October 1, 2025 • 37 mins
Exoneree Amanda Knox on prison life, Manic Pixie Dream Girls, and the similarities she sees between her case and Sandy Medgar’s.
In the first of two special, bonus episodes, we also hear the latest developments in Sandy’s case from The Innocence Project of Texas’ Mike Ware.
Host: Maggie Robinson Katz
Series producers: Maggie Robinson Katz and Maggie Latham
Sound designer: Tom Brignell
Production support from: Dan Marchini Mabel Finnegan-Wright
Managing Executive Producer (iHeart): Cristina Everett
Executive Producer (BBC Studios): Joe Kent
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Bbcsdis Before we begin, I just want to flag that
this episode deals with adult themes sexual violence, drugs, and
it contains some very strong language. Hey everyone, it's Maggie.
(00:22):
I want to welcome you to the first of two
special bonus editions of Hands Tied. Before we dive in,
I want to thank you all for listening to the series. Truly,
it meant a lot to me that you followed along
with us as we went into Sandy's case, and I
really appreciated reading all of your questions and comments throughout
the series. In this episode, I'm going to catch up
(00:45):
with the Innocence Project of Texas for some new developments
in Sandy's case. But first I want to share a
conversation I had with Amanda Knox. Amanda, you might remember,
was accused of murdering her roommate Meredith Kircher in Italy.
As a brief synopsis of what happened in Amanda's case
(01:08):
in two thousand and nine, following a trial that gripped
the world's media, she was found guilty and sentenced to
twenty six years in prison. In twenty eleven, she and
her ex who was accused of the same crime, were
freed on appeal. In twenty fourteen, after a retrial, she
was once again convicted of murder, and then in twenty
(01:31):
fifteen that conviction was overturned and both Amanda and her
ex boyfriend were exonerated.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
So I am very close friends with the folks at
the Texas Innocence Project, and I was really struck by
how much Sandy's case resembles mine, which is odd because
my case and her case are not your typical women's
wrongful conviction cases, right.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
It's very different than men.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Like they're accused of something happening to some loved one
in their care and they're held to blame. And the
typical way that they are held to blame is that
people look at the way that they acted and say,
are they grieving properly? Are they giving us sort of weird,
suspicious vibes by the way that they're responding emotively to
(02:22):
the tragedy that has occurred. So that is sort of
a universal response to how women get judged in the
aftermath of tragedies. But what's really interesting about Sandy's case,
which is similar to mine, is that she was accused
of an actual crime that occurred to someone who.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
She cared about, who she lived with, but it was.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
A crime that was committed in all likelihood by a
man who had broken into her home and assaulted her
husband and her and locked her in a closet and
locked him in a closet and just happened to murder
him and not her.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
It's pretty clear that Amanda believe Sandy is innocent, and
that is of course her opinion, and she's entitled to it,
but that's not why I wanted to talk to her.
And researching Sandy's case and refamiliarizing myself with amandas I
too was struck by some of the similarities that Amanda sees.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
I think people might famously know that when I was
studying abroad in Perusia, Italy at twenty, someone broke into
my home and raped and murdered my roommate. And I
thankfully was not present when this occurred, but I was
the one who came home and found the crime scene.
Me and my boyfriend called the police. And what's very
(03:41):
similar between Sandy's case and my case is immediately immediately
when the police arrive, they assume that the break in
is staged, that it's all part of a conspiracy to
cover up from what really took place, which is, there
was some sort of domestic violence sit situation that resulted
(04:02):
in murder, and even more specifically, there was some kind
of sexual violence domestic violence situation that resulted in murder.
So Sandy's you know, celebrating her wedding anniversary with her
husband so like it's kind of a sex game, and
then she murders him and gets him in the closet
(04:23):
and somehow somehow locks herself in a closet while being
bound to such a degree that she has to be
cut free. Similarly, in my case, you know, the prosecution
took one look at my house and said, there's no
way that a burglar actually broke in the way that
the burglar actually broke in, So there must be some
(04:44):
kind of someone in the house is covering up for
the crime. And they almost immediately fell upon me as
being the foreigner, the youngest person in the house, the
person who called the police, and the person who they
assumed was reacting in not the way that you would
expect an innocent person to react. So in Sandy's case,
(05:05):
they're looking at her behavior, they're questioning her in the
aftermath and she's apparently making some inconsistent statements, and then
of course they're also looking at her behavior. They look
at you and they go are you making eye contact?
Are you avoiding eye contact? Does it seem like you
want to be there? Are you really crying or are
you fake crying? Like there's all of these sort of
(05:27):
subjective interpretations of Sandy's behavior where they are viewing her
from a lens of guilt. They have a gut feeling
that she's guilty, and then they're viewing her in her
responses to their questions in light of this view.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Very similar thing in my case.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
You know, I'm in a foreign country, so I'm having
to speak a foreign language while I'm being interrogated, and
there's some inconsistencies to my statements. I think one because
of just language difficulties, like I'm trying to explain a
thing with a language that I'm not familiar with, and
so there's some fumbling along the way.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
But also like one thing that.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
I did lie about very early on was the fact
that everyone in the house smoked marijuana, and I was
very afraid. In fact, I was told by my roommates,
do not tell the police that we smoke marijuana because
we'll get into trouble. So I lied about that, and
they use that as a kind of way to say, well,
if she's lying about that, what else is she lying about?
(06:29):
And then it unfolds the way it does so, viewing
young women or women in general in a moment of
existential crisis and stress and interpreting their behavior with a
guilt presumptive lens weirdly similar in these cases because like,
(06:50):
how often is a woman accused of orchestrating a death
orgy a sex crime and covering it up by making
it look like a break in when in fact and
actual break in took place. Like that's where Sandy and
my case are very very similar and connected.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Yeah, I think that the assumption is something that I
really want to dial into because in her interrogation video,
even the first time I watched it, you kind of
can't help but have these assumptions of how you expect
someone to act right after you know, seeing that your
husband's died, to being interrogated, but then you know, you
have to remember it's late at night. She has medical histories, right,
(07:32):
and like these assumptions that we have, just like you said,
of how we expect women primarily to act in moments
of trauma.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Well, I'm not saying that investigators are just trying to
frame innocent people. In fact, I do not think that
that's what happened necessarily in Sandy's case or in my
own case. It's just that police officers are trained to
have confidence in their gut judgments of people. But the
unfortunate reality is that they are human beings. They are
(08:01):
capable of making mistakes in their judgment. But once you
have that cognitive bias in place, you are going to
interpret really subjective things, like subtle things of behavior, like
is she making eye contact with me or not? Is
she looking to the left or not when she's speaking,
Like maybe you know, in her case, she's looking to
(08:22):
the left because she's struggling to remember, or because she's
had a head injury, like and in my case, maybe
I'm looking this way or that way because I'm trying
to remember what word it is in Italian that I'm
trying to say, you know. So, like, there's there's so
many innocent explanations for a person's behavior, and I find
it really obnoxious when because you have assumed guilt, you
(08:47):
just find fault in the person that you have accused.
And that's especially tragic in a case where we were
victims of crime before we became victims of the criminal
justice system. Right, what an utter betrayal. It's just a
continued trauma on top of a trauma.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
How much do you think those first couple hours in
the police interrogation set the same for the rest of
your trial and examination from the Italian prosecutors.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Well, unlike Sandy, I was actually questioned for a lot longer.
So I was questioned for around fifty three hours over
five days. And we've had to sort of figure out
that because none of my actual questionings were videotaped or recorded,
because the police claimed that they were never interrogating me,
they were only interviewing me as a witness, which is
(09:43):
really frustrating. But anyway, so I was around ten hours
of day with them in their custody, answering questions, sharing information,
going over what I found when I came home to
the crime scene, all of that, and I was told
from the very beginning that I was their most important witness.
I was the one roommate who lived with Meredith, my
(10:06):
roommate who was murdered, who was around her age, who
knew her comings and goings, who knew her friendships. So
it made sense to me that I was spending so
much time with the police to help them solve this crime.
But at no point was I ever informed that I
was a suspect. I was never given my Miranda rights
or the Italian equivalent of them. What ultimately transpired was
(10:29):
the police accusing me of lying, accusing me of covering
up for the actual murderer, gaslighting me, lying to me,
telling me that I had actually witnessed the crime but
I couldn't remember it because it was so traumatizing, and
ultimately sort of feeding me this idea that my boss,
who had texted me the night of the murder, was
(10:49):
actually the murderer and I was covering for him. And
so I eventually was coerced under duress to believing them
and signing statements to that effect. And I am convinced
that I never ever would have been arrested, imprisoned, put
on trial, and convicted were it not for that interrogation.
(11:12):
There was simply no evidence that I had anything to
do with this crime. The only evidence that the police
ever were able to, you know, put out there in
regards to me was that I lived in the house
where Meredith was murdered, and everything else was unreliable, speculative,
all of that, and you know, like no motive. In
(11:35):
Sandy's case, no motive. They say that she's trying to
escape an unhappy marriage. In my case, they say, oh,
I basically was trying to escape an unhappy roommateship, you know,
And it's just where's the evidence where you know, where's
the evidence of that conflict? They had just been celebrating.
They were just in the hot tub together. So I
think that before they can get the answers from the
(11:56):
forensic evidence, instead, they're going to hyperfolk some people's behavior,
and if they have a cognitive bias to the effect
of assuming the guilt of a certain person, they're going
to see what they want to see. And in my case,
they saw what they wanted to see, and they put
me through an interrogation to get the statement that they
wanted to get. End of story.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
And you know, there's something moving on to the trial
that you wrote in your book, which I think connects
directly to Sandy's case, and indulge me. I'm going to
read it to you, Okay, So often our courtrooms are
not like laboratories where competing information is boiled.
Speaker 4 (12:32):
Down to truth beyond a reasonable doubt, but.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
More like battlegrounds were the most compelling story, not the
most truthful wins. And I think Sandy's case to a
lot of the jurors, you know, I spoke with one
of the jurors, and to him, the prosecution had a
better story. It made more sense. They were able to
show a theory of how the prosecution believed that Sandy
(12:54):
would be able to tie her hands and to lock
herself in the closet. To him, he felt like the
defense didn't have that strong of a story. So I'd
love to kind of just cure your reactions to that
and how story is such a big thing.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
When it comes to trials and murder.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, I look at the prosecutions story in Sandy's case
and I go, well, that's a much more interesting story.
Compelling in the sense that it's way more interesting. The
idea that a woman orchestrated this like sex game murder
of her husband and then very cunningly tied herself up
(13:36):
and locked herself in a closet. That's interesting, But does
it make sense? I don't think so. I think that
what's interesting about that for me is I look at
what might be the psychology of a juror who might
connect the idea that an interesting story means that it
makes more sense, like for some reason, it's a sticky story,
(13:59):
a story sorry that stays in our head.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
But does that mean that it actually makes sense.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
That's where the disconnect for me happens, because I think
it makes a lot more sense in both Sandy's in
my case to just you know Ockham's razor this thing
and go. It looks like a break in, It smells
like a break in, It talks like a break in.
It's a break in, like someone broke into the house
and murdered somebody and took advantage of a situation, like
(14:25):
a vulnerable situation. So they said that in my case,
you know that the window that the burglar broke into,
he couldn't physically actually break into it when he has
a history of breaking into second story windows. They say
that nothing was stolen from the house, Well, what do
you mean nothing was stolen from the house, Like Meredith's
money was gone, her keys were gone, her phones were gone.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
They were stolen.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
But because you have reinterpreted the facts of the case
to be oh, well, that was just part of the
staged break in. Now you are just reinterpreting actual facts
and saying that they aren't what they appear to be.
So again, I find it incredibly frustrating when and I
feel so horribly for Sandy, and I wonder if this
(15:08):
is the reason why I am free today and she
is not. Is that DNA evidence was found at the
crime scene that the prosecution was not intending to find.
It was sort of inevitably found because my roommate was
sexually assaulted and viciously attacked, and the murderer left copious
quantities of his DNA all over the crime scene, on
(15:31):
her body, in her belongings, his footprints and fingerprints were
left in her blood. It was very bad, but also
it was inevitable that they were going to discover this person,
whether they intended to or not, that he was involved
in the crime. And I think the twist with my
story is even though they found that evidence of the intruder,
they just decided to reinterpret that evidence of the intruder as, oh, well,
(15:54):
it's not really a break in. Yes, he has a
history of breaking entering but in this case, he was
let into the house by Amanda and just happened to
be there to commit the crime with her. Like that's
the level of like twisting that the prosecution has to
do to make sense of their theory. In Sandy's case,
there was unknown DNA found at the crime scene, but
(16:16):
it remains unknown. And as jurors, as people in society,
we do not like we do not like cases to
be unsolved. And so if we have a person who's
put in front of us to take the responsibility for
a crime, and the police are telling us this is
the person, we want to believe that the police are
(16:37):
not just going to put an innocent person, just a
random innocent person in front of us. Where there's smoke,
there must be fire. And therefore, I think we too
are inclined to be guilt presumptive, even in a situation
where technically we are supposed to be hearing the various
stories coming at us with truth beyond a reasonable doubt
(16:57):
at the core of our reasoning. But I think that
that is a lot to request of human beings who
want to find closure. We are instinctively drawn towards closure
and wanting some kind of finality and sense that the
universe makes sense that somebody just couldn't be randomly assaulted
and murdered.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
So We're just going to take a quick break and
then I'll be back with Amanda Knox when she talks
Pixie Girls and prison hustles, amongst other things. Welcome back.
I'm going to continue my conversation with Amanda. We're pretty
(17:42):
much the same age, and when I was reading her
most recent book, I really was struck by some similarities,
some similarities I wanted to share with her. I just
want to say personally, like I finished your book yesterday
and I couldn't help it feel so much similarity to you,
because I think I was around the same age that
(18:04):
you were abroad, And like when you talk about Sailor Moon,
I was like, I am regressing and have a Sailor
Moon phone case.
Speaker 5 (18:12):
Right now, Yes, girl, And like Harry Potter, and like
I just like really felt for you, and like putting
myself in the shoes of being twenty in a new country,
totally naive and then being thrown into I can't imagine
being thrown into the justice system here, let alone in
another country.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Yeah, and I have actually another little like thing that
I'm actually working on like a little stand up bit
about because we're also have to remember that in two
thousand and seven it was also like peak of manic
pixie dreamgirl vibes, where like it was really cute to
like strom a ukulele and dye your hair pink and
(18:53):
just like be a sort of goofy girl up until
your roommate gets murdered and then you become a law
and Order episode because everyone's like, oh, you're a freaking psychopath.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
So yeah, you know. I Unfortunately, we weren't granted the
right to interview Sandy.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
It was denied because she's in a medical facility.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
But I have been able to write to her and
she kind of took me through the daily hum drums
of prison, you know, the structure of it, and you know,
one of the major takeaways and just reading that is
that her world has become so small now. And I'm wondering,
you know, just from your experience, is that a self
preservation technique? How do you start to cope when your
(19:35):
world just becomes smaller and smaller.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Well, I think that different people respond differently. I know
that my first two years of imprisonment, I was living
in a kind of state of denial that I was.
I felt like I was living somebody else's life by mistake.
I also spent a significant amount of that time in isolation.
(20:00):
So when I was arrested, I was not immediately thrown
into gen POP. I was held in isolation for eight months,
and so there was this weird limbo space period while
the investigation was ongoing that I was like not a
part of the greater world of the prison environment. And
then I was putting into gen Pop after the investigation
(20:20):
closed after eight months of imprisonment, and then I spent
another good amount of time in prison before I was
actually convicted. And I got through it by really believing
in the justice system and believing that the truth would
win out, and that eventually, once the adults sort of
all gathered into the room and agreed beyond a reasonable doubt,
(20:42):
I was going to go home. I was going to
get back to my life. So I was just sort
of waiting to live, and I was waiting to live
in a very very scary, very foreign, very punitive environment.
But I was very much mentally feeling like I'm not here,
I'm out there. I'm writing letters to my family every day,
(21:02):
I'm writing letters to my friends, every day, I'm reading books.
I'm just like hanging in there until I can get
my life back. And then everything shifted for me after
I got convicted and I was facing a twenty six
year sentence, and I realized that my life was not
somewhere else out there, It was right here in the prison.
(21:26):
This was my life, and I was almost wasting my
opportunities to live by waiting to live. Like I started
looking around me and going, Okay, what possibilities do I
have to live in here? And they were very limited? Right,
(21:47):
Like I cannot open a single door, There's very few
people I can talk to. I only have one ten
minute phone call a week. I only have one visitation
a week that lasts for an hour, and only very
specific people can come visit me. I have very few
opportunities in life. I my opportunities weirdly expanded once I
(22:10):
looked around me in the prison environment, and I realized
that many of the women that I was in prison
with were actually very less privileged than me, despite me
being the innocent person in prison, and how unfair that was.
Like all of these guilty women around me did not
have loved ones who cared about them could not read
and write, were you know, dealing with mental illness or
(22:31):
drug addiction. I had none of those problems, and so
I discovered that I could develop a prison hustle, so
a sense of purpose in prison, where I started writing
and reading people's letters for them, helping them understand their
court documents. And it became this like invaluable resource that
both selfishly elevated me within the prison, you know, hierarchy
(22:54):
as someone to not fuck with, you know, like you
don't want to, you know, like this is Amanda writes
our letters for us, do not bother her, you know.
And on the flip side, it was helpful to other people.
And so the possibilities for any single person in prison
are very very limited, but they are there. It's just that,
(23:17):
you know, for me, surviving in prison meant that I
took everything day by day. I did not have dreams
of my future. I had a really hard time imagining
how I could live a fulfilled life in prison, and
I had to grieve the things that were stolen from me,
(23:38):
like the possibility of having children. Women who are imprisoned,
and especially for long sentences, are facing our biological clocks
running out while we are in prison, and so not
only do we lose, you know, the opportunity of a
career or anything like that, but we lose the opportunity
of having a family of our own. And I had
(24:01):
to grieve that and try to imagine a life worth
living that didn't have that aspect to it, and it
was really, honestly too difficult for me to imagine. So
I instead focused on how do I make today worth living?
And I'll figure out tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Tomorrow, Yeah, And I imagine. You know, Sandy doesn't have
the same circumstances, but it's a similar thing of the
connections that she can get with her grandchildren, the connections
that she can get with her daughter. You know, one
thing that you talk about which you know, even though
I didn't get to meet Sandy in person, I do
know her daughter and I spent a couple days with
(24:40):
her in London. And you know, Liz really talks about
and you talk about it in your book too, as
this before and after where she really remembers who she
was before her dad's.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
Murder and her mom's imprisonment and who she is now.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
And you know, she talks about similar things that you
talked about in your most recent book of not being
able to trust anybody to feeling, you know, a gloraphobic,
And I think that that would be a great thing
if you could just kind of talk about your own
experience of those two identities, you know, and I imagine
please correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
You know, you were talking about.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
This fantasy of maybe getting out what life will be like,
maybe isn't what you fantasize, and how you sort of
start to make sense of this new life.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Yeah, I look back on my life and see it
as as I've lived three distinct lives, right Like, there's
before I was arrested for a crama didn't commit, and
then there's the life that I lived in prison, and
then there is the life that I have lived since
(25:48):
I've been fully exonerated. And they are very very different
lives and very different people in a way who lived
those lives, right Like, since you know, getting out of prison,
I went back to Italy, because you know, while I
was in prison, I had this fantasy that as soon
(26:10):
as I got out, I would get to go back.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
To that life of before prison.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
I would get to go back to being the anonymous
college student who was, you know, studying languages and doing
creative writing, and this horrible thing that just happened to
me that didn't really have anything to do with me
would fade away.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Like it would go away.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
And I was very rudely awakened to the reality that
that was not the case when I got home, not
just because I was still on trial after being released
from prison, and the media were, you know, following me around,
and I was still the girl accused of murder in
the in the public imagination, I could never go back
(26:58):
to being an anonymous person in the world, like I
was carrying the stigma of that accusation forever with me
from an external point of view. But on top of that,
there is the realization that the girl that nothing bad
had ever happened to no longer existed. And I was
carrying with me a deep knowledge and experience of suffering
(27:23):
that I didn't have before that had changed me and
that I now was burdened with having.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
To make sense of. And it it changed me.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
I mean, like I had emotions that I'd never really
felt before, a big one being rage. I was not
somebody who experienced rage when I was a kid. Like
that was deep deep existential angst or I was never
the kind of person who was triggered by being around
(27:54):
other people. Or there was this period of time and
I got out when everyone in my family sort of
had to walk around on eggshells around me because they
didn't know what kind of thing was going to set
me off, and because they had not, you know, walked
through the prison experience alongside me, They had not been
in the interrogation room with me, And so there were
(28:16):
things that I experienced in the real world that had
like just a little bit of resonance, or even just
something like walking down the sidewalk and glimpsing somebody out
of the corner of my eye who reminded me a
lot of one of my cellmates. And then immediately I'm
just like back on the prison block, and I'm just
and I have to like get that out of my
head so I can just keep on walking to my
(28:38):
job at the bookstore.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Right Like, there are these.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Things, like you feel haunted by these experiences that you've
gone through, and you have to make sense of them
in order to feel like you are not just utterly
debilitated by them, which is the journey that I then
describe in my new book, which is taking the question
of like now what now that I've gone through this?
(29:02):
Now what how do I have a place in the
world after this? How do I trust people after this?
How do I trust myself after all of this? Those
are big questions that anyone who has gone through trauma
is going to face, but especially someone who has been
again victimized by crime and the criminal justice system, those
(29:23):
institutions like collapsed beneath her, beneath me?
Speaker 3 (29:29):
And how do.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
You rebuild a sense of stability and confidence in the
world and in humanity after having that taken away from you? Right,
We've all had loss, We've all had a.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Worse moment of our lives.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
We've all had something happened to us that was out
of our control. And it is finding that common ground
that we can see each other and support each other.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Beautifully said, thank you so much. Yeah, I think so
often it's hard for us to fathom what it's like
going through something like Amanda did. But if we can
focus on the universal experiences she flagged, like loss, grief,
having something happen to us outside of our control, it
(30:18):
may help us better understand each other in the different.
Speaker 4 (30:21):
Paths all our lives take.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
So I want to thank Amanda again for taking the
time to chat with me, and after a quick break,
I'll catch up at the Innocence Project of Texas and
hear some of the latest developments in Sandy's case. So again,
(30:46):
welcome back, appreciate you staying with us. Before we hear
from the Innocence Project of Texas, a quick reminder of
where things were left. Back in twenty twelve, on the
night Jim's body was found, the police swapped the crime
scene for DNA and took away more than one hundred
bits of evidence for further testing, but because they were
(31:06):
low level samples, many didn't reveal much. As we heard
in the last episode, technology has come a long way
since then, and the Innocence Project is trying to get
some of those bits of evidence retested. We heard about
the murder weapon, the knife that was found in the jacuzzi,
and how a new test showed Jim's DNA was found
(31:29):
on it, but so is at least one other person's,
someone who isn't Sandy or anyone else in the family. Now,
other samples from the crime scene have been reanalyzed, like
the fabric that was used to tie Sandy up in
the closet where she was found, and Mike Ware from
the Innocence Project of Texas explains what those tests reveal.
Speaker 6 (31:54):
The bindings on Sandy. They have reanalyzed the data taken
from the swabs from the bindings on her arms and hands,
and they have determined that her DNA's on there, but
so is an unknown person's DNA on there. It's not
anybody in the families. It doesn't belong to them who
originally found her and untieder. It is an unknown DNA.
(32:16):
Now it's not redundant of what's on the knife handle,
which does tells us there were two people.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
So there's Sandy's DNA as you'd expect on the bindings
used to tire up, but there's also someone else's DNA,
and that DNA is different to the DNA on the knife.
Speaker 6 (32:34):
There's no reason to believe there was not at least
two people. I have no reason to believe there weren't
two people. One person's DNA on the bindings of Sandy,
another person's DNA on the murder weapon, which I think
is enough that she should win a writ on.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
That, a writ of habeas corpus, which basically means they're
asking for a federal court to re review Sandy's case
because they believe she is wrongly in prisoned.
Speaker 6 (33:01):
When you look at the evidence at trial vs. IV,
this new evidence, it's very powerful. And then we decided
that we wanted to DNA test the hair or hairs
that were in Jim's hand. They're fairly short, rootless hairs
in around his hand. This is not you know, a
(33:23):
case where he was shot by a gun from across
the room. He was in a struggle that resulted in
you know, however, many stab and cut wounds, and so
this was a very as they say, up close and personal.
So if he has a hair or hairs, regardless of
the fact that they're very short and rootless in his hands,
(33:47):
that belonged to an unknown individual, once again, we would
say that it's highly likely that that unknown individual that
is not Sandy and is not him, is the person
he was struggling with in his you know, last moments.
And the judge has signed the order ordering that done,
ordering that testing done.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
And so that's the first step to kind of start
to figure out whose hair, If it isn't Gems or Sandy's,
whose it could possibly.
Speaker 6 (34:14):
Be well, it belongs to the murderer who's not Sandy.
That's whose it is. Now. The only way to identify
whose it is is to have an alternative suspect and
get a profile from that alternative suspect and do a
side by side and if it's a match, that in
and of itself might not be enough to convict that
(34:36):
person because the numbers are not that high.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
I know, in our last conversation you were saying that
justice is very much a marathon and not a sprint.
But in terms of these new developments and these new angles,
where are you on the hope spectrum?
Speaker 6 (34:55):
I feel very cautiously optimistic. And the thing about getting
back into court and getting a judge involved, I mean,
the DA's office has been very cooperative with us, but
having a judge involved and having a formal motion and
this is a formal what we call Chapter sixty four
motion for post conviction DNA testing, we've got kind of
(35:17):
those guardrails that you know, we've got a judge pushing
us along too, so hopefully that will speed the process.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Well. I hope that you'll keep us posted on how
it goes in these results, because it seems like things
are moving in ways that when the last time we
talked it, it seems like there's more momentum now.
Speaker 6 (35:40):
I think so, I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
We will continue to be following this story as it progresses,
and I hope we'll be able to update you with
any major developments. Not to be all like in subc
but liken subscribe and any new updates will be uploaded
to the feed. Next week. I'm going to get into
some of the stuff that didn't quite make it into
(36:10):
the series, including more on the home invasions that we're
plaguing parts of Texas in twenty twelve. I hope you'll
stay with us, and I hope to see you next week.
Thanks you've been listening to Hands Tied. I'm Maggie Robinson
(36:33):
Katz and the producer is Maggie Latham. Sound design and
mix is by Tom Brignoll. Our script consultant is Emma
Weatherall production support is from Dan Martini, Elena Boutang, and
Mabel Finnigan Wright, and our production executive is Laura Jordan Raul.
The series was developed by Anya Saunders and Emma Shaw
(36:57):
at iHeart. The Managing Executive producer is Christina Everett. And
for BBC Studios. The executive producer is Joe Kent.
Bbcsdis Before we begin, I just want to flag that
this episode deals with adult themes sexual violence, drugs, and
it contains some very strong language. Hey everyone, it's Maggie.
(00:22):
I want to welcome you to the first of two
special bonus editions of Hands Tied. Before we dive in,
I want to thank you all for listening to the series. Truly,
it meant a lot to me that you followed along
with us as we went into Sandy's case, and I
really appreciated reading all of your questions and comments throughout
the series. In this episode, I'm going to catch up
(00:45):
with the Innocence Project of Texas for some new developments
in Sandy's case. But first I want to share a
conversation I had with Amanda Knox. Amanda, you might remember,
was accused of murdering her roommate Meredith Kircher in Italy.
As a brief synopsis of what happened in Amanda's case
(01:08):
in two thousand and nine, following a trial that gripped
the world's media, she was found guilty and sentenced to
twenty six years in prison. In twenty eleven, she and
her ex who was accused of the same crime, were
freed on appeal. In twenty fourteen, after a retrial, she
was once again convicted of murder, and then in twenty
(01:31):
fifteen that conviction was overturned and both Amanda and her
ex boyfriend were exonerated.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
So I am very close friends with the folks at
the Texas Innocence Project, and I was really struck by
how much Sandy's case resembles mine, which is odd because
my case and her case are not your typical women's
wrongful conviction cases, right.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
It's very different than men.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Like they're accused of something happening to some loved one
in their care and they're held to blame. And the
typical way that they are held to blame is that
people look at the way that they acted and say,
are they grieving properly? Are they giving us sort of weird,
suspicious vibes by the way that they're responding emotively to
(02:22):
the tragedy that has occurred. So that is sort of
a universal response to how women get judged in the
aftermath of tragedies. But what's really interesting about Sandy's case,
which is similar to mine, is that she was accused
of an actual crime that occurred to someone who.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
She cared about, who she lived with, but it was.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
A crime that was committed in all likelihood by a
man who had broken into her home and assaulted her
husband and her and locked her in a closet and
locked him in a closet and just happened to murder
him and not her.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
It's pretty clear that Amanda believe Sandy is innocent, and
that is of course her opinion, and she's entitled to it,
but that's not why I wanted to talk to her.
And researching Sandy's case and refamiliarizing myself with amandas I
too was struck by some of the similarities that Amanda sees.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
I think people might famously know that when I was
studying abroad in Perusia, Italy at twenty, someone broke into
my home and raped and murdered my roommate. And I
thankfully was not present when this occurred, but I was
the one who came home and found the crime scene.
Me and my boyfriend called the police. And what's very
(03:41):
similar between Sandy's case and my case is immediately immediately
when the police arrive, they assume that the break in
is staged, that it's all part of a conspiracy to
cover up from what really took place, which is, there
was some sort of domestic violence sit situation that resulted
(04:02):
in murder, and even more specifically, there was some kind
of sexual violence domestic violence situation that resulted in murder.
So Sandy's you know, celebrating her wedding anniversary with her
husband so like it's kind of a sex game, and
then she murders him and gets him in the closet
(04:23):
and somehow somehow locks herself in a closet while being
bound to such a degree that she has to be
cut free. Similarly, in my case, you know, the prosecution
took one look at my house and said, there's no
way that a burglar actually broke in the way that
the burglar actually broke in, So there must be some
(04:44):
kind of someone in the house is covering up for
the crime. And they almost immediately fell upon me as
being the foreigner, the youngest person in the house, the
person who called the police, and the person who they
assumed was reacting in not the way that you would
expect an innocent person to react. So in Sandy's case,
(05:05):
they're looking at her behavior, they're questioning her in the
aftermath and she's apparently making some inconsistent statements, and then
of course they're also looking at her behavior. They look
at you and they go are you making eye contact?
Are you avoiding eye contact? Does it seem like you
want to be there? Are you really crying or are
you fake crying? Like there's all of these sort of
(05:27):
subjective interpretations of Sandy's behavior where they are viewing her
from a lens of guilt. They have a gut feeling
that she's guilty, and then they're viewing her in her
responses to their questions in light of this view.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Very similar thing in my case.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
You know, I'm in a foreign country, so I'm having
to speak a foreign language while I'm being interrogated, and
there's some inconsistencies to my statements. I think one because
of just language difficulties, like I'm trying to explain a
thing with a language that I'm not familiar with, and
so there's some fumbling along the way.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
But also like one thing that.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
I did lie about very early on was the fact
that everyone in the house smoked marijuana, and I was
very afraid. In fact, I was told by my roommates,
do not tell the police that we smoke marijuana because
we'll get into trouble. So I lied about that, and
they use that as a kind of way to say, well,
if she's lying about that, what else is she lying about?
(06:29):
And then it unfolds the way it does so, viewing
young women or women in general in a moment of
existential crisis and stress and interpreting their behavior with a
guilt presumptive lens weirdly similar in these cases because like,
(06:50):
how often is a woman accused of orchestrating a death
orgy a sex crime and covering it up by making
it look like a break in when in fact and
actual break in took place. Like that's where Sandy and
my case are very very similar and connected.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Yeah, I think that the assumption is something that I
really want to dial into because in her interrogation video,
even the first time I watched it, you kind of
can't help but have these assumptions of how you expect
someone to act right after you know, seeing that your
husband's died, to being interrogated, but then you know, you
have to remember it's late at night. She has medical histories, right,
(07:32):
and like these assumptions that we have, just like you said,
of how we expect women primarily to act in moments
of trauma.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Well, I'm not saying that investigators are just trying to
frame innocent people. In fact, I do not think that
that's what happened necessarily in Sandy's case or in my
own case. It's just that police officers are trained to
have confidence in their gut judgments of people. But the
unfortunate reality is that they are human beings. They are
(08:01):
capable of making mistakes in their judgment. But once you
have that cognitive bias in place, you are going to
interpret really subjective things, like subtle things of behavior, like
is she making eye contact with me or not? Is
she looking to the left or not when she's speaking,
Like maybe you know, in her case, she's looking to
(08:22):
the left because she's struggling to remember, or because she's
had a head injury, like and in my case, maybe
I'm looking this way or that way because I'm trying
to remember what word it is in Italian that I'm
trying to say, you know. So, like, there's there's so
many innocent explanations for a person's behavior, and I find
it really obnoxious when because you have assumed guilt, you
(08:47):
just find fault in the person that you have accused.
And that's especially tragic in a case where we were
victims of crime before we became victims of the criminal
justice system. Right, what an utter betrayal. It's just a
continued trauma on top of a trauma.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
How much do you think those first couple hours in
the police interrogation set the same for the rest of
your trial and examination from the Italian prosecutors.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Well, unlike Sandy, I was actually questioned for a lot longer.
So I was questioned for around fifty three hours over
five days. And we've had to sort of figure out
that because none of my actual questionings were videotaped or recorded,
because the police claimed that they were never interrogating me,
they were only interviewing me as a witness, which is
(09:43):
really frustrating. But anyway, so I was around ten hours
of day with them in their custody, answering questions, sharing information,
going over what I found when I came home to
the crime scene, all of that, and I was told
from the very beginning that I was their most important witness.
I was the one roommate who lived with Meredith, my
(10:06):
roommate who was murdered, who was around her age, who
knew her comings and goings, who knew her friendships. So
it made sense to me that I was spending so
much time with the police to help them solve this crime.
But at no point was I ever informed that I
was a suspect. I was never given my Miranda rights
or the Italian equivalent of them. What ultimately transpired was
(10:29):
the police accusing me of lying, accusing me of covering
up for the actual murderer, gaslighting me, lying to me,
telling me that I had actually witnessed the crime but
I couldn't remember it because it was so traumatizing, and
ultimately sort of feeding me this idea that my boss,
who had texted me the night of the murder, was
(10:49):
actually the murderer and I was covering for him. And
so I eventually was coerced under duress to believing them
and signing statements to that effect. And I am convinced
that I never ever would have been arrested, imprisoned, put
on trial, and convicted were it not for that interrogation.
(11:12):
There was simply no evidence that I had anything to
do with this crime. The only evidence that the police
ever were able to, you know, put out there in
regards to me was that I lived in the house
where Meredith was murdered, and everything else was unreliable, speculative,
all of that, and you know, like no motive. In
(11:35):
Sandy's case, no motive. They say that she's trying to
escape an unhappy marriage. In my case, they say, oh,
I basically was trying to escape an unhappy roommateship, you know,
And it's just where's the evidence where you know, where's
the evidence of that conflict? They had just been celebrating.
They were just in the hot tub together. So I
think that before they can get the answers from the
(11:56):
forensic evidence, instead, they're going to hyperfolk some people's behavior,
and if they have a cognitive bias to the effect
of assuming the guilt of a certain person, they're going
to see what they want to see. And in my case,
they saw what they wanted to see, and they put
me through an interrogation to get the statement that they
wanted to get. End of story.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
And you know, there's something moving on to the trial
that you wrote in your book, which I think connects
directly to Sandy's case, and indulge me. I'm going to
read it to you, Okay, So often our courtrooms are
not like laboratories where competing information is boiled.
Speaker 4 (12:32):
Down to truth beyond a reasonable doubt, but.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
More like battlegrounds were the most compelling story, not the
most truthful wins. And I think Sandy's case to a
lot of the jurors, you know, I spoke with one
of the jurors, and to him, the prosecution had a
better story. It made more sense. They were able to
show a theory of how the prosecution believed that Sandy
(12:54):
would be able to tie her hands and to lock
herself in the closet. To him, he felt like the
defense didn't have that strong of a story. So I'd
love to kind of just cure your reactions to that
and how story is such a big thing.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
When it comes to trials and murder.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, I look at the prosecutions story in Sandy's case
and I go, well, that's a much more interesting story.
Compelling in the sense that it's way more interesting. The
idea that a woman orchestrated this like sex game murder
of her husband and then very cunningly tied herself up
(13:36):
and locked herself in a closet. That's interesting, But does
it make sense? I don't think so. I think that
what's interesting about that for me is I look at
what might be the psychology of a juror who might
connect the idea that an interesting story means that it
makes more sense, like for some reason, it's a sticky story,
(13:59):
a story sorry that stays in our head.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
But does that mean that it actually makes sense.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
That's where the disconnect for me happens, because I think
it makes a lot more sense in both Sandy's in
my case to just you know Ockham's razor this thing
and go. It looks like a break in, It smells
like a break in, It talks like a break in.
It's a break in, like someone broke into the house
and murdered somebody and took advantage of a situation, like
(14:25):
a vulnerable situation. So they said that in my case,
you know that the window that the burglar broke into,
he couldn't physically actually break into it when he has
a history of breaking into second story windows. They say
that nothing was stolen from the house, Well, what do
you mean nothing was stolen from the house, Like Meredith's
money was gone, her keys were gone, her phones were gone.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
They were stolen.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
But because you have reinterpreted the facts of the case
to be oh, well, that was just part of the
staged break in. Now you are just reinterpreting actual facts
and saying that they aren't what they appear to be.
So again, I find it incredibly frustrating when and I
feel so horribly for Sandy, and I wonder if this
(15:08):
is the reason why I am free today and she
is not. Is that DNA evidence was found at the
crime scene that the prosecution was not intending to find.
It was sort of inevitably found because my roommate was
sexually assaulted and viciously attacked, and the murderer left copious
quantities of his DNA all over the crime scene, on
(15:31):
her body, in her belongings, his footprints and fingerprints were
left in her blood. It was very bad, but also
it was inevitable that they were going to discover this person,
whether they intended to or not, that he was involved
in the crime. And I think the twist with my
story is even though they found that evidence of the intruder,
they just decided to reinterpret that evidence of the intruder as, oh, well,
(15:54):
it's not really a break in. Yes, he has a
history of breaking entering but in this case, he was
let into the house by Amanda and just happened to
be there to commit the crime with her. Like that's
the level of like twisting that the prosecution has to
do to make sense of their theory. In Sandy's case,
there was unknown DNA found at the crime scene, but
(16:16):
it remains unknown. And as jurors, as people in society,
we do not like we do not like cases to
be unsolved. And so if we have a person who's
put in front of us to take the responsibility for
a crime, and the police are telling us this is
the person, we want to believe that the police are
(16:37):
not just going to put an innocent person, just a
random innocent person in front of us. Where there's smoke,
there must be fire. And therefore, I think we too
are inclined to be guilt presumptive, even in a situation
where technically we are supposed to be hearing the various
stories coming at us with truth beyond a reasonable doubt
(16:57):
at the core of our reasoning. But I think that
that is a lot to request of human beings who
want to find closure. We are instinctively drawn towards closure
and wanting some kind of finality and sense that the
universe makes sense that somebody just couldn't be randomly assaulted
and murdered.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
So We're just going to take a quick break and
then I'll be back with Amanda Knox when she talks
Pixie Girls and prison hustles, amongst other things. Welcome back.
I'm going to continue my conversation with Amanda. We're pretty
(17:42):
much the same age, and when I was reading her
most recent book, I really was struck by some similarities,
some similarities I wanted to share with her. I just
want to say personally, like I finished your book yesterday
and I couldn't help it feel so much similarity to you,
because I think I was around the same age that
(18:04):
you were abroad, And like when you talk about Sailor Moon,
I was like, I am regressing and have a Sailor
Moon phone case.
Speaker 5 (18:12):
Right now, Yes, girl, And like Harry Potter, and like
I just like really felt for you, and like putting
myself in the shoes of being twenty in a new country,
totally naive and then being thrown into I can't imagine
being thrown into the justice system here, let alone in
another country.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Yeah, and I have actually another little like thing that
I'm actually working on like a little stand up bit
about because we're also have to remember that in two
thousand and seven it was also like peak of manic
pixie dreamgirl vibes, where like it was really cute to
like strom a ukulele and dye your hair pink and
(18:53):
just like be a sort of goofy girl up until
your roommate gets murdered and then you become a law
and Order episode because everyone's like, oh, you're a freaking psychopath.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
So yeah, you know. I Unfortunately, we weren't granted the
right to interview Sandy.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
It was denied because she's in a medical facility.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
But I have been able to write to her and
she kind of took me through the daily hum drums
of prison, you know, the structure of it, and you know,
one of the major takeaways and just reading that is
that her world has become so small now. And I'm wondering,
you know, just from your experience, is that a self
preservation technique? How do you start to cope when your
(19:35):
world just becomes smaller and smaller.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Well, I think that different people respond differently. I know
that my first two years of imprisonment, I was living
in a kind of state of denial that I was.
I felt like I was living somebody else's life by mistake.
I also spent a significant amount of that time in isolation.
(20:00):
So when I was arrested, I was not immediately thrown
into gen POP. I was held in isolation for eight months,
and so there was this weird limbo space period while
the investigation was ongoing that I was like not a
part of the greater world of the prison environment. And
then I was putting into gen Pop after the investigation
(20:20):
closed after eight months of imprisonment, and then I spent
another good amount of time in prison before I was
actually convicted. And I got through it by really believing
in the justice system and believing that the truth would
win out, and that eventually, once the adults sort of
all gathered into the room and agreed beyond a reasonable doubt,
(20:42):
I was going to go home. I was going to
get back to my life. So I was just sort
of waiting to live, and I was waiting to live
in a very very scary, very foreign, very punitive environment.
But I was very much mentally feeling like I'm not here,
I'm out there. I'm writing letters to my family every day,
(21:02):
I'm writing letters to my friends, every day, I'm reading books.
I'm just like hanging in there until I can get
my life back. And then everything shifted for me after
I got convicted and I was facing a twenty six
year sentence, and I realized that my life was not
somewhere else out there, It was right here in the prison.
(21:26):
This was my life, and I was almost wasting my
opportunities to live by waiting to live. Like I started
looking around me and going, Okay, what possibilities do I
have to live in here? And they were very limited? Right,
(21:47):
Like I cannot open a single door, There's very few
people I can talk to. I only have one ten
minute phone call a week. I only have one visitation
a week that lasts for an hour, and only very
specific people can come visit me. I have very few
opportunities in life. I my opportunities weirdly expanded once I
(22:10):
looked around me in the prison environment, and I realized
that many of the women that I was in prison
with were actually very less privileged than me, despite me
being the innocent person in prison, and how unfair that was.
Like all of these guilty women around me did not
have loved ones who cared about them could not read
and write, were you know, dealing with mental illness or
(22:31):
drug addiction. I had none of those problems, and so
I discovered that I could develop a prison hustle, so
a sense of purpose in prison, where I started writing
and reading people's letters for them, helping them understand their
court documents. And it became this like invaluable resource that
both selfishly elevated me within the prison, you know, hierarchy
(22:54):
as someone to not fuck with, you know, like you
don't want to, you know, like this is Amanda writes
our letters for us, do not bother her, you know.
And on the flip side, it was helpful to other people.
And so the possibilities for any single person in prison
are very very limited, but they are there. It's just that,
(23:17):
you know, for me, surviving in prison meant that I
took everything day by day. I did not have dreams
of my future. I had a really hard time imagining
how I could live a fulfilled life in prison, and
I had to grieve the things that were stolen from me,
(23:38):
like the possibility of having children. Women who are imprisoned,
and especially for long sentences, are facing our biological clocks
running out while we are in prison, and so not
only do we lose, you know, the opportunity of a
career or anything like that, but we lose the opportunity
of having a family of our own. And I had
(24:01):
to grieve that and try to imagine a life worth
living that didn't have that aspect to it, and it
was really, honestly too difficult for me to imagine. So
I instead focused on how do I make today worth living?
And I'll figure out tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Tomorrow, Yeah, And I imagine. You know, Sandy doesn't have
the same circumstances, but it's a similar thing of the
connections that she can get with her grandchildren, the connections
that she can get with her daughter. You know, one
thing that you talk about which you know, even though
I didn't get to meet Sandy in person, I do
know her daughter and I spent a couple days with
(24:40):
her in London. And you know, Liz really talks about
and you talk about it in your book too, as
this before and after where she really remembers who she
was before her dad's.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
Murder and her mom's imprisonment and who she is now.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
And you know, she talks about similar things that you
talked about in your most recent book of not being
able to trust anybody to feeling, you know, a gloraphobic,
And I think that that would be a great thing
if you could just kind of talk about your own
experience of those two identities, you know, and I imagine
please correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
You know, you were talking about.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
This fantasy of maybe getting out what life will be like,
maybe isn't what you fantasize, and how you sort of
start to make sense of this new life.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Yeah, I look back on my life and see it
as as I've lived three distinct lives, right Like, there's
before I was arrested for a crama didn't commit, and
then there's the life that I lived in prison, and
then there is the life that I have lived since
(25:48):
I've been fully exonerated. And they are very very different
lives and very different people in a way who lived
those lives, right Like, since you know, getting out of prison,
I went back to Italy, because you know, while I
was in prison, I had this fantasy that as soon
(26:10):
as I got out, I would get to go back.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
To that life of before prison.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
I would get to go back to being the anonymous
college student who was, you know, studying languages and doing
creative writing, and this horrible thing that just happened to
me that didn't really have anything to do with me
would fade away.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Like it would go away.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
And I was very rudely awakened to the reality that
that was not the case when I got home, not
just because I was still on trial after being released
from prison, and the media were, you know, following me around,
and I was still the girl accused of murder in
the in the public imagination, I could never go back
(26:58):
to being an anonymous person in the world, like I
was carrying the stigma of that accusation forever with me
from an external point of view. But on top of that,
there is the realization that the girl that nothing bad
had ever happened to no longer existed. And I was
carrying with me a deep knowledge and experience of suffering
(27:23):
that I didn't have before that had changed me and
that I now was burdened with having.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
To make sense of. And it it changed me.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
I mean, like I had emotions that I'd never really
felt before, a big one being rage. I was not
somebody who experienced rage when I was a kid. Like
that was deep deep existential angst or I was never
the kind of person who was triggered by being around
(27:54):
other people. Or there was this period of time and
I got out when everyone in my family sort of
had to walk around on eggshells around me because they
didn't know what kind of thing was going to set
me off, and because they had not, you know, walked
through the prison experience alongside me, They had not been
in the interrogation room with me, And so there were
(28:16):
things that I experienced in the real world that had
like just a little bit of resonance, or even just
something like walking down the sidewalk and glimpsing somebody out
of the corner of my eye who reminded me a
lot of one of my cellmates. And then immediately I'm
just like back on the prison block, and I'm just
and I have to like get that out of my
head so I can just keep on walking to my
(28:38):
job at the bookstore.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Right Like, there are these.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Things, like you feel haunted by these experiences that you've
gone through, and you have to make sense of them
in order to feel like you are not just utterly
debilitated by them, which is the journey that I then
describe in my new book, which is taking the question
of like now what now that I've gone through this?
(29:02):
Now what how do I have a place in the
world after this? How do I trust people after this?
How do I trust myself after all of this? Those
are big questions that anyone who has gone through trauma
is going to face, but especially someone who has been
again victimized by crime and the criminal justice system, those
(29:23):
institutions like collapsed beneath her, beneath me?
Speaker 3 (29:29):
And how do.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
You rebuild a sense of stability and confidence in the
world and in humanity after having that taken away from you? Right,
We've all had loss, We've all had a.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Worse moment of our lives.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
We've all had something happened to us that was out
of our control. And it is finding that common ground
that we can see each other and support each other.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Beautifully said, thank you so much. Yeah, I think so
often it's hard for us to fathom what it's like
going through something like Amanda did. But if we can
focus on the universal experiences she flagged, like loss, grief,
having something happen to us outside of our control, it
(30:18):
may help us better understand each other in the different.
Speaker 4 (30:21):
Paths all our lives take.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
So I want to thank Amanda again for taking the
time to chat with me, and after a quick break,
I'll catch up at the Innocence Project of Texas and
hear some of the latest developments in Sandy's case. So again,
(30:46):
welcome back, appreciate you staying with us. Before we hear
from the Innocence Project of Texas, a quick reminder of
where things were left. Back in twenty twelve, on the
night Jim's body was found, the police swapped the crime
scene for DNA and took away more than one hundred
bits of evidence for further testing, but because they were
(31:06):
low level samples, many didn't reveal much. As we heard
in the last episode, technology has come a long way
since then, and the Innocence Project is trying to get
some of those bits of evidence retested. We heard about
the murder weapon, the knife that was found in the jacuzzi,
and how a new test showed Jim's DNA was found
(31:29):
on it, but so is at least one other person's,
someone who isn't Sandy or anyone else in the family. Now,
other samples from the crime scene have been reanalyzed, like
the fabric that was used to tie Sandy up in
the closet where she was found, and Mike Ware from
the Innocence Project of Texas explains what those tests reveal.
Speaker 6 (31:54):
The bindings on Sandy. They have reanalyzed the data taken
from the swabs from the bindings on her arms and hands,
and they have determined that her DNA's on there, but
so is an unknown person's DNA on there. It's not
anybody in the families. It doesn't belong to them who
originally found her and untieder. It is an unknown DNA.
(32:16):
Now it's not redundant of what's on the knife handle,
which does tells us there were two people.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
So there's Sandy's DNA as you'd expect on the bindings
used to tire up, but there's also someone else's DNA,
and that DNA is different to the DNA on the knife.
Speaker 6 (32:34):
There's no reason to believe there was not at least
two people. I have no reason to believe there weren't
two people. One person's DNA on the bindings of Sandy,
another person's DNA on the murder weapon, which I think
is enough that she should win a writ on.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
That, a writ of habeas corpus, which basically means they're
asking for a federal court to re review Sandy's case
because they believe she is wrongly in prisoned.
Speaker 6 (33:01):
When you look at the evidence at trial vs. IV,
this new evidence, it's very powerful. And then we decided
that we wanted to DNA test the hair or hairs
that were in Jim's hand. They're fairly short, rootless hairs
in around his hand. This is not you know, a
(33:23):
case where he was shot by a gun from across
the room. He was in a struggle that resulted in
you know, however, many stab and cut wounds, and so
this was a very as they say, up close and personal.
So if he has a hair or hairs, regardless of
the fact that they're very short and rootless in his hands,
(33:47):
that belonged to an unknown individual, once again, we would
say that it's highly likely that that unknown individual that
is not Sandy and is not him, is the person
he was struggling with in his you know, last moments.
And the judge has signed the order ordering that done,
ordering that testing done.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
And so that's the first step to kind of start
to figure out whose hair, If it isn't Gems or Sandy's,
whose it could possibly.
Speaker 6 (34:14):
Be well, it belongs to the murderer who's not Sandy.
That's whose it is. Now. The only way to identify
whose it is is to have an alternative suspect and
get a profile from that alternative suspect and do a
side by side and if it's a match, that in
and of itself might not be enough to convict that
(34:36):
person because the numbers are not that high.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
I know, in our last conversation you were saying that
justice is very much a marathon and not a sprint.
But in terms of these new developments and these new angles,
where are you on the hope spectrum?
Speaker 6 (34:55):
I feel very cautiously optimistic. And the thing about getting
back into court and getting a judge involved, I mean,
the DA's office has been very cooperative with us, but
having a judge involved and having a formal motion and
this is a formal what we call Chapter sixty four
motion for post conviction DNA testing, we've got kind of
(35:17):
those guardrails that you know, we've got a judge pushing
us along too, so hopefully that will speed the process.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Well. I hope that you'll keep us posted on how
it goes in these results, because it seems like things
are moving in ways that when the last time we
talked it, it seems like there's more momentum now.
Speaker 6 (35:40):
I think so, I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
We will continue to be following this story as it progresses,
and I hope we'll be able to update you with
any major developments. Not to be all like in subc
but liken subscribe and any new updates will be uploaded
to the feed. Next week. I'm going to get into
some of the stuff that didn't quite make it into
(36:10):
the series, including more on the home invasions that we're
plaguing parts of Texas in twenty twelve. I hope you'll
stay with us, and I hope to see you next week.
Thanks you've been listening to Hands Tied. I'm Maggie Robinson
(36:33):
Katz and the producer is Maggie Latham. Sound design and
mix is by Tom Brignoll. Our script consultant is Emma
Weatherall production support is from Dan Martini, Elena Boutang, and
Mabel Finnigan Wright, and our production executive is Laura Jordan Raul.
The series was developed by Anya Saunders and Emma Shaw
(36:57):
at iHeart. The Managing Executive producer is Christina Everett. And
for BBC Studios. The executive producer is Joe Kent.
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