Greg Cole

Greg Cole is an Alabama Bureau of Investigation investigator whose findings help expose the weakness of the case against Walter McMillian. Working with Tom Taylor, he brings the defense team news that two trial witnesses have disavowed their testimony, and that the accusation that Bryan Stevenson tried to bribe one of them was itself false. Cole’s role marks a consequential turn: the state’s renewed investigation, requested to confirm McMillian’s guilt, instead points toward his innocence and raises the harder question of identifying the real killer.

Identity and Assignment

Cole enters the account as one of two investigators from Montgomery assigned to reexamine the murder case. After the Rule 32 hearing exposed serious problems in the evidence, prosecutor Tom Chapman privately grew concerned about the conviction and formally asked ABI officials to investigate again. Chapman did not tell the defense team that the new inquiry was underway. Cole and Taylor instead contacted Stevenson directly, and Stevenson agreed to share the case files and information they requested.

The defense had sought a fresh examination of the evidence for more than two years, so the investigators’ call offered a possibility long denied to them. Stevenson later described both men as experienced investigators who appeared interested in doing credible, reliable work. That judgment mattered because they were entering a case shaped by local investigators and officials whose earlier account had been challenged in court. Cole was part of an inquiry that was not simply reviewing a conviction from within the same local circle: the investigators had no connection to the South Alabama figures involved in the case.

Investigating the Case

The defense supplied files, memoranda, and even original evidence. Sharing so much carried a risk: if McMillian won a reversal and the case had to be retried, state investigators would have more information with which to challenge the defense. Stevenson nevertheless believed that an honest investigation would expose the absurdity of the charges. Within weeks, Cole and Taylor appeared to doubt that McMillian was guilty.

The account’s January meeting with the defense team came after six months had passed since the appeal was filed, with a decision from the Court of Criminal Appeals expected soon. Cole and Taylor returned to Stevenson’s office to discuss what their investigation had found. Taylor declared the conclusion directly; Cole’s contribution was to substantiate it with evidence about the witnesses. He told the defense that both Bill Hooks and Joe Hightower had admitted their trial testimony was false. The significance was not merely that the defense had disputed their credibility: the state investigators had obtained admissions that directly undermined testimony used to convict McMillian.

Cole also explained that Hooks had acknowledged never speaking to Stevenson and never receiving a bribe from him. Hooks, he said, had admitted that his testimony against McMillian was made up. Cole’s account thus connected two revelations that had previously threatened to be treated as separate issues: the prosecution’s witness had fabricated his account of McMillian, and the allegation that the defense had tried to corrupt that witness was also invented.

The Bribery Allegation and Its Collapse

The alleged bribe involved a supposed offer of money and a condominium in Mexico in exchange for Hooks changing his testimony. According to Cole, when the investigators were assigned to the case, they were told that Stevenson should be investigated because Hooks had made that accusation. The charge therefore placed the defense lawyer under suspicion at the same time that the defense was challenging the state’s evidence against McMillian.

Cole reported that the investigators questioned Hooks and quickly established that he had never spoken to Stevenson and had not been bribed. In the same conversation, Hooks acknowledged that his testimony against McMillian had been fabricated. Cole’s explanation reverses the allegation’s direction: rather than revealing misconduct by the defense, the inquiry exposed the accusation against Stevenson as baseless and the witness’s account as false. When the supposed Mexican condominium came up, Cole added that Hooks had meant one on a beach, a detail that made the bribery story’s extravagance especially plain without making it more credible.

Cole also described how the inquiry widened beyond the witness interviews: the investigators began administering polygraphs, and, as he put it, things fell apart quickly. The account does not specify every person tested or the results of individual examinations. What it does establish is the broad consequence Cole drew from this phase of the work: the allegations and testimony on which the case rested could not withstand renewed scrutiny.

From Exoneration to the Unsolved Murder

The meeting did not end with the investigators’ findings about McMillian. When Stevenson’s colleague Bernard Harcourt asked what would happen next, Taylor said that the investigators still wanted to solve the crime and had a suspect. He asked whether the defense team would help identify the actual killer, reasoning that people might be more willing to accept McMillian’s innocence if they knew who had committed the murder. Cole was present as Taylor made that request, having helped establish why the conviction could no longer be trusted.

That turn gives Cole’s part in the episode a particular significance. The inquiry began at Chapman’s request to confirm McMillian’s guilt, but Cole’s disclosures instead dismantled the credibility of central testimony and the accusation directed at McMillian’s lawyer. The investigators’ task then shifted from defending the conviction to pursuing the crime itself. The account leaves Cole at that threshold: the evidence has changed the understanding of McMillian’s case, while the search for the person responsible remains unresolved.