Part 1 is here

In the late 1960s Dr. John M. Branion was on trial for the murder of his wife and the only evidence against him was circumstantial.
Branion was a very successful emergency room physician in Chicago who came from an influential and prominent black family at a time when segregation made breaking into the city’s power structure difficult at best. His wife, Donna, came from an equally well-to-do family.
Donna was murdered sometime in the late morning of December 22, 1967 while she was alone in the Branion home. John was nearby at the Ida Mae Scott Hospital and the couple’s young son was not far away at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club.
Donna Branion was known to be alive at 10:15 a.m. because she spoke by telephone with her sister. There was no suggestion of anything wrong at that time. In fact, there was never any suggestion that there was significant discord in the Branion household of the type that could lead to murder.
The apparently harmonious relationship between man and wife was only impacted by John’s friendship with Shirley Hudson, a nurse with whom John marched along side Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The friendship did cross over into a physical one, according to John’s appellate attorney.
At 11:05 a.m. a neighbor returned from grocery shopping and began putting away her purchases. She later told police that “sometime later” (20 minutes more or less) She heard a loud sound followed by two or three similar sounds and then a commotion.
Make note that the time of these events was not later than 11:25 a.m.
The neighbor also testified that 15 or 20 minutes after she heard the commotion, Dr. Branion came out of his apartment and called for a doctor-friend who lived nearby.
At 11:57 a.m. Chicago police logged a call which dispatched a prowl car to the Branion home.
Officer William Catizone was the responding cop and found Donna Branion lying on the floor of the utility room in the home, dead. The number of wounds she suffered were later disputed, but it is accurate to say that three .380 bullets were found at the crime scene and another was later recovered at the autopsy.
The medical examiner testified that Donna had been shot four times, while the defense strongly disputed that assertion.
“There were 13 wounds on the victim’s body, as detailed in the state pathologist’s report,” wrote Northwestern University Law Professor Anthony D’Amato. “One bullet lodged in Donna’s body; the others entered and exited. It would have taken five or six other bullets to inflicte the remaining twelve wounds.”
D’Amato was one of Dr. Branion’s appellate counsel who wrote an excoriating critique of the judicial review the doctor’s case received in a Cardozo Law Review article.
The number of bullet wounds, like the timeline, is essential to understanding the Branion case. The state recovered four slugs that were later identified as having the class characteristics of bullets fired from a Walther PPK (six lands and grooves with a right-hand twist and marks on the cartridge from a pin that indicates the weapon is loaded).
The Chicago police firearms expert who testified about the murder weapon (which was never found) stated that the slugs had the class characteristics of .380 caliber automatic ammunition.
Because we’re dealing with circumstantial evidence, appearances are important. Dr. Branion owned a Walther PPK — a 9mm Walther, not a .380. A 9mm can fire .380 rounds, but it’s not designed to do so. At the time Walther made both 9mm and .380 PPKs.
Dr. Branion was questioned at the crime scene.
He told police that he left the hospital by 11:30 a.m.(a nurse puts the time as late as 11:34 a.m.), drove to the club to pick up his son and arrived there at 11:35 a.m. He said his son was waiting out front. However, a teacher at the club testified that she “distinctly remembered seeing the defendant enter the Club between 11:45 and 11:50 a.m. and that his son was not outside but rather in the all-purpose room waiting for his father.”
Branion told investigators that after leaving the club he stopped again to pick up Maxine Brown with whom he and his wife had a lunch date. The state estimated that the drive to Maxine’s and conversation with her (during which she cancelled the lunch) took 4 minutes.
It took another minute or two to drive home and discover Donna’s body.
Assuming that the murder occurred when the shots were fired at 11:25 a.m., by his account — and that of a nurse/witness — Dr. Branion was at least a mile away from the scene of the crime.
However, putting aside the fact that Dr. Branion was very likely not at the scene of the crime, let’s explore the state’s theory of the crime that Dr. Branion was the killer because the crime was not committed when the neighbor heard the shots, but was actually committed sometime between the time he left the hospital and the call to the police was made.
The police estimated that the drive from the hospital to the club to pick up the Branion child would take between 4 and 5¹/₂ minutes. Therefore the earliest he could arrive would be 11:34 a.m. The teacher testified that Dr. Branion took off his own coat, dressed his young son, and put on his own coat, taking 5 minutes to complete the ritual. It was then 11:39 a.m.
The police estimated that it took Branion somewhere between 1 and 2 minutes to drive to Maxine Brown’s office. He arrived there at 11:40 a.m. The conversation with Maxine took a maximum of 2 minutes, making the earliest he left there 11:42 a.m. The minimum drive time home was 1 minute, according to the state. Thus, according to the minimum time required to traverse the route Branion took, he could have arrived home at 11:43 a.m. — a full 14 minutes before the call was made to police.
The defense, however, could argue that every one of the 27 minutes between the time Branion left the hospital and the police were alerted could be accounted for by taking the nurse’s statement that he left at 11:34 as fact, and using the maximum times for each stop. The defense’s argument isn’t that far-fetched once one learns that the police timed the drive from checkpoint to checkpoint but never included the time it would take to enter and exit a car and walk to the building.
It is important to note that when the state presents an entirely circumstantial case like the one against John Branion, to support a conviction, it is “essential that the facts proved be not only consistent with the defendant’s guilt, but that they must be inconsistent with any reasonable hypothesis of innocence,” the Illinois Supreme Court wrote in reviewing the doctor’s case. “But the people are not required to establish it (the consistency) beyond a reasonable doubt.”
No one ever seems to have suggested that any one of the theories could be blown out of the water if a clock here or there was inaccurate or if the streets were more or less crowded on the day of the murder or if the initial assumption that murder occurred exactly at 11:25 a.m. was just plain wrong.
There was a bit more circumstantial evidence that did in Dr. Branion. After he became the chief suspect, police executed a search warrant and found a box of shells with exactly four missing (interestingly, the court opinions state that the bullets were .380 caliber while D’Amato writes that they were 9mm).
He was having an affair with Shirley Hudson that police used as the motivating factor for Donna’s murder. Nothing else made sense. Donna’s family was wealthier than Branion’s — his best hope for wealth lay in keeping her alive (although he would have done OK by managing what their son inherited).
Ballistics experts determined that Donna was shot by a Walther PPK, a type of gun owned by Dr. Branion. However, when police asked him whether he had any guns capable of firing the .380 slug of the type that killed his wife, Dr. Branion did not tell them that he owned a PPK — which can fire .380 cartridges despite being a 9mm weapon. Although conclusively established as the owner of a Walther, Dr. Branion claimed it had been stolen and could not produce it. That gun, like the murder weapon, was never found.
On May 28, 1968, Dr. John Marshall Branion was convicted of murdering his wife.
Even if the evidence had been more straightforward, the scales of justice were tipped against Dr. Branion for the judge overseeing his case was crooked.
Judge Reginald Holzer, who presided over Branion’s trial, was eventually convicted of corruption charges as a result of the infamous Chicago Greylord investigation.
After the doctor’s conviction his defense counsel moved for judgment notwithstanding the verdict — essentially asking the judge to nullify the jury’s decision. Judge Holzer announced that he would take the motion under advisement.
At this point the rules went out the window and a free-for-all began. Justice was for sale to the highest bidder.
The prosecutor in the case, Patrick Tuite, apparently heard a rumor that Holzer was going to grant Branion’s motion to set aside the verdict. Violating the prohibition against ex parte communication, Tuite asked Holzer not to grant the motion but instead to allow the appellate court to decide the case.
Holzer called Tuite and “suggested” that he seek a continuance to answer Branion’s motion despite Tuite’s assertion than no continuance was needed. This was Holzer’s way of putting more pressure on Branion’s side to come up with money to tilt the scales of justice their way.
An affidavit signed by a person connected to the case states that

Nelson Brown (Donna’s brother) came to me and said that Judge Holzer was looking for a bribe. ..A couple of days later Nelson Brown told me that he was able to get $20,000 from other friends of John Branion’s, but they had imposed the condition that $10,000 be paid to Judge Holzer in advance and the remaining $10,000 would be paid to him as soon as John Branion was freed.

Several days later, the affidavit continues, “$10,000 cash was passed to Judge Holzer” at a Holiday Inn on Lake Shore Drive.
Shortly after the bribe, John Branion, a convicted murderer facing life in prison, was released on $5,000 bail.
It turns out that Judge Holzer accepted the $10k but told Nelson Brown that he could not overturn the verdict because Tuite had gotten wind of the bribe and threatened to expose the whole setup. Instead, he would keep the ten grand and give Dr. Branion a chance to flee the country — which he did.
Dr. Branion fled to Uganda where he was either the personal physician to Idi Amin or a humanitarian doctor providing services to the poor (depending on who you want to believe. Personally, I’m partial to the humanitarian-doctor story).
When the Idi Amin regime fell in the 1980s, Dr. Branion was put on a plane and sent back to the United States to begin a 20-to-30-year sentence.
His appeals failed and Dr. Branion served 7 years in prison. As Dr. Branion’s health failed, his sentence was commuted for mercy reasons and he died in September 1990 at the age 64, closing one of the most bizarre and pathetic chapters of American criminal investigation and justice ever.