A Sex Crime Ends With a Wrongful Convicted
(‘Crime Seen,’ Forensic Files)
In 1984, Ed Honaker was in his early 30s and at a low point. His wife had recently packed up their three children and left. He was suffering from depression. And he already had a few scrapes with the law on his record.
No one could have imagined how much worse things were about to become.
Ed looked like a police sketch made from a rape victim’s memory. And he had a vehicle, jewelry, and clothing that resembled those described by the teenager, who had been sexually assaulted for two hours.
Bad luck. Soon, Ed would hear himself referred to as the “Blue Ridge rapist” and go to prison for nearly a decade for a crime he didn’t commit.
Ed, who gave an on-camera interview to Forensic Files, talked about the harshness of life behind razor wire and the joy he felt when the governor of Virginia called to say he was free.
The episode about Ed first aired in 1998. Ed next made national headlines in 2015, when he died two weeks after receiving a cancer diagnosis at the age of just 65. It was another rough break.
But Ed did have 20 years of freedom in between his release and his untimely passing. For this week, I looked for news coverage about his life during that time.
So, let’s get going on the recap of “Crime Seen” along with extra information from internet research.
Nightmarish ordeal. In 1984, an engaged couple on a camping trip to Crabtree Falls got lost and decided to sleep in their car off the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. They awoke to a man, who they assumed was a law officer, aiming a flashlight at them.
He pointed a gun at the man, 22, and told him to run into the woods. He abducted the woman, 19, and raped her repeatedly at a campsite.
Then, he let her go.
The woman, who lived in Newport News, described the attacker as a white male wearing camouflage pants and a necklace with a cross and having a scar on his chest. During the attack, he chain-smoked, drank whiskey, and ranted about the Vietnam War. She said he drove a yellow truck.
Meanwhile, in Roanoke, another sexual assault took place, and the victim implicated her neighbor Ed Honaker.
Flawed past. So who was this fellow? Edward William Honaker was born on February 20, 1950 in West Virginia to Anna Mae Ripley and Virgil Honaker, a police officer. He grew up in White Sulphur Springs.
His previous legal trouble included a “breaking and entering conviction, drinking, and some fights,” according to the Roanoke Times. He received a dishonorable discharge from the military. A newspaper account gave his occupation as laborer; Forensic Files said welder.
Fortunately, he had a solid alibi for the time when his neighbor’s attack took place. But the accusation turned investigators’ attention toward Ed because the composite drawing of the Blue Ridge rapist looked like him.
Visual evidence. His vehicle had rust damage and no backseat, like the one driven by the Blue Ridge rapist. In a photo lineup, the Blue Ridge victim and her fiancé pointed to Ed, then 34. At his residence, police found a necklace and fatigues like the ones the attacker had been wearing. His hair samples supposedly matched the ones found on the victim’s shorts.
His truck, however, was blue, not yellow as the victim described. Ed was 5-foot-11, whereas she had estimated 6-foot-4. But the fact that it was dark and she was subjected to trauma could explain the discrepancies.
When first asked about the Blue Ridge rape, Ed didn’t immediately provide an alibi. Later, he said he was sleeping at his mother’s home in Montvale that night.
Convincing testimony. At the trial, it came out that Ed had a vasectomy, which meant he couldn’t have been the source of the sperm specimens from the rape, but they could have come from her fiancé.
A juror who gave an on-camera interview to Forensic Files, recalled how sure the victim sounded when she pointed to Ed Honaker as the attacker. The fiancé also identified Ed in the courtroom.
After deliberating for two hours, the jury found Ed guilty of rape, sodomy, aggravated sexual battery, and use of a firearm in the commission of an abduction and rape.
Ed later said that he wanted to scream out in the courtroom that he was innocent and not a horrible monster.
He received a sentence of three life terms plus 34 years.
Life in lockup. Hence his life as an inmate began. “It was a sad day when he went in,” his brother Wayne Honaker would later tell the Times of Roanoke. “I cried.”
To avoid appearing weak in front of other prisoners, Ed acted tough during the day, then cried himself to sleep, he later told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He saw a man stabbed in the cafeteria line and heard the screams of an 18-year-old inmate who was being raped.
Ed’s family stayed faithful, writing him letters, visiting, and helping him financially.
He spent years writing to anyone who might help prove his innocence, but he had no luck.
By 1994, Ed’s seniority at the Nottoway Correctional Center had earned him better living conditions. As the Washington Post reported:
He enjoys a choice corner cell on the first floor of the model-prisoners wing. His living area is what you’d imagine officers’ quarters are like on a submarine: tiny platform bed, hot plate, portable TV, just enough maneuvering room to change clothes without bloodying an elbow.
But it was prison just the same. Fortunately, some good luck was coming his way.
Back to the drawing board. Ed got a positive response to one of his letters, from Centurion Ministries, a prisoner-advocacy organization founded by a former theological school student in Princeton, New Jersey.
Kate Germond, an investigator for Centurion, spoke of the flawed nature of the type of eyewitness testimony that helped convict Ed. She noted that eyewitness accounts aren’t like videotape. “Also mixed into that are memories, dreams, some little distractions,” Germond said. “It’s just a huge variety pack.”
She also disputed the hair evidence. “There is no such thing as a hair match,” Kate Germond wrote. The most you can say is that it’s similar or dissimilar, she told Forensic Files.
Forensic Files pointed out that, of the six photos in the lineup, Ed’s was the only one with a plain white background rather than a height chart. Research has suggested that an eyewitness is more likely to pick out a photo that has a conspicuously defining trait.
Germond, whom Ed would later call his earthly angel, deemed it an especially tainted lineup.
And the victim, who initially said she didn’t see her assailant well during the attack, had undergone hypnotism, reportedly to get help remembering the attacker’s face.
Hypnotism-influenced testimony has dubious integrity (Jim Barton).
From Simpson to Honaker. DNA testing paid for by Centurion found that some semen retrieved from the victim didn’t match the DNA of Ed, the fiancé, or a boyfriend the victim had. That meant it came from the real rapist.
At some point during Centurion’s investigation, Barry Scheck, the O.J. Simpson defense lawyer who created the Innocence Project, offered help, which was accepted.
“Scheck is fast-talking quick-stepped and can subtly introduce his own spin on an issue into the conversation,” the Roanoke Times wrote about the lawyer, who had offices in Lower Manhattan. Scheck emphasized that then-new DNA technology could expose the flaws in a well-meaning justice system.
In Virginia, prisoners have to appeal for clemency via the governor rather than courts. Gov. George Allen could either pardon Ed, which would wipe the rape conviction from his record, or grant clemency, which would reduce his sentence. Or he could choose to do neither.
Ed’s family waited for word from the governor. “My nerves are so bad I can hardly write my son a letter,” Anna Honaker said.
Fabulous phoning. At 10:28 a.m. on October 21, 1994, Gov. George Allen called Honaker in prison.
“He said, ‘As of this moment you are a free man,'” Ed, then 44, recalled. “What he said after that, I have no idea.” Ed told the News & Advance that it was the greatest feeling in the world, and likened it to a resurrection.
The former Virginia governor, who appeared on Forensic Files, later said that the jurors weren’t at fault for the guilty verdict in the trial; DNA testing didn’t exist then and they didn’t know about the hypnosis.
So how did life go for Ed after the initial exuberance of freedom?
Mostly well, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
His first order of business was buying a tan sports jacket at a department store. He said he was enjoying the little things in life—like riding an escalator — and was looking forward to eating pizza again.
Strangers who knew about his wrongful conviction would recognize him on the street and offer words of support. At Kmart, an elderly couple he had never met insisted on paying for his purchases.
Ed got a job doing ductwork for an HVAC service and also started a business of his own. In May 1996, he married Rosalie Opalka, a Roanoke Symphony Orchestra violinist he’d met at a prison dance.
He admitted it was awkward getting to know his children again after missing so much time with them; they were in grade school when he went to prison and in their teens when he got out. His 19-year-old daughter, Michele, told the Roanoke Times that, at first, she didn’t know what to say to him, but they soon began talking every three weeks or so. They spent her birthday together playing pool and going shopping at the Crossroads Mall.
In a pleasant surprise, another daughter — who he didn’t know existed — from a relationship in the early 1970s sought him out after seeing media coverage.
Sympathy from the press. And speaking of surprises, Ed and his lawyer asked the state government for relatively modest compensation, just $750,000, to compensate for his wrongful conviction.
They made a case that the deputy sheriff and commonwealth prosecutor had been overzealous because of pressure to find a culprit quickly. The Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial board published an opinion piece titled “Pay Ed Honaker.” It read in part:
It’s a miracle Honaker kept resentment from consuming him. And anyone who has squirmed through a two-hour committee meeting can only imagine what it would be like to be locked up not for another two hours but for another 10 years…with evil men who would casually kill for a pack of cigarettes.
In 1996, Virginia’s general assembly agreed to give Ed $150,000 immediately followed by $350,000 as an annuity.
The jurors who convicted Ed seemed amenable to his exoneration.”If the governor liked the new evidence enough to pardon him,” said Roy Bivens, “it must be right because Governor Allen doesn’t believe in parole.”
Hazel Hight, described as a housewife at the time she served on the Honaker jury, echoed that thought. “If he’s innocent, I don’t want to see him serving more time,” Hight told the Roanoke Times. “But we really thought he was guilty.”
As of 2005, Ed and Rosalie were living in Bedford County on a small farm.
“I won’t say there haven’t been emotional problems,” Ed told a reporter. “Not a day goes by I don’t think about prison.” The story notes that Ed largely beat the odds because many exonerees end up mired in dysfunction, often with drug problems.
Fortunately, Ed’s pastimes — fishing, riding his ATV, and writing a children’s book and a novel — were legal and safe. In a way, prison made him kinder, he told the Roanoke Times. His urge to shoot squirrels disappeared; he wanted to watch them play instead.
Last chapter. Ed died on June 12, 2015. His obituary mentioned that he and Rosalie lived with two beloved German shepherd dogs, and suggested that mourners make donations to Centurion Ministries.
Thanks to DNA technology, innocence advocates, and a governor with a conscience, the headline of Ed Honaker’s obituary refers to him as an exoneree, not an ex-convict.
That’s all for this time. In a future post, I’ll look into what efforts law enforcement has made to find the real attacker in the Blue Ridge rape case.
Until then, cheers. — R.R.
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Peacock or Amazon
