October 23, 2023 • 54 mins
Maurice Chammah hosts a podcast called “Smoke Screen: Just Say You’re Sorry.” It tells the story of a brutal murder of a woman who was disparaged by the police to secure a suspect. And that's just the beginning of the questionable techniques used by investigators, as well as the Texas Rangers.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
There's all these times where Driscol almost gets there. He says, Hey,
I think I should call my friend Charlie. It's my friend.
He's a lawyer, and Hannd says, oh, well, you could
if you want to. I'm not here to stop you,
but I don't think Charlie's going to help you. I
think we're going to help you. I remember almost like
grabbing my hand, just being like, Larry, what are you doing?
Call Charlie.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:58):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold Where
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories The Marshall Project is a fantastic nonprofit
(01:19):
news organization, and my friend Maurice Schama is one of
its best reporters. He hosts a podcast called Smokescreen Just
Say You're Sorry. It tells the story of a brutal
murder of a woman who was disparaged by the police
to secure a suspect. And that's just the beginning of
the questionable techniques used by the investigators as well as
(01:42):
the Texas Rangers.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
So let's first.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Talk about the construction of this piece, because to say
it's an article or a podcast tied to it as
too simplistic. Tell me what you created in your piece,
which is called Anatomy of a murder confession, kind of
describe for listeners what you're doing before we talk about
the actual story, which is unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Sure, I mean, I am primarily a writer, but I
know that writing isn't the only way that people take
in information. And this is primarily a story about memory
and how faulty our memories can be and the risks
that come with kind of exploiting the faultiness of our
memories in the criminal justice system. And I wanted the
writing to try to capture that, but I also knew
(02:26):
that there were other ways to capture it too, and
the Marshall Projects we created a kind of multimedia experience
where you're reading an article, but you're also looking at
visuals where, for example, it's a van on a street
corner and the van flips through multiple different iterations to
mimic the way that someone's memory of that van changed
over time. Right, it looked one way and then ten
(02:47):
years later it looked a different way.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Tell me the purpose of the Marshall Project, because you know,
people who are listening to our show are used to
hearing from people who are independent authors with publishing houses
or at the New Yorker, so this feels different. Would
you consider the Marshal Project to be like an advocacy
program and you're a journalist within it, because I always
(03:09):
think of the Marshall Project as people who are really
digging into wrongful convictions, which seems like advocacy to me.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah, it's a very good question. I mean, there's always
been an element of journalism that advocates for kind of
a better world in a general sense, you know, whether
that's a more transparent society, a society with more equality,
fewer disparities of race and gender, but we do really
see ourselves as journalists. First. The Martial Project was founded
by a former editor in chief of The New York Times,
(03:36):
a guy named Bill Keller, with a former hedge fund manager,
Neil Barski, who was just really amped up about the
injustices and the criminal justice system. And the mission statement
is very broad. It's to create a sense of urgency
around that system and to tell stories that help the
public kind of understand what the problems are in the
system and potential solutions. We're not advocates in the sense
(03:58):
of taking positions on individual policies or candidates. We don't
advocate for any particular thing, but we advocate for the
things that I think all journalists do to an extent,
which is more justice in the world and more equality
and more transparency. To that end, I think we're in
line with a certain generation of investigative journalism outlets like
Pro Publica or the Texas Tribune that really see the
(04:22):
kind of public service mission as the number one thing
before entertaining people, before telling a story, you know, we
want people to understand the system, and then we think, Okay,
what stories are going to help people understand the system better.
And that's really I think. How I came to this
story and how I felt like this story was sort
(04:42):
of special is that, on the one hand, it's a
twisty true crime narrative with lots of exciting surprises in it,
but on the other hand, it features all kinds of
lessons about the reality of wrongful convictions in the United States,
false confessions, how it is that psychology works in the
way that the tech actives do their work. And then finally,
I'll say that I do a lot of stories on
(05:04):
wrongful convictions and some people who go to prison, but
I and my colleagues also probably the majority of our
work is on people who are guilty, and the questions
are not did they do it? The questions are should
prison conditions be this awful? Or should police, let's say,
send a canine to maul someone who was selling drugs
on the corner. You know, the questions can get very
(05:24):
complex and rich beyond the question of isn't innocent person
in prison?
Speaker 1 (05:28):
When you and I initially talked about this, you asked
me where should we start? Should we start with the victim,
which in this case is Bobby Sue Hill or do
we start from the point of view of someone who's
arguably another victim in this case, which would be the suspect. Right, So,
when we're talking about this case, where does it make
the most sense to start? Can we talk about where
(05:50):
we are and the time period.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
This starts in two thousand and five. Many of us
listening probably where we're alive at the time, and we're
in a small town called Alito, Texas, aled which is
in a rural county called Parker County. It's about an
hour west of Fort Worth, the Dallas Fort Worth metro area,
and it's where you know, the suburbs give way to
(06:12):
vast rolling fields. There are a lot of peach farms
out there. It's a really kind of lovely, beautiful area.
And within Alito, this one part of this county, there's
a rural area that has a road in the trees
where there's a lot of really large houses. It's very beautiful.
Somebody wants to describe it to me as if you
live in Fort Worth and want a mansion but can't
afford a mansion, this is the street you go live
(06:34):
in out in the country where the property is cheap
and you can have a mansion. So imagine a bunch
of houses that are really spread out and really really
big and pretty. In March two thousand and five, there
are two teenage boys who are hiking around. I imagine
it's a day they have off from school, and they
are in this creek bed and they find a pair
(06:55):
of trash bags and they see what looks like an
ear coming out of one of the trash bags, and
they realize, oh my god, this is a body. So
they sprint. I imagine the kind of panic that would
set in if this were me as a high school kid.
They sprint to a house nearby. They call nine one
Pint one. The Parker County Sheriff's Office descends on the
area and basically has the body of a woman. They
(07:17):
figure out, They put out alerts to other law enforcement,
and eventually it goes on the local news in the
region that this woman has been found and they can't
identify her, but she has a pair of tattoos that
are very specific on her shoulders, and a member of
her family calls in and says, that's Bobby Sue Hill,
and so now they know who she is and they
(07:38):
start to investigate. You know, who is this woman and
what circumstances could possibly have led her to be so
brutally raped and murdered and strangled and left you for
dead out here in this creek. My own investigation as
a reporter kind of mirrored. I remember feeling like, oh,
this is what I'm doing is similar to what the
sheriff's deputies were doing at the very outset, which is
(08:00):
just the question of who is this woman and her
family shared with those officers and then eventually with me
some detail, and it is a really sort of tragic
story that I've spent a lot of time trying to
put together because I felt like earlier versions of the
story that appeared in local newspapers and police records in
the courts really limited her and put her in this
(08:22):
very specific box where it was easy to it really
almost degraded her memory. So Bobby Souhill was a young
woman from the Fort Worth area. She fell in love
with her high school sweetheart, who was from an immigrant
family from Southeast Asia, and she dropped out of high
school to marry him. They had five kids together, and
there was also a sort of dark strain in her
(08:43):
family history. She had a cousin who had done sex
work and had died of AIDS years earlier. My understanding
is that she had a really contentious relationship with her
own mother, and sex work was sort of accepted almost
in the family, and so she falls into with her husband,
even though they have five kids. They fall into using
drugs together, harder and harder drugs, and then tragically he
(09:05):
dies in a car accident and she's left. She's in
her twenties, she has five kids, and she descends into
drug use and sex work. In fort Worth, her five
kids moved in with the husband who had died his family,
and she is living with a boyfriend in a in
(09:25):
these like derelict motels on the outskirts of downtown fort Worth.
Fort Worth has this street called East Lancaster that runs
off of downtown that is just famous. I mean, I
have friends who grew up in Fort Worth who say,
that's where the sex workers are, that's where the drugs are,
that's where there's all those little motels and shelters for
unhoused people, and that's where she is. And her cousins
(09:47):
were described going and driving down the street looking for Bobby,
finding her, trying to convince her to come home. Eventually,
she calls her oldest daughter, who's in I think middle
or high school at this point, and basically says like,
I'd like to come back and live with you all.
I think the most tragic element of this is that
(10:07):
I found another cousin of hers who is now in
prison himself, sort of speaking of this dark thread in
the family, and he said basically that she felt like
a failure as a mother, and she kind of drowned
that sense of failure in drugs. One version of this
is she abandoned her children, but another version is she
didn't feel like she could be a proper mother to them.
She didn't feel like she'd had the right kind of
mother in herself. But then we know that she was
(10:28):
about to try to go back and live with them,
and about to try to pick herself up and get
out of this lifestyle, and instead they have to identify
her body. It took a lot of work to kind
of get that story, but I felt like it was
really necessary to understand the full scope of the tragedy
that is this case.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
What was the other reporting like on her life story
in contrast to all of the deep research you clearly
did on her life story.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Oh, it was half a sentence. It was sex worker
found in the court records. There was a little bit
of a sense that the detectives were almost disparaging her
in order to solve the case. And you can debate
whether this was okay for them to do, but they
would talk to suspects and say, well, you know, she
wasn't the daughter of a senator, so like, go ahead, basically,
go ahead and confess because you're not going to get
a harsh punishment because no one cared about this woman.
(11:14):
And so the family members I reached just said they
were imbevalent because on the one hand, they were displeased
with elements of my reporting, which we'll get into. It's
very complex, But on the other hand, they wanted the
world to know that there was so much more to
this person, that she loved her kids, that she had
this incredible sense of humor, that she really was an
incredible mother to these young kids before she kind of
(11:35):
got in her own head and fell off the track.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
So in two thousand and five, Bobby Sue Hill is saying,
I am ready to get my life together. I'd like
to come back. What happens next that changes everything?
Speaker 2 (11:48):
So her body's found. And there's a question immediately for
law enforcement, which is how did a woman who was
last seen on the streets of East Lancaster in downtown
Fort Worth end up in a ditch an hour away
in a rural area. Pretty soon, through just you know,
running the different investigative leads in downtown Fort Worth, they
(12:08):
find a man who was her boyfriend at the time.
They often refer to him as a pimp. I have
wrestled with whether that word is fair. It seems like
she was doing sex work. He was also using drugs
and the mowing lawns to try to make ends meet,
and they were living together, and he was protecting her,
you know, from John's in certain scenarios. I interviewed him myself,
and the story that he says to investigators is I
(12:31):
was with Bobby when she was abducted. I saw her
be abducted. There was a John who came. He was
driving a white van, and you know, he stopped at
this little intersection. He drove back and forth a few times.
There was something a little bit uneasy or sketchy about it.
I didn't feel totally trustworthy, but she said, no, it's okay,
I'm going to go do this job, and so she
disappears into the van. He follows the van as it
(12:55):
drives over to a side street, and then at some
point after a few minutes, you know, standing there, the boyfriend,
his name is Michael Hardin, and he sees a face
pop up in the window of a man whose eyes
got wide, and recognizes him the protector boyfriend figure from
the previous interaction, and kind of flips out and throws
(13:15):
the van into gear and speeds off with it. And
he doesn't see Bobby Sue Hill's face, so for all
he knows, she's already been killed in the van. At
this point, we don't have an exact time of death
to know when it happened, but that is the story
that he tells to investigators. Investigators do what they do.
They set him up with a sketch artist who draws
an image of that face.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
So the police believe him, Michael the boyfriend who is
also her protector. I mean, this does not seem like
a credible witness to me. How do we know he's
not involved?
Speaker 2 (13:47):
My sense is that they decided that they believed him,
that his story was broadly corroborated. Although this was a
whole universe of people whose memories were tainted by drug use,
And in my own investigation of the case, the one
kind of point in his favor, so to speak, is
that a his story has remained remarkably consistent in certain ways,
(14:08):
but B it is impossible to imagine how or why
if he was involved, she would have ended up in
this ditch an hour west, in this small town that
people in East Lancaster wouldn't necessarily know. That said, it
is entirely possible that he's lying, and in fact, later
on in this case, an investigator who's looking into it
(14:29):
finds an ant and asks the aunt when was the
last time you spoke to her? And she gives a date,
and it's in fact after the date that he gave
that she was abducted. So it's also possible that his
story isn't exactly wrong, but that she wanted to get
away from him, and she did get away, and then
her death had nothing to do with this white van
and this man that he saw drive off with her.
(14:50):
Everything is an option still, and I think a claim
that a lot of lawyers working on the case now
have made to me is that basically this case was
never going to be an easy one to solve, and
I think her family acknowledged that too. This was a
murder committed in a scenario where people are looking out
for themselves. There's a culture of being opposed to snitching.
So it's yes reasonable to assume that the boyfriend could
(15:12):
have been involved, reasonable to assume that his entire story
is just faulty, reasonable to assume he made it up
to protect someone else. When I interviewed him and kind
of got into this world, I mean, I tracked him
down to one of these derelict motels in Fort Worth.
I mean, everything was just so depressing and desperate in
terms of the circumstances that it sort of felt like
there was a whole universe of things I didn't know
(15:33):
in terms of who's protecting whom with what story.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
So Michael sits down with a sketch artist in two
thousand and five, once his girlfriend is discovered in her
bodies discovered, he sits down and he works with the
sketch artist. What does this man look like? Who's in
this white van?
Speaker 2 (15:49):
So according to Harden, to Michael Hard and the boyfriend,
the man in the white van has a big, bushy mustache.
She's kind of got a bit of a receiving heroline.
If you learn a less look at this photo in passing,
you might think this is a Latino man. You might
think that he's you know, of Mexican heritage, although you know,
sketches are an art as much as the science. But
this is all to say that the sketch does not
(16:11):
lead to any suspects, to any matches. And around this time,
I should say there is a suspect that emerges because
he reports that his white van was stolen in a
nearby town. A man named Tim Dawson basically calls a
police and says a sex worker stole my white van.
Threads of that sound similar to this case, right, So
they bring him in. They ask him about the details.
(16:33):
He claims that he was with a sex worker and
she stole his van, but he claims to have no
knowledge of Bobby sou Hill know nothing about this case.
Added to the mysteriousness, he lives in Weatherford, Texas, which
is the county seat of Parker County, which is just
a stone's throw from Aledo, so he also lives somewhat
near the place her body was found. He's been arrested
(16:55):
in the past for various violence, but he basically has
no knowledge, and then don't press him, or at least
at a certain point, they just give up on pressing
him because he says, I know nothing about this, and
you know, his connection is circumstantial, circumstantially fairly strong. But
you know, they kind of reach a barrier in the
investigation and at that point the case goes entirely cold.
(17:15):
So to situate this in history, over the last twenty years,
the number of cold cases has been going up because
the number of homicides that are solved has been going down,
and this case just kind of enters that ocean of
unsolved cold cases out there that Texas law enforcement hopes
to solve someday but is not exactly prioritizing.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Why is that that's such an odd statistic. You would
think with more advances in forensic science that you would
be solving more cases instead of fewer.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
I think a distrust of the police sometimes makes it
hard for them to actually solve it. So you look
at a case like this, I imagine many of those
people in Fort Worth who were around Bobby sou Hill
and her boyfriend at the time don't trust the police
and are so less likely to talk to them about
what they saw and heard. For all of the advances
in forensics, genealogy, etc. These are expensive and time intensive processes.
(18:09):
You know, anyone case takes a lot of effort to solve,
and as law enforcement officers have told me that their
departments are just generally cash strapped and just kind of
honestly have to jump to the next one every day.
So if there's a new murder, they have to start
solving that one, and so cases are allowed to go cold.
But to combat that problem, and this is where the
next element of our story comes in, the Texas Rangers
(18:33):
decided to create a basically unsolved crime cold case unit. Now,
the Texas Rangers, or the one percent of listeners who've
never heard of them, are this two hundred year old
law enforcement agency in Texas that have kind of almost
mythicual ties to the early history of Texas. They existed
even before Texas was a state. They are associated with
(18:54):
all kinds of atrocities in the eighteen nineteen hundreds, but
by the early Tiefouans are treated as this elite almost
like FBI meet CIA element of the Texas Department of
Public Safety, which is our statewide law enforcement body, and
typically the best of the best among the highway patrol
(19:15):
troopers are elevated to the position of being a Texas Ranger.
There's one hundred and sixty in change across the state
and in the early two thousands, they decide to create
a unsolved Crimes cold case unit that they say is
going to use the best of the new forensic tools
that we have to try to solve cases. Around twenty
thirteen twenty fourteen, there's a small break in the case
(19:39):
of Bobby Zoue Hill. There was a cigarette butt that
was found near her body in the ditch in Parker County,
and there's a DNA hit on the cigarette butt that
it matches a woman. That woman is brought in for questioning.
She is. From the audio, it's clear horrified by Bobby
Sue Hill's death and claims I know nothing about it.
She says, I had this one boyfriend who tried to
(20:00):
strangled me this one time. They go and interview him.
He says, I don't know nothing about nothing. You know, again,
you talk about distrust of the police, and there's really
nothing to pin anything on him or her beyond just
that tiny bit of DNA and a cigarette butt, which,
to be fair, they could have thrown into the same
ditch a week or a year later, and the connection
(20:20):
to the body is not particularly tight. Around that time, though,
the Texas Rangers have really amped up their cold case
unit and a Texas Ranger named James Holland comes into
the picture to try to solve this case again. He
looks at the file and he says, well, this cigarette
butt has gone nowhere, but why don't we try Tim
Dawson again. Remember he's the one who had described having
(20:40):
his white van stolen and basically Holland at this point
he's been a Texas Ranger for five to ten years.
I think he became one in two thousand and eight.
He's developing this reputation for being really really good at interrogations,
for being the guy who walks into the room and
spends the hours and gets the confession every time. So
he starts to try to solve the case again, and
(21:02):
he goes back to Tim Dawson and they spend a
few hours together. Dawson continues to say I have no
knowledge of any of this. This is in fact the
interview where Holland says, well, Bobby Souhill wasn't exactly a
debutante caream of society, so go ahead and confess and
no one o't care. And I interviewed Tim Dawson and
he told me that when a microphone was not going,
(21:22):
he said to Holland, well, if you won't care about
closing this case so bad, I didn't do it. You
didn't do it, so like, why don't you take the
friggin charge? You know, basically just fitting in his face
in a way, and Holland gives up. But this is
where things get really strange. Holland then goes back to
Michael Hart and the boyfriend and he interviews him again,
(21:43):
and he starts to use these techniques that are meant
to get hardened to really remember things that at this
point have happened ten years in the past. And so
there's really interesting language where he says, you know, let's
run through the events and backwards chronology, and let's imagine
your high up on a telephone pole looking down at
(22:04):
the scene. You know, these are tools that I did
a lot of research on them to understand how accepted
they are, and elements of them are very accepted by
psychologists at being good at kind of relaxing your brain
into a state where you can pick up some memories
that you maybe didn't realize we're in there. But it
also raises a risk of confabulation, of kind of inventing
(22:25):
something and then having that become your memory. And then
Hollin says, well, we want to try this other thing,
which is to hypnotize you.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
What year are we.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
In when we have James Holland, the Texas Ranger is
now talking to Michael the boyfriend, trying to figure out
what happened, and sort of it sounds like he's trying
to do some memory tricks with him to take them
back in time.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
And this is in late twenty fourteen. At this point,
the Texas Rangers have been using hypnosis to try to
solve crimes for twenty thirty years. At this point, psychologists
researchers are basically screaming, this is really risky. So hypnosis,
I mean it sounds like we all think of sort
of a party trick or getting you to quit smoking
(23:22):
with a hypnotist. In the context of law enforcement, it's
really about relaxing the witness or if it's in the
case maybe a sexual assault, the victim and getting them
into the sort of hyper relaxed state where they are
just really really focused, laser focused on the sort of
pictures in their heads from the past. Right. So there's
(23:44):
this video of a Texas Ranger hypnotist coming in to
Michael the boyfriend and counting down from a high number
and imagining, you know, you're on a beach, and there's
stuff about like going through a doorway and grains of
sand and this sort of weird language that is meant
to get him into this relaxed state. And the audio
(24:04):
is a little bit unsatisfying because at a certain point
Michael is just mumbling and you imagine, you know, you're
super relaxed and you're kind of mumbling your memories. Now,
why is this risky? What researchers have told me is
that when you're in that really relaxed state, you're also
kind of suggestible. So the Texas Ranger may do his
best not to give you new information, but if you're
(24:27):
not careful, you may just kind of invent something in
your mind. You know, we all if you just imagine
you've got a memory, if you just try to like
hypothesize like, oh was the T shirt red or was
it green, and you kind of go with red. And
then the more time you spend on that, the more
you know, the red T shirt gets kind of locked
into your memory and suddenly you remember it definitively as
(24:48):
a red T shirt. And so the problem isn't just
that you have potentially false memories, it's that you become
more confident in your false memories. So he comes out
of hypnosis. He gets back in the room with Texas
Ranger James Hu and a new forensic sketch artist. So
remember in two thousand and five he had spoken to one,
and now he is back again with the sketch artist,
(25:11):
a new sketch artist, and describes the face of a man,
and we have basically an entirely new face. It looks
nothing like the two thousand and five face. If you
had thought the two thousand and five face sort of
looked like a Latino man, this new man is pretty
definitely looks like a white man, middle aged, flat top haircut,
the bushy mustache has disappeared, and you now have what
looks like a little bit of five o'clock shadow. The
(25:33):
face is definitely more gaunt in a way, just like
Hollywood cheeks, a little bit. In addition the and this
is I think where I was really particularly fascinated as well,
the van changes. So in two thousand and five we
were talking about a mini van. Michael said, yeah, the
guy drove a minivan and had a bunch of windows
on the sides. It had a very long pointed sort
(25:56):
of nose, like the front hood was very long. Image
in your head. Right nine years later, following the hypnosis,
following all these memory tricks that the Texas Rangers are using,
he says, actually it was a big workvan. So the
color hasn't changed. It's still white, but it's now a big,
boxy workvan, one of those ones that has like no
windows on the sides and a very squish front hood.
(26:20):
So two different, entirely different white vans. Now. Part of
the reporting and research of this was looking at the
materials and then also going to researchers who have done
studies of human memory and eyewitness identification and confessions, et cetera,
and asked them like, what do you make of this?
And basically they said, well, knowing nothing about this case,
(26:43):
I can just tell you that memory never gets better
over time. It only gets worse. There's no way that
this man, nine years after the crime, produced a more
accurate representation of what happened than he did in the
immediate aftermath. So treat the new sketch and the new
van with tremendous skepticism. The Texas Rangers, instead of being skeptical,
(27:04):
take one more step. They take that face and remember
ten years have past. They use aging technology. So you
know how when you look at them in the old days,
that was on a milk cart and you'd have the
missing child and they would run it through some computer
program to imagine what the kid looked like. Five years later,
they do something similar with the face of the perpetrator
(27:24):
in this case, where they age the suspects face. And
this is a flyer that goes out to other law
enforcement and eventually to the media and to the public,
and so in newspapers in the Greater Fort Worth area
you have these images of the hypnosis induced sketch and
hypnosis induced van that are now there for the public
(27:46):
to see.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
One of the things that I'd like you to talk
about now would be one of the top reasons we
know that people are wrongfully convicted is witness misidentification. Going
back to the idea that he first had a sketch
of someone who was Latino. Also, cross racial misidentification is
pretty common too, even at the onset when they have
(28:10):
a sketch artist in two thousand and five talking to Michael,
how reliable do we think that would have been? Even
at the time someone who's going through like a trauma,
his girlfriend has taken away in this van, he sees
this guy for a second.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
It's still valuable to have a sketch.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
But is it also not dangerous to have a sketch
of someone who is sort of a generic sketch of
someone of a different race.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Oh. Absolutely. There is a long history in this country
of tragedies in which someone commits a crime and someone
else goes to prison because either a witness or in
some cases, even more tragically, the victim themselves if it's
a sexual assault, misidentifies who did it. And typically you
see this in the realm of lineup identifications, right where
(29:02):
let's say you have a white woman who was sexually
assaulted and it was a black man who did it,
and the police bring in a lineup of, you know,
five black men from the same neighborhood we just know,
and this is not really to detegrate the victims in
these cases. We just know that human memory is faulty
and that that is a problem that the criminal justice system,
you know, has to confront and well meeting investigators are
(29:25):
doing their best to deal with it. But in earlier
eras where the science was not as robust, or where
police were putting, you know, getting convictions over getting the
accurate truth, you just had a lot of scenarios where
the victim or a witness pick someone out of the
lineup and then they become the lead suspect and then
they are coerced in whatever way to be convicted, to
(29:46):
be wrongly convicted of the crime, and sometimes spend years
or decades in prison for it.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
So let's go back to this brand new sketch of
the white man, middle aged, flat top haircut. First, does
this look like Tim Dawson, I'm assuming not the guy
who originally owned a van.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
You know, I'm gonna pause and say that this was
a moment where I had to just check humbly my
own subjectiveness, because like it, does it look like him?
Doesn't not? But does it really? Know? I mean, the
sketch is so generic and Tim Dawson also just kind
of looks like a middle aged white guy. I will
say Tim Dawson looks nothing like the two thousand and
five sketch at all, but the twenty fifteenth sketch like
(30:26):
he doesn't not look like him. Tell me I really
want to be careful of in this is to not
just sort of cast undue suspicion on Tim Dawson. I
don't call him him having a solid alibi, but the
links to the crime were still very circumstantial, unlimited, so
there's no reason to think that he secretly did it
and is out there. But this sketch goes out there,
and this is where the story takes what I described
(30:48):
as like a very small town turn. It goes out
in a newspaper called the Weatherford Democrat. And there's a
man named Jean Burkes who runs a pawn shop in Weatherford.
There's a guy who comes into his pawn shop frequently
named Larry Driscoll. Jean knows Larry not only because he
comes into the pawn shop to buy things or sell things,
but also because he is the handyman for Jean's neighbor.
(31:09):
So you imagine Jean goes out to pick up the newspaper,
and he frequently sees Larry Driscoll mowing his neighbor's lawn.
They wave, they know each other. Weatherford's got fewer than
fifty thousand people in it. It's a small place where
everyone knows everyone. And Jean Burks told me that he
gets the Weatherford Democrat and he just sits in his
pawn shop all day on the counter, and he keeps
(31:29):
looking at it, and he keeps thinking that kind of
looks familiar, and then eventually it snaps in his mind
and he goes, that kind of looks like Larry. And again,
as I said before, doesn't look like Larry. Well, it's subjective,
like doesn't not, But it's like two white men in
their forties and fifties, like it's pretty pretty blurry. He
shows it to his wife. Does you think that looks
like Larr Driscoll? She goes in, not really. He shows
(31:50):
it to other people in the pawn shop. They're like, ah, maybe,
but it's enough that Jean calls to the Texas Rangers.
Jean himself also struck me as a someone who maybe
maybe reads them and watches a lot of true crime
and has a kind of let me just say, like
has a certain confidence about his ability to like do
the polices work for them. So he googles Larry's house
(32:12):
where the body was found and discovers that they're like
less than a mile from each other and thinks it's like, oh, well,
that's compelling. So he calls the Texas Rangers. He gets
through to James Holland and he says, you know, I
think this kind of looks like Larry driscoll And. So
the Texas Ranger, James Holland, looks into driscoll and finds
out that yes, he lives near the crime scene, and
his day job is actually that he works in addition
(32:34):
to being a handyman for the local jail, and so
the jail will like send inmates out to do like roadwork,
you know, mow medians in the highway whatever, and he
oversees that so he's actually a licensed jailer. Holland drives
over to this barn where Larry is working, and basically
(32:54):
he just approaches Larry driscoll and says, I want to
talk to you. We think you might be able to
help us solve the crime. And this is the beginning
of two very dramatic days of interrogation in which Larry
is pulled from saying I know nothing about this to
a full confession to the murder of Bobbysuit Hill. And
a huge part of my reporting is understanding how that
(33:17):
happened and is there any reason to believe Larry's confession.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
And that's another thing that we know is a very
large portion of people who have been wrongfully convicted are
there because of false confessions. And I think that oftentimes
people I encounter say, well, they wouldn't confess if they
weren't guilty, which is bullshit. People confess when they are innocent.
They do, especially when they don't call on attorney.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
I agree that it's bullshit. I also, I think, came
into this story knowing that that was a common sentiment
and having a real empathy for that sentiment, because, like
I get it intuitively, it feels so weird because all
of us cannot imagine that we would confess to a
crime we didn't commit. And I think actually Larry Driscoll
would have said, I would have never confessed to a
crime that I didn't commit until I was in the
(34:03):
room with this ranger and going through this process, and
so part of why I wanted to tell this story
and go deep into it was that I thought it
was just an incredibly valuable case study or illustration of
what these tactics look like when they're being used in
their full manipulative power.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
When Larry Driscoll is being interrogated by the Texas Ranger
James Holland.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Based on the sketch based on.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
This armchair detective who says, this guy lived very close
to where Bobby Sue Hill's body was found, and that's
about it. What techniques is Holland using to be able
to elicit a confession out of somebody who I'm going
to assume you're going to tell me was actually innocent.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
It's really fascinating. The way that I came into the story,
just for context, is that I was told about this
case by the Innocence Project of Texas. I had gotten
to know the lead lawyer there who had taken on
Larry Driscoll's case and fully believed in his wa in
a sense. As a result of talking to him about it,
I sent Larry a letter. Larry sent me back a letter.
Eventually I go out to the prison where he is
(35:07):
and interview him length about this and the way that
he tells the story, the Texas ranger approached him in
the barn and said, we think you may be able
to help us, and then that turns into we think
you may have witnessed something, and Larry at this point says, well, sure,
if it's possible I witness something and didn't realize it.
And the story at first is, you know, maybe you
(35:29):
were in the area and picked up this woman and
one of the last people to see her alive, and
so we need your help, and Larry racks his brain
and says, well, I don't really remember ever being in
that area. And this is the point at which the
first crucial technique starts to show up, and that is
deception or lies. So it's entirely legal for law enforcement
(35:50):
to lie to suspects in the interrogation room, and law
enforcement says, we need to do this basically to catch
the guilty. And the lie at first is, well, there's
a record that the local police have you around the
time and place of the crime, that you were in
a white van driving around and you were on a
list of men that was known to sex workers, or
(36:11):
at least your license plate was on there. Maybe they
made a mistake. Maybe you're not that guy, but help
us out here. Why would you be on that list?
And so Larry starts thinking, well, why would I be
on that list? And he starts racking his brain, like
when have I been in that area? And keep in mind,
this is all lies. It's bs. There's no record of
him being in that time and place, but the lie
is enough to get Larry sort of imagining. Okay, I
(36:34):
guess there was this one time when my dad had
fallen on hard times and was in a Salvation Army
shelter around that area, and I went to visit him,
and then, you know, I guess I was doing some
contract work, and I guess I bid on some jobs
and some houses near there, but I think I was
always driving a blue truck, not a white van. Right.
So you see this process of him racking his brain,
(36:55):
and the more he then produces, the more Holland the
Texas Range thinks, oh wait a minute, this guy was
lying to me before. He knows more than he's letting on,
and I'm starting to pull the truth out of him. Right,
So there's this dance that starts to go on, and
lies are the way that Holland starts to kind of
pull it out, but over time he starts to ratchet
up the pressure and he says, well, we think you
(37:15):
can help us solve this crime, but we want to
be absolutely sure that you know you're telling us the
full truth. So would you be willing to take voluntarily
a polygraph? At this point, Larry says, well, you know,
maybe I need a lawyer. Do you think I might
need a lawyer? He doesn't explicitly ask for one, so
it's just vague enough that the ranger says, well, we
don't think a lawyer is going to help you. You
(37:36):
just need to help us, you know, search your memory
and take the polygraph. You know, I'm sure you're going
to ace it, but let's just do the polygraph to
be sure, and Larry says all right. So he takes
it and one of the questions is did you cause
the death of this woman, Bobby Sue Hill? And he
says no, and then the polygrapher says, uh, oh, this
is a lie, and Larry's like, how is that possible?
(37:56):
I don't think I killed anybody. I have no memory
of killing Anyone says, well, you know, sometimes your body
remembers things that your brain doesn't remember. In reality, we
know that polygraph tests are notoriously unreliable. They're not admissible
in court.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
They're intimidating, though, and that's the point.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
That's absolutely it. It's intimidating. And so suddenly Larry starts to think,
Oh my god, Like there's these little moments in his
mind where he thinks, is it possible I killed this
moment and just don't remember it. I can't imagine that.
I try to imagine just the experience of trying to
reckon with the idea that you could have killed somebody,
that you're a murderer and don't remember it. That would
be very head spinning and really destabilizing. It's important to
(38:35):
remember that the Texas Rangers are considered the elite of
the elite, and Larry Driscolls lived in Texas most of
his life. He knows this. And another suspect once said
to me, well, if a Texas Ranger said I did it,
I guess I must have done it, because they get
their man and they're always right. And so Driscoll's also
got the prestige of the Texas Rangers, sort of tainting
the picture here, and eventually Hollin moves into a couple
(38:59):
more attachs. One is hypothetical language, so he says, well,
let's just say hypothetically. You know, we're shooting the shit here,
we're bullshitting. Let's just say you did do it. What
would have happened? You know, how would this have gone down?
You know, you're in the van, and this story emerges
that Holland is advancing that tries to sort of let
(39:20):
Larry off the hook, which is to say, hey, maybe
you got she got in the van. You were going
to pay her for a good time. And then this
black man, her boyfriend, Michael Harden, shows up at the window,
and you get scared and you freak out, and you
go into a kind of military mode. And Larry's a veteran,
so he thinks this will appeal to him. You snap
(39:40):
into a kind of I don't know, big PTSD trauma thing,
and you kill her and you freak out, and then
you go dump the body by your house. And he
kind of is throwing these little possibilities at Larry, and
Larry keeps being like, I guess that's possible, but I
don't remember any of this. But over time, the hours
pile up the exhaustion piles up, the sense of hopelessness,
(40:01):
and that you're never getting out of this room until
you confess. All that piles up, and eventually Larry gives
in and says, sure, okay, but still I don't remember it.
So he confesses, but it's a very weak confession.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
I think about this my dad and I.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
You know what, My dad was a criminal law professor
at UT for decades and we would talk about this
all the time, and he would say he wished I
think it was three things he would say. I wish
that everyone knew you had a right to an attorney.
He would tell my friends and me, if you ever
get stopped by the police, you need to call an attorney.
Innocent people call attorneys. He said, I wish people knew
(40:37):
that police could lie to get information out of you,
to not believe everything that the police are saying, if
this is something that's serious and they're bringing you down,
and that there are people who can help you, that
all is not lost. That you know the criminal justice
system can work, but you have a right to an attorney,
and you need that that Innocent people do talk to attorneys,
which I thought was always great advice.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
It is going to advice, and it's advice that I
had heard many times and was rattling around in my
brain as I listened to these tapes. So I got
something like, I don't know, six seven hours of interrogation
audio of Holland and Driscoll together, and there's all these
times where Driscoll almost gets there. He says, Hey, I
think I should call my friend Charlie. And Holland says, well, wait,
who's Charlie? And Driscoll says, oh, he's my friend. He's
(41:21):
a lawyer. And Holland says, oh, well you could if
you want to. I'm not here to stop you, but
I don't think Charlie's going to help you. I think
we're going to help you. And I'm listening to this
years later, and just I remember almost like grabbing my hand,
just being like, Larry, what are you doing? Call Charlie?
And granted, I also think it's worth noting here that
at no point in my reporting has it ever come
off that Texas Ranger Holland thought he was coercing an
(41:44):
innocent person into a false confession. I think that he
had convinced himself that Larry Driscoll had committed this murder.
And it was a problem of if anything tunnel vision
of you know, shutting off the little question marks in
your brain that are like, wait, this isn't adding up
and just saying, well, like, look i've got this guy.
Look he keeps offering new memories. Look now he's even
(42:07):
willing to go down this road and talk hypothetically. And
eventually Larry breaks and confesses, and then you know, he's
arrested and his life transforms. He goes from overseeing jail
inmates to being a jail inmate. He sits in prison
for two plus years and is confronted with this problem
of I want to go to trial, but I just
(42:28):
don't think a jury's ever going to believe me that
I confessed to a crime I didn't commit. In the
same way that you and I talked about how most
people think that's impossible. Larry Jesscholl was confronting you know,
this jury in rural Parker County of his peers, who
he just thought, we're never going to believe that he
falsely confessed to this crime. So he ends up taking
(42:48):
a no contest plea, which means that he's not exactly
acknowledging guilt, but he is acknowledging the strength of the
case against him, and he takes a fifteen year sentence
and goes to prison.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Does Michael Harden look at him and say, Yeah, that's him.
That's the guy with the wide eyes that I saw
looking at me before he took off with my girlfriend
in the van.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Well. First of all, and shockingly to me, the cops
never go to him with a picture of Larry Driscoll. Yeah, okay,
after he's hypnotized, and he was actually in jail at
this point on like a low level drug charge, after
the hypnos succession, all that they get the sketch, they
never go back to him and check the picture of
Larry Driscoll with him. I did it though, so that
all was twenty fifteen. I'm coming into this case to
(43:29):
report twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, and I do find
Hardin at this little motel. He was very hard to find.
But once I found him, I pulled up on my
phone a picture of Larry Driscoll and I said, what
do you think this is him? And just stared at
it for a while, and he just goes maybe nah,
Like he just hems and haws and hedges because and
(43:49):
I feel for him, you know, yeah, this is the
man you saw for like two seconds fifteen years ago.
Since then, you've been asked to give a sketch twice,
You've been hypnotized, different race, different race. You've been in
and out of jail, You've had your own troubles in life.
You've seen what this is. To quote one psychologist, You've
seen thousands of faces in the interim. So you know,
(44:12):
does it look like him? It doesn't not, but it's
hardly a dead ringer.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
So Larry Driscoll has taken fifteen years and he settles
in where is he Huntsville?
Speaker 3 (44:23):
He settles into prison life.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yeah, it's in a tiny town called Woodville, about an
hour from Huntsville, where it's just like, it's not a prison.
I'd ever this was really sad to me. I went
to prison to interview him, and I talked to the
warden and she said she I was the first journalist
she could ever remember coming to interview a prisoner like
it gives you a taste of just how cut off
these places are. So yeah, he settles into his time,
(44:45):
but he also starts writing letters to the Annison's Project
of Texas. Eventually, his case makes it to the desk
of an law student actually in Fort Worth, a woman
named Ashley Fletcher, who's really a kind of under some
hero of this story. Ashley's in law school like you know,
any other law student. She signs up for the Innocence
(45:06):
Project clinic, and one of the jobs they give the
law students is to just sift through cases that come
into them as like a first you know, past screening
before the lawyers look at it. This case kind of
sticks out a little bit because Larry has access to
and sends her a full transcript of his interrogation of
his exchange with Holland, and she describes to me just
(45:27):
sort of like hunkering down on her couch for hours
and reading it and just being horrified and sort of
going to her law professor, who also runs the Innocent
Productor of Texas, and the way he describes the story,
he's like, she seemed traumatized by what she'd read, you
know that there was just she was horrified by this confession.
And then I read it. I listened to the tapes
and it felt like Innocent Product Lawyers has spent the
(45:49):
last ten twenty years working on false confession cases and
finding what are all the tricks and tools that cops
can use to coerce one and this was just chock
full of all the worst practices. So Larry has been
working with the Nsons Project of Texas and late twenty
twenty two there was the shocking development in the case
where Larry had been in prison for so long that
(46:10):
he was actually eligible for parole, and in a rare
moment of surprise, the parole board basically bought into his
claims of innocence enough to say, you're not dangerous to anybody,
you can go home on parole. Wow, he gets out,
but he's still living, you know, with the ankle monitor,
his movements are very restricted and so he's still trying
to clear his name. Meanwhile, James Holland, the Texas Ranger,
(46:32):
has gone on to fame and success. He took all
confessions from a famous serial killer in California named Samuel Little.
It's a name that may be familiar to some listeners.
Where the case stands now is that the innocentce Project
of Texas is trying to retest all the DNA from
the case, some of which hadn't been tested or hadn't
been tested with the current level of scientific advancement in
(46:54):
terms of what's possible with DNA right where you can
take very small amounts and kind of zoom in and
blow them up and connect them to people. So I
think the silver bullet hope for Larry and his lawyers
is that some DNA is going to match, you know,
some known perpetrator who is killing women at this time
and place. But in lieu of that, it is hard
(47:16):
to imagine what it would take to get the right person.
And so part of the tragedy here is that the
law enforcement process was just so messed up that it
almost like clouds our ability to get the actual truth.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
What does Bobby Sue Hill's family think? Do they think
that Larry is the one who killed her or do
they believe he was innocent.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
So Bobby Sowell has a large family. She had five kids,
she had a brother, She had lots of aunts and
uncles and cousins, and I've only reached a few of them.
Many of them declined to talk to me at the outset,
and then many of them also declined to talk to
me after my article came out. And I think that's
largely because the few who did talk to me have
reason to doubt at this point that Larry your'schol did it.
(48:02):
They believe in his guilt. They've gone on this horrible
journey where, you know, Bobby Sue Hill is murdered, and
then the case goes cold, and they basically think this
is never going to get solved, no one cares. And
then the Texas Rangers come along in twenty fifteen and
say we've got the guy. We found him, and this
is shocking to the family. This is how they describe
it to me. I mean, they just never thought this
(48:22):
was going to get solved. So here comes the solution.
And so then eight years later, the Innocence Project of
Texas is showing up, a journalist me is showing up saying,
you know, there's some real flaws in this that you
know you should be aware of. And it was really
sort of tricky for me in terms of the ethics
and just the human morality of how to approach this
(48:43):
with the family to say, you're entitled to your privacy,
you don't need to talk to me if you don't
want to. I want to give readers a sense of
who Bobby Sue Hill was beyond the two sentences about
her being a sex worker in these old articles. Some
family members said, yes, okay, we want to tell you
all about her, But there's whole long way of saying
that they still, at least publicly believe in Larry's guilt,
(49:05):
and if that is starting to change, I don't know yet. Lastly,
I'll say that because I spoke with so few of them,
I wanted to understand what it is they're confronting, and
so I saw there's a really interesting organization called Healing
Justice that works therapeutically with families who have lost a
loved one to murder, but the case ends up being
(49:27):
a wrongful conviction. That's a very unique and rough and
complex experience for people, and so I ended up interviewing
this organization and some of the families they've been working
with about what that's like, because it's this double trauma.
You lose your loved one, then you think you have
the answer, and then the answer gets ripped away again
and you're back to square one. And so the ultimate
(49:47):
tragedy of this case to me is that law enforcement
handled it in such a way that her family now
has to lose the promise of a solution and go
back to not knowing who killed her, and also whether
that person may still be out there.
Speaker 1 (50:01):
Is there a suspicion that this person is a serial killer?
Is there anything else sort of connected? I know that
we've mentioned a few things, but do profilers do you
think think this is indicative of someone who has done
this before or has done this since.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
Yes. And the reason for that is not that any
elite profiler has come into the case. But Texas Ranger
Holland himself indicated in his reports suspicion that while he
in his case, he thought Larry committed these other crimes.
But there were two other women around this time. There
was one other woman who was a sex worker who
(50:39):
is found dead in a creek similar to the one
that Bobbysoo has found in but actually in Fort Worth itself,
but same rough time, same rough m And then there's
a woman who told police at the time. Yeah, there
was this guy who took me in his van and
he started driving on the highway in the direction of
(51:00):
you know, Whetherford Alito, the places where Bobby Sujoe was found,
and he basically pulled a knife on me and was
like trying to basically rape me and coerce me, and
at one inner I think as like a stoplight or
an exit off the highway, I managed to like basically
push the door open and get out of the van
and escape. She described that man. But you know, again,
(51:20):
there weren't a lot of like really specific details that
you could tie to anyone. She said he wore like
a tie, like he was almost like a like a
cleaned up businessman type. So in theory, you know, this
could lead somewhere. Maybe there was like a known serial
killer who was wearing a tie or something. Yeah, there
are these little threads out there that you kind of
see long in the reports. Law enforcement sort of gave
up on because they just couldn't get any further with it.
(51:43):
And then the more time passes, as we know with
cold cases, the harder it is to find these witnesses. Again,
you know, this woman, it's hard to know where she
is now or how to find her. Sometimes people weren't
even using their real names. Yeah, I think there is
still some hope for solving who killed Bobby Sue Hill,
But you know, you know, as with any of these cases,
the more time goes by, the harder a lift it is,
(52:03):
and the more time and effort and resources it takes
to solve.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
This case as a conclusion, seems to me to have
all of the pitfalls a wrongful conviction. Right, You've got
cross racial misidentification, you've got a false confession, you've got
you know, bad science, hypnosis, and a polygraph on top
of it. It's like every check mark you can think
of of a wrongful conviction. What is the big message
(52:30):
that you want listeners and readers to take away from
this story?
Speaker 2 (52:35):
Well, what is call a lawyer?
Speaker 3 (52:36):
Yeah, that's my message too, if.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
You're ever picked up. I mean, this is the news
you can use element of this case. It's like, call
a lawyer, you know, don't be like Larry driscoll. But
I also think a big takeaway is that in this era,
you know, there's more and more cold cases, there's increasingly
sort of an industry of profilers of well meaning law
enforcement across the country who are trying to solve these
(53:01):
old cases. And I think that there's sometimes an incentive
with these old cases to do the sort of hail
Mary pass and to take really big risks with some
of the tools that we use to try to solve them.
And so those tools include, you know, the hypnosis, the
sketch art, the course of interrogation techniques. And I think
a big lesson here is that we need to just
(53:22):
take care on risk, you know, be careful about you know,
just throwing all of these tools at the wall and
seeing what sticks, because some of these tools are manipulative
and problematic in the sense that they can lead to
the wrong person. And so we have to kind of
reckon with like how much risk as a society we
are we willing to take on some of these hail
(53:43):
Mary cold cases, to not do things that risk putting
innocent people in prison and just getting closure for the
sake of closure without getting the truth.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Mmerosi. Our associate
producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by Nick Toga. Executive
(54:25):
produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(54:46):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
There's all these times where Driscol almost gets there. He says, Hey,
I think I should call my friend Charlie. It's my friend.
He's a lawyer, and Hannd says, oh, well, you could
if you want to. I'm not here to stop you,
but I don't think Charlie's going to help you. I
think we're going to help you. I remember almost like
grabbing my hand, just being like, Larry, what are you doing?
Call Charlie.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:58):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold Where
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories The Marshall Project is a fantastic nonprofit
(01:19):
news organization, and my friend Maurice Schama is one of
its best reporters. He hosts a podcast called Smokescreen Just
Say You're Sorry. It tells the story of a brutal
murder of a woman who was disparaged by the police
to secure a suspect. And that's just the beginning of
the questionable techniques used by the investigators as well as
(01:42):
the Texas Rangers.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
So let's first.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Talk about the construction of this piece, because to say
it's an article or a podcast tied to it as
too simplistic. Tell me what you created in your piece,
which is called Anatomy of a murder confession, kind of
describe for listeners what you're doing before we talk about
the actual story, which is unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Sure, I mean, I am primarily a writer, but I
know that writing isn't the only way that people take
in information. And this is primarily a story about memory
and how faulty our memories can be and the risks
that come with kind of exploiting the faultiness of our
memories in the criminal justice system. And I wanted the
writing to try to capture that, but I also knew
(02:26):
that there were other ways to capture it too, and
the Marshall Projects we created a kind of multimedia experience
where you're reading an article, but you're also looking at
visuals where, for example, it's a van on a street
corner and the van flips through multiple different iterations to
mimic the way that someone's memory of that van changed
over time. Right, it looked one way and then ten
(02:47):
years later it looked a different way.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Tell me the purpose of the Marshall Project, because you know,
people who are listening to our show are used to
hearing from people who are independent authors with publishing houses
or at the New Yorker, so this feels different. Would
you consider the Marshal Project to be like an advocacy
program and you're a journalist within it, because I always
(03:09):
think of the Marshall Project as people who are really
digging into wrongful convictions, which seems like advocacy to me.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah, it's a very good question. I mean, there's always
been an element of journalism that advocates for kind of
a better world in a general sense, you know, whether
that's a more transparent society, a society with more equality,
fewer disparities of race and gender, but we do really
see ourselves as journalists. First. The Martial Project was founded
by a former editor in chief of The New York Times,
(03:36):
a guy named Bill Keller, with a former hedge fund manager,
Neil Barski, who was just really amped up about the
injustices and the criminal justice system. And the mission statement
is very broad. It's to create a sense of urgency
around that system and to tell stories that help the
public kind of understand what the problems are in the
system and potential solutions. We're not advocates in the sense
(03:58):
of taking positions on individual policies or candidates. We don't
advocate for any particular thing, but we advocate for the
things that I think all journalists do to an extent,
which is more justice in the world and more equality
and more transparency. To that end, I think we're in
line with a certain generation of investigative journalism outlets like
Pro Publica or the Texas Tribune that really see the
(04:22):
kind of public service mission as the number one thing
before entertaining people, before telling a story, you know, we
want people to understand the system, and then we think, Okay,
what stories are going to help people understand the system better.
And that's really I think. How I came to this
story and how I felt like this story was sort
(04:42):
of special is that, on the one hand, it's a
twisty true crime narrative with lots of exciting surprises in it,
but on the other hand, it features all kinds of
lessons about the reality of wrongful convictions in the United States,
false confessions, how it is that psychology works in the
way that the tech actives do their work. And then finally,
I'll say that I do a lot of stories on
(05:04):
wrongful convictions and some people who go to prison, but
I and my colleagues also probably the majority of our
work is on people who are guilty, and the questions
are not did they do it? The questions are should
prison conditions be this awful? Or should police, let's say,
send a canine to maul someone who was selling drugs
on the corner. You know, the questions can get very
(05:24):
complex and rich beyond the question of isn't innocent person
in prison?
Speaker 1 (05:28):
When you and I initially talked about this, you asked
me where should we start? Should we start with the victim,
which in this case is Bobby Sue Hill or do
we start from the point of view of someone who's
arguably another victim in this case, which would be the suspect. Right, So,
when we're talking about this case, where does it make
the most sense to start? Can we talk about where
(05:50):
we are and the time period.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
This starts in two thousand and five. Many of us
listening probably where we're alive at the time, and we're
in a small town called Alito, Texas, aled which is
in a rural county called Parker County. It's about an
hour west of Fort Worth, the Dallas Fort Worth metro area,
and it's where you know, the suburbs give way to
(06:12):
vast rolling fields. There are a lot of peach farms
out there. It's a really kind of lovely, beautiful area.
And within Alito, this one part of this county, there's
a rural area that has a road in the trees
where there's a lot of really large houses. It's very beautiful.
Somebody wants to describe it to me as if you
live in Fort Worth and want a mansion but can't
afford a mansion, this is the street you go live
(06:34):
in out in the country where the property is cheap
and you can have a mansion. So imagine a bunch
of houses that are really spread out and really really
big and pretty. In March two thousand and five, there
are two teenage boys who are hiking around. I imagine
it's a day they have off from school, and they
are in this creek bed and they find a pair
(06:55):
of trash bags and they see what looks like an
ear coming out of one of the trash bags, and
they realize, oh my god, this is a body. So
they sprint. I imagine the kind of panic that would
set in if this were me as a high school kid.
They sprint to a house nearby. They call nine one
Pint one. The Parker County Sheriff's Office descends on the
area and basically has the body of a woman. They
(07:17):
figure out, They put out alerts to other law enforcement,
and eventually it goes on the local news in the
region that this woman has been found and they can't
identify her, but she has a pair of tattoos that
are very specific on her shoulders, and a member of
her family calls in and says, that's Bobby Sue Hill,
and so now they know who she is and they
(07:38):
start to investigate. You know, who is this woman and
what circumstances could possibly have led her to be so
brutally raped and murdered and strangled and left you for
dead out here in this creek. My own investigation as
a reporter kind of mirrored. I remember feeling like, oh,
this is what I'm doing is similar to what the
sheriff's deputies were doing at the very outset, which is
(08:00):
just the question of who is this woman and her
family shared with those officers and then eventually with me
some detail, and it is a really sort of tragic
story that I've spent a lot of time trying to
put together because I felt like earlier versions of the
story that appeared in local newspapers and police records in
the courts really limited her and put her in this
(08:22):
very specific box where it was easy to it really
almost degraded her memory. So Bobby Souhill was a young
woman from the Fort Worth area. She fell in love
with her high school sweetheart, who was from an immigrant
family from Southeast Asia, and she dropped out of high
school to marry him. They had five kids together, and
there was also a sort of dark strain in her
(08:43):
family history. She had a cousin who had done sex
work and had died of AIDS years earlier. My understanding
is that she had a really contentious relationship with her
own mother, and sex work was sort of accepted almost
in the family, and so she falls into with her husband,
even though they have five kids. They fall into using
drugs together, harder and harder drugs, and then tragically he
(09:05):
dies in a car accident and she's left. She's in
her twenties, she has five kids, and she descends into
drug use and sex work. In fort Worth, her five
kids moved in with the husband who had died his family,
and she is living with a boyfriend in a in
(09:25):
these like derelict motels on the outskirts of downtown fort Worth.
Fort Worth has this street called East Lancaster that runs
off of downtown that is just famous. I mean, I
have friends who grew up in Fort Worth who say,
that's where the sex workers are, that's where the drugs are,
that's where there's all those little motels and shelters for
unhoused people, and that's where she is. And her cousins
(09:47):
were described going and driving down the street looking for Bobby,
finding her, trying to convince her to come home. Eventually,
she calls her oldest daughter, who's in I think middle
or high school at this point, and basically says like,
I'd like to come back and live with you all.
I think the most tragic element of this is that
(10:07):
I found another cousin of hers who is now in
prison himself, sort of speaking of this dark thread in
the family, and he said basically that she felt like
a failure as a mother, and she kind of drowned
that sense of failure in drugs. One version of this
is she abandoned her children, but another version is she
didn't feel like she could be a proper mother to them.
She didn't feel like she'd had the right kind of
mother in herself. But then we know that she was
(10:28):
about to try to go back and live with them,
and about to try to pick herself up and get
out of this lifestyle, and instead they have to identify
her body. It took a lot of work to kind
of get that story, but I felt like it was
really necessary to understand the full scope of the tragedy
that is this case.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
What was the other reporting like on her life story
in contrast to all of the deep research you clearly
did on her life story.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Oh, it was half a sentence. It was sex worker
found in the court records. There was a little bit
of a sense that the detectives were almost disparaging her
in order to solve the case. And you can debate
whether this was okay for them to do, but they
would talk to suspects and say, well, you know, she
wasn't the daughter of a senator, so like, go ahead, basically,
go ahead and confess because you're not going to get
a harsh punishment because no one cared about this woman.
(11:14):
And so the family members I reached just said they
were imbevalent because on the one hand, they were displeased
with elements of my reporting, which we'll get into. It's
very complex, But on the other hand, they wanted the
world to know that there was so much more to
this person, that she loved her kids, that she had
this incredible sense of humor, that she really was an
incredible mother to these young kids before she kind of
(11:35):
got in her own head and fell off the track.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
So in two thousand and five, Bobby Sue Hill is saying,
I am ready to get my life together. I'd like
to come back. What happens next that changes everything?
Speaker 2 (11:48):
So her body's found. And there's a question immediately for
law enforcement, which is how did a woman who was
last seen on the streets of East Lancaster in downtown
Fort Worth end up in a ditch an hour away
in a rural area. Pretty soon, through just you know,
running the different investigative leads in downtown Fort Worth, they
(12:08):
find a man who was her boyfriend at the time.
They often refer to him as a pimp. I have
wrestled with whether that word is fair. It seems like
she was doing sex work. He was also using drugs
and the mowing lawns to try to make ends meet,
and they were living together, and he was protecting her,
you know, from John's in certain scenarios. I interviewed him myself,
and the story that he says to investigators is I
(12:31):
was with Bobby when she was abducted. I saw her
be abducted. There was a John who came. He was
driving a white van, and you know, he stopped at
this little intersection. He drove back and forth a few times.
There was something a little bit uneasy or sketchy about it.
I didn't feel totally trustworthy, but she said, no, it's okay,
I'm going to go do this job, and so she
disappears into the van. He follows the van as it
(12:55):
drives over to a side street, and then at some
point after a few minutes, you know, standing there, the boyfriend,
his name is Michael Hardin, and he sees a face
pop up in the window of a man whose eyes
got wide, and recognizes him the protector boyfriend figure from
the previous interaction, and kind of flips out and throws
(13:15):
the van into gear and speeds off with it. And
he doesn't see Bobby Sue Hill's face, so for all
he knows, she's already been killed in the van. At
this point, we don't have an exact time of death
to know when it happened, but that is the story
that he tells to investigators. Investigators do what they do.
They set him up with a sketch artist who draws
an image of that face.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
So the police believe him, Michael the boyfriend who is
also her protector. I mean, this does not seem like
a credible witness to me. How do we know he's
not involved?
Speaker 2 (13:47):
My sense is that they decided that they believed him,
that his story was broadly corroborated. Although this was a
whole universe of people whose memories were tainted by drug use,
And in my own investigation of the case, the one
kind of point in his favor, so to speak, is
that a his story has remained remarkably consistent in certain ways,
(14:08):
but B it is impossible to imagine how or why
if he was involved, she would have ended up in
this ditch an hour west, in this small town that
people in East Lancaster wouldn't necessarily know. That said, it
is entirely possible that he's lying, and in fact, later
on in this case, an investigator who's looking into it
(14:29):
finds an ant and asks the aunt when was the
last time you spoke to her? And she gives a date,
and it's in fact after the date that he gave
that she was abducted. So it's also possible that his
story isn't exactly wrong, but that she wanted to get
away from him, and she did get away, and then
her death had nothing to do with this white van
and this man that he saw drive off with her.
(14:50):
Everything is an option still, and I think a claim
that a lot of lawyers working on the case now
have made to me is that basically this case was
never going to be an easy one to solve, and
I think her family acknowledged that too. This was a
murder committed in a scenario where people are looking out
for themselves. There's a culture of being opposed to snitching.
So it's yes reasonable to assume that the boyfriend could
(15:12):
have been involved, reasonable to assume that his entire story
is just faulty, reasonable to assume he made it up
to protect someone else. When I interviewed him and kind
of got into this world, I mean, I tracked him
down to one of these derelict motels in Fort Worth.
I mean, everything was just so depressing and desperate in
terms of the circumstances that it sort of felt like
there was a whole universe of things I didn't know
(15:33):
in terms of who's protecting whom with what story.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
So Michael sits down with a sketch artist in two
thousand and five, once his girlfriend is discovered in her
bodies discovered, he sits down and he works with the
sketch artist. What does this man look like? Who's in
this white van?
Speaker 2 (15:49):
So according to Harden, to Michael Hard and the boyfriend,
the man in the white van has a big, bushy mustache.
She's kind of got a bit of a receiving heroline.
If you learn a less look at this photo in passing,
you might think this is a Latino man. You might
think that he's you know, of Mexican heritage, although you know,
sketches are an art as much as the science. But
this is all to say that the sketch does not
(16:11):
lead to any suspects, to any matches. And around this time,
I should say there is a suspect that emerges because
he reports that his white van was stolen in a
nearby town. A man named Tim Dawson basically calls a
police and says a sex worker stole my white van.
Threads of that sound similar to this case, right, So
they bring him in. They ask him about the details.
(16:33):
He claims that he was with a sex worker and
she stole his van, but he claims to have no
knowledge of Bobby sou Hill know nothing about this case.
Added to the mysteriousness, he lives in Weatherford, Texas, which
is the county seat of Parker County, which is just
a stone's throw from Aledo, so he also lives somewhat
near the place her body was found. He's been arrested
(16:55):
in the past for various violence, but he basically has
no knowledge, and then don't press him, or at least
at a certain point, they just give up on pressing
him because he says, I know nothing about this, and
you know, his connection is circumstantial, circumstantially fairly strong. But
you know, they kind of reach a barrier in the
investigation and at that point the case goes entirely cold.
(17:15):
So to situate this in history, over the last twenty years,
the number of cold cases has been going up because
the number of homicides that are solved has been going down,
and this case just kind of enters that ocean of
unsolved cold cases out there that Texas law enforcement hopes
to solve someday but is not exactly prioritizing.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Why is that that's such an odd statistic. You would
think with more advances in forensic science that you would
be solving more cases instead of fewer.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
I think a distrust of the police sometimes makes it
hard for them to actually solve it. So you look
at a case like this, I imagine many of those
people in Fort Worth who were around Bobby sou Hill
and her boyfriend at the time don't trust the police
and are so less likely to talk to them about
what they saw and heard. For all of the advances
in forensics, genealogy, etc. These are expensive and time intensive processes.
(18:09):
You know, anyone case takes a lot of effort to solve,
and as law enforcement officers have told me that their
departments are just generally cash strapped and just kind of
honestly have to jump to the next one every day.
So if there's a new murder, they have to start
solving that one, and so cases are allowed to go cold.
But to combat that problem, and this is where the
next element of our story comes in, the Texas Rangers
(18:33):
decided to create a basically unsolved crime cold case unit. Now,
the Texas Rangers, or the one percent of listeners who've
never heard of them, are this two hundred year old
law enforcement agency in Texas that have kind of almost
mythicual ties to the early history of Texas. They existed
even before Texas was a state. They are associated with
(18:54):
all kinds of atrocities in the eighteen nineteen hundreds, but
by the early Tiefouans are treated as this elite almost
like FBI meet CIA element of the Texas Department of
Public Safety, which is our statewide law enforcement body, and
typically the best of the best among the highway patrol
(19:15):
troopers are elevated to the position of being a Texas Ranger.
There's one hundred and sixty in change across the state
and in the early two thousands, they decide to create
a unsolved Crimes cold case unit that they say is
going to use the best of the new forensic tools
that we have to try to solve cases. Around twenty
thirteen twenty fourteen, there's a small break in the case
(19:39):
of Bobby Zoue Hill. There was a cigarette butt that
was found near her body in the ditch in Parker County,
and there's a DNA hit on the cigarette butt that
it matches a woman. That woman is brought in for questioning.
She is. From the audio, it's clear horrified by Bobby
Sue Hill's death and claims I know nothing about it.
She says, I had this one boyfriend who tried to
(20:00):
strangled me this one time. They go and interview him.
He says, I don't know nothing about nothing. You know, again,
you talk about distrust of the police, and there's really
nothing to pin anything on him or her beyond just
that tiny bit of DNA and a cigarette butt, which,
to be fair, they could have thrown into the same
ditch a week or a year later, and the connection
(20:20):
to the body is not particularly tight. Around that time, though,
the Texas Rangers have really amped up their cold case
unit and a Texas Ranger named James Holland comes into
the picture to try to solve this case again. He
looks at the file and he says, well, this cigarette
butt has gone nowhere, but why don't we try Tim
Dawson again. Remember he's the one who had described having
(20:40):
his white van stolen and basically Holland at this point
he's been a Texas Ranger for five to ten years.
I think he became one in two thousand and eight.
He's developing this reputation for being really really good at interrogations,
for being the guy who walks into the room and
spends the hours and gets the confession every time. So
he starts to try to solve the case again, and
(21:02):
he goes back to Tim Dawson and they spend a
few hours together. Dawson continues to say I have no
knowledge of any of this. This is in fact the
interview where Holland says, well, Bobby Souhill wasn't exactly a
debutante caream of society, so go ahead and confess and
no one o't care. And I interviewed Tim Dawson and
he told me that when a microphone was not going,
(21:22):
he said to Holland, well, if you won't care about
closing this case so bad, I didn't do it. You
didn't do it, so like, why don't you take the
friggin charge? You know, basically just fitting in his face
in a way, and Holland gives up. But this is
where things get really strange. Holland then goes back to
Michael Hart and the boyfriend and he interviews him again,
(21:43):
and he starts to use these techniques that are meant
to get hardened to really remember things that at this
point have happened ten years in the past. And so
there's really interesting language where he says, you know, let's
run through the events and backwards chronology, and let's imagine
your high up on a telephone pole looking down at
(22:04):
the scene. You know, these are tools that I did
a lot of research on them to understand how accepted
they are, and elements of them are very accepted by
psychologists at being good at kind of relaxing your brain
into a state where you can pick up some memories
that you maybe didn't realize we're in there. But it
also raises a risk of confabulation, of kind of inventing
(22:25):
something and then having that become your memory. And then
Hollin says, well, we want to try this other thing,
which is to hypnotize you.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
What year are we.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
In when we have James Holland, the Texas Ranger is
now talking to Michael the boyfriend, trying to figure out
what happened, and sort of it sounds like he's trying
to do some memory tricks with him to take them
back in time.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
And this is in late twenty fourteen. At this point,
the Texas Rangers have been using hypnosis to try to
solve crimes for twenty thirty years. At this point, psychologists
researchers are basically screaming, this is really risky. So hypnosis,
I mean it sounds like we all think of sort
of a party trick or getting you to quit smoking
(23:22):
with a hypnotist. In the context of law enforcement, it's
really about relaxing the witness or if it's in the
case maybe a sexual assault, the victim and getting them
into the sort of hyper relaxed state where they are
just really really focused, laser focused on the sort of
pictures in their heads from the past. Right. So there's
(23:44):
this video of a Texas Ranger hypnotist coming in to
Michael the boyfriend and counting down from a high number
and imagining, you know, you're on a beach, and there's
stuff about like going through a doorway and grains of
sand and this sort of weird language that is meant
to get him into this relaxed state. And the audio
(24:04):
is a little bit unsatisfying because at a certain point
Michael is just mumbling and you imagine, you know, you're
super relaxed and you're kind of mumbling your memories. Now,
why is this risky? What researchers have told me is
that when you're in that really relaxed state, you're also
kind of suggestible. So the Texas Ranger may do his
best not to give you new information, but if you're
(24:27):
not careful, you may just kind of invent something in
your mind. You know, we all if you just imagine
you've got a memory, if you just try to like
hypothesize like, oh was the T shirt red or was
it green, and you kind of go with red. And
then the more time you spend on that, the more
you know, the red T shirt gets kind of locked
into your memory and suddenly you remember it definitively as
(24:48):
a red T shirt. And so the problem isn't just
that you have potentially false memories, it's that you become
more confident in your false memories. So he comes out
of hypnosis. He gets back in the room with Texas
Ranger James Hu and a new forensic sketch artist. So
remember in two thousand and five he had spoken to one,
and now he is back again with the sketch artist,
(25:11):
a new sketch artist, and describes the face of a man,
and we have basically an entirely new face. It looks
nothing like the two thousand and five face. If you
had thought the two thousand and five face sort of
looked like a Latino man, this new man is pretty
definitely looks like a white man, middle aged, flat top haircut,
the bushy mustache has disappeared, and you now have what
looks like a little bit of five o'clock shadow. The
(25:33):
face is definitely more gaunt in a way, just like
Hollywood cheeks, a little bit. In addition the and this
is I think where I was really particularly fascinated as well,
the van changes. So in two thousand and five we
were talking about a mini van. Michael said, yeah, the
guy drove a minivan and had a bunch of windows
on the sides. It had a very long pointed sort
(25:56):
of nose, like the front hood was very long. Image
in your head. Right nine years later, following the hypnosis,
following all these memory tricks that the Texas Rangers are using,
he says, actually it was a big workvan. So the
color hasn't changed. It's still white, but it's now a big,
boxy workvan, one of those ones that has like no
windows on the sides and a very squish front hood.
(26:20):
So two different, entirely different white vans. Now. Part of
the reporting and research of this was looking at the
materials and then also going to researchers who have done
studies of human memory and eyewitness identification and confessions, et cetera,
and asked them like, what do you make of this?
And basically they said, well, knowing nothing about this case,
(26:43):
I can just tell you that memory never gets better
over time. It only gets worse. There's no way that
this man, nine years after the crime, produced a more
accurate representation of what happened than he did in the
immediate aftermath. So treat the new sketch and the new
van with tremendous skepticism. The Texas Rangers, instead of being skeptical,
(27:04):
take one more step. They take that face and remember
ten years have past. They use aging technology. So you
know how when you look at them in the old days,
that was on a milk cart and you'd have the
missing child and they would run it through some computer
program to imagine what the kid looked like. Five years later,
they do something similar with the face of the perpetrator
(27:24):
in this case, where they age the suspects face. And
this is a flyer that goes out to other law
enforcement and eventually to the media and to the public,
and so in newspapers in the Greater Fort Worth area
you have these images of the hypnosis induced sketch and
hypnosis induced van that are now there for the public
(27:46):
to see.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
One of the things that I'd like you to talk
about now would be one of the top reasons we
know that people are wrongfully convicted is witness misidentification. Going
back to the idea that he first had a sketch
of someone who was Latino. Also, cross racial misidentification is
pretty common too, even at the onset when they have
(28:10):
a sketch artist in two thousand and five talking to Michael,
how reliable do we think that would have been? Even
at the time someone who's going through like a trauma,
his girlfriend has taken away in this van, he sees
this guy for a second.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
It's still valuable to have a sketch.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
But is it also not dangerous to have a sketch
of someone who is sort of a generic sketch of
someone of a different race.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Oh. Absolutely. There is a long history in this country
of tragedies in which someone commits a crime and someone
else goes to prison because either a witness or in
some cases, even more tragically, the victim themselves if it's
a sexual assault, misidentifies who did it. And typically you
see this in the realm of lineup identifications, right where
(29:02):
let's say you have a white woman who was sexually
assaulted and it was a black man who did it,
and the police bring in a lineup of, you know,
five black men from the same neighborhood we just know,
and this is not really to detegrate the victims in
these cases. We just know that human memory is faulty
and that that is a problem that the criminal justice system,
you know, has to confront and well meeting investigators are
(29:25):
doing their best to deal with it. But in earlier
eras where the science was not as robust, or where
police were putting, you know, getting convictions over getting the
accurate truth, you just had a lot of scenarios where
the victim or a witness pick someone out of the
lineup and then they become the lead suspect and then
they are coerced in whatever way to be convicted, to
(29:46):
be wrongly convicted of the crime, and sometimes spend years
or decades in prison for it.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
So let's go back to this brand new sketch of
the white man, middle aged, flat top haircut. First, does
this look like Tim Dawson, I'm assuming not the guy
who originally owned a van.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
You know, I'm gonna pause and say that this was
a moment where I had to just check humbly my
own subjectiveness, because like it, does it look like him?
Doesn't not? But does it really? Know? I mean, the
sketch is so generic and Tim Dawson also just kind
of looks like a middle aged white guy. I will
say Tim Dawson looks nothing like the two thousand and
five sketch at all, but the twenty fifteenth sketch like
(30:26):
he doesn't not look like him. Tell me I really
want to be careful of in this is to not
just sort of cast undue suspicion on Tim Dawson. I
don't call him him having a solid alibi, but the
links to the crime were still very circumstantial, unlimited, so
there's no reason to think that he secretly did it
and is out there. But this sketch goes out there,
and this is where the story takes what I described
(30:48):
as like a very small town turn. It goes out
in a newspaper called the Weatherford Democrat. And there's a
man named Jean Burkes who runs a pawn shop in Weatherford.
There's a guy who comes into his pawn shop frequently
named Larry Driscoll. Jean knows Larry not only because he
comes into the pawn shop to buy things or sell things,
but also because he is the handyman for Jean's neighbor.
(31:09):
So you imagine Jean goes out to pick up the newspaper,
and he frequently sees Larry Driscoll mowing his neighbor's lawn.
They wave, they know each other. Weatherford's got fewer than
fifty thousand people in it. It's a small place where
everyone knows everyone. And Jean Burks told me that he
gets the Weatherford Democrat and he just sits in his
pawn shop all day on the counter, and he keeps
(31:29):
looking at it, and he keeps thinking that kind of
looks familiar, and then eventually it snaps in his mind
and he goes, that kind of looks like Larry. And again,
as I said before, doesn't look like Larry. Well, it's subjective,
like doesn't not, But it's like two white men in
their forties and fifties, like it's pretty pretty blurry. He
shows it to his wife. Does you think that looks
like Larr Driscoll? She goes in, not really. He shows
(31:50):
it to other people in the pawn shop. They're like, ah, maybe,
but it's enough that Jean calls to the Texas Rangers.
Jean himself also struck me as a someone who maybe
maybe reads them and watches a lot of true crime
and has a kind of let me just say, like
has a certain confidence about his ability to like do
the polices work for them. So he googles Larry's house
(32:12):
where the body was found and discovers that they're like
less than a mile from each other and thinks it's like, oh, well,
that's compelling. So he calls the Texas Rangers. He gets
through to James Holland and he says, you know, I
think this kind of looks like Larry driscoll And. So
the Texas Ranger, James Holland, looks into driscoll and finds
out that yes, he lives near the crime scene, and
his day job is actually that he works in addition
(32:34):
to being a handyman for the local jail, and so
the jail will like send inmates out to do like roadwork,
you know, mow medians in the highway whatever, and he
oversees that so he's actually a licensed jailer. Holland drives
over to this barn where Larry is working, and basically
(32:54):
he just approaches Larry driscoll and says, I want to
talk to you. We think you might be able to
help us solve the crime. And this is the beginning
of two very dramatic days of interrogation in which Larry
is pulled from saying I know nothing about this to
a full confession to the murder of Bobbysuit Hill. And
a huge part of my reporting is understanding how that
(33:17):
happened and is there any reason to believe Larry's confession.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
And that's another thing that we know is a very
large portion of people who have been wrongfully convicted are
there because of false confessions. And I think that oftentimes
people I encounter say, well, they wouldn't confess if they
weren't guilty, which is bullshit. People confess when they are innocent.
They do, especially when they don't call on attorney.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
I agree that it's bullshit. I also, I think, came
into this story knowing that that was a common sentiment
and having a real empathy for that sentiment, because, like
I get it intuitively, it feels so weird because all
of us cannot imagine that we would confess to a
crime we didn't commit. And I think actually Larry Driscoll
would have said, I would have never confessed to a
crime that I didn't commit until I was in the
(34:03):
room with this ranger and going through this process, and
so part of why I wanted to tell this story
and go deep into it was that I thought it
was just an incredibly valuable case study or illustration of
what these tactics look like when they're being used in
their full manipulative power.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
When Larry Driscoll is being interrogated by the Texas Ranger
James Holland.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Based on the sketch based on.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
This armchair detective who says, this guy lived very close
to where Bobby Sue Hill's body was found, and that's
about it. What techniques is Holland using to be able
to elicit a confession out of somebody who I'm going
to assume you're going to tell me was actually innocent.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
It's really fascinating. The way that I came into the story,
just for context, is that I was told about this
case by the Innocence Project of Texas. I had gotten
to know the lead lawyer there who had taken on
Larry Driscoll's case and fully believed in his wa in
a sense. As a result of talking to him about it,
I sent Larry a letter. Larry sent me back a letter.
Eventually I go out to the prison where he is
(35:07):
and interview him length about this and the way that
he tells the story, the Texas ranger approached him in
the barn and said, we think you may be able
to help us, and then that turns into we think
you may have witnessed something, and Larry at this point says, well, sure,
if it's possible I witness something and didn't realize it.
And the story at first is, you know, maybe you
(35:29):
were in the area and picked up this woman and
one of the last people to see her alive, and
so we need your help, and Larry racks his brain
and says, well, I don't really remember ever being in
that area. And this is the point at which the
first crucial technique starts to show up, and that is
deception or lies. So it's entirely legal for law enforcement
(35:50):
to lie to suspects in the interrogation room, and law
enforcement says, we need to do this basically to catch
the guilty. And the lie at first is, well, there's
a record that the local police have you around the
time and place of the crime, that you were in
a white van driving around and you were on a
list of men that was known to sex workers, or
(36:11):
at least your license plate was on there. Maybe they
made a mistake. Maybe you're not that guy, but help
us out here. Why would you be on that list?
And so Larry starts thinking, well, why would I be
on that list? And he starts racking his brain, like
when have I been in that area? And keep in mind,
this is all lies. It's bs. There's no record of
him being in that time and place, but the lie
is enough to get Larry sort of imagining. Okay, I
(36:34):
guess there was this one time when my dad had
fallen on hard times and was in a Salvation Army
shelter around that area, and I went to visit him,
and then, you know, I guess I was doing some
contract work, and I guess I bid on some jobs
and some houses near there, but I think I was
always driving a blue truck, not a white van. Right.
So you see this process of him racking his brain,
(36:55):
and the more he then produces, the more Holland the
Texas Range thinks, oh wait a minute, this guy was
lying to me before. He knows more than he's letting on,
and I'm starting to pull the truth out of him. Right,
So there's this dance that starts to go on, and
lies are the way that Holland starts to kind of
pull it out, but over time he starts to ratchet
up the pressure and he says, well, we think you
(37:15):
can help us solve this crime, but we want to
be absolutely sure that you know you're telling us the
full truth. So would you be willing to take voluntarily
a polygraph? At this point, Larry says, well, you know,
maybe I need a lawyer. Do you think I might
need a lawyer? He doesn't explicitly ask for one, so
it's just vague enough that the ranger says, well, we
don't think a lawyer is going to help you. You
(37:36):
just need to help us, you know, search your memory
and take the polygraph. You know, I'm sure you're going
to ace it, but let's just do the polygraph to
be sure, and Larry says all right. So he takes
it and one of the questions is did you cause
the death of this woman, Bobby Sue Hill? And he
says no, and then the polygrapher says, uh, oh, this
is a lie, and Larry's like, how is that possible?
(37:56):
I don't think I killed anybody. I have no memory
of killing Anyone says, well, you know, sometimes your body
remembers things that your brain doesn't remember. In reality, we
know that polygraph tests are notoriously unreliable. They're not admissible
in court.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
They're intimidating, though, and that's the point.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
That's absolutely it. It's intimidating. And so suddenly Larry starts to think,
Oh my god, Like there's these little moments in his
mind where he thinks, is it possible I killed this
moment and just don't remember it. I can't imagine that.
I try to imagine just the experience of trying to
reckon with the idea that you could have killed somebody,
that you're a murderer and don't remember it. That would
be very head spinning and really destabilizing. It's important to
(38:35):
remember that the Texas Rangers are considered the elite of
the elite, and Larry Driscolls lived in Texas most of
his life. He knows this. And another suspect once said
to me, well, if a Texas Ranger said I did it,
I guess I must have done it, because they get
their man and they're always right. And so Driscoll's also
got the prestige of the Texas Rangers, sort of tainting
the picture here, and eventually Hollin moves into a couple
(38:59):
more attachs. One is hypothetical language, so he says, well,
let's just say hypothetically. You know, we're shooting the shit here,
we're bullshitting. Let's just say you did do it. What
would have happened? You know, how would this have gone down?
You know, you're in the van, and this story emerges
that Holland is advancing that tries to sort of let
(39:20):
Larry off the hook, which is to say, hey, maybe
you got she got in the van. You were going
to pay her for a good time. And then this
black man, her boyfriend, Michael Harden, shows up at the window,
and you get scared and you freak out, and you
go into a kind of military mode. And Larry's a veteran,
so he thinks this will appeal to him. You snap
(39:40):
into a kind of I don't know, big PTSD trauma thing,
and you kill her and you freak out, and then
you go dump the body by your house. And he
kind of is throwing these little possibilities at Larry, and
Larry keeps being like, I guess that's possible, but I
don't remember any of this. But over time, the hours
pile up the exhaustion piles up, the sense of hopelessness,
(40:01):
and that you're never getting out of this room until
you confess. All that piles up, and eventually Larry gives
in and says, sure, okay, but still I don't remember it.
So he confesses, but it's a very weak confession.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
I think about this my dad and I.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
You know what, My dad was a criminal law professor
at UT for decades and we would talk about this
all the time, and he would say he wished I
think it was three things he would say. I wish
that everyone knew you had a right to an attorney.
He would tell my friends and me, if you ever
get stopped by the police, you need to call an attorney.
Innocent people call attorneys. He said, I wish people knew
(40:37):
that police could lie to get information out of you,
to not believe everything that the police are saying, if
this is something that's serious and they're bringing you down,
and that there are people who can help you, that
all is not lost. That you know the criminal justice
system can work, but you have a right to an attorney,
and you need that that Innocent people do talk to attorneys,
which I thought was always great advice.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
It is going to advice, and it's advice that I
had heard many times and was rattling around in my
brain as I listened to these tapes. So I got
something like, I don't know, six seven hours of interrogation
audio of Holland and Driscoll together, and there's all these
times where Driscoll almost gets there. He says, Hey, I
think I should call my friend Charlie. And Holland says, well, wait,
who's Charlie? And Driscoll says, oh, he's my friend. He's
(41:21):
a lawyer. And Holland says, oh, well you could if
you want to. I'm not here to stop you, but
I don't think Charlie's going to help you. I think
we're going to help you. And I'm listening to this
years later, and just I remember almost like grabbing my hand,
just being like, Larry, what are you doing? Call Charlie?
And granted, I also think it's worth noting here that
at no point in my reporting has it ever come
off that Texas Ranger Holland thought he was coercing an
(41:44):
innocent person into a false confession. I think that he
had convinced himself that Larry Driscoll had committed this murder.
And it was a problem of if anything tunnel vision
of you know, shutting off the little question marks in
your brain that are like, wait, this isn't adding up
and just saying, well, like, look i've got this guy.
Look he keeps offering new memories. Look now he's even
(42:07):
willing to go down this road and talk hypothetically. And
eventually Larry breaks and confesses, and then you know, he's
arrested and his life transforms. He goes from overseeing jail
inmates to being a jail inmate. He sits in prison
for two plus years and is confronted with this problem
of I want to go to trial, but I just
(42:28):
don't think a jury's ever going to believe me that
I confessed to a crime I didn't commit. In the
same way that you and I talked about how most
people think that's impossible. Larry Jesscholl was confronting you know,
this jury in rural Parker County of his peers, who
he just thought, we're never going to believe that he
falsely confessed to this crime. So he ends up taking
(42:48):
a no contest plea, which means that he's not exactly
acknowledging guilt, but he is acknowledging the strength of the
case against him, and he takes a fifteen year sentence
and goes to prison.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Does Michael Harden look at him and say, Yeah, that's him.
That's the guy with the wide eyes that I saw
looking at me before he took off with my girlfriend
in the van.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Well. First of all, and shockingly to me, the cops
never go to him with a picture of Larry Driscoll. Yeah, okay,
after he's hypnotized, and he was actually in jail at
this point on like a low level drug charge, after
the hypnos succession, all that they get the sketch, they
never go back to him and check the picture of
Larry Driscoll with him. I did it though, so that
all was twenty fifteen. I'm coming into this case to
(43:29):
report twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, and I do find
Hardin at this little motel. He was very hard to find.
But once I found him, I pulled up on my
phone a picture of Larry Driscoll and I said, what
do you think this is him? And just stared at
it for a while, and he just goes maybe nah,
Like he just hems and haws and hedges because and
(43:49):
I feel for him, you know, yeah, this is the
man you saw for like two seconds fifteen years ago.
Since then, you've been asked to give a sketch twice,
You've been hypnotized, different race, different race. You've been in
and out of jail, You've had your own troubles in life.
You've seen what this is. To quote one psychologist, You've
seen thousands of faces in the interim. So you know,
(44:12):
does it look like him? It doesn't not, but it's
hardly a dead ringer.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
So Larry Driscoll has taken fifteen years and he settles
in where is he Huntsville?
Speaker 3 (44:23):
He settles into prison life.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yeah, it's in a tiny town called Woodville, about an
hour from Huntsville, where it's just like, it's not a prison.
I'd ever this was really sad to me. I went
to prison to interview him, and I talked to the
warden and she said she I was the first journalist
she could ever remember coming to interview a prisoner like
it gives you a taste of just how cut off
these places are. So yeah, he settles into his time,
(44:45):
but he also starts writing letters to the Annison's Project
of Texas. Eventually, his case makes it to the desk
of an law student actually in Fort Worth, a woman
named Ashley Fletcher, who's really a kind of under some
hero of this story. Ashley's in law school like you know,
any other law student. She signs up for the Innocence
(45:06):
Project clinic, and one of the jobs they give the
law students is to just sift through cases that come
into them as like a first you know, past screening
before the lawyers look at it. This case kind of
sticks out a little bit because Larry has access to
and sends her a full transcript of his interrogation of
his exchange with Holland, and she describes to me just
(45:27):
sort of like hunkering down on her couch for hours
and reading it and just being horrified and sort of
going to her law professor, who also runs the Innocent
Productor of Texas, and the way he describes the story,
he's like, she seemed traumatized by what she'd read, you
know that there was just she was horrified by this confession.
And then I read it. I listened to the tapes
and it felt like Innocent Product Lawyers has spent the
(45:49):
last ten twenty years working on false confession cases and
finding what are all the tricks and tools that cops
can use to coerce one and this was just chock
full of all the worst practices. So Larry has been
working with the Nsons Project of Texas and late twenty
twenty two there was the shocking development in the case
where Larry had been in prison for so long that
(46:10):
he was actually eligible for parole, and in a rare
moment of surprise, the parole board basically bought into his
claims of innocence enough to say, you're not dangerous to anybody,
you can go home on parole. Wow, he gets out,
but he's still living, you know, with the ankle monitor,
his movements are very restricted and so he's still trying
to clear his name. Meanwhile, James Holland, the Texas Ranger,
(46:32):
has gone on to fame and success. He took all
confessions from a famous serial killer in California named Samuel Little.
It's a name that may be familiar to some listeners.
Where the case stands now is that the innocentce Project
of Texas is trying to retest all the DNA from
the case, some of which hadn't been tested or hadn't
been tested with the current level of scientific advancement in
(46:54):
terms of what's possible with DNA right where you can
take very small amounts and kind of zoom in and
blow them up and connect them to people. So I
think the silver bullet hope for Larry and his lawyers
is that some DNA is going to match, you know,
some known perpetrator who is killing women at this time
and place. But in lieu of that, it is hard
(47:16):
to imagine what it would take to get the right person.
And so part of the tragedy here is that the
law enforcement process was just so messed up that it
almost like clouds our ability to get the actual truth.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
What does Bobby Sue Hill's family think? Do they think
that Larry is the one who killed her or do
they believe he was innocent.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
So Bobby Sowell has a large family. She had five kids,
she had a brother, She had lots of aunts and
uncles and cousins, and I've only reached a few of them.
Many of them declined to talk to me at the outset,
and then many of them also declined to talk to
me after my article came out. And I think that's
largely because the few who did talk to me have
reason to doubt at this point that Larry your'schol did it.
(48:02):
They believe in his guilt. They've gone on this horrible
journey where, you know, Bobby Sue Hill is murdered, and
then the case goes cold, and they basically think this
is never going to get solved, no one cares. And
then the Texas Rangers come along in twenty fifteen and
say we've got the guy. We found him, and this
is shocking to the family. This is how they describe
it to me. I mean, they just never thought this
(48:22):
was going to get solved. So here comes the solution.
And so then eight years later, the Innocence Project of
Texas is showing up, a journalist me is showing up saying,
you know, there's some real flaws in this that you
know you should be aware of. And it was really
sort of tricky for me in terms of the ethics
and just the human morality of how to approach this
(48:43):
with the family to say, you're entitled to your privacy,
you don't need to talk to me if you don't
want to. I want to give readers a sense of
who Bobby Sue Hill was beyond the two sentences about
her being a sex worker in these old articles. Some
family members said, yes, okay, we want to tell you
all about her, But there's whole long way of saying
that they still, at least publicly believe in Larry's guilt,
(49:05):
and if that is starting to change, I don't know yet. Lastly,
I'll say that because I spoke with so few of them,
I wanted to understand what it is they're confronting, and
so I saw there's a really interesting organization called Healing
Justice that works therapeutically with families who have lost a
loved one to murder, but the case ends up being
(49:27):
a wrongful conviction. That's a very unique and rough and
complex experience for people, and so I ended up interviewing
this organization and some of the families they've been working
with about what that's like, because it's this double trauma.
You lose your loved one, then you think you have
the answer, and then the answer gets ripped away again
and you're back to square one. And so the ultimate
(49:47):
tragedy of this case to me is that law enforcement
handled it in such a way that her family now
has to lose the promise of a solution and go
back to not knowing who killed her, and also whether
that person may still be out there.
Speaker 1 (50:01):
Is there a suspicion that this person is a serial killer?
Is there anything else sort of connected? I know that
we've mentioned a few things, but do profilers do you
think think this is indicative of someone who has done
this before or has done this since.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
Yes. And the reason for that is not that any
elite profiler has come into the case. But Texas Ranger
Holland himself indicated in his reports suspicion that while he
in his case, he thought Larry committed these other crimes.
But there were two other women around this time. There
was one other woman who was a sex worker who
(50:39):
is found dead in a creek similar to the one
that Bobbysoo has found in but actually in Fort Worth itself,
but same rough time, same rough m And then there's
a woman who told police at the time. Yeah, there
was this guy who took me in his van and
he started driving on the highway in the direction of
(51:00):
you know, Whetherford Alito, the places where Bobby Sujoe was found,
and he basically pulled a knife on me and was
like trying to basically rape me and coerce me, and
at one inner I think as like a stoplight or
an exit off the highway, I managed to like basically
push the door open and get out of the van
and escape. She described that man. But you know, again,
(51:20):
there weren't a lot of like really specific details that
you could tie to anyone. She said he wore like
a tie, like he was almost like a like a
cleaned up businessman type. So in theory, you know, this
could lead somewhere. Maybe there was like a known serial
killer who was wearing a tie or something. Yeah, there
are these little threads out there that you kind of
see long in the reports. Law enforcement sort of gave
up on because they just couldn't get any further with it.
(51:43):
And then the more time passes, as we know with
cold cases, the harder it is to find these witnesses. Again,
you know, this woman, it's hard to know where she
is now or how to find her. Sometimes people weren't
even using their real names. Yeah, I think there is
still some hope for solving who killed Bobby Sue Hill,
But you know, you know, as with any of these cases,
the more time goes by, the harder a lift it is,
(52:03):
and the more time and effort and resources it takes
to solve.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
This case as a conclusion, seems to me to have
all of the pitfalls a wrongful conviction. Right, You've got
cross racial misidentification, you've got a false confession, you've got
you know, bad science, hypnosis, and a polygraph on top
of it. It's like every check mark you can think
of of a wrongful conviction. What is the big message
(52:30):
that you want listeners and readers to take away from
this story?
Speaker 2 (52:35):
Well, what is call a lawyer?
Speaker 3 (52:36):
Yeah, that's my message too, if.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
You're ever picked up. I mean, this is the news
you can use element of this case. It's like, call
a lawyer, you know, don't be like Larry driscoll. But
I also think a big takeaway is that in this era,
you know, there's more and more cold cases, there's increasingly
sort of an industry of profilers of well meaning law
enforcement across the country who are trying to solve these
(53:01):
old cases. And I think that there's sometimes an incentive
with these old cases to do the sort of hail
Mary pass and to take really big risks with some
of the tools that we use to try to solve them.
And so those tools include, you know, the hypnosis, the
sketch art, the course of interrogation techniques. And I think
a big lesson here is that we need to just
(53:22):
take care on risk, you know, be careful about you know,
just throwing all of these tools at the wall and
seeing what sticks, because some of these tools are manipulative
and problematic in the sense that they can lead to
the wrong person. And so we have to kind of
reckon with like how much risk as a society we
are we willing to take on some of these hail
(53:43):
Mary cold cases, to not do things that risk putting
innocent people in prison and just getting closure for the
sake of closure without getting the truth.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Mmerosi. Our associate
producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by Nick Toga. Executive
(54:25):
produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(54:46):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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