Introducing - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance - Preview

On April Fools Day 1999, 26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered in her Alliance, Ohio home. David Thorne, her ex-boyfriend and father of one of her children, was instantly a suspect. Another young man admitted to the murder,  and David breathed a sigh of relief, until the confessed murderer fingered David; “He paid me to do it.”  David was sentenced to life without parole. Two decades later, Pulitzer winner and podcast host, Maggie Freleng (Bone Valley Season 3: Graves County, Wrongful Conviction, Suave) launched a “live” investigation into David's conviction alongside Jason Baldwin (himself wrongfully convicted as a member of the West Memphis Three). Maggie had come to believe that the entire investigation of David was botched by the tiny local police department, or worse, covered up the real killer. Was Maggie correct? Was David’s claim of innocence credible? In Death & Deceit in Alliance, Maggie recounts the case that launched her career, and ultimately, “broke” her.” The results will shock the listener and reduce Maggie to tears and self-doubt. This is not your typical wrongful conviction story. In fact, it turns the genre on its head. It asks the question: What if our champions are foolish? 

New episodes of The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance are every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts. To binge the entire season, ad-free, subscribe to True Crime Clubhouse on Apple podcasts.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today, we have a special preview of Death and Deceit
in Alliance episode one. To share the podcast in its entirety,
go to Death and Deceit and Alliance in the feed
of the show The Burden.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Today.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
Date of July fourteenth, nineteen ninety nine, Wednesday, it's thirteen
oh nine hours. My name is Detective Bud Sampson. We're
in the rerevent A Plate Department interview room. Along with
me is Detective William Mucklow and Detective John Leach of
the Alliance Police Department. Also in the room is Joseph
Isaac Bolk. Okay, we're investigating his hone side of Yvonne Lee.

(00:33):
Can you tell us you're pardon this?

Speaker 1 (00:35):
The tape you're listening to is Joe Wilkes, a nineteen
year old boy confessing to murder.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
She was like, yeah, what are you doing here?

Speaker 2 (00:43):
She goes, I haven't seen you a long time. I
was like, oh, David just wanted me to stop out
and see how things were. And then we're sitday talking
for about three to five minutes, and then.

Speaker 4 (00:56):
I know this is gonna be hard, but we gotta
go through and you tell me what happened here? Where
were you sitting Were you sitting upstairs?

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Adopt? We were on the second floor up the third one. Okay,
and we're still doing the cops talking and unstory. Okay,
did che get up and trying to run? Where they run?

Speaker 5 (01:26):
Up the door?

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Up the door?

Speaker 5 (01:30):
This live and.

Speaker 4 (01:39):
Could you be.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
Thought of this?

Speaker 1 (01:43):
So, Joe just said, David told me to David as
in David Thorn. On April first, nineteen ninety nine, twenty

(02:07):
six year old Yvonne Lane was found with her throat
slashed dead in her home in Alliance, Ohio.

Speaker 6 (02:14):
Twenty six year old Ivonne Lane, a beautiful, vivacious woman,
found in a pool of her own blood, her throat
slashed while her children slapped.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
She was discovered by her mother, who had arrived to
take her six year old grandchild to kindergarten. Yvonne was
a mother to five kids. David Thorn was the father
of one of the children, although he and Yvonne were
not together anymore.

Speaker 6 (02:38):
The murder of a mother of five in her own
home stunt the small town of Alliance, Ohio.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
David had recently been ordered to pay child support three
hundred and fifty one dollars a month and Joe said
in his confession that he was hired by David Thorn
to kill yvon so he didn't have to pay, and
so he could have his to himself.

Speaker 6 (03:01):
The father of one of the children. The motive child
support Thorn was ordered to pay.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
To the untrained listener at one point myself too. This
seems like a pretty clear cut case, someone confessing and
someone with a motive. But when you start seaking, going
through documents and talking to people, the more complicated things get,

(03:27):
and it seems like just about everyone around Yvonne also
had a motive to kill her. This is death and
Deceit in Alliance, a real time investigation into whether David

(03:49):
Thorne killed Yvonne Lane. I'm Maggie Freeling. The murder of
Yvonne Lane and David Thorne's claims of innocence were never
the feature of a Netflix film or made for TV series,

(04:11):
but it wasn't a blip on the radar either. Journalists
were drawn to it for years.

Speaker 6 (04:16):
The attack grabbed headlines as police hunted for a killer.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
Like investigative journalist Dwayne Pullman, who you also heard in
the previous clips. Dwayne looked into David's claims for three years. However,
that was over a decade ago, and since then, former prosecutors,
private investigators, sleuth's and the like have all looked into
David's claim of innocence. Yet the question still remains.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
Did the system convict the wrong man?

Speaker 1 (04:46):
So here we are. Since Yvonne's murder, David has continually
said he had no involvement. He says he never paid
Joe Wilkes or anyone to murder his ex girlfriend and
the mother of child. When you make it to David's
official website WCODT dot org, you discover that this was

(05:08):
an incredibly brutal murder. Yvonn Lane's throat was slit to
the spine, almost decapitating her blood was all over the house.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
She begins to spur blood, pumping blood violently out.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Of her neck.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
The living room where her body was found looks like
someone took buckets of blood and threw it around the room.
It just didn't look like a hit or a random
murder to me. This looked personal. Police had to process
this absolute mess of a room, which I'm sure was
not easy, especially because they also had to get four

(05:49):
of her kids out of the house because all but
one of her children were home when she was killed,
but they were too young to be helpful to the police,
that is, except for one of them, a four year old,
who'd play a part in the investigation. The police say
they tried to get the kids through the crime scene
without seeing their mother's body, so some flubs may be

(06:12):
understandable if they're focusing on the boys, but not to
the extent that happened here. Part of the problem may
just be in experience. Murders in Alliance are rare. A
bad year might see two homicides, but most the city
saw just one. If any I feel confident saying at

(06:33):
minimum they were not ready to deal with this particular homicide.
Police say they covered Yvonne's body with a blanket from
one of the bedrooms, potentially contaminating any evidence on her.
As every watcher of CSI knows, this probably wasn't best practice.
No one wore shoe coverings or gloves to preserve evidence,

(06:56):
and investigators went back and forth stepping over for Yvonne's
body when crossing the room. A bloody footprint between her
legs apparently came from a detective, not the killer, and
the chief even brought a woman a civilian into the
crime scene. It was an absolute disaster. Evidence was collected

(07:19):
from the scene and never tested, and the evidence that
was didn't match David or Joe. Yet the case still
made it to trial, and that's thanks to Joe's confession,
the one you heard part of at the top of
the episode. The prosecutor said that David hired Joe to

(07:42):
kill Yvonne, and as you heard, that's the story that
Joe told. He said David gave him three hundred dollars
to kill Yvonne. After his confession, Joe took the police
to the alleged murder weapon, a three inch pocket knife
that he said he tossed in a storm drain. He
also showed them where he disposed of the pants he
allegedly wore when he killed vonn. Another key element of

(08:05):
the States case. A witness who said she saw Joe
the knight of the murder. Rose Moore, said Joe told
her and her boyfriend that he was on his way
to kill someone. Will come back to this later, but
I just want to point out that in this version,
the prosecution's version, this nineteen year old was so excited

(08:27):
about an evening out with his knife to kill someone
that he wanted even strangers to know about it. If true,
Joe's boast is pretty damning, but it's worth noting that
there was no physical evidence linking even Joe to the scene.
No fingerprints, no shoeprints or DNA. The pants Joe allegedly

(08:51):
wore when he killed Van there was no blood on them,
much less anything linking David to the crime. Sure, Joe
took cops to knife, but there's no evidence linking that
knife to the murder. In fact, the prosecution will rest
on witness testimony alone. But some witnesses were never called.

(09:12):
And here's a key one. Keep him in mind. A
neighbor who saw a man leaving Yvonne's house in the
morning after her murder. He told cops that man was
not David or Joe.

Speaker 7 (09:25):
I was not asked to testify in the trial of
David Thorne. I was showing a photo of David Thorne
in December of two thousand. That was not the man
I saw leaving the residents in nine sixteen of mine.
I was showing a photo of Joseph Wilkes, a confess
murder in December of two thousand. It was not the
man I saw leaving the residents of Nice six.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
But the jury never heard this, and after deliberating just
three hours, David was convicted of paying Joe Wilkes three
hundred dollars to murder Yvonne Lane. He was sentenced to
life without the possibility of parole. Joe took a plea
deal of thirty to life for his cooperation. He could
be out of prison very soon.

Speaker 6 (10:09):
It didn't take a jury long to convict David Thorn.
Wilkes pleaded guilty. Both are now serving life sentences.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
The entire conviction of David Thorn rests on Joe's testimony.
But was Joe telling the truth, and if he was lying,
why he lost almost as much as David did. But
I'm skeptical. Hiring a hitman to kill your ex over
three hundred and fifty one dollars a month seems like

(10:39):
more risk than it's worth. Sure, back then the amount
was more like six hundred and today's dollars, and that
might feel like a lot of money to fork over
monthly if you're working at an hourly job, which David was.
But David was making decent money at a high end
car shop and compared to the motive of other folks.

(11:01):
To me, David's alleged motive appears week. Evidence uncovered in
later investigations pointed to other potential killers, like any one
of the men who fathered Yvonne's four other kids, or
even members of law enforcement Yvonne was reported to be
sleeping with, or the man scene leaving her house after

(11:25):
she's presumed dead. Journalist Dwayne Pullman was equally as intrigued.

Speaker 6 (11:32):
This case is filled with sex, secrets and surprises.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
And things only got more complicated when I talked to David.

Speaker 5 (11:42):
All Right, you there, yep, allowed on that way, Okay,
how are you doing?

Speaker 3 (11:56):
Not too bad?

Speaker 1 (11:57):
When I first spoke to David, he had done twenty
one years, almost half of his life in prison, and
there seemed to be no hope. Left pretty much dead
in the water.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
We need new evidence.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
David didn't have a lawyer anymore. He ran out of
money in all of his appeals. If David's going to
get out of prison by proving his innocence, he needs
a lawyer and investigator to find new evidence to show
he deserves a new trial.

Speaker 3 (12:25):
That's why I would have been pushing so hard, is
to find.

Speaker 7 (12:29):
A private investigator that.

Speaker 3 (12:31):
Would kind of go ahead and kind of almost start
the case anew.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
And that's proven difficult to find. Investigators can cost thousands,
and finding someone to take a case pro bono, that is,
without pay, is not exactly easy