JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – This is a condensed version of a story published Tuesday morning in The Tributary. The full story, along with parts two and three of the series, can be found at jaxtrib.org/cold-blooded.
On its surface, the prosecution of Kenneth Hartley was like hundreds of others in Jacksonville in the 1990s, when the violent deaths of young Black men had become commonplace.
No physical evidence tied Hartley to the 1991 kidnap/murder of Gino Mayhew, 17. Instead, prosecutor George Bateh built the case on the shoulders of a star witness eager to peg Hartley as one of three men responsible.
In 1993, a jury convicted Hartley, who had previously served four years for manslaughter.
He was sent to Death Row.
But there was something about the witness, a man named Sidney Jones, that neither the jurors nor Hartley’s defense team knew: Jones was a fabulist who was previously imprisoned for lying under oath. Jacksonville detectives who’d once paid him for tips came to distrust him.
An investigation of Hartley’s Death Row odyssey by The Tributary, a Florida nonprofit newsroom, revealed a case marred by the dubious use of jailhouse informants and omissions about Jones’ lack of credibility, actions one attorney labeled “outrageous.”
Thirty-two years later, appellate lawyers are trying to save Hartley’s life. If they succeed, it could also unravel the cases against Harley’s two co-defendants, both serving life.
This investigation is based on interviews, thousands of pages of court records, handwritten detective and prosecutor notes, and documents produced by State Attorney Melissa Nelson’s Conviction Integrity Unit.
The Tributary spoke with Bateh for about 90 minutes and gave him the investigation’s findings. He declined to speak on the record about the prosecution, but said of his career: “I was firm, but I always felt I was fair. I could be aggressive with violent crime but I always felt it was an appropriate balance. I was honest with the court and honest with other counsel. And I preached that (honesty) in the office and told the younger counsel we had to play fair – that the people we were prosecuting were American citizens and they had rights.”
Sherwood Forest
Just before school started on April 23, 1991, a cafeteria worker at Sherwood Forest Sixth Grade Center noticed something out of place: a bronze Chevy Blazer on a grassy patch by the basketball court.
Inside, Gino Mayhew lay dead. William Bolena, a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office homicide detective, was summoned to the scene.
Mayhew’s relatives approached Bolena with a story: Mayhew’s distant cousin, Sylvester “Duck” Johnson, had robbed Mayhew and shot at him two days earlier. Johnson robbed people all the time, they said, suggesting maybe Duck was involved.
Bolena made a note of it.
Mayhew had three bullet holes in the back of his head, one on his shoulder and another through his right index finger.
One set of fingerprints not belonging to Mayhew – or Hartley – was lifted from the SUV. Nobody knows to this day to whom they belong.
The Drug Mart off Moncrief
A day after Mayhew’s body was found, detectives fielded another tip: Ronnie “Fish” Ferrell, a friend of Mayhew’s, had been with him around 9 the night of the killing.
Unpromoted, Ferrell called police a day or two later to ask about the case’s status. He was invited in for an interview on April 26.
Ferrell told detectives he saw Mayhew that night outside the Washington Heights apartment complex, off Moncrief Road, but said he left around 9:30, hours before the kidnapping.
Detectives re-interviewed Ferrell on May 7, prompted by multiple people saying they’d seen him at the apartment complex after 9:30. That interview grew heated and Bolena asked Ferrell if he knew Kenneth “Kip” Hartley, whose name had come up as a friend of Johnson. Ferrell said Hartley was a “bad dude.”
Ferrell joined Johnson on the suspect list.
At some point – the entry isn’t dated – Bateh wrote himself a note saying he needed to discuss the “weak case” with Mayhew’s family.
Just 11 hours after the second Ferrell interview, according to a police report, Bolena got a call from Jones, who’d been locked up on a trespass charge. According to the detective, Jones recounted seeing Hartley, Ferrell and Johnson on the night of the murder – and Hartley holding a gun to Mayhew’s head.
Detectives arrested Hartley, 24, Ferrell, 27, and Johnson, 23.
Felon, liar, witness
Sidney Jones was no one’s idea of an ideal witness. He picked up pocket money from Jacksonville detectives by snitching on drug dealers as he purchased and consumed the same dealers’ wares. At Hartley’s trial, he testified he had six prior felonies, although in truth he had many more.
But, unknown to the jury and Hartley’s attorney at the time, Jones’ biggest problem was perjury.
In March 1979, when Jones was 19, he gave highly detailed eyewitness testimony in a Duval County robbery-turned-homicide trial.
The story was made up. He’d been in jail when the crime occurred. Jones got three years for perjury. But the Florida Supreme Court overturned the conviction a decade later, faulting the judge for not letting Jones return to the stand to recant.
The defense and prosecution are required to exchange information like that before trial.
Bateh did no such thing in Hartley’s case.
That information could have destroyed his credibility.
There was another problem with Sidney Jones: Cops knew he was dishonest.
A confidential-informant payment voucher from the week before Mayhew’s murder has the word “blackballed” boldly scrawled across it, though it’s unclear when the word was written.
The reputation stuck. Seventeen years later, a retired JSO detective who had assisted with the Hartley investigation would send an email to an associate referring to Jones as a “lying piece of s***.”
The former cop, John Zipperer, was by then a private investigator working for Ferrell.
As far as the jury knew, Jones was credible as they listened to his account, which went as follows:
He was outside the Washington Heights apartment complex where he helped draw in drug-buying customers to Mayhew.
Under oath, he described a “huddle” involving Johnson, Ferrell and Hartley, after which Hartley approached Mayhew’s Blazer, gun in his ungloved hand. Jones said Hartley climbed into the rear seat and Ferrell slid into the front next to Mayhew. Mayhew sped away and turned left onto Moncrief Road. A purple truck followed, with Johnson driving.
Jones said he figured his friend was a dead man. He could have called his JSO handler, but, he testified, he’d been told not to bother the detective outside business hours.
Instead, he walked home, boiled a sausage, drank a Coke, watched TV and fired up $10 worth of crack.
For weeks he said nothing – until his arrest.
“I felt more secure and felt more protected in being in jail than I did on the street,” he testified.
Alleged coercion
Bateh presented no one else from the apartment courtyard, despite Jones saying dozens had been present, but the prosecutor produced a witness whose story picked up where Jones’ left off.
Juan Brown, 29, told the jury he was one of three occupants of a car heading north on Moncrief at 11:30 p.m. when he spied his friend Mayhew’s Blazer approaching.
Brown testified he spotted Ferrell in the front passenger seat and a light-skinned Black male with a build similar to Hartley’s behind Mayhew.
Dr. Brian Cahill, a University of Florida eyewitness testimony expert, found it impossible to determine the make and model of oncoming vehicles on the dark road, much less the physical characteristics of the occupants, after he reconstructed the event for the defense.
In January 2024, the state attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit caught up with Brown while looking into Ferrell’s conviction. In a new twist, he recalled being on foot when he saw Mayhew. Questioned further, he said he’d been in a car but alone.
That’s not all that’s new. Investigators documented how prosecutors had put the squeeze on Brown: by arresting his girlfriend. According to appellate attorneys privy to the unit’s findings, Mayhew did not live in Washington Heights, but Brown’s girlfriend did – and Mayhew used that apartment as a drug base.
Records show that on May 2, 1991, two weeks after Mayhew’s murder, an undercover operative purchased a $20 rock there from Brown’s girlfriend.
Recently, Brown’s half-brother, Roland Redmond, connected the dots. He said Brown told him JSO arrested his girlfriend to make him testify.
In his sworn statement, Redmond said, “Juan told me his testimony was coerced. He had seen nothing at all.”
On June 5, 1991, Bateh, as the division chief, signed charges against Brown’s girlfriend. The same day, Brown wrote a longhand account of what he said he had seen.
A month after securing that statement, prosecutors dropped the cocaine-selling charge. She got community service for possession.
Jabo, Tank and Snake
Ronald “Jabo” Bronner worked as a jailhouse informant on multiple occasions.
In the summer of 1991, Bronner and Eric “Tank” Brooks found themselves in the Duval County jail at the same time as Hartley and his co-defendants. Records show both were assigned as Hartley’s cellmates, specifically to help investigators. Both claimed Hartley confessed, as did a third man, Anthony “Snake” Parkin.
Brooks and Bronner insisted they were working independently of each other, but their accounts were strikingly similar.
Bronner: “He was bragging. He was going to get off. He said everyone was scared of him.”
Brooks: “:[He was] bragging... because the police didn’t have a case against him because the witnesses were afraid.”
Parkin said he heard Hartley confess not once, but twice.
The informants provided prosecutors with their theory of who did what: Hartley shot Mayhew, then he and Ferrell were driven away from the campus by Johnson. Motive: robbery of his money and drugs.
Each spontaneously described Hartley’s demeanor as “cold-blooded.” That, said Rick Sichta, the appellate attorney who got Ferrell’s death sentence reduced to life, is an indication that they were “fed this information.”
Asked what they’d been promised by prosecutors, the men testified only that they would not be sentenced as habitual offenders, which could double a sentence. But they still faced between 15 and 30 years.
‘The Courage to Come Forward’
After two days of testimony, Bateh stood before jurors with a blown-up photo of Mayhew’s body as a backdrop. It didn’t matter, he said, that Hartley’s fingerprints weren’t on the truck: He’d confessed. As for Jones, he said they might not want him as a neighbor, but they had to admire his bravery.
“He was the only person out at Washington Heights that had the courage to come forward,” Bateh said.
Bateh argued the informants were credible because they knew details – such as the murder weapon’s caliber – that had not been publicly released.
For the defense, Bob Willis had hoped to introduce evidence of an alternate suspect, a man who purportedly told a friend while both were in jail that he had shot Mayhew.
In a pre-trial hearing, the man denied admitting any such thing, and the judge ruled the matter inadmissible.
In his closing, Willis could only argue that the case was weak, likening it to a train that started on the wrong track and just kept chugging.
After three hours of deliberation, Hartley was convicted: first-degree murder, kidnapping, armed robbery.
On Sept. 7, 1993, with the case still on his calendar, Judge R. Hudson Olliff penned a gushing letter to State Attorney Harry Shorstein, Bateh’s boss:
“George’s dogged determination and devotion to duty is reminiscent of Inspector Javert’s relentless pursuit of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.”
Two days later, the prosecutor was back before Olliff for the punishment phase.
Referencing Hartley’s “cold-blooded” actions, Bateh said: “I would submit to you that he places no value on human life…. [I]t justifies a recommendation of death.”
The jury concurred by a 9-3 vote.
Two months later, it was Judge Olliff’s turn. The headline of his obituary years later called him the “hanging judge.” On this day, he lived up to his reputation.
“This is another of many violent criminals given an early prison release and thereafter committed more violent crimes, all to the great danger of the people of Florida and especially to the danger of Gino Mayhew,” Olliff said.
Hartley went to Death Row. The three snitches, who told jurors they faced between 15 and 30 years, went home. None would see the inside of a Florida prison cell.
Craig Trocino, a University of Miami associate professor who runs the Miami Law Innocence Clinic, said it is “outrageous” the jury knew nothing about Jones’ past perjury conviction and the get-out-of-jail-free cards given to the informants.
“The defense has a right to cross-examine any deal from a prosecutor,” he said.
A Nagging Conscience
On April 8, 2022, Bronner, who’d parlayed his testimony against Hartley into a get-out-of-jail-free card, called attorney Nah-Deh Simmons to cleanse his conscience, according to an affidavit signed by the lawyer.
Bronner made clear that his testimony was false. “Hartley never admitted to killing or being involved in the murder of Gino Mayhew.”
Simmons’ statement about Bronner, however, could prove to have limited use for Hartley: Simmons was arrested the following year for conspiracy to commit perjury and solicitation to commit perjury in an unrelated case.
But Simmons wasn’t the only one to hear from Bronner about his past life: About five months later, Bronner allegedly confessed again to giving false testimony against Hartley, this time to a friend, Leroy Tillie, as they dined at Golden Corral.
Before he could tell it to a judge, Bronner died. But his alleged admissions spurred Hartley’s appellate attorneys to seek out Bronner and Brooks’ old jailmates.
They said Bronner and Brooks schemed together to make up confessions:
Dwayne Hagans: “Hartley never confessed to him but Ronald Bronner was still willing to point the finger.”
Larry Wynn: “Jabo had no concerns about falsely testifying about Hartley.”
Derrick Shiloh remembered Detective Zipperer, the cop who later called Jones a “lying piece of shit,” coming to the jail with coffee and donuts.
“He told me all I needed to say was that Hartley confessed to me,” Shiloh swore.
Like Bronner, Anthony Parkin has also recently recanted, according to a 460-page court filing in support of having a full-scale evidentiary hearing on Hartley’s guilt or innocence.
Brooks died in 2020, making Parkin the only living informant.
Closure
Ferrell and Johnson continue to maintain they did not kill Mayhew, as does Hartley, who signs his letters “an innocent man.”
Judge Olliff retired two years after the trial and died in 2015, having put more people on Death Row than any other Jacksonville judge, according to the Florida Times-Union.
Bolena died in 2017. Zipperer and Bateh, both long retired, declined to talk to the Tributary.
Parkin declined to comment to the Tributary.
Since the Hartley trial, Jones has been arrested repeatedly, including pulling a 10-year stretch for burglary and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.
On June 23, 2023, Daniel J. Ashton, with the Federal Public Defender’s Office, accompanied representatives of the Conviction Integrity Unit as they interviewed Jones.
Details were vastly different, but he still maintained that Hartley, Ferrell and Johnson had abducted Mayhew and forced him to drive to his death.
The one-time CI revealed why he came forward, and it wasn’t, as Bateh said, necessarily a matter of newfound courage.
He thought he was going to be paid.
This story was reported, written and edited by The Tributary, a non-profit investigative newsroom covering Florida, and shortened for republication. Senior Investigative Reporter Nichole Manna reviewed more than 65,000 pages of court documents – including testimony and detective notes – that she obtained through multiple record requests. She spoke to everyone involved in the case who is alive and was willing. This is part 1 of a 3 part series – to read the full story and its other parts, go to jaxtrib.org/cold-blooded.
