November 25, 2024 • 38 mins
On the morning of April 26, 1980, visitors at Wildcat Den State Park in Iowa found the body of 22-year-old Michiel Winkel. She had been stabbed 17 times. From the start, police zeroed in on William Beeman, a local DJ with a reputation for being a womanizer. Despite the fact that William did not know Michiel, there was no physical evidence for the crime, and he had an alibi for the days of her possible killing, William was convicted of murder and remains in prison today.
If you want to help William you can contact the Muscatine, Iowa County Attorney, Jim Berry:
https://www.muscatinecountyiowa.gov/141/Attorneys-Office
or, The Drake Wrongful Convictions Clinic:
https://www.drake.edu/law/clinics-centers/clinic/wrongfulconvictionsclinic/
Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freleng is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
We have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed by the individuals featured in this show are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, you have a call at no expense to you
from an inmate at anamosata. What did he call himself?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
You may begin speaking now, Hello, Hello, how you doing?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
I'm good? Is this William?
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
What do you like to be called? Do you like
to be called will or William?
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Most people call me drifty Drifty.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Bill got the nickname drifty because his mind tends to
wander and he's.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Aloof Bill was kind of a loner.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
This is his mom, Donna.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
He's off from the corner by myself, reading or watching television.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
I just don't like crowds. Crowds even people I like it, don't.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Like crowd especially in prison.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I come in when I was twenty three, I was
sixty seven. Now, well, do you realize what happened day
to day and a place like this? And I just
you wouldn't believe some of the stuff I've seen.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
So he sticks to himself, and the name drifty stuck
to him. Like this. One time in the prison yard,
two guys started getting into it.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
They get dark in then down the old fort. I
used to watch the two red tail hawks sore while
they were arguing, and he says, all there he goes
drifted off again.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Drifty Beaman, but he also says I can call him Bill.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
I'm William Beaman. I've been incarcerated for forty four years
or something I didn't do, and I hope some good
comes of this, not only for me, but for others.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
From lava for good. This is wrongful conviction with Maggie
Freeling today William Beeman. William Beeman was born April twenty second,
nineteen fifty seven, in Muscatine, Iowa. What was life like
growing up in Iowa? Hey?
Speaker 3 (02:14):
It was great. Mustin eat that that rule. I mean,
it ain't no big city, but we had a lot
of industry and stuff around. Heine's fargest metal factory was
(02:34):
in Muscatine. Band eggs hedgecorners. We had three factors of them.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
And many many other factories. Once known as the pearl
button capital of the world in the early nineteen hundreds,
before most buttons were made of plastic, Muscatines button factories
employed half of the city's workforce. The city was the
world's largest producer of pearl buttons. Muscatine was a blue
(03:01):
collar town, and so was Bill's family. Here's Bill's mom,
Donna again.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
I was a checkout at highge and I also managed
the music department at War Worse.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
She was also a mom to two other.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Kids, two girls and a boy.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Bill is in the middle.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
There's four years older than I am. She's mom's first marriage.
And my little sister you're younger. And we were together
all the time, and Teresa.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Teresa and Belle were like two pieces of pod where
you've seen one, you've seen the other.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Bill and his little sister, Teresa did everything together.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Every now and then at dolls was or so she'd
play army with me. I thought both of them how
to fight is one against two, and I got a
little nose start fighting back. They had to learn how
to fight, so it kind of hard. Hits some sentence too.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
The girls kicked on him that I think it was
because he was a boy.
Speaker 5 (04:13):
What would they do?
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Oh just till tale stuff.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Uh Bill's doing this, Bill's doing that, which wasn't He
wasn't doing anything really.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
So I was two against fun. One time I got
accused of shooting out a woman's neighbor woman's window with
my beaf. Again, as the only guy on the blocks
that had to beat against him, I had to pay
for the window. I had to help fix mode and
filled the snow lawn for a year. Yeah, I've been
(04:49):
down here four or five years and found out Terry's
the woman had done it. Because I had that woman
made her mad.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Donna now remembers those times fondly.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
He was a happy, go lucky kid.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
He had a milk adney on a mini bike, and
he made Gramps some things out here in the backyard
and jumped them and rode over him.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
She remembers hunting and family camping trips and making him
his favorite food.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
He likes whoppers, and then he likes pizza. When he
was a kid, I fixed stuff on the grill at
that time, and it was hamburgers and hotbugs.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
You know, he just lived on stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Donna remembers being close with her only son.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
It just seemed like every time he had a little problem,
he would come to me. And his dad usually slep
a lot in the daytime because he worked at night.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
And I just I don't know what to say. Bill
and I were just close.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Donna says. The girls were troublemakers, but not Bill smoked.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
He never drank, he never took street drugs.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
He just well, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
He stayed home most of the time.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
At night, they would watch TV or cook, or Bill
would go off and do his favorite thing.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
That was what he was more interested in was his
mini bike and mo dead and his motorcycle.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
As Bill got older, he struggled in school. Donna says
he would have to stay home often because he'd get
so worked up about going to school he'd make himself sick.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
He'd actually run a fever and throw up. Really yeah,
and Bill's very smart.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Despite being smart, school just wasn't for Bill, so Donna
took him out instead. Bill got his ged and joined
a job core program in South Dakota.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
I went to South Dakota. I got certified as a
welder Union carpentry building supply.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
After getting certified, Bill bounced around working different gigs, trying
to figure out what he wanted to do in life.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Or did gas station as maintenance man at a nursery
or nursing home. I was a maintenance man in a
dress shop or gas stations, working a couple of different
button factories, one feet mill bandagg rubber, retire pre.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Treading, lots of working and writing. What did you write?
Speaker 3 (07:31):
What I was doing? The street racing and stuff on
the street with the dirt bike was three fifty six
fifty straight bike and a GS thousand Uzuki.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Street In his early twenties, Bill was good looking, tall, slim,
with floey brown hair. He's been described as a charmer,
and that's evident by the amount of girlfriends Bill says
he had.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
That's kind of a buttole because how was Cardra to
settle down?
Speaker 1 (08:07):
After a while searching for the right job, Bill finally
found one he liked as a part time DJ at
a local night spot called Baker's Front Street Disco. What
kind of music were you playing?
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Disco?
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Disco? So you know, what would that have been like
in nineteen seventy eight? What were the heads?
Speaker 3 (08:31):
What all depends on the real disco was always you
had to beg Michael Jasson had more than people thought.
Then you had point your sisters and oh it's been
a long time.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
You might be wondering what a guy who hates crowds
was doing as a DJ.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Well.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Bill says that the DJ booth was on the floor.
There was only room for him and a few chairs,
so there wasn't.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
A bunch of people coming up there and standing room right,
so I wasn't in any.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Crowds and stuff, and Bill loved it. He was part
of the fun, but far away enough to feel safe.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
I could look out over the dance floor and everything,
see everybody having a good time, and I knew they
were doing it because of me. And that's what being
a djvent to me.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Bill had the life as.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
DJ and night I built remodeled houses during the day.
I really liked that.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
One night in April nineteen eighty, twenty three year old
Bill Beeman was in his DJ booths.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
People would use all kinds of different reasons to come
talk to me up in the booth, and I think
gets first place I heard about it.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
About the body of a young woman found in the
campground of wildcat Den State Park. She was naked and
had been beaten and stabbed seventeen times. Whispers of the
crime were making their way around town.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Yeah, everybody was talking about it. Mom and dad was
talking about it.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
The body turned out to be twenty two year old
Michelle Winkle. Police said she had last been seen on Monday,
April twenty first, nineteen eighty at the Canterbury Inn and Spa,
a hotel she would go and swim at after work.
Michelle Winkle allegedly spent a lot of time alone.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
She didn't seem to have a lot of close friends
are relatives.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Erica Nichols Cook is the director of the Wrongful Conviction
Unit at the Iowa Public Defender's Office. She says Michelle
also spent a lot of time at the mall.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
She was also known as the crier by a group
of girls who worked at the mall. That's so mean
because she'd walk around the mall crying.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Erica says Michelle had a troubled life.
Speaker 5 (11:10):
She had experienced a lot of mental instability. She had
been treated for psychiatric issues in seventy eight seventy nine
at the University of Iowa.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
She had recently moved back home with her parents, who
were devout Catholics, and Erica says Michelle's father could be abusive.
Speaker 5 (11:30):
Comments about her being overweight. There was comments that she
wouldn't wear red because her dad said only sluts wore
read that he called her piggy, those types of things.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
So kind of a sad life.
Speaker 5 (11:45):
That sounds like, yes, I think, much more so than
the state portrayed at the trial. She'd had some struggles.
We also learned that she liked a hitchhike.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Michelle had recently been in a car accident and her
dad wouldn't let her drive the family car anymore. Despite
living on a state highway, she had to walk everywhere.
Speaker 5 (12:08):
So she would walk along this state highway and catch
a ride into town or catch a ride back out.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
She was last seen that Monday around ten forty five pm,
leaving the spa and getting into a brown car with
a white man. Five days later, her body was found.
Speaker 5 (12:27):
One of the sticking points in this investigation was that
they didn't have any immediate leads of who Michelle was
with or who she could have been hanging out with
or gotten a ride from.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Police evaluated her body for sexual assaults and collected semen
and blood samples, but in nineteen eighty forensic testing was
in its infancy. The most law enforcement could determine from
a sample was blood type, and their tests found specimens
from an unknown male and.
Speaker 5 (13:00):
Someone told investigators that she used to go to Baker's
Front Street disco and that they had seen her there.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Police thought maybe she got a ride to the disco
after swimming.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
That was the only reason they even interviewed me. They
thought maybe her with somebody.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
More than a week after the body was found, police
brought him Bill for questioning. Bill says he was laid
up and on painkillers because he'd broken his foot on
his birthday about two weeks earlier. He also had a migraine.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
I've had migraine headaches since I was a little kid,
and my dumbass didn't know I couldn't mix the pain
painkiller from migraines with the painkiller for more broken foot.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
And on top of that, he was now in a
police station being asked about Michelle.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah, I didn't know her at all, but police let
him go home.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
His girlfriend is then questioned.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
His girlfriend, Joyce, and she says.
Speaker 5 (13:59):
Well, he was with me that week of his birthday
and you know, after he broke his foot.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
But her memory was blurry, and she says.
Speaker 5 (14:07):
I don't know for sure about Monday night if he,
you know, stayed at my house or went to his apartment.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Bill had accompanied Joyce to the police station that day
on May eighth, and police brought him back in to
question him again about what had happened Monday night.
Speaker 5 (14:22):
And during that interrogation they tell Bill that we know
that you know something. We think you picked her up
and killed her Monday night.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
They must have realized I was on drig or whatever
and decided to had done it.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
They also knew Bill had a reputation.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
I've never been addicted to anything other than motorcycles and
maybe girls.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Bill had a reputation with girls and a club.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
I had three motorcycles. I had a fifty seven two
door hard top. I had a blue van and the
sixty eight BIS came and a fan cloth and they
made a joke about it. Day after I got arrested,
(15:20):
nine girls come down stam. We were engaged and needed
to talk to me. I told you I was about
all the time.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
He might have been a butthole, but Bill says he
wasn't a killer, and he had an alibi for Monday night.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
I stopped the Clark gas station. It was not far
from where I lived, talked to a girl about my
birthday party. The next day I got home.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Joyce was there, but detectives weren't buying it. They were
pointing the finger at Bill in the interrogation room, and
Bill says his mind was cloudy from the meds and
from fear.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
They both had their guns out, wiping them off of handkerchiefs,
and I was thinking, this don't look good, and I
was starting to feel kind of happy, I guess, and
they kept saying, well, what if we had somebody that
seen it. I said, they're lying because I didn't do it.
(16:25):
I was confused because I knew I didn't do it,
So how can they have this evidence? How can they
have these witnesses.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
The interrogation wasn't recorded, and Bill didn't have a lawyer present,
and the next thing he knows, he's in a holding cell.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
I just thought they golt me for like a drunken
disorderly or something like that. And cop Star laughing, SnO, boys,
So they got you in there for murder.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Police called Donna to the station.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
He didn't even know where he was at or what
he was doing in there when I walked in and
I said Bill, I said what is going on? And
he said, Mom, I don't know. He said, they took
my picture and took my wallet and my shoe strings.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
According to police, Bill signed a confession. Do you remember
signing anything like? Do you remember having anything in front
of you?
Speaker 3 (17:18):
I don't remember.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
I not.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
I remember going in there and Nick harping on this,
bad witnesses, bad evidence, parah cleaning their guns. They were
doing this. I mean, my mind was on Cody.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
But there was the statement signed by Bill saying he
picked up Michelle that night, took her to the park
where they made out, and after she refused to have
sex with him, he kicked her in the head with
a steel toe boot. By the time the sexual assault
kit came back, it didn't matter that the samples didn't
match Bill. Law enforcement had what they needed a confession.
(17:59):
Bill was arrested that day on May eighth, for the
murder of Michelle Winkle. Donna was frantic trying to help
Bill and pay a two hundred and fifty thousand dollars bond.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
They said that we could have got him out of
bond by putting my house up for you know, collateral, and.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Dick wouldn't do it.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Bill's dad, He said no.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
And I tried to sell my coin collection and different things,
but it wasn't enough money.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Wow, how much money did you get for the coins?
Speaker 4 (18:36):
Well, I only got five hundred dollars and I should
have got about two thousand.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
That I had to pay.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
The lawyers had to pay somebody. They got court appointed,
but there was somebody they had to pay, so I
had to sell it and give them the money. And
I was on disability and I didn't get much money
at that time.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
I think I was only getting.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
Ninety two dollars a month, and I tried to save
my money and I hired a private detective, but that
didn't go any place, and I couldn't keep him because
I couldn't afford it.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Bill was actually offered a plea before.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
Trial, second great plea bard Well second Gree then was
only twenty five years and me, mom, dad and lawyer's
got talked about it and I didn't do it. So
I believed in system and boy.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Bill went to trial in October, just short of five
months after his arrest.
Speaker 5 (19:47):
The state's theory was that Bill picks her up close
to the SPA, but not from the SPA, at a
gas station and offers to give her a ride home,
and they just said I had to drive around, and
they end up at the park, they start making out,
and then you know the failed sexual encounter, but that
he killed her. On Monday the twenty.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
First, a pathologist testified that Michelle's body was infested with
maggots placing the time of death around three to fourteen
days before her body was found on Saturday, but she
was last seen five days prior, on Monday the twenty first. Remember,
Bill had broken his foot on Tuesday the twenty second,
(20:29):
and the lead investigator conceded that Bill had an alibi
for all the days between Tuesday and Saturday when Michelle's
body was found. So law enforcement determined that if Bill
killed her, it had to have been on Monday, but
the evidence to back that up had holes.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
The only thing they had against me was the statement,
no way out stands see you know, said, well, we
know he'd done it because we've seen it, or no,
we know he'd done it because this evidence backs it up.
All their evidence counterdicted the.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Statement Michelle was seen getting into a brown car. Bill's
defense said he used a motorcycle to get around because
his car didn't run well. The defense also presented three
alibi witnesses for the evening of April twenty first, who
testified to seeing Bill between ten thirty and midnight, when
the crime had supposedly occurred. But most surprising of all
(21:25):
was that a witness testified at trial that she'd seen
Michelle alive after the twenty first. A high school peer
of Michelle's testified she had seen her at the mall
on April twenty second, the day after she was supposedly killed,
with a man who was not Bill. At trial, Bill's
defense also contended he had signed the alleged confession out
(21:47):
of fear and confusion. Still, after deliberating for five and
a half hours, the jury found Bill guilty of first
degree murder on October eighth, nineteen eighty. Donna sat through
the whole trial.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
It was terrible.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
I I really can't explain it. I have believed Bill
right from the start. Bill just couldn't do that, did anybody.
I done a lot of crying.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
God took me through the value of death.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
You know.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
I stuck my tone, and I'm still in the value
of death as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Used to being alone, safe up in his DJ booth,
far away from everyone, Bill was surrounded in prison.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
When I got down with Fort Madison, it was like
they were throwing a goky did in the shark can.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Bill says he had to fight to survive.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
I turned out to be a wolf, and he.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Was angry, resentful about what happened. To him and his family,
and he took it out on anyone who crossed him.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
I had that rage. Somebody could say something stupid, go
off on him.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
After decades, the rage turned into loneliness, and people on
the outside fell.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Off, girlfriend's friends, family, everybody did.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Even Teresa.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
After a while, she just kind of fell off.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Too, everyone except Donna.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
People don't have that much to do with somebody in prison,
you know, they kind of forget him.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
But Donna never forgot about her only son.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
I feel terrible. I told Bill just this morning, I
wish I could do more. I wish there was something
I could do, and he said, Mom, you'd done it
when you were younger. I've gave him money as when
I could, and done everything I could for him.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
For more than four decades, They've stayed in co instant
contact through phone and visitation. What is that like? Going
to visit your son in prison.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
After forty four years? You get used to it, but
I don't like it.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
I want him home.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Do you worry that maybe you're getting older and you
might not see him come home?
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yes? I do.
Speaker 4 (24:25):
I'm ninety two and I have several things that matter.
My voice, as you can tell, I have COPD, which
kind of gets worse all the time, and I have
an ampathy in my legs, and of course the usual
arthritis and everything, and I just want him home. I'd
(24:49):
like to know I have a son for a while.
I just sometimes feel like I've never had a son.
And then there's times I feel like, you know, I've
had him and he's just gone for a while.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
That I don't sleep.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
I uh, if you just had a key where you
could shut off your mind, but you can't do that.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
However, when Erica came across Bill's case, Donna was able
to sleep a bit easier. When Erica's office was first started,
she was given a specific assignment from.
Speaker 5 (25:34):
Higher ups get a DNA exoneration.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Iowa had never had one, so she was on the hunt,
and Bill's case appeared to have evidence from which her
team could potentially recover DNA.
Speaker 5 (25:46):
We had a chance to, you know, submit that all
for testing if it could be found, and that kind
of started our quest, I guess.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
A quest that gave Donna nude hope.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
Oh, Erica is a doll. I there you if she's
a miracle. She has a found out stuff that we
didn't even.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Know Erica started with the basics. What would have been
Bill's motive to kill Michelle.
Speaker 5 (26:19):
The most fascinating part was that there was no connection
between him and the victim. They weren't They hadn't dated,
they didn't go to school together, they hadn't been seen together.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
But Michelle had been seen with an unidentified man in
a brown car from the beginning. Were there any better
suspects that should have been looked into?
Speaker 5 (26:40):
Yes, we found a handwritten suspect matrix from the in
the DCI file.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
That is something you could only hope to find.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
And we'd read a little bit about the fact that
she had gone out with a guy or told someone
that she had a date with the Larry Dance.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Erica found that Larry Dance had gone out with Michelle
about a month before she disappeared.
Speaker 5 (27:10):
He told investigators that he'd picked her up from the spa.
They'd gone back to his house. They were messing around,
They got naked and got into his bed, and then
she changed her mind and didn't want to have sex,
and so they went to sleep, and he took her
to her friend to a mutual friend's house the next
morning and dropped her off there and to me, the
(27:34):
similarities between his story and the confession quote unquote were
so eerily similar.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
And Dans didn't have an alibi for the night of
the twenty first, but he was cleared after a polygraph and.
Speaker 5 (27:49):
The lead DCI investigator, Rick saiwasinc His brother Jeff vouched
for Larry Dance and said he's a good guy. I
play softball with him. But the most alarming was that
law enforcement had her dad, Frances Winkle, as a suspect
(28:09):
on their list.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Remember, Michelle had a troubled home life, which was evident
to Erica by the fact that no one had reported
her missing.
Speaker 5 (28:18):
I can't imagine if my family saw me on Monday
and didn't hear from me when my body was found
on Saturday, that they still hadn't raised an alarm.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (28:29):
Michelle never came home, and the brothers also had a
really callous attitude towards her, things like she'd being a
problem child, used to run away. And then none of
the family members testify at trial. They actually call the
(28:51):
brother Mark's girlfriend now wife, Diana, to say the last
time that she saw her at the house was that
Monday afternoon. She wanted a ride into town so she
could go to the bank before going to work, and
her brother refused to take her, so she left on foot.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
What did all this information tell you?
Speaker 5 (29:13):
That the investigation that it had all of the features
of a wrongful conviction, That investigators focused on the player right,
the DJ, the guy that had multiple girlfriends. They ignored
all these other legit credible alibis or motives for murdering her.
(29:37):
We knew there was just there had to be more
to the story.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Erica and her team discovered a list of people who
said they saw Michelle alive after the twenty first, the
only day the state concedes Bill could have killed Michelle.
It wasn't just the schoolmate who testified at trial that
she'd seen Michelle at the mall Tuesday.
Speaker 5 (29:58):
People saw her alive up through Thursday.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
This list was never disclosed to the defense. Erica filed
this as a Brady violation withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense.
Then she turned to the crime scene.
Speaker 5 (30:14):
The pathologist testified she was heavily infested with maggots, and
she's not when you look at the crime scene photos.
An entomologist that we hired said that the best in
her opinion, the best estimate was that Michelle died Wednesday night,
the twenty third, and that she did not die on Monday,
(30:35):
that the bugs that were there, the maggots, and the temperatures,
that there's no way she died on Monday and looked
like that on Saturday.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
And again everyone agrees Bill could not have killed Michelle
after Monday the twenty first. So Erica also filed an
actual innocence claim, but she had to explain if Bill
was actually innocent, why did he confess? She says, to
start calling the statement a confession is a stretch.
Speaker 5 (31:08):
It's a one page statement, and he never admits or
remembers killing her. It's I must have done it, but
I don't remember it. And so it raises all of
these red flags about whether it's reliable, and what coercion
(31:28):
was happening in that room, and how vulnerable was he.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
In terms of the evidence that brought Erica to Bill's
case in the first place.
Speaker 5 (31:37):
We were denied DNA testing because the state kept saying
the evidence was gone. They don't have it, they can't
find it.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
The sexual assault kit the one thing that could help
prove Bill's innocence.
Speaker 5 (31:48):
We could find everything, but the physical evidence.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
So Erica also filed a young blood claim.
Speaker 5 (31:54):
Young Blood versus Arizona, which is a due process violation
for destruction evidence. And so we just had a trial
on that in June, and the court ruled and denied
that claim and said that while the sexual assault kit
has been destroyed, it wasn't done in bad faith. A
(32:17):
couple of big things the court missed was that the
victim's clothing is still unaccounted for. It was never released,
it was never on an order to be released it.
It was there, they collected it, they had it.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
So you just don't know where it is. Like, do
you think it was destroyed?
Speaker 5 (32:41):
I think it was destroyed. I think it should have
been with the sexual assault kit. Wow, it should have
been in the sheriff's office.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
And remember agent Saiwazink, whose brother vouched for Larry Dan's.
Speaker 5 (32:52):
He's the last one to have known to have had
the sexual assault kit or any physical evidence. He picked
it all up from the lab in Des Moines and
was supposed to drive it back to Muscatine a couple
hours away. But he doesn't file a report, he doesn't
sign a chain of custody document, he doesn't do anything.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
All of the claims Erica filed have been denied. She's
amending them and refiling.
Speaker 5 (33:23):
If we lose these claims in Iowa, I think next
stop is federal court.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Erica says that Iowa is a hard place to litigate
post conviction cases.
Speaker 5 (33:35):
There's no skepticism, and everybody knows everybody, and it's oh,
I know him, he's a great guy. He's done lots
of murder cases. To me, it's a hard place to
be because I'm the outsider. I'm a threat. The work
is a threat because they're so nice. They don't get
anything wrong.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Do you get any community backlash?
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (34:00):
I think there is a unwillingness to work with us.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
And through all this bill sits in prison year after year.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
Every time we turn around, we prove I didn't do it,
and nobody seems to give a shit. There's no justice
in Iowa. There's no way you can convince me. I
don't care what they do convince me. Yl ever be
justice in Iowa or the courts. I mean, if you're
(34:38):
going to put somebody in prison, you've got to be
damn sure. Especially with a death sentence, which is a
life sentence in Iowa, you should be sure you should
be on the shadow of a doubt. Well, I got
a cave darkness.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
One minute remaining. I had dream last night that Bill
was home.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Were there any specifics in your dream?
Speaker 4 (35:08):
I just dreamed that he came walking in and we
just kind of, you know, I was explaining to him
what things.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Were, because Bill no computers, no phones, no, you know,
a lot of things. And this town has changed so
much since.
Speaker 4 (35:30):
In fact, it's changed so much that I see these
things whenever this lady takes me to the doctor or
out of town that I don't know if there. And
that was the main thing, and I was so tickled.
I just would let him out of my sight, and
I took him to McDonald's because that's the first place.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
He's gonna go. And then it's going to be a
piece of.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Every now and then Donna lets herself believe that dream
of having Bill home will become a reality.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Oh I'm gonna love it.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
I don't know as I'm gonna be here that long
that I'm gonna love every minute of it.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Bill was recently moved to another prison and he's been
having a hard time adjusting. He says this new prison
is rough, it's also hard holding onto hope. He has
yet another petition pending in.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Court, but it's gonna take probably a year.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
I asked Bill if he thinks his mom has a
year left.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
No, no, I'm afraid you don't.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
What does it mean to you to have had her
all these years?
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Yes, Mama, that's where mom is.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Bill says, if his mom is on there's only one
other thing he'd want.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
We left the hell.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
And get a motorcycle.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
I want to have a woman on a back. I
want to be going down the road. Reached down and
lay my hand on her sigh the slag next to
me for her being on the back of the bike,
and I'll know I'm home.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
If you want to help Bill, you can contact the Muscatine,
Iowa County Attorney Jim Barry. Thank you for listening to
Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support your local innocence
organizations and go to the links in the episode description
to see how you can help. This episode was written
(37:54):
by me Maggie Freeling, with story editing and sound designed
by senior producer Rebecca Ibara. Our producer is Kathleen Fink.
Our mixer is Josh Allen, with research by Donald Salzman
and additional production help by Jeff Cliburn. Executive producers are
Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wordis. The music is
by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Make sure
(38:18):
to follow us on all social media platforms at Lava
for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow
me on all platforms at Maggie Freeling. Wrongful Conviction with
Maggie Freeling is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number one
Hello, you have a call at no expense to you
from an inmate at anamosata. What did he call himself?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
You may begin speaking now, Hello, Hello, how you doing?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
I'm good? Is this William?
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
What do you like to be called? Do you like
to be called will or William?
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Most people call me drifty Drifty.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Bill got the nickname drifty because his mind tends to
wander and he's.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Aloof Bill was kind of a loner.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
This is his mom, Donna.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
He's off from the corner by myself, reading or watching television.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
I just don't like crowds. Crowds even people I like it, don't.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Like crowd especially in prison.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I come in when I was twenty three, I was
sixty seven. Now, well, do you realize what happened day
to day and a place like this? And I just
you wouldn't believe some of the stuff I've seen.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
So he sticks to himself, and the name drifty stuck
to him. Like this. One time in the prison yard,
two guys started getting into it.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
They get dark in then down the old fort. I
used to watch the two red tail hawks sore while
they were arguing, and he says, all there he goes
drifted off again.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Drifty Beaman, but he also says I can call him Bill.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
I'm William Beaman. I've been incarcerated for forty four years
or something I didn't do, and I hope some good
comes of this, not only for me, but for others.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
From lava for good. This is wrongful conviction with Maggie
Freeling today William Beeman. William Beeman was born April twenty second,
nineteen fifty seven, in Muscatine, Iowa. What was life like
growing up in Iowa? Hey?
Speaker 3 (02:14):
It was great. Mustin eat that that rule. I mean,
it ain't no big city, but we had a lot
of industry and stuff around. Heine's fargest metal factory was
(02:34):
in Muscatine. Band eggs hedgecorners. We had three factors of them.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
And many many other factories. Once known as the pearl
button capital of the world in the early nineteen hundreds,
before most buttons were made of plastic, Muscatines button factories
employed half of the city's workforce. The city was the
world's largest producer of pearl buttons. Muscatine was a blue
(03:01):
collar town, and so was Bill's family. Here's Bill's mom,
Donna again.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
I was a checkout at highge and I also managed
the music department at War Worse.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
She was also a mom to two other.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Kids, two girls and a boy.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Bill is in the middle.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
There's four years older than I am. She's mom's first marriage.
And my little sister you're younger. And we were together
all the time, and Teresa.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Teresa and Belle were like two pieces of pod where
you've seen one, you've seen the other.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Bill and his little sister, Teresa did everything together.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Every now and then at dolls was or so she'd
play army with me. I thought both of them how
to fight is one against two, and I got a
little nose start fighting back. They had to learn how
to fight, so it kind of hard. Hits some sentence too.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
The girls kicked on him that I think it was
because he was a boy.
Speaker 5 (04:13):
What would they do?
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Oh just till tale stuff.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Uh Bill's doing this, Bill's doing that, which wasn't He
wasn't doing anything really.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
So I was two against fun. One time I got
accused of shooting out a woman's neighbor woman's window with
my beaf. Again, as the only guy on the blocks
that had to beat against him, I had to pay
for the window. I had to help fix mode and
filled the snow lawn for a year. Yeah, I've been
(04:49):
down here four or five years and found out Terry's
the woman had done it. Because I had that woman
made her mad.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Donna now remembers those times fondly.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
He was a happy, go lucky kid.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
He had a milk adney on a mini bike, and
he made Gramps some things out here in the backyard
and jumped them and rode over him.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
She remembers hunting and family camping trips and making him
his favorite food.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
He likes whoppers, and then he likes pizza. When he
was a kid, I fixed stuff on the grill at
that time, and it was hamburgers and hotbugs.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
You know, he just lived on stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Donna remembers being close with her only son.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
It just seemed like every time he had a little problem,
he would come to me. And his dad usually slep
a lot in the daytime because he worked at night.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
And I just I don't know what to say. Bill
and I were just close.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Donna says. The girls were troublemakers, but not Bill smoked.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
He never drank, he never took street drugs.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
He just well, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
He stayed home most of the time.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
At night, they would watch TV or cook, or Bill
would go off and do his favorite thing.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
That was what he was more interested in was his
mini bike and mo dead and his motorcycle.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
As Bill got older, he struggled in school. Donna says
he would have to stay home often because he'd get
so worked up about going to school he'd make himself sick.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
He'd actually run a fever and throw up. Really yeah,
and Bill's very smart.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Despite being smart, school just wasn't for Bill, so Donna
took him out instead. Bill got his ged and joined
a job core program in South Dakota.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
I went to South Dakota. I got certified as a
welder Union carpentry building supply.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
After getting certified, Bill bounced around working different gigs, trying
to figure out what he wanted to do in life.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Or did gas station as maintenance man at a nursery
or nursing home. I was a maintenance man in a
dress shop or gas stations, working a couple of different
button factories, one feet mill bandagg rubber, retire pre.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Treading, lots of working and writing. What did you write?
Speaker 3 (07:31):
What I was doing? The street racing and stuff on
the street with the dirt bike was three fifty six
fifty straight bike and a GS thousand Uzuki.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Street In his early twenties, Bill was good looking, tall, slim,
with floey brown hair. He's been described as a charmer,
and that's evident by the amount of girlfriends Bill says
he had.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
That's kind of a buttole because how was Cardra to
settle down?
Speaker 1 (08:07):
After a while searching for the right job, Bill finally
found one he liked as a part time DJ at
a local night spot called Baker's Front Street Disco. What
kind of music were you playing?
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Disco?
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Disco? So you know, what would that have been like
in nineteen seventy eight? What were the heads?
Speaker 3 (08:31):
What all depends on the real disco was always you
had to beg Michael Jasson had more than people thought.
Then you had point your sisters and oh it's been
a long time.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
You might be wondering what a guy who hates crowds
was doing as a DJ.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Well.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Bill says that the DJ booth was on the floor.
There was only room for him and a few chairs,
so there wasn't.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
A bunch of people coming up there and standing room right,
so I wasn't in any.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Crowds and stuff, and Bill loved it. He was part
of the fun, but far away enough to feel safe.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
I could look out over the dance floor and everything,
see everybody having a good time, and I knew they
were doing it because of me. And that's what being
a djvent to me.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Bill had the life as.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
DJ and night I built remodeled houses during the day.
I really liked that.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
One night in April nineteen eighty, twenty three year old
Bill Beeman was in his DJ booths.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
People would use all kinds of different reasons to come
talk to me up in the booth, and I think
gets first place I heard about it.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
About the body of a young woman found in the
campground of wildcat Den State Park. She was naked and
had been beaten and stabbed seventeen times. Whispers of the
crime were making their way around town.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Yeah, everybody was talking about it. Mom and dad was
talking about it.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
The body turned out to be twenty two year old
Michelle Winkle. Police said she had last been seen on Monday,
April twenty first, nineteen eighty at the Canterbury Inn and Spa,
a hotel she would go and swim at after work.
Michelle Winkle allegedly spent a lot of time alone.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
She didn't seem to have a lot of close friends
are relatives.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Erica Nichols Cook is the director of the Wrongful Conviction
Unit at the Iowa Public Defender's Office. She says Michelle
also spent a lot of time at the mall.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
She was also known as the crier by a group
of girls who worked at the mall. That's so mean
because she'd walk around the mall crying.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Erica says Michelle had a troubled life.
Speaker 5 (11:10):
She had experienced a lot of mental instability. She had
been treated for psychiatric issues in seventy eight seventy nine
at the University of Iowa.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
She had recently moved back home with her parents, who
were devout Catholics, and Erica says Michelle's father could be abusive.
Speaker 5 (11:30):
Comments about her being overweight. There was comments that she
wouldn't wear red because her dad said only sluts wore
read that he called her piggy, those types of things.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
So kind of a sad life.
Speaker 5 (11:45):
That sounds like, yes, I think, much more so than
the state portrayed at the trial. She'd had some struggles.
We also learned that she liked a hitchhike.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Michelle had recently been in a car accident and her
dad wouldn't let her drive the family car anymore. Despite
living on a state highway, she had to walk everywhere.
Speaker 5 (12:08):
So she would walk along this state highway and catch
a ride into town or catch a ride back out.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
She was last seen that Monday around ten forty five pm,
leaving the spa and getting into a brown car with
a white man. Five days later, her body was found.
Speaker 5 (12:27):
One of the sticking points in this investigation was that
they didn't have any immediate leads of who Michelle was
with or who she could have been hanging out with
or gotten a ride from.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Police evaluated her body for sexual assaults and collected semen
and blood samples, but in nineteen eighty forensic testing was
in its infancy. The most law enforcement could determine from
a sample was blood type, and their tests found specimens
from an unknown male and.
Speaker 5 (13:00):
Someone told investigators that she used to go to Baker's
Front Street disco and that they had seen her there.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Police thought maybe she got a ride to the disco
after swimming.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
That was the only reason they even interviewed me. They
thought maybe her with somebody.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
More than a week after the body was found, police
brought him Bill for questioning. Bill says he was laid
up and on painkillers because he'd broken his foot on
his birthday about two weeks earlier. He also had a migraine.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
I've had migraine headaches since I was a little kid,
and my dumbass didn't know I couldn't mix the pain
painkiller from migraines with the painkiller for more broken foot.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
And on top of that, he was now in a
police station being asked about Michelle.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah, I didn't know her at all, but police let
him go home.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
His girlfriend is then questioned.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
His girlfriend, Joyce, and she says.
Speaker 5 (13:59):
Well, he was with me that week of his birthday
and you know, after he broke his foot.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
But her memory was blurry, and she says.
Speaker 5 (14:07):
I don't know for sure about Monday night if he,
you know, stayed at my house or went to his apartment.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Bill had accompanied Joyce to the police station that day
on May eighth, and police brought him back in to
question him again about what had happened Monday night.
Speaker 5 (14:22):
And during that interrogation they tell Bill that we know
that you know something. We think you picked her up
and killed her Monday night.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
They must have realized I was on drig or whatever
and decided to had done it.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
They also knew Bill had a reputation.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
I've never been addicted to anything other than motorcycles and
maybe girls.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Bill had a reputation with girls and a club.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
I had three motorcycles. I had a fifty seven two
door hard top. I had a blue van and the
sixty eight BIS came and a fan cloth and they
made a joke about it. Day after I got arrested,
(15:20):
nine girls come down stam. We were engaged and needed
to talk to me. I told you I was about
all the time.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
He might have been a butthole, but Bill says he
wasn't a killer, and he had an alibi for Monday night.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
I stopped the Clark gas station. It was not far
from where I lived, talked to a girl about my
birthday party. The next day I got home.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Joyce was there, but detectives weren't buying it. They were
pointing the finger at Bill in the interrogation room, and
Bill says his mind was cloudy from the meds and
from fear.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
They both had their guns out, wiping them off of handkerchiefs,
and I was thinking, this don't look good, and I
was starting to feel kind of happy, I guess, and
they kept saying, well, what if we had somebody that
seen it. I said, they're lying because I didn't do it.
(16:25):
I was confused because I knew I didn't do it,
So how can they have this evidence? How can they
have these witnesses.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
The interrogation wasn't recorded, and Bill didn't have a lawyer present,
and the next thing he knows, he's in a holding cell.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
I just thought they golt me for like a drunken
disorderly or something like that. And cop Star laughing, SnO, boys,
So they got you in there for murder.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Police called Donna to the station.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
He didn't even know where he was at or what
he was doing in there when I walked in and
I said Bill, I said what is going on? And
he said, Mom, I don't know. He said, they took
my picture and took my wallet and my shoe strings.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
According to police, Bill signed a confession. Do you remember
signing anything like? Do you remember having anything in front
of you?
Speaker 3 (17:18):
I don't remember.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
I not.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
I remember going in there and Nick harping on this,
bad witnesses, bad evidence, parah cleaning their guns. They were
doing this. I mean, my mind was on Cody.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
But there was the statement signed by Bill saying he
picked up Michelle that night, took her to the park
where they made out, and after she refused to have
sex with him, he kicked her in the head with
a steel toe boot. By the time the sexual assault
kit came back, it didn't matter that the samples didn't
match Bill. Law enforcement had what they needed a confession.
(17:59):
Bill was arrested that day on May eighth, for the
murder of Michelle Winkle. Donna was frantic trying to help
Bill and pay a two hundred and fifty thousand dollars bond.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
They said that we could have got him out of
bond by putting my house up for you know, collateral, and.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Dick wouldn't do it.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Bill's dad, He said no.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
And I tried to sell my coin collection and different things,
but it wasn't enough money.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Wow, how much money did you get for the coins?
Speaker 4 (18:36):
Well, I only got five hundred dollars and I should
have got about two thousand.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
That I had to pay.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
The lawyers had to pay somebody. They got court appointed,
but there was somebody they had to pay, so I
had to sell it and give them the money. And
I was on disability and I didn't get much money
at that time.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
I think I was only getting.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
Ninety two dollars a month, and I tried to save
my money and I hired a private detective, but that
didn't go any place, and I couldn't keep him because
I couldn't afford it.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Bill was actually offered a plea before.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
Trial, second great plea bard Well second Gree then was
only twenty five years and me, mom, dad and lawyer's
got talked about it and I didn't do it. So
I believed in system and boy.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Bill went to trial in October, just short of five
months after his arrest.
Speaker 5 (19:47):
The state's theory was that Bill picks her up close
to the SPA, but not from the SPA, at a
gas station and offers to give her a ride home,
and they just said I had to drive around, and
they end up at the park, they start making out,
and then you know the failed sexual encounter, but that
he killed her. On Monday the twenty.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
First, a pathologist testified that Michelle's body was infested with
maggots placing the time of death around three to fourteen
days before her body was found on Saturday, but she
was last seen five days prior, on Monday the twenty first. Remember,
Bill had broken his foot on Tuesday the twenty second,
(20:29):
and the lead investigator conceded that Bill had an alibi
for all the days between Tuesday and Saturday when Michelle's
body was found. So law enforcement determined that if Bill
killed her, it had to have been on Monday, but
the evidence to back that up had holes.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
The only thing they had against me was the statement,
no way out stands see you know, said, well, we
know he'd done it because we've seen it, or no,
we know he'd done it because this evidence backs it up.
All their evidence counterdicted the.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Statement Michelle was seen getting into a brown car. Bill's
defense said he used a motorcycle to get around because
his car didn't run well. The defense also presented three
alibi witnesses for the evening of April twenty first, who
testified to seeing Bill between ten thirty and midnight, when
the crime had supposedly occurred. But most surprising of all
(21:25):
was that a witness testified at trial that she'd seen
Michelle alive after the twenty first. A high school peer
of Michelle's testified she had seen her at the mall
on April twenty second, the day after she was supposedly killed,
with a man who was not Bill. At trial, Bill's
defense also contended he had signed the alleged confession out
(21:47):
of fear and confusion. Still, after deliberating for five and
a half hours, the jury found Bill guilty of first
degree murder on October eighth, nineteen eighty. Donna sat through
the whole trial.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
It was terrible.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
I I really can't explain it. I have believed Bill
right from the start. Bill just couldn't do that, did anybody.
I done a lot of crying.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
God took me through the value of death.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
You know.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
I stuck my tone, and I'm still in the value
of death as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Used to being alone, safe up in his DJ booth,
far away from everyone, Bill was surrounded in prison.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
When I got down with Fort Madison, it was like
they were throwing a goky did in the shark can.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Bill says he had to fight to survive.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
I turned out to be a wolf, and he.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Was angry, resentful about what happened. To him and his family,
and he took it out on anyone who crossed him.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
I had that rage. Somebody could say something stupid, go
off on him.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
After decades, the rage turned into loneliness, and people on
the outside fell.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Off, girlfriend's friends, family, everybody did.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Even Teresa.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
After a while, she just kind of fell off.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Too, everyone except Donna.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
People don't have that much to do with somebody in prison,
you know, they kind of forget him.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
But Donna never forgot about her only son.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
I feel terrible. I told Bill just this morning, I
wish I could do more. I wish there was something
I could do, and he said, Mom, you'd done it
when you were younger. I've gave him money as when
I could, and done everything I could for him.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
For more than four decades, They've stayed in co instant
contact through phone and visitation. What is that like? Going
to visit your son in prison.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
After forty four years? You get used to it, but
I don't like it.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
I want him home.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Do you worry that maybe you're getting older and you
might not see him come home?
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yes? I do.
Speaker 4 (24:25):
I'm ninety two and I have several things that matter.
My voice, as you can tell, I have COPD, which
kind of gets worse all the time, and I have
an ampathy in my legs, and of course the usual
arthritis and everything, and I just want him home. I'd
(24:49):
like to know I have a son for a while.
I just sometimes feel like I've never had a son.
And then there's times I feel like, you know, I've
had him and he's just gone for a while.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
That I don't sleep.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
I uh, if you just had a key where you
could shut off your mind, but you can't do that.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
However, when Erica came across Bill's case, Donna was able
to sleep a bit easier. When Erica's office was first started,
she was given a specific assignment from.
Speaker 5 (25:34):
Higher ups get a DNA exoneration.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Iowa had never had one, so she was on the hunt,
and Bill's case appeared to have evidence from which her
team could potentially recover DNA.
Speaker 5 (25:46):
We had a chance to, you know, submit that all
for testing if it could be found, and that kind
of started our quest, I guess.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
A quest that gave Donna nude hope.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
Oh, Erica is a doll. I there you if she's
a miracle. She has a found out stuff that we
didn't even.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Know Erica started with the basics. What would have been
Bill's motive to kill Michelle.
Speaker 5 (26:19):
The most fascinating part was that there was no connection
between him and the victim. They weren't They hadn't dated,
they didn't go to school together, they hadn't been seen together.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
But Michelle had been seen with an unidentified man in
a brown car from the beginning. Were there any better
suspects that should have been looked into?
Speaker 5 (26:40):
Yes, we found a handwritten suspect matrix from the in
the DCI file.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
That is something you could only hope to find.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
And we'd read a little bit about the fact that
she had gone out with a guy or told someone
that she had a date with the Larry Dance.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Erica found that Larry Dance had gone out with Michelle
about a month before she disappeared.
Speaker 5 (27:10):
He told investigators that he'd picked her up from the spa.
They'd gone back to his house. They were messing around,
They got naked and got into his bed, and then
she changed her mind and didn't want to have sex,
and so they went to sleep, and he took her
to her friend to a mutual friend's house the next
morning and dropped her off there and to me, the
(27:34):
similarities between his story and the confession quote unquote were
so eerily similar.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
And Dans didn't have an alibi for the night of
the twenty first, but he was cleared after a polygraph and.
Speaker 5 (27:49):
The lead DCI investigator, Rick saiwasinc His brother Jeff vouched
for Larry Dance and said he's a good guy. I
play softball with him. But the most alarming was that
law enforcement had her dad, Frances Winkle, as a suspect
(28:09):
on their list.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Remember, Michelle had a troubled home life, which was evident
to Erica by the fact that no one had reported
her missing.
Speaker 5 (28:18):
I can't imagine if my family saw me on Monday
and didn't hear from me when my body was found
on Saturday, that they still hadn't raised an alarm.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (28:29):
Michelle never came home, and the brothers also had a
really callous attitude towards her, things like she'd being a
problem child, used to run away. And then none of
the family members testify at trial. They actually call the
(28:51):
brother Mark's girlfriend now wife, Diana, to say the last
time that she saw her at the house was that
Monday afternoon. She wanted a ride into town so she
could go to the bank before going to work, and
her brother refused to take her, so she left on foot.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
What did all this information tell you?
Speaker 5 (29:13):
That the investigation that it had all of the features
of a wrongful conviction, That investigators focused on the player right,
the DJ, the guy that had multiple girlfriends. They ignored
all these other legit credible alibis or motives for murdering her.
(29:37):
We knew there was just there had to be more
to the story.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Erica and her team discovered a list of people who
said they saw Michelle alive after the twenty first, the
only day the state concedes Bill could have killed Michelle.
It wasn't just the schoolmate who testified at trial that
she'd seen Michelle at the mall Tuesday.
Speaker 5 (29:58):
People saw her alive up through Thursday.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
This list was never disclosed to the defense. Erica filed
this as a Brady violation withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense.
Then she turned to the crime scene.
Speaker 5 (30:14):
The pathologist testified she was heavily infested with maggots, and
she's not when you look at the crime scene photos.
An entomologist that we hired said that the best in
her opinion, the best estimate was that Michelle died Wednesday night,
the twenty third, and that she did not die on Monday,
(30:35):
that the bugs that were there, the maggots, and the temperatures,
that there's no way she died on Monday and looked
like that on Saturday.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
And again everyone agrees Bill could not have killed Michelle
after Monday the twenty first. So Erica also filed an
actual innocence claim, but she had to explain if Bill
was actually innocent, why did he confess? She says, to
start calling the statement a confession is a stretch.
Speaker 5 (31:08):
It's a one page statement, and he never admits or
remembers killing her. It's I must have done it, but
I don't remember it. And so it raises all of
these red flags about whether it's reliable, and what coercion
(31:28):
was happening in that room, and how vulnerable was he.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
In terms of the evidence that brought Erica to Bill's
case in the first place.
Speaker 5 (31:37):
We were denied DNA testing because the state kept saying
the evidence was gone. They don't have it, they can't
find it.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
The sexual assault kit the one thing that could help
prove Bill's innocence.
Speaker 5 (31:48):
We could find everything, but the physical evidence.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
So Erica also filed a young blood claim.
Speaker 5 (31:54):
Young Blood versus Arizona, which is a due process violation
for destruction evidence. And so we just had a trial
on that in June, and the court ruled and denied
that claim and said that while the sexual assault kit
has been destroyed, it wasn't done in bad faith. A
(32:17):
couple of big things the court missed was that the
victim's clothing is still unaccounted for. It was never released,
it was never on an order to be released it.
It was there, they collected it, they had it.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
So you just don't know where it is. Like, do
you think it was destroyed?
Speaker 5 (32:41):
I think it was destroyed. I think it should have
been with the sexual assault kit. Wow, it should have
been in the sheriff's office.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
And remember agent Saiwazink, whose brother vouched for Larry Dan's.
Speaker 5 (32:52):
He's the last one to have known to have had
the sexual assault kit or any physical evidence. He picked
it all up from the lab in Des Moines and
was supposed to drive it back to Muscatine a couple
hours away. But he doesn't file a report, he doesn't
sign a chain of custody document, he doesn't do anything.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
All of the claims Erica filed have been denied. She's
amending them and refiling.
Speaker 5 (33:23):
If we lose these claims in Iowa, I think next
stop is federal court.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Erica says that Iowa is a hard place to litigate
post conviction cases.
Speaker 5 (33:35):
There's no skepticism, and everybody knows everybody, and it's oh,
I know him, he's a great guy. He's done lots
of murder cases. To me, it's a hard place to
be because I'm the outsider. I'm a threat. The work
is a threat because they're so nice. They don't get
anything wrong.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Do you get any community backlash?
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (34:00):
I think there is a unwillingness to work with us.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
And through all this bill sits in prison year after year.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
Every time we turn around, we prove I didn't do it,
and nobody seems to give a shit. There's no justice
in Iowa. There's no way you can convince me. I
don't care what they do convince me. Yl ever be
justice in Iowa or the courts. I mean, if you're
(34:38):
going to put somebody in prison, you've got to be
damn sure. Especially with a death sentence, which is a
life sentence in Iowa, you should be sure you should
be on the shadow of a doubt. Well, I got
a cave darkness.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
One minute remaining. I had dream last night that Bill
was home.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Were there any specifics in your dream?
Speaker 4 (35:08):
I just dreamed that he came walking in and we
just kind of, you know, I was explaining to him
what things.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Were, because Bill no computers, no phones, no, you know,
a lot of things. And this town has changed so
much since.
Speaker 4 (35:30):
In fact, it's changed so much that I see these
things whenever this lady takes me to the doctor or
out of town that I don't know if there. And
that was the main thing, and I was so tickled.
I just would let him out of my sight, and
I took him to McDonald's because that's the first place.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
He's gonna go. And then it's going to be a
piece of.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Every now and then Donna lets herself believe that dream
of having Bill home will become a reality.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Oh I'm gonna love it.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
I don't know as I'm gonna be here that long
that I'm gonna love every minute of it.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Bill was recently moved to another prison and he's been
having a hard time adjusting. He says this new prison
is rough, it's also hard holding onto hope. He has
yet another petition pending in.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Court, but it's gonna take probably a year.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
I asked Bill if he thinks his mom has a
year left.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
No, no, I'm afraid you don't.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
What does it mean to you to have had her
all these years?
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Yes, Mama, that's where mom is.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Bill says, if his mom is on there's only one
other thing he'd want.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
We left the hell.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
And get a motorcycle.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
I want to have a woman on a back. I
want to be going down the road. Reached down and
lay my hand on her sigh the slag next to
me for her being on the back of the bike,
and I'll know I'm home.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
If you want to help Bill, you can contact the Muscatine,
Iowa County Attorney Jim Barry. Thank you for listening to
Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support your local innocence
organizations and go to the links in the episode description
to see how you can help. This episode was written
(37:54):
by me Maggie Freeling, with story editing and sound designed
by senior producer Rebecca Ibara. Our producer is Kathleen Fink.
Our mixer is Josh Allen, with research by Donald Salzman
and additional production help by Jeff Cliburn. Executive producers are
Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wordis. The music is
by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Make sure
(38:18):
to follow us on all social media platforms at Lava
for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow
me on all platforms at Maggie Freeling. Wrongful Conviction with
Maggie Freeling is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts
in association with Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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