Michigan Man Convicted of Arson and Murder Exonerated After Witness Confessed to Lying

In 1982, Walter Forbes was a full-time student at Michigan’s Jackson Community College, who had dreams of owning his own real estate development firm.

One night that year, he broke up a bar fight that drastically changed his life forever. The very next day, the man involved in the bar fight shot Forbes.

The man who shot Forbes was identified as Dennis Hall, but on July 12, 1982, he died in his apartment from a deliberately set fire.

Later that day, police arrested Forbes because he had recently been in an altercation with Hall, so police considered Forbes a suspect in the arson.

In May of 1983, Forbes was convicted of arson and murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

After more than 37 years following his conviction, Forbes, 63, became a free man on Nov. 20, after the protections star witness admitted to lying.

According to court documents filed by Jackson County Circuit Court, evidence surfaced that the fire was apart of an insurance fraud scheme cooked-up by the apartment buildings owner.

“It felt like all the possibilities that I was working on all those years was coming to fruition,” Forbes said. “I didn’t think it would take that long, but patience paid off.”

The key evidence that was used to implicate Forbes was witness testimony from Annice Kennebrew. The witness said that she had seen three men, including Forbes, burn down the apartment building in Jackson.

In 2017, Kennebrew admitted that she fabricated her story. She said that she never saw Forbes at the scene of the fire.

After the judge granted an evidentiary hearing in February of this year, she testified “that she had falsely implicated Mr. Forbes because she had been intimated into doing so by two local men who knew her from around the neighborhood and who had threatened to harm her and her family if she did not implicate Mr. Forbes.”

Forbes said, “Even though it took forever, I’m still grateful she did the right thing, that she did finally tell the truth.”

As for the alleged insurance fraud scheme, the apartment building’s owner, David Jones, was convicted in a separate arson conspiracy scheme in 1990 after a man died in the Michigan fire.

Forbes is currently staying with family in metro Detroit and plans on visiting his mom, 94, in Mississippi in the coming weeks.