Savannah — On a recent fall day, Sylvester Nathaniel Coles appeared in Chatham County State Court, twitching in his seat as he waited to face a litany of criminal charges.

A wiry man who looks younger than his 42 years, Coles wore a blue and gray workshirt with "Redd" stitched on the pocket. On the streets of Savannah, Coles is known by that name, apparently a reference to his ruddy brown complexion.

Family (ENLARGE)

Savannah police officer Mark Allen MacPhail was killed in the parking lot of a Burger King in 1989. He is shown in this photo with daughter Madison MacPhail, 1, son Mark Allen MacPhail Jr., 3 weeks, and wife Joan MacPhail.

Stephen Morton/Special (ENLARGE)

Sylvester 'Redd' Coles waits in a Chatham County courtroom Oct. 16, 2007, for for traffic violations.

Curtis Compton/AJC (ENLARGE)

Troy Davis, convicted of the 1989 murder, poses with his mother, Virginia Davis (left), and sister Martina Correia in a picture taken on death row.

• Second part: High court faces classic murder mystery THE MURDER, AND THE AFTERMATH • Aug. 19, 1989, 1:18 a.m.: Police officer Mark Allen MacPhail is shot to death in a Burger King parking lot in Savannah. Three men leave the scene: Troy Anthony Davis, Daryl Collins and Sylvester "Redd" Coles. • 1:21 a.m.: Police begin the investigation, looking at the crime scene and interviewing witnesses. • 7:55 p.m.: Coles tells police he saw Davis with a .38-caliber gun, the type used to kill MacPhail. • Between 7 and 8 p.m. Davis leaves for Atlanta, where he says he plans to check out a job possibility the next day; shortly after, police issue a criminal warrant for his arrest. • Aug. 20: Davis' photo appears in reports announcing a manhunt for a suspected "cop killer." • Aug. 22: MacPhail is buried. • Aug. 23: Davis surrenders. • Aug. 28, 1991: Davis is convicted of murdering MacPhail. • Aug. 30: Davis sentenced to die. • July 5, 2007: Davis' execution is set for 7 p.m. on July 17. • July 16: State Board of Pardons and Paroles stays the execution. • Aug. 3: Georgia Supreme Court agrees to hear appeal for new trial. • Tuesday: Georgia Supreme Court scheduled to hear arguments starting at 10 a.m.

In his neighborhood haunts, people speak of Redd in mythical terms. In affidavits, some have called him "a crazy thug" who threatened to shoot people. Others have sworn that they live in fear of him.

First of two parts

In the courthouse, Coles must have found the surroundings familiar. It was here, 18 years ago, that he helped send another man to death row.

In the early morning hours of Aug. 19, 1989, Coles and two other young men fled the scene of a policeman's murder just a short walk from this courthouse. Hours later, Coles volunteered a suspect to the police: Troy Anthony Davis.

Davis, who has always maintained his innocence, was convicted and sentenced to die for the murder of Officer Mark Allen MacPhail.

Last July, just 23 hours before he was scheduled to die by lethal injection, lawyers persuaded the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to suspend the execution. Now they have asked the state Supreme Court to grant him a new trial.

On Tuesday, they will tell the high court justices that police got the wrong man. The right man, they will say, is Coles.

Their motion to the justices contains that assertion: "In the simplest of terms, this is a case of mistaken identity. Since Mr. Davis' trial, substantial evidence has surfaced that shows not only that Troy Davis is innocent, but that Sylvester

'Red' [sic] Coles murdered Officer MacPhail."

Seven of nine witnesses who originally testified that Davis was the killer have recanted. Others have stepped forward to say Coles is the murderer. The Supreme Court justices will decide whether their testimony will ever be heard in a court of law.

In the courthouse last month, as Coles waited to face charges that included speeding and fleeing to elude an officer, he, too, refused to talk about that night in 1989. Asked what he thought about others implicating him in MacPhail's murder, he said, "I ain't saying nothing about it."

The most definitive account of what happened that night is contained in the transcripts of Davis' trial, in police reports and in witness affidavits. Those documents provide a glimpse of the elusive Coles and how instrumental his statements were in the case against Davis.

Coles' story remains central to two families still seeking justice: The loved ones of MacPhail, whose life was snuffed out in a Burger King parking lot, and Davis, whose life soon may end on Georgia's lethal injection gurney.

——-

In the summer of 1989, Troy Davis was almost 21 and living at his mother's house in Cloverdale, a modest subdivision of tidy lots where the residents, mostly black, all knew each other.

His name had appeared five times on charge sheets in the Chatham County court system. The most serious charge: carrying a concealed weapon. He paid a $252 fine.

One police report said Davis' alias was R.A.H. — "rough as hell" — a reference to his street acumen. His family says Rah was short for Raheem, his acquired Muslim name, which means "compassion" or "merciful" in Arabic. That's how his family describes him.

His mother, Virginia Davis, said her son stayed at home to take care of a sister suffering from multiple sclerosis and left $80 on her dresser every payday, even though his minimum wage salary was meager. He wanted a better job, a decent life.

Mark MacPhail already had the stability Davis craved. The former Army Ranger was a Savannah police officer, happily married and the father of two: newborn Mark Jr. and 1-year-old Madison.

MacPhail was only 13 when his own father died of a heart attack, and he was especially close to his mother, Anneliese MacPhail. On dark days after his father's death, he tried to cheer up his "Mumsy." He would put on her clothes or an old hat to make her smile.

His grandmother, who came to stay with the family for a while, told Anneliese: "You thank God for that child."

The month before he died, MacPhail celebrated his 27th birthday at his mother's house in Columbus. It would be the last time the whole family was together.

——-

On Friday evening, Aug. 18, 1989, Davis went to a pool party at a friend's house. People were eating chicken and drinking wine coolers. Davis didn't stay long.

As he was leaving with a friend, Daryl "D.D." Collins, a car drove by, the passengers hanging out of the windows and yelling obscenities. Someone shot into the car and hit a man named Michael Cooper.

Davis and Collins kept going, heading to Charlie Brown's Pool Hall in downtown Savannah. It was there that they ran into Redd Coles. He was outside arguing with a homeless man, Larry Young, over a beer.

"Why don't you leave the man alone?" Davis said, according to his testimony at trial.

"Go to hell," Coles said.

Coles and Young started walking toward the parking lot of a nearby Burger King restaurant at one end of the downtown Greyhound Bus station. It was after midnight, but people were still milling about.

Davis was nosy; he wanted to see how the argument would end. He and Collins followed Coles.

——-

MacPhail had worked his regular police shift that Friday and reported for an off-duty security detail at the bus station. A little after 1 a.m., he heard a commotion in the parking area by the Burger King drive-through window. With his Smith & Wesson still in his holster and a baton in his hand, he ran to see what was happening.

Davis, Coles and Collins were gathered around Young, the homeless man. He had been pistol-whipped and was bleeding from the head.

The three men scattered.

"Hold it!" MacPhail shouted.

A shot was fired. Then two more. MacPhail fell limp to the ground.

He'd been hit in the face. Another bullet pierced his left lung. Blood trickled onto the parking lot.

Within three minutes, police cordoned off the area. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, a colleague frantically performed CPR on MacPhail.

Anneliese MacPhail had fallen asleep by the time her telephone rang. It was her son Bill.

Mark had been shot.

"Is he alive?" she asked frantically.

"No."

——

The police had nothing.

No fingerprints, tire tracks or murder weapon. The bullets extracted from MacPhail and empty shell casings found on the ground — all from a .38-caliber pistol — provided the only physical evidence.

Soon, though, police would tie the shooting of Michael Cooper at the pool party, where Davis and Collins had been earlier that night, to the killing of MacPhail. The weapon in both, they said, was a .38-caliber gun.

A cop was dead and "there was a lot of pressure to get somebody," recalls Louis Tyson, who was on the Savannah police force and knew the Davis family.

Detectives began to interview people in the Burger King drive-through lane, in the parking lot by the bus station, across Oglethorpe Street at the Thunderbird Inn.

Their accounts of what happened varied. But one detail was critical: Witnesses agreed that one of the men gathered around Young wore a white shirt; the other, yellow. And it was the man in white, they said, who first struck Young with a handgun, then shot MacPhail.

At 7:55 p.m. that day, police got a break. Coles, accompanied by his lawyer, walked into the Criminal Investigation Bureau office in Savannah. Coles told police that he saw Davis with a .38-caliber gun at the pool hall and that he had used it to hit Young on the head.

Immediately, police focused their investigation on Davis. They added a color Polaroid of him to a photo lineup. In the next few days, they tracked down Davis' family and friends and searched the homes of his mother and sister.

News of the manhunt appeared on television and in newspaper articles. Davis' trial attorneys would describe it as the "most intensive investigation probably done in the history of this county."

They would also argue that police had fallen for Coles' statements "hook, line and sinker."

——

On Saturday night, Aug. 19, about the time Coles went to see police, Davis made his way to Atlanta.

He would later say he went there to check out a construction job. His sister Martina Correia says her brother showed up at her house in the late afternoon and asked for a ride. She says he looked calm, acted like his usual self. About 7 or 8 p.m., they got into her Nissan Sentra for the trip north.

They went the wrong way and stopped to ask a South Carolina state trooper for directions, not something someone running from the law would do, Correia says.

They joked and talked about future plans. Correia dropped her brother off at a construction site in College Park and drove back to Savannah. She says she still had no idea that she had just ferried a wanted man out of town.

When she got home Sunday, she turned on her television and saw her brother's face. Underneath it was a ticker flashing the manhunt for a cop killer.

She watched, stunned, thinking surely there had been a mistake.

——

Why would an innocent man run away? Not just from the scene, but out of town? Anneliese MacPhail has asked that question for almost two decades. "Am I crazy to think that way?"

Correia says her brother was going about his business, as any innocent person would. He called her Sunday, excited about job prospects in Atlanta.

"Troy," she told him, "the police are looking for you."

Correia says her brother thought she was joking. "He had no idea what I was talking about." Later, he would say he had heard the shots fired at the Burger King, but that he did not know the police officer had been killed.

On the phone, Davis assured his sister he was innocent. And he was confident that when he gave his account of that night to police, they would let him go.

——

On Tuesday, four days after the shooting, a line of cars in MacPhail's funeral procession stretched from Trinity Lutheran Church to Hillcrest Abbey West Cemetery. Police officers came from across the nation to honor one of their fallen. MacPhail's older brothers wore their military uniforms.

As the family arrived at the graveyard, they noticed two police cars bolt from the cemetery. Across town, police had gotten word that Troy Davis wanted to surrender. Davis' sister had persuaded him to turn himself in — to protect his own life. "I didn't want him to get shot."

The next day, with Mark MacPhail's body committed to the ground, Troy Davis was lying face down on the floor in a minister's home, awaiting arrest.

Two years would pass before Davis would be convicted of MacPhail's murder, 18 before he would face execution. During his capital murder trial in Chatham County, he would face the witnesses who identified him as MacPhail's killer. Among them was the man who was the first to point the finger: Redd Coles.

Troy Anthony Davis thought his life was about to end.

[Second story in a two-part series.]

(ENLARGE)

Who killed Mark Allen MacPhail?

(ENLARGE)

The Georgia Supreme Court will say whether Troy Davis gets a new trial or waits for execution.

Stephen Morton/Special (ENLARGE)

Sylvester Coles pointed police to Davis. But witnesses have said he's really the murderer.

RELATED: • First story in series

It was July 16, and he was isolated in a death watch cell at the state prison in Jackson. A clemency board in Atlanta was deciding whether to spare his life.

Often, a clemency hearing is little more than a formality, but this session had attracted the national spotlight.

After 16 years on death row, Davis was a cause célèbre. He had amassed support from the human rights group Amnesty International, Hollywood stars and civil rights activists. Even the pope had sent a letter asking the state to stay the execution.

The attention stemmed from an extraordinary reversal of testimony: Seven of nine key witnesses who said at trial that Davis killed a Savannah policeman in 1989 had recanted.

Tuesday, the Georgia Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about whether the recanted testimony should be heard in a court of law.

Davis' lawyers will tell the justices that the new testimony not only exonerates Davis in the murder of Officer Mark Allen MacPhail, but also implicates another man: Sylvester Nathaniel Coles.

Otherwise known by his nickname "Redd," Coles still hangs out in Davis' old Savannah haunts. On those streets, according to affidavits, he is considered a thug.

"Since Mr. Davis' trial, substantial evidence has surfaced that shows not only that Troy Davis is innocent, but that Sylvester "Red [sic]" Coles murdered Officer MacPhail," Davis' lawyers wrote in a document filed with the Board of Pardons and Paroles. It is an assertion they repeat in their motion before the state Supreme Court.

Damning testimony

On Aug. 19, 1991, exactly two years after MacPhail's murder in a downtown Burger King parking lot, Davis went on trial at the Chatham County courthouse.

The prosecution put on the stand nine witnesses whose testimony, they said, proved beyond a doubt that Davis was the killer. Fairly consistently, witnesses said a man wearing a white T-shirt pistol-whipped a homeless man, Larry Young, and then shot MacPhail before fleeing the scene.

Perhaps most damning was the testimony of Young's girlfriend, Harriet Murray. She said a man wearing a white T-shirt pointed his gun at MacPhail and shot him before the police officer could pull his gun out of his holster. MacPhail was down on the ground when the man shot him two or three more times, Murray testified.

She pointed in court to Davis, identifying him as the person wearing the white shirt that night. "He had a little smile on his face, a little smirky-like smile," she said.

Dorothy Ferrell, who was across the street from the Burger King, identified Davis in court and said: "I'm real sure, positive sure, that that is him, and you know, it's not a mistaken identity."

Antoine Williams, who had just arrived to work the graveyard shift at the restaurant, also identified Davis as the shooter. Davis' neighbor Jeffrey Sapp testified that Davis confessed to the killing just hours after MacPhail died.

When Coles took the stand, he admitted arguing with Young but said Davis hit the homeless man. He said he had already turned around to run from the parking lot when MacPhail was shot.

Questioned about why he sought out lawyer John Calhoun the day of the murder, Coles told the jury he had worked for Calhoun "off and on."

The attorney had accompanied Coles to the police station, where he told officers that he saw Davis with a .38-caliber gun just before the murder.

"Why didn't you just go straight to the police?" asked defense attorney Robert Falligant.

"I don't know," Coles said. "That's what I chose to do."

What Coles had not told police was that he, too, owned a .38-caliber gun. He later would admit it and say he had stashed the gun in some bushes before going to the Burger King. Coles had been convicted of carrying a concealed weapon and could not legally carry a gun.

During the trial — and since — Davis' various attorneys have repeatedly asked why Coles and another man at the scene, Daryl "D.D." Collins, weren't ever considered suspects by police. Why wasn't Coles' house searched after they learned he was carrying a gun that night — the same type as the murder weapon.

Police never recovered a murder weapon — or Coles' gun or the one he said Davis owned. An expert on ballistics, however, testified that shell casings found near MacPhail's body matched those found in the subdivision where another man, Michael Cooper, had been shot earlier that night at a pool party. Davis was linked to both locations.

Savannah police stand by their investigation.

Retired police Maj. Dwane Everette Ragan, who was a lieutenant at the time of the shooting, said in an interview last week that Coles and Collins were "persons of interest." But he said neither fit witness descriptions of the shooter. "What [Coles] did was put names and descriptions on the people in the parking lot," Ragan said. "We're confident we got the right person."

Stories changed

Davis was convicted and sentenced to die. But as he aged on Death Row, witnesses changed their stories:

Murray said in a statement signed in 2002 that it was the man following Young who hit him and shot MacPhail.

Murray said: "The man following Larry started digging in his pants for a gun and slapped Larry in the side of the face with it ... I saw the man who was arguing with Larry ... and who slapped Larry shoot the police officer." Coles had testified that he was the person following and arguing with Young.

In 2000, Ferrell signed an affidavit saying that she was on parole in 1989 and feared she would be locked up again if she didn't tell police what they wanted to hear. "I don't know which of the guys did the shooting because I didn't see that part," she said in her statement.

In his affidavit, Williams said: "I was totally unsure whether [Davis] was the person who shot the officer." And Sapp said: "I told them Troy confessed to me. None of it was true."

Three others — Anthony Hargrove, Shirley Riley and Darold Taylor — stepped forward after the trial and said Coles confessed to killing MacPhail. Hargrove said Coles admitted letting a man named Troy take the fall.

Prayers for justice

Troy Davis' clemency hearing on July 16 lasted more than 10 hours.

Though the MacPhails saw the hearing as routine, the Davises hoped it would be anything but that. Members of both families testified. Around 7 p.m., the board wrapped up its questioning. It took just an hour to make a decision.

At 8 p.m., 23 hours before Davis was scheduled to die, his execution was stayed.

He had at least another 90 days.

The Davises were overjoyed. The MacPhails, who had followed every twist and turn in the case for 18 long years, felt confused, crushed: When would their ordeal end?

"You hear time heals all wounds," said MacPhail's sister Kathy McQuary. "Not exactly true. It kind of dampens it, but when something like this comes back up, it's like reliving it all over again."

Then, on Aug. 3, the Georgia Supreme Court stepped into the fray, announcing it would hear arguments in Davis' extraordinary motion for a new trial. That hearing is scheduled for Tuesday morning.

State attorneys had successfully used a federal law that seeks to streamline the appeals process in capital murder cases to block the courts from hearing the new evidence.

But Davis' lawyers will argue that a new jury needs to relive that night and hear the witness recantations. But most of all, they will argue, there is doubt as to who killed MacPhail.

Prosecutors suggest that the Davis case has more to do with opposition to capital punishment than with the question of Davis' innocence. They say that Davis' defense lawyers already pointed the finger at Coles during Davis' trial. The witnesses, they will say, either lied then or are lying now. Why should their statements now be more believable than what they said under oath in a courtroom?

The families of both MacPhail and Davis say they will pray for justice Tuesday.

But their prayers could not be more different: One asks for Davis' death sentence to be imposed; the other that it be overturned. The first would close the murder case of Mark Allen MacPhail forever; the other would open it up all over again.

Coles stills roams

Sylvester Coles hasn't spoken publicly about the Davis case since his testimony at the 1989 trial. But Coles' name has been spoken in connection with MacPhail's murder many times now.

Some of the witnesses who implicate him say they live in fear in his shadow. Tonya Johnson kept quiet at the time of the police investigation but says in an affidavit that she saw Coles hide a gun in an empty apartment after the shooting that night.

"I have been scared to death of him," she says in the affidavit. "In fact, he threatened me after this happened. ... But I have decided that I must tell the truth."

When Coles was shot in the chest a few years ago in a street scuffle, Davis' sister worried.

"I said, 'Please God, don't let him die,' " she said. "That would be the end of the truth."

Coles survived and continues to live in Savannah, in the same neighborhoods he roamed 20 years ago. Last month, he appeared in a Chatham County courtroom to face charges that included reckless driving, fleeing to elude an officer, violating the open container law and speeding.

When his name was called, he and his attorney walked up to face the judge and entered his plea: guilty.

The judge ordered Redd Coles to spend 10 days in jail.

— Staff writer Megan Matteucci contributed to this article.