Princeton, N.J. -- The ash blonde working in an office above Edith's Lingerie on Main Street here -- she with a taste for the eclectic -- could well be inmate Sam Malone's angel of mercy.
Two binders on Kate Germond's crowded bookshelf and a brown legal file at her feet hold the details of Malone's rape conviction in Maryland, a crime he says he didn't commit. And this 47-year-old former boutique owner-turned-criminal investigator says there's enough in the court records and police files to provoke her interest. And she can be provoked.
"I'm incredibly tenacious," says Ms. Germond. That attribute has been difficult for her ex-husbands -- of whom she's had three -- but great for her work as co-manager of Centurion Ministries Inc., an advocacy group that works for the release of those wrongly convicted.
On this summer day, in her tailored black cotton suit and black leather pumps, pinned-back hair and horn-rimmed glasses, Kate Germond looks more like a professor of English literature than a criminal investigator poking around decades-old murders and rapes.
Her desk, a hand-me-down polished mahogany table, and her office reflect her varied tastes: a pair of folk-art dolls, the memoirs of civil rights activist Andrew Young, a sampling of her collection of pig figurines, inflatable dinosaurs, framed quotations from the book of Isaiah and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, a bookshelf crammed with mysteries (American and French), four versions of the Bible and criminal texts, a bottle of Scotch whisky for the road ("Johnny Walker Black and peanut butter are my medicine," she confides).
This gumshoe with a soul -- her business card says "advocate/investigator" -- spent much of her adult life in an artsy hamlet on the northern California coast. But she found her life's work in this university town beside a former seminarian who set out 14 years ago to prove innocent those imprisoned for life or sentenced to death.
So far, Centurion Ministries and its founder, lay minister James C. McCloskey, have helped free 13 people by turning up new evidence, exposing shoddy police work, convincing reluctant witnesses to come forward and liars to tell the truth. A convicted rapist in Virginia may be the 14th freed, a case in which Ms. Germond discovered evidence never given to the man's lawyer and in which DNA tests -- similar to those involved with O.J. Simpson's trial -- excluded him as the source of semen on the victim's underclothes.
"That's the purpose of Centurion Ministries -- to prove that they were innocent, not get them released because of trial error or some legal technicality," Ms. Germond says.
Along the way, she has won the confidence of Pagan motorcycle gang members, convinced an ex-husband of a rape victim to provide evidence -- his own semen -- that might help free a rapist, uncovered a "smoking gun" in police files.
Her credentials?
"Read a lot of mysteries. Snoopy. And charming if I have to be," says the plain-spoken Ms. Germond, daughter of a biologist and astronomer who was raised in rural Connecticut and lasted a year at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Mont., before heading for the West Coast.
The group's work began during Mr. McCloskey's days as student chaplain at a Trenton, N.J., prison where he met the first convicted murderer he would help set free. Today, Centurion is a year operation funded by churches, foundation grants and individuals.
"Very few cases get overturned once a conviction occurs," says Dennis J. Cogan, a Philadelphia lawyer who has worked with the group. "What McCloskey has done with Kate and their organization, they have taken 13 cases that are past Armageddon, which are past the last battle of the war. . . . The results are extraordinary."
The three paid staffers and a corps of volunteers work on cases of provable innocence, convicts with life or death sentences who "have nowhere to go, appeals denied and have no resources whatsoever to come to their aid to get them out of the box," says Mr. McCloskey, 52.
There is plenty of work. Hundreds of file folders fill several cabinets in Centurion's office. Among them is the case of Kirk Bloodsworth, the Eastern Shore man who won his freedom last year after serving nine years in prison for a rape-murder he says he didn't commit. After an initial review of the case, Ms. Germond encouraged the Bloodsworth family to have evidence resubmitted for DNA-testing that later excluded him as the source of semen found on the 9-year-old victim's underwear, and led to his release.
Not every request for help reviewed by Centurion becomes part of its caseload. In the Bloodsworth case, the Office of the Public Defender in Maryland and a Washington, D.C., lawyer stepped in.
In the Centurion office, the names of the group's 12 active cases are written on a grease-pen board; the 24 pending ones are scribbled below them. The investigations can take four to five years: reviewing trial transcripts and court files, scrutinizing witnesses and the assailant's description, comparing the defendant's record with the brutality of the crime.
In some cases, the devil may well be in the details. Like the case of Sam Malone, an African-American from Anne Arundel County serving a life sentence for rape.
When Ms. Germond reviewed several police reports on the case, she noticed something: In nearly every instance where the report referred to the assailant, the typed narrative had been whited out and the words or abbreviation for "black male" written by hand.
"Everybody got it wrong?" she asks, suggesting that the handwritten changes in the police reports were suspicious.
But Centurion staffers can be as tough on their prospective clients as they are on the system. If an inmate has a good case but is running up gambling debts in jail, assaulting other prisoners, whining about life behind bars, Centurion tells him to clean up his act.
"Kate and I, the only thing we care about is the truth," explains Mr. McCloskey. "We are not out to win. We're not out to get more notches in our belt. . . . If we think they are guilty or seeds of doubt come into it, bang, we shut down. We've shut down three times."
Once an investigation is completed, the group presents its findings to a friendly lawyer -- or hires one -- and then the legal fight begins.
The trail, however, does not always lead to freedom. Two men have been executed, despite Mr. McCloskey's efforts to free them. One California man died in prison before the Centurion staff could push ahead on his file.
Through the years, over the many hours sifting through court records, Ms. Germond has seen how single-minded the criminal justice system can be, how it can zero in on a suspect to the exclusion of all others.
"It's a complicated little trail to frame innocent people," says Ms. Germond. "This doesn't happen by mistake. This is willful. That's what's so wrong about it. If it only was a mistake, we could be more forgiving. You can take apart every one of our cases and find the point where they had to know they had the wrong person."
L And yet, her reasons for doing this work aren't very "deep."
"Always what I've done is what I've done," says Ms. Germond, the mother of a 24-year-old son.
Says Mr. McCloskey of his coworker: "She has a gift and an instinct for this kind of work. And she has a heart of gold and a very, very incisive, intelligent, common-sensical, feet-on-the-ground approach to this work."
In the fall of 1986, Ms. Germond moved from California to New York where her husband Mark had been offered a new job. While reading the New York Times one day, she saw a piece on Centurion Ministries, which takes its name from the Roman Centurion who in the Bible said, when looking at Jesus on the cross, "Surely this one was innocent." The photograph of Jim McCloskey "with all this junk piled around him" spoke to the organizer in her.
In January 1987, she began working for Mr. McCloskey in the rented room that served as his home and office.
"At the time I had no notion of finding my life's work. God did not speak to me," says Ms. Germond, who now earns about about $34,000 (she thinks).
Asked about her job today, Ms. Germond says, in a moment of reflection, "I feel a responsibility for myself in the universe. As I walk through this world . . . I feel responsible."
But when she talks about the daily grind, the gum-chewing sleuth returns.
"I like the part when they slam the door in your face and you have to figure out how to get back there and win their confidence and get them to tell you what you want -- I love that . . .," she says.
It took Ms. Germond two years of meeting with a convicted murderer before the Pagan motorcycle gang member agreed to sign an affidavit, clearing three other Pagans in a Washington murder for which all four had been convicted.
"Hey, getting people to do the right thing is not always easy," says Ms. Germond.