March 4, 2020 • 29 mins
So their theory is that a wandering necrophiliac comes across the body and defiles it?
Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin tell the story of how five Chicago teens were wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of their classmate - and how prosecutors tried to explain away the DNA that proved them innocent. This case happened during the early 1990s, when the media was saturated with misleading stories about youth of color committing violent crimes in groups. This "superpredator" narrative drove the wrongful prosecution of the so-called Central Park Five “wolfpack” -- but it didn’t stop there.
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This episode includes story line about and clips from Retro Report, The Superpredator Scare.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I
writer and I'm Steve Drissen. Last week, we told you
the story of Robert Davis, a false confession case that
happened in Virginia. Today, we're going to tell you about
a case out of Chicago, the story of a violent
and tragic crime that took the life of a young girl.
But there's a larger reason why we want to talk
(00:22):
about this case because of what it also took from
not one, but five innocent teenage boys and from their
families and communities. This case happened during what we now
call the super Predator era, the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties.
The news media was saturated with stories of urban crime,
drugs and gangs, and in particular, sensationalized stories about black
(00:46):
and brown youth committing violent crimes in groups. This narrative
is often associated with New York City. It drove the
wrongful prosecution of the so called Central Park five Wolfpack,
but it didn't stop there. Today we're going to tell
you about a group of teenage boys whose false confessions
transformed them into Chicago's own wolf pack. They're known as
(01:09):
the Dicksmore five. You know, Chicago may be called the
second City, but then when it comes to false confessions,
we don't take a back seat to anybody, not New
York or any other jurisdiction for that matter. We're home
(01:30):
to more false confessions than any other city in the
United States, were home to more juvenile false confessions. And
we're also the home of more cases in which there
are multiple false confessions. And over the years, the Center
on Wrongful Convictions has obtained exonerations in many of these cases,
all of which were from African American teenagers in the
(01:53):
Chicago area. Marquette Park, four Uptown seven, Englewood four Dicksmore five.
These numbers start to add up, and the thing is
each one of these cases involved innocent African American teenagers
in groups confessing to crimes they didn't commit. Of course,
the most famous case like this was New York's Central
Park five case. In April of nine, five teenage boys
(02:17):
were charged with the sexual assault and the attempted murder
of a female jogger in New York's Central Park. The
boys falsely confessed to beating this woman with an inch
of her life and leaving her in the Woods to die.
The Central Park five confessions were driven by race wolfpacks.
(02:42):
Wilding was a whole new language to describe groups of
African American and Latino teenagers, and it created a level
of fear in New York City and around the country
that I had never seen before. So when we began
to look at the dicks More case, the case of
the Central Park five was ringing in my years. It
(03:07):
was November of and fourteen year old Cattersa Matthews was
in the eighth grade. She lived with her mom in
Dicks Moore, a suburb on the south side of Chicago,
surrounded by a tight knit extended family and community. Every
day after school, Catteresa followed the same routine. She'd walk
to her great grandmother's house, where she'd do her homework,
talk on the phone, and do whatever fourteen year old
(03:28):
girls do. After school, she was waiting until her mom
came home from work to go back to her own house.
Cattersa followed this routine religiously until November. When she doesn't
show up at her great grandmother's house after school. Her
family panics, They call the police and a search begins,
(03:48):
but for three weeks there's no sign of Catresa until
December eight. That's when Catteresa's body is found lying in
a wooded field next to the Inner eight highway that
runs through Dick's Moore. She's on her back, partially undressed,
with her pants draped across her lower body. On her
chest is a spent casing from a twenty five caliber bullet.
(04:12):
She's been shot once in the mouth. Even though Catres
had been missing for three weeks, the medical examiner concludes
that she's been killed recently, right around the time her
body's found. There are several reasons for this. For one thing,
rigor mortis is present when she's found. That usually disappears
about hours after death. Her body is also still bleeding
(04:35):
when she's discovered, which she wouldn't expect if she had
been killed much earlier. And also, when a body has
been lying outside for a long time, there are usually
signs like animal or insect bites. There's nothing like that here.
And the medical examiner finds something else too, semen on
Catres's body. She's been raped. This was an awful It's
(04:56):
the worst. I mean, it's every parents nightmare to have
this happened to their child. Know, when you think of
a crime like this, you don't think of it as
something that teenagers would do. Typically, teenage crimes are impulsive crimes.
There's not a lot of planning or premeditation. They happen
in the spur of the moment, but this crime clearly
required some forethought. For eleven long months, the investigation into
(05:20):
Catresa's death goes nowhere until fall, when a teenage boy
tells police that he saw Catresa getting into a car
with some friends around the time of her disappearance. Police
decide to question those friends, starting with Robert Veal on October. Now,
Robert's fourteen years old, but he has pretty severe intellectual
(05:42):
limitations that make him think more like a five year old.
He's questioned for hours without a parent or a lawyer
presence off camera, and in the end he signs a
confession prepared by his interrogator, and the story in this
confession is brutal. Robert says he and four other African
(06:05):
American teenage boys kidnapped a girl they knew from school.
They gang raped her as she pleaded with them to stop,
and then they shot her once in the mouth. It
was a story of an animalistic group of black teenagers
attacking their classmate for sport. The level of depravity in
(06:26):
this story was so out of bounce that it made
me question whether it was true. But it also had
an eerily familiar ring to it, and for me, the
significance was as I was seeing the same explanations in
different cases, which made me begin to feel it like
maybe there was a script that was getting passed around
(06:47):
among Chicago police officers. Only hours after Robert Veale confesses,
police bring in one of his supposed co perpetrators, fifteen
year old Robert Taylor. He's a kid from a loving
and protective vamily, but his parents didn't know he was
at the police station being interrogated. Hours later, his signature
appears on a confession too, and that confession tells a
(07:09):
similarly vicious story. The same five African American teenagers lured
Catrisa into a car, then raped her and shot her
in a field. The super Predator Era was a period
of pronounced moral panic in the United States that focused
on young people, race, and crime. That's our colleague and friend,
(07:32):
Perry Moriarty. She's a professor of law at the University
of Minnesota and an expert on juvenile justice. And the
era of the super predator. The front end marker is
more than likely the Central Park five case that was
April of nine, and that began on era when in
the name of public safety, in the name of being
(07:54):
tough on crime, law enforcement authorities dropped any pretense of
treating children as children and prosecuted them as adults. If
they were black and brown children, they were adultified, either
by law or by connotation, and certainly by the media.
A jogger murdered in New York Central Park. A little
girl gunned down on her family's car in Los Angeles.
(08:16):
A judge has sentenced two boys for killing another child
who refused to steal candy for them. There's a tidal
wave of juvenile violent crime right over the horizon, and
some who study it say the worst is yet to come.
Terms like wilding, beast, chill, predatory. In New York City
newspapers alone, the term wilding appeared a hundred fifty six
(08:40):
times in articles over the eight years following the Central
Park five arrests. To put it in perspective, just a
few months after the Central Park five case, a large
group of Italian and Irish, predominantly teenagers and Vincent Hurst
Brooklyn chased down and killed a young black teenager named
you step Hawkins. And the headlines did not say wilding,
(09:04):
they did not say beasts Hill, They did not even
say gang. They said a group of white teenagers. Now
the police have two confessions that implicate the same five teenagers,
(09:24):
but they're not done yet. Next up is Cheyenne Sharp,
seventeen years old, the third supposed co perpetrator. He's questioned
for nearly twenty four hours before he also confesses and
implicates the other four. And it's the same brutal story,
a group of African American teenage boys terrorizing their classmate
(09:44):
for fun. Now you have to understand how these confessions
are taken. These confessions are scripted, usually by a prosecutor
from the States Attorney's office. Sometimes they're written by police officers,
and these scripts contain a narrative, including character development. Kids
(10:07):
are described as thugs, there's usually references to gang membership.
Women are called bitches and hose. And the scriptwriter in
these cases is doing two things. He's painting the suspects
in a way that nobody can ever think of them
as teenagers. And he's also painting them in a way
(10:28):
that nobody, and that means nobody in the public and
nobody on the jury can have an ounce of sympathy
for them, And in doing so, he's making a script
that is about as rock solid as a route to
conviction as one can imagine. So far, the police have
(10:50):
confessions from three of the Dicks Moore five, and within
days they bring in the two remaining teenagers for questioning
two brothers, seventeen year old James Harden and fifty year
old Jonathan Barr. The boys are interrogated for hours, but
their father had always told them never assign anything prepared
by the police. Somehow a miracle they remember these words
(11:12):
and they don't confess, but they're still named in the
other three teenagers statements. So all five are on the
hook in part because they were arresting and prosecuting kids
in mass in groups. Law enforcement became very adept in
that period at pitting kids against each other during the
interrogation process and using kids against each other to extract
(11:37):
false confessions. When you look at these cases of multiple
false confessions, you see a similar pattern. First of all,
the police usually start with the most vulnerable, most naive,
most gullible of the suspects, and they focused in this
case on Robert Field. He was the weak link. Then
they get a confession from Robert Veal, and what do
(11:59):
they do with that confession They use it as a
battering ram to plow over all of the other defendants.
This is how it works. The first suspect comes in
and the police officers tell them that they know that
he was involved in this crime, and nothing that suspect
can say is going to change their mind. But they
(12:20):
don't think he was the one who actually raped anybody
or killed anybody. He was just a follower. The suspect
is pressured into adopting a story in which he is
a passive participant to the crime and which he fingers
his co defendants as the more active participants. Then, once
(12:41):
that suspect confesses, they bring that confession to the next
in line and they go over the same thing again.
We don't think you committed the crime. He's telling us
that you committed the crime. We know you were there,
but maybe you just held down her arm while they
were raping and killing her. Each suspect is vying for
(13:04):
the least culpable role, and at the end of the day.
This is a very effective way to get confessions from
multiple suspects. In this case, the dominoes are falling, and
each one of them eventually agrees to a story in
which James Harden is the one who actually places the
gun inside Catresa's mouth and pulls the trigger. It's no
(13:26):
coincidence that James is one of the last ones questioned here,
That's right. And at the end of the day police
got confessions from Robert Field, Robert Taylor, and Cheyenne Sharp,
but they couldn't get James Harden and Jonathan Barr to confess.
Based on the confessions, all five teenagers are charged with
(13:47):
the assault and murder of Catresa, Matthews and the Dicks
Moore five are transformed into Chicago's own wolfpack. Pretty soon, though,
it becomes apparent that this case has major problems for starters.
The teenagers versions of what happened are wildly inconsistent. They
can't agree on how they met up with Cattersa, what
(14:09):
the group did before they ended up in that field
by the interstate, or who assaulted Cattersa, and in what order.
In fact, one of the only things they do agree
on was that Catresa had been murdered the day she
disappeared November. But remember this was contradicted by the medical examiner,
who determined that she had been killed three weeks later,
(14:29):
around the time her body was found. And then here
comes the biggest problem. After all five teenagers were charged
but before trial, DNA testing from the seamen left on
Cattersa's body excludes all five suspects. Instead, this DNA belongs
to a single unidentified male. This is mc drop evidence,
(14:51):
the kind of evidence that should have resulted in these
cases being dismissed before trial. Exactly these confessions had been
proven false. But instead of dropping its case, the state
offers deals to two members of the Dicks Moore five,
Cheyenne Sharpe and Robert Veal. If the boys agree to
testify against their codefendants, they'll receive much shorter sentences. Cheyenne
(15:14):
and Robert decide to take the deal, while the state
moves forward with trials for the other three. And those trials,
of course, are based on the stories told in the
confessions despite the DNA you talk here about tunnel vision.
This is what happens. The police officers lock into a story,
they become invested in this notion of a gang rape,
(15:35):
and they can't get out of that box exactly. And
you see this when they have to deal with the
DNA and the prosecutor addresses it during closing argument. And
what does the prosecutor say. He explains the presence of
DNA as the work of a necrophiliac. Now, see if
this isn't exactly a household term. What is a necrophiliac?
(15:55):
It's someone who has sex with dead bodies. I knew
you know that this is officially the most batchet theory
I think I've ever heard. By the way, I couldn't
agree more So, let's get this straight. The theory here
at the Dicksmore five trial was that five teenage boys
sexually assault this victim. They don't leave a trace of
themselves behind. Then here comes this wandering necrophiliac who comes
(16:16):
across the body and decides to defile it. I mean,
we've heard a lot of excuses for DNA and our time,
but this one may take the prize. It's unbelievable that
they would even present this to a jury. It's that insane.
But you have to understand, in the context of a
climate of fear, the irrational becomes rational now. In the
(16:40):
opening statement in this case, the prosecutor said that these men,
pointing at the five teenagers, these men came from a
world where so called friends were turned into a pack
of jackals hunting down their prey, and then they were
done with it, killing it for sport jackals. Can you
believe that this really is Chicago's own wolfpack? Again, it's
(17:05):
a lot easier to fathom locking up a young beast,
youll feral thing, than it is a child, which is
in fact what we were doing. And when you talk
about children as if they were animals, it becomes so
much easier to throw away their lives, to just not
worry about doing that last bit of DNA testing figure
(17:27):
out whose DNA it was actually left Uncle Risa Matthew's body.
It becomes easier to try them as adults. It becomes
easier to sentence them to life sentences or even the
death penalty. It becomes easier to just lock them up
and throw away the key. The dehumanizing story embedded in
(17:56):
these boys confessions, while it works, each that Dicks Moore
five is convicted and the three who don't cut deals,
Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr and James Harden are sentenced to
life in prison. Cheyenne Sharpe and Robert Veale serve their
time and are eventually released with murder convictions on their records.
But the other three language behind bars forgotten people, but
(18:21):
they were not forgotten by their parents or their loved ones.
You know, I'll never forget learning that Jonathan Barr and
James Harden's dad would literally drive around with boxes full
of files regarding their cases in his trunk, trying to
get lawyers interested in taking his son's cases. And Robert
(18:42):
Taylor's family did similar things. They would write letters and
letters and letters to lawyers begging them for help. Finally,
in two thousand and ten, we learned about the case
of the Dicksmore five, our colleague Josh tepfur New, a
public defender, and Jennifer Blagg, who had represented Robert Taylor
(19:03):
on appeal. She referred the case to Josh and we
agreed to take Robert's case. By this time, Robert was
in his early thirties. That's right, he had served over
fifteen years of his sentence. Robert Taylor grew up with
his parents, sister, and brother in Harvey Illinois, right next
to Dicks Moore. From day one, Robert's dad, a Navy vet,
(19:25):
was his strongest defender. Robert Sor refused to be broken
by the fact that his son had gone to prison
because of the words he'd signed his name to. When
the Center on Wrongful Convictions agreed to take Robert's case,
his dad became a major presence in our lives. I
can still remember the smell of his leather jacket when
he hugged us and welcomed us to his family's struggle.
(19:45):
Around the same time, organizations like the Innocence Project and
Exoneration Project got involved in representing other members of the
Dicks Moore five. Our collective first priority was identifying whose
DNA had been left at the crime scene. We had
a new tool called CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System,
and over the time frame since the advent of DNA
(20:06):
testing in the late nineteen eighties, that database had grown,
and so the chances of finding the identity of the
person who raped and killed KATRISA Matthews had grown exactly.
I mean, let's remember for a moment that we're talking
here about DNA that was taken from the semen left
on a rape victim. You cannot ask for better evidence
(20:27):
than that, And it's just sitting there forgotten. How can
you not want to know whose DNA that was? Isn't
that the most important question in this case had been
sitting there unanswered for fifteen years. But where was it sitting?
That was the first challenge. And after a year of searching,
we found the DNA in some warehouse or in some trailer,
(20:50):
and we then had to get permission from the court
to test the DNA. We then sent the DNA off
for testing to a lab, and we waited and the
lab extracted a profile, and when that profile was extracted,
it was run through the code AS database. A miracle
of miracles. In March of two thousand and eleven, we
(21:11):
got a hit and the hit was to a man,
not a boy, a man named Willie Randolph. Now Willie
Randolph was a troubled guy. He was much older than
Catresa or the dicksmore five. When Catresa disappeared, he was
thirty three years old, more than twice her age. Willie
(21:32):
had been in and out of prison his entire adult
life for all sorts of different offenses. In fact, he'd
been paroled only a few months before Cattersa was killed
to a house within a mile of where she lived,
and Willie Randolph had previously been accused of rape in
that very same field by the interstate where Catresa's body
was found. This is a person with a history of
(21:55):
these kinds of attacks, and his DNA and no one
else's was present at the crime scene. Finally, it all
made sense when we learned the identity of Willie Randolph,
when we investigated his background, when we learned the history
of abusing and sexually assaulting women, including young women, teenagers,
(22:17):
we thought this case was over. We thought we were
going to get these boys out tomorrow. Exactly, there's no
relationship at all between Willie Randolph and any of the
Dicks more five. He's not mentioned in any of their confessions.
And why would there be a relationship. This is a
man with a long history of violence in his record,
and none of these boys had a history of violence. Right,
(22:39):
He's twice their age. When they were growing up in
the neighborhood. He was in prison. Willie Randolph as the
guy who did this to Katrisa Matthews. The DNA proved
it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now we had
to convince the prosecutors to do the right thing. But
as incredible as it sounds, the state wouldn't let go
of their necrophilia theory, and the case dragged on for months.
(23:02):
You know, old habits die hard. The state actually suggested
again and maybe Willie Randolph was their mystery necrophiliac. This
is an unbelievable things. Still they're clinging to this theory
that five teenage boys assaulted Gatrisa Matthews, left no trace
of their DNA behind, and here comes Willie Randolph, the
older man, the man of the history of assaults and
(23:24):
violent crime and rape in that very field, and just
happens to defile her body. It beggars belief. It still
took six to seven months to investigate whether there was
any link between Willie Randolph and any of the dicks
more five, there wasn't one. Meanwhile, we were coming back
to court every few weeks to get an update on
(23:45):
the state's investigation and to ask the judge is today
the day of exoneration? And for six long months we
were disappointed. I remember coming home after those court dates
and crying with frustration that I was able to go
home Robert Taylor, our clients had to go back to
a prison cell. Yeah, I remember pulling out my hair
and I had hair back. That's where it all went.
(24:08):
That's where it all went because we had the best
possible evidence of their innocence, and not only were they
refusing to clear our clients, Willie Randolph was on the street.
He was out of prison on parole, and he could
be doing this to somebody else. It was driving me
(24:28):
crazy every time before we walked into that courtroom, I
remember watching Roberts hold his whole body just just taught.
His muscles would be tense, and you could see those
twenty years of trauma that he had endured and the
toll it had taken on him. He couldn't relax into
the possibility that it was going to be his day
that day, and it wasn't his day for months until
(24:52):
it finally was November three, two thousand eleven, Robert Veale,
Cheyenne Sharp, James Harden, Jonathan Barr, and Robert Taylor were exonerated.
Their convictions were thrown out. Nearly twenty years to the
day after Catresa matthews disappearance. The Dicks Moore five had
wrongly served a total of more than fifty years in prison. Eventually,
(25:17):
Willie Randolph was charged with the attack on Catresa Matthews
based on DNA evidence. He's still awaiting trial today. We're
proud to have helped free the Dicksmore five, but as
our colleague Josh Tepford put it, this is not justice.
Justice would have happened a long time ago. Hey, Robert, Stephen, Laura,
(25:42):
good to hear your voice. What's going on with you
these days, Roberts, I'm hanging in Now. How's your son doing?
He's all right, I got you got to pick him
up the school. Yeah, every day. Say what's your favorite
thing to do with your son? Robert. You can't give
(26:06):
those twenty years back to Robert, or to any of
the Dicks more five or any of the guys were
going to talk about on this podcast. You can't give
that time back. But what you can do is make
the years decades that they lost means something. One of
the greatest tragedies in my opinion, and I've been teaching
about the Central Park five case for years and to
(26:26):
this day. When I introduced the case in my criminal
law classes. The one thing that people don't know about
the case is that the kids were innocent, so few
people knew that, even after Matthias Reus confessed, even after
these kids were let out of prison, even after they
were compensated. It is the footnote in this story that
(26:47):
gets lost in our collective consciousness. Maybe not anymore. Finally,
there's attention being brought to who they actually were in
what they suffered, and that's a big part of how
Steve and I approach these cases. Right. It's about, of
course getting them out of prison, fighting for them, opening
up those doors, but it's also about telling the stories.
It's about making it meaningful. It's about saying their name.
(27:09):
It's about not forgetting what happened to them and changing
it so it doesn't happen again. Like the Central Park five,
the story of the Dicks Moore five is about convictions
that were driven by prejudice rather than proof. But the
injustices of the super Predator era were not just a
New York City thing or a Chicago thing, and although
(27:30):
we may want to think so, they're not even really
a ninety nineties thing. In times of great fear or
moral panic, prejudices can distort the search for the truth.
Mistaken assumptions, faulty investigations, and flawed evidence are all still real,
and they still cause wrongful convictions across the country. Every day.
(27:50):
We tell these stories so that we can learn from them,
so that one day there won't be any more Dicks.
Moore fives to all the Dick's more five, but especially
to our client and friend, Robert Taylor. You've endured years
of injustice while remaining a pillar of strength and resilience.
To you and your families, we wish you all the best.
(28:12):
Thanks for letting us tell your story. Next week we'll
tell you the story of a false confession out of Arkansas,
or a twelve year old boy maintains his innocence in
a murder case until police turn off the cameras. Wrongful Conviction,
(28:35):
False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to
our executive producer Jason Flom and the team at Signal
Company Number one Executive producer Kevin Wardace, Senior Producer and Pope,
and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Our music
was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on
(28:57):
Instagram or Twitter at Laura and I and you can
follow me on Twitter at s driven. For more information
on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com and
be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction,
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wrong Conviction
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I
writer and I'm Steve Drissen. Last week, we told you
the story of Robert Davis, a false confession case that
happened in Virginia. Today, we're going to tell you about
a case out of Chicago, the story of a violent
and tragic crime that took the life of a young girl.
But there's a larger reason why we want to talk
(00:22):
about this case because of what it also took from
not one, but five innocent teenage boys and from their
families and communities. This case happened during what we now
call the super Predator era, the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties.
The news media was saturated with stories of urban crime,
drugs and gangs, and in particular, sensationalized stories about black
(00:46):
and brown youth committing violent crimes in groups. This narrative
is often associated with New York City. It drove the
wrongful prosecution of the so called Central Park five Wolfpack,
but it didn't stop there. Today we're going to tell
you about a group of teenage boys whose false confessions
transformed them into Chicago's own wolf pack. They're known as
(01:09):
the Dicksmore five. You know, Chicago may be called the
second City, but then when it comes to false confessions,
we don't take a back seat to anybody, not New
York or any other jurisdiction for that matter. We're home
(01:30):
to more false confessions than any other city in the
United States, were home to more juvenile false confessions. And
we're also the home of more cases in which there
are multiple false confessions. And over the years, the Center
on Wrongful Convictions has obtained exonerations in many of these cases,
all of which were from African American teenagers in the
(01:53):
Chicago area. Marquette Park, four Uptown seven, Englewood four Dicksmore five.
These numbers start to add up, and the thing is
each one of these cases involved innocent African American teenagers
in groups confessing to crimes they didn't commit. Of course,
the most famous case like this was New York's Central
Park five case. In April of nine, five teenage boys
(02:17):
were charged with the sexual assault and the attempted murder
of a female jogger in New York's Central Park. The
boys falsely confessed to beating this woman with an inch
of her life and leaving her in the Woods to die.
The Central Park five confessions were driven by race wolfpacks.
(02:42):
Wilding was a whole new language to describe groups of
African American and Latino teenagers, and it created a level
of fear in New York City and around the country
that I had never seen before. So when we began
to look at the dicks More case, the case of
the Central Park five was ringing in my years. It
(03:07):
was November of and fourteen year old Cattersa Matthews was
in the eighth grade. She lived with her mom in
Dicks Moore, a suburb on the south side of Chicago,
surrounded by a tight knit extended family and community. Every
day after school, Catteresa followed the same routine. She'd walk
to her great grandmother's house, where she'd do her homework,
talk on the phone, and do whatever fourteen year old
(03:28):
girls do. After school, she was waiting until her mom
came home from work to go back to her own house.
Cattersa followed this routine religiously until November. When she doesn't
show up at her great grandmother's house after school. Her
family panics, They call the police and a search begins,
(03:48):
but for three weeks there's no sign of Catresa until
December eight. That's when Catteresa's body is found lying in
a wooded field next to the Inner eight highway that
runs through Dick's Moore. She's on her back, partially undressed,
with her pants draped across her lower body. On her
chest is a spent casing from a twenty five caliber bullet.
(04:12):
She's been shot once in the mouth. Even though Catres
had been missing for three weeks, the medical examiner concludes
that she's been killed recently, right around the time her
body's found. There are several reasons for this. For one thing,
rigor mortis is present when she's found. That usually disappears
about hours after death. Her body is also still bleeding
(04:35):
when she's discovered, which she wouldn't expect if she had
been killed much earlier. And also, when a body has
been lying outside for a long time, there are usually
signs like animal or insect bites. There's nothing like that here.
And the medical examiner finds something else too, semen on
Catres's body. She's been raped. This was an awful It's
(04:56):
the worst. I mean, it's every parents nightmare to have
this happened to their child. Know, when you think of
a crime like this, you don't think of it as
something that teenagers would do. Typically, teenage crimes are impulsive crimes.
There's not a lot of planning or premeditation. They happen
in the spur of the moment, but this crime clearly
required some forethought. For eleven long months, the investigation into
(05:20):
Catresa's death goes nowhere until fall, when a teenage boy
tells police that he saw Catresa getting into a car
with some friends around the time of her disappearance. Police
decide to question those friends, starting with Robert Veal on October. Now,
Robert's fourteen years old, but he has pretty severe intellectual
(05:42):
limitations that make him think more like a five year old.
He's questioned for hours without a parent or a lawyer
presence off camera, and in the end he signs a
confession prepared by his interrogator, and the story in this
confession is brutal. Robert says he and four other African
(06:05):
American teenage boys kidnapped a girl they knew from school.
They gang raped her as she pleaded with them to stop,
and then they shot her once in the mouth. It
was a story of an animalistic group of black teenagers
attacking their classmate for sport. The level of depravity in
(06:26):
this story was so out of bounce that it made
me question whether it was true. But it also had
an eerily familiar ring to it, and for me, the
significance was as I was seeing the same explanations in
different cases, which made me begin to feel it like
maybe there was a script that was getting passed around
(06:47):
among Chicago police officers. Only hours after Robert Veale confesses,
police bring in one of his supposed co perpetrators, fifteen
year old Robert Taylor. He's a kid from a loving
and protective vamily, but his parents didn't know he was
at the police station being interrogated. Hours later, his signature
appears on a confession too, and that confession tells a
(07:09):
similarly vicious story. The same five African American teenagers lured
Catrisa into a car, then raped her and shot her
in a field. The super Predator Era was a period
of pronounced moral panic in the United States that focused
on young people, race, and crime. That's our colleague and friend,
(07:32):
Perry Moriarty. She's a professor of law at the University
of Minnesota and an expert on juvenile justice. And the
era of the super predator. The front end marker is
more than likely the Central Park five case that was
April of nine, and that began on era when in
the name of public safety, in the name of being
(07:54):
tough on crime, law enforcement authorities dropped any pretense of
treating children as children and prosecuted them as adults. If
they were black and brown children, they were adultified, either
by law or by connotation, and certainly by the media.
A jogger murdered in New York Central Park. A little
girl gunned down on her family's car in Los Angeles.
(08:16):
A judge has sentenced two boys for killing another child
who refused to steal candy for them. There's a tidal
wave of juvenile violent crime right over the horizon, and
some who study it say the worst is yet to come.
Terms like wilding, beast, chill, predatory. In New York City
newspapers alone, the term wilding appeared a hundred fifty six
(08:40):
times in articles over the eight years following the Central
Park five arrests. To put it in perspective, just a
few months after the Central Park five case, a large
group of Italian and Irish, predominantly teenagers and Vincent Hurst
Brooklyn chased down and killed a young black teenager named
you step Hawkins. And the headlines did not say wilding,
(09:04):
they did not say beasts Hill, They did not even
say gang. They said a group of white teenagers. Now
the police have two confessions that implicate the same five teenagers,
(09:24):
but they're not done yet. Next up is Cheyenne Sharp,
seventeen years old, the third supposed co perpetrator. He's questioned
for nearly twenty four hours before he also confesses and
implicates the other four. And it's the same brutal story,
a group of African American teenage boys terrorizing their classmate
(09:44):
for fun. Now you have to understand how these confessions
are taken. These confessions are scripted, usually by a prosecutor
from the States Attorney's office. Sometimes they're written by police officers,
and these scripts contain a narrative, including character development. Kids
(10:07):
are described as thugs, there's usually references to gang membership.
Women are called bitches and hose. And the scriptwriter in
these cases is doing two things. He's painting the suspects
in a way that nobody can ever think of them
as teenagers. And he's also painting them in a way
(10:28):
that nobody, and that means nobody in the public and
nobody on the jury can have an ounce of sympathy
for them, And in doing so, he's making a script
that is about as rock solid as a route to
conviction as one can imagine. So far, the police have
(10:50):
confessions from three of the Dicks Moore five, and within
days they bring in the two remaining teenagers for questioning
two brothers, seventeen year old James Harden and fifty year
old Jonathan Barr. The boys are interrogated for hours, but
their father had always told them never assign anything prepared
by the police. Somehow a miracle they remember these words
(11:12):
and they don't confess, but they're still named in the
other three teenagers statements. So all five are on the
hook in part because they were arresting and prosecuting kids
in mass in groups. Law enforcement became very adept in
that period at pitting kids against each other during the
interrogation process and using kids against each other to extract
(11:37):
false confessions. When you look at these cases of multiple
false confessions, you see a similar pattern. First of all,
the police usually start with the most vulnerable, most naive,
most gullible of the suspects, and they focused in this
case on Robert Field. He was the weak link. Then
they get a confession from Robert Veal, and what do
(11:59):
they do with that confession They use it as a
battering ram to plow over all of the other defendants.
This is how it works. The first suspect comes in
and the police officers tell them that they know that
he was involved in this crime, and nothing that suspect
can say is going to change their mind. But they
(12:20):
don't think he was the one who actually raped anybody
or killed anybody. He was just a follower. The suspect
is pressured into adopting a story in which he is
a passive participant to the crime and which he fingers
his co defendants as the more active participants. Then, once
(12:41):
that suspect confesses, they bring that confession to the next
in line and they go over the same thing again.
We don't think you committed the crime. He's telling us
that you committed the crime. We know you were there,
but maybe you just held down her arm while they
were raping and killing her. Each suspect is vying for
(13:04):
the least culpable role, and at the end of the day.
This is a very effective way to get confessions from
multiple suspects. In this case, the dominoes are falling, and
each one of them eventually agrees to a story in
which James Harden is the one who actually places the
gun inside Catresa's mouth and pulls the trigger. It's no
(13:26):
coincidence that James is one of the last ones questioned here,
That's right. And at the end of the day police
got confessions from Robert Field, Robert Taylor, and Cheyenne Sharp,
but they couldn't get James Harden and Jonathan Barr to confess.
Based on the confessions, all five teenagers are charged with
(13:47):
the assault and murder of Catresa, Matthews and the Dicks
Moore five are transformed into Chicago's own wolfpack. Pretty soon, though,
it becomes apparent that this case has major problems for starters.
The teenagers versions of what happened are wildly inconsistent. They
can't agree on how they met up with Cattersa, what
(14:09):
the group did before they ended up in that field
by the interstate, or who assaulted Cattersa, and in what order.
In fact, one of the only things they do agree
on was that Catresa had been murdered the day she
disappeared November. But remember this was contradicted by the medical examiner,
who determined that she had been killed three weeks later,
(14:29):
around the time her body was found. And then here
comes the biggest problem. After all five teenagers were charged
but before trial, DNA testing from the seamen left on
Cattersa's body excludes all five suspects. Instead, this DNA belongs
to a single unidentified male. This is mc drop evidence,
(14:51):
the kind of evidence that should have resulted in these
cases being dismissed before trial. Exactly these confessions had been
proven false. But instead of dropping its case, the state
offers deals to two members of the Dicks Moore five,
Cheyenne Sharpe and Robert Veal. If the boys agree to
testify against their codefendants, they'll receive much shorter sentences. Cheyenne
(15:14):
and Robert decide to take the deal, while the state
moves forward with trials for the other three. And those trials,
of course, are based on the stories told in the
confessions despite the DNA you talk here about tunnel vision.
This is what happens. The police officers lock into a story,
they become invested in this notion of a gang rape,
(15:35):
and they can't get out of that box exactly. And
you see this when they have to deal with the
DNA and the prosecutor addresses it during closing argument. And
what does the prosecutor say. He explains the presence of
DNA as the work of a necrophiliac. Now, see if
this isn't exactly a household term. What is a necrophiliac?
(15:55):
It's someone who has sex with dead bodies. I knew
you know that this is officially the most batchet theory
I think I've ever heard. By the way, I couldn't
agree more So, let's get this straight. The theory here
at the Dicksmore five trial was that five teenage boys
sexually assault this victim. They don't leave a trace of
themselves behind. Then here comes this wandering necrophiliac who comes
(16:16):
across the body and decides to defile it. I mean,
we've heard a lot of excuses for DNA and our time,
but this one may take the prize. It's unbelievable that
they would even present this to a jury. It's that insane.
But you have to understand, in the context of a
climate of fear, the irrational becomes rational now. In the
(16:40):
opening statement in this case, the prosecutor said that these men,
pointing at the five teenagers, these men came from a
world where so called friends were turned into a pack
of jackals hunting down their prey, and then they were
done with it, killing it for sport jackals. Can you
believe that this really is Chicago's own wolfpack? Again, it's
(17:05):
a lot easier to fathom locking up a young beast,
youll feral thing, than it is a child, which is
in fact what we were doing. And when you talk
about children as if they were animals, it becomes so
much easier to throw away their lives, to just not
worry about doing that last bit of DNA testing figure
(17:27):
out whose DNA it was actually left Uncle Risa Matthew's body.
It becomes easier to try them as adults. It becomes
easier to sentence them to life sentences or even the
death penalty. It becomes easier to just lock them up
and throw away the key. The dehumanizing story embedded in
(17:56):
these boys confessions, while it works, each that Dicks Moore
five is convicted and the three who don't cut deals,
Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr and James Harden are sentenced to
life in prison. Cheyenne Sharpe and Robert Veale serve their
time and are eventually released with murder convictions on their records.
But the other three language behind bars forgotten people, but
(18:21):
they were not forgotten by their parents or their loved ones.
You know, I'll never forget learning that Jonathan Barr and
James Harden's dad would literally drive around with boxes full
of files regarding their cases in his trunk, trying to
get lawyers interested in taking his son's cases. And Robert
(18:42):
Taylor's family did similar things. They would write letters and
letters and letters to lawyers begging them for help. Finally,
in two thousand and ten, we learned about the case
of the Dicksmore five, our colleague Josh tepfur New, a
public defender, and Jennifer Blagg, who had represented Robert Taylor
(19:03):
on appeal. She referred the case to Josh and we
agreed to take Robert's case. By this time, Robert was
in his early thirties. That's right, he had served over
fifteen years of his sentence. Robert Taylor grew up with
his parents, sister, and brother in Harvey Illinois, right next
to Dicks Moore. From day one, Robert's dad, a Navy vet,
(19:25):
was his strongest defender. Robert Sor refused to be broken
by the fact that his son had gone to prison
because of the words he'd signed his name to. When
the Center on Wrongful Convictions agreed to take Robert's case,
his dad became a major presence in our lives. I
can still remember the smell of his leather jacket when
he hugged us and welcomed us to his family's struggle.
(19:45):
Around the same time, organizations like the Innocence Project and
Exoneration Project got involved in representing other members of the
Dicks Moore five. Our collective first priority was identifying whose
DNA had been left at the crime scene. We had
a new tool called CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System,
and over the time frame since the advent of DNA
(20:06):
testing in the late nineteen eighties, that database had grown,
and so the chances of finding the identity of the
person who raped and killed KATRISA Matthews had grown exactly.
I mean, let's remember for a moment that we're talking
here about DNA that was taken from the semen left
on a rape victim. You cannot ask for better evidence
(20:27):
than that, And it's just sitting there forgotten. How can
you not want to know whose DNA that was? Isn't
that the most important question in this case had been
sitting there unanswered for fifteen years. But where was it sitting?
That was the first challenge. And after a year of searching,
we found the DNA in some warehouse or in some trailer,
(20:50):
and we then had to get permission from the court
to test the DNA. We then sent the DNA off
for testing to a lab, and we waited and the
lab extracted a profile, and when that profile was extracted,
it was run through the code AS database. A miracle
of miracles. In March of two thousand and eleven, we
(21:11):
got a hit and the hit was to a man,
not a boy, a man named Willie Randolph. Now Willie
Randolph was a troubled guy. He was much older than
Catresa or the dicksmore five. When Catresa disappeared, he was
thirty three years old, more than twice her age. Willie
(21:32):
had been in and out of prison his entire adult
life for all sorts of different offenses. In fact, he'd
been paroled only a few months before Cattersa was killed
to a house within a mile of where she lived,
and Willie Randolph had previously been accused of rape in
that very same field by the interstate where Catresa's body
was found. This is a person with a history of
(21:55):
these kinds of attacks, and his DNA and no one
else's was present at the crime scene. Finally, it all
made sense when we learned the identity of Willie Randolph,
when we investigated his background, when we learned the history
of abusing and sexually assaulting women, including young women, teenagers,
(22:17):
we thought this case was over. We thought we were
going to get these boys out tomorrow. Exactly, there's no
relationship at all between Willie Randolph and any of the
Dicks more five. He's not mentioned in any of their confessions.
And why would there be a relationship. This is a
man with a long history of violence in his record,
and none of these boys had a history of violence. Right,
(22:39):
He's twice their age. When they were growing up in
the neighborhood. He was in prison. Willie Randolph as the
guy who did this to Katrisa Matthews. The DNA proved
it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now we had
to convince the prosecutors to do the right thing. But
as incredible as it sounds, the state wouldn't let go
of their necrophilia theory, and the case dragged on for months.
(23:02):
You know, old habits die hard. The state actually suggested
again and maybe Willie Randolph was their mystery necrophiliac. This
is an unbelievable things. Still they're clinging to this theory
that five teenage boys assaulted Gatrisa Matthews, left no trace
of their DNA behind, and here comes Willie Randolph, the
older man, the man of the history of assaults and
(23:24):
violent crime and rape in that very field, and just
happens to defile her body. It beggars belief. It still
took six to seven months to investigate whether there was
any link between Willie Randolph and any of the dicks
more five, there wasn't one. Meanwhile, we were coming back
to court every few weeks to get an update on
(23:45):
the state's investigation and to ask the judge is today
the day of exoneration? And for six long months we
were disappointed. I remember coming home after those court dates
and crying with frustration that I was able to go
home Robert Taylor, our clients had to go back to
a prison cell. Yeah, I remember pulling out my hair
and I had hair back. That's where it all went.
(24:08):
That's where it all went because we had the best
possible evidence of their innocence, and not only were they
refusing to clear our clients, Willie Randolph was on the street.
He was out of prison on parole, and he could
be doing this to somebody else. It was driving me
(24:28):
crazy every time before we walked into that courtroom, I
remember watching Roberts hold his whole body just just taught.
His muscles would be tense, and you could see those
twenty years of trauma that he had endured and the
toll it had taken on him. He couldn't relax into
the possibility that it was going to be his day
that day, and it wasn't his day for months until
(24:52):
it finally was November three, two thousand eleven, Robert Veale,
Cheyenne Sharp, James Harden, Jonathan Barr, and Robert Taylor were exonerated.
Their convictions were thrown out. Nearly twenty years to the
day after Catresa matthews disappearance. The Dicks Moore five had
wrongly served a total of more than fifty years in prison. Eventually,
(25:17):
Willie Randolph was charged with the attack on Catresa Matthews
based on DNA evidence. He's still awaiting trial today. We're
proud to have helped free the Dicksmore five, but as
our colleague Josh Tepford put it, this is not justice.
Justice would have happened a long time ago. Hey, Robert, Stephen, Laura,
(25:42):
good to hear your voice. What's going on with you
these days, Roberts, I'm hanging in Now. How's your son doing?
He's all right, I got you got to pick him
up the school. Yeah, every day. Say what's your favorite
thing to do with your son? Robert. You can't give
(26:06):
those twenty years back to Robert, or to any of
the Dicks more five or any of the guys were
going to talk about on this podcast. You can't give
that time back. But what you can do is make
the years decades that they lost means something. One of
the greatest tragedies in my opinion, and I've been teaching
about the Central Park five case for years and to
(26:26):
this day. When I introduced the case in my criminal
law classes. The one thing that people don't know about
the case is that the kids were innocent, so few
people knew that, even after Matthias Reus confessed, even after
these kids were let out of prison, even after they
were compensated. It is the footnote in this story that
(26:47):
gets lost in our collective consciousness. Maybe not anymore. Finally,
there's attention being brought to who they actually were in
what they suffered, and that's a big part of how
Steve and I approach these cases. Right. It's about, of
course getting them out of prison, fighting for them, opening
up those doors, but it's also about telling the stories.
It's about making it meaningful. It's about saying their name.
(27:09):
It's about not forgetting what happened to them and changing
it so it doesn't happen again. Like the Central Park five,
the story of the Dicks Moore five is about convictions
that were driven by prejudice rather than proof. But the
injustices of the super Predator era were not just a
New York City thing or a Chicago thing, and although
(27:30):
we may want to think so, they're not even really
a ninety nineties thing. In times of great fear or
moral panic, prejudices can distort the search for the truth.
Mistaken assumptions, faulty investigations, and flawed evidence are all still real,
and they still cause wrongful convictions across the country. Every day.
(27:50):
We tell these stories so that we can learn from them,
so that one day there won't be any more Dicks.
Moore fives to all the Dick's more five, but especially
to our client and friend, Robert Taylor. You've endured years
of injustice while remaining a pillar of strength and resilience.
To you and your families, we wish you all the best.
(28:12):
Thanks for letting us tell your story. Next week we'll
tell you the story of a false confession out of Arkansas,
or a twelve year old boy maintains his innocence in
a murder case until police turn off the cameras. Wrongful Conviction,
(28:35):
False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to
our executive producer Jason Flom and the team at Signal
Company Number one Executive producer Kevin Wardace, Senior Producer and Pope,
and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Our music
was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on
(28:57):
Instagram or Twitter at Laura and I and you can
follow me on Twitter at s driven. For more information
on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com and
be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction,
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at
wrong Conviction
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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