Radley Balko + Tucker Carrington: The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

After two three-year-old girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, two innocent men were convicted and were in prison for decades. Meanwhile the real killer remained free. Today I’m talking to Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington about their fantastic book, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
What must it have been like to be Levon and
be sitting in that chair, you know, knowing you've just
been wrongly convicted of crime, but then like having to
sit there and take it while somebody's saying that you're
biologically defective and you're missing this part of your brain,
and like they're doing it in your interest to save
your life, you know.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,

(01:00):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. After two three year old
girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, two innocent

(01:21):
men were convicted and were in prison for decades. Meanwhile
the real killer remained free. Today, I'm talking to Radley
Balco and Tucker Carrington about their fantastic book, The Cadaver
King and the Country Dentist, a true story of injustice
in the American South. Tucker and my father started the

(01:43):
Actual Innocence Clinic at the University of Texas. Before he died,
I worked with them. I was at the journalism well
I'm still at the journalism school, but I co taught
the law school class at actual Nisance Law School class
so I would take attorney of Young Young, one of
the attorneys to prison and interview potential clients. But my
dad never saw our first exoneration. He died before that happened.

(02:07):
So I really admire this book, but I especially admire
the work that you do know, and maybe we could
talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
First.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Tell me a little bit about what you do, and
then Bradley, let's talk a little bit about your area
of expertise before we jump into the story.

Speaker 4 (02:23):
Yeah, I teach at the law school. I teach a
couple of doc chrinal classes from time to time, but
mainly what I do is teach in the legal clinic, which,
as you know, maybe listeners don't, is an opportunity for
law students, usually like in their second or third year
of law school, to jump into what amounts to a
small law practice and put into practice the sort of

(02:45):
theory that they've learned in their sort of doctrinal classes.
And there's all different kinds of clinics. I happen to
direct a criminal justice clinic, specifically an innocence clinic, So
we have live cases in the clinic that were work
you knowin either we're investigating to see whether we think
it's a meritorious claim that we should devote some resources

(03:06):
to all the way to cases that are deep into litigation,
and the students come in and they are in essence,
associates in this small law firm, and they get to
work alongside with practicing licensed attorneys who are either me
or my colleagues, or we often co counsel cases with

(03:27):
outside lawyers, lawyers outside of the law schools, sometimes in
the cippy or elsewhere. And you know, the other thing
I'd say about is what you sort of alluded to
with your dad and the clinic at Texas, which is
for students really irrespective of what clinic they're in, but
particularly this one, it's a remarkable experience because, as I

(03:47):
tell them, there will never be another time when it's
the first time you go to Parchment, say, and meet
a client who is serving a life sentence, and that
can be a very formative experience. It doesn't mean that
all the students will go out and do this kind
of practice, but they will be different lawyers, one hope's

(04:08):
better lawyers, more empathic lawyers as a result of having
these experiences, and they'll never forget it. And so you know,
it's a real privilege for me to be able to
teach and you know, sort of be alongside and when
they had when they have those experiences.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yeah, my experience with taking students to different prisons in
Texas was you know, they were, of course expecting the
law school students and the journalism students were expecting this
to be an experience out of television. And we got
to one small, small Texas prison and you know, like
the guard was in the tower and he lowered a
bucket for us to put our keys and our cell

(04:46):
phone in and they got padded down and you know,
I was asked, you have metal wire and your bra
and then we had a contact a visit which none
of us expected for a guy who had been convicted
of killing three people. And my dad talked about all
that shakes you up. It really shakes them, you know,
and in a good way.

Speaker 4 (05:04):
I think your Brad story is funny because I had
a student who did have underwire in her bra and
for whatever reason, you know, the prison that day was like, Nope,
I don't know how many students I've been with. I
don't check their bras for underwire, but I know, you know,
in the past. So we had to run out the
Dollar General and shop for you know, and I was like,

(05:25):
I bet you didn't have this on your law school
bingo card, you know, having the one of your professors,
you know, buy you some some underwear. But that's something
all joking aside. It is the kind of experience that
you just just don't get unless you do the work.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
Radley.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
But what about you, Is this your first experience working
kind of in exonerations or is this part of what
you do as a journalist.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
Well, I kind of got my start in journalism with
a case that was a wrongful conviction, although it resulted
in him getting a plea deal and not an exoneration.
But it was the case of Corey May which was
also in Mississippi. And actually how I first learned about
Stephen Haynes because he did the autopsy in that case.
But yeah, that was a case where the guy had

(06:11):
was sleeping in his home which was half of a duplex.
The police raided the place in the middle of the night.
His eighteen month old daughter was on the bed. It
turns out they were targeting the guy who lived in
the other half of the duplex, who was a known
drug dealer. And this guy, Corey, woke up, you know,
heard people breaking into his house, shot and killed one
of the officers and then immediately surrendered with bullets still

(06:34):
left in the gun. And so yeah, I started writing
about that case, and you know, there were a lot
of problems in that case. But one of the problems
was the testimony that Stephen Hayn gave. Corey claimed he
was on the ground and was shooting up at the
officer because he was scared, and Hayne claimed that the
trajectory the bullet was going down through the officer's body
and so then he speculated the Corey must have been

(06:55):
sort of laying in weight to pounce and it you know,
it had a big impact on the jury. It wasn't
you know, it wasn't the most by any means of
the most outrageous testimony Haine had ever given, but you know,
it was enough probably to swing the jury. And you know,
even at that point, it was very early in my career,
but I had sort of done enough of these raide
cases to know that when you know, when you find

(07:17):
one thing, when you find one instance of that sort
of misconductor or misleading testimony for somebody who probably haven't
found the only example. So I just started calling around
the South and just saying, you know, I'm looking into
a questionable medical examiner. And like most of the times,
I couldn't finish the sentence before the person would say, oh,
you're talking about Stephen Hayin in the Mississippi right, Like wow,

(07:39):
So so yeah. I mean, I I've written about a
number of wrongful convictions over the years, but that one,
that one was the one that was kind of kind
of started my career and also was the gateway to
this book.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
I think, let's start with the story. You know, true
crime is so heavy as a genre, but this story
feels even heavier than most of the stories that I've covered.
We're talking about two little girls who were raped and
then murdered. We're talking about wrongful convictions with very clear

(08:09):
racist undertones throughout, and bad science the justice system. There
are so many big themes, Tucker. I wonder when you're
at some dinner party and somebody says, give me the
thirty second pitch on this book, what do you highlight
the most besides this is clearly a wrongful conviction case.

Speaker 4 (08:30):
Well, usually I just walk away and get another drink
when someone asked me that. Now, because the story can
be so dispiriting, I want to go back a second though,
before I answer your question and say, one of those
people that Radley called was me. I had just gotten
to Mississippi, and I've told this story before, but it's true.

(08:52):
The law school wasn't quite prepared for my arrival. So
I had this sort of cut up office, small on
both portions, with a sort of half dividing wall in
my desk and computer were on one side and the
phone was on the very other. And you know, I
got there and I started the clinic, so there was

(09:13):
there was really nothing there, and there were several days
early on when I looked around, there's no application, nothing.
But one day my phone rang, and you know, I thought,
oh my god, this is this is great. Someone's reaching out.
I ran across to get out to go, you know,
to the other side, and it was Radley who had
not I think it was the first time we had spoken.
And anyway, all that to say that it's true that

(09:36):
Radley you know, got involved in this Corey May case
and has been indefatigable ever since. Radley did go briefly
to law school. In some ways, I'm glad he didn't finish,
because he's a terrific journalist, but he would have been
a ferocious lawyer by the same token. So I guess
what I say to an answer to your question is
I had an inkling for lack of a better word,

(09:59):
about some of what was going on, both because of
what Radley was asking me in the Corey May stuff
he was covering. I also remember distinctly being in my
office again early on and really not sort of knowing
what to work on the att or how to organize things.
So I thought, well, let me just read some recent

(10:19):
Mississippi Supreme Court opinions. I'll start there. And I picked
up one, and it was a murder case where the
victim had been killed with a shotgun from a sort
of distance, and the expert had testified that he could
tell essentially where the person was and the angle of
the gun, and that the person in fact had been

(10:41):
across the street shooting at an upward trajectory, as I recall,
and I remember I had just come from DC. I
was a public defender, and I remember thinking, what in
God's name is who possibly can testify to this? Like
what this would never I mean, it would never have
even been offered DC Superior Court, much less, and it was.

(11:02):
It turned out it was doctor Haynes who testified. And
this was early on. I didn't I hadn't connected all
the dots yet, but as between Radley's called, I distinctly
remember reading that case. And then in late two thousand
and seven, early two thousand and eight, these two cases,
the Kennedy Brewer case in the Levon Books case which
you were talking about, both men were exonerated the Innocent

(11:24):
Project in New York. I've been working specifically on Brewer's
case for a number of years. They were both exonerated,
and as you said, part of what convicted them was
fraudulent evidence from these two guys that Weld document in
the book, and it became apparent, then obviously a parent
that this was sort of the tip of the iceberg,

(11:44):
and that there likely were a significant number of other
cases that they had been involved in. And then you know,
that begs a lot of questions, not only Okay, how
do we identify the cases the other cases that need
some exims emanation, but it also begs questions about forensic science,
begs questions about what appeared to be at least implicit,

(12:09):
if not the sort of explicit efforts by all sorts
of people, law enforcement, the Attorney General's office, courts to
allow these guys to flourish. So I guess that's a
long way of saying when someone asked me that at
a dinner party or whatever, I guess I also tell
them we should go read the book. It's a chunk,

(12:29):
you know, It's it's not just mean. I think Riley
and I when we wrote the book, I think Radley
agrees with this. Emeli does that what we wanted to
do was not only talk about the individual cases, but
really create a record of just how deep and the
breadth of what had happened over the course of a
couple decades in the state.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's so hard to kind
of squeeze into an elevator pitch just because I mean,
this is why we wrote the book, because over the years,
you know, Tucker and I would would talk and discuss
some of these cases and discuss kind of what was
happening in terms of Hain and you know, meantime I'm
writing about individual cases, and the amount of exposition that
I have to like lay out, you know, the number

(13:11):
of paragraphs just kind of set everything up so you
fully understand, you know, why this case is completely screwed up.
And then Tucker, you know, is having to do the
same thing in his in his court filings at some
of these cases. And I think at some point we
just both realized that, like, if somebody's got to put
all of this somewhere, like, you know, this has to
be there has to be a place where somebody can

(13:32):
go to read this whole entire story. And and I
think that's when we decided that we needed to write
this book.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
For the purposes of our show. You know, we're very narrative.
We like to tell the story in as much detail
as we can to really get a sense of who
the people are. Do we have a lot of information
or enough information about these two little girls to kind
of be able to tell the story chronologically starting with
their situations. Do we know anything about their personality that

(14:00):
kind of thing, Well.

Speaker 4 (14:02):
You ask a really good, a good question. I would
say that these girls are both quite young. They're roughly
three years old. So inasmuch as a three year old
I think can develop, you know, a personality and a
place in the family, I think they did that. I
was actually just down in Knoxaby last week visiting with
Kennedy Brewer, and one of the things I thought, sitting

(14:24):
down on his he lives at his mom's house now,
but sitting out in the carport and there are some
kids running, little kids running around, is that it's a
very sort of poverty stricken part of East Mississippi, and
in particular in the black community. You know, that's particularly true.
One of the things that struck me as I was
watching this one little kid play was just how much

(14:46):
of a sort of community effort it is a cross
generational effort to live down there, and that that includes
raising children everybody sort of looks out for everybody else.
You know, there's grandmothers and aunts and friends, and you know,
I think it would strike some people as not ideal.

(15:06):
You know, there's not a whole lot of nannies around,
or governesses or summer opportunities, right There's there's not a
lot of that down there, and instead there's this group
effort to survive and in particular to raise children. And
I think just to start that was one of the
tragedies in these cases, was that these children were being

(15:31):
taken care of in this way. And the downside to
that was and I think maybe I can give a
Radley an entree to the point he wanted to make
was that, you know, there wasn't anybody specifically in charge
on either of the Knights that these young children were abducted,
and so what that meant was that there were a

(15:54):
host of people who suffered the consequences of feeling they
failed this child somehow, and of course they really hadn't.
You know. It was a tragic situation and there was
a sort of serial rapist at work, but not only
did it destroy a number of people's lives. When Kennedy

(16:17):
and Levon were prosecuted. They weren't really the only ones
that were prosecuted. There were others who were arrested. And
then the sort of concentric circles of pain sort of
radiated out from these events. And what's upsetting about that
is that these communities work really hard to do well

(16:39):
by their children. They're not perfect. You know, you could
argue all day about how, you know, how people raise kids, right,
we all have different opinions, but they do their best
under the circumstances. And here they all suffered greatly as
a result of what happened, and they're sort of their
whole way of acting and being, which until that day

(17:00):
they had felt was more than adequate, came under scrutiny,
to say the least. That doesn't really quite put you
at the chronological place maybe you want to be, but
that sort of sets the tone for, i think, for
the atmosphere for sort of what happened.

Speaker 2 (17:15):
I'll talk a little bit about the night of the
first murder, you know, at the home of this this
little girl, you know, they put her to bed and
there's kind of a bit of a gathering on the
porch as people were preparing to go out, and you know,
some people were going to this club that had opened
for a while that you know, played kind of newer
music or had newer bands, and then some of the

(17:36):
older people were going to finally Grick Hall, right one
of the juke joints nearby. But everybody kind of meets
and meets up on this porch and socializes a little bit,
and you know, there's there are exchanges. At one point,
I think somebody hits on somebody else and there's a
little bit of jealousy there, and then you know, they
all kind of go out, and what happens is one

(17:57):
uncle I believe it is, is asleep on the couch
and that's really kind of the only adult who's around.
And so this guy who ends up committing these crimes
is able to kind of tiptoe past him because he
to sleep on the couch and able to abduct the
little girl. And that's Tucker talked about. What happens next is,
you know, it's basically just kind of a drag net

(18:18):
for you know, black any young black men are actually
not even young any black men who are in the area.
So you know, they start with this older I guess
would be sort of a great uncle, maybe who may
have hit on somebody else, you know, and so they,
the law enforcement here, you know, sort of processes that
as some sort of sex pest type crime. So immediately

(18:39):
they start focusing on him. They end up arresting, you know,
basically most of the black men in this family at
some point or another, and they're all kind of put
in a jail cell. And I think at one point
Tucker correct me if I'm wrong, but the sheriff down
there says, basically, sort of like his his method of
investigating a case like this is just to arrest anybody
who could have done it and sort of put them

(19:00):
all together and eventually the truth will shake out. And
you know, that has really broad ramifications. I mean, the
one guy who was arrested, the older gentleman, you know,
he was a youth sports coach, and he gets put
on the evening news as a suspect in this case,
and he never really recovers from it. And that's also
true of one of the younger guys who's arrested. He

(19:21):
ends up sort of later in the homeless. You know,
just the arrest themselves have really profound implications on and
these are the family, you know, these are the families
of the victim, right, I mean, these aren't just sort
of random people. I mean people are also grieving as
they're going through all this. You know, one of the
things that Tucker told me that Kennedy Brewer in the
other case had told him at one point was that,

(19:41):
you know, when he got out, which was you know,
I don't know, was it fifteen years or so after
the crime, he was finally able to grieve, you know,
like he like this little girl too. But he didn't
have time to agree because he was constantly you know,
he's fighting this conviction. You know, the people who were
affected by the way law enforcement approached this case were
also you know, victims, they were also a family of

(20:03):
the deceased. We talk about race a lot in this book.
I would also point out that the sheriff in this
case was black, and a lot of the people involved
in the system were black. I think it's important to
emphasize that because you hear a lot, particularly you know,
since the George Floyd protests, that there's this sort of
implicit assumption that a system can't be racist to black
people are operating in it. You know, I think what

(20:24):
we detail in this book is that the very nature
of systemic racism is that everybody in the system is racist,
is that the system itself is a racist, regardless of
who's operating in it. And I think this case, you know,
in the way it was handled, both of these cases
actually really emphasized that point.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
What's the name of the first victim? Are you you
all withholding that or do you talk about her at all?

Speaker 4 (20:45):
No, we're not withholding it at all. The fact we
dedicate the book to Courtney Smith and Christine Jackson. Courtney
Smith was the victim in the first case, in Christine
Jackson in the second.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
So when Courtney Smith goes missing in nineteen and she's
got this you know uncle, great uncle on the couch,
and the sheriff who's black, is combing the whole town
specifically looking for a black man who they're presuming took her.
At what point do they start targeting Levon Brooks And
how is he related to Courtney's family at all?

Speaker 2 (21:20):
So Levon had at one point dated Courtney's mother. You know,
the thing is he never really should have been a suspect.
He was working at this club on the night of
the murdered. In fact, Courtney's mom saw him at the
club that night, as did other people. You know, he
becomes a suspect for reasons that are so. There was
one the older uncle had a habit of putting a

(21:42):
quarter in his ear, and so when they're interviewing Courtney
Smith's sister, who was in the room at the time
of the abduction, she, you know, at some point she
says something about an ear or something about somebody having
something in their ear, and the guy who's interviewing her,
who we can talk about later, Uncle bunk kind of
seizes on this and makes it and basically sort of

(22:04):
thinks that, oh, he must have been wearing an earring,
and so Levon Brooks for an earring. He had once
dated Courtney's mother. I don't think he actually ever even
met Courtney. But he becomes a suspect basically because he
wears an earring and because the girl at one point
described somebody who had a quarter in the air. The
uncle who put his quarters in his ear, you know,

(22:24):
was innocent also, but he just happened to be there
that night the girl saw him. I mean, I gotta
tell you, when you read the interview Uncle Bunkie had
this girl, it is it's one of the most sort
of tragic and heartbreaking and also sort of darkly I mean,
if it were fiction, it would be darkly humorous, right,
because it's just the way that he pulls information out

(22:47):
of her and sort of keeps what he wants and
discards everything else. I mean, it's just a it is
a it ought to be sort of taught as how
not to interview children for law enforcement, but that this
is how Levon becomes a suspect. Basically, it's this kind
of loose connection with the ear. He then gives her
a couple of photo lineups and both of them they're

(23:08):
highly suggestive, and it's pretty clear, you know, sort of
who he wants her to choose.

Speaker 1 (23:14):
Now, what is Levon saying he was doing at the
time you said he was at a club? Is that?
Is that what his alibi is for when Courtney disappears.

Speaker 4 (23:22):
Leavon did a lot of things for work, and one
of them was to work at this club, which was
between a little town where this happened in Columbus, Mississippi,
which is a bigger town a sort of on the
Alabama border, and this club I think was relatively new,
it was popular. It's packed on the weekends and Levon
worked there after his regular job, and he was sort

(23:43):
of like a jack of all trades. He got there
early and set up. Levon passed away a few years ago.
He was a super charismatic when you say Radley, nice,
funny gentle. People were drawn to him. He was a
great higher at this club. As you can imagine. He's
he was the bouncer, but as far as I know that,
I can never actually had to engage in any bouncing

(24:05):
because he just sort of, you know, negotiated problems down
would be my guest, but that's where he was working
the night that or during the time that she was abducted.
He found out that he was a suspect because he
came to the club one evening a few days after

(24:26):
the murder, and the law enforcement had just been there
looking for him, and so his coworker said, hey, they
just they came to look for you. They wanted to
talk to you about the Courtney Smith thing. And so
Levon said, well, you know, let me go run down
to Macon, which is the county seat, and to the
police station and let me just take care of this

(24:46):
and now I'll be back still early, I think still
early enough the afternoon and the evening, I'd be back
to work. So he went down and said, I don't
know what to tell you. I was at work and
have anything to do with it. But that was it.
That was the last time, you know, he was free
until he was exonerated in two thousand and eight, and
we went down to sort of straightened things out.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
Well, you know, the last we had known she had
been taken and was missing. When do we find out
what actually happens to Courtney? How long does that take?

Speaker 2 (25:15):
I want to say it was about three or four days.
Is that right? Took her?

Speaker 4 (25:17):
That's about right. There's a little bit of delay in
figuring out that she's missing because, as I said before,
you know, taking care of these kids, oftentimes the group
effort and these kids would sort of go from one
house to another. So when people get there the following
morning sort of come back into the house and she's
not there. No one raises a real alarm because that's

(25:38):
not uncommon for the kids, especially the two children in
the house, to walk down to a relative's house down
down the road. And this, by the way, is a
part of town which is it's dirt roads. It's a
real small community. People wandering around, ride bikes all over
the place, and they think even that her mom may
have come back and picked her up and gone somewhere.

(25:59):
So the arm doesn't really get raised until later that evening,
So it's almost not quite twenty four hours after because
the mom comes home and they say, have you seen her?
And she says, no, I thought you had, you know,
that kind of thing. Yeah, And so the sort of
realization that she's missing happens the following evening and police recall,

(26:23):
law enforcement comes out and there's a search that sort
of goes on through the night. It becomes difficult, obviously
when it gets super dark to do much searching in
places out of the waite places. And so the next
day one of the law enforcement officers happens to be
there's a there's a little pond. It's about I don't know,

(26:44):
half an acre maybe an acre in size, not too
far away from the house. They had searched the pond
the evening before but hadn't hadn't been able to see anything,
but he looks again and sees something floating in the
pond and walks out to it. It's not very deep
and it's her body that has sort of floated up,
and so he pulls it to shore. So it's I

(27:05):
don't know, it's roughly thirty six maybe a little bit hours,
maybe a little bit more than that after she disappears,
that they find her in this pond.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
And I always have to remind myself and I try
to remind listeners to the time period that we're talking about,
which nineteen ninety doesn't seem like all that long ago
to me, at least my age. But we didn't have
cell phones. I didn't get a cell phone until I
think ninety four. This is a much slower process the search,
even getting her out of the water and driving her.

(27:35):
I mean, there's just delay after delay, I think, compared
to what we experience now when somebody goes missing and
then they're discovered, there's just so much more lag time
because you don't have you have a home phone, you
have a phone at the precinct. Maybe you have radios,
you know, and all of that, and pay phones. But
the communication, particularly when Courtney went missing but nobody knows

(27:57):
it is I'm sure severely delayed because of that.

Speaker 4 (28:01):
Yeah, it's and it's you have to Yeah, you do
have to cast yourself back to nineteen ninety and this
community where kids go off for a while, you know,
and even kids this young, it'll go far, but they'll
go down to somebody else's house because someone else makes
really good, you know, food, and they'll go down there
and watch television. So, you know, the sort of looseness

(28:23):
of you know, the way people live and care for
one another down there actually ended up sort of contributing
to the delay and in realizing that she was in
fact missing.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
Will you tell me, I know that they found out
that she had been raped. Do we have a cause
of death for Courtney?

Speaker 4 (28:40):
Yeah? The cause of death was manual strangulation and freshwater drowning.

Speaker 1 (28:45):
What were they able to pull from her? I'm assuming semen,
anything else that was helpful. She was in the water
for a few days. I don't know what the dcomp
was like on that.

Speaker 4 (28:53):
Not really, you know, this is pre DNA at some level.
It wasn't like the forensic examination collection was with an
eye towards what we all now would think about think
of DNA testing. And also as we get further into
the story, it's unclear precisely what they were able to
get in the way of a rape kit, but they

(29:15):
did do a rape kit. Other than that, I don't
know that there was really much that was material or
probative ultimately with respect to the evidence they collected. But
there was one important piece of evidence which was collected earlier.
There's a patch of earth. There's probably more than one,
but somewhere over central Knoxabye County where the Fourth Amendment

(29:37):
doesn't apply. That was where all these adult males were
just rounded up. But one of the things law enforcement
did was they took cheek swabs from all the people
that they rounded up, which comes to be an important
factor later on in the case.

Speaker 1 (29:54):
What was Courtney Smith's mother's reaction to the interest and
her ex boyfriend, Levon Brooks. Did she think, yeah, that
totally makes sense that guy was a scumbag or did
they have a good ending?

Speaker 3 (30:08):
What was her reaction?

Speaker 2 (30:09):
Yeah, So Levon was you know, as Tucker said, he
was extremely charismatic. He had a lot of girlfriends over
the years, but he also always seemed dend things on
a good note with him, so he didn't have you
know a lot of women angry at him for past romances.
And that was true of Courney Smith's mother as well.

(30:31):
She saw him at the club that night. She said, Hi,
you know, they had a brief conversation, and you know,
I think both because of who Lebron was and the
type of person that he was, and because she had
she had seen him that night, she was skeptical of
him as a suspect. And that goes all the way
through his trial, and in fact, one of the just

(30:52):
really kind of chilling moments for me and the story is,
you know, she testifies at his trial. She's you know,
she's not a hostile witness for the state, but she's
not she's not incriminating Lebron. She's just kind of answering
the questions. And then after he gets convicted, during the
sentencing portion, she's called a stand by the prosecutor forrest Allgood,
and he basically asks her if she thinks that Levon

(31:15):
should be executed, and she says no, and he turns
on a dime and he just basically starts treating her
like asti witness. And you know, I mean prosecutors in
these cases they're always talking about the victims, are always
talking about how they represent not just the people, but
also the victims and the victims' voices need to be heard.
And here's a victim saying, I think he got this wrong.
And in his closing argument to the jury, he attacks

(31:37):
her for being a bad mother. He basically says, you know,
she let her daughter get killed, and now she's like
trying to tell you not to execute the man who
killed her, and and you know, just really goes after her.
And it was such a veil dropping movement right where
it's like, you just see just how sort of bloodthirsty
this prosecutor is. And you know she was right in
the end, it wasn't you know, he didn't do it, So,

(31:59):
you know, she again, I think she was victimized obviously
because of what happened to her daughter. But then I
think she was, you know, victimized again by the prosecutor
in the state of Mississippi when she you know, when
they attacked her for being a bad mother at this trial.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
Did whomever do this know that people weren't home, or
this house was relatively empty, or where Courtney would have slept.
Did they have to be familiar with the layout to
be able to pull this off.

Speaker 4 (32:24):
I don't know, you know the real answer to that,
My guess is yes, I mean, I think, you know,
the true perpetrator was a known quantity around the neighborhood,
so I think he must have been familiar at the
very least with, you know, this sort of social dynamics
around these houses and who was at home and who wasn't.
I will also say, though, that you know, what he

(32:46):
did was fairly in both instances, was still fairly brazen,
I guess is the word for, you know, sort of
walking into a house past a sleeping adult in the
above Brooks case and then raising an open closed window
and reaching in the in the Kennedy Brewer case is
both I think raising and also consistent with you know,

(33:09):
someone who has some real significant, you know, anti social
behavior characteristics. I mean, and those weren't the only things,
the only crimes we know that he committed. I think
there were some serious issues going on in addition to
his familiarity with where he was doing these things.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
Yeah, I mean it was he was clearly mentally ill,
and I think he was eventually diagnosed with some sort
of form of schizophrenia. When he confessed to the crimes,
he talked about, you know that there are voices in
his head telling him to do it and you know
not obviously that doesn't excuse anything, but this was somebody
who was suffering from untreated, you know, mental illness, and
this was the result.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
When Courtney Smith is found in this pond and you know,
they are determining cause of death and they're doing the
rape kit and all of that, and the family I'm
assuming is reeling and they are looking at Levon Brooks.
What is then the timeline after that to win another
three year old Kristen Jackson goes missing, same circumstances.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
Does this feel familiar?

Speaker 2 (34:09):
Well, yeah, so they don't, you know, they don't immediately
fixate on Brooks. I mean, Brooks is who they start
to focus on after you know, they've made a couple
of wrongful arrests, and eventually, you know, they focus in
on this earring situation. I mean, maybe maybe one way
to tell the story is to just talk about sort
of how how Brooks became, you know, was arrested and

(34:30):
became the main suspect, which is that they brought in
you know, Stephen Haynes, this medical examiner who does the autopsy,
claims to find bite marks on the body that we
later thought to be bug marks. But this is our
bug bites, but this is you know, decades later. He
then brings in Michael West, his sort of sidekick, who
had been at that point working with five or six
years probably, but they would work together for the next

(34:52):
twenty and so West is brought in to take dental
impressions of all the suspects and I think that maybe
about a half dozen, including insidantly the person who actually
did it. And so West takes dental impressions from all
of these people and basically eventually concludes that that it
was Brooks. And so, you know, they had done a
rape kit. You know, this was very early on in

(35:13):
sort of the DNA story, so that wasn't going to
be conclusive. But you know, Wes clean that his BYTEmark
matching was better than a fingerprint, and so if he
could could match the bite marks on a body to
the teeth of suspect, that was you know, that was gold,
particularly at that time because this was when this bite
mark junk science was sort of finding a lot of

(35:34):
resonance with the courts, and so this is that's how
Ruer ends up being arrested. He's given a eventually he's
given a lie detector test, by an FBI agent who
says he fails it, which should tell you something about
lie detector tests. And so all those things together, I
think basically make make Lebon sort of the main suspect.
And he wasn't. He definitely wasn't the first person to

(35:56):
be arrested, but he was the person they ended up
you know, settling on. And then it is I want
to say, was it about a year and a half later, Tucker,
that the next murder happens.

Speaker 4 (36:06):
Yeah, May of May of nineteen ninety two, and of
course by then Levon had been to trial.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
Right, So yeah, So when I think about this story,
there are moments that still just kind of give me
chills when I think about them. And one of them
is when when all good, you know, force, all good
turns on Courtney's mother. But the other one is at Brooks'
trial also during the sentencing phase. So he's been convicted
and now they're deciding whether or not to sentence him
to death. So during the sentencing portion of Levan's trial,

(36:35):
as mitigation, which is something defense attorneys are supposed to
do to save their client's life, they put on this
expert medical expert who claims that Levon is missing a
piece of his brain that deals with impulse control, and
so that he doesn't have this you know thing that's
sort of part of the brain that makes us civilize, right,
and this is why he's raping and murdering little girls.

(36:57):
And I just remember, like, what what must it have
been like to be Levon and be sitting in that chair,
you know, knowing you've just been wrongly convicted of crime
that he didn't commit, but then like having to sit
there and take it while somebody's saying that, like you're
biologically defective and you're missing this part of your brain,
and like they're doing it in your interest, just to
save your life, you know. But that was one of

(37:18):
the moments of the story that I remember when I
read that of a transcript, you know, I had to
stop and you know, take a break and then go
back to what I was doing.

Speaker 1 (37:26):
So what was he ultimately? Did he get life in
prison or what was his sentence?

Speaker 4 (37:31):
Got sentenced to life? Well, Jerry came back and was
not unanimously noting for death, so he got a life sentence.

Speaker 1 (37:37):
So was is he sent to like a supermax or
where does he end up?

Speaker 4 (37:41):
He has Department Actually, that's not true. That he went
to a different prison in Central Mississippi for a brief
period of time, but then went to Parchment after that.
That's where he spent the bulk of his incarceration.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
And in the grand scheme of prisons in Mississippi, where
does Parchment lay as far as just brutality, I can't
imagine he has an easy time, But where does he
fit in into the ecosystem of prison?

Speaker 2 (38:04):
You know, nobody does well in prison, obviously, but he
does comparably well because he's he's a little older. He
very quickly kind of earns respect of other prisoners. As
Stucker said, he's very charismatic. He told me one story
that I still remember today, which is that, you know,
one of the things he said, when you first get
into prison is that you you're alone, right, You're still
trying to figure the system out. You're still trying to

(38:26):
figure out where you fit into all this. And he said,
just you know, having comfort of someone knowing someone in
that system is kind of on your side, you know,
was immense comfort to him. He didn't find in many places.
One of the things he did at the club where
he worked was he would cook food after the club
closed and sell it to people. So he gets a
job in the kitchen at the prison and he he

(38:48):
leverages that job to help him, you know, sort of
gain social status within the prison. But he talks about
what he talks about. One thing he would do is
he could tell when when there was a new person
in the prison and that they were struggling. And he said,
he remember, you know how important it was to him
for him just to know that somebody was on his
side and somebody found somebody like that, he would just
give them an extra portion of something. And you know

(39:11):
it's not it's not like it's going to be valued
a valued commodity. But it was just the act, you know,
just the sort of note, the idea of hey, you know,
I'm I can tell you're struggling. I'm doing this for you.
And he said one guy in particular, years years later
after he had served as a sentence, came back on
visiting day and told Levon that, like, you know, you
did that to me in my one of my first

(39:32):
days in the prison. You gave me an extra portion.
And he's like, I never forgot it, you know, And yeah,
that was who who Levon was? He was a very empathetic,
very very ahead, a very high social IQ. You know,
he could he could read you, which which I learned
a couple of times when I first met him.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
Well, let's talk about what happens a year and a
half later. Are Kristen Jackson and Courtney Smith? Are their families?
Do they know each other really well? Are they related
in any way? Are they close by each other?

Speaker 4 (40:02):
They know one another, I mean, it's a pretty small
set of communities there, but they don't know each other
super well. Okay, and in fact it's not the same community.
They're roughly I can't remember now, but I think it's
about eight or so miles as the crow flies between
these two communities. It's not far. But they don't know
one another well and they don't socialize often. But they're

(40:25):
not strangers either.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
You know, if people weren't close, everyone sort of knew
of one another.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
In the story, tell me about the circumstances behind Kristen's disappearance.
You said this is May of ninety two, about a
year and a half after Courtney Smith is found dead.

Speaker 4 (40:41):
So Kennedy Brewer, who's the person ultimately charged and convicted
for Christine's murder. He and his girlfriend live in a
house out in the country, sort of set apart from
other handles, is on a dirt road. It's pretty isolated
where they live. It backs up to a bunch of
fields and a creek. The house is in just terrible condition,

(41:05):
as I recalls, a lot of it was dirt floors.
I don't know that they actually had running water, or
at least consistently running water. On the night that all
this happened, Kenny is there with Christine or both. He
and his girlfriend are there, and his girlfriend leaves to
go with some friends out that evening, and Kenny's in

(41:27):
charge of the children, and they're all at home inside,
and he puts them to sleep, to bed, and then
a couple actually a couple of his friends come down,
guy friends from a house up the road. It's actually
the landlord, but they come down and they watch some
TV at his place, and then he goes to sleep.

(41:48):
His girlfriend comes back home. They then all go to bed,
and Christine is in the room with them at the
bottom of their bed when they go to sleep. The
next morning when they wake up, though she's not there.
In that case, it's unlike the earlier one. It's fairly
clear that you know something's gone wrong. She's not. This

(42:08):
is not a community where there's that many people that
live nearby, and so people start looking for her, including Okay,
and they sort of move out up and down the
dirt road. They go to a couple of houses, they
go back into the fields, they go down towards the creek,
and they can't find her. It's not long though, before

(42:31):
they bring some tracking dogs, some bloodhounds in. It doesn't
go well, there's not a it doesn't seem like there's
anything super promising, but one of the dogs does go
down farther along the creek to a pool that you know,
where the creek is pooled some but it's from what
I gathered from law enforcement, it was hard to get

(42:52):
in there. I mean I've been there. It's like it's
a thicket. I think Raley's been there to me, especially
by this point in May. It's difficult to get to
and there's a bunch of snakes, so it's not something
that you just want to sort of, you know, knock
your way into. So they actually bring law enforcement brings
up a big helicopter and they drop the helicopter down

(43:15):
over this portion of the creek, and evidently the rotor
blades blow the water out of this pool far enough
that they can see her body in the pool, and
so they go in and recover it, and you know,
it's it's essentially not unlike the earlier case. She seems
to have been sexually assaulted, probably it's unclear, but you know,

(43:37):
probably strangled, manually strangle, which turns out to be the case.
Her body is found relatively speaking, fairly soon after she's
gone missing.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
Does doctor Hayne identify another bite mark that needs to
be analyzed by his buddy.

Speaker 2 (43:54):
Yeah, so that it happens again. And in this case,
you know, they focus on Kennedy fairly early on because
because there's a little bit of tension between the families,
and you know, I think the Jackson family sort of
suspects Kennedy may have had something to do with it,
and so law enforcement done very quickly focus in on him.
And so Haines finds, you know, magically finds the bite

(44:15):
marks brings in west. You know, they're able to match
the bite marks to Kennedy. You know, one thing about
Wes too is that he was never you know, he
never was able to generate new suspects for the police. Right,
he never was able to find bite marks, and you know,
you didn't have a database. They random against. It was always,
you know, they always brought in West once the police

(44:37):
suspected someone, and then West sort of magically confirmed their suspicions.
And that's what happened in both of these cases.

Speaker 3 (44:42):
Yeah, I have such a hard time.

Speaker 1 (44:44):
Bite mark evidence to me is some of the weirder
of the junk science pseudoscience.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
But I mean West was especially at landish, brazen, cocky,
you know, I mean West claim that he could find
he could use ultra violet light and these yellow goggles
and find bites on a body that nobody else could see,
including including bites bites that had been left you know,
weeks or months earlier that it mostly healed, and you know,

(45:12):
only he could do it. And you know the process
there or seffalcasions where he said the process couldn't be photographed,
so you would just have to sort of take its
word for it, which is convenient, right, because nobody can
replicate it. Nobody can object. He gave these you know,
law enforcement and what they needed to close these crimes.
And you know, clearly there was a lot of pressure
on them to arrest someone, to convict someone who setting

(45:33):
someone quickly in these cases and West and hanging help
them do that. It's just poor said that. You know,
they often not often many times they got the wrong person.

Speaker 3 (45:43):
I just want to be clear.

Speaker 1 (45:44):
We have a grown man and his girlfriend asleep in
a room with this three year old sleeping at the
foot of their bed.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
Is that right, right?

Speaker 1 (45:53):
And then someone sneaks past a grown man and another
person in a bed and snatches this girl and leaves undetected.
Talk about brazen you said that before.

Speaker 4 (46:04):
Well, in this in this case, the facts were slightly different,
and it was actually one of the reasons that Kenny
became a chief suspect was that the house did not
have a functioning The front door did not have a
functioning lock. Instead, the way you locked it was you
turned a nail on the interior up against the frame.

(46:25):
You know, you just twisted the nail, And both Kenny
and his girlfriend said when they woke up, one of
the things that baffled them was the door. The front
door was still latched with this nail, so you know,
she had to have gotten out of the house some
other way, and the only other way really was this

(46:48):
window at the foot of their bed. Law enforcement came
sort of serially, you know, there was no there was
no sort of real organizational scheme. So this first guy
would show up and he looked and figure out someone,
you know, was there any way that someone could have
gotten her out of the bedroom window. So he would
go over and stand outside the house by the bedroom

(47:09):
window and look and figure this looks difficult. Next guy
would show up do the same thing. Finally the sheriff
showed up. Actually two guys showed up, and one, as
I recall, tried to like climb on the other's shoulder
and and you know that was kind of difficult. Then
the sheriff showed up. It's like if he was, you know,
fifty pounds, he's like three hundred and seventy five pounds.

(47:31):
And he walked around and he's like, well, there's no
way that happened, because there was a poke slid plant
at the base of the window and it had quote
unquote been undisturbed. But of course what he didn't know
is well, there had been a whole three or four
people had already done this, you know who who hadn't
disturbed the plant. But what had happened was, and as
the troop perpetrator later explained to law enforcement, he had

(47:54):
come to this window and just you know, pushed it
up and reached He didn't climb in, he didn't come through.
He just pushed it up and looked in and presumably
saw her laying there and reached in and took her.

Speaker 1 (48:09):
That's awful. So do you want to shorthand the trial?
I mean, is he convicted and given a life sentence
just like Levonne Brooks?

Speaker 4 (48:17):
No. Unfortunately for Kenny, I don't know what Rabbit's coming
will be, probably more substant than mine. But I'll just
tell you this. There was concern amongst a lot of
people at first that Kennedy might have been the one
that had killed both girls, because you know, law enforcement
had this problem on their hands, which is, they had
arrested and convicted Brooks for the murder of this three

(48:40):
year old girl. You know, a short time later, the
exact same offense occurs. Clearly it's not Brooks because he's
locked up at Parchment, and so there was there was
some thought that, well, you know, maybe you ever did it.
Still out, maybe it's Brewer that did them both, and
so in part because of that, Brewer's lawyers moved for

(49:04):
a change of venue out of Knoxyby County over to
the neighboring county of Lowndes. Unfortunately, as far as I know,
still Knoxyby County has never returned to death ord in
all the capital cases that have been tried there. Lowndes County,
on the other hand, will do it in a heartbeat.
And he was convicted, and sure enough, unlike Brooks who

(49:29):
was tried in Knoxyby County, Brewer got the death sentence
out of Lowndes County.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
How do they explain the girlfriend saying I would have
known if he had taken this kid and climbed out
the window.

Speaker 3 (49:42):
I mean, what did she have to say about all this?

Speaker 2 (49:44):
Well, they, Tucker, can maybe get more details, but they
I mean, you know, she was also charged and was
basically threatened, and so she, if I recall correctly, she
at first does say that, and then eventually she sort
of comes around and supports the state after she herself
gets arrested. Is that is that right, Tucker?

Speaker 4 (50:05):
Yeah, there was allegations that her children would be They
were threatening to take her children from her and so forth.
You know that and there's seemed to be no other suspects,
and she and Kennedy got crosswise obviously over this and
other things, and she changed her to the extent she
could changed her story.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
There's a moment several years after Kennedy's convicted where you know,
he's finally the Project New York is finally able to
get DNA testing done, and it excludes him. He's not
the source of the semen, you know that they find
in this case. And you know, the same prosecutor that
went after, you know, the mother of the first victim,

(50:44):
now in this case, now he's presented with, you know,
evidence that excludes the person that he convicted and got
sentenced to death. And you know, you would think maybe
that in that position, you have two very similar crimes
that a prosecutor might be like, oh shit, you know, like,
well what am I going to do here? Maybe maybe
Michael West isn't the genius you know that I've there.

(51:04):
At one point he compares them to Copernicus in one case,
that he was a man ahead of his time. But
instead he says, no, well that all that proves that
Kennedy Brewer did in rape her, so he must have
just but we've got this evidence from from Michael West
that the irrefutable. So you know, Brewer must have held
her down and bit her while somebody else raped her.
And so Brewer ends up staying in prison in another

(51:26):
seven years. And all they had to do was run
run the DNA against the state database, and and all
good refused to do that. I don't think I'm not
being uncharitable when I say I think he didn't do
it because he knew not only would it exonerate Brewer,
it probably you know, there's a good chance it could
exonerate Brooks as well and ruined his career maybe you

(51:47):
know who knows. But yeah, the the end result is
that not only does Brewer stay in prison for another
seven years after he should have been exonerated, but then
that means Brooks, you know, also stays in prison long
but he should have I mean, he should never.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
Are both of these men released at the same time
in two thousand and eight, are the separated or what happens?

Speaker 4 (52:07):
What happens is that actually, if I might let me
go back and add to a piece of what Ratling
is talking about, because it's even worse than all that. Initially,
when Brewer was allowed to do his first round of
DNA testing. Remember now Levon Brooks is still locked up
serving his life sentence at Parchment Brewer sentenced to death.

(52:28):
He through the help of some lawyers of Jackson before
the Innocence Project arrived on the scene, he gets leave
to do DNA testing. The test results showed initially that
there was semen in the rate kit from Christine Jackson.
When they tested though to see who the source of

(52:49):
that semen might be, it excluded Brewer and according to
this initial testing initial round of testing, it included two
unidentified male contributors. So the theory at that point for
the prosecution was that, huh, we were still sticking with

(53:10):
our sort of original story. But it must have been
the two friends that came down to watch TV with Kenny.
It was a little bit unclear, but basically their theory
was that Kenny must have I mean, you know, they weren't,
as Radly says, they weren't backing away from the West
BYTEmark identification. So it became this completely ridiculous theory that

(53:36):
Kennedy somehow held the girl down in bitter while these
other two guys sexually assaulted her. And it turns out
that an additional round of testing excluded those two guys.
So at that point this is all pre two thousand
and seven. The state, I don't know what their theory

(53:56):
was exactly. The best articulation, quote best articulation came from
Forest to all Good, which was that Kennedy must have
sold her for some crack cocaine, that this was all
some drug adult performance. Sorry to get down these rabbit holes,
but this is the whole thing is so outrageous. I

(54:17):
still get my blood pressure still gives up when I
talk about it. When the police arrested folks in both
this case and in Brooks's case, they you know, this
this group of people they arrested, they did drug screenings,
and Kennedy Brewer didn't use drugs, so he was cleaned
into the von. The only person who tested positive for

(54:38):
drugs turned out to be the true perpetrator who had
been arrested in Levon's case. So to the extent that
anybody was using drugs, it was not Kenny. It turned
out to be the true perpetrator. In any event, their theory,
sort of unsubstantiated, racist, you know, was that was that
Kenny was using drugs and somehow must have gotten rid

(55:00):
of this girl. But anyway, to get back to your question. Finally,
Kennedy gets convicted and sentenced to death, and then Kennedy
is exonerated first in two thousand and eight early two
thousand and eight, and Levon is actually present at that
hearing but is not exonerated until a couple of months later.

(55:23):
The prosecution asks that may be able to sort of
spend some more time with the DNA results. We haven't.
We haven't gotten to the part yet where Lebon's case
is sort of implicated DNA wise, But by that point
some DNA results come back in his case too, but
the state wanted a little bit more time to review it,
so it took another couple months for him to be exonerated.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
So the two of them are exonerated. When do we
get rid of these stupid theories as well as still
leaning into the forensic bitemark evidence and focus in on
the real perpetrator, who is Justin Johnson.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
Sure, so they find Justin Johnson after running the sample
and Brewer's case through a state database, and then they
eventually go and interview Johnson and he confesses to both
crimes and in in great detail, and and you know,
his confession basically matches, you know, the evidence, and so

(56:26):
it's pretty clear at that point that you know, they
have their their guy, and you know, this, again, this
is a guy who was clearly mentally ill. He uh
obviously clearly had a drug problem in various times. And
the way he just kind of immediately kind of opened
up but almost I don't know, Mitch Tucker agrees with
me in this, but it almost sort of felt like
he was waiting to confess at some point.

Speaker 4 (56:49):
What was really interesting about the DNA testing was that
the lab in California is staffed by some really cruific
friends in DNA analysts whose separate story. They took the
semen sample from Christine Jackson's rape kit and retested it,
and one of the first things they determined was that
there weren't two male contributors. There was only one.

Speaker 3 (57:11):
Oh I was wondering about that.

Speaker 4 (57:13):
Yeah, So then the question was who they didn't know
because they didn't have any reference samples in Brewer's case
to run it against. And at sort of that moment,
one of the things was really interesting is at that moment,
you know, Lavon Brooks is sort of out of luck
because the material, the DNA biological material from his case

(57:34):
had been sent to the same lab, but a lot
of it, at least from the rape kit from the
victim in his case, was not usable. But this is
where those cheek swabs come into the story. If you
remember I mentioned them earlier, when all those guys had
been arrested in Levon's case, they'd done cheek swabs, so

(57:55):
that analyst in California sort of follows the lead of
the project origionally. Wait a minute, you now, these them
in these cases seem remarkably similar. Maybe they somehow or
another in their dragnet got the guy who was around
the house in Brooks's case, who was also, you know,

(58:16):
is the contributor for this semen sample. So they went
back and they started testing the semen sample again in
Brewer's case with me against the cheek swabs in Brooks's case.
And one of the people that had been arrested in
Brooks's case was justin Albert Johnson, the true perpetrator, And
they made the connection.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
By the way, Johnson had a previous sex offense.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
I was going to ask that, so tell me what
his priors were did he have any priors before this happened,
or I guess even in A better question would be
if they had been able to figure this out after
Courtney's case, would anybody aside from Christine's life have been saved?
Was he doing terrible things from Courtney on forward?

Speaker 4 (59:02):
Well, as far as we know, he didn't murder anybody else,
but there were some additional sexual assaults. One of the
really interesting things in my view, and I know I
know Bradley shares this, One of the reasons we decided
to write the book is that these cases, as we say,
shine such a sort of light on real systemic problems,
separated apart from them from the wrongful convictions. And one

(59:24):
of them to me, and one of the most compelling
was Levon to Levin was arrested when he went down
that night to tell the folks that, you know, the
police stationally ind know anything about the murder. He had
to wait I can't now I remember exactly how long,
but over a year to go to trial and he's innocent.
On the morning that his trial was supposed to start,

(59:46):
which was a Monday, his lawyer clearly had sort of
gotten around to preparing the weekend before because the lawyer
noticed that one of the suspects, one of the arrestees
and Ron's case, had been Justin Albert Johnson. It just
so happened that this lawyer represented Justin Albert Johnson in

(01:00:08):
one of his sexual assault cases in making. And so
the lawyer said to the judge, you know, this is
a potential conflict, which he's in. I guess, he said,
potential is because he never really had a theory of
defense form Levon. Clearly, the theory of defense is that,
you know, when you're thinking about investigating this case, is

(01:00:28):
that Levon didn't do it right, and there's someone else
who did, and ideally there's someone else who has exhibited
similar behavior in the past, breaking into people's houses. Yeah,
this lawyer represented the guy.

Speaker 3 (01:00:41):
Amazing.

Speaker 4 (01:00:42):
The judge says, well, to Levon, he says, I guess
you sort of have a choice. You can you can
get a new lawyer because there's a conflict, but that's
I don't know how long that's going to take, and
you're not going to go to trial today. And in
Levon's mind, you know, he's like, well, I'm innocent, Let's
go to trial because the truth will come out and

(01:01:06):
they did go to draw and the truth didn't come out.
You know, the failures on every level, just in that
portion of the back and forth. You know, the lawyer
had just realized the day before trial, essentially the weekend
before trial, that there was this conflict. He realized that,
presumably because he had never really investigated the case, hadn't

(01:01:28):
thought about it that much. They didn't handle the conflict carefully,
you know. I mean, I don't mean to get two
in the weeds, but Levon's lawyer and the judge shouldn't
have been discussing the conflict. There should have been a
separate lawyer. You should have come in and said, hey, look,
you know, I don't know what your defense is, but
your defense needs to be someone else did it, and
we got to figure out who that is, and it's
probably this guy's client would be the best place to start, right.

(01:01:52):
None of that happened, and so Levon, you know, puts
his faith in a system that completely let him down.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
One other things that I think it's kind of amazing
in the story is during Kennedy Brewer's trial, by that point,
Michael West had been criticized by other forensics people and
in fact there had been a few media investigations and
actually during Kennedy Brewer's trial twenty twenty, and John Stossel

(01:02:19):
had been investigating West, and the judge in the case
had heard a rumor that the twenty twenty special was
going to air one night during Kennedy Brewer's trial, and
it ended up airing much later. But in response to that,
they had all the TVs taken out of the rooms
that the jurors were staying in so that they wouldn't
see it, which is, you know, completely understandable, you don't

(01:02:41):
want to buy some jers, but like you know, but
also it didn't cause anyone to stop and think, oh,
because I mean in that in that case, you know,
or that that story ended up being really damning for West.
I mean, it talked about multiple other cases where he
caused the wrong person to be arrested, where you know,
he had given just really preposterous testimony about you know,
finding purse marks on an arm that had you know,

(01:03:05):
happened where someone a person been snatched you know, months
maybe weeks earlier, and using his ultra violet light technology.
I mean, it was just really yeah, it made him
look like a fool. Like the fool that he was,
and instead they just decided to make sure the jury
didn't see any of that.

Speaker 1 (01:03:20):
Well, to wrap this up, you have a pretty like
medium list of characters. You've got the dentist, You've got
the medical examiner, You've got Courtney's family, You've got Christine's family,
and then you have these two men who have been
wrongfully convicted but then exonerated, and then you have the
real killer, Justin Johnson. What ultimately happens with all of

(01:03:43):
these people. Just to sort of summarize, Justin Johnson pled
in order to avoid the death penalty, and he's serving
two life sentences. Levon unfortunately passed away not too long
before our book was published. I think Riley and I
both think that he died of stomach cancers, but that
he had gotten ill while he was locked up.

Speaker 4 (01:04:05):
But he hung in there for a while and did
well and was in good spirits, but ultimately succumbed. Kenny
has also had his own health problems. He just had
He's had a series of strokes. It's one of the
reasons that stopped in last week to check on him.
He's doing okay, He's he's lost his ability to talk
and lost some use in his right arm. But he's

(01:04:28):
living in his mom's place. A couple of sisters are nearby.
In fact, one was right across the way. All things considered,
he's in good spirits, though not in particularly good health.

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
So I'll talk about Hain and West. So Hain was
he was state medical examiner for a couple of years,
but for the most part he was always in private practice,
and he was he would be contracted by prosecutors to
do autopsies and suspicious death cases. H and he was
able to kind of monopolize those those referrals by telling
prosecutors what they wanted to hear. After of Brooks and

(01:05:00):
Brewer xonerations, I'm was saying, maybe two thousand and eight,
two thousand and nine, the Department of Public Safety told
Haine he could no longer do autopsies for prosecutors in
the state, so it was essentially fired. He then continued.
He then started testifying for the defense in a number
of cases, which he had never done before. But you know,
ultimately three I think other exonerations that Hain and or

(01:05:23):
West worked on maybe four, and then I and Tucker
and lots of other people who you know, have been
involved in these cases have said, you know, Haine testified
in thousands of homicide cases West probably in some at
least probably one hundred or more. You know, there's never
been any attempt to assess the damage that they that
they did to the criminal justice system or to find

(01:05:45):
other innocent people. And Tucker has valiantly, you know, represented
a number of these people to try to get their
cases reviewed, and it's really really difficult, particularly in federal court.
You know, I think part of it is people don't
really want to know how much nigmage was done because
it would you know, fundamentally calling a question in the
legitimacy of the criminal justice system to know that, you know,
this guy who testified in thousands and thousands of cases,

(01:06:08):
who knows how many innocent people he put in prison?
But also, you know, there are also all the cases
where you know that the case is where they needed
Haynes's testimony to help them get a conviction. But also
you know, in parts of this country, black life wasn't
valued quite as much as other life by by state officials,
and so there were lots of other cases where maybe
a police chief or a prosecutor just wanted, didn't want

(01:06:29):
another homicide to deal with, and so Hain would say
somebody died of natural causes or suicide. There's one case
in particular, I remember talking to a medical examiner reviewed
hanes work where a woman was found with blunt force
trauma to the head and there was blood all over
the walls and a neighbor saw somebody running out of
the house carrying with a bloody shirt. And Hained did
the autopsy. And this was a low income black woman

(01:06:51):
in rural Mississippi, and Hain include that she had died
of a stroke, and you know when another medical examiner
reviewed that, it was you know, she was clearly murdered.
So you know, there are all those cases. There are
deaths in police custody there. For a while there there
were when there was a rash of suicides in Mississippi jails.
There was fear that black people were being lynched in
Mississippi jails. Now so it turns out these were all suicides,

(01:07:15):
which was the product of another problem, which was that
the jails were so decrepit that people were killing themselves
rather than stay in them. But you know, part of
the problems when when Mississippi did an investigation. They had
Hay do all the autopsies, and and you know, people
who knew Hey knew that he couldn't be trusted, and
so the States weren't on what was happening, you know,
wasn't legitimate. So there has never been any effort to audit,

(01:07:37):
you know, the cases that these guys are involved with,
to assess the full damage they did to the system.
And it's it's it's tragic because there are a lot
of people people Tucker represents people in Louisiana as well.
There's at least one guy in death row in Louisiana
where we know that West created bitemarks on the corpse
of the little girl and then match them to the defendant,
used a dental mold of the defendant to create the

(01:07:59):
bite marks, and nobody's you know, it's left to people
like Tucker and groups like the Innis's Project and pro
bono attorneys to sort of try to get justice in
these cases one at a time, when really what needs
to happen is the state makes needs to take responsibility
for its failure and do a thorough audit and find
out how much damage has been done.

Speaker 1 (01:08:31):
If you love historical true crime stories. Check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Mrosi.

(01:08:55):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgariff and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More
Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod