This is part of “Cold-Blooded,” a series of stories by The Tributary’s senior investigative reporter Nichole Manna that unravels the 1993 prosecution of Kenneth Hartley, who is on Death Row. To read the whole series go to jaxtrib.org/cold-blooded
Nearly a decade ago, Ronnie Ferrell, a man imprisoned for a 25-year-old murder, wrote Fourth Judicial Circuit State Attorney Melissa Nelson relaying a remarkable story: He claimed his 1993 conviction in the killing of teenage drug dealer Gino Mayhew rested largely on the testimony of a prosecution witness with a known track record of lying under oath, of which his jury was unaware. He’d been railroaded by police and prosecutors, he said.
Ferrell was right about the witness’s prolific penchant for dishonesty, which eventually led even Jacksonville detectives to discard him as a credible source.
In fact, Ferrell’s complaints about the conduct of Jacksonville law enforcement officials were compelling enough to prompt concerns from a unit set up by Nelson to review past convictions for potential injustices. That unit’s examination of Ferrell’s conviction spanned years but was abruptly cut short in 2023.
The Tributary sifted through the law enforcement file on Ferrell – largely consisting of court transcripts, police reports, crime scene photos, and news clippings covering hundreds of pages. Sprinkled within are previously unreported memos suggesting the outlines of an abortive investigation into Ferrell’s complaints to Nelson’s conviction-integrity unit, as well as his correspondence with Nelson. It’s not clear if investigators ever came to any conclusions about the strength of Ferrell’s 30-year-old conviction before abandoning it, although the unit’s leader told one potential witness she had “concerns about Ronnie’s case and some questions about how the case was handled back in the early 1990s.”
That canceled review demonstrates the limitations of a unit that Nelson set up to fanfare, the first of its kind in Florida, to seek justice for the wrongly accused, and it calls into question the validity of a high-profile prosecution against three men accused of murder – Ferrell, but also his two co-defendants, Sylvester Johnson and Kenneth Hartley.
Unlike Ferrell and Johnson, who are both serving life, Hartley is on Death Row.
Impeccable timing
Ferrell also complained that the police and prosecutors in effect bribed jailhouse snitches to lie to his jury that he’d confessed while awaiting trial, promising them reduced punishment, which they indeed received; and that a witness who claimed he saw Ferrell and Mayhew zooming down Moncrief Road at midnight shortly before the murder could not possibly have reliably ID’d anyone in a fast moving car on that poorly lit artery.
Ferrell had impeccable timing.
When he initially put pen to paper, in June 2017, Nelson was establishing her conviction-integrity unit. Similar units were emerging around the country as advances in DNA science revealed a startling number of wrongful convictions. In addition to freeing those wrongfully convicted, Nelson said the unit, under the leadership of Director Shelley Thibodeau, would “promote a culture which fosters fair and just prosecution” and show the people of the judicial circuit “our commitment to accountability and transparency in the work we do every day.”
Thibodeau’s team was curious enough about Ferrell’s claims to scour through records of his conviction, hunt down witnesses, conduct interviews, and correspond with him over a span of years.
She then shut down the investigation, citing an uncompromising interpretation of her unit’s rulebook.
She invoked Policy 2.03, Subsection 4, which requires that a convicted person must have no post-conviction litigation pending for their case to be considered.
By the letter of the policy, Ferrell’s conviction fit the bill for a review by Thibodeau’s unit.
But another man did have appeals before the courts. That man, Hartley, Ferrell’s co-defendant, was convicted of the same murder in a separate trial and sentenced to Death Row. Thibodeau reasoned that Hartley’s and Ferrell’s cases were “inextricably linked” and that Hartley’s appeal was the same as if Ferrell were appealing.
One murder, three trials
Gino Mayhew, 17, was found shot in the head behind Jacksonville’s Sherwood Forest Elementary School on the morning of April 23, 1991. No one witnessed the shooting, and no murder weapon was found. But a man named Sidney Jones, a drug dealer and longtime police informant, came forward weeks later after his own unrelated arrest with a damning story.
He claimed seeing Ferrell and Hartley abduct Mayhew outside the Washington Heights apartment complex in Northwest Jacksonville and force the teen to drive the three of them away in the victim’s Chevy Blazer, trailed by a fourth man, Sylvester Johnson, behind the wheel of a purple truck.
All three were arrested despite a lack of fingerprint matches or other physical evidence. The theory of the case was that Hartley shot Mayhew behind the school, and then he, Ferrell, and Johnson made their getaway in the purple truck. They were tried separately in front of different juries, with each being convicted of murder. Ferrell and Hartley were sentenced to die, Johnson to life in prison. Ferrell’s sentence was later reduced to life. All three are in their fourth decade of incarceration.
A series of articles in The Tributary has raised questions about whether police and prosecutors built their cases on a foundation of falsehoods.
The stories reported for the first time that Jones, the key witness in all three trials, had been convicted of perjury after testifying falsely 14 years earlier at a different murder trial. In that 1979 trial, he swore he observed events at a Trailways bus station when, in fact, he’d been in jail at the time.
The perjury conviction and a three-year prison sentence were later thrown out because the original judge failed to offer Jones a chance to return to the stand to recant his lies.
None of that prevented Jones from working regularly in the coming years as a paid police informant, snitching on fellow drug dealers, until he was “blackballed” – discarded as unreliable – by Jacksonville sheriff’s deputies. One cop, years later, wrote a memo calling the Jones a “lying piece of shit.”
A second key witness was Juan Brown, a frequently arrested man who testified that as he drove north on Moncrief around midnight the night of the murder, he spotted Mayhew in his Blazer, approaching from the opposite direction. He said he recognized Ferrell, an acquaintance, in the front passenger seat and caught a glimpse of a man roughly resembling Hartley in the back. A traffic reconstruction specialist working for defense attorneys replicated the conditions – two cars passing in the night from opposite directions on the dark street – and found it impossible to ID occupants.
The Tributary reported there were purportedly two other occupants of Brown’s car that night, but that, according to Brown, police never asked him to name them so they could be tracked down and bolster or refute his story.
Investigators for Ferrell also talked to jail detainees from the time Hartley, Johnson, and Ferrell were awaiting trial. Several signed affidavits saying cellmates who testified to hearing the three confess were liars who were encouraged to make up stories by a JSO detective who fed them details of the crime and promised reduced sentences if they played along.
Cases using questionable tactics are why conviction-integrity units have sprouted around the country, from Chicago to New York state to Broward County in Florida. Nelson’s unit, which covers Duval and two adjacent counties, made headlines by exonerating Hubert Nathan Myers and Clifford Williams, Black men wrongly convicted of first-degree murder as a result of eyewitness misidentification, police misconduct, and ineffective counsel. They were freed in March 2019 after 42 years.
Although there have been no exonerations since 2019, the integrity unit is fulfilling its mission, said David Chapman, spokesman for the state attorney’s office. He said, as of Dec. 22, the unit had logged 69 inquiries in 2025, including 26 formal petitions, and closed out 44, some dating back to prior years.
Cases examined by integrity units do sometimes conflict with ongoing court appeals, especially in cases involving the death penalty. Such conflicts can be resolved by “tolling” the criminal case – putting it on hold until the unit can independently examine prosecutors’ ethical practices.
“[A conviction-integrity unit] should be willing to appear before appropriate courts of record and request a tolling order from the judge that will ensure that the petitioner’s participation in the [integrity-unit] process will not jeopardize any other rights he or she might have in a habeas/post-conviction review process,” wrote John Hollway of the University of Pennsylvania’s law school in a 104-page study on integrity units, published shortly before Nelson started her unit.
“That is what we believe to be a national best practice,” Hollway, senior advisor at the law school’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, told The Tributary. “But not every state allows post-conviction tolling. And it is my understanding that Florida is a state where tolling is not allowed, even if both the prosecution and the defense want it to occur.”
All this appears to leave Ferrell’s fate hanging on the post-conviction appeal pursued by Hartley, the Death Row inmate who is trying to convince a judge to grant him an evidentiary hearing on many of the same issues raised by Ferrell.
“Hartley’s appeals and litigation through the court process will undoubtedly result in a robust and rigorous review of the factual circumstances associated with the murder of Gino Mayhew and subsequent criminal prosecutions,” said Chapman. “Because Hartley’s appeals and related litigation remain active and ongoing, we will refrain from further commenting on either case.”
A peek inside the file
An integrity-unit memo from May 2023 says that an investigator for the unit, together with an investigator representing Ferrell, planned to interview a bar owner “who apparently knows the whereabouts of some of the folks back in the day.”
The records show that the unit was also interested in interviewing a different man who supposedly had confessed to the killing of Mayhew to a friend. Efforts by the defense to introduce that purported confession at trial as exculpatory evidence were thwarted by Circuit Judge R. Hudson Olliff, who presided over all three trials.
A note to Ferrell from a state attorney legal assistant informed him that one of his alibis – he said his wife and mother-in-law would vouch for him being home for a bit the night of the murder – wasn’t panning out. The note asks for additional information on his movements that night.
One memo in the file, its author and recipient redacted, references Jones: “The pleadings in the Ferrell case claim that Sidney Jones twice stated that he witnessed two murders when in fact he was in custody at the time. Apparently, he was charged with perjury twice. Have you all seen anything in the file to verify this?”
The information about Jones’s perjury case is readily accessible in the state attorney’s files. It can also be obtained through the Florida Department of Corrections’ public-facing offender website.
Still another memo makes reference to a jailhouse informant who recanted his claim that Ferrell had confessed and then, according to the memo, “recanted his recantation.” It’s not clear from the file if several other ex-detainees – who signed affidavits for Ferrell’s investigator claiming police encouraged cellmates to make up confessions – were questioned.
A March 29, 2023, letter from Linda McDermott, federal public defender representing Hartley in his death penalty appeals, to Shelley Thibodeau, lists some of the same issues raised by Ferrell in his letter and asks for an investigation by the integrity unit. It indicates McDermott would be meeting with Thibodeau that day.
Finally, a memo from Thibodeau to an unnamed representative of Ferrell refers to a planned new reconstruction of the encounter on Moncrief, where Juan Brown allegedly saw Ferrell and Mayhew riding together in the victim’s Blazer. The reconstruction was scheduled that very day, and Thibodeau had been invited to observe it.
She took a pass.
“I appreciate the notice and invitation to observe the recreation as it might relate to my investigation of the Ferrell case,” Thibodeau wrote. “[But,] it has come to my attention that Hartley’s attorneys …have filed a 3.851 [appeal] motion on behalf of Hartley and have litigation currently pending at the trial court level. Given the pending litigation, our … policies require my investigation to be placed on hold…[we] will not be present this evening.”
Nichole Manna is The Tributary’s senior investigative reporter. You can reach her at nichole.manna@jaxtrib.org.
Casey Frank is The Tributary’s projects editor. You can reach him at casey.frank@jaxtrib.org.
