Law - Seeking truth and justice

Willard “Bill” Raynor ’64 has invested much of the past four years of his life trying to salvage what’s left of the lives of three other men. He is investigating a 1970s murder in hopes of exonerating three men that he believes have been wrongly imprisoned for nearly 30 years.

"One of the men, in particular, has touched me in terms of his innocence and his refusal to be bitter," Raynor says. "He’s in his early 60s now, and that’s one of the things that’s pushing me. I want him to be able to live as a free man before he dies."

Raynor got involved with the case after meeting up at his 35th class reunion with Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brother Jim McCloskey ’64, founder of Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit that works to vindicate those who have been unjustly convicted and imprisoned for life or sentenced to death. "Jim’s passion for his work just oozed out of him," he recalls.

Two years later, Raynor and his wife, Mary Ann “Bonnie” Vasilawsky Raynor ’64, took McCloskey up on his invitation to visit Centurion Ministries’ Princeton headquarters. Heather McNally ’85 is the case development manager at Centurion Ministries, and her father, Tom McNally ’58, volunteers there.

While the Raynors were in Princeton, they met one of the 36 people (34 men and two women) that Centurion Ministries has helped to free. "He was an absolutely honest, candid, charming guy who was dragged into the system because he was young and black," Raynor recalls.

That’s when he decided to take on a case that had been lingering at Centurion Ministries because no one was available to work on it. "Jim warned me that five years is the average length of a case, but I didn’t believe him at the time," Raynor says.

Since then, he has poured over tens of thousands of pages of records and has interviewed more than 100 people related to the crime. He makes several trips a year to Pennsylvania, the site of the crime, staying for up to two weeks at a time. The case is nearly ready for Centurion Ministries to bring to a lawyer, who will seek to present new evidence to the court.

Raynor says he is "ready and eager" to see the case through to the end. "This has been a life-changing experience for me. I’ve learned to be very critical about police murder investigations and the legal systems associated with those investigations. I’ve also learned that if you keep going back and keep driving at it, you can learn the truth."