About Face

Gregory and another detective searched through Ancona's belongings the day after her body was found. They found her telephone book. Police say they found Ray Krone's number in that book.

The odd thing: The handwriting used to write Krone's number in the book doesn't look like Kim Ancona's.

One of Ancona's friends told police that, days earlier, when a group of friends and bar patrons went together to a Christmas party, Ancona had received a ride to the party from Ray Krone.

An acquaintance of Ancona's also told police that Ancona had told her she might be meeting someone after the bar closed. The acquaintance said she thought the guy's name was Ray.

Ancona's close friends told police she never mentioned any such after-work meeting.

At 2 p.m. on December 29, 1991, Detective Gregory visited Krone, who had no criminal history of any kind, at his home.

Gregory noted that Krone's upper teeth were extremely uneven.

At this point, almost everyone involved in the case understands how Phoenix police could consider Ray Krone a possible suspect.

But from that afternoon on, all signs led away from Ray Krone -- and cops and lab technicians and prosecutors ignored them all.

Krone said he sometimes played darts at the CBS Lounge. Ancona was an acquaintance, he told police, but they were not dating. He had once driven her to a Christmas party.

Krone's roommate informed authorities that Krone was home all night. Krone's shoes were all size 11, not 9 1/2 to 10 1/2 -- and he owned no Converse sneakers.

Gregory took Krone to Phoenix police headquarters for an interview.

"I'm there for two hours and 45 minutes," Krone recalls. "It's just going on and on, and he's asking me the same questions. Then he asks me for a hair sample, and they pull on different parts of my head for 15 minutes. So, you know, that's unpleasant. Then he's sitting there calling me a liar the whole time. Then he wants bite marks. So I bite into Styrofoam and they have me moving my mouth forward and backward and all around.

"When that's done, Gregory says, 'Now I'm going to take your blood.' I said, 'No you're not,' and he gets mad. He pulls out this search warrant with everything circled on it and says he's taking my blood. I wanted a nurse to take it, not this guy, because I'm not liking this guy much and don't trust him, and I don't want him poking me with no needle."

A nurse came in and drew Krone's blood.

Then Gregory got tough.

"He says, 'I know you're lying,'" Krone continues. "'We have people who say you had her over for dinner. We have people who know you took her to a Christmas party. It's time to come clean.'"

Krone had had enough.

"I said, 'Get whoever is saying this in here, and we'll introduce ourselves and get this straightened out. That isn't true. Talk to them. Where'd they hear this? I mean, get out there and do your damn job!'"

As the interview dragged on, Krone began to express more and more anger toward Gregory's questions.

Gregory clearly didn't appreciate Krone's insolence.

Based on a New Times review of police records in the case, it seems clear that Gregory, then others in the justice system, fell into what psychologists call "target fixation."

They began to believe that Ray Krone was the only possible culprit. They aimed their investigation toward finding only evidence that pointed to Krone as the killer.

They seemed to ignore any evidence, or any testimony, that pointed away from Krone.

They used a less-than-well-trained lab technician, Scott Piette, and a dentist, Ray Rawson, to create a façade of scientific credibility on evidence that more credible scientists stated emphatically was bogus.

This is how it happened. This is how an innocent man went to death row in America.

One day a policeman came to Ray Krone's door asking questions, and a few days later he was sitting in jail, and a few months later he was labeled a murderer, and a few weeks after that, he was in solitary confinement getting told he's going to be executed by lethal injection or, if he chose, poison gas.

By the end of 1992, Krone was having trouble remaining an optimist.

"That was a bad year," he says, smiling at the obvious understatement. "It's tough to keep your spirits up when you're on that kind of roll."

Still, he figured the truth would soon come out.

But the bad roll lasted 3,769 days.

It has been several months since Ray Krone appeared on ABC's Extreme Makeover.

His teeth were the focus of the show. He was wrongly convicted of murder primarily on Ray Rawson's contention that his crooked teeth matched the bite mark on Kim Ancona's left breast. The press labeled him the Snaggletooth Killer after his arrest in 1992.