The Box Man: Ray Long

It was Summer in Nashville, 2000.

A string of Nashville sex worker killings and the usual gang related slayings were on the menu at the elite Davidson County Murder Squad.

Savvy new squad detective Roy Dunaway went by feel, casting aside procedure and DNA evidence. Dunaway made claims he had a “gift from God” that could extract a confession from those he interrogated.

Now, 20 years later, a new DA is apologizing to one innocent man and convicting the real killer after it turned out the detective’s gift was nothing more than flat-out perjury. It is a cleanup that includes at least three other officers swept up in the fervor.

The detectives made scary claims of having solved hundreds of murders. But while one man is now free, what about others who could be falsely imprisoned by Dunaway’s “gifts” and massive corruption?

Paul Garret

Garret was convicted of the murder of Velma Tharp in 2003 by corrupt detectives who concocted a witness who proceeded to lie on the stand. Dunaway also testified Garret had confessed, when he had done no such thing. When DNA evidence surfaced pointing to the real killer, Dunaway – not wanting to be wrong – swept the new facts under the rug. He then coerced a jailhouse “witness” to explain why Garret’s DNA was not at the crime scene. This left the real killer on the loose for 18 years.
In 2022, 20 years later, Garret was finally fully exonerated.

Raymond Long

In 2003 Ray’s girlfriend Falon Glaze was found murdered in Nashville along with another man, Terrence Scruggs. Detectives looked no further than Glaze’s long term boyfriend Raymond Long. One of those detectives was Dunaway. the same detective outed in Garret’s case.
For 20 years, Long’s family have never wavered, saying Ray was at home with them the night of the murder. But none of them were allowed to testify. The
murder weapon, found after Long’s arrest in the possession of someone not connected to Raymond, was neatly swept aside by bizarre assumptions the murder was not aimed at Scruggs, who was a gang-affiliated felon who had just been released from prison for attempted murder. The Jury was told none of this.

Fact:

While there’s no dispute that corruption in the Davidson County Police Department was causing false convictions in the early 2000s, the question is – how many exist?
It wasn’t until 2022, after Glenn Funk was elected District Attorney for Davidson County, that corruption dating from the early 2000’s at the Nashville Murder Squad was uncovered and made public. It started when Funk announced that tow truck driver Paul Garret was innocent and had been framed for the murder of sex worker Velma Tharp by the lying detective with psychic powers. Having no evidence against Garret, the detectives invented what they needed to frame Garret.

Garret was not only cleared and freed, the new administration offered an apology for what happened at the hands of officer Roy Dunaway and others who lied in court and manipulated evidence to gain a conviction of an innocent man.

Even when DNA pointed to the real perpetrator, Calvin Atchison, Dunaway forced a jailhouse “witness” to say Garret confessed to him that he wore a condom when killing Tharp. This was meant to explain why Garret’s DNA was not found at the crime scene. The hard evidence was swept aside for 18 years, not fitting with Dunaway’s so-called “gift from god” he claimed to have possessed that could make a murderer confess. Dunaway’s gift turns out to be the oldest of “gifts.” He lied in court, testifying that Garret confessed to him when he did no such thing.
Dunaway’s criminal actions put an innocent man in prison and left a dangerous killer, Atchison, on the loose.

Atchison was eventually arrested and convicted.

Quietly fired from the force for lying in another case, Dunaway took a job in security by lying on his resume. When that lying was revealed, Dunaway, AKA “The Box Man.” then made a podcast of his great interrogation gifts and the 100’s of murders he “solved”. The podcast lasted two episodes, until the former Nashville detective was publicly outed
in 2022, when it was revealed that Dunaway’s “gift” was nothing more than lying about what his suspects said during unrecorded interrogations.
Garret was pronounced innocent and filed suit, winning a record 1.2 million dollars – at the time, a record for Tennessee wrongful conviction settlements.

See: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/crime/2022/01/25/paul-shane-garrett-exonerated 2000-murder-sues-nashville/9202422002/

DA Glenn Funk acknowledged that other bad cases exist.  

This brings up the case of Raymond Long. 

“I was on my way shopping for her Christmas present with my friend Jarvis when mom  called and told me Falon (Glaze – Ray’s girlfriend) had been shot.  

I broke down beside myself – Jarvis had to drive. The truth was I had seen another girl  and Falon was not happy. But I had just sent her flowers with a note asking her to go to  Church for Christmas service.”  

The note was not allowed in evidence.  

Ray’s mother Carolyn 

“I had just called Falon asking her when I could drop her present off.” The call took  place a half hour before the shooting, according to phone records.  “Ray was home with us that night. If I thought he did it, I would not lie for him.”  Carolyn Long was an administrator at the TSU police.  

She was not allowed to testify. 

Raymond. “There were recent phone records where she called me, yet they made it  sound like she was afraid of me.”  

Raymond was convicted in 2005 of killing his girlfriend Falon Glaze and the man she  was with at her Nashville apartment, Terrence Scruggs. The case was handled by  detectives Roy Dunaway and Charles Freeman.  

They put their narrow focus on Long while once again sweeping aside blatant evidence  the perpetrator was someone else. The murder weapon itself was found in the  possession of someone having no association with Long, but this hard evidence was  ignored.  

A reasonable theory was cast aside – that the murder was aimed at Scruggs, who had  just been released from a five-year stretch in prison for attempted murder. The officers  proclaimed that Scruggs had no enemies, despite the obvious fact of the gang-affiliated  man he shot, robbed, and left for dead.  

Incredibly, the jury was never told any of this, or that the murder weapon was found and  proved by the State itself to be the weapon used to shoot Terrence Scruggs and Falon  Glaze! 

And more incredible detail – Ray’s court-appointed attorney Ed Ryan later told the  appeals court that he thought he brought the murder weapon up at Long’s trial when he 

did no such thing. This statement refutes all confidence that Ray Long was adequately  or fairly defended.  

The man found with the murder weapon, Terrio Williams, was not called to testify by Ed  Ryan. As a result, the appeals court decided that since Williams was not called, the  murder weapon was equally likely to be in Ray Long’s possession. 

This statement appears to be racial and hard to comprehend, putting Long in an ever shifting legal maze to prove his innocence. 

Adding to this situation, from a childhood accident, Raymond is verbally challenged,  making misrepresentation of what he said during his initial questioning all too easy.  Meanwhile not a single piece of paperwork or recorded evidence exists that Long made  the statements used to convict him. This begs the question of why these “confessions”  are the only statements not recorded by detectives Dunaway and Freeman.  This mirrors the Garret case, where Dunaway invented confessions.  

And like Garret, Ray Long asked for a polygraph to prove his innocence, but none was  given. 

When detectives asked to examine Long’s car and clothing at his parents’ house where  he was living, Long made no objections. No evidence of blood or gunshot residue was  found. The only reason sustaining the detective’s pursuit of Long was that he had been  dating Falon for four years.  

Conflict of Interest 

Raymond’s mother Carolyn, administrator of campus police at UTS, swore that Ray was  home the night of the murder and has never wavered from her stance.  Yet the jury would never hear her testimony.  

This was because Ed Ryan would not call Carolyn to the stand to testify. Ryan was a  former Nashville police officer who became Ray’s court appointed attorney when Ray’s  family could not come up with the $100,000 to pay the private lawyer he had first hired,  

Ryan refused to challenge his former brethren on the police force as he was paving his  way to becoming a Davidson County prosecutor.

To gain a conviction, detectives Freeman and Dunaway came up with a witness so  bizarre that even the unnamed judge in the preliminary hearing transcripts admitted the  witness was unreliable. The judge added that it was the toughest ruling he ever made,  when letting the case proceed against Ray on such flimsy and ever-changing testimony.  

After going to the police willingly, Long was immediately accused of the murders.  Ignoring his family’s alibi, they accused Raymond of kicking down Falon’s door and  shooting her and Scruggs.  

At this point Long rolled up his pants to show them his prosthetic leg – a handicap that  made it hard to walk, let alone be able to kick down a door.  

Weeks later, when police came up with a witness, the witness would conveniently say  he saw Ray push Falon’s door down in one heave. Yet not be able to say what color the  door was, or describe the features of the building, what Ray was wearing etc.  And at first, the witness said he never saw a gun, but by the time of the trial he would  say he saw that Ray had a gun.  

A neighbor said he heard arguing for ten minutes. He also said he had smelled  chemicals coming from the apartment. After the gun shots, he said he heard single  footsteps running down the stairs and then a car peel out from the front of the building.

Since this testimony was all contrary to their case, detectives called the  neighbor/witness a drunk and kept him off the stand.  

The detectives’ story was that Ray and an alleged accomplice named Joseph Whitfield parked their car on the highway and walked through a hole in the fence to get to Falon’s apartment. 

Later, Whitfield would say he didn’t even know a murder had taken place.  When police first looked for a hole in the fence it was not there. Yet by the time of the trial, they had a photo of a hole in the fence. 

Obviously, the new regime is trying to rectify the mess that happened with Paul  Garret at the hands of a few bad eggs trying to get ahead at the cost of justice.  What I ask is for them to look at this case and listen to Ray’s mother, who hired  me to help her son, now 15 years later.  

And ask this.  

What mother would throw money at a lost cause unless she knew her son was  home that night.  

Surely, she would work towards a parole. But as she said to me, if she thought  her son was guilty, she would never lie for him. As she said: “I’m not going to jail  for someone else’s crime.” 

Not all murders are by jealous boyfriends.  

But such cases are low-hanging fruit for detectives who simply lie about the evidence.  Relying on their position, it becomes a situation of their word against a suspect whom  they have profiled as an evil criminal.