An 8-year-old girl had been raped and murdered. Her brother had glimpsed the killer. Someone, the detectives explained, was going to pay.

But something didn't make sense to Frank Lee Smith, the prime suspect. He told his inquisitors: ``I thought you said it was dark in the house.''

Somehow, attorneys contend, that innocuous comment mutated into a confession to the 1985 murder of Shandra Whitehead. Smith went to Death Row, where he died of cancer in January 2000. Eleven months later, DNA testing proved him innocent.

That scenario is laid out in a civil rights lawsuit against the two Broward Sheriff's detectives whose casework put Smith in prison. Attorneys contend investigators concocted a case against Smith and fabricated evidence to keep him behind bars, knowing all along a different man was probably to blame. The suit seeks unspecified damages.

Smith ''died of a painful cancer in a lonely prison bed away from his family after spending 15 years wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of Shandra Whitehead, a crime he did not commit,'' the lawsuit filed Sept. 13 in Broward Circuit Court states. Smith ``was, for all practical purposes, robbed of his life by these Defendants.''

EIGHT MURDERS

DNA testing pointed to a different killer: Eddie Lee Mosley, a man now linked by genetic testing to eight murders in and around Northwest Fort Lauderdale.

Detectives knew about Mosley, a distant relative of Whitehead, but did nothing, the lawsuit states. Mosley, who is in a state facility for mentally retarded defendants, was a ''Teflon'' suspect who repeatedly dodged prison time because of mental incompetence.

Sheriff's officials have cited several factors that contributed to the wrongful conviction of Smith:

• The victim's mother glimpsed a man fleeing the crime scene and never swayed from her conviction it was Frank Lee Smith;

• Detectives considered Mosley as a suspect, but Shandra's mother dissuaded them. She said she would have recognized Mosley.

The civil suit names BSO detectives Richard Scheff and Phil Amabile, Sheriff Ken Jenne and former Sheriff Nick Navarro, who presided over the Whitehead investigation. Both Scheff and Amabile are now senior staffers under Jenne, while Navarro runs a private security business in Broward.

The 61-page complaint is strikingly similar to another lawsuit filed against Jenne and BSO last month by Jerry Frank Townsend, a man exonerated by DNA after 22 years in prison for murders he did not commit.

''The one thing I want to make clear is, this happened a long time before Ken Jenne was sheriff of Broward County,'' said Tom Panza, an attorney for BSO, referring to both complaints.

The Frank Lee Smith suit is filed in the name of Virginia Smith, Frank's sister and a Broward resident.

At Smith's trial, Scheff testified that the defendant had uttered a remark only a killer would know during questioning.

DETECTIVE'S RUSE

Scheff said he employed a ruse, telling the suspect the dead girl's brother had seen the killer. He hadn't. According to Scheff, Smith replied: ``No way that kid could've seen me, it was too dark.''

Smith attorneys contend Scheff fabricated that statement, which appeared in his handwritten notes.

The posthumous DNA exoneration of Smith prompted Gov. Jeb Bush to order an independent investigation of the case. An independent prosecutor cleared Scheff and Amabile of criminal wrongdoing.

''I think this case sort of exemplifies some of the very serious problems with the application of the death penalty in the United States,'' said William Matthewman, an attorney for the Smith family.

Years after the conviction, two crucial witnesses testified that detectives had cajoled them into identifying Smith from a photo lineup. In a 1989 affidavit, witness Chiquita Lowe stated she was certain it was Mosley, not Smith, she saw near the crime scene.

That statement might have derailed Smith's conviction. But Scheff countered by testifying Lowe had passed over Mosley in a photo lineup years earlier. Attorneys for Smith said Scheff was lying. The detective hadn't mentioned any such photo lineup in his notes or at trial.

The independent prosecutor concluded there was no proof Scheff intentionally lied.