He was surprised to receive a phone call from the FBI that his brother’s killer had confessed. Me and my brother and my sister, we’d always talk about it. “It was hard on me,” said Julius Ricks, who is now 74 and still lives in the North Little Rock area. Ricks’ brother described James Ricks as a friendly and fun-loving young man.
He was 67 at the time of his arrest in 2015 and will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars.įor Ricks’ family, the years without justice and closure for their loved one were difficult, especially knowing that the Clay brothers had been convicted of other crimes but would be released. After the judge declared his taped confession admissible, Clay pleaded guilty to the murder charges and was sentenced to 20 years. Clay recounted everything, both in the office and as the two men continued to chat in Clay’s truck.Ĭlay was quickly arrested and returned to Little Rock, where he was charged with Ricks’ murder. Right on schedule, the cellmate arrived at the probation office when Clay did, wearing a hidden recording device. Given where Clay and his old cellmate had met and bonded, the probation office seemed the most likely place for their “chance” meeting, so Downen, Calloway, and officials from the Delaware Department of Probation and Parole came up with a plan to have the two former cellmates in the lobby at the same time as they were arriving for meetings with their probation officers. It was time to get their taped confession. In August 2014, he got the answer he’d been waiting for: Clay was released that morning. The case is 50 years old, so the only way we get a conviction is to get the guy on tape admitting to it.”ĭownen called the Delaware prison system occasionally to check on Clay during those two years. “Then it was just a matter of how we would prove it. “There’s just no way this story isn’t true,” Downen said after listening to the story and seeing how it corroborated with known details of Ricks’ murder. I don’t know how much of it was ego and wanting people to think he was a tough guy, or how much of it was just boredom.”Īfter additional investigation, it became clear that the story checked out. “He’s an old man in prison, and you wonder how much he wanted people to be a little bit scared of him. “I think some of it was bragging a little bit,” Downen said of Clay’s willingness to confide in his cellmate. The cellmate, who slept in the top bunk, took detailed notes on their discussions while Clay talked from the bottom bunk.Ĭlay told the cellmate he regretted killing Ricks, and that his brother, who had since died, had told him to do it. (Calloway was familiar with Clay because he had investigated the bank robbery-unrelated to the Ricks murder-that landed Clay in prison.)Ĭlay’s cellmate, who was imprisoned on drug charges, gave the investigators a detailed account of the killing-the circumstances, type of gun used, Clay facing Ricks’ family in the courtroom when he was charged with stealing the car. So Downen and Officer Derrick Calloway of the Laurel (Delaware) Police Department interviewed the cellmate of James Leon Clay, by then in his 60s, at Sussex Correctional Institution in Georgetown, Delaware. Though Downen was not familiar with the killing, the story piqued his interest. Nearly 50 years later and 1,100 miles away in Delaware, Special Agent Justin Downen-working out of the FBI Baltimore Division’s Dover Resident Agency-received a call from a man who said his brother-in-law’s prison cellmate had confessed to the murder.
Ricks’ body was found by hikers two months later on August 27, 1967. But the men were never charged with Ricks’ murder, despite having stolen his car and leaving fingerprints inside the vehicle. James Leon Clay, 20, and his brother Leon Junior Clay, 25, were convicted of interstate vehicle theft for stealing Ricks’ car and for the robberies they’d committed earlier that night. After driving around with a wounded Ricks in the trunk, they shot him again in the back of the head and left him in a wooded area in rural Arkansas. The pair of criminals shot Ricks, a 27-year-old African-American father of a young daughter, and locked him in the trunk of his own 1964 Oldsmobile. They stole Ricks’ car-and his life-but decades would go by before his killer was brought to justice. Two criminals were fleeing a store they had robbed when their getaway car broke down. James Ricks was sitting in his car late on a summer night in 1967 in North Little Rock, Arkansas when he was startled by tapping on his car window.
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