CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Cedric Dean had just left Sunday services in the chapel of a Louisiana prison when a killer offered him a deal.
Help me tell my story, fellow inmate Clay Waller said in the spring of 2013, and I’ll pay you $10,000.
The plot for Waller’s narrative would involve the murder of his estranged wife, Jacque — a killing that sent him to prison and still tormented the Mississippi River town where it had occurred.
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50 pages a day
From the start, Waller had insisted his goal with the tell-all was “setting things right.” While he couldn’t bring back Jacque, he told Dean he would use any proceeds from the sales to establish a trust fund for the triplets. Dean, Waller knew, had a passion for kids.
“He was a great manipulator,” Dean now says. “He was telling me what I wanted to hear.”
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They also became aware of Cedric Dean.
That October, Ferrell and an FBI agent traveled to a prison in northern Ohio to meet Dean face to face. The Missouri prosecutor carried a copy of the manuscript. He says he remained skeptical Dean had truly written it.
“I was a little bit pessimistic about it,” Ferrell explained last month. “He hadn’t finished high school. He’d gotten a GED in prison.”
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n late November, federal authorities filed a document that officially thanked and rewarded Dean for his help in closing the Waller case. When U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn of Asheville added his signature, the last years of Dean’s sentence from his long-ago drug conviction disappeared.
A few days after Thanksgiving — 22 years and 11 months since he left Charlotte — the 45-year-old Dean came home.
