May 6, 2020 • 34 mins
Am I telling the story the way the story needs to be told?
Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin tell us the story of David McCallum, one of two New York teens wrongfully convicted of murder in 1986. Luckily for David, he had incredible allies in his corner - the famous boxer, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, and a district attorney, Ken Thompson, who was dedicated to real justice. Here comes the story of the DA and the Hurricane, and one of the men they saved.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, This is Laura and I writer. Because of COVID nineteen,
Steve and I recorded this episode from our homes, not
together in the studio. We might sound a little difference,
but I think the story we tell is as inspirational
as always be well and stay healthy. Welcome to Wrongful Conviction,
False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer, and I'm Steve Drissen.
(00:23):
Today we'll tell you the story of David McCallum, one
of two New York teens wrongfully convicted of murder. In
Luckily for David, he had incredible allies in his corner,
the famous boxer Reuben Hurricane Carter and a district attorney,
Ken Thompson, who was dedicated to real justice. Here comes
(00:43):
the story of the d A and the Hurricane and
one of the men they saved. So it was two
thousand and six and I had just become the legal
director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, and my colleague
(01:08):
Rob Warden came into my office and handed me a
VHS tape. On the tape there were confessions from David
McCallum and Willie Stucky. And Rob told me he said,
Ruben Hurricane Carter would like you to look at this.
You know, when Ruben Hurricane Carter asked you to do something,
(01:29):
you do it. At the time, Ruben Carter was the
most famous person who had ever been wrongly convicted. In
the nineteen sixties, he was a prize winning professional boxer,
nicknamed Hurricane for his record of early round knockouts. But
in nineteen sixties six he was convicted of a triple
murder he didn't commit. After twenty years behind bars, Reuben
(01:53):
was exonerated. He dedicated the rest of his life to
advocating for others he'd been wrongly convicted. To invent sex.
Bob Dylan wrote the song Hurricane as a tribute to
Ruben Carter. You know, I had met Reuben a couple
of years before Rob handed me that tape. Ruben was
at Northwestern he was at a conference to honor dozens
(02:14):
of people who had been exonerated off of death row,
and for me, it was you know, there's a little
bit of hero worship on my part. I was eager
to meet him because I was so impressed with the
way he remade himself. You know, from a brawler to
a deep thinker. To be honest, you need both of
(02:36):
those skills to work on cases of wrongful conviction, and
you need plenty of perseverance. I got hooked on a
ten year struggle to represent David after watching that tape.
Today's story begins in Queens, New York, in South Ozone Park,
(02:56):
a working class neighborhood next to JFK Airport. It's phil
with single family homes, storefronts, and the sound of jet
planes circling overhead. It's three thirty on a Sunday afternoon October.
Twenty year old Nathan Blenner is behind the wheel of
his nineteen seventy nine black Buick Regal. It's parked on
(03:18):
a neighborhood street and he's trying to get the car
to start. A couple of kids playing in a nearby
yard were the only witnesses to what happened next. According
to the kids, Nathan is fiddling with the ignition when
two men approach him from behind. They're about to pass
the car when they turn around, go to the driver's
side and tell Nathan to move over. The men push
(03:40):
him into the backseat, get in, managed to start the
car and drive off. It's over in the blink of
an eye. A car jacking and a kidnapping. Police from
the local precinct and Queen's canvass the neighborhood looking for leads.
About a block away, they find a woman who says
she'd been outside washing her Buick Regal a red one,
(04:03):
when two men walked by, clearly checking out her vehicle.
One of them said nice car, She answered, if it
goes missing, I'll know where to look. The two men
didn't say anything else. Instead, they kept on walking in
the direction of Nathan Blenner. The woman gave a description
to the police. Both men were black and in their twenties.
(04:26):
They were also of noticeably different heights. One was around
five ft six and the taller guy who had braided
hair was five ft ten. But this car theft and
kidnapping soon got even more serious. The next day, October one,
police in Brooklyn get a phone call a d O
a dead on arrival in a wooded area near a cemetery.
(04:49):
Nathan Blenner's body had been found. He was lying face
down with a single gunshot wound to the back of
his head. And two days after the car jacking, Brooklyn
lease were called to Fulton Street, about a mile from
where they discovered Nathan's body. A car had been set
on fire. It was Nathan's Buick. Regal police douse the flames,
(05:11):
search the car and find fingerprints, along with some cigarette
butts in the ashtray. Brooklyn cops get in touch with
NYPD Central Robbery. They learned there's been a string of
eight car thefts in Queens over the two days leading
up to Nathan's kidnapping. In every case, the offenders were
described as two black men around age twenty one, five
(05:35):
ft six, the other five ft ten and armed with
a gun. This was a two man car theft crime
spree that culminated in Nathan Blenner's murder, and police were
feeling intense pressure to stop it in its tracks. A
few days later, on October to Brooklyn men Terence Hayward
(05:55):
and Herman Mumford are arrested for snatching a chain off
a subway rider. One of these guys was five ft six,
the other one who had braided hair, was five ft ten.
Both were black. In other words, they matched the car
thief descriptions pretty well. Police question Hayward and Mumford about
the string of car thefts and about Nathan's death. Now
(06:18):
we'll never definitively know whether these two were involved in anything.
They didn't confess, and police stopped investigating them pretty soon.
That's because Hayward deflects attention away by telling the cops
he knows about a gun that had been used in
a murder. Now stick with me here, because like a
lot of police investigations, this gets messy. Hayward told the
(06:42):
police that his friend James Johnson knew more about the gun.
It turns out that James was a suspect in a
grocery store robbery in which a gun had been used.
When police interviewed James, he said that he'd given the
grocery store gun to his aunt Lottie, who then gave
the gun to a man named Jamie, and then, shortly
before Nathan's murder, Jamie supposedly gave the gun to a
(07:05):
sixteen year old Brooklyn teenager named Willie Stuckey. What kind
of story is that you got James's and Jamie's and
Lotties and who are all these people? No kidding? This
is a ridiculous story, and it's even worse because it's
coming from two guys who matched the descriptions of the
car thieves it's never clear whether the supposed grocery store
(07:25):
gun had anything to do with the car thefts or
Nathan Blenner, and there's no record of police ever speaking
to Aunt Lottie or Jamie. Instead, police go straight for
Willie Stucky. For some reason, they jumped to the conclusion
that Willie used that gun to kill Nathan. At about
seven pm on October, police pick up sixteen year old
(07:48):
Willie Stuckey and bring him to the eighty third Precinct
in Brooklyn for questioning, And within a few hours police
also pick up Willie's sixteen year old buddy, David McCallum
and bring him in for questioning who Willie and David
were longtime friends who played handball together at a local park. Now,
Willie had never been in trouble with the law before,
(08:09):
but for David it was a different story. David's family
had moved from South Carolina to Brooklyn when he was
just seven years old, and the culture shock had been
pretty severe. You know. He went from a very rural
environment where he would play in the fields and go
fishing and not have that many worries in his life.
(08:31):
But once he hit the streets at Brooklyn, he took
on this sort of aura of a big, tough guy
because he needed that to survive, and he began to
act out on the street in ways to fit his profile.
But it was really more bravado than anything else. Police
(08:55):
feel like they're hot on the trail and they begin
interrogating Willie and David in separate rooms at the police station. Now,
neither one of their interrogations was recorded, so we'll never
have a perfect record of what happened inside the box,
but suffice to say that the detectives described the interrogations
very differently than William David did. In court, the lead
(09:19):
detective testified that both Willie and David voluntarily confessed to
killing Nathan Blenner after just a few questions. But Willie
testified that police handcuffed him and then hit him three
or four times. David also testified that police hit him
in the mouth hard enough to draw blood and they
threatened to use a chair next time. You know. The confession,
(09:42):
when I first looked at it had a very rehearsed
quality to it. It was very short. But there's one
moment it gave me pause. It's when David McCallum looks
with a moment of sheer terror at the police officer
who's not on the screen but is clearly sitting in
(10:03):
the room, and it was a look like and like
doing okay, um, I telling the story the way the
story needs to be told. And I remember Freeze framing
that one frame of terror, and that suggested to me
that what David was saying in terms of getting hit,
(10:25):
it was probably true. Both David and Willie testified that
after they agreed to confess, the police rehearsed a story
with them. Willie in particular, testified that police fed him
details about the perpetrator's conversation with that woman washing her
red Buick Regal. But the police claimed that all the
information in Willie and David's confessions came straight from them.
(10:48):
This is exactly why you need to record the entire
interrogation process. If you don't do that, it's the police
versus the suspects, and the suspects are never going to
be found more credible by a judge or a jury.
Police officers are professional witnesses, they testifying court on a
regular basis, and really and David were just kids. They
(11:12):
never stood a chance on cross examination. But David and
Willie's confessions were both really problematic. The stories they told
didn't match the actual evidence. Willie said Nathan had been
shot three times, when in fact he had only been
shot once. Both Willie and David said the shooting happened
at night, but the medical examiner said the murder happened
(11:34):
during the day, probably right after the carjacking. Willie told
the police that he had hidden the gun under his mattress,
but when police went to Willie's home and looked, they
couldn't find any gun. There were other problems too, Like
a lot of New York City kids, David and Willie
didn't know how to drive, making them unlikely suspects for
a car theft ring, and most importantly, they didn't match
(11:57):
the descriptions of the car thieves. David and Willie were
sixteen years old, not twenty something, neither one of them
had braids, and both were short, nowhere near five ft ten.
But despite all this, Willie and David were charged with
the murder of Nathan Blenner based on their confessions and
(12:18):
nothing else. Both were convicted on October six. Each was
sentenced to twenty five years to life. The story fast
forwards now more than eighteen years to two thousand four,
(12:42):
David McCallum was thirty four years old. He had transformed
from an insecure teenager into a man known by other
prisoners for his unshakable integrity. David had always maintained his innocence,
but he'd lost all his appeals and was running out
of options. Tragically, Willie Stucky had died in two thousand one,
(13:03):
at the age of thirty one, from what the prison
said was a heart attack. So this was David's fight now,
and for too long, he'd been fighting alone. By two
thousand and for, David had written over six hundred letters.
He wrote to lawyers, he wrote to TV stations, radio stations,
he wrote to anybody, and he always insisted that he
(13:25):
was innocent, But all he got back were rejections until
one of those letters made its way to Ruben Hurricane Carter.
Remember Ruben Carter was the famous boxer who had spent
twenty years in prison for a triple murder he didn't commit,
whose long fight to clear himself was immortalized by Bob
Dylan in the song Hurricane Now. Ruben wasn't exonerated until
(13:49):
the same year that David and Willie went down for
Nathan Blenner's murder. When he got out, Reuben was malnourished
from decades of prison food, and he'd lost sight in
one eye from a botched prison surgery. He couldn't fight
for the middleweight crown any longer, so instead he started
fighting for the wrongfully convicted. After working for one of
(14:11):
North America's leading innocence organizations, Ruben founded his own group,
Innocence International. Ruben recognized that he was probably the most
well known figure who had been wrongfully convicted, and that
if he didn't use his voice in some way to
(14:35):
be a champion for the wrongfully convicted, that it would
be a terrible waste. For twenty years, I was incuscerated
as a racist, triple murderer, condemned by history, repudiated by
the court, and sentenced to die amid the squalor and despair,
(14:59):
and you creation of a maximum security prison. And tonight
I am standing here at the United Nations making this address. Now,
if that's not miraculous, then I don't know what it is.
I don't know what it is. David was at his
(15:22):
wits end. His best friend had died, and every day
was a struggle for him because he didn't see a
way out. In February two thousand four, David McCallum read
a magazine interview with Ruben Hurricane Carter, and he sent
a letter asking for help to the author, a man
(15:43):
named Ken Klonsky. Reuben and Ken had started working together
on wrongful conviction cases, and today Ken is the director
of Innocence International. David sent me a letter and he
explained his case and the situation he was in. Now,
I have no legal back and I had no background
in wrongful convictions, so I just thought, well, here's a
(16:05):
person sounds honest, and I'll just tell Reuben about him.
And Reuben at first he took it in and he
said at some point, well, let's go visit the brother
and see what he's like. Both Ken Klonsky and Ruben
Carter read up on David's case and came to visit
him in prison. This was a prison in New York
(16:25):
called Eastern Correctional. When we visited, first of all, I've
never been in a prison in my life, and the
place itself was enormous. It looked like a medieval castle.
In a visiting room, Ruben and David sat on opposite
sides at the table, silently studying each other. Later, David
would remember feeling like Ruben was reading him, and David
(16:48):
refused to break the silence. The eye contact was like
love at first sight, and they had a conversation which
David started going on about case and Reuben interrupted says,
you know what, I'm not interested right now in your case.
I want to know who you are. Ruben was a
tough interviewer. He grilled David about you know, if I
(17:11):
get involved in your case, I don't want you to
come out of prison and act like a fool and
I'm wasting my time. And he got from David the
said that this was somebody who was going to make
him proud. And Ruben left that meeting knowing that he
(17:31):
was going to do everything in his power to get
David McCallum out of prison. I think we were there
about two hours, and I remember us getting up and leaving,
and I look back at that enormous prison and I said, Reuben, really,
who's who's going to get him out of there. Reuben
(17:53):
and Ken hired a defense lawyer, Oscar Michelin, and in
two thousand and six, the three of them sent the
con session tapes to the Center on Wrongful Convictions for
Steve to review. Now, David had read about your work, Steve,
and I'm going to out you here. He considers you
the Lebron James of false confessions. Look, Laura, we're in Chicago,
(18:16):
and out of respect for the greatest basketball player of
all time, I think we should go with the Michael
Jordan's of false confessions. Slow down, Steve. First of all,
you're from Philly, that's right. So actually, the more I
think about it, I prefer to be known as the
Doctor j of false confessions. As in the Doctors in
the house, the doctor makes house calls, the doctor is
(18:40):
on the case. Okay, Dr j you analyze these confessions
and you found a pretty revealing error what we call
a false fed fact. I did. A false fed fact
is a fact that comports with the police theory at
the time of the interrogation, and it's adopted by the
suspect in his or her confession. Um, but the fact
(19:03):
later turns out to be false. If it is in
the suspect's confession, then you know that the police fed
that fact to the suspects. And that's exactly what happened here.
At the time of the interrogations, the police believed that
Willie and David were the ones who had talked to
that woman with a red Buick Regal just before going
(19:24):
around the block and attacking Nathan Blenner. And sure enough,
right there in Willie Stucky's confession is a story about
talking to that woman and saying nice car. But David
and Willie didn't match their description. Remember, the woman had
described two guys five ft six and five ten, one
with braids. Now David and Willie were both five six
(19:47):
and neither of them had braids. They couldn't have been
the guys who talked to that woman. And by the
time of trial even the state agreed that David and
Willie were not the ones she'd seen. So how did
story get into Willie's confession? It must have been fed
by the police. That was enough to make Steve joined
the team right then and there, and I decided to
(20:10):
recruit Laura Cohen, a law professor and an attorney at
Rutgridge University, to join our defense team. Laura Cohen and
Steve approached the Brooklyn d A's office and got them
to agree to do forensic testing on the cigarette butts
and fingerprints found in Nathan Blenner's car, and the results
the cigarette butts had DNA on them that excluded both
(20:33):
David and Willie. Instead, the DNA matched a different Brooklyn
teenager they had no connection to. The fingerprints also excluded
David and Willie. They matched yet another Brooklyn teenager who
had been killed years before in an altercation with the police.
This was more powerful evidence of both Willie and David's innocence,
(20:55):
and the whole team, including Rubin, was very excited. But
this evidence still wasn't enough to persuade the Brooklyn d
A to exonerate David, not yet. Then two big things happened. First,
an election in a new Brooklyn d A was elected
(21:16):
a reformer named Ken Thompson who had campaigned on a
platform of rooting out wrongful convictions. David's legal team immediately
contacted Thompson and told him about the case. We used
every bit of our connections to try to get David's
case on Ken Thompson's radar screen, and it worked. The
(21:39):
second big thing that happened was a terrible blow to
the whole team. In Ruben announced that he had prostate cancer,
and it was spreading fast. You know. When Ruben announced
that he had cancer, he and I were kind of
at odds with one another. Ruben was upset with me
(22:01):
because he thought that we um coddled the d A
instead of looking for an opportunity to land a knockout
blow with new evidence. So Ruben's answer to us was,
stopped fiddling around with the d a's office, stopped dealing
with state court. You need to go to federal court
(22:23):
in order to get David out of prison. And we
told Ruben that's just not gonna work. And it created
a tension between Reuben and me at this point in time.
But the announcement that he had prostate cancer was devastating
because even though we were at odds, I had tremendous
(22:45):
respect for Reuben and I knew that his voice was
going to be crucial if we were ever going to
win this case. Reuben was very sick and quickly got
much sicker, but he was still the ultimate fighter. On
his deathbed, with ken Klonsky's help, Reuben wrote an o
ed for the New York Post urging the New Brooklyn
(23:07):
d A to exonerate David McCallum. It was one of
the last things he did with his life. Here's some
of what Reuben Hurricane Carter wrote. My single regret in
life is that David McCallum is still in prison. My
aim in helping this fine man is to pay it forward,
to give the help that I received as a wrongfully
(23:29):
convicted man to another who needs such help. Now now
I'm looking death straight in the eye, Reuben wrote, He's
got me on the ropes, but I won't back down.
And then Reuben asked the new Brooklyn d A to
look straight into the eye of truth, a tougher customer
than death, and not to back down either. To this day,
(23:53):
Ken Klonsky remembers helping Reuben write that abed. We wrote
a utter together and it didn't have a proper ending,
and finally I hit on something to live in a
world where truth matters, and just as however late still happens,
(24:14):
that world would be heaven enough for us all. So
it was out there that Reuben was dying and that
Reuben had made a last wish. That op Ed was
the knockout blow that we were looking for. Reuben's dying please,
(24:44):
combined with the new DNA evidence made the difference. A
few months after Reuben passed away, the Brooklyn d A.
Ken Thompson announced that he was going to exonerate David
McCallum and posthumously exonerate Willie Stuck two. And while this
news was incredibly welcome, the way Ken Thompson's office handled
(25:06):
the exonerations was extraordinary. I had never seen so much
grace in an exoneration. And let me explain what I
mean by that. When we exonerate people, most of the time,
it's after a hard fought legal battle that brings the
state down to its knees and the state reluctantly gives up,
(25:28):
and on the day of exoneration it's oftentimes a kind
of anticlimactic moment. But David's case was so different. When
David was picked up by the detectives from prison, he
was taken to the courthouse and then the d a's
office brought him a lunch of barbecue chicken and whatever
(25:51):
he wanted to drink, and one by one, members of
the d a's conviction Review unit congratulated David. David not
only met Ken Thompson the d A, but he also
met Ken Thompson's wife, and there was such a recognition
(26:11):
of the humanity of David throughout this process. I'm Brooklyn
District Attorney Ken Thompson, and I'm here today with some
members of my conviction review team. And it continued because
from day one I made a pledge to the people
of Brooklyn, and my pledge was to put the guilty away,
(26:32):
but also to make sure that our criminal justice system
was based on fundamental fairness. That's what we're doing here today. Normally,
when prisoners are brought into the courtroom, they had come
in through the back door. They're handcuffed and they are shackled.
When it came time for David's case to be called,
(26:54):
he walked in through the front door with his head
held high, knowing that he would soon be a freeman.
Mr McCallum asked me to look at his case. I
agreed to do so because my duty is not just
to convict, but to do justice. We have conducted a
thorough and fair investigation of this matter, and as a
(27:17):
result of that investigation, we've determined that there's not a
single piece of evidence that linked David McCallum or William
Stuckey to the abduction of Nathan Blunt. Of unbeknownst to David,
they had brought really Stucky's mother in for the exoneration
and it was a reunion that was just heartbreaking and
(27:40):
incredibly tender. She was there also to feel that her
son was being vindicated at the same time. And so
today at two pm before Judge Demmick in Brooklyn State
Supreme I will move in the inches of justice is
(28:00):
to vacate the convictions of David McCallum and Willie Stucky.
This was not a reluctant exhoneration, but a public reckoning,
and that kind of exoneration really is such an important
step in the healing process for people who get out
of prison. David McCallum walked into prison as a boy.
(28:27):
Today he will walk out of the courthouse as a man.
The District Attorney had a press conference and in the
press conference he said, I've inherited a legacy of disgrace
with respect to wrongful convictions. And at that moment you
(28:47):
knew his intention to change things, to write everything was
gonna be realized. It was just a wonderful moment. You know.
The only thing missed from David McCallum's exoneration was Ruben
(29:08):
Hurricane Carter, and the state even found a way to
bring Reuben into these proceedings. On the day of David's exoneration,
the d a's office dispatched two detectives to take him
from prison to court, and on the way back from prison,
(29:30):
one of the detectives pulled out his iPhone and he
pressed play, and of course it was the Story of
the Hurricane by Bob Dylan. It comes the story of
the Hurricane, the man the authorities came to blame. Reuben
Carter wasn't the only hero of this story who passed
(29:50):
away too soon. On October nine, Ken Thompson, that reform
minded Brooklyn da who exonerated David McCallum and will He's
stucky with such grace, also died of cancer. He had
exonerated by that point in time about thirteen or fourteen people,
and so when he died it was a really terrible
(30:12):
blow for justice. But one of the things that happened
after Ken's death was his wife actually reached out to
David McCallum and invited David to speak at the going
home service for Ken Thompson, and so David McCallum stood
up at the packed memorial service for the d A
(30:35):
who had agreed to free him and gave a powerful eulogy.
He promised that he would investigate vawful convictions in a
very fair way and my legal team and uh, that's
all we ever wanted. It was two years to the
day after David had been exonerated. Mr Thompson touched me
(30:58):
in a way that I don't think anybody ever would again.
Because Mr Thompson didn't only give me my freedom. Mr Thompson,
and this may sound quaint to some who don't believe
making passion. Mr Thompson gave me my father an old daughter, Quinn.
(31:20):
Because had he not did what he promised he would do,
I'm not sure where I would be right now. David, Yes,
how still seek It's been a while, so you've been
out now for five and a half years almost. You know,
(31:42):
what are your hopes and dreams? And what are your
hopes and dreams for Quinn? What about hopes and dreams
is to become even the more effective than I think.
I'm pretty good at it now, but I just want
to be really really good at it because the hard working,
very hard work if it's all worth it at the
end of the day. And I embraced it, you know,
set myself at hands on dad. She had daddy's little girl. Absolutely.
(32:09):
I could tell you how many times I'm picked us
to school and so as I'm coming to door, oh
my god. You know, he doesn't runs from what else
she's doing. And that's uh, it's almost underscinal one someday,
but it's really really good sailing up. And that's the
(32:31):
story of David McCallum. Join us next week for the
last episode in our first season, we'll tell you about
one of the first modern day cases of false confession
from Peter Riley was just sixteen when he was wrongfully
convicted of murdering his own mother. Peter's innocence was championed
by everyone from neighborhood moms to New York celebrities. His
(32:54):
people powered campaign for exoneration has been the inspiration for
the work Steve and I do till then. Thanks for
listening to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions
is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association
(33:15):
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. Special thanks to
jog Hammer for additional script editing and for wrangling and
writing like a madwoman. Our music was composed by j Ralph.
(33:38):
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura
ni Writer and you can follow me on Twitter at
s Drizzing. 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 d
Hi, This is Laura and I writer. Because of COVID nineteen,
Steve and I recorded this episode from our homes, not
together in the studio. We might sound a little difference,
but I think the story we tell is as inspirational
as always be well and stay healthy. Welcome to Wrongful Conviction,
False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer, and I'm Steve Drissen.
(00:23):
Today we'll tell you the story of David McCallum, one
of two New York teens wrongfully convicted of murder. In
Luckily for David, he had incredible allies in his corner,
the famous boxer Reuben Hurricane Carter and a district attorney,
Ken Thompson, who was dedicated to real justice. Here comes
(00:43):
the story of the d A and the Hurricane and
one of the men they saved. So it was two
thousand and six and I had just become the legal
director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, and my colleague
(01:08):
Rob Warden came into my office and handed me a
VHS tape. On the tape there were confessions from David
McCallum and Willie Stucky. And Rob told me he said,
Ruben Hurricane Carter would like you to look at this.
You know, when Ruben Hurricane Carter asked you to do something,
(01:29):
you do it. At the time, Ruben Carter was the
most famous person who had ever been wrongly convicted. In
the nineteen sixties, he was a prize winning professional boxer,
nicknamed Hurricane for his record of early round knockouts. But
in nineteen sixties six he was convicted of a triple
murder he didn't commit. After twenty years behind bars, Reuben
(01:53):
was exonerated. He dedicated the rest of his life to
advocating for others he'd been wrongly convicted. To invent sex.
Bob Dylan wrote the song Hurricane as a tribute to
Ruben Carter. You know, I had met Reuben a couple
of years before Rob handed me that tape. Ruben was
at Northwestern he was at a conference to honor dozens
(02:14):
of people who had been exonerated off of death row,
and for me, it was you know, there's a little
bit of hero worship on my part. I was eager
to meet him because I was so impressed with the
way he remade himself. You know, from a brawler to
a deep thinker. To be honest, you need both of
(02:36):
those skills to work on cases of wrongful conviction, and
you need plenty of perseverance. I got hooked on a
ten year struggle to represent David after watching that tape.
Today's story begins in Queens, New York, in South Ozone Park,
(02:56):
a working class neighborhood next to JFK Airport. It's phil
with single family homes, storefronts, and the sound of jet
planes circling overhead. It's three thirty on a Sunday afternoon October.
Twenty year old Nathan Blenner is behind the wheel of
his nineteen seventy nine black Buick Regal. It's parked on
(03:18):
a neighborhood street and he's trying to get the car
to start. A couple of kids playing in a nearby
yard were the only witnesses to what happened next. According
to the kids, Nathan is fiddling with the ignition when
two men approach him from behind. They're about to pass
the car when they turn around, go to the driver's
side and tell Nathan to move over. The men push
(03:40):
him into the backseat, get in, managed to start the
car and drive off. It's over in the blink of
an eye. A car jacking and a kidnapping. Police from
the local precinct and Queen's canvass the neighborhood looking for leads.
About a block away, they find a woman who says
she'd been outside washing her Buick Regal a red one,
(04:03):
when two men walked by, clearly checking out her vehicle.
One of them said nice car, She answered, if it
goes missing, I'll know where to look. The two men
didn't say anything else. Instead, they kept on walking in
the direction of Nathan Blenner. The woman gave a description
to the police. Both men were black and in their twenties.
(04:26):
They were also of noticeably different heights. One was around
five ft six and the taller guy who had braided
hair was five ft ten. But this car theft and
kidnapping soon got even more serious. The next day, October one,
police in Brooklyn get a phone call a d O
a dead on arrival in a wooded area near a cemetery.
(04:49):
Nathan Blenner's body had been found. He was lying face
down with a single gunshot wound to the back of
his head. And two days after the car jacking, Brooklyn
lease were called to Fulton Street, about a mile from
where they discovered Nathan's body. A car had been set
on fire. It was Nathan's Buick. Regal police douse the flames,
(05:11):
search the car and find fingerprints, along with some cigarette
butts in the ashtray. Brooklyn cops get in touch with
NYPD Central Robbery. They learned there's been a string of
eight car thefts in Queens over the two days leading
up to Nathan's kidnapping. In every case, the offenders were
described as two black men around age twenty one, five
(05:35):
ft six, the other five ft ten and armed with
a gun. This was a two man car theft crime
spree that culminated in Nathan Blenner's murder, and police were
feeling intense pressure to stop it in its tracks. A
few days later, on October to Brooklyn men Terence Hayward
(05:55):
and Herman Mumford are arrested for snatching a chain off
a subway rider. One of these guys was five ft six,
the other one who had braided hair, was five ft ten.
Both were black. In other words, they matched the car
thief descriptions pretty well. Police question Hayward and Mumford about
the string of car thefts and about Nathan's death. Now
(06:18):
we'll never definitively know whether these two were involved in anything.
They didn't confess, and police stopped investigating them pretty soon.
That's because Hayward deflects attention away by telling the cops
he knows about a gun that had been used in
a murder. Now stick with me here, because like a
lot of police investigations, this gets messy. Hayward told the
(06:42):
police that his friend James Johnson knew more about the gun.
It turns out that James was a suspect in a
grocery store robbery in which a gun had been used.
When police interviewed James, he said that he'd given the
grocery store gun to his aunt Lottie, who then gave
the gun to a man named Jamie, and then, shortly
before Nathan's murder, Jamie supposedly gave the gun to a
(07:05):
sixteen year old Brooklyn teenager named Willie Stuckey. What kind
of story is that you got James's and Jamie's and
Lotties and who are all these people? No kidding? This
is a ridiculous story, and it's even worse because it's
coming from two guys who matched the descriptions of the
car thieves it's never clear whether the supposed grocery store
(07:25):
gun had anything to do with the car thefts or
Nathan Blenner, and there's no record of police ever speaking
to Aunt Lottie or Jamie. Instead, police go straight for
Willie Stucky. For some reason, they jumped to the conclusion
that Willie used that gun to kill Nathan. At about
seven pm on October, police pick up sixteen year old
(07:48):
Willie Stuckey and bring him to the eighty third Precinct
in Brooklyn for questioning, And within a few hours police
also pick up Willie's sixteen year old buddy, David McCallum
and bring him in for questioning who Willie and David
were longtime friends who played handball together at a local park. Now,
Willie had never been in trouble with the law before,
(08:09):
but for David it was a different story. David's family
had moved from South Carolina to Brooklyn when he was
just seven years old, and the culture shock had been
pretty severe. You know. He went from a very rural
environment where he would play in the fields and go
fishing and not have that many worries in his life.
(08:31):
But once he hit the streets at Brooklyn, he took
on this sort of aura of a big, tough guy
because he needed that to survive, and he began to
act out on the street in ways to fit his profile.
But it was really more bravado than anything else. Police
(08:55):
feel like they're hot on the trail and they begin
interrogating Willie and David in separate rooms at the police station. Now,
neither one of their interrogations was recorded, so we'll never
have a perfect record of what happened inside the box,
but suffice to say that the detectives described the interrogations
very differently than William David did. In court, the lead
(09:19):
detective testified that both Willie and David voluntarily confessed to
killing Nathan Blenner after just a few questions. But Willie
testified that police handcuffed him and then hit him three
or four times. David also testified that police hit him
in the mouth hard enough to draw blood and they
threatened to use a chair next time. You know. The confession,
(09:42):
when I first looked at it had a very rehearsed
quality to it. It was very short. But there's one
moment it gave me pause. It's when David McCallum looks
with a moment of sheer terror at the police officer
who's not on the screen but is clearly sitting in
(10:03):
the room, and it was a look like and like
doing okay, um, I telling the story the way the
story needs to be told. And I remember Freeze framing
that one frame of terror, and that suggested to me
that what David was saying in terms of getting hit,
(10:25):
it was probably true. Both David and Willie testified that
after they agreed to confess, the police rehearsed a story
with them. Willie in particular, testified that police fed him
details about the perpetrator's conversation with that woman washing her
red Buick Regal. But the police claimed that all the
information in Willie and David's confessions came straight from them.
(10:48):
This is exactly why you need to record the entire
interrogation process. If you don't do that, it's the police
versus the suspects, and the suspects are never going to
be found more credible by a judge or a jury.
Police officers are professional witnesses, they testifying court on a
regular basis, and really and David were just kids. They
(11:12):
never stood a chance on cross examination. But David and
Willie's confessions were both really problematic. The stories they told
didn't match the actual evidence. Willie said Nathan had been
shot three times, when in fact he had only been
shot once. Both Willie and David said the shooting happened
at night, but the medical examiner said the murder happened
(11:34):
during the day, probably right after the carjacking. Willie told
the police that he had hidden the gun under his mattress,
but when police went to Willie's home and looked, they
couldn't find any gun. There were other problems too, Like
a lot of New York City kids, David and Willie
didn't know how to drive, making them unlikely suspects for
a car theft ring, and most importantly, they didn't match
(11:57):
the descriptions of the car thieves. David and Willie were
sixteen years old, not twenty something, neither one of them
had braids, and both were short, nowhere near five ft ten.
But despite all this, Willie and David were charged with
the murder of Nathan Blenner based on their confessions and
(12:18):
nothing else. Both were convicted on October six. Each was
sentenced to twenty five years to life. The story fast
forwards now more than eighteen years to two thousand four,
(12:42):
David McCallum was thirty four years old. He had transformed
from an insecure teenager into a man known by other
prisoners for his unshakable integrity. David had always maintained his innocence,
but he'd lost all his appeals and was running out
of options. Tragically, Willie Stucky had died in two thousand one,
(13:03):
at the age of thirty one, from what the prison
said was a heart attack. So this was David's fight now,
and for too long, he'd been fighting alone. By two
thousand and for, David had written over six hundred letters.
He wrote to lawyers, he wrote to TV stations, radio stations,
he wrote to anybody, and he always insisted that he
(13:25):
was innocent, But all he got back were rejections until
one of those letters made its way to Ruben Hurricane Carter.
Remember Ruben Carter was the famous boxer who had spent
twenty years in prison for a triple murder he didn't commit,
whose long fight to clear himself was immortalized by Bob
Dylan in the song Hurricane Now. Ruben wasn't exonerated until
(13:49):
the same year that David and Willie went down for
Nathan Blenner's murder. When he got out, Reuben was malnourished
from decades of prison food, and he'd lost sight in
one eye from a botched prison surgery. He couldn't fight
for the middleweight crown any longer, so instead he started
fighting for the wrongfully convicted. After working for one of
(14:11):
North America's leading innocence organizations, Ruben founded his own group,
Innocence International. Ruben recognized that he was probably the most
well known figure who had been wrongfully convicted, and that
if he didn't use his voice in some way to
(14:35):
be a champion for the wrongfully convicted, that it would
be a terrible waste. For twenty years, I was incuscerated
as a racist, triple murderer, condemned by history, repudiated by
the court, and sentenced to die amid the squalor and despair,
(14:59):
and you creation of a maximum security prison. And tonight
I am standing here at the United Nations making this address. Now,
if that's not miraculous, then I don't know what it is.
I don't know what it is. David was at his
(15:22):
wits end. His best friend had died, and every day
was a struggle for him because he didn't see a
way out. In February two thousand four, David McCallum read
a magazine interview with Ruben Hurricane Carter, and he sent
a letter asking for help to the author, a man
(15:43):
named Ken Klonsky. Reuben and Ken had started working together
on wrongful conviction cases, and today Ken is the director
of Innocence International. David sent me a letter and he
explained his case and the situation he was in. Now,
I have no legal back and I had no background
in wrongful convictions, so I just thought, well, here's a
(16:05):
person sounds honest, and I'll just tell Reuben about him.
And Reuben at first he took it in and he
said at some point, well, let's go visit the brother
and see what he's like. Both Ken Klonsky and Ruben
Carter read up on David's case and came to visit
him in prison. This was a prison in New York
(16:25):
called Eastern Correctional. When we visited, first of all, I've
never been in a prison in my life, and the
place itself was enormous. It looked like a medieval castle.
In a visiting room, Ruben and David sat on opposite
sides at the table, silently studying each other. Later, David
would remember feeling like Ruben was reading him, and David
(16:48):
refused to break the silence. The eye contact was like
love at first sight, and they had a conversation which
David started going on about case and Reuben interrupted says,
you know what, I'm not interested right now in your case.
I want to know who you are. Ruben was a
tough interviewer. He grilled David about you know, if I
(17:11):
get involved in your case, I don't want you to
come out of prison and act like a fool and
I'm wasting my time. And he got from David the
said that this was somebody who was going to make
him proud. And Ruben left that meeting knowing that he
(17:31):
was going to do everything in his power to get
David McCallum out of prison. I think we were there
about two hours, and I remember us getting up and leaving,
and I look back at that enormous prison and I said, Reuben, really,
who's who's going to get him out of there. Reuben
(17:53):
and Ken hired a defense lawyer, Oscar Michelin, and in
two thousand and six, the three of them sent the
con session tapes to the Center on Wrongful Convictions for
Steve to review. Now, David had read about your work, Steve,
and I'm going to out you here. He considers you
the Lebron James of false confessions. Look, Laura, we're in Chicago,
(18:16):
and out of respect for the greatest basketball player of
all time, I think we should go with the Michael
Jordan's of false confessions. Slow down, Steve. First of all,
you're from Philly, that's right. So actually, the more I
think about it, I prefer to be known as the
Doctor j of false confessions. As in the Doctors in
the house, the doctor makes house calls, the doctor is
(18:40):
on the case. Okay, Dr j you analyze these confessions
and you found a pretty revealing error what we call
a false fed fact. I did. A false fed fact
is a fact that comports with the police theory at
the time of the interrogation, and it's adopted by the
suspect in his or her confession. Um, but the fact
(19:03):
later turns out to be false. If it is in
the suspect's confession, then you know that the police fed
that fact to the suspects. And that's exactly what happened here.
At the time of the interrogations, the police believed that
Willie and David were the ones who had talked to
that woman with a red Buick Regal just before going
(19:24):
around the block and attacking Nathan Blenner. And sure enough,
right there in Willie Stucky's confession is a story about
talking to that woman and saying nice car. But David
and Willie didn't match their description. Remember, the woman had
described two guys five ft six and five ten, one
with braids. Now David and Willie were both five six
(19:47):
and neither of them had braids. They couldn't have been
the guys who talked to that woman. And by the
time of trial even the state agreed that David and
Willie were not the ones she'd seen. So how did
story get into Willie's confession? It must have been fed
by the police. That was enough to make Steve joined
the team right then and there, and I decided to
(20:10):
recruit Laura Cohen, a law professor and an attorney at
Rutgridge University, to join our defense team. Laura Cohen and
Steve approached the Brooklyn d A's office and got them
to agree to do forensic testing on the cigarette butts
and fingerprints found in Nathan Blenner's car, and the results
the cigarette butts had DNA on them that excluded both
(20:33):
David and Willie. Instead, the DNA matched a different Brooklyn
teenager they had no connection to. The fingerprints also excluded
David and Willie. They matched yet another Brooklyn teenager who
had been killed years before in an altercation with the police.
This was more powerful evidence of both Willie and David's innocence,
(20:55):
and the whole team, including Rubin, was very excited. But
this evidence still wasn't enough to persuade the Brooklyn d
A to exonerate David, not yet. Then two big things happened. First,
an election in a new Brooklyn d A was elected
(21:16):
a reformer named Ken Thompson who had campaigned on a
platform of rooting out wrongful convictions. David's legal team immediately
contacted Thompson and told him about the case. We used
every bit of our connections to try to get David's
case on Ken Thompson's radar screen, and it worked. The
(21:39):
second big thing that happened was a terrible blow to
the whole team. In Ruben announced that he had prostate cancer,
and it was spreading fast. You know. When Ruben announced
that he had cancer, he and I were kind of
at odds with one another. Ruben was upset with me
(22:01):
because he thought that we um coddled the d A
instead of looking for an opportunity to land a knockout
blow with new evidence. So Ruben's answer to us was,
stopped fiddling around with the d a's office, stopped dealing
with state court. You need to go to federal court
(22:23):
in order to get David out of prison. And we
told Ruben that's just not gonna work. And it created
a tension between Reuben and me at this point in time.
But the announcement that he had prostate cancer was devastating
because even though we were at odds, I had tremendous
(22:45):
respect for Reuben and I knew that his voice was
going to be crucial if we were ever going to
win this case. Reuben was very sick and quickly got
much sicker, but he was still the ultimate fighter. On
his deathbed, with ken Klonsky's help, Reuben wrote an o
ed for the New York Post urging the New Brooklyn
(23:07):
d A to exonerate David McCallum. It was one of
the last things he did with his life. Here's some
of what Reuben Hurricane Carter wrote. My single regret in
life is that David McCallum is still in prison. My
aim in helping this fine man is to pay it forward,
to give the help that I received as a wrongfully
(23:29):
convicted man to another who needs such help. Now now
I'm looking death straight in the eye, Reuben wrote, He's
got me on the ropes, but I won't back down.
And then Reuben asked the new Brooklyn d A to
look straight into the eye of truth, a tougher customer
than death, and not to back down either. To this day,
(23:53):
Ken Klonsky remembers helping Reuben write that abed. We wrote
a utter together and it didn't have a proper ending,
and finally I hit on something to live in a
world where truth matters, and just as however late still happens,
(24:14):
that world would be heaven enough for us all. So
it was out there that Reuben was dying and that
Reuben had made a last wish. That op Ed was
the knockout blow that we were looking for. Reuben's dying please,
(24:44):
combined with the new DNA evidence made the difference. A
few months after Reuben passed away, the Brooklyn d A.
Ken Thompson announced that he was going to exonerate David
McCallum and posthumously exonerate Willie Stuck two. And while this
news was incredibly welcome, the way Ken Thompson's office handled
(25:06):
the exonerations was extraordinary. I had never seen so much
grace in an exoneration. And let me explain what I
mean by that. When we exonerate people, most of the time,
it's after a hard fought legal battle that brings the
state down to its knees and the state reluctantly gives up,
(25:28):
and on the day of exoneration it's oftentimes a kind
of anticlimactic moment. But David's case was so different. When
David was picked up by the detectives from prison, he
was taken to the courthouse and then the d a's
office brought him a lunch of barbecue chicken and whatever
(25:51):
he wanted to drink, and one by one, members of
the d a's conviction Review unit congratulated David. David not
only met Ken Thompson the d A, but he also
met Ken Thompson's wife, and there was such a recognition
(26:11):
of the humanity of David throughout this process. I'm Brooklyn
District Attorney Ken Thompson, and I'm here today with some
members of my conviction review team. And it continued because
from day one I made a pledge to the people
of Brooklyn, and my pledge was to put the guilty away,
(26:32):
but also to make sure that our criminal justice system
was based on fundamental fairness. That's what we're doing here today. Normally,
when prisoners are brought into the courtroom, they had come
in through the back door. They're handcuffed and they are shackled.
When it came time for David's case to be called,
(26:54):
he walked in through the front door with his head
held high, knowing that he would soon be a freeman.
Mr McCallum asked me to look at his case. I
agreed to do so because my duty is not just
to convict, but to do justice. We have conducted a
thorough and fair investigation of this matter, and as a
(27:17):
result of that investigation, we've determined that there's not a
single piece of evidence that linked David McCallum or William
Stuckey to the abduction of Nathan Blunt. Of unbeknownst to David,
they had brought really Stucky's mother in for the exoneration
and it was a reunion that was just heartbreaking and
(27:40):
incredibly tender. She was there also to feel that her
son was being vindicated at the same time. And so
today at two pm before Judge Demmick in Brooklyn State
Supreme I will move in the inches of justice is
(28:00):
to vacate the convictions of David McCallum and Willie Stucky.
This was not a reluctant exhoneration, but a public reckoning,
and that kind of exoneration really is such an important
step in the healing process for people who get out
of prison. David McCallum walked into prison as a boy.
(28:27):
Today he will walk out of the courthouse as a man.
The District Attorney had a press conference and in the
press conference he said, I've inherited a legacy of disgrace
with respect to wrongful convictions. And at that moment you
(28:47):
knew his intention to change things, to write everything was
gonna be realized. It was just a wonderful moment. You know.
The only thing missed from David McCallum's exoneration was Ruben
(29:08):
Hurricane Carter, and the state even found a way to
bring Reuben into these proceedings. On the day of David's exoneration,
the d a's office dispatched two detectives to take him
from prison to court, and on the way back from prison,
(29:30):
one of the detectives pulled out his iPhone and he
pressed play, and of course it was the Story of
the Hurricane by Bob Dylan. It comes the story of
the Hurricane, the man the authorities came to blame. Reuben
Carter wasn't the only hero of this story who passed
(29:50):
away too soon. On October nine, Ken Thompson, that reform
minded Brooklyn da who exonerated David McCallum and will He's
stucky with such grace, also died of cancer. He had
exonerated by that point in time about thirteen or fourteen people,
and so when he died it was a really terrible
(30:12):
blow for justice. But one of the things that happened
after Ken's death was his wife actually reached out to
David McCallum and invited David to speak at the going
home service for Ken Thompson, and so David McCallum stood
up at the packed memorial service for the d A
(30:35):
who had agreed to free him and gave a powerful eulogy.
He promised that he would investigate vawful convictions in a
very fair way and my legal team and uh, that's
all we ever wanted. It was two years to the
day after David had been exonerated. Mr Thompson touched me
(30:58):
in a way that I don't think anybody ever would again.
Because Mr Thompson didn't only give me my freedom. Mr Thompson,
and this may sound quaint to some who don't believe
making passion. Mr Thompson gave me my father an old daughter, Quinn.
(31:20):
Because had he not did what he promised he would do,
I'm not sure where I would be right now. David, Yes,
how still seek It's been a while, so you've been
out now for five and a half years almost. You know,
(31:42):
what are your hopes and dreams? And what are your
hopes and dreams for Quinn? What about hopes and dreams
is to become even the more effective than I think.
I'm pretty good at it now, but I just want
to be really really good at it because the hard working,
very hard work if it's all worth it at the
end of the day. And I embraced it, you know,
set myself at hands on dad. She had daddy's little girl. Absolutely.
(32:09):
I could tell you how many times I'm picked us
to school and so as I'm coming to door, oh
my god. You know, he doesn't runs from what else
she's doing. And that's uh, it's almost underscinal one someday,
but it's really really good sailing up. And that's the
(32:31):
story of David McCallum. Join us next week for the
last episode in our first season, we'll tell you about
one of the first modern day cases of false confession
from Peter Riley was just sixteen when he was wrongfully
convicted of murdering his own mother. Peter's innocence was championed
by everyone from neighborhood moms to New York celebrities. His
(32:54):
people powered campaign for exoneration has been the inspiration for
the work Steve and I do till then. Thanks for
listening to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions
is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association
(33:15):
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. Special thanks to
jog Hammer for additional script editing and for wrangling and
writing like a madwoman. Our music was composed by j Ralph.
(33:38):
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura
ni Writer and you can follow me on Twitter at
s Drizzing. 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 d
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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