25 years after Michael Jordan's father was murdered, key questions remain unanswered
James Jordan hit the road shortly after midnight, cruising into the summer darkness in his red Lexus SC400. Jordan had spent that day - July 22, 1993 - at the funeral of a former co-worker in Wilmington, N.C., later visiting with friends.
Now he was headed 3 1/2 hours toward his home in Charlotte, scheduled to fly to Chicago the following day.
He never made it.
On the same evening, Daniel Green and Larry Demery gathered at a cookout in Lumberton, N.C., two teenage friends hanging out. Within hours, though, their lives converged with the father of the world's most renowned basketball player.
Jordan wound up in a South Carolina swamp, his dead body draped over a tree limb. Green and Demery wound up with life sentences for first-degree murder.
Yet 25 years later, key questions remain unanswered. And with Green bidding for a new trial in the North Carolina justice system, somehow the back cover on the case has still not been closed.
Green is now awaiting a superior court judge's ruling on a motion that contends, among other things, that the initial investigation into Jordan's death overlooked or ignored important evidence. Green's defense team hopes to present new evidence that they contend will show that the blood evidence and testimony were misrepresented at the original trial; that a bullet hole found in Jordan's shirt is suspect; and that there were failures by the prosecution to properly disclose information that would have connected the sheriff's drug-trafficking biological son to the investigation.
Folded within that complex legal battle is a straightforward question: Is the accepted narrative of James Jordan's murder an accurate account of what happened?
Johnson Britt, the prosecutor in the case, sees Green's legal fight as little more than desperation. "I just think that's his personality," Britt says. "He's never going to own up to what he did. He's never going to own up to what the jury said he did. He just won't accept it."
The North Carolina attorney general's office is representing the state and maintains the evidence against Green is "overwhelming," according to court filings.
Among the general public, many remember the crime as follows: that James Jordan, a little more than an hour into his drive from Wilmington to Charlotte, stopped to nap in his Lexus alongside a highway; that he was shot as he slept during a botched robbery; that his body was found and two troubled teens were charged, tried and convicted soon after.
Yet so many odd circumstances surrounded Jordan's death.
Jordan's body was not discovered in his car but turned up in a swamp in McColl, S.C., 11 days after the murder. Jordan was cremated Aug. 7 by a South Carolina coroner - as a John Doe before his body had been identified.
His 1992 Lexus was not discovered on the side of the road where he had purportedly slept but abandoned in the woods near Fayetteville, N.C., 60 miles from where his body was found and after it had been stripped.
A total of 21 days passed before family members reported Jordan missing. His 57th birthday came and went on July 31, nine days after he had last been seen alive. On the 22nd day, his body was identified with dental records.
Michael Jordan's father had been murdered, shot once in the chest.
Less than five weeks earlier, Michael and James Jordan were on top of the world, together in Phoenix celebrating the Bulls' third consecutive NBA championship. James was, in Michael's words, his "best friend," perhaps his most loyal supporter, the man affectionately known as "Pops."
