Man's search for faith ends in freedom for many

PRINCETON, N.J. - Jim McCloskey remembers the rage boiling inside him as he read the paper while traveling on the train to work one morning in 1978. An 11-year-old girl in a Philadelphia housing project had been raped and stabbed to death with an ice pick. A man named Matthew Connor had been charged.

"I hope they burn that son of a gun," McCloskey recalls thinking.

Little did he realize how dramatically his opinion would change: McCloskey would trade his high-paying job and comfortable house for the austerity of seminary life. He would found a prison ministry. And he would help free Connor from prison.

McCloskey, 57, grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia without a thought of prisons or courtrooms. He seemed destined for a successful business career.

After graduating from Bucknell University in 1964, he spent three years in the Navy, including a tour in Vietnam. He returned to college to get his master's degree and then set out for Tokyo, where he landed a market-research job.

Four years later, he returned to the United States and a job with Hay & Associates, a Philadelphia management-consulting firm. He helped build its business in Japan and reaped the rewards of success.

But he also developed a nagging sense, after six years with the firm, that material riches weren't enough. "The fuller I got, the emptier I became," he said.

A return to childhood faith

He decided to reconnect with the faith he had abandoned in his teens. At Paoli Presbyterian Church, he grew fascinated with the sermons of the Rev. Dick Streeter, who exhorted his congregation to serve others.

The pastor noticed McCloskey, too.

"He was a very prosperous young businessman, making a significant amount of money and traveling the world, and it wasn't really as fulfilling as he thought it would be," Streeter said.

A Saturday night spent reflecting and reading the Bible convinced McCloskey that to serve, he would have to turn away from his secular life.

"I thought Christ was speaking directly to me," he said.

His boss, William Dinsmore, "just about had a heart attack," McCloskey said.

At Dinsmore's request, McCloskey stayed on another year. But in August 1979, he put the house up for rent and drove his Lincoln to Princeton Theological Seminary.

He imagined he would eventually become a church pastor, but the seminary's fieldwork requirement derailed that plan. Out of curiosity, he chose prison ministry and was assigned in fall 1980 to Trenton State Prison.

There he met Jorge De Los Santos, who was serving a life sentence for the 1975 murder of a Newark used-car salesman. De Los Santos insisted he was innocent and relentlessly made his case to McCloskey.

"He figuratively grabbed me by the throat. He said, `What are you gonna do, say a prayer?' " McCloskey said.

McCloskey, a legal novice, decided to read the trial transcripts. He struggled mightily with the notion of challenging the system that had determined De Los Santos was guilty.

Then he took another leap of faith. He decided to take a year off from his seminary studies and devote the time to freeing De Los Santos - on one condition.

"If I ever catch you lying, we're done," he told De Los Santos.

McCloskey moved out of seminary housing and rented a room that doubled as an office. He assembled a defense committee and raised $25,000.

Dream erases doubts

One lawyer who worked on the case was Paul Casteliero. He was impressed by the divinity student's conviction.

"He was so outraged by the injustice," Casteliero said. "I thought, in some sense I knew, he was absolutely, positively right."

The key was tracking down a jailhouse informant, Richard Dellisanti, whom McCloskey believed had lied on the stand. McCloskey eventually reached Dellisanti through his mother and persuaded him, after several visits, to recant his testimony.

De Los Santos was freed in July 1983, after U.S. District Court Judge Frederick Lacey said Dellisanti's testimony "reeked of perjury."

McCloskey thought freeing De Los Santos would be a one-shot deal. But then De Los Santos introduced him to two other inmates who also believed they were wrongly imprisoned.

Two things held McCloskey back: He had spent his life savings freeing De Los Santos, and he was not entirely convinced that trying to clear the wrongly convicted was his true calling.

The financial dilemma was resolved by a gift of $10,000 - McCloskey calls it "manna from heaven" - his parents decided to give each of their children.

It took a vivid dream to answer his remaining question:

"I'm in Vietnam, standing on a riverbank with someone, and we see a boat with refugees on it, and the boat sinks. We just kind of throw up our hands and say, `There's nothing we can do.'

"But then out of nowhere come these helicopters, and these Navy SEALs go down into the river and come up with people and save them. To me, this was a strong metaphor that I had to go into the bowels of these prisons and bring out the dying."

McCloskey formed Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit organization that seeks to free inmates wrongly convicted of capital crimes. Through its work, 21 men and women in the United States and Canada have been exonerated; six others have won early parole.

One of those released was Connor. McCloskey took his case after receiving a letter in 1984 from a fellow inmate who believed Connor's claims that he didn't rape and kill Corinthea Fields. With an attorney's help, McCloskey uncovered evidence that the girl was killed by her half-brother. That evidence helped free Connor in 1990.

Paying back an `angel'

Joyce Ann Brown swears she saw "a glow like a halo" around McCloskey when she first met him in the visitors room at Mountain View Penitentiary in Gatesville, Texas.

"It was as if God had sent this angel," she said.

In 1980, Brown began serving a life sentence for the robbery and murder of a Dallas fur-store owner. Appeals courts denied her claims of innocence.

She obtained a list of prisoner-advocacy groups from another inmate. Three responded, including McCloskey, who said he didn't have the resources to take her case but would keep her in his files.

Brown continued to write McCloskey during the next two years and met him in 1987, when he was in Texas to interview potential clients.

Thirty minutes into their 3 1/2-hour conversation, McCloskey asked her to hold her train of thought. She worried he had changed his mind. Instead, he said he would commit to her case.

"He promised me one thing - that if I didn't commit that crime, he would help me to be free," Brown said.

Two years later, McCloskey delivered on his promise. His investigation found that a witness had lied and that another woman who bore a striking resemblance to Brown committed the murder.

After her release, Brown founded her own inmate-advocacy group in Dallas.

"I wanted to make sure he was always proud of what he had done," she said.

With a staff of five and an annual budget of about $650,000, McCloskey doesn't make commitments lightly.

"The whole thing with Jim is that he has to feel you were totally innocent before he'll take your case," said James Landano. He was convicted in 1977 for the murder of a Newark police officer, freed in 1989, reindicted in 1996 and acquitted two years later with McCloskey's help.

It can take up to six years from the time an inmate first writes seeking assistance to the day Centurion decides to take a case. From that point, grinding through the courts can take three to 10 more years.

There have been disappointments. One person died in prison in 1994, and two others were executed despite McCloskey's efforts. To this day, he believes the two were innocent.

McCloskey acknowledges such situations have tested his faith. But he says he has come to accept he can't base it on how cases turn out.

"If I get a bad result, what do I do, fire God?" he asked. "What kind of faith is that?"

He has no regrets for spurning the corporate world.

"I consider myself to be very lucky to have found a real, authentic purpose in life, because I was so empty before. My life is rich and full of meaning."