March 11, 2020 • 35 mins
While eating a hamburger, this kid spontaneously confesses to killing his sister?
Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin take us to Camden, Arkansas, where a twelve-year-old boy is left to fend for himself against police officers who suspect him of murder. The interrogation tape is bad enough – but the worst parts happened off camera. This is the story of Thomas Cogdell.
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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.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And I'm Steve Drissen.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
So far, we've told you the story of Robert Davis
in Virginia and the Dixmore five in Chicago, two cases
that show how the interrogation room works and how racial
biases can script false confessions. Today's episode is about how
interrogation tactics designed for seasoned adult criminals are often used
on the most vulnerable among us. We're going to take
(00:28):
you to Camden, Arkansas, where a twelve year old boy
is left to fend for himself against grown ups who
suspect him of murder. The interrogation tape is bad enough,
but the worst parts happened off camera. This is the
story of Thomas.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Cogdal I do a lot of searches online to try
to keep up to date about cases involving false confessions
and juveniles, and this case came on my radar screen.
(01:07):
When I saw these interrogation tapes, I was absolutely floored.
You know, Robert Davis was eighteen, he was well over
six feet tall. But Thomas Cogdell, he was a boy.
He hadn't started shaving yet.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
This is the first video I had seen where adult
tactics were being used on someone as young as Thomas
twelve years old. I'm a mom. I've got kids not
much younger than Thomas, and the way the cops railroaded
this child, it brings me to tears when I hear this.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
You have two boys, I have three boys. I remember
what my boys were like when they were twelve years old,
and they reminded me very much of Thomas.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Cogdele and that the climax of this interrogation they turn
off the camera, that's when the heat really gets turned up.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
What happened off camera? I wanted to know what happened.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Thomas's story starts in Camden, Arkansas, a small town about
twelve thousand people one hundred miles south of Little Rock.
Now Camden's a beautiful place, but like too many smaller towns,
modernity has been hard for Camden. Once upon a time,
it was home to a naval ammunition depot that employed
a lot of people, and it was even known for
(02:20):
being the home of the man who invented gray Pet
soft drinks, which were really popular in the fifties and sixties,
but gray Pet fizzled out and the ammunition depot closed
at the end of the Cold War, and ever since
the late eighties early nineties, Camden's been losing jobs, residents,
and morale. Now, at the beginning of the summer in
two thousand and six, Thomas and his family had moved
(02:44):
into a tidy, little gray house on Waco Street. They
live there, just the three of them. It's Thomas who's twelve,
his eleven year old sister Kayley, and their mom, Melody Jones.
Let me tell you a little about Thomas. He's one
of those whiz kids. It's the kind of kid who
racks up all a's in school and then comes home
and dives straight into a book. He's well mannered, polite, quiet,
(03:08):
small for his age, with these chubby cheeks that made
him look even younger than his age. And at twelve,
he still spoke with a lisp, this really childlike lisp
that was incredibly endearing. Now, in many ways, Thomas shouldered
a lot of the responsibility around the house. Melody was
on Social Security disability because of mental illness, and the
(03:29):
family got by on her monthly check and food stamps.
Thomas had a sister who was eleven, Kaylee. She was
as immature in some ways as Thomas was mature. She
wasn't as good as he was at reading, so he'd
spend a lot of time helping her learn her words
and remembered. They were new on the block, which unfortunately
meant that Kaylee was in for some bullying. But when
(03:50):
other kids would pick on her, Thomas would literally launch
himself at them, chubby cheeks and all. He was the
big brother, it was his responsibility he felt to defend.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
The two of them got along well for the most part,
but like all children, they had their spats, and it
usually occurred when Kaylee would interrupt something that Thomas was
working on or listening to, or video game he was playing,
and that would frustrate him. But that happens in every family.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
So let's fast forward to the morning of August seventh,
two thousand and six. It was Monday morning, but school
was out, so the kids had stayed up really late
the night before. Kayley had gone to bed at about
two point thirty in the morning, and Thomas had stayed
up even later than her until about five am, eating
em and m's and reading a spooky children's book in
his room.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
He fell asleep with the book still open to the
page that he had left it at.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
And then the morning comes at about eleven forty five
or so, both Melody and Thomas are awake. Melody later
said she went to check the mail that morning found
a letter for Kaylee, who was still in her bedroom.
Melody asks Thomas to come with her to surprise Kaylee
with her letter, but they're met with a horrible Kaylee's
in the bedroom. Her hands are tightly bound with a
(05:05):
red dog leash, and her feet are loosely bound with
a cloth measuring tape, the kind of thing you'd use
to measure out and cut fabric. And there's a plastic
bag over her head. Melody removed the bag and it
was immediately clear Kayley was dead. Melody's screamed. She screams
so loudly that the neighbors hear her. She becomes hysterical.
(05:27):
Thomas has the presence of mind to call nine one one.
An ambulance arrives. The neighbors are gathering outside everybody's concern,
but no one's being brought out to that ambulance for treatment. Slowly,
word is beginning to spread among the neighbors that kayleie
Cogdal had been found dead.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
When police arrived at a crime scene, they look for
evidence of forced entry, and they didn't see any evidence
of forced entry. That means that either somebody in the
home had let the murderer in, or that the murder
had been committed by somebody who was in the home
at the time of the crime.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Kayley had not been sexually assaulted. Instead, she'd been smothered
to death. The absence of any sexual attack meant that
both Thomas and his mother, Melody were suspects. Now. At
this point in the investigation, police had thought the time
of death was about six to eight hours before the
body had been discovered. Working back from eleven forty five,
(06:25):
that would have placed the murder around three forty five
to five forty five in the.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Morning, and because Thomas had said that he was awake,
still reading a book at the time, suspicion began to
focus on him.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
The police bring both Melody and Thomas in for questioning
later in the day, and it's melodies turn to go first.
The mom Now, she's questioned at about four thirty pm
for about an hour, and long story short, she denies
doing anything to Kayley, and in fact spends most of
that interview answering questions about Thomas. At the end of
that interview, the end of the hour, she gives the
(06:59):
police permier to question Thomas. Now, this is interesting and problematic, right,
I mean, Melody's a suspect as well as Thomas, and
she's the one who is giving the police consent to
question her son, the other suspect.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
It's totally inappropriate.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
But the police relied on that consent that they'd gotten
from Melody, from Thomas's mom, plowed ahead with questioning Thomas
all by himself, no lawyer, no parent, no nothing, starting
at about five thirty PM.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
So Thomas, a twelve year old boy who had never
had any contact with law enforcement, is left to fend
for himself against seasoned homicide detectives.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
All of the beginning of Thomas's interrogation is captured on videotape,
And when you watch this tape, you see a small
boy sitting in a chair at a table in a
small room with no windows, no clock. Thomas is about
to undergo about five hours of questioning at age twelve,
by himself. Now, the first segment of this tape runs
(07:58):
from about five thirty in the afternoon to sixty five,
and it's hard to watch.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
It's brutal. It literally gutted me and caused me to cry.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Exactly I mean. At first, Thomas keeps his cool. You
can see the honor Roll student in him, trying to
be the big man who helps the police. He calls
his interrogators sir. He answers them quickly and politely. The
only way you can tell he's nervous is by the
way he's wringing his hands over and over again, almost
non stop. But it gets awful, and it gets awful quickly.
(08:31):
The police start out by telling Thomas that he has
to choose between incriminating himself and incriminating his own mother.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
In the bottom line on me is nobody broke in
that house last night. There's no indication of any break here.
So your sister died and there was only two people
in the house that could have killed him. Okay, that's
the only way he can.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Make boy, understand you or your mother. That's the only
way it can be, boy, There ain't no other way.
And again, did your mother kill her? Not that I
know of. They say, why would you kill your sister?
And he says, I wouldn't, but they've continued to press
(09:21):
you had to have killed her, because if your mother didn't,
that just leaves you that she had.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
If your mother didn't, I just leave she. Thomas begins
to cry, actually wail, and the sound of his high
pitch wailing is what caused me the greatest distressed because
it sounded almost like the way an animal would sound,
a baby animal if their foot were caught in a
bear trap or an animal trot. One of the detectives
(10:09):
says to him, why are you crying, Thomas, And Thomas says,
because you're accusing me of something I didn't do. He
(10:36):
had the presence of mind to articulate exactly what he
was feeling.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Is unbelievable from a twelve year old little and a
twelve year old who had just gone through this this
level of trauma. I mean to be that self aware.
I'm crying because you're accusing me of something I didn't do.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
And the detective he's not yelling, he's not screaming, but
he's pressing the point it had to be you, boy.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
So Thomas right is a smart kid. He's an Honoraal student,
and you can see his mind starts spinning. He's trying
to figure a way out of this horrific situation, and
he asks the officers, is there any way I can
prove to you that I didn't do this?
Speaker 2 (11:15):
In no way want to okay, personally okay, A moment
he woke me up.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Ahead my lap, and his idea for proving his own
innocence is this heartbreakingly childlike idea. He fell asleep that
night at five am with a book in his lap,
and he tells the officers that if he had woken
up and killed his sister, the book would have fallen
off his lap and be on the floor of his bedroom.
And he says, go back and look in my bedroom.
(11:43):
You'll see that there's no book on the floor, which
proves I didn't do this. The officers reject this theory, right,
and instead they tell Thomas he had no choice but
to confess. You're going to have to tell us everything.
Thomas keeps denying his guilt as the pressure is turned
up dozens of times over and over. He tells him
(12:05):
he didn't kill his sister, and of course it's the
officer's job to cut through those denials to make him
believe the case against him is rock solid to bring
him down to that point of hopelessness. So they lie
to twelve year old Thomas. They lie, They say to him,
their investigation is going to find his fingerprints on the
plastic bag that was over Kaylee's head, and his fingerprints
(12:29):
are going to be at a certain angle that somehow
indicates that he had held the bag over his sister's head.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
And then they offer inducements to get him to confess. Thomas,
you're twelve years old. If you confess, we're here to
help you and your mother, You've got to be flat
honest with us so that we can help you. You're
going to need some help to get rid of this guilt.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
We're here to help you and your.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
Mother, Okay, But you've got to be flat honest with
us so we can help you. Okay. Return.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Oh, it's the help theme again versus punishment. We're here
to help you, that's what we want to do, Temas.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
And it's at this point during the interrogation that the
officers introduce their theory of the crime. In other words,
they start telling Thomas what it is they want him
to say. Could it have been an accident? They asked Thomas,
even though the crime is scene obviously indicates that what
happened to Kayley was was clearly no accident, and Thomas,
who's crying and scared out of his mind, says, this
(13:29):
possibility and I don't, well, it's a possibility. It could
have been an accident. And I don't remember it.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Do you remember tomorrow?
Speaker 4 (13:40):
You knows.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
This goes on, Okay, it goes on for more than
an hour, and by the end it culminates in this
horrible ten minute segment where Thomas is left alone. The
officers step out of the room, but the camera is
still running, and he starts rocking back and forth in
his seat and muttering to himself. It's like halfway distinguishable gibberish.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Nobody came, so I didn't do it?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Why she wanted to do it? Why mom wouldn't do this.
She loves her daughter, doesn't she? She loves me. I
didn't do it, that's the bottom line. But they don't
believe me. Help. I'm scared.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
We've seen cases where people are reduced to a place
where they're crawled up in a fetal position on the
floor from these tactics, and they're working their magic on Thomas.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
I mean it's so hard to watch. This is psychological torture,
and this moment, the emotional breakdown of Thomas, this is
the moment when police decide to turn off the video camera.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
There's no excuse for that. I think what they began
to realize was that this was awful what they were
recording on tape, and Thomas had reached a place where
he was having a breakdown and he still would not
confess to this crime. So they needed some time to
try to work on him outside of the interrogation room
(15:29):
with the.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Camera off exactly, and outside of this camera which was
recording this trail of emotional destruction that would turn off
any judge, any jury, any listener in America. So they
(15:57):
turned off the camera for what they later called a
break questioning r a break that ended up lasting about
three and a half hours. Now, it's perfectly legal for
them to turn off the camera, right That's the thing
there was, and in fact, there still is no law
in Arkansas requiring interrogations to be recorded in full.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
We need to have the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth of what happens in the interrogation room.
We can't allow law enforcement officers to have the discretion
on when depressed the stop button.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Later, when the state was prosecuting this case, it said
that all that happened during this break was that the
deputy prosecutor sat with Thomas while he had something to eat, right,
And during that break, while he was eating, the prosecutor
said that Thomas just spontaneously decided to blurt out a
confession to killing his sister. Right, not being questioned, not
(16:54):
being pressured, not being manipulated, not being lied to. He
just blurts it out in the middle of eating this hamburger.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
And this is a common refrain that we hear from
law enforcement officers, the spontaneous confession. And why is it common? Well,
if someone blurts out at confession without any prompting or
persuasion by the police, police officers don't need to read
them their miranda rights.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
It's not until ten twenty pm that officers turn the
video camera back on. We're back now in the same
interrogation room with Thomas sitting in the same seat as
in the earlier session. But what we now see and
hear is a very different Thomas Coddle.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Right, Cole H, I am to actually feel good and
good and you know, it's like a completely different person
in that interrogation room. He is calm, he is cool,
he is collected. He seems to be eager to want
to help police officers. And it's as if someone presses
(17:56):
the play button and he starts telling a story that
involves and implicates him in his sister's death.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Exactly. He's almost cheerful while he's reciting the story, one
that sounds really rehearsed and practiced. He tells a story
in which Kaylee had been in her bed, apparently sleeping,
and Thomas had tied her hands and feet to slower down.
He says when she got out of bed, he didn't
mean to hurt her, and then he described putting a
(18:24):
plastic bag over her head, leaving the room, then going
back and loosening it so that air could get in there.
But even this story, right, this confession to being involved
in the death of his sister, it develops inconsistencies. The
police have him go through it a second time, and
this time they have him take out the part where
(18:45):
it was an accident. On the second go round, Thomas
said he put two bags on Kaylee's head because the
first one had a hole in it, and he said
he held the bags there until she started twitching. In
this account, he says he tied her up after she
was smothered.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
You shit bags and one more bags?
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Why did you used to because the other one had
a hole in it? Okay, so she's charged.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
You've gone. You've got these things to tie.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Her wrists and to tie her legs, and you.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
Do that for fear that she's gonna wake up and
come hurt you.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
That's what you're telling us. Then what do you do?
Speaker 4 (19:25):
And I turn onto TV as I said, leave home
and go back to me, and then I false lea.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
And it's this story, this concession, that leads to Thomas's
arrest and being charged in juvenile court with his own
sister's murder.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
But it's still not quite the end of the story,
because as soon as Thomas gives this strangely calm confession,
the police bring in his mother, Melody.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
They're probably hoping that Thomas is gonna confess to his
mom and then they'll have another piece of evidence that
they can use against Tom. But what does Thomas say, Well,
he leans over and he whispers to his mother something
that he's obviously trying to say without the camera picking
it up. Thomas whispers to his mom not to worry,
(20:14):
just go along with it. He didn't really do it
and they won't find his fingerprints on the bag. The
interrogators want to know what he whispered to his mother,
so they ask her when they have her alone again,
what did he whisper to you?
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Did he go along with what he said because he said.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
He didn't do it and that y'all wouldn't find his fingerprints?
Speaker 1 (20:39):
What does he mean? Thomas knows his fingerprints aren't on
the bags that were found over his sister's head because
he never touched those bags. He believes that the absence
of his fingerprints will prove his confession false and set
him free. And then he appears to think that, having
done as he was told, after having confessed to the
(21:03):
murder of his own sister, he's going to walk out
of that room and go to his cousin's house. Instead,
police come back in place Thomas under arrest and charge
him with the murder of his own sister.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
So let's talk a little bit about Thomas's confession. One
of the best ways to measure the reliability of a
confession is to look at the evidence that corroborates it,
and in Thomas's case, there was no corroboration linking Thomas
to this crime. They took that cloth measuring tape and
they sent it to the lab for DNA testing. Thomas's
(21:42):
DNA wasn't on that cloth measuring tape. Instead, another male's
DNA was on that tape. And the story didn't account
for other findings that the medical examiner had made. Caylee
had bruising on her forehead, suggesting that there was some
beating or some kind of a struggle before she had
been killed, and Thomas's confession said nothing about a beating
(22:03):
or a struggle.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
There's such a lack of corroboration of Thomas's story and
the psychological tactics that were used to extract this story,
including fact feeding, including threats and promises. This confession bears
so many red flags. But let's talk for a minute though,
about that three and a half hour period when the
video camera was turned off. I mean, you look at
(22:24):
this and it just stinks to high heaven when they
press that stop button and then somehow Lo and Behold
come back with a confession and a completely different child.
What happened during that time. How did Thomas turn from
this panicked child having an emotional breakdown to a cool, calm, confident,
confessed murderer.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
To hear it from Thomas, this was no spontaneous outburst
suggesting that he was guilty the whole time. This was
part of an interrogation process that actually was ramped up
during that three and a half hour period.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Thomas has said that the interrogation continued after he had
that emotional breakdown and was taken out of the room
that off camera, the police had continued telling him that
it was either going to be you or your mother,
and that he needed to stand up and be a
man and admit what he did and if he did
then he'd be able to go home. Right That's why
(23:21):
he later thought he was going to be able to
go back to his cousin's house after confessing to the
murder of his own sister. And Thomas also told his
court appointed psychologist that they told him that if he
didn't confess, he a twelve year old, would be charged
as an adult and could get the death penalty.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Or his mother could get the death penalty if he
didn't confess, because there are only two people who could
have been guilty of this crime, Thomas or his mother.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
So we have these two different stories of what happened
during this three and a half hour period. Off camera,
the prosecutor says Thomas is eating and he spontaneously confesses.
But to Thomas has a story of continuing pressure, continuing manipulation,
all occurring off camera. So how do we weigh those
two accounts well. During Thomas's break in questioning Melody, the
(24:12):
mom is reinterviewed a second time on video camera, and
during that second interview of Melody, you can hear a loud,
deep male voice yell Thomas, I'm not going to ask
you again. Thomas is being questioned. That much is really clear,
(24:32):
and he's being yelled at. That horrible process that we
saw earlier is still happening just off camera.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Thomas is convicted despite the heroic efforts of a very
good attorney who Laura and I met for the first
time in this case. Thomas's attorney was a public defender
named Dorsey Corbin.
Speaker 4 (24:55):
My name is Dorsey Corbin, and I represented Thomas Cogdaal
from seven months after he was charged with murder until
the Supreme Court handed down its opinion on May six,
twenty ten.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
She had challenged the confession aggressively before trial and lost,
and she had tried this case very effectively.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Confessions are one of the most powerful forms of evidence,
and it can be incredibly hard to unwind these cases.
After the fact, eighty one percent of false confessors who
took their case to trial were convicted even though they
were factually innocence of these crimes.
Speaker 4 (25:30):
Okay, can I talk about things that don't make sense
in this whole case. The police, they originally thought that
Kaylee must have died somewhere between two thirty or three thirty,
and that was the time frame that Thomas used in
his confession. Lividity is the process which after death, your
blood settles because of basically gravity. So if you're laying
(25:53):
on your back, you're going to have red marks on
the back where the blood settles. The medical exammeinter tests
that lividity stops after six to eight hours. However, the
pictures taken at the crime scene at twelve oh two
pm in the afternoon and at one fifty in the
afternoon showed continuing lividity, the time of death being six
(26:16):
to eight hours before two pm. In the afternoon, is
well after the time Thomas had gone to sleep, and
the police never made him change that part of his story.
He didn't do this in his sleep and somehow managed
to leave no fingerprints, no DNA. It just didn't happen
at the hands of Thomas. The judge had heard all
(26:41):
of the evidence from the very beginning, but the.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Power of the confession again was so strong that the
juvenile court judge believed the confession.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
Very few people can understand how or why anyone would
admit to a crime they didn't commit.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
So Thomas has sent off to a juvenile detention facility
in Texarkana, where he was sentenced to stay there until
his eighteenth birthday. Dorsey Corbin, meanwhile, his public defender, continued
fighting his case. She took Thomas's case to the Arkansas
Court of Appeals and argued about the confession there lost,
and then she decided to take the case to the
(27:21):
Arkansas Supreme Court. And that's when we got involved. When
we first heard about Thomas's case, it was right when
we were getting ready for Brendan Dassi's post conviction hearing
(27:42):
in Manitoba, Wisconsin, and we reached out to Dorsey Corbin,
and when she learned that the Arkansas Supreme Court had
agreed to hear Thomas's case, she asked us to file
an amicus brief. Write a brief from experts explaining the
problem of false confessions and explaining how kids like Thomas
are more likely to falsely confess than adults, believe it
(28:05):
or not. When you're in the part of the appeals
process called a direct appeal, you can't file it based
on whether the confession is true or false. Instead, the
only argument that you can make is whether the confession
was coerced or forced, and whether there were any problems
with the way in which police read the defendant his
Miranda rights. These are the right to remain silent, the
(28:26):
right to have a lawyer with you during questioning.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
The defendant has to knowingly and intelligently waive his Miranda rights.
So if the suspect, because of his or her vulnerabilities,
doesn't understand those rights, that's another way to attack the confession.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
What was Dorsey doing in this case? For Thomas? Here
we have a twelve year old in the interrogation room
who's being told that he has a constitutional right to
silence and a lawyer, all these difficult concepts. They tell
him he has these rights and then they ask him,
do you agree to waive these rights?
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Well, you sign a waiver. And this is where inquisitiveness
saved the day for Thomas. The detective asks him to
sign a waiver, and Thomas said, what's a waiver? You know,
a waiver is a legal term exactly. You know, every
time you go bungee jumping, you have to sign a
(29:21):
waiver to protect the business from getting sued.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Here's Thomas about to go off the cliff, right, I
mean a different kind of cliff.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
So the detective freezes and he's never been asked that question.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
He says, well, this simply states that what you were doing,
you were doing of your own free will. That's not
what a waiver means. That that's not what it means
to give up your rights. This is the issue that
Dorsey Corbyn, Thomas's lawyer, brought before the Arkansas Supreme Court,
and it was the issue that we supported her with
(29:55):
by writing an amicus brief that not only talks about
how insane it is the twelve year olds like Thomas
are allowed to waive their constitutional rights without any adult
advising them, but that also highlighted all of the reasons
why this confession we thought was not worth the tape
it was recorded on, and it worked.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
The Arkansas Supreme Court held that the detective's explanation of
what a waiver was was wrong, and that as a result,
Thomas did not knowingly and intelligently wave his Miranda rights.
The confession was out and the conviction was overturned.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
It angers me so much that police officers lie to children,
isolate children, and do all the terrible things that they
did to Thomas in this interrogation, and God only knows
what they did to him for the three and a
(30:53):
half hours that they didn't bother to put the tape on.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Because he was an honor roll student, he wanted to
make sure he understood this new he hadn't heard before waiver.
That's what freed him. How many other Thomas Cogdals are
there out there, children twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, who
were interrogated in just this way, but who didn't have
that moment of good fortune in a way to be
able to ask what a word means, As.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
The captain of the police force said at the time
of trial, had we known at the interview. What we
know now, we would have conducted the interview differently. That
speaks volumes. They focused in on Thomas, they had tunnel vision,
and their sole goal was to get a confession out
of a scared twelve year old boy. Congratulations, they did it.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
No one else has ever been charged with the murder
of Kaylee Cogdal.
Speaker 4 (31:46):
Thomas deserves closure, and equally importantly, Thomas's sister deserves justice.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Melody never confessed to this crime. And the bottom line
is police and prosecutors made a judgment that there wasn't
enough evidence pointing to an alternative suspect. We weren't there
on the scene. We can't tell you what the evidence
on the scene shoulder who had pointed to. But what
we do know is that Thomas's confession is false. Two
weeks or so after the Arkansas Supreme Court, throughout his conviction,
(32:16):
Thomas was free living with his grandparents.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
When he was younger, his mother had taken Thomas and
his sister to the Department of Human Services and basically said, here,
take these kids. I can't deal with them anymore. I
suspect that when Thomas came back he felt somewhat of
a burden to be more of a caretaker for both
his mother and for his sister after the murder.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
I think it was very.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
Important for Thomas to live with people who would take
care of him, nurture him, and love him. He found
that with his grandparents, and they were so very happy
to have him their home.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Despite the ordeal of trial and conviction, everything that Thomas
went through after he was released, he still had dreams.
He wants to be an astronomer, and he wants to
go where people don't know him. Thomas, wherever you are,
we wish you all the best.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
My friend and Dorsey, thank you so much for allowing
us to play a role in this case.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
It's a great honor to be able to work with
people like Dorsey to fight for the freedom of kids
like Thomas. But there are larger questions here. What can
we do to prevent these kinds of cases from happening again?
What kinds of reforms are needed. One of the laws
that Steve has been fighting for is a law requiring
lawyers in the interrogation room for kids like Thomas, not
(33:46):
allowing them to give up their rights to a lawyer,
but rather insisting that they have someone there by their
side to advise.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Them, and they need help in understanding what the Mirianda
warnings are and understanding what the consequence witz are of
giving them up. That's why you need lawyers to be
an advocate for that child in the interrogation room.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Thanks for listening to Thomas Cogdell's story. Next week, we'll
take you to a small farmtown in Nebraska that was
racked by a double murder, a false confession, and a
surprising twist that sounds like it's right out of a
Tarantino movie. Until then, thanks for listening. Wrongful Conviction, False
Confessions is the production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
(34:35):
association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to our
executive producer Jason Flamm and the team at Signal Company
number one. Executive producer Kevin wardis Senior producer and Pope,
and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Our music
was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on
Instagram or Twitter at Laura Nyrider and you.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
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
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And I'm Steve Drissen.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
So far, we've told you the story of Robert Davis
in Virginia and the Dixmore five in Chicago, two cases
that show how the interrogation room works and how racial
biases can script false confessions. Today's episode is about how
interrogation tactics designed for seasoned adult criminals are often used
on the most vulnerable among us. We're going to take
(00:28):
you to Camden, Arkansas, where a twelve year old boy
is left to fend for himself against grown ups who
suspect him of murder. The interrogation tape is bad enough,
but the worst parts happened off camera. This is the
story of Thomas.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Cogdal I do a lot of searches online to try
to keep up to date about cases involving false confessions
and juveniles, and this case came on my radar screen.
(01:07):
When I saw these interrogation tapes, I was absolutely floored.
You know, Robert Davis was eighteen, he was well over
six feet tall. But Thomas Cogdell, he was a boy.
He hadn't started shaving yet.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
This is the first video I had seen where adult
tactics were being used on someone as young as Thomas
twelve years old. I'm a mom. I've got kids not
much younger than Thomas, and the way the cops railroaded
this child, it brings me to tears when I hear this.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
You have two boys, I have three boys. I remember
what my boys were like when they were twelve years old,
and they reminded me very much of Thomas.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Cogdele and that the climax of this interrogation they turn
off the camera, that's when the heat really gets turned up.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
What happened off camera? I wanted to know what happened.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Thomas's story starts in Camden, Arkansas, a small town about
twelve thousand people one hundred miles south of Little Rock.
Now Camden's a beautiful place, but like too many smaller towns,
modernity has been hard for Camden. Once upon a time,
it was home to a naval ammunition depot that employed
a lot of people, and it was even known for
(02:20):
being the home of the man who invented gray Pet
soft drinks, which were really popular in the fifties and sixties,
but gray Pet fizzled out and the ammunition depot closed
at the end of the Cold War, and ever since
the late eighties early nineties, Camden's been losing jobs, residents,
and morale. Now, at the beginning of the summer in
two thousand and six, Thomas and his family had moved
(02:44):
into a tidy, little gray house on Waco Street. They
live there, just the three of them. It's Thomas who's twelve,
his eleven year old sister Kayley, and their mom, Melody Jones.
Let me tell you a little about Thomas. He's one
of those whiz kids. It's the kind of kid who
racks up all a's in school and then comes home
and dives straight into a book. He's well mannered, polite, quiet,
(03:08):
small for his age, with these chubby cheeks that made
him look even younger than his age. And at twelve,
he still spoke with a lisp, this really childlike lisp
that was incredibly endearing. Now, in many ways, Thomas shouldered
a lot of the responsibility around the house. Melody was
on Social Security disability because of mental illness, and the
(03:29):
family got by on her monthly check and food stamps.
Thomas had a sister who was eleven, Kaylee. She was
as immature in some ways as Thomas was mature. She
wasn't as good as he was at reading, so he'd
spend a lot of time helping her learn her words
and remembered. They were new on the block, which unfortunately
meant that Kaylee was in for some bullying. But when
(03:50):
other kids would pick on her, Thomas would literally launch
himself at them, chubby cheeks and all. He was the
big brother, it was his responsibility he felt to defend.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
The two of them got along well for the most part,
but like all children, they had their spats, and it
usually occurred when Kaylee would interrupt something that Thomas was
working on or listening to, or video game he was playing,
and that would frustrate him. But that happens in every family.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
So let's fast forward to the morning of August seventh,
two thousand and six. It was Monday morning, but school
was out, so the kids had stayed up really late
the night before. Kayley had gone to bed at about
two point thirty in the morning, and Thomas had stayed
up even later than her until about five am, eating
em and m's and reading a spooky children's book in
his room.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
He fell asleep with the book still open to the
page that he had left it at.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
And then the morning comes at about eleven forty five
or so, both Melody and Thomas are awake. Melody later
said she went to check the mail that morning found
a letter for Kaylee, who was still in her bedroom.
Melody asks Thomas to come with her to surprise Kaylee
with her letter, but they're met with a horrible Kaylee's
in the bedroom. Her hands are tightly bound with a
(05:05):
red dog leash, and her feet are loosely bound with
a cloth measuring tape, the kind of thing you'd use
to measure out and cut fabric. And there's a plastic
bag over her head. Melody removed the bag and it
was immediately clear Kayley was dead. Melody's screamed. She screams
so loudly that the neighbors hear her. She becomes hysterical.
(05:27):
Thomas has the presence of mind to call nine one one.
An ambulance arrives. The neighbors are gathering outside everybody's concern,
but no one's being brought out to that ambulance for treatment. Slowly,
word is beginning to spread among the neighbors that kayleie
Cogdal had been found dead.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
When police arrived at a crime scene, they look for
evidence of forced entry, and they didn't see any evidence
of forced entry. That means that either somebody in the
home had let the murderer in, or that the murder
had been committed by somebody who was in the home
at the time of the crime.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Kayley had not been sexually assaulted. Instead, she'd been smothered
to death. The absence of any sexual attack meant that
both Thomas and his mother, Melody were suspects. Now. At
this point in the investigation, police had thought the time
of death was about six to eight hours before the
body had been discovered. Working back from eleven forty five,
(06:25):
that would have placed the murder around three forty five
to five forty five in the.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Morning, and because Thomas had said that he was awake,
still reading a book at the time, suspicion began to
focus on him.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
The police bring both Melody and Thomas in for questioning
later in the day, and it's melodies turn to go first.
The mom Now, she's questioned at about four thirty pm
for about an hour, and long story short, she denies
doing anything to Kayley, and in fact spends most of
that interview answering questions about Thomas. At the end of
that interview, the end of the hour, she gives the
(06:59):
police permier to question Thomas. Now, this is interesting and problematic, right,
I mean, Melody's a suspect as well as Thomas, and
she's the one who is giving the police consent to
question her son, the other suspect.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
It's totally inappropriate.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
But the police relied on that consent that they'd gotten
from Melody, from Thomas's mom, plowed ahead with questioning Thomas
all by himself, no lawyer, no parent, no nothing, starting
at about five thirty PM.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
So Thomas, a twelve year old boy who had never
had any contact with law enforcement, is left to fend
for himself against seasoned homicide detectives.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
All of the beginning of Thomas's interrogation is captured on videotape,
And when you watch this tape, you see a small
boy sitting in a chair at a table in a
small room with no windows, no clock. Thomas is about
to undergo about five hours of questioning at age twelve,
by himself. Now, the first segment of this tape runs
(07:58):
from about five thirty in the afternoon to sixty five,
and it's hard to watch.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
It's brutal. It literally gutted me and caused me to cry.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Exactly I mean. At first, Thomas keeps his cool. You
can see the honor Roll student in him, trying to
be the big man who helps the police. He calls
his interrogators sir. He answers them quickly and politely. The
only way you can tell he's nervous is by the
way he's wringing his hands over and over again, almost
non stop. But it gets awful, and it gets awful quickly.
(08:31):
The police start out by telling Thomas that he has
to choose between incriminating himself and incriminating his own mother.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
In the bottom line on me is nobody broke in
that house last night. There's no indication of any break here.
So your sister died and there was only two people
in the house that could have killed him. Okay, that's
the only way he can.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Make boy, understand you or your mother. That's the only
way it can be, boy, There ain't no other way.
And again, did your mother kill her? Not that I
know of. They say, why would you kill your sister?
And he says, I wouldn't, but they've continued to press
(09:21):
you had to have killed her, because if your mother didn't,
that just leaves you that she had.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
If your mother didn't, I just leave she. Thomas begins
to cry, actually wail, and the sound of his high
pitch wailing is what caused me the greatest distressed because
it sounded almost like the way an animal would sound,
a baby animal if their foot were caught in a
bear trap or an animal trot. One of the detectives
(10:09):
says to him, why are you crying, Thomas, And Thomas says,
because you're accusing me of something I didn't do. He
(10:36):
had the presence of mind to articulate exactly what he
was feeling.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Is unbelievable from a twelve year old little and a
twelve year old who had just gone through this this
level of trauma. I mean to be that self aware.
I'm crying because you're accusing me of something I didn't do.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
And the detective he's not yelling, he's not screaming, but
he's pressing the point it had to be you, boy.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
So Thomas right is a smart kid. He's an Honoraal student,
and you can see his mind starts spinning. He's trying
to figure a way out of this horrific situation, and
he asks the officers, is there any way I can
prove to you that I didn't do this?
Speaker 2 (11:15):
In no way want to okay, personally okay, A moment
he woke me up.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Ahead my lap, and his idea for proving his own
innocence is this heartbreakingly childlike idea. He fell asleep that
night at five am with a book in his lap,
and he tells the officers that if he had woken
up and killed his sister, the book would have fallen
off his lap and be on the floor of his bedroom.
And he says, go back and look in my bedroom.
(11:43):
You'll see that there's no book on the floor, which
proves I didn't do this. The officers reject this theory, right,
and instead they tell Thomas he had no choice but
to confess. You're going to have to tell us everything.
Thomas keeps denying his guilt as the pressure is turned
up dozens of times over and over. He tells him
(12:05):
he didn't kill his sister, and of course it's the
officer's job to cut through those denials to make him
believe the case against him is rock solid to bring
him down to that point of hopelessness. So they lie
to twelve year old Thomas. They lie, They say to him,
their investigation is going to find his fingerprints on the
plastic bag that was over Kaylee's head, and his fingerprints
(12:29):
are going to be at a certain angle that somehow
indicates that he had held the bag over his sister's head.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
And then they offer inducements to get him to confess. Thomas,
you're twelve years old. If you confess, we're here to
help you and your mother, You've got to be flat
honest with us so that we can help you. You're
going to need some help to get rid of this guilt.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
We're here to help you and your.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
Mother, Okay, But you've got to be flat honest with
us so we can help you. Okay. Return.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Oh, it's the help theme again versus punishment. We're here
to help you, that's what we want to do, Temas.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
And it's at this point during the interrogation that the
officers introduce their theory of the crime. In other words,
they start telling Thomas what it is they want him
to say. Could it have been an accident? They asked Thomas,
even though the crime is scene obviously indicates that what
happened to Kayley was was clearly no accident, and Thomas,
who's crying and scared out of his mind, says, this
(13:29):
possibility and I don't, well, it's a possibility. It could
have been an accident. And I don't remember it.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Do you remember tomorrow?
Speaker 4 (13:40):
You knows.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
This goes on, Okay, it goes on for more than
an hour, and by the end it culminates in this
horrible ten minute segment where Thomas is left alone. The
officers step out of the room, but the camera is
still running, and he starts rocking back and forth in
his seat and muttering to himself. It's like halfway distinguishable gibberish.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Nobody came, so I didn't do it?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Why she wanted to do it? Why mom wouldn't do this.
She loves her daughter, doesn't she? She loves me. I
didn't do it, that's the bottom line. But they don't
believe me. Help. I'm scared.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
We've seen cases where people are reduced to a place
where they're crawled up in a fetal position on the
floor from these tactics, and they're working their magic on Thomas.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
I mean it's so hard to watch. This is psychological torture,
and this moment, the emotional breakdown of Thomas, this is
the moment when police decide to turn off the video camera.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
There's no excuse for that. I think what they began
to realize was that this was awful what they were
recording on tape, and Thomas had reached a place where
he was having a breakdown and he still would not
confess to this crime. So they needed some time to
try to work on him outside of the interrogation room
(15:29):
with the.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Camera off exactly, and outside of this camera which was
recording this trail of emotional destruction that would turn off
any judge, any jury, any listener in America. So they
(15:57):
turned off the camera for what they later called a
break questioning r a break that ended up lasting about
three and a half hours. Now, it's perfectly legal for
them to turn off the camera, right That's the thing
there was, and in fact, there still is no law
in Arkansas requiring interrogations to be recorded in full.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
We need to have the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth of what happens in the interrogation room.
We can't allow law enforcement officers to have the discretion
on when depressed the stop button.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Later, when the state was prosecuting this case, it said
that all that happened during this break was that the
deputy prosecutor sat with Thomas while he had something to eat, right,
And during that break, while he was eating, the prosecutor
said that Thomas just spontaneously decided to blurt out a
confession to killing his sister. Right, not being questioned, not
(16:54):
being pressured, not being manipulated, not being lied to. He
just blurts it out in the middle of eating this hamburger.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
And this is a common refrain that we hear from
law enforcement officers, the spontaneous confession. And why is it common? Well,
if someone blurts out at confession without any prompting or
persuasion by the police, police officers don't need to read
them their miranda rights.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
It's not until ten twenty pm that officers turn the
video camera back on. We're back now in the same
interrogation room with Thomas sitting in the same seat as
in the earlier session. But what we now see and
hear is a very different Thomas Coddle.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Right, Cole H, I am to actually feel good and
good and you know, it's like a completely different person
in that interrogation room. He is calm, he is cool,
he is collected. He seems to be eager to want
to help police officers. And it's as if someone presses
(17:56):
the play button and he starts telling a story that
involves and implicates him in his sister's death.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Exactly. He's almost cheerful while he's reciting the story, one
that sounds really rehearsed and practiced. He tells a story
in which Kaylee had been in her bed, apparently sleeping,
and Thomas had tied her hands and feet to slower down.
He says when she got out of bed, he didn't
mean to hurt her, and then he described putting a
(18:24):
plastic bag over her head, leaving the room, then going
back and loosening it so that air could get in there.
But even this story, right, this confession to being involved
in the death of his sister, it develops inconsistencies. The
police have him go through it a second time, and
this time they have him take out the part where
(18:45):
it was an accident. On the second go round, Thomas
said he put two bags on Kaylee's head because the
first one had a hole in it, and he said
he held the bags there until she started twitching. In
this account, he says he tied her up after she
was smothered.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
You shit bags and one more bags?
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Why did you used to because the other one had
a hole in it? Okay, so she's charged.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
You've gone. You've got these things to tie.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Her wrists and to tie her legs, and you.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
Do that for fear that she's gonna wake up and
come hurt you.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
That's what you're telling us. Then what do you do?
Speaker 4 (19:25):
And I turn onto TV as I said, leave home
and go back to me, and then I false lea.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
And it's this story, this concession, that leads to Thomas's
arrest and being charged in juvenile court with his own
sister's murder.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
But it's still not quite the end of the story,
because as soon as Thomas gives this strangely calm confession,
the police bring in his mother, Melody.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
They're probably hoping that Thomas is gonna confess to his
mom and then they'll have another piece of evidence that
they can use against Tom. But what does Thomas say, Well,
he leans over and he whispers to his mother something
that he's obviously trying to say without the camera picking
it up. Thomas whispers to his mom not to worry,
(20:14):
just go along with it. He didn't really do it
and they won't find his fingerprints on the bag. The
interrogators want to know what he whispered to his mother,
so they ask her when they have her alone again,
what did he whisper to you?
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Did he go along with what he said because he said.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
He didn't do it and that y'all wouldn't find his fingerprints?
Speaker 1 (20:39):
What does he mean? Thomas knows his fingerprints aren't on
the bags that were found over his sister's head because
he never touched those bags. He believes that the absence
of his fingerprints will prove his confession false and set
him free. And then he appears to think that, having
done as he was told, after having confessed to the
(21:03):
murder of his own sister, he's going to walk out
of that room and go to his cousin's house. Instead,
police come back in place Thomas under arrest and charge
him with the murder of his own sister.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
So let's talk a little bit about Thomas's confession. One
of the best ways to measure the reliability of a
confession is to look at the evidence that corroborates it,
and in Thomas's case, there was no corroboration linking Thomas
to this crime. They took that cloth measuring tape and
they sent it to the lab for DNA testing. Thomas's
(21:42):
DNA wasn't on that cloth measuring tape. Instead, another male's
DNA was on that tape. And the story didn't account
for other findings that the medical examiner had made. Caylee
had bruising on her forehead, suggesting that there was some
beating or some kind of a struggle before she had
been killed, and Thomas's confession said nothing about a beating
(22:03):
or a struggle.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
There's such a lack of corroboration of Thomas's story and
the psychological tactics that were used to extract this story,
including fact feeding, including threats and promises. This confession bears
so many red flags. But let's talk for a minute though,
about that three and a half hour period when the
video camera was turned off. I mean, you look at
(22:24):
this and it just stinks to high heaven when they
press that stop button and then somehow Lo and Behold
come back with a confession and a completely different child.
What happened during that time. How did Thomas turn from
this panicked child having an emotional breakdown to a cool, calm, confident,
confessed murderer.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
To hear it from Thomas, this was no spontaneous outburst
suggesting that he was guilty the whole time. This was
part of an interrogation process that actually was ramped up
during that three and a half hour period.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Thomas has said that the interrogation continued after he had
that emotional breakdown and was taken out of the room
that off camera, the police had continued telling him that
it was either going to be you or your mother,
and that he needed to stand up and be a
man and admit what he did and if he did
then he'd be able to go home. Right That's why
(23:21):
he later thought he was going to be able to
go back to his cousin's house after confessing to the
murder of his own sister. And Thomas also told his
court appointed psychologist that they told him that if he
didn't confess, he a twelve year old, would be charged
as an adult and could get the death penalty.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Or his mother could get the death penalty if he
didn't confess, because there are only two people who could
have been guilty of this crime, Thomas or his mother.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
So we have these two different stories of what happened
during this three and a half hour period. Off camera,
the prosecutor says Thomas is eating and he spontaneously confesses.
But to Thomas has a story of continuing pressure, continuing manipulation,
all occurring off camera. So how do we weigh those
two accounts well. During Thomas's break in questioning Melody, the
(24:12):
mom is reinterviewed a second time on video camera, and
during that second interview of Melody, you can hear a loud,
deep male voice yell Thomas, I'm not going to ask
you again. Thomas is being questioned. That much is really clear,
(24:32):
and he's being yelled at. That horrible process that we
saw earlier is still happening just off camera.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Thomas is convicted despite the heroic efforts of a very
good attorney who Laura and I met for the first
time in this case. Thomas's attorney was a public defender
named Dorsey Corbin.
Speaker 4 (24:55):
My name is Dorsey Corbin, and I represented Thomas Cogdaal
from seven months after he was charged with murder until
the Supreme Court handed down its opinion on May six,
twenty ten.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
She had challenged the confession aggressively before trial and lost,
and she had tried this case very effectively.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Confessions are one of the most powerful forms of evidence,
and it can be incredibly hard to unwind these cases.
After the fact, eighty one percent of false confessors who
took their case to trial were convicted even though they
were factually innocence of these crimes.
Speaker 4 (25:30):
Okay, can I talk about things that don't make sense
in this whole case. The police, they originally thought that
Kaylee must have died somewhere between two thirty or three thirty,
and that was the time frame that Thomas used in
his confession. Lividity is the process which after death, your
blood settles because of basically gravity. So if you're laying
(25:53):
on your back, you're going to have red marks on
the back where the blood settles. The medical exammeinter tests
that lividity stops after six to eight hours. However, the
pictures taken at the crime scene at twelve oh two
pm in the afternoon and at one fifty in the
afternoon showed continuing lividity, the time of death being six
(26:16):
to eight hours before two pm. In the afternoon, is
well after the time Thomas had gone to sleep, and
the police never made him change that part of his story.
He didn't do this in his sleep and somehow managed
to leave no fingerprints, no DNA. It just didn't happen
at the hands of Thomas. The judge had heard all
(26:41):
of the evidence from the very beginning, but the.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Power of the confession again was so strong that the
juvenile court judge believed the confession.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
Very few people can understand how or why anyone would
admit to a crime they didn't commit.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
So Thomas has sent off to a juvenile detention facility
in Texarkana, where he was sentenced to stay there until
his eighteenth birthday. Dorsey Corbin, meanwhile, his public defender, continued
fighting his case. She took Thomas's case to the Arkansas
Court of Appeals and argued about the confession there lost,
and then she decided to take the case to the
(27:21):
Arkansas Supreme Court. And that's when we got involved. When
we first heard about Thomas's case, it was right when
we were getting ready for Brendan Dassi's post conviction hearing
(27:42):
in Manitoba, Wisconsin, and we reached out to Dorsey Corbin,
and when she learned that the Arkansas Supreme Court had
agreed to hear Thomas's case, she asked us to file
an amicus brief. Write a brief from experts explaining the
problem of false confessions and explaining how kids like Thomas
are more likely to falsely confess than adults, believe it
(28:05):
or not. When you're in the part of the appeals
process called a direct appeal, you can't file it based
on whether the confession is true or false. Instead, the
only argument that you can make is whether the confession
was coerced or forced, and whether there were any problems
with the way in which police read the defendant his
Miranda rights. These are the right to remain silent, the
(28:26):
right to have a lawyer with you during questioning.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
The defendant has to knowingly and intelligently waive his Miranda rights.
So if the suspect, because of his or her vulnerabilities,
doesn't understand those rights, that's another way to attack the confession.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
What was Dorsey doing in this case? For Thomas? Here
we have a twelve year old in the interrogation room
who's being told that he has a constitutional right to
silence and a lawyer, all these difficult concepts. They tell
him he has these rights and then they ask him,
do you agree to waive these rights?
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Well, you sign a waiver. And this is where inquisitiveness
saved the day for Thomas. The detective asks him to
sign a waiver, and Thomas said, what's a waiver? You know,
a waiver is a legal term exactly. You know, every
time you go bungee jumping, you have to sign a
(29:21):
waiver to protect the business from getting sued.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Here's Thomas about to go off the cliff, right, I
mean a different kind of cliff.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
So the detective freezes and he's never been asked that question.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
He says, well, this simply states that what you were doing,
you were doing of your own free will. That's not
what a waiver means. That that's not what it means
to give up your rights. This is the issue that
Dorsey Corbyn, Thomas's lawyer, brought before the Arkansas Supreme Court,
and it was the issue that we supported her with
(29:55):
by writing an amicus brief that not only talks about
how insane it is the twelve year olds like Thomas
are allowed to waive their constitutional rights without any adult
advising them, but that also highlighted all of the reasons
why this confession we thought was not worth the tape
it was recorded on, and it worked.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
The Arkansas Supreme Court held that the detective's explanation of
what a waiver was was wrong, and that as a result,
Thomas did not knowingly and intelligently wave his Miranda rights.
The confession was out and the conviction was overturned.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
It angers me so much that police officers lie to children,
isolate children, and do all the terrible things that they
did to Thomas in this interrogation, and God only knows
what they did to him for the three and a
(30:53):
half hours that they didn't bother to put the tape on.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Because he was an honor roll student, he wanted to
make sure he understood this new he hadn't heard before waiver.
That's what freed him. How many other Thomas Cogdals are
there out there, children twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, who
were interrogated in just this way, but who didn't have
that moment of good fortune in a way to be
able to ask what a word means, As.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
The captain of the police force said at the time
of trial, had we known at the interview. What we
know now, we would have conducted the interview differently. That
speaks volumes. They focused in on Thomas, they had tunnel vision,
and their sole goal was to get a confession out
of a scared twelve year old boy. Congratulations, they did it.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
No one else has ever been charged with the murder
of Kaylee Cogdal.
Speaker 4 (31:46):
Thomas deserves closure, and equally importantly, Thomas's sister deserves justice.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Melody never confessed to this crime. And the bottom line
is police and prosecutors made a judgment that there wasn't
enough evidence pointing to an alternative suspect. We weren't there
on the scene. We can't tell you what the evidence
on the scene shoulder who had pointed to. But what
we do know is that Thomas's confession is false. Two
weeks or so after the Arkansas Supreme Court, throughout his conviction,
(32:16):
Thomas was free living with his grandparents.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
When he was younger, his mother had taken Thomas and
his sister to the Department of Human Services and basically said, here,
take these kids. I can't deal with them anymore. I
suspect that when Thomas came back he felt somewhat of
a burden to be more of a caretaker for both
his mother and for his sister after the murder.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
I think it was very.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
Important for Thomas to live with people who would take
care of him, nurture him, and love him. He found
that with his grandparents, and they were so very happy
to have him their home.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Despite the ordeal of trial and conviction, everything that Thomas
went through after he was released, he still had dreams.
He wants to be an astronomer, and he wants to
go where people don't know him. Thomas, wherever you are,
we wish you all the best.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
My friend and Dorsey, thank you so much for allowing
us to play a role in this case.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
It's a great honor to be able to work with
people like Dorsey to fight for the freedom of kids
like Thomas. But there are larger questions here. What can
we do to prevent these kinds of cases from happening again?
What kinds of reforms are needed. One of the laws
that Steve has been fighting for is a law requiring
lawyers in the interrogation room for kids like Thomas, not
(33:46):
allowing them to give up their rights to a lawyer,
but rather insisting that they have someone there by their
side to advise.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Them, and they need help in understanding what the Mirianda
warnings are and understanding what the consequence witz are of
giving them up. That's why you need lawyers to be
an advocate for that child in the interrogation room.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Thanks for listening to Thomas Cogdell's story. Next week, we'll
take you to a small farmtown in Nebraska that was
racked by a double murder, a false confession, and a
surprising twist that sounds like it's right out of a
Tarantino movie. Until then, thanks for listening. Wrongful Conviction, False
Confessions is the production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
(34:35):
association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to our
executive producer Jason Flamm and the team at Signal Company
number one. Executive producer Kevin wardis Senior producer and Pope,
and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Our music
was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on
Instagram or Twitter at Laura Nyrider and you.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
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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