Frank Milano -- Victim Of "Hit and Run" Justice

By Dr. Glenn Larkin, Forensic Pathologist, and Mary Baldwin, RN.

Editor for Justice Denied: Joanne Walker

On May 22, 1996, Frank Milano was falsely convicted and sentenced to eighty-four years in prison for a rape that never happened.

The convoluted tale that became Frank Milano's fate began at approximately 10 p.m. one day in 1994 when he was driving through a shopping center parking lot in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. Suddenly he heard a loud thump.

The State of North Carolina claims that the thump came from Frank's deliberate bashing of his intended victim with his 4 X 4 Montero so that later that evening he could "have his way with" the woman whose body he struck.

Tragically, it was Frank Milano who was the intended victim that fateful night.

Frank did not know that the "victim," Mrs. C., a woman with a considerable police record, had been lying in wait for an unsuspecting driver. When Frank Milano slowed down for a right turn near the curb where she stood, he became the target of her malicious plot. The woman threw herself at the fender of his car and Frank believed that he was to blame.

Frank Milano first encountered Mrs. C. sitting on the ground near the left-front fender of his car, screaming that he had hit her. Almost immediately, she began to curse and move about, apparently not seriously injured. Seeking to avoid reporting the "accident" because of increased insurance rates and yet nearly panicked with concern, Milano offered to take the woman to the nearest hospital. His first indication that something was amiss should have been the way her purse and other belongings were neatly arranged in a safe spot back from the site of the accident, but Frank, caught up in the anxiety that follows any motor vehicle accident, did not think to question it at the time.

Possibly intoxicated or drug-positive, or both, Mrs. C. tried to get Frank to deliver her to work instead of to the hospital -- maybe because she was afraid to have her blood tested. During that confusion, Frank took a wrong turn, and then Mrs. C. asked him to take her directly home. Desperate to reach a simple solution for an unfortunate situation, Milano naively aimed toward what he thought was a friendly rapport with this seemingly sympathetic woman and did not balk at her unusual manner. On the way to her home they passed a field and she asked Frank to stop so she could urinate.

Mrs. C. next asked Frank to steady her and to help pull down her pants. Also needing to urinate, he turned away from her to relieve himself. At that moment, she toppled over, and Frank instinctively turned to see what happened, inadvertently exposing himself to her in the semi-darkness. Seeing an advantage, she immediately mentioned that she had lost a day's wages, and asked if he would help her recover the lost money. Milano gave her the forty-seven dollars in his pocket, and then she surprised him. She grabbed him and began to perform oral sex on him. Milano, uncomfortable with the situation, stepped away, saying, "This is all wrong -- I am a married man, and this is not right." He helped Mrs. C. back into his car and drove the rest of the way to her home.

At Mrs. C.'s home, more anxious than ever to promote an amicable atmosphere, Milano accepted her offer of beer, and chatted informally with her for about an hour. Then, after Milano suggested she do something to treat her "accident" symptoms -- since she wouldn't go to the hospital -- Mrs. C.took a hot bath. Afterwards, they sat on her couch. Soon, Mrs. C.'s eighteen year-old daughter and live-in boyfriend arrived and everyone talked socially for about 45 minutes more. When Frank Milano finally left, he told Mrs.C. that he was willing to pay her medical bills, and they exchanged business cards.

During their conversation that evening, Mrs. C. had volunteered that her boyfriend, who later became her husband, was serving time in a federal penitentiary on drug charges, which she claimed were false. Frank, too, had once been entangled with false charges and unwisely divulged this to Mrs. C. Frank's folly came back to haunt him because after he sent her three hundred dollars and offered to pay all her related medical bills, Mrs. C. pressed him for more. She apparently felt that, between the "accident," his sense of guilt over the near-sex encounter in the field, and her knowledge of his unfortunate criminal record, she could succeed in extorting more cash from him. Frank drew the line at her greater demands, however, and refused to agree to her ploy.

Mrs. C. decided to activate "Plan B" and reported the incident to police -- a twist in the sequence of events that ultimately led to Frank's conviction on seven counts of sexually related crime and one count of kidnapping. However, even when Mrs. C. arrived at the emergency department of the Carolina Medical Center, twenty-two hours after she was supposedly sexually assaulted, she still did not report a "rape."

Mrs. C. claimed she had been hit by Milano's four-wheel-drive sport utility vehicle at 35 to 40 miles per hour, yet the emergency physician found no treatable injuries of any kind on her body. No fractures. No lacerations. Nothing but a "possible shiner," and that may have been little more than mascara, for there was no associated injury to the eye.

In contrast to the records of the attending physician at the hospital that night, subsequent reports prepared by Charlotte-Mecklenburg police detectives claim that there was a "cut" or "gash" on Mrs. C.'s head. Yet the doctor had explicitly stated that there was no such injury. In fact, the detectives could not even agree on which side of her face they had seen these marks.

At 11:00 p.m. on Monday, October 17, four days after the "crime," Frank Milano was arrested at his home. He voluntarily allowed the police to search his house and provided them with the clothing he had been wearing the previous Thursday. He took them to the parking lot where he had met Mrs. C. and showed them the impossibility of her account of the "hit and run." At police request, he submitted fluid and fiber samples at the local hospital. Then, Frank Milano spent more than three hours in the middle of the night being interrogated by Sergeant Detective Bill Tucker, of the Union County Sheriff's Office, and Detective Mike Eastley.

Milano, led to believe that a tape recording was being made of his comments, spoke freely about the incident. No such tape recorder was ever used. Instead, Sergeant Tucker was editing Milano's responses and entering them into his notes. Milano's admission, "I admit I am guilty -- guilty of adultery and infidelity, and nothing else." became abbreviated in Tucker's notes as, "I admit that I am guilty." Frank's ill-advised open style became his Judas; the police treated his candid references to guilt as confession to rape, and he was held without bail. In fact, at a preliminary hearing a few weeks later, Mrs. C. was heard to say, "I did it for money, and I earned it!" Unfortunately, the wheels of injustice were already in motion against Frank Milano, and her statement could not be confirmed by a transcript.

Frank's family made significant financial sacrifices to help him hire what they believed were quality lawyers. Money does not buy compassion or competence, however, and Frank soon discovered that his attorneys believed the police version of his "confession." Accordingly, they only did minimal investigation on Frank's behalf and did not interview any witnesses at all. The testimony of the emergency room doctor and the glaring deviations in the statements made by the police about Mrs. C.'s phantom injuries were all but ignored. When it came to light that Mrs. C. had had a second medical exam two weeks after the incident, Milano's attorneys failed to properly acquire the records and the reports were suppressed, even though they contained exculpatory information (e.g., Mrs. C. complained of pain in her left side, but the only evidence of abnormality on her x-rays was a slight swelling in her right knee -- a hurt she never complained she had).

Despite copious amounts of bogus evidence, Milano's attorneys consistently failed to rebut it and did not provide him with a worthy defense. They only objected four times during the entire trial. In fact, the usually loquacious Mrs. C. answered "I don't know," or "I don't remember," to over one hundred questions about the incident, yet her testimony was allowed to stand. Milano's defense attorneys should have used those inconsistencies to underscore the lack of credibility in Mrs. C.'s testimony. Instead, they missed one opportunity after another.

In the end, Frank Milano was sentenced to eighty-four years in prison, without possibility of parole, for a crime that never occurred.

Frank Milano may be "guilty" of infidelity and poor judgment, but he certainly did not rape or kidnap anyone on the night of October 13,1994, yet he remains in prison with the bulk of an eighty-four year sentence in front of him.

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