November 20, 2025 • 39 mins
On November 22, 1975, a mother reported her three-year-old son missing after seeing him roaming in the vicinity of a wooded area behind their apartment complex in Richmond, VA. His body was found in the river nine miles from his home four days later. The murder garnered tremendous media attention and public outrage, yet the police failed to find a lead or suspect. 20-year-old Marvin Grimm Jr. lived across the hall from the family and, based on two arguments Grimm had with the boy’s father almost a month after the murder, police set their sights on him. After a nine-hour work day, police picked up Grimm and subjected him to another nine-plus hours of interrogation, causing Grimm to break down and confess to killing the boy. Grimm pleaded guilty, and the court sentenced him to life in prison.
To learn more and get involved:
https://www.arnoldporter.com/en
https://www.law.virginia.edu/clinics/innocence-project-uva-school-law
https://lavaforgood.com/podcast/236-jason-flom-with-thomas-haynesworth/
https://lavaforgood.com/podcast/401-guest-host-ashley-fantz-with-marvin-anderson/
Wrongful Conviction with Lauren Bright Pacheco 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.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode of Wrongful Conviction contains discussion of sexual assault
and suicidal ideation. Please listen with caution and care. On
November twenty second, nineteen seventy five, a three year old
boy was reported missing in Richmond, Virginia. A twenty year
old neighbor named Marvin Grimm joined the search party, mentioning
(00:23):
that he may have seen the boy while running an
errand after the body was recovered, investigators question Marvin, threatening
him with the death penalty until they got a statement
that corroborated what they already believed that the boy had
died by exphyxiation related to a sexual assault, and any
(00:44):
evidence that arose to the contrary was summarily ignored. This
is wrongful conviction. The Fox Foundation is proud to support
this episode of wrongful Conviction and the work of After Innocence,
a nonprofit that helps hundreds of people nationwide rebuild their
(01:07):
lives after wrongful incarceration. Each year, innocent people are released
after spending years behind bars for crimes they didn't commit.
Nearly all of them leave prison with nothing more than
the clothes on their backs, with no help or compensation
from the state, as they face the steep challenges of
rebuilding their lives after wrongful imprisonment. After Innocence is changing
(01:29):
that After Innocence helps exoneries get and make good use
of essential services like health care, dental care, mental health support,
legal aid, financial counseling, and more. Since twenty sixteen, they've
brought that help to more than eight hundred exoneries across
forty six states, working tirelessly to ensure that no one
(01:51):
released after wrongful incarceration is left behind. Learn more at
after dashinnocence dot org and join after Innocence to set
support exoneries as they rebuild their lives. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco.
(02:14):
Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction, where we have a Virginia
case related to the subject of a twenty twenty three
podcast called Admissible. They covered twelve wrongful convictions related to
one Virginia forensic examiner named Mary Jane Burton, some of
which have been covered here, Thomas Hainsworth, Marvin Anderson, and
the list is longer than twelve.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Well now several on the list. I knew Julius Ruffin,
I used to play ball with him, and I can't
think of the other ones I only knew if Thomas Haynesworth.
I met him at the AG's office when I was
brought in after right after my exoneration, and he was
working in the Attorney General's office.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
That is our guest of honor, Marvin Grimm Junior, welcome
and to help tell his story. We have this attorney
from Arnold and Porter Angelique celebrity.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Thank you for having us.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
So, Marvin, you're from Richmond, Virginia and had three sisters.
Where did you fall in the sibling lineup? I was
top dog, so three little sisters, all right, I thought,
So tell me a little bit about yourself as a kid.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
I played hardball as a kid. I played up about
the fifteen year old. Because we were moving around, I
couldn't get it to stay situated. Because my father, he
was a salesman. We had time in Richmond, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio,
back to Richmond, being up to Mason City, Iowa, and Moorhead, Minnesota.
(03:40):
That's where mom and Dad divorced. And when we came
back to Richmond, and I felt that I was going
to be a drain on the resources. So I said,
I'll just go in the Navy. I'm old enough to
do it. So that's what I did.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
And this was in nineteen seventy three, when the Vietnam
War was still ongoing.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, so I'm going in boot camp getting ready to graduate. Says, hey,
we need some people go to Japan. I said, cool,
I'll go to Japan because I did not want to
wind up in Vietnam. Well, I didn't know at the
time when I volunteered for Japan it's just across the
bay from Vietnam. Well, I was impulsive. Our first cruise,
we went to the Philippines and while we were in dock,
(04:16):
there was an explosion in one of the engine rooms
and a couple of the guys that were working in
the electricians got burned alive. And I've witnessed it all
because I passed right through it. I don't care how
strong of a person you are. You see somebody on fire,
it can rattle your brain.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
I can't even imagine that. You started having panic attacks
and anxiety. So you were honorably discharged because the anxiety
and the panic attacks were getting worse.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
That's what the psychologist said.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So Marvin returned from the Navy, got married to his
wife Jan and with a baby on the way. Marvin
picked up a second job doing maintenance work at their
apartm and complex, and they lived across the hall from
the victim and his family, with whom Marvin had two
trivial run ins, like accidentally running over a few small
(05:11):
toys with the lawnmower. The family also had a dog.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
I was going back here with the ride lawnmower, and
I knocked on the door and asked him to take
the dog in because I didn't want to run him
over the lawnmower. So that night and I came back,
the stepfather was standing there on the car and he
threatened me behind, saying I'm going to run his dog over.
And I said I adn't saying running your dog over.
I walked away from him and kept going. The running
(05:36):
over the toys was an accident by the lawnmower too.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Later on, this interaction became an alleged motive in the
death of the neighbor's three year old son, who was
reported missing by the mother on November twenty second, nineteen
seventy five.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
She calls the Richmond Police and she says that she
last saw her boy at about one point thirty headed
into a wooded area behind the apartment complex. She caused
the cops to report him missing at two forty pm.
The officers respond pretty quickly and they show up at
the apartment complex at two forty five pm. They don't
(06:14):
know the exact location, so they just randomly happened to
knock on Marvin's door, who lived in the same apartment
complex as the boys family.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
So I'm watching the game when I get a knock
on the door. This guy doesn't identify himself. He just
asked me who in the building has children? I said, well,
the only ones across the hall. After the game, that's
when I go out straight down the road to the highway.
I thought I saw the victim and his a dog
jump out from behind a car. I didn't think of anything.
(06:43):
So when I come back, Channel twelve is set up
and there's people running around everywhere. So I go over
and see what's going on. They told me the victim
was missing. I said, well, I just thought I saw
him such and such. Well take us there and then
we searched all around the area, and then I was
going down to see my wife at night hospital. So
we did it for about an hour. Then they thanked
me and I went home got ready to go down
(07:04):
to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Marvin's pregnant wife, jan was dealing with preclampsia, sometimes known
back then as toxemia, so she was being monitored at
the hospital. Meanwhile, a massive search operation was underway, which
ended four days later when the little boy was found
lying face up, fully clothed in shallow water in the
(07:26):
James River, about nine miles from the apartment complex.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
The medical examiner saw what she described to be a
white gelatinate material at the back of the boy's throat,
so she swabs the boy's throat, puts it under a
microscope and reports seeing sperm and so she ultimately concludes
that the boy asphyxiated, with the implication being that he
was orally sodomized and choked to death during the assault.
(07:53):
Detectives were under a lot of pressure to solve this crime.
I know the father of the boy had provided a
list of individuals upon the request of the officers, but
when they went weeks without any suspects or leads, they
zeroed in on Marvin because he was a neighbor to
the boys family.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
And Marvin had mentioned to the initial responders that he
thought he had seen the boy while driving that afternoon.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
That and plus the even parents had told him that
we'd had problems in the past. Here's the FBI knocking
on my door. Write this statement saying you saw this,
victims such and such, such and such, no problem. Then
all of a sudden, the Richmond Police Department kept coming
over to my house talking to me, and they kept
trying to get me to say something about somebody else,
and I said, I don't know anything about this. I
(08:41):
can't say who did what or did not do what.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Unwilling to create a different target, Marvin was asked to
take a polygraph.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
I had nothing to hide, but that polygraph was strange
because they gave me asked me about five questions. Then
he just started strutting the thing off, jerking things around
and said, man, you're lying. The police come running in
and start screaming at me. So I took it as
a setup, and that's when I figured out, hey, there
after me, can.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
You also explain to me, just for somebody who doesn't
really understand what it's like to deal with panic disorder,
what goes through your body, like how your heart.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Rate will increase, you will sweat, so you know, the
polograph takes your breathing. It does your heart and everything.
So if I got a racing heart and I'm breathing
heavy and sweat, and They're going to think I'm lying
about something. So that's when I told the police I
have problems with anxiety depression and I forget things. The
Navy they call them blackouts, because I call them blackouts.
(09:41):
I don't know if I can explain that exactly I
would be doing stuff. Then I come back. Oh man,
I didn't know was that time like that? So that's
when I told the police about it, and I guess
that's when everything changed.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
However, Marvin's momentary alertness lapses, as well as police allegations
of deceit fullness, were not enough to make an arrest.
After all, our audience is quite familiar with the use
of polygraphs as cudgeled to coerce false confessions, and it
hadn't worked, so they took another stab a few days
(10:14):
later when they picked up Marvin from work at around
four forty pm for more questioning.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
Marvin had worked a nine hour shift and they proceeded
to interrogate him for nearly ten hours without ever turning
on the tape recorder.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
We was in a room about the size of your bathroom,
four of them sitting around me. I was fenced in.
All they said was, you know you're being questioned. You
can have a lawyer if you wanted. I knew I
hadn't done anything, so why do I need a lawyer.
They started getting upset with me, getting loud, hollering at
you don't tell us what happened. If we convict you,
we're going to give you a death penalty and all
(10:49):
that stuff like that. So I started having a panic
attack at that time. So it was around eleven o'clock.
They just finally said, man, I'm trying to get out
of here. I want to get away from this. What
do you want me to say?
Speaker 3 (11:01):
At this point, Marvin, who is twenty years old, he's young,
He's been awake for nearly twenty four hours.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
And suffering with PTSD and anxiety.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Attacks exactly, he just wants to go home. So he
finally tells them what they want to hear.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
And not only that, but parents back details that only
they knew at that point or thought they knew.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
If you listen to the confession, even if you read
the transcript, there are several red flags that stand out
that this is not a reliable confession. So, for example,
Marvin is unable to supply any of the details, and
so the officer has to supply the details of the act.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
They asked me, did you sexual assaultant? I'm like what
that was? When I was stuttering, but la la la lah,
and he said, you put his mouth over your privates.
I didn't even know he was sex and exulted.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
To that moment, the officers ask Marvin what he did
to the boy, and Marvin responds, I forced sexual assault.
To me, that sounds like language that a detective would
use rather than a twenty year old man.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
And by the way, I never took them to where
the body was found. They played it up that I
took them, but they really took.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Me right after the interrogation.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Right, this is two about two thirty in the morning.
I've been up almost twenty four hours.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
And when do you realize that you've confessed to something
you didn't do?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
The next day, when they pulled me in the rain me,
I guess it was around six o'clock. They took me
over to a courtroom in front of the magistrate and
he told me I'm charged with murder and asked me
in my financial situations before appointing me an attorney. My
son was born ten days before I was arrested. I
only knew him for ten days.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
How did you explain the fact that you had confessed
to something that you didn't do to your family, to
your wife.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
They visited me in the jail, I think the second
day I was there. I told him I didn't have
nothing to do with it, and I said, I don't
understand how they can charge me. And then Jan spoke
up and said, you know, they came through and took
all their medication.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
So in Virginia, it's not enough to have a confession
from somebody to achieve a conviction. You also have to
have evidence that corroborates the confession. So after they got
what they wanted from Marvin, they had to go execute
a search board and then they collected the evidence that
they would then use to corroborate the confession in the
autopsy report. The toxicology report that came back showed high
(13:32):
levels of alcohol and Cler's oxyzone, which is a prescription
muscle relaxant in the boys' system.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
My wife had toxemia, but they took all of her
medication at the hospital that gave her for that.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Because they wanted to claim that.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
The drugs and the alcohol, which I had no idea
what happened.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Marvin never mentioned that in his confession. We think that
the officers were trying to get that information out of
him by asking, well, how did you get the boy
to comply? But Marvin never makes any mention of the
drugs or the alcohol.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Remember, the victim's mother had reported that the last time
she'd seen her son was around one thirty PM, and
then first responders knocked on Marvin's door just seventy five
minutes later, around two forty five PM.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
So we worked with a toxicologist to calculate how long
it would have taken for the alcohol to reach the
levels that it did in the boy's system, and a
toxicologist puts that time period at ninety to one hundred
and fifty minutes, which is well outside the seventy five
minutes that Marvin would have had to commit all the
acts that he states in his false confession.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
The police search turned up a few other items, a
pair of shoes which Marvin said were torn up while
dumping the body. There's also blonde hairs from Marvin's car
and the pea coat.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
So he says that he wrapped the boy in a
pea coat and tossed the boy forty feet into the river.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
I don't care. Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn't throw a dead body
forty five feet. It was physically impossible.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
The other thing is that the boy's body was found
with his arms crossed, as though he had been placed
in the river. So it doesn't make sense that the
body would land with its arms crossed if tossed in
the way that Marvin described.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
And then when my lawyers first brought me the statement
I had seen where I had said something about the
pea coat and the shoes, and I explained them my
shoes were destroyed at work. And then I says that
pea coat was not even in my possession. My sisters
had been using and my mom would wear it was
my pea coat from the Navy. My sister's Patty used
it to most. Now she's blind, and so is my
(15:38):
little sister Lisa.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
But this was nineteen seventy five. DNA testing was not
available yet, so the state's expert, Mary Jane Burton, sent
the throat swabs for serological testing to find the blood
type and then examine the hares under a microscope.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Hair of my cross copee has now been debunked. It's
a junk science, but at the time it was considered valid,
and so Mary Jane Burton concluded that the hairs matched
the three year old boy, placing the boy in Marvin's car.
The other evidence that they obtained from Marvin was two
towels from his car, and Mary Jane Burton said that
(16:17):
there was ejaculate on one of the towels, which would
seemingly corroborate the sexual assault theory.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
So, while they awaited the results of the serological testing
from the victim's throat swabs, Marvin awaited trial under the
care of a state appointed psychiatrist, all while his appointed
attorney failed to develop any of the issues that discredit
his statement or the state's theory.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
My lead attorney he was Robert Dooling. The police chief's
name was Frank Louling. He was the family member of
the police chief that was prosecuting me.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
That would seem like a bit of a conflict.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Right at the time that he was representing me, he
was up for judgeship in Virginia.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
And then the prology results came back.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
My attorney said, ed the saliva, and here's samples that
it took from you. Inconclusive, they can't make a determination.
Beth was the reason I entered the guilty piece. Said
we didn't have anything to prove your innocence with. So
he said, what's the only way we will save your life?
So you should take the plead.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
But there are two issues with this advice to plead guilty,
one of which we'll address now.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
So in Virginia at this time, the death penalty was
only available for certain types of murder, murder for higher
murder where there is extortion, and then murder by an
inmate in prison. The crime that Marvin was accused of
very obviously did not fall into any of those categories,
and so there was no way death penalty would have
ever been on the table for this crime.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
So the threat of death touted by both his interrogators
and now by his own attorney didn't exist. Nonetheless, to
seal the deal, the evidence underlying his guilty plea still
needed to be heard by a judge, so hearing was
held in March nineteen seventy six, where the medical examiner,
(18:04):
Doctor Fierro, testified about the existence of sperm on the
throat swabs as well as the towel, followed by Mary
Jane Burton's findings that the hair from the pea coat
and car were consistent with the victims, at which point
the serological report was submitted to evidence, and importantly, doctor
(18:27):
Fierro represented that the report did not change her conclusions
from the preliminary report. Additionally, Marvin's attorney, Robert Doolan, did
not challenge that assertion, and Mary Jane Burton was not
called to testify about her findings or the sorology report.
Then a detective took the stand to testify about Marvin's confession.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
The prosecution at the hearing describe how Marvin took the
officers to the boy's body, but really it was the
officers who took Marvin to where the box was found.
The other point is that this was a highly publicized crime.
There were details about the crime and the newspapers, including
a detailed map of where the body was found.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
But Marvin's attorney didn't point that out either, or any
of the other issues that could have discredited his false confession,
and somehow an already terrible situation was made worse during
that time.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
I was not in touch with reality. The psychiatrists I
was seeing appointed by the state and he was keeping
me on senequon value and something else. I forget what
it is.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Do you even remember the verdict?
Speaker 2 (19:38):
I remember as the judge was saying something, he seemed
to be highly pissed. I want to say. During the
guilty plea hearing, my attorneys warned me to keep my
mouth shut, don't go in and a running my mouth
because I was telling them I was innocent. They said,
if you go and run in your mouth, the judge
ain't going to accept you guilty, please, and you go
get the death penalty.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
But the death plony was never on the table. It
wasn't available for the crime with which he was charged.
But Marvin, he was afraid of dying, and he was
promised that he would be out in fifteen years. Of
course we know that didn't happen.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
I was promised orally promised by both sides I'd be
out in fifteen years, but they didn't put it in writing.
(20:34):
I tried to keep the emotions out of it, because
I knew if I got the emotions in anxiety would
come about, and so with my depression, I was trying
to stay away from that because during that time I
had thought about it and actually tried at the city
jail to commit suicide. Remember I told you Amy on Senequan.
(20:54):
So I figured if I kept enough huh saved up,
then i'd take it all one time. There I could
probably get out of this situation. And don't ever think
people are doing it because they're guilty of something they're not.
You've ever been in a situation where nothing seems to
go right, No matter what you do, it goes wrong.
That was the kind of situation where I was living
(21:15):
in at that time. So I was tired of life.
I didn't want anything more to do with life. But
all I did was sleep for two days and then
I woke up. I spent my first five or six
years in protective custody the administration. They didn't want my
death on their head.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
I would assume that you're looked at as a bit
of a pariah by the other inmates. With a much
more uncomfortable than typical prison experience, Marvin began studying the
law god his trial transcripts as well as the related
records in which he found the serology report for the
(21:53):
throat swabs.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
When Mary Jane Burton did that blood testing, Marvin is
type A, the boys type Oh, the results come back
showing type of secretions excluding Marvin, and that's something that
they knew back in seventy six.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yet Marvin's own attorney never raised this clearly exculpatory report
while advising him to plead guilty and save himself from
certain death. I think it's worth mentioning that this attorney,
Robert Doolan, accepted a judgeship in Virginia soon after Marvin's conviction. Anyway,
this sorology report seems like it should have been very
(22:32):
useful on appeal.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
So, I think one of the most fascinating facts about
Marvin's case, in equally infuriating, is that Marvin had raised
a lot of the same arguments that we ultimately raised
in the petition in twenty twenty three that ultimately led
to his exoneration, but he was denied on procedural grounds,
or because that there were certain archaic statutes still on
(22:59):
the books that made it very difficult for somebody like
Marvin to prove his innocence. So for example, in Virginia,
it used to be that if you had fled guilty,
you could not petition for a writ of actual innocence.
Of course, we know there are lots of reasons why
somebody might plead guilty to a crime. They did it too,
and that hurdle was not removed until twenty twenty.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
And here it was barely creeping into the nineteen eighties.
But by the end of that decade we had the
advent of DNA testing, at which point Marvin petitioned to
test his evidence, but Virginia did not have a statute
that allowed for it until two thousand and one, and
Marvin hired an attorney named Mike Brickhill to handle his proceedings.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
By this time, my father had passed and he left
me a bit of an inheritance, so I paid mister
Brickhill to get my first runt of DNA testing done.
And the judge that was presiding over the case for
the DNA testing, he didn't know me, but he's telling
my attorney all about the case. Well, then Brickhill found
out Robert Dooling, my ex attorney. It was now judge
(24:06):
was sitting in the back of the courtroom so the
judge wasn't going to grant it, but the Commonwealth job
said no, no, no, y're are we agree. Let's get this
settle once and for all.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
The first round of testing for the throat swabs either
excluded Marvin or were inconclusive, but the victim could be
excluded from the hares on the PEA code they were
all female, but the hares from the car could not
yet be excluded.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
The problem was is they didn't get a sample of
the victims, so they couldn't identify whose DNA it was
they had. So the Commonwealth said they were not going
to recognize the results of the DNA testing. Furthermore, they're
going to oppose any more DNA testing that you request.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
And so the Supreme Court of Virginia denied the relief
a on a procedural grounds as untimely. But then they
also pointed to the fact that Marvin had pled guilty
and that there were still some swabs that hadn't been
excluded by DNA tests, and it still some of the
hairs hadn't been excluded as the boys.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Soon mister brick Hill enlisted the Innocence Project, who tried
to access a vial of blood that could provide a
DNA profile for the victim. But still the fact that
Marvin pled guilty was a major obstacle to relief. So
they also went to work on lobbying for legislation and
eventually the team at Arnold and Porter also came on board.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
When we joined forces with the Nison's project on this case,
our first goal was to prepare the clemency petition, but
we knew that that was a long shot, and so
we continued to collaborate with the ennosonce project working to
get Marvin released on a role while we would continue
to fight for his innocence. And so our strategy was
(25:53):
really to understand the facts of the case, not just
the DNA what was the timeline?
Speaker 1 (25:59):
So they I enlisted renowned false confession expert doctor Richard
Leo to develop the evidence that discredited the false confession,
as well as the toxicology expert who we mentioned earlier. Meanwhile,
Marvin visited the parole board for the twenty seventh time
in twenty twenty, where perhaps some of the new evidence
(26:19):
had an effect as he was released after nearly forty
five years.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Well, I went in December and I came out in November,
so it's forty four years and eleven months.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
That is your entire adult life to a certain extent.
I know that you were compensated ultimately, right, But money.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
I don't care about the money. They should take the
money to build the time machine and take me back
to the day before I've arrested and leave me the
hell alone. That's the way I think about it. I'd
rather have the time back than the money. I wasn't
at here as the world evolved when I came out
in April twenty twenty. I was still thinking it was
nineteen seventy five. Perfect example was when I made parole
(27:05):
in Virginia. If you're a registered sex offender and they
drop you off at your parole office, she gives me
the rules and then they put a monitoring ankle bracelet
on me and gave me this box GPS trackers, and
she was explaining how it can pinpoint you on the map.
So we go to leave take off down the road.
The thing starts ringing and I don't know what it is,
(27:26):
so I hit the button turned it off. It started
ringing again, so I turned it off again. All of
a sudden, my sister's phone rings and if my parole
officer telling her tell him to answer that phone. I
said that he' supposed to have the phone. He's been
in prison for the last forty five years. So anyway,
she called me again and I answered it, and we
(27:46):
talked for a minute, and then she said, by the way,
tell your sister to.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Slow down, because they knew exactly how fast she was driving.
After Marvin was paroled in twenty twenty, the fight to
(28:09):
clear his name continued, and through the efforts of the
Innocence Project in New York as well as the UVA
School of Law to educate legislators on the issues facing
many of the wrongfully convicted. New legislation passed first in
twenty twenty, making Marvin's guilty plea no longer an obstacle
to a wrint of actual innocence, and then another breakthrough
(28:32):
happened in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
In Virginia, they would only consider DNA testing done by
the state lab. And that's problematic because private laboratories sometimes
have more advanced technology and they might be able to
extract a DNA sample when the state lab might not
be able to. And so that law changed in twenty
(28:57):
twenty one and Virginia would allow for DNA testing by
a private laboratory. So we had three labs look at
the swaps that the medical examiner had taken from the
boy's mouth that they said at that time had sperm
on them, suggesting that the boy had been sexually assaulted.
Three different labs looked at the swabs and could not
(29:17):
find sperm, and that is problematic because sperm is one
of the hardiest cells in the human body, and so
experts have said that you can find sperm on a
degraded sample long after the epithelial skin cells have degraded.
You will find it on a sample that has been
(29:39):
poorly kept. And so the fact that it wasn't there
even though there was DNA from skin cells on the swabs,
that DNA just happened to match the boy, not Marvin.
That means that the boy likely wasn't sexually assaulted, and
that the substance in the boy's throat was likely his
own phlegm. So that was one piece of new evidence
(30:01):
that we used in our petition. The same labs had
also looked at the towel that Mary Jane Burton had
said contained sperm on it. And had concluded there was
also no sperm on the towel.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
The towel it was in my car, but I used
on cold days wipe down the windshield instead of waiting
for the defrostr I'd wipe the windshield down. That's what
that towel was.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
So it appears that the state's experts presented false testimony
to support the exphyxiation by sexual assault theory.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
And then the other DNA piece of evidence that we used.
Modern DNA testing of the eight hares found in Marvin's
car excluded the boy as the source from those hair,
so no longer placing the boy and Marvin's car.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Not only were the hares not the boy in.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
Question, they belonged to six six different people. Yes, yes,
which just shows you how junk science hair microscopy is.
Some of the hairs were female and the co Marvin's
sisters had been wearing. The new evidence shows that Marvin
confessed to an impossibility. What he pleaded to, what he
confessed to did not happen. There's no evidence of a
(31:10):
sexual assault. The new toxicology report shows that Marvin couldn't
have done everything that he said in his statement in
the seventy five minute window really is an impossible feat.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
As was the alleged forty foot launch of the body
into a riverbed where the victim was found with his
hands neatly folded on his chest. So they piled this
new evidence into their filing in April of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
After we filed the petition in twenty twenty three, we
had met with the Attorney General's office, had presented our case,
answered some of the questions that they had, and I
think left feeling good. But in these cases, you never
want to assume that the other side is going to
join your petition, no matter how strong of the case
you think you have. And I should say that the
(32:00):
Virginia Attorney General's Office did a fantastic job at doing
their own investigation and in fact uncovered exculpatory evidence that
we had no idea existed. So in Marvin's statement, he
says that he tore his shoe on the river bank
throwing the body into the river, And so they had
taken his shoe and done testing of the dirt on
(32:22):
the shoe to see if it matched the soil from
where the body was found. And there is a report
showing that it doesn't match, which is exculpatory.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
And while the state's reinvestigation continued through the spring of
twenty twenty three, a podcast called Admissible Shreds of Evidence
released twelve episodes covering twelve wrongful conviction cases tied to
one Virginia LabTech Mary Jane Burton, who was initially lauded
(32:52):
as a hero for having saved physical evidence from decades
old cases that would have otherwise been destroyed.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
Yeah, so it's unfortunate because people viewed her as a
hero because her preservation of this evidence allowed people to
test that evidence later on and clear their name. But
then it also begs the question, well, were they wrongfully
convicted in the first place because of Mary Jane Burton?
Speaker 1 (33:16):
And a whistleblower came forward who was positing exactly that
one who had also tipped the podcasters to Marvin's case.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Did you ever hear the thirteenth episode called the Fallout,
where the podcaster found out through the whistleblower about my case.
She described the whole case and she said that Mary
Jane Burton is being under pressure to come to these conclusions.
And they talked to the Attorney General and he told
them about the investigation they did. They basically said they
came away from the labs standing was this really a crime?
Speaker 1 (33:48):
After all, there was no evidence of sexual assault. There
was the presence of prescription drugs and alcohol which may
have been accidentally ingested, potentially leading to an unfortunate series
of events ending in death, and perhaps the Attorney General's
office came to the same conclusion, and they reached out
to Marvin's team.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
They told my attorneys that they're one hundred percent behind me.
I'm innocent. I need to be granted rit of actual innocence.
And then we finally got the oral arguments and I
sat in I was very very unhappy with what I heard,
and the judges when they got ready to close it,
and he says, well, you'll be hearing from us soon
rather than later. And sure enough, like twenty eight days later,
(34:29):
here comes the decision of the court.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Marvin got the order from the Virginia Court of Appeals
that he was exonerated.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
So when was the first time that you really truly
felt free?
Speaker 2 (34:40):
I was about two weeks later. I decided I'm going
down to visit my friend in Virginia Beach. He's another
Exgonnery that was in Greensville with me. He hasn't been
officially exonerated yet, but he was granted parole based upon
DNA testing. So I went down to seem and as
far out as I'd been from the city was the airport.
So as I passed by the exit, I was a
little nervous. I kept I kept thinking, oh man, what's
(35:04):
going to happen here? But that finally hit me by
the time I got to the Virginia Beach. Hey, I
can do anything I want to you now except break
the law.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Well, there's the first time for everything, right, since you
hadn't broken the law ever before in your entire life. Right,
So you know there are people who were at fault
in this case, right, Mary Jane Burton, your attorney, those
police officers who lied to you during the ten hour interrogation.
What would accountability look like?
Speaker 2 (35:35):
That's a good question. I thought, maybe, okay, maybe they
made a mistake. But when you find out how intentional
it was. The time I was finally exonerated of the judge,
three of the detectives, Mary Jane Burton, and one of
my attorneys had already passed. One of the guys asked
me he being a Christian, like I'm being a Christian.
(35:57):
You know, they say that someday everybody's going to be
judged by Guy. He asked me, what are you going
to do when your attorney steps up in front of
God to be judged. I said, I'm going to step
back a few steps. Kay's lightning hits him.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
I mean, Marvin will never get those forty nine years
of his life back. His family will never get that
time back, and the same is true for the victim
and the victim's family. Right the victim's family may never
know what happened to their loved one given the passage
of time. But I think we still try to achieve accountability. First,
(36:31):
I think we need acknowledgment from the state, and as
part of that, I think we need a public examination
into the decisions, the incentives, the culture that led to
this wrongful conviction in the first place, so that we
can prevent it from happening in the future. And alongside
of that, frankly, we need awareness of wrongful convictions, which
(36:55):
is why I think conversations like this are so important,
because we need people to understand that people confess to
crimes that they don't do. We need people to understand
that there is junk science being used in courtrooms to
convict people. And we also need justice reform to change
some of the archaic laws that are still on the
books that make it difficult for people like Marvin to
(37:18):
fight for the innocence.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
And so what do you hope that people take away
from Marvin's case in particular?
Speaker 3 (37:26):
I think an open mind. There is still a lot
of disbelief over the fact that somebody could confess to
a crime that they didn't do, and so I think
being aware of these cases and recognizing that it does happen,
and that there are certain circumstances and that create an
environment that is ripe for somebody to give a false confession.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I'm like this. I believe that most wrongful convictions happen
because you have a public defender, the state. They have
ample amount of funds to prosecute you, and they only
give attorneys ay fifteen hundred dollars to defend you, and
they're not going to investigate the case. They're just going
to assume you're guilty because the state charged you. So
(38:12):
that's where I think most wrongful convictions come about. Thanks
to DNA and other things, it's coming up. A lot
of innocent people are sitting in prison.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen
to this and all Lava for Good podcasts one week
early and add free by subscribing to Lava for Good
Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'd like to thank our production team,
Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as executive producers
Jason Vlahm, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wardis, and Jeff Clyburn. The
music in this production was supplied by three time Oscar
(38:49):
nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across
all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at
Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at
Lauren Brightfchecko. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for
Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One. We
have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in
this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed by
(39:10):
the individuals featured in this show are their own and
do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good.
This episode of Wrongful Conviction contains discussion of sexual assault
and suicidal ideation. Please listen with caution and care. On
November twenty second, nineteen seventy five, a three year old
boy was reported missing in Richmond, Virginia. A twenty year
old neighbor named Marvin Grimm joined the search party, mentioning
(00:23):
that he may have seen the boy while running an
errand after the body was recovered, investigators question Marvin, threatening
him with the death penalty until they got a statement
that corroborated what they already believed that the boy had
died by exphyxiation related to a sexual assault, and any
(00:44):
evidence that arose to the contrary was summarily ignored. This
is wrongful conviction. The Fox Foundation is proud to support
this episode of wrongful Conviction and the work of After Innocence,
a nonprofit that helps hundreds of people nationwide rebuild their
(01:07):
lives after wrongful incarceration. Each year, innocent people are released
after spending years behind bars for crimes they didn't commit.
Nearly all of them leave prison with nothing more than
the clothes on their backs, with no help or compensation
from the state, as they face the steep challenges of
rebuilding their lives after wrongful imprisonment. After Innocence is changing
(01:29):
that After Innocence helps exoneries get and make good use
of essential services like health care, dental care, mental health support,
legal aid, financial counseling, and more. Since twenty sixteen, they've
brought that help to more than eight hundred exoneries across
forty six states, working tirelessly to ensure that no one
(01:51):
released after wrongful incarceration is left behind. Learn more at
after dashinnocence dot org and join after Innocence to set
support exoneries as they rebuild their lives. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco.
(02:14):
Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction, where we have a Virginia
case related to the subject of a twenty twenty three
podcast called Admissible. They covered twelve wrongful convictions related to
one Virginia forensic examiner named Mary Jane Burton, some of
which have been covered here, Thomas Hainsworth, Marvin Anderson, and
the list is longer than twelve.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Well now several on the list. I knew Julius Ruffin,
I used to play ball with him, and I can't
think of the other ones I only knew if Thomas Haynesworth.
I met him at the AG's office when I was
brought in after right after my exoneration, and he was
working in the Attorney General's office.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
That is our guest of honor, Marvin Grimm Junior, welcome
and to help tell his story. We have this attorney
from Arnold and Porter Angelique celebrity.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Thank you for having us.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
So, Marvin, you're from Richmond, Virginia and had three sisters.
Where did you fall in the sibling lineup? I was
top dog, so three little sisters, all right, I thought,
So tell me a little bit about yourself as a kid.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
I played hardball as a kid. I played up about
the fifteen year old. Because we were moving around, I
couldn't get it to stay situated. Because my father, he
was a salesman. We had time in Richmond, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio,
back to Richmond, being up to Mason City, Iowa, and Moorhead, Minnesota.
(03:40):
That's where mom and Dad divorced. And when we came
back to Richmond, and I felt that I was going
to be a drain on the resources. So I said,
I'll just go in the Navy. I'm old enough to
do it. So that's what I did.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
And this was in nineteen seventy three, when the Vietnam
War was still ongoing.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, so I'm going in boot camp getting ready to graduate. Says, hey,
we need some people go to Japan. I said, cool,
I'll go to Japan because I did not want to
wind up in Vietnam. Well, I didn't know at the
time when I volunteered for Japan it's just across the
bay from Vietnam. Well, I was impulsive. Our first cruise,
we went to the Philippines and while we were in dock,
(04:16):
there was an explosion in one of the engine rooms
and a couple of the guys that were working in
the electricians got burned alive. And I've witnessed it all
because I passed right through it. I don't care how
strong of a person you are. You see somebody on fire,
it can rattle your brain.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
I can't even imagine that. You started having panic attacks
and anxiety. So you were honorably discharged because the anxiety
and the panic attacks were getting worse.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
That's what the psychologist said.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So Marvin returned from the Navy, got married to his
wife Jan and with a baby on the way. Marvin
picked up a second job doing maintenance work at their
apartm and complex, and they lived across the hall from
the victim and his family, with whom Marvin had two
trivial run ins, like accidentally running over a few small
(05:11):
toys with the lawnmower. The family also had a dog.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
I was going back here with the ride lawnmower, and
I knocked on the door and asked him to take
the dog in because I didn't want to run him
over the lawnmower. So that night and I came back,
the stepfather was standing there on the car and he
threatened me behind, saying I'm going to run his dog over.
And I said I adn't saying running your dog over.
I walked away from him and kept going. The running
(05:36):
over the toys was an accident by the lawnmower too.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Later on, this interaction became an alleged motive in the
death of the neighbor's three year old son, who was
reported missing by the mother on November twenty second, nineteen
seventy five.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
She calls the Richmond Police and she says that she
last saw her boy at about one point thirty headed
into a wooded area behind the apartment complex. She caused
the cops to report him missing at two forty pm.
The officers respond pretty quickly and they show up at
the apartment complex at two forty five pm. They don't
(06:14):
know the exact location, so they just randomly happened to
knock on Marvin's door, who lived in the same apartment
complex as the boys family.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
So I'm watching the game when I get a knock
on the door. This guy doesn't identify himself. He just
asked me who in the building has children? I said, well,
the only ones across the hall. After the game, that's
when I go out straight down the road to the highway.
I thought I saw the victim and his a dog
jump out from behind a car. I didn't think of anything.
(06:43):
So when I come back, Channel twelve is set up
and there's people running around everywhere. So I go over
and see what's going on. They told me the victim
was missing. I said, well, I just thought I saw
him such and such. Well take us there and then
we searched all around the area, and then I was
going down to see my wife at night hospital. So
we did it for about an hour. Then they thanked
me and I went home got ready to go down
(07:04):
to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Marvin's pregnant wife, jan was dealing with preclampsia, sometimes known
back then as toxemia, so she was being monitored at
the hospital. Meanwhile, a massive search operation was underway, which
ended four days later when the little boy was found
lying face up, fully clothed in shallow water in the
(07:26):
James River, about nine miles from the apartment complex.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
The medical examiner saw what she described to be a
white gelatinate material at the back of the boy's throat,
so she swabs the boy's throat, puts it under a
microscope and reports seeing sperm and so she ultimately concludes
that the boy asphyxiated, with the implication being that he
was orally sodomized and choked to death during the assault.
(07:53):
Detectives were under a lot of pressure to solve this crime.
I know the father of the boy had provided a
list of individuals upon the request of the officers, but
when they went weeks without any suspects or leads, they
zeroed in on Marvin because he was a neighbor to
the boys family.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
And Marvin had mentioned to the initial responders that he
thought he had seen the boy while driving that afternoon.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
That and plus the even parents had told him that
we'd had problems in the past. Here's the FBI knocking
on my door. Write this statement saying you saw this,
victims such and such, such and such, no problem. Then
all of a sudden, the Richmond Police Department kept coming
over to my house talking to me, and they kept
trying to get me to say something about somebody else,
and I said, I don't know anything about this. I
(08:41):
can't say who did what or did not do what.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Unwilling to create a different target, Marvin was asked to
take a polygraph.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
I had nothing to hide, but that polygraph was strange
because they gave me asked me about five questions. Then
he just started strutting the thing off, jerking things around
and said, man, you're lying. The police come running in
and start screaming at me. So I took it as
a setup, and that's when I figured out, hey, there
after me, can.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
You also explain to me, just for somebody who doesn't
really understand what it's like to deal with panic disorder,
what goes through your body, like how your heart.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Rate will increase, you will sweat, so you know, the
polograph takes your breathing. It does your heart and everything.
So if I got a racing heart and I'm breathing
heavy and sweat, and They're going to think I'm lying
about something. So that's when I told the police I
have problems with anxiety depression and I forget things. The
Navy they call them blackouts, because I call them blackouts.
(09:41):
I don't know if I can explain that exactly I
would be doing stuff. Then I come back. Oh man,
I didn't know was that time like that? So that's
when I told the police about it, and I guess
that's when everything changed.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
However, Marvin's momentary alertness lapses, as well as police allegations
of deceit fullness, were not enough to make an arrest.
After all, our audience is quite familiar with the use
of polygraphs as cudgeled to coerce false confessions, and it
hadn't worked, so they took another stab a few days
(10:14):
later when they picked up Marvin from work at around
four forty pm for more questioning.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
Marvin had worked a nine hour shift and they proceeded
to interrogate him for nearly ten hours without ever turning
on the tape recorder.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
We was in a room about the size of your bathroom,
four of them sitting around me. I was fenced in.
All they said was, you know you're being questioned. You
can have a lawyer if you wanted. I knew I
hadn't done anything, so why do I need a lawyer.
They started getting upset with me, getting loud, hollering at
you don't tell us what happened. If we convict you,
we're going to give you a death penalty and all
(10:49):
that stuff like that. So I started having a panic
attack at that time. So it was around eleven o'clock.
They just finally said, man, I'm trying to get out
of here. I want to get away from this. What
do you want me to say?
Speaker 3 (11:01):
At this point, Marvin, who is twenty years old, he's young,
He's been awake for nearly twenty four hours.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
And suffering with PTSD and anxiety.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Attacks exactly, he just wants to go home. So he
finally tells them what they want to hear.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
And not only that, but parents back details that only
they knew at that point or thought they knew.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
If you listen to the confession, even if you read
the transcript, there are several red flags that stand out
that this is not a reliable confession. So, for example,
Marvin is unable to supply any of the details, and
so the officer has to supply the details of the act.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
They asked me, did you sexual assaultant? I'm like what
that was? When I was stuttering, but la la la lah,
and he said, you put his mouth over your privates.
I didn't even know he was sex and exulted.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
To that moment, the officers ask Marvin what he did
to the boy, and Marvin responds, I forced sexual assault.
To me, that sounds like language that a detective would
use rather than a twenty year old man.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
And by the way, I never took them to where
the body was found. They played it up that I
took them, but they really took.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Me right after the interrogation.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Right, this is two about two thirty in the morning.
I've been up almost twenty four hours.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
And when do you realize that you've confessed to something
you didn't do?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
The next day, when they pulled me in the rain me,
I guess it was around six o'clock. They took me
over to a courtroom in front of the magistrate and
he told me I'm charged with murder and asked me
in my financial situations before appointing me an attorney. My
son was born ten days before I was arrested. I
only knew him for ten days.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
How did you explain the fact that you had confessed
to something that you didn't do to your family, to
your wife.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
They visited me in the jail, I think the second
day I was there. I told him I didn't have
nothing to do with it, and I said, I don't
understand how they can charge me. And then Jan spoke
up and said, you know, they came through and took
all their medication.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
So in Virginia, it's not enough to have a confession
from somebody to achieve a conviction. You also have to
have evidence that corroborates the confession. So after they got
what they wanted from Marvin, they had to go execute
a search board and then they collected the evidence that
they would then use to corroborate the confession in the
autopsy report. The toxicology report that came back showed high
(13:32):
levels of alcohol and Cler's oxyzone, which is a prescription
muscle relaxant in the boys' system.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
My wife had toxemia, but they took all of her
medication at the hospital that gave her for that.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Because they wanted to claim that.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
The drugs and the alcohol, which I had no idea
what happened.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Marvin never mentioned that in his confession. We think that
the officers were trying to get that information out of
him by asking, well, how did you get the boy
to comply? But Marvin never makes any mention of the
drugs or the alcohol.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Remember, the victim's mother had reported that the last time
she'd seen her son was around one thirty PM, and
then first responders knocked on Marvin's door just seventy five
minutes later, around two forty five PM.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
So we worked with a toxicologist to calculate how long
it would have taken for the alcohol to reach the
levels that it did in the boy's system, and a
toxicologist puts that time period at ninety to one hundred
and fifty minutes, which is well outside the seventy five
minutes that Marvin would have had to commit all the
acts that he states in his false confession.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
The police search turned up a few other items, a
pair of shoes which Marvin said were torn up while
dumping the body. There's also blonde hairs from Marvin's car
and the pea coat.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
So he says that he wrapped the boy in a
pea coat and tossed the boy forty feet into the river.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
I don't care. Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn't throw a dead body
forty five feet. It was physically impossible.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
The other thing is that the boy's body was found
with his arms crossed, as though he had been placed
in the river. So it doesn't make sense that the
body would land with its arms crossed if tossed in
the way that Marvin described.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
And then when my lawyers first brought me the statement
I had seen where I had said something about the
pea coat and the shoes, and I explained them my
shoes were destroyed at work. And then I says that
pea coat was not even in my possession. My sisters
had been using and my mom would wear it was
my pea coat from the Navy. My sister's Patty used
it to most. Now she's blind, and so is my
(15:38):
little sister Lisa.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
But this was nineteen seventy five. DNA testing was not
available yet, so the state's expert, Mary Jane Burton, sent
the throat swabs for serological testing to find the blood
type and then examine the hares under a microscope.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Hair of my cross copee has now been debunked. It's
a junk science, but at the time it was considered valid,
and so Mary Jane Burton concluded that the hairs matched
the three year old boy, placing the boy in Marvin's car.
The other evidence that they obtained from Marvin was two
towels from his car, and Mary Jane Burton said that
(16:17):
there was ejaculate on one of the towels, which would
seemingly corroborate the sexual assault theory.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
So, while they awaited the results of the serological testing
from the victim's throat swabs, Marvin awaited trial under the
care of a state appointed psychiatrist, all while his appointed
attorney failed to develop any of the issues that discredit
his statement or the state's theory.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
My lead attorney he was Robert Dooling. The police chief's
name was Frank Louling. He was the family member of
the police chief that was prosecuting me.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
That would seem like a bit of a conflict.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Right at the time that he was representing me, he
was up for judgeship in Virginia.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
And then the prology results came back.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
My attorney said, ed the saliva, and here's samples that
it took from you. Inconclusive, they can't make a determination.
Beth was the reason I entered the guilty piece. Said
we didn't have anything to prove your innocence with. So
he said, what's the only way we will save your life?
So you should take the plead.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
But there are two issues with this advice to plead guilty,
one of which we'll address now.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
So in Virginia at this time, the death penalty was
only available for certain types of murder, murder for higher
murder where there is extortion, and then murder by an
inmate in prison. The crime that Marvin was accused of
very obviously did not fall into any of those categories,
and so there was no way death penalty would have
ever been on the table for this crime.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
So the threat of death touted by both his interrogators
and now by his own attorney didn't exist. Nonetheless, to
seal the deal, the evidence underlying his guilty plea still
needed to be heard by a judge, so hearing was
held in March nineteen seventy six, where the medical examiner,
(18:04):
Doctor Fierro, testified about the existence of sperm on the
throat swabs as well as the towel, followed by Mary
Jane Burton's findings that the hair from the pea coat
and car were consistent with the victims, at which point
the serological report was submitted to evidence, and importantly, doctor
(18:27):
Fierro represented that the report did not change her conclusions
from the preliminary report. Additionally, Marvin's attorney, Robert Doolan, did
not challenge that assertion, and Mary Jane Burton was not
called to testify about her findings or the sorology report.
Then a detective took the stand to testify about Marvin's confession.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
The prosecution at the hearing describe how Marvin took the
officers to the boy's body, but really it was the
officers who took Marvin to where the box was found.
The other point is that this was a highly publicized crime.
There were details about the crime and the newspapers, including
a detailed map of where the body was found.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
But Marvin's attorney didn't point that out either, or any
of the other issues that could have discredited his false confession,
and somehow an already terrible situation was made worse during
that time.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
I was not in touch with reality. The psychiatrists I
was seeing appointed by the state and he was keeping
me on senequon value and something else. I forget what
it is.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Do you even remember the verdict?
Speaker 2 (19:38):
I remember as the judge was saying something, he seemed
to be highly pissed. I want to say. During the
guilty plea hearing, my attorneys warned me to keep my
mouth shut, don't go in and a running my mouth
because I was telling them I was innocent. They said,
if you go and run in your mouth, the judge
ain't going to accept you guilty, please, and you go
get the death penalty.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
But the death plony was never on the table. It
wasn't available for the crime with which he was charged.
But Marvin, he was afraid of dying, and he was
promised that he would be out in fifteen years. Of
course we know that didn't happen.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
I was promised orally promised by both sides I'd be
out in fifteen years, but they didn't put it in writing.
(20:34):
I tried to keep the emotions out of it, because
I knew if I got the emotions in anxiety would
come about, and so with my depression, I was trying
to stay away from that because during that time I
had thought about it and actually tried at the city
jail to commit suicide. Remember I told you Amy on Senequan.
(20:54):
So I figured if I kept enough huh saved up,
then i'd take it all one time. There I could
probably get out of this situation. And don't ever think
people are doing it because they're guilty of something they're not.
You've ever been in a situation where nothing seems to
go right, No matter what you do, it goes wrong.
That was the kind of situation where I was living
(21:15):
in at that time. So I was tired of life.
I didn't want anything more to do with life. But
all I did was sleep for two days and then
I woke up. I spent my first five or six
years in protective custody the administration. They didn't want my
death on their head.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
I would assume that you're looked at as a bit
of a pariah by the other inmates. With a much
more uncomfortable than typical prison experience, Marvin began studying the
law god his trial transcripts as well as the related
records in which he found the serology report for the
(21:53):
throat swabs.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
When Mary Jane Burton did that blood testing, Marvin is
type A, the boys type Oh, the results come back
showing type of secretions excluding Marvin, and that's something that
they knew back in seventy six.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yet Marvin's own attorney never raised this clearly exculpatory report
while advising him to plead guilty and save himself from
certain death. I think it's worth mentioning that this attorney,
Robert Doolan, accepted a judgeship in Virginia soon after Marvin's conviction. Anyway,
this sorology report seems like it should have been very
(22:32):
useful on appeal.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
So, I think one of the most fascinating facts about
Marvin's case, in equally infuriating, is that Marvin had raised
a lot of the same arguments that we ultimately raised
in the petition in twenty twenty three that ultimately led
to his exoneration, but he was denied on procedural grounds,
or because that there were certain archaic statutes still on
(22:59):
the books that made it very difficult for somebody like
Marvin to prove his innocence. So for example, in Virginia,
it used to be that if you had fled guilty,
you could not petition for a writ of actual innocence.
Of course, we know there are lots of reasons why
somebody might plead guilty to a crime. They did it too,
and that hurdle was not removed until twenty twenty.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
And here it was barely creeping into the nineteen eighties.
But by the end of that decade we had the
advent of DNA testing, at which point Marvin petitioned to
test his evidence, but Virginia did not have a statute
that allowed for it until two thousand and one, and
Marvin hired an attorney named Mike Brickhill to handle his proceedings.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
By this time, my father had passed and he left
me a bit of an inheritance, so I paid mister
Brickhill to get my first runt of DNA testing done.
And the judge that was presiding over the case for
the DNA testing, he didn't know me, but he's telling
my attorney all about the case. Well, then Brickhill found
out Robert Dooling, my ex attorney. It was now judge
(24:06):
was sitting in the back of the courtroom so the
judge wasn't going to grant it, but the Commonwealth job
said no, no, no, y're are we agree. Let's get this
settle once and for all.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
The first round of testing for the throat swabs either
excluded Marvin or were inconclusive, but the victim could be
excluded from the hares on the PEA code they were
all female, but the hares from the car could not
yet be excluded.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
The problem was is they didn't get a sample of
the victims, so they couldn't identify whose DNA it was
they had. So the Commonwealth said they were not going
to recognize the results of the DNA testing. Furthermore, they're
going to oppose any more DNA testing that you request.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
And so the Supreme Court of Virginia denied the relief
a on a procedural grounds as untimely. But then they
also pointed to the fact that Marvin had pled guilty
and that there were still some swabs that hadn't been
excluded by DNA tests, and it still some of the
hairs hadn't been excluded as the boys.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Soon mister brick Hill enlisted the Innocence Project, who tried
to access a vial of blood that could provide a
DNA profile for the victim. But still the fact that
Marvin pled guilty was a major obstacle to relief. So
they also went to work on lobbying for legislation and
eventually the team at Arnold and Porter also came on board.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
When we joined forces with the Nison's project on this case,
our first goal was to prepare the clemency petition, but
we knew that that was a long shot, and so
we continued to collaborate with the ennosonce project working to
get Marvin released on a role while we would continue
to fight for his innocence. And so our strategy was
(25:53):
really to understand the facts of the case, not just
the DNA what was the timeline?
Speaker 1 (25:59):
So they I enlisted renowned false confession expert doctor Richard
Leo to develop the evidence that discredited the false confession,
as well as the toxicology expert who we mentioned earlier. Meanwhile,
Marvin visited the parole board for the twenty seventh time
in twenty twenty, where perhaps some of the new evidence
(26:19):
had an effect as he was released after nearly forty
five years.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Well, I went in December and I came out in November,
so it's forty four years and eleven months.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
That is your entire adult life to a certain extent.
I know that you were compensated ultimately, right, But money.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
I don't care about the money. They should take the
money to build the time machine and take me back
to the day before I've arrested and leave me the
hell alone. That's the way I think about it. I'd
rather have the time back than the money. I wasn't
at here as the world evolved when I came out
in April twenty twenty. I was still thinking it was
nineteen seventy five. Perfect example was when I made parole
(27:05):
in Virginia. If you're a registered sex offender and they
drop you off at your parole office, she gives me
the rules and then they put a monitoring ankle bracelet
on me and gave me this box GPS trackers, and
she was explaining how it can pinpoint you on the map.
So we go to leave take off down the road.
The thing starts ringing and I don't know what it is,
(27:26):
so I hit the button turned it off. It started
ringing again, so I turned it off again. All of
a sudden, my sister's phone rings and if my parole
officer telling her tell him to answer that phone. I
said that he' supposed to have the phone. He's been
in prison for the last forty five years. So anyway,
she called me again and I answered it, and we
(27:46):
talked for a minute, and then she said, by the way,
tell your sister to.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Slow down, because they knew exactly how fast she was driving.
After Marvin was paroled in twenty twenty, the fight to
(28:09):
clear his name continued, and through the efforts of the
Innocence Project in New York as well as the UVA
School of Law to educate legislators on the issues facing
many of the wrongfully convicted. New legislation passed first in
twenty twenty, making Marvin's guilty plea no longer an obstacle
to a wrint of actual innocence, and then another breakthrough
(28:32):
happened in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
In Virginia, they would only consider DNA testing done by
the state lab. And that's problematic because private laboratories sometimes
have more advanced technology and they might be able to
extract a DNA sample when the state lab might not
be able to. And so that law changed in twenty
(28:57):
twenty one and Virginia would allow for DNA testing by
a private laboratory. So we had three labs look at
the swaps that the medical examiner had taken from the
boy's mouth that they said at that time had sperm
on them, suggesting that the boy had been sexually assaulted.
Three different labs looked at the swabs and could not
(29:17):
find sperm, and that is problematic because sperm is one
of the hardiest cells in the human body, and so
experts have said that you can find sperm on a
degraded sample long after the epithelial skin cells have degraded.
You will find it on a sample that has been
(29:39):
poorly kept. And so the fact that it wasn't there
even though there was DNA from skin cells on the swabs,
that DNA just happened to match the boy, not Marvin.
That means that the boy likely wasn't sexually assaulted, and
that the substance in the boy's throat was likely his
own phlegm. So that was one piece of new evidence
(30:01):
that we used in our petition. The same labs had
also looked at the towel that Mary Jane Burton had
said contained sperm on it. And had concluded there was
also no sperm on the towel.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
The towel it was in my car, but I used
on cold days wipe down the windshield instead of waiting
for the defrostr I'd wipe the windshield down. That's what
that towel was.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
So it appears that the state's experts presented false testimony
to support the exphyxiation by sexual assault theory.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
And then the other DNA piece of evidence that we used.
Modern DNA testing of the eight hares found in Marvin's
car excluded the boy as the source from those hair,
so no longer placing the boy and Marvin's car.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Not only were the hares not the boy in.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
Question, they belonged to six six different people. Yes, yes,
which just shows you how junk science hair microscopy is.
Some of the hairs were female and the co Marvin's
sisters had been wearing. The new evidence shows that Marvin
confessed to an impossibility. What he pleaded to, what he
confessed to did not happen. There's no evidence of a
(31:10):
sexual assault. The new toxicology report shows that Marvin couldn't
have done everything that he said in his statement in
the seventy five minute window really is an impossible feat.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
As was the alleged forty foot launch of the body
into a riverbed where the victim was found with his
hands neatly folded on his chest. So they piled this
new evidence into their filing in April of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
After we filed the petition in twenty twenty three, we
had met with the Attorney General's office, had presented our case,
answered some of the questions that they had, and I
think left feeling good. But in these cases, you never
want to assume that the other side is going to
join your petition, no matter how strong of the case
you think you have. And I should say that the
(32:00):
Virginia Attorney General's Office did a fantastic job at doing
their own investigation and in fact uncovered exculpatory evidence that
we had no idea existed. So in Marvin's statement, he
says that he tore his shoe on the river bank
throwing the body into the river, And so they had
taken his shoe and done testing of the dirt on
(32:22):
the shoe to see if it matched the soil from
where the body was found. And there is a report
showing that it doesn't match, which is exculpatory.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
And while the state's reinvestigation continued through the spring of
twenty twenty three, a podcast called Admissible Shreds of Evidence
released twelve episodes covering twelve wrongful conviction cases tied to
one Virginia LabTech Mary Jane Burton, who was initially lauded
(32:52):
as a hero for having saved physical evidence from decades
old cases that would have otherwise been destroyed.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
Yeah, so it's unfortunate because people viewed her as a
hero because her preservation of this evidence allowed people to
test that evidence later on and clear their name. But
then it also begs the question, well, were they wrongfully
convicted in the first place because of Mary Jane Burton?
Speaker 1 (33:16):
And a whistleblower came forward who was positing exactly that
one who had also tipped the podcasters to Marvin's case.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Did you ever hear the thirteenth episode called the Fallout,
where the podcaster found out through the whistleblower about my case.
She described the whole case and she said that Mary
Jane Burton is being under pressure to come to these conclusions.
And they talked to the Attorney General and he told
them about the investigation they did. They basically said they
came away from the labs standing was this really a crime?
Speaker 1 (33:48):
After all, there was no evidence of sexual assault. There
was the presence of prescription drugs and alcohol which may
have been accidentally ingested, potentially leading to an unfortunate series
of events ending in death, and perhaps the Attorney General's
office came to the same conclusion, and they reached out
to Marvin's team.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
They told my attorneys that they're one hundred percent behind me.
I'm innocent. I need to be granted rit of actual innocence.
And then we finally got the oral arguments and I
sat in I was very very unhappy with what I heard,
and the judges when they got ready to close it,
and he says, well, you'll be hearing from us soon
rather than later. And sure enough, like twenty eight days later,
(34:29):
here comes the decision of the court.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Marvin got the order from the Virginia Court of Appeals
that he was exonerated.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
So when was the first time that you really truly
felt free?
Speaker 2 (34:40):
I was about two weeks later. I decided I'm going
down to visit my friend in Virginia Beach. He's another
Exgonnery that was in Greensville with me. He hasn't been
officially exonerated yet, but he was granted parole based upon
DNA testing. So I went down to seem and as
far out as I'd been from the city was the airport.
So as I passed by the exit, I was a
little nervous. I kept I kept thinking, oh man, what's
(35:04):
going to happen here? But that finally hit me by
the time I got to the Virginia Beach. Hey, I
can do anything I want to you now except break
the law.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Well, there's the first time for everything, right, since you
hadn't broken the law ever before in your entire life. Right,
So you know there are people who were at fault
in this case, right, Mary Jane Burton, your attorney, those
police officers who lied to you during the ten hour interrogation.
What would accountability look like?
Speaker 2 (35:35):
That's a good question. I thought, maybe, okay, maybe they
made a mistake. But when you find out how intentional
it was. The time I was finally exonerated of the judge,
three of the detectives, Mary Jane Burton, and one of
my attorneys had already passed. One of the guys asked
me he being a Christian, like I'm being a Christian.
(35:57):
You know, they say that someday everybody's going to be
judged by Guy. He asked me, what are you going
to do when your attorney steps up in front of
God to be judged. I said, I'm going to step
back a few steps. Kay's lightning hits him.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
I mean, Marvin will never get those forty nine years
of his life back. His family will never get that
time back, and the same is true for the victim
and the victim's family. Right the victim's family may never
know what happened to their loved one given the passage
of time. But I think we still try to achieve accountability. First,
(36:31):
I think we need acknowledgment from the state, and as
part of that, I think we need a public examination
into the decisions, the incentives, the culture that led to
this wrongful conviction in the first place, so that we
can prevent it from happening in the future. And alongside
of that, frankly, we need awareness of wrongful convictions, which
(36:55):
is why I think conversations like this are so important,
because we need people to understand that people confess to
crimes that they don't do. We need people to understand
that there is junk science being used in courtrooms to
convict people. And we also need justice reform to change
some of the archaic laws that are still on the
books that make it difficult for people like Marvin to
(37:18):
fight for the innocence.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
And so what do you hope that people take away
from Marvin's case in particular?
Speaker 3 (37:26):
I think an open mind. There is still a lot
of disbelief over the fact that somebody could confess to
a crime that they didn't do, and so I think
being aware of these cases and recognizing that it does happen,
and that there are certain circumstances and that create an
environment that is ripe for somebody to give a false confession.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I'm like this. I believe that most wrongful convictions happen
because you have a public defender, the state. They have
ample amount of funds to prosecute you, and they only
give attorneys ay fifteen hundred dollars to defend you, and
they're not going to investigate the case. They're just going
to assume you're guilty because the state charged you. So
(38:12):
that's where I think most wrongful convictions come about. Thanks
to DNA and other things, it's coming up. A lot
of innocent people are sitting in prison.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen
to this and all Lava for Good podcasts one week
early and add free by subscribing to Lava for Good
Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'd like to thank our production team,
Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as executive producers
Jason Vlahm, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wardis, and Jeff Clyburn. The
music in this production was supplied by three time Oscar
(38:49):
nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across
all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at
Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at
Lauren Brightfchecko. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for
Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One. We
have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in
this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed by
(39:10):
the individuals featured in this show are their own and
do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good.
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.