CONCORD, N.C. -- His trial brought protests, his conviction a melee inside the courthouse and fire-bombings in a small North Carolina mill town.

The victim was white, the 54-year-old widow of a Canon Mills executive. The suspect was a 20-year-old black man, the son of a masonry contractor.

An all-white jury convicted Ronnie Wallace Long in 1976 to a lifetime in prison for rape based almost exclusively on the eyewitness identification of the victim. Now Long has spent 30 years in prison for rape he steadfastly denies.

He lives with one hope: to get out of prison while his parents are still alive. As his father James “Ike” Long talks about Ronnie, a tear dribbles down his cheek, “I pray every night - all through the day - that this will come to an end, that Ronnie will come home while me and his mother are living.”

Innocence Project lawyers have taken up his case, and WCNC found this racially charged conviction so compelling, we spent the last three months tracking down most of the major players, reviewing the trial transcript and police records, and literally reopening the dusty evidence and finding Ronnie Long’s conviction in question.

When asked point blank if he raped the victim, Ronnie Long replies, “No. No. I don’t even know the woman.” Never seen her? “'Til the day I saw her in court.”

But when Ronnie Long saw the all-white jury, he said, “I knew that I was going to the penitentiary. I just knew it.”

The case boiled down to who the jury believed. The prosecution witnesses were all white. The defense witnesses all black. The all-white jury’s verdict meant two life sentences: one for rape, one for burglary.

Now Long, interviewed at the Albermarle prison near Badin, asks “What kind of justice could I receive - you understand what I'm saying? Under these type circumstances?”

On Friday, October 1, 1976, at 8 p.m. Concord police called in officers from surrounding towns as they braced for the verdict. A dozen officers waited outside the courtroom with billy clubs in hand. More officers lined the courtroom, standing between Long’s supporters and the jury. When the verdict was announced, news accounts said Long’s supporters begin shouting protests. Fights broke out in the court. Police maced Long’s supporters and one of his attorneys, Jim Fuller. Supporters spilled out into the hallway outside the courtroom and began chanting, fists in the air, “Free Ronnie Long! Free Ronnie Long!” Police clubbed them, chasing them out of a public courthouse.

Protestors threw rocks, breaking courthouse windows. Police had an armed personnel carrier on standby in the small mill town. They wore riot gear. That weekend someone threw a fire bomb into a white family’s home. And hundreds marched peacefully in protest carrying a banner that read “Free Ronnie Long. Drop all charges.”

It all started on Union Street among the stately historic homes of Concord. On Sunday, April 25, 1976 around 9:40 p.m., the widow was preparing a dinner of hamburger and broccoli when a stranger raped her in her own home.

Police believe her attacker climbed a column, entering a second floor window. He jumped on her downstairs, knocking a plate of hamburger from her hand. She testified he demanded money. She said he marched her to her purse on the bed and she was missing the $15 she thought was inside. She said that made him violently angry and that’s when he ripped off her bathrobe and pantyhose and raped her at knifepoint.

She later testified the rapist ordered her not to look at his face and slammed her head against the floor. But she said she stole looks.

“She was afraid she wasn't going to live through it and if she did live through it she wanted to ID him,” said former assistant prosecutor Ron Bowers.

The victim in this case is now 84-years-old and in assisted living. She’s declined offers to speak about the case and WCNC has chosen not to identify her.

Police quickly suspected Ronnie. The reason: nine months earlier, on July 31, 1975, a 64-year-old woman in southeast Washington D.C. found Ronnie Long’s Social Security card under the bed where she'd been raped.

Ronnie insists, “I've never sexually assaulted anyone.”

He was living with his uncle just a few blocks away from the scene of the rape. He said he lost the Social Security card while looking for work. He later drove a truck for a dry cleaner and said he no longer needed the card.

The District of Columbia victim described her attacker as clean-shaven. Ronnie Long usually wore a beard. And by June of 1976 when the victim and her neighbor, who also saw the attacker running away, looked at a photo lineup with Ronnie Long’s mug shot in it and they couldn't identify him. So the assistant US Attorney handling the case closed it.

Retired Concord Police Lieutenant George “Sonny” Vogler cites the District of Columbia case as the reason police looked at Ronnie Long as a suspect in the Concord rape.

Vogler said “Of course, naturally we put two and two together and Ronnie became a suspect.”

But Long said, “I've never even been questioned about this (the District of Columbia rape).”

On April 30, 1976, five days after the rape of the Concord widow, Concord police arrested Ronnie on a trespassing charge. He’d been banned from a park behind his home for fighting over a basketball game and police found Ronnie back in the park.

Ronnie came to court on the trespassing charge with his father, Ike Long, at his side on May 10, 1976. That was the last day Ronnie Long was a free man.

Because without Ronnie knowing about it, in a highly unusual police “lineup," police had invited the victim to come to court disguised in a wig and glasses to look around and see if she could recognize her attacker. As he walked forward to answer the trespassing charge, the victim signaled with her hand to Detective Vogler and Detective David J. Taylor, who were sitting in the jury box where they could see her and the defendants.

Studies show that, even with the best of intentions, police can steer victims toward suspects in a lineup - without even knowing it.

Vogler said, “The only thing I can tell you I did not point at him. That's all I can say. I can understand how people would think that but we certainly didn't nod or anything like that.”

But there were discrepancies in the victim’s identification of skin tone and facial hair.

On the witness stand, she described Ronnie as "light skinned," even "yellow" and "not a real black man."

Former Concord detective Van Isenhour remembers that part of the victim’s testimony distinctly. “Ronnie Long was a dark skinned negro male,” Isenhour says today. “She did a terrible job of describing the color aspect if that’s important. But in my mind and I think in the mind of the jury, that in no way weakened her identifying him as her assailant.”

There was another discrepancy. None of the police reports detailing the rapist's description have any mention of facial hair. Most pictures of Ronnie at the time, including his mug shot taken less than five days after the rape, clearly show facial hair.

But at trial police and the victim testified she told them from the start that the rapist had a thin moustache and scattered beard. And she swore Ronnie was the rapist, repeating she had "absolutely no doubt … none whatsoever."

Sonny Vogler said he had doubts about some cases in his career but to this day, “I feel confident. I don't feel like I have a doubt on this one really.”

That’s in spite of the fact that Ronnie produced an alibi.

“See I knew Ronnie wasn't guilty because Ronnie was at home with me,” says his mother Elizabeth Long. And she wasn’t the only one. Both Elizabeth Long and Ronnie’s girlfriend, Janice Spears, the mother of his then 2-year-old son Carlos, testified that Ronnie was at home talking to Janice on the phone at the time of the rape.

Prosecutors pressed Janice on the time since clocks changed to daylight-savings time that day. But Janice testified she knew the time not by the clock but because a television show, "The six Million Dollar Man', had just gone off. Television schedules show 'The Six Million Dollar Man' ended at 9 p.m.

Janice and Elizabeth testified that Ronnie and his mother both spoke to the 2-year-old and to Janice and that the conversation lasted from thirty to forty-five minutes. That would put Ronnie at home on Melrose Street more than a mile away from the rape.

Ronnie is frustrated to this day, 30 years later, that there were no phone records to back up his alibi. But a spokeswoman for Concord Telephone said the carrier did not keep records of local phone calls in 1976.

Ronnie’s current attorney, Donna Bennick at the Innocence Project, says alibi defenses can be problematic since they usually rely on family and friends whom juries assume will lie to protect the defendant.

But beyond alibis, Concord police once held a tantalizing bit of physical evidence, evidence which could erase all doubt about Ronnie’s guilty or identify him as a man wrongfully imprisoned for more than 30 years and free him.

The night of the rape a gynecologist at Cabarrus Memorial Hospital collected semen from the victim and signed it over to police.

So what happened to this key piece of evidence?

WCNC and the Charlotte Observer will pursue that mystery Sunday morning at 8 a.m.