December 7, 2020 • 29 mins
These police were willing to sacrifice one of their own just to close a case.
Laura and Steve tell us the story of a Michigan murder case with an unusual suspect: a small-town police officer named Ray McCann. After Ray helped investigate the disappearance of a little girl, he was wrongfully accused of her murder. In pursuit of their only suspect, police turned Ray’s whole life into an interrogation room.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I
writer and I'm Steve Drissen. Today we'll tell you about
a Michigan murder case with an unusual suspect, a small
town police officer named Ray McCann. After Ray helped investigate
the disappearance of a little girl, he was wrongfully accused
of her murder, cops turned on one of their own
(00:25):
in one of the worst cases of tunnel vision we've seen.
In pursuit of their only suspect, police turn raised whole
life into an interrogation room. One of the things we've
(00:48):
tried to do this season is to show that you
don't need a full confession in order to bring charges
against somebody. A false admission that implicates you in the crime,
or a false statement effect a lie in this case,
could bring the weight of the system down against an
(01:09):
innocent person. And all of that stems from what happens
in the interrogation room. Police have so much power over
what you say in the interrogation room and the way
in which what you say can be used against you
in courts. It's that power and the misuse of that
power that's what Ray mccannn's case is all about We've
(01:31):
seen tunnel vision in other cases, but I've never seen
tunnel vision that was this extreme, this long standing, and
that included coercion both in and outside of the interrogation room.
You have the police officers lying, right. The police officers
(01:51):
don't get charged. It's Ray who gets charged. I mean,
this is asymmetric warfare, right. And it becomes even more
asymmetrical when they charge him with perjury. Ray McCann a
reserve police officer who all he wanted to do was
assist police. All he wanted to do was to be
a police officer. They ran him over like a truck.
(02:15):
Today's story starts in Constantine, Michigan, a small town of
two thousand people in the southern corner of the state.
Constantine is an old fashioned dairy farming community, the kind
of place that looks like time stopped a half century ago.
The town's historic main street is lined with shops that
have been kept immaculate for decades. Annual events like the
(02:36):
car show and barbecue cook off are marked on everyone's calendar.
But in the autumn of two thousand seven, this Michigan
town was hit by a crime that no one could
have expected. It was November eight, fourty five in the afternoon,
only an hour before sunset. Eleven year old Jodi Perick
left her friend's house on her bike and headed for
(02:56):
dinner at home a half mile away. But when Joe
he didn't arrive on time, her mom called the police,
and words spread fast. As the sun went down and
temperatures plummeted too, it seemed like the whole town was
out searching for Jody. Joining the search was Ray mccahan,
a forty year old family man born and raised in Constantine.
(03:19):
Ray was a reserve police officer who hoped one day
to join the Michigan State Police. He wasn't a full
fledged cop, but he was allowed to carry a badge
and do basic police work like making traffic stops and
searching for missing people. In this particular missing person case,
Ray's son was good friends with Jody, so Ray didn't
have to be asked twice to help look for her.
(03:42):
Along with many of his neighbors, Ray threw on a
coat and went out to look for Jody. He searched
high and low at the baseball field, at the Dollar General,
even at a local riverside, walking trail called the Tumble
Damn Path. Others searched elsewhere, but no luck for anyone,
no Jody. Around ten thirty at night, Ray met up
(04:03):
with Jody's mom to talk about where they should look next.
That's when Ray McCann asked if anyone had searched the cemetery.
No one had, so Jody's mom headed that way, followed
by Ray in another car. The cemetery is where they
found Jody. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death.
Her bike was lying next to her on the ground.
(04:26):
Jody's mom bent down tried to embrace her daughter's body,
but Ray knew this was a crime scene that shouldn't
be disturbed. He gently guided her away from Jody's body
and sat her down in her car. The police arrived
quickly at the scene, but as they hunted for leeds,
they locked almost immediately onto Ray McCann as a suspect
(04:46):
because Ray had been the person who suggested searching the cemetery.
Based on that coincidence, police questioned Ray that night. He
adamantly denied involvement in this horrible crime. Somehow, though reserve off,
Sir Ray McCann became the sole suspect, the only person
police focused on for the next five years. When someone
(05:08):
discovers a body, they're gonna be a person of interest
in a police investigation because of their proximity to the crime.
It's a basis for wanting to question somebody about what
they were doing on the evening in question. But they
focused on him as the sole and exclusive suspect, and
(05:29):
they did so because they grew desperate. This is a
crime that is absolutely devastating to this community, and police
did everything in their power to close that vice on Ray. Now,
it's not like there was any evidence against Ray. Police
(05:49):
compared raised DNA to the DNA left on Jody's body,
but it didn't match. No physical evidence implicated him, and
no eyewitnesses had identified him. But as Jody's murder sat
unsolved for years, pressure escalated on the authorities to come
up with a culprit. After a new police chief was
elected in new investigators were assigned to the case, and
(06:11):
they immediately doubled down on prime suspect Ray mccan. Over
the next few years, police interrogated Ray more than twenty times.
Again and again, police asked him to describe what he
did on the night of Jody's disappearance, where he searched
who he talked to. During these interrogations, police gradually but
(06:34):
relentlessly upped the anti The evidence against you is insurmountable.
They told him, we know scientifically you touched her body,
oh annointed on your people, whatever, and think that now,
(06:55):
that was a lie. But these kinds of lies can
be extremely coercive, even on a cop, even on someone
like Ray mccan. You guys couldn't do what you're talking
to talk to talking, But you know what I did
my job that I I wish I knew what happened
or because then I guess we would be having this conversation.
The way they questioned Ray was for one purpose, and
(07:16):
one purpose only, to get him to give them information
that they could use to charge him with this product.
And Ray called them out about that too, over and
over again. I don't know what you're trying to give me.
Confess somebody didn't have no power and now you guys
are doing That's the thing. He knew exactly what they
were doing. He's a cop. You wanted me to admit
to something I didn't do. I'm not gonna do it.
(07:39):
I confessionally I can't give you. I didn't find or
didn't put it there, didn't I did. But the more
Ray insisted on his innocence, the more police became obsessed
with proving him guilty. Here's the really twisted thing. Their
obsession began to spread beyond the interrogation room. They blamed
Ray for Jody's death in the local media, ruin his reputation,
(08:01):
and they viciously attacked his personal life. Police tracked down
Rai's friends and relatives and worked to turn them against him.
Police told Ray's family that physical evidence d n A
proved he had killed Jody, even though that wasn't true,
and they went even further for no clear reason. They
told Ray's wife that he had been unfaithful. They falsely
(08:23):
told Ray's teenage son, the one who had been friends
with Jody when he was younger, that his dad was
a drug addict. They also told the boy that his
dad was visiting online chat rooms the worst kind I
guess that these cops could imagine. Just listen to this.
The computer shows activity in a chat room regularly of
(08:45):
gain nature homosexual behavior, talking about how this man on
man sexual encounter is going to go, and then how
it did go There's been no signs of any of
that personally, for anything, I haven't seen anything like that.
Is there any part of you at all that questions
your dad's sexuality or of what you're saying is absolutely
(09:09):
honest to God true? I can tell you that it
is your computer. I took it off there and then, yeah,
of course it's going to make me question it. None
of this was honest to God true. The cops were
lying again, and that's bad enough, but the fact that
they equated visiting gay chat rooms with raping and killing
an eleven year old girl, I'm sorry, but that's beyond
(09:29):
offensive in any event. Until Ray confessed, police were hell
bent on taking his life apart peace by peace, and
I guess this. Cops thought that telling Ray's teenage son
that his dad was gay would be a good way
to accomplish that. Their purpose was to make life for
Ray McCann in Constantine, Michigan unendurable, to make his life
(09:54):
so miserable and so painful that they could bring him
to a place where he could conf s to killing
Jodie Park. Despite all this, years go by and Ray
doesn't confess. Finally, the cops had to plan. They'll file
charges against Ray and see if that gets him to
admit guilt. An officer is caught saying as much during
(10:16):
a taped interview with Ray's wife. He's going to have
to be charged, The officer says, he'll get so scared
he'll talk. It may just come to that. At a
certain point in time, they should have realized that Ray
had nothing to do with this, and there were all
kinds of reasons for them to believe that, beginning with
(10:37):
the DNA evidence, but they didn't care one bit about Ray.
This was the first time that I had seen tunnel
vision so take over law enforcement officers that they were
willing to sacrifice the life of another officer to close
a case. Now, the police didn't have any evidence against
(10:59):
Ray that would allow them to charge him with murder,
so they came up with a different plan and different charges.
In police served Ray McCann with an investigative subpoena requiring
him to answer questions yet again about the night Jody
disappeared five years earlier because of the subpoena, though this
time Ray had to give answers under oath. Ray did
(11:22):
bring a lawyer with him. By this point in time,
Ray's reputation in the community was so damaged, so tarnished.
He couldn't go anywhere without people looking at him as
if he had killed Jody Parrock. So the lawyer advised
him to go in and talk to the authorities as
a way to maybe put an end to this. The
(11:45):
police's subpoena strategy worked. It did put an end to
the harassment, but not the end Ray had hoped for.
After the interview, on July sevente, two thousand fourteen, prosecutors
accused Ray McCann of lying under oath and charged him
with five counts of perjury. He was arrested and thrown
into the local jail. So did Ray McCann lie under oath?
(12:19):
Four of the five perjury charges were based on incredibly
minor inconsistencies between the details Ray remembered about the night
Jodie died five years earlier and the details that other
people remembered. You know, what stands out to me in
this story is how a completely innocent man who is
just out trying to help got caught up in this
(12:40):
web of lies that was spun by the detectives. It's
unbelievable that that could have happened and frightening. That's Ken Colker,
a journalist based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He's been covering
Ray McCann's case for years. I'm an investigative reporter, so
my job is to just sniff around and look for
(13:01):
things that seem wrong. You know, the perjury charges seemed
totally unfounded. I mean, if somebody asked me what I
had for lunch, I might say Taco bell, but maybe
it wasn't. Is that really a lie? Here's one example
of what Ray was charged with under oath. Ray McCann
said that at one point while he was searching, he
(13:22):
saw Jody's mom with a blonde haired kid, and he
thought Jody had been found. He testified that he said
to Jody's mom, oh good, you found her. Now. Everyone
agreed that a local seventh grader with blonde hair named
Katie was with Jody's mom during the search, but Jodie's
mom couldn't remember whether five years earlier, Ray had said,
(13:42):
oh good, you found her. One of these perjury charges
was based on this so called discrepancy. Here's another example.
Police told Ray they found his d n A on
Jody's body, even though that was a lie. In a
desperate attempt to provide some explanation, Ray made a us.
He thought back to the moment he and Jody's mom
(14:03):
discovered her little girl's body. He remembered guiding Jody's mom
away and helping her sit down in her car. Maybe
sometime later the mother had been grieving over her daughter's body.
He said, maybe his DNA had been transferred from Jody's
mom to the little girl. But five years after the fact,
Jody's mom didn't remember Ray pulling her away, or taking
(14:25):
her to the car, or much of anything else from
that terrible moment. So the cops charged Ray with another
count of perjury. What's interesting is that Ray McCann was
a reserve police officer, and for some reason they turned
on him. That's the suspect they're focused on. So they're
just hammering and hammering and telling him far more lies
(14:46):
than they claim he told them. Raise history as a
police officer may have offered him some protection against a
false confession, but it couldn't protect him against another weapon
in the police officers arsenal, the weapon of perjury. In
race case, they turned a series of inconsistencies in his
(15:08):
statements over a five year period into perjurious. Wise, the
penalties for perjury in Michigan are extreme, and they charged
him with five counts of perjury. So under investigative subpoena,
especially in a murder case, telling a lot of police
is actually punishable by up to life in prison. The
(15:31):
punishment is as bad as if you committed the crime.
Four of those five charges were based on ridiculous inconsistencies,
like the ones we've talked about. The fifth charge, though,
was different. The fifth charge was based on raised sworn
statement that he had searched for Jody near that riverside
walking trail, the tumble Damn Path. They claimed, well, that's
(15:53):
a lie, because we've got video showing that nobody went
to the tumble Damn that time of night. We don't
see your car, we don't see your headlights or whatever.
There was a video camera on this nearby creamery that
supposedly was aimed right at the tumble dam And the
quote unquote lie that they got him on was the
fact that he said he was at the tumble Damn,
(16:15):
but the surveillance video proved he wasn't there. Police claimed
that video proved Ray was lying. In fact, an officer
even took the stand at Ray's first court hearing and
swore that this video proved Ray had committed perjury. For
his part, Ray couldn't figure it out. He knew he'd
gone to the tumble Dam path that night to search
for Jody. But his trial approached and five possible life
(16:39):
sentences loomed, Ray finally broke. He didn't confess to killing Jody. Instead,
on March twenty two, fifteen, he pled no contest to
that fifth perjury charge. No contest plea is an admission
that the state has sufficient evidence against you to convict you,
(16:59):
so as a matter of law, it's treated within this
system just as any other guilty plea would be treated.
For that plea of no contest to perjury, Ray received
a sentence of twenty months in prison. In exchange, the
state dropped the other four charges. They hadn't gotten Ray
for murder, but they had gotten him for something, and
(17:21):
I guess that was good enough. Fast forward five months
after Ray entered his plea to August two thousand, fifteen,
Ray was in prison serving his perjury sentence, and every
day was horrific. He was a suspected child rapist and killer.
And he talked about you know what other prisoners due
(17:43):
to child rapists and killers. He got dragged off of
his bunk one night, got smashed over the head with
what he thinks was a padlock, and somebody tried to
gouge his eyes out. I mean, that's what happened to
the support in prison. While Ray suffered, there was a development.
(18:05):
A man named Daniel Furlong, who lived one town over
from Constantine, lured a ten year old girl into his
garage and attacked her. She escaped, thank god, and was
able to lead police to furlong store. They arrested him
and took his DNA and what did it match the
DNA left eight years earlier on Jodi Parick's body. Police
(18:28):
questioned Daniel Furlong on October eighteenth, two thousand fifteen, and
he admitted that he'd raped and killed Jody. Forlong used
to live in Constantine, a few blocks away from the
Parrot family. When he saw Jody riding by on her bike,
he lured her into his garage just like the other girl.
That's where he assaulted and killed Jody. And he did
(18:49):
it all alone. Furlong told investigators he didn't know Ray McCann.
We saw the videotape of police interviewed Daniel for a
long and they were a lot nicer to him than
they were to Ray McCann. They asked for long. So
what did you think when you saw that in a
newspaper that they were focusing on Ray McCann, And he thought, well,
I'm in the clear. So, in other words, the fact
(19:11):
that the police had pursued this wrongful prosecution of Ray
made Furlong feel enough comfort to strike again, and that
blew me away. It was crystal clear Ray McCann was
never involved in Jody's disappearance. All he did was trying
(19:32):
to help a distraught mom find her missing kid. The
police's suspicions about Ray had been wrong from the start.
In November two thousand fifteen, Daniel Furlong pled guilty to
killing Jody Parrock by himself and received a sentence of
thirty to sixty years, But the state wasn't ready to
exonerate Ray McCann, not yet. Ray had been convicted of perjury,
(19:57):
and the state insisted that even if Ray hadn't committed murder,
he had still lied under oath. I started in this
case because we were doing stories about the real killer
who confessed and was getting sentenced to prison, and nobody
was talking about what happened to Ray McCann. It's like, well,
what about this guy who had nothing to do with it.
(20:28):
In December two thousand fifteen, Ray was paroled from a
Michigan prison after serving his sentence. He was still a
convicted felon, a perjurer in the eyes of the law.
It was right around that time that his case came
across Steve's desk. Ray had been out of prison for
a few months. He was having a hard time reintegrating
back in the community. The police officers were still suggesting
(20:51):
to the general public that he knew things about this
crime and he had spent twenty months locked up for
something he didn't do. Thank god for Ken Colker for
taking the interest to tell this story about Ray, because
if it wasn't for him, I never would have known
about the case. I had seemed the work done by
the Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern End. I just
(21:13):
reached out to Stephen said, here's an interesting case. I
was so angry at what these law enforcement officers had
done to Ray, and so I called up to Michigan
Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, and
I said, will you work on this case with me?
The legal team's task was to prove Ray innocence of
(21:36):
the only perjury charge he'd been convicted of. That was
the charge where the police had sworn under oath that
they had a surveillance tape showing the Tumble Damn Path,
a video that they said proved Ray had lied about
going there to search for Jody Well. Ken Colker got
ahold of a copy of that videotape. I remember going
down to Ray McCann's home in meeting Stephen Drisen down there. Yeah,
(22:00):
that was like a could have been a scene in
a movie, actually standing around this dining room table with
my laptop open watching this video that would eventually lead
to Ray McCann's case being dismissed. What we saw was
that you couldn't see anything from the camera footage. It
was simply too dark to make out what kinds of
(22:21):
cars were on the street, whether there were any people
on the street. You couldn't see the tumble Dawn Path
at all, let alone who was walking on it. So
the legal team actually went to the creamery, the business
that had taken the surveillance video, and looked at their
security camera. The creamery owner assured them that the camera
hadn't been moved since the night of Jody's disappearance. The
(22:43):
video camera wasn't even aimed at the damn The surveillance
camera that they claimed showed he wasn't there was aimed elsewhere.
I wish I'd have been the one that noticed that.
Under no circumstances could the creamery camera footage have proven
at Ray was not at the tumbled damn path. The
(23:04):
whole damn thing was made up. It was a lie.
The video was essentially worthless as evidence. This video certainly
didn't prove that Ray McCann had lied under oath. Instead,
what it proved was that the police were the ones
who had lied. In order to convict him. Ray's wish
had come true. He needed to have some kind of
(23:24):
evidence to demonstrate that he didn't lie at all, but
that the police officers were lying, and that camera footage
proved it. Based on that video, Ray's attorneys filed emotion
for relief, and on December seventh, two thousand seventeen, the
court throughout Ray's perjury conviction. Ray McCann was innocent of
(23:47):
the murder and innocent of perjury. He was exonerated. The
prosecutor decided not to fight it and to allow the
judge to dismiss the case. And I just felt great
for Ray. Mean, you can't take away the twenty months
that he spent in prison, but you know, at least
he was able to clear his name. That was the
(24:09):
end of Ray McCann's legal ordeal. But what happened to
the officers who lied to convict him? Okay, Steve, So
I'm really hoping you're going to tell us that after
Ray was exonerated, these cops were tried for perjury. I
wish I could tell you that. But nothing has happened
to these police officers. The prosecutor eventually ended up losing
(24:32):
in his next election, but these police officers have never
faced any consequences. They were the ones who lied, not Ray.
They were the ones who should have gone down for perjury.
That's the ultimate irony here. And what about Ray McCann.
What's life like for him now? In many ways, it's
still really hard. And they took a lot away from
(24:54):
this guy. He barely tossed to one of his sons.
This wife divorced him, the he missed the birth of
a grandchild. I'm sure there are people in that town
who still think Ray McCann had something to do with it.
And so, you know, his name is, in some people's eyes,
is still mud and constantine. The only thing Ray McCann
(25:15):
ever wanted was to find the killer of Jodie Parrock,
and that's been accomplished. Now raise free to put his
life back together as best he can. Ray. Yeah, Hey, Ray,
it's Laura. How are you doing pretty good? So you're
(25:35):
living up north in Michigan. You've got snow on the
ground yet, Yeah, actually just got some yesterday. I want
to go cut some woods and stuff, and all a
sudden just started coming down. Tell me about your your wife, Ray,
I am delighted to hear that you're married. Yeah. We
got married in um April twelve. I actually on my
dad's birthday in two thousand eighteen. Well that's a beautiful
(25:56):
way to honor your dad. How did you meet your wife?
We worked together. If she caught my eye right away,
you must have caught her I too, Yeah, I must
have done something right. We were actually in southwest Michigan
there for a while, and we made a decision to
start a new life somewhere else because it just, you know,
(26:18):
it was hard for me. It's been going a lot
better since we made the move up here. It really
has I struggle at times, you know, I met that
I go through a lot of depression. My wife knows
I go through that, and she's there for me. I
am so thankful to my daughter Ashley. She wasn't with
me the whole time this was going on and still
lives with me. And I just love you know, the grandkids.
(26:41):
They keep it busy, that's for sure. You're a good man,
right and a survivor, Steve, and I are with you
all the way. One of the jobs that we, as
innocent lawyers have is to try to tell the story
of our clients in a way that can bring them
back some measure of their reputation, to tell the story
(27:04):
in a way that makes it abundantly clear that Ray
McCann is innocent. We can't undo the trauma that Ray experienced,
but at least we can establish that he never committed
the crime he was accused of. In fact, a crime
was committed against him. One of the arguments against allowing
police officers to lie during interrogations is that it creates
(27:27):
a culture in which lying is acceptable not only during interrogations,
but when police officers come into court and testify about cases,
and that may very well have been what happened here.
You're allowed to lie to get a confession, why not
lie to get a conviction. It's one of the strongest
arguments for banning deception during police interrogations. When you allow
(27:49):
police to lie, that sends a message that truthfulness is
not essential to the task of enforcing the law, and
of course it is. It's vital. And that's the story
of Ray McCann. Join us next week when we take
you to Aida, Oklahoma to tell you about Tommy Ward.
After detectives learned about a strange dream he had, Tommy
(28:11):
was accused of a local woman's murder and found himself
on death row. Tommy remains behind bars to this day,
but a team of lawyers, including our Center on Wrongful Convictions,
is fighting to end Tommy's nightmare. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions
is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association
(28:34):
with Signal Company Number one Special thanks to our executive
producers Jason Flam and Kevin Wardis. Our production team is
headed by Senior producer and Pope, along with producers Josh
Hammer and Jess Shane. Our show is mixed by Jeanie Montalvo.
John Colbert is our intrepid intern. Our music was composed
by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or
(28:56):
Twitter at Laura ni Rider and you can follow me
on Twitter at s Driven. For more information on the show,
visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com. 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 and I'm Steve Drissen. Today we'll tell you about
a Michigan murder case with an unusual suspect, a small
town police officer named Ray McCann. After Ray helped investigate
the disappearance of a little girl, he was wrongfully accused
of her murder, cops turned on one of their own
(00:25):
in one of the worst cases of tunnel vision we've seen.
In pursuit of their only suspect, police turn raised whole
life into an interrogation room. One of the things we've
(00:48):
tried to do this season is to show that you
don't need a full confession in order to bring charges
against somebody. A false admission that implicates you in the crime,
or a false statement effect a lie in this case,
could bring the weight of the system down against an
(01:09):
innocent person. And all of that stems from what happens
in the interrogation room. Police have so much power over
what you say in the interrogation room and the way
in which what you say can be used against you
in courts. It's that power and the misuse of that
power that's what Ray mccannn's case is all about We've
(01:31):
seen tunnel vision in other cases, but I've never seen
tunnel vision that was this extreme, this long standing, and
that included coercion both in and outside of the interrogation room.
You have the police officers lying, right. The police officers
(01:51):
don't get charged. It's Ray who gets charged. I mean,
this is asymmetric warfare, right. And it becomes even more
asymmetrical when they charge him with perjury. Ray McCann a
reserve police officer who all he wanted to do was
assist police. All he wanted to do was to be
a police officer. They ran him over like a truck.
(02:15):
Today's story starts in Constantine, Michigan, a small town of
two thousand people in the southern corner of the state.
Constantine is an old fashioned dairy farming community, the kind
of place that looks like time stopped a half century ago.
The town's historic main street is lined with shops that
have been kept immaculate for decades. Annual events like the
(02:36):
car show and barbecue cook off are marked on everyone's calendar.
But in the autumn of two thousand seven, this Michigan
town was hit by a crime that no one could
have expected. It was November eight, fourty five in the afternoon,
only an hour before sunset. Eleven year old Jodi Perick
left her friend's house on her bike and headed for
(02:56):
dinner at home a half mile away. But when Joe
he didn't arrive on time, her mom called the police,
and words spread fast. As the sun went down and
temperatures plummeted too, it seemed like the whole town was
out searching for Jody. Joining the search was Ray mccahan,
a forty year old family man born and raised in Constantine.
(03:19):
Ray was a reserve police officer who hoped one day
to join the Michigan State Police. He wasn't a full
fledged cop, but he was allowed to carry a badge
and do basic police work like making traffic stops and
searching for missing people. In this particular missing person case,
Ray's son was good friends with Jody, so Ray didn't
have to be asked twice to help look for her.
(03:42):
Along with many of his neighbors, Ray threw on a
coat and went out to look for Jody. He searched
high and low at the baseball field, at the Dollar General,
even at a local riverside, walking trail called the Tumble
Damn Path. Others searched elsewhere, but no luck for anyone,
no Jody. Around ten thirty at night, Ray met up
(04:03):
with Jody's mom to talk about where they should look next.
That's when Ray McCann asked if anyone had searched the cemetery.
No one had, so Jody's mom headed that way, followed
by Ray in another car. The cemetery is where they
found Jody. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death.
Her bike was lying next to her on the ground.
(04:26):
Jody's mom bent down tried to embrace her daughter's body,
but Ray knew this was a crime scene that shouldn't
be disturbed. He gently guided her away from Jody's body
and sat her down in her car. The police arrived
quickly at the scene, but as they hunted for leeds,
they locked almost immediately onto Ray McCann as a suspect
(04:46):
because Ray had been the person who suggested searching the cemetery.
Based on that coincidence, police questioned Ray that night. He
adamantly denied involvement in this horrible crime. Somehow, though reserve off,
Sir Ray McCann became the sole suspect, the only person
police focused on for the next five years. When someone
(05:08):
discovers a body, they're gonna be a person of interest
in a police investigation because of their proximity to the crime.
It's a basis for wanting to question somebody about what
they were doing on the evening in question. But they
focused on him as the sole and exclusive suspect, and
(05:29):
they did so because they grew desperate. This is a
crime that is absolutely devastating to this community, and police
did everything in their power to close that vice on Ray. Now,
it's not like there was any evidence against Ray. Police
(05:49):
compared raised DNA to the DNA left on Jody's body,
but it didn't match. No physical evidence implicated him, and
no eyewitnesses had identified him. But as Jody's murder sat
unsolved for years, pressure escalated on the authorities to come
up with a culprit. After a new police chief was
elected in new investigators were assigned to the case, and
(06:11):
they immediately doubled down on prime suspect Ray mccan. Over
the next few years, police interrogated Ray more than twenty times.
Again and again, police asked him to describe what he
did on the night of Jody's disappearance, where he searched
who he talked to. During these interrogations, police gradually but
(06:34):
relentlessly upped the anti The evidence against you is insurmountable.
They told him, we know scientifically you touched her body,
oh annointed on your people, whatever, and think that now,
(06:55):
that was a lie. But these kinds of lies can
be extremely coercive, even on a cop, even on someone
like Ray mccan. You guys couldn't do what you're talking
to talk to talking, But you know what I did
my job that I I wish I knew what happened
or because then I guess we would be having this conversation.
The way they questioned Ray was for one purpose, and
(07:16):
one purpose only, to get him to give them information
that they could use to charge him with this product.
And Ray called them out about that too, over and
over again. I don't know what you're trying to give me.
Confess somebody didn't have no power and now you guys
are doing That's the thing. He knew exactly what they
were doing. He's a cop. You wanted me to admit
to something I didn't do. I'm not gonna do it.
(07:39):
I confessionally I can't give you. I didn't find or
didn't put it there, didn't I did. But the more
Ray insisted on his innocence, the more police became obsessed
with proving him guilty. Here's the really twisted thing. Their
obsession began to spread beyond the interrogation room. They blamed
Ray for Jody's death in the local media, ruin his reputation,
(08:01):
and they viciously attacked his personal life. Police tracked down
Rai's friends and relatives and worked to turn them against him.
Police told Ray's family that physical evidence d n A
proved he had killed Jody, even though that wasn't true,
and they went even further for no clear reason. They
told Ray's wife that he had been unfaithful. They falsely
(08:23):
told Ray's teenage son, the one who had been friends
with Jody when he was younger, that his dad was
a drug addict. They also told the boy that his
dad was visiting online chat rooms the worst kind I
guess that these cops could imagine. Just listen to this.
The computer shows activity in a chat room regularly of
(08:45):
gain nature homosexual behavior, talking about how this man on
man sexual encounter is going to go, and then how
it did go There's been no signs of any of
that personally, for anything, I haven't seen anything like that.
Is there any part of you at all that questions
your dad's sexuality or of what you're saying is absolutely
(09:09):
honest to God true? I can tell you that it
is your computer. I took it off there and then, yeah,
of course it's going to make me question it. None
of this was honest to God true. The cops were
lying again, and that's bad enough, but the fact that
they equated visiting gay chat rooms with raping and killing
an eleven year old girl, I'm sorry, but that's beyond
(09:29):
offensive in any event. Until Ray confessed, police were hell
bent on taking his life apart peace by peace, and
I guess this. Cops thought that telling Ray's teenage son
that his dad was gay would be a good way
to accomplish that. Their purpose was to make life for
Ray McCann in Constantine, Michigan unendurable, to make his life
(09:54):
so miserable and so painful that they could bring him
to a place where he could conf s to killing
Jodie Park. Despite all this, years go by and Ray
doesn't confess. Finally, the cops had to plan. They'll file
charges against Ray and see if that gets him to
admit guilt. An officer is caught saying as much during
(10:16):
a taped interview with Ray's wife. He's going to have
to be charged, The officer says, he'll get so scared
he'll talk. It may just come to that. At a
certain point in time, they should have realized that Ray
had nothing to do with this, and there were all
kinds of reasons for them to believe that, beginning with
(10:37):
the DNA evidence, but they didn't care one bit about Ray.
This was the first time that I had seen tunnel
vision so take over law enforcement officers that they were
willing to sacrifice the life of another officer to close
a case. Now, the police didn't have any evidence against
(10:59):
Ray that would allow them to charge him with murder,
so they came up with a different plan and different charges.
In police served Ray McCann with an investigative subpoena requiring
him to answer questions yet again about the night Jody
disappeared five years earlier because of the subpoena, though this
time Ray had to give answers under oath. Ray did
(11:22):
bring a lawyer with him. By this point in time,
Ray's reputation in the community was so damaged, so tarnished.
He couldn't go anywhere without people looking at him as
if he had killed Jody Parrock. So the lawyer advised
him to go in and talk to the authorities as
a way to maybe put an end to this. The
(11:45):
police's subpoena strategy worked. It did put an end to
the harassment, but not the end Ray had hoped for.
After the interview, on July sevente, two thousand fourteen, prosecutors
accused Ray McCann of lying under oath and charged him
with five counts of perjury. He was arrested and thrown
into the local jail. So did Ray McCann lie under oath?
(12:19):
Four of the five perjury charges were based on incredibly
minor inconsistencies between the details Ray remembered about the night
Jodie died five years earlier and the details that other
people remembered. You know, what stands out to me in
this story is how a completely innocent man who is
just out trying to help got caught up in this
(12:40):
web of lies that was spun by the detectives. It's
unbelievable that that could have happened and frightening. That's Ken Colker,
a journalist based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He's been covering
Ray McCann's case for years. I'm an investigative reporter, so
my job is to just sniff around and look for
(13:01):
things that seem wrong. You know, the perjury charges seemed
totally unfounded. I mean, if somebody asked me what I
had for lunch, I might say Taco bell, but maybe
it wasn't. Is that really a lie? Here's one example
of what Ray was charged with under oath. Ray McCann
said that at one point while he was searching, he
(13:22):
saw Jody's mom with a blonde haired kid, and he
thought Jody had been found. He testified that he said
to Jody's mom, oh good, you found her. Now. Everyone
agreed that a local seventh grader with blonde hair named
Katie was with Jody's mom during the search, but Jodie's
mom couldn't remember whether five years earlier, Ray had said,
(13:42):
oh good, you found her. One of these perjury charges
was based on this so called discrepancy. Here's another example.
Police told Ray they found his d n A on
Jody's body, even though that was a lie. In a
desperate attempt to provide some explanation, Ray made a us.
He thought back to the moment he and Jody's mom
(14:03):
discovered her little girl's body. He remembered guiding Jody's mom
away and helping her sit down in her car. Maybe
sometime later the mother had been grieving over her daughter's body.
He said, maybe his DNA had been transferred from Jody's
mom to the little girl. But five years after the fact,
Jody's mom didn't remember Ray pulling her away, or taking
(14:25):
her to the car, or much of anything else from
that terrible moment. So the cops charged Ray with another
count of perjury. What's interesting is that Ray McCann was
a reserve police officer, and for some reason they turned
on him. That's the suspect they're focused on. So they're
just hammering and hammering and telling him far more lies
(14:46):
than they claim he told them. Raise history as a
police officer may have offered him some protection against a
false confession, but it couldn't protect him against another weapon
in the police officers arsenal, the weapon of perjury. In
race case, they turned a series of inconsistencies in his
(15:08):
statements over a five year period into perjurious. Wise, the
penalties for perjury in Michigan are extreme, and they charged
him with five counts of perjury. So under investigative subpoena,
especially in a murder case, telling a lot of police
is actually punishable by up to life in prison. The
(15:31):
punishment is as bad as if you committed the crime.
Four of those five charges were based on ridiculous inconsistencies,
like the ones we've talked about. The fifth charge, though,
was different. The fifth charge was based on raised sworn
statement that he had searched for Jody near that riverside
walking trail, the tumble Damn Path. They claimed, well, that's
(15:53):
a lie, because we've got video showing that nobody went
to the tumble Damn that time of night. We don't
see your car, we don't see your headlights or whatever.
There was a video camera on this nearby creamery that
supposedly was aimed right at the tumble dam And the
quote unquote lie that they got him on was the
fact that he said he was at the tumble Damn,
(16:15):
but the surveillance video proved he wasn't there. Police claimed
that video proved Ray was lying. In fact, an officer
even took the stand at Ray's first court hearing and
swore that this video proved Ray had committed perjury. For
his part, Ray couldn't figure it out. He knew he'd
gone to the tumble Dam path that night to search
for Jody. But his trial approached and five possible life
(16:39):
sentences loomed, Ray finally broke. He didn't confess to killing Jody. Instead,
on March twenty two, fifteen, he pled no contest to
that fifth perjury charge. No contest plea is an admission
that the state has sufficient evidence against you to convict you,
(16:59):
so as a matter of law, it's treated within this
system just as any other guilty plea would be treated.
For that plea of no contest to perjury, Ray received
a sentence of twenty months in prison. In exchange, the
state dropped the other four charges. They hadn't gotten Ray
for murder, but they had gotten him for something, and
(17:21):
I guess that was good enough. Fast forward five months
after Ray entered his plea to August two thousand, fifteen,
Ray was in prison serving his perjury sentence, and every
day was horrific. He was a suspected child rapist and killer.
And he talked about you know what other prisoners due
(17:43):
to child rapists and killers. He got dragged off of
his bunk one night, got smashed over the head with
what he thinks was a padlock, and somebody tried to
gouge his eyes out. I mean, that's what happened to
the support in prison. While Ray suffered, there was a development.
(18:05):
A man named Daniel Furlong, who lived one town over
from Constantine, lured a ten year old girl into his
garage and attacked her. She escaped, thank god, and was
able to lead police to furlong store. They arrested him
and took his DNA and what did it match the
DNA left eight years earlier on Jodi Parick's body. Police
(18:28):
questioned Daniel Furlong on October eighteenth, two thousand fifteen, and
he admitted that he'd raped and killed Jody. Forlong used
to live in Constantine, a few blocks away from the
Parrot family. When he saw Jody riding by on her bike,
he lured her into his garage just like the other girl.
That's where he assaulted and killed Jody. And he did
(18:49):
it all alone. Furlong told investigators he didn't know Ray McCann.
We saw the videotape of police interviewed Daniel for a
long and they were a lot nicer to him than
they were to Ray McCann. They asked for long. So
what did you think when you saw that in a
newspaper that they were focusing on Ray McCann, And he thought, well,
I'm in the clear. So, in other words, the fact
(19:11):
that the police had pursued this wrongful prosecution of Ray
made Furlong feel enough comfort to strike again, and that
blew me away. It was crystal clear Ray McCann was
never involved in Jody's disappearance. All he did was trying
(19:32):
to help a distraught mom find her missing kid. The
police's suspicions about Ray had been wrong from the start.
In November two thousand fifteen, Daniel Furlong pled guilty to
killing Jody Parrock by himself and received a sentence of
thirty to sixty years, But the state wasn't ready to
exonerate Ray McCann, not yet. Ray had been convicted of perjury,
(19:57):
and the state insisted that even if Ray hadn't committed murder,
he had still lied under oath. I started in this
case because we were doing stories about the real killer
who confessed and was getting sentenced to prison, and nobody
was talking about what happened to Ray McCann. It's like, well,
what about this guy who had nothing to do with it.
(20:28):
In December two thousand fifteen, Ray was paroled from a
Michigan prison after serving his sentence. He was still a
convicted felon, a perjurer in the eyes of the law.
It was right around that time that his case came
across Steve's desk. Ray had been out of prison for
a few months. He was having a hard time reintegrating
back in the community. The police officers were still suggesting
(20:51):
to the general public that he knew things about this
crime and he had spent twenty months locked up for
something he didn't do. Thank god for Ken Colker for
taking the interest to tell this story about Ray, because
if it wasn't for him, I never would have known
about the case. I had seemed the work done by
the Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern End. I just
(21:13):
reached out to Stephen said, here's an interesting case. I
was so angry at what these law enforcement officers had
done to Ray, and so I called up to Michigan
Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, and
I said, will you work on this case with me?
The legal team's task was to prove Ray innocence of
(21:36):
the only perjury charge he'd been convicted of. That was
the charge where the police had sworn under oath that
they had a surveillance tape showing the Tumble Damn Path,
a video that they said proved Ray had lied about
going there to search for Jody Well. Ken Colker got
ahold of a copy of that videotape. I remember going
down to Ray McCann's home in meeting Stephen Drisen down there. Yeah,
(22:00):
that was like a could have been a scene in
a movie, actually standing around this dining room table with
my laptop open watching this video that would eventually lead
to Ray McCann's case being dismissed. What we saw was
that you couldn't see anything from the camera footage. It
was simply too dark to make out what kinds of
(22:21):
cars were on the street, whether there were any people
on the street. You couldn't see the tumble Dawn Path
at all, let alone who was walking on it. So
the legal team actually went to the creamery, the business
that had taken the surveillance video, and looked at their
security camera. The creamery owner assured them that the camera
hadn't been moved since the night of Jody's disappearance. The
(22:43):
video camera wasn't even aimed at the damn The surveillance
camera that they claimed showed he wasn't there was aimed elsewhere.
I wish I'd have been the one that noticed that.
Under no circumstances could the creamery camera footage have proven
at Ray was not at the tumbled damn path. The
(23:04):
whole damn thing was made up. It was a lie.
The video was essentially worthless as evidence. This video certainly
didn't prove that Ray McCann had lied under oath. Instead,
what it proved was that the police were the ones
who had lied. In order to convict him. Ray's wish
had come true. He needed to have some kind of
(23:24):
evidence to demonstrate that he didn't lie at all, but
that the police officers were lying, and that camera footage
proved it. Based on that video, Ray's attorneys filed emotion
for relief, and on December seventh, two thousand seventeen, the
court throughout Ray's perjury conviction. Ray McCann was innocent of
(23:47):
the murder and innocent of perjury. He was exonerated. The
prosecutor decided not to fight it and to allow the
judge to dismiss the case. And I just felt great
for Ray. Mean, you can't take away the twenty months
that he spent in prison, but you know, at least
he was able to clear his name. That was the
(24:09):
end of Ray McCann's legal ordeal. But what happened to
the officers who lied to convict him? Okay, Steve, So
I'm really hoping you're going to tell us that after
Ray was exonerated, these cops were tried for perjury. I
wish I could tell you that. But nothing has happened
to these police officers. The prosecutor eventually ended up losing
(24:32):
in his next election, but these police officers have never
faced any consequences. They were the ones who lied, not Ray.
They were the ones who should have gone down for perjury.
That's the ultimate irony here. And what about Ray McCann.
What's life like for him now? In many ways, it's
still really hard. And they took a lot away from
(24:54):
this guy. He barely tossed to one of his sons.
This wife divorced him, the he missed the birth of
a grandchild. I'm sure there are people in that town
who still think Ray McCann had something to do with it.
And so, you know, his name is, in some people's eyes,
is still mud and constantine. The only thing Ray McCann
(25:15):
ever wanted was to find the killer of Jodie Parrock,
and that's been accomplished. Now raise free to put his
life back together as best he can. Ray. Yeah, Hey, Ray,
it's Laura. How are you doing pretty good? So you're
(25:35):
living up north in Michigan. You've got snow on the
ground yet, Yeah, actually just got some yesterday. I want
to go cut some woods and stuff, and all a
sudden just started coming down. Tell me about your your wife, Ray,
I am delighted to hear that you're married. Yeah. We
got married in um April twelve. I actually on my
dad's birthday in two thousand eighteen. Well that's a beautiful
(25:56):
way to honor your dad. How did you meet your wife?
We worked together. If she caught my eye right away,
you must have caught her I too, Yeah, I must
have done something right. We were actually in southwest Michigan
there for a while, and we made a decision to
start a new life somewhere else because it just, you know,
(26:18):
it was hard for me. It's been going a lot
better since we made the move up here. It really
has I struggle at times, you know, I met that
I go through a lot of depression. My wife knows
I go through that, and she's there for me. I
am so thankful to my daughter Ashley. She wasn't with
me the whole time this was going on and still
lives with me. And I just love you know, the grandkids.
(26:41):
They keep it busy, that's for sure. You're a good man,
right and a survivor, Steve, and I are with you
all the way. One of the jobs that we, as
innocent lawyers have is to try to tell the story
of our clients in a way that can bring them
back some measure of their reputation, to tell the story
(27:04):
in a way that makes it abundantly clear that Ray
McCann is innocent. We can't undo the trauma that Ray experienced,
but at least we can establish that he never committed
the crime he was accused of. In fact, a crime
was committed against him. One of the arguments against allowing
police officers to lie during interrogations is that it creates
(27:27):
a culture in which lying is acceptable not only during interrogations,
but when police officers come into court and testify about cases,
and that may very well have been what happened here.
You're allowed to lie to get a confession, why not
lie to get a conviction. It's one of the strongest
arguments for banning deception during police interrogations. When you allow
(27:49):
police to lie, that sends a message that truthfulness is
not essential to the task of enforcing the law, and
of course it is. It's vital. And that's the story
of Ray McCann. Join us next week when we take
you to Aida, Oklahoma to tell you about Tommy Ward.
After detectives learned about a strange dream he had, Tommy
(28:11):
was accused of a local woman's murder and found himself
on death row. Tommy remains behind bars to this day,
but a team of lawyers, including our Center on Wrongful Convictions,
is fighting to end Tommy's nightmare. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions
is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association
(28:34):
with Signal Company Number one Special thanks to our executive
producers Jason Flam and Kevin Wardis. Our production team is
headed by Senior producer and Pope, along with producers Josh
Hammer and Jess Shane. Our show is mixed by Jeanie Montalvo.
John Colbert is our intrepid intern. Our music was composed
by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or
(28:56):
Twitter at Laura ni Rider and you can follow me
on Twitter at s Driven. For more information on the show,
visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com. 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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