The Neighbors Who Destroyed Their Lives
Photographs by Phil Jung
The Schweitzer brothers see John Gonsalves everywhere now.
In the small towns on the eastern tip of Hawaii’s Big Island, everyone knows everyone, and if you’re not from here, you might never fit in. Everywhere the brothers go, they see Gonsalves’s truck. He’s a small man with a scraggly beard, and runs a business building fences on properties up and down the coast. Rumor has it the business isn’t doing so well. Rumor also has it he funded that business with the reward money he took for sending the Schweitzer brothers to jail.
Sometimes, at traffic lights or in parking lots, Gonsalves sees them too. On these occasions, he smiles a little. Sometimes he even waves. The brothers can’t believe it. He’s waving? They turn and head in the other direction, fast. If they didn’t leave, they have no idea what they might say to the man they believe ruined their lives.
Albert Ian Schweitzer is 52 now—short and wide and muscular, with Popeye forearms, a deep tan, and a close-cropped, graying buzz cut. He walks with the rugged, unfluid strides of a guy who spends most of his time at the gym, which is an accurate if incomplete way of describing how he’s spent the past 25 years of his life. Until January, he was lifting weights during every available hour in a federal prison yard in Arizona. Now he is back home, on the porch of his brother’s house, his nieces milling around him.
In idle moments, Ian, who goes by his middle name, seems to stare at his surroundings, as if trying to focus. “Three months ago I was sitting in a prison cell, you know?” he said when I visited in April. “I can’t even wrap my head around it.” He and his brother, Shawn—also muscle-bound but taller and four years younger—are dealing with the damage of the past several decades. Ian is trying to figure out how to be free after so much time. Shawn, after serving more than a year, kept on living in the area, enduring decades of stares, his employment prospects grim, the stigma surrounding him seeping out and tainting his wife and children.
Everyone had been convinced that the brothers were the culprits in one of the most notorious criminal cases in the modern history of Hawaii: the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman named Dana Ireland on Christmas Eve, 1991. At the time, Ian was 20 and Shawn was 16. Neither had a record, and their parents were law-abiding citizens. For three years, no one came to them to talk about this case. But in 1994, the police, acting on a tip, began investigating them both, latching on to a theory that implicated them even when the physical evidence—the blood, the semen, the tire tracks—all pointed elsewhere.
Wrongful convictions can result from any number of cascading errors, blatant oversights, and outright slipups—some conscious and deliberate, some structural and circumstantial. Over 32 years, the investigation and prosecutions of the Schweitzers seem to have incorporated every possible one of them. There was intense media attention putting pressure on police to make an arrest—the “dead white girl” phenomenon. There was cultural bias against Native Hawaiians like the Schweitzers—the legacy, well known to Hawaiians, of lynchings of native men for alleged attacks on white women. There was investigative tunnel vision—going after the Schweitzer brothers even after the facts failed to support that case. There was blind faith in jailhouse informants—a slew of them, all hoping for special favors from prosecutors in return for their testimony. There was junk science—about teeth marks, and tire treads. There even may have been prosecutorial misconduct—a state lawyer misleading a judge about the outcome of one of the brothers’ polygraph tests.
Now that Ian has been exonerated, he needs to reacclimate to life in the world. He had to get a driver’s license and learn how to use a smartphone. He needs to get comfortable around people again. These towns were small enough already. For decades the Schweitzers were the area’s greatest villains; now they But he knows there are others out there too—people who benefited from accusing him of a crime they knew he hadn’t committed. Chief among them is John Gonsalves.
