OKLAHOMA – A former Oklahoma City police officer was sentenced to 263 years in prison after being convicted of a number of sex crimes against women.
The trial took weeks, deliberation took days and finally a conviction put Daniel Holtzclaw away for the rest of his life.
We’re hearing from a juror who found Holtzclaw guilty.
Holtzclaw sits behind bars for sexually assaulting multiple black women in the metro, and now we hear not only form a juror but also one of the investigators who said she had a gut feeling Holtzclaw had done something very wrong.
“He unzipped his pants and took his genital out,” remembered Jannie Ligons, the first victim to come forward. “I said, ‘Come on. Oh, sir, please don’t make me do this.'”
That was the beginning of a nightmare for just one of the women Holtzclaw is convicted of sexually assaulting.
“I had a lot of people tell me, ‘Oh, he’s a police officer. They’re not gonna do anything to him,'” Ligons said.
Some victims didn’t want to share what happened.
“The victims didn’t come forward, because they didn’t think we’d believe them,” said Kim Davis, the woman who interrogated Holtzclaw. “They all said, ‘Who am I gonna call – the police on the police?'”
But, investigators did do something.
“It was just her demeanor, and she had no reason to make it up. There was no motive. She wasn’t getting out of a ticket, wasn’t getting out of an arrest and, sometimes in investigations, you go with your gut,” Davis said.
Their coworker seated feet away refuting allegations of an accused crime.
“It was kind of like interviewing a robot. He just there, no emotion at all from him,” Davis said. “You’d think, if you were being accused of something so heinous, your voice might raise a bit, your eyebrows might raise a little bit, going ‘What?’ Nothing. Just straight across the board no reaction at all.”
A non-reaction helped convict this man of 18 sex crimes.
“The more we looked at the different victims, the more we saw the pattern, the more we saw the evidence. The evidence proved to us that he was guilty of the charges we found him guilty on,” said Ronald Hill, a juror in the trial.
Holtzclaw’s sentence felt like justice for his 13 accusers.
“My mind was opened up more, and I look at it that these were women, and he was a man. Whatever their lifestyle, they were still violated,” Hill said.
You can see the rest of the juror’s interview Thursday night on Crime Watch Daily at 4 p.m. on our sister station, Freedom 43.
