1st trial: found guilty, verdict overturned;
2nd trial: hung jury;
3rd trial: not guilty
Outgoing North Carolina Democratic governor Roy Cooper has pardoned Mark Elliott Crotts for the November 23, 1990 murders of his landlords. The official “Pardon of Innocence” will make Crotts eligible to receive compensation for his wrongful convictions, Cooper announced last week.
Crotts, now 55, white, male, had been charged in 1991 with two counts of first-degree murder in the fatal stabbing deaths of Willie (“Bill”) Gilliam and Alma Gilliam, then 79 and 77 respectively, and tried three times.
Then 23, Crotts was originally convicted of both murders during his first trial in Alamance County superior court on October 28, 1992 and given two consecutive life sentences in prison.
The state Supreme Court granted Crotts a new trial two years later, based on Crotts’ claim that his constitutional rights had been violated during his first trial. His second trial in Alamance County in 1995 resulted in a hung jury; at the conclusion of his third trial in Granville County in 1997, Crotts was acquitted.
During the first trial in October 1992, prosecutors argued that Crotts had a turbulent tenant-landlord relationship with Willie Gilliam, from whom he had rented a building across N.C. Highway 87 from the couple’s home, where he had operated a taxidermy business and then a game room.
In December 1993, the state Supreme Court granted a Motion for Appropriate Relief (MAR) and remanded the case to Alamance County for a new proceeding to address Crotts’ claim that multiple errors at his trial in 1992 had violated his constitutional rights.
In August 1994, visiting superior court judge Gregory A. Weeks – who two years earlier presided over Crotts’ trial in Alamance County superior court – concluded that Crotts’ constitutional rights to due process, a fair trial, and the effective assistance of counsel had, in fact, been violated during the first trial, based on the case background that Cooper cited in issuing the pardon last week.
In October 1994, the N.C. Supreme Court ordered Crotts to receive a new trial in Alamance County.
His second trial in Alamance County superior court in 1995 resulted in a hung jury.
Famed criminal defense attorney F. Lee Bailey – one of the lawyers on the “Dream Team” that represented O.J. Simpson for his 1995 trial in the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman – represented Crotts for his second trial, along with Graham attorney Robert Craig.
In 1997, Crotts was tried for a third time in Granville County, following a motion for a change of venue. He was acquitted of both first-degree murder charges.
New evidence in the case reportedly emerged in December 2017, according to news reports published at the time. Alamance County sheriff Terry Johnson said in an interview in December 2017 that he could find “no evidence linking” Mark Crotts to the murders.
Meanwhile, the case appears to remain unsolved.
Crotts’ father, Paul B. Crotts, has long advocated for his son’s exoneration and has been interviewed about the case for true crime series, including by veteran T.V. journalist Keith Morrison of Dateline NBC in May 2009. The elder Crotts owns Graham Furniture Mart in downtown Graham.
Official public records indicate that Mark Crotts currently lives in Snow Camp.
