12-10-2025, 04:43 PM
A riveting, in-depth account of one of New York City's most notorious crimes.
On April 20, 1989, the body of a woman is discovered in Central Park, her skull so badly smashed that nearly 80 percent of her blood has spilled onto the ground. Within days, five black and Latino teenagers confess to her rape and beating. In a city where urban crime is at a high and violence is frequent, the ensuing media frenzy and hysterical public reaction is extraordinary. The young men are tried as adults and convicted of rape, despite the fact that the teens quickly recant their inconsistent and inaccurate confessions and that no DNA tests or eyewitness accounts tie any of them to the victim. They serve their complete sentences before another man, serial rapist Matias Reyes, confesses to the crime and is connected to it by DNA testing.
Before the trial of the Central Park 5, Real Estate magnate, Donald Trump spent over $80,000 taking advertising in the NY Times, advocating the death penalty for the 5 teenagers. The now exonerated Central Park 5 spoke at the 2024 Democrat National Party Convention against Trump's racially charged attempts in 1989 to have these 14 and 15 year old black and latino boys executed for crimes they did not commit.
Intertwining the stories of these five young men, the police officers, the district attorneys, the victim, and Matias Reyes, Sarah Burns unravels the forces that made both the crime and its prosecution possible. Most dramatically, she gives us a portrait of a city already beset by violence and deepening rifts between races and classes, whose law enforcement, government, social institutions, and media were undermining the very rights of the individuals they were designed to safeguard and protect.
Quote: The Central Park jogger case was a criminal case based on the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a 28-year-old, white woman who was jogging in the park, and attacks on eight other persons in the North Woods of Manhattan's Central Park on the night of April 19, 1989. Meili, an investment banker, was so injured that she was in a coma for 12 days. At the time of the first trial in 1990, The New York Times described the attack on her as "one of the most widely publicized crimes of the 1980s".
Attacks in Central Park that night were allegedly committed by around 30 teenagers, and police attempted to apprehend suspects. Meili was not found until 1:30 am, after which the police hunt intensified. Among other suspects, four African American teenagers and two Hispanic American teenagers were taken into custody. After lengthy interrogations, these six teenagers were indicted on May 10 on charges of assault, robbery, riot, rape, sexual abuse, and attempted murder relating to the attack on Meili and an unrelated man in the park. A seventh suspect was also indicted on these charges. (Two of the seven defendants made plea deals with the prosecution; they were dropped from the trial and later received lesser sentences.)
Prosecution of the five defendants was based primarily on confessions which they had made during police interrogations, which in some cases had proceeded for hours without parents or counsel present. They each later withdrew these confessions, pleaded not guilty, and refused plea deals. None of the suspects' DNA matched the DNA from two semen samples found on, and close to the victim, which both belonged to the same unidentified man, a fact stated by an FBI witness in the first of the two trials. There was no substantive physical evidence connecting the five teenagers to the rape scene, but each was convicted in 1990 of assault and other charges by juries in two separate trials. Subsequently known as the Central Park Five, they received sentences ranging from 5 to 15 years. Four of the defendants appealed their convictions, but these were affirmed by appellate courts. Four defendants served 6-7 years each; one, tried and sentenced as an adult, served 13 years in adult prison. Five other defendants had earlier pleaded guilty to charges related to other crimes against other victims that night, and received lesser sentences.
In 2001, Matias Reyes, a convicted murderer and serial rapist who was serving life in prison, confessed to officials that he had raped the female jogger. His DNA matched the two samples found on and near the rape victim, and there was other confirmatory evidence. He said he committed the rape alone. Reyes was not prosecuted for raping Meili, because the statute of limitations had passed. After an investigation by his office, in 2002 Robert Morgenthau, District Attorney for New York County, recommended that the convictions of the five men related both to charges for the assault and rape of Meili and other charges, be vacated. The court vacated their convictions in 2002, and the state withdrew all charges against the men.