst was that “he was a stud football player and he got away with things because he was a stud football player. Not things like rape.” Any sign of predatory behavior in college? “There were not.” Gregory: “Nothing pointed directly that he was that way.” Gregory–Davis interview for Michelle Malkin Investigates, Sept. 19, 2016 (transcript). Disclosure: Michelle Malkin is married to UNCUFF president Jesse Malkin.
He got her to the ER after she swallowed PCP, and then he tried to help her.
On December 20, 2013, Daniel stopped Shardayreon Hill. She was smoking PCP. When he confronted her she pretended to be disoriented, fell against the patrol car, and bit down on a vial of PCP in her mouth to destroy it, shattering the glass and swallowing the drug. Officers watched her do it; she admitted it under oath. Daniel got her to the hospital. He stayed with her in the recovery room while she came out of it. The nurse responsible for her that night saw nothing inappropriate and said Hill never mentioned anything to him. Trial Tr. 1329, 1331; Standard Supplement Report on Shardayreon Hill (RN Richard Watkins), Oct. 8, 2014.
Afterward he did something he shouldn’t have. He found her on Facebook and accepted her as a friend. Police later screenshotted the whole thread from inside her account, with dates, and the State put it in front of the jury as evidence of grooming. Here is how it starts. The first message is hers, January 8, 2014, 1:51 a.m.: “Damn took u long enough i been waiting lol u still got my number right??” Then: “thanks for looking out for me that night lol..” with her phone number, “make it ring ;)”. His reply that afternoon: “I can’t tell a difference between you and your sister, obviously you guys are twins ….. You staying out if trouble !?! you better be.” Scott Adams 08663 (Facebook thread, dated capture).
That is the tone of the whole thread. February 10, Hill: “Iv been ok still working on gettin it together.” February 16, Daniel: “U in okc.” “Making sure your doing ok and staying out of trouble.” February 17, Hill: “Im back now and yea im trying to stay out tha way.” February 28, Daniel: “Hey how court go?” Hill: “Went back to jail n they made my charge wth intent.” Daniel: “Huh. What. How you go back to jail. ????” “I’m lost, how did you get arrested again. Did you f up again.” “Hey call me.” March 3: “Sharday? Last thing you said was you went back in let me know about it maybe I can help or explain what’s going on.” Hill: “Help how i dont get it??” Daniel: “You gota call me I can’t talk through Facebook I don’t know your details.” March 22: “Hey I’m going to pick you up where u at.” And the last message, April 30: “Sharday, hey you got a warrant out for your arrest. Try to get that taken care of. I’m worried about you, I know your a good person, stay out of trouble.” Scott Adams 08663–08667, 10040–10042; State’s Ex. 145; Trial Tr. 1339–40, 1354, 1381.
Contacting a woman he had arrested, off duty, on a personal phone, was a bad idea, and it cost him. But read the messages, starting with hers. She wrote first. She thanked him for looking out for her the night she nearly died. A cop asking a 24-year-old addict how court went, why she got arrested again, and telling her to take care of her warrant and stay out of trouble is not a predator’s script. It is a young officer who thought he could help someone he had watched nearly die, and a woman who, for four months, thought so too.
Hill accused him nine months later, after his arrest was on the news. At the end of her recorded interview, after the detective seemed to be finished, she stood up and said: “Even if he didn’t like even rape nobody or nothing he’s still getting in contact with people he arrested.” Watch it here. According to the defense investigator who appears on the video, Brian Bates, the prosecutor had never heard that part of the tape before trial. If so, the State charged six counts on an interview nobody on its side had watched to the end. Had the last minute been cut, Daniel could well be serving another fifty-plus years on her word. The jury acquitted him on all six of her counts. Hill video interview with Det. Gregory, Sept. 19, 2014 (as posted); Trial Tr. 1422:20–1424:3, 1731:1–4, 4326; Motion for New Trial & Sentencing Tr. 24, 46 (Jan. 21, 2016).
He gave them his DNA, his pants and a polygraph offer, and told them to go test everything.
On June 18, 2014, hours after Jannie Ligons’s complaint, Detectives Kim Davis and Rocky Gregory brought Daniel in. He came without a lawyer and never asked for one. For more than two hours he answered every question. He signed a body-search waiver and gave four buccal swabs. He handed over the uniform pants he was wearing. He agreed to a polygraph on the spot, without conditions. Scott Adams 00013, 00025, 00072–00117; Trial Tr. 1145.
Told there was video of the stop, he said it would not show his penis out and would not show Ligons’s breasts. He was right on both counts; the camera was too far away to show much of anything. Told the pants would be tested, he pushed them to do it: “go, go at it — not my DNA.” “Please, go.” “I want to clear my name.” Scott Adams 00020, 00029, 00042, 00047, 00067.
The detectives who accused him that afternoon never interviewed him again. He got a lawyer after the first session, as anyone should, and the lawyer declined further interviews and the polygraph. The State later told jurors that a man who offers to take a polygraph is “just trying to sell it to you.” That is Gregory’s line, on camera, two years later. It is one way to read a suspect who willingly hands over his DNA and pants and urges prompt forensic testing. Gregory–Davis interview for MMI, Sept. 19, 2016.
The State went through his phone and his work computer. It found nothing.
The State searched his phone under a warrant in October 2014: texts, call logs, search history, stored media, and his iCloud account. It subpoenaed his carrier records back to December 2013 and put an analyst on the stand to map his cell-tower hits. What it found and used: the Hill messages, and one call from his personal phone to Adaira Gardner’s mother just before midnight on June 17. Some context for that call. Gardner was 17. At 10:47 that morning her mother had reported her to 911 as a runaway, after Gardner punched her in the face four or five times and ran. Daniel encountered Gardner twice that evening. At 11:42 p.m. he called the home number, identified himself as an Oklahoma City police officer, and asked for Adaira; her mother cursed at him and hung up. He ran the mother’s name fourteen minutes later. OCPD did not issue its officers work phones, so the call came from his own. What the search did not find: a single photograph of any accuser, a single explicit message, a single pornographic file or search, or a single contact with any other accuser. Search Warrant, Oct. 2, 2014 (OKC 1141); State’s Exs. 145, 397; Trial Tr. 3785–88; Scott Adams 11451, 11535 (runaway report #14-48792 and the 11:42 p.m. call); Gregory–Davis interview for MMI, Sept. 19, 2016 (“We’re not provided with work phones”).
The City also went through his work computer. In September 2014 the City’s information-security office pulled every logged internet hit from Daniel’s patrol-car account for the four and a half months before the Ligons stop: 342 of them. They were the state prison offender lookup, the state court-records site, the law-enforcement telecommunications system, Windows and Adobe updates, the department’s policy manual, eight search-engine hits and four on Facebook. The security officer who ran the search told the deputy chief the files “probable have no value.” The deputy chief passed them to the Sex Crimes lieutenant with “not sure if there’s anything of value.” The search and its results were not disclosed until civil discovery, three years after his trial. OKC 0883–0938 (Kuhlman to Muzny, Sept. 9, 2014, forwarding Gibson, Sept. 4, 2014, with Vantage reports).
His girlfriend of several years, Kerri Hunt, testified at trial. He sent her a scripture verse most mornings. Asked whether she had ever noticed anything odd or unusual about his sexual activities: “No.” Whether she had ever seen him view any type of pornography: “No.” Trial Tr. 4108–14.
There is no version of Daniel in the record that matches the man the State described.
UNCUFF has read the whole file. Every supervisor’s note, every message on his phone, every hit on his work computer, every word of the two hours he spent with the detectives who accused him. There is nothing in it. There is no version of Daniel Holtzclaw in the record before June 18, 2014, that matches the man the State described, and the man in the interview room that day did what an innocent man does: he asked them to test everything and waited for the results. They came back with less of one woman’s DNA on his fly than a car door handle carries, and the State built 263 years on it.
Explore the rest of the case.
Daniel Holtzclaw: case summary
A summary of the whole case: the investigation, the DNA, the accusers, the trial, and where things stand.
The DNAHow the State Distorted the DNA Evidence
A trace of DNA, less than a car door handle leaves, and no stain. The prosecutor called it “fact” that it came from a rape.
The analystThe Analyst In Her Own Words
The State’s only forensic witness, on video: what she looked for, what she didn’t test, what she told the prosecutor, and what her opinions rested on.
The emailsEvidence Destruction
The analyst’s email account was deleted while the appeal was pending. What the State later recovered began after the trial was over.
The searchHow the State Manufactured Accusers
Nine of thirteen accusers were found by police, who opened with a “tip” that didn’t exist. Thirty-some other women said nothing happened.
Accuser evidenceWhat Police Never Checked
Missing recordings and what the objective records actually showed, once each woman had made her allegation.
Case studyTerri Morris
How Morris's allegation changed, how police selected May 8, and what the AVL records do and do not show.
The first accuserJannie Ligons
The June 18 allegation, the unrecorded first interview, and the negative forensic test results.
Case studySherry Ellis
How police found Ellis, the description that did not match Daniel, and her later testimony that she had never seen him before trial.
Case studyKala Lyles
Twenty or thirty minutes through the fly, hours before the pants were seized. Her DNA wasn’t there, and the patrol car’s records leave about eleven minutes.
Guilt by associationOne Accuser’s DNA Carried Twelve Others
The only physical evidence belonged to one accuser. All thirteen were tried together, and jurors later said the DNA got deliberations moving when they doubted some of the others.
The courtroomThe Circus-Like Trial
The protests, audible chanting, courthouse conditions, and the denied request to sequester the jury.
The fly“I Don’t Know How He Did It.”
Jannie Ligons said it at trial. Eight of the nine women who alleged rape or oral sodomy placed the act through the fly of pants that stayed on. Under the uniform, Daniel wore compression shorts with no fly. Getting past them would take work. Nobody has ever explained how he was able to extricate himself with so little time and effort.
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