March 4, 2020 • 29 mins
So their theory is that a wandering necrophiliac comes across the body and defiles it?
Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin tell the story of how five Chicago teens were wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of their classmate - and how prosecutors tried to explain away the DNA that proved them innocent. This case happened during the early 1990s, when the media was saturated with misleading stories about youth of color committing violent crimes in groups. This "superpredator" narrative drove the wrongful prosecution of the so-called Central Park Five “wolfpack” -- but it didn’t stop there.
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This episode includes story line about and clips from Retro Report, The Superpredator Scare.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And I'm Steve Drusen.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Last week, we told you the story of Robert Davis,
a false confession case that happened in Virginia. Today, we're
going to tell you about a case out of Chicago,
the story of a violent and tragic crime that took
the life of a young girl. But there's a larger
reason why we want to talk about this case because
of what it also took from not one, but five
innocent teenage boys and from their families and communities. This
(00:31):
case happened during what we now call the super Predator era,
the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. The news media was
saturated with stories of urban crime, drugs and gangs, and
in particular, sensationalized stories about black and brown youth committing
violent crimes in groups. This narrative is often associated with
(00:52):
New York City. It drove the wrongful prosecution of the
so called Central Park five wolf Pack, but it didn't
stop there. Today we're going to tell you about a
group of teenage boys whose false confessions transformed them into
Chicago's own wolf pack. They're known as the Dixmore five.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
You know, Chicago may be called the second City, but
in when it comes to false confessions, we don't take
a back seat to anybody, not New York or any
other jurisdiction for that matter. We're home to more false
confessions than any other city in the United States. We're
home to more juvenile false confessions, and we're also the
home of more cases in which there are multiple false confessions.
(01:42):
And over the years, the Center on Wrongful Convictions has
obtained exonerations in many of these cases, all of which
were from African American teenagers in the Chicago area.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Marquette Park four, Uptown seven, Englewood four, Dix Moore five.
These numbers start to add up, and the thing is
each one of these cases involves innocent African American teenagers
in groups confessing to crimes they didn't commit.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Of course, the most famous case like this was New
York's Central Park five case. In April of nineteen eighty nine,
five teenage boys were charged with the sexual assault and
the attempted murder of a female jogger in New York's
Central Park. The boys falsely confessed to beating this woman
(02:30):
within an inch of her life and leaving her in
the woods to die. The Central Park five confessions were
driven by race wolfpacks. Wilding was a whole new language
to describe groups of African American and Latino teenagers, and
it created a level of fear in New York City
(02:52):
and around the country that I had never seen before.
So when we began to look at the Dixmore case,
the case of the Central Part five was ringing in
my years.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
It was November of nineteen ninety one and fourteen year
old Kateresa Matthews was in the eighth grade. She lived
with her mom in Dixmore, a suburb on the south
side of Chicago, surrounded by a tight knit extended family
and community. Every day, after school, Kateresa followed the same routine.
She'd walk to her great grandmother's house, where she'd do
her homework, talk on the phone, and do whatever fourteen
(03:28):
year old girls do after school, she was waiting until
her mom came home from work to go back to
her own house. Kateresa followed this routine religiously until November nineteenth,
nineteen ninety one. When she doesn't show up at her
great grandmother's house after school, her family panics, They call
the police and a search begins, but for three weeks
(03:50):
there's no sign of Kateresa until December eighth, nineteen ninety one.
That's when Kateresa's body is found lying in a wooded
field next to the Inner Highway that runs through Dixmore.
She's on her back, partially undressed, with her pants draped
across her lower body. On her chest is a spent
casing from a twenty five caliber bullet. She's been shot
(04:13):
once in the mouth. Even though Katse had been missing
for three weeks, the medical examiner concludes that she's been
killed recently, right around the time her body's found. There
are several reasons for this. For one thing, rigor mortis
is present when she's found. That usually disappears about twenty
four to forty eight hours after death. Her body is
(04:34):
also still bleeding when she's discovered, which she wouldn't expect
if she'd been killed much earlier. And also, when a
body's been lying outside for a long time, there are
usually signs like animal or insect bites. There's nothing like
that here, and the medical examiner finds something else too,
seamen on Katse's body. She's been raped.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
This was an awful crime. It's the worst.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
I mean, it's every parent's nightmare to have this happen
to their child.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
You know, when you think of a crime like this,
you don't think of it as something the teenagers would do. Typically,
teenage crimes are impulsive crimes. There's not a lot of
planning or premeditation. They happen in the spur of the moment.
But this crime clearly required some forethought.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
For eleven long months, the investigation into Kateresa's death goes
nowhere until fall nineteen ninety two, when a teenage boy
tells police that he saw Kateresa getting into a car
with some friends around the time of her disappearance. Police
decide to question those friends, starting with Robert Veil on
October twenty ninth, nineteen ninety two. Now, Robert's fourteen years old,
(05:40):
but he has pretty severe intellectual limitations that make him
think more like a five year old. He's questioned for
hours without a parent or a lawyer present, off camera,
and in the end he signs a confession prepared by
his interrogator, and the story in this confession is brutal.
(06:03):
Robert says he and four other African American teenage boys
kidnapped a girl they knew from school. They gang raped
her as she pleaded with them to stop, and then
they shot her once in the mouth. It was a
story of an animalistic group of black teenagers attacking their
classmate for sport.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
The level of depravity in this story was so out
of bounds that it made me question whether it was true.
But it also had an eerily familiar ring to it,
and for me, the significance was as I was seeing
the same explanations in different cases, which made me begin
to feel it like maybe there was a script that
(06:46):
was getting passed around among Chicago police officers.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Only hours after Robert Veale confesses, police bring in one
of his supposed co perpetrators, fifteen year old Robert Taylor.
He's a kid from a loving and protective family, but
his parents didn't know he was at the police station
being interrogated. Hours later, his signature appears on a confession too,
and that confession tells a similarly vicious story. The same
(07:12):
five African American teenagers lured Katsa into a car, then
raped her and shot her in a field.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
The super Predator era was a period of pronounced moral
panic in the United States that focused on young people,
race and crime.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
That's our colleague and friend, Perry Moriarty. She's a professor
of law at the University of Minnesota and an expert
on juvenile justice and the era of the super predator.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
The front end marker is more than likely the Central
Park five case that was April of nineteen eighty nine,
and that began an era when, in the name of
public safety, in the name of being tough on crime,
law enforcement authorities dropped any pretense of treating children as
children and prosecuted them as adults. If they were black
(08:04):
and brown children, they were adultified, either by law or
by connotation, and certainly by the media. A jogger murdered
in New York Central Park. A little girl gunned down
in her family's car.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
In Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
A judge has sentenced two boys for killing another child
who refused to steal candy for them. There's a tidal
wave of juvenile violent crime right over the horizon, and
some who study it say the worst is.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yet to come.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Terms like wilding, beast chill, predatory. In New York City
newspapers alone, the term wilding appeared one hundred and fifty
six times in articles over the eight years following the
Central Park five arrests. To put it in perspective, just
a few months after the Central Park five case, a
(08:51):
large group of Italian and Irish, predominantly teenagers in benson Hurst, Brooklyn,
chased down and killed a young black teenager named you
Seph Hawkins. And the headlines did not say wilding. They
did not say beastschill. They did not even say gang.
They said a group of white teenagers.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Now the police have two confessions that implicate the same
five teenagers, but they're not done yet. Next up is
Cheyenne Sharp, seventeen years old, the third supposed co perpetrator.
He's questioned for nearly twenty four hours before he also
confesses and implicates the other four. And it's the same
brutal story, a group of African American teenage boys terrorizing
(09:44):
their classmate for fun.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Now you have to understand how these confessions are taken.
These confessions are scripted, usually by a prosecutor from the
State Attorney's office. Sometimes they're written by police, and these
scripts contain a narrative, including character development. Kids are described
(10:07):
as thugs. There's usually references to gang membership. Women are
called bitches and hoes. The scriptwriter in these cases is
doing two things. He's painting the suspects in a way
that nobody can ever think of them as teenagers. And
he's also painting them in a way that nobody and
(10:29):
that means nobody in the public and nobody on the
jury can have an ounce of sympathy for them. And
in doing so, he's making a script that is about
as rock solid as a roote to conviction as one
can imagine.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
So far, the police have confessions from three of the
Dixmore five, and within days they bring in the two
remaining teenagers for questioning two brothers, seventeen year old James
Harden and fifteen year old Jonathan Barr. The boys are
interrogated for hours, but their father had always told them
never sign anything prepared by the police. Somehow a miracle
(11:11):
they remember these words and they don't confess, but they're
still named in the other three teenagers' statements. So all
five are on the.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Hook, in part because they were arresting and prosecuting kids
in mass in groups. Law enforcement became very adept in
that period at pitting kids against each other. During the
interrogation process and using kids against each other to extract
false confessions.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
When you look at these cases of multiple false confessions,
you see a similar pattern. First of all, the police
usually start with the most vulnerable, most naive, most gullible
of the suspects, and they focused in this case on
Robert Field. He was the weak link. Then they get
a confession from Robert Veel and what do they do
(11:59):
with that confession They use it as a battering ram
to plow over all of the other defendants. This is
how it works. The first suspect comes in and the
police officers tell them that they know that he was
involved in this crime and nothing that suspect can say
is going to change their mind. But they don't think
(12:21):
he was the one who actually raped anybody or killed anybody.
He was just a follower. The suspect is pressured into
adopting a story in which he is a passive participant
to the crime and which he fingers his co defendants
as the more active participants. Then, once that suspect confesses,
(12:43):
they bring that confession to the next in line and
they go over the same thing again. We don't think
you committed the crime. He's telling us that you committed
the crime. We know you were there, but maybe you
just held down her arm while they were raping and
killing her. Each suspect is vying for the least culpable role,
(13:07):
and at the end of the day, this is a
very effective way to get confessions from multiple suspects.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
In this case, the dominoes are falling and each one
of them eventually agrees to a story in which James
Harden is the one who actually places the gun inside
Kateresa's mouth and pulls the trigger. It's no coincidence that
James is one of the last ones questioned.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Here, That's right. And at the end of the day,
police got confessions from Robert Field, Robert Taylor, and Cheyenne's Sharp,
but they couldn't get James Harden and Jonathan Barr to confess.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Based on the confessions, all five teenagers are charged with
the assault and murder of Katsa Matthews and That Dixmore
five are transformed into Chicago's own Wolfback. Pretty soon, though,
it becomes apparent that this case has major problems for starters.
The teenager's versions of what happened are wildly inconsistent. They
(14:06):
can't agree on how they met up with Katrisa, what
the group did before they ended up in that field,
by the interstate, or who assaulted Katsa, and in what order.
In fact, one of the only things they do agree
on was that Katsa had been murdered the day she
disappeared November nineteenth. But remember this was contradicted by the
medical examiner, who determined that she'd been killed three weeks later,
(14:29):
around the time her body was found. And then here
comes the biggest problem. After all five teenagers were charged
but before trial, DNA testing from the seaman left on
Kateresa's body excludes all five suspects. Instead, this DNA belongs
to a single, unidentified male.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
This is might drop evidence, the kind of evidence that
should have resulted in these cases being dismissed before trial.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Exactly these confessions had been proven false. But instead of
dropping its case, the state offers deals to two members
of the Dixmore Five, Cheyenne Sharp and Robert Viel. If
the boys agree to testify against their co defendants, they'll
receive much shorter sentences. Yanna and Robert decide to take
the deal, while the state moves forward with trials for
(15:18):
the other three, and those trials, of course, are based
on the stories told in the confessions despite the DNA.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
You talk here about tunnel vision. This is what happens.
The police officers lock into a story. They become invested
in this notion of a gang rape, and they can't
get out of that box exactly.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
And you see this when they have to deal with
the DNA and the prosecutor addresses it during closing arguments.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
And what does the prosecutor say. He explains the presence
of DNA as the work of a necrophiliac.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Now see if this isn't exactly a household term. What
is a necrophiliac?
Speaker 2 (15:55):
It's someone who has sex with dead bodies.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
I knew you know that. This is officially the most
batchet theory I think I've ever heard, By the way.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
I couldn't agree more So, let's get this straight.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
The theory here at the Dixmore five trial was that
five teenage boys sexually assault this victim. They don't leave
a trace of themselves behind. Then here comes this wandering
necrophiliac who comes across the body and decides to defile it.
I mean, we've heard a lot of excuses for DNA
in our time, but this one may take the prize.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
It's unbelievable that they would even present this to a jury.
It's that insane. But you have to understand in the
context of a climate of fear, the irrational becomes rational. Now,
in the opening statement in this case, the prosecutor said
that these men, pointing at the five teenagers, these men
(16:48):
came from a world where so called friends were turned
into a pack of jackals hunting down their prey, and
then they were done with it, killing it for sport jackals.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Can you believe that this really is Chicago's own wolf pack?
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Again, it's a lot easier to fathom locking up a young, beastial,
feral thing than it is a child, which is in
fact what we were doing.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
And when you talk about children as if they were animals,
it becomes so much easier to throw away their lives.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
To just not worry about doing that last bit of
DNA testing figure out whose DNA it was actually left
on Katriza Matthew's body.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
It becomes easier to try them as adults. It becomes
easier to sentence them to life sentences or even the
death penalty. It becomes easier to just lock them up
and throw away the key.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
The dehumanizing story embedded in these boys confessions. While it works,
each that dix Moore five is convicted and the three
who don't cut deals, Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr, and James
Harden are sentenced to life in prison. Cheyenne Sharp and
Robert Veale serve their time and are eventually released with
murder convictions on the records, But the other three languish
(18:16):
behind bars forgotten people.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
But they were not forgotten by their parents or their
loved ones. You know, I'll never forget learning that Jonathan
Barr and James Hardin's dad would literally drive around with
boxes full of files regarding their cases in his trunk,
trying to get lawyers interested in taking his son's cases.
(18:42):
And Robert Taylor's family did similar things. They would write
letters and letters and letters to lawyers begging them for help. Finally,
in twenty ten, we learned about the case of the
Dixmore five. Our colleague Josh tepfer knew a public defender
name named Jennifer Blagg who had represented Robert Taylor on appeal.
(19:04):
She referred the case to Josh and we agreed to
take Robert's case.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
By this time, Robert was in his early thirties.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
That's right, he had served over fifteen years of his sentence.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Robert Taylor grew up with his parents, sister, and brother
in Harvey, Illinois, right next to Dixmore. From day one,
Robert's dad, a Navy vet, was his strongest defender. Robert
Senior refused to be broken by the fact that his
son had gone to prison because of the words he'd
signed his name to. When the Center on Wrongful Convictions
agreed to take Robert's case, his dad became a major
(19:37):
presence in our lives. I can still remember the smell
of his leather jacket when he hugged us and welcomed
us to his family's struggle. Around the same time, organizations
like the Innocence Project and Exoneration Project got involved in
representing other members of the Dixmore five. Our collective first
priority was identifying whose DNA had been left at the
(19:58):
crime scene.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
We had a new tool called CODIS, the Combined DNA
Index System, and over the timeframe since the advent of
DNA testing in the late nineteen eighties, that database had grown,
and so the chances of finding the identity of the
person who raped and killed Kateresa.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Matthews had grown exactly. I mean, let's remember for a
moment that we're talking here about DNA that was taken
from the semen left on a rape victim. You cannot
ask for better evidence than that, and it's just sitting
there forgotten. How can you not want to know whose
DNA that was? Isn't that the most important question in
this case had been sitting there unanswered for fifteen years?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
But where was it sitting? That was their first challenge.
And after a year of searching, we found the DNA
in some warehouse or in some trailer, and we then
had to get permission from the court to test the DNA.
We then sent the DNA off for testing to a lab,
and we waited and the lab extracted a profile, and
(21:02):
when that profile was extracted, it was run through the
CODA database. A miracle of miracles. In March of twenty eleven,
we got a hit and the hit was to a man,
not a boy, a man named Willie Randolph.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Now Willie Randolph was a troubled guy. He was much
older than Kateresa or the dixmore five. When Kateresa disappeared.
He was thirty three years old, more than twice her age.
Willy had been in and out of prison his entire
adult life for all sorts of different offenses. In fact,
he'd been paroled only a few months before Kateresa was
killed to a house within a mile of where she lived,
(21:44):
and Willie Randolph had previously been accused of rape in
that very same field by the interstate where Kateresa's body
was found. This is a person with a history of
these kinds of attacks, and his DNA and no one
else's was present at the crime scene. Finally, it all
made sense.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
When we learned the identity of Willy Randolph, when we
investigated his background, when we learned the history of abusing
and sexually assaulting women, including young women teenagers, we thought
this case was over. We thought we are going to
get these boys out tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Exactly, there's no relationship at all between Willy Randolph and
any of the Dixmore five. He's not mentioned in any
of their confessions.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
And why would there be a relationship. This is a
man with a long history of violence in his record,
and none of these boys had a history of violence.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Right, He's twice their age when they were growing up
in the neighborhood. He was in prison.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Willie Randolph is the guy who did this to Katrisa Matthews.
The DNA proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Now we had to convince the prosecutors to do the
right thing.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
But as incredible as it sounds, the state wouldn't let
go of their necrophilia theory, and the case dragged on
for months.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
You know, old habits die hard. The state actually suggested
again and maybe Willie Randolph was their mystery necrophiliac.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
This is an unbelievable thing. Still, they're clinging to this
theory that five teenage boys assaulted Kateresa Matthews, left no
trace of their DNA behind, and here comes Willy Randolph,
the older man, the man of the history of assaults
and violent crime and rape in that very field, and
just happens to defile her body. It beggars belief.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
It still took six to seven months to investigate whether
there was any link between Willie Randolph and any of
the Dix More five, there wasn't one.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Meanwhile, we were coming back to court every few weeks
to get an update on the state's investigation and to
ask the judge is today the day of exoneration? And
for six long months we were disappointed. I remember coming
home after those court dates and crying with frustration that
I was able to go home. Robert Taylor, our clients
had to go back to a prison cell.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Yeah. I remember pulling out my hair and I had
hair back there.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
That's where it all went.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
That's where it all went because we had the best
possible evidence of their innocence. And not only were they
refusing to clear our clients, Willie Randolph was on the street.
He was out of prison on parole, and he could
be doing this to somebody else. It was driving me crazy.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Every time before we walked into that courtroom, I remember
watching Robert hold his whole body just taught. His muscles
would be tense, and you could see those twenty years
of trauma that he had endured and the toll it
had taken on him. He couldn't relax into the possibility
that it was going to be his day that day,
and it wasn't his day.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
For months until it finally was.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
On November third, twenty eleven. Robert Ville, Cheyenne Sharp, James Harden,
Jonathan Barr and Robert Taylor were exonerated. Their convictions were
thrown out. Nearly twenty years to the day after Kateresa
matthews disappearance, The Dix Moore five had wrongly served a
total of more than fifty years in prison. Eventually, Willie
(25:17):
Randolph was charged with the attack on Kateresa Matthews based
on DNA evidence. He's still awaiting trial today. We're proud
to have helped free the Dix Moore five, but as
our colleague Josh Tepfer put it, this is not justice.
Justice would have happened a long time ago.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Hello, Hey, Robert, Stephen Waura A long time. I'll see
too long, too long. Good to hear your voice.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
What's going on with you these days, Robert? I'm hanging
in now. How's your son doing?
Speaker 2 (25:49):
I got picked boys. You got to pick him up
the school. Yeah, I'll picking him up every day.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Held your point, haven't going away?
Speaker 1 (25:58):
What's your favorite thing to do with your son, Robert?
Speaker 2 (26:01):
I'd like Sam Smatters.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
So you can't give those twenty years back to Robert,
or to any of the Dixmore five, or any of
the guys we're going to talk about on this podcast.
You can't give that time back, but what you can
do is make the years decades that they lost mean something.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
One of the greatest tragedies in my opinion, and I've
been teaching about the Central Park five case for years
and to this day. When I introduced the case in
my criminal law classes, the one thing that people don't
know about the case is that the kids were innocent.
So few people knew that even after Matthias Rayes confessed,
(26:40):
even after these kids were let out of prison, even
after they were compensated. It is the footnote in this
story that gets lost in our collective consciousness, maybe not anymore. Finally,
there is attention being brought to who they actually were
and what they suffered, and.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
That's a big part of how Steve and I approach
these cases.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Right.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
It's about, of course getting them out of prison, fighting
for them, opening up those doors, but it's also about
telling the stories. It's about making it meaningful. It's about
saying their name. It's about not forgetting what happened to
them and changing it so it doesn't happen again. Like
the Central Park five, the story of the Dixmore five
(27:20):
is about convictions that were driven by prejudice rather than proof.
But the injustices of the super Predator era were not
just a New York City thing or a Chicago thing,
And although we may want to think so, they're not
even really a nineteen nineties thing. In times of great
fear or moral panic, prejudices can distort the search for
the truth. Mistaken assumptions, faulty investigations, and flawed evidence are
(27:45):
all still real, and they still cause wrongful convictions across
the country. Every day. We tell these stories so that
we can learn from them, so that one day there
won't be any more. Dix Moore fives to all the dicksive,
but especially to our client and friend, Robert Taylor. You've
endured years of injustice while remaining a pillar of strength
(28:08):
and resilience. To you and your families, we wish you
all the best. Thanks for letting us tell your story.
Next week, we'll tell you the story of a false
confession out of Arkansas, where a twelve year old boy
maintains his innocence in a murder case until police turn
off the cameras. Wrongful conviction. False Confessions is a production
(28:36):
of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company
number one Special thanks to our executive producer Jason Flamm
and the team at Signal Company Number one. Executive producer
Kevin wardis Senior producer and Pope, and additional production and
editing by Connor Hall. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph.
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Nyrol and you can follow me on Twitter at Sdrizzen.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
For more information on the show, visit wrongfulconvictionpodcast dot com
and be sure to follow the show on Instagram at
Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on
Twitter at wrong Conviction
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And I'm Steve Drusen.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Last week, we told you the story of Robert Davis,
a false confession case that happened in Virginia. Today, we're
going to tell you about a case out of Chicago,
the story of a violent and tragic crime that took
the life of a young girl. But there's a larger
reason why we want to talk about this case because
of what it also took from not one, but five
innocent teenage boys and from their families and communities. This
(00:31):
case happened during what we now call the super Predator era,
the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. The news media was
saturated with stories of urban crime, drugs and gangs, and
in particular, sensationalized stories about black and brown youth committing
violent crimes in groups. This narrative is often associated with
(00:52):
New York City. It drove the wrongful prosecution of the
so called Central Park five wolf Pack, but it didn't
stop there. Today we're going to tell you about a
group of teenage boys whose false confessions transformed them into
Chicago's own wolf pack. They're known as the Dixmore five.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
You know, Chicago may be called the second City, but
in when it comes to false confessions, we don't take
a back seat to anybody, not New York or any
other jurisdiction for that matter. We're home to more false
confessions than any other city in the United States. We're
home to more juvenile false confessions, and we're also the
home of more cases in which there are multiple false confessions.
(01:42):
And over the years, the Center on Wrongful Convictions has
obtained exonerations in many of these cases, all of which
were from African American teenagers in the Chicago area.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Marquette Park four, Uptown seven, Englewood four, Dix Moore five.
These numbers start to add up, and the thing is
each one of these cases involves innocent African American teenagers
in groups confessing to crimes they didn't commit.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Of course, the most famous case like this was New
York's Central Park five case. In April of nineteen eighty nine,
five teenage boys were charged with the sexual assault and
the attempted murder of a female jogger in New York's
Central Park. The boys falsely confessed to beating this woman
(02:30):
within an inch of her life and leaving her in
the woods to die. The Central Park five confessions were
driven by race wolfpacks. Wilding was a whole new language
to describe groups of African American and Latino teenagers, and
it created a level of fear in New York City
(02:52):
and around the country that I had never seen before.
So when we began to look at the Dixmore case,
the case of the Central Part five was ringing in
my years.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
It was November of nineteen ninety one and fourteen year
old Kateresa Matthews was in the eighth grade. She lived
with her mom in Dixmore, a suburb on the south
side of Chicago, surrounded by a tight knit extended family
and community. Every day, after school, Kateresa followed the same routine.
She'd walk to her great grandmother's house, where she'd do
her homework, talk on the phone, and do whatever fourteen
(03:28):
year old girls do after school, she was waiting until
her mom came home from work to go back to
her own house. Kateresa followed this routine religiously until November nineteenth,
nineteen ninety one. When she doesn't show up at her
great grandmother's house after school, her family panics, They call
the police and a search begins, but for three weeks
(03:50):
there's no sign of Kateresa until December eighth, nineteen ninety one.
That's when Kateresa's body is found lying in a wooded
field next to the Inner Highway that runs through Dixmore.
She's on her back, partially undressed, with her pants draped
across her lower body. On her chest is a spent
casing from a twenty five caliber bullet. She's been shot
(04:13):
once in the mouth. Even though Katse had been missing
for three weeks, the medical examiner concludes that she's been
killed recently, right around the time her body's found. There
are several reasons for this. For one thing, rigor mortis
is present when she's found. That usually disappears about twenty
four to forty eight hours after death. Her body is
(04:34):
also still bleeding when she's discovered, which she wouldn't expect
if she'd been killed much earlier. And also, when a
body's been lying outside for a long time, there are
usually signs like animal or insect bites. There's nothing like
that here, and the medical examiner finds something else too,
seamen on Katse's body. She's been raped.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
This was an awful crime. It's the worst.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
I mean, it's every parent's nightmare to have this happen
to their child.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
You know, when you think of a crime like this,
you don't think of it as something the teenagers would do. Typically,
teenage crimes are impulsive crimes. There's not a lot of
planning or premeditation. They happen in the spur of the moment.
But this crime clearly required some forethought.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
For eleven long months, the investigation into Kateresa's death goes
nowhere until fall nineteen ninety two, when a teenage boy
tells police that he saw Kateresa getting into a car
with some friends around the time of her disappearance. Police
decide to question those friends, starting with Robert Veil on
October twenty ninth, nineteen ninety two. Now, Robert's fourteen years old,
(05:40):
but he has pretty severe intellectual limitations that make him
think more like a five year old. He's questioned for
hours without a parent or a lawyer present, off camera,
and in the end he signs a confession prepared by
his interrogator, and the story in this confession is brutal.
(06:03):
Robert says he and four other African American teenage boys
kidnapped a girl they knew from school. They gang raped
her as she pleaded with them to stop, and then
they shot her once in the mouth. It was a
story of an animalistic group of black teenagers attacking their
classmate for sport.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
The level of depravity in this story was so out
of bounds that it made me question whether it was true.
But it also had an eerily familiar ring to it,
and for me, the significance was as I was seeing
the same explanations in different cases, which made me begin
to feel it like maybe there was a script that
(06:46):
was getting passed around among Chicago police officers.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Only hours after Robert Veale confesses, police bring in one
of his supposed co perpetrators, fifteen year old Robert Taylor.
He's a kid from a loving and protective family, but
his parents didn't know he was at the police station
being interrogated. Hours later, his signature appears on a confession too,
and that confession tells a similarly vicious story. The same
(07:12):
five African American teenagers lured Katsa into a car, then
raped her and shot her in a field.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
The super Predator era was a period of pronounced moral
panic in the United States that focused on young people,
race and crime.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
That's our colleague and friend, Perry Moriarty. She's a professor
of law at the University of Minnesota and an expert
on juvenile justice and the era of the super predator.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
The front end marker is more than likely the Central
Park five case that was April of nineteen eighty nine,
and that began an era when, in the name of
public safety, in the name of being tough on crime,
law enforcement authorities dropped any pretense of treating children as
children and prosecuted them as adults. If they were black
(08:04):
and brown children, they were adultified, either by law or
by connotation, and certainly by the media. A jogger murdered
in New York Central Park. A little girl gunned down
in her family's car.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
In Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
A judge has sentenced two boys for killing another child
who refused to steal candy for them. There's a tidal
wave of juvenile violent crime right over the horizon, and
some who study it say the worst is.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yet to come.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Terms like wilding, beast chill, predatory. In New York City
newspapers alone, the term wilding appeared one hundred and fifty
six times in articles over the eight years following the
Central Park five arrests. To put it in perspective, just
a few months after the Central Park five case, a
(08:51):
large group of Italian and Irish, predominantly teenagers in benson Hurst, Brooklyn,
chased down and killed a young black teenager named you
Seph Hawkins. And the headlines did not say wilding. They
did not say beastschill. They did not even say gang.
They said a group of white teenagers.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Now the police have two confessions that implicate the same
five teenagers, but they're not done yet. Next up is
Cheyenne Sharp, seventeen years old, the third supposed co perpetrator.
He's questioned for nearly twenty four hours before he also
confesses and implicates the other four. And it's the same
brutal story, a group of African American teenage boys terrorizing
(09:44):
their classmate for fun.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Now you have to understand how these confessions are taken.
These confessions are scripted, usually by a prosecutor from the
State Attorney's office. Sometimes they're written by police, and these
scripts contain a narrative, including character development. Kids are described
(10:07):
as thugs. There's usually references to gang membership. Women are
called bitches and hoes. The scriptwriter in these cases is
doing two things. He's painting the suspects in a way
that nobody can ever think of them as teenagers. And
he's also painting them in a way that nobody and
(10:29):
that means nobody in the public and nobody on the
jury can have an ounce of sympathy for them. And
in doing so, he's making a script that is about
as rock solid as a roote to conviction as one
can imagine.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
So far, the police have confessions from three of the
Dixmore five, and within days they bring in the two
remaining teenagers for questioning two brothers, seventeen year old James
Harden and fifteen year old Jonathan Barr. The boys are
interrogated for hours, but their father had always told them
never sign anything prepared by the police. Somehow a miracle
(11:11):
they remember these words and they don't confess, but they're
still named in the other three teenagers' statements. So all
five are on the.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Hook, in part because they were arresting and prosecuting kids
in mass in groups. Law enforcement became very adept in
that period at pitting kids against each other. During the
interrogation process and using kids against each other to extract
false confessions.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
When you look at these cases of multiple false confessions,
you see a similar pattern. First of all, the police
usually start with the most vulnerable, most naive, most gullible
of the suspects, and they focused in this case on
Robert Field. He was the weak link. Then they get
a confession from Robert Veel and what do they do
(11:59):
with that confession They use it as a battering ram
to plow over all of the other defendants. This is
how it works. The first suspect comes in and the
police officers tell them that they know that he was
involved in this crime and nothing that suspect can say
is going to change their mind. But they don't think
(12:21):
he was the one who actually raped anybody or killed anybody.
He was just a follower. The suspect is pressured into
adopting a story in which he is a passive participant
to the crime and which he fingers his co defendants
as the more active participants. Then, once that suspect confesses,
(12:43):
they bring that confession to the next in line and
they go over the same thing again. We don't think
you committed the crime. He's telling us that you committed
the crime. We know you were there, but maybe you
just held down her arm while they were raping and
killing her. Each suspect is vying for the least culpable role,
(13:07):
and at the end of the day, this is a
very effective way to get confessions from multiple suspects.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
In this case, the dominoes are falling and each one
of them eventually agrees to a story in which James
Harden is the one who actually places the gun inside
Kateresa's mouth and pulls the trigger. It's no coincidence that
James is one of the last ones questioned.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Here, That's right. And at the end of the day,
police got confessions from Robert Field, Robert Taylor, and Cheyenne's Sharp,
but they couldn't get James Harden and Jonathan Barr to confess.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Based on the confessions, all five teenagers are charged with
the assault and murder of Katsa Matthews and That Dixmore
five are transformed into Chicago's own Wolfback. Pretty soon, though,
it becomes apparent that this case has major problems for starters.
The teenager's versions of what happened are wildly inconsistent. They
(14:06):
can't agree on how they met up with Katrisa, what
the group did before they ended up in that field,
by the interstate, or who assaulted Katsa, and in what order.
In fact, one of the only things they do agree
on was that Katsa had been murdered the day she
disappeared November nineteenth. But remember this was contradicted by the
medical examiner, who determined that she'd been killed three weeks later,
(14:29):
around the time her body was found. And then here
comes the biggest problem. After all five teenagers were charged
but before trial, DNA testing from the seaman left on
Kateresa's body excludes all five suspects. Instead, this DNA belongs
to a single, unidentified male.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
This is might drop evidence, the kind of evidence that
should have resulted in these cases being dismissed before trial.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Exactly these confessions had been proven false. But instead of
dropping its case, the state offers deals to two members
of the Dixmore Five, Cheyenne Sharp and Robert Viel. If
the boys agree to testify against their co defendants, they'll
receive much shorter sentences. Yanna and Robert decide to take
the deal, while the state moves forward with trials for
(15:18):
the other three, and those trials, of course, are based
on the stories told in the confessions despite the DNA.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
You talk here about tunnel vision. This is what happens.
The police officers lock into a story. They become invested
in this notion of a gang rape, and they can't
get out of that box exactly.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
And you see this when they have to deal with
the DNA and the prosecutor addresses it during closing arguments.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
And what does the prosecutor say. He explains the presence
of DNA as the work of a necrophiliac.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Now see if this isn't exactly a household term. What
is a necrophiliac?
Speaker 2 (15:55):
It's someone who has sex with dead bodies.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
I knew you know that. This is officially the most
batchet theory I think I've ever heard, By the way.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
I couldn't agree more So, let's get this straight.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
The theory here at the Dixmore five trial was that
five teenage boys sexually assault this victim. They don't leave
a trace of themselves behind. Then here comes this wandering
necrophiliac who comes across the body and decides to defile it.
I mean, we've heard a lot of excuses for DNA
in our time, but this one may take the prize.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
It's unbelievable that they would even present this to a jury.
It's that insane. But you have to understand in the
context of a climate of fear, the irrational becomes rational. Now,
in the opening statement in this case, the prosecutor said
that these men, pointing at the five teenagers, these men
(16:48):
came from a world where so called friends were turned
into a pack of jackals hunting down their prey, and
then they were done with it, killing it for sport jackals.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Can you believe that this really is Chicago's own wolf pack?
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Again, it's a lot easier to fathom locking up a young, beastial,
feral thing than it is a child, which is in
fact what we were doing.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
And when you talk about children as if they were animals,
it becomes so much easier to throw away their lives.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
To just not worry about doing that last bit of
DNA testing figure out whose DNA it was actually left
on Katriza Matthew's body.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
It becomes easier to try them as adults. It becomes
easier to sentence them to life sentences or even the
death penalty. It becomes easier to just lock them up
and throw away the key.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
The dehumanizing story embedded in these boys confessions. While it works,
each that dix Moore five is convicted and the three
who don't cut deals, Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr, and James
Harden are sentenced to life in prison. Cheyenne Sharp and
Robert Veale serve their time and are eventually released with
murder convictions on the records, But the other three languish
(18:16):
behind bars forgotten people.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
But they were not forgotten by their parents or their
loved ones. You know, I'll never forget learning that Jonathan
Barr and James Hardin's dad would literally drive around with
boxes full of files regarding their cases in his trunk,
trying to get lawyers interested in taking his son's cases.
(18:42):
And Robert Taylor's family did similar things. They would write
letters and letters and letters to lawyers begging them for help. Finally,
in twenty ten, we learned about the case of the
Dixmore five. Our colleague Josh tepfer knew a public defender
name named Jennifer Blagg who had represented Robert Taylor on appeal.
(19:04):
She referred the case to Josh and we agreed to
take Robert's case.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
By this time, Robert was in his early thirties.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
That's right, he had served over fifteen years of his sentence.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Robert Taylor grew up with his parents, sister, and brother
in Harvey, Illinois, right next to Dixmore. From day one,
Robert's dad, a Navy vet, was his strongest defender. Robert
Senior refused to be broken by the fact that his
son had gone to prison because of the words he'd
signed his name to. When the Center on Wrongful Convictions
agreed to take Robert's case, his dad became a major
(19:37):
presence in our lives. I can still remember the smell
of his leather jacket when he hugged us and welcomed
us to his family's struggle. Around the same time, organizations
like the Innocence Project and Exoneration Project got involved in
representing other members of the Dixmore five. Our collective first
priority was identifying whose DNA had been left at the
(19:58):
crime scene.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
We had a new tool called CODIS, the Combined DNA
Index System, and over the timeframe since the advent of
DNA testing in the late nineteen eighties, that database had grown,
and so the chances of finding the identity of the
person who raped and killed Kateresa.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Matthews had grown exactly. I mean, let's remember for a
moment that we're talking here about DNA that was taken
from the semen left on a rape victim. You cannot
ask for better evidence than that, and it's just sitting
there forgotten. How can you not want to know whose
DNA that was? Isn't that the most important question in
this case had been sitting there unanswered for fifteen years?
Speaker 2 (20:40):
But where was it sitting? That was their first challenge.
And after a year of searching, we found the DNA
in some warehouse or in some trailer, and we then
had to get permission from the court to test the DNA.
We then sent the DNA off for testing to a lab,
and we waited and the lab extracted a profile, and
(21:02):
when that profile was extracted, it was run through the
CODA database. A miracle of miracles. In March of twenty eleven,
we got a hit and the hit was to a man,
not a boy, a man named Willie Randolph.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Now Willie Randolph was a troubled guy. He was much
older than Kateresa or the dixmore five. When Kateresa disappeared.
He was thirty three years old, more than twice her age.
Willy had been in and out of prison his entire
adult life for all sorts of different offenses. In fact,
he'd been paroled only a few months before Kateresa was
killed to a house within a mile of where she lived,
(21:44):
and Willie Randolph had previously been accused of rape in
that very same field by the interstate where Kateresa's body
was found. This is a person with a history of
these kinds of attacks, and his DNA and no one
else's was present at the crime scene. Finally, it all
made sense.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
When we learned the identity of Willy Randolph, when we
investigated his background, when we learned the history of abusing
and sexually assaulting women, including young women teenagers, we thought
this case was over. We thought we are going to
get these boys out tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Exactly, there's no relationship at all between Willy Randolph and
any of the Dixmore five. He's not mentioned in any
of their confessions.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
And why would there be a relationship. This is a
man with a long history of violence in his record,
and none of these boys had a history of violence.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Right, He's twice their age when they were growing up
in the neighborhood. He was in prison.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Willie Randolph is the guy who did this to Katrisa Matthews.
The DNA proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Now we had to convince the prosecutors to do the
right thing.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
But as incredible as it sounds, the state wouldn't let
go of their necrophilia theory, and the case dragged on
for months.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
You know, old habits die hard. The state actually suggested
again and maybe Willie Randolph was their mystery necrophiliac.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
This is an unbelievable thing. Still, they're clinging to this
theory that five teenage boys assaulted Kateresa Matthews, left no
trace of their DNA behind, and here comes Willy Randolph,
the older man, the man of the history of assaults
and violent crime and rape in that very field, and
just happens to defile her body. It beggars belief.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
It still took six to seven months to investigate whether
there was any link between Willie Randolph and any of
the Dix More five, there wasn't one.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Meanwhile, we were coming back to court every few weeks
to get an update on the state's investigation and to
ask the judge is today the day of exoneration? And
for six long months we were disappointed. I remember coming
home after those court dates and crying with frustration that
I was able to go home. Robert Taylor, our clients
had to go back to a prison cell.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Yeah. I remember pulling out my hair and I had
hair back there.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
That's where it all went.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
That's where it all went because we had the best
possible evidence of their innocence. And not only were they
refusing to clear our clients, Willie Randolph was on the street.
He was out of prison on parole, and he could
be doing this to somebody else. It was driving me crazy.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Every time before we walked into that courtroom, I remember
watching Robert hold his whole body just taught. His muscles
would be tense, and you could see those twenty years
of trauma that he had endured and the toll it
had taken on him. He couldn't relax into the possibility
that it was going to be his day that day,
and it wasn't his day.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
For months until it finally was.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
On November third, twenty eleven. Robert Ville, Cheyenne Sharp, James Harden,
Jonathan Barr and Robert Taylor were exonerated. Their convictions were
thrown out. Nearly twenty years to the day after Kateresa
matthews disappearance, The Dix Moore five had wrongly served a
total of more than fifty years in prison. Eventually, Willie
(25:17):
Randolph was charged with the attack on Kateresa Matthews based
on DNA evidence. He's still awaiting trial today. We're proud
to have helped free the Dix Moore five, but as
our colleague Josh Tepfer put it, this is not justice.
Justice would have happened a long time ago.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Hello, Hey, Robert, Stephen Waura A long time. I'll see
too long, too long. Good to hear your voice.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
What's going on with you these days, Robert? I'm hanging
in now. How's your son doing?
Speaker 2 (25:49):
I got picked boys. You got to pick him up
the school. Yeah, I'll picking him up every day.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Held your point, haven't going away?
Speaker 1 (25:58):
What's your favorite thing to do with your son, Robert?
Speaker 2 (26:01):
I'd like Sam Smatters.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
So you can't give those twenty years back to Robert,
or to any of the Dixmore five, or any of
the guys we're going to talk about on this podcast.
You can't give that time back, but what you can
do is make the years decades that they lost mean something.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
One of the greatest tragedies in my opinion, and I've
been teaching about the Central Park five case for years
and to this day. When I introduced the case in
my criminal law classes, the one thing that people don't
know about the case is that the kids were innocent.
So few people knew that even after Matthias Rayes confessed,
(26:40):
even after these kids were let out of prison, even
after they were compensated. It is the footnote in this
story that gets lost in our collective consciousness, maybe not anymore. Finally,
there is attention being brought to who they actually were
and what they suffered, and.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
That's a big part of how Steve and I approach
these cases.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Right.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
It's about, of course getting them out of prison, fighting
for them, opening up those doors, but it's also about
telling the stories. It's about making it meaningful. It's about
saying their name. It's about not forgetting what happened to
them and changing it so it doesn't happen again. Like
the Central Park five, the story of the Dixmore five
(27:20):
is about convictions that were driven by prejudice rather than proof.
But the injustices of the super Predator era were not
just a New York City thing or a Chicago thing,
And although we may want to think so, they're not
even really a nineteen nineties thing. In times of great
fear or moral panic, prejudices can distort the search for
the truth. Mistaken assumptions, faulty investigations, and flawed evidence are
(27:45):
all still real, and they still cause wrongful convictions across
the country. Every day. We tell these stories so that
we can learn from them, so that one day there
won't be any more. Dix Moore fives to all the dicksive,
but especially to our client and friend, Robert Taylor. You've
endured years of injustice while remaining a pillar of strength
(28:08):
and resilience. To you and your families, we wish you
all the best. Thanks for letting us tell your story.
Next week, we'll tell you the story of a false
confession out of Arkansas, where a twelve year old boy
maintains his innocence in a murder case until police turn
off the cameras. Wrongful conviction. False Confessions is a production
(28:36):
of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company
number one Special thanks to our executive producer Jason Flamm
and the team at Signal Company Number one. Executive producer
Kevin wardis Senior producer and Pope, and additional production and
editing by Connor Hall. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph.
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Nyrol and you can follow me on Twitter at Sdrizzen.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
For more information on the show, visit wrongfulconvictionpodcast dot com
and be sure to follow the show on Instagram at
Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on
Twitter at wrong Conviction
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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The Burden
The Burden is a documentary series that takes listeners into the hidden places where justice is done (and undone). It dives deep into the lives of heroes and villains. And it focuses a spotlight on those who triumph even when the odds are against them. Season 5 - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance 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 and 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? Season 4 - The Burden: Get the Money and Run “Trying to murder my father, this was the thing that put me on the path.” That’s Joe Loya and that path was bank robbery. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank. In season 4 of The Burden: Get the Money and Run, we hear from Joe who was once the most prolific bank robber in Southern California, and beyond. He used disguises, body doubles, proxies. He leaped over counters, grabbed the money and ran. Even as the FBI was closing in. It was a showdown between a daring bank robber, and a patient FBI agent. Joe was no ordinary bank robber. He was bright, articulate, charismatic, and driven by a dark rage that he summoned up at will. In seven episodes, Joe tells all: the what, the how… and the why. Including why he tried to murder his father. Season 3 - The Burden: Avenger Miriam Lewin is one of Argentina’s leading journalists today. At 19 years old, she was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires for her political activism and thrown into a concentration camp. Thousands of her fellow inmates were executed, tossed alive from a cargo plane into the ocean. Miriam, along with a handful of others, will survive the camp. Then as a journalist, she will wage a decades long campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Avenger is about one woman’s triumphant battle against unbelievable odds to survive torture, claim justice for the crimes done against her and others like her, and change the future of her country. Season 2 - The Burden: Empire on Blood Empire on Blood is set in the Bronx, NY, in the early 90s, when two young drug dealers ruled an intersection known as “The Corner on Blood.” The boss, Calvin Buari, lived large. He and a protege swore they would build an empire on blood. Then the relationship frayed and the protege accused Calvin of a double homicide which he claimed he didn’t do. But did he? Award-winning journalist Steve Fishman spent seven years to answer that question. This is the story of one man’s last chance to overturn his life sentence. He may prevail, but someone’s gotta pay. The Burden: Empire on Blood is the director’s cut of the true crime classic which reached #1 on the charts when it was first released half a dozen years ago. Season 1 - The Burden In the 1990s, Detective Louis N. Scarcella was legendary. In a city overrun by violent crime, he cracked the toughest cases and put away the worst criminals. “The Hulk” was his nickname. Then the story changed. Scarcella ran into a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent. They turned themselves into jailhouse-lawyers and in prison founded a lway firm. When they realized Scarcella helped put many of them away, they set their sights on taking him down. And with the help of a NY Times reporter they have a chance. For years, Scarcella insisted he did nothing wrong. But that’s all he’d say. Until we tracked Scarcella to a sauna in a Russian bathhouse, where he started to talk..and talk and talk. “The guilty have gone free,” he whispered. And then agreed to take us into the belly of the beast. Welcome to The Burden.