A homicide detective reveals something unexpected about the practices of the Houston Police Department. He says he cleared the alternate suspect in the murder of Edna Franklin — but it turns out the suspect’s alibi was a lie.

Transcript

A quick listener note: This podcast contains adult language and descriptions of violence.

Jeff Hattenbach: No, I ain’t gonna talk about all that. I mean, y’all are some reporters. I ain’t doing all that. That’s 22 years ago. I’m still waiting for the dude to die. I thought this phone call might’ve been telling me that he was up for death, for his sentence, I thought.

Liliana Segura: You mean his execution?

Jeff Hattenbach: Yes, yes.

Liliana Segura: That’s Jeff Hattenbach. He was good friends with Eric Benge, one of Edna Franklin’s grandsons. In fact, Hattenbach was the first person Eric called the night that he found his grandmother murdered.

His name is mentioned in an affidavit provided to Charles Raby’s lawyer, Sarah Frazier, by a woman Eric worked with. This co-worker told Sarah that Eric had also called her that night. He was hysterical, she said. She went over to the house.

Here’s what she told Sarah back in 2002: “That night, Eric was saying that some junkie must have been looking for some money to buy drugs with. He seemed to have an idea of who it might be and why. I think he mentioned that the person who killed his grandmother might have been someone to whom he owed some money.”

This woman never responded to our requests for an interview. But we thought that Hattenbach might be able to shed some light on all of this. Turns out, he wasn’t interested.

Jeff Hattenbach: The guy said he did it, so there ain’t no changing it now. He did it that night. Everybody knew he did it.

[Theme music]

Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Texas. Episode 9, “The Other Suspect.”

We talked to Hattenbach while he was driving, so the connection was a bit noisy at times. He told us what he remembered about the night Franklin was murdered.

Jeff Hattenbach: I was the first one he called. He was like my brother. Ms. Franklin was like my grandmother, so I was there every day. At that time, we were kids at the time, and that’s kind of like where we hung out at.

Liliana Segura: Yeah. And did you go over there that night?

Jeff Hattenbach: Yeah, we were there. Everybody was there.

Liliana Segura: It must have been really traumatic. One thing that — did the police ever talk to you?

Jeff Hattenbach: No. There was no reason for them to talk to me. I wasn’t there till after everything had happened. I was at work that night, same as Eric. He was at work as well.

Liliana Segura: I started to ask him about some of the other people who had been hanging around Franklin’s house in the days before the murder, including Edward Bangs — the other guy Franklin’s grandsons named as a potential suspect.

Jeff Hattenbach: All right. I’m done. I see where this is going. I’m done.

Liliana Segura: No, I’m not trying to —

Jeff Hattenbach: Thank you guys! I know, y’all trying to make it seem like it’s somebody else. The guy already admitted he did it. I mean, he’s pulling all the straws he can because, like I said, he’s getting to the end of his time. So you know what? The next phone call I need is to know whenever they’re putting this dude to death. And if y’all ain’t got that information for me, I can’t help y’all. Thank you.

Jordan Smith: So there are a couple notable things about this conversation. The first is this police thing. There was every reason to think that the police would want to talk to Hattenbach. As you heard him say, he was the first person that Eric Benge called after finding his grandmother. But, as with so many other things, there’s no indication in the police report that investigators ever talked to him. There were plenty of people they never bothered to interview. And witnesses they never followed up with, like John Allen Phillips.

He arrived at the house that night with Lee Rose, Edna Franklin’s other grandson. We’ve never been able to reach Phillips. But Mike Giglio, who covered Charles’s case in the Houston Press, did speak to him, back in 2010. What Phillips told Giglio was pretty shocking.

Phillips said that when he and Lee arrived at the house, Eric was in his grandmother’s bedroom, rummaging through her purse in search of $300. This is a big deal because, if true, it undercuts the state’s argument that whoever killed Franklin was trying to steal from her. At Charles’s trial, the prosecutor pointed to her purse, which had been emptied out, as proof of this.

Liliana Segura: Now, both Eric and Lee told Giglio that Phillips was wrong about this. Eric said money was the last thing on his mind that night. But between what Phillips said and the recollections of Eric’s co-worker, there are some unsettling questions about Eric lurking over this case that we’ve never been able to shake.

Just to be clear: It’s not that we think Eric might have been the real killer. He was the first person to find his grandmother. And she did have strands of Eric’s hair clutched in her hand. As you might recall, the state tried to explain this away by saying that Eric lived at the house, so it wouldn’t be surprising for his hair to be on the living room floor and end up in Franklin’s hand after she was attacked.

Regardless, the DNA found in blood caked under Franklin’s fingernails wasn’t Eric’s. Still, there is this nagging feeling that Eric knew more than he might’ve let on.

Jordan Smith: The other thing that we found so strange about our brief conversation with Hattenbach was his reaction when we brought up Edward Bangs. It’s logical that we’d want to know about Bangs.

It’s not that we thought Hattenbach had any particular knowledge about him, but Bangs was also in their friend group and hung around the house on Westford Street. In the weeks leading up to Franklin’s murder, he’d been working there, painting the outside of the house. But again, other than what Lee and Eric told the cops about Bangs, there’s nothing in the police report about him.

Obviously, we wanted to talk to the police investigators directly about this. There were two main detectives on the case: Sgts. Waymon Allen and Wayne Wendel. Allen, who extracted the confession from Charles, died in 2019. But Wendel is still around.

Liliana Segura: We caught up with him in mid-March 2021. He’d recently been released to a rehab facility after spending time in the hospital, sick with Covid.

Jordan Smith: Sgt. Wendel?

Wayne Wendel: Yes.

Liliana Segura: We didn’t have a lot of time before he had to go to some kind of appointment. So we tried to cut to the chase. He brought up Edward Bangs first. He said Bangs was an alternate suspect, but that they’d cleared him.

Jordan Smith: How did you clear Edward Bangs?

Wayne Wendel: He had an alibi for when — the time of death. I think that’s how we cleared him. He had an alibi.

Jordan Smith: Do you remember what it was?

Wayne Wendel: He was somewhere else and witnesses that verified it.

Jordan Smith: Huh. I’m just curious. It’s not in the police report, so would it normally have been in there? Do you have any idea why it wouldn’t be in there?

Wayne Wendel: It normally would be in there.

Jordan Smith: Huh. Yeah, there’s nothing about him in there, other than that the grandson, as you noted, mentioned his name. But the report is silent other than that.

Wayne Wendel: Well, is his written statement in there?

Jordan Smith: No, there’s no statement.

Wayne Wendel: We would have taken a written statement from him.

Jordan Smith: No, there isn’t any.

Wayne Wendel: Well, I would have taken a written statement.

Jordan Smith: Do you remember taking a statement from him?

Wayne Wendel: Yeah, I do.

Jordan Smith: Huh.

Liliana Segura: Although Wendel seemed certain that Bangs had an alibi, there’s nothing in the police report to suggest that investigators ever talked to him or to anyone else about his whereabouts the night Franklin was killed. And Wendel revealed something pretty astonishing in the process.

Liliana Segura: You said you don’t recall precisely what the alibi was for Edward Bangs. Is that correct?

Wayne Wendel: No, I don’t —

Liliana Segura: Or any of the folks who might have provided that alibi?

Wayne Wendel: Well, why don’t you ask him?

Liliana Segura: Oh, we’ve tried.

Wayne Wendel: I know he was eliminated, and it was because he had an alibi. He was somewhere else and could not have killed Mrs. Franklin.

Liliana Segura: Since it seems like not everything is in the police report that you all did, at any point —

Wayne Wendel: Well, some things are left out of there on purpose, because I really don’t want the defense to know everything. This is relayed in orally to the district attorney. So some of it is left out on purpose, intentionally.

Jordan Smith: You heard that right. He’s basically saying the cops would deliberately withhold information they didn’t want the defense to know. This becomes a problem when police and prosecutors fail to disclose evidence that’s favorable to a defendant. That’s called a Brady violation: conduct that runs afoul of a Supreme Court ruling that requires the state to hand over exculpatory evidence to the defense.

But it’s not every day that a state actor just comes out and says they withhold evidence. And here, Wendel was telling us that the cops themselves had a policy of keeping certain information out of the record — before it even reached the DA’s office. This isn’t just screwed up because they’re purposely hiding things from the defense; it also undermines their own work. The whole point of a police report is to document every step of an investigation. So it would be especially weird to eliminate any mention of clearing an alternate suspect.

Jordan Smith: Would the Bangs stuff be among that content?

Wayne Wendel: I’m sorry?

Jordan Smith: The Bangs, sorry, the Edward Bangs stuff. Because it’s not in there.

Wayne Wendel: Frankly, I don’t know. I don’t recall that.

Jordan Smith: We pressed him on this apparently informal policy of withholding information. And it seemed like he was trying to walk it back a bit.

Liliana Segura: You’re saying that you all didn’t necessarily put everything in writing specifically because it was stuff that you didn’t want the defense to have?

Wayne Wendel: No, just not in writing because we — it should be in the written statement. If it’s in the written statement, I may not put it in the body of the report. I would just tell the district attorney, the prosecuting attorney, “Well, why don’t you just read the written statement?” Sometimes you have to hold it in front of their eyes for them to read it because they want the whole case handed to them on, like, a piece of cake. I may have left it out of a report, but it was in the written statement.

Jordan Smith: Yeah, that’s the thing: There’s just no written statement. There’s nothing about Bangs at all.

Wayne Wendel: Well, they might not release it to you.

Liliana Segura: Wendel suggested that maybe there were documents the police department just didn’t give us. That’s possible, but we have no reason to believe that’s the case. In fact, we got a lot from the HPD, including Wendel’s and Allen’s investigator notebooks.

Jordan Smith: Spoiler alert: They didn’t take many notes.

Liliana Segura: We also wanted to know if Wendel had any idea what happened to Edna Franklin’s nightshirt: the one she was wearing when she was killed, which was covered in blood and which disappeared the day before Charles went to trial.

Liliana Segura: There’s sort of this mystery around what happened with that nightshirt, why it hasn’t been found. Obviously, Mr. Raby’s defense attorneys would like to do some testing on there. Do you remember that issue, that problem of the missing nightshirt or what might have happened to it?

Wayne Wendel: No, I don’t. It should have been part of the evidence at trial. If they called for it in court, then it’s in possession of the district attorney’s office. If they didn’t call for it for trial, it should be in the property room. And it may not be in the property room because those things are destroyed once their shelf life or —

My session is about to start. So I got to let you all go.

Jordan Smith: OK.

Liliana Segura: Wendel was wrong about at least one thing, and that’s his idea that Franklin’s nightshirt would have been destroyed after so long. That’s not supposed to happen. In Texas, evidence in death penalty cases is stored for decades — sometimes even after a defendant has been executed.

And while there’s no evidence that Wendel and Allen got a statement from Bangs that cleared him, we do know that Bangs claimed to have an alibi for October 15, 1992. He told reporter Mike Giglio that more than 10 years ago. According to Bangs, he was with his girlfriend, Alicia Overstreet, the night that Franklin was killed.

Jordan Smith: The problem? Alicia Overstreet said that wasn’t true. She told Giglio that she and Bangs hadn’t been together for months when the murder took place, in part because she said Bangs threatened to kill her. “He was psychotic,” she told Giglio.

We knew that Bangs had a long rap sheet: theft, burglary, robbery, criminal trespass, and various drug charges. But the most serious was from 1993, the year before Charles’s trial.

In August of that year, Bangs was arrested for robbing a 63-year-old woman, who told police that he had stolen her purse after threatening to kill her. Bangs pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight years.

We wanted to talk to Bangs. We found him in prison, serving time for drug possession. We wrote him an email, and he sent a letter back in February 2020. In all, we got three letters from him. And generally speaking, he was polite and seemed pretty eager to talk. Actually, he was surprisingly eager.

Let’s face it: If he was the real murderer in this case, why would he be so interested in speaking to reporters about it?

Liliana Segura: Bangs wanted to know what “motive” we had for telling this story. And he didn’t want to answer any questions in writing, which is how he’d communicated with Giglio. He said Giglio had used him as a “scapegoat” in the Houston Press piece.

He told us he was getting ready to be paroled and would be going back to Houston once he got out. He said he would get in touch. Several months went by, and Bangs’s parole date kept getting pushed back because of Covid. And then, quite unexpectedly, on May 1, 2020, we got an email from him. He said he was back in Houston and recovering from a bad case of Covid. He picked it up in prison and then gave it to his brother and nephew after he was released. We asked if we could set up a time to talk when he was feeling better.

Jordan Smith: But then, his tone shifted in a pretty stark way. He wrote that he had a lot to tell us but that he wanted to be paid for the information. “I would gladly speak to you, tell you of several odd things I saw, but I feel as if I should be compensated for my time.” We told him that ethically, we couldn’t do that. That journalists don’t pay for interviews.

He retorted that it would be unethical not to pay him. “I would be truthful in the interview,” he wrote. “So if you want truth, facts, the real on your story, I will help. Because I was there painting for a month and a half beforehand, I witnessed the crazy stuff going on.” After that, we emailed him a couple more times but never heard back.

Liliana Segura: We figured we’d keep trying to get in touch with Bangs. But we also decided we should find Alicia Overstreet, his ex-girlfriend: the one who told Giglio that she was not with Bangs the night Franklin was killed. We sent her several emails but didn’t hear from her. Then, in April 2021, at the end of a long workday, I finally got a response. And it was not what I expected.

[Phone ringing]

Jordan Smith: Yes.

Liliana Segura: Hey, sorry to bother you. Do you have a second?

Jordan Smith: No problem. Yeah, what’s up?

Liliana Segura: You’ll never guess who just emailed me.

Jordan Smith: Who?

Liliana Segura: Alicia Overstreet.

Jordan Smith: No!

Liliana Segura: I read the email from Alicia to Jordan over the phone. “Good afternoon, I did know Charles when we were teenagers. I remained in contact with Edward on and off until he passed away in September last year.”

Jordan Smith: Wait, what? Wait, did he die?

Liliana Segura: We looked online to see what we could find about what had happened. We found a Facebook post written by Bangs’s brother. Bangs had been found unresponsive in his car on September 2, 2020. He had a temperature of 110. He’d apparently had a series of massive strokes.

He was brain dead and on a ventilator at a Houston hospital for a couple weeks. The hospital had been trying to find Bangs’s family. He was apparently homeless and had no ID on him. His brothers had to go to the hospital to take him off life support. He was just 50 years old.

Jordan Smith: We called Alicia. We asked her how she found out that Bangs had died.

Alicia Overstreet: Well, he spent most of his life locked up, on and off. He had been out of jail for maybe like six months. It’s my daughter, he was my daughter’s dad, so she found out and she let me know.

Liliana Segura: Wow, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had a child with him.

Alicia Overstreet: Yeah.

Jordan Smith: She said she knew Bangs and Charles growing up. They all ran in the same circles.

Liliana Segura: I guess, how would you describe them sort of individually?

Alicia Overstreet: Charles, well — both, God, just wild, like delinquent. What’s the word I wanted to use? Yeah, delinquent teenagers just robbing stores. I remember one night, Charles came running over to my house from the gas station like two blocks away, saying they had just robbed them. So yeah, he came over to my house with a bunch of things they had stolen out of the store. I remember once he got into a fight with my brother-in-law and my dad. I don’t remember details, but I remember these things happening.

And then with Edward, he was the same, bipolar. He would have just outbursts, and he was violent with me. And I know that I had told the Giglio person that, yeah, either one of them could have done what Charles is accused of, because I had to get away from Edward because of the abuse and the mental stuff he put me through. I found out I was pregnant, and I was like, “I can’t bring my child up like this.” So I left him.

Jordan Smith: After that, she didn’t see Bangs for years. He was in and out of jail. But when they finally did reconnect, she said he was still the same: violent with her.

Liliana Segura: One of the big questions we’ve had, do you remember, did the police ever speak to you or do you remember them speaking to Edward?

Alicia Overstreet: Nope, neither one of them, I don’t think. Not me, not Edward. Because I had asked Edward did he do it, and he was like, “No.” But this was years later, this was, God, like, past — about four or five years ago when I asked him did he do that, and he said, “No.” But I was thinking, well, of course he’s going to say no, but I don’t know.

Liliana Segura: One of the things that just jumped out at us in the Giglio story was that Edward had claimed to have an alibi, that he said that he was with you.

Alicia Overstreet: Oh yeah, no, no, I was not with him. He was not with me. Yeah, I didn’t even know that that had ever been said because no one ever asked me.

Jordan Smith: What Alicia is saying here means that Bangs had no alibi for the night Franklin was murdered. Because she was his alibi.

Alicia Overstreet: I don’t even know why Edward would have even said I was with him. I was in another relationship with — I would have never been with him, not since I left him.

And Edward would — He would snap, if someone looked at him the wrong way or if they looked at me when we were together. He would get in lots of fights and be beat up and just trouble.

Liliana Segura: Man, did it sort of freak you out I guess to learn from that story that you’d been used as an alibi? I know we already discussed it, but, man, that must have been a little bit chilling.

Alicia Overstreet: Yes, because it was a blatant lie.

Jordan Smith: We were surprised that she’d confronted Bangs and asked him if he’d killed Franklin.

Alicia Overstreet: Because I had told him, I said, “Well, you know” — we talked about a lot of stuff — and I was like, “I feel like you might have killed me or that you’re capable of killing somebody and did you?” I guess it was probably along the lines like that, that I asked.

Liliana Segura: It sounds like you did fear that he might —

Alicia Overstreet: Oh yeah, when I was with him, yeah, that’s why I left him. And then even later, when he was coming around visiting me and we were just friends, and he got mad at me one day here at my house — because I would help him out every once in a while with his laundry or whatever because he was homeless — and he kind of got crazy with me. Well, not kind of, he did: pushed me and shoved me and slammed doors. I had to call the cops. He had me by the neck. He said he was going to kill me.

Jordan Smith: In case you missed that, she said she called the cops because Bangs had her by her neck, saying he was going to kill her.

Liliana Segura: Alicia’s account of Bangs’s abuse was pretty sobering. And his volatility, his capacity for violence — a lot of it sounded like Karianne’s descriptions of Charles.

If Charles’s behavior made him a good suspect for murder, it certainly seems like the same might have applied to Bangs. Yet police never spoke to Alicia.

In any event, finding out that Bangs was dead it was a real blow. It’s always shocking to have been in touch with someone who suddenly dies, especially in such grim circumstances. And for all his obvious flaws, there was a part of me that felt bad. Unlike Lynn Hardaway, the former Harris County prosecutor who told us an interview would require payment, Bangs had just gotten out of prison. He needed the money.

From a reporting standpoint, of course, his death left so many unanswered questions. As Jordan and I went back and read our correspondence with Bangs, we were struck by a couple of things. One, he clearly had some knowledge about things going on around Edna Franklin’s house before her murder. “Crazy stuff,” as he put it. We really wanted to know what he was talking about.

Jordan Smith: The other thing that jumped out from the emails: Unlike so many other people who were around at that time — and who insist that Charles is guilty — Bangs never once said this to us, even though Bangs knew that he himself was the only other suspect whose name was given to police. For what it’s worth: Charles has never pointed a finger at Bangs either. Here’s Charles talking about that when we visited him in 2019.

Jordan Smith: You don’t have any idea who you think might — I mean, you’ve had a lot of time to think about it.

Charles Raby: I don’t want to point no fingers at nobody.

Jordan Smith: Do you think he could have been capable of this?

James Jordan: Man. [sighs] Personally, I’m one that — I don’t make accusations lightly, so I won’t speak one way or another about it. I don’t know because I don’t know that side of him. I’ve seen him when he was drunk, and I’ve watched him act a donkey. I watched him kick all the windows out of his house because he was throwing a temper tantrum with his mom. Edward was a very, very angry young man when we were growing up. And he could be a fool. He could be a fool.

But like I told you, I won’t sit there and tell you something negative about him that he hasn’t been found guilty of. They’ve never acknowledged him as any part of that. So I wouldn’t do that to him or anybody else. But you never know what’s inside of one’s heart, especially when there’s alcohol or drugs involved. And at that point in time in our lives, all of us were strung out on some type of dope.

I hope that, when it’s all said and done, that Charles gets what he has coming to him — be it freedom, be it death. But I just hope he goes in peace.

Jordan Smith: So in the letters and emails that Bangs wrote to us, he never once threw shade on Charles or anyone else. But what he did say was pretty intriguing, which was that there was all this crazy shit going on around Franklin’s house. That at least suggests that there was more to the story and that whatever was going on might’ve played a role in what happened to Franklin.

Which brings me to another point: one that Charles has made over and over again, not only when we talked to him back at the end of 2019, but in numerous letters he’s written to us since then. And that is that he hadn’t been around the house on Westford that much. He actually hadn’t hung with this group in years because he’d been in prison. And once he was out, he was spending time with Merry Alice. So it’s hard to figure out why Charles would suddenly turn on Franklin in such a brutal and seemingly personal way, and why the only evidence left behind at the crime scene would point to someone other than him.

Liliana Segura: So many people pointed to the fact that Charles was in prison to suggest he was capable of murder. Whereas Charles looks at it in an opposite way: He was in prison. And so for years, he had no connection to whatever was going on over there, which would cut against the idea that he had a motive to kill Franklin. Charles isn’t the only person who’s pointed this out.

Tyme Martin, James Jordan’s ex-girlfriend, who was good friends with Eric Benge, told us this too. She hung around there all the time. She said Charles didn’t.

Tyme Martin: Me and Eric grew up together in the same neighborhood. So yes, I spent many of my days in that house with those people.

Charles was not like a part of our everyday group or every-other-day group. He would come around once in a while with Karianne.

Liliana Segura: You still might say: Charles confessed to the crime. But there’s actually another reason to distrust Charles’s confession, one we haven’t told you about yet. And it’s information that came to us from an unlikely source: Linda McClain, Edna Franklin’s daughter.

Jordan Smith: You might recall that Franklin had bad arthritis and that she couldn’t get around the house without her shoes on. You might also remember that in his confession, Charles said that he walked in the house, sat on the couch, and then heard Franklin behind him in the kitchen — at which point, he said he got up, grabbed her, and killed her in the living room.

But Linda told us this couldn’t possibly be right because her mom’s shoes were in her bedroom, which was in the back of the house, behind the kitchen. In the crime scene photos, you can see the shoes next to her bed.

Jordan Smith: There is a picture with them by the bed, by her bed.

Linda McClain: She did not walk without her shoes on.

Jordan Smith: This bothers Linda, but not because she thinks it is any indication that Charles is innocent. She thinks it’s because he lied in his confession. That he left that out on purpose.

Jordan Smith: Have you ever tried to figure that out in your head, why she’s in one room and her shoes are in the other?

Linda McClain: Yeah, because he went in the back bedroom and drug her out of the bed and murdered her. That is what he probably did.

Jordan Smith: There’s nothing about the shoes in the police report or the fact that Franklin couldn’t walk without them. Linda told us it wasn’t until after Charles’s trial that she saw any crime scene photos. And that’s when she spotted the shoes.

Liliana Segura: In one of our last conversations with Linda, we asked if she’d heard anything about Edward Bangs.

Linda McClain: I think he’s in jail.

Liliana Segura: Actually, we found out a little while back that Edward Bangs died.

Linda McClain: Oh my God. No kidding. Why? What happened to him?

Liliana Segura: We told her what we knew and listened as she processed this information. She’d never believed that DNA cleared Charles. But news of Edward Bangs’s death brought her back to the question of why he’d never been tested for DNA.

Linda McClain: I mean, I don’t know why they wouldn’t have DNA tested Edward Bangs. Why wouldn’t they have done that? He was in jail for assaulting someone, an old lady or something, which certainly is weird.

Liliana Segura: But she couldn’t figure out a motive for Bangs. Among other things, she pointed out, he was getting paid to paint her mother’s house. So why would he kill her?

Linda McClain: Because after she got murdered, I don’t think he got paid anything else. I’m pretty sure he didn’t. So that doesn’t make any sense either — to me. I mean, I don’t know what he got out of it; he wasn’t mad at her.

So what would he do it for? Well, no one can ask him. I kind of wish I’d known he’d gotten out of jail, so I could’ve gone and found him. Because he’s the only other likely suspect — would be him. Buster was the only person that I know who was angry at her, so. He’s still my prime suspect, DNA or no DNA. The one that confessed to the murder, that’s the one I’m going with.

[Transition music]

Sarah Frazier: I do have a little bit of an update for you guys.

Jordan Smith: That’s Sarah Frazier, Charles’s lawyer. We got on a Zoom call with her in early May 2021, and she told us something that Charles had mentioned in a recent letter: that the state of Texas, after a long pause, was gearing up to restart executions. Sarah told us that Charles was one of the longest serving people on Texas death row out of Harris County who was still eligible for execution. Meaning, no pending appeals or other factors that would make an execution unconstitutional.

Of those who are eligible, there was only one other guy out of Harris County who had been there longer, and he was on the verge of getting an execution date. So this would also make Charles vulnerable to having a date set — except, there was actually a bigger piece of news Sarah had to share.

The Harris County DA’s office had agreed to another round of DNA testing. The new prosecutor on the case told Charles’s lawyers that they could test whatever they wanted to.

Liliana Segura: This was pretty mind-blowing. Sarah had gone from a situation where the state had fought tooth and nail against DNA testing to one in which the state was saying, “Sure! Go ahead. Let’s do DNA testing!”

Sarah Frazier: I was not expecting him to say that. It’s sort of like wait, wait, wait, wait. I mean, because there are just so many things about this case that test your notion of reality. And so that was just another thing, it was like,“Wait a minute. Am I talking to the Harris County DA’s office, did you say I can test whatever I want?”

Liliana Segura: This is a really big deal because there’s a lot of evidence that has never been tested. And it certainly could shed new light on this case — particularly if any of the new DNA testing reveals the same unknown male profile found under Franklin’s fingernails. In other words, if the same male profile comes up on multiple pieces of evidence.

Jordan Smith: Among the things that will be a part of this new round of DNA testing are a pair of Franklin’s pants, that were found near her body, and her purse and credit cards, which were found scattered on the floor by her bed. The state has also agreed to do another search for the missing nightshirt that Franklin was wearing when she was killed. If they can finally find it, it will be tested too.

Liliana Segura: Of course, we don’t know how all of this will play out. But whatever the DNA results, it will be up to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to decide whether any of it matters.

Jordan Smith: Over the course of reporting this story, we asked pretty much everyone how they felt about the death penalty. And in particular, how they’d feel if Charles were executed. And what we found was that almost no one seemed to be pushing for that.

Frankly, no one thought that would change anything. You might recall that Franklin’s grandson, Lee Rose, told us he had to forgive Charles in order to move on with his life. And Linda has told us from the beginning that even though she’s convinced Charles is guilty, she doesn’t necessarily want to see him executed.

Linda McClain: I don’t personally care what they do with him. I don’t care what happens to him. I don’t care if he drops dead tomorrow, in the next five minutes, in the next 40 years.

Jordan Smith: And even people who worked within the system, like Sgt. Wayne Wendel, don’t believe the death penalty prevents violent crime.

Liliana Segura: I’m curious because obviously Mr. Raby’s confession was very powerful evidence against him. And on the other hand, we know that there have been cases over the decades where people are wrongfully convicted or even confessed to things that they didn’t do. I just wonder to what extent that has concerned you, over the years, just in general. Does that give you pause at all about the death penalty?

Wayne Wendel: Well, if you’re asking my opinion about the death penalty, I never thought it’d be a deterrent to crime, to murder. I think more appropriately life without parole is a much harsher sentence. That’s just my opinion.

Liliana Segura: How about the question of innocence? How much does that have to do with that?

Wayne Wendel: Innocence? I think a jury of 12 people who listened to the evidence and a prosecution and a defense can make that decision. That’s who it should be.

Jordan Smith: Charles is approaching his 30th year on Texas’s death row. In that time, he’s seen nearly 500 others sent to the execution chamber, including innocent people.

Liliana Segura: We often hear death penalty supporters blame people like Charles for dragging out their cases, pursuing endless appeals, just to game the system. This isn’t really accurate; it’s more complicated than that. But there’s a more fundamental problem that we’ve seen over and over again. And that’s the fact that the system often gets these cases wrong, in ways that can take years to uncover.

Look at Charles’s case: The cops never really investigated the crime and instead became fixated on him from the start. At trial, the state withheld crucial blood evidence that pointed away from Charles. And when DNA testing came back that also didn’t match him, the prosecutors just shrugged it off. And the courts have been happy to rubber-stamp it all.

Right now, Charles has hope that this round of DNA testing will finally prove his innocence. But he’s had hope before. And every time those hopes have been crushed, it makes it harder to keep moving forward.

Jordan Smith: Even after all these years, Charles cannot accept that the state wants to kill him for something he swears he did not do. But he’s had to learn how to live with the fact that it may happen anyway.

Liliana Segura: I think a lot of Americans don’t think about the death penalty, but what do you think people really need to know, not just about your case, but about what it’s like to be here, to live here, and to live like you have?

Charles Raby: What do you mean, like knowing you’re going to die one day? That isn’t easy. But it’s something like, I don’t know, you come to terms with it. It’s just — I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t really give it much thought. You would think I would think about that stuff all the time, but I do everything I can not to think about it.

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Texas is a production of The Intercept and First Look Media.

Andrea Jones is our story editor. Julia Scott is senior producer. Truc Nguyen is our podcast fellow. Laura Flynn is supervising producer. Fact-checking by Meerie Jesuthasan. Special thanks to Jack D’Isidoro and Holly DeMuth for additional production assistance, and to Spotland Productions in Nashville, Tennessee, for recording the whole series.

Our show was mixed by Rick Kwan, with original music by Zach Young. Legal review by David Bralow.

Executive producers are Roger Hodge and Christy Gressman. For The Intercept, Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief.

I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith.

You can read show transcripts and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter: @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/donate. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show. And please do leave us a rating or review; it helps people find us. If you want to give us feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post Episode Nine: The Other Suspect appeared first on The Intercept.

Charles Raby’s early life was defined by abuse and neglect. His own behavior later took a toll on the people who knew him, many of whom remain certain that he killed Edna Franklin. No one is more convinced than his ex-girlfriend, who has a surprising story about Charles that she says proves his guilt. Charles is adamant the story isn’t true. But memories are complicated things.

Transcript

A quick listener note: This podcast contains adult language and descriptions of violence.

Karianne Wright: I am Charles Raby’s ex-girlfriend and also the mother of his child. The only thing that I can bring to the table is the way that he treated me, which I guess that could give you some insight to who he was before this crime happened. 

Jordan Smith: Karianne Wright met Charles Raby in the mid-’80s at an apartment complex in Houston where a friend of hers lived. They were both teenagers back then. And the only thing she could bring to the table now, she told us, was how Charles treated her before the crime that would send him to death row. As you can probably tell, our connection with Karianne was a bit spotty.

Karianne Wright: I met him just on the grounds of the apartments one day. A bunch of kids, unsupervised, had the freedom to do whatever they want, and we just sort of took a liking to each other pretty much right away.

Jordan Smith: It was a volatile relationship. During the penalty phase of Charles’s trial — where the jurors had to decide whether to sentence him to life or death — Karianne was almost certainly the most damaging witness.

Liliana Segura: She’s aware of the DNA and blood evidence that point away from Charles as being responsible for Edna Franklin’s murder. None of that matters to her.

Karianne Wright: As probably the single person that knows him better than anybody did back then, even than his own mother, just know that if you’re beating down a path to try and prove this man’s innocent, you are wrong. You are wrong. 

[Theme music]

Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Texas. Episode 8, “Memories.”

Early on in our reporting, we knew that we needed to try to reach Karianne. All these years later, she is still unsparing in her view of Charles.

Liliana Segura: She left Houston almost two decades ago. She’s married, has kids and grandkids. Her life seems genuinely happy. Charles represents a dark and ugly chapter from her past.

Karianne Wright: Anytime these memories come up, they’re kind of something that I have to remind myself to think past. Like, “Get your mind out of that time frame,” and bring it to the happier parts of my life.

Jordan Smith: Karianne was 13 when she met Charles, who everybody called Buster. He was 15. At first, he was charming, but things quickly changed. Not long into their relationship, she said, he turned violent — yelling at her and flying off the handle, as she testified back in 1994. This led to pushing and shoving, then slapping “and things like that,” she said.

Karianne Wright: The amount of violence that would come out of him from a look, from a sigh — it didn’t matter.

Liliana Segura: She was 15 when she got pregnant. Her relationship with Charles did not improve.

Karianne Wright: It didn’t calm him down, it didn’t. I’m sure there were moments when he would be excited about being a dad and really liked the idea of it all, but it didn’t make him a better partner to me.

Liliana Segura: And after their daughter was born, she said the abuse continued. She told us a story that she’d told at trial. It was winter, and their daughter was just a few months old.

Karianne Wright: I was sitting on the foldout couch with Amber, bundled up with her, trying to keep her warm. He was standing next to a dresser, and he said, “Can you give me a pair of socks?” And I looked at him and I said, “You’re standing at the dresser, get ’em.” And there was a knife on top of the dresser and he grabbed the knife and he threw it across the room at me and I cupped the baby, turned my head, and the knife stabbed me right in the head and stuck in my head.

Liliana Segura: In your head?

Karianne Wright: Stuck in my head. 

Jordan Smith: If you didn’t catch that, Karianne said that Charles threw a knife at her after she told him to get himself a pair of socks. On the stand, Karianne described what he’d thrown as a multitool, like you use for camping. It had a can opener on it, and a fork and spoon. It was chrome in color.

According to Karianne, she left Charles for good in 1989 after he’d gone to jail for getting in a fight with his mom and stepdad. She’d met another boy whose family took her in.

Karianne Wright: He’d gone to jail, and it was my way out. I thought, “This is it. I’ve got a way.”

Liliana Segura: In legal filings, Charles’s lawyers describe the circumstances of the breakup a bit differently. They say Karianne actually left Charles before the fight that sent him to jail, and that Charles spent some months taking care of their daughter on his own, with the help of his mother, Betty.

Jordan Smith: Regardless, it was while Charles was in jail for the fight with his mom and stepdad that he met Merry Alice Gomez, who has a very different story about Charles. He was loving and caring with her and her baby. We’ve thought about this a lot. This isn’t a question of who you believe. They’re not mutually exclusive experiences.

Abusive relationships often have a honeymoon period, where an abuser is charming and lavishes attention. Could that be what Charles was doing with Merry Alice? Sure, it’s possible. But it’s also possible that theirs was an entirely different relationship.

Liliana Segura: No one, not even Charles, has denied that he had a violent streak. And knowing what we know about intimate partner violence, it isn’t surprising that Karianne told us she felt lucky to get out of that relationship alive. But none of this means that Charles killed Edna Franklin. And there’s no physical evidence to show that he did.

But the way that Charles behaved — toward Karianne and others — is precisely why people think that he’s guilty. It’s maybe an obvious point, but an important one: If Charles hadn’t had a reputation as a violent jerk, Edna Franklin’s grandsons, Eric Benge and Lee Rose, wouldn’t have been so quick to name him as a suspect. In our experience, this is often the case, in some form or another, with wrongful convictions.

Almost everyone we’ve ever written about had something in their background that either put them on law enforcement’s radar or gave them some kind of negative reputation. These are the kinds of things that can drive cases.

Jordan Smith: We also know that Charles wasn’t the only one among the group of kids that Eric and Lee ran with who was violent, including toward their girlfriends. So if you consider Charles’s behavior as the key to singling him out as the most capable of killing Franklin, then he wasn’t the only suspect the police should’ve considered.

Jordan Smith: Can you describe how you know Charles, and what growing up around him was like?

James Jordan: [laughs] Well, it was an adventure, I’ll give it that. There was never a dull moment. He was actually probably my closest and best friend at the time. We went through a lot of things together, so to speak.

Jordan Smith: That’s James Jordan, Charles’s friend from childhood. He lived in the same apartment complex as Karianne’s friend. James was the person Charles was hanging out with when he met Karianne.

James has been in and out of prison for most of his life. When we talked to him, he’d just gotten out months earlier. He was having a rough time getting back on his feet. Right after he was released, he came down with Covid and was super sick. But he was open to talking with us and gave us some insight into Charles’s problems as a teenager.

James Jordan: Man, Charles was a very angry young man. He was a handful because he had problems that he hadn’t addressed, that I guess made him like a little Roman candle. But if he was your friend, there was probably nothing he wouldn’t ever do for you.

Liliana Segura: As James describes it, Charles seemed to be something of a walking contradiction. Charles did beat up Karianne, he said. But James also said that when he was violent toward his own girlfriend, Tyme Martin, Charles would intervene. Tyme remembers this too.

Tyme Martin: Yeah, yeah. He was always a helpful hand when it came to being around James Jordan, having issues with him. So, yes, he was very helpful to me in many ways, in certain times. Man, everything’s just so long ago. He was even kind of the defender, but I don’t think that was so much the case with Karianne. I don’t remember them having a very good relationship.

Liliana Segura: It’s like Charles tried to protect people in certain situations, but it made him controlling. James told Charles’s lawyer, Sarah Frazier, that Charles disapproved of hard drugs and would beat him up over it. “Once Charles attacked me when he found me sniffing paint,” he said.

And then there’s the story about the sunflower seeds, which Karianne told on the stand. She said Charles once beat up James for eating sunflower seeds because he was concerned that they were bad for James’s blood pressure.

James Jordan: It’s not to say that he was a dangerous individual, but he’s somebody you really wouldn’t want to get on his bad side because he didn’t have a problem showing you how he felt, or telling you how he felt. He was a little bit outspoken. But he was a great guy! If he was your friend, he was a great guy.

Liliana Segura: Ultimately, Charles’s behavior took a toll on the people he knew. And they basically lined up to testify against him during the punishment phase of his trial.

James Jordan: The whole neighborhood testified against him. I was probably one of the only ones that didn’t. Even though I was subpoenaed, it was against my will, and I never got on the stand against him. But everybody else we knew did. Do I believe that he killed that lady? No, I don’t.

Liliana Segura: We asked James if he remembered where he was when Edna Franklin was murdered.

James Jordan: I was in jail, and I’d seen it on the news. And I told myself then, if you did it, you deserve to fucking die. But if you’re innocent, then I pray to God that you come home. And I told him that. When I got out of jail, I came and seen him. He didn’t have the face of somebody who had just killed a 72-year-old lady.

Jordan Smith: When James went to visit Charles in jail, not long after Franklin’s murder, he said Charles just didn’t have the face of a killer. That may be how James saw it. But it wasn’t how others saw it — including James’s mom, who also testified against Charles.

She said Charles had hit her once after she caught him and Karianne in her home without her permission. James disputes his mom’s account. He said he’d told them they could hang out there, but his mother didn’t like that and threatened to call the cops. James says that she hit her head on the wall when Charles tried to push past her to get out of the house.

Many of the people who testified about Charles’s violent streak remain convinced of his guilt. Yet, according to James, the DNA evidence pointing to another killer disturbed his mom.

James Jordan: That’s the first time I’d seen my mother cry. Because that’s a bitter pill to swallow, to think that you might have helped put somebody on death row that is innocent.

Liliana Segura: And there’s another reason James questions Charles’s guilt. It’s because of a guy named James Falcon. They met in the Harris County jail.

James Jordan: I didn’t know James, but we had gotten cool in jail because he was from the same neighborhood I’m from. Conversation started up: Who do you know? Who’s this, who’s that? You know how it goes. And Charles’s name come up.

Liliana Segura: Falcon told James that he’d seen Charles the night that Franklin was murdered.

James Jordan: He had told me, “Yeah, I seen Buster and he was drunk but he didn’t have blood on him. He didn’t look like he had been fighting. He didn’t look like he had been doing anything he shouldn’t have been.” And I tried to encourage him to seek out Charles’s lawyer, but when Sarah went to look for him, she told me that he had passed away.

Jordan Smith: We didn’t know who Falcon was, so we wrote to Charles to ask. Charles knew Falcon but wasn’t friends with him. Falcon was actually friends with Karianne’s brother — so it’s not like he had any reason to help Charles.

Charles told us that he didn’t remember seeing Falcon that night. But he said that Falcon had written him a letter in which he “swore up and down” that he’d seen Charles. Despite the fact that James Jordan was Charles’s best friend, he said that Charles’s trial lawyers never talked to him to see what he might know. If they had, maybe they could’ve tracked down Falcon. It seemed like another missed opportunity.

Liliana Segura: James knows that Charles had anger issues. But he also thought that the witnesses who testified against him overstated things on the stand.

James Jordan: They basically got up there and just either told lies or told things about him that it’s normal for kids to do when you’re angry or you’re running the streets or not doing the things that productive growing children do.

Liliana Segura: James said this included Karianne.

James Jordan: But a lot of things she probably said about him were probably true. The rest of it, hey, you know how it goes in court. They coach you along, tell you what they want you to say.

It’s not about your guilt or your innocence in Texas. It’s hell to be fucking poor and broke in Texas, and it’s all about who puts on the best show. When you got somebody you’re getting ready to juice up on that gurney, why wouldn’t you want to know the truth?

They paint a picture of a person whose childhood was shaped by violence and neglect. Charles lived with his mother and grandmother, both of whom had mental health problems. His mother had a series of dysfunctional relationships. Charles was abused and abusive. From the time he was pretty young, he was repeatedly removed from home and shipped off, typically to a group home or wilderness camp.

Liliana Segura: Charles really didn’t want to talk about any of this with us, especially anything about his mom. He made clear early on that this stuff was off-limits. This wasn’t surprising.

Almost every death penalty case we’ve ever written about contains some level of childhood trauma or abuse. Violent family situations are extremely painful to revisit. So a lot of times people just don’t want to talk about it, even where it could provide important context that helps others understand how they ended up where they did.

Jeff Page: Out of all the cases I’ve had, Charles’s is probably the one I remember most.

Liliana Segura: As we read through Charles’s files, one name kept popping up: a guy who worked for child welfare and was one of Charles’s case workers.

Jeff Page: My name is Jeffrey Page. In 1982, I began working for Harris County children’s protective services. I worked in a specialized unit — an institutional unit — which dealt with kids who had emotional problems and had to be institutionalized all over the state. And that is how I came into contact with Charles.

Liliana Segura: Page’s job was to try to reunite children with their families. And if that couldn’t be done, to seek a termination of parental rights.

Jeff Page: Charles, he had to be removed from his home. It was a neglectful supervision.

Liliana Segura: Page really liked Charles.

Jeff Page: I really connected with him because I felt like, if he only had a chance, maybe he could do better. But in the environment he lived in, I said, “He really doesn’t have a chance.” And it was very sad.

Jordan Smith: He put in a lot of work, trying to find a safe place for Charles to live. But Charles frequently ran away, always trying to get back to Houston to his mom. After months of work, Page thought he’d found the right spot for Charles.

Jeff Page: He ended up at a place — and I’m cutting through months — called New Horizons in Goldthwaite, Texas. I know he didn’t necessarily like it there, but that was probably the best place for him because they treated him well. He had a horse. He really kind of straightened up. He had problems there, don’t get me wrong.

I placed him there, and I said, “Oh, this isn’t going to work, because he’s a city boy.” When I came back up there, about three months later, he was a cowboy. He had his boots on and he had his horse and he really liked it; there were things he really liked, and he told me that he liked it there.

Liliana Segura: Charles had a girlfriend at New Horizons and a teacher who’d finally taught him to read. Then Page was told that the folks there were ready to send him home. Page did not think he was ready.

Jeff Page: I told them, I said, “I think he needs to stay here.” But one day, I get a call and they’re like, “He’s well. He needs to be brought back to Houston.” I said, “That’s the worst place you could ever bring him back to. He cannot come back here.” I told my supervisor, I told my supervisor’s supervisor — because I was very concerned about that. And I told them, “If he came back here, he was going to get into some trouble. He’d either be killed, or he would kill somebody.”

Jordan Smith: To Page, it was a turning point for Charles. Page finally saw Charles thriving — and at that moment, Charles was sent back to Houston.

Jeff Page: He needed stability, and that’s why I wanted him to stay where he was. He needed a job. He needed somebody to at least tell him which way to go. He never had that; he never had that. That was maybe the saddest thing about him, because I could see him working on a ranch. I could see him married and with a family. But it wasn’t to be. And part of that, you can’t just blame everybody else; he has some responsibility in that too. But like I said, the deck was stacked against him.

Jordan Smith: We asked Page what he meant when he said that Charles might kill or be killed. Page said that it wasn’t that he thought Charles had it in him to go out and kill someone, but that without structure, he had impulse control problems.

Jeff Page: I grew up in a pretty rough — I grew up in Detroit, and I knew people like him, and I said, “Something’s going to happen to him, if nobody intervenes.” I just knew he was headed for trouble. I don’t know. Did I think he was a murderer? No, I didn’t think that. I didn’t think he would think things through. I just thought something might happen.

Liliana Segura: Page was called to testify by the defense during the sentencing phase of Charles’s 1994 trial. But he told us that Charles’s lawyers didn’t prepare him before putting him on the stand. So he wasn’t able to fully describe the trauma and neglect Charles had lived through in his youth.

Jeff Page: They put me on the stand. The attorney said, “Do you know him?” And I said, “Yes, Charles.” They just asked me stuff. They never asked me what I thought they were going to ask.

Jordan Smith: The questions were just “weird,” he told us. And under cross-examination, it seemed like the prosecutor, Roberto Gutierrez, was trying to steer him in a certain direction: to weaponize what Page knew about Charles’s background in order to paint him as a lost cause.

Jeff Page: It seemed like they were asking me for something I couldn’t give them.

Liliana Segura: Of course, as a prosecutor questioning a witness at sentencing, Gutierrez’s goal was to show why Charles should be sentenced to death — not to get Page’s genuine feelings about Charles. At one point, Gutierrez asked Page about all the resources that had been spent trying to help this one kid. Here’s the actor reading Gutierrez.

Roberto Gutierrez (Actor): The system, the state of Texas, spent thousands and thousands of dollars to try and help Charles Raby, isn’t that true? … And one of the sad things about your job is that you try to save them all and you can’t?

Liliana Segura: Page told us he couldn’t speak to whether Charles was innocent or guilty of murdering Edna Franklin. But he understands enough about the system to know that it’s fallible.

Jeff Page: It just seemed like everything was a foregone conclusion. Why am I sitting there? I always like to think back, because when I was Charles’s age, maybe a little younger — I told you, I grew up in Detroit — I was walking down the street with a friend one day and got arrested for suspicion of armed robbery. They locked me in a cell. My parents were out of the country, and I was 17. They put me in a holding cell, tried to make me confess to a crime. When I was sitting there giving answers, that’s what it felt like to me: Here he is, we’ve got him, and he’s going down for whatever he’s going down for. I guess that’s why I could relate a little bit to that.

Liliana Segura: Page’s dad was a juvenile probation officer. And when he got back to the city, he pulled the report of his son’s arrest and found out that the cops had been looking for two Black kids wearing jeans.

Jeff Page: And I said, “How many people in Detroit could that be? 300,000?” So when I see Charles, it’s just like: Here’s this kid, maybe he did something. I don’t know what he did. I haven’t seen the evidence. But they certainly got him for what they said and he was going to be convicted. And I guess he had already been convicted at that point.

Jordan Smith: Karianne remembers being at court every day until it was time for her to testify. When she finally took the stand, she just tried to concentrate on the task at hand.

Karianne Wright: I think, if anything, I probably felt a little bit sad for him because it’s got to be hard having your mom there, not only my mom but his mom and his whole family just knowing what had happened. You can’t take it back; you can’t undo who you are.

Jordan Smith: We asked about how she reacted to hearing that Charles had been sentenced to death. She described mixed feelings but mostly sadness for their young daughter.

Karianne Wright: I cried. And I cried for our daughter, for knowing that some day that, regardless of how well I try to raise her, there’s going to be an absence and sadness and a horrific reality.

Jordan Smith: Days after Charles was sentenced to death, Karianne went to see him one last time. He was in jail, awaiting transfer to prison. She took their daughter with her. Karianne’s description of this visit was by far the most surprising part of our conversation.

Karianne Wright: I remember asking him, in these exact words, “Why did you do that? Why did you do it?” And we got our hands touching on the glass, and Amber had her little hand up there, and he shrugged and shook his head and he says, “I don’t know, I just snapped.” And we just sat and cried and cried and cried.

Jordan Smith: This was the first time we’d ever heard about this. That Charles had supposedly confessed — again — after he was convicted.

Karianne Wright: It was one of those things where my mom reached out to me, and she said, “He’s fighting this. He’s trying to say he’s innocent, blah, blah, blah,” and I said, “Well, he’s not innocent.” And I said, “He actually told me, he confessed to me. We talked about this.”

Liliana Segura: Her mother had apparently read about this in the newspaper in 2009 after the DNA results came back, pointing away from Charles. The article included the name of the Houston prosecutor who was handling the case. It was Lynn Hardaway: the prosecutor who argued to the Court of Criminal Appeals that the DNA results linking the murder to an unknown male weren’t important.

Jordan Smith: So Karianne called her. She wanted Hardaway to know that Charles had confessed to her.

Liliana Segura: We sent the Harris County DA’s office a public information request, asking for records related to this call. We got a recording of a conversation from June 2009, which seemed to be the phone call Karianne told us about.

Lynn Hardaway: Hi, Kari. This is Lynn Hardaway at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.

Karianne Wright: Oh, hi. Sorry for the babbling message.

Lynn Hardaway: Oh, no, that’s OK. I understand.

Liliana Segura: The phone call confirmed Karianne’s recollection about talking with Hardaway.

Karianne Wright: So I started asking him. And in the beginning, he wouldn’t answer me.

Lynn Hardaway: This is when you went and visited him at the jail, right?

Karianne Wright: Yeah. And he kept shaking his head, like, “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it.” And then I just said, “Then we’re going to leave.” Because I wanted to hear him say he did it. And he looked at me and I said, “Why did you feel like you had to kill her? Why? She was old.” And I was just talking to him, and he just broke down and started crying and said, “I just cracked. I snapped.”

Lynn Hardaway: Wow. Did you ask him anything else?

Karianne Wright: I asked him a lot, but that’s the only answer he gave. The only other thing that he mentioned was rinsing blood off his hands. That’s it. In dirty water.

Lynn Hardaway: So he didn’t deny that he did it.

Karianne Wright: He did not deny it.

Lynn Hardaway: OK, that’s good.

Karianne Wright: He did not deny it.

Jordan Smith: Obviously, we had to write to Charles to ask him about this. “You caught me completely off guard with this one,” he wrote back. He said the exchange with Karianne never happened. He was pretty pissed off and worried about how this story might be used against him in the future.

He remembered Karianne and his daughter coming to visit. He also recalled something Karianne had described to us: his lawyer, Felix Cantu, coming in during the visit and standing behind Karianne as they talked. But he swore he never said anything about his case to Karianne.

Liliana Segura: We asked Cantu about this, but he didn’t remember the visit.

For much of their call, Karianne and Hardaway discussed the potential impact of the DNA results on Charles’s case. They also discussed the serology work from 1992 that Charles’s defense hadn’t known about.

Lynn Hardaway: Well, OK, the way that — I’m not a scientist, and I don’t really understand it. The bad thing about the blood evidence is this other blood type is showing up. But —

Karianne Wright: Couldn’t be a mix of her blood and his blood making some weird strain, right?

Lynn Hardaway: No, no.

Liliana Segura: Hardaway acknowledged that this evidence could make a difference for Charles.

Lynn Hardaway: But I don’t know what the judge is going to do. I don’t know. I just don’t know. But you know what? What you have told me could be very helpful.

Liliana Segura: Hardaway asked Karianne if she would be willing to give an affidavit recounting her story about the jail visit. Karianne agreed and eventually traveled to Houston to give a video statement.

Jordan Smith: We’d reached out to Hardaway for an interview weeks before we ever talked to Karianne. She’s now in private practice. She responded quickly, saying she would be happy to talk with us about her work on Charles’s case, as soon as the following morning.

We followed up with a few more details about what we hoped to cover: specifically, the DNA evidence that didn’t match Charles. She responded the next morning, and she’d changed her tune. “When I said that I would speak to you about Mr. Raby’s case, I meant on an informal, non-recorded basis,” she wrote. She said that if we wanted to do a “formal” interview, she would need to prepare. That would take time and, it turned out, money. “I require a retainer to proceed with a formal interview,” she wrote. “My rate is $250/hour, and I estimate five hours of prep time.”

Liliana Segura: In other words, we’d have to pay her $1,250. Needless to say, that wasn’t happening. And as someone who dealt with the media as part of her job, she must have known that we don’t pay for interviews.

We asked if she’d be willing to answer some questions via email instead. Sure, she said. Hardaway told us that she remembered meeting with Karianne and taking her statement. But she said she never used it in any legal proceedings.

Jordan Smith: We found this odd. Hardaway had argued in court — first in Houston and then at the Court of Criminal Appeals — that the DNA evidence wasn’t strong enough to overturn Charles’s conviction. And she leaned heavily on his confession as proof that the DNA didn’t matter and he was clearly guilty. So it would seem reasonable that Hardaway would have seized upon Karianne’s story as further evidence of his guilt. Why wouldn’t she use Karianne’s account if she found it credible?

Liliana Segura: We asked Hardaway why she never used Karianne’s statement. Hardaway said she wasn’t sure whether she had the statement at that time. In fact, she did.

Karianne provided her statement in August 2009 — as the DNA hearing in Houston was still going on — and Hardaway didn’t go before the Court of Criminal Appeals until 2013. Regardless, she said that Karianne’s story didn’t fit into what she was trying to do.

Jordan Smith: All of this left us with a lot of questions.

Liliana Segura: Karianne’s story about the jail visit was obviously unsettling. She clearly believes it happened exactly as she remembers. She even told Hardaway that if there was a recording of the visit, Hardaway could confirm her account. Those records are long gone, of course. So there’s no proof, one way or another. Regardless, we don’t see why Karianne would make this up.

Jordan Smith: But also, why would Charles deny this if it happened? He’s never denied that he confessed. And he’s been straightforward about questioning his own memory of the night Franklin was murdered. He even said that, for a time, he wondered whether he might actually have done it. And this brings us back to the whole problem of memory.

Kara Moore: When we recall a memory, we aren’t just pulling this neat package of information from our brain. Instead, we’re pulling lots of details back together and basically reconstructing the memory from scratch.

Liliana Segura: That’s Kara Moore. She’s a professor of psychology at Oklahoma State University. She studies memory.

Kara Moore: In reality, our memories reflect a blend of information contained from our memory, our existing knowledge, our expectations, our beliefs, and information derived from other sources. As a result, no memory is a perfect recall of the past. 

Jordan Smith: We’ve seen this play out over and over again in our reporting. People will tell the cops one thing, shortly after a crime. And research tells us that these are the most reliable statements. But by the time a case goes to trial, those statements have often evolved — sometimes in really dramatic ways, with lots of new details.

Liliana Segura: The thing is, the older the memory is, the more likely it is to be corrupted because memories get weaker over time. And memories of traumatic events are especially prone to distortion, Moore said, because mental imagery and imagining also play a role in the reconstruction of memory.

Jordan Smith: She gave us an example involving Desert Storm veterans. Researchers found that over time, the number of traumatic events they remembered experiencing during combat multiplied.

Kara Moore: The most important finding from that study is that the majority of the changes were from “No, I did not experience any of these types of events” to “Yes, I did experience one or more of these types of events.”

Jordan Smith: All the factors that impact memory — time and trauma in particular — are at play in this case.

Liliana Segura: The reality is, when it comes to this case, everybody is an unreliable narrator — at least insofar as their memories are concerned. The only thing we know for sure is what the science tells us. The serology and DNA evidence point to a different killer.

Jordan Smith: Next time on Murderville, Texas: “The Other Suspect.”

Linda McClain: I don’t know why they wouldn’t have DNA tested Edward Bangs. Why wouldn’t they have done that? He was in jail for assaulting someone, an old lady or something, which certainly is weird.

Sgt. Wayne Wendel: I know he was eliminated, and it was because he had an alibi. He was somewhere else and could not have killed Mrs. Franklin.

Alicia Overstreet: He was not with me. Yeah, I didn’t even know that that had ever been said because no one ever asked me.

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Texas is a production of The Intercept and First Look Media.

Andrea Jones is our story editor. Julia Scott is senior producer. Truc Nguyen is our podcast fellow. Laura Flynn is supervising producer. Fact-checking by Meerie Jesuthasan. Special thanks to Jack D’Isidoro and Holly DeMuth for additional production assistance. Voice acting on this episode by Vincent Thomas.

Our show was mixed by Rick Kwan, with original music by Zach Young. Legal review by David Bralow.

Executive producers are Roger Hodge and Christy Gressman. For The Intercept, Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief.

I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith.

You can read show transcripts and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter: @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/donate. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show. And please do leave us a rating or review; it helps people find us. If you want to give us feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post Episode Eight: Memories appeared first on The Intercept.

Charles Raby says he confessed to protect his girlfriend, Merry Alice Gomez. Some people don’t believe this — as they understand it, Charles had only known Merry Alice for a few weeks when Edna Franklin was murdered. Why would he lie for a woman he barely knew? But it turns out this premise was incorrect. And there’s a lot more to Merry Alice’s story.

Transcript

A quick listener note: This podcast contains adult language and descriptions of violence.

[Phone ringing]

Merry Alice Gomez: Hello?

Liliana Segura: Hi, Merry Alice?

Merry Alice Gomez: Hi, yes, ma’am.

Liliana Segura: Hi, it’s Liliana again. Just checking back with you.

Merry Alice Gomez: Yes. The pastor said that it would be OK. Do I need to bring anything or —?

Liliana Segura: Yeah, we were just thinking if you’ve got pictures you’d want to share, anything like that would be really great.

Merry Alice Gomez: And maps would be OK?

Liliana Segura: Maps? Absolutely. Anything you want to share, for us, the more the better. It’s so helpful that you’re willing to meet up. We really appreciate it.

Merry Alice Gomez: I’ll never stop. That’s why I’m here. I knew something would come back. I know he’s innocent and I knew his case would come up again. That’s why I never left Houston.

Jordan Smith: In the fall of 2019, we arranged our first meeting with Merry Alice Gomez, Charles Raby’s girlfriend from back in the day. She was with him when he was arrested, just days after Edna Franklin was murdered. And according to Charles, Merry Alice was the reason he confessed to the crime.

We drove to a low-slung office building, just off a state highway northwest of downtown Houston. We were meeting in a space leased by Christ Over Our Life ministries, or COOL: an evangelical group that works with incarcerated people and those in recovery. The motto “Every Prison, Everywhere” was printed on a poster hanging on the wall. Merry Alice is a devout Catholic. But she got involved with COOL because of their work with prisoners.

Merry Alice has spent a lot of time helping out incarcerated people — not just Charles. She helps them wade through the everyday challenges that come with being in prison. She’s a caretaker by nature.

Liliana Segura: Merry Alice walked in carrying a bunch of stuff. Poster boards, file folders, and a photo album, which she spread out on a conference table.

She was wearing a white shirt under a pink leather vest and a silver cross fashioned from the word “Jesus” on a chain around her neck. Her long black hair was done in two braids. The first thing we asked her? When and how she and Charles met.

Jordan Smith: This question is important because it’s central to Charles’s claim that he falsely confessed to murder in order to protect her. Remember, Edna Franklin’s daughter, Linda McClain, dismissed the idea that Charles would’ve done this because, as she understood it, he’d only just met Merry Alice weeks before Franklin’s murder in October 1992. But it turns out, that wasn’t true.

[Theme music]

Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Texas. Episode 7, “Merry Alice.”

Merry Alice Gomez: I’m Merry Alice and I was born here in Houston. I’ve known Charles since about ’89.

Merry Alice Gomez: He started calling on the phone, early morning phone calls, and she was always asking me to talk to Charles, and I would tell her, “No, I don’t have time. I don’t have time.” I was always on the go, going to school.

I never met anyone that was in jail before. [laughs] I always said I didn’t have time for no jail bird, that’s what I would always say.

Liliana Segura: But Ray told Charles about Merry Alice anyway.

Merry Alice Gomez: He says, “She has a sister,” and he goes, “What does she look like?” And Ray said, he goes, “Well, the best way to describe her is she’s a short Mexican with hair down to her ass.” He said right there, when he said that long hair, he said, “That was it.”

Liliana Segura: Eventually, Merry Alice came around and began talking to Charles on the phone.

Merry Alice Gomez: So then that’s when he asked me at one of the little phone calls — because they didn’t last too long, the phone calls — if I could send a picture. I said, “I don’t have no picture. I don’t take pictures.” So that year, like I said, I was graduating and we took these. So I sent him the one with the white fuzzy and that was it. I think I was 18.

Liliana Segura: Do you remember what he said about the picture?

Merry Alice Gomez: He was in love.

Jordan Smith: It was a classic 1980s high school senior portrait: all soft lighting and big hair, thick gold hoop earrings, shot at a slight angle. But instead of the standard drape across the chest, Merry Alice’s top is fashioned out of something fluffy and white, like a big feathered boa. It gives the portrait an ethereal quality. A few months later, Charles got out of jail and showed up on the porch of her mother’s house.

Merry Alice Gomez: He just looked thin. [laughs] I remember seeing his profile, and I was looking out my sister’s window and I seen him out on the front porch, and then I don’t know, something rose in me. I had to play like I wasn’t interested, and I told my sister — because we were both looking out the window, and he was knocking, like teenagers do. I kept saying, “You go out there. You go out there.” She goes, “No, you go out there. He’s here for you.” I said, “Ugh.”

Jordan Smith: She finally came outside and introduced herself. The two of them sat and talked on the porch. She felt an immediate connection with Charles, but she tried to play it cool.

Merry Alice Gomez: Just came out and, like, “Nice to meet you,” and then we sat on the porch, and I guess I just talked about how long I’d lived there and just kind of introduced ourselves. It wasn’t too long. Right away, he was gone again.

Jordan Smith: Merry Alice said that not long after they met, Charles went back to jail. But he was hardly a criminal mastermind. He and two other dudes had stolen a couple 12-packs of Budweiser. A store clerk said Charles had threatened him with a knife. Then the trio crashed their car trying to get away from the police. Charles was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but he would only do about two and a half.

Liliana Segura: This is the crime he was on parole for at the time Franklin was murdered. While he was inside, Charles wrote to Merry Alice every week. But she wasn’t nearly as eager as he was at that point. And she didn’t want to just wait for him to get out.

Merry Alice Gomez: I would tell him, “I’m young. You went back to jail. What am I supposed to do? Wait? You said you wanted to start this with me, now you’re back in.” I had a little argument, and that’s what he kept saying. He kept saying, “Well, if God permits, we will be together. Try and wait for me. I know it’s selfish for me to ask you to wait.”

After that, we continued to write back and forth for the next two-and-a-half years, and then he told me, he promised me 8/10/92, he would come home to me.

Liliana Segura: His release date was August 10, 1992. He promised that on that day, he would be on her front porch. He reiterated this even after Merry Alice got pregnant.

Merry Alice Gomez: That’s what he said in one of his letters, when I told him I was pregnant. He said, “Well, you take the mother, you accept the child.” And that’s why he was ready to accept me being pregnant when he came home.

Liliana Segura: Understandably, Merry Alice had doubts.

Merry Alice Gomez: I said, “He’ll probably forget. He’s going to get out and go be free again and probably not even think about it.” And he was. He was on my porch that day he got out.

Liliana Segura: As promised, it was August 10, 1992.

Merry Alice Gomez: I just felt like we were soulmates. He just came over and sat down and started holding hands like normal, like we were already together. Didn’t even have to say it, make it official or anything.

Liliana Segura: Once Charles was out of prison, he was all-in for Merry Alice. He got a job at Westfield Sandblasting Company. And 12 days later, he showed up to the baby shower at her mother’s house loaded down with gifts.

Merry Alice Gomez: Baby powder, diaper cloths, cloth diapers, baby socks, baby shoes, bottle washer, bottles, baby oil, one of them warming baby plates with the spoon and cup, pacifier, brush and comb, lotion.

Jordan Smith: And then the swing.

Merry Alice Gomez: And the mechanical baby swing. It blew me away. That’s why I said, “It’s too much,” because to me, I guess I’ve been a little tight to spend money. But to me, it was just — like I said, I never seen it. Nobody’s ever done that. And I felt low too because it wasn’t his baby. I said, “This is too much!” He was like, dumped it right there on the coffee table and there you go. That was the opening of the gift.

Liliana Segura: Merry Alice posed for a photo, the gifts piled on the coffee table in front of her. She’s got a big smile on her face and is wearing a T-shirt with balloons and the word “Mommy” across the front. Sitting off to her side on the sofa is Charles, in a striped button-down. He’s looking down with a slight smile on his face.

Merry Alice Gomez: He didn’t like taking pictures. He was always turning away. I kept telling him, “Scoot closer,” and he said, “No, you take pictures,” so that’s why we were that far apart.

Jordan Smith: Merry Alice’s son, Christopher, was born in early September 1992. Charles wasn’t there. She had a C-section. But he showed up right after. There are photos of him and Merry Alice in her hospital room. Where he was sitting off to the side at the baby shower, he’s now up close and personal.

Merry Alice Gomez: He came after work one day and said, “I’m going to spend the night even if they don’t let me.” But the nurse came in and she said, “You want me to get a blanket and pillow? Are you staying? OK,” and she went and got it.

I always told them that he served me like Jesus did, served his apostles. He gave me a rocking chair. Never had a man to bring me a chair. He would wash my feet and put lotion on them knowing I couldn’t bend down. And my son had colic for three days straight, and there he was, just holding him and rocking him.

Jordan Smith: He was gentle with Chris?

Merry Alice Gomez: Yes. Like a father, like I said.

Jordan Smith: Merry Alice says her mother fell in love with Charles after seeing how devoted he was to her daughter.

Merry Alice Gomez: She saw how he was with me and my son. She saw how he was with me when I was big and pregnant. Like I said, around us, around my house, Charles was something we never seen. The unconditional love that he showed towards us, towards me.

Liliana Segura: Charles had never seen this kind of love either. His father, Charles Elvis Raby, left his mom when he was just a baby. Charles Elvis had his share of run-ins with the law too. Most recently, he was sentenced to 60 years for aggravated robbery.

We wrote to him in prison, early on in our reporting. In March 2020, he wrote back and said that he regretted not being there for Charles when he was a kid. “I was not a very good person back then and I abandoned all my responsibility as a father to Charles,” he wrote.

Jordan Smith: After Christopher was born, Charles and Merry Alice were pretty much inseparable. He drew a picture that Merry Alice hung behind Christopher’s crib. You can see it in the background of one of the photos she brought to our first interview.

Merry Alice Gomez: See, this is the drawing that he had, so I always kept it hung over his crib.

Jordan Smith: What is this?

Merry Alice Gomez: A drawing of a rose with my name on top, and then the middle heart says “Christopher, Little C,” and then the bottom heart says “Charles, Big C.”

Jordan Smith: One day, Charles announced that Bobby Hebb’s 1966 hit “Sunny” was Christopher’s song.

[Excerpt of “Sunny” by Bobby Hebb plays]

Sunny, yesterday my life was filled with rain
Sunny, you smiled at me …

Jordan Smith: Merry Alice still gets emotional when she hears it. In October 1992, she asked Charles to marry her. “One day,” he told her.

Liliana Segura: They ended up having a future together — just not the one they were planning.

Right when it looked like they had their lives together ahead of them, Edna Franklin was murdered on October 15, 1992. And Franklin’s grandsons, Eric Benge and Lee Rose, quickly named Charles as a suspect.

The cops jumped on this and spent the next few days running around Houston looking for him. They went everywhere Charles was known to spend time: his mother’s place and then Merry Alice’s place. They might’ve caught up with him there, but his mom called, giving him the heads up. He went out the back door just before the cops arrived. This happened on Friday, October 16 — not even 24 hours after the murder.

Jordan Smith: By Sunday afternoon, Charles, Merry Alice, and baby Christopher were together again, at Charles’s mother’s boyfriend’s house on Reid Street, just blocks away from Franklin’s place. They sat on the porch and talked. Merry Alice remembers it was a lovely evening; breezy.

They decided Charles would turn himself in the next morning. They held hands. That’s when she asked him to marry her. As it turned out, they both had marriage on the mind. That same day, Charles had asked his aunt, Charlotte, “How do you go about marrying someone?” Charlotte actually told the cops about that conversation. But as with everything else that didn’t fit their chosen narrative, it appears they never wondered: Why would a man facing a murder charge be more concerned with the mechanics of marriage than with getting the hell out of town? It’s a small detail, but a curious one.

Liliana Segura: As Merry Alice would later explain to Charles’s attorney, Sarah Frazier, that night they “made love” for the first time. The next morning, before Charles headed out for the police station, the cops showed up at the Reid Street house. They put Charles in one car and Merry Alice and Christopher in another. According to Charles, he thought they were taking Merry Alice home.

Jordan Smith: He had good reason for concern. Merry Alice recalled being threatened by one of the investigators, Sgt. Wayne Wendel. He said that police could arrest her and take her baby away.

Merry Alice Gomez: Wendel said, “Ma’am,” he goes, “You know we can get you for aiding and abetting and take your son to foster care?” And I said, “You know what?” I said, “My female family members will care for my son.” I said, “I will rot in this place until he comes home,” I said, “because he did not do it.”

Jordan Smith: According to Merry Alice, she didn’t realize that Charles had confessed until Wendel told her.

Merry Alice Gomez: Wendel helped me to get my stuff and went and got in his car, and I said, “When is Charles coming home?” And he said, “Ma’am, he signed a confession.” And I said, “What?”

Liliana Segura: A couple days later, Merry Alice went to visit Charles at the Harris County jail.

Merry Alice Gomez: He said, “Well, they told me they were going to put you — you know, lock you up,” and I said, “I didn’t care, man.” I said, “My God.” He laid his life down. The courts can’t see he did it out of love.

Liliana Segura: By the time Charles was put on trial in the summer of 1994, Merry Alice was pregnant with her second child.

Jordan Smith: Let’s take a moment to look back on Charles’s trial. It was a shit show. There was no physical evidence linking him to the murder. And the state hid forensic evidence that undercut their theory of the crime.

Charles’s lawyers, Felix Cantu and Michael Fosher, failed to object to all kinds of testimony. And then, after the state rested its case, they decided not to call any witnesses. Instead, in their closing arguments, they conceded Charles’s guilt.

Liliana Segura: Merry Alice was called as a witness by the state. The prosecutor, Roberto Gutierrez, never talked to her before the trial. And the first time she saw him, in court, he pressed her about whether Charles had ever confessed to her.

Merry Alice Gomez: I said, “I’m not saying anything.” And he goes, “But look, look. You want to look at the pictures? Look, look.” And he laid them all on that thing up front, and I just turned away. I could see some images from the corner of my eye.

Liliana Segura: The pictures she’s talking about are the crime scene photos from the murder. We’ve looked at them, and they’re pretty graphic and upsetting.

Ideally, a lawyer would prepare their witness so that they know what to expect when they testify and feel comfortable on the stand. This is the exact opposite of that. It almost seemed like Gutierrez was trying to scare her — and shake her confidence in Charles.

Jordan Smith: Ultimately, her testimony was brief. It started with what should’ve been a straightforward line of questioning by Gutierrez. But it ended up being really awkward. We got a couple actors to read it for you.

Robert Gutierrez (Actor): Do you recall whether or not back in October of 1992, how long it was you had known Mr. Raby?

Merry Alice Gomez (Actor): I met him in November of ’92.

Robert Gutierrez (Actor): When?

Merry Alice Gomez (Actor): November ’92.

Robert Gutierrez (Actor): November of ’92? Well, did you meet him before or after he was arrested?

Merry Alice Gomez (Actor): Before.

Robert Gutierrez (Actor): How many months before he was arrested on this case did you meet him?

Merry Alice Gomez (Actor): Can you repeat the question?

Robert Gutierrez (Actor): Sure. Do you agree with the fact that as of the day he was arrested … that you had known him for about two months?

Merry Alice Gomez (Actor): Yes.

Jordan Smith: Two months. This obviously isn’t true. Merry Alice met Charles in 1989, not 1992. Keep that in mind. We’ll get back to it in a second.

The rest of the testimony was pretty pointless, unless the point was to undercut the idea that Merry Alice and Charles were in a meaningful relationship — one strong enough that he would confess to murder in order to protect her.

Gutierrez also asked her about being pregnant. Was she carrying Charles’s kid? No, she said. What about her other kid, Christopher? Was that Charles’s baby? No. Again, the line of questions seemed designed not only to shame Merry Alice, but also to emphasize that her relationship with Charles couldn’t have been all that serious.

Liliana Segura: All of this presented Charles’s lawyers with an opportunity to set the record straight when it came time to cross-examine Merry Alice. Instead, they asked no questions at all — which brings us back to the weird exchange between Gutierrez and Merry Alice about when she’d met Charles.

According to Merry Alice, she was thrown off by that question because of instructions given to her by Felix Cantu, Charles’s lead attorney. He didn’t want the jury to know that she’d met Charles while he was in jail back in 1989. Because it would make Charles look bad.

Merry Alice Gomez: Mr. Cantu, he did tell me, “You don’t want to tell them that you met him while he was in jail because that’d just put doubt in the jury’s mind.” That’s what he told me. So I said, “OK.” He goes, “Just tell them that you met him at his grandmother’s at a dinner or something, after church or something.”

Jordan Smith: But is that true?

Merry Alice Gomez: Mm-mmm [negative]. And then he gave me a date —

Jordan Smith: So he was basically suggesting you make something up?

Merry Alice Gomez: And then he gave me a date and everything. That’s why I even got confused with the dates.

Liliana Segura: We asked Cantu about this. In an email, he wrote, “I never asked Ms. Gomez to lie on the witness stand.” He said he just didn’t want her to “volunteer” that she and Charles had met while Charles was locked up on aggravated robbery charges.

It’s understandable that a defense attorney wouldn’t want something like that brought in. But the truth is that Merry Alice met Charles in 1989, when he was in jail on different charges. And whether he meant to or not, Cantu put her in a really awkward and pretty stressful position.

Liliana Segura: Did you think that Charles’s lawyers thought he was guilty?

Merry Alice Gomez: Mm-hmm. He was — didn’t prepare, didn’t investigate, didn’t do anything, didn’t talk to anybody. I would call his aunt and say, “Has his lawyer called you?” “No.” “Has his lawyer called you?” “No.” “Anything?” “No.”

Jordan Smith: Cantu told us he didn’t recall exactly what he or his co-counsel, Michael Fosher, did to reach out to Charles’s family. But he also said they never reached out to him.

In fairness to Cantu, he did call Merry Alice and her mother, Aurora, as witnesses later on, during the sentencing phase of the trial. So they had a chance to describe how Charles was a loving and supportive boyfriend.

On cross-examination, Gutierrez asked Aurora about her interactions with Charles before the murder. “Now, at the time that Charles was in your home, he gave you no indication that he was going to kill anybody?” he asked. No, she replied. Well, knowing what she knew now, would she be comfortable having Charles in her home? “Well, I really don’t know,” she said, “because I’m not sure if he did it or not.”

Aurora might still have had doubts, but the jurors had already convicted Charles, and in June 1994, they sentenced him to death. Still, Merry Alice stood by Charles at great personal cost.

Merry Alice Gomez: All my neighbors quit talking to me. I’ve had threats. I had phone calls. I had things thrown on my porch. “Quit helping him or else.”

Jordan Smith: This is in part why she felt so vindicated by the news that DNA had been recovered from under Franklin’s fingernails — DNA that didn’t match Charles.

When the Houston Chronicle wrote a story about it in the summer of 2009, she carried a copy of it with her everywhere. She wanted the whole world to know.

Merry Alice: I carried a clear bag because I’m not your girly type, pretty purse like that. That newspaper, I carried it facing out. I went to church, I went everywhere with it facing out.

Liliana Segura: Merry Alice carried a clear plastic purse so people could see the headline: “Inmate’s case puts HPD crime lab back in spotlight.” The article had some choice quotes from Charles’s attorney, Sarah Frazier. “Trying to pretend that Mr. Raby’s trial was at all legitimate is becoming more and more strained,” she said. “He clearly is entitled to a new trial after all this time.”

Of course, as we’ve previously discussed, the DNA evidence wasn’t enough to exonerate Charles. But from the first time we met Merry Alice, it was clear she was not giving up.

Jordan Smith: You feel confident he’s going to get out.

Merry Alice Gomez: Mm-hmm. I can’t think no other way. I serve an awesome God, and Charles is still alive. I believe that. That’s what I hold onto.

Liliana Segura: I guess, just for the record, we’re here at a McDonald’s on — what is this neighborhood?

Merry Alice Gomez: North Lane and I-45.

Liliana Segura: The next time we saw Merry Alice was in November 2019. We met her at a McDonald’s and talked near the play area as Christmas music played through the speakers. She said she’d recently told her family that she planned to be more public in advocating for Charles.

Merry Alice Gomez: I did a little presentation in front of my family Saturday, and they said they would be supportive of me.

Jordan Smith: We hoped we’d be able to meet members of her family, including her mom. And we assumed we’d have plenty of time to do this.

But then: pandemic.

It ended up being months before we’d catch up with Merry Alice again. We finally got her on the phone in May 2020. Like so many others, she’d struggled during the early phases of the pandemic. But she was also really on the ball. She’s worked in health care for years, taking care of elderly dementia patients.

Merry Alice Gomez: I guess early March I started wearing my face masks. At that time, I just went to storage and pulled out my little sewing machine. I said, “God, I want to be a part of that.” So I started making face masks. My daughter is a foreman at the Port of Houston. And so she wore one of my masks, and next thing you know, all the guys wanted one.

Jordan Smith: Where many people were upset when Texas shut down prison visits, Merry Alice was relieved. She felt like Charles would be better protected from the virus that way.

Merry Alice Gomez: The last time that I saw him, I think it was February. I told him, I said, “I will not be surprised if they shut this place down.” I said, “That would be the best thing. They need to stop visits.” And sure enough, the next week, that very next Monday or whatever, no more visits.

Jordan Smith: But she also acknowledged feeling really depressed as the pandemic set in. And she relied on Charles for support. He kept her motivated.

Merry Alice Gomez: I went three days without leaving the bed, literally. I would talk to Charles, and I told him, “Nothing’s the same. Nothing’s the same. And this is not the same, and this is not the same.” And that’s when he said, “Get ahold of yourself.”

He’s always looked out for my best interests, all the time, no matter what. There’s an article on my refrigerator that he sent me, and it’s about what herbs to start cooking with that will boost your immune system.

Liliana Segura: The next time we talked to her was in late June. Houston was getting hit hard by Covid.

Liliana Segura: Hey, Merry Alice.

Merry Alice Gomez: Hello, how are you?

Liliana: OK, how are you?

Liliana Segura: Things were getting so bad all around her, it was hard to keep up. Earlier in the month, she’d gotten a letter that shocked her. It was from Charles’s dad, Charles Elvis.

In recent years, Merry Alice had been trying to help facilitate a relationship between him and his son. It wasn’t easy, especially with both of them in prison. Now, Charles Elvis was writing her to say that he was sick with Covid.

Merry Alice Gomez: I literally fell to my knees. 

It just says, “Hey Merry Alice I have to keep this short. Now I tested positive with the virus and I’ve never been sicker in my entire life and so far I’m not getting any better.”

“I can’t really tell you much because I really don’t know what’s happening with me. I’m good with our Lord but maybe a prayer wouldn’t hurt.”

Liliana Segura: Charles Elvis would eventually recover. But we could tell Merry Alice was pretty stressed out. She was trying to keep herself safe, keep her elderly patients safe, tend to her family’s needs, and to Charles’s needs.

Merry Alice Gomez: I’ve gone to church. Sunday, I went for the first time, last Sunday. There was distance, and people had masks on. I just needed to get back to church.

Liliana Segura: By August 2020, the virus had made it to death row. And despite the ongoing pandemic, the state of Texas had decided to carry out an execution.

ABC 13 (News Anchor): Here are some of the big stories we’re following today. In Huntsville, a man is scheduled to be executed tonight. Billy Wardlow shot and killed an 82-year-old man in northeast Texas during a 1993 robbery when he was 20. Wardlow’s execution will be the first during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Liliana Segura: Merry Alice was feeling burnt out and even more vulnerable. So that execution hit her harder than others had over the years. She told us Charles was struggling too.

Liliana Segura: Merry Alice, how’s Charles doing?

Merry Alice Gomez: Well, nervous, scared. Finally it’s gotten into death row, the virus. So I don’t know, I don’t know. He hardly doesn’t write me. I don’t know if he was going through a bout of depression, I don’t know what’s going on. So he just tells me, “I’ve been sleeping a lot, way too much. Sleeping a lot, way too much. I don’t want to do nothing, I don’t want to work out, I don’t want to.” I say, “Yeah, I’m feeling the same way right now.”

Jordan Smith: There was also a growing tension in their relationship. Charles always had tasks for Merry Alice related to his case. He was always asking her to make copies of things that he wanted to be sure his lawyers saw, things he thought would help his appeals. This was going on long before the pandemic. And when it hit, he didn’t stop. She was getting increasingly frustrated with him about it.

Merry Alice Gomez: He’s sending me a bunch of stuff. It’s getting overwhelming, but he says, “It’s got to get done, it’s got to get done.” So that makes me feel good because he trusts me 100 percent. But other than that, we don’t talk about the future, we don’t talk about anything other than the case.

Jordan Smith: Part of the problem was that Charles seemed not to understand how much the outside world had changed — because of the pandemic, but also in general since the early 1990s. For example, at one point Merry Alice sent him a bunch of things she’d printed out for him — copies of case-related photos and documents — because he wanted to see how they looked. But instead of sending them back to her so she could scan and email them to his lawyers, he mailed them directly to the lawyers — to their office.

Merry Alice Gomez: And now, I said, “Why did you do that? Send them back to me and I scan them and I’ll send them to them, email.” Oh, he didn’t trust that. He didn’t trust that they were going to come out with the same color, the same texture, and all that. And I said, “Why did you do that? They went to the office. Nobody’s in their office, Charles.”

Liliana Segura: They were losing patience with one another. Charles was nitpicking about the copies. Merry Alice was pushing back, telling him she couldn’t spend all her time at Office Depot. They seemed to be having the same argument over and over again.

Merry Alice Gomez: It’s almost like dealing with one of my patients, having to repeat myself and repeat. And that’s a lot. That’s a lot, a lot of times.

And like I said, I’m getting older and trying to take care of myself now, looking for the next 10 years: How am I going to take care of myself? And I got to think some more, and just something in my brain wore out of thinking for other people.

Jordan Smith: It was clear that Merry Alice was starting to reevaluate things in her life. She had always put others first. Maybe it was time to put herself first. She bought herself a leather reclining chair. As a treat, she told us.

Liliana Segura: And she bought something else she told us she’d wanted her whole life.

Merry Alice Gomez: I finally went and bought me a gun. [laughs]

Liliana Segura: A gun?

Merry Alice Gomez: Mm-hmm. Nobody could believe it, but I said, “You know what, y’all don’t know me — that I wanted one forever.” I’ve always wanted to have one. And so I’ve been practicing, I’m real good.

Jordan Smith: Where have you been going to shoot the gun? What range you been going to?

Merry Alice: This one off of 45. People are nice, and I just forget the world when I’m in there. It takes me somewhere else. Gives me peace.

Liliana Segura: She was dreaming about buying a piece of property and a house — just getting out of the city.

Jordan Smith: Where would you want to have property if you could? Where would you want to go?

Merry Alice Gomez: Well, I don’t know. Probably, I guess between Humble and Splendor, maybe.

Jordan Smith: So you wouldn’t go very far.

Merry Alice Gomez: No, I couldn’t do that right now. Like I said, number one, because of Charles, I can’t go too far. I’m always going to stay right here because of that.

Jordan Smith: She’d lost two loved ones to Covid, she told us. And two of her uncles, down in Mexico, had died suddenly in tragic circumstances. She’d bought a used car and was still thinking about buying some land outside of town.

Jordan Smith: Have you talked to Charles recently?

Merry Alice Gomez: Not much. I’m kind of upset with him. A big old misunderstanding. It was strange. He just didn’t understand that everything was shut down, couldn’t do nothing. I said, “I can’t even get ink unless I order it, Charles, for my printer.” Then he didn’t like the way my prints were coming out. “They don’t look good” and “They’re not clear enough.” I said, “Whoa, wait a minute. I bought this printer to make T-shirts, not to be printing you exhibits.” He’s like, “Oh, that.” A big old mess. I wasn’t doing it fast enough, I guess. He just started blowing up on me like I never imagined he would.

Jordan Smith: He was bickering with her again about making copies. The same old problem. But as Merry Alice went on, it started to feel like things were escalating. It wasn’t just about the copies.

Liliana Segura: Merry Alice, can I go back to something you said? You said something about how Charles exploded at you in a way that you never thought he would. What exactly happened there?

Merry Alice Gomez: Well, I’ve always confided in him, told him everything. We talk. He’s the only person in the whole world that I could trust. And little by little, he just started throwing things in my face. I’m like, “Whoa.” I said, “I thought that was confident. I thought that was just something I talked to you about, and you’re going to bring that up now?” Just everything he was holding, everything against me.

He even mentioned one time because I told him, “You have not and cannot earn to speak to me this way.” He wrote back, and he says, “I think I earned the right to speak to you this way the day I signed that paper.” And to me, that cut my heart strings completely.

Jordan Smith: Signed what paper?

Merry Alice Gomez: I guess that false confession.

Jordan Smith: Oh.

Liliana Segura: This was a devastating thing for Merry Alice to hear. Charles was basically holding her responsible for what had become of his life. It wasn’t fair. And it was cruel.

Charles and Merry Alice are on far better footing now. But this was a real low point in their relationship because, as Merry Alice saw it, it was actually Charles who didn’t hold up his end of the bargain.

They’d talked about getting married and had planned a life together. She had dreams of becoming a translator. Charles was going to stay home and take care of Christopher. And then he signed the confession.

Merry Alice Gomez: I told him, I said, “I was supposed to be a translator. You were supposed to stay home with Chris.” I wanted to be a translator for Mexico and France. I wanted to speak French and Spanish. That’s what I wanted to do. We had it all planned out. Why he signed it, I don’t know why. He said he did it for me; he said he did it for my son. I told him, I said, “I would’ve fought.” It’s hard to say, but 28 and a half years later, I’m still shedding tears over him.

Jordan Smith: Next time on Murderville, Texas: “Memories.”

Karianne Wright: Just know that if you’re beating down a path to try and prove this man’s innocent, you are wrong. You are wrong. 

Jeff Page: I really connected with him because I felt like, if he only had a chance, maybe he could do better. But in the environment he lived in, I said, “He really doesn’t have a chance.” And it was very sad.

James Jordan: When you got somebody you’re getting ready to juice up on that gurney, why wouldn’t you want to know the truth?

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Texas is a production of The Intercept and First Look Media.

Andrea Jones is our story editor. Julia Scott is senior producer. Truc Nguyen is our podcast fellow. Laura Flynn is supervising producer. Fact-checking by Meerie Jesuthasan. Special thanks to Jack D’Isidoro and Holly DeMuth for additional production assistance. Voice acting on this episode by Vincent Thomas and Edie Salas-Miller.

Our show was mixed by Rick Kwan, with original music by Zach Young. Legal review by David Bralow.

Executive producers are Roger Hodge and Christy Gressman. For The Intercept, Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief.

I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith.

You can read show transcripts and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter: @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/donate. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show. And please do leave us a rating or review; it helps people find us. If you want to give us feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post Episode Seven: Merry Alice appeared first on The Intercept.

Linda McClain has always believed that Charles Raby killed her mother. But when she finds out about the evidence concealed at trial, it raises new questions. And she has insight into the death penalty that most people don’t: Charles isn’t the only person she’s known on Texas’s death row.

Transcript

A quick listener note: This podcast contains adult language and descriptions of violence.

Linda McClain: Well, I don’t talk to reporters as a — I mean, I’ve never had anyone approach me or to talk to me about it. After all these years, people don’t know where people are, and they’re not interested. Why are they interested in this case? I mean, he’s clearly guilty. So nobody’s looking for me to interview me. I haven’t given any interviews to anybody about anything ever.

Liliana Segura: It was just before Christmas 2019 when I got an unexpected tweet from Edna Franklin’s daughter, Linda McClain. This was just a few days after we’d been to death row to meet Charles Raby. And she’d been notified that he had a media visit. Before long, I found myself on the phone with Linda, making plans to meet up the next time Jordan and I were in Houston.

Jordan Smith: This isn’t how things usually go. Reaching out to victims’ families is a critical part of reporting stories like these, but it’s not necessarily the first thing we do. These are delicate matters.

Sometimes the victim’s family wants to talk, but a lot of times, they don’t — and that’s understandable. You’re asking people to revisit some of the most painful and tragic experiences they’ve had. Just bringing it up can be enough to re-traumatize them. This is especially tricky when we’re questioning a conviction.

So it’s not like we weren’t going to contact Linda. What we didn’t expect was that she’d be the one to reach out to us, and that she’d be so willing to talk — and keep talking. We’ve been talking with her on and off for more than two years now, and not just about Charles’s case. We’ve learned a lot about her.

Liliana Segura: But we started with her Twitter feed. In her profile picture, she’s smiling, with the sun on her face. She has long hair and bangs. She’s wearing sunglasses in the shape of shamrocks, along with green Mardi Gras beads. It’s clearly St. Patrick’s Day, and she’s at some kind of outdoor event at a strip mall.

Most of Linda’s tweets were directed at other accounts, expressing her strong opinions about a range of topics. She hates car commercials. She loves Arby’s chicken salad sandwiches. A fan of Kroger; a foe of Walmart.

Jordan Smith: And then there’s true crime. She watches a lot of it. Her last tweets before she contacted us praised the show “Homicide Hunter,” whose latest season was coming to an end. But she also had a lot of complaints. Her biggest beef was that the shows on Investigation Discovery recycled the same stories over and over. She knew these murder cases inside and out. And she wondered why none of these shows looked for new stories to tell — like her mom’s.

[Theme music]

Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Texas. Episode 6, “Linda.”

Jordan Smith: As much as Linda was open to talking, she often reminded us that she was skeptical about what we were doing. She wanted to make sure that we didn’t misrepresent her. And from the start, she was clear that she didn’t exactly align with The Intercept’s progressive values — at least as she perceived them.

Liliana Segura: In our second phone call, I asked if she thought her son, Lee Rose, might also be willing to meet with us. Lee had lived with his grandmother and found her body the night she was murdered.

Liliana Segura: Have you talked to your son at all about the possibility of talking?

Linda McClain: Yeah, I talked to the one son, who said he wouldn’t mind giving an interview. Then I talked to another son who said to be leery of interviews because of the way people misconstrue things.

And I do know that you’re a Democratic magazine, and I am not a Democratic — they’re completely insane. Those people need to be just erased off the planet of the earth. But anyway, it’s neither here nor there.

I don’t know what your goal is. I think that your goal is against the death penalty. That’s what your magazine is about. Not innocence or guilt. Am I right or wrong?

Liliana Segura: She asked us this a lot. Almost every time we talked.

Liliana Segura: We talked about this last time too. You’re right that Jordan and I are both against the death penalty; we’re pretty clear on that. But we also write stories and look into individual cases where there’s a claim about the possibility of a wrongful conviction, where people claim to be innocent.

I completely understand why your son would be concerned, and why you would feel some trepidation, but that’s something we work through with everyone we talk to for all our stories. We’re not interested in manipulating anyone or misrepresenting the facts. That’s just not how we roll, that’s not what we’re about.

Liliana Segura: In February 2020, we met Linda for the first time at Lee’s apartment in Conroe, Texas, just north of Houston.

[Door knocking]

Jordan Smith: Hi. Are you Linda?

Linda McClain: Yes.

Liliana Segura: Hi, sorry — Liliana. Sorry to show up with all this stuff.

Jordan Smith: I’m Jordan, nice to meet you.

Linda McClain: Nice to meet you.

Lee Rose: Hello, how you doing?

Liliana Segura: Lee?

Jordan Smith: Jordan.

Lee Rose: Jordan? That’s my granddaughter’s name.

Jordan Smith: All right, there you go. Good choices.

Liliana Segura: Lee lives with his wife, Cindy, and they seem to have built a happy and cozy home. The living room was decorated in soft pastels, with family photos and a bunch of those wooden wall signs that have inspiring words or Bible quotes in loopy cursive. “Grateful, Thankful, Blessed,” one of them read.

Jordan Smith: Lee is tall. He wore glasses and a pink checkered shirt. He sat on the couch next to his mom, who was wearing a bright yellow shirt. Her toenails were painted pink. They were both friendly but, understandably, also a bit guarded. We told them that we wanted to know more about Franklin.

Liliana Segura: We don’t know much about her as a person before all this happened, and we just really want to learn a little bit more about who she was —

Lee Rose: Oh, OK. Right.

Liliana Segura: — before all of this. We definitely want to talk about the case —

Linda McClain: Well, we know who she was after it.

Liliana Segura: Well, we want to — yeah.

Linda McClain: She was nobody. She was dead.

Liliana Segura: Well, we —

Linda McClain: She was somebody that nobody ever even asks about.

Jordan Smith: Well, we want to talk about her.

Linda McClain: After it happened, she’s nobody.

Jordan Smith: Was she from Houston? Is your family from Houston originally?

Linda McClain: Yeah, she was born in Houston. She lived in the Heights when she was a little girl.

Lee Rose: I mean, she’d do anything for anybody.

Linda McClain: She would because she used to always bail my boyfriends out of jail if they’d get drunk. She was always bailing them out of jail.

Lee Rose: You know, she treated all our friends like her own grandsons.

Linda McClain: Well, she treated all my friends like her own sons.

Lee Rose: Yeah.

Jordan Smith: Franklin worked at First City Bank for 25 years. She’d been retired two years when she was murdered.

Linda McClain: She had the same job ever since I was 8 years old. Seven maybe, 6 or 7, 7, 8? I don’t remember how old we were when she went to work for the bank.

She was a proof operator. It’s the person that runs the checks. And they add it all up with a calculator, with the machine; quite sure they don’t do that now.

She told me once, “Don’t ever give to the United Way. You should see the check that they write for themselves to give their parties at the end of their campaigns.” She said, “You should see this check. It’s ridiculous.” I said, “Yeah. You’re probably right.” I never gave to the United Way again.

People shouldn’t be doing that. You’re just making somebody — giving some CEO a Cadillac or a big house, just like what’s his name, Joel Osteen. Oh God, don’t get me started on him. I can’t talk about Joel Osteen, or I’ll go bananas. We’re not gonna get started on him. We’re trying to talk about Buster and how he deserves to be on death row.

Jordan Smith: This was classic Linda — conversations swinging wildly in different directions.

Liliana Segura: She told us that her parents were married for more than a decade before they had kids.

Linda McClain: She wasn’t like your average mother. She was always older. And she was feisty. I mean, she wouldn’t take crap off anybody. And so that’s one thing about her. She could be both ways.

Lee Rose: Yeah.

Linda McClain: She could let you in, or she could kick you out. Just depended on what you were doing.

Liliana Segura: Linda said her father was an alcoholic, and her mother put up with a lot. But also, by her own telling, Linda, and her sister, were a bit wild. Linda was impressed by how her mother dealt with it all.

Linda McClain: So then my sister and I started acting out. My mother — I don’t know what she was thinking or how she could not have thought, “I’m going to go crazy between these two girls.” She put up with a lot of stuff. She put up with all of our boyfriends and crazy shenanigans, sneaking out of the house, all kinds of stuff.

She never lost it, as far as I know. She never did. I’d have strangled my daughter if she’d have been acting like me. I have a daughter that’s 25 — acts nothing like me. I’m like, “Wow. This is what I’m supposed to have acted like.” Like a quiet person, but no.

She put up with a lot of stuff from my sister and from me. We would get in arguments, like normal teenagers, mothers, and stuff do, and it was no big deal. She bailed the guys out of jail if they got in jail or went to the hospital if they got stabbed. I mean, it was pretty rough back then. [laughs]

Liliana Segura: Hearing this helped put into context why Lee spent so much time at Franklin’s house.

Liliana Segura: So when did you start staying —

Lee Rose: At my grandma’s? Oh, I stayed there all the time.

Linda McClain: You stayed there all forever. Yeah, I was out partying.

Liliana Segura: But Linda didn’t live far from Franklin, just a few blocks away. When she was growing up, the neighborhood felt pretty safe. But she and Lee agreed that things changed in the ’80s. Now, that wasn’t just their neighborhood; in that era, Houston was dealing with a staggering number of homicides.

Liliana Segura: What do you remember about the last time you saw your grandmother?

Lee Rose: Well, the last time I saw my grandmother she was — I left the house to go with a friend of mine, and I left the door unlocked because I did not have a key to the door, and I told her I’d be back in a little while, and that was the last time. Told her I loved her and left. And then came home about 10 o’clock and that’s when me and my cousin discovered her, and she was dead.

I was in shock — I don’t know how to describe it. It was just hard to take in. I just walked in and the lights were off and she was in the living room, and my cousin was already there and it was crazy. Probably the worst thing that night, I had to call my mom and tell her.

Jordan Smith: Linda had spoken to her mother just a few hours earlier. They were both at home, watching different TV shows. Linda was watching “A Current Affair,” the half-hour news magazine first hosted by Maury Povich.

[“A Current Affair” show intro]

Linda McClain: Maury Povich was coming on, about the lady who had the asthma attack, after she got out of the prison in Mexico and she died. And my mother was going to watch “Wheel of Fortune.”

I don’t remember if I asked her if she wanted me to come over there, or I think she said that Lee was going to come back and make something to eat. I don’t remember that part. But I told her I would call her back after the Maury Povich show was over, and I didn’t call her back. 

I stayed at my house and painted my toenails, and I didn’t call her back, and I didn’t go over there. And the next thing I knew it was 10 o’clock, and they were calling me, telling me that she’d been hurt. That was the last I talked to her. I hadn’t seen her for two weeks before then. It had been two weeks since I’d been over there. I don’t know why. I just didn’t go over there.

Linda doesn’t remember much of what happened before the funeral. The funeral was on October 19, 1992: the same day Charles Raby was arrested.

Linda McClain: There was no eulogies or anything like that at her funeral, just a graveside service. I don’t remember a whole lot of the in-between parts, except for: I picked out a gown for her to wear, and it was blue. She hated that.

And all these years later, I think, every once in a while, “Why’d I bury her in a blue gown? I mean, I should have got a purple gown or a lavender gown. Why’d I do that?” Because I know she’s like, “Why is she putting me in this blue gown?” Anyway, I don’t know why I did that. I have no idea. I don’t even know what I was doing. But we did get that done, which was good.

I remember the funeral and people going that I hadn’t seen for years came, which I thought was miraculous. I’m like, “Holy cow.”

Jordan Smith: Throughout our time with Linda and Lee, the conversation frequently turned back to Charles, or “Buster,” as everyone called him — and why they thought he was guilty. It was mostly because they remember him as violent and an asshole, who’d been run off by Franklin a few weeks before her death. That’s why Lee and his cousin gave Charles’s name to the police.

Lee Rose: The only person I could think of was Buster.

Jordan Smith: Why did he come to mind so readily?

Lee Rose: Because he’s the one that she cussed out a week, two weeks before. And I hadn’t seen him in that two-week period. He’s the only one that’s got a mind to do something like that.

Jordan Smith: The other person that Eric mentioned, that maybe you mentioned, was the guy who had been painting the house?

Lee Rose: Oh, Edward? Yeah, Edward was nothing like that. Edward was totally opposite from what Buster is, totally opposite. Edward doesn’t have a mean spot in his body. Back then he didn’t; I don’t know how he is now, I haven’t seen him in 20-something years. But back then he was — I never seen him get mean with nobody. I don’t know. I seen Buster plenty of times get, pull a knife out, quick to pull a knife out; he always had a knife on him. But I’d never seen — I mean, my grandmother liked Edward. She didn’t care too much for Buster.

Jordan Smith: This generally positive impression of Edward Bangs wasn’t enough for Lee and Eric to completely dismiss him as a suspect. After all, they’d given his name to the Houston Police Department too because he’d been around Franklin’s house, painting the outside.

Liliana Segura: It was during this visit that we told Linda and Lee about the blood evidence found back in 1992: that it didn’t match Charles and that the crime lab analyst had lied about it, saying it was inconclusive. There was also the unknown male DNA, developed from blood taken from under Franklin’s fingernails, which also didn’t match Charles. They wanted to know why no one had tested to see if the evidence matched Bangs.

Linda McClain: So they’ve never DNA tested anyone else? They didn’t DNA test Edward?

Jordan Smith: Well, no. 

Linda McClain: They didn’t DNA test Edward?

Jordan Smith: Who?

Linda McClain: Edward.

Jordan Smith: Bangs?

Linda McClain: Yes. They didn’t DNA test him? Why wouldn’t they have DNA tested him then?

Liliana Segura: I know that this is a lot to take in, but it strikes me that your mind went to Edward. Why did you —

Linda McClain: Because he had been painting the house. He was the only other male person that had been around there.

Lee Rose: Yeah. Like I said, I had never seen him get mean.

Linda McClain: I mean, there’s only so many people you can choose from.

Liliana Segura: Franklin’s murder was deeply traumatic for Linda and her family. Everyone seems to have dealt with it in their own way. One of Linda’s sons became a forensic pathologist. Lee said it was because his brother wanted to better understand death. Before Franklin was killed, Lee and his cousin, Eric Benge, both partied pretty hard. But after the murder, things got serious. Eric’s substance abuse was compounded by the fact that he continued to live in his grandmother’s house on Westford Street.

Liliana Segura: What was the impact? How did it impact your family?

Lee Rose: Well, I turned to drugs and alcohol, and my cousin turned to drugs and alcohol for a numerous of years. I think, if he would’ve left the house, if he wouldn’t have stayed there all these years, if he would’ve moved out and maybe rented it out to somebody, he might be still here. But every year around October, he would drink, and he was addicted to pain pills, and he would take pills and drink and just live in misery from what happened. And he just couldn’t handle it.

Jordan Smith: When Eric’s mom died in 2012, it was another blow.

Lee Rose: He just spiraled out of control. And when she passed away, it was like, man, it just hit him hard. That’s probably what did it.

Jordan Smith: In October of that same year, within days of the anniversary of Franklin’s murder, Eric was killed on Interstate 10. He’d taken a bunch of pills and crashed into an 18-wheeler. The whole thing really shook Lee up.

Lee Rose: That was a wake-up for me. I was eating pills too, and that woke me up on that time. I stopped eating pills, but I was still drinking and stuff. And then I quit drinking. I started going to church. I quit drinking. Been going to church ever since.

Liliana Segura: It was obvious that Lee had worked hard to overcome quite a lot of trauma. He’d really turned his life around. Part of that was his faith. But he also told us that part of it was forgiving Charles.

Lee Rose: I forgave Buster. He says he didn’t do it. I mean, if he didn’t do it, he shouldn’t have confessed to it, that’s all I’m saying, but I forgive him for doing it. I mean, it’s the only way I can move forward, if I forgive him. I don’t forget it, but I forgive him, and I don’t want nothing to do with him.

Liliana Segura: When did you decide that you were ready to forgive Buster?

Lee Rose: When I started going to church. You gotta move forward. That’s probably what I’d write him if I wrote him a letter. Well, that’s part of it, tell him that I forgive him, and then, if you didn’t do it, you should’ve never said you did it. I mean, that is a horrible crime to admit to. I just, I don’t know.

Jordan Smith: As we reflected on our visit, a couple things were clear. Neither Linda nor Lee had found any closure around Franklin’s murder — the closure prosecutors often promise that families will feel after a conviction. And while Lee had found some measure of peace through forgiveness, Linda was just not in the same place.

Linda McClain: I don’t think anything can give people closure. The only way I would think you could get closure is if someone was missing and you found them. Either they were dead, or they were alive. That, to me, you might be able to get closure. But it never gets any better. It doesn’t really change.

Jordan Smith: Every year, Linda pulls out the last birthday card she ever got from her mom. And she thinks about how old her mother would’ve been that same year.

Linda McClain: But I can say that, on November 27, it would’ve been her 100th birthday. So I can finally say that I’m absolutely for certain she would not be here any longer. So I can put that part to rest.

Jordan Smith: We followed up with Linda a few days later. We wanted to see how she was doing. She told us she was surprised by how emotional Lee had gotten during our visit.

Linda McClain: I’ve never seen Lee like that. I was like, oh my God, please don’t start crying, Lee. He’s a very emotional person. He cries about silly things. He’s like a big baby. He’s a big baby. He’s always been the one that cried all the time for nothing.

I felt so bad, but what can you do? If I had grabbed him and hugged him, then I probably would’ve started crying and that wouldn’t have worked. That’s what happens to people if you’re upset. Somebody grabs you and hugs you, it makes it worse. It’s like, don’t say anything. You know what I mean?

If you say something to somebody, it makes it 50 times worse. Don’t say anything. Don’t say “I’m sorry that happened” or anything. Whatever you do, don’t say “I’m sorry to hear that.” That makes me so mad when people say “I’m sorry to hear that.” Do you know what that sounds like? It sounds like they’re sorry to hear it. Well, I’m sorry I told you then.

Jordan Smith: As for talking with us again, Linda was skeptical. She didn’t want to be seen as advocating for Charles.

Linda McClain: I can’t fight for him. I don’t want him out of prison.

Liliana Segura: But she also clearly wanted to talk — and was frankly more accommodating than most people are.

Linda McClain: Hello?

Liliana Segura: Hi, Linda. Can you hear me?

Linda McClain: I can hear you, yes, but can you hear me?

Liliana Segura: I think so. It sounds OK.

Linda McClain: I have like a fraction of a bar.

Liliana Segura: Linda told me she was staying at her beach house and got terrible service everywhere except her bathroom. So we set up a time to talk when she would be waiting for the call in her bathroom.

Linda McClain: I’m in the bathroom, and it’s fine because it’s kind of a big bathroom.

Liliana Segura: I reassured her that we weren’t going to present her as advocating for Charles.

Liliana Segura: Like I say, we’re not trying to convince you to do any one thing or think any one thing, but we certainly think you’ve got a story to tell that we think is really important.

Linda McClain: You better hurry, because I’m 66 now and I may be dead any minute.

Liliana Segura: Linda has had a cinematic life, full of wild spontaneity but also tragic losses. She’s lost her mother, her sister, her nephew, and her husband in unexpected or violent ways. She asked if I’d ever seen the movie “Steel Magnolias.”

Linda McClain: You don’t remember that line in “Steel Magnolias”? Truvy says it. Truvy is telling Annelle:

Dolly Parton as Truvy Jones: I have to tell you when it comes to suffering, she’s right up there with Elizabeth Taylor.

Jordan Smith: There’s another piece of her story that we couldn’t possibly have anticipated — one that has forced her to grapple more directly with the death penalty than most people do. It comes into play every time we talk about her mother’s murder and Charles’s conviction.

Charles isn’t the only person she’s known on Texas death row. In the early 2000s, Linda moved from Houston to the Fort Worth suburbs. She’d been living up there about a year when she got a call from a friend back home.

Linda McClain: My friend called me, and she’s like, “You’ll never guess who they arrested for being a serial killer.” And I’m like, “Who? Who is it?”

KPRC Houston: Some breaking news. A 90-day reprieve for one of Houston’s most notorious criminals, the so-called Tourniquet Killer. Anthony Allen Shore confessed to the murders of at least three girls and one woman between 1986 and 1995.

Jordan Smith: Anthony Shore was an infamous Houston serial killer who murdered four people over the course of a decade. He confessed to raping two of them. His youngest victim was 9. He was known as the tourniquet killer because of the homemade garrots he used to strangle his victims.

Liliana Segura: He managed to go undetected for years for a couple reasons. For starters, he was something of a charmer. Linda met him because they both worked for Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. Shore hung phone lines. He had the nickname Telephone Tony.

Linda McClain: We hung around together a lot. We went to lunch all the time. We went out on boats. And he was always, well, everybody else said they thought he was strange. But I never really saw it except he’d make strange little remarks about the way I looked or something. But that didn’t bother me. I didn’t care.

Liliana Segura: But behind closed doors, he was a tyrant. He terrorized his two daughters in truly sadistic ways and ultimately pleaded guilty to molesting them. In return, he had to pay a fine and was sentenced to eight years’ probation. As part of that deal, he also had to provide the cops with a DNA sample. And yet, because of the dysfunction in the Houston Police crime lab, the cops still didn’t connect him to the string of unsolved murders.

Police had found DNA on his second victim, who Shore raped and murdered in 1992. But the lab never tested the sample. In an in-depth story about Shore published in 2004, the Houston Press repeatedly asked why the evidence had never been tested, but police wouldn’t say.

Jordan Smith: That the lab never tested the evidence wasn’t exactly surprising. According to the Bromwich reports, which revealed the findings of the independent investigation into the HPD crime lab, this was a common problem. The lab would get evidence sufficient for DNA testing and then just never do it.

After the HPD lab’s DNA section was shuttered, evidence from that 1992 case was finally tested by a different lab. It matched Shore. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 2004.

Like many others, Linda was shocked to hear the truth about Shore. Years later, when he was facing an execution date, she wrote him a letter, asking if he’d ever considered killing her. No, he wrote in return.

Before he was executed in 2018, Linda went to Huntsville to visit him. She told us about this when we went up to her home outside Fort Worth, just days before the country went into pandemic lockdown.

Liliana Segura: Hi! Oh, I like your sign.

Jordan Smith: Hi.

Linda McClain: Hi.

Liliana Segura: “There’s always room for one more dog.”

Jordan Smith: Oh, yeah.

Liliana Segura: How are you?

Linda McClain: There will never be another dog.

Jordan Smith: Linda’s chihuahua sat with us on the couch in her living room. There was a collection of snow globes and seashells, a cabinet full of dolls, and family photos everywhere. There was a picture of her daughter on the table in a frame decorated with ducklings and a girl in a raincoat that said “You’re my shelter from the storm.”

Linda McClain: There wasn’t any fanfare when Tony got executed. There was hardly anything, nothing. But you know what? I guess most of the populace knew what he had done. I don’t know.

Jordan Smith: We asked Linda how it felt to visit Shore right before his scheduled execution.

Linda McClain: I was conflicted because it was stupid — because I know what he did, and I shouldn’t have went to see him. If I hadn’t have gone to see him, it probably would have been OK. I could still envision the monster Tony. But when I went to see him, he was joking and laughing, carrying on. He’s like six hours from being executed, and he’s laughing and joking at me. He’s so weird. He was like, “Well, look, if I don’t get executed this time, will you come back and marry me?” I’m like, “Sure. Why not, Tony? What the hell? I’ve always wanted some notoriety. My kids’ll have a fit.”

Liliana Segura: Did you really say yes?

Linda McClain: I said, “Sure, I’ll come back and marry you.”

Liliana Segura: At that point, did you think he was going to be executed?

Linda McClain: Yes.

Liliana Segura: Linda talks about Shore a lot. She’s pretty matter-of-fact about it, even though the whole situation was extremely traumatic for her. The thing that seems to bother her the most is that she never saw him as a monster. She’s never been able to reconcile the friend she knew with the horrifying things he’d done.

Linda McClain: Who did I see? I saw Tony. I didn’t see Anthony Allen Shore, the monster, and it made me so mad. I’m like, “Why can’t you just act like a monster?” He didn’t act like a monster. I could still hear him talking. He’s laughing and joking and kidding around.

I can still hear him joking and laughing on the day of his execution, just like nothing’s going to happen. It’s like any other day. Like, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” It was just absolutely the strangest thing.

Liliana Segura: On the one hand, he did these horrible things. On the other hand, you knew him as a human being. How do you feel about his execution in terms of — do you think that that’s justice?

Linda McClain: You know, it’s hard to say. The reason is, of course, because of Buster. I’m assuming that possibly, you know, it’s conflicting, but there’s — it’s like Tony was two different people, but Buster’s only one mean person. So there you go. OK. Does this two-different-people person deserve to live? If he did live, he should not have ever been able to get out of prison and live. Never! Because Tony was a dangerous person. I mean, he was a total maniac.

Liliana Segura: This is something she puzzles over a lot. She doesn’t know how to make sense of both Shore and Charles in the context of her life. She wonders what she would see if she went to visit Charles. She thinks he’d just be mean. But if he wasn’t? She’s not sure she’d like that either.

Linda McClain: You know, I kind of felt like going to see him with the rule that we don’t talk about her. And I just want to see what he’s like when I talk to him. What is he like now? What is he gonna do? Is he gonna start having a fit? Is he gonna start screaming and hollering? Is he gonna be sitting there nice and just talking to me about the weather? I just want to see how he acts. Will he act like a normal person? Because, I mean, that’s why he got the death penalty. Because he can’t be around people.

But that’s probably what I would talk about, like, how is it in there, and maybe I’d think of something. Maybe just tell him how Lee’s doing or ask him how he’s doing. See if he can go without saying anything or just how he acts — like with my interaction with Tony. It wasn’t like the murdering Anthony Allen Shore. I’m like, “Where’s the monster? Come on.” I never saw that guy, but I did see the monster in Buster, so there you go. Many people saw the monster in Buster, so which is better? To have the monster all the time so you can be afraid, or the one like Tony?

Jordan Smith: What do you think?

Linda McClain: I don’t know. I think the all-the-time monster is where you can be afraid.

Jordan Smith: A few months later, Linda brought up the idea of talking to Charles again.

Linda McClain: I’d like to hear what he has to say. I’d like to hear the manner of tone he uses, because he’s not a nice person. I don’t care what he says to you guys. He is not a nice person. He is not a nice person.

He can fool you, just like Tony Shore. Tony Shore could fool the damn pants off of somebody, and if he didn’t fool the pants off of you, he would rip them off of you and kill you.

I don’t know what kind of charmer he’s turned into, because he’s never been a charmer to me, not like Tony Shore was. But I don’t know what he got on you two, or why you think he’s so sweet or whatever you think he is. He’s a monster. He’s not sweet. There’s nothing sweet about him.

Jordan Smith: This is another of her concerns. That somehow Charles has done to us what Shore did to her. That we don’t see Charles for who she believes he is.

There’s also something else that’s been bothering her: what we told her about the serology work from 1992 that the state hid. That, combined with the more recent DNA results, troubles her. She understands the significance of this kind of evidence. She’s watched enough true crime, including shows about wrongful convictions. But she really doesn’t know what to do with this information.

Liliana Segura: This is another way in which wrongful convictions are so harmful to the people who believed that their loved one’s murder had been solved. The crime and trial are traumatic enough. But when years or decades later people are confronted with evidence suggesting the state got it wrong, that’s a whole other nightmare.

Linda McClain: I don’t know, I think it’s just more confusing. It’s so confusing. I hate being confused about things. And I don’t understand it. I think they made a mistake. Even though they say they didn’t make a mistake. Well, why are they going to say they did make a mistake? But I don’t understand the whole thing. I don’t understand why, where it came from. It does drive me crazy. Don’t think it doesn’t drive me crazy, because it does. But don’t think I think he’s innocent, because I don’t. He is not innocent.

If it wasn’t for his confession, he might not have gotten convicted. If it wasn’t for him telling what he did that day and what he did that night and what he did the next day, he might not have been convicted. He should’ve never said anything. He should’ve just kept his mouth shut, and we would still be wondering who killed my mother. So why did he do that?

Liliana Segura: We continued to talk to Linda as the pandemic rolled on. She’d taken to painting, recreating Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” or images of Tom and Jerry, her beach house, and a pelican.

She’d also taken to Twitter to criticize Domino’s Pizza for not taking sufficient pandemic precautions. Her daughter worked there and she worried.

Jordan Smith: After watching “The Innocence Files” on Netflix, she told us, she’d become skeptical of the death penalty. Not that she ever expressed real support for it. From day one, she told us over and over that she really didn’t care if Charles was ever executed.

Linda McClain: I just don’t feel like they’re ever going to execute him because of that DNA. But sometimes, I don’t think they care. I’m sure that there have been innocent people executed, and that is really horrible, but I don’t think Buster’s going to be one of them if they ever do decide to execute him. I don’t think he’ll be one of them. So I’m not too worried about that.

Jordan Smith: Linda said she knows innocent people have probably been executed. She doesn’t think Charles will be one of them. In part, it comes back to the confession.

Linda McClain: Why would you confess after four hours, because they have a girl that you barely know and her baby in the other room?

Jordan Smith: She’s talking about Merry Alice Gomez, Charles’s girlfriend.

Lee Rose: I would’ve been like, “All right, do what you got to do. I didn’t do it.”

Jordan Smith: One of the reasons Linda and Lee don’t believe that Charles was coerced into confessing is that, as they understand it, Charles had only known Merry Alice for a brief period of time before the murder. And they knew Charles’s ex-girlfriend, Karianne Wright, who he’d treated like shit. Why would he be different with anyone else? And why would he lie for a woman he barely knew?

Liliana Segura: As it turns out, this premise was incorrect. It’s not their fault they thought that. Anyone watching Charles’s trial would’ve come away with that impression too. But, as with so many aspects of this case, there’s a lot more to the story.

Jordan Smith: Next time on Murderville, Texas: “Merry Alice.”

Merry Alice Gomez: Wendel helped me to get my stuff and went and got in his car, and I said, “When is Charles coming home?” And he said, “Ma’am, he signed a confession.” And I said, “What?”

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Texas is a production of The Intercept and First Look Media.

Andrea Jones is our story editor. Julia Scott is senior producer. Truc Nguyen is our podcast fellow. Laura Flynn is supervising producer. Fact-checking by Meerie Jesuthasan. Special thanks to Jack D’Isidoro and Holly DeMuth for additional production assistance.

Our show was mixed by Rick Kwan, with original music by Zach Young. Legal review by David Bralow.

Executive producers are Roger Hodge and Christy Gressman. For The Intercept, Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief.

I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith.

You can read show transcripts and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter: @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/donate. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show. And please do leave us a rating or review; it helps people find us. If you want to give us feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post Episode Six: Linda appeared first on The Intercept.

Foreign DNA is found under Edna Franklin’s fingernails. And in the wake of a scandal within the Houston police crime lab, Charles Raby’s lawyers discover that forensic evidence was hidden from the defense at trial.

Transcript

A quick listener note: This podcast contains adult language and descriptions of violence.

Sarah Frazier: May it please the court, good morning. My name is Sarah Frazier. I represent Mr. Raby. This is a case pending out of Harris County.

In 2005, this court granted DNA testing in this case. With this appeal, I’m asking the court to reject the District Court’s Article 64.04 findings and rule that DNA results in this case are favorable to Mr. Raby for this reason.

They show a complete DNA profile from a man’s blood left under the decedent’s left hand fingernails at her death — and it is not Mr. Raby.

Liliana Segura: Sarah Frazier has been on Charles Raby’s case since 2001. She was just a rookie lawyer then, working for a fancy civil law firm that would sometimes take on death row clients pro bono. Charles’s first round of appeals — at the state level — had failed. Like all people on death row, he was entitled to federal review. So the federal judge handling the case appointed Sarah, along with some of her colleagues to represent him.

Jordan Smith: It wasn’t long after this that she asked the courts to grant DNA testing on a number of key items that had never been analyzed. Texas had recently passed a law making it easier to seek post-conviction DNA testing, and Sarah and her team thought that DNA evidence might exonerate Charles. But in order to get anything tested all these years later, Sarah had to seek permission in the court where Charles was tried.

Liliana Segura: Asking for DNA testing might seem reasonable in any death penalty case, but prosecutors often fight hard against it. And the courts are often reluctant to grant it. That’s exactly what happened here.

The prosecutors balked, and the trial judge in Houston denied testing. So Sarah appealed that ruling to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, or the CCA. That’s who you heard her talking to.

Jordan Smith: There were plenty of reasons to think this would be futile. The CCA is notoriously conservative and, over the years, has really gone out of its way to interpret the state’s DNA testing law in order to deny defendants access.

So when the CCA agreed with Sarah that the evidence in Charles’s case should be tested, it was a big deal. It actually made headlines. It was the first time that the CCA had overruled a lower court’s decision to deny testing. And the result of that testing was huge: It revealed a DNA profile from an unknown male in the blood crusted under Edna Franklin’s fingernails.

Remember, there was no physical evidence tying Charles to the crime. And the autopsy revealed defensive wounds on Franklin’s body, meaning she’d fought with her attacker. So it was reasonable to think that she’d gotten a piece of him. The DNA testing indicated that she had, and that it wasn’t Charles Raby; it was someone else altogether. To Sarah, this was proof that Charles was innocent.

[Theme music]

Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Texas: Episode 5, “The Evidence.”

Sarah Frazier: I’m Sarah Frazier. I have been representing Charles Raby, along with a team of people, since 2001.

When Sarah was appointed to represent Charles, she didn’t have any experience with criminal cases — aside from what she’d seen in the courtroom during her time clerking for a federal judge. It was during that clerkship that she was first exposed to questionable forensic evidence.

Sarah Frazier: There was one habeas corpus case involving a murderer among the Lumbee Indians in North Carolina, which was really pretty crazy. That was a crazy story. And that was definitely interesting to me.

Liliana Segura: The case involved a man accused of shooting, stabbing, and dumping a guy in a river. A bloody footprint had been left nearby. To tie the man to the footprint, the state called a supposed forensic expert named Louise Robbins, whose claim to fame was the uncanny ability to match footprints at a crime scene to the person who left them.

Sarah Frazier: There was this spurious footprint expert who said that she could tell by someone’s even shoeprint their height, weight, and socioeconomic status. And that was the expert evidence against this guy.

Jordan Smith: Sarah thought this was ridiculous and utterly unscientific. Apparently the prosecution had shopped for an expert, and only Robbins would give them what they wanted.

Sarah Frazier: The rigor of the science was important to me, I would say. It was not OK that the prosecution in that case had gone through a number of experts who just would not testify to what they needed against this person, and so they ended up with Louise Robbins. She was the go-to prosecution witness for a while. But in the end, the judge ruled that it didn’t change the result because of other evidence. So there we were.

Jordan Smith: What Sarah didn’t know at the time was that Robbins was part of a much larger problem: that junk science and faulty forensics are pervasive throughout the criminal legal system. And that a single bad actor can end up doing a lot of harm, especially in a system that is not designed to acknowledge its mistakes or correct them.

Liliana Segura: The cops who handled Charles’s case had predicted that DNA would tie him to the murder of Edna Franklin, but no DNA testing ever took place. For one, Charles had confessed to the crime. But there’s another reason, and that had to do with the Houston Police Department crime lab: It was a mess. And it would take the conviction of an innocent teenager to expose just how bad it was.

“60 Minutes” (Vicki Mabrey): Four years ago, a Houston teenager named Josiah Sutton was found guilty of rape and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was convicted primarily on the basis of DNA tests performed by the Houston Police Department’s crime lab. But is he really a rapist? The DNA said so, and that was enough for the jury.

It probably would be enough for most of us, who have come to believe that DNA is foolproof.

Jordan Smith: In 1999, 16-year-old Josiah Sutton was convicted of raping a woman in Houston. She’d IDed him as her attacker, and DNA testing done at the HPD lab seemed to back that up. But Sutton was adamant that he hadn’t done it.

KHOU (Anna Werner): A jury found Josiah Sutton guilty and sentenced him to 25 years. But Sutton still insists —

Josiah Sutton: Something’s wrong.

KHOU (Anna Werner): And now it turns out, he may be right.

Liliana Segura: Three years later, an investigation by local journalists with KHOU, the city’s CBS affiliate, would call those lab results into question and, ultimately, break open a far-reaching scandal.

KHOU (Anna Werner): Meet Dr. William Thompson from the University of California at Irvine. 

William Thompson: Repeated gross incompetence.

KHOU (Anna Werner): He’s a nationally known expert on scientific evidence in the courts.

William Thompson: After a while, you have to wonder whether they could really be that stupid.

Liliana Segura: The HPD lab was a complete disaster, and it had been for a long time. There was no better emblem of its dysfunction than the lab’s leaky roof, which repeatedly led to flooding in areas where crucial forensic testing was being done.

William Thompson: I’m William Thompson. I’m a professor, or now professor emeritus, at the University of California, Irvine. I’ve been studying and writing about DNA evidence for over 30 years.

Jordan Smith: Thompson helped KHOU expose the problems at the HPD crime lab.

William Thompson: I became involved in the Houston crime lab scandal because I had written a series of articles critiquing the way labs do DNA testing and pointing out problematic aspects of lab work, and I was somebody people started contacting when they saw things that they thought were troubling. And I was hearing a lot about troubling activities at the Houston crime lab.

Liliana Segura: He’d actually been asked to speak to a grand jury that was investigating problems at the lab. They had scheduled a tour, and they asked him to come along. The lab officials told them that they’d devised an “innovative way” to keep water out of the lab while the roof was being fixed. Thompson said it was like a Rube Goldberg device.

William Thompson: So we went in the lab, and you could immediately see the “innovative” steps that involved like these tarpaulins and garden hoses that were hanging from the ceiling [laughs]. So the idea was that water would be falling down from the ceiling panels into the tarps and be channeled on to the floor.

Liliana Segura: That afternoon, there was a pressure test scheduled for the roof.

William Thompson: And we knew that they were starting to pressure test the roof because, looking up, water was falling. Water was falling down that was hitting the very benches that they told us had been protected [laughs].

Liliana Segura: The lab also had human problems: Poor supervision and analysts who didn’t know what they were doing. This was a particular problem in DNA cases. KHOU ended up highlighting seven questionable cases, including Sutton’s. He was eventually exonerated.

KHOU (Anna Werner): An 11 News Defenders investigation brought his case to light. But the retesting of DNA evidence that resulted from those reports exonerated him.

Liliana Segura: In December 2002, the lab’s DNA operations were shuttered. Houston officials started looking for someone to conduct an independent investigation into the lab. In 2005, they hired Michael Bromwich.

Michael Bromwich: Folks in the lab were inadequately trained. Many of them did not have strong scientific backgrounds to begin with. There was virtually no quality control that was done in the lab, and so they just did bad work. There’s no other way to say it accurately. 

Jordan Smith: Bromwich had seen these kinds of problems before. Years earlier, as inspector general for the Department of Justice, he had spearheaded an inquiry into the FBI crime lab, which, generally speaking, was considered the gold standard for forensics. Turns out, that wasn’t exactly the case.

Michael Bromwich: It took about 18 months, and we found that the emperor had no clothes, and that the FBI — which was such a vaunted forensic laboratory, both domestically and internationally — was in fact an agency, an entity that was not doing good scientific work. And it was mostly the result of not having well-trained people, not following scientific protocols, not having management that — at its high levels — was composed of scientists.

Jordan Smith: The truth is that forensic practices were developed by police and not scientists, which is an ongoing problem in the fight over junk science used in criminal cases.

Liliana Segura: Once the probe into the HPD lab got up and running, it didn’t take long for Bromwich and his team to realize that this wasn’t just about a few DNA cases.

Michael Bromwich: DNA had not been around that long in the criminal justice field, but serology had been around for a really long time. We came to realize that there were so many profound problems with the way that lab examiners had looked at serology cases that we had to go way back in time.

Liliana Segura: In this context, the serology work we’re talking about is the identification and characterization of blood evidence found at a crime scene. Like, what type of blood is it? This is some of the most basic work a crime lab would do. And if that work got messed up, the implications were pretty vast.

Michael Bromwich: It seemed to us that clearly the right thing to do was to go back as far as 1980 and to look at all of the serology cases that had been mishandled — and so we did that. We got a significant amount of resistance from some of the stakeholders. We got a very substantial amount of resistance from City Hall, who claimed that we were broadening the investigation inappropriately, but that’s where the evidence was taking us.

Liliana Segura: In the end, the investigators reviewed more than 3,500 cases involving a range of forensic disciplines — DNA, serology, ballistics, toxicology, and controlled substances — and issued seven reports, known as the Bromwich reports. Their revelations were a bombshell: Analysts had fabricated results in drug cases, a practice known as “dry labbing.” And in DNA cases, analysts had failed on a number of fronts: screwing up or misstating results, including in death penalty cases.

Jordan Smith: At the same time, there were other, more subtle patterns that emerged, including with how crime lab analysts reported their findings. In particular, there was an issue with the word “inconclusive” and how it was repeatedly used to describe the results of forensic testing that didn’t match the cops’ theory of a case.

So, say the cops had a suspect who had Type O blood. And Type A blood was found at the crime scene. Instead of reporting that the blood types didn’t match, the result would be reported as “inconclusive.”

Liliana Segura: And remember the HPD analyst from Charles’s trial, Joseph Chu? He testified that when he compared the blood under Edna Franklin’s nails to Charles’s blood, his finding was “inconclusive.”

Here’s Sarah Frazier again.

Sarah Frazier: So there are problems with what Joseph Chu said and also problems with what Joseph Chu did. So he took the material that he knew to be, like, probative material. At the request of Sgt. Allen, he took it from the fingernail scrapings and he tested it for blood typing.

Jordan Smith: He found Franklin’s blood type: Type B. So no surprise there.

Sarah Frazier: But he also found in the right hand scrapings, he found a strong presence of Type A blood group substance, which means that someone left blood underneath those right fingernails and that person could only have had either Type A blood or Type AB blood because those are the two kinds of blood types that include blood group substance A. So he got that result, and then he did nothing else because that pointed not to Charles but to some other attacker. Charles had Type O blood. That means there is no A blood group substance there; there is no B blood group substance there.

Jordan Smith: That’s because Type O blood is defined as the absence of A and B. Charles has Type O blood. And the blood found under Franklin’s nails contained the A blood group substance, meaning that blood could not have belonged to Charles — or to Franklin.

Sarah Frazier: And so, someone else contributed that A. That should have led to additional forensic testing and additional investigation by HPD. But nothing like that happened.

Liliana Segura: When the cops got the warrant to arrest Charles, they’d promised the judge that once they had him in custody they’d be able to get a blood sample — and through that, DNA — and that would tie up the crime. But that never happened. And once Chu reported out the blood typing as “inconclusive,” the forensic investigation stopped.

Sarah Frazier: And the Bromwich reports that came out many years later reported that that is exactly the practice of HPD and its crime lab at the time: to just shut down forensic work once it starts to point away from the arrested person. But all he puts in the homicide report was that his blood typing results were inconclusive. And everybody has agreed that they were not actually inconclusive. It was a conclusive result. Everybody’s also agreed that you would have to be incompetent as a scientist to believe that that was an inconclusive result. The other possibility is that you were lying.

Liliana Segura: We tried to reach Joseph Chu multiple times. We made calls.

[Calling Chu]

We went to his house and left a note.

[Driving to Chu’s house]

We sent him a letter in the mail.

[Leaving Chu’s house]

We never heard back.

Jordan Smith: Chu’s lab report was never handed over to the defense. So they went to trial without this critical information.

Sarah Frazier: There is no way for them to know that the most important forensic evidence in the case points to a different person having been the killer. And so there’s no way that they can know to ask that when they are cross-examining Joseph Chu at trial. And again, all he says at trial is that the results are inconclusive. And that is false testimony.

Liliana Segura: Charles’s trial lawyer, Felix Cantu, provided an affidavit to Sarah back in 2009, saying that he knew nothing about the blood not matching Charles and the jury had been misled as a result.

“If I had known about the presence of blood group substance A in the blood typing findings before trial, I would have asked Mr. Chu about it further and made sure the jury understood the significance of the finding,” Cantu wrote. “This exculpatory fact would likely have altered both the way I saw the case and my trial strategy.”

We asked Cantu about this when we met him back in March 2020.

Liliana Segura: Were you surprised when that came out?

Felix Cantu: Well, surprised? That’s probably not the right word for it.

Jordan Smith: Cantu said he wasn’t surprised so much as disappointed in Roberto Gutierrez, the prosecutor who tried Charles. If he’d had this lab report back then, he was required by law to turn it over to the defense.

The information about the blood typing wasn’t the only piece of forensic evidence that was withheld from Cantu. As it turned out, Chu had also tested articles of Charles’s clothing for blood. He found none. And that was significant, because it was such a bloody crime scene. Also troubling is that key pieces of evidence were just lost.

There is the crime scene video, which was checked into evidence back in October 1992 but has since disappeared. And then there’s Edna Franklin’s nightshirt: white with little purple flowers. She was wearing it when she was murdered. According to police records, the shirt was inspected in the HPD property room by Gutierrez back in March 1994.

Then, just one day before opening statements in Charles’s trial, it was checked out permanently by HPD’s homicide division. It wasn’t entered into evidence, and it’s never been seen again. Charles’s lawyers have been looking for it for years.

During a March 2006 court hearing regarding the missing shirt, Gutierrez claimed ignorance, saying it could’ve been packed in with paper files after the trial — which is weird, at best, since it would be covered in biological evidence.

Sgt. Waymon Allen testified that the homicide division never had the shirt. Even though it was recorded that way in the files, he said the evidence went straight to Gutierrez.

Liliana Segura: The nightshirt was never tested by the crime lab, which is super sketchy because it was covered in blood: Franklin’s for sure, but also possibly her killer’s.

We know Franklin put up a fight, and we know foreign blood was found under her nails. And it wouldn’t be surprising if the killer had cut himself while stabbing her repeatedly. This happens. Blood is slippery, and the more of it there is, the greater the chance that an attacker’s hand will slip onto the blade.

The wounds to Edna Franklin were severe. Dr. Eduardo Bellas, the medical examiner, said some of the cuts were four or five inches deep. This is something else that’s always bothered us. At trial, Bellas testified that a knife with a blade as small as two inches could have been used to stab her.

Charles was known to carry a small pocket knife. For the case to make sense, these two things had to fit together: small knife, deep wounds. But they never even found a murder weapon. So all of this was just speculation on top of speculation.

Jordan Smith: We decided to ask our own expert to weigh in.

Lloyd White: Hello!

Jordan Smith: Hey, Dr. White! How are you?

Lloyd White: Hi, Jordan Smith. How are you?

Jordan Smith: Dr. Lloyd White has been a forensic pathologist for decades. He’s worked in Mississippi and all over Texas. He’s retired now, but he agreed to check out Charles’s case.

He’s a big fan of classical music and pretty much any time you talk with him, you’ll hear it in the background.

We wanted to be careful not to bias him in any way. So we sent him just a brief overview of the crime, along with the autopsy report, crime scene and autopsy photos, and Bellas’s testimony.

Lloyd White: This is a really vicious attack. I mean, it’s what we usually refer to as overkill. In other words, not somebody that just kills somebody, but they just really produce injuries upon injuries upon injuries intentionally with a lot of anger involved. Was this a robbery situation?

Jordan Smith: That’s a very good question. We don’t know.

Jordan Smith: White had some pretty clear feelings about the murder weapon and Bellas’s assertion that the injuries could’ve been caused by a knife with a two-inch blade.

Lloyd White: I mean, take out a ruler. This definitely was not a small pocketknife. I mean, yes, it could have been a pocketknife in the sense of a knife that you can close up and put in your pocket.

Look at the wounds, the muscles. He mentions the sternocleidomastoid. That’s the big muscle on each side of your neck that runs down from behind your ear down to your clavicle. That’s a big, thick muscle. Both of those muscles were severed all the way through, all the way through. And then he mentions the strap muscles — the small up and down muscles in front of the larynx — those were severed. And then part of the trachea was severed, about 50 percent of its circumference was severed through. That is a large, sharp knife to produce those kinds of injuries.

I mean, to me, I think it was some kind of a hunting knife, like a Bowie knife or something like that. Or it could have been some kind of a kitchen knife, a steak knife. During the investigation, did anybody ever look at the kitchen knives?

Liliana Segura: There’s no way to know, but there’s no mention in the police report of anyone looking for evidence in the kitchen or what might be missing. White said the killer wouldn’t necessarily have cut himself during the attack.

Lloyd White: They certainly are going to have some blood on them somewhere or on their clothing.

Jordan Smith: Do you think that would be hard to avoid?

Lloyd White: Yeah, I think it’d be impossible to avoid, unless you were dressed up head to toe in some kind of a protective suit.

Liliana Segura: He asked us if anyone had ever done any DNA testing. We told him there was the serology evidence from 1992 and then later DNA, both developed from blood caked under Franklin’s fingernails, and that neither matched Charles.

Lloyd White: You’ve got two pieces that are very significant. There’s a blood type that doesn’t match, and now you’ve got DNA that doesn’t match. So you’ve got two pieces of powerful physical evidence that exonerate the defendant.

Liliana Segura: Sarah and the rest of Charles’s legal team firmly believed that if the jury had known about the serology evidence back in 1994, the outcome of Charles’s trial would’ve been way different — that he would’ve been acquitted. Now they believed the DNA evidence should exonerate him. All they had to do was convince the courts.

Jordan Smith: OK. Easier said than done, because the criminal justice system is designed as a one-way ticket. You have a constitutional right to a fair trial, but once you’re convicted, the system is set up to keep it that way.

This is one of the reasons why appeals can be so drawn out — and why they bounce back and forth among various courts. Lawyers have to jump through dozens of hoops to get anything done. And these hurdles don’t disappear just because you have DNA evidence that points to your innocence.

In Charles’s case, the legal wrangling over the DNA went on for years. First, there was the fight to get DNA testing. And then when the DNA results came back, pointing away from Charles, his legal team would face a whole new battle.

Liliana Segura: Before we get into this legal saga, we need to share a bit of history with you about the Texas law that allowed Charles to seek DNA testing in the first place. It’s commonly referred to as Chapter 64. And before it passed, it was almost impossible for people like Charles to access testing that might help them prove their innocence.

Jordan Smith: And, as with so many of Texas’s criminal justice reforms, Chapter 64 was passed in response to a string of high-profile embarrassments, including in the case of Roy Criner.

KPRC 2 (Linda Lorelle): Good evening everyone, Roy Criner was sentenced to —

Jordan Smith: In 1990, Criner was sentenced to 99 years in prison for the rape and murder of 16-year-old Deanna Ogg. But he swore he was innocent. He caught a rare break in 1997 when he got access to DNA testing. It showed semen left in Ogg’s body did not match Criner.

[News montage]

News Anchor: The DNA test shows that the semen found in the victim is not Criner’s.

News Anchor: The judge says that if jurors had known all of this, they might have acquitted.

Jordan Smith: He wanted a new trial. But the Court of Criminal Appeals, the CCA, balked.

Sharon Keller: The evidence didn’t show that he did not have sex with this woman. It can’t. Just like the absence of fingerprints right here doesn’t show that I didn’t touch that chair. It can’t show he didn’t do it.

Jordan Smith: In a truly mind-boggling interview with PBS’s “Frontline,” the court’s presiding judge, Sharon Keller, said the DNA didn’t matter. She claimed Criner might’ve worn a condom and that Ogg was just “promiscuous” and probably had sex with multiple people before she was killed.

Sharon Keller: You’re not taking into account the fact that she was a promiscuous girl.

Jordan Smith: Neither claim had ever been argued before any court. And neither was true.

Liliana Segura: In 2000, then-Gov. George W. Bush pardoned Criner. And the following year, the Texas Legislature passed Chapter 64.

So when Sarah started seeking DNA testing in Charles’s case, the law was brand new. Pretty quickly, it became clear that prosecutors weren’t exactly embracing it. Sarah went to the court where Charles was tried to ask for DNA testing. At the state’s urging, the judge denied the request. That meant Sarah had to go to the CCA to ask the judges to step in.

In 2004, Sarah made her case. Since the serology that had been hidden from the defense pointed to another killer, it was reasonable to think the DNA might too. The state, on the other hand, argued that because Charles had confessed, he wasn’t entitled to testing — even under this new law.

The lawyer who argued this position was Assistant District Attorney Kelly Smith.

Kelly Smith: May it please the court. My name is Kelly Smith, I’m from Harris County on behalf of the state of Texas.

Jordan Smith: Smith was peppered with questions from a number of the court’s nine judges. Their job was to decide a legal question. But they seemed at least as interested in a practical one: Why didn’t the state want to know the results of DNA testing?

Judge 1: Are you prepared to state the position why you wouldn’t just do it, just allow?

Kelly Smith: Me personally? [laughs]

Judge 1: No, the state of Texas, as represented by you. Why would you not want to know DNA test results?

Kelly Smith: Well, I have to tell you that we’ve been inundated by requests. There has to be an expense issue there.

Liliana Segura: One judge brought up the HPD crime lab scandal and questioned why the state wouldn’t want to spend a little money to ensure, at the very least, the “perception of justice.”

Kelly Smith: I don’t want to say no. I would say I would agree with you, but personally I’m not the person making those decisions. That’s a valid argument, especially because the nightshirt is missing. We don’t know where it is.

Judge 1: I’m just wondering why you would not want to do it if it didn’t cost you a dime? I’m talking about you guys jumping up and saying, “We want to be sure all the evidence about this case is known before we kill this guy.”

Kelly Smith: Well, I understand, that’s a completely valid concern.

Judge 1: But you don’t know the answer. [crosstalk]

Kelly Smith: I’m not privy to that decision-making — no, I don’t know the answer.

Judge 1: You’re not the person who makes these decisions.

Kelly Smith: Right, no, and I’m kind of glad too. This is a hard decision to make. Where do we draw the line? There’s hundreds and hundreds of defendants that want tests.

Liliana Segura: The judges also wanted to know what the state would do if the DNA evidence came back pointing to someone else, and Smith’s answer was pretty remarkable.

Kelly Smith: I don’t think finding someone else’s blood or DNA at the crime scene would prove this appellant’s innocence, given his admittedly voluntary confession and the other circumstantial evidence tying him to the —

Judge Cheryl Johnson: But you just admitted that the state’s theory was that he was the one and only attacker.

Jordan Smith: Smith conceded that in his confession, Charles talked about committing the crime alone. But if the DNA didn’t match Charles, the Harris County DA’s office wouldn’t let that pesky fact interfere with its case.

Kelly Smith: Then we might charge someone else with the crime as a party. We would change the theory. But I think just looking at the reasonable probability standard here, I don’t think that finding someone else’s blood, finding the presence of a third person is going to exonerate this defendant.

Liliana Segura: Did you hear that? Her answer was that the DA’s office would just change their theory of the crime. They would look for another suspect, in addition to Charles, not instead of him — even though they acknowledged there was no physical evidence tying Charles to the scene.

Jordan Smith: In June 2005, the CCA handed down its ruling. The judges agreed with Sarah that Charles should be allowed DNA testing. It was a huge deal and way outta character for the court.

Before long the testing got underway. And the results were a revelation: An unknown male profile was found in blood caked under Franklin’s fingernails. The DNA results and the withheld serology work from 1992 both pointed to an unknown suspect. That was potent evidence. So you’d think the state would acknowledge that. But you’d be wrong.

The striking thing about this hearing was that these experts agreed that Chu had falsely reported that the serology evidence was inconclusive. And they agreed that there was foreign DNA found under Franklin’s fingernails.

They also agreed that the DNA wasn’t the result of contamination; so it didn’t get there because of a lab mistake or other blunder. But while Sarah argued that the DNA evidence would have acquitted Charles at trial — and that it should clear him now — the state, represented by Assistant District Attorney Lynn Hardaway, insisted that it didn’t exonerate Charles and that the DNA under Franklin’s fingernails could have gotten there in any number of ways, including when she fell onto the carpet in her living room.

It was a lot like what the state did at Charles’s trial. There, prosecutors found a bunch of ways to explain away the total lack of physical evidence pointing to Charles. Now they were explaining away concrete physical evidence that pointed towards another person.

Jordan Smith: Also, this whole idea of casually getting foreign DNA under your fingernails is just ridiculous. There are a bunch of studies that show it’s really hard to get foreign DNA under your nails — and that once it’s there, it doesn’t easily disappear.

They’ve studied intimate partners (turns out, it’s not so easy to get your lover’s DNA under your nails) and bodies submerged in water (DNA was still there). So the whole idea that Franklin just touched the carpet and this DNA lodged under her nails was pretty hard to believe. And remember, this DNA was developed from blood found under her nails.

Plus, she was pretty isolated. She didn’t get around well and spent most of her time in her bedroom. The only people she came into daily contact with were her grandsons, Eric Benge and Lee Rose. And the DNA didn’t belong to them either. If getting foreign DNA under your nails was as easy as touching the carpet, you’d expect to find Lee’s or Eric’s genetic material there too.

Still, Judge Campbell wasn’t convinced. In a ruling riddled with typos, she denied that Charles’s trial would’ve gone any differently if the jury had known about the DNA. And to back up her opinion, she invoked some things that can only be described as bullshit.

Liliana Segura: Remember the supposed foot impressions found on Eric’s bed the night Franklin was murdered, the wrinkles that weren’t actually footprints — at least as far as the state’s own expert was concerned? Campbell pointed to these “footprints on the bed” as proof that Charles still would’ve been convicted. Campbell’s ruling meant Sarah would have to go back to the Court of Criminal Appeals.

Jordan Smith: When Sarah returned to the CCA in 2013, the state was once again being represented by Assistant DA Lynn Hardaway. And the arguments were a lot more jumbled, confusing, and, frankly, misleading.

The DA’s office had initially told the court that if the DNA didn’t match Charles, they would just change their theory of the case. Now they said the DNA didn’t matter at all, and you could forget about looking for anyone to match it to. The DNA evidence was “weak,” Hardaway said. What was important was the confession.

Lynn Hardaway: And in this case, you can’t get around the fact that not only did Mr. Raby confess, he got up and testified at the suppression hearing that his confession was truthful and voluntary.

Liliana Segura: Hardaway emphasized the parts of Charles’s confession were corroborated at trial. One judge responded by pointing out things in the confession that clearly contradicted the state’s case. She gave an example: Police said Charles left Franklin’s house out the back door, but there was no blood found on the door handle. And the confession said that it was only later that Charles realized his fingers were sticky and washed off the blood.

Judge Cheryl Johnson: That’s the kind of thing I’m thinking about. That there were some things that were remarkably inconsistent between the testimony at trial and his confession.

Judge Elsa Alcala: Is there any physical evidence, not his confession but physical evidence, that ties him to the crime scene, such as DNA on other articles?

Lynn Hardaway: No.

Liliana Segura: Was there any physical evidence tying Charles to the crime, another judge asked? No, Hardaway replied.

Jordan Smith: In the end, even though the judges had some good questions, it didn’t matter. They ruled that the new DNA and the serology evidence that had been hidden from Charles’s defense weren’t enough to overturn his conviction. The court, like the DA’s office, seemed to care a lot more about a confession with some serious holes in it than biological evidence that did not match the suspect and that would call into question the entire theory of the crime.

Liliana Segura: This might seem shocking. But for those who know the CCA, it’s all too familiar.

Elsa Alcala: My name is Elsa Alcala, and I am a former judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which is the Supreme Court of Texas for criminal cases.

Liliana Segura: Alcala is one of the judges you just heard questioning Lynn Hardaway.

Jordan Smith: She worked as a prosecutor in Harris County at the time Charles was convicted. Later she was appointed to the CCA by Republican Gov. Rick Perry. In his 14 years in office, Perry oversaw 319 executions, the most of any governor in the U.S.

During her years on the court, Alcala was transformed. She became more and more vocal about her concerns with the state’s death penalty system.

Elsa Alcala: It just seemed like they were bending over to affirm the death convictions.

Jordan Smith: One of the long-standing criticisms of the CCA is that they’re all too eager to act as a rubber stamp, upholding death sentences no matter how messed up the case is.

Elsa Alcala: I found it very frustrating. I sometimes joked; I said, I feel like I’m the police officer of the court. That if I’m not here threatening to write a dissenting opinion to kind of shed light on what’s going on, that they would be happy to just issue this one paragraph order that just says “We deny.”

Jordan Smith: She found herself going along with some of their rulings but tried to write opinions that would explain why the court was doing what it was doing.

Elsa Alcala: I got tired of writing opinions that said, “This really stinks. This really, really, really stinks, and I feel really bad, but this is what I have to do.”

Liliana Segura: Eventually, she found that untenable and began writing fiery dissents.

Elsa Alcala: I just thought, “You know, you’re a judge on a high court. You can actually try to do justice. You can actually try to reform the law to make the law make sense.”

Jordan Smith: But in the end, she decided that advocating from the bench wasn’t gonna cut it. She announced that she was leaving the court at the end of 2018. 

Liliana Segura: We didn’t discuss the details of Charles’s case with Alcala. But it’s not every day that someone in her position speaks so honestly about their misgivings over a system they spent so much of their career upholding. The institutions that carry out capital punishment are largely opaque and unaccountable. And here’s someone who knows those offices inside and out, calling out the system for being unfair.

Jordan Smith: Still, like the CCA, Edna Franklin’s daughter, Linda McClain, sees the confession as pretty much the last word.

Liliana Segura: All these years later, she just doesn’t see why Charles would’ve confessed to something he didn’t do. So the DNA alone has never really impressed her all that much. But when we went to visit her and her son, Lee Rose, back in February 2020, we had a chance to talk to them a bit more deeply about the forensic evidence.

They didn’t know about the serology work that had been done in 1992. And they didn’t know that Joseph Chu had lied about it: said in court that the results were inconclusive, when he’d actually found a foreign blood type under Franklin’s nails. We were the ones who told them.

Jordan Smith: They found, back in 1992, blood that was not yours, blood that was not Eric’s, blood that was not Charles’s. And then at trial, the crime lab analyst lied about that. And I don’t know if you knew about that.

Linda McClain: No. But I mean, if he did that, why wouldn’t that be enough of a reason to get a new trial or something?

Jordan Smith: Because they hid it. The police hid that evidence.

Linda McClain: Wait, OK. [crosstalk]

Lee Rose: Back then, the police were —

Jordan Smith: The crime lab was under the police department.

Lee Rose: The crime lab was under scrutiny —

Jordan Smith: Well, it didn’t come out until later.

Linda McClain: But then what I’m saying is, if somebody said they lied about that, and everybody knows that they lied about that — [crosstalk]

Jordan Smith: Only found about it as the DNA was being found, then this paperwork that had existed that had never been turned over —

Lee Rose: So why couldn’t they give him a new trial now?

Linda McClain: Why wouldn’t they give him a new trial?

Liliana Segura: Why couldn’t they give Charles a new trial now? It was a good question.

Jordan Smith: Does it bother you that they lied about finding foreign blood, back in the ’90s?

Lee Rose: If they knew it was there, I mean, everything should’ve been legit, and they should’ve tested everything, I think. They shouldn’t have lied about it.

Liliana Segura: It’s worth taking a second to consider what it must have been like in this moment for Linda and her son. This was the first time — in some 28 years — that they were hearing about the fact that there was evidence that pointed to someone else back in 1992. And for some reason, they were learning about it from a pair of reporters. Not from the cops who were supposed to thoroughly investigate. And not from the prosecutors who always bend over backwards in death penalty cases, claiming everything they do is for the victims.

Jordan Smith: We listened as they thought through the implications. The serology evidence recast the DNA evidence. And, Linda wondered, could someone else have been there? And could this actually help Charles?

Next time on Murderville, Texas: “Linda.”

Linda McClain: I don’t understand why, where it came from. It does drive me crazy. Don’t think it doesn’t drive me crazy, because it does. But don’t think I think he’s innocent because I don’t. He is not innocent.

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Texas is a production of The Intercept and First Look Media.

Andrea Jones is our story editor. Julia Scott is senior producer. Truc Nguyen is our podcast fellow. Laura Flynn is supervising producer. Fact-checking by Meerie Jesuthasan. Special thanks to Jack D’Isidoro and Holly DeMuth for additional production assistance.

Our show was mixed by Rick Kwan, with original music by Zach Young. Legal review by David Bralow.

Executive producers are Roger Hodge and Christy Gressman. For The Intercept, Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief.

I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith.

You can read show transcripts and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter: @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/donate. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show. And please do leave us a rating or review; it helps people find us. If you want to give us feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post Episode Five: The Evidence appeared first on The Intercept.

A lot of people swear they’d never confess to something they didn’t do. They just can’t conceive of it, especially when the stakes are so high. But it happens — a lot more than you’d think. And as far out as it sounds, sometimes people come to believe in their own guilt.

Transcript

A quick listener note: This podcast contains adult language and descriptions of violence.

Texas Department of Public Safety recording: Most criminals know the marvels of modern law enforcement, and they know the effects of a carefully prepared alibi. But there’s one way they won’t talk but their emotions will. It’s simply a matter of reading the suspect’s emotions and pressing in the right direction until he breaks.

Liliana Segura: From the moment we first read Charles Raby’s confession, it struck us as something out of a movie, sort of improbable. He denies, denies, denies — and then breaks down and confesses. This is how Sgt. Waymon Allen described it in the police report. An actor will read it for you.

Sgt. Waymon Allen police report (read by actor): Allen advised Raby that this sergeant knew he was not being truthful. Allen advised Raby that he had been identified jumping over a fence leaving Edna’s house Thursday night at about the time she was killed. Raby looked down at the floor and his eyes filled with tears. Raby stated: “I was there. I went in through the front door,” and “I saw her on the living room floor.”

Jordan Smith: Our fascination with confessions is tied to this idea of a uniquely gifted interrogator: someone who can get a suspect to give it all up. That was Allen’s reputation within the Houston police homicide squad. Sgt. Wayne Wendel was his partner. They worked Edna Franklin’s murder together.

Wayne Wendel: Sergeant Allen was the crème de la crème of detectives in homicide. He was just a joy to work with because he was so dedicated and so concentrated on the mission to clear the case. I worked two years with him. Gosh, it was just a real joy to work with him. He’s dead now. But he could talk the horns off a billy goat.

Jordan Smith: Allen died in 2019. Wendel wrote about him on an online memorial page. He said that Allen often operated at “full throttle.” And he lauded him for his interrogation skills: “I actually felt sorry for crooks sitting across the table from him in the interrogation room.”

[Theme music]

Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Texas. Episode 4, “Confessions.”

First, let’s review. Seventy-two-year-old Edna Franklin was brutally murdered in her home in Houston on October 15, 1992. Her grandsons lived with her. They were the ones to find her body just after 10 p.m. that night. The cops asked them if they had any idea who might’ve killed her.

They named two of their own friends: Edward Bangs, who’d been painting the outside of Franklin’s house in the days before the murder, and 22-year-old Charles Raby, who was kind of an asshole. He’d supposedly gotten sideways with Franklin a couple weeks before her murder. And he’d recently been released on parole after serving several years for the armed robbery of a convenience store. This caught the cops’ attention. Just four days later, they arrested Charles and secured a confession.

That confession would be the most important piece of evidence connecting him to the murder. No physical evidence tied him to the scene. And they have never found a murder weapon. Despite the lack of evidence, the state tried Charles for murder in the summer of 1994. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

Liliana Segura: We told you that false confessions happen more than you would think. And maybe you’re still skeptical about that. But consider this: To date, 15 percent of death row exonerations have involved a false confession.

When we first read the confession and police report in Charles’s case, we were struck by how little information they contained. There’s no transcript of the interrogation — let alone a video — and it’s just impossible to know what happened in that room.

Jordan Smith: To be fair, it wasn’t exactly standard practice for cops to record these kinds of interactions back in the early ’90s. A lot of them just didn’t have the equipment. But we know that in this era, the Houston PD did have the equipment. In fact, they routinely recorded interrogations of robbery suspects. For whatever reason, they didn’t see fit to do so in homicide cases.

Nevertheless, we do know some things about Charles’s interrogation. Like what the room looked like, because that’s what’s in the police report. The walls were painted white. There were desks, computers, and rolling chairs. And Charles wore a white tank top and blue jeans, as well as white tennis shoes.

All of this would be fine, except these details are irrelevant compared to the mechanics of the interrogation itself, which are not included. Instead, there’s only Sgt. Allen’s summary of what Charles told him up until the point that Allen says, “I know you’re lying,” and Charles supposedly breaks down in tears.

Liliana Segura: The lack of detail also extends to the confession itself. We’re going to have an actor read the confession for you now. So you can see what we’re talking about. But we have to warn you, it’s pretty confusing. The only thing we’ve taken out are the addresses and phone numbers of the people Charles named.

Charles Raby (Actor): My name is Charles Douglas Raby. I am 22 years old. I was born in Houston, Texas on March 22, 1970. I last went to school at Sam Houston and have a total of 10 years of formal education.

I am at the Houston Police Department’s homicide division. Today is Monday, October 19, 1992, and it is approximately 1:25 p.m. Sergeant Allen read me my rights on two occasions this afternoon. I fully understand my rights and I have gave up my right to remain silent and right to an attorney. I have not been threatened or promised anything in return to make a statement. I told Sergeant Allen that I [had] not been at Lee’s house on Westford Street Thursday night. I was not telling the truth at first, because I was scared. I decided to tell the truth and get this over with. … I am unemployed at the present time. I can read and write the English language. I can see this statement as it is being typed by Sergeant Allen on the monitor.

On Thursday, October 15, 1992, I had gotten up that morning and I had gone over to my little brother, Robert Butler. … Robert was in school and I visited with a friend by the name of Anthony. Anthony is a Hispanic male, about 25-26 years old. Anthony lives next door to Robert. My little brother came home after school and I stayed at his house until some time that afternoon.

My little brother Robert gave me a ride on his bicycle to Jimmie’s house. We call Jimmie, “Crawdead.” Jimmie lives off of Laura Koppe Street. Jimmie was not there. I visited with his mother for awhile. I had a little pocket knife and I was cleaning my fingernails on Jimmie’s front porch. I believe my pocket knife was an “Old Timer.” I stayed there at Jimmie’s for an hour. I left there and walked over my ex-mother-in-law’s house. … I talked to Barbara, Dusty and Blane.

I left their house and walked over to a friend of mine named Larry. Larry lives off of Irvington. I had been drinking beer and whiskey. I only talked to Larry for a few minutes. I left Larry’s house and walked over to Melody’s house on Post Street. I talked to her mother and I left there. I walked over to John Phillips house on Wainwright Street. I asked John’s grandmother if he was at home and she told me, John was not there. I walked over off of Crosstimbers Street to try and locate a friend named Pookie. Pookie had moved.

I went to a little store and bought some wine. I think it was some Mad Dog 20/20. I drank the bottle of wine and then I walked over to Lee’s house on Westford Street. Lee lives with his grandmother, Edna and his cousen Eric. There is an old Volkswagon in the drive way at their house. I walked up to the front door. The front door has a screen type door in front of a wooden door. I knocked on the door. I did not hear anyone answer. I just went inside.

I sat down for a little bit on the couch. I called out when I got inside, but I did not hear anyone say anything. I heard Edna in the kitchen. I walked into the kitchen and grabbed Edna. Edna’s back was to me and I just grabbed her. I remember struggling with her and I was on top of her. I know I had my knife but I do not remember taking it out. We were in the living room when we went to the floor. I saw Edna covered in blood and underneath her. I went to the back of the house and went out the back door that leads into the back yard.

Shortly after I had left Lee’s house on Westford I was approached by a man and this man told me something like “I had better not catch you in my yard,” “jumping his fences.” Or something like that. I woke up later on the ground near the Hardy Toll Road and Crosstimbers. I walked home, on Cedar Hill from there. I remember feeling sticky and I had blood on my hands. I washed my hands off in a water puddle that is near the pipe line by the Hardy Toll Road. I do not remember what I did with my knife.

The next day I knew I had killed Edna. I remembered being at her house and struggling with her and Edna was covered with blood when I left. I think I was wearing a black concert shirt, the blue jeans I’m wearing and my Puma tennis shoes. I also had on a black jacket. I have read this, my statement, consisting of 3 pages.

There is also some weird language that echoes verbatim what’s in the police report. For example, investigators referred to Franklin as “Edna.” And in the confession, this is also how they said Charles referred to her. But as he told us, he didn’t even know her first name.

Charles Raby: All this time, I’m just telling them, “I don’t know. I don’t know no nobody named Edna.” And I swear to God, I did not know Ms. Franklin’s first name was Edna. I got a cousin named Edna. And I told them, I said, “I’ve got a cousin named Edna.” He said, “Well, I’m not talking about that.” But he never mentioned that it was Lee and Eric’s grandmother until later on. And then it hit me: “OK, Ms. Franklin. OK.”

Jordan Smith: And there are facts that we know the cops provided Charles before taking his confession — including that a man had been seen jumping the neighbor’s fence on the night of the murder.

We know what we see in all this. But we wanted an expert to weigh in.

Jeff Kukucka: So, my name’s Dr. Jeff Kukucka. I’m an associate professor of psychology at Towson University in Maryland.

Liliana Segura: Among the things that Kukucka studies are interrogation techniques and false confessions. He’s part of a second generation of psychologists studying this stuff, and he’s pretty much a rising star in the field.

We gave him a brief summary of the case, along with police reports and trial transcripts — the same kinds of documents he routinely gets when asked to review a case.

Jeff Kukucka: My gut reaction to reading all this stuff is this could be a case study of why interrogations should be recorded, because there is so much “he said, she said” here, so many inconsistencies, so little clarity on what actually happened. And the sad thing is we’re never going to know what actually happened.

Jordan Smith: There are a lot of things about Charles’s confession that give Kukucka pause, like the speed of it.

Jeff Kukucka: This confession goes from zero to 60 maybe faster than any confession I’ve ever seen. You know, he was denying guilt, denying guilt, and I said to him, “Well, we think you’re lying,” and then all of a sudden he started crying and confessing and that was it. Like, that’s not how it works. Having read these things and seen these things, that’s not how it works.

Jordan Smith: Generally speaking, confessions develop over time, Kukucka said, getting more and more detailed as they go.  

Liliana Segura: And he’s skeptical about some of the details included in Charles’s confession.

Jeff Kukucka: I would love to know where these details are coming from: the old Volkswagen in the driveway and the window and the — I find it very hard to believe that he remembers the old Volkswagen in the driveway but doesn’t remember what he did with the knife. It just doesn’t add up.

There is little doubt in my mind that something happened in there that we don’t know about. Whether it was coercive or not, I don’t know. But that’s just not how these stories evolve.

Jordan Smith: I’m so glad you brought up the VW thing.

Jeff Kukucka: I say this as a VW driver.

Jordan Smith: The broken-down VW and the other thing that gets me, and it’s a small thing, which is where he’s describing the door as a wooden door. And I’m like, who says that? Who’s like, “Oh, I went over to the house. They had a screen door and a wooden door”? You don’t say that. But you go look at the police report, and, of course, the crime scene guy is describing it: There’s an old, broken-down VW on the property, and there’s a wooden front door. I mean, you could see a crime scene investigator being like, “It’s a hollow core door” or “It’s a metal door.” But a random person is not going to be like, “Yeah, it was a wooden door.” Do you know what I’m saying? It just struck me as so bizarre.

Jeff Kukucka: And that’s exactly the sort of detail that they could either feed him or sort of slow-walk him to.

Liliana Segura: Then there’s the thing about jumping the neighbor’s fence.

Jordan Smith: One of the things that would seem to me to be a perfect hold-back fact, so to speak, if you were going into an interrogation situation, would be the idea that somebody jumped the back fence.

Because there’s this neighbor, and somebody did jump that back fence — it might make sense that that was connected to the murder. So I would think, as an investigator, I certainly would not want to spill that to anybody, because I’d want to see if they came back with it. Well, if you read through the police report, they told him that.

Jeff Kukucka: The last thing an interrogator should be doing is walking in the room and immediately laying all their cards on the table, because a savvy liar is going to take those cards and incorporate them into their lie, right? You should go in, withhold that information, get them to tell their side of the story, and then you can identify contradictions with known facts. They hardly did that here. We’ll never know, but it makes me suspicious about the other details that they might have fed to him to make the confession seem persuasive.

Liliana Segura: And it’s not just the details that are there that trouble him, it’s also those that aren’t there. Kukucka told us that he went through the confession and circled every verb in the section where Charles describes the murder.

Jeff Kukucka: The verbs in here are so innocuous. “I walked into the kitchen. I grabbed her. I remember struggling. We went to the floor.” These are very passive verbs. There’s nothing in here like, “I tackled her. I stabbed her. I hit her. She scratched me.” The verbs in this sentence are all very benign. I don’t really know what to make of that. I don’t know if this is deliberate or not on the part of the officers who sort of “took,” and I say “took” in quotes because I have doubts about whether this confession was really dictated or not.

Jordan Smith: There’s another thing about this confession that we need to get into. Remember when we told you about the suppression hearing and how Charles seemed to double down on the truth of his confession? We want to try to unpack that a bit.

Charles has always been clear in his conversations with us that the reason he gave the confession was that he was worried about his girlfriend, Merry Alice Gomez, and her infant son, Christopher. He thought that the cops might try to arrest her if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.

Liliana Segura: But there’s another piece of this too, and it might sound a little out there. For a long time, Charles told us, he wasn’t sure if he’d committed the murder or not. This is also something that happens with false confessions — and with memory in general.

Take the case of the Beatrice Six, a group of friends in small town Nebraska who were convicted of raping and killing an elderly woman in 1985. All but one of them gave false confessions after being questioned by a police psychologist who convinced them that they had repressed the memory of committing the crime. But one of the six insisted on his innocence — and ultimately they were all cleared by DNA.

Jordan Smith: And then there’s the Norfolk Four, a group of sailors accused of raping and murdering a Virginia woman in 1997. All of the men told the police they had nothing to do with the crime. But each of them ended up confessing anyway. And one of them came to believe he was guilty and became the star witness for the state. They were eventually cleared by DNA too.

Liliana Segura: These are pretty extreme examples, but the truth is that people develop false memories about all kinds of things, from the most inconsequential childhood experiences to major life-altering events. It feels counterintuitive, but we’ve all experienced some version of this.

Jordan Smith: And science tells us that memory is unreliable. People think that our minds record things exactly as they happen and then that memory is stored intact, but that’s not how it works.

Our brains reconstruct memories every time we recall them. And research has shown that things like trauma or drug and alcohol abuse can further distort our recollections. Charles had a history of violence. He’d broken the law plenty of times. He’d been in prison. And his memory of the night Edna Franklin was killed was pretty sketchy. He was really, really drunk at the time and on pills.

Mike Giglio: For me, the idea of memory itself being so fallible was really important.

Liliana Segura: This is Mike Giglio. He’s a journalist who used to write for the Houston Press.

Mike Giglio: I know that in every interview I’ve ever done since as a journalist, that has informed even the way I approach stories. It was so, for me, enlightening just to realize how memories can change and people can think that they’re telling the truth and really actually have kind of a composite picture of what happened based on all these questionable ways that they built their memory.

Liliana Segura: He wrote a bunch of stories about Charles’s case — not at the trial stage but years after he was convicted, including one from 2010 that was all about the confession and the questions swirling around it.

Mike Giglio: And so, it’s not that he confessed, right? It’s that he stuck to the confession. It’d be much simpler if he confessed in the interrogation room and then right away or at trial had gone back on it, but he basically admitted it twice.

Liliana Segura: Giglio went to visit Charles on death row.

Mike Giglio: I was really struck … that he was still wrestling with his own perception of himself. There’s a quote in the piece, like, “Did I do it? Could I do it?” He wasn’t even 100 percent sure. But I felt what was really honest was him questioning himself. The fact that he wasn’t saying, “I didn’t do it.” He was saying, “I just don’t think I could have. I’ve really mulled this.”

Jordan Smith: “I do know I’m crazy. But killing crazy?” Charles told Giglio for the 2010 piece. He said Sgt. Allen “planted the seed: Did I do that? A long time I was walking around with that guilt — did I do it?”

When we met Charles, he was no longer questioning whether he had killed Franklin. He is adamant that he didn’t. But it’s not entirely clear when or how he turned that corner. The one thing he comes back to time and again is that he said what he said to protect Merry Alice.

Liliana Segura: What do you remember, I suppose, about this confession and how you came to think about it, when you realized that you had confessed to this? I guess it’s a little unclear to me, like, how you came to realize — how this all began to sink in.

Charles Raby: Oh, you’re talking about when I realized that I actually messed up? When I was getting loaded into the van, getting taken to the courthouse. That’s when I realized I actually messed up, because of all these cops. They’re saying, “That’s him right there. That’s him right there.” Everywhere I’d go, they said, “That’s him. The granny killer.” That’s what the one cop called me, a granny killer. And that’s when I started getting like more frustrated and angry, starting just hating everything and everyone at that point. But, that’s when it really dawned on me that I really fucked up.

Jordan Smith: He said that it was while he was in jail, awaiting trial, that the gravity of his confession started to sink in. But, he said, he didn’t really regret it because he’d protected Merry Alice.

Charles Raby: I got her out of there. That was my main focus, and I fight with that all the time. One guy asked me back there, he said, “Do you regret it?” And I said a yes and no answer. Yeah, 27 years of this right here, I regret it. But I don’t regret that she never got humiliated by being in the strip search or fingerprinted. She never went to jail. She never had the baby taken from her.

Liliana Segura: Was there a moment where you started — either with your lawyer or with other — insisting, like taking back your statement?

Charles Raby: Oh yeah, yeah.

Liliana Segura: Maybe you can describe that a little bit.

Charles Raby: OK, well, the first time I told my attorney, Felix Cantu, I met him at the courthouse when we go up before the judge. And the judge, he says, “How do you plead?” And I said, “Not guilty.” I think that was at the arraignment, and then that’s when Felix was talking to me. I said, “Man, I didn’t do this, man. I didn’t kill nobody,” you know.

Liliana Segura: He told Cantu that the cops had used Merry Alice as leverage to get him to confess — but that his confession wasn’t true. He said he didn’t think Cantu believed him.

Charles Raby: But the last time I talked to him about it was, I just knew he wasn’t believing anything I said. He was, “Well, they got the confession. They got this.”

Liliana Segura: Charles said he wanted to press the issue with Cantu, but then realized that if he started changing his story, the cops might still go after Merry Alice.

Charles Raby: Then I’m listening to all them guys in the county jail, telling me, “Man, you got to be cool,” that they can still arrest her if you fucking start changing your story. All these jailhouse attorneys, they know everything but they don’t know nothing. So I’m listening to all these guys talk.

Jordan Smith: Did that scare you when they were saying that?

Charles Raby: Yeah, it did. I really thought they could still arrest her. I never — I quit talking to my attorney about it and everything. I just let it go, thinking they could still arrest her.

Jeff Kukucka: I found it really interesting because at different points in reading these materials, and particularly this confession in the trial transcript where he kind of half-heartedly reaffirms the truth of his confession, I found myself kind of going back and forth trying to figure out what kind of confession it was.

There’s three different types of false confessions. There’s voluntary false confessions, which is effectively the same as un-coerced, meaning someone gives a confession that they know is false — well, they don’t necessarily know it’s false, but they do it of their own volition. And then there’s two different types of coerced confessions. The key distinction between them essentially boils down to, do you know that the confession is false?

Liliana Segura: The first is called “coerced compliant,” where you knowingly give the cops false information for some short-term gain.

Jeff Kukucka: So you give a confession that you know is false just to get out of the situation.

Liliana Segura: The second type is probably the hardest to wrap your head around.

Jeff Kukucka: The other type is an internalized — coerced internalized — false confession, where you actually come to believe that you committed the crime.

The more and more I read it, I’m inclined to think that this is in fact an internalized confession. That he does — he at least did at the time, even if he doesn’t now — he did believe that he had actually done it, or that it was at least very plausible that he had done it. But there are striking inconsistencies between the content of the confession and the known facts of the case.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to know the relative incidence of the three different types of false confessions, but anecdotally, internalized seem to be the most rare. Which is not surprising. But we’ve known for 30 years that people can form false memories of things that didn’t happen. Even if those things are really vivid autobiographical events that have very real consequences.

Liliana Segura: Not only is memory unreliable on its own, there are factors that increase the risk of corrupting a person’s memory.

Jeff Kukucka: You have the effects of social pressure, and the setting, the environment of the interrogation room, and the authority of the interrogating detective. Those are meaningful social pressures that can foment the creation of false memories very quickly, as we see in a case like this, especially, not even to mention, when there’s drugs and alcohol involved. Probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody that drugs and alcohol impair memory. You kind of have the perfect storm here for an internalized false confession.

Liliana Segura: We’ve told you about a couple of cases where this happened and Kukucka gave us another example: the case of Michael Crowe.

Jeff Kukucka: The prototypical example of an internalized false confession that I always think of is actually a case of a juvenile, his name was Michael Crowe. Michael Crowe was 14 years old when his little sister, who was 12, was murdered in their own house. Long story short: Police decided there was no sign of forced entry, therefore it must’ve been someone inside the house, therefore it must’ve been her older brother. His interrogation actually was recorded, you can watch excerpts from it on YouTube.

[Crowe interrogation in 1998]

Det. Chris McDonough: Hypothetically, could that have happened?

Michael Crowe: [crying] No, not that I know of.

Det. Chris McDonough: Not that you know of.

Michael Crowe: Like I said, I would have to be completely unaware of it.

Det. Chris McDonough: OK. Have you ever blacked out before?

Michael Crowe: No, never.

Det. Chris McDonough: OK. I believe you.

Jeff Kukucka: The interrogators sort of concoct this whole narrative about how he was jealous of his sister, and he decided he wanted to get rid of her, and he insists, “I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I don’t remember.” And what the interrogators did is they sort of manufactured this vulnerability in his memory, and they said, “Well, sometimes people do things while they’re sleeping, and they don’t remember that they did it.” They effectively convinced him that he did it in the middle of the night, that he was sleepwalking and he didn’t even remember it. And he actually did come to believe that he had actually done this, and he even implicated two of his friends who had nothing to do with it whatsoever.

In a case like that, the vulnerability arguably is the fact that they’re interrogating a juvenile. And juveniles, their memories are more malleable, and they’re more vulnerable to social pressures, and all those things. But even so, they had to sort of manufacture his memory vulnerability.

Liliana Segura: In Charles’s case, he said, they wouldn’t even have had to do that.

Jeff Kukucka: The guy had been drinking, doing drugs. I mean, he already sort of came into the interrogation room with this added vulnerability of “Well, I’m not entirely sure what happened.” So they very well could have exploited that to get him to agree to just about anything probably at that point.

Jordan Smith: And there’s another difference between Charles Raby and Michael Crowe.

Jeff Kukucka: Thankfully, he was never convicted. They found the real killer through DNA evidence before his trial.

Liliana Segura: We spent a lot of time trying to unravel Charles’s confession and figure out where he was, when, and who might’ve seen him on the day Edna Franklin was murdered. There are people who saw him earlier that day and testified at trial, like the woman who said he sat on her porch cleaning his nails with a pocket knife.

But there are also people who saw or talked to him that night, after the murder had taken place, who weren’t called to testify — including Timothy. People call him Timmy. We met him at a noisy Starbucks.

Timothy Ferrier: My name is Timothy James Ferrier, and I’m Charles’s younger half-brother.

Liliana Segura: He saw Charles that night at the home their mom and grandmother shared in northeast Houston. He was about 10 years old.

Timothy Ferrier: I can remember him coming into the door, you know what I mean? I didn’t see no blood whatsoever, just a sweat stain like he had been walking for miles from wherever he was at.

But I can’t even remember what time it was. My mother was at work, I believe, that night. I didn’t want to go to bed. I was trying to stay up late, trying not to go to school tomorrow probably. And then I heard a knock on the door. “Who is it? Who is it?” “It’s Charles. It’s me, your brother.” “Oh, OK.”

Liliana Segura: Timmy described Charles’s behavior that night as normal. He said he looked sweaty from walking, but there were no signs that he’d been in a fight or anything. At one point while they were talking, Charles called Merry Alice.

Timothy Ferrier: I vaguely remember that, and I think she had asked him what he was drinking, and I think she had said it was a beer, but it was in fact water. And I just so vaguely remember that. I can’t say that’s the biggest thing I remember, but I kind of remember having a short interaction with him in the kitchen, and then shortly after I went back to bed. And then I couldn’t tell you what happened the next day. It’s just been so long ago.

Jordan Smith: Given what Kukucka was saying about the fallibility of memory, there’s reason to question Timmy’s recollection, which he acknowledges is fuzzy. But where the basic facts are concerned, Merry Alice’s recollections have been consistent, and they corroborate Timmy’s  account: that nothing seemed off about Charles the night that Franklin was murdered. Merry Alice said she hadn’t heard from Charles all day, which was odd. Then, around 10 p.m., her phone rang.

Merry Alice Gomez: I just asked him, “Where are you?” He said, “At my grandma’s house.” And I said — I guess I probably doubted him, I said, “Are you sure?” He goes, “Yeah, Timmy’s right here. He can tell you.” And that’s when I heard him. I can’t remember what he joked about, then I said, “Are you drinking?” And then he goes, “No!” He goes, “Timmy, do I got a beer in my hand?” And I said, “You know what I mean. Have you been drinking?” And then he goes, “A couple, you know, a little bit.”

So I heard Timmy. He said, “No.” He goes, “Do I got a beer in my hand?” He goes, “No.” I said, “All right. So go to bed.” And he was at my house early the next morning.

Jordan Smith: And how was he the next morning, do you remember? Just normal or what was that next day like?

Merry Alice Gomez: Just — I feel like it was just this day, just normal.

Jordan Smith: With the unreliability of the confession, the lack of physical evidence connecting Charles to the murder, and the lackluster representation he got at trial, there are plenty of reasons to question the case against Charles Raby.

Liliana Segura: But there’s an even bigger one. One that doesn’t come to light until 2006, 14 years after the murder. DNA: an unknown male profile found in blood caked under the fingernails of Edna Franklin’s left hand. It doesn’t match Charles Raby or her grandsons Eric Benge and Lee Rose.

Jordan Smith: On the next episode of Murderville, Texas: DNA, the Houston Police crime lab, and what Charles’s jury didn’t know.

Lloyd White: This is a really vicious attack. I mean, it’s what we usually refer to as overkill. In other words, not somebody that just kills somebody, but they just really produce injuries upon injuries upon injuries intentionally.

Sarah Frazier: You would have to be incompetent as a scientist to believe that that was an inconclusive result. The other possibility is that you were lying.

Elsa Alcala: It just seemed like they were bending over to affirm the death convictions.

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Texas is a production of The Intercept and First Look Media.

Andrea Jones is our story editor. Julia Scott is senior producer. Truc Nguyen is our podcast fellow. Laura Flynn is supervising producer. Fact-checking by Meerie Jesuthasan. Special thanks to Jack D’Isidoro and Holly DeMuth for additional production assistance. Voice acting in this episode by Dan Triandiflou and Jake McCready.

Our show was mixed by Rick Kwan, with original music by Zach Young. Legal review by David Bralow.

Executive producers are Roger Hodge and Christy Gressman. For The Intercept, Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief.

I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith.

You can read show transcripts and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter: @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/donate. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show. And please do leave us a rating or review; it helps people find us. If you want to give us feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post Episode Four: Confessions appeared first on The Intercept.

Charles Raby is tried for the murder of Edna Franklin. The murder weapon is missing, and no physical evidence ties him to the crime. But he’s up against a powerful prosecutor’s office, and his attorneys call no witnesses. The jury sentences him to death.

Transcript

A quick listener note: This podcast contains adult language and descriptions of violence.

[Phone ringing]

Linda McClain: Hello.

Liliana Segura: Hi, is this Linda?

Linda McClain: Uh-huh.

Liliana Segura: Hi, Linda. It’s Liliana Segura. How are you?

Linda McClain: Oh, I’m OK. How are you?

Liliana Segura: I’m OK. Thanks so much for returning my call.

Liliana Segura: Two days after we visited Charles Raby on Texas death row, I was startled to see a tweet about his case, directed at me, from a name that I didn’t immediately recognize. As it turned out, it was Linda McClain, the daughter of Edna Franklin: the woman Charles was accused of killing in 1992. After a brief game of phone tag, I caught up with her two days before Christmas.

Linda McClain: Yeah, I was just surprised to hear from you.

Liliana Segura: I was surprised to hear from you on Twitter! [laughs]

Linda McClain: Well, I couldn’t figure out any other way to do it, so I thought, “Well, Twitter, surely somebody will get a message, or I can reach somebody on this Twitter.” But, yeah. Did you have a question?

Liliana Segura: Yeah — well, I was curious how you thought to contact me about Mr. Raby.

Linda McClain: Well, every time something happens with Charles Raby, I’m notified, as a victim, because my mother was murdered by Charles Raby.

Jordan Smith: That’s how she got our names. She wanted to know if we had an agenda.

Linda McClain: I’m assuming in case you’re out there blabbering all over the world, “Oh, this man is innocent. He didn’t do it. He’s innocent. Oh my goodness.” That’s what makes me mad, is these Innocence Project people. They don’t go and find out the other story. And do they even read the transcripts and the confessions and the witnesses? I don’t know.

[Theme music]

Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Texas. Episode 3, “The Trial.”

Liliana Segura: We’re going to talk more about Linda McClain. We got to know her pretty well. She had a lot to say from the start. Above all: She wanted to make clear that she did not believe Charles Raby was innocent. This was based on his confession, of course, but also her own experiences with Charles and what happened when he was tried for her mother’s murder.

Jordan Smith: Before we get to the details of Charles’s trial, we need to talk a bit about a pretrial hearing that took place in May 1994. It was all about Charles’s confession and whether it should be allowed as evidence against him. This is known as a suppression hearing. The defense tries to convince a judge that certain evidence should be tossed out. When it comes to a confession, the argument is often that the defendant recanted, saying it was made up or coerced by cops. What happened at Charles’s suppression hearing makes his confession all the more vexing.

Charles was represented by an attorney named Felix Cantu. During the hearing, Cantu argued that Charles’s confession had been coerced — that the cops had threatened to arrest his girlfriend, Merry Alice Gomez, and take her baby away, and that’s what had prompted Charles to confess.

Liliana Segura: The state, represented by Harris County Assistant District Attorney Roberto Gutierrez, said this was nonsense. Remember how the cops said they’d given Charles coffee, a Coke, and a burger? They emphasized this to show that there was no coercion whatsoever. And they adamantly denied making any threats, even veiled ones, that they’d arrest Merry Alice. But then, Charles got on the stand.

We brought on actors to read from the court transcripts. Here’s what happened next.

Roberto Gutierrez (Actor): You do agree that nobody mistreated you?

Charles Raby (Actor): No.

Roberto Gutierrez (Actor): And nobody mistreated Ms. Gomez?

Charles Raby (Actor): No.

Roberto Gutierrez (Actor): Your only concern is that she was being inconvenienced some and you were just concerned about her?

Charles Raby (Actor): Yeah.

Roberto Gutierrez (Actor): OK. Well, would you agree with me, Mr. Raby, there was nothing really about that that would have made your signing a confession involuntary?

Charles Raby (Actor): Well, I didn’t want her to go to jail.

Jordan Smith: Gutierrez reiterated that nobody had explicitly threatened to throw Merry Alice in jail. Charles agreed.

Roberto Gutierrez (Actor): In terms of you giving that confession, you were giving that confession because you wanted to come straight with Sgt. Allen?

Charles Raby (Actor): Yeah. And I wanted her to go home. The quicker I got that over with, the quicker she could get out of there.

Liliana Segura: Gutierrez tried to steer the conversation away from Merry Alice: Wasn’t it true that Charles was going to turn himself in anyway, and give a full confession?

Charles said he didn’t know, just that he was going to say whatever he needed to convince them he hadn’t done it.

Roberto Gutierrez (Actor): You’re not telling the judge that the only reason you signed the confession was because you wanted to get her out of there? You signed it because you did it voluntarily, and because it’s true, right?

Jordan Smith: OK. Here’s where you’d think that Charles would say “no.” He would deny the confession was true and reiterate his concern about Merry Alice. But instead, he said this:

Charles Raby (Actor): Because it’s true and, you know, well, he didn’t force me to do it, but I wanted her to go home. I didn’t feel that it was right for her to be there.

Liliana Segura: Now, when I first read this, I was like: What? “Because it’s true?” Did he just admit that the confession had been true all along?

Jordan Smith: Yeah, I really didn’t know what to think. Charles’s whole defense at this point is that the confession was coerced. So, you know, it would’ve been the perfect moment for his lawyer, Cantu, to ask Charles a few questions to clear everything up.

Liliana Segura: But that didn’t happen. Instead, moments after his client appeared to double down on his confession, Cantu asked a convoluted question about what time it was when Charles gave his statement — and that was it.

Jordan Smith: Even in the very best of scenarios, it is super hard for the defense to win a suppression hearing. With Charles’s disastrous turn on the witness stand, there was no way that the judge was going to toss his confession. It was definitely going to be admitted as evidence.

Roberto Gutierrez, the prosecutor who would try Charles for Edna Franklin’s murder, started his career as a journalist. He scored a big scoop when a man tried to break out of prison in Huntsville back in the 1970s. Gutierrez pivoted to the law and quickly proved himself a talented prosecutor. By the end of the ’80s, he’d secured several death sentences.

Liliana Segura: From the start of our reporting, we’ve been unable to reach Gutierrez. We tried various phone numbers and email addresses and sent a letter to an address we thought was his. We also tried looking for him on social media. Nothing.

In the handful of newspaper articles we found that mention Gutierrez, he comes across as a charismatic guy with a self-deprecating sense of humor. In 1991, he chased down a 19-year-old probation violator who was shot in the butt by a bailiff while trying to flee a courtroom. Gutierrez tackled the kid in a hallway and later quipped: “When I got up, everybody thought I got shot. Everybody seemed disappointed.”

Finally, through a public records request, we managed to get our hands on Gutierrez’s personnel file, which was illuminating — not only about him, but the Harris County DA’s office as a whole.

Jordan Smith: Throughout the ’90s, the office was aggressively seeking death sentences. The district attorney was a man named Johnny Holmes.

Maurice Chammah: He had a handlebar mustache. His office was decorated with sort of Old West paraphernalia. And in his office, a culture of seeking the death penalty really developed.

Jordan Smith: That’s Maurice Chammah. He’s a Texas journalist who wrote a book about the state’s death penalty system.

Maurice Chammah: I heard stories about prosecutors who called themselves the Silver Needle Society because they had sent men to death row. There was a rock band formed by prosecutors who in their free time would perform gigs under the name Death by Injection.

Jordan Smith: During this era, prosecutors were evaluated not only on how many convictions they secured, but also on how much prison time those defendants got.

Liliana Segura: Gutierrez consistently got high marks in his performance reviews. He was described as well-liked, hard-working, and willing to take on “tough” cases.

But he was also praised for things that don’t exactly sound like something to strive for if your goal is to do justice. One supervisor wrote: “Roberto will try any case regardless of the strength or weakness of evidence.” Another lauded him for winning a death sentence on a “thin case.”

Jordan Smith: Meanwhile, many of the lawyers representing defendants facing the death penalty were not up to the task. You know how you have a right to an attorney if you can’t afford one? Well, the majority of people facing the death penalty are poor and rely on court-appointed lawyers. Charles Raby was one of them.

Liliana Segura: At the time, there was no public defender office. There were just private attorneys appointed by the courts. A lot of them were unqualified to begin with. And to make matters worse, they were often denied the resources they needed to represent their clients, like funding for investigators and expert witnesses. Meaning, there was a huge power imbalance. The state had attorneys who were trained for this job, and they had full budgets for these cases.

Jordan Smith: Here’s Jim Marcus. He is a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s worked on death penalty cases for decades. He was just starting his legal career in Houston when all of this was going on.

Jim Marcus: That’s the era, that’s when Mr. Raby was sentenced to death, and so he was fed into this system which was characterized by — plagued by, really — rampant ineffectiveness. Many, many, many people were sent through the system with inadequate counsel.

Liliana Segura: In theory, those defendants would have a chance to challenge their convictions by arguing that their trial lawyers were ineffective. But more often than not, those efforts went nowhere. That’s eventually what would happen in Charles’s case. His challenge was denied by the courts.

Jordan Smith: It’s June 6, 1994. The 248th District Court in Harris County, Texas. Judge Woody Densen presiding over the capital murder trial of Charles Raby. The state would be seeking the death penalty.

Liliana Segura: Charles was seated towards the front of the courtroom. He wore a white-striped shirt with a blue and red tie. Several of Edna Franklin’s relatives were seated in the gallery.

Charles’s mother, Betty, attended the trial too. At 42, she was slight, with blond hair. Watching her son go on trial for his life was another trauma in a life already filled with trauma. Growing up, Betty had been sexually abused by her father. She married Charles’s dad, Charles Elvis Raby, after finishing 10th grade. But he abandoned her when Charles was just a baby.

Later, Betty was repeatedly hospitalized for mental illness. The first time, Charles had just turned 12. Child welfare removed him and his younger sister from their home. For Charles, it was the first of countless placements throughout the foster care system.

Jordan Smith: The trial did not get off to a good start — at least for the defense.

Liliana Segura: The first thing that happened? Cantu, Charles’s attorney, asked Judge Densen for the trial to be delayed. His co-counsel, a guy named Michael Fosher, was nowhere to be found.

Jordan Smith: This isn’t just a minor wrinkle. In death penalty trials, it is standard practice to have two attorneys representing a defendant: first and second chair. Fosher was the second chair, which means Cantu was the lead guy. So you’d think he’d know where his co-counsel was. But Cantu told the judge that he hadn’t heard from him. At this point, Gutierrez piped up helpfully. “I spoke to him yesterday, Judge. I talked with co-counsel at his home.”

Gutierrez said that Fosher had a ruptured disc and was in a lot of pain and had been given medication. As Gutierrez recalled, Fosher said he was going to see his doctor that morning and then would “try to make it to court.”

The judge seemed unfazed by this. “OK. Anything further?” he asked, before starting the trial. It was a sign of the way things would go.

Liliana Segura: In his opening argument to the jury, Gutierrez laid out the state’s case. He contended that Charles had killed Edna Franklin because he was pissed that she didn’t want him coming over to her house.

Remember, the police had specifically argued that if they could get blood from Charles, they’d be able to get his DNA and link it to the crime. But Gutierrez told the jury, “There is no DNA” in this case. In fact, there was no physical evidence tying Charles to the crime. And while the confession was their main evidence, Gutierrez acknowledged that even that was pretty weak.

Charles never mentioned that he’d sexually assaulted Edna Franklin, Gutierrez said. Or had any intention to rob her or burglarize the house. This was an important admission. In order for a murder to be eligible for the death penalty, it has to be murder plus something. So, murder plus rape or murder plus robbery. It’s called an aggravator. And it’s what is supposed to turn a regular murder into one so heinous the state can kill you for it.

Jordan Smith: As Gutierrez continued, he basically gave the jury permission to decide that one of three aggravators existed — rape, robbery, or burglary — but without having any direct evidence that any of them took place. And they didn’t have to agree on which of these things happened.

One of the first witnesses for the state was 25-year-old Eric Benge, Franklin’s grandson, who found her on the night of the murder. Eric talked about why his grandmother didn’t like Charles, which you would expect. But he didn’t stop there.

Gutierrez had him describe the house, from room to room, essentially asking him to analyze the crime scene. This is the kind of testimony that you usually get from a cop or a crime scene investigator, not from a victim’s relative.

There’s at least one problem with this. According to the confession, Charles came into the house through the front door.

Liliana Segura: Gutierrez asked Eric to tell the jury about the “point of entry.” He had Eric hold up a picture taken of his bedroom on the night of the murder and asked him:

Roberto Gutierrez (Actor): Is there anything particular about the bed?

Eric Benge (Actor): Yes. You can see where he climbed through the window.

Liliana Segura: Eric replied.

Eric Benge (Actor): It looks like there are two footprints on the bed.

Liliana Segura: Gutierrez asked him to mark the photo and show the jury where these “indentations” were. For the record, Eric was not actually qualified to say one way or another whether anyone had stepped on the bed. In the crime scene photos, there’s nothing that resembles a footprint; it’s just a rumpled sheet. Later, an actual expert, called by the state, would testify that there were no footprints found on the bed.

In any event, Gutierrez tried to bolster Eric’s testimony with some unusual circumstantial evidence: marijuana. According to Eric, he smoked pot regularly. And everybody knew this. What’s more, everyone knew where he kept it. So on the night of the murder, Eric went to look for his pot — and he found it right in its place.

There was only one person who didn’t know where Eric kept his pot. That was Charles Raby.

Jordan Smith: OK, hold up. Eric is basically saying that whoever killed his grandmother would’ve stolen his pot, if they’d known where it was. And since it wasn’t stolen, only one person he knew could’ve been responsible: Charles.

We’re not sure what this is supposed to tell the jury. But it’s bizarre. And rather shocking that the prosecution would’ve brought this in. Even more shocking? Charles’s lawyers didn’t object to any of this — not the window, the sheets, or the pot.

Even more important, they didn’t do anything to address the glaring holes in the state’s case: the total lack of physical evidence linking their client to the crime. The state called a series of experts to explain away the lack of forensic evidence pointing to Charles.

Liliana Segura: But first there was Dr. Eduardo Bellas, the medical examiner who did Franklin’s autopsy. He described Franklin’s injuries in painful detail. Eight of her ribs had been broken in the struggle with her attacker, he said. He found defensive wounds to her arms, signs that she’d fought back. Ultimately, she was stabbed five times — including twice through the heart — and slashed across the neck, deep enough to sever her windpipe. All of these wounds could’ve been made with just a small pocket knife, Bellas said — like the one Charles carried. Bellas also examined Franklin for signs of sexual assault but found none. But that didn’t mean it didn’t happen, he told the jury.

An examiner from the Houston Police Department crime lab testified about underwear found next to Franklin — underwear the state assumed she’d been wearing that night. This witness concluded it had been forcibly ripped apart.

Another crime lab analyst testified that hairs found clutched in Franklin’s hand belonged to Eric Benge, not Charles. Gutierrez suggested that since Eric lived there, it wasn’t weird that his hair would be on the carpet or that some of it would have wound up in Franklin’s hand when she fell to the floor during the attack.

Jordan Smith: There was a fingerprint examiner who said he found nothing at all at the house: no bloody fingerprints or shoe prints anywhere. He gave the jurors several reasons why he found no prints. One of the most absurd was that the wind could’ve blown them away. For the record, that’s not a thing.

And then there was Joseph Chu, another HPD crime lab analyst. He typed Charles’s blood — he has Type O blood — and then compared it to blood evidence found at the scene. His testimony was brief, but really important. Particularly the following exchange, in which he was questioned by Cantu. Actors will read it for you.

Felix Cantu (Actor): And your conclusions from that analysis?

Joseph Chu (Actor): From the evidence, it is inconclusive test results, so I cannot do any comparison.

Felix Cantu (Actor): So it was inconclusive results?

Joseph Chu (Actor): Yes, you can say that.

Jordan Smith: He said it was inconclusive. Remember that.

Liliana Segura: Aside from a few other witnesses — the cops who arrested Charles, the people who said they saw him around the day of the murder — there wasn’t much else to the state’s case.

Except the confession, which Gutierrez read to the jury. The state rested its case and turned it over to the defense.

You might expect Charles’s lawyers to have called their own experts — like, maybe a pathologist to challenge the medical examiner’s claim that even the smallest of knives could have caused Franklin’s wounds, or Merry Alice to describe what happened at the police station. But instead, they called no witnesses and said they too would just rest.

Then it was time for closing arguments. Co-counsel Michael Fosher — the lawyer who was MIA at the start of the trial — spoke first. An actor will portray him.

Michael Fosher (Actor): First of all, I would like to apologize for the way I look.

Jordan Smith: He explained that several months earlier, he’d fallen and hurt his ribs. He’d been dealing with medical problems ever since. The weekend before the trial was especially tough, he said. So he’d been given a kind of neck brace.

Michael Fosher (Actor): Which is very uncomfortable, very hot, and makes me sweat.

Jordan Smith: Fosher emphasized that there was no evidence to back up the aggravators alleged by the state.

Michael Fosher (Actor): They haven’t proven the burglary, they haven’t proven the robbery, they haven’t proven the aggravated sexual assault.

Jordan Smith: It was clearly a gruesome crime, he conceded, but —

Michael Fosher (Actor): I’m telling you, you just can’t assume that a person has committed a crime without valid proof.

Jordan Smith: Then Fosher did something astonishing. He conceded Charles’s guilt.

Michael Fosher (Actor): The state has proved there was a killing. They have proved that Mr. Raby committed this killing.

Jordan Smith: Reading the transcript, it just comes out of nowhere. And it’s really surreal and a crappy strategy. He’s saying, look, my guy killed someone, but it was just a regular murder. Not a death-eligible one. So, convict him, but don’t kill him.

When I read all this, I was like, O-M-F-G, what is happening? That’s literally what I wrote in my notes.

Liliana Segura: I had a similar reaction. The state really hadn’t proven their case. Yet Fosher is telling the jury that his client killed Edna Franklin — before they’ve even gone back to deliberate.

Then, when Cantu took over, he basically made the state’s case for them. Instead of reiterating that there was no physical evidence tying Charles to the crime, he seemed to get carried away, pointing out just how gruesome it all was.

Cantu took off his jacket and started vividly illustrating the many wounds Franklin suffered. “It indicates the level of intensity, the level of just the madness, and the craziness of that moment for somebody to stab another person,” he said.

Jordan Smith: It should come as no surprise that the jury quickly convicted Charles of murder. What was left to decide was whether he would be sentenced to life or death. That would happen after another mini-trial, what’s known as a punishment hearing.

Liliana Segura: In a death penalty case, one of the most important things a defense team is supposed to do, in advance of a sentencing hearing, is a deep dive on their client’s early life — to uncover any potential abuse, neglect, or trauma. This is called mitigation: developing evidence that explains how a person ended up on the wrong path, which can be used to persuade a jury to spare their life. It’s extremely sensitive and time-consuming work, best done by an expert known as a mitigation specialist. But there was no such expert on Charles’s team.

Instead, the defense called an array of relatives and other witnesses who seemed to bolster the state’s case, like Robert Butler, Charles’s former stepfather.

Charles lived with him on and off from the time he was 4 years old. According to court and child welfare records, Butler routinely beat Charles with a belt. Once, he forced Charles to eat a pencil — because he caught him chewing on its eraser.

Another time, he made Charles wear a brick around his neck for a week as punishment for breaking a lawnmower.

But on the stand, Butler downplayed his treatment of Charles. He conceded that he gave Charles “a little whipping” on two occasions but blamed Charles, saying he just refused to behave.

Jordan Smith: Charles’s mom, Betty, also took the stand. While she briefly mentioned the brick and pencil incidents, Cantu failed to elicit testimony that would have put these events into context. They were part of a much longer history of abuse and neglect that the jury never got to hear.

The picture they were left with was that Charles was just incorrigible, and that everything that happened in his life was basically his fault. And it was no match for what happened when the state’s witnesses took the stand.

Liliana Segura: Gutierrez presented an overwhelming series of friends, neighbors, jailers, and just about anyone who could cast Charles in a violent light. Most damaging among them: Charles’s ex-girlfriend, Karianne Wright. Her testimony was devastating, truly excruciating to read.

They’d met when Karianne was just 13; Charles was 15. She described him as charming at first. But then, after she got pregnant with his kid, he’d turned mean — volatile. She described physical beatings of her and of other people, and numerous instances of rape.

There’s no question Charles was violent toward Karianne. He’s told us as much.

Jordan Smith: You know, she basically tells a giant, long tale of horrific abuse —

Charles Raby: Yeah, yeah.

Jordan Smith: — at your hands.

Charles Raby: Right.

Jordan Smith: And can you explain all that?

Charles Raby: Back then, I felt I was justified. And I did, I did beat her up. I beat her up twice. But I didn’t beat her with my fists. I smacked her around, but I never hit her with my fist.

Liliana Segura: On the stand, Karianne depicted the abuse as far, far worse: just relentless beatings, which seemed to escalate dramatically over time. There’s no way to know the truth of exactly what happened between them, and you’ll hear more from Karianne later. But it makes sense that she would describe this on the stand: That’s the kind of testimony you expect at a punishment hearing. Still, at times her testimony veered into speculation about whether Charles would pose a danger to society going forward.

Jordan Smith: This is another important aspect to Texas death penalty cases. The idea is that if you’re so dangerous that you would pose a threat to society, even to the community inside prison, then there’s nothing that can be done but execute you. Frankly, it’s pseudoscience at best. But it’s been in Texas law for decades. And prosecutors often bring this kind of stuff out at trial, usually through expert testimony.

For what it’s worth, Karianne is not an expert. Yet she said things like, Charles “lives and breathes” violence and knows “nothing more.” That everyone would be safer without him. Did she think he could be rehabilitated, Gutierrez asked. No chance, she said.

We were surprised the defense didn’t object to the testimony. Instead, when his turn came to push back against this picture of Charles as an ongoing danger to society, Cantu again seemed to do the state’s work for them — by calling a notorious Texas psychologist named Walter Quijano. He’s one of a handful of self-proclaimed experts in so-called future dangerousness.

If you know Quijano’s name at all, it’s probably because of his quack theory: that being Black makes you more likely to be violent in the future. He peddled that crap in at least six capital cases in Texas.

Liliana Segura: Typically Quijano would be called as a witness by the state. But in Charles’s case, he was called by the defense. And by the end of his testimony, Quijano had concluded that Charles was a psychopath who would always be a threat. On cross-examination, Gutierrez asked, well, if that’s the case, wouldn’t sentencing him to death be the best way to deal with it? “That would do the work,” Quijano replied.

On June 17, 1994, Charles was sentenced to die.

Liliana Segura: Do you remember when the verdict came down?

Charles Raby: Yeah.

Liliana Segura: What was that like?

Charles Raby: It sucked something out of me. I mean, I knew they was going to find me guilty from the start. But it was a hard thing, especially knowing my mom’s sitting back there, you know.

Liliana Segura: We wanted to talk to as many people involved in the trial as possible — the judge, prosecutor, defense attorneys, and jurors. We spent a lot of time tracking the jurors down on our trips to Houston. None agreed to meet us in person.

One guy shared some thoughts in an email, saying that no one disputed that Charles had confessed, and if there was any evidence of innocence, the jury never heard it. A couple more people agreed to talk to us on the phone.

Jada Lancaster Wiley: That is certainly something I’ll never forget. That was a very disturbing and emotional jury that I sat on. That was a very hard decision to make, concerning Mr. Raby — my thought was, who died and made me God to judge this man’s life?

Jordan Smith: This is Jada Lancaster Wiley. The way she described it, the jury was unanimous in its decision that Charles was guilty. But exactly what he was guilty of was a different question.

Jada Lancaster Wiley: I thought it was murder-rape.

Jordan Smith: What was it that convinced you about that? Do you remember?

Jada Lancaster Wiley: The way her clothes were taken off.

Jordan Smith: But not everyone agreed it was rape. And one guy, he couldn’t decide if there even was an aggravator.

Jada Lancaster Wiley: He had a really hard time debating whether it was a capital murder charge or a lesser charge. He had a hard time with that.

Jordan Smith: Another juror, who did not want his name used, said that it was a traumatizing experience.

Anonymous Juror: I can tell you that ever since that trial, I would never again in my life convict someone of murder. I don’t think that is my job in life. That’s God’s decision. I did it because we “followed the law,” and that’s what the law told us to do, but if I was ever confronted with something like that again, I would have to tell the judge and everyone that I can’t do that ever again in my life. It haunted me for a long time that I decided that that guy was supposed to die.

Jordan Smith: We were also curious about what the judge, Woody Densen, would remember about the case. Densen served as a judge from 1983 to 1995. The press on him that we could find wasn’t exactly flattering.

Liliana Segura: Densen’s most recent claim to fame was having been caught on a surveillance camera keying his neighbor’s Range Rover because he thought it was blocking the sidewalk. He denied it but eventually pleaded guilty to criminal mischief. One local attorney summed up Densen for the Houston Press: “In almost 30 years of doing criminal-defense law, if ever there was such a thing as a four-man judicial bobsled team from hell, he’d be riding point.”

Densen died in 2020. When we reached out to him in 2019, we weren’t optimistic that he would want to talk to us.

[Phone ringing]

Woody Densen: Hello?

Liliana Segura: Hi, is this Judge Densen? Hello?

[Phone hangs up]

Liliana Segura: That was totally him. It was definitely.

Jordan Smith: That was definitely him.

Liliana Segura: All right, let me call back.

Jordan Smith: OK.

[Phone ringing]

Woody Densen: Hello.

Liliana Segura: Hi, sorry, I think we might’ve gotten cut off. I was looking for Woody Densen.

Woody Densen: This is he.

Liliana Segura: Oh, hi. My name is Liliana Segura, I’m a reporter. And I was hoping — I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.

Liliana Segura: We told him we had questions about Charles’s case.

Woody Densen: What’s the name of the case?

Liliana Segura: The defendant was Charles Raby.

Woody Densen: Oh, Lavie. Hold on, just a second. Paul Lavie, that’s the — hello?

Liliana Segura: No. It was, sorry, Charles Raby. Raby with an R.

Woody Densen: Oh, I think Rapier is his name. Are you talking about Rapier?

Liliana Segura: No, it’s R-A-B-Y was the last name, so it’s —

Woody Densen: That doesn’t really ring a bell.

Liliana Segura: This went on for a while. It might seem weird that a judge wouldn’t remember a death penalty case that he presided over. Sending someone to death row is obviously a pretty heavy burden. But Densen is not the only judge we’ve spoken to who didn’t remember a particular capital case. And given how many people were being sentenced to death in this era, it’s not all that surprising.

Densen asked us who Charles’s lawyers were. We told him it was Felix Cantu and Michael Fosher.

Woody Densen: Michael Fischer?

Liliana Segura: Fosher, with an O, or Fosher. I’m not sure how to pronounce it.

Woody Densen: Oh, how do you spell the last name, O what?

Liliana Segura: Fosher is F, as in Frank, O-S-H-E-R.

Woody Densen: Well, I remember Felix. The last name of this other lawyer is named Oscar, O-S-C-A-R, right?

Liliana Segura: No, no. Fosher, with an F.

Woody Densen: Well, that one I do not recall. 

Liliana Segura: And then, Densen insisted he wasn’t the judge who presided over Charles’s trial.

Woody Densen: Maybe another lawyer tried, another judge tried it. It’s possible that — I can’t imagine the kind of thing — maybe I went on vacation or something, and it was tried by court.

Liliana Segura: The record shows that you were the judge, so that’s why— otherwise, I wouldn’t know to get to in touch with you.

Woody Densen: Well, no, no, I can appreciate it. My name’s there. But I just don’t remember one with Felix Cantu being on it and this other guy, Oscar, doesn’t ring a bell at all. 

Liliana Segura: We thought it best to end the call.

Woody Densen: OK, well, take care.

Liliana Segura: Take care. Bye-bye.

Woody Densen: Bye-bye.

Jordan Smith: Halfway through that conversation, I was like, “Maybe he wasn’t the judge. He seems so certain he wasn’t the judge.”

Liliana Segura: We also tried to reach Michael Fosher, Charles’s second chair lawyer, but he didn’t want to talk to us. Most of all, we wanted to talk to Felix Cantu. We wanted to know why he made the decisions he made at trial. As it turned out, that’s the one thing he didn’t want to talk to us about.

Felix Cantu: I’m going to limit it to what occurred and not what I did or didn’t do.

Jordan Smith: Cantu said he couldn’t meet up while we were in Houston because he was dealing with an emergency.

Felix Cantu: It’s actually the plumbing in my house.

Liliana Segura: Oh, God! Yeah.

Felix Cantu: Yeah. You know plumbing is serious, a problem, so that’s what I’ve got.

Jordan Smith: We made a tentative plan to meet up the next time we were in town. But apparently, he was still having plumbing problems. After that, we left a bunch of messages for him.

Finally, in February 2020, we decided to track him down. We went to his house in a leafy neighborhood on Houston’s west side. We knocked on his door, but no one answered. So we left a note in his mailbox. Nothing.

In early March, we went back. And wrote him another note.

Liliana Segura: It totally looks like maybe they’re just not here.

Jordan Smith: That is too bad.

Jordan Smith: Still nothing. At this point, it was becoming clear that the pandemic was a big deal. And we might not be able to come back to Houston for a while. We decided to give it one more shot.

Liliana Segura: Somebody is definitely there.

Jordan Smith: Yeah.

Liliana Segura: I see them.

Jordan Smith: You do?

Liliana Segura: I see someone through the glass.

Jordan Smith: Oh, here he comes.

Chris: Hello.

Liliana Segura: Hi.

Jordan Smith: Hi.

Liliana Segura: How are you?

Chris: Hi, I’m Chris.

Liliana Segura: Chris?

Jordan Smith: We were looking for Felix.

Chris: Oh, he’s out. He’ll be back about 20 minutes. He went to the store.

Jordan Smith: We decided to wait around. There was only one way onto his street so we’d see him when he returned. We parked the car down the block and watched. No Cantu.

But then, suddenly, a man emerged from the house and checked the mailbox. He looked up and down the road. It was Cantu. He’d been inside the house the whole time — dodging us.

[Door knocking]

Liliana Seugra: Oh, my god.

Jordan Smith: This is just maddening.

Liliana Segura: Completely maddening.

Jordan Smith: Knock again?

Liliana Segura: Yeah.

[Door knocking]

Liliana Segura: This is the strangest game of cat and mouse I’ve ever —

Jordan Smith: Felix!

Liliana Segura: Are you Felix?

Felix Cantu: Yes.

Liliana Segura: Hi.

Jordan Smith: Hi! It’s Jordan and Liliana.

Liliana Segura: How are you?

Jordan Smith: How are you?

Felix Cantu: Why are you?

Jordan Smith: What?

Felix Cantu: Why are you here?

Jordan Smith: Well, because we’ve been trying to get in touch with you, and you said you would meet with us, and then you never got back with us, and we’ve been trying to get in touch with you.

Felix Cantu: So you just decided just to come by?

Liliana Segura: Yeah.

Felix Cantu: Uninvited?

Jordan Smith: Sorta.

Felix Cantu: No, no, not sort of.

Jordan Smith: Well, I mean, you said you’d meet with us, and then you kind of blew us off.

Felix Cantu: But that doesn’t mean that you’re invited today, at this hour. Well, come on in.

Liliana Segura: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you. I’m sorry, it’s not our preference to show up uninvited.

Jordan Smith: It’s not our preference to dive bomb.

Felix Cantu: I don’t believe that one. So y’all don’t read much into non-calls, huh?

Jordan Smith: Well, no, I mean, we prefer it if someone’s going to tell us to go away, that they just literally tell us to go away.

Felix Cantu: I wouldn’t be that rude. Go sit down.

Liliana Segura: He led us to his home office. The phone on his desk rang a couple times as we talked. To be honest, after all of our anticipation and our stakeout, the conversation we had with Cantu was just a letdown. It’s not just that he didn’t want to discuss the trial — he genuinely didn’t remember most of it.

Felix Cantu: I mean, you’re going to ask me to remember a lot of things about a case, and I’m not going to. I’m not going to remember. Not that I don’t want to tell you, it’s just I just will not remember.

Liliana Segura: One thing that did come through: From the start, the odds were stacked against him.

Jordan Smith: Were you nervous about doing a capital case? I mean, you said you’d done, what, one before?

Felix Cantu: Yeah. No, not really. Not really. The only thing that I was bothered by is if the state wants to go to trial, that’s usually pretty, well, a done deal for them. How many do they lose? Maybe one out of a thousand. Maybe.

Liliana Segura: As we talked with Cantu, a couple things became pretty clear. One: He really liked Charles and felt sorry for him. More importantly, though, we also got the feeling that Cantu thought Charles was guilty and that Charles’s confession had something to do with that.

Felix Cantu: What he says now is not what he said then. That’s all I can say. Which one is true? I can’t tell you that. This is what I do say: I hope that he gets off the death penalty, the death row, and I wish him the best, and I hope I live long enough to see him walking the streets of Houston, Texas. We’ll go have a Coke together. That’d be nice.

Liliana Segura: Needless to say, Linda McClain, Edna Franklin’s daughter, doesn’t have the same warm feeling about Charles that Cantu does.

But it seems they may have one thing in common. Regardless of what Charles says now, neither of them can get past his confession.

Linda McClain: I mean, who’s going to confess to murdering a 72-year-old woman with arthritis? Who’s going to confess to that? Because they have a girl in the other room with a baby. Are you really gonna do that? Oh, and then guess what: It’s going to be capital murder. Ooh, do you know what that means? That means you’re gonna be eligible for the death penalty. Do you still want to confess to this? Uh, I wouldn’t have at all. I would have ran screaming from the room.

Jordan Smith: Next time on Murderville, Texas: “Confessions.”

Jeff Kukucka: I find it very hard to believe that he remembers the old Volkswagen in the driveway but doesn’t remember what he did with the knife. It just — it doesn’t add up. There is little doubt in my mind that something happened in there that we don’t know about.

Mike Giglio: “Did I do it? Could I do it?” He wasn’t even 100 percent sure.

Charles Raby: Everywhere I’d go, they said, “That’s him. The granny killer.” That’s what the one cop called me, a granny killer. And that’s when I started getting like more frustrated and angry, starting just hating everything and everyone at that point.

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Texas is a production of The Intercept and First Look Media.

Andrea Jones is our story editor. Julia Scott is senior producer. Truc Nguyen is our podcast fellow. Laura Flynn is supervising producer. Fact-checking by Meerie Jesuthasan. Special thanks to Jack D’Isidoro and Holly DeMuth for additional production assistance. Voice acting on this episode by Vincent Thomas, Jake McCready, Beau Davidson, Luis Bermudez, Tommy Donoghue, and Bill Celler.

Our show was mixed by Rick Kwan, with original music by Zach Young. Legal review by David Bralow.

Executive producers are Roger Hodge and Christy Gressman. For The Intercept, Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief.

I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith.

You can read show transcripts and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter: @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/donate. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show. And please do leave us a rating or review; it helps people find us. If you want to give us feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post Episode Three: The Trial appeared first on The Intercept.

Crime is surging in Houston, and homicide detectives are given free rein as they race to close cases. Investigators are certain that Charles Raby is guilty of Edna Franklin’s murder — and that DNA evidence will prove it. But once Charles confesses, the forensic investigation stops.

Transcript

A quick listener note: This podcast contains adult language and descriptions of violence.

Broadcaster: Now stay tuned for an NBC News special presentation.

Jordan Smith: On December 6, 1990, NBC preempted their Friday night primetime drama “Midnight Caller,” about a former cop turned talk radio host, for a show about real cops. Titled “Houston Homicide,” it was hosted by Tom Brokaw and kind of like the old reality show “Cops” but more cinéma vérité.

“Houston Homicide” (Tom Brokaw): Tonight, a detective story. We’ll take you inside the working lives of Houston homicide investigators. We’ll be with them during their daily struggles with the awful realities of America’s sudden and alarming increase in the business of violent death.

Liliana Segura: The show opens with the two lead detectives who investigated Edna Franklin’s murder: Houston Police Sgts. Wayne Wendel and Waymon Allen.

They pull up to the scene of a homicide. There’s a man dead in a ditch by the side of the road. Allen is driving. It’s one of those boxy, ’80s unmarked cop cars.

Allen parks behind some crime scene tape. He grabs his jacket with one hand and his gun with the other, which he shoves into the waistband of his pants. Wendel follows behind Allen. He has a dark mustache and glasses. They lift the white sheet covering the body. After examining the scene, they go over to talk to the victim’s brother.

Jordan Smith: Among the Houston homicide cops, Allen was known as a masterful interrogator. He would end up interrogating Charles Raby.

Allen died in 2019, so this is the only time you’re going to hear his voice.

Waymon Allen: There’s not any good time for you to talk to me, I know, and what we’ve told you is devastating, I know. But we need to try to find out what happened to your brother, OK? Can you help me do that?

Jordan Smith: In a tribute to Allen on Facebook, Wendel said they’d cleared so many cases together that he’d lost track. “If you killed someone in Houston,” Wendel wrote, “you would not want Waymon on your case. He would find you, arrest you and he knew how to get incriminating statements from suspects.”

[Theme music]

Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Texas. Episode Two, “The Cops.”

Liliana Segura: Let’s do a quick recap. After Edna Franklin’s grandsons discovered her body, they told police they had a couple suspects in mind, including Charles Raby. He was on parole at the time. The police wanted to question him, but Charles was avoiding them, which only made them more suspicious.

Jordan Smith: They caught up with him a few days later, and Charles confessed to the crime. But no physical evidence tied him to the scene, and the cops have never found a murder weapon.

Liliana Segura: One of the first things we look at when we start working on a case is the police report. Ideally, it should give you a detailed road map of how the investigation went: where it started, what was learned along the way, and how it was all resolved.

Jordan Smith: The police report in Charles’s case is just thin. To be sure, there are a lot of details — but mostly about how the inside of Franklin’s house looked: where the couches were located, that there was a bag of old car parts in a corner.

Liliana Segura: But aside from the crime scene investigator mentioning that he booked into evidence a small paring knife found in one of the bedrooms, there is no discussion of looking for a murder weapon. In fact, there’s really no investigation documented in this report at all. Instead, the cops asked Franklin’s grandsons who they thought did it, glommed on to Charles, and spent the next few days trying to run him down.

Jordan Smith: How do we know there was no investigation? The cops had an arrest warrant for Charles the day after the murder. Think about that: Franklin’s body isn’t found until 10 p.m. The cops are there all night processing the scene, so they don’t really know yet what kind of evidence they may or may not have. And then, armed with a hunch and a very general description of a dude seen jumping the neighbor’s fence, they seek out a judge who will allow them to pick up Charles, less than 24 hours later.

Oh, and the warrant? It’s for trespassing, for being in the neighbor’s yard. But the search warrant application makes clear this is just a pretense for capital murder — a death-eligible offense.

Jordan Smith: We found Sgt. Wendel on Facebook. He retired in 2005 after a 34-year career with the Houston Police Department. This freed him up for what is clearly a true passion: photography. His landscape and travel photos are all over his Facebook page, which is otherwise full of right-wing memes. Wendel said that working homicide for the Houston PD back in the day was intense.

Waymon Wendel: You had, basically, about a three-day window to clear your case before you got another one. We would get a case about every fourth or fifth day, a new homicide would come up. That’s after going through 30 detectives.

Jordan Smith In other words, they were trying to close cases as quickly as possible. Here’s Sgt. Dwane Shirley. He helped Allen and Wendel on the Franklin case. In fact, it was Shirley who drove Charles to the police station the day he was arrested for Franklin’s murder.

Dwane Shirley: I spent 26 years in homicide. The caseload when I hit there, when I first got to homicide in 1980, the homicides were streaming up every year. 

Liliana Segura: Homicides peaked the following year, at 701. By the time Franklin was killed, that number had dropped. But per capita, 1992 was one of the worst years for murder in Houston’s history. Still, Shirley told us that they were really good at catching the bad guys — actually, unbelievably good. He said that, in his day, the clearance rate in the homicide division was close to 90 percent.

Jordan Smith: This claim struck us as problematic because the national average is much lower, and police departments have been known to pad their numbers. Closing a case doesn’t necessarily mean solving it.

Lilian Segura: Of course, a clearance rate as high as Shirley described would be great, if they were actually getting the right person for the crime. Getting the wrong person in a murder case leaves a killer on the streets, but Shirley also suggested that they did pretty much whatever they wanted to close cases, without a whole lot of oversight.

Dwane Shirley: You can’t do now what we did then.

Jordan Smith: What do you mean?

Dwane Shirley: Well, look at all the scrutiny that’s being placed on police officers right now. Every single move they make is subject to videotape.

Jordan Smith: And you think that is hamstringing?

Dwane Shirley: Sure. It hamstrings the entire police department.

Jordan Smith: Why do you think that is? In homicide, why do you think that would have impacted your work?

Dwane Shirley: I think I better not discuss it; you’d better not discuss it. But we were given a free rein in solving a case.

Liliana Segura: And Shirley had a story about Wendel to describe the kinds of things they would do to investigate murder cases.

Dwane Shirley: I have one instance here that was probably not politically correct in today’s climate referring to Wayne Wendel. We were once conducting surveillance on a suspect in a Black area of town, and we didn’t have access to some Black officers to help us stake out this location, so Wayne Wendel dressed up in blackface and conducted surveillance on this location, which today would probably get him fired and charged.

Liliana Segura: Do you remember when that was or what the case was?

Dwane Shirley: I don’t remember what the case was, but it was over on the east side of town, in the ghetto. I remember everybody was kidding him about dressing up in blackface so that he wouldn’t get recognized as being a police officer on surveillance. But the deal is, there was no racial overtones in his actions. We were trying to arrest a murder suspect.

Liliana Segura: We were obviously pretty shocked by this story. When we later wrote to Wendel, he confirmed it and elaborated. “I rode around Fifth Ward in the backseat of a yellow cab,” he wrote. “We were looking for a serial rapist/murderer.”

This might be a good moment to make clear: Charles Raby is white, and so was Edna Franklin. But Wendel’s actions here speak volumes about the culture that existed within the homicide bureau and their attitude towards the communities they were supposed to be protecting.

Jordan Smith: We also asked Shirley about something Charles says happened on the way to the police station — that Shirley told him they could charge his girlfriend, Merry Alice Gomez, with aiding and abetting him, for not turning Charles in.

Liliana Segura: He named you specifically as the officer who took him into custody, I believe, drove him to the station. And according to him, you had said something to the effect of, his girlfriend could be charged with aiding and abetting. But does any of that sound familiar to you?

Dwane Shirley: Well, very slightly, but let me explain something to you. Nothing says an investigator has to tell the truth to a suspect. I would lie to a suspect in a minute. It wouldn’t bother me. I’m not going to threaten him, I’m not going to beat him. But if I had to lie to get him to tell me a confession or the truth, I’d lie.

Liliana Segura: We told Shirley that Charles maintains his innocence. And we wanted to know, with the rise of DNA testing and exonerations, has he ever worried about the possibility of executing an innocent person?

Dwane Shirley: It’s never given me pause — ever. Because if I ever worked a case and I had doubts about whether or not the suspect did it, I wouldn’t have charged him. I wouldn’t have arrested him. But if I arrest him on a murder charge that he didn’t do, that means the person who did it is still out there.

Jordan Smith: Right.

Dwane Shirley: You know how they do it in Russia, right, when they give you a death penalty? They lock you up. They don’t give you a date for execution or anything. All they do, you stay there, it may be there a week, it may be there a month, it may be there a year. They walk up to your cell, take you out of the cell, walk you out back, and shoot you in the head with a 9 mm. That’s how they do it. There’s no fancy stuff about it.

Liliana Segura: Are you saying that we should do it more like that?

Dwane Shirley: No, I’m not saying we’re doing it like that. But a suspect should have one appeal, and after that, he should be executed.

Liliana Segura: For the record, that’s not actually how they do it in Russia. Technically, the death penalty has been on hold there since the ’90s.

Jordan Smith: Some of the most detailed information in the police report was written by the crime scene investigator. He diagrammed and described the scene — a man named Jim Norris. He had a decidedly less cavalier attitude about the system than Sgt. Shirley. This is because Norris not only saw the system from a cop’s point of view, but later from the other side too.

Jim Norris: My name is Jim Norris. I am — I was a crime scene investigator with the homicide division at this time, in 1992. Right now, I’m 67 years old and the pastor at a small country church. [In 1992] I worked the night shift. It was nothing for me to catch a scene at 2 o’clock in the morning and then work the entire rest of the night on the scene and then all the day shift doing paperwork.

Jordan Smith: We sent Norris his portion of the police report. He recognized it as his work but has no specific recollection of it. The murder took place toward the end of his time with HPD.

Liliana Segura: Norris worked Houston homicide for about a decade before leaving the state for a series of career changes, including a short stint as an emu farmer.

Jim Norris: I picked those emus up in Texas. It was a big thing back then, and it was a shot in the dark sort of thing, but I took those emus to North Carolina with me.

Liliana Segura: More importantly, after moving to Indiana, he began doing work for criminal defendants.

Jim Norris: I was a private investigator, and I concentrated mostly on criminal defense work and that usually involved death penalty cases.

Liliana Segura: Norris knows the system sometimes gets things wrong. In a 2001 profile of him in the Times of Northwest Indiana headlined “Gumshoe With Gumption,” Norris talked about his passion for investigating wrongful convictions, especially in death penalty cases.

“If every time 100 people flew in an airplane one of them died, people would stop flying,” he told the paper. “But we may have 1 out of 100 inmates sitting on death row with no connection to the crime.”

Norris is opposed to capital punishment now. He saw serious flaws in the evidence that police and prosecutors relied upon to send people to die.

Jim Norris: I think that eyewitness testimony was probably the biggest thing that deterred me from believing that the death penalty was right. And then when you got into DNA and you found out how many times blood typing was wrong, and how many people were convicted on that basis, then that kind of solidified the idea we need to take a step back from the death penalty until we can get it more right than what we have.

Jordan Smith: Norris talked about a couple things that we know are leading causes of wrongful convictions, including erroneous eyewitness identification, which is the most common factor found in DNA exonerations and — along with the confession — a key component of Charles’s case.

Remember: Edna Franklin’s neighbor, Hillery Truitt, told the cops that he and his brother-in-law had seen a guy jump the fence from Franklin’s backyard the night of the murder. And even though the pair said they didn’t get a good look at the guy’s face, the cops decided that it was Charles they had seen. But even under the best circumstances, eyewitness IDs are notoriously unreliable. Norris told us that it wasn’t until after he left HPD that he learned just how unreliable they are.

Jim Norris: And I think things like that bothered me for a long time. I’ve tested myself and my own recollection — just take anybody in a restaurant some day and look at them for a minute and then ask yourself the next day what you can tell me about it. Could you 100 percent sure pick that person out of a lineup or photo array? How often, if you did that, would you be right?

Jordan Smith: Norris also talked about false confessions, which have been implicated in hundreds of wrongful convictions.

Jim Norris: False confessions, I think, fall into two categories: a forced false confession and a voluntary false confession. And certainly, a forced false confession is probably the saddest thing that an investigator can be accused of. However, that doesn’t negate the fact that there are voluntary false confessions, and I believe that they’re in abundance.

One of the things that I have found over the years in confessions is that a guy will say whatever he thinks he needs to say that will benefit him at the time. Certainly the one that is a self-interest false confession is something that you’ve got to go back to step one and see: Does the evidence support what he says?

Liliana Segura: Today, Charles insists he didn’t murder Edna Franklin. He says the confession he gave the police was false.

Jordan Smith: Now, you may be thinking, come on: Confess to something I didn’t do? No way. Let alone something so horrible as murder. Something that could send me to the execution chamber? Not gonna happen.

Liliana Segura: A lot of people think that no one would confess to something they didn’t do. They just can’t conceive of it, especially when the stakes are so high. But false confessions do happen, more than you’d think.

The National Registry of Exonerations catalogs all the factors that have led to wrongful convictions in the U.S. Since 1989, there have been more than 2,900 exonerations. More than 360 of those cases involved false confessions. Twenty-seven were death penalty cases.

We’re going to dig deeper into false confessions, but first, you need to hear what Charles has to say about how all of this happened.

Jordan Smith: We went to see Charles in December 2019. It was just before Christmas. Texas’s death row is in Livingston, down the road from the execution chamber in Huntsville.

To get inside, you have to go through security and a series of gates that lock behind you. Before you reach the visitation area, you pass a glass display cabinet full of handmade crafts. Many are decorated with characters from Disney. They’re made by prisoners.

The visiting area is stark and has all the charm of an old high school cafeteria. There are rows of booths. On one side is where we’ll sit. On the other side are cages behind plexiglass-like windows. That’s where prisoners are brought in and uncuffed.

Liliana Segura: I’ll just start. This is paused right now, but I’ll just start rolling.

Guard: So that’s going to work for you?

Jordan Smith: Yeah, I think it’s going to work.

Liliana Segura: Yeah. I think we’re good.

Guard: OK. You start at 12:39.

Jordan Smith: Sounds good. Thank you. Hey, Charles.

Charles Raby: How you doing?

Jordan Smith: Good. Nice to meet you.

Charles Raby: That’s how she’s going to do it, sit there like that?

Jordan Smith: Yeah, it’s going to be fine.

Liliana Segura: Charles has blue eyes and a small, upturned nose. He was dressed in the all-white prison scrubs issued by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. At 49, he was a slightly doughier version of the 24-year-old who first went to death row. He was also visibly nervous — like, really nervous. He seemed apologetic about his demeanor. At one point, he told us that he was getting short of breath. “I don’t do a lot of talking,” he said.

Jordan Smith: We only had an hour, and we had a lot of questions. Going in, we understood his explanation for why he confessed to Edna Franklin’s murder. He said it was to protect his girlfriend, Merry Alice Gomez. But we wanted to hear more about what happened at the police station, especially his interactions with Sgt. Waymon Allen. Remember: Charles’s interrogation wasn’t recorded.

Liliana Segura: Charles had been in and out of the system his whole life. Growing up, his father was absent and his mother was neglectful. He was repeatedly removed from her home by the state’s child welfare agency. He barely ever went to school; instead, he ran the streets.

Charles told us that he’d heard the cops were looking for him on October 16, 1992 — the day after the murder — but he really didn’t know why. He’d only recently gotten out of prison. Just knowing that the cops were looking for him was enough to make him want to avoid them.

Jordan Smith: Merry Alice had told him that the cops had asked her to call if she saw him. Charles says that’s why he decided to turn himself in. He was worried she might get in trouble, but before he could, the cops showed up. Here’s Charles.

Charles Raby: And I tell Merry, “Well, they’re here.” He told me to come out, I’m under arrest, you know. He didn’t really tell me what right then and there, but later on. Then, I told Merry to stay in the house and I said, “You stay here.” They asked me about who she was. I told them, “That’s my girlfriend. She can stay here.” The next thing I know, they’re taking her and I asked them, “Where you all taking her?” They told me they were taking her home.

So I really thought they were taking her home. But then we go to the police station, and they started questioning me. I’m like, “Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about or anything like that.”

Liliana Segura: He recalled going to the bathroom and hearing the baby crying and Merry Alice’s voice. He was surprised. He thought the cops had taken them home. He asked Allen why they were at the station.

Charles Raby: He said, “Well, we just want to talk to them and everything, question them, see what she might know.” I said, “Man, she don’t know nothing. She don’t know none of them people over there.” I’m just kind of paraphrasing everything really, but later on, he seen how focused I was on talking about her. I didn’t want to talk about nothing else but why the hell she’s here, I want her to leave. And that’s when he said, “Well, we told her to call us if she seen you, and the next thing we know, we find her hiding out with you.” And I told them, “Man, we wasn’t hiding out. We were at my house.”

I’ve got to admit that he never actually told me, “We’re going to arrest her,” but he gave me the impression. I’m not stupid. I know, “We could arrest her. You know we could do this and we could do that.” To me, that’s you can and that you will if I don’t start talking to you about those things you want me to say.

Liliana Segura: Charles told us that when he’d gotten arrested with his friends growing up, it was every man for himself inside the police station. But with Merry Alice, it was different. He didn’t want her to get in trouble because of him. It seems clear Allen saw that he cared about her and that he could use that as leverage to get Charles to cooperate.

Charles Raby: I mean, I’ve been in trouble quite a bit. I’m sure you know that. I’ve been to jail. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been in and out of juvenile and in jail. But this is the first time I ever had anybody use somebody I love against me like that. I mean, this is someone totally innocent, doesn’t have no reason to be there. Then you’re talking about taking her or taking the baby away from her. They really had me. I don’t know any other way to explain it. I just know they found my weak spot, so I just started telling them whatever I thought they wanted to hear, you know.

Jordan Smith: One thing the cops did do before getting the arrest warrant for Charles was to speak to people who had seen him the day of Edna Franklin’s murder. Like the woman who said he’d sat in front of her house, cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife. So it wasn’t hard for Allen to trip Charles up when he claimed to be somewhere else.

Charles Raby: He was just asking me, “Where have you been, what have you been doing?” And I kept lying to him. He’d say, “Where was you over here?” And he said like, “What’d you do that day?” I said, “Well, I stayed in my grandmother’s neighborhood.” He said, “Well, did you go over here?” I’m like, “Well fuck, how the hell did you know I went over there?” I said, “Yeah, I went over there.” And then just these little lies — so then when I started finally telling the truth, it’s like he ain’t trying to hear it. He done caught me in so many of these little lies, you know? But he tracked me all the way from my brother’s house to my friend’s house. He tracked me from all the way over there to the neighbor. He’s putting me in this neighborhood.

Jordan Smith: Not only did Allen get Charles to put himself in the neighborhood, he got Charles to say he’d knocked on Franklin’s front door.

Charles Raby: Once he got me to admit that I was there at the house, that I actually knocked on the door, that was it. That’s all he wanted. He placed me at the house, said I was there. So, I don’t know. I was willing to do, say anything he wanted me to to get Merry and the baby out of there.

Jordan Smith: So, Charles said, he gave Allen a story.

Charles Raby: I don’t know why I was lying to him like I was, in other words. I just didn’t — it’s just what I do. I grew up on the street. Just don’t tell the cops nothing, right?

He was, just had me, “Well, what’d you do?” By this time, I know somebody’s dead. He done told me that somebody’s dead, right? And that’s when I told him, “Well, I guess I went in the front door, just walked in, knocked on the door, just walked in and there she is, and I just grabbed her and did what I did.” You know, it’s just so many details, it just doesn’t make no sense. I mean, nothing.

Liliana Segura: Charles told us that Allen fed him details about the case. Police thought the murderer had left through Franklin’s back door and had been seen by neighbors jumping a fence. So, Charles said, he fed those details right back to Allen.

Charles Raby: He said, “What about the back door?” I said, “What about the back door?” He said, “Did you go out the back door?” I said, “I guess I went out the back door then.” He says, “Was you confronted by somebody about staying out of his yard?” I said, “Yes, I guess somebody told me to stay out of their yard.”

Jordan Smith: Ultimately, Charles insisted that despite what he told the cops, he did not kill Edna Franklin.

Charles Raby: All I know is I didn’t have no blood. I didn’t kill the woman. I didn’t. I feel for Lee and them, but I did not do it. That’s all I can say.

Jordan Smith: We obviously didn’t get a chance to ask everything we wanted during that visit, but in our mind, that was no big deal. The way it works is that reporters get one visit with the same person every 90 days. So we were already planning our next visit — for April 2020. That didn’t happen.

Liliana Segura: Instead, the pandemic would end up locking down the prison for more than a year. Our reporting, like everything else, suddenly ground to a halt. We would have to continue our investigation remotely. Of course, there was no way we could have known what was coming.

Before we left Livingston, we exchanged Christmas gifts in the parking lot. Then, two days later, I was checking Twitter on my phone when I saw a tweet directed at me from a woman I didn’t recognize. She said, “I certainly hope Charles ‘Buster’ Raby hasn’t convinced you he’s innocent.”

Her name sounded familiar, but I didn’t know why. It was clearly someone who knew the case, but this was still pretty early in our reporting. And I just couldn’t place it. So I called Jordan. I told her I’d gotten a strange tweet about Charles. It came from a woman named Linda McClain.

Jordan did recognize the name.

Jordan Smith: That’s Edna Franklin’s daughter.

Next time on Murderville, Texas: More about Linda, and Charles Raby goes on trial for his life.

Maurice Chammah: I heard stories about prosecutors who called themselves the Silver Needle Society because they had sent men to death row.

Anonymous Juror: It haunted me for a long time that I decided that that guy was supposed to die.

Linda McClain: Do you still want to confess to this? Uh, I wouldn’t have at all. I would have ran screaming from the room.

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Texas is a production of The Intercept and First Look Media.

Andrea Jones is our story editor. Julia Scott is senior producer. Truc Nguyen is our podcast fellow. Laura Flynn is supervising producer. Fact-checking by Meerie Jesuthasan. Special thanks to Jack D’Isidoro and Holly DeMuth for additional production assistance.

Our show was mixed by Rick Kwan, with original music by Zach Young. Legal review by David Bralow.

Executive producers are Roger Hodge and Christy Gressman. For The Intercept, Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief.

I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith.

You can read show transcripts and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter: @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/donate. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show. And please do leave us a rating or review — it helps people find us. If you want to give us feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post Episode Two: The Cops appeared first on The Intercept.

A Houston grandmother named Edna Franklin is found stabbed to death in her living room. Charles Raby, a friend of Franklin’s grandsons, is swiftly arrested. He confesses to the crime. But from the start, things don’t add up.

Transcript

A quick listener note: This podcast contains adult language and descriptions of violence.

Gloria Rubac [on megaphone]: All over Texas, people are watching what’s happening here in Huntsville, the killing capital of the country.

Jordan Smith: Huntsville, Texas. August 21, 2019. It’s hot and humid. The air is thick with the smell of guano. The late afternoon sun is being chased west by dark clouds. There’s a storm coming. A group of protesters has gathered outside the imposing prison known as “The Walls.” We’re minutes away from an execution — the fourth this year.

Gloria Rubac: Tonight, the state of Texas will commit premeditated murder of an innocent man. We know that they don’t have the evidence to prove he had anything to do with this murder, and yet Texas, in its infinite ignorance, is going to kill another innocent person.

Liliana Segura: We’ve just come up from Houston, which is about an hour south. We traveled there to begin reporting on an old death penalty case from 1992.

It involves a man named Charles Raby, who was convicted and sent to death row for the murder of an elderly woman named Edna Franklin. She was stabbed to death in her home on Houston’s north side. No physical evidence tied Charles to the crime. But just days after Franklin was killed, he confessed to her murder.

Jordan Smith: Charles’s case played out during a pivotal time in Houston’s history. The population was booming — and so was crime. There were hundreds of homicides a year, and police were racing to close cases as fast as possible.

Meanwhile, the long-standing culture in the Harris County District Attorney’s Office — which covers Houston — was aggressively pro death penalty. Throughout the ’90s, Harris County sent more people to death row than any other jurisdiction in the country. A lot of people were condemned to die in cases that would never result in a death sentence today.

Liliana Segura: Charles’s case is almost certainly one of those. But there’s another glaring problem with it: Despite his confession, there’s a good chance he’s innocent.

[Theme music]

From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome to Murderville, Texas. Episode One, “The Killing Capital.”

[Huntsville protesters]

Gloria Rubac: Miscarriages of justice take place way too often in Texas, and tonight —

Jordan Smith: Our first trip to Houston coincided with the scheduled execution in Huntsville of a man named Larry Swearingen. There are a lot of parallels between his case and Charles Raby’s.

Both men have proclaimed their innocence. And both cases reflect a host of common problems found in death penalty cases prosecuted in the ’90s.

In Charles’s case, that included lackluster police work, overzealous prosecutors, flawed forensic practices, and seriously questionable defense lawyering. These are the kinds of things that, as journalists, we know lead to wrongful convictions. We’ve seen this over and over again.

Liliana Segura: But Charles’s story is about more than just guilt versus innocence. It’s about the fallibility of memory and the effects of living with trauma. And it stretches far beyond Charles.

It’s about a legal system that promises justice and closure — but instead often creates chaos and confusion for the people caught up in it.

Jordan Smith: And this is especially true when the system gets things wrong. I’ve spent the better part of two decades writing about Texas’s death penalty. In the process, I’ve learned how easy it is to send someone to the row, even when there are serious questions about their guilt.

Liliana Segura: This isn’t unique to Texas, of course. I’ve covered death penalty cases all over the country. We know that innocent people end up on death row. Of the thousands of people sentenced to die in the so-called modern death penalty era, 186 have been exonerated.

But what’s especially terrifying about Texas is just how many people have been executed here in the face of evidence that showed they were innocent. There’s Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted of killing his own children based on junk forensic science.

CNN (Anderson Cooper): In Texas tonight, explosive new charges over the execution of a man who at least half a dozen forensic experts now believe was innocent. These new charges are again being leveled against Gov. Rick Perry, who removed four members of a state commission investigating the death of this man, Cameron Todd Willingham.

Jordan Smith: And Carlos DeLuna, who was convicted based in part on a faulty eyewitness identification.

ABC News: It’s just one of many crimes that occur in this country every year that end in the death penalty. But now this killing from 30 years ago is raising the most provocative question: Does the death penalty in our country always punish the guilty or are mistakes made? Is it possible our system has killed an innocent man, Carlos DeLuna?

Jordan Smith: We’ve spent nearly three years investigating the case of Charles Raby. He’s been on death row longer than the vast majority of people sentenced to die in Harris County, which puts him in a dangerous position. He’s in a race against time to prove his innocence.

Liliana Segura: We wanted to bring you here, to Huntsville, because it’s where all of these executions have taken place. It’s a space that most people never see up close, even though executions are carried out in our names. And, more often than not, the prosecutors who win these death sentences don’t actually show up to witness executions.

Jordan Smith: It’s other people — the prison staff, the families on both sides — who have to deal with the reality, which is an execution in a grim, 170-year-old prison just outside downtown Huntsville, with protesters behind yellow caution tape. All just a few feet away from the ordinary scenes of everyday life. A man with a leaf blower. A woman walking her dog while talking on the phone, asking casually, “Oh, who are we killing today?”

Liliana Segura: This is what prosecutors fight for when they seek the death penalty. And if the state gets its way, this is where Charles Raby will die, whether he’s guilty or not.

Gloria Rubac: So the Supreme Court website has been updated. The denial is for real. Larry’s not having any of his family or friends witness the execution. He will only have a priest, his spiritual adviser with him — who’s apparently a better Catholic than the stupid governor of the state.

[Church bells ring]

Liliana Segura: The bells strike 6 p.m. Less than an hour later, Larry Swearingen will be pronounced dead. His final words: “Lord forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”

Speaker 1: … Craig Roberts and the Channel Two news team.

Linda Lorelle: Good evening, everyone. Larry is sitting in for Bill tonight. Well, the great debates of ’92 are history.

Jordan Smith: Monday, October 19, 1992: the day of the final presidential debate. Also the day Charles Raby was arrested for murder.

Larry Audas: A recent parolee with a violent history has been arrested and charged with the murder of a Houston grandmother. Seventy-two-year-old Edna Franklin was found dead in her Northwest Houston home last Thursday. Her throat was slashed, and she was nearly decapitated. Houston police say Charles Douglas Raby confessed to the murder today, but he couldn’t tell them why he killed that retired widow, who was in poor health at the time.

Sgt. Wayne Wendel: He does not give us an explanation why he jumped on this woman, why he stabbed her to death. His explanation is that he blacked out and doesn’t know why.

Larry Audas: Hmm. Raby knew Edna Franklin’s grandson, that was the contact. The suspect was paroled two months ago, after serving time for aggravated robbery.

Liliana Segura: Edna Franklin had been found just four days earlier. Her body was discovered by her grandsons, who told police they had a suspect in mind. A friend of theirs, actually: 22-year-old Charles “Buster” Raby. A guy with a mean temper and a reputation for violence. He was quickly arrested and confessed to the crime. Open and shut, right?

Jordan Smith: Not exactly.

Liliana Segura: It was just before 10 p.m. on Thursday when the 911 call came into Houston Police dispatch. Seventy-two-year-old Edna Franklin was dead on her living room floor. She had been repeatedly stabbed and was naked from the waist down.

Jordan Smith: Homicide investigators, Sgts. Wayne Wendel and Waymon Allen, were called to the scene. Here’s Wendel.

Wayne Wendel: I remember the poor victim, Edna Franklin, and the way we found her. She had multiple stab wounds to her chest, throat was cut, and she looked like she had been raped. A poor, innocent old woman like that; who would kill her?

Jordan Smith: Franklin’s two grandsons, Eric Benge and Lee Rose, lived with her in her home on Westford Street. Eric was the one to find her.

Liliana Segura: Eric told the homicide investigators that he’d arrived home after work to find the front door wide open. Their three dogs were running around in the front yard. The porch light was off. In fact, all the lights in the house were off except for one, a dim glow coming from the back bedroom where his grandmother spent most of her time.

She was frail — at least in appearance. She weighed 72 pounds and had bad arthritis. So she had a hard time getting around, especially without shoes on. But, people told us, she was also feisty — a woman not to be messed with.

Eric made his way toward her room. Moving through the house, he stumbled on something that he thought was a pile of laundry, near the doorway separating the living room from the kitchen. This wasn’t surprising. The house was in a constant state of disarray.

Back in Franklin’s room, Eric saw that her purse was overturned. Her credit cards were scattered on the floor. Her shoes were next to the bed. But she wasn’t there.

The back door was unlocked, and a nearby table had been moved. Eric retraced his steps and turned on the light. When he did, he realized that it wasn’t laundry he’d tripped over. It was his grandmother’s body.

Jordan Smith: She was lying facedown. There was a lot of blood. He rolled her over thinking he would try CPR. Immediately, he realized it would be of no use. Her throat had been slashed all the way across, slicing her windpipe. It was at that moment that Eric’s cousin Lee came home.

Eric died in 2012. But Lee talked to us.

Lee Rose: I was in shock, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just hard to take in. I just walked in and the lights were off, and she was in the living room, and my cousin was already there and it was crazy.

Jordan Smith: Lee was with a friend named John Allen Phillips. Eventually, Lee, Eric, and Phillips all ended up downtown at the police station giving statements.

In the police report, Wendel described how he started the search for possible suspects. “I asked Eric Benge to make a list of people who have been over to his grandmother’s house within the last few weeks. He then began to tell me about a white male friend of theirs by the name of Charles Raby.”

Charles — who pretty much everybody called “Buster” — had recently been released from prison. Eric told Wendel that Charles had come by the house earlier that month looking for a place to stay. But his grandmother had run Charles off because he was drunk. In response, Charles had supposedly broken a beer bottle on her front porch.

Liliana Segura: The other potential suspect Eric and Lee offered to the cops was a guy named Edward Bangs. He was a friend of theirs too. In the days before the murder, he’d been painting the outside of Edna Franklin’s house. He’d also stolen from Eric, according to the police report, a shotgun and a paycheck. Even so, the cops appear to have totally ignored Bangs.

Charles was on parole after all; he and a couple other guys, armed with knives, had robbed a convenience store for beer a few years earlier. So, from the start, all eyes were on Charles.

The morning after Edna Franklin’s body was found, a neighbor named Hillery Truitt called the police to say he might have some information. Truitt’s property backed up to Franklin’s. According to Truitt, his brother-in-law, Martin Doyle, was pulling up to his house around 8:15 the night before when Doyle saw a man jump the backyard fence. Truitt and Doyle followed the man onto the street. This is what Doyle remembers:

Martin Doyle: He was just casual dressed. He just used one hand to jump over the fence, that’s a little unusual. So he was pretty athletic. Didn’t get a look at his face, I got a look at the man. A younger white guy, I could tell that.

Jordan Smith: But you never saw his face?

Martin Doyle: No, I didn’t see a direct face.

Jordan Smith: Truitt told police that the man was in his early 20s, 155 to 165 pounds, with dark hair. He was wearing jeans, a dark shirt, and a dark jacket.

When they caught up to him, the man said he was taking a shortcut because there had been an accident a street over. Truitt didn’t think much of it until he saw the news of Edna Franklin’s murder. This isn’t a very strong eyewitness account. It’s generic, and they didn’t even get a good look at the guy’s face.

Neither man reported seeing any blood on the fence-jumper, which is odd given that Eric Benge, who’d only rolled his grandmother over, reported his arms being covered in blood. He had to wash his hands, and he still left traces of blood on the phone he used to call the police.

Nonetheless, the cops decided it was Charles the men had seen. They declared him the “best suspect” in the case. People who saw him in the neighborhood the day of the murder seemed to support this theory.

One woman said Charles came by her house that afternoon to look for her son, who wasn’t home. He sat on her porch for a while and took out a pocketknife, which he used to clean his fingernails. She told the cops he was wearing dark stonewashed jeans, a black concert T-shirt, and a black leather jacket.

Liliana Segura: By the end of the day on Friday — less than 24 hours after the murder — the police had gotten a warrant for Charles’s arrest.

The sergeant who attended Franklin’s autopsy said he’d been told that the stab wounds could have been caused by a pocketknife, presumably like the one Charles carried. But in the police report, there’s no mention of any search for a murder weapon. In fact, to this day no murder weapon has ever been found. Wendel and his partner went on a hunt for Charles.

Wayne Wendel: I think it became an obsession with Sgt. Allen and I to find this guy. And Raby was on parole. He went to prison for robbery, which is a violent crime.

Raby became the focus when we couldn’t catch him. He was dodging us, every address that we had for him, he was just there. But eventually his luck ran out. We cornered him.

Liliana Segura: Charles was avoiding the cops at various points over the weekend, which only made them more convinced of his guilt. At one point, they caught up with him at his girlfriend’s house. But he ran out the back door.

They found him on Monday, October 19, at his mother’s boyfriend’s house — where he was living part-time — just a few blocks from Edna Franklin’s place. He was with his girlfriend, Merry Alice Gomez, and her infant son, Christopher, when the police pulled up.

Merry Alice Gomez: We agreed that he was going to turn himself in Monday to see what — because all they wanted to do was talk to him. So I said, “Well, I’m going with you.” He said, “How?” And I said, “I’m going with you.” I packed the baby best I could, and I was gonna go with him. I said, “If you’re not in trouble, if they just want you to question, I’m gonna go with you.”

Jordan Smith: Charles was handcuffed and put into the back of a police car. Merry Alice and Christopher were placed in the back of a second car. At the station, Charles was taken to an interview room and uncuffed while Merry Alice was taken to a family waiting room nearby.

According to Charles, he didn’t know Merry Alice was at the police station. He thought she’d been driven home.

Liliana Segura: It’s not entirely clear how long Charles was questioned. The interrogation was not recorded. And the police report contains only a vague summary of what Charles was asked and how he answered.

Jordan Smith: In contrast, the report spends a lot of time describing how Charles had waived his right to an attorney and had consented to having blood and hair samples taken. And it goes into detail about how well he was treated — he was given multiple cups of coffee, a hamburger, and a Coke — things cops often include in their reports as evidence that a person wasn’t held against their will or coerced into talking.

What’s striking is how quickly things seemed to unfold. According to the police report, Allen started interviewing Charles around noon. He asked some basic questions about whether he knew Edna Franklin and her grandsons, then moved on to what Charles did on Thursday, October 15.

Charles gave him a summary of his whereabouts that day, which was all over the place. He walked around Houston’s north side, visiting various friends and family members, and eventually made his way toward Franklin’s neighborhood. But he denied going to Franklin’s house.

At 12:40 p.m., Charles asked to use the bathroom. What happened next is really important: Charles says that during this bathroom break he heard a baby crying and Merry Alice’s voice cooing. When he asked why she was at the station, he said he was told that police were keeping her for a little while, just in case they needed to talk to her.

Liliana Segura: It wasn’t long after Charles returned from the bathroom that he confessed to killing Edna Franklin. It kind of comes out of nowhere. Allen got him another cup of coffee and asked a few more questions, including whether he’d gotten into an altercation with Franklin a couple weeks earlier. No, Charles said. But he said that her grandson, Lee, had told her that Charles was a burglar, so Franklin told Charles not to come around any more. He said he complied with her wishes.

But then, a sudden turn of events: Allen told Charles he knew he was lying. Here’s how it’s described in the police report. An actor will read it for you.

Sgt. Waymon Allen police report (read by actor): Allen advised Raby that he had been identified jumping over a fence leaving Edna’s house Thursday night at about the time she was killed. Raby looked down at the floor and his eyes filled with tears. Raby stated: “I was there. I went in through the front door” and “I saw her on the living room floor.”

Liliana Segura: According to the police report, it’s at this point that Charles asked if he could talk to Merry Alice. Allen said, sure, briefly, and when Charles returned, he gave a full statement. But according to Charles — and Merry Alice — he didn’t get to talk with her until after he’d made a full confession.

Merry Alice Gomez: Next thing you know, they come in, told him we got three minutes. I think there was like three cops in that room with us. It was a little room. He had the handcuffs on. I couldn’t stand to see Charles in handcuffs.

All he wanted to do was hold the baby, so that’s what he did the whole three minutes, he was like this. The world wasn’t there — just him and Chris. And he asked me, “Are you OK?” And I said, “Yeah.” And I’m right here, like, “Are we leaving?” [crying] He just gave me a kiss on the cheek, and that was it. He walked out, and I never saw him again.

Jordan Smith: You’re going to hear Charles’s entire confession later. But for now, what’s important is how he said the murder happened. He repeated a bunch of stuff about visiting people and then said he made his way to Franklin’s house. He was looking for Lee and drinking Mad Dog 20/20. Here’s what he said next. An actor will read it for you.

Charles Raby’s confession (read by actor): I walked up to the front door. The front door had a screen type door in front of a wooden door. I knocked on the door. I did not hear anyone answer. I just went inside. I sat down for a little bit on the couch. I called out when I got inside but I did not hear anyone say anything. I heard Edna in the kitchen. I walked into the kitchen and grabbed Edna. Edna’s back was to me and I just grabbed her. I remember struggling with her and I was on top of her. I know I had my knife but I do not remember taking it out. We were in the living room when we went to the floor. I saw Edna covered in blood and underneath her. I went to the back of the house and went out the back door that leads into the back yard.

Shortly after I had left Lee’s house on Westford I was approached by a man and this man told me something like, “I had better not catch you in my yard,” “jumping his fences.” Or something like that. I woke up later on the ground near the Hardy Toll Road and Crosstimbers. I walked home, on Cedar Hill from there. I remember feeling sticky and I had blood on my hands. I washed my hands off in a water puddle that is near the pipeline by the Hardy Toll Road. I do not remember what I did with my knife.

Charles Raby’s confession (read by actor): I think I was wearing a black concert shirt, the blue jeans I’m wearing and my Puma tennis shoes. I also had on a black jacket.

Liliana Segura: So, according to the confession, Charles was still wearing the same pair of jeans he had on when he stabbed Franklin to death. Police collected these clothes as evidence. But there’s no mention in their report of any blood on them or scratches or anything else on Charles’s body.

Jordan Smith: From the jump, his confession doesn’t match the physical evidence. This should have raised big red flags for the investigators.

At the time the cops secured this confession, there was no physical evidence tying Charles to the bloody crime. Still, they plowed ahead — remaining confident that, in the end, physical evidence would prove that Charles committed the murder. And not any old physical evidence but DNA evidence.

Liliana Segura: All of this is laid out in a three-page document within the police report. It’s the sworn affidavit in which the cops persuade a judge that they have probable cause to arrest a suspect.

The affidavit was written by Sgt. William Stephens, who said that if they could just get Charles into custody and get a blood sample, then they’d have what they needed to charge him with murder. Stephens had attended the autopsy. He wrote that he noticed Edna Franklin had human hair clutched in her fist, which he believed had been “pulled from the head of the person who stabbed Franklin as she was fighting for her life.” The hair was brown, like Charles’s. Most importantly, Stephens wrote that he was “personally aware that DNA can be found within human hair and that the DNA within each person is unique.”

“If a blood sample is taken from Raby,” he wrote, “the DNA can be extracted from this sample and compared with the DNA found in the aforementioned hair for purposes of determined [sic] whether or not Raby committed the murder of Franklin.”

So the police are promising that DNA evidence is going to prove that Charles Raby committed this murder — DNA evidence from blood, specifically.

Jordan Smith: The cops asked the Houston Police Department crime lab to test multiple items of evidence for DNA, which was fairly new technology at the time. The HPD lab had just begun in-house DNA testing earlier that year. It was a big deal that was supposed to revolutionize the city’s crime-fighting efforts.

Liliana Segura: But, ultimately, the cops didn’t wait for any of this testing to be done. Instead, once Charles confessed, pretty much everything else faded away.

Liliana Segura: This was a really brutal stabbing, but the weapon, the knife, was never found. What do you remember about that, in particular? Do you remember searching for that knife?

Wayne Wendel: Yeah, we searched all over the yard for it, the house, turned every piece of furniture around, upside down, had crime scene go over the yard with a metal detector. We just never found it.

Liliana Segura: Did that bother you?

Wayne Wendel: It didn’t matter anyway.

Liliana Segura: It didn’t matter, you said?

Wayne Wendel: All these questions you’re asking are moot because Raby confessed. He confessed to killing her.

Jordan Smith: In the eyes of Sgt. Wayne Wendel and the Houston Police Department, Charles’s confession made everything else moot. It neatly obscured the lack of physical evidence tying Charles to Edna Franklin’s murder.

Liliana Segura: The thing is, there was plenty of physical evidence in this case — evidence that was withheld, misrepresented, or never tested. And that evidence tells a different story. One in which the state went after the wrong man.

Jordan Smith: This season on Murderville, Texas:

Anonymous Juror: I would never, ever be able to do that again. It’s haunted me for a long time that I decided that that guy was supposed to die.

Wayne Wendel: Some things are left out of there on purpose because I really don’t want the defense to know everything.

Sarah Frazier: There is no way for them to know that the most important forensic evidence in the case points to a different person having been the killer.

James Jordan: It’s not about your guilt or your innocence in Texas. It’s hell to be fucking poor and broke in Texas.

Dwane Shirley: I would lie to a suspect in a minute. It wouldn’t bother me. I’m not going to threaten him, I’m not going to beat him. But if I had to lie to get him to tell me a confession or the truth, I’d lie.

Linda McClain: If it wasn’t for his confession, he might not have gotten convicted. If it wasn’t for him telling that what he did that day and what he did that night and what he did the next day, he might not have been convicted. He should’ve never said anything. He should’ve just kept his mouth shut.

Charles Raby: All I know is I didn’t have no blood. I didn’t kill the woman. I didn’t.

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Texas is a production of The Intercept and First Look Media.

Andrea Jones is our story editor. Julia Scott is senior producer. Truc Nguyen is our podcast fellow. Laura Flynn is supervising producer. Fact-checking by Meerie Jesuthasan. Special thanks to Jack D’Isidoro and Holly DeMuth for additional production assistance. Voice acting in this episode by Dan Triandiflou and Jake McCready.

Our show was mixed by Rick Kwan, with original music by Zach Young. Legal review by David Bralow.

Executive producers are Roger Hodge and Christy Gressman. For The Intercept, Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief.

I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith.

You can read show transcripts and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter: @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/donate. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show. And please do leave us a rating or review; it helps people find us. If you want to give us feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post Episode One: Killing Capital appeared first on The Intercept.

Devonia Inman’s exoneration was the culmination of decades of work, first by the Georgia Innocence Project, which secured DNA evidence pointing to another suspect, and then by former Georgia State University law professor Jessica Cino and pro bono attorneys with the Atlanta firm Troutman Pepper. After spending most of his adult life behind bars, Inman, now 43, faces a long road to realizing a future that was derailed by his wrongful conviction. His release also leaves open the question of whether anyone will be held accountable for the 1998 murder of Donna Brown.

Jordan Smith: Hey Murderville listeners. Man, have we got an update for you. It’s the one we’ve been hoping we’d have for years. Let’s get to it!

Speaker 1: Is that him in the car? 

Speaker 2: I think so. Yup

Speaker 1: Oh, let’s get out of the way.

Liliana Segura: So, let me describe what you’re hearing.

A red Escalade is pulling up on Highway 10, just across the street from Augusta State Medical Prison. There’s a crowd of people standing on the shoulder as cars and 18-wheelers zoom past. Devonia Inman is waving from the passenger seat of the Cadillac SUV.

He’s got a huge smile on his face. His 3-year-old granddaughter, Alana, is sitting on his lap. He’s just been released from prison and into the arms of his parents, Dinah and David Ray.

Dinah Ray: My heart was racing. But when I saw him then I knew it was real. So real, wow. I can’t believe this day. We’ve been waiting for this day for so long.

[Theme music.]

Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Georgia.

First, a quick recap. Devonia was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the 1998 murder of Donna Brown in Adel, Georgia. Brown was the night manager at the Taco Bell there and was shot in the parking lot as she left work after closing up for the night. No physical evidence linked Devonia to the crime. And years later, DNA found on a crucial piece of evidence linked another man, Hercules Brown, to her murder.

Hercules worked with Donna Brown at the Taco Bell, and he knew how the closing procedures worked. And while Devonia was in jail awaiting trial, Hercules was arrested and charged with the double murder of a beloved local shopkeeper and his employee. Hercules pleaded guilty to that crime and is now doing life without parole.

The last time we talked to you, back in August, we told you about the evidentiary hearing in Devonia’s case — where his lawyers argued that the state had withheld from his defense key evidence that pointed to Hercules — and that his trial attorneys did a lousy job.

On November 16, Judge Cristina Cook Graham released her decision: “Under the circumstances of this extraordinary case and having carefully considered the evidence presented, this Court is convinced that the trial and post-trial proceedings against Mr. Inman were fundamentally unfair and are unworthy of confidence in their outcome.” And with that, after 23 years, Graham overturned Devonia’s conviction.

Liliana Segura: We first got the news from Jessica Cino, the former law professor who has been Devonia’s fiercest advocate, and who first brought us the story of Devonia’s case. She sent a text message that ended with 10 exclamation points: “The court GRANTED Devonia’s motion for a new trial!!!!!!!!!!”

We also got a text message from Devonia’s mom, Dinah. When we called her, she was overcome with emotion.

Dinah Ray: We’ve got so much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. Ok, I’m sorry. I’m ready.

Liliana Segura: Take your time. Take your time, Dinah … it’s a lot. You’ve waited a long time for this.

Dinah Ray: A long time. It’s been 23 years, I’ve been waiting to hear something like this. And I thought would never happen. I don’t know if he knows yet, but I’m just waiting on him to call me, so.

Jordan Smith: Obviously, this was all great news. But there was a catch, or at least a potential one.

Liliana Segura: The Georgia attorney general would have 30 days to appeal Judge Graham’s ruling. And honestly, we were pretty convinced that they would.

For one, the state had fought tooth and nail to keep Devonia’s conviction intact and to keep him in prison for the rest of his life. Even after DNA came back pointing to Hercules. Why would they stop now? But also, in our experience, that’s just what prosecutors tend to do in cases like these. Even when their evidence has fallen apart.

Jordan Smith: So then, we just had to wait, and wait.

It wasn’t until the 11th hour that the AG’s office said it would not appeal Graham’s decision. Again, the news came in a text message from Cino on Thursday, December 16.

[Phone ringing.]

Liliana Segura: Hello.

Jordan Smith: Hello.

Liliana Segura: [Laughs.]

Jordan Smith: This is very exciting.

Liliana Segura: Oh my God. Should we just call Jess?

Jordan Smith: Yeah, yeah.

Liliana Segura: [Laughs.]

Jordan Smith: That is so awesome.

Liliana Segura: Yeah.

[Dialing.]

Jordan Smith: Hello.

Liliana Segura: Jess. 

Jess Cino: Hey. Merry Christmas. You know they had us in nail-biter mode but at last this guy is going to get some justice.

Jordan Smith: This meant the case would bounce back to Cook County, where Devonia was tried. And it would be left up to the district attorney, Chase Studstill, to make the call: Re-try Devonia for Donna Brown’s murder or cut him loose. Studstill was ready with his decision: He declined to prosecute and asked a judge for Devonia’s immediate release from prison.

Chase Studstill: I felt like the state didn’t need to keep pursuing something that we couldn’t win at trial beyond a reasonable doubt. I knew the AG’s office had their appellate rights for 30 days. They chose not to appeal the habeas, and once they did, it comes back to me to make a decision, and I had already been weighing in on this — just say this, last week when the window for appeals closed for the AG I wasn’t caught off guard scrambling to make a decision.

Liliana Segura: After that, things moved quickly but chaotically.

The order called for Devonia’s release within 24 hours. We’d gotten intel that it could happen much sooner. But we didn’t know exactly when — or even where — his release would take place.

Devonia was housed at a prison just outside Augusta, which is on the border of South Carolina. So there was a good chance he’d walk out from there. But there was also a chance he’d be taken down to Adel and released from the Cook County Jail, which is near the Florida border.

Dinah and her husband, David Ray, had come from California and were waiting for word in Adel. Meanwhile, Cino had packed a go-bag and was ready to leave Atlanta at a moment’s notice.

Finally, late on the morning of Monday, December 20, another text: Devonia would be released from Augusta between 3 and 4 p.m. By 2:30 that afternoon, people had started showing up at the prison. But it became immediately clear that the prison officials did not want Devonia’s release on display.

Liliana Segura: Hi, we’re just waiting for someone who is getting out shortly.

Speaker 3: Well, who are you?

Liliana Segura: Well, I’m press. There’s legal team members here.

Claire Reynolds: I’m also press.

Liliana Segura: She’s with me.

Speaker 3: You’re going to have to leave the premises.

Liliana Segura: Leave the premises?

Speaker 3: No press, no ma’am.

Liliana Segura: Well, I wasn’t going to take pictures or anything.

Speaker 3: No press on the premises. I’ve been informed no press on the premises at all.

Liliana Segura: I mean this is a story that we’ve been following a long time. It’s a man that is getting out after 23 years locked up for a crime he didn’t commit.

Speaker 3: [Crosstalk.] They don’t want any press on the premises, ma’am. This is state property. This is private property. You have to leave.

Liliana Segura: For the next couple of hours we waited by the side of the road. A bunch of family members were there, including cousins who had grown up with Devonia.

There was Andrekos Pickett.

Andrekos Pickett: We knew this day was coming. We just didn’t know it was going to take this long.

Liliana Segura: And Tamara Pickett.

Tamara Pickett: I was 11 when he left, yup. So I used to write him all these letters because, you know, we was close in my eyes when I was little.

Liliana Segura: Finally, Devonia pulled up.

[People cheering.]

Liliana Segura: There were hugs, and tears, and lots of discussion about what he wanted to eat. Devonia wanted wings and pizza.

Speaker 4: So what he said, wings first?

Speaker 5: Pizza and wings was his first choice.

[Laughter and crosstalk.]

Jordan Smith: Needless to say, this was all a really big deal. But there are a few more things we want to discuss with you.

Liliana Segura: First, let’s start by talking about the AG’s decision.

Jordan Smith: I completely expected them to appeal because that’s what they do. And this isn’t just in Georgia. This is pretty much everywhere where we’ve worked on wrongful conviction cases. Prosecutors — usually at this point it’s a state attorney general — get their back up against a wall with all of this cascade of how wrong this case is, and they just cannot let it go. And it just becomes really grotesque after a while.

And so in this situation, I was just expecting that that’s what they were going to do. But there’s one kind of little catch here, which was that ultimately they really had nowhere to go with it because the Georgia Supreme Court had this sort of extraordinary ruling in 2019 where the judge that was the presiding judge at the time — who is now the chief judge — was basically like “Back the hell off. Stand down. We got this case wrong. And you should stop this.” So for them to appeal, they would have had to appeal right back to the Georgia Supreme Court. And so it seemed like a non-starter. But that didn’t stop us from thinking, well, they’re totally going to do that, just to drag it out.

Liliana Segura: They had 30 days from when Judge Graham’s order came down, and I totally expected, maybe not immediately but within the first week. Jordan and I were checking the docket on this site called Peach Court, which is where the filings come in and all of these Georgia cases, and refreshing that docket — assuming that the AG would appeal. And then a week passed. And another week passed and there was nothing. And we started checking in with Tom Reilly, Devonia’s lawyer, to see if he had heard anything. And he kept saying, “Nope. Haven’t heard anything. Haven’t heard anything.”

And so the more time passed, the more I found myself cautiously optimistic. Like, oh my god, maybe they won’t appeal. But still we both expected that it was just a matter of time, and that maybe they were just waiting until the last minute to make that deadline.

Jordan Smith: But what they still did was drag it out as long as they could. So it’s just par for the course. Again, it’s just really important to keep in mind that this is just kind of how they roll. I think a lot of it, unfortunately, is politics. It’s not an interest in justice and a true belief that we got it right. It’s machinations inside the office that are purely political. In that way it’s obscene — routine but nonetheless obscene.

Liliana Segura: It’s important to keep in mind just how much it flies in the face of claims that these prosecutors are operating in the interest of justice but also in the interests of victims’ families because what this ultimately did was not only keep Devonia’s family in this incredibly destabilizing holding pattern, but it dragged it out for Donna Brown’s family. And I know we’ll talk about that more. But what this exoneration means for them is really hard to even wrap our heads around. In this case I really think the AG’s office, they saw the writing on the wall and still they chose to wait until the very last second and make everyone else sort of wait there during the holidays in a state of uncertainty.

Jordan Smith: Yeah, it’s cruel basically all around, right? It’s hard to describe it any other way.

This all obviously has ended well for Devonia and his family but I think — and we’ve said this before, actually — that Devonia is pretty fortunate that he even had lawyers. I mean all along the way he had lawyers. Now most people, especially when they’re doing a sentence that’s less than a death sentence, right — because that kicks in a whole new apparatus — but here he’s sentenced to life in prison. And that sort of stops his ability to have lawyers appointed to him.

So this took an extraordinary effort from people along the way. I mean he was the first to reach out to the Georgia Innocence Project. The fact that they took his case is huge, and then when they got stalled out, Jess Cino appears and gets really involved because she’s infuriated by the case. And then she recruits this very elite team of lawyers from a very prestigious law firm in Atlanta. And even then, look, this has taken 23 years. And most people don’t get that kind of opportunity.

So he’s fortunate and this has all ended up well for him. But even with all of these relative advantages, he was there for 23 years for something he didn’t do, right? I mean, that’s just crazy. But that is how the system works. So in a way Devonia is very much an exception to the rule. And we don’t know, we have no clue — and this is what should be mind-blowing and disturbing, I think — is we have no clue how many Devonias there are.

Liliana Segura: Devonia was incredibly lucky to have the legal team that he did because as we’ve said before, the system is not designed to enable processes like these. The system is designed to convict people and then keep people in prison. This very well could have gone very differently for Devonia depending on the jurisdiction where the hearing took place, the judge he got. The procedural rules that create barriers to relief and to exonerations are enormous in a very real way. The deck was stacked against Devonia and stacked against any number of people in his position. So many things had to go right for him to be released. It took so many people to get to this point.

[Music interlude.]

Jordan Smith: First of all, there were two key witnesses. There was Marquetta Thomas and LarRisha Chapman, who had initially implicated Devonia but said they had done so under coercive pressure from police. They tried to recant before Devonia was ever tried. I mean, think about that, and they went forward anyway, right? But meanwhile the other thing that’s happening is there are people who tried to tell law enforcement that they had heard that the real culprit was Hercules.

Liliana Segura: One of the key people that made this happen, who got Devonia back in court, was a woman named Kim Brooks, who we were unaware of but was found by Devonia’s legal team some years ago during a visit to Adel. And Kim Brooks had tried to tell police way back in the day that Hercules had tried to convince her to rob the Taco Bell, essentially to carry out this very kind of crime. And she tried to go to the Adel police and they told her, well, you need to GBI. But what Kim Brooks described — only to be ignored — was hugely significant. She said that Hercules had told her that he’d done something bad, and that he was aware that someone else was going to prison for what he’d done. So if not for her and that critical piece of evidence, it’s very likely Devonia wouldn’t have gotten back into court.

Jordan Smith: Now that Devonia is free, I guess a huge question that is out there is: What will the Cook County DA do? Have a bunch of evidence — DNA, and these other people like Kim Brooks, and there’s others out there too to whom he confessed that he had done it, like in detail. So the question becomes, Is the DA going to charge him?

And so we had a chance to actually talk to Chase Studstill. I mean, what did you make of what he said?

Liliana Segura: We were delighted to find that not only was he willing to talk to us on the phone — on the record — but he actually brought us inside his thought process in a way that we did not expect.

One of the exciting parts of that conversation was the fact that he told us that one of the first things he did to try and get up to speed on this case was listen to the podcast, which was pretty cool.

But it was very clear that he is a guy who took this case very seriously and wanted to be ready — as well he was — to make a decision here. But I will say that for all of his generosity during the conversation and openness he spoke very, very cautiously about what he planned to do when it came to Hercules Brown. And essentially said that he hasn’t really made a decision on that front.

Chase Studstill: The one thing I will say is with Mr. Brown, I would have more of a charge to make a case on him if he weren’t sitting where he is today. In other words, because he’s never getting out of prison, the necessity in trying to build a strong case against him isn’t as strong as if he were a free man.

Liliana Segura: He made clear that Hercules is already in prison. He’s going to be there for the rest of his life. And in a sense that makes the push — the imperative — to bring charges against Hercules in this case a little less urgent because it’s not like he’s out in the world.

Naturally for us the question was, well, that may be true for a lot of people, but if you’re Donna Brown’s family, I imagine it’s important to them. Of course we don’t know what Donna Brown’s family thinks about this case. We don’t know if they’re persuaded that Devonia was innocent or if they believe that Hercules might have been the real killer.

Jordan Smith: This naturally leads into a question about: What about Donna Brown’s family?

Liliana Segura: Have you been in touch with or have you heard from the family of Donna Brown? Whether about Inman himself or do you have a sense of whether they want to see Hercules Brown tried for this. Have you been in contact with them?

Chase Studstill: I don’t have a comment on that at this time.

Jordan Smith: I guess we don’t really know at this point if there will be any accountability for what happened to Donna Brown. But I would toss it to you, Liliana, because I think you describe best the response that we have gotten from the family in the past.

Liliana Segura: I wrote an email pretty early on. There was an email to a family member in 2016 essentially asking, “We’d love to talk to you. We want to know more about Donna Brown as a person.” All of the things you would ask a victim’s family member to do. And the email response was sad but quite definitive. This was a family member who said that you would think after all of this time that the death of my loved one would get easier, but it doesn’t get easier. And this family member specifically made clear that not only were they not interested in speaking to us, they really resented that their loved one was being made into a “project” — now her death is a project. That rings very real. That speaks to the trauma. And I can completely understand why that family member would feel that way. And so they basically said please don’t contact me again.

At the same time there were family members who did speak to other reporters and over the years we’ve actually heard from a number of people on that side of the case who were under the impression that we hadn’t sought out the family. And so I do regret that we didn’t make clear at least that of course we did. We would never neglect to do so.

After Devonia’s exoneration, I did write back to that one particular family member hoping that maybe they would feel differently or have something more to say because I think family members often feel like their loved one was forgotten in moments like this, and that their trauma … that somehow that doesn’t count. Thus far we haven’t gotten a response.

Jordan Smith: Now to the extent that Donna Brown’s murder is unsolved, there’s another unsolved murder in this podcast. You might remember that Shailesh Patel was in Adel running a convenience store for a family member who was out of town and staying at this family member’s house. And he’s working one night — this is after Donna Brown is killed but before Bennett and Browning are killed, who Hercules is in prison for murdering.

Patel is closing up the convenience store and goes home just a couple of blocks away, and then is truly brutally beaten to death in this house. And this crime has never been solved. We’ve inquired multiple times with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the GBI, about that. And they’ve been a little flip about it, insisting that it’s open but there’s no movement. But I would say the other thing that the DA in Cook County, Chase Studstill, told us that the podcast had kind of alerted him — I guess would be the best way to put it — that the Patel murder had never been solved. And he expressed to us deep desire to get to the bottom of that case, so.

Liliana Segura: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because, yeah, that was a really important part of our conversation too. Talk about forgotten. It was really important to represent the murder of Shailesh Patel in our podcast because in this period of time — when these murders took place — there was a lot of collective memory around not only the murder of Donna Brown and the wrongful conviction of Devonia Inman but also the Bennett and Browning murders that ultimately sent Hercules to prison. And yet this man, Shailesh Patel — who was an immigrant, who wasn’t from around there, who was only visiting Adel for a brief amount of time — died in this brutal death. And what we came to discover while investigating this story was that the GBI’s efforts, as far as we can tell, had been truly negligible. I mean the family had received no communication almost from the start and certainly not over the years.

And there’s just one piece of this that I will always remember, which is basically when we were done reporting this whole podcast at one point I received a message, a voicemail message, from a GBI agent who I tried to contact to see where their supposed efforts were to solve the murder of Shailesh Patel. And he called me back and left me a message in which it became really clear that he thought I was a member of the family inquiring about Shailesh Patel and that I might have some information for him.

GBI Agent: My name is Jason [inaudible]. I’m a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. I’m trying to make contact with a family member of a Shailesh Patel, Sam, Sam Patel that was involved in an ongoing death investigation out of Adel, Cook County, Georgia, many, many years ago.

Liliana Segura: That really spoke volumes about their supposed progress in investigating that cold case. So we’re really heartened to hear that the DA wants, as he put it, some closure in that case.

Jordan Smith: So I guess that brings you to the question of Devonia is out of prison now and that is great, right. But I suppose what we know all too well also is that that is an awesome first step, but it certainly doesn’t necessitate a happy ending, right? I mean, that’s probably not the greatest way to put it. I don’t know, how would you describe it, Liliana?

Liliana Segura: There are so many stories that both of us have written about people who have gotten out of prison, whether they were innocent or not, but who have struggled to rebuild their lives after decades behind bars. And that struggle is largely invisible to a lot of people who kind of love this happy ending. I mean, of course we’re all really excited that Devonia is free now. But he spent his entire adult life in prison. And now he has to find a way to get a job, figure out where he’s going to live, try to reestablish relationships with his loved ones — his family members, his son and his son’s daughter. All of that is incredibly, incredibly daunting. And he’s doing it without the benefit of any resources. One of the most egregious elements of these wrongful convictions is the fact that the states that are responsible for robbing people of their lives oftentimes don’t do anything to contribute to helping people rebuild their lives after all of this time. And that’s certainly true in Devonia’s case.

Jordan Smith: The road for him in many ways is just beginning.

Liliana Segura: One of the things about being there across from the prison that day there was something so emblematic about the scene there. You had Devonia’s loved ones — the people who are part of his community, who’ve waited all of this time — show up at the prison, many of them from hours and hundreds of miles away to welcome him home. And the first thing that prison officials did was say, “No you can’t be here. Press can’t be here.”

There were rumors that Devonia was going to be taken through the back of the prison where nobody could greet him or nobody could see. You know, the state doesn’t want this to be an event. They don’t want any level of transparency or publicity because they’re the ones who are responsible for this egregious injustice. So all of that speaks to the reason that they don’t then make any effort to actually help people rebuild their lives. So yeah, I think for a lot of people starting with an apology is a really good place to begin, and many people don’t even get that.

Jordan Smith: There are a number of states that do have compensation packages for the wrongfully convicted — people who are exonerated. This may surprise people but the best is Texas, where it’s up to, I think, $80,000 at this point for every year you’re wrongfully convicted, plus you get annuities, plus you get health care, educational benefits. Now Texas of course did not do this out of the kindness of its heart. It was basically embarrassed into this because of how many wrongful convictions there have been. But it is a model.

And there are states that have some model, but they’re kind of crappy, but they have something in name. Where I think Missouri is one of these. So it’s like you can only seek compensation from the state where you were exonerated because of DNA evidence, which people maybe don’t know is like the smallest percentage of exonerations total, writ large. And then after that the state is like, “OK, so only if you got exonerated because of DNA.” And then after that they’re like, “And also we don’t care how many years you were in prison — be it 10 or be it 40. You get $36,000 total.”

So it’s not just that having a compensation package means you’re automatically awesome, because it doesn’t, because there’s a range there. But then there are 13 states — and Georgia is one of them — that has zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero compensation for exonerees. Except for this bizarre sort of bullshit route you can take, which is: go to the legislature, find a lawmaker to write a specific bill for you to get your compensation. Let that sink in.

Think about that. You’ve just gotten out of prison. Now you have to go back to essentially the county where you were convicted, find a state rep there who would feel compelled to help you, then write a bill, and then push it through the legislature. I’m sorry, that’s just nonsense. And this is how they’ve done it every single time, every single time. And then you have lawmakers who are just like, “Well, I guess that guy’s life is worth 50 grand.” I mean, it’s just … obscene. And it is insulting. And the state has used its power to take your life away and then they act like they owe you nothing on the other side. And it just infuriates me. So this is where Devonia is. He spent 23 years behind bars in a state where at least halfway along the way they knew he didn’t have anything to do with this crime. And now he’s out, and they’re like, we don’t have to do anything for you.

Liliana Segura: So, for now, this story has basically come to a close: With Devonia Inman free and home with his family in California for Christmas for the first time in more than 23 years.

Jordan Smith: Why don’t we let David Ray, Devonia’s stepdad, take us out.

David Ray: It’s like a dream come true. Like they said, the nightmare is over with. My son is coming home. And I just want to say, I’m so happy. For everybody who had a part in it I just want to say thank you. Thank you very much.

[Musical interlude.]

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Georgia, is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. This episode was edited by Andrea Jones, produced by Laura Flynn and Truc Nguyen, and mixed by Rick Kwan. Special thanks to Claire Reynolds for additional field recordings.

For The Intercept, Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief.

I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville.

You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan.

We’re also hard at work on season two: Murderville, Texas, dropping February 1.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/donate — your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show. And please do leave us a rating or review — it helps people find us. If you want to give us feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post Update: Devonia Inman Is Free appeared first on The Intercept.

After 20 years in prison for a murder he insists he did not commit, Devonia Inman returns to court for an evidentiary hearing that could finally help him prove his innocence. Testimony reveals that the state hid evidence tying Hercules Brown to the 1998 murder of Donna Brown and that Inman’s trial lawyers dropped the ball, sitting on information that could have cleared him years ago. In a rare move, the presiding judge signs an order that could change the case forever.

Jordan Smith: Hi Murderville listeners. It’s been almost two years since we last talked to you about Devonia Inman’s case. And needless to say, a lot has happened since then.

[Musical interlude.]

As you might recall, back in September 2019 we posted an update episode about a truly extraordinary ruling from the Georgia Supreme Court. In a unanimous opinion, the justices sided with Devonia to allow his legal team to pursue evidence that could finally prove his innocence. In fact, not only did they give the green light to keep pushing for a new trial, they also expressed grave doubts about Devonia’s conviction.

Liliana Segura: Here’s what then-presiding Judge David Nahmias wrote at the time:

“During my decade of service on this court, I have reviewed over 1,500 murder cases in various forms. Of the multitude of cases in which a new trial has been denied, Inman’s case is the one that causes me the most concern that an innocent person remains convicted and sentenced to serve the rest of his life in prison.”

We’ve been waiting a long time to be able to update you. And finally, we have something pretty exciting to share.

From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Georgia.

[Musical interlude.]

Jordan Smith: First, let’s do a quick recap. Back in 1998, Donna Brown, a manager at the Taco Bell in tiny Adel, Georgia, was murdered in the parking lot after closing up for the night. Twenty-year-old Devonia Inman, who was new to town, was quickly jailed and charged with her murder. The state would seek the death penalty. But while he was awaiting trial, three more people were brutally murdered in this town of about 5,000. One of those murders remains unsolved.

But the others, a double murder of a beloved shopkeeper and his employee, were committed in broad daylight, and the killer, a man named Hercules Brown, was quickly caught and ended up pleading guilty to the crime.

Devonia was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Donna Brown. But he has always maintained his innocence, insisting he had nothing to do with her murder. What’s more, there were rumors around town the whole time that Hercules Brown was the real killer. Hercules — no relation to Donna — also worked at the Taco Bell.

At Devonia’s trial, his lawyers tried to point the finger at Hercules with two witnesses. One witness said Hercules had tried to get her to help him rob the Taco Bell. Another said Hercules had confessed. But, as you might recall, the district attorney, Bob Ellis, balked at this, saying it wasn’t credible evidence. And the judge agreed. So the jury never heard from these witnesses.

Liliana Segura: Devonia reached out to the Georgia Innocence Project not long after he was convicted. They took the case. It took years, but they eventually won permission to test a key piece of evidence for DNA: a homemade mask, made from a pair of gray sweatpants, with eye holes cut out of it. It had been found in Donna Brown’s car after her murder. Almost 10 years after Devonia was sentenced to life in prison, testing of the mask revealed a single genetic profile: Hercules Brown.

Devonia had been tried as the sole perpetrator of this crime. And at trial, prosecutors said the killer had worn the mask. But once the DNA came back as a match to Hercules, the state insisted that none of that mattered. And that it didn’t exonerate Devonia. In 2014, the trial court — and the Georgia Supreme Court — agreed. They denied Devonia a new trial.

Jordan Smith: After this — thanks largely to Jessica Cino, who at the time was a law professor and dean at Georgia State University — Devonia got a crack pro bono defense team from the prestigious firm Troutman Pepper (it used to be known as Troutman Sanders). And they dug up new evidence that the state had failed to turn over to Devonia’s defense before trial, which is a legal no-no; a constitutional violation. Basically, they’d found a new witness who said Hercules had confessed to her. And she tried to tell the cops, way back in 1998.

Liliana Segura: Devonia’s lawyers sought an evidentiary hearing on this issue and a new trial for Devonia. In July 2019, Lookout Mountain Chief Judge Kristina Cook Graham granted their request for a hearing, which didn’t make the state happy. They appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, which shot them down.

And as we mentioned at the start of this episode, that ruling was a huge breakthrough. In September 2019, the justices said in no uncertain terms that the state should stand down and stop blocking Devonia’s efforts to win a new trial. In fact, the justices said that they themselves had gotten it wrong when they reviewed the case back in 2014.

Jordan Smith: We knew that there would be an evidentiary hearing at some point. We just didn’t know when. But before it took place, Devonia’s lawyers were given access to a bunch of new documents. And also, they were going to get the chance to talk to Hercules Brown.

The pandemic slowed this process down a lot. The deposition of Hercules was finally scheduled for December 17, 2020. But when it came time for him to be interviewed, he refused. Prison staff caught this moment on video.

Unknown speaker: Recording has started. Is your name Hercules Brown?

Hercules Brown: Yes, sir.

Unknown speaker: Were you informed that you had a video court appearance that you needed to report for?

Hercules Brown: Yes, sir, about two minutes ago. About a minute ago.

Unknown speaker: Well, are you going to that appearance?

Hercules Brown: No, sir.

Unknown speaker: So you are refusing?

Hercules Brown: Yes, sir.

Unknown speaker: Thank you —

Liliana Segura: In this video, which was provided to Devonia’s attorneys, Hercules is standing in front of what looks like an entryway at Ware State Prison. He’s got on a blue watch cap and jacket over his prison whites. It says Department of Corrections on the back. He’s shifting his weight back and forth and is looking around. It’s not exactly easy to gauge what he might be thinking, but his posture is sort of nonchalant — almost dismissive.

At the time the video was filmed, the evidentiary hearing was supposed to happen in just a matter of weeks. In January 2021. But it was rescheduled because of Covid. In the meantime, however, Devonia’s lawyers filed what’s called a motion in limine — these are filed before a trial or hearing and usually ask a judge to agree to either include or exclude certain evidence. But here, Devonia’s lawyers were asking for something unusual. They asked Judge Graham to draw what’s known as an “adverse inference” from Hercules’s refusal to provide testimony. In other words, to conclude it was a sign that he was guilty of murdering Donna Brown.

Here’s what they wrote: “Mr. Brown’s refusal to provide testimony is not the only factor for the court to consider in determining whether to draw an adverse inference. Substantial corroborating evidence indicates that Hercules Brown committed the murder of Donna Brown.”

Jordan Smith: This adverse inference thing may sound a bit counterintuitive. Under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, a person has the right against self-incrimination. And, in the criminal system, if a person invokes that right, you’re not supposed to assume it is indicative of their guilt.

But even though Devonia’s case started out as a criminal matter, once it moves into post-conviction appeals, it is actually considered a civil case. And in civil courts, a judge can infer guilt if a witness invokes their Fifth Amendment right. This doesn’t happen often, but it’s perfectly legal.

If the judge were to assume Hercules’s guilt, that would certainly be a good sign for Devonia that she’s paying attention and finds the evidence of his innocence compelling.

The state didn’t like any of this, of course. And wrote a reply that was mostly technical bullshit, arguing that Hercules wasn’t actually required to attend the court-ordered interview.

Lawyers rehashed the same discredited evidence prosecutors used at Devonia’s trial back in 2001, including statements from multiple witnesses who later recanted. Some said that investigators with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, had coerced them into saying things that weren’t true.

In any event, the state’s lawyers argued that even if Judge Graham did draw an adverse inference from Hercules’s refusal to cooperate, it didn’t mean Devonia was innocent.

Liliana Segura: So I’m here outside the courthouse. It’s about quarter of 9 and Devonia Inman’s evidentiary hearing is going to start shortly. It’s been a long wait for him and for his family.

The hearing finally happened on Monday, June 28, at the Chattooga County Superior Court in downtown Summerville. It’s a rural town in northwest Georgia even smaller than Adel. The hearing was held here because this is the part of the state where Devonia was incarcerated back when his lawyers sought the hearing in 2018.

The courthouse is on the main drag, and you can hear the traffic going by from inside the courtroom. There’s a gigantic American flag out front. It’s tied to the columns and covers up the whole entrance to the building. And just off to the side, there’s a new Confederate monument — installed in 2014 — extolling the virtues of fallen soldiers who’d fought to “preserve freedom and liberty.”

[Walking into the courtroom.]

All right. I’m going in. 

Inside, Devonia was one of the only Black people in the courtroom. He’d gotten permission to ditch his prison whites in favor of a proper suit. He was wearing a gray collared shirt with a black tie — and a white face mask. His mom and dad, Dinah and David Ray, had driven from California.

Devonia just waved. You can tell he’s smiling under his mask.

Unknown speaker: All rise.

Kristina Cook Graham: Please be seated, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. I’m Judge Graham. Have a seat.

Liliana Segura: Judge Graham wore a gray dress with pink and black flowers on it. No standard black robe. But she did have a blue surgical mask.

Kristina Cook Graham: I don’t mean to be disrespectful. We wear robes in this circuit for jury trials only generally, and in northwest Georgia right now, it is very hot. [Laughter.]

Jordan Smith: Before the hearing officially started, Judge Graham made her decision about the adverse inference thing. She granted it. Exactly as Devonia’s lawyers had asked. They’d written up a “proposed order.” The judge just crossed out the “proposed” part and signed it. Here’s Jessica Cino. She was in the courtroom when this happened.

Jessica Cino: I was not expecting it. The adverse inference is an exceptional and extraordinary rare remedy. It is a ruling from the judge that based upon Hercules’s silence every time he gets asked if he has killed Donna Brown, which again is his Fifth Amendment right, that despite that, she is going to treat that silence as Hercules effectively saying, “I killed Donna Brown.” She’s filling that silent gap that has always existed. You cannot use that in a case against Hercules. If Hercules ever got tried for the murder of Donna Brown, his silence could not be used against him. That’s his Fifth Amendment right.

However, for Devonia, what the judge has done here is said, “We’re now going to, in your post-conviction proceedings, which is asking for a new trial, assume that Hercules has now admitted to killing Donna Brown.” And that, from a legal standpoint, is a tremendous development for Devonia’s case.

Jordan Smith: In his opening statement, Tom Reilly, one of Devonia’s attorneys, laid out the case for Judge Graham.

Tom Reilly: Mr. Inman has been wrongfully imprisoned for almost 23 years for a murder that he did not commit. He has maintained his innocence from day one. He was convicted 20 years ago, almost to the day, in a deeply flawed and unfair trial that failed to uphold and protect his constitutional rights.

We will focus our evidentiary presentation before the court on two fundamental constitutional violations that require that Mr. Inman receive a fair trial.

Jordan Smith: First, there was the prosecution’s failure to turn over exculpatory evidence to Devonia’s defense attorneys.

What’s known as a Brady violation. After a famous Supreme Court ruling that said withholding evidence violates a person’s constitutional rights.

Tom Reilly: Now, we don’t have to show that the state hid this information on purpose. Whether it was intentional or just negligent, it’s still a Brady violation.

Jordan Smith: In particular, Reilly brought up police reports related to Hercules Brown that Devonia’s attorneys had never seen. Back in September 2000 — well before Devonia was tried — Hercules was arrested in connection with an attempted robbery at a grocery store in Adel.

Tom Reilly: When Hercules Brown was arrested, the police found in his car a gun, crack cocaine, and a homemade ski mask with eye holes cut out of it. The state had these police reports in the fall of 2000, many months before Mr. Inman’s trial in June of 2001. But they concealed that. They failed to provide them to Mr. Inman’s counsel despite repeated requests by the defense for all exculpatory evidence.

Despite repeated assurances and representations to the court and to defense counsel by the state that they had turned over everything and that the defense had everything the state had. Despite knowing that Hercules Brown worked at Taco Bell with Donna Brown and that a homemade ski mask was found in her car after she was killed.

Liliana Segura: The second constitutional violation was the fact that Devonia’s trial attorneys did a pretty crappy job. And this compounded the Brady violations, Reilly argued.

Devonia’s lead attorney at trial, a man named David Perry, died in 2015. But his other lawyer was a woman named Melinda Ryals. She was actually appointed to the case first. But she didn’t have any experience with death penalty cases. So she asked for Perry to get involved. Perry led the defense team at trial, but soon after Devonia was convicted in 2001, he withdrew from the case, leaving Ryals in charge. It was up to her to try to get Devonia a new trial.

Tom Reilly: At some point she obtained that report showing Hercules Brown had been arrested with a homemade ski mask, a gun, and drugs in September 2000 in Adel. She did nothing with that information. She told no one about it.

Liliana Segura: Ryals testified at the hearing. She wore a gray woven blazer with frayed edges. Ryals was clearly less than thrilled to be taking the stand. She emphasized that she was only “second chair” on the case — meaning she wasn’t the main person in charge.

But she did have one very important job: looking into the rumors that Hercules Brown was the real killer and finding out if there was concrete evidence to back them up. One of the best ways to do this would have been to see if there was any link between Hercules and the mask found in Donna Brown’s car. But there’s no indication this happened. At the hearing, Ryals said she didn’t recall any testing being done on the mask before trial. In fact, she said she didn’t remember much about the mask at all.

Here’s Ryals, responding to questions from Troutman attorney Tiffany Bracewell.

Melinda Ryals: I do not recall the mask being entered into evidence.

Tiffany Bracewell: And if I represent to you that it was, trial exhibit number 24 was the mask, do you have any reason to believe that it was not, in fact, admitted? 

Melinda Ryals: I wouldn’t, no, I wouldn’t speak that, no.

Tiffany Bracewell: Is this mask unique?

Melinda Ryals: It … yes.

Tiffany Bracewell: Why was the mask significant in Mr. Inman’s case?

Melinda Ryals: I don’t recall. Are you talking significant to the state or —

Tiffany Bracewell: Let me ask different. Was the mask, did the mask have any significance to Mr. Inman’s defense? 

Melinda Ryals: I don’t recall.

Jordan Smith: Honestly, one of the most shocking things to come out of the hearing was just how much critical evidence Ryals had in her possession that she never used. This evidence basically falls into two buckets.

The first is the Brady bucket, which contains the September 2000 police report. It’s clear she did not have this information before Devonia was tried. But she did get it at some point after trial and should have understood that it was Brady material. And just how important it would have been at trial.

Remember, the defense tried to put on evidence that Hercules was responsible for Donna Brown’s murder. But that evidence was in the form of witness testimony, folks who said they’d heard things about his involvement. The police report was potentially more powerful precisely because it came from law enforcement.

And this gets to her second bucket, which is evidence of ineffective assistance of counsel. A nice way of saying that she fucked up.

It seems Ryals didn’t realize the significance of the Brady violation. And if she did, she still didn’t do anything about it — like use it to bolster her motion for a new trial.

There was also a bunch of really important evidence pointing toward Hercules that she got later while she was still Devonia’s only attorney of record. And she didn’t use any of it either. And then didn’t turn it over to the lawyers who later took over the case — including the team from Troutman Pepper.

Liliana Segura: It wasn’t until 2019 that Reilly and his colleagues got access to her full files. There were thousands of pages.

Tiffany Bracewell: How large was your file in your estimation?

Melinda Ryals: I do not recall. Maybe a banker’s box, or two banker’s boxes.

Tiffany Bracewell: If I represent to you that you produced in this proceeding more than 15,000 pages to my office, do you have any reason to believe that’s not correct?

Melinda Ryals: No, ma’am.

Liliana Segura: Among the things buried in these files was a series of handwritten notes. One set documented an interview Ryals conducted with a man from Adel named James Overstreet, after Devonia’s trial. At a time when she was supposedly working on his appeal.

Ryals didn’t recall who Overstreet was. And we didn’t recognize his name either — it’s nowhere in the original GBI report or in our own files. But Overstreet was clearly friendly with Hercules Brown. And according to Ryals’s handwritten notes, Overstreet told her that Hercules had confessed to Donna Brown’s murder before Devonia was even arrested for the crime.

If true, this was obviously a big deal, especially since Overstreet would be at least the third person who Hercules had supposedly confessed to around this same time.

Tiffany Bracewell: What did Mr. Overstreet tell you about the Taco Bell murder?

Melinda Ryals: He said that Hercules had worked at Taco Bell — and I’m not reading the whole thing — told him that he had robbed Taco Bell, that the woman turned around and said, “Herc don’t do this,” or “Hercules don’t do this, please don’t do this.” He had to kill her to leave no witnesses.

Liliana Segura: Did you hear that? He said he had to kill Donna Brown so there would be no witnesses.

Then there was a GBI report that they found. And this one is weird. Apparently at some point after Devonia was convicted, Ryals went to a witness interview conducted by the GBI. One of the prosecutors on Devonia’s case, a guy named Tim Eidson, was there too.

Jordan Smith: Now, why Ryals was at this interview is anyone’s guess. But what happens is pretty wild — a bit convoluted, but important.

The witness being interviewed was a woman you’ve heard from before named Christy Lima. She was Devonia’s girlfriend back in 1998. And she had a story about someone else Hercules had confessed to. This person, a woman Ryals referred to only by the name Hewitt during the hearing, told Lima that Hercules had confessed to killing Donna Brown. According to Lima’s account, Hercules told Hewitt that he’d intended to tell the cops it was him, but his mother talked him out of it. And Hercules’s mom, Lucinda Brown, had threatened Hewitt, telling her not to say anything about what Hercules had said. If Hewitt didn’t stay quiet, Lucinda, who worked for the Division of Family and Children Services, would take Hewitt’s kid away.

In the document, Lima is referred to as Thomas. We’re not entirely sure why. It was actually her sister’s last name. Here is Ryals reading from this report.

Melinda Ryals: As to the Taco Bell murder, on page three of the document that Thomas stated Hewitt said that Hewitt had a conversation with Brown a few weeks ago, and that Brown confessed to Hewitt that Brown committed the Bennett and Browning homicides, as well as the Taco Bell murder.

Jordan Smith: Bennett and Browning are the shopkeeper and his employee. The murders Hercules pleaded guilty to.

Melinda Ryals: Thomas stated Hewitt said that Brown was going to confess to the police that he did the killings in both cases and take whatever punishment was given along and not tell on anyone involved. Thomas stated that Hewitt said Brown told her that Brown’s mother talked him out of confessing and pleading not guilty. Thomas added that Hewitt said that Brown’s mother told Hewitt personally not to tell anything Hewitt knew of this case, again, threatening to take Hewitt’s child.

Tiffany Bracewell: And what did you do with this information?

Melinda Ryals: I don’t recall.

Tiffany Bracewell: Do you recall sharing with Mr. Inman that you had learned this information?

Melinda Ryals: No, I do not.

Jordan Smith: In different ways, the Overstreet and Hewitt stories are just bombshells.

Let’s start with Overstreet. After the hearing, we got a copy of Ryals’s notes from her interview with him. And Overstreet comes across as credible, in part because he offered up some side details that we know are accurate.

Liliana Segura: But there’s something even more intriguing about the Hewitt piece of this. Something that, if true, would confirm an aspect of Devonia’s case that has been lurking in the background for years.

We knew that Hercules’s mom, Lucinda Brown, was a powerful person in Adel. And that she used her power to protect Hercules when he got in trouble. One former Adel cop told us that they frequently bit their tongue with Lucinda because the police relied on her in child abuse investigations. So, for example, when Hercules got arrested in September 2000, Lucinda demanded that the Adel cops release him. And they did.

You might remember, there was another thing we found out about Lucinda, which is one of the most insane parts of this case. It was what the former prosecutor, Eidson, told us. That police and prosecutors never considered Hercules a suspect in the Taco Bell murder because his mom told them Hercules had an alibi. That he was at home, in bed, when Donna Brown was killed. Eidson has since died, but here’s what he told us back then:

Tim Eidson: She said that at the time of the Taco Bell murder, that Hercules Brown was at home asleep. And she gave an alibi for him. In any event, she gave an alibi for Hercules and there wasn’t any reason to disbelieve her at the time, I mean, she was a well-respected citizen.

Jordan Smith: This is obviously ridiculous. And spoke volumes not only about the incompetence of the whole investigation into Donna Brown’s murder, but also about Lucinda’s influence.

We’d always heard that people were worried about coming forward and pointing the finger at Hercules, because they were afraid Lucinda would use the power of her position to retaliate by taking away their kids.

The story about Hewitt is the first time we’ve heard of anyone explicitly saying that Lucinda had threatened this. And telling law enforcement about it. Granted, in this GBI report it’s coming secondhand from Lima, but there was plenty for investigators to follow up on, especially when you consider who Hewitt is, which we didn’t realize until after the hearing, when we got a copy of this document.

Hewitt is Sharon Hewitt, Hercules’s ex-girlfriend — and according to the GBI interview, the mother of his child. According to the document, Hewitt left Adel for Valdosta in order to get away from Lucinda. Given that Valdosta is in a different county, this would make sense if she was actually afraid of Lucinda’s alleged threat.

Liliana Segura: We tried to reach Hewitt years back but we were unsuccessful. We tried her again after the hearing. We never heard back. We reached out to Overstreet too. He didn’t get back to us either.

Voicemail: Hello, we are not available now. Please leave your name and phone number after the beep. We will return your call. [Beep.]

Liliana Segura: Hi, this is a message for Lucinda Brown. Ms. Brown, my name is Liliana Segura and I’m a reporter with The Intercept and my colleague Jordan Smith and I actually reached you a few years ago to talk about the case of the murder of Donna Brown in Adel, Georgia —

Sean Brown: Hello.

Liliana Segura: — many years ago —

Sean Brown: Hello.

Liliana Segura: Oh, hi.

Sean Brown: Hello.

Liliana Segura: Yeah.

Sean Brown: How you doing, ma’am?

Liliana Segura: Hi. Yeah, I’m OK. I was looking for Lucinda Brown.

Sean Brown: I’m sorry, she’s not here right now. This is her son. What can I help you with, ma’am?

Liliana Segura: We actually spoke to her many years ago about the case of Donna Brown, who was murdered in Adel at the Taco Bell in 1998. We specifically reached out because we’ve been investigating that case for a long time, and we actually produced a podcast and series of stories. And as I’m sure you’re aware, Hercules Brown was considered an alternate suspect in that case. [Crosstalk.]

Sean Brown: I’m not aware. Hello, hello, ma’am, I know you want to do an interview. Hey, I don’t give you the authority to record this call, please. Also, we have no comment on anything regarding any of those cases. And I’m her son, Sean Brown. I’m her guardian.

[Hang-up sound.]

Liliana Segura: Hello?

Jordan Smith: I think he hung up.

Liliana Segura: We described the Hewitt and Overstreet information as bombshells because they would have been crucial to Devonia’s appeal. They also confirm what Devonia knew to be true almost two decades ago: that Ryals had documents in her possession that could help him. And he was desperate to get ahold of those files.

Testimony at the hearing revealed that Devonia had repeatedly asked Ryals to turn over all the documents related to his case. And she basically ignored him. Finally, in the summer of 2003, Devonia filed a complaint with the Georgia State Bar saying that Ryals was not communicating with him — that she was pretty much just letting him languish in prison.

Ryals clearly remembered this. And it seemed to piss her off.

Tiffany Bracewell: What did Mr. Inman complain about with respect to your performance? Not Mr. Perry.

Melinda Ryals: To my performance? “Specifically, due to Ms. Ryals’s unethical conduct, lies, and misrepresentation of a lawyer elected to do only one thing …”

Jordan Smith: Ryals was sort of speed reading the complaint Devonia filed. And as she did, she grew increasingly agitated and defensive, as if Devonia was being unfair to her. At one point, the lawyer questioning her is like, OK, enough of that, but Ryals tries to go on, saying, Oh, I could read more.

Tiffany Bracewell: Thank you, Ms. Ryals.

Melinda Ryals: Oh, it goes further. Do you want the rest of it?

Tiffany Bracewell: No. You don’t need to read the whole document. I’m happy to ask you a question. In this report, Mr. Inman again requests certain files from you. Is that correct?

Melinda Ryals: Yes, ma’am.

Tiffany Bracewell: And did you provide those files to Mr. Inman?

Melinda Ryals: Not to my recollection.

Liliana Segura: After Ryals testified, the court went into a brief recess. I stepped into the hallway to talk to Cino about what we’d just heard.

Jessica Cino: Realistically, ineffective assistance of counsel is a high bar to clear. Now, what generally helps those along is that the original attorney is like, “You know what? I was underwater. I had way too many cases.” And they, in effect, throw themself under the bus in admitting, “It was bad. My representation fell below what we would attribute to a normal lawyer or reasonable lawyer in these circumstances.”

Liliana Segura: But instead, Ryals appeared to be doing the opposite.

Jessica Cino: She has dug in hard. I mean, you saw, she was very upset by just even bringing up the bar complaint. I don’t know what switch flipped. It almost seemed that she was pissed at Devonia for bringing a bar complaint when she wasn’t actually doing her job of giving him the files he kept requesting.

Liliana Segura: We tried to interview Ryals for the podcast years back. But she refused. We tried her again after the hearing. She still didn’t want to talk.

Jordan Smith: The next and last witness was veteran defense attorney August “Bud” Siemon. He was brought on to handle Devonia’s direct appeals. He took over after Ryals just dropped the ball. And it turns out, the failures of the original defense team screwed him over too.

Here’s Devonia’s attorney Tom Reilly asking him about that.

Tom Reilly: And what was your understanding of why you were being retained?

August Siemon: Well, initially, when I was retained, the problem in his case was that he had been sitting in prison for several years and nothing was happening in his case.

Jordan Smith: His first priority was finding evidence that could win Devonia a new trial.

August Siemon: I specifically went looking for the mask, because this case, my representation started right around the time that DNA evidence was just starting to really come out. And I thought that if I could find the mask, it might have DNA on it, and that would be the breakthrough that we were looking for.

Jordan Smith: But it turned out that no one knew where the mask was.

Tom Reilly: And what do you do to try to find the mask?

August Siemon: Well, I called everybody. I called the court reporter, I think, first, to see if she had the evidence, and she didn’t have it. I called the district attorney’s office. And I think I spoke to the district attorney at the time.

Tom Reilly: In any event, you never got your hands on the mask.

August Siemon: I never got my hand on the mask. Apparently, they had two boxes of evidence in the courthouse and they only showed me one.

Jordan Smith: Reilly showed him the September 2000 report detailing Hercules’s arrest for the attempted grocery store robbery. The one where they found a gun and another homemade mask in the trunk.

August Siemon: I never saw this. This was Adel police?

Jordan Smith: He studied the report. And right, away the implications were pretty clear.

Tom Reilly: So you didn’t receive this report from anybody during the course of your representation?

August Siemon: No, absolutely not. I can say with certainty that I didn’t. I would have done something about it if I’ve seen it.

Tom Reilly: What would you have done?

August Siemon: Well, I would have expanded the motion for a new trial and made the specific argument that Brady was violated. Clearly, I mean, this is the Adel Police Department. Adel’s a small town. The state, the local police, and the prosecutors must have known that this evidence existed, and they didn’t turn it over. That would have been, that would have been a slam dunk Brady issue. And it would have tied — it could have tied Hercules Brown into the — it would have tied Hercules Brown even more strongly into the murder that Devonia was convicted of.

Liliana Segura: On cross examination, the state’s lawyer, an assistant attorney general named Paula Smith, asked Siemon a series of pretty confusing questions. The point seemed to be to suggest that Devonia’s lawyers at trial did have information about Hercules’s run-ins with the law. So, you know, that the whole thing about the September 2000 police report wasn’t really such a big deal. But when Reilly took over the questioning again, he asked Siemon to read a portion of the trial transcript out loud. Where DA Bob Ellis is speaking. And denying there’s anything out there to indicate that Hercules was a plausible alternate suspect.

Tom Reilly: And what does Mr. Ellis there on line 14 say?

August Siemon: “There’s not any indicia, whatsoever, that Hercules Brown had anything to do with this.”

Jordan Smith: When Tom Reilly was laying out the case for Devonia’s innocence to Judge Graham, he emphasized the 2019 Georgia Supreme Court ruling that we told you about earlier. Here’s Reilly again.

Tom Reilly: In short, your honor, the question for you to answer after you have considered the entire record before you is this: Is this a conviction worth defending and upholding — a conviction that justifies confidence in the result and in the fairness and integrity of our justice system? On behalf of Mr. Inman, we respectfully submit that it is not.

Liliana Segura: One of the most memorable parts of the hearing was the reaction Reilly’s opening statement got from the law enforcement officers sitting next to Devonia. The guys who were there to transport him to and from court and to ostensibly ensure that people in the courtroom were safe from him. They kept shooting each other looks. Even under their masks, their expressions made clear that they were pretty sure the state’s case, and its efforts to keep Devonia locked up, were a cruel joke.

And again, it was really hard to miss the racial dynamics in the room. Devonia and the guards were Black. Just about all the other people in the courtroom were white — the people holding Devonia’s life in their hands, including the state’s lawyers, who show no signs of giving up their fight to keep Devonia in prison.

Jessica Cino: It’s ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous position to draw this hard line in the sand after you have had such a deliberate, intentional ruling from the Georgia Supreme Court basically saying stand down. Stop pushing or stop fighting this man’s attempt to get a new trial because this is keeping us justices up at night. How can you keep pursuing this when the Supreme Court of your state has said stop?

Liliana Segura: For Devonia’s parents, Dinah and David Ray, the whole thing was emotionally exhausting. For almost a year, Dinah had written to us to make sure we knew that Devonia was going to be in court for this hearing. First it was set for October 2020, then January, then April. When it finally looked like this court date would stick, she sent a text message: “Omg! I’m so nervous and excited at the same time. I will definitely be there with bells on.”

Liliana Segura [in courtroom]: So it’s about, it’s not quite 4:20 and they’re wrapping up, much earlier than expected. Devonia’s parents are going up to give him a hug. His mom is hugging him. You can tell she’s smiling under her mask. Now his dad is hugging him. It was an emotional day for them.

Liliana Segura: I went up to talk to Dinah and David after the hearing. Where David was focused on when Devonia would be coming home, Dinah was relieved that the hearing had finally taken place.

[In the courthouse.]

Dinah Ray: I’m just, I mean words just can’t express the joy I feel for him. This court date, it’s taken its toll on Devonia and the entire family. So I’m really, really happy to see this day come. And I’m hoping and praying that he’ll be coming home soon.

Liliana Segura: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t want to keep you too long, but I’m curious what it was like for you to listen to Melinda Ryals answer these questions about her performance.

Dinah Ray: You know, I’ve been, I was unhappy with her performance then, and I wasn’t too happy with it there.

David Ray: For me, it just brought all these emotions back. It brought the whole trial over and got me all emotional.

Liliana Segura: From the moment they hugged Devonia and throughout Reilly’s opening, David was wiping tears from his eyes. It was the first time they’d been allowed to touch their son in some 20 years.

[In the courthouse.]

Dinah Ray: I got to get two hugs. I’m really happy about that because even when I visit him, it’s been through the window, so this is great.

Liliana Segura: Yeah. What’s it like to see him dressed in a tie and shirt?

Dinah Ray: That’s my old son. [Crosstalk.] He used to love to dress up. So it was great seeing him. I can’t believe how grown up he’s gotten. He left as a boy, now he’s a man. So I was really happy to see him and definitely happy to get a hug.

Jordan Smith: Cino also got to hug Devonia. This meant a lot to her too. She’s been Devonia’s fiercest advocate for years.

Jessica Cino: I’ve seen Devonia over the course of the last 6 1/2 years but always behind glass or behind bars, if you will. I mean, I know it has taken years to get to this point, but none of us have forgotten him and pushing this case forward as much as we can.

Jordan Smith: And she thought it was really nice that the judge got to see how much support there was for him.

Jessica Cino: It’s great for the judge to have that human component to it because I think a lot of times, judges considering post-conviction cases, you’re somewhat removed. You read all of these briefs, you read the evidence, but seeing not a courtroom full of people, but a lot of people in your courtroom for this one guy, I think, has to have some effect.

Jordan Smith: So now it’s up to the judge. And it’ll take a while. The lawyers on both sides will file post-hearing briefs trying to highlight things from the hearing and from the law that support their case. There are a few possible outcomes.

The judge could deny Devonia’s request for a new trial. Or she could grant it. Either way, the losing side would have the opportunity to appeal, again, to the Georgia Supreme Court, which has made its position clear. If Devonia wins, the case would likely be kicked back to Adel, and prosecutors there would have to decide if they want to try him again. But given where the case stands, that seems unlikely. Frankly, there’s no way they would win. And they know that. Or at least they should.

So we’ll be back. As soon as we know what happens next.

For now, thanks so much for listening.

[Musical interlude.]

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. This episode was edited by Andrea Jones, produced by Laura Flynn and Jose Olivares, and mixed by Rick Kwan. For The Intercept, Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @LilianaSegura and @chronic_jordan. We’re also hard at work on season two: Murderville, Texas. Keep an eye out for it.

The post Update: The Case for a New Trial appeared first on The Intercept.

In an extraordinary ruling issued Thursday, the Georgia Supreme Court denied the state’s latest effort to prevent Devonia Inman from proving his innocence in a murder that sent him to prison for life. The ruling itself is brief but accompanied by two powerful concurring opinions that call on the state to get out of the way of Inman being granted a new trial and “let justice be done.”

The post Georgia Supreme Court: “Let Justice Be Done” for Devonia Inman appeared first on The Intercept.

More than eight years after DNA evidence revealed that the state of Georgia sent the wrong man to prison for murder, Devonia Inman may finally have a chance to prove his innocence in court. In an order released on July 22, Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit Chief Judge Kristina Cook Graham ruled that Inman’s challenge to his 2001 conviction could move forward. Graham gave permission for Inman’s attorneys to pursue his innocence claim and develop evidence to prove that Georgia prosecutors concealed critical information that could have shown from the start that Inman had nothing to do with the crime.

The post Update: Devonia Inman’s Chance to Prove His Innocence appeared first on The Intercept.

After the new evidence comes to light, we look back at the investigation into the murder of Donna Brown. And share some information we didn’t quite know what to do with — information about some key players who we know shaped the outcome of the case. Players we still have questions about. One is an elusive police detective with a bad reputation. The other is a witness we’ve talked about before. Or, maybe she’s a suspect. It’s hard to tell.

Jordan Smith: Okay. So, by now you pretty much know the story. Devonia Inman has been behind bars for nearly 20 years for a crime he almost certainly did not commit.

Liliana Segura: He was sentenced to life in prison for the 1998 robbery and murder of Donna Brown, a manager at the Taco Bell in Adel, Georgia. It would be the first of four brutal murders in this tiny town of just more than 5,000 people. One of those murders, of a man named Shailesh Patel, remains unsolved. Just months later two beloved members of the community, William Carroll Bennett and Rebecca Browning, were bludgeoned to death in broad daylight.

Jordan Smith: A man named Hercules Brown was quickly arrested for that crime and sent to prison for life. Nine years later, DNA evidence taken from a mask found in Donna Brown’s car was matched to Hercules. And only to Hercules. And that raised a whole bunch of questions. And the biggest question? Why didn’t the police ever consider Hercules a suspect in Donna Brown’s death?

Liliana Segura: That’s the question we’ve come back to over and over again while reporting this story. Remember, people around town had told investigators that Hercules was responsible for her murder and that he’d even confessed to the crime. He was known to police and he had a violent streak.  It just seems like if we could answer that question, we could get closer to the truth of what happened — not just at the Taco Bell, but during this violent period that traumatized so many people in Adel. For The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith.  Welcome back to Murderville, Georgia.  When we set out to report this story, we wanted to get to understand why Devonia Inman was convicted. We learned a lot, but didn’t come away with a definitive answer. Why? Partly because — if you noticed — we got a lot of doors slammed in our face. Key law enforcement just didn’t want to talk.

Liliana Segura: But we didn’t give up. We kept trying. In this final episode, we wanted to give you a glimpse of what’s that like. First up, tracking down Adel police detective Jimmy Hill.

Earline Goodman:  I think Jimmy Hill is the reason why this case- I think because he was the lead investigator and if y’all could talk with Jimmy Hill, I think that’s who you need to talk to.

Liliana Segura: Why? You started to say you think he’s the reason that this didn’t …

Earline Goodman: I just think his investigation- he was the head investigator of the police department. I think he’s the one that put the case together.

Liliana Segura: That’s Earline Goodman. She was part of Inman’s original defense team. Remember, the Adel police department was so small that it didn’t have the resources to handle a big murder case. So they called in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. GBI Agent Jamy Steinberg took charge. Jimmy Hill was his local partner. But people like Earline Goodman thought Hill was the real driving force behind the investigation.

Earline Goodman: He’s the one you guys need to talk with. Ask him why did he think Devonia done it.

Liliana Segura: My question to him would be, “Why didn’t you pursue Hercules Brown as a suspect?”

Earline Goodman: Very good question. That’s a very good question.

Jordan Smith: We spent a lot of time trying to ask him that question and we really didn’t get anywhere. For one, Hill was hard to track down. Not because we didn’t know where he worked — after leaving the Adel police force, he went to work for the Cook County Sheriff’s Department. In one of the only photos we found of him, he’s standing behind a group of smiling sheriff’s deputies. He is wearing a blue shirt and a bright red tie — everyone else is in uniform. And he’s got a look on his face that we think is supposed to be a smile, but looks more like he’s in mid-growl.

Liliana Segura: But even though he’s still active in law enforcement in this small, rural place, Hill proved amazingly elusive. We went to his house, we left messages with a good friend, we camped out in the lobby of the sheriff’s department and left multiple notes for him. Yet, no Jimmy Hill. Finally, on the way out of town after our last visit to Adel, the phone rang.

Jordan Smith: Oh. Oh my gosh. Gosh, gosh, gosh. Yeah, we’ve got to find to somewhere that we can pull over because that call was definitely from the sheriff’s office.

Liliana Segura: Yeah. Holy fucking shit. Sorry. Oh. Yep.

Jordan Smith: Sheriff’s office just called twice but-

Liliana Segura: Two times in a row.

Jordan Smith: -no messages. It’s vexing.

Liliana Segura: Yeah. Oh my god. I mean it can only be him. Who else would be calling?

Jordan Smith:  Nobody.

Liliana Segura: We were about an hour-and-a-half north of Adel. We found a gas station and pulled over. We called him back.

Jimmy Hill:  Cook County Sheriff’s Office.

Jordan Smith:  Is this Chief Deputy Hill?

Jimmy Hill: Yes, ma’am.

Jordan Smith:  Well, hey, this is Jordan Smith. It’s great to hear your voice. How are you doing?

Jimmy Hill: I’m doing fine.

Jordan Smith: So we’ve been trying to get in touch with you because we’ve been working on a-

Jimmy Hill: Isn’t it a clue when I don’t return your call I don’t intend to talk to you?

Jordan Smith: Well, no, not necessarily.

Jimmy Hill: Well, I’m not talking to you.

Jordan Smith: Can you tell me why not?

Jimmy Hill: I’ve got nothing- Yeah. I don’t want to.

Jordan Smith: Well, can you tell me why not?

Jimmy Hill: Yes, because I don’t want to talk to you.

Jordan Smith: But I mean is there-

Jimmy Hill: Now you have a nice day.

Jordan Smith: I’m sorry? Wow. That was hostile.

Liliana Segura: I think he said you have a nice day.

Jordan Smith: Well, you have a nice day too, Mr. Hill.

Liliana Segura: I don’t think he meant it.

Jordan Smith: Oh.

Jordan Smith: It was hardly a satisfying exchange. And it certainly didn’t get us any closer to understanding his role in the investigation. And that’s a problem. Because his name is all over the GBI report on Donna Brown’s murder. He’s clearly involved in key interviews. He provides Agent Steinberg with important evidence and with information about Inman, but none of the entries in the report were actually written by him.

Liliana Segura: This isn’t exactly surprising. None of the local cops who first responded to the call about a body at the Taco Bell wrote reports. There were no observations from the scene. This basic information is just absent from the GBI report. In fact, there are no reports written by the Adel officers at all. At Inman’s trial, Adel police Chief Kirk Gordon testified that his officers didn’t write reports “because we’re not going to interfere” with the GBI. Even when an officer was the first to get a tip or to develop some sort of lead. “What’s the use in writing it down when you can just explain it to them face to face?” he asked.

Jordan Smith: I’m sorry, but this is crazy. The point of writing a police report is so that there is an actual report — a detailed record of what steps were taken, when, and by whom. It is critical to understanding why leads were followed and perhaps why others weren’t. Police reports often serve as a window into who might’ve exerted influence on various players in the case or on the overall direction of the investigation. Without a full accounting written by the individuals who actually handled specific tasks, there is simply no way to know.  And certainly no way to know what might’ve fallen through the cracks, or was ignored, or was left out of the record on purpose.

Liliana Segura: But there was another reason we really, really wanted to talk to Jimmy Hill. It wasn’t just about the murder at Taco Bell. It was also about figuring out why there seemed to be no trace of an investigation into the killing of Shailesh Patel. Remember the page on the GBI website listing unsolved homicides? The one with the short entry about Patel that has that weird sketch of a possible witness but no actual suspect? There are two investigators listed on that page: one, an agent with the GBI. And the other is Jimmy Hill. We tried him again.

Jimmy Hill: Cook County Sheriff’s  Office.

Liliana Segura: Hi, this is Liliana.  Is this Jim Hill?

Jimmy Hill: Yes.

Liliana Segura: Well, you  spoke to my colleague a  day or two ago. We’ve been  trying to get in touch about this  project we’ve been working on, and she  didn’t really, you know-

Jimmy Hill: Ma’am, I told  you, I don’t want  to talk with you people.

Liliana Segura: Well-

Jimmy Hill: And,  I’m not going to  talk to you people.

Liliana Segura: I  just have a very  important question, which  is-

Jimmy Hill: You  have a nice day.

Liliana Segura: Did  you know about the  DNA-

Liliana Segura: The phone calls really didn’t amount to much, but they did give us a sense of what was behind Hill’s reputation.

Johnny Daugherty: He’s the most hated guy in Cook County, there’s no doubt about it, from one end of the county to the other.

Liliana Segura: This is Johnny Daugherty, the former Cook County Sheriff. And one of the only people who would talk with us on-the-record about Jimmy Hill.

Johnny Daugherty:  He’s a vicious little man. He is a vicious little man. He’s always threatening. He’s threatening something all the time. If you go in to talk to him, first thing you’re going to find out is he thinks he’s already smarter than you are when you walk in the room. And I can tell you what he would say if you walked in the room, as soon as you walked out of the room, “That bunch of dumb bitches.” That’s Jim Hill. I don’t know how else to put it, but that’s Jim Hill.

Liliana Segura: The prosecutors in Inman’s case described Hill in very different terms. They said he was an aggressive investigator with a strong personality. Maybe a little rough around the edges, but he got the job done. One called him a “true detective.”

Jordan Smith: But Inman’s family said he targeted black people. Here’s Takeisha Pickett, Inman’s cousin.

Takeisha Pickett: I just heard that he was always not a good cop. He was just always trying to get the black people off the streets, he wasn’t giving you a chance. I just always known him to not be a good person.

Jordan Smith: And Inman’s aunt, Ethel Pickett.

Jordan Smith: Is Jimmy  Hill’s reputation so terrible?  What was it?

Ethel: ’Cause  he always doing  stuff to people. He- Jimmy  Hill always doing to young, you  know, young black mens. He was always  pinning stuff on them and then make it stick  ’cause of what he say. You know? What he say  goes. That’s the type of reputation he got.

Liliana Segura: Inman’s family says that this, combined with Hill’s vindictiveness, drove him to go after Inman for Donna Brown’s murder. Dinah Ray, Inman’s mother, remembers her son calling her after his arrest.

Dinah Ray: My son, I spoke to him on the phone when he was in jail and he told me that he had smart-mouthed a police officer.

Liliana Segura: She’s convinced this is why Hill was out to get him.

Dinah Ray: I strongly believe this is the reason. Him disrespecting authority, does that equal to life in prison?

Liliana Segura: In the end, it’s hard to know exactly how this went. We never really got to know Jimmy Hill at all. Except by reputation. So we still don’t know how deeply he influenced the case.

Jordan Smith: There’s another character in this story that we want to come back to. One we know far better. But one whose influence on the case, or even potential involvement in the crime, is a similar mystery. That person? Marquetta Thomas.

Jordan Smith: If you remember, Marquetta Thomas was the sister of Inman’s girlfriend, Christy Lima, and she really hated Inman for the way he treated her sister. So when the cops came around asking where Inman was the night of Donna Brown’s murder, Thomas threw him under the bus. Said he hadn’t been around that night. And worse, later she said that he’d talked about “jacking and robbing” places around town. Eventually she said he’d talked about robbing Taco Bell.

Liliana Segura: Then, she took it all back. She testified at Inman’s trial that she’d been coerced by the GBI into implicating him. When we met Thomas, she was filled with remorse. She had only recently gotten out of prison herself and her son was serving an 80-year sentence for a robbery murder. She told us she thinks about Inman all the time.

Marquetta Thomas: I haven’t spoke with him. I would like to, but I don’t know if I could handle his rage if he is angry or mad or hurt because of what I said or did, which I’ll accept, but I would like forgiveness. That would be peace.

Liliana Segura: She also told us that she had worked hard to turn her life around. She became involved with a ministry while in prison. When she got out, they put her up in an apartment and paid the rent for three months so that she could get job training. She found work in a warehouse and devoted herself to her church. Now she’s a youth minister and sings in a traveling choir.

Jordan Smith: You should sing for us.

Marquetta Thomas: I will. I can. I can. I’m not shy, it’s a gift. Let me see what I could sing. Here’s just a worship song that we sing. It’s called How Great Our God. Let me get my breath right.

[SINGING]

Jordan Smith: Look. We liked Thomas. She was personable and open. But, you know, she’s also- what’s the word? Complicated. This too comes back to the GBI report. We’ve talked a lot about how confusing it is. And about how some key things — like really any mention of Hercules — seem to be absent. But what we haven’t said before is that Marquetta Thomas is all over it and not just as the person that implicates Inman. A lot of people around town seem to think she had something to do with the murder at Taco Bell. We didn’t bring this up before because, honestly, it raises way more questions than answers.

Earline Goodman: Marquetta, I’ll never forget Marquetta. Marquetta was something else. Do I believe Marquetta was involved? Yes, I think so, because Marquetta was involved in everything in Adel it seemed like.

Liliana Segura: That’s Earline Goodman again. She’s not the only one with that impression of Thomas. When it came to the murder at Taco Bell, a bunch of people had stories for the cops that somehow involved Thomas. One was her manager at Waffle House. Remember, Thomas worked the night shift there. But the night of Donna Brown’s murder, the manager said Thomas didn’t show up for work. Then, the next day, she showed up acting so nervous the manager sent her home. A different woman, who worked at the Hampton Inn, had some third-hand information to share. She’d heard that Thomas was initially planning to rob a convenience store with her sister’s boyfriend. In other words, Inman. But when they got there it was closed, so they decided to rob the Taco Bell instead. This was pretty sketchy stuff, but we asked Thomas about it.

Jordan Smith: What’s weird is in the big police report, there are places in there where people are basically pointing at you as possibly having been involved in that crime.

Marquetta Thomas: Right, I heard about that a while later, but it didn’t bother me because I didn’t have anything to do with it or I wasn’t around, so it really didn’t bother me at all, didn’t penetrate me, because I was like, “Yeah, whatever. Yeah right.”

Jordan Smith: Whatever might’ve been behind these various rumors, it’s hard to know what the cops made of them, if anything. In part, because the GBI report, as you know, is totally opaque. In fact, the report was so confusing, at a certain point Liliana decided to make a master timeline. One that included everything that happened in Adel over a period of about two years, and including all four murders. It was to get a better sense of how all the pieces fit. It became an epic document, like 15 pages long. And when you read it? There are things that really jump out.

Liliana Segura: One of the main things is what happens after November 11, 1998 — roughly two months after Donna Brown’s murder. Until then, the cops don’t seem to be all that interested in what people have said about Thomas, only what she said about Inman. But on that day, the Adel News Tribune runs a front page story identifying Inman as the “prime” suspect in the murder at Taco Bell. That same day, Thomas is booked into jail in a neighboring county on a totally unrelated charge. And then it just gets weird. Within a week, Agent Steinberg is all over Thomas. Interviewing all kinds of people about her.

Jordan Smith: There are a couple possible reasons for the sudden interest. The first? Virginia Tatem. Remember, she’s the newspaper carrier who had a dramatic story about seeing Inman fleeing the Taco Bell the night of the murder. A story she never bothered to mention until after there was a hefty reward offered for information about the crime. And a story that was totally implausible. A story that her fellow newspaper carrier, Lee Grimes, says was a total lie. Tatem also told the GBI she saw a woman in a second car that night, one the cops decided looked like Marquetta Thomas. This could explain their sudden interest in her. It could explain it. But what it doesn’t explain is the one thing that Thomas has insisted on for years: that early on she had recanted her story about Inman’s involvement in the murder. This is conspicuously absent from the GBI report.

Marquetta Thomas: And I was like, “Yeah, he didn’t do it.” I don’t know if they recorded it…

Liliana Segura: There’s something even bigger that is also missing from the GBI report. Something we only discovered earlier this year at the end of our reporting. That there was another person who came forward with information that should have made investigators question whether Inman was really the right suspect. And that’s Kim Brooks.

Jordan Smith: Brooks is the woman who took over as Taco Bell manager after Donna Brown died and who tried to tell the police that her co-worker, Hercules Brown, was acting odd and that he’d all but confessed his involvement in the murder. Remember, this is the new evidence contained an appeal filed last winter. It is still pending. According to Brooks, she came forward with this information by December of 1998. But, as usual, instead of looking at Hercules, the cops looked away. They seemed to obsess over Marquetta Thomas. It’s pretty inexplicable, but totally par for the course.

Liliana Segura: They talked to a couple of Thomas’ old school counselors, then a guard and a nurse at the jail, and then a bunch of jailhouse snitches. Women who said Thomas had variously confessed to being involved in Donna Brown’s murder. One said she mentioned having $800 from the crime. Another said Thomas had bragged about burying the gun. A third mentioned something pretty out there about Thomas having made a bomb from a Coke can.

Jordan Smith: This is how they spent the month of December. No sign of Hercules in the report. By the end of the year, Steinberg had refocused all of his attention on Inman. There is one sign in the report that Hercules was on their radar. Less than a week before Inman was indicted for murder, on January 4, 1999, Steinberg got a tip that Hercules shot Donna Brown and tossed the gun behind a convenience store. That same day, he went to the store. He didn’t find anything. And that was it, it was over.

Liliana Segura: So, what does this all mean? Jordan and I have had this conversation too many times to count.

Jordan Smith: To me, it’s just that GBI report is just a hot mess. It’s a pretty crappy narrative of a pretty important investigation. So you’ve got a woman, Donna Brown, brutally murdered, and she deserves justice. But you’ve also got someone who could potentially be sentenced to death. Inman wasn’t, but that was on the table. I mean, there’s a premium on getting this shit right. And it doesn’t seem that anyone really cared about that. And the one thing we know for sure is that Hercules was in Donna Brown’s car. And he’s the only one that the evidence shows was involved in her murder. The only one. And they completely ignored him. Even when they were told multiple times about his involvement. And then even more egregious, when they found out there was DNA tying him to the crime, they essentially shrugged their shoulders.

Liliana Segura: For me, when I back up and look at everything that happened after Kim Brooks comes forward, it’s just so damning. Here was this woman who was courageous enough to contact police, not just to share information that might be relevant to the murder of Donna Brown, but to warn them that Hercules was a dangerous man. If you look at the overall timeline, every time Hercules comes up after Inman is indicted, he’s committing some kind of violence. There’s the woman he beats up in June of 1999, then the man he sent to the hospital the following summer. And then, just a month and a half before Hercules kills Bennett and Browning, there’s his run-in with police, where they find a gun and a black cloth cap with two eye holes cut out. It’s like this rolling disaster in slow motion.

Jordan Smith: And then there’s Shailesh Patel.

Liliana Segura: Right. He’s killed right in the middle of all of this. And his murder is still unsolved.

Jordan Smith: Exactly. Is there a connection? We don’t know.

Liliana Segura: Did anyone look for one? We don’t know that either.

Jordan Smith: We decided to check in one last time, to see if the GBI had any updates about that supposedly ongoing investigation. We called agent Mark Pro.

Mark Pro: We’re trying to do some stuff, the case agent has got some stuff that he’s trying to do as far as any physical evidence that they’re trying to work on. Basically that’s where he’s at. He’s got some people that he has to make contact with. Once he does that and secures stuff with him, we’re going to have to have that stuff tested. Then we’ll kind of go and see what we got once we do that, that could be something that could be, I don’t want to say something that will…

Jordan Smith: Again, it was a bunch of bullshit.

Mark Pro: …help us in a direction that we need to go based on what he’s looking at right now because we’ve been going in a direction but if the information doesn’t pan out the way we think it will, we’ll have to take a new direction.

Liliana Segura: Okay, just to be clear, the physical evidence you’re talking about for testing, is that new evidence?

Mark Pro: No, we’re just following up on existing evidence that we have. It’s nothing new.

Liliana Segura: Is there a potential suspect in the case?

Mark Pro: No, not right now.

Jordan Smith: Not very enlightening.

Liliana Segura: Over the last 20 years, Inman has been transferred a bunch of times, to prisons all over the state. We sent him a card around Christmas last year, but we never heard back. Then in January his mom, Dinah Ray, told us he’d been transferred again, to one of the most notoriously violent prisons in Georgia. She sends us emails pretty regularly, asking about our investigation. But sometimes, she also talks about how she’s feeling and her guilt about sending Inman to Adel in the first place.

Jordan Smith: She wrote to us: “I have taken over half my son’s life away by leaving him there. Never in a million years did I think this would ever happen to him, I still think this is a dream that I can’t wake up from.”  She wrote that Inman tells her that he doesn’t blame her, that it isn’t her fault.

Liliana Segura: “But it was,” she wrote. “A mom is suppose to protect her kids and I failed him and I will have to live with that for the rest of my life.”

Jordan Smith: She tries to keep busy. Because, “when I sit still,” she wrote, “I can hear my son saying to me over and over, mom, don’t leave me. It’s like a recorder I can’t turn off.”

Liliana Segura: For now, she’s waiting to find out if her son’s appeal will be granted and she’s grateful for all the people who are trying to help him. “It gives us hope,” she wrote. “I just pray that whoever has the authority to make it right, does so.”

Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Thanks for listening.

The post Epilogue: Unanswered Questions appeared first on The Intercept.

Jessica Cino is a dean at the Georgia State University law school — and Devonia Inman’s biggest advocate. His plight has shaken Cino’s faith in the criminal justice system. She’s poured hours into his case, trying to help him clear his name. But the odds are stacked against him, and she knows it. But then new evidence comes to light — something the cops should have known about all along.

Liliana Segura: In 1895, a case called Coffin v. United States came before the Supreme Court. It was a complicated case. Alleging, more or less, that three men had aided and abetted a fourth in committing bank fraud.

Jordan Smith: The most important thing that came out of that case: The idea that a person is to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Here’s how the court explained it: “The principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary,” the court wrote, “and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law.”

Liliana Segura: The presumption of innocence is fundamental, embedded in the guarantee of due process laid out in the Constitution. But there’s a flip side to this idea of innocent until proven guilty. It’s that once you’ve been found guilty of a crime it is really hard to prove you’re innocent, even when you are.

Jessica Cino: I think one of the biggest myths about the criminal justice system and the way it functions is that most of the time we get it right, but in the slim chance we get it wrong, we’ll be able to correct it down the road. That’s just not true. That’s not true on any level whatsoever.

Jordan Smith: That’s Jessica Cino. She’s a lawyer and a dean at the law school at Georgia State and Devonia Inman’s tireless and most determined advocate.

Jessica Cino: So the system, once you’re convicted, is, I won’t call it rigged, but once you’re convicted, it’s meant to keep you there.

Jordan Smith: That’s because the system operates with the idea of “finality” in mind. The Supreme Court has said as much. What really matters is that you got a “fair” trial. If the courts think you did, then that’s it. And that is, almost entirely, the final word.

Jessica Cino: That’s a complete design fault with the system. Like, it’s designed to keep people there, it’s designed to minimize challenges to convictions. It’s this notion of finality. So we will do everything possible to keep people where we think they belong.

Liliana Segura: But what if you didn’t get a fair trial? What if you’re found guilty, but you’re not? What if you’re Devonia Inman and you’ve been locked up for 20 years, insisting you’re innocent and almost no one with any power to help seems to give a damn? From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome back to Murderville, Georgia.

Liliana Segura: It’s been three years since we started reporting this story. And the whole time there have been lawyers working on the case too, trying to find a way to exonerate Devonia Inman. There are plenty of reasons to believe that he’s innocent, including new information only recently uncovered. So does he have a chance?

Jordan Smith: First, let’s review. Back in September 1998, Donna Brown was murdered in the parking lot of the Taco Bell in tiny Adel, Georgia. She was killed by a single bullet, fired at close range. It tore through her right eye. The Adel police quickly turned the case over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI. That’s pretty routine for small departments in rural Georgia when there’s a major crime to solve. In 1998, this crime and this town fit that bill.

Liliana Segura: GBI agent Jamy Steinberg led the investigation and he quickly focused on a 20-year-old man from California, Devonia Inman. His family had deep roots in Adel, but aside from yearly visits to see his relatives, he was pretty much an outsider. Focusing on Inman, Steinberg ignored other lead, good ones. In fact, as he homed in on Inman, folks around town were pointing to another man as the real killer: Hercules Brown. Some even told the investigators about him and that he was responsible for Donna Brown’s murder. They didn’t listen.

Jordan Smith: Inman insisted he had nothing to do with the crime and there was zero physical evidence tying him to it, but he was charged with it anyway. And after an equally messed up trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Liliana Segura: But even before that, even as Devonia Inman sat in jail waiting to be tried and facing the death penalty, there were three more vicious murders in Adel. In the spring of 2000 a man named Shailesh Patel was beaten to death in a relative’s home. Again, the GBI was brought in. And, again, there were rumors: Talk that Hercules Brown had something to do with it. Patel’s murder remains unsolved. And just months after that, more bloodshed. The gruesome bludgeoning death of  William Carroll Bennett, owner of a mom-and-pop grocery and lunch counter, and his employee, Rebecca Browning. They were killed in the store, just before lunchtime. Within an hour, a suspect was picked up. It was Hercules Brown. Steinberg had a hand in that case too. And, ultimately, Hercules pleaded guilty to the double murder, in exchange for prosecutors taking the death penalty off the table. He’s doing life in prison, too.

Jordan Smith: Devonia Inman had been locked up for more than a decade, when lawyers looking into his case went back to a key piece of evidence that had never been tested for DNA: a mask made from gray sweatpants. It had been left on the passenger seat of Donna Brown’s car the night she was killed. When Inman was on trial, the prosecutors said that it was worn by her killer. In 2011, the lawyers finally had it tested. There was DNA inside from a single source. It belonged to Hercules Brown.

Aimee Maxwell: I’m Aimee Maxwell.

Liliana Segura: Aimee Maxwell was the executive director of the Georgia Innocence Project when she received a letter from Devonia Inman asking for help to clear his name. When we met Maxwell, she and her team were working in a former nail salon in a strip mall in Decatur, next to a Wal-Mart. The old carpet had been ripped out to get rid of the smell of chemicals, but otherwise, the space still had all the remnants of the previous business, Nails 4 U, including the price list hanging on the wall.

Aimee Maxwell: Devonia first wrote us in 2002, I believe, so he’s case number 63 of- now we’re up to almost 6,500 cases that we’ve looked at. So we started looking at his case early on and have stayed with his case all through the many years.

Liliana Segura: Maxwell was really affected by the case. There was just so much wrong with it.

Aimee Maxwell: Probably one of the things that stands out first is how many of the witnesses recanted or changed their story and how many of them had to be brought to court from jail or prison. It was very telling who the witnesses were against him and, you know,  the recantations- the question is, do you believe them then or now? You can’t figure out when they’re telling the truth. Do you really want to put a man in prison with life without parole? That’s the shocking thing, and it could have possibly been death. Is that really the kind of evidence you want to use when you put somebody in prison?

Liliana Segura: And there was even more crappy evidence. There was the jailhouse snitch who said Inman had confessed to him and then asked what he might get in exchange for telling his story. And the newspaper carrier who came up with an elaborate and implausible claim about seeing Inman fleeing the scene in Donna Brown’s car and who only came forward after Inman had been arrested and after a $5,000 reward was offered. In short? Each of them had a clear incentive to testify against Inman.

Aimee Maxwell: So there really was no witness that put Devonia at the scene or in any involvement at all that wasn’t incentivized.

Liliana Segura: That’s why the DNA found on the mask inside the car was such a game-changer. The evidence against Inman at trial was just weak. And there were all those people who’d said that Hercules was responsible for Donna Brown’s murder. And now his DNA, and only his DNA, had been found on the mask. To Maxwell, it was clear that Inman deserved a new trial.

Jordan Smith: Maxwell and another attorney with the Georgia Innocence Project, Christina Cribbs, dove into Inman’s case. Thousands of pages of trial transcripts and police reports. They got volunteer lawyers from a big firm in Atlanta to help out. After getting the DNA results, they filed a motion with the court down in Cook County. Officially it’s known as an EMNT. An Extraordinary Motion for a New Trial. And it was granted. A judge down in Adel would hear what they had to say. That judge would consider the DNA evidence and decide if it was compelling enough to undermine Inman’s conviction and if Inman deserved a new trial. Meanwhile, the Cook County district attorney’s office, the one that was led by Bob Ellis at the time of Inman’s original trial, they would argue against them that the DNA was not important and that Inman was clearly guilty. Ellis wasn’t the DA anymore and he wouldn’t be at the hearing, but he agreed with the state’s position. We met him for lunch at a buffet restaurant. He talked with his mouth full and kept banging his hand on the table.

Bob Ellis: We never once thought that this defendant was not guilty. We tried to have integrity about what we did.

Jordan Smith: Right. Do you remember what it was in particular that really sealed that deal for you that made you think that he was guilty?

Bob Ellis: I honestly can’t remember.

Jordan Smith: The hearing got off to a rocky start. For one thing, there was the fact that the judge who would hear the case was the same judge who presided over Inman’s original trial.

Aimee Maxwell: It makes it so much more difficult because it’s really hard for anybody to say what happened- what I did may not have been the right thing. I sat- I was the judge on this case where there were mistakes made and we may have put an innocent person in prison. That’s a hard thing for any human being to say, to be okay with.

Jordan Smith: This is common — and not just in Georgia. And it does not inspire confidence. Then the judge made clear he didn’t have much time. Maxwell thought their evidence could take two days of testimony. The judge gave them half a day. If that wasn’t enough, he said, they could reschedule. But getting to this point had taken years, so Maxwell decided to go for it.

Aimee Maxwell: I think we were all pretty confident about what we had. I mean, obviously we were nervous because this is the one shot, right, and we had to convince the trial judge that let all that nonsense happen in trial. We’ve got to convince him that what- all those witnesses were all wrong and that what happened was wrong.

Jordan Smith: They told the judge about the DNA on the mask and why it was so critical.

Liliana Segura: Remember, Jamy Steinberg, the GBI agent, had gone to see Hercules in prison back when the DNA match first came up. And the interview is a little crazy. While questioning him, Steinberg gave Hercules every single “out” he could think of.

Jamy Steinberg: I mean, is there any way – I’m just tryin’ to figure out – is there any way that you could have tried this mask on or y’all had done something in the past? You know…

Liliana Segura: Is it possible, Steinberg asks, that Hercules tried on the mask at some point?

Hercules Brown: It been a long time man.

Liliana Segura: Then Steinberg tries to figure out what kind of relationship Hercules had with Devonia Inman.

Jamy Steinberg: What was your relationship with Devonia?

Hercules Brown: I didn’t have a relationship with Devonia.

Jamy Steinberg: And I’m not tryin’ to do smoke and mirrors, I’m asking, I mean, did you know that he was in town, even when that happened, he had not been in Adel very long.

Hercules Brown: I don’t know- I don’t remember that. I don’t know. I don’t know him.

Liliana Segura: If you didn’t catch that, Hercules said no. He said he’d seen Inman before. But he didn’t know him.

Jordan Smith: This is a crucial point. At Inman’s trial, the prosecutors, Bob Ellis and Tim Eidson, had pursued a conviction with a simple theory: Devonia Inman acted alone in robbing and killing Donna Brown. If that was the case, there is no reason why the only DNA found in her car belonged to Hercules Brown. Maxwell called Hercules as a witness during the hearing, but he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to testify. He wasn’t the only one. Maxwell wanted to question the newspaper carrier, Virginia Tatem, about her wild story and about whether she’d collected the reward money after testifying at Inman’s trial. She refused to answer questions, too. The judge said that was fine. And then there was the snitch, Kwame Spaulding. He did answer questions on the stand and said that the story he’d told about Inman confessing was just that: a story. He’d been coerced by the GBI, he said. The judge cut him off, basically said he didn’t want to hear about it. We wrote numerous letters to Spaulding, hoping he would talk to us about what had happened with the GBI.

Kwame Spaulding: Yo, hello, Jordan Smith, how you doing? It’s Kwame Spaulding. I was calling in reference to thousands of notifications you sent me. I’m just trying to figure out, like, how is this beneficial to me? You know what I’m saying? It’s going to be beneficial to me, you know?

Jordan Smith: Yeah, we knew what he meant.

Kwame Spaulding: Exactly what [inaudible] give me a call right now. Kind of dangerous, you know what I’m saying? [inaudible] in that position, so yeah, let me know. I’ll call you back.

Jordan Smith: Dangerous. We don’t know exactly what he was referring to, but we could certainly make some guesses. For one, no one wants to be out there talking smack about the GBI, or about a guy like Hercules, for that matter, even if he is in prison. So, in the end, he just didn’t talk to us.

Liliana Segura: He tried to speak up once and the people who could have done something about it did their best to ignore him. To the state, anything he had to say now didn’t matter and neither did the DNA. The prosecutors used a new theory to explain it away: The gray mask might have implicated Hercules, but it didn’t exonerate Devonia Inman. The two of them must have pulled off the murder together. They pushed this, even though it completely clashed with the theory they presented at trial. We talked to Tim Eidson about this. Remember, he’s the one who told us that Hercules’s mom had provided an alibi for her son and how police and prosecutors believed her, because she was a well-respected lady. When we met, Eidson had gone back to working as a defense attorney, traveling between south Georgia and eastern Alabama. We reached him on Facebook — he’s an avid user and has a penchant for selfies. He remembered how he found out about the DNA.

Tim Eidson: Now I know that my ex-wife called me one day and he was kind of in a tizzy because they had got a call from someone and she says, “Do you remember that mask that you found?” And I said yeah. She said, “Well, they found that it had Hercules Brown’s DNA in it.” Well, it wasn’t like it was a shocking revelation or anything. I just said, “Really?” She said, “Yeah, and they’re saying that he might have been involved in the Taco Bell murder.”

Liliana Segura: You might ask why his ex-wife found out about the DNA before he did. Well, that goes back to the kind of small town Adel was.

Tim Eidson: The reason she called is because Hercules Brown killed her uncle.

Liliana Segura: William Bennett, that is. The grocery store owner who was beaten to death with a bat.

Tim Eidson: And that was my ex-wife’s uncle. That’s how I knew all of these people. You know, I mean, that’s how I found out about Hercules Brown’s DNA. Nobody ever called me on the phone and said, “Hey, let’s tell you about that ski mask.” I hadn’t worked with the prosecution in several years. It wasn’t like it was shocking because his name kept popping up during the hearing.

Liliana Segura: Not just at the hearing, but at Inman’s trial, too. Back then, several people said Hercules either confessed to them or had asked them to rob the Taco Bell with him. But Eidson and Ellis had convinced the judge not to let any of them testify. At the hearing, Amy Maxwell reminded the judge that he had ruled against Inman’s lawyers when they tried to introduce that evidence at trial. “Is that a nice, euphemistic way of saying I screwed up?” the judge said. Maxwell said no, of course not.

Jordan Smith: The judge wasn’t the only one being defensive. When Steinberg, the GBI agent, took the stand, he was downright surly. Maxwell asked if he’d done any more investigation after he got the DNA match to Hercules. Steinberg said no.  Did he try to see if the fingerprints from Donna Brown’s car matched Hercules? “I just answered that question,” he said. If there was any doubt the judge wasn’t taking things all that seriously, his ruling would make it pretty clear. They lost the case and Inman would remain in prison. Adding insult to injury, the judge asked the prosecutor to write up his decision for him. That isn’t supposed to happen, but it does. This is Maxwell’s colleague, Christina Cribbs.

Christina Cribbs: He gave no reasoning, he allowed the state to draft the order, to explain why the ruling was coming their way. So we really had zero insight into what made the judge go one way or the other, and we never did. We do know that he told us in an email as well, that he wouldn’t be surprised if he was overturned on appeal, that he thought it was a really close case.

Jordan Smith: We asked Bob Ellis, the former prosecutor, if there was any chance the state might have gotten it wrong.

Bob Ellis: There’s a chance that the sun will rise in the west. You hope you get it right. I just don’t know. Based on what we had at the time, we felt strongly that we had the right guy or we wouldn’t have gone forward.

Jordan Smith: We tried the question a different way.

Liliana Segura: In light of the DNA testing that was done and the fact that there are people asking questions about this conviction, even if you have a different perspective, are you glad that the jury didn’t come back with a death sentence in this case?

Bob Ellis: I think I’m probably neutral. I think it is what it is.

Jordan Smith: It is what it is.

Liliana Segura: It’s easy to say that when you’re not sitting in a prison cell for a crime you didn’t commit. The ruling was confounding to Maxwell and Cribbs. They didn’t understand how the judge could shrug at a clear miscarriage of justice. He knew that the defense had always suspected Hercules Brown was guilty. Now that they DNA to prove it, he didn’t seem to care.

Christina Cribbs: So, to me, that was a no brainer. Here’s what you wanted. Here’s scientific evidence. Here’s objective proof that Hercules was involved in this, and how do you not get a new trial based on that? The jury should know. So let’s have a new trial, let’s present Hercules as an alternate suspect and let’s let the jury hear about the DNA and these people who said Hercules confessed to them. But the judge didn’t go for it.

Liliana Segura: And also, the state was now claiming that their entire theory of the case, that Inman acted alone, wasn’t their theory at all. Instead, Inman conspired with Hercules to kill Donna Brown. Maxwell and Cribbs knew they had to appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court. But the law says that the Court doesn’t have to review the case if it doesn’t want to.

Christina Cribbs: The Supreme Court decides whether they want to look at the case or not. If they decide they don’t want to look at the case, then you’re stuck with the trial court’s decision and there’s nowhere to go from there.

Jordan Smith: And guess what? The Georgia Supreme Court wasn’t interested. They rejected the appeal.

Liliana Segura: The lawyers were devastated. They were certain Inman was innocent and that Hercules killed Donna Brown.

Aimee Maxwell: I pretty much think about this case almost every day. I can’t believe that this young man is in prison for the rest of his life based on a bunch of liars.

Liliana Segura: It wasn’t long after Maxwell received the news from the Georgia Supreme Court that Jessica Cino walked into her office. Since joining the faculty at Georgia State, Cino had developed a pretty close relationship with the Innocence Project.

Jessica Cino: I wanted to talk and hang out ’cause I love talking to other lawyers and learning about their cases, and they had just gotten the letter from the Georgia Supreme Court declining review and so Aimee started telling me about this case.

Liliana Segura: Cino was horrified.

Jessica Cino: I think even my own notions of how the criminal justice system worked and how pivotal DNA evidence is in cases was tested.

Liliana Segura: She started reading Inman’s case file. The more she did, the more disturbed she was. She knew she had to find a way to help Inman.

Jessica Cino: I don’t even necessarily know if there’s really a way to define what it is about the case other than it’s just so appalling and depressing that if I don’t try to do everything I can, then who I think of as myself as a lawyer doesn’t really matter much. This is a case that cries out for people to look at and to re-examine and I wouldn’t be able to just walk away from it.

Jordan Smith: There were all the recanting witnesses. The people who’d told the GBI that Hercules was responsible for the murder. The fact that Hercules was in prison for killing Bennett and Browning and the rumors that he’d also been involved in Patel’s death.

Jessica Cino: Yeah, I mean, it’s convenient, right? The minute he gets locked up, people stop dying in this little town. That says a lot and it would be great if he could answer questions about that.

Jordan Smith: We tried to reach Hercules Brown a bunch of times. He only responded once with a brief letter. He wrote that he had nothing to say. For Cino, one of the biggest red flags in the case was that the prosecutors changed their theory of the crime. Going from Inman acted alone to Inman and Hercules did it together.

Jessica Cino: I would call it a bait and switch, absolutely.

Jordan Smith: And what the prosecution did? It wasn’t legal.

Jessica Cino: The indictment that says that one and only one person committed this crime. And they never left room in the indictment for anybody else.

Jordan Smith: So how can they do that?

Jessica Cino: Under Georgia law, they should not be able to do that.

Jordan Smith: The case offended her. She gathered together a team of law students. They went to see Inman and made a number of trips to Adel to poke around. Finally, Cino enlisted the help of attorneys from Troutman Sanders, a prestigious Atlanta law firm. She convinced them to take over the case for free.

Liliana Segura: But there was a problem. The Georgia Supreme Court had refused to consider the case and that meant Inman was basically out of options. He had no easy avenue of appeal. Remember that notion of finality the criminal justice system loves so much? That’s what Inman was up against.

Jessica Cino: The US constitution does not guarantee that only guilty people get convicted. The US constitution merely guarantees that you are entitled to a fair trial and if the system has deemed that even you, innocent person, got a fair trial, then you’re screwed. You don’t have a constitutional right to come back and prove your innocence after you’ve been convicted. The whole point to it is we reinforce finality because we want the criminal justice system to be able to sleep at night, so we can’t go around just willy-nilly overturning convictions because that would be a serious problem.

Liliana Segura: The lawyers would have to find a way to squeeze back into court, and it wouldn’t be easy. While they worked on tackling the legal arguments, Cino became Inman’s lifeline to the outside world. For the hundreds of hours she’s poured into the case, in some ways, that’s the hardest part: managing his expectations.

Jessica Cino: It keeps me up at night. Because whenever I talk to him on the phone, and he always asks me “What are the chances of me getting out? Do I have a good chance?” He wants to be optimistic and the lawyer in me knows the reality of what he faces, of it being an uphill battle.

Liliana Segura: The lawyers wanted to prove that Inman is innocent. But in order to do so, they would need to show that his constitutional rights were violated at trial. Without that, the courts wouldn’t even consider another appeal. Not one based only on his claim of innocence. But the chances of finding something new, so many years later, was a longshot. And then they found it.

Jordan Smith: Last year, Troutman Sanders sent an investigator down to Adel to find more people to talk to. They found Kim Brooks. She had gone to work at the Taco Bell shortly after Donna Brown was murdered. In fact, she took over Brown’s position. Hercules was still working there at the time. And what Brooks remembers is a pretty big deal. Big enough that it could get Inman back into court. Brooks said that when she worked at the Taco Bell, Hercules harassed her. He would “play” like he was going to rob her and hurt her. More importantly, she said that Hercules Brown asked her to help him pull off an “inside job” to rob the store. He would “rough her up” to make it look realistic, and they would split the money. This is the same thing that Inman’s cousin Takeisha Pickett told us. She said Hercules had asked her to rob the Taco Bell too. But that’s not the only thing. Brooks says that at one point, Hercules confessed that he had done something “bad.” He didn’t say what. But she asked him if someone else was going to pay for it. He said, “It’s better their life than mine.”

Liliana Segura: This is pretty damning. But it’s not even the craziest part. Kim Brooks didn’t sit on this information. Hercules creeped her out enough that she decided to tell the cops. There was this one police sergeant, Joel Reddick, who would escort her to the bank to do the night deposits. She tried to tell him about Hercules’ suspicious behavior, but he brushed her off. Still, she wouldn’t let it go. So finally, he told her to call the GBI. Jamy Steinberg. In a legal filing, lawyers from Troutman Sanders describe what happened next:

“Ms. Brooks contacted Agent Steinberg to inform him that she believed Mr. Brown to be involved with Donna Brown’s murder. In response, Ms. Brooks was informed that Donna Brown’s murderer had been found, and that the case was closed. Ms. Brooks believes that this conversation occurred sometime in the months after the murder, but no later than December 1998.”

Jordan Smith: In December 1998, Devonia Inman hadn’t even been indicted yet. The information that Brooks provided to the GBI should have been included in the police report and shared with Inman’s lawyers before his trial. It’s what is known as “Brady material.” Facts and evidence that contradict the state’s case. But it wasn’t reported and it wasn’t handed over. That’s a constitutional violation. The kind of violation that could get Inman back into court.

Liliana Segura: This past January, the legal team at Troutman Sanders filed a special appeal seeking to overturn Inman’s conviction. It’s what is known as a “writ of habeas corpus.” The appeal is currently pending before a state district judge. It’s a major long shot and there’s no telling when the judge will rule. It could take years, because the law doesn’t put a deadline on such decisions. We tried to reach Steinberg again. He previously brushed us off, said Inman’s case was closed and he had nothing more to say about it.

Lisa: GBI, this is Lisa, how can I help you?

Liliana Segura: Hi, yes, I was hoping to reach Jamy Steinberg.

Lisa: He will return to the office tomorrow. Can I give him a message to return your call?

Liliana Segura: That’d be great, yea. My name is Liliana Segura…

Liliana Segura: He didn’t call us back. We were able to reach Joel Reddick, the Adel cop Brooks told about Hercules. He wasn’t particularly helpful either.

Liliana Segura: So yea, so Kim Brooks, the reason we were asking you about her is that in the weeks and months after Donna Brown died, she says that she knew you because apparently you used to be one of the police officers who would provide an escort when, you know-

Joel Reddick: Yeah.

Liliana Segura: Yeah. To make deposits at the bank, so she knew you from there and she says that she told you at one point that she had been disturbed by some behavior and some things that were said by Hercules Brown who she was working with at the night shift at the Taco Bell.

Joel Reddick: I don’t remember none of that. I- seriously I don’t. I didn’t even remember that Kim Brooks you just said.

Liliana Segura: This wasn’t a big surprise. For all the cops we’ve talked to over these last three years, hardly anyone remembers anything. To be honest, we didn’t remember who Reddick was until we went back to the GBI report. It turns out he was one of the first cops dispatched to the Taco Bell. Only he and his partner went to the wrong parking lot. Twice. First to the Waffle House and then the Huddle House, before finally finding the crime scene next door. To Cino, Brooks’ story was a bombshell.

Jessica Cino: So I think my reaction at first was, “oh my god, this is huge.” Right? There’s this feeling of elation of, you know, it’s not a smoking gun, but it certainly helps his case, especially from the perspective of, we have to clear some procedural legal hurdles in order for a court to hear this case. So in one aspect, it’s that. You think about it, like, she reported it. She tried to get them to do something. And this was, you know, decades ago. Like, it’s just- It’s staggering and it’s sad. It’s infuriating. And I’m not the one sitting in prison. I can’t imagine how he feels about this.

Jordan Smith: Talking to Devonia Inman is not easy. We’ve talked to him a number of times on the phone. He is despairing and quite often, deeply depressed.

Devonia Inman: These people don’t even care about messing, they don’t care about my life. How somebody can just find somebody guilty for something and they didn’t even did nothing?

Jordan Smith: He doesn’t understand why he is still in prison, even though DNA clears him. His parents, Dinah and David Ray, don’t understand it either.

Liliana Segura: Do you remember when you heard about the DNA evidence?

Dinah Ray: Yes. I remember we were sitting in front of my job in the car on our lunch break when Aimee called us and told us that the DNA had came back and it was Hercules Brown and all we could do was cry. We thought, this is it. He’s going to be coming home soon. But that didn’t happen.

David Ray: It’s been almost what, six years? Six years since they had the DNA evidence, and they still didn’t let him come home. That’s me and my wife, she wrote everybody. The president to everybody. And we still can’t believe this.

Jordan Smith: Jessica Cino has spent a lot of time trying to explain this to Inman and to his parents and to anyone else who will listen.

Jessica Cino: I think the issue that shocks the most people is how it is so different from what they read in the headlines of, oh, there’s DNA, points to somebody else, somebody else who we can actually go and look at who that person is and see, oh, they actually went on to commit similar crimes to this… and the courts don’t care. That they just don’t give a damn. And I think that to most people is probably what shocks them because it does not fit into any of those nice little boxes that we like to put wrongful convictions in. We like to think that they get solved and ultimately, the wheels of Justice turn the way they’re supposed to but in this case, it didn’t.

Liliana Segura: And it’s not just in this case. We’ve written a lot of stories about people who are in similar circumstances. Innocent and in prison, out of appeals, sometimes facing execution, and nobody seems to care. People think that mistakes in the criminal justice system are rare and just get sorted out on their own, but they don’t. In a way, Devonia Inman is lucky, because he has a dedicated legal team actively trying to help him. That’s not a given. Still, they may not be able to help him in the end. He may die in prison.

David Ray: This is supposed to be the justice system? My son been wrongly accused of this justice system. Something is wrong with this system. It needs to be checked again.

Jordan Smith: It’s not too late. But it’s up to Georgia now to fix it.

Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Thanks for listening.

The post Episode Six: New Evidence appeared first on The Intercept.

Hercules Brown grew up in a well-respected family in Adel. Residents remember him as a good kid. But then something changed. He became violent and mean. And he had several run-ins with the law. But when he got in trouble, nothing seemed to stick. Until the murders of Bennett and Browning raised new questions about the Taco Bell and the Patel murders too. When DNA comes back as a match to Hercules on a key piece of evidence, will it be enough to help Devonia Inman?

Liliana Segura: In Greek mythology, Hercules was the illegitimate son of a mortal woman and Zeus, the king of the gods. Zeus’ wife, the goddess Hera, was furious about the infidelity and vengeful toward Hercules. She sent two snakes to kill the infant in his crib. It didn’t work. He was so strong that he crushed them both. Growing up, the mythical Hercules was known for his size and strength and athletic prowess. He learned wrestling and horseback riding. But he was also musical. He played the lyre and sang. Eventually, he would also be known for his murderous temper. He wore a lion skin with the head still attached. It came up over his head like a mask. And he carried a club, his favorite weapon.

Jordan Smith: Hercules Brown, a man from Adel, Georgia, had a lot in common with the original Hercules.

Daniel Connell: The name was very fitting. He was usually the biggest kid in our grade, very big, strong kid.

Jordan Smith: That’s Daniel Connell. He grew up in Adel and he still lives there. He’s a lawyer now. He went to grade school with Hercules Brown. They weren’t exactly best friends, but it was a small town and they were in the same grade.

Daniel Connell: Good athlete for the most part. He was usually the biggest football player or the guy that could hit home runs before everybody in baseball. Very mild-mannered, very well-spoken.

Jordan Smith: This Hercules played music, too. He was in the Cook County High School band. He played the trombone.

Daniel Connell: He never got in trouble that I recall in high school, was polite to teachers, never went to parties or anything like that that I’m aware of.

Liliana Segura: But Connell had heard rumors about a dark side. That, at some point, Hercules had changed. That he started having issues with drugs– using and maybe dealing. He became known for his horrible temper.

Christy Lima: This boy had a violent streak in him and everybody in Adel knew that about Hercules. Everybody was scared of him.

Liliana Segura: That’s Devonia Inman’s old girlfriend, Christy Lima. Of course, she had reason not to like Hercules Brown. When Donna Brown was killed at the Taco Bell, she heard that Hercules, and not Devonia Inman, had been responsible. But she wasn’t the only one aware of Hercules’ violent temper.

Jordan Smith: The cops in Adel cops knew about it too. There were vicious and seemingly unprovoked attacks on random people around town. Then an attempted robbery. And more rumors– that he was selling drugs out of the drive-through window at Taco Bell where he often worked nights as a closer. But for all the trouble he managed to find, for a long time Hercules Brown also managed to escape any real consequences.

Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: I’m Jordan Smith. And this is Murderville, Georgia. Were the rumors about Hercules true? That he’d killed Donna Brown and maybe even Shailesh Patel? If he’d killed Bennett and Browning at the corner store, was he the only person who could’ve killed the other two? And if so, how did he get away with it?

Liliana Segura: Police in Adel had arrested Hercules before. A couple of years before William Carroll Bennett and Rebecca Browning were murdered the grocery store, Hercules was accused of dragging a woman he knew, the mother of a drug dealer, out of her car. And beating her up. Badly. A random witness had to pull him off of her. Tim Balch, the former Adel cop we’ve been talking to, remembers this incident.  He was working at the police station when the woman came in to report the attack.

Tim Balch: It looked like she had been in a fight with Mike Tyson. Her eyes were shut. I asked her what had happened and she told me that Hercules Brown beat her up.

Liliana Segura: Hercules was charged with the assault. But the woman ultimately refused to cooperate. So the charge was dropped.

Jordan Smith: The next year, there was an even more violent attack. Hercules knocked a man from his bicycle and beat him in the head so savagely that the man went into convulsions. He had to be hospitalized. Hercules pleaded guilty to the assault and was sentenced to just a year of probation. Then there was the other grocery store robbery. Well, attempted anyway. Less than two months before Bennett and Browning were bludgeoned to death. Balch was working that day too. He got a call from one of his confidential informants saying that two men were on their way to Harvey’s Supermarket with a plan to rob it.

Tim Balch: They all pulled up in the car, and I stopped it. Got Hercules out. There was a ski mask, a gun. Found crack cocaine in the car, and I arrested him.

Jordan Smith: Balch put him in handcuffs and into the back of the squad car. But then something happened.

Tim Balch: No sooner got him to the police station, which is literally six blocks away, before Mom shows up cussing me out about how her son would never have done any of this and that it was all planted and a big conspiracy by the police and all this, that and the other on him getting in trouble.

Jordan Smith: He was rescued by his mom.

Liliana Segura: It sounds ridiculous, but for people in Adel, Hercules’ mom, Lucinda Brown, was a pretty big deal. She worked for the state Division of Family and Children Services—the agency responsible for benefits like food stamps and for taking kids out of abusive homes. Some thought she took advantage of her position in order to protect her son.

Tim Balch: Now his mother was always very, very, very overprotective. Anytime something happened and his name was brought up, “Oh, it can’t be my son,” type thing. So, when he started getting in trouble with school, she was always down there raising cane, and it was always somebody else’s fault, which kind of, I think, led to a lot of the problems that he’s getting into now.

Liliana Segura: People in Adel were afraid to drop the dime on Hercules Brown in case his mother got mad. They were scared she would find a reason to deny them food stamps or other things they needed.

Jordan Smith: Or take their kids away.

Liliana Segura: And it wasn’t just regular people who worried. Balch says the cops tiptoed around her, too, because they knew they needed her. Especially with child abuse investigations. They were afraid of getting on her bad side.

Tim Balch: So when she would come down there and get angry, it was easy not to get angry back because you didn’t want the kids to be caught in the middle of it, so you’d take the abuse. With her, I held my tongue, you know, and that’s kind of the way things were.

Liliana Segura: We called Lucinda Brown. She was not interested in talking to us.

Jordan Smith: A lot of people have been saying some things that aren’t all that nice about your son and we really wanted to see if you could help us out, because we just don’t know what’s true and what’s not.

Lucinda Brown: Well you will never know what’s true and what’s not. So I don’t have anything to give you.

Jordan Smith: Now, not everybody remembers the Browns playing the system that way. We asked Kirk Gordon, the former chief of police in Adel, if Hercules’ mom was always saving his ass. According to his version, Hercules didn’t really need his ass saved.

Kirk Gordon: There wasn’t that many run-ins with the police, because Hercules, when he was in high school, was a good kid. I never had any problems.

Jordan Smith: Still, Gordon had known Hercules a long time. Since he was a kid. And he was aware that, at some point, he changed.

Kirk Gordon: I’ve known Hercules since he’s a puppy.

Jordan Smith: What happened to him do you think?

Kirk Gordon: Drugs.

Jordan Smith: Was it something you could kinda see happening?

Kirk Gordon: I couldn’t. I know that- I mean, in the drug world, no. I didn’t have an every day contact with Hercules. I knew his mom and dad real well, and his sister. Just super good people.

Jordan Smith: But Tim Balch says it was almost like Hercules wanted to be bad.

Tim Balch: He would say, “Oh, yeah. Well, I did that. The police are stupid. They never solved it,” and you don’t know- I mean he is very braggadocious and he’s always been that way since I’ve known him. I think I even told one of the GBI guys. I was like, “Well, you know, if there’s ever an unsolved murder,” I said, “I could get 20 witnesses that would come in here and say Hercules Brown said he did it,” because that’s the way that he was.

Jordan Smith: But the murders of Bennett and Browning were a different story.

Liliana Segura: The evidence against Hercules Brown for the Bennett-Browning murders was strong. Two witnesses, Lloyd Crumley and Corbit Belflower — a.k.a. Cornbread — saw him and another man fleeing the store just after the murders. They also recorded the license plate number of the getaway car, a car known to belong to Hercules. Less than an hour after the killings, cops pulled him over in that car. But none of that stopped Hercules from trying to deny he had anything to do with it.

Jordan Smith: The investigation was being led by Jamy Steinberg, the GBI agent who’d handled the Donna Brown case. He’d talked to Hercules Brown during that investigation too, for about a hot minute. When Hercules was brought in for questioning in connection with the slaying of Bennett and Browning, Steinberg said he remembered him from back in 1998. Hercules feigned ignorance. Said his name was Al Railey. When Steinberg called in Jimmy Hill, the Adel PD detective, to positively ID him, Hercules relented. Yes, that was his name. But he swore he knew nothing about any double murder. He was booked into jail anyway. As police and prosecutors built a murder case against Hercules, there was one piece they couldn’t seem to figure out. Who was the second man with him that day? The man Crumley and Cornbread saw leaving the store and carrying a baseball bat? There was talk around town that the accomplice was Wesley Mason, a 21-year-old who lived not far from Bennett’s Cash and Carry and who worked with Hercules at the aluminum finishing plant in town.

Gail Bennett: I was very frustrated. As you know, it’s a small community.

Jordan Smith: Even the victim’s wife, Gail Bennett, had heard that Mason had a hand in her husband’s death.

Gail Bennett: We all knew who the second one was.

Jordan Smith: But it didn’t appear that Steinberg was in much of a hurry to figure it out. More than two months would pass before he finally brought Mason in for questioning. Mason denied any involvement and was released. Gail couldn’t understand it. She was frustrated. She pressed Steinberg for answers and she said he didn’t like that.

Gail Bennett: It took almost four or five weeks for the GBI to even talk to me. And that was after really showing my behind and sending letters and this and that and he came and he was very ugly and he looked at me and said, “I don’t have to tell you anything.” And I told him, I said, “No, Jamy, you don’t, but you will answer to my girls.” I said probably because of the connections we had, I probably knew more than he did.

Liliana Segura: None of this was exactly surprising. After Donna Brown was killed, Steinberg and his team ignored what they’d been told about Hercules Brown being responsible. Instead they cobbled together a sad array of questionable evidence to support their theory that Devonia Inman was guilty. And the family of Shailesh Patel says that the GBI didn’t even bother to talk to them for days after Patel was killed in April of 2000. The GBI still hasn’t solved that crime. And now, with the brazen murder of Bennett and Browning, Steinberg appeared to be sitting on his heels, ignoring the talk around town about Mason’s involvement.

Jordan Smith: I know you said Jamie said he didn’t have to give you any information, but did he ever explain anything about why it was taking so long?

Gail Bennett: Nope. They didn’t, they never would explain anything to me.

Liliana Segura: Part of the problem was Hercules Brown. He insisted he had nothing to do with the crime. So, naturally, he didn’t say a word about Wesley Mason. Even so, it seemed inevitable that Hercules would be convicted. Not only was there the positive ID by Crumley and Cornbread, there was also DNA evidence. The blood stains found on the white Nikes and blue jeans that Hercules was wearing that day matched William Bennett.

Jordan Smith: And after four murders, the people of Adel seemed ready for someone to pay. Charles Shiver works for the local paper, the Adel News-Tribune. He’s written a lot about crime, including the murders of Donna Brown and Shailesh Patel and the bludgeoning of Bennett and Browning. The ongoing violence had rocked the town.

Charles Shiver: It just seemed like the community was darkening, or I don’t know how to put it … At least some parts of it, you know?

Jordan Smith: In the summer of 2001, Devonia Inman had come within inches of being sentenced to death on far flimsier evidence than what the state had against Hercules and now the Bennett family was pushing hard for the death penalty. So just before his trial was scheduled to start, Hercules cut a deal with the prosecutors. He told them that Wesley Mason had helped him to rob the Cash and Carry and to kill Bennett and Browning. Actually, he said more than that. He said the whole thing had been Mason’s idea. Sure, he’d thrown the cash register at Lloyd Crumley. But that was Mason’s idea. And it was Mason who had beaten Bennett and Browning to death and who whacked the railroad conductor so hard that part of his scalp peeled back. Hercules said it was all Mason’s doing. In Hercules’ version of events, he was just a hapless victim too, in the wrong place at the wrong time. In exchange for his story, he was given a sentence of life without parole. Now, Wesley Mason was the only one facing a possible death sentence.

Liliana Segura: The prosecutors went for it, but there was every reason to question Hercules’ story. Apparently he and Mason knew each other only casually — as one tends to know everyone in a small town. So it was hard to imagine why Hercules Brown would agree to partner up with him to kill two people.

Liliana Segura: When police finally got Mason to talk, he flatly denied being involved in the murders. He said he went to the store with Hercules that day, but had no clue that anything was going to happen. Once they got inside the store, he said Hercules just went crazy.

Laura Mason: Hello?

Jordan Smith: Hi, I was trying to reach Laura Mason.

Liliana Segura: We tracked down Mason’s mom.

Laura Mason: Speaking.

Jordan Smith: Ms. Mason, My name is Jordan Smith and I’m a reporter-

Liliana Segura: She didn’t want to talk to us.

Laura Mason: You got the wrong person.

Jordan Smith: You’re not related to Wesley Mason?

Laura Mason: I am, but I don’t have anything to say, ma’am, I’m sorry.

Jordan Smith: Oh, did she hang up…

Liliana Segura: I think she hung up.

Jordan Smith: Yeah.

Liliana Segura:  We all know about the right to an attorney and that if you can’t afford one, the state will provide one for you. But when a person faces the death penalty, a whole different attorney apparatus kicks in. Defense lawyers who specialize in fighting capital cases.

Jordan Smith: Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be. Wesley Mason was appointed two attorneys. They were two very different people, with very different experience. The lead counselor was a local guy. A prosecutor from a neighboring county who handled misdemeanors. The second lawyer was Josh Moore.

Josh Moore: Okay. My name is Josh Moore and I represent clients facing the death penalty all across the state, have done about 15 years now.

Jordan Smith: He’s actually the appellate director for the Office of the Georgia Capital Defender. It’s a state office with attorneys who represent indigent clients. That’s pretty much everyone facing the death penalty. He’s sharp and to-the-point. The kind of guy that you know does not suffer fools lightly. When Moore got appointed, one of the first things he worried about was that Mason couldn’t possibly get a fair trial. For starters, a prosecutor had been tapped to lead the defense. It sounds bizarre, but Moore says that’s just about par for the course in South Georgia. Then there’s the fact that the crime had captivated the town. There was a lot of local press about it, much of it angry and vengeful.

Josh Moore: You’re dealing with Cook County, Georgia. This is not a place where the judicial system runs in any kind of recognizable way to most lawyers, right? And so there was no, you know- the notion of Wesley Mason getting a fair trial in Cook County, Georgia was almost laughable.

Jordan Smith: Moore also needed to figure out whether his client was actually responsible for murdering Bennett and Browning. Because when two people are accused of committing a crime, who exactly did what can mean the difference between an acquittal and a conviction. Or in this case, between life and death.

Josh Moore: So we were dealing with a client who had professed his innocence to the police when they interrogated him but admitted his presence. And so the question was, how much of it was Wesley Mason and how much of it was Hercules Brown?

Liliana Segura: It didn’t take long for Moore to reach a conclusion.

Josh Moore: It was absolutely clear based on the evidence in this case that Hercules Brown was the primary moving force behind this case.

Liliana Segura: So he started looking more deeply into Hercules Brown. And pretty soon, he heard about another murder Hercules had supposedly committed.

Josh Moore: I started focusing on what I was hearing about Hercules Brown and very quickly I was hearing that Hercules Brown had committed a previous murder and that was the Taco Bell case that Devonia Inman was convicted for.

Liliana Segura: But he’d also heard another rumor. That Hercules might’ve been involved with the unsolved murder of Shailesh Patel.

Josh Moore: I think it was somebody, maybe an Indian fellow who got murdered, maybe like a television or an air conditioner smashed over his head. I can’t really remember it very well.

Liliana Segura: The Patel murder.

Josh Moore: That’s what people were saying about Hercules that he had committed both of those two murders prior to the Bennett murder.

Liliana Segura: Moore stepped up his investigation. If he could show that Hercules had blood on his hands already, it would, at the very least, suggest something about his propensity for violence. The investigation didn’t last long.

Josh Moore: I started aggressively investigating the Taco Bell case in fairly short order and Clark Landrum, who was lead counsel on the case, basically got wind of it, I think from the GBI agents. I mean, this is a guy who is a prosecutor so… and had said to me, “You’re a real curious guy. I don’t know why you keep looking into this stuff.” And I explained to him why I thought it was important and he said, “Well, I’m directing you to stop looking into it anymore. And I’m lead counsel and I make that decision.”

Jordan Smith: Yup. You heard that right. The man who was the lead attorney appointed to represent Mason told Moore to quit investigating something that could save their client’s life. Moore said that lawyer, Clark Landrum, even wrote him an official letter laying it all out. Moore couldn’t find the letter when we visited him. And for his part, Landrum told us in an email that Moore’s version of events wasn’t accurate, that he didn’t tell Moore to stop doing anything.

The whole thing came to a head in a meeting with the judge assigned to preside over Mason’s case. The judge himself tried to kick Moore off the defense team. Moore was indignant. His client didn’t want Landrum defending him. He wanted Moore.

Josh Moore: I had said to the judge maybe there’s some confusion here, but we’re representing Mr. Mason and we’re not asking for any money from you, so you have absolutely no authority to bar me from having contact with him, he’s my client. The judge eventually understood that he was not going to be able to stop that and just said, “Well, I guess there’s not much that I can do, but you better sure as hell not ask for any money from me because I’m not giving you any money, but if you want to keep representing him on your own dime, then do it.”

Jordan Smith: Moore ended up representing Mason for free.

Liliana Segura: But then, a deal. The District Attorney was Bob Ellis, the same man who had prosecuted Devonia Inman for the murder of Donna Brown. He made Mason an offer: Plead guilty and no death penalty. Instead, life in prison. Mason took the deal.

Josh Moore: As you have seen, I’m sure, in looking into this again, a lot of doors close in your face and so ultimately whether we were in a position to prove that he did this other murder or not, you know, we didn’t follow that trail all the way through to the end.

Liliana Segura: Of course, Josh Moore wasn’t the first person to hear that Hercules Brown had been responsible for the murder at the Taco Bell. Back then, a lot of people in Adel said it was him.

Jordan Smith: Jamy Steinberg, the GBI agent, talked to Hercules the day after Donna Brown was murdered. It isn’t exactly clear why. He didn’t ask him much, save for whether he knew if Donna Brown had been having any man trouble. Hercules said, not as far as he knew. And that was it. According to the GBI report that was the only time anyone interviewed Hercules Brown. Nobody ever followed up. And we could never figure out why. We’d wondered about this from the start. Why did police and prosecutors ignore Hercules? It didn’t make any sense. Until we talked to Tim Eidson, one of the prosecutors who tried Devonia Inman. And we realized, again, it apparently came back to his mother. Lucinda Brown.

Tim Eidson: She gave an alibi for him. She gave an alibi and there wasn’t any reason to disbelieve her at the time, I mean, she was a well-respected citizen.

Jordan Smith: According to Eidson, this is what Lucinda told him.

Tim Eidson: At the time of the Taco Bell murder, Hercules Brown was at home asleep.

Jordan Smith: They never did anything to investigate or to corroborate her story, which is crazy. Imagine a murder in your neighborhood. There’s a suspect everyone is pointing at. And the police, they just ignore it. Because his mom tells them he’s at home in bed.

Liliana Segura: If they hadn’t been so quick to accept Lucinda Brown’s alibi for her own son, there would have been plenty to look at. But before we get into that, it might be useful to review the case against Devonia Inman. You might remember, it’s pretty flimsy. There’s the testimony of an incoherent drug dealer. Several teenagers who later recanted. Information from a jailhouse snitch who used the occasion to ask for leniency. And a newspaper carrier with a wholly unbelievable story who collected a five-thousand dollar reward for her “information.”

Jordan Smith: Then there’s the evidence against Hercules Brown. Hercules actually worked at the Taco Bell with the victim. He even handled the closing shift, so he would’ve known how the whole closing process worked. Then there’s the fact that Hercules actually talked about robbing the Taco Bell. Including Takeisha Pickett, one of his co-workers. Pickett is Devonia Inman’s cousin.

Takeisha Pickett: Me and him is the same age. We always been close. We always been close.

Jordan Smith: She worked as a night manager at Taco Bell for a while. One of the people she supervised was Hercules Brown. She says he tried to convince her to help him rob the place.

Takeisha Pickett: Yea, he gave me a ride home one night and then we came in for a little while. And that’s when he brought the conversation that was like, “Man, you should let me rob you one night,” or whatever. And I was like, “Man, there ain’t enough money to get robbed from there.” And, you know, we kind of- I brushed it off always and left it at that.

Jordan Smith: Neither the cops nor the GBI investigators took it any further than that. They didn’t investigate Pickett’s story and she didn’t get to testify at Inman’s trial. And she wasn’t the only one who told the cops they had information about the murder and then didn’t get to testify.

Liliana Segura: One man, Thomas Dewayne Edwards, a friend of Hercules Brown, even told the investigators that Hercules had confessed to him: Hercules told him that he shot Donna Brown with a single .44 caliber bullet. Edwards said Hercules told him that he wore a mask during the crime, because Donna Brown knew him as an employee at the Taco Bell. He said he wore a mask. Right after Donna Brown was killed, the cops found her car in a nearby parking lot. There was a lot of evidence in it—the keys, the purse, the fingerprints, and a mask, made from a piece of gray sweatpants.

Jordan Smith: At the time of the murder, nobody looked at it. In fact, nobody even realized it was there until nearly two weeks later. Even though you can clearly see it in the crime scene photos. And certainly, it was never tested for fingerprints or DNA. In 2002, Devonia Inman was in prison. Just starting his life sentence there. He was desperate and despairing. He wrote to the Georgia Innocence Project, which works to exonerate the wrongly convicted. The lawyers there started looking into his case right away. They were astonished by the quality of the investigation—the recanting witnesses, the lack of physical evidence. They devoured the transcripts. And the police reports. And they began a search for evidence they could test for DNA. Finally, they found the mask, and in 2011, it was tested. There was DNA from a single source.

Liliana Segura: Hercules Brown. Aimee Maxwell, the former head of the Georgia Innocence Project, remembers the video of Steinberg interviewing Hercules Brown in prison about why his DNA might be on the mask.

Jamy Steinberg: Have you ever been with Devonia Inman and had a mask on? Because it didn’t come back with any other DNA, I mean it came back with…

Liliana Segura: In the video, Hercules sits on a bench wearing white prison scrubs. White cinder block wall behind him. His head is shaved, his face impassive. Sometimes he seems bored. Even as Steinberg backs him into a corner. At first, Maxwell says, she thought Steinberg was trying to feed Hercules the ‘right’ answer.

Aimee Maxwell: But, he says no I barely knew Devonia, he was an acquaintance.

Liliana Segura: Maxwell remembers him saying.

Aimee Maxwell: I knew who he was but we didn’t hang out. I’ve never given him a mask, he’s never taken a mask, and so by the end, I realized it was this genius interrogation because they gave him all the outs. He took none of them. So they backed him into a corner and he has no place to go from now.

Liliana Segura: There was basically no way for Hercules to argue that Devonia Inman had killed Donna Brown and that he, Hercules, was innocent. In 2014, Devonia Inman was finally granted a hearing to ask for a new trial, in light of the evidence that had emerged.

Jordan Smith: On the next episode of Murderville: Devonia Inman goes back to court. But will the new evidence exonerate him?

Liliana Segura: Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Talk to you next week.

The post Episode Five: Hercules Brown appeared first on The Intercept.

William Carroll Bennett and Rebecca Browning were beloved in Adel. There was no reason anybody would want to hurt them. Then they were fatally beaten in broad daylight at a popular lunch spot. Thanks to the actions of a couple customers, their assailant was quickly apprehended: 20-year-old Hercules Brown. But the question quickly arose, was this the only murder Hercules was responsible for?

Liliana Segura: Bennett’s Cash and Carry was a corner store. More neighborhood grocery than 7-Eleven. Half of the store was stocked with groceries. Nothing too fancy. Meat, bread, chips, milk, sodas- or Coke, as they say in Georgia. The front of the store is where it was at. There was a lunch counter. The old fashioned kind. They served hamburgers, barbecue, fries, and the best chili dogs around. The store was owned by William Carroll Bennett. His family was well known in town. They’d been there for several generations. Everyone knew Bennett as a kind and gentle man. His employee, Rebecca Browning, was also well-known and well-liked. Friendly and sweet. She was usually behind the lunch counter.

Jordan Smith: The store was on the south side of Adel, Georgia, near the outskirts of town. It was a concrete block building on West Ninth Street. There was a Weyerhaeuser plant down the way that made particle board, and a few houses scattered nearby. Directly behind the store were the railroad tracks that slice the small city in half. So it was popular with the guys who worked on the railroad. People like Lloyd Crumley, an engineer who drove freight trains for nearly 40 years.

Lloyd Crumley: We’d stop there quite often. We’d have to work in a little place called Weyerhaeuser and it was right beside the track, and we could just get off and go in there and get us a hamburger for lunch and then go finish the rest of our customers. We enjoyed them, they were really nice people.

Jordan Smith: It wasn’t just the railroad people who loved it though. The store was a real neighborhood fixture. Here’s how Gail Bennett, the owner’s widow, describes it.

Gail Bennett: It was actually, really a family business, because my girls grew up there. They grew up checking people out, working in the store, doing hotdogs and hamburgers at lunch and stuff like that when they weren’t in school.

Jordan Smith: And when somebody didn’t have money for groceries, her husband often gave them credit until the end of the month.

Gail Bennett: Yeah, he did. He did that and especially those that were on fixed income, that had social security. He would let them get groceries until they got their check on the end of the month or the first of the month.

Liliana Segura: The community genuinely loved Bennett and Browning. It was inconceivable that anyone would want to hurt them. Yet, two years after Donna Brown died at the Taco Bell and six months after Shailesh Patel was killed, two more shocking murders: Bennett and Browning. Inside the store, just before lunchtime. From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. This is Murderville, Georgia.

Liliana Segura: These last two murders of the four that rocked Adel may be the bloodiest. We wanted to understand what happened and looked for clues that might connect them all.

Jordan Smith: I hope it’s  marked, because this is kind  of a country road, and it’s a  bit unclear. I wonder if we passed  it. Doesn’t it seem like that’s the end  of the road?

Liliana  Segura: Yes.

Jordan  Smith: We  have to have  passed it by now. These  aren’t even houses.

Liliana  Segura: I didn’t see any houses.

Jordan  Smith: There  were some over  on that side. But  maybe it’s up here.

Jordan Smith: We went to visit Lloyd Crumley at his house on the outskirts of Valdosta, about half an hour south of Adel.  It’s a tidy white house set far back from a secluded country road. There’s a rooster in the yard and a tractor with its engine running.

Jordan Smith: I’m gonna say we’re here.

Liliana Segura: Okay. Well.

Jordan Smith: I think this is him. Mr. Crumley?

Lloyd Crumley: Come up to the back door.

Jordan Smith: Oh, I don’t even know, sorry. I’m Jordan, nice to meet you, and this is my colleague, Liliana.

Liliana Segura: Liliana, it’s nice to meet you.

Lloyd Crumley: I thought you’d pull up around here like most people do.

Jordan Smith: Oh, well I didn’t even know if we were at the right house, so…

Jordan Smith: Crumley’s retired now. But he still drives a train sometimes, for the smaller railroad operators.  We sat with him on a brown leather sofa in his airy, light-filled living room. And he told us what happened the day William Bennett and Rebecca Browning were killed.

Liliana Segura: It was a Friday. Crumley was working with a brakeman named Corbit Belflower. The man he, and everybody else, calls Cornbread, and a conductor named Wayne Peters. The three of them worked together for years. It was just after 11 a.m. when they decided to break for lunch. Peters was starving, so he led the way.

Lloyd Crumley: That day, my conductor, he jumped off a little bit ahead of us, me and my brakeman.  He was a little bit anxious. Let’s say it that way.

Liliana Segura: Crumley and Cornbread stayed behind to make sure the train was properly parked.

Lloyd Crumley: The duties of my brakeman and myself was to secure the train to where it wouldn’t roll away, or nobody could jump on it and take it off or anything like that.

Jordan Smith: The train was behind the store, just feet from the entrance. The men were used to working together, so it took them mere minutes to secure the train. As Cornbread recalled it, they were really just seconds behind Peters. As soon as the train was set, Crumley and Cornbread headed over to the grocery store. They were looking forward to a lunch cooked by the woman that Crumley affectionately called Miss Becky. They walked down a path worn through the grass around the side of the building and into a dusty parking lot that ran all the way up to the front of the store. The door was near the middle of the building and there were four large windows across the front. As they approached the entrance, Crumley noticed something odd.

Lloyd Crumley: And as we got off the engine walking towards the train, a guy come walking by me with a baseball bat behind his back and got in a car. And I thought, “My Lord, that sure did look unusual,” you know? Like, “That don’t look right”.

Liliana Segura: The man was black. Twenty-something. Nearly six feet tall. More than 200 pounds. Short hair. He was wearing dark blue pants. The bat seemed to have some kind of stains on it. It looked suspicious. Crumley filed it away in his head but kept going, the way you do with something that seems kind of strange. The man walked toward a blue car parked diagonally right in front of the store. Crumley and Cornbread kept walking towards the grocery.  Crumley got there first and reached for the door.

Lloyd Crumley: And then, my brakeman and myself, we went in and went to open the door, and this black guy was holding the cash register in the door. I reached to open the door for somebody coming out, then I looked and he had a big cash register in his hands.

Liliana Segura: A man carrying a great big electric cash register with the cord dangling from the back. He was a big guy, also black, wearing a hockey jersey and white Nikes. There were small red spots on them. He burst through the door.

Lloyd Crumley: I said, “Hey, buddy, what you doing with the cash register?” And so he threw the cash register and knocked me down with the cash register.

Liliana Segura: Crumley threw his arms up to try to catch it.

Lloyd Crumley: I caught it with my hands as it come to me and it didn’t really hurt me at all. I just fell backwards, because it was pretty heavy. A cash register’s pretty large. He had it in his arms and he just went, “He-yah” and just screamed at me, and throwed it at me. Because I said, “Boy, what are you doing with that cash register?” And he didn’t like what I said, so he knocked me down with it.

Jordan Smith: Crumley quickly scrambled to his feet. The man who had thrown the cash register ran toward the blue car. The man with the bat was already inside it, sitting in the passenger seat.

Lloyd Crumley: And the other guy with me went to grab him.

Jordan Smith: Cornbread.

Lloyd Crumley: He’s a big old feller, the feller that was with me. Big old guy.

Jordan Smith: Crumley thought we might want to talk to Cornbread, to hear his version of the events that day. He offered to call him for us.

Lloyd Crumley: Cornbread. What are you doing feller? Working? Look here. You remember when the Bennett store got robbed and them two people got killed? Me and you went in there. You remember all of that? Uh-oh. I called Conrad. I’m sorry. I’m trying to get a hold of Cornbread. I dialed the wrong number Conrad, I’m sorry. Yeah. All right, you’re Conrad instead of Cornbread. All right, let me dial the right number this time. Excuse me, buddy. All right, bye.

Jordan Smith: He tried again.

Lloyd Crumley: Let me try and find Cornbread instead of Conrad. Oh my goodness, what’d I do that for? Good gracious. Now, see Cornbread is the next one down, under Conrad, and I hit the wrong button there. I might not get- He’s an engineer on the railroad now. He may be on the railway. If he is, he can’t answer. Hey, feller. What you up to? You are? Well lord help. Let me run something by you. You remember that Browning guy, where me and you went into the restaurant, the little store there and he killed them people? Yeah. There’s two ladies that’s reviewing that, and wanting to people about it nowadays. Would you be willing to talk to someone about it? Suppose I hand them my phone and let you talk to them and you give them the information. Will that be all right? Are you sure? All right.

Jordan Smith: Okay. Hello? Is this Mr. Bellflower, correct? My name is Jordan Smith…

Jordan Smith: We didn’t have a good way to record what Cornbread told us, but it corroborated Crumley’s story.

Liliana Segura: Cornbread wasn’t able to catch the man with the cash register before he got behind the wheel of the blue car. He tore out of the parking lot, churning up dirt. Speeding off to the west. Toward the Weyerhauser plant. Crumley and Cornbread jumped into action. Crumley pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and quickly jotted down the license plate number. Crumley then turned back to the store. He knew his conductor, Wayne Peters, was already inside. Cornbread noticed that Peters’ baseball cap was caught in the door.

Lloyd Crumley: I opened the door and looked in the door.

Liliana Segura: Peters was on the floor.

Lloyd Crumley: My conductor was laying on the ground over there just bleeding.

Liliana Segura: He had been hit in the head. His scalp was peeled back near his ear. There was a lot of blood. Crumley was horrified.

Lloyd Crumley: I tell you, it’s shocking to see something like that, to see that much blood on the ground. I didn’t know people would bleed that much.

Liliana Segura: Amazingly, Peters was alive.

Lloyd Crumley: But he was hurt pretty bad, he had a big place on the back of his head that the hide was peeled over, on his head you know? But when I walked over there, and went to pick him up, he was alive, he wasn’t dead.

Jordan Smith: William Carroll Bennett, the owner of the store, was also on the floor. Near the meat counter.

Lloyd Crumley: And then I walked on in and I found Mr. Bennett laying in the middle with a big puddle of blood. His whole head was bashed in.

Jordan Smith: The pool of blood extended from his head to his waist. His legs were straight out and his hands were up by his face. There was blood on the ceiling and on the counter. And a space in the blood to his left, where his assailant had been standing. On the floor there were bits of skull and scalp, with the hair still attached.

Liliana Segura: Rebecca Browning, the woman who worked for Mr. Bennett, had also been viciously attacked. There was blood spatter on the lunch counter near a partially-eaten sandwich and a cup of tea. Browning’s purse was next to it. There was $2.19 inside. Dark hair was stuck to the blood. A pair of dentures were found on the floor near her body, which was also drenched in blood.

Lloyd Crumley: And then the lady, that done the little cooking, she was over to my right. I could see her too, she was- tried to get up under the counter but he had killed her too.

Liliana Segura: Bennett and Browning each died of “blunt force injuries” to the head. Injuries consistent with a baseball bat. Only Peters survived the attack.

Lloyd Crumley: Yea, I was very surprised that Wayne was still alive. So I drug him to the door and put my handkerchief over the back of his head an all that and just held it and had dialed 911. And had talked with them, was telling them what was going on. And of course, they got there in just a few minutes, the police and the ambulance both.

Jordan Smith: Crumley’s call came in at 11:12 a.m. The Adel cops arrived soon after. And they called in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the GBI, to take over. They did that anytime there was a big case to solve. Jamy Steinberg, the GBI agent who had investigated Donna Brown’s murder, would take the lead.

Liliana Segura: The Bennett family, which owned the grocery, had deep roots in Adel. Bennett’s widow, Gail, told us it wasn’t just his daughters who had sold hot dogs there in the summer.

Gail Bennett: My husband was raised there. I was raised not far from there in a little town in Nashville. So, yeah, the Bennetts have been there for several generations.

Liliana Segura: They had owned the store for about a dozen years. Bennett’s brother, Derrell, also owned a store, which he’d had for almost 20 years. Derrell told the Adel News Tribune that “running a country store is a good clean way to make a living. You have to have it in your blood.”

Jordan Smith: Gail told us that on the day her husband died, she was out with a friend. They were both nurses at the local hospital. Gail was helping to plan her friend’s daughter’s wedding. They had heard the sirens, but didn’t think much of it.

Gail Bennett: Then I got a call around lunchtime from the director of nurses, saying “I need you to come home.” They wouldn’t tell me anything. When I got to the hospital, everybody was there, most of the family and friends and the deacons of the church were there.

Jordan Smith: What did you think? Can you remember what was going through your mind?

Gail Bennett: That it couldn’t be true. Mostly shock, anger. Wanting to see him, and I wasn’t allowed to. Basically when he kissed me bye that morning, that was the last time. That morning was the last time I seen him.

Jordan Smith: Gail Bennett had been in the area nearly all her life, but she couldn’t bear to stay in Adel after her husband died. It took a few years, but eventually she moved to Maine, where she works as a traveling nurse. She’s on the road a lot and hard to reach, but we caught her on the phone one day. She told us about meeting her husband, when she was 16 and he was 18.

Gail Bennett: Back then we just rode around town and we met and started dating. We went out on a double date to start with and then we started dating and ended up getting married.

Jordan Smith: They got married in 1973. His obituary said that he was an Army veteran and the Sunday School superintendent at his church. They had kids and grandkids.

Gail Bennett: We had three girls and he got to see three of the grandchildren. He didn’t get to see all of the grandchildren.

Jordan Smith: She remembers her husband fondly.

Gail Bennett: He was a very caring person. He would do anything for you. He was the deacon of the church that we went to. He was just a very kind, loving, family father, grandfather.

Liliana Segura: But she isn’t the only one who loved him. Tim Balch, the retired Adel police officer, remembered how he helped out in the community. Both on the black and white sides of town.

Tim Balch: I mean, I can’t tell you, probably two or 300 people that I talked with owed Mr. Bennett over $1,000, because he would give them groceries at the end of the month even when they had no money. He made sure the kids were gonna eat and stuff like that, I mean, he was a big-hearted guy, and it was a very adverse reaction down there on him getting killed.

Liliana Segura: Rebecca Browning was well-loved too. She was married and had a bunch of kids. A son, a daughter and five stepkids. Her obituary ran just above Bennett’s in the newspaper. There’s a picture of her, smiling. She has curly hair, pulled back. She wears glasses and small hoop earrings. Lloyd Crumley, the train engineer, remembered that she was the one who always cooked for them.

Lloyd Crumley: She’d fix us hamburgers and hotdogs, and just as sweet a lady as you ever met in your life. I really hated to see that. It looked like she had tried to get away from him and she was up under the counter. Terrible.

Jordan Smith: The community’s response to the murders of Bennett and Browning was powerful, far more so than the reaction to the grisly murder of Shailesh Patel, which was still unsolved. First there was just shock. Right after the crime, people gathered across the street. They saw paramedics attend to Wayne Peters and watched the police put up yellow crime scene tape. Then there was an outpouring of support. Flowers and cards and remembrances in the Adel News-Tribune. And lots and lots of prayers. By the end of the year, the Bennett family had bought an ad in the paper to show the family’s gratitude. “Words of thanks could never start to express the love we felt from this community at the time of the death of our loved one,” it read. “May God bless you, The Family of Carroll Bennett.”

Liliana Segura: The investigation into this murder started out on much stronger footing, certainly compared to the murders of Shailesh Patel and Donna Brown. This was mostly thanks to the quick thinking of Lloyd Crumley as he watched the men speed off. They drove a blue Cadillac with the muffler hanging low.

Lloyd Crumley: And as it come by me, I just looked at the tag number and I said, “You know, I might not remember that tag number.” So I keep a pen on me at all times, for railroad use. So I wrote it down across my hand, the tag number. It was a good thing I did.

Liliana Segura: The number was 104 WRS. A Georgia tag. After the Adel PD showed up, they put out a call for the car and the tag. Within minutes, an officer on patrol spotted the car pulling into a trailer park right around the corner from Bennett’s grocery. There was only one man in the car now. Police pulled him over.

Jordan Smith: The driver sat in the car for a minute. Then he got out. It was the large man from the grocery store with the red spots on his Nikes. The man who threw the cash register and ran. When the police asked him his name, he lied. He gave them a false one. But he wasn’t fooling anyone. Police knew who exactly who he was. It was Hercules Brown. 20 years old, former Cook County High School student and member of the school’s band. The beloved son of an important woman in town. And a guy with a mean streak.

Liliana Segura: People in Adel knew that Hercules’ behavior had been getting worse and more violent. Some had even told the cops that he might have been responsible for the last two murders in town. In particular, Donna Brown. The crime that Devonia Inman was facing the death penalty for.

On the next episode of Murderville: Now that Hercules Brown appeared to have committed a brazen double murder in broad daylight, would the police finally listen?

Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Talk to you next week.

The post Episode Four: Murder in Broad Daylight appeared first on The Intercept.

Shaliesh Patel was visiting Adel when he was brutally murdered in the spring of 2000. Years later, his family still doesn’t know anything about who killed him. Their interactions with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations left them with more questions than answers. But one thing was clear, Patel’s murder was part of an emerging pattern of crime.

Jordan Smith: When someone dies, no matter how it happens, there are some questions we always ask.

Liliana Segura: How did they die? Who was with them? Did they suffer? Or was it peaceful?

Jordan Smith: Knowing doesn’t change anything, but it does bring a measure of comfort, closure. When somebody gets killed, knowing how and why takes on a bigger meaning. A way to make sense of something scary and inconceivable.

Liliana Segura: Families of victims often talk about the need for closure and especially the need to know the perpetrator has been ‘brought to justice.’ But when a crime goes unsolved, the family is left with nothing. Especially when it’s gone unsolved for 20 years.

Vipul Patel: Yeah, I talk about couple times GBI to be mostly … I talk almost about eight, nine times over there. And they tell me on the phone, “We still looking, we still looking there. We still don’t find nothing there.”

Liliana Segura: Vipul Patel’s uncle, Shailesh Patel was brutally murdered in Adel, in April of 2000, about a year and a half after Donna Brown’s death. His killer has never been found.

Vipul Patel: Then after I move over here in 2004 so I don’t talk anything after then.

Jordan Smith: Did you ever have contact with the Adel police department after the-

Vipul Patel: Yeah, I contact Adel but they say, GBI handle everything so we don’t have any information.

Liliana Segura: The investigation into Shailesh Patel’s death is still officially open. Officially. But, from the little information we have, it seems more likely that there was never much of an investigation at all. And there’s a chance that if there had been one, the violence in Adel that began with the murder of Donna Brown in 1998 could have been stopped in its tracks. From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. This is Murderville, Georgia. In the spring of 2000, Shailesh Patel was 37 years old. He had a wife and two kids. He had recently sold the gas station he owned in Albany, Georgia, about an hour northwest of Adel, and was living in Locust Grove — another hour and a half north of there, when his brother-in-law Vishnu called. Vishnu needed somebody to watch his store down in Adel while he went on a trip. Shailesh was happy to help.

Manishh Patel: Shailesh had a- he was in between businesses or jobs, whatever. So he was kinda free. So he asked him and was like, “Hey, can you come run my store while I go for this wedding?” So my mom and everybody was at this wedding in California.

Liliana Segura: This is Manishh Patel. He’s translating for his uncle, Haribai, Shailesh’s older brother. This is a big immigrant family, really close knit. We’re at a budget hotel in Macon, Georgia, which Manishh runs. Hotels are part of a long family tradition.

Manishh Patel: Hotels are our original businesses, but now we’re more into gas stations.

Liliana Segura: Maybe you’ve heard of the phenomenon known as the Patel Motel. It’s a thing, all over the country. One third of U.S. hotels are owned by Indians – and some 70 percent of them have the last name Patel. The story goes back to the Indian region of Gujarat, which is where the Patel name comes from. The short version is that beginning in the 1960s, the U.S. loosened immigration laws, attracting waves of Indian immigrants. Back home, the Patels were largely landowners and farmworkers. In the U.S., they began buying distressed properties for pennies, then converting them to motels where they often lived and worked. Like all immigrant communities, they networked and spread.
Jordan Smith: Today, If you’re looking for a cheap room for the night in Georgia, it’s likely you’ll be staying in a Patel motel.

Liliana Segura: Shailesh Patel, the murder victim, and his big extended family, were a part of this trend. They’re from a small town in Gujarat named Jasalpur. Shailesh was born there and, like the rest of his family, moved to the United States. They settled in North Carolina, first working at a textile company, and then moved to Georgia. Shailesh arrived around 1985. He helped out his relatives, running the Passport Inn just off the highway in Locust Grove.

Here’s Manishh again, remembering his uncle Shailesh.

Manishh Patel: Oh man, he was super kind. He stayed with us for a little bit when he first came to America. Probably one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, soft spoken. I mean, just a hard working guy.

Liliana Segura: Manishh asked Haribai to describe his brother, then translated what he said.

Manishh Patel: Shailesh, if you want to describe him. Yeah, genuine guy, like he was a good guy. He wasn’t very gossipy. That wasn’t his scene. He was always to himself. Just took care of stuff.

Jordan Smith: Haribai was almost 20 years older than Shailesh and like any big brother, he worried. He didn’t want him to go to Adel. Vishnu, their brother-in-law, had recently been robbed at the store. By a “stocky black man,” he said, wearing a mask and brandishing an Exacto knife. But Shailesh insisted.

Manishh Patel: My uncle, he was like, “I made a promise so I’m going to go run the store for him like I said I would.” That’s why he was down there. And I think he was only down there for three, four days only when this thing happened.

Jordan Smith: Shailesh had actually been thinking about moving to Adel — it was supposed to be safer than where he’d been working.

Manishh Patel: My uncle had a gas station in Albany. And the reason why he sold that is because of crime in Albany. So he was like, “I’m trying to get away from this stuff.”

Jordan Smith: April 7, 2000 was a Friday. Shailesh was in Adel, filling in for Vishnu at the E-Z Mart Convenience store on North Hutchinson Ave. It’s connected to a Phillip’s 66 gas station. Today, it’s called the Adel Food Mart.

Liliana Segura: We went there. It’s a typical gas station convenience store. You can buy pretty much anything. Coffee, Gatorade, air fresheners, ChapStick, a lottery ticket. Inside, it kinda smells like wet socks. Haribai said he would call his brother every night. But on Shailesh’s fourth night in Adel – his last night alive – Haribai didn’t call for some reason. He doesn’t remember why. His memories are really fuzzy. It was a long time ago. But also, like a lot of people who live through traumatic events, the details are just a blur. Part of what we know about Shailesh Patel’s death comes from an article in the Adel News Tribune. Manishh was in college then and was the family spokesperson – he is quoted in the story a bunch, although he has no memory of that now.

Jordan Smith: According to the story, Shailesh left work after closing the store with an unidentified co-worker at 11:20 p.m. It says that Patel usually went to get dinner in the neighboring town of Nashville after work. For a vegetarian like him, there really aren’t any options in Adel — save for the Taco Bell. But that night, apparently, he didn’t go to Nashville. He walked home instead, to Vishnu’s house on North Gordon Ave. Police think he got there around 11:30 p.m.  But this is about all we know. Unlike the GBI file in the case of Donna Brown, there are no police records to sort through or summaries of interviews done by investigators.

Liliana Segura: When Shailesh didn’t show up for work the next day, another employee at the E-Z Mart called the cops. They got to the house a little after 1 p.m. on Saturday afternoon. The front door was open. Shailesh was inside, covered in blood. Dead. He had been brutally beaten and repeatedly stabbed. The attacker had also picked up the TV — one of those old, heavy tube TVs —  and used it to smash his head in. It was gruesome.

Tim Balch: You see something savagery like that, it’s like- somebody that does that is a straight psychopath.

Liliana Segura: This is Tim Balch, the former Adel cop. He was one of the first to arrive at the scene that afternoon. He was also one of the first to arrive at the Taco Bell the night that Donna Brown was murdered.

Tim Balch: When I got there, I just peeped in and it was like, “We’re calling GBI. This is bad.”

Jordan Smith: The GBI. That’s the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. As we’ve explained before, they’re a statewide law enforcement agency. And small, rural police departments all over Georgia routinely call them in to investigate when there’s a major crime. The Adel police called them in to investigate Donna Brown’s murder too.  But calling in the GBI doesn’t necessarily mean that things get done right, or at all. Investigating Donna Brown’s murder, the GBI left plenty of stones unturned and then they arrested the wrong guy, Devonia Inman, for the crime. So, there was reason to believe things wouldn’t work out for the Patels either. For starters, they say the GBI didn’t even call the family to tell them what had happened. Instead, the family got a call from an acquaintance. Here’s Manishh, again, translating for Haribai:

Manishh Patel: It’s either one of those guys that called him. So that’s how we found out. No police or nobody called us and let us know this happened.

Liliana Segura: No police called?

Manishh Patel: No.

Jordan Smith: Manishh’s father was the first to hear the news that something bad had happened. But he didn’t know how bad.

Manishh Patel: They didn’t really know that he was killed. They knew that he was beat up pretty bad.

Jordan Smith: Manishh’s father got in the car and headed for Adel. He called Haribai on the way.

Manishh Patel: Before my dad even made it down there saying that, “Make your way down there, but he’s not alive anymore. Like, it’s not- he just didn’t get beat up, he was murdered.” He said he’d never talked to a cop until GBI came to their place like four or five days later.

Liliana Segura: I guess I would ask you what that was like to hear that news?

Manishh Patel: [foreign language]

Haribai Patel: [foreign language]

Manishh Patel: He was like sad. How else would I feel? I was heartbroken.

Liliana Segura: And shocking, I would imagine, shocking.

Manishh Patel: You can tell in his voice right now. I don’t know, by the tone of him.

Liliana Segura: Try to imagine for a minute what it would be like to find out that your loved one was violently murdered and then waiting four or five days to hear from police. It certainly wouldn’t make you feel like solving the crime was a priority. According to Haribai, when the GBI finally came to see the family, the officer didn’t spend very much time with them.

Manishh Patel: 20 to 30 minutes?

Haribai Patel: Only one person GBI.

Manishh Patel: Oh, one. One guy came only. One GBI officer came. And about 20, 30 minutes he asked them questions. [foreign language].

Haribai Patel: [foreign language]

Manishh Patel: Oh, so basics. He said, he asked them basic … Yea, the basic question were like, “How are you related to this guy? Why was he down there?” You know, the basic interview questions that we just kind of did right now. That’s what he was asking. And then that was the last what they heard from him.

Liliana Segura: Haribai doesn’t remember who did most of the talking with the GBI agent. Again, it’s all a blur. But a few months after the murder, the family was asked to help produce a public service announcement, pleading for anyone with information to come forward. Just like Manishh had to speak for the family, it fell to one of his cousins to do it. She filmed the spot and it aired on a local TV station. And that was all they ever heard. No one from the family knows if it attracted any leads. Yet another unanswered question. Still, even without people coming forward, there should have been plenty to work with. Like in Donna Brown’s case, there was a lot of evidence at the scene. Including plenty of fingerprints. And even DNA — at least according to a story in the local paper.

Jordan Smith: It seems the best the GBI could come up with was a composite sketch of a man they say could have been a witness. A slim white guy with greasy brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. They said he’d been seen around the neighborhood several hours before Patel arrived home that night. So, not exactly a promising lead. But there’s something even more disturbing. Talking at the hotel, Haribai said something Manishh had never heard before. He said that the GBI told the Patels that if they wanted the murder investigated, they would have to help pay for it. It’s not clear who said this – or who in the family received the information. Maybe there was a misunderstanding. Maybe it was the language barrier. Whatever the reason, the family couldn’t afford it. They didn’t know that the system doesn’t work this way.

Manishh Patel: Cause the thing is, first generation here, they don’t know the actual process of what happens. If this happened today, I would definitely be like, ‘That’s not right. This is what you all’s supposed to do.’ Like I said, we never had any kind of police investigation or like involved with police or…We’re just hard working people, you know what I’m saying? So, if somebody tells you, “This is what it is, you got to pay for it,” and like “Oh, we don’t have the money for it,” I guess case closed then.

Liliana Segura: While we discussed this, it became clear Haribai was getting upset at what he was hearing. It was bad enough to have all this dragged back up. Now it turns out that the little they thought they knew wasn’t even true.

Manishh Patel: They just don’t know what really happened, because the communication was one thing back then, the mental state they were in. So like even just bringing this up right now, is even hard for them right now. Because they kind of sealed it away a little bit, you know? There was like, they’d rather be free, not have to think about this no more.

Liliana Segura: It’s been nearly 20 years since Shailesh Patel was killed. We called the GBI to see what the story was and reached Special Agent Mark Pro. Like a lot of people we spoke to, he was not forthcoming.

Mark Pro: There’s very little information that I can give you. I mean, you can ask some questions, and if I can answer it, I’ll be glad to, but I can’t go into specific details about what we’re investigating or who we’re looking at or anything like that because my agent is actively pursuing leads in the case. I’ve kind of tried to motivate my newer agents to pick up these older cases and put a fresh set of eyes on them. But go ahead, if I can answer any questions for you, feel free to ask.

Liliana Segura: We asked if he could put us in touch with the original agent in charge of the case. A man named Mike Clayton. It’s Clayton’s name that appears next to Patel’s on the GBI unsolved homicides page. Adel police investigator Jimmy Hill’s name is there too.

Mark Pro: I really would not like for that to happen at this point, because we are still working on it and if you put something out there that is different than what we’re looking at, or that if it puts the people on notice that we’re looking back at them, I don’t really want to risk that.

Liliana Segura: I see.

Mark Pro: Generally, and I’ll just be frank with you, we’re dealing in an area in South Georgia that is very small and the neighborhood and the people that live in that area are very close knit and very tight and it’s very difficult to work cases in those type of areas, because everybody unfortunately is related to each other, and they don’t want to give up information on their relatives. Really right now, to be quite honest with you, where we’re at in the case, I really don’t want any kind of publicity on the case other than something simplistic that, “We’re working the case.” I don’t want to get into any kind of specifics, because I don’t want to put somebody on notice that we’re going in a direction. Do you know what I’m saying?

Jordan Smith: Yeah, we knew what he was saying. A bunch of bullshit. I mean, certainly the cops play it close to the vest in the days and weeks following a murder. That makes perfect sense. But nearly two decades later? That makes no sense at all. In cases as cold as this, cops usually welcome some help to shake out tips and new leads. But apparently the GBI is fine with where things are.

Liliana Segura: Pro wasn’t saying anything else. So we tracked down Richard Deas. Deas is a former GBI agent. He collected evidence at the scene of the murder. He retired in 2001.

Richard Deas: I just remember, just like you said, it was very brutal. He was beaten very severely, lots of blood around. I just remember processing and taking pictures, dusting for prints.

Jordan Smith: From that scene, do you remember what you thought about the evidence that you had in front of you to collect? In other words, did it seem like that you had a good amount of evidence that might be probative in trying to determine who did it?

Richard Deas: Yeah. I thought so. They came up with a suspect I thought they could link it to.

Jordan Smith: I don’t know if you know, but that crime was never solved.

Richard Deas: It wasn’t?

Jordan Smith: No, does that surprise you?

Richard Deas: In a way it does. It really does, yeah.

Jordan Smith: Why?

Richard Deas: Well I figured whoever did that would be a person that would be in trouble with the law, or had been in trouble with the law, or would be in trouble with the law again. And there’d be fingerprints on file that they could match to. I thought it might be a local person.

Liliana Segura: We talked to Deas last year. As of today, the story of Shailesh Patel’s murder is still just five short paragraphs on the GBI website, with a gray N/A instead of a picture. The Patel family still has a lot of questions and they may never get answers.

Manishh Patel: We just want to know what happened. You know, I told you, was it a forced entry or not? What was the story? Were they waiting for him at home to get there or did- they were already there and he walked in? How many people were there? Was it one-on-one at the house? Were they going after him or was this really for Vishnu? And really, my uncle just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, kind of thing?

Jordan Smith: One thing is certain. Patel’s murder was part of an emerging pattern of crime in Adel. In fact, it was the second of four heinous murders that engulfed the small city over a two-year period. It started with the murder of Donna Brown in 1998 and ended with the slaughter of a beloved shopkeeper and his employee in 2000. In between, there was Shailesh Patel. Patel’s death didn’t cause the same kind of stir in Adel that these other murders did. Sure, an elderly resident told the newspaper that the crime was a shock. “We live in a nice, quiet neighborhood,” he said. “We have never had anything like this happen here before.” But nobody really knew Shailesh Patel — remember he’d only been in town for a few days when he was killed. And even his family who owned the store there were relative outsiders in the community.

Liliana Segura: But when William Carroll Bennett and Rebecca Browning — the shopkeeper and his employee — were killed in Adel just months later, there was talk. Lots of it. About a man named Hercules Brown. People had told the GBI back in 1998 that it was Hercules, and not Devonia Inman, who killed Donna Brown. Eventually, Hercules would confess to murdering Bennett and Browning. Some wondered, could it be that Hercules was also responsible for the death of Shailesh Patel?

Manishh Patel: Even if it was Hercules Brown, like what was he thinking?

Jordan Smith: Next time on Murderville, the grisly killing of Bennett and Browning. The last two people murdered in a two-year string of bloodshed. Were these really random acts of violence? Or is it possible they were all connected?

Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Talk to you next week. If you can’t wait for more episodes, you can binge listen to the entire season ad-free on Stitcher Premium. For a free month of Stitcher Premium, go to stitcherpremium.com/murderville and use promo code MURDERVILLE.

The post Episode Three: The Patels appeared first on The Intercept.

Devonia Inman goes on trial for his life. But there’s really no evidence against him. Witnesses keep changing their stories. And the jury never hears about an alternate suspect — a man who was just arrested for a brazen murder of two prominent community members.

Liliana Segura: On the website of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation — the GBI — is a gruesome tab. Unsolved homicides. It’s five pages long, fifty names total. Lives cut off and reduced to a paragraph or two. More police blotter than tabloid.

Jordan Smith: Laneisha Crowder, a 21-year-old single mom, murdered at home 18 years ago. Mary Susan Humphrey, air traffic controller. She died after leaving a nightclub in Valdosta back in 1980. And then there’s a man known only as Roy. He died sometime between 1975 and 1979, maybe in Georgia. Or maybe in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi or Texas. There’s a number to call if you have more information.

Liliana Segura: Some of the entries include pictures of the victims. Old school photos, outdated haircuts. Lots of blurry snapshots, family and friends cropped out to frame the victim.

Jordan Smith: On about half of them, there’s no picture at all. Just a little white box with a gray N/A where the face should be. One of those belongs to a man named Shailesh Patel, murdered Friday, April 7, 2000, in Adel, Georgia, at a house just blocks from the small convenience store where he was working. Tim Balch is a former police officer from Adel and he remembers when Patel was killed, because it was the second gruesome murder in less than two years in this town of just 5,000 people.

Tim Balch: That store is literally like a block, and in fact, you can see the front end of it from here, where those gas pumps are down there is where that happened, yeah. He was found dead three streets behind us on Gordon Street.

Liliana Segura: What do remember about that case? What can you tell us about that?

Tim Balch: That was probably one of the most savage murders. The fight was throughout the house and I think that the coup d’etat, as you could say, the final deal was when the television went over his head. I mean, there was fighting and stabbing, and it was a very bloody crime scene.

Jordan Smith: I mean, it seems amazing to me that that didn’t get solved. It seems like there’d be a lot of good potential evidence there, it’s so violent. I just wonder if you just have ever thought about what actually might have occurred and why.

Tim Balch:  It was just a very strange place for a murder to take place anyway, because it wasn’t one of those areas that you would even expect family fighting to take place. It was a pretty good area. We rarely got calls over there.

Liliana Segura: We’ve talked about how wrongful convictions leave the real killer free. Well, Shailesh Patel was murdered barely a year and a half after Donna Brown and we’re sure the GBI pegged the wrong man, Devonia Inman, for that crime. We can’t say that there is a connection between the murder of Donna Brown and the murder of Shailesh Patel. We can say that there was talk around town that there might have been. But we don’t know if the Adel police or the GBI ever considered that. What we do know is that Patel’s death was grisly. Left his family devastated and the town shocked. Again. And that nearly 20 years later, his killer has never been identified. From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. This is Murderville, Georgia. Shailesh Patel was murdered in April 2000. After Devonia Inman was jailed for Donna Brown’s murder, but well before he would go to trial. That’s a lot of time. And if the wrong man’s in jail, it’s a lot of time for the right man, the real killer, to plot his next crime. So could Patel’s killer be the real culprit behind Donna Brown’s murder? And if so, then why wasn’t that person caught? And why was Devonia Inman pegged for the crime? We’re going to try to figure that out. But first we need to understand what happened with the Donna Brown case and Devonia Inman’s conviction. And how Devonia went from a kid getting in trouble in California to an adult facing murder charges in South Georgia.

Liliana Segura: Hi.

Dinah Ray: Hi!

Liliana Segura: Dinah-

Dinah Ray: How are you?

Liliana Segura: I’m good. How are you?

Dinah Ray: I’m good. Nice to meet-

Liliana Segura: Sorry to show up with all this equipment. Nice to meet you too.

Dinah Ray: Come on in.

Liliana Segura: Sorry, my hands are full.

Liliana Segura: This is the house in California where Devonia Inman lived when he was a teenager. White, single story home, green trim. It’s in a suburb in South Sacramento, not far from the freeway. He moved there with his parents, Dinah and David Ray, when he was about 15 or 16, from a house just a few miles away. The family wanted to settle down in a better neighborhood. Outside there’s a basketball hoop over the two-car garage, inside a stone fireplace with family photos on the mantle. Dinah had collected all the photos she could find of her son over the years. Inman as a toddler, reading with his sister. Inman as a teenager, with an earring and a sideways cap. He has a dimple when he smiles. Dinah also had letters and a poem he had sent from prison earlier that year. His parents were really proud of it. He wrote it for a poetry contest and won, they said. It was called The History of Being Black. Here’s David reading from the poem.

David Ray: …a dream, then I would foresee a race of color that needs to perfect itself. For in the days lost to gangs, greed, and selfishness…

Jordan Smith: Inman grew up here in California. But his family’s roots were in Adel.

Dinah Ray: I was born and raised in Adel and my family lives in Adel. All of my family. My parents, my dad’s dad. He dead now, but at that time, my parents, all my siblings are back in Adel. I enjoyed growing up in Adel. It was the country, you know, quiet, slow. I thought Adel was a great place to grow up in as a child.

Jordan Smith: Devonia Inman was born there, too, in the same house where Dinah grew up. He was born on the couch. And he was still a baby when they moved to California.

Dinah Ray: Actually left Adel when he was about 2, 3 months old. I was married to his dad and he was military, so we went to Oklahoma and then wound up here in Sacramento where his dad and I divorced.

Jordan Smith: Dinah and David Ray have been married for three decades now. David raised Inman since he was a toddler, like he was his own son. Inman doesn’t call David his stepfather. He’s his dad – period. Inman was the oldest of four kids.

Dinah Ray: He was a good son. He’s a caring and loving person. He loved people. He liked to dress up as a kid. His dad was in the military, so he liked to dress up in military clothing and wear them around the house. He liked tearing things apart and putting them back together.

Liliana Segura: What kinds of things did he like to take apart and put back together? What was his, sort of-

Dinah Ray: He would take his toys apart. A stereo or that scooter. He loved to see how something worked, I guess.

Jordan Smith: But things started to change in high school when he started running with the wrong crowd.

Dinah Ray: The trouble here- My son, I think the only thing here that he was guilty of was really choosing wrong friends. Certainly, he can’t control what his friends do, which is one of the reasons I sent him back to my family in the country, so that he could, you know, maybe not get in trouble.

Liliana:  How old was he when you were starting to be a little concerned like that?

Dinah Ray: He was a teenager. He was about 14, 15.

David Ray: About 15 or 16.

Jordan Smith: We’ve said it before and we’re gonna say it again. Just because somebody is wrongfully convicted doesn’t mean they’re an angel. Sometimes they’re even a bit of a dick. But that doesn’t mean they should spend the rest of their life in prison, especially for something they didn’t do.

Liliana Segura: Devonia Inman certainly has some good qualities. His parents clearly love him and he loves his son. And that thing where he used to like to take things apart and put them back together – maybe he could have done something with that. He had just turned 20 when he was arrested for Donna Brown’s murder. That said: He definitely has a dark side. Inman’s police records from Sacramento are hard to piece together. The GBI requested them just weeks after he was arrested in Adel for Donna Brown’s murder. Pages are scattered throughout the GBI report, which is almost 1,000 pages long. What’s clear is that he started to get in trouble early. There are disciplinary reports from two separate high schools. Then, a couple of arrests – armed robbery, attempted robbery, and car theft. But the main thing: he seems to have had a real problem with violence against women. That started early, too. Apparently, part of a cycle. His biological dad had been abusive toward his mom.

Jordan Smith: He was only 16 the first time he got in trouble for it. There was a girl he’d been dating for just two weeks who accused him of choking her and threatening to kill her. Then, a few years later, he was living with another girl. Her family filed a bunch of complaints against him. Saying he beat her up all the time and that he had been threatening the whole family. Police arrested Inman a couple times. He spent several months in jail and a few years on probation. In the summer of 1998, on the eve of his 20th birthday, he seemed bound for more trouble. So his mother decided to do what mothers have done for decades when their kids need shaping up. She sent him to stay with Grandma, far away. It was one of those times when you do what you think is the right thing and it turns out to be the wrong thing. Very wrong.

Liliana Segura: Inman was no stranger to Adel. He and his siblings had been going there from the time he was little. Dinah would take them during holidays and school vacations. They would stay for two weeks. During one of those visits, in 1995, he got a girl pregnant. She was known around town as Pebbles. Later, when Inman was back in Adel for Christmas, he went to see Pebbles. She was still pregnant and in the hospital. But she didn’t want him there. He got angry. Inman was charged with making a “terroristic threat” after insisting to see her. He was put on probation, but he quickly broke it by returning to California. That probation violation would come back to haunt him. The DA who charged him in that case — his name was Bob Ellis. He’s the same DA who would later charge Inman with murder.  By the summer of 1998, Inman was 19 and his parents didn’t know what to do. They brought him to a family reunion in Mobile, Alabama and instead of bringing him back to Sacramento with them, Dinah and David put him in a car with his aunt and uncle and sent him to Adel.

Dinah Ray: I just didn’t want him to get into anything serious or in behind peer pressure. I thought I was protecting him by sending him to Adel in the country. That wasn’t the case.

Liliana Segura: Maybe you can tell me a little bit more about when you decided to send him to Adel and how he reacted.

Dinah Ray: He didn’t really want to. All of my kids are really very close and I’m really close to my kids, maybe because I’m so far away from my family. He didn’t really want to stay there, but I thought if he could stay a school year or something, then I would come back to get him after school year, or to see if he liked it. Maybe he could finish school-

David Ray: It was a very hard decision, I mean-

Dinah Ray: It was.

David Ray: He didn’t want to stay and my wife didn’t want him to leave him, and she cried the whole ride back.

Dinah Ray: I didn’t want to leave him.

David Ray: We thought we was having him in a better environment.

Dinah Ray: And that was the worst mistake.

Liliana Segura: Do you regret having sent him to Adel?

Dinah Ray: Every day. Every day of my life. It was the worst thing I could have ever done. It destroyed our lives. It destroyed his life. And I had to blame myself for that.

Liliana Segura: Inman arrived in Adel in late July, 1998. He was angry.

Devonia Inman: I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to stay with my grandma at the time, I didn’t want to stay with my aunt. I just wanted to leave that town. There wasn’t nothing there except just a whole bunch of chaos and trouble.

Liliana Segura: The hope his parents had that he might finish school — that wasn’t happening. Instead, he was getting into fights, making threats, and getting in trouble with police. In September, just a few days before the murder at Taco Bell, Inman was accused of pointing a gun at Zach Payne. That’s the same weird, rambling, drug-dealing Zach Payne who knew nothing about the death of Donna Brown, but told police anyway that Inman was capable of killing her. Two days after the murder, police arrested Inman for violating the terms of his probation from that fight at the hospital back in 1995. It was the perfect excuse to keep him locked up while they collected more evidence against him. They’d leave him in jail until they were ready to charge him with murder.

Jordan Smith: We’ve talked about Adel before. Here’s the Adel music again. The short version: small town in southern Georgia, sharply divided by race, with a long racist history. And like in so many places, that racist history finds a home in policing. Good stats are hard to come by, but there are plenty of anecdotes. Like the time in 1982 when Adel made national news. Two white cops fired their guns into a moving car with four black kids inside. They said the kids were speeding. After the officers shot at them, their car flipped over. The NAACP called for the cops to be fired. And if you ask folks like Devonia Inman’s aunt and uncle, they’ll tell you they don’t need statistics to prove that the town is racist. They’ve lived here their whole lives and they see it every day.

We went to meet the aunt and uncle, Ethel and Ben Pickett, at a buffet restaurant in Adel, the Western Sizzlin. It’s right next door to the Taco Bell where Donna Brown was murdered. It’s a popular spot. During Inman’s trial jurors ate lunch there.

Liliana Segura: Ethel told us that Adel’s always been a tough place to be a young black man.

Ethel Pickett: When a black child graduated from high school, they went to the army. They got out of Adel. They went to Atlanta, they went to Detroit, somewhere. They got out of Cook County, because if they hadn’t have got out of Cook County, they was going to jail. They was going to prison.

When you’re out there on the streets, whether you doing something or whether you’re not, you was going to jail. And if you resisted, you got the consequences. It was a privilege for a black man to graduate back in the day and get out of Adel. Parents, when their child got of age, that was their main thing, to get them gone.

Liliana Segura: She says the racism is a little more subtle today. But she’s still convinced that racism was behind her nephew’s arrest and conviction. It’s hard to prove that. And at least at the beginning, it was Inman’s behavior that got him onto the radar of the Adel PD. Part of that was due to his relationship with Christy Lima, the girlfriend he was with at the time Donna Brown was killed. He met her soon after moving to Adel. The cops had been called to her house after he and Lima got into a couple of fights. Now she says she was the abusive one, that Inman just played tough.

Christy Lima: He used to wear the bandanas, you know, because he was from California. Like, you know, gangster thugs, but Devonia is a sweetheart. You know, he wasn’t a fighter, it never was nothing, him being like- He was just crazy about me. We were young. We would fight. And more me, I’ve always been like the type of abusive person. Devonia probably hit me once. Hit me back for hitting him.

Liliana Segura: In the months before Donna Brown’s murder, Inman wasn’t really doing much. He didn’t have a job and he wasn’t going to school. He was mostly hanging out with Lima, or with his grandmother, or his aunt Ethel, or one of his many cousins. He smoked pot and drank beer. And he visited his son, who was just a toddler. The last time he saw him was the day Donna Brown was murdered.

Jordan Smith: While Inman was in jail waiting for his trial to start, he got moved around to different facilities. It’s not clear why — and neither the GBI nor the Adel PD would tell us — but his family thinks it was to keep them from seeing him. Meanwhile, the prosecutor kept plugging away, even as the case seemed to be falling apart. The murder weapon never materialized. Inman’s prints did not match those lifted from Donna Brown’s car. Witnesses were starting to recant their statements and another two were sticking to totally fishy stories about Inman’s involvement.

Liliana Segura: The fishiest? The story told by a woman named Virginia Tatem. She’s the newspaper carrier who claimed to hear a gunshot over six lanes of interstate traffic and then said she saw Inman speeding away from the Taco Bell. But remember — she didn’t come forward until weeks later, after a $5,000 reward for information about the crime had been posted. She eventually collected that cash.

Lee Grimes: We were waiting for the papers, they were late sometimes, and we were standing kind of to the side of the place where we picked up the papers.

Liliana Segura: Lee Grimes was another newspaper carrier. He was with Tatem waiting for the papers to be delivered the night that Donna Brown died. He says nothing unusual happened that night.

Lee Grimes: A dark car with some black people rode by and we were talking about the crime that had occurred that month, and she was telling me, “You know there’s a $5,000 reward for that. It sure would be nice to get that reward, blah, blah, blah, etc., etc, etc.” This car rode by, “You know those people right there, they could have committed that crime or they might have committed that crime,” and they rode on down the street. And that’s my memory of that- of the quote “the crime.” It was a month or so after the crime and there was a reward which she was, Virginia was always into whatever she could do to make some extra money and that kind of thing. That’s basically the story. Also at the time that corner was pretty dark. There wouldn’t be no way I or anybody else could pick out a black person in a dark car, could pick out the description she picked out of- that she said she saw. I mean, it’s just impossible.

Liliana Segura: Grimes says he confronted Tatem about it years later, when he saw her in a bank. He asked how she was sleeping at night. She wouldn’t answer him. We wanted to talk to Tatem, so we went to her house.

Liliana Segura: …which I understand you played a pretty central role in. I’m sorry to show up, we called you a couple times. I understand you were pretty key to cracking that case open, and-

Liliana Segura: She was not interested, she told us through a crack in the door. She told us not to come back. Inman’s aunt and uncle think the police and GBI knew he didn’t do it, but decided to pin the murder on him because he was an easy target, because he was black, and the cops thought he was a pain in the ass.

Ethel Pickett: He had smarted off at a couple of police officers. They had assaulted him and he had smarted off at them and then when he headed out with the girl and went up there, he was getting smart with them. He was telling Jimmy-

Liliana Segura: Jimmy Hill, the investigator from the Adel Police Department.

Ethel Pickett: He called him all kinds of names and stuff. And he was saying he knew his rights, they couldn’t do this, they couldn’t do that to him. And it made them mad. Jim Hill was like, “I heard him say that he was coming here using three or four different aliases thinking he all bad, and this, and that. “He ain’t getting out of here. He won’t never see the daylight of dawn around here, in this jail.”

Jordan Smith: So, wait, so-

Ethel Pickett: That was the words that the detective Jimmy Hill said.

Jordan Smith: So, Jimmy Hill, basically didn’t like that Devonia was smarting off to him and said he would never get out of jail.

Ethel Pickett: Right.

Jordan Smith: And, then he didn’t.

Ethel Pickett: No, he didn’t. They just focused on him because, basically, they was going to get somebody black for killing that lady. And I knew that. The whole town knew this. I said, well everybody better know where they was and have a witness or alibi for what happened, because they’re going to pin that murder on somebody black.

Jordan Smith: Again, that’s hard to prove. What should’ve been easier to see was that police had the wrong guy. But it seemed no one wanted to want to see that. Instead, prosecutors aggressively ignored all the red flags that were turning up before the trial. One of the craziest ones: just months before Inman’s trial began, LarRisha Chapman sent a letter to Inman’s attorneys. She’s one of the teens working with Donna Brown the night she was killed — the one who first told investigators she saw nothing weird at the Taco Bell that night, but then implicated Inman, saying she’d heard his voice coming from the weeds by the parking lot. Now, in her letter, she confessed that the GBI had pressured her to say that and that they fed her details of the crime. She was just 16 at the time. No adults were present when she was questioned. Inman’s lawyers gave prosecutors the letter. But the prosecutors kept moving towards trial anyway. The trial began in Adel in June 2001, more than two-and-a-half years after Donna Brown was killed. It’s hard to find impartial jurors in a community as small as Adel, especially when the crime was as awful as this one was. The county called hundreds of potential jurors and eventually whittled it down to 15.

Jessica Cino: Nice to meet you.

Steven King: Steven. Nice to meet you.

Jordan Smith: I’m Jordan. Nice  to meet you.

Steven King: Good to meet  you.

Jessica Cino: This is Jordan, this is Liliana.

Steven King: Liliana. Jessie, Jordan, Liliana.

Jordan Smith: We met one of them, Steven King, at his house near Adel. King was appealing because at the time of the murder, he had been away from town for six years, serving in the Army. Today he’s a mail carrier. The jury was sequestered. Also unusual for Cook County.

Steven King: They would take us back and forth from the motel to the courthouse to lunch, back to the motel to supper in a little yellow school bus. They did let us swim, but they would ask the other guests “can the jury have the pool for an hour or so?” and we went in the evenings. Yeah, it was a- it was an experience.

Jordan Smith: The trial was a big deal. The first capital case in a generation. Inman’s parents, Dinah and David Ray, were there from California. But they say they weren’t allowed into the courtroom for most of the trial. They were told they might have to testify. And in the end, they did, after their son was convicted. They had to beg jurors to spare his life. Family of the victim — Donna Brown — was there too. So were other curious people from around town. A reporter for the local paper took notes.

Liliana Segura: There are no recordings of the trial, only the transcripts. But when we first read through them, it became pretty clear that, like the investigation into the crime, the trial was a total shitshow. The evidence was thin, so prosecutors did everything they could to make Inman seem scary and menacing.

More than a dozen local cops were sworn in as bailiffs to act as court security. A normal case might have three. It seemed like a brazen attempt to make the jury believe that Inman was a very dangerous man before even a single witness had testified. Another thing: they kept calling Inman by like four different aliases, which certainly made him seem sketchy, but they weren’t names he actually used. Then there was the bizarre, and frankly racist, courtroom drama. Halfway through the trial, one juror — a black man — was removed after he admitted he’d had sex with one of the witnesses, a black woman. A second juror, a white man, also had sex with a witness, at least according to her. That juror denied it, so the judge let him stay. Tim Eidson, one of the prosecutors, gave the opening statement. Eidson wears glasses, he has a receding hairline and an easy smile. He has a lyrical southern accent and a resonating voice. “There really was no physical evidence,” he acknowledged to the jury. But the reason for that, he said, was that Inman had plotted out the crime so well.

Jordan Smith: Eidson later ran into trouble with the law himself. There was an indictment on federal corruption charges for a drug case involving his wife. He later became a public defender and then was sued by a civil rights group that said he provided inadequate defense to indigent clients. And then there was elected district attorney Bob Ellis. He ran into legal trouble, too. And he was also indicted in a federal case for sexual misconduct with a confidential drug informant. She accused him of rape, but he denied it. He later became a boat salesman and part-time Baptist preacher. The prosecutors brought in a parade of witnesses from California to talk about Inman’s criminal past, including crimes he committed as a juvenile. Not the domestic violence, but the other stuff. Prosecutors said these petty crimes — which they called “similar transactions” — showed that Inman was a bad egg, indications that he would ultimately become a murderer. Earline Goodman, who worked on the defense team, told us that was one of Tim Eidson’s signature moves.

Earline Goodman: Tim was the king of kings of similar transactions.

I never understood how that little penny ante stuff in California was a similar transaction to this, but like I said, Tim was king of similar transactions. I don’t know how in the world, but he was.

Jordan Smith: For what it’s worth, Eidson’s “similar transactions” didn’t exactly impress juror Steven King.

Steven King: I don’t know why they brought all the guys in from California. To me that was a total waste. They were just trying to have a base of his criminal history or something?

Liliana Segura: And in 2011, Georgia finally changed its rules of evidence.  So, if the trial were to take place today, a lot of that California stuff wouldn’t be admissible anymore. Not that the rules mattered a whole lot. The judge let all sorts of stuff in. “It  seemed like everybody forgot they went to law school, including me,” he joked at one point, after allowing improper questioning of a witness to go unchecked.

The witnesses were as bad on the stand as they had been in the investigation. People like Zach Payne. He was brought from drug rehab to testify. He was brief and nonsensical, contradicting himself on the stand and talking about Jesus. Then there was LarRisha Chapman. Despite the letter she wrote months earlier, prosecutors still called her to testify, apparently to humiliate her and paint her as a liar. When she swore she saw nothing that night, Eidson was ruthless. He insisted that her statement about seeing Inman in the weeds was the true story and that it was Chapman’s fault that Donna Brown was dead. “Well, Ms. Chapman,” he began. “I think the fact of the matter is, if you had told somebody that night, Ms. Brown might still be alive.” Chapman was devastated when Inman was convicted, at least according to Dinah Ray, Inman’s mother. She says after the trial, Chapman came up to her in tears and said she was sorry. Chapman wasn’t the only one to recant on the stand. Marquetta Thomas, who had recently done a stint in jail, also said she had lied. But prosecutors brought a procession of jailhouse informants to describe how she told them Inman had killed Donna Brown. Finally, the story told by Virginia Tatem, the newspaper carrier, got even more preposterous. Now she insisted that she was so close to Donna Brown’s car as it sped past that she could have reached out and touched it. And she could see the gold chain around Inman’s neck.

Jordan Smith: Inman’s lawyers tried to show the jury that Inman was not a killer. It didn’t go very well. They called Lee Grimes, the newspaper carrier who was with Tatem that night. He was a really important witness, but he wasn’t particularly forceful. He just said he didn’t see any of the things that Tatem claimed to have seen. District Attorney Bob Ellis defended Tatem’s version of the events.. He told the jury that she remembered the details because she was a woman. Women are more “nosey” than men, he said, and they notice things like the jewelry a person is wearing. “You know that book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus?” he asked the jury. “Men perceive things differently than women do.” Throughout all this, King, the juror, took a lot of notes. He showed them to us when we went to visit.

Steven King: Very interesting but I’ve got… and the actual vote, for where we, where we voted, this was the vote count and apparently we took two votes if- my notes are what they are. They may not be complete, they may, you know-

Jordan Smith: Maybe you could read those notes that you have and the times and what the counts were.

Steven King: Okay, on the voting for guilt or innocence we had, it was- apparently it was nine for guilty, zero for not-guilty and three were undecided on the first vote.

Jordan Smith: Zero for not-guilty. King said he was skeptical of a lot of the witnesses, including Virginia Tatem, who he did not believe at all.

Steven King:  Looking back at my notes, I believe she had said something about she could see the cars from where she was and anybody that’s from Adel knows you can’t see the Pizza Hut because the Dairy Queen is right there.

Jordan Smith: But remember the jailhouse snitch who claimed that Devonia Inman had confessed to him? And then asked to have his sentence reduced? His name is Kwame Spaulding and he clinched it for King.

Steven King: From what I remember the things that Kwame knew, he could have only known that as a fact and that really weighed- that was the most, without Kwame it wouldn’t have been a case.

Jordan Smith: Both prosecutors and investigators swore that Spaulding’s story was legit. And, they told the jury, they knew that because he offered details of the crime that only the killer would know. Like that a .44 caliber revolver was used to murder Donna Brown. But that wasn’t true. That detail, and others, had been printed in the newspaper more than once. Jurors like King never knew that. An hour later, the jury voted again and decided to convict Devonia Inman. Inman’s old girlfriend, Christy Lima, says it wasn’t a fair trial.

Christy Lima: But they wouldn’t listen to nothing that I said, but Devonia’s lawyer told me I did a good job, because my story never changed, they just kept going back and forth about me being a stripper. It was never nothing about- they kept just putting me down like, “She was a stripper, I’ve got all these kids, how can they believe anything that I say when I let men pay me for money to have sex with them.” And I was like, wait a minute, what does that have to do with Devonia being on trial for murder? You know, the trial was just a mess. To me it wasn’t even a trial. It was just whatever the prosecutor said, that’s what it was. That’s it, that’s all.

Jordan Smith: While Bob Ellis insisted that being a woman helped Tatem to remember so clearly what happened the night Donna Brown died, he did not extend the same ability to Lima and her story that provided Inman an alibi. In fact, Ellis told the jury that Lima’s recollection — which never once varied — couldn’t be trusted because, he implied, she was a whore. “Are you going to believe those folks?” he asked the jury.

But the biggest problem with Inman’s trial probably wasn’t the faulty evidence or the lying witnesses or even the prosecutors who discredited the legitimate ones. It’s what wasn’t said.

Liliana Segura: By the end of 2000 there had been three more brutal killings in Adel. Shailesh Patel — the man we talked about at the beginning of this episode — was beaten and stabbed to death after work. His killer has never been caught.  And a beloved shopkeeper and his employee. They were bludgeoned to death in broad daylight. A man named Hercules Brown was quickly arrested and charged with those murders.

Word had gone around town that Hercules Brown killed Donna Brown, too. Multiple people had told the GBI investigators that and Inman’s attorneys tried to talk about that during the trial, but the prosecutors wanted none of it. District Attorney Bob Ellis told the judge that there was no indication “whatsoever” that Hercules Brown had “anything to do with this.” One of Inman’s defense lawyers told the judge there was plenty of evidence implicating Hercules. For one, he was a closer at the Taco Bell and he’d recently been arrested for two savage armed robbery-murders. If Devonia Inman’s lesser crimes in California were enough to suggest a pattern of deadly violence, certainly Hercules Brown’s “similar transactions” should have been relevant.

And if there was nothing more concrete, it’s because the GBI never bothered to compare Hercules’ fingerprints to the ones lifted from the car. In fact, they completely ignored the warnings about Hercules altogether.

Jordan Smith: All of this happened outside the presence of the jury. The judge sided with Ellis. He said none of the evidence linking Hercules to the murder at the Taco Bell passed “the smell test, much less any test for trustworthiness.” So the jurors never heard it. But the judge, he was wrong. There was good reason to believe that Hercules was connected to Donna Brown’s murder — and to the others, including the unsolved murder of Shailesh Patel. To be clear, there is nothing definitive that connects Hercules Brown to Patel’s murder. But there was talk that he might have been responsible and that should have been worth looking into.

In Murderville, it seems things are often overlooked. That has consequences, like the wrong man, Devonia Inman, being sent to prison for murder.

Liliana Segura: Next time on Murderville, we’ll meet the Patel family. It took us a long time to track them down. When we did, they said some surprising things about the GBI and told us about the unanswered questions the family is still living with.

Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Talk to you next week. If you can’t wait for more episodes, you can binge listen to the entire season ad-free now on Stitcher Premium. For a free month of Stitcher Premium, go to stitcherpremium.com/murderville and use promo code MURDERVILLE.

The post Episode Two: The Trial appeared first on The Intercept.

A murder in the small southern town of Adel, Georgia, sent Devonia Inman to jail 20 years ago. He was accused of robbing and shooting a woman named Donna Brown in a Taco Bell parking lot. He swore he was innocent and there were good reasons to believe him. And while he awaited trial, three more brutal killings took place in Adel. Did police get the wrong man?

Jordan Smith: Okay, quick. I want you to think back. Think back to 20 years ago. It was 1998. A different world. Phones with antennas, cargo pants, meeting your friend at the gate at the airport. You’ve done a lot in the last 20 years. Think about that. Everything you’ve accomplished. Maybe you finished school, or got married, or had a baby. Maybe that baby graduated high school and is now in college.

Liliana Segura: 20 years is a long time.  A marriage, a career.

Jordan Smith: But 20 years is a whole other experience if you’re spending that time in prison.

Devonia Inman: My depression is more about being incarcerated. They really don’t, they really can’t give me pills for that.

Liliana Segura: And insisting the whole time that you’re innocent.

Devonia Inman: Cause no matter what, every time I wake up, I’m still going to feel the same way. Like I’m not supposed to be here.

Liliana Segura: In 1998, a brutal murder shocked the small southern town of Adel, Georgia. A guy named Devonia Inman was arrested and tried for that murder. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Devonia Inman: This is like- it’s worser than an old folks home to me. The reason is, you’re waiting to get old. You know, it’s like, it’s the most miserable-est life you can ever possibly go through. I’d rather be dead or a bum on the street than be in prison.

Liliana Segura: We’re gonna tell you about the murder that sent Inman to prison. We’ve looked into it. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what happened. And we’ve found quite a few problems with the investigation. They’re the kinds of problems that can eventually lead to a new trial. Maybe even an exoneration. But that hasn’t happened for Devonia Inman. And that makes Inman sad. It makes him angry. But mostly he’s just really fucking depressed.

Devonia Inman: I remember my son wanted me to, you know, cause I usually take him riding on the bicycle.

Liliana Segura: This is Inman talking about the day the murder happened. That day plays on a loop in his mind. He thinks that maybe, if he’d just stayed with his son, none of this would have happened.

Devonia Inman: If you, you know, look at the way he was crying, because he was really crying, he was like holding my shirt and wouldn’t let go. I’m like, “I’ll come back and talk to you later on. I’ll come and get you later on.” He was just crying, saying,”No, no, no.”.

Liliana Segura: Inman’s son is an adult now. Inman hasn’t seen him in 20 years.

Jordan Smith: Wrongful convictions are tragic, often infuriatingly so. And wrongful conviction stories — we’ve written a lot of them and they never get any easier, because lives are ruined and justice is rarely served. And there’s something else that happens when someone is sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit, especially when that crime is murder. It means the real killer is still out there and it means the real killer sometimes kills again, and again, and again.

Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.

Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome to Murderville, Georgia. Starting in 1998, a series of brutal, brutal murders ended up with four people dead, two men in jail, and one of the craziest stories we’ve ever reported on, from beginning to end.

Liliana Segura: And the craziest part? Even though the state of Georgia has seen the evidence of Devonia Inman’s innocence, even though nearly every witness against him has recanted, many going out of their way to tell the state that they lied, none of that seems to matter.

Jordan Smith: In all likelihood, Devonia Inman will spend the rest of his life in prison. We wanted to understand how this could happen. How could an investigation this shoddy—and a case this weak—end in a conviction and a life sentence? We also want to know why the state doesn’t care, even after evidence turned up that would exonerate Inman. The state might not care, but we hope that you will.

Liliana Segura: September 18, 1998 was a Friday. Donna Brown was on her third day as the new assistant manager at the Taco Bell in Adel. Adel is a very small town in South Georgia. About three hours south of Atlanta, 40 miles from the Florida line. It’s not quite the middle of nowhere, but close. More like the kind of place you pass through on your way somewhere else.

Jordan Smith: Brown was white, 40, a single mom. According to news reports, she knew how to fish and how to shoot a gun. And she worked hard to take care of her seven-year-old son Matthew, who was the center of her world. Before heading into work that evening, she put on her uniform: navy blue pants. A white, collared, short-sleeved shirt tucked into them. A green name tag, shaped like a chili pepper, pinned to the left side of her shirt. On either side of her collar she wore a small pin: on one side an angel, the other side a dove. Those were her additions.

Liliana Segura: By all accounts it was an ordinary night. Until the end of the shift. Just after 2 a.m., a call came into the Adel police department. It was an employee at the Huddle House restaurant on West 4th Street, next door to the Taco Bell. She didn’t identify herself on the call. There’s something strange in the parking lot of the Taco Bell. Somebody is lying down in the middle of it. Maybe they passed out, drunk? Minutes later the cops arrived.

Jordan Smith: It wasn’t a drunk passed out in the middle of the lot. It was Donna Brown. She was lying in the parking lot face up with her arms splayed out to the side. Her head was in a puddle of blood. There was a hole where her right eye used to be and a .44-caliber bullet lodged deep in her brain. We went to see the Taco Bell. We were with an attorney named Jessica Cino. She’s gotten pretty involved with Devonia Inman’s case. Actually, she’s obsessed by his plight. She’s the one who brought this story to our attention. She learned about Inman’s case from the Georgia Innocence Project, more than three years ago. Cino is certain he is innocent and she’s determined to prove it.

Jordan Smith: So, okay, so here we are in the parking lot. It’s a pretty, you know, typical looking Taco Bell that fronts a sort of state highway. Let’s just talk about what happened to Donna Brown, what time of night it was, and where she ended up.

Jessica Cino: So it was the early morning hours of September 19. She was locking up, we’re talking like, you know, one in the morning, and she was closing with two employees.

Liliana Segura: That night Brown was working with a couple of teenagers, Robin Carter and LarRisha Chapman. They’re all supposed to leave together, but Brown couldn’t get the time cards to clock out properly. She probably didn’t want to be the boss who makes everyone wait on her. So she tells the young women to go on home.

Jessica Cino: So those two women leave.

Liliana Segura: Carter’s boyfriend picked her up around 12:45 am. Chapman waited on the curb until her boyfriend came, around 1:00 am.

Jessica Cino: And she then proceeds to shut down the store and leave by herself, which was actually against Taco Bell protocol at that time.

Jordan Smith: Taco Bell protocol: At the end of the night, the manager counts all the money and then either locks it up in the safe or calls the cops for an escort to the bank to make a night deposit. There was about $1700 in the cash register that night. Donna Brown figured out the time card thing and decided to take the cash to the bank. She did not call the cops.

Jessica Cino: She exits through a side door into the parking lot and presumably immediately encounters her murderer. There’s parking spaces on either side, there’s parking spaces right up against the restaurant and then there’s parking spaces on the opposite side of that, and so her body is just found in the middle of the parking lot between where cars would park.

Jordan Smith: There were weeds growing along the edge of parking lot. They were tamped down, like somebody had been lying there, waiting. The police later said they thought Donna Brown was already lying on her back when she was shot at very close range. The cops arrived just minutes later. Brown was dead. The money was gone and so was her car.

Murder is always shocking. And it was even more shocking for a quiet little town like Adel, which only has about 5,000 people. By morning, news of the crime was already making its way around town.

Let’s take a second to talk about Adel. This is our “talking about Adel” music. Adel was founded in the late 1800s. The land used to belong to Native Americans before it was overtaken by slave plantations.

Liliana Segura: For a long time, cotton was king. But later, it was timber and turpentine – and eventually tobacco. Today, a lot of the jobs are service related. The town was built along the Georgia Southern and Florida Railways. The tracks still run through Adel. And they divide the town — Adel’s black community on the west side of the tracks, whites over on the east side.

Jordan Smith: The town is equal parts black and white. But it’s sharply split, including in how it sees itself. Black people we’ve spoken with say racism is a problem. White people seem almost surprised at the question.

Today Interstate-75 brings traffic through. Driving down from Atlanta you know you’re getting close when you see a series of eye-popping religious billboards. There’s one with Jesus backed by a military battalion. Another seems open to interpretation, but it features a bunch of zombies. Most of the town sits east of the highway. What remains on the west is your basic highway exit: a motel, an I-HOP, a truck stop, a WalMart, and the Taco Bell where Donna Brown was killed.

Liliana Segura: One of the first cops to arrive that night was a man named Tim Balch.

Tim Balch: Hi, I’m Tim.

Jordan Smith: Nice to meet you.

Liliana Segura: Liliana.

Tim Balch: Liana?

Jordan Smith: Liliana.

Liliana Segura: Liliana, nice to meet you.

Tim Balch: Okay, okay, good to meet you.

Liliana Segura: Thanks for meeting us.

Jordan Smith: Yea, I appreciate it.

Liliana Segura: Balch isn’t a cop anymore. But he spent five years as an Adel police officer and then another eight as a deputy in the county sheriff’s department. He has a buzz cut, lots of tattoos and drives a Hummer.

Jordan Smith: We’re in AJ’s Country Kitchen, a small diner on the north side of town that serves up Southern comfort food. It’s in an old house the color of butter, and open for breakfast and lunch six days a week. It sits on the city’s main drag, Hutchinson Avenue. It’s just blocks from the police station and the fire station, the library and the weekly paper, which is the oldest business in Cook County. But even so, downtown Adel feels like a place that has seen better days. There are a lot of empty storefronts and it’s quiet, even in the middle of the afternoon.

Jordan Smith: Did you like policing here, or what, you know, what’s it like?

Tim Balch: With Adel, it’s only like 5,500 people here, so you get to kind of bump into a lot of the people. You go to a restaurant, you know, and they see you, and especially being an out-of-towner, you got noticed that much faster so that a lot more people would engage you faster than if you were just Johnny off the street that they knew for years and years.

Liliana Segura: This can be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on who you are. But at its best, Adel’s the kind of town where the cops will make sure you get home okay after you’ve worked the night shift. The night Donna Brown died, they escorted managers from three other restaurants to the bank.

Tim Balch: You know, “can we get an escort to the bank?”, and we’d go over there. We’d escort them, which means basically we drive behind them when they go up there and do their nightly deposit. They drop it in. Contrast in the mornings, we would come and sit outside like AJ’s here, City Cafe, Dave’s Diner, all these little diners, and when the girls would come in to open up, we’d sit outside and make sure that they were fine going in, and once they gave us the thumbs up, we’d take off and go.

Liliana Segura: Tim Balch knew Donna Brown. That’s something that comes with small town policing too.

Tim Balch: I had worked in Clinch County prior to coming over here, and she was the manager at Hardee’s over in Homerville, Georgia, and just always very nice, very nice. I mean, any time that we would come in, she would stop what she was doing, come over, talk with us. Then, one night I was over here at Taco Bell, and I saw her, and I was like, “Hey, what are you up to?” And she said, “Oh, well, I’m manager of Taco Bell now.”

Liliana Segura: When Balch got called in, there didn’t seem to be much to do. He went to the Taco Bell to guard the crime scene.

Tim Balch: I think the chief was there, and of course, our investigator is not set up to handle a murder, so they turn all that kind of stuff over to Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and they had their crime scene truck there very quickly.

Jordan Smith: The Georgia Bureau of Investigation—the GBI. They’d always come when there was a big case. Not just in Adel, but throughout rural Georgia. And that’s because the local departments don’t have the forensic labs or manpower to solve big, complicated crimes. Tim Balch told us that the GBI usually did things very methodically and by the book. Usually.

Liliana Segura: So, until now, the story is pretty straightforward. Brutal murder, small town cops, state investigators. But this is where things start to get weird. Like, after police found Donna Brown’s car, they did pretty much nothing. They didn’t talk to any witnesses. They didn’t even file a report about what the scene looked like. Apparently, this was typical.

Jordan Smith: The Adel police department was small. There was only one detective, a man named Jimmy Hill. And nowhere near the resources to handle a serious crime like murder. That’s why the local cops called in the GBI. But the GBI is supposed to work with the local cops. In Adel, at least, the cops didn’t do much until the GBI showed up. They didn’t talk to witnesses, they didn’t write reports. It was a sign of the way the investigation would go. Basic things got bungled, or overlooked, or ignored.

Liliana Segura: Around 4:00 am, investigators found Donna Brown’s car. It had been left in the parking lot of an abandoned Pizza Hut, not far from the Taco Bell. Brown’s purse was in the trunk. Her keys were wedged between the driver’s seat and the door. The GBI team lifted prints from the car. They have never been matched to anyone. There were tire tracks that indicated a single vehicle had recently entered the lot. Presumably they belonged to Brown’s car, but there’s nothing in the GBI report that shows anybody ever tried to confirm it. And there was a shoe print in some dirt near the car, but nobody tried to figure out what size it was or even compare it to the shoes of any suspect. Maybe worst of all though, is that they apparently missed the key piece of evidence altogether. Even though it was clearly visible in the crime scene photos. A homemade mask cut from a pair of gray sweatpants. You can see it on the passenger seat.

Jordan Smith:  Around 11:00 am Saturday morning, Jamy Steinberg, the lead investigator for GBI, interviewed Robin Carter, one of the girls who was working with Donna Brown the night she died. We called her during one of our trips to Adel.

Robin Carter: I remember washing dishes because that was one of my first nights closing. Because I wasn’t a regular closer and I believe that was, that was probably one of the only nights I closed and I was stuck in the back washing dishes.

Jordan Smith: Carter doesn’t remember much about that night, but she remembers that Donna Brown sent her and the other girl, LarRisha Chapman, home.

Jordan Smith: Right. And then, so what d- do you remember what you saw of LarRisha outside? Like, because you got picked up first, right?

Robin Carter: We were both outside waiting for our rides. My boyfriend picked me up and her boyfriend, I think it was her boyfriend. I think I left before her. I left from- I believe I left from the parking lot when my boyfriend picked me up.

Jordan Smith: While Steinberg was interviewing Carter, a GBI investigator and Adel’s chief of police went to talk to LarRisha Chapman. Chapman also said it had been a normal night. She’d hung around the parking lot waiting for her boyfriend. He picked her up just before 1:00 am. There was nothing unusual or suspicious. We couldn’t reach Chapman and a bunch of other people refused to talk with us, like Adel police investigator Jimmy Hill.

Jordan Smith:  Is this Chief Deputy Hill?

Jimmy Hill: Yes, ma’am.

Jordan Smith:  Well, hey. This is Jordan Smith. It’s great to hear your voice. How are you doing?

Jimmy Hill:  I’m doing fine.

Jordan Smith:  So we’ve been trying to get in touch with you because we’ve been working on a-

Jimmy Hill: Isn’t it a clue when I don’t return your call I don’t intend to talk to you?

Jordan Smith: Well, no, not necessarily.

Jimmy Hill: Well, I’m not talking to you.

Jordan Smith: Well, can you tell me why not?

Jimmy Hill:  Yes, because I don’t want to talk to you.

Jordan Smith:  But I mean is there-

Jimmy Hill:  Now you have a nice day.

Jordan Smith: And Jamy Steinberg, the GBI investigator.

Liliana Segura: My  colleague and I are  in town looking into this  old case you worked on, the  1998 murder of Donna Brown at the  Taco Bell and we’re hoping that we might  be able to meet with you and kind of maybe ask  you some of your recollections about that case.

Jamy Steinberg:  No ma’am, I’m not  going to discuss the  case. It’s been adjudicated.  I’m not going to talk to you  about it.

Jordan Smith: It seems they couldn’t be bothered with questions about a case they consider closed. There were a lot of people who did talk to us, though. And the Georgia Bureau of Investigation put together an enormous file. Plus there are trial transcripts. We’ve been looking at this case for three years and the more we’ve looked at it, the more it seems like the GBI just blew it. For one thing, even though there was no evidence that pointed to the killer’s race, they only interviewed young black men. People like Zach Payne, a low-level drug-dealer they interviewed the night of the murder and whose testimony turned out to be critical, even though he told investigators right off the bat that he knew nothing about the murder at the Taco Bell. We talked to him on the phone.

Zach Payne: Listen, I don’t wanna mess nothing up. What I need to do is go look in the newspapers and get my memory back right.

Liliana Segura: We don’t know exactly what Zach Payne was like 20 years ago, but we talked to him for a long, long time and honestly, he was so rambling, incoherent, and, frankly, paranoid, we could hardly follow the conversation, let alone take any of it as truth. But whether or not he was more reliable back in 1998, what Payne told investigators became the basis for the entire case. There was a man named Devonia Inman, he told them.  Payne didn’t know him very well. But once, Inman had pointed a gun at him. Payne thought he’d be ‘very capable’ of committing this crime. Just to reiterate: a weird small-time drug dealer says he knows nothing about the crime, so the police focus their entire investigation on a man he mentions.

Jordan Smith: On September 21, 1998, two days after Donna Brown was murdered, Adel police officers arrested Devonia Inman at his aunt’s house for a probation violation. Here’s how he remembers it:

Devonia Inman: We was walking in the middle of the street, like on Monday, the day they came and arrested me. So, we were just walking. I didn’t think that it was for no murder or anything like that because I never committed no murder. I didn’t have no idea, so I didn’t have anything to hide, so I got in the back of the police car. They only asked me to talk to me. That’s what he said in front of everybody. He was like, “Do you mind if we question you or take you downtown and question you” and I’m like, “sure.” I got in the back of the police car.

Jordan Smith: They took Inman to the city jail, a five-minute drive from the parking lot where Donna Brown was shot. It was the last time Inman was free. A GBI agent asked to search Inman’s aunt’s house to see if there was a gun there. Inman’s aunt said no. Later that same evening, the investigators went to see Inman’s girlfriend, Christy Swain. The house at 412 Wildwood was just across the interstate from the Taco Bell. Swain had just moved there with her two sisters. Inman was there a lot. Steinberg from the GBI asked Swain if they could search her house for a gun. She said she’d only seen Inman with a gun once, but she said they could look. They didn’t find anything. Steinberg asked her where Inman was on Friday night. He was with her, she said, at the home on Wildwood, all night.

We caught up with her recently. She now lives in Ohio, back with her family. She’s had a hard time, struggling to raise seven kids. Her name is now Christy Lima.

Christy Lima: Okay, well I am Christy, Christy Lima. I’m Devonia’s ex-girlfriend, during that time. He was living with me during that time. Do you want me to tell what happened that day?

Liliana Segura: Lima was 19 years old. A single mom. She did what she could to get by. Sometimes she stripped at parties for extra cash. She says back then she told Jimmy Hill, the Adel police investigator, that she and Inman had gotten into a fight the night Donna Brown died. After they made up, he stayed home with her all night. He was watching her baby.

Christy Lima: I got ready to go to bed, and my son, Justice, woke up. So Devonia came back there, he got my baby, and basically he kept my baby all night. I mean, he didn’t ever leave out the house, like I was telling them before, how can he leave when he had my son all night, because the next morning my mom came over and he was still asleep on the couch with my son.

Jordan Smith: Steinberg was still interviewing her that night, when her two sisters came home. One of them agreed with what she said, but the other one, Marquetta Thomas, had more to say. Later that night, Thomas ended up at the Adel police station. She sat down with Steinberg and another GBI agent. She told them Inman had talked about “jacking and robbing” people in Adel. She also said she thought her sister would lie to protect him.

Jamy Steinberg: Let’s  talk about Devonia first,  has Devonia spoken of armed  robbery plans or committing armed  robberies or anything like that in the past?

Marquetta Thomas: Yes…

Jamy Steinberg: Tell us a little  bit about that.

Marquetta Thomas: He’s- I just- always  talking about he wants  to rob a bank or a store…

Liliana Segura: In this police video of the interview, Marquetta Thomas sits in front of a desk. She’s wearing her uniform from Waffle House. Her hair is cropped short and dyed blonde. She wears wire-rimmed glasses. She uses her hands a lot when she talks.

Jamy Steinberg: How big was the gun?

Marquetta Thomas: About this big, not that big.

Jordan Smith: The following day, an Adel police officer interviewed Inman in jail. He told Inman that people were saying he’d killed Donna Brown. Inman denied it and said he’d never had a gun. But the next day, during a second interrogation, Inman admitted that he’d once borrowed a gun from his uncle. It was a .38 caliber revolver. Inman also told the cops what his girlfriend had already told them, that he’d been at her house the whole night. In case you missed that, Inman said he’d had a .38. The gun that killed Donna Brown was a .44. It’s not the same kind of gun.

Liliana Segura: Marquetta Thomas was eager to talk to us. She’s the sister of Inman’s then-girlfriend, Christy Lima, and she’s the one who told the cops she thought Inman could have killed Donna Brown. These days Thomas wears her hair long. She doesn’t dye it anymore. The day we met her, she had it in neat braids pulled back in a ponytail. It was July, but she wore long pants and a red sweater vest, along with a silver bowtie.

Marquetta Thomas: I’m Marquetta Thomas.

Jordan Smith: Nice to meet you.

Marquetta Thomas: Nice to meet you too.

Liliana Segura: Hi.

Marquetta Thomas: How you doing?

Liliana Segura: Good.

Marquetta Thomas: Marquetta.

Liliana Segura: I’m Liliana. It’s nice to meet you.

Marquetta Thomas: Nice to meet you.

Liliana Segura: Thomas lives in Baldwin, Georgia, a town two hours north of Atlanta and roughly half the size of Adel. She moved there after spending 14 years in prison for robbery. Her house is literally five minutes from where she did her time. One of the first things she told us: she really hated Devonia Inman.

Jordan Smith: I gather at the time you didn’t think much of him?

Marquetta Thomas: No, I really didn’t. Basically me and my two sisters, my baby sister Christian, my older sister, Tamekia. We were all staying in a subdivision called Dellwood Acres. I think it was like behind McDonald’s and like half of I-75, we were like under the underpass.

Liliana Segura: She says the night Donna Brown was killed, Inman was at their house, fighting with her sister.

Marquetta Thomas: My older sister had a blue station wagon. So later on that night, probably after midnight, maybe one or two o’clock in the morning we heard this big pop. We thought it was a gunshot. We looked out the windows, we didn’t see anybody, but when we went out the next morning, he had like literally stabbed all four of my sister’s tires, and that was the only vehicle for all of us, so I had a big, disgusted hate for him. Then the next day he pops up with groceries and diapers like nothing ever happened. I’m like, “Are you serious?” My sister’s like, “Yeah, I love him. Let him in.” I was like, “No, he’s not coming in.” So they end up going outside on the porch, and I end up leaving, because I didn’t want to be in the same household.

Jordan Smith: She told the cops a different story.

Marquetta Thomas: They were asking had we seen him that prior night or was he with us. That’s when I lied and was like, “Nope, he wasn’t there,” but he actually was beating up my sister that night. But the fight and the arguing, that probably happened around like, between 9, 10, 10:30, 11, whatnot.

Liliana Segura: But that same evening?

Marquetta Thomas: Yes. That’s basically his alibi. I don’t know why they didn’t correlate and put that together, because he was at our house beating up my sister.

Jordan Smith: She was mad at him for beating her sister, for slashing their tires. And the cops, they just kept harassing her.

Marquetta Thomas: I was working third shift at Waffle House, and probably a few nights later, the detectives or Adel police, whoever it was, they came to my job and started questioning me and asking me questions. They were asking like everybody that was riding through the neighborhood. I think I was either in the parking lot at Waffle House or getting ready to walk out, and they just swarmed in, like two or three cops. They were like, “Get in, we need to talk to you.” And then they started telling me about the lady that was killed and the car abandoned or whatnot, and have I heard or seen. I’m like, “Why would you ask or question me?” Like, you know what I’m saying? So, I can’t really remember like chronologically how it happened and what times, but they were like questioning me for about two weeks straight. They would come to my job, they would come to my house, they went to my mom’s. They was harassing our whole family.

Finally I was just like, “Yeah, Devonia probably did it,” because I was really angry and bitter at him. I literally hate him for beating on my baby sister.

Jordan Smith: It was a stupid, hateful lie to tell. But she just wanted the cops to leave her alone. And she wasn’t the only one with a wild story.

Liliana Segura: Wrongful convictions are never about just one thing. A lot of the time it’s a combination of factors: bad evidence, like junk forensics, or unreliable eyewitness identification. But a lot of the time, it starts with investigators who fail to do their job. They decide on a suspect and get tunnel vision. That’s what happened in this case. Some witnesses started changing their stories. Others had obvious reasons to testify against Devonia Inman that had nothing to do with whether or not he was guilty. None of that seemed to matter.

Jordan Smith: There was LarRisha Chapman. The other teenager who was working with Donna Brown the night she died. At first she told the GBI that nothing unusual happened at Taco Bell that night. Then, under pressure, she changed her story, said that while waiting for her ride that night she heard Devonia Inman’s voice coming from some weeds near the parking lot. Then, she took that back on the witness stand at Inman’s trial. And when the local paper offered a five-thousand dollar reward for information about the murder, a newspaper carrier came out with a completely implausible story about hearing a gunshot and seeing a black man speeding away. And then there was the jailhouse snitch, who told a GBI investigator that he and Inman had briefly shared a cell and that Inman had confessed to him. After revealing this “new information,” the snitch quickly asked the investigator if he might get released early for providing the damning testimony.

On January 11, 1999, four months after Donna Brown died, a Cook County grand jury indicted Devonia Inman for her murder. Soon after, district attorney Bob Ellis announced that he would seek the death penalty for Inman.

Liliana Segura: Just to recap, here’s the state’s case: the drug dealer who said he once saw Inman with a gun. The newspaper carrier. A teenager with a changing story. A snitch who wants out of jail bad. And Thomas, who said Inman talked about robbing people. She was about to change her story too. Devonia Inman swore he was innocent and no physical evidence tied him to the crime. No eyewitnesses, a bullet that didn’t match the gun. Early on, Marquetta Thomas tried to take back her story.

Marquetta Thomas: I was like, “He didn’t do it, yo.” And they just, they never paid any attention. I took the whole, I recanted the whole statement in court under oath. So I don’t see how that wasn’t applied to his case or a new hearing or whatever he was supposed to have or overturn his case or whatever. I did it way before getting sent to prison. Nobody would listen to me. They’re dirty, crooked, sheisty like all the movies and things I’ve seen coming up A&E and all this stuff. They are very corrupt and I think they were just looking to pin the crime on somebody to make their job lighter, easier, and I was a pawn in their game that they used. You know, I don’t know if they- Their interrogation tactics, like I’m not going to say they were forced, but it was coerced. It was verbal coercion, because they would say, “Wasn’t this this?” and I just kind of agreed. You know what I’m saying? So, I guess the story started getting formulated with bits and pieces they were telling me and I just fused the story together to get him out the picture.

Liliana Segura: She has an idea what Devonia Inman’s life is like now. She spent 14 years in prison and her son is serving an 80-year sentence. She thinks about Inman all the time.

Marquetta Thomas: Every time I talk to my son. Every time I open my refrigerator, because the liberties of just being free and walking in the grass barefoot or being allowed to open my own refrigerator when I want, when I hear a collect call on the phone from my son from a correctional institute.

Liliana Segura: Thomas has tried to take back her story about Inman killing Donna Brown a bunch of times and she’s not the only one. Over the last 20 years just about every one of the state’s witnesses has recanted.

Jordan Smith: And that’s not all. Ten years after Inman was convicted, investigators got proof that he is innocent and that the state’s theory of the case was wrong. The mask the cops missed when searching Donna Brown’s car? It had DNA on it and it wasn’t Devonia Inman’s. It was the DNA of another man. A man the cops had ignored during their investigation, even when they were told that he’d killed Donna Brown. A man who went on to murder at least two other people in Adel.

Liliana Segura: In the next episode, remember what we said before about wrongful convictions? That the real killer goes free? Yeah, we’re gonna talk about that. And how, even as Devonia Inman went on trial for his life, the case against him was unraveling. Meanwhile, the murders in Adel continued.

Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Talk to you next week. Can’t wait for more episodes? You can binge listen to the entire season ad-free now on Stitcher Premium. For a free month of Stitcher Premium, go to stitcherpremium.com/murderville and use promo code MURDERVILLE.

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