Be acquitted, go to jail anyway. Was that right?

The woman’s body lay in the Nacogdoches woods, partially unclothed and stabbed repeatedly.

The 7-year-old boy lay crying in the back seat of a nearby Buick, blood leaking from 20 stab wounds.

Nothing connected the white woman and black child beyond blood splatters running from the car to the woods. But nine days later, police made an arrest that linked both brutal attacks to a local man: Jimmy Lee Page, a convicted murderer out on parole.

It was August 1987, and prosecutors vowed to see Page put to death. When pretrial publicity forced the trial’s move from East Texas to Austin, Page’s lawyer was delighted. Austin, he thought, would give a fair shake to a black man accused of killing a white woman and nearly killing a child.

Sure enough, jurors were swayed by the lack of evidence against Page and found him not guilty. Afterward, several even shook the defendant’s hand.

But while everybody else filed out of the courtroom, Page did not go free — not that day nor any other. Almost 20 years later, he remains Prisoner 258222, still doing time despite the not guilty verdict.

That may be inconsistent with the textbook version of justice, dispensed by a jury of peers and validated with the bang of a judge’s gavel. But as the State v. Jimmy Lee Page demonstrates, that wasn’t the kind of justice he got.

Now 52, Page is in prison today because state officials revoked his parole — trumping the jury’s verdict with their own finding of guilt. It’s a common practice. Last year, 91 Texas parolees were returned to prison after being charged with a new crime, even though the charges against them were later dropped or they were acquitted in court.

Bound by looser rules than a court of law, parole officials reached their verdict on Page after hearing testimony from only one witness, a police detective who declares Page is “guilty as homemade sin.” In the years since, he was denied parole a dozen times, most recently in early 2006.

Jurors in the Austin trial, unaware of Page’s fate, were shocked that parole officials could nullify their verdict. Page’s lawyer says he believes they abused their authority.

A defense attorney for 36 years, John Heath Sr. admits most of his clients have been guilty. Page, he says, was not.

“I think a horrible injustice was done there,” Heath said. “That’s the one case that still bothers me.”

Police say the parole system worked the way it’s supposed to, protecting the public from a dangerous felon.

“Jimmy Lee Page is a serial murderer,” said Cliff Lightfoot, a retired Nacogdoches police detective.

“The first murder he committed (in 1975) was a friend of his. He’s prone to overkill, and he shot that man many, many times with a single-shot rifle. It pretty much proves intent if you have to reload, shoot, eject, reload and shoot again.”

Page pleaded guilty to the 1975 killing and received a life sentence. He served 11 years in prison and was paroled eight months before the Nacogdoches stabbings.

“If he’s ever let out, he will kill again. It’s in him,” Lightfoot said.

‘Don’t let me die’

“Please don’t let me die,” Joe Howard Jr. whispered to paramedics.

Stab wounds circled the skinny child’s neck and back, and several inches of intestine bulged from a gash across his belly button. As the ambulance raced away, police turned to the bizarre crime scene at St. Matthew’s Baptist Church in a rural, wooded corner of Nacogdoches.

Blood was smeared on a door of the small wooden church. The Buick Regal in which Joe was found sat about 10 feet away, the back seat smeared with the boy’s blood, the front seat empty save for a purse with its wallet missing.

Police fanned out into the nearby woods and found the body of the Buick’s owner, Shirley Marshall, a 37-year-old house cleaner, wife and mother of a teenage son.

Investigators said Marshall had driven to St. Matthew’s Church to discuss a cleaning job — with whom isn’t known — and arrived in the parking lot about 8:30 a.m. on Aug. 13, 1987.

There were no witnesses to what happened next.

A short time later, Joe Howard was taking a shortcut to his grandmother’s house when he stumbled across a man emerging from the woods behind the church. He offered to show Joe some puppies and led the child down a zigzag trail to Marshall’s body, naked from the waist down.

“He said, ‘There’s your puppies,’ ” Joe would testify later. “But I didn’t have time to see her because he throwed me down. He throwed me down and started stabbing me. I played like I was dead so he would quit stabbing me.”

The man ran. Joe waited, then stumbled back down the path. The church door was locked, so he crawled into the only shelter he could find — the back seat of Marshall’s Buick.

He closed the door behind him.

‘That’s the man’

Lightfoot was the first officer to interview Joe — the two developed a bond that lasted long beyond the investigation — and he was back in the child’s hospital room nine days later with a police book of mug shots.

When Joe didn’t see his attacker among the 354 photos, Lightfoot showed him 14 Polaroid snapshots of men who lived near the church.

Lightfoot flipped the photos over six at a time, watching the boy.

“Suddenly, he pushed himself back into the bed, got real wild-eyed and urinated all over himself,” Lightfoot said. “I asked, is this the man? He pointed to Jimmy Lee Page, and he said, ‘That’s him.’ “

Page was arrested a short time later at his mother’s house. He had been staying there, in a predominantly black neighborhood of modest homes near St. Matthew’s, since his release from prison.

Three days later, Page was one of seven men put into a lineup for Howard to view.

“As soon as they all walked into the room, he started getting all excited and pointed to Jimmy Lee Page and said, ‘That’s the man who stabbed me,’ ” Lightfoot said. “So we were in good shape.”

At least eight weeks later — the exact date is unknown — something happened that nobody who then served in the district attorney’s office can explain. A second lineup was held with six men, none of whom were Page. The child was asked if he saw his attacker. Yes, he said, pointing to Suspect Four.

Police were bewildered and angry. A shaky witness is a defense lawyer’s dream, and the second lineup was like being hit by friendly fire.

Tempers flared, and one cop almost got into a fistfight with then-District Attorney Herb Hancock.

Experts who specialize in memory and eyewitness testimony say the added lineup revealed the fallibility of Joe’s memory. But to Lightfoot, the lineup was a crucial mistake that undercut the entire case against Page.

“In my opinion, that’s exactly why (the trial) went the way it did,” he said. “We had a positive, positive ID on him, and that’s really what we based our case on.”

‘I don’t blame the kid’

Heading into trial in Austin in July 1988, prosecutors still had no physical evidence tying Page to the crimes.

They had an 11-year-old girl, who lived between Page’s house and the crime scene, who testified that Page ran by her house twice on the morning of the murder. They had a theory of the killer’s path, established by the discovery of Marshall’s torn pants, along a route that led to the Page house.

But no incriminating evidence was found at the murder scene, Marshall’s car or Page’s house.

Tests indicated Marshall was not raped, and there was no forensic evidence to help identify her attacker.

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