More questions surround doctor's 1981 slaying

Dr. John Chase Wood Jr. was shot in the heart for $5 in his wallet in 1981, walking back to work at a hospital after dinner with his pregnant wife. The 31-year-old pediatric surgeon-in-training died as weeping colleagues tried to save him in his emergency room.

Wood's killing became a symbol of a violent era's senseless street crime - and a case that lingered unresolved for more than two decades. It took 13 years for the first arrest. One suspect was acquitted; the second, Daryl Whitley, was convicted, but not until his second trial in 2002.

But last week a judge threw out Whitley's conviction, saying jurors should have been told that the key prosecution witness had tried to back off his testimony. The ruling opens a chance at freedom for Whitley, who has maintained his innocence. And it reopens questions and wounds that prosecutors, police and the doctor's family had considered, at long last, closed.

"You know, this is just never going to be over," the doctor's widow, Dr. Diana Newton Wood, this week told the son that Wood never met.

It was Nov. 2, 1981, when two men accosted Wood on an upper Manhattan street. He scuffled with them after they demanded prescription drugs and money. One drew a gun and shot him.

The trail went cold until 1994, when a detective who had collected a cardboard carton full of clues in the case arrested a man he had long suspected of being the gunman, Patrick McDowell.

Whitley was arrested a year later.

Jurors deadlocked during McDowell's first trial and acquitted him in 1997.

One longtime acquaintance, Glenn Richardson, agreed to testify against Whitley as part of a plea bargain in a drug case that could have sent him to prison for 20 years to life; he ended up serving about three years, said Whitley's lawyer, Barry Ostrager.

At Whitley's first trial, Richardson testified that Whitley told him he and McDowell were "looking for somebody to rob, and the doctor came along, and [McDowell] shot him." Jurors deadlocked.

By the time of Whitley's retrial, Richardson was out of prison and told a judge he "was not clear and conscious" when he initially told police about Whitley's alleged remark. Through a lawyer, he added that he'd never been sure Whitley admitted taking part in the robbery and shooting.

In his ruling last week, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein said Whitley hadn't gotten a fair trial because jurors didn't know about Richardson's attempt to recant.

For now, Whitley, 47, remains in a maximum-security state prison. After her husband's death, Diane Wood became an anesthesiologist, moved to her native Sudbury, Mass., remarried and had two more sons. But her loss still reverberates, reminders never further away than her eldest son and his infant son - both named John.

As for the case against Whitley, she said, "I'm confident things will turn out the way they were supposed to be."