By Mrs. Eileen Hunter — about the author. Posted August 11, 2026.
Provenance: sworn affidavit of Glen Dale Nelson, executed July 26, 2001 while incarcerated at the Ouachita Parish Correctional Center, filed as Exhibit J-4 to the December 30, 2022 Application for Post-Conviction Relief. The signed original is in the court record (a scan is held in the case file). This page presents the affidavit’s operative passages as quoted in the filed applications; where the source scan is difficult to read, we quote rather than guess — a complete character-for-character transcription will replace this page if a cleaner copy is obtained, per our corrections policy.
What Nelson swore — five months before any informant testified
In this affidavit — sworn July 26, 2001, six days after Vaccara Comanche’s statement and weeks before Clarence Kennedy’s — Glen Dale Nelson stated that in February 2001 he had contacted the Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office with information implicating Tony Hunter in a different homicide — the Roderick Hall killing — and that the information was false:
He swore he “only told Sergeant David Harris and the other Detective what they had wanted to hear, ‘So I could go home.’”
He swore he had assembled the account “through friends and neighborhood gossip” and from “what was said in the News Media… to implicate Tony Hunter and… free myself from incarceration.”
He swore he had “never seen Tony Hunter with a gun.”
And he apologized — to Tony Hunter and to his family.
(Affidavit of Glen Dale Nelson, July 26, 2001, Exhibit J-4 to the Application for Post-Conviction Relief filed December 30, 2022.)
Why this document matters
This affidavit is the earliest sworn recantation in the case — and it describes, in Nelson’s own words and in real time, the exact mechanism the defense says produced the trial testimony: an incarcerated man assembling an accusation against Tony Hunter from gossip and news coverage, in the hope of going home. It predates every informant’s trial testimony by more than two years. Mr. Hunter was arrested in the Roderick Hall matter but never indicted. Eleven years later Nelson swore a second affidavit about the Tanglewood “confession” itself, and in 2026 he said it again on a recorded line.
The other half: Nelson’s reliability is contested from every direction — that is precisely why his sworn statements are presented with their history rather than adopted as fact (see the Nelson file). No court has held an evidentiary hearing on this affidavit. Back to all case documents.