#093 Jason Flom with Gloria Killian

On December 9th, 1981, Stephen DeSantis and Gary Masse, disguised as telephone repair men, gained entry to the suburban home of Sacramento coin collector Ed Davies. They hogtied Ed and his wife Grace, ransacked the house, and came up with 6 suitcases full of silver before murdering the older couple. There had been a string of robberies connected to area coin shops, and Ed Davies was a customer at the coin store where law student Gloria Killian had worked. When an anonymous tip sent police in search of DeSantis and Masse, Joanne Masse named Gloria as the mastermind to her husband’s crimes, an assertion that was repeated through the anonymous tip line. However, without sufficient evidence the charges against Gloria were dropped. Upon being convicted, Gary Masse offered his testimony, naming Gloria as the mastermind of his criminal enterprise, in exchange for sentencing leniency and other perks. This deal was concealed from the defense and the jury. In absence of corroborating evidence, Gloria Killian was sentenced to 32 years to life solely upon Masse’s incentivized testimony. She spent 17 years in prison until evidence surfaced, exposing the prosecution’s machinations and Masse’s false testimony. Gloria Killian was released in August of 2002 and currently advocates for women in prison. You can support Gloria Killian’s efforts by visiting the Action Committee for Women in Prison at acwip.net. In this episode​, Gloria tells her story alongside Innocence Project Senior Staff Attorney Nina Morrison.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This call is from a correction facility, and it's subject
to monitoring and recording exactly a hundred years. That's manly.

(00:21):
I'm a kid. I didn't do anything, you know, and uh,
you know that was that was real payingful man, no,
because my life was discarded as if you know, like
I was a piece of trash or something, you know,
a hundred years. I had dreams and I wanted to
do things. I wouldn't commit me crimes. You know, that
was a very good young man. That is what happened

(00:43):
in so many cases. The cops have a hunch because
they're so smart at the scene, they have a hunch,
and once they act on that hunch, they sort of
developed tunnel vision and they take off marching in the
wrong direction. And that happens in so many of these
wrongful convictions. They opening the cell door and I walk

(01:03):
down stairs. And I actually walked down stairs to be outside.
It felt very strange to be, like I said, to
be walking without no chakos on my feet. I thought
it was a dream, But then again, it wasn't a dream.
This is wrongful conviction. Welcome back the wrongful conviction today.

(01:30):
I have Gloria Killian who served seventeen years for a
murder that well, double murder that of course she had
no part in. And when you hear how this all
came down, you're going to be scratching your head like
I am now, and with her is one of my
favorite humans. The senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project,

(01:50):
Nina Morrison. So, Gloria, Nina, welcome, Thank you, Hi Jason.
And like I always say, I'm glad you're here, but
I'm sorry you're here, so, you know, said her here
than somewhere else. Yeah. Um, I read about your case
in that amazing book, Anatomy of Innocence by Laura Caldwell,
and I was dumbfounded. Actually, I mean forgetting the fact

(02:13):
that you look. I mean, you can't judge a book
by its cover, but you look so unlike anyone that
would be a double murderer that is actually sort of
hard to process. Um. I don't know if you ever
looked like a double murderer back in nine did you? Hardly? No,
not so much. And if you don't believe me, just
take a look at my Instagram and you'll see what
I mean, because I posted pictures of Gloria on there.

(02:35):
And uh, and then I defy you to uh to
identify her as anything other than just what she is,
is this sweet, lovely woman. I was not a master criminal. Now,
in fact, you were a law student, but we'll get
to that in a minute. Um. And this is a
bizarre case because, UM, on December nine one, just to
set the stage, two men disguises telephone repairman, this is

(02:58):
what we know, entered the home of an elderly couple
in Rosemont, California. Sounds sort of ominous. Already, Ed Davies
was fatally shot, his wife, Grace was shot in the
head but survived, and six suitcases full of silver were stolen.
I mean, it's like the beginning of a novel or something.
That's weird. Okay, this was obviously a terrible crime and

(03:20):
raised I'm sure a lot of anxiety in the community,
which leads to pressure. But you were an unlikely suspect
on for a lot of reasons. I mean, you weren't
anywhere near there. So this whole situation makes absolutely no
sense to me and for you, I can't even imagine.
So can you take this back to can you explain

(03:43):
how this all happened? Yes, Um, back then I was
going to law school. I also worked as a process
server and did small investigative work in order to make
enough money. I had just gone through divorce and it
was not particularly pleasant, so we were fighting about everything.

(04:03):
So I actually took a semester's leave from law school
so that I could make enough money because it looked
like the settlement for my divorce wasn't going to go through.
I worked for a man named Virgil Fletcher who owned
a coin store. It was called Allied Coins, and Mr
Davies was one of the customers there. We found out

(04:24):
later Virgil Fletcher did not like Mr Davies for some
reason which I didn't know at the time, which made
it even more confusing. Virgil Fletcher and his partner were
splitting up, and that also was a very acrimonious split,
and he and his partner were trying to pull everything
on each other that they could, you know. So what
I was doing for him was um a lot of

(04:46):
the accounts that had been assigned to him. I had
to go out and find them and do things like that.
But this whole case is centered around coins and coin
shop dealers and the people that were were fully involved
in that scene at that time, there were several robbery
murders from people that were in that particular world. And

(05:08):
it's interesting to reading back near the story of how
you were first arrested. I mean, it's sort of very
cinematic too. Right, you were in there, you were visiting
your boyfriend. I guess he was right and preparing to
have a little afternoon delight type situation. And um, I'm
not saying anything. Why that always comes up, I don't know,
it's sort of it sort of does paint a picture.

(05:28):
But and then here comes a knock on the door. Yes,
and the knock on the door. Unfortunately, it was the
Sacramento County Sheriff's Department. And one of the things that
you mentioned was, you know, creating a problem in the community.
Sacramento County Sheriffs had not solved one single homicide in
so they were really pushing on this one as well.

(05:50):
The Sheriff's department had set up a tip line and
someone called in. It was a woman and it was
later to learn that it was Virgil Fletcher's girlfriend. He
got her to make this call. But it's said you
should check out a law student named Gloria, And that
is how the police got to me. They had interviewed
Fletcher the night before and the next day when the

(06:13):
knock came on the door at the most inauspicious time.
What they told me was that they wanted to ask
me some questions about Fletcher, which, okay, I didn't really
get it, but I went downtown with him. In the
minute they got me in a room, everything changed. That
was very cinematic as well. You know, you have the
poor suspects locked up in the room with these guys

(06:34):
and they're accusing me of planning this crime. They're starting
from the position that they know I did it and
they can prove it. And you know, I talked to
him for a little while and finally I just said,
you know, this is ridiculous. I want a lawyer. When
people get picked up as you did, who had nothing
to do with and had no knowledge of a situation

(06:55):
a crime, they generally go in as you did, waiving
the right to an attorney, expecting that everything's going to
go smoothly. And you, being a law student, you had
reason to believe that the system would work. You're studying
the law and you're a smart woman. So if you
just say what you gotta say, you get home in
time for the six o'clock news, But that was not

(07:16):
anything like what happened. I actually ended up on the
six o'clock news because once once they stood up and
arrested me and they took me outside, I realized it
had to have been a setup. The media was everywhere.
Obviously they had been notified and it had been called,
and this had been their intention from the very beginning.
One of the cops I was wearing a long sweater
coat and he took it and put it over my head,

(07:39):
which you know, was the perfect image right there, right
So this way they could begin the process of sort
of shaping public opinion in the way that they wanted to,
which is to turn you into this master criminal, which
was again ironic, since you had no prior record of
any kind. Do you think that they actually thought that
you did it at that time? I don't know. I

(07:59):
do know the years later, when my investigator went to Sacramento,
he interviewed Lieutenant Beyondi, who was the head of homicide
at that time, and he asked him specifically if beyond
I thought I was guilty, and beyond A said quote, um,
I don't know. I know, Ray thought she was. It

(08:20):
sounds like sometimes in these cases there's a little thread
where they they have one fact that they can't quite
figure out or a lead, and then they run with
it in a direction that you know, has no basis
in fact, but fits what they think they now. Was
there a tip early on or some information that a
woman had shown up to case the house with the
two actual killers at some point, Yes, And that made
the case even more confusing because that particular I guess

(08:44):
pattern style of operating had been used in Sacramento County
and one of the victims was a woman named Elizabeth Lee.
Elizabeth Lee happened to be in the courthouse when she
saw Gary Massey's wife and she went running to the
nearest depth. He's saying, that's the woman. Those are the
people that robbed me, and she, you know, ran around

(09:07):
the courthouse in the state of panic. Eventually she ended
up talking to Christopher Cleveland, who was the district attorney
who was prosecuting me, and he told her if she
didn't shut up and get out of the courthouse, he
would have her arrested. He was not interested in anything
that she had to say. If she identified Joe and

(09:27):
Massey as a woman who came to her door with
that same particular fact pattern. It would just make my
guilt even more dubious as far as the jury was concerned. Right,
it would have made his job more difficult. That was
not part of the plan. Um. They held you in
jail for almost five months awaiting trial. They tried to
get an extension. I was being prosecuted by John O'Mara

(09:49):
at the time, but the judge who was hearing the
case ruled that there was insufficient evidence and he ordered
me released. Right then, Yeah, there was insufficient evidence, There
was no viens um, and you go back home, try to,
I guess, rebuild, right. I was really in a state
of shock and I just kind of wandered around, both
dazed and numb. But I had a horrible feeling in

(10:12):
the back of my head somewhere that this wasn't over.
And I don't know why I had that feeling, but
I was right, it wasn't over. And then there's another
knock on the door. Yeah. Literally about a year later
they came and they re arrested me. And this of
course was after Gary Massey had gone to trial and

(10:33):
had made the deal that he had made, which I
knew nothing of at the time. So Massey was the killer, yes,
And he had been sentenced to life in prison, life
without the possibility parole. And as soon as he got
that sentence, he decided he was going to try to
take a little more active role than his own sort
of destiny, right, and he wanted to make a deal
with the cops, and he immediately contacted the Sheriff's department

(10:56):
offering the same day. The same day, he went back
to the jail and picked up the phone and called
them and said, I can help you. And at that point,
it's fair to say and I guess he would have
said anything they wanted him to say. Yeah, it's hard
to believe he just suddenly had a crisis of conscience
on the same day he got sentenced to life without parole.
And this is again pretty common. You know. Sometimes we
see people who have committed crimes, who are arrogant, assume

(11:18):
they're going to get away with it. Suddenly the trial
or the investigation doesn't go so well. They're facing serious time,
and then they become desperate and say, what can I
do to help myself? My lawyers aren't going to get
me out of this. I gotta help myself and offer
up somebody who had nothing to do with the crime
as a way to try to reduce their own sentence.
That's perfectly legal. They can do that, they can offer cooperation,

(11:40):
but the law says that the prosecutor has to turn
that information, all discussions, all agreements, all suggestions or promises
of benefits to these witnesses over to the accused so
that the jury can hear about it. Because a jury
is going to feel very differently about someone who they
think is getting a ben to fit to themselves from

(12:01):
turning in another person, versus someone who claims there's nothing
in it for me. I just him doing the right thing.
And in Massey's case, because he'd already been sentenced, it
allowed the prosecutor to say he's got nothing to gain,
he's already going to prison for the rest of his life.
In some ways it makes it much more believable because
he's doing his time, he's going to pay the price,

(12:22):
and he's just come and clean on what really happened. Um,
and that wasn't the truth, right, And if they would
have asked him to identify you as the kidnapper of
the Lindbergh baby, that probably would have been what he
would have done, absolutely right, I mean, because at that
point he really did have nothing to lose. We know
the guy is not a stand up guy, and he's
looking to make a deal, and they've got a great offer.
So he identifies you for allegedly planning this crime, and

(12:44):
we say incentivized witness. We could say extremely incentivized witness.
In this case, incentivized almost doesn't apply to the treatment
that they gave him. They took him out to dinner
in nice restaurants, They let him have sex with his
wife in some of their offices. They actually took his
twelve year old son with them when they went up
in the hills with Massey to reclaim the property that

(13:08):
he had buried up there. The district Attorney Kit Cleveland
gave this twelve year old boy a coin that had
come from the robbery. It had belonged to Mr Davies
and allowed him to keep it, apparently as some sort
of souvenir, which still appallsed me to this day. I
think that's absolutely sick, Yes, very but I'm still trying

(13:33):
to get a grip on this. So all these perks
that he was offered, this was after he was convicted. Yes,
people who have been convicted of serious crimes can get
a lot of benefits after they testify. I mean, we've
got on the Innocence Project website examples of benefits that
convicted people get while they're in jail, video games, and

(13:54):
you know, extra visits and hotel rooms when they go
travel to testify that the rest of us could never afford.
You know, Thankfully, it doesn't happen in every case, or
even most cases, but it does happen. And again, the
rule is prosecutor's office can give people benefits within the law,
depending on whatever the law is of that jurisdiction, but
they've got to let the defense know. And that's really

(14:15):
where the outrage comes in, because when jurors here about this,
if they hear about this criminal getting treated like a king,
they're obviously going to feel very differently about their testimony.
And prosecutors know that, so they either don't give the
benefits in the first place, or if they do, they
have to disclose them. And the inverse is true to
like in Sandy Jacob's case, when the real murderer wanted
to confess, they kept giving him perks in prison. In

(14:37):
order to get him not to confess, right. So that's
actually the flip side of the same sort of very
strange problem. And it is such a strange thing because
everybody knows that you can't priv a witness, right, All
kinds of penalties come with that. Nothing good happens out
of that, but they can anyway. So he identifies you,
they come and arrest you, and you go to trial. Actually, um,

(15:02):
when they came and arrested me, they charged me with
the death penalty again, even though Cleveland, who was now
the prosecutor, knew for a fact where he'd gotten his
new witness from and his new information. But fortunately for me,
the California Supreme Court made a decision in People Versus
Carlos that took my actual charges out from underneath the
death penalty. So they released me on bail. The judge

(15:25):
let me out on bail, and I was out for
almost three and a half years. That's just it's crazier
and crazier. I mean, I've never been a judge, but
I would say that if I was a judge and
I thought that you were responsible for shooting two elderly people,
killing one of them during a robbery, in cold blood.

(15:48):
I'm not sure would be the number I would choose,
you know what I mean, I think it would be
a high multiple of that. But so you're out for
three and a half years with this gigantic anvil hanging
over your head? How did you function during that time?
Very poorly? What did you do? Mostly have a nervous breakdown?

(16:08):
I mean, I was really as you said, it's like
having an anvil hanging over your head. It's a true
sort of democles. But I worked. Um, It's difficult to explain,
and part of it was my own state of mind.
But it was almost as if I didn't have this case.
I never went to court except to get an extension.

(16:29):
Nobody seemed to be interested in me. Nobody paid any
attention to me until everything else was done. The other
problem was that I could no longer afford private counsel.
I had hired a lawyer for my first arrest. This
time I had a lawyer who was appointed from the
appellate defenders because the public defenders were already involved in
Massey's case. And I guess it was just good enough

(16:52):
to get me convicted. Well, there's good enough to process you,
but not represent you, it's pretty nuts that you were
sentenced to thirty two years to life. Right. Oh. Yes,
the prosecutor on the day that I was sentenced, and
the standard sentenced for this type of case would have
been twenty five years to life. But Mr Cleyland stood

(17:13):
up in court and he went on to this short
rant about how I'd always been a model citizen, I'd
never been in trouble, I was going to law school
and therefore I should get more time than anybody. And
the judge granted his request and they sentenced me to
thirty two years to life, despite the fact that the
actual killer was already going to be sentenced to twenty

(17:33):
five years to life. Right, So you've got an extra
seven years for allegedly planning this crime. Yes, um, And
when you're experience need that this doesn't seem like and
I don't want to come off sounding the wrong way,
but this doesn't seem like the type of crime that
a young woman who's on her way up in the world.
There's a law student would participate in. Like if you
were really desperate for money, would you go and rob

(17:56):
and shoot an elderly couple to steal some silver? I
mean a lot of our client to get prosecuted on
theories that make absolutely no sense, you know. And and
oftentimes what we find in these wonnerful conviction cases is
the police come up with a suspect or a theory
and then come up with a motive to make it fit.
So they think that somebody must have killed his spouse

(18:18):
or girlfriend, and even though there's no history of animosity,
they come up with a crazy hypothesis. Like our client
Michael Morton in Texas, they said he killed his wife
because she wouldn't have sex with him on his birthday,
because she was tired, because they had been out to
dinner with their toddler son and he was disappointed they
didn't have sex, which is true because he left a
note along those lines, but he didn't kill her over it.

(18:39):
And in Glorious case, there are some indications that they
thought that there was a woman involved helping them case
the joint. And then it seems like somebody came up
with this concept like, oh, maybe it's that law student
who's hanging around with that coin dealer. She's a smart broad,
maybe she's the mastermind, and they ran with it. The
problem is there was no evidence to supported except these

(19:01):
incentivized witnesses facing criminal charges themselves, and in some cases
like Gloria's, they build an entire prosecution around these highly
dubious witnesses and an unsupported theory. I mean, there was
no evidence whatsoever except for the word of the killer.
I mean it almost seems like that should be not okay,
like not okay. Well, state courts are free to set

(19:23):
the parameters of what constitutes sufficient evidence to convict someone.
So just because the jury says you're guilty, doesn't mean
the conviction stands. Uh. That's not even because of new evidence,
but even just evaluating what happens at trials. A lot
of times courts will undertake what's called a sufficiency review
and say that's just not enough. In Texas, for example,

(19:43):
of all places, the highest criminal court has ruled that
you cannot be convicted of murder based on the uncorroborated
testimony of an accomplice. So if someone were to be
charged in a situation like Gloria's, were the only evidence
against them was the word of one or two people
who admitted their own involvement in the crime, you couldn't
be convicted without corroboration. The problem is that in a

(20:05):
lot of places that even have those rules, almost anything
counts as corroboration. So one eye witness saying oh, I
saw someone who looked like a woman with short brown
hair fleeing the scene could be corroboration. Or a witness
who's not an accomplice saying, oh, she said something about
you know they did something bad last week. I mean,
people can interpret it pretty loosely. It really depends on

(20:26):
the judges you're in front of. But at least there's
a corroboration requirement. And I don't know. I don't practice
in California now, so I don't know what the law
currently is. It's hard to imagine many courts today, knowing
what we know about Gail House informants, would allow that
testimony to be the basis for a conviction, even if
the jury believed it right, at least of all of
an eviction in which I mean thirty two years of

(20:47):
life's basically a life sentence. He's in thirty two years
to eligibility, right, So, and that doesn't mean you're walking
out the door at thirty two years either. And as
you know, Jason, and you know, most parole boards, the
innocent get penalized, so you get a sentence of thirty
two to life. But as soon as you come up
for parole, if you're not ready to quote unquote express
remorse for the crime, which really means admitting guilt. You

(21:10):
can't say I'm sorry those people died, but I had
nothing to do with it. You have to say, I'm
sorry they died and I did it, and I regret
what I did. And if you don't show that appropriate
remorse in their view, you're not going to get parole
in most cases. And so in glorious case, you know,
she was exonerated before I think right before you had
to go before the board. No, I still I still

(21:31):
had several years left, even though i'd been in there
for seventeen and a half years. But when I went
from my first parole board review, which they later did
away with, but the woman from the board talked to
me and I told her I was innocent, I had
nothing to do with this, and she actually said to me,
you know, you're not going to come up for parole
for a long time, but you need to realize that

(21:54):
if you don't accept responsibility, and if you don't express
your remorse and make a for what you did, then
you're not going to get out on parole. Right. So
isn't it bizarre that we have a system in which
you plead innocent, you go to prison, and you plead
guilty and you go home. Yes, that's truly Alice in Wonderland, right,
except not the cute kid's version. Um, So we can

(22:16):
go back to the trial, that moment in the courtroom
when the jury went out, and now you're dealing with
your appellet defender who's not Clarence Darrow, right, and the
jury goes out. I mean, you've been now through sort
of Kafka escort deal for the last four plus years already,
starting with the time that you were first taken in well, yeah,

(22:39):
before you're even arrested, but starting from the time to
knock on the door, did you think that there was
still a chance that the jury would see the light
and do the right thing. It's difficult for me to
put that into wards. At times my law school education
really betrayed me, and at other times it served me well.
On this particular their issue, I simply decided that you know,

(23:04):
I hadn't done this, They couldn't possibly convict me. I mean,
there wasn't anything there except for this guy on the
witness stand, and I don't know the Jerry was out
for two and a half days, if I recall that correctly.
But I rocketed from one side to the other half
the time. I believe that I was going to go
home when my boyfriend dropped me off at court that

(23:27):
last time, he said, um, I'll pick it out for dinner.
You know, we'll go out someplace nice, assuming that I
would be found innocent, and so I went with that
fantasy for a while. It's difficult to explain how the
mind deals with some of these things that are simply
impossible to deal with. It means you think I'm going

(23:48):
to lose my mind. This is insane, and it is insane.
And then again, somehow or other, you managed to switch
over to another state of thought or of being. Most
people that have been through this experience have experienced that
same thing to where there you're not even thinking logically anymore.

(24:10):
I'm having a hard time articulating it because it is
that difficult to understand, and I still don't get it.
Something you were ill prepared for, to say the least,
right based on your previous life. You know, I mean
you were going to have You're on your way to
having a very pleasant existence. Right. What kind of lawyer
were you planning on being? By the way, actually I

(24:31):
was interested in the states and trusts, but I also
would occasionally give some thought to criminal law. But like
everybody else, the only thing I knew about criminal law
was what I learned in the first year of law school.
You know. I didn't want to have anything to do
with criminals, not those people. Um, while I rapidly became
one of those people and found out that those people

(24:53):
are not at all who we think they are. You know,
when I started recording these podcasts, my main goal was
and is that we would by telling these stories and
sharing the real life situations that happened to people just
like you, we would educate the audience so that when

(25:16):
they go to serve on a jury, they are woke
right and they are for lack of a better where
that's a technical term, um, And they are you know,
armed with with the knowledge that these things happen and
also that you know, it's it's really terrifying. You know,
a friend of mine who is herself and a Harvard
Law School graduate lawyer, Um, she was on a jury

(25:38):
not that long ago, and she told me by the
third day, people were like, I really don't care anymore
whether they're guilty or not. I want to go home.
I got stuff to do, Like so if you need
me to vote guilty, so be it. Like that was
literally conversations that were happening in the jury room. And
we don't know what was happening in your jury room.
But the fact is all I can do is say
to people that are listening, you know, listen to the
words of Gloria. Even know it's all that longer, we

(26:00):
can still hear the pain and you know, recognize that,
you know, the extra day of your life or whatever
it is. And of course then there's that saying, which
I'm gonna start using a tagline of my emails. I
think you know that it's better than a hundred guilty
men go free than that one innocent should suffer William
Black And people seem to literally believe that it's better
and they are safer if all the innocent people go

(26:22):
to prison, just so they get the one guilty person right.
And then the irony of that is that, of course
we know in most cases when the innocent person goes
to prison, the guilty person remains free. Um in your case,
if there was another perpetrator, that person was free. We
know the actual killer in your case did go to prison.
But in most cases, and you know we know this
from the Innocence Project, there's so many cases where we

(26:44):
have used DNA to identify an innocent person or to
prove the innocence of the person who is convicted, and
then whila, a hit comes up in the national database
CODUS and we are able to identify the actual perpetrator
or of the authorities identified the actual perpetration. I mean.
One of the things that all the innocent's cases, the

(27:05):
DNA cases, and then on DNA cases have shown is
that this false choice we were sold in the nineties
by the tough on crime crowd that you have to
choose between safety and due process or safety and justice
is a myth, because sending innocent people to prison doesn't
keep us any safe, or it makes us less safe.
We've you know, as you mentioned, in a number our cases,

(27:27):
in fact, close to half of them, a hundred and
sixty out of the first three hundred and sixty four
d naserations. The investigation that was done to clear the
innocent person also led to the apprehension of someone who
had actually gone on to commit other violent crimes while
the innocent person was sitting in prison. And that includes murders,
that includes rapes, that includes robberies, you name it. Um,

(27:49):
sometimes multiple crimes by the same person. And we created
additional crime victims and additional suffering while this innocent person
was sitting in prison. So, you know, jurors should know
that by sending someone to prison in who they have
some doubts about their guilt, they're not making the streets safe.
They're not doing the safe thing or the right thing.
They're doing a pretty reckless thing. No, they're actually making
themselves left safe, even on just a purely selfish basis. Right,

(28:10):
And you look at probably one of the most glaring
examples that would be Ronald Cotton, right because we know
when he was wrongfully convicted of rape, the actual perpetrator
remain free and raped over thirty other women before he
was apprehended. So, I mean, what a terrifying thought that is.
It's just my heart goes out to everyone involved in
that situation. Um, it's just unimaginable. So how did you

(28:31):
manage to survive this ordeal in seventeen and a half years,
and it seems like your mind is intact, right. I mean,
I only know you for um No, from what I
know of you, you've accomplished amazing things since you've been out,
So you can't have lost your mind completely while you
were in. Can you explain that? What? How does that?

(28:52):
No one can really understand, including me, and I've been
doing this up for twenty five years. Actually it goes
back to what I said earlier about having to say
states of mind. But I was also saved by a
peculiar situation at that particular time. When you first go
to prison, you have to appear before what's known as
a classification committee, and they look over your past, your conviction, etcetera, etcetera,

(29:16):
and they decide where you should best work. Um. When
I told them that I had been to law school,
this particular group of people laughed at me. They said
I was lying, They said it was impossible, and then
they assigned me the law library and I remained working
there for sixteen years. And it was a strange time
and place. It has never happened before with California Department

(29:39):
of Corrections, and probably it will never happen again, that's
for certain. But I worked for people that had absolutely
no information about a law library, or how to staff in,
how to run it, or how to do anything else.
And they quickly realized that I could help them learn this,
and then they thought, oh, what the heck, will just

(30:01):
let her do it. So I eventually ended up buying
all the books organizing the institution, and I spent all
of my days helping women, not just with their various convictions,
but also with a lot of institutional stuff. And about
that time, there was a senator from San Diego and

(30:22):
she wanted to hold a hearing on battered women because
it was just at that time period that people were
becoming interested in battered women, and in California at that time,
they were not allowed to present any evidence of abuse
or violence against them in their defense, which made those
convictions a definite slam dog. So anyhow, this had all

(30:43):
they had been institution had been contacted. Chief Deputy Warden
came down and he asked me to put together panel
and to do some other stuff for these various interviews
that were coming up, which I did, and after that
they just pretty much let me do whatever I wanted
to do. I ordered all the books. I instituted services

(31:05):
across the fence, which means that there are areas of
the prison where the confinement is far more restrictive. One
area of the prison was simply for people who were
suffering from mental illness, and so I was able to
establish legal services for them. So it's fair to say
that you maintain your own well being by helping other people, right.

(31:28):
I had my little underground law practice going on there,
and some very strange clients by the way, But um, yeah,
I knew I could not figure out what had happened
to me. The only thing that I seized on and
I don't know why, And as it turns out, it
was pretty scient But I always believed in the back
of my head that if the Ninth Circuit ever saw

(31:50):
my case, they would not let it stand. And as
it happened, it was the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
that reversed my conviction. So I'm just going to read
a paragraph that I think is going to really shake
people up because it shakes me up, which is that
ten years later, after a federal petition for rid of
habeas corpus had been filed, defense investigators discovered evidence of

(32:12):
Massey's agreement with the prosecution, including a letter. This is
where it gets deep, right, that's me editorializing, including a
letter Massey sent to the prosecutor soon after you were arrested.
In the letter, brace yourself, Massey said, quote, I lied
my ass off for you people. The letter, as well
as two others Massy wrote that detailed the resentencing agreement,

(32:34):
were never disclosed to the defense by the prosecution. Um, Nina,
you want to shine a little light on this one,
because that's illegal. I'm gonna I'm gonna use my actual
law degree to tell you that's illegal. No, it's um
in all seriousness. Um, that is a textbook example of

(32:55):
the kind of correspondence from a witness that has to
immediately be turned over to the defense. Whether or not
the prosecutor thinks that Massy is telling the truth, that is,
did he lie his ass off? Then? Is he laying
his ass off now when he says he did? Is
the truth somewhere in between? The defense has to have
access to that statement so that they can cross examine

(33:16):
him on it. And obviously, a witness who's telling the
prosecutor I lied my ass off for you people is
not going to have much credibility in the eyes of
the jury. So the prosecution has to know that turning
that over will be fatal to glorious prosecution. They still
have to turn it over. At my Habeo's hearing, the
district attorney when when he was questioned about these letters

(33:36):
and when he had done with them, he was asked,
why didn't you turn them over to the defense at once?
And he said, I didn't know where to send them. Obviously,
once your conviction is final, you no longer have the
same trial attorney that you had. But that doesn't mean
that the guy fell off the end of the earth either.

(33:57):
He should have turned them over immediately to him. He
could have sent them to me. He could have done anything,
and he knew precisely what he should have done, but
he was determined enough to stand there and come up
with a bald faced law. Lauren was pretty easy to find.
He could he could have found her. She was in
the California Department of Corrections with a number attached to

(34:17):
her name, and he knew exactly where to find her,
and he could have sent the letter to her, and
he certainly knew who her prior lawyers were yes, And
the idea that he would even have the goal to
say something like that, it just bothered me, and it
still does. There are a few things that have been
said and done in my case that just still blow
my mind. And I think it says a lot about

(34:37):
the culture of lack of accountability for the minority of prosecutors,
and it is fortunately still a minority. But who commit
these egregious acts of misconduct that he thought he could
get away with such a ridiculous answer. You know, anybody,
anybody else caught red handed hiding a letter like that,
I mean, could have come up with a better excuse,

(35:00):
a lie, something, And the fact that he just gave
this completely ridiculous explanation that doesn't hold water just shows
how he thought nobody was going to care and nobody
would believe him. And Gloria, you know, was the rare
convicted defendant who was able to get a federal court
to throw out her conviction based on undisclosed evidence. It's

(35:21):
very hard to do. These kinds of violations by definition
stay hidden right there, designed to stay in the shadows,
and many of those letters get shredded, never to be
seen again. And it's you know has in so many
of these cases, Jason, of people you talked to, they're
both the unluckiest and the luckiest people in the world.
The unluckiest for what happened to them, and the luckiest

(35:43):
that the proof of their innocence and of the state's
misconduct was available and that their lawyers found it someday.
And and Massy, in some sort of strange attack of conscience,
later admitted that much of the evidence he gave was false,
including all the testimony way he said that he didn't
make it able to prosecution in exchange for testimony that
his testimony that you were the mastermind behind the robbery,
admitted all of that was false, and ultimately, as we

(36:06):
said in two thousand two of the Ninth Circuit Court
reversed your conviction and ultimately the charges were dropped. From
all the years of me working with Nina and the

(36:29):
good people at the Innocence Project serving on their board.
Um the two questions I could ask most frequently are
in cases like this, did somebody go after the prosecutor?
And the second question I get asked the most is
did this person who served seventeen that killing lady did
she get compensation. I mean, please tell me she got

(36:50):
taken care of um. He was brought up on charges
by this California State Bar Association from what he had
done to me, And they had fooled around my case
for apparently quite a few years. They were considering raising charges,
then they did, then they didn't. Whatever. But eventually he
had a trial at the State Bar Association. He was

(37:12):
found guilty and he was censured. The judge said that
the real problem with the case was that it was
so old that he had a wonderful career except for
this minor laughs. And if the case had been recent,
then her decision would have been very different because he

(37:33):
had already retired, and so she censured him and that
was it. It did make a difference to me because
it was at least an acknowledgement by the state of
California that somebody had done something wrong to me personally.
I would have liked to have seen him locked up,
even though that wasn't on the table at that particular time.
But at least they acknowledged that there was an issue

(37:54):
there other than that the whole thing was a big joke.
I mean, it's extremely rare for any prosecutor caught committing
misconduct ever face any accountability from the state bar in
any state. And we actually have data in California, there
was the study done about ten years ago by our
friends at the Northern California Innoson's Project and the Veritas

(38:15):
Initiative where they tracked court findings of misconduct by prosecutors
over a twelve year period, and they found more than
six hundred cases where they could identify the prosecutors by
name who were found by a court to have committed misconduct,
and only six of them had faced any professional discipline whatsoever,
So less than one percent of the ones they could find,

(38:36):
and of those, many were what glorious prosecutor got, which
was a slap on the wrist. I mean, he got
a finding that he had violated the ethics rules, which
is what the state bar has jurisdiction over. But all
he got was a what's called an admonishment, So just
don't do that again. Yeah, And she lost seventeen years
of her life, plus all the time she spent before

(38:57):
she went to prison within being ever had, and then
the lifelong consequences and repercustants that she'll have to deal
with for having had her life stolen, in her career stolen. Yeah,
you know, and society lost out too, because you could
have been out here contributing and you know, doing good
stuff and paying taxes and instead of us paying for
you to be locked up, right, for Californians to be

(39:18):
um And that's a whole another consequence of all these things.
It's probably the least dire consequence, but it's still a consequence.
And when you multiply it by the number of people
who end up in a situation like yours, it becomes
a real number. Since you got out, I mean, one
of the things that I find interesting because of my
you know, sort of obsession with this advocacy work on
behalf of people who are formally incarcerated, is this organization

(39:41):
that you founded, which is called the Action Committee for
Women in Prison. And all I know is what I read,
which is that it's an organization that works to improve
conditions for female prisoners. Of course, it's worth noting that
in America, many people know that we have four point
four percent of the world's population the world's prison population.

(40:02):
But what people don't seem to talk about as much
is the fact that we have thirty of the world's
female prison population. So you know, organizations like yours are
so needed, and can you talk about the organization and
what led you to found it and what does it
do and where's it that now? I wanted to help
the women that I left behind, and at the time
when I was in prison, there was a lot going

(40:24):
on in there, not just with battered women, although that
was where I developed my interest in expertise and battered
women because I didn't believe they should have been in
prison in the first place. I mean, you know, when
someone is strangling you or attempting to shoot you, I
think you have the right to defend yourself or to
defend your child. Other than that, there were a lot

(40:44):
of women that I knew that deserved to get out regardless,
and the parole board was a real problem at that time.
There was also a tremendous problem with the medical department.
They were killing us on a regular basis, and that
also includes in the men's prisons. And beyond that, I
wanted to do what I could to ensure that they

(41:07):
did not feel that they were forgotten. When I first
went to prison, things were a lot different. We were
our ound clothes, we got various privileges, we got Christmas gifts.
There was a lot that was done to try to
make people feel women feel that they were not forgotten
by society and that they were still decent people. That

(41:27):
changed radically, particularly in the nineties. The composition the pro
board changed totally. It was all former law enforcement basically,
and I certainly didn't think that they could understand what
it was like to be small, female and inferior your life.
I started a Christmas project so that people would not
feel that they had been forgotten, and it still goes

(41:48):
on to this day. Um last year, my organization helped
provide approximately five thousand gift bags for incarcerated women in
southern California. That includes the prison and the fire camps
and the jail as well. The main thing that I
thought that I could do was to tell people what
I had learned, which was that women in prison were

(42:11):
not who I thought they were. They're just basically people
like you and me who have made wrong choices or
who have been in intolerable circumstances. That of course applies
to people who acquired their convictions in defense of their
life or in defense of their children. I thought that

(42:31):
people in prison must be vicious, bizarre, every stereotype you
could possibly think of. And I learned very quickly that
that is not who those women were at all. And
a lot of those women helped to save my life
because it was a lot of times when I didn't
think I could make it another three and a half seconds.
And there are times when it just closes in on

(42:51):
you and you can't do this anymore. With women, that
usually happens between five and seven years. It happened to
me at about six years, and I had a very
good friend. Her name is Janet Dixon Um. We're still
trying to get her out. She's been in almost forty
three years. But she would pick me up every night

(43:11):
after dinner with a friend of hers, another lifer, and
they would make me come out and they would just
walk me around the yard for two or three hours
at a time. I guess the purpose was just to
keep my feet moving and to keep my head from
the darker places, and somehow or other, I mean, with
their love and their care, I got through it. There

(43:35):
were definitely times when I looked at the fence and thought,
why isn't that stupid thing electrified? And why can't I
get to it. I was devastated when they told me
they didn't shoot to kill. There are times when that
is exactly where you go. Suicide is an alternative to
an intolerable reality. And there were plenty of times when

(43:56):
I spent that time thinking about that, thinking about some
way to end this all, when I didn't think I
could stand in the pain anymore. But then I would,
something would happen, and I would get interested in something else,
like getting somebody out of prison, or you know, beating
their one fifteen which are disciplinary reports. And somehow I
got through it. You just put one ft in front

(44:19):
of the other day after day. I do not know
how people that are sentenced to life without the possibility
of parole get through a day. I don't believe that
I could have done it if that had been my sentence.
I'm not a stupid woman. I would not have been there.
If I was facing something like that, I would have
taken myself out. Can I ask you about something that

(44:41):
you know we hear and read a lot about women
in prison, that there are a lot of women there
who end up because they have a relationship with someone,
typically but not always, a man who is kind of
high up in a crime or a criminal enterprise, and
the woman might have some tangential involvement agreeing to carry
something or transport something or make a phone call once,

(45:02):
but they don't have access to information they can trade
with law enforcement when they get caught. Was that something
that you found to be common among the women that
you met inside. Absolutely. In fact, there were cases where
the women weren't even involved in the crime at all,
but they were convinced by the man, usually a man
that they were with, that if they would plead guilty

(45:23):
and take the case, that you know, they only get
like sixteen months in prison, and he would love them
forever and take care of them and send them boxes
and whatever. And some of these women actually walked into
court and did that, they took the case, and of
course everything turned out totally different. They ended up getting
you know, longer sentences, like maybe ten years, and the

(45:44):
guy was gone in the wind. Another thing is that
people who were involved with crime, or have been arrested,
or have dealt with the criminal justice system in some
way know how to work the system. There are cases
that I know of where women have confessed to doing
something that is physically impossible for them to have done.
And I'm thinking of the woman who was about my size.

(46:07):
I'm five ft tall and if I lie about it,
I pounds. This woman was convicted of strangling her six
ft one husband to death manual strangulation. It was her
son who committed the crime, and the prosecution just went
along with it. I mean, what do you tell him,

(46:28):
Just lie there and I'll try to make this quick.
It's insane. And yet they go ahead and they accept
those cases. They accept those please and the women end
up doing the time. Oftentimes the man will say something like,
you know, you'll get less time, the women get more time.
Or if the man says that she is the mastermind,

(46:49):
she's the one who planned all of this, she will
get a longer sentence than he will. He'll get to live,
she'll get life without he'll get fifteen to life. She'll
get to live. And they are held to longer terms
by the parole board. It's a type of discrimination that

(47:09):
I mean, you think it can happen until you see
it and it's right there in front of you on
the paperwork. It amazes me to this day that someone
would even accept a plea bargain like that, so I
wanted to ask you this. UM, I'll ask both of
you this, and then we'll go to closing comments. UM,
if people are listening now and they want to get involved,

(47:29):
and they want to help with your organization, or they
want to help with women in prison in general. Because
I have a number of amazing women who have you know,
approached me and wanted to volunteer, I wanted to do stuff,
so we started to put together our own sort of
impromptu group. We came up with an interim name called
Women for Women who Shouldn't be in Prison. But then
I found out that you've already been doing this work,
and so I wanted to hear more about that and

(47:50):
how can other people women are otherwise get involved. UM.
I do have a website. I haven't been doing much
with it lately. I've been focusing more on the exoneration
issue and my work with Exonerated Nation. But my website
is a c w I P dot net. It's always

(48:10):
a struggle to come up with enough gifts. We can
definitely use donations and anybody who wants to get involved.
I think the saddest thing about prison that is so
different in the United States from other countries as that.
We isolate our prisoners, We demonize our prisoners. They're all

(48:33):
murderers and maniacs and nobody should have anything to do
with them or to get involved. And that just isn't true.
In other countries where they have a different philosophy, they
help people rehabilitate themselves and reintegrate themselves into society. We
don't do that here. But visiting programs, gift programs, letter

(48:54):
writing programs, all of those things are really important, and
people can access that information on your website. Yes they can.
Maybe there'll be some web designers out there who want
to take that duty over from you so you can
focus on the other piece. That's a wonderful idea. You know,
everyone in prison needs outside support, but for women it
can be particularly lonely and isolating. Because of the way

(49:14):
our society structure and the way we're raised, women are
often the caretakers when a man goes to prison. They're
the glue that keeps the family together, keeps the relationship together,
and sadly, when women go to prison. You know, there
there are exceptions to every rule, but by and large,
a lot of men, a lot of family members, they're
overwhelmed with their own lives, and they move on and
the women get left behind. And that's why the support
from people who are generous of heart is so critical.

(49:37):
Women get dumped at the gate. Okay, So once again,
it's a cw I P dot net and you can
go there and learn about how to get involved and
write letters and volunteer or send donations. Um, glare you
can you tell us about your book? Yes, my book
is called full Circle because it begins with my arrest
and it ends with my district attorney being brought up

(49:57):
on charges, and in that sense, the circle is closed,
despite the fact that so much has continued to go on. Um.
It's available on Amazon, It's available on Barnes and Noble,
or any place else where you can normally buy a book. Um,
I talk about my case, but I also have about
a third of the book explaining what happens in prison

(50:19):
and what goes on behind the walls. And it actually
is like a real little universe, but it's not one
you'd ever want to get caught up in. Again, the
book is full circle, like Gloria Killian and Sandy Coburn,
Full Circle. Like Gloria Killian, I'm gonna read it, and
I hope you will too. So we have a tradition.

(50:39):
Nina knows this, but i'll tell you, Gloria at ralful conviction,
don't be scared. UM. I don't like surprises. So the
tradition is that at the end of each episode, UM,
I first of all, thank you both for being here, UM,
Gloria Killian and Nina Morrison. And then I get to

(51:00):
up talking, which I think, you know, not something I'm
great at, but I'm going to do it anyway, and
just listen and just leave the mic open for any
final thoughts that you have. And so let's start with you, Nina,
and then you will be closer. You're the headline act.
One thing you asked about earlier that I don't think
we got to because our conversation was going in so
many other interesting directions is whether Gloria ever got financial

(51:23):
compensation for any of the time that she lost or
what happened to her. And the answer is no. And
her case highlights a glaring whole of injustice in the
compensation system, which is that if your civil rights are violated,
which Gloria's clearly were in the course of a criminal case,
you often can sue the law enforcement officials responsible under

(51:46):
the federal civil rights laws or under state law. The
catch is that if the prosecutor is the one responsible
for those civil rights violations, they have what's called immunity.
It's like those of you who had Harry Potter may
remember the invisibility cloak where you can put it on
and not be seen. Prosecutors get the lawsuit equivalent of
an invisibility cloak, by and large, where anything they do
during the course of a criminal trial, no matter how egregious,

(52:08):
they can't be sued for by order of the U. S.
Supreme Court for many years ago, and so if the
letters from Massey, the real killer, had been in the
police file but the prosecutor had never seen them, Gloria
might have had a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the state
and one. However, because they were in the prosecutor's file,
everyone involved guests immunity, and that's incredibly unfair. It needs

(52:29):
to change, thank you, Nita. It's often said that you
can judge a society by looking at its prisons, and
if that is true, then our society is in really
terrible shape. As they said earlier, we demonize our prisoners,
We separate them. We do everything that we can to
act as if they're not even humans, they're not part

(52:51):
of us. I think maybe it makes people feel safer.
I don't know, but I probably felt the same way
decades and decades ago before I had any world experience.
But we need to stop sending innocent people to prison.
And I know that sounds like a no brainer, but
it happens all the time. My guess is that at

(53:12):
any given time, there are at least probably a hundred
thousand people you know in prison who do not deserve
to be there, who are wrongfully convicted. Most of them
have short sentences. You can't even get organized to help
them because it is so expensive and so time consuming
to exonerate a person. I am, as we said earlier,

(53:33):
one of the luckiest people alive, because the evidence that
saved my life and then got me out of that
hell hole was there for me to be able to use.
But I need to help the people that I left behind.
I have to believe this happened to me for a
reason other than just playing ill luck. We need to
take a look at what goes on in our criminal

(53:54):
justice society, and the last thing that I can say
to you is the most important thing this could happen
to you. Don't ever believe it couldn't. Thank you for listening.
This has been a very special episode for me and
hopefully for you too, Scholia, thanks for coming. Thank you

(54:23):
don't forget to give us a fantastic review. Wherever you
get your podcasts, it really helps. And I'm a proud
donor to the Innocence Project and I really hope you'll
join me in supporting this very important cause and helping
to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence Project dot
org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd
like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis.

(54:45):
The music on the show is by three time OSCAR
nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on
Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast.
Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam is a production of Lava
for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one

(55:17):
m