When a 15-year-old Philadelphia boy was wrongly accused of rape in a case of mistaken identity, public defender Glenn Gilman C’69 and two Penn anthropologists, Dr. Alan Mann and Dr. Janet Monge Gr’80, combined their expertise to ensure that justice was served.
By Susan Lonkevich | Illustration by Anastasia Vasilakis
Sidebar | That’s Mr. Neanderthal to You
“The details of that day will be in my mind forever.” Marion Jessie is on the other end of the phone line, recalling with painful precision the afternoon her youngest son was arrested: Sept. 30, 1997. “I had come home from work that day. I was in the house getting ready to prepare dinner. Across the street is a little hairdresser’s, and Greg was sitting over there with two of his friends.”
Suddenly, she says, one of the friends ran to the door and shouted to her oldest son, “The cops just locked your brother up!” Jessie, who lives in the Olney neighborhood of North Philadelphia, called the police station and waited four excruciating hours before she learned that Greg had been arrested for rape.
“A parent knows her child,” Jessie says slowly. “I knew I couldn’t have possibly raised a child that was a rapist.”
Already a quiet 15-year-old (though known as something of a jokester by friends and family members), Gregory Wilburn turned inward, and Jessie worried what would happen to her son during his incarceration, first in the maximum security wing of the Youth Study Center, and later, in the Philadelphia House of Correction in the Northeast. “I hate to put it in a certain category,” she says, “but these are hard-core criminals—even though they are kids.” Each visit ended in tears. “For one whole year, my son never smiled. I was like, ‘Say something.’” And he would respond, “What do you want me to say? Tell me when am I going home. I’ve got to stay here, and I didn’t do anything.”
Wilburn’s lawyer, Glenn Gilman C’69, an attorney with the Defender Association of Philadelphia, was convinced his client was the victim of mistaken identity. But he needed a way to prove his conviction to authorities. He found that in the expertise of two Penn physical anthropologists, Dr. Alan Mann and Dr. Janet Monge Gr’80. What follows is a story about the convergence of science—in particular, the quest to answer what distinguishes humans from one another—and justice, where such differences can mean jail or freedom.
On Aug. 1, 1997, a 17-year-old girl steps into a corner grocery and deli to buy a loaf of bread for her aunt. Walking close behind her, a little too close, is a young man, slim and unshaven. When she leaves, he follows her out the door. Their movements are recorded in grainy detail by the store’s surveillance camera.
Two houses away from her home, the stranger grabs her, holds a knife to her throat and takes her down a neighbor’s narrow driveway where he unzips her skirt, pulls down her underwear and attempts to sodomize her. Rubbing himself against her buttocks, he ejaculates without penetrating. As he walks up the driveway, the neighbor confronts him, and he flees.
When the victim contacts police, their response is noteworthy for what they don’t do. They don’t take her to a hospital to gather physical evidence, even though that is standard procedure in the 72 hours following a sexual assault. They don’t collect her underwear (she would supply it to them nearly eight months later). And they don’t bother to interview neighbors who might have seen the assailant.
Two months later, when the victim is walking to the same store to pick up a copy of the surveillance tape for investigators, she spots Gregory Wilburn on a street corner with two friends. Believing that he is her attacker, she calls police.
Wilburn, a 10th-grader at the time, is arrested on the spot. Because his family can’t produce the $5,000 required for a $50,000 bail, he is held in two different correctional facilities under a 1996 Pennsylvania law requiring juveniles accused of violent felonies to be prosecuted as adults.
In July 1998, Glenn Gilman took over Wilburn’s defense from a colleague who was transferred to another office. The boy he visited in prison was quiet and kind of depressed, and like so many other defendants that it’s his duty to represent, he avowed his innocence. Gilman believed him.
Gilman is a balding, thickly-mustached man, who at age 52 looks, as one newspaper columnist observed, as though he could be Richard Dreyfuss’s younger brother. He went to Penn in the late 1960s and soaked up a fair amount of the idealism of the decade. “The career choice then was law school or the Peace Corps,” he recalls. “And some little bit of me thought I had to do something that would help me make a living, so I chose law school.”
After graduating from American University Law School in Washington, he returned to Philadelphia, where he worked as an assistant attorney general in the Pennsylvania Justice Department. “It was 1972, and there was a certain excitement because the new governor, Milton Schapp—a non-politician’s politician—had attracted a lot of young people to get into state government and make things better.”
He went on to work for the U.S. Department of Energy, prosecuting oil companies for violating price regulations. “Then Carter lost to Reagan, and within a week, there were no price regulations.” So Gilman became a public defender in Philadelphia. “I enjoyed it,” he says. “Even though you couldn’t make any money, I was having fun and I really felt excited about helping individual people.”
Gilman’s two sons were growing, however, and by 1990, he realized he soon would need to start paying for their college education. “I went into private practice, and I represented people trying to get money because other people had injured them. And I didn’t like that all that much,” he says quietly. “After five years of it, I just didn’t want that to be my life, so I came back here.” Here is an office building at 17th and Arch streets, where the waiting room is lined with orange, hard-backed chairs in which clients doze or sit with folded arms, splayed legs and guardedly blank faces. Most of those waiting for appointments on this late-August morning are young, male and African-American.
Gilman’s office is furnished with a couple of standard-issue metal desks, file cabinets and a striped couch. He picks up his own phone and responds to a pager which goes off frequently—often when clients, who’ve been mulling over their cases from jail, experience minor epiphanies. His caseload runs the gamut of criminal charges, including robbery, drug, rape and aggravated assault, but he draws the line at homicides. “I would be too emotionally involved because I have a strong, visceral, moralistic anti-capital-punishment streak.”
Leaning back in his swivel chair, with his dress-down loafers propped up on his desk (he won’t be in court this particular week), Gilman tells how his own work led him to collaborate—twice—with a couple of anthropologists from his alma mater:
In 1984, one of Gilman’s clients was picked out of a photo lineup by a teller whose bank had been robbed. In fact, the defendant had robbed a bank in the past—but not that one. Gilman noticed some differences between his client and the image of the robber on the bank’s surveillance tape. “I had to find somebody with some degree of expertise who could help me persuade a court that this teller was making a good-faith error, but a serious one.
After he’d talked to a lot of people, someone suggested, “Why don’t you try this professor, Dr. Alan Mann, who’s done some work in this field?” Gilman recalls. Mann, a professor of anthropology at Penn and curator of the vast physical anthropology collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, agreed to take a look at the evidence.
With his colleague, Dr. Janet Monge, an adjunct assistant professor and the keeper of the museum’s physical anthropology collection, Mann went to the bank to check on camera angles and then took pictures of Gilman’s client at precisely those angles. “He constructed sculptures of the head of the robber, and he was able to show in court real physical distinctions between that guy and my client, who was sitting in the courtroom with us,” Gilman says. “The trial was successful and my client was found not guilty because of [their testimony].”
Gilman kept in touch with the Penn anthropologists over the years. In fact, his oldest son took one of Monge’s classes at Bryn Mawr College, where she also teaches. He didn’t expect, however, that a similar confluence of events would reunite them for another criminal case—not until he met Greg Wilburn.
Gilman had been briefed by Wilburn’s first attorney that “he felt that this was the wrong guy.” When he finally met his client and reviewed the surveillance video, he agreed. “I saw that the guy who did it looked older than Greg, and he looked skinnier. And he looked to me like his head was shaped in a different fashion. He also had a walk that appeared different.”
But how could he build a defense around these subjective observations? Gilman needed solid evidence, and he knew exactly who could provide it. Mann was out of the country at the time, doing work on Neanderthals in his summer research appointment at the University of Bordeaux. So Gilman called up Monge and told her, “I think I have another one.” When Mann returned from France last August, he and Monge set to work on the case, taking pictures at all angles of Wilburn in jail, and through computer technology, superimposing those images next to the head of the suspect in stills from the store video.
Go up to the third floor of the University Museum’s Kress wing, out of the view of the visiting public, and you’ll find the physical anthropology teaching lab—an exhibit unto itself. Busts of early man seem to keep sentient watch over the room, while on the cabinet shelves below are rows of human skulls, lined up like so many beer steins in a busy bar. A complete set of child’s bones—slender ribs and tiny vertebrae—resembles jewelry in its meticulous display behind a glass case. Two plastic lunch trays hold an array of fossil fragments arranged for a daunting identification quiz. In the midst of these visual distractions, Mann and Monge present a slide show of their findings demonstrating that Wilburn was not the individual caught on film in the convenience store that July day two years ago.
As scholars who spend most of their time poking around in our distant past, their legal work is not a side-specialty they like to advertise. All the same, they consider it a part of their civic duty. Mann says he isn’t aware of any other anthropologists who have served as expert witnesses in criminal cases. He and Monge have accepted about a dozen cases over the past 16 years, “losing” in only one of them. In one case, the essential distinguishing mark was a pair of attached earlobes; in others, a duck-like gait or a widow’s peak helped secure a defendant’s freedom.
They have established a couple of ground rules, however, that result in them turning down many pressure-filled pitches. They work only for the defense, and only when they believe the defendant is innocent.
Because Mann and Monge must convince themselves of this fact before they can convince others, they typically argue a lot in the early phases of an investigation. “I’m more likely to go out on a limb because I have a feeling [about something],” Monge says. Mann, the more skeptical one, acknowledges that Monge’s insights usually prevail. “I give good testimony,” he says.
Perhaps in the great sweep of human history, Mann’s scholarly association with Monge isn’t so long-lived. But in the context of, say, Penn’s anthropology department, they go way back. Mann has been teaching at Penn since he completed his Ph.D. at UC-Berkeley in 1968. “That entitles me to be fossilized here,” he boasts. “I can’t believe that I’ve already reached the point where former students of mine have children who are in my courses. That’s truly scary.”
Monge, who teaches both at Penn and Bryn Mawr, began pursuing her Ph.D. at Penn in 1976; Mann was her adviser. “I finished in 1990—a mere 13 years later,” she says, letting out one of her infectious laughs. Mann shakes his head. “We just gave up and gave her the degree. We couldn’t take it anymore.”
A good portion of the time, Mann and Monge are consumed with Neanderthals, a group they believe have been unfairly maligned by everyone from respected scientists to insult-slinging lawmakers. “I think 40,000 years ago,” surmises Mann, “if they got angry at somebody, they said, ‘Oh you congressperson!’” Recently, they studied x-rays of an enormous collection of Neanderthal fossils from Croatia, and concluded from the bone density levels that these early hominids were actually a hardier bunch than had been previously believed.
Word of advice to purse snatchers: don’t pick an anthropologist to rob. Janet Monge recalls the time she was mugged 10 years ago, outside a grocery story at 10th and South streets. She was wearing a sturdy Coach pocketbook with straps that refused to break; the robber, determined not to run away empty-handed, tussled with her, threw her to her knees and spun her around on the sidewalk. But Monge had gotten a look at the guy when she passed by him before the assault. “The police came up to me and asked, ‘Can you describe the person that mugged you?’ I said, ‘No problem! I know exactly what he looks like.’” She proceeded to give a precise account of the shape of the robber’s nose as well as the rest of his physiognomy, easily picking him out from mug shots and in a lineup.
Ordinary folks don’t record faces so systematically, whether they’ve just left the scene of a crime or a party. “Many people don’t look specifically at features,” explains Mann. “When you go past an individual, you take in the whole gestalt. That’s why people sometimes have difficulty when they see somebody on the street. It looks like your buddy, but when you get close, there’s something wrong. And it’s only later that you realize, well, this person had a thin chin, or their cheeks were broader.
“But Janet and I study the individual differences, because that’s what our business is all about. So when Glen brought us the surveillance tape and we looked at these images, and then when Janet initially went to the prison and looked at Greg, it was very clear that this person was dissimilar from Greg.”
If this were a Hollywood movie, Mann says, laser pointer aimed at the projection screen, “Somebody puts [an ordinary surveillance tape] into the computer and all sorts of magic happens. It’s a huge picture like this and they focus in, and not only can you see the ice cream ad [inside the store] clearly, but you can see the price. That’s science fiction.” In reality, they had to work with a copy of an old tape that most likely had been erased and recorded over many times. While they could enhance the images somewhat, such manipulation would probably disqualify their testimony. Despite these limitations, Mann and Monge were able to identify some striking differences between the two individuals.
Forget the fact that the face in the tape appears to be unshaven and Wilburn was a smooth-cheeked 15-year-old at time of the crime. Or the fact that the suspect walked into the store with some kind of bookbag and Wilburn’s mom insists that she could hardly get him to carry one during the school year, let alone the middle of summer. What Mann and Monge were looking for—and found—were immutable physical variations, features that don’t simply change with the fashions, the seasons or from one haircut to the next.
Wilburn, for one, has a more “vertical” forehead; that of the young man on tape is more sloping. Both the nasal bridge—that’s the place between the eyes, where glasses sit—and the chin project more on the face of the suspect than is the case with Wilburn. The suspect’s skull from front to back, “as in hat size,” is distinctively long; Wilburn’s is not. Wilburn’s facial profile, from eye sockets to chin, is more extended.
Even with the ample evidence provided by Mann and Monge, Gilman wanted to avoid having a trial. For one thing, he knew that emotional courtroom testimony from the young victim might resonate more with a jury than a fact-laden defense. But more important, he understood that the judge could decide not to permit the anthropologists’ testimony. So he took the unusual step of opening up his case to the district attorney’s office, inviting them to see Mann and Monge’s slide show.
Although the DA’s office wouldn’t concede that Wilburn was innocent, “The noise that I had made certainly raised questions in their mind,” Gilman says. And by now, the case had become a crusade for him. “I strongly believed that it wasn’t just whether he was guilty or not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. He was 100 percent innocent.”
Investigators had already gone back and put the neighbor who was a witness through a lineup. (She didn’t pick Wilburn.) They then turned their attention to the victim’s underwear, which had lain, neglected, in an evidence drawer for several months. (Due to a lab technician’s oversight, the garment had never before been tested for DNA. At the request of the DA’s office, the crime lab supervisor rechecked the panties and discovered a small semen stain.) Four days before his scheduled trial, with his mother’s permission, Wilburn had a blood sample drawn. It didn’t match the DNA from the victim’s underwear, and the assistant D.A. immediately dropped the charges.
On October 5, 367 days after his freedom was taken away from him, Wilburn walked out of jail. “The first night he was back home,” recalls his mother, Marion Jessie, “I just could not fall asleep. I was back and forth, up and down the steps, peeping at him, because it was like this nightmare was finally over. I felt like my household was complete.”
But Wilburn, who is in therapy arranged by Gilman, is still trying—a year later—to deal with the emotional scars left by his time in prison. “Sometimes when I look at him, I know he’s not the same person,” Jessie says. “Sometimes he just wanders off by himself.” At the family reunion this summer, she remembers, he went home after only a couple of hours of socializing.
The outcome of Wilburn’s case generated intense local and national media coverage, as well as a storm of letter-writing by reform-minded citizens. Gilman doesn’t believe that race was a factor in the bungled police investigation (both Wilburn and the victim are African-American), but he does think that socioeconomics played a role. “If this was some kid from the suburbs or from a so-called ‘good family,’” he says, “I think they would have worked harder on this case. But to this investigator, it obviously didn’t matter at all.”
For Wilburn’s mother, it boils down to the investigators not giving their all to their jobs. “When I go to work,” says Jessie, a licensed practical nurse, “I know the lives of the people I take care of is in my hands. I think that when a person gets comfortable in their job and stops giving 100 percent, they don’t need to be in that job anymore.”
Lending their expertise to legal-defense work has not been a lucrative side-line for Mann and Monge. In most cases, they barely recover their expenses; on two occasions they didn’t get paid at all by the attorneys who hired them. But if another case with the merits of Wilburn’s comes along, Mann says, they will feel compelled to step forward.
Until that opportunity presents itself, the anthropologists will continue sifting through calcified clues in their quest to learn more about our human ancestors, and as a result, more about ourselves. “To me,” says Mann, “it’s a story about roots. And I think my interest is just an extension of what everybody does,” he says. “Everybody wants to know where their grandparents came from, their great grand- parents. Everybody has some albums they go to and look through all those great yellowing pictures. I just take that back 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 generations.
“Everybody wants to know what the ultimate place of their origin is and why, and what people looked like, and why people looked that way,” he adds. “We’re right back to what we were talking about with the differences between Greg and the person who committed this crime.”
The result of Mann and Monge’s fascination with such details and Gilman’s impassioned defense was a victory not just for Wilburn and his family, but for Gilman’s professional colleagues as well. “It was kind of nice for our office—and for defenders’ offices everywhere—that we got some positive [publicity] out of it [to help people understand] that you’re not necessarily screwed by the system,” Gilman says.
Gilman still keeps in touch with Wilburn’s mom on a monthly basis; they developed quite a rapport, he says, traveling together on the TV news circuit. “What happened to [Wilburn] that year, God knows. It will be with him forever. But he’s got a great, supportive mom who’s aggressively on his side. So I think that’s going to help. We’re hoping.”
Now that the cameras are turned off, Gilman is quietly going about the unglamorous work of a public defender. One of his sons is a senior at Haverford College who wants to attend graduate school at Penn. The other is 15 and will probably go “somewhere brilliant and outrageously expensive,” Gilman says with a sigh. “So I’m spending money I don’t have. It’s like playing Monopoly. But I’m much happier. It’s the right niche for me.
“I’m still getting a lot of psychic income from helping individual people,” he adds. “In one respect [my sixties ideals] are still going strong, because what does a criminal defense attorney do but fight against the system? He’s part of the system, but he has to fight using the rules of the system to help an individual who is being prosecuted by the system. That’s pretty sixties.”
Jessie describes Gilman’s work more effusively. “I love him. When [Greg’s friends found out] that he had a public defender, they’d say to my oldest son, ‘Oh man, the public defender’s nothing. They’re not going to help Greg.’ But Mr. Gilman … gave me my son. He gave it everything, as if he was fighting for his own child. For that I’m truly grateful.” Jessie never had a chance to meet Mann or Monge, the people behind the scenes, but she also would like to thank them for helping her son.
In response to the Gilman case, Philadelphia’s new police commissioner, John F. Timoney, announced plans last fall to provide more training to the officers who investigate sex crimes, and to improve evidence-gathering and examination procedures. But Jessie, who has filed a lawsuit against the police department, says she and Wilburn are still waiting for an official apology. “Nothing will ever give my son back the year that he lost.”
Wilburn told his mom that he also wanted an apology from the young woman who accused him. She reminded him, she says, that “the girl was victimized three times: ‘She was victimized by the person who assaulted her, she was victimized by the system, plus there’s the thought that the real person is out there ready to do that again.’”
Jessie planned to speak with high-school counselors this fall to see if her son has enough credits to enter 12th grade and graduate. Wilburn has mentioned an interest in going into the military service after high school. “Whatever he decides to do in life,” she says, “if he gives it 100 percent, he’ll be fine.”
To motivate her son, Jessie has compiled a scrapbook full of articles about his case from start to finish. “When he feels down, or feels disgusted, I tell him, ‘Take your book, go up to your room. Go through the book, know where you’ve been, realize where you are now, and thank God. You’ll forever be able to go through this book—even when you’re having your worst day—because I don’t think nothing is worse than prison.’”
SIDEBAR
That’s Mr. Neanderthal to You
One hundred years ago, a paleontologist from Zagreb University visited a cave on the outskirts of the Croatian village of Krapina, where he found bits of animal bones, a chipped stone tool and a single human molar. Excavations at the Krapina cave would eventually turn up much greater treasures: 874 fossilized Neanderthal human remains.
Dr. Alan Mann and Dr. Janet Monge Gr’80, two physical anthropologists at Penn, recently had the first opportunity to study x-rays of this extensive bone collection. And they found evidence that would surprise many scientists who have dismissed Neanderthals as sickly, dumb brutes on the brink of extinction when modern humans ambled over to Europe from Africa. By and large, Mann says, “These guys were really healthy.”
Although Mann and Monge have used their scholarly expertise on a number of occasions to assist in the legal defense of modern-day humans (see main story), their primary focus is on Neanderthals, a group of early hominids who occupied Europe between 130,000 and 30,000 years ago, and according to Mann’s engagingly pithy commentary, “had bad press.
“Neanderthals looked different from living humans, it’s true,” he says. “But their brains were as big as modern humans’, sometimes bigger. They buried their dead. They used fire. They may have been superintelligent people. We don’t know. We play them down and look at them as subhuman.”
Mann and Monge recently worked with a Penn professor of radiology, Dr. Morrie Kricun GM’79, to examine radiographic images of more than 75 Neanderthals from the Krapina collection. They determined from the bone density that most of these individuals were quite robust. (Their findings are published in The Krapina Hominids: A Radiographic Atlas of the Skeletal Collection, and were presented at an international conference this summer on the centennial of the Krapina cave’s discovery.) “We were able to document one of the earliest benign bone tumors every found; one individual may have had a surgical amputation of his hand; and several individuals had examples of osteoarthritis–which may have made them a little stiff in the morning,” Mann says.
The two anthropologists have also done extensive work on the histology, or microscopic anatomy, of Neanderthal teeth, finding clues about human evolution in the patterns within hardy tooth enamel. When he introduces classes to dental anthropology–ordinarily not the sexiest of topics–Mann sets out bowls of apples and caramels for his students to crunch and chew on. This, he explains, helps them appreciate what important structures teeth are–while simultaneously preventing them from falling asleep.
For Monge, the excitement of her field lies in its “string of never-ending questions … the fact that when you test the hypotheses, you don’t actually come to a truth in the end. You just say that this or that hypothesis was not supported, and then you can go on and generate more hypotheses.”
Her study of human fossils, for example, has even yielded evidence of domestic violence in antiquity. Monge has found indications of spousal abuse from the prevalence of female skulls with healed cheekbone fractures discovered in two Iron Age burial sites of north-central Iran (part of the University Museum’s collection). “People were getting smacked around,” Mann says. What this suggests is that “male aggression toward females is not something that just appeared in our own society, but has a very unfortunate history.”
The big question that both anthropologists would like to answer one day centers on the ultimate relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans. “I really feel that part of our ancestry contains Neanderthals,” Mann says. “That these brutish peoples are in our backgrounds. To deny that is to give us a kind of pristine origin, which in some ways [is] not in keeping with what biology and evolution are all about.”
