Ashley Estell Pt. Two

September 4, 1993. Plano, Texas. While attending a soccer game at Carpenter Park with her family, seven-year old Ashley Estell goes missing after an apparent abduction. The following day, Ashley is found strangled to death next to an isolated dirt road six miles away. The investigation soon leads to a paroled sex offender named Michael Blair, who is subsequently convicted of Ashley’s murder and sentenced to death. However, as the years go by, the case against Blair begins to fall apart and DNA testing eventually exonerates him of the crime. So who was actually responsible for the murder of Ashley Estell? This week’s episode of “The Path Went Chilly” explores a controversial case which led to the passing of some new laws, but failed to bring the right perpetrator to justice.

Support the show: 

Patreon.com/julesandashley

Patreon.com/thetrailwentcold

Additional Reading:

https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2001/june/did-this-creep-really-kill-ashley-estell/

https://www.innocenceproject.org/cases/michael-blair/

https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3030

https://starlocalmedia.com/planocourier/news/plano-who-is-ashley-estell-s-killer/article_8e1b99a3-3e0f-5db7-ba5f-56db0ae7ea7b.html

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Welcome back to the Pathwe Chile for part two of
our series about the murder of Ashley Estell. Robin, do
you want to catch everyone up on what we talked
about in our previous episode.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Well, this is a heartbreaking case involving a seven year
old victim named Ashley Estelle who lived in Plano, Texas
in September of nineteen ninety three, and she was going
to her brother's soccer tournament in the middle of a
public park and she separated from her parents for a
few minutes to go play in the playground. But even
though there were hundreds of people around, she somehow got
abducted without anyone seeing or hearing anything, and the following day,

(01:05):
her murdered body would be discovered next to a remote
country road and would turn out that she had been
strangled to death. It was long before a potential suspect
named Michael Blair popped up on the radar. He was
a convicted sex offender who had spent time in prison
for attempting to sexually assault and kidnap a young girl
from her bedroom, and even though he received a ten

(01:26):
year prison sense, he was released after only serving eighteen months.
He caught on the investigator's attention because he drove by
Ashley Estelle's murder scene and he seemed to have a
weird obsession with the case, so they gradually built a
case against him, and he was finally charged with Ashley's murder,
and it turned out that most of the case against

(01:47):
him was based on what we now know as junk science,
because they found hairs on Ashley's body, but of course
they did not match Blair, and they found hairs and
fiber evidence in his car, but of course none of
it could be linked to Ashley or the murder scene.
And Blair was definitely a bad guy because he did
have an extensive history of molesting children and because he

(02:07):
was painted as such a monster in court. He was
convicted at his trial, but surprisingly he spent eighteen years
on death row. But they did DNA testing against the evidence,
and surprisingly it turned out that none of it actually
match Blair. He was exonerated as being responsible for Ashley's murder,

(02:27):
but because while he was in prison he had confessed
to molesting some other children before he was charged with
the murder, he wound up getting some additional life sentences
added to his original death sentence. So even though he
was taken off death row, he was not released from prison.
Emerald Man incarcerated for the rest of his life because
of his other child sex offenses. So they've attempted to

(02:50):
try to figure out who Ashley's real killer might be.
They looked at an unnamed individual named Suspect number four,
who has since passed away, but they've yet to find
any evidence such as DNA which proves he could have
been responsible for murdering Ashley. So officially, after thirty years,
more than thirty years, this crime is still unsolved. Now.

(03:11):
This is definitely one of the most complex wrongful conviction
cases I've ever come across, and it's pretty remarkable to
see how this story has evolved over the past three decades.
If you type Ashley Estelle's name into YouTube, you'll find
a one hour clip which is a compilation of local
news segments which aired in the year following her murder
and chronicled the investigation and arrest of Michael Blair, along

(03:34):
with his subsequent trial and conviction. And if you were
following the media coverage at that time, it would really
be hard to imagine Blair being innocent of this crime.
There was zero doubt that Blair was a dangerous sexual
predator who armed children, and many of those aforementioned news
segments put a heavy emphasis on the fact that he
was senced to ten years in prison for attempting to

(03:56):
assault and abduct an eleven year old girl, but he
wound up being after serving only eighteen months. This escalated
into quite a scandal, as the Texas Board of Pardons
and Pearles tried to do a lot of covering up
to justify their decision, such as concocting a really lame
story about how the paperwork about Blair's attack on the
girl was mistakenly left out of his file at his

(04:19):
parole hearing. Well, the fact of the matter is that
Blair's early release was due largely to an epidemic of
serious prison overcrowding which took place in Texas during the
nineteen eighties and early nineties. It reached the point where
as many inmates as possible had to receive parole or
early release in order to deal with this issue, and unfortunately,

(04:40):
this meant that some dangerous criminals were allowed to walk
back out under the streets and wound up reoffending. So
you can imagine the outrage when everyone believed that Blair
murdered Ashley Estelle during a time period he should have
been behind bars serving a ten year sentence. As we
mentioned in our last episode, this whole controversy led to
the passing of Ashley the Laws, which ensured that sex

(05:02):
offenders who harm children when receive harsher sentences lesser chances
of parole and mandatory sex offender registration if they did
get released. Now, even though he did not actually kill Ashley,
we know that Blair did molest some children after he
was parolled, so the decision to release him still had
negative consequences. Those who champion Ashley's Laws do not believe

(05:24):
Blair's exoneration made the legislation any less worthwhile, and I
do agree with that though it's pretty ironic how these
laws stem from a case which turned out to be
a wrongful conviction.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah, when you step back and you think about these laws,
that Ashley's Laws that come out, I don't think anyone
would say those shouldn't be in place.

Speaker 4 (05:44):
When you look at the idea that it.

Speaker 3 (05:47):
Took a person who was wrongfully convicted of the murder
of a child for these laws to pass, none of
these laws are about murder. There to get a notification
and I didn't vcation and awareness about who sexual predators
are in the community and to get higher punishments for
these sex offenders. That should have been in place long

(06:09):
before Ashley Estelle was ever killed. That should have been
in place when they started to pay attention to the
serial nature of child sex offenders, when they started to
pay attention to the fact that once they start offending
against a child, it's likely that that's something that is
going to be continuous. It's something that will escalate, it's
something that's really difficult to overcome. And so why it

(06:32):
took Ashley's death is what's frustrating. And you do have
to step back and say, you know, are we basing
it on his sexual offenses that he committed, because we
know that Blair did have sexual offenses against children. So
Blair alone could have been an example for Ashley's law
without Ashley's murder. So the part that maddens me is

(06:53):
that the murder of this little child should have had
nothing to do with the existence of these laws in
the first place. But I I'm grateful as a mother
and a community person and someone who wants to protect
the children of our communities that these laws are on
the books.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Yeah, and I should have mention that the overcrowding in
prisons in Texas was a serious issue during the nineteen eighties,
and there were criminals even worse than Michael Blair who
wound up getting released even though they really shouldn't have been.
And one of those is serial killer Kenneth McDuff, who
was originally sentenced to death for a murder from the
nineteen seventies, got it commuted to life imprisonment, but then

(07:28):
got released in nineteen eighty nine because the prisons were
so crowded that they just had to start releasing dangerous
offenders and hope they had rehabilitated. And then Kenneth McDuck
went on to kill more people before he was recaptured.
So this was a rampant problem. And it is a
big shame that Michael Player, even though he did not
kill Ashley, did wind up harming other children after his

(07:50):
early release.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
I don't know how I didn't know that about Texas.
I had this idea in my head that they're so
tough on crime that I thought that it wasn't possible
that they would rule least all of these prisoners prematurely.
It goes against this obviously false belief that I held.
This is really wild, but as sho, didn't you live
in Texas for a while.

Speaker 3 (08:09):
I did, And I believe that McDuff actually told the
prison officials and the sheriff that if you release me,
you're going to have another body on your doorstep. And
he followed through with that after he was released, and
so they it was almost no systematic approach to it.
It was, oh, you murdered someone, likelihood you'd kill again

(08:30):
is lo How do you know that?

Speaker 4 (08:32):
Right?

Speaker 3 (08:33):
Because he was a dangerous offender, and so he even
said you should not release me, and then he went
on to kill. Beyond that, it became to the point
where it was just so overcrowded they desperately had to
start opening doors and figuring out, you know, we're going
to take a gamble, and a lot of those gambles
did not pay off. Texas is crazy. It's very very

(08:53):
harsh on crime. But then they do just like every
other you know, corrections department, when they don't have the
budget and they don't have the space, it almost seems
like they're not really looking at the data when they
make some of these decisions.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
Yeah, I think this is a situation where they were
just too tough on crime and as a result, they
did not have a space for all their prisoners.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
So there's really no other way to say this. Michael
Blair is a sick human being and he most definitely
deserves to be locked up for the rest of his life.
This isn't like most other wrongful conviction cases, as there
was no emotional scene where an innocent person walked out
of prison to experience freedom for the first time in years.

(09:37):
Even though his death sentence was overturned ensuring that he
would not be executed for murder, Blair had already received
multiple life sentences for molesting other children, so the only
change was that he was transferred from death row to
the prison's general population. I know everyone was pretty insulted
when Blair sought one million in compensation for his wrongful conviction.

(10:00):
A few years earlier, Texas had passed a bill called
the Tim Cole Act, named after a young man who
was wrongfully convicted of rape and died in prison before
his family used DNA evidence to exonerate him and earn
him a posthumous pardon. The Tim Cole Act ensured that
anyone who was wrongfully convicted would receive one hundred and

(10:21):
sixty thousand for each year of incarceration, but Cole's brother
publicly stated that awarding that type of compensation to Blair,
who was guilty of a number of other terrible crimes,
would soil his brother's name and memory. It's a valid
point since the money is supposed to help wrongfully convicted
people to readjust to society, and there's no reason a

(10:43):
child molestor who is going to remain locked up for
the rest of his life needs one million dollars, which
is why his request was ultimately rejected.

Speaker 3 (10:53):
Yeah, I mean, honestly, when you look at Blair's case,
a lot of states have these clauses built in that'll
say if if you are a dangerous offender, if you
have a record, if you have things that would have
made the police more likely to include you in a
suspect pool or elevate your suspects status, that those things
can all chip away into the compensation decision. And so

(11:16):
even though there are compensation statutes on the books, there's
also exceptions woven in to say, oh that would take
off half of the money. Oh, this would actually exclude
you from getting money. And so again I don't think
anyone with Blair is going, oh, this poor man, he
has to be made whole again. His family needs to
be made a whole again.

Speaker 4 (11:35):
But when you look.

Speaker 3 (11:36):
At the laws, they're very very pro state. There to
protect the Department of Corrections in the state. They are
not to protect someone who's wrongfully convicted. So when it
isn't someone like Blair. You look at these compensation statutes
and on paper, some of them look pretty powerful, but
then you'll start to see things where it says, unless
it's a DNA exoneration, you will get nothing, and there's

(11:58):
these kind of just crazy restrictions on them. Some people
walk away with nothing when truly they were not dangerous
offenders that put themselves at the heart of the crime.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
Quick question for you, Ash, I don't know if you
know the stats on this, but just maybe in your
personal opinion, what percentage of people who are wrongfully incarcerated
actually get the compensation that they deserve. And I don't
mean people where they've said like you are absolutely factually
like innocent of this, but just those who are wrongily

(12:31):
incarcerated and who get let out. And I know there's
different types of designations or results for that, like you
are innocent, you're pardoned of the crime, and then sometimes
they're just let out. What percentage did those people get compensation?

Speaker 3 (12:47):
So a quick surge when you look at it, it
says as of twenty twenty three that it looks like
around forty one percent of exonerated individuals who have sought
payment received it. Now that means that there has to
be an attorney who's teaching them and saying, hey, you're
eligible for it, you need to go after it, and

(13:08):
here's what you should be compensated with.

Speaker 4 (13:12):
Do people not seek after it if.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
They know that they're in a jurisdiction where they are
not eligible given a set of circumstances. So I think
that's a misleading stat I think it's low. And remember too,
a lot of people are exonerated or freed, but their
criminal record is not always expunged and they're not always
released with this freedom pass. And so remember things like

(13:36):
an Alfred plea or making an agreement with the state
is part of the release of that prisoner, and so
in those cases, they aren't able to come after compensation,
because they'll say, we'll let you walk today. If you
want to plead guilty, we'll let you walk today. If
you want to take an Alford plea, you can walk
today if you'll sign that you agree that you're not

(13:59):
coming after the state. So I mean there's deals like
that made all the time. And so if eligible and
they've applied for it, forty one percent, I would say
a very glow percentage actually get compensated for what they
are eligible for what they deserve.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
It's hard to understand what Blair's motivation might have been
when he decided to confess to molesting all these other
children while he was on death row. Perhaps he felt
there was no way his death sentence was going to
be overturned, and he just wanted to clear his conscience
before he was executed. I did not want to go
into explicit detail about Blair's crimes on these episodes, but
if you want to learn more information, go check out

(14:39):
the article published in d magazine by Jackie Hilburn in
two thousand and one. She interviewed Blair and had to
read all those letters he sent her in which he
described all his abuse against children in graphic detail. And
being a mother herself. This made Hilburn physically ill. It's
definitely a good thing that Blair wound up being convicted
of additional crimes while he was on death row, because

(15:00):
if he had walked out of prison after his murder
conviction was overturned, I think it's pretty much a guarantee
he would have attempted to harm more children, because it
looks like he was one of those serial predators who
just cannot stop.

Speaker 3 (15:13):
Yeah, exactly, Blair is someone who has an affinity for
hurting innocent children. And so when you look at this
idea that he is, you know, convicted of these additional crimes,
he's put in life, into prison for life. Even though
he's exonerated for this murder conviction, it's still incredibly powerful

(15:35):
to say, thank goodness someone like this was locked up right.
Like you said, there's no grief loss, there's no sadness here,
there's no rallies outside saying free this man. He's innocent,
you know, release him back into the community where he
can be a successful member of our society. I think
people were pretty quiet when Blair's conviction was overturned, and

(15:57):
like you said, when you look there's a whole lot
of def details about Blair and the death of Ashley
a stealth and so for on his front, I don't
think many people were very upset that he ended up
serving life in prison anyway.

Speaker 1 (16:15):
In most cases, I'd be pretty agast at the idea
that the jury at his murder trial took only twenty
seven minutes to find him guilty. But I can kind
of understand why it happened here. The jury wouldn't have
known the physical evidence against him was junk science, or
been aware of the credibility issues with Charles Lynch, the
forensic analyst who testified against him, And even though Blair

(16:38):
denied being a murderer, the trial did not shy away
from sharing some of his other heinous crimes, which included
raping his six year old half sister when he was
a teen. So I can definitely see why the jury
would believe that he was more than capable of killing Ashley.
It's no secret that Texas is the most pro death

(16:59):
penalty state there is, and to sent a number of
people to death row who turned out to be innocent.
But that doesn't necessarily mean all of those exoneries were
good people. If you're on our Patreon pages. You might
recall that Robin and I once did an exclusive bonus
Minnesot about the nineteen seventy nine murder of Deborah Jackson,
who spent forty years as an unidentified Jane Doe known

(17:22):
only as Orange Socks. Notorious serial killer Henry Lee Lucas
was sentenced to death for her murder after he falsely
confessed to it, but the sentence was later commuted to
life imprisonment because the evidence clearly showed that Lucas was
in an entirely different state at the time the crime
took place. Like Michael Blair, Lucas was a vile individual

(17:44):
who was guilty of other crimes and deserved to be
locked up. But no matter what your views on the
death penalty might be, if you execute these monsters for
the crimes they did not actually commit, that allows the
real killer to get away with it.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
Yes, yes, yes, Juels for the people in the back,
you got to say aloud, right, it allows the real
killer to get away with this. So I've often heard
people when we're sitting around and we're talking and someone says, oh, yeah,
did you hear there's this guy who might not have
done this crime and people say, who cares, right, who
cares this guy's trouble anyway, or oh man, that guy's

(18:19):
been scum ever since you know, he's been here and
everyone knows he's a bad guy.

Speaker 4 (18:24):
And I'm thinking you should care. I care.

Speaker 3 (18:28):
We care because if the wrong person is locked up
and a guilty person is now on the streets, and
with crimes like this, with crimes against children, sexual crimes
against children, crimes that are going to escalate in intensity,
who's the next child that's going to be hurt by
this person who actually killed Ashley Stell or Orange socks? Right,

(18:52):
So if you do not get the correct defender, if
you do not lock up the right person, even though
a wrongful conviction should may get someone like Henry Lee
Lucas in prison or his sentence elongated, you have a
killer or a sexual sadist or someone walking around and

(19:12):
everyone is now at risk. So all of us should
be carrying. And on the flip side, when you look
at people who are executed, same kind of thing where
people go, yeah, but they had done all these other things, Well,
you want to make sure that our justice system is
always getting it right. And with the death penalty, and
things like that. If there's a chance that people get

(19:33):
it wrong, which we know we see in wrongfulu miicture cases,
you just got to be really careful with those kind
of ultimate decisions because you can't take them back.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
And in these situations, I often think of Stephen Avery
because no matter what you think of him, he was
genuinely wrongfully convicted for the rape charge from nineteen eighty
five and served eighteen years for a rape he did
not commit. And some people might think, well, he was
a terrible person anyway, so he deserved it. But then
you remember that the real rapist in that case, Greg Reallen,

(20:04):
he wound up braping I think two or three other women. Well,
Avery was incarcerated in prison. So that's yet another example
where even if someone's a bad human being, you put
him in prison for the crimes that you do not commit,
and the real killer, the real perpetrator, is free to
harm other people. So let's go back to the beginning
and see how this crime unfolded. This is another one

(20:25):
of those heartbreaking cases in which a child was murdered
after seemingly being abducted in the blink of an eye.
To recap Ashley Estelle's parents took her to a soccer
tournament in Carpenter Park and only let her out of
their sight for a few minutes so she could use
a swing set at a playground located just a couple
yards away. But even though there were literally over one

(20:45):
thousand people in the park that day, an unknown perpetrator
somehow managed to abduct Ashley and flee the area without
anyone seeing anything. This story is every parent's worst nightmare
and shows just how easily something horrible like this can
have happen. What's even more incredible is that a number
of people were filming the soccer games that day, which

(21:06):
prompted law enforcement to collect and extensively study their footage,
but it doesn't sound like anyone captured anything which provided
clues about Ashley's abduction. One of the biggest points which
was made in Michael Blair's defense is that there were
no witnesses who could place him and Ashley together that day.
But there were also no witnesses who could place Ashley

(21:26):
with anyone else who might have abducted her, which is
why this case is so frustrating.

Speaker 3 (21:31):
You know, you got to think about what a soccer
field looks like when there's a tournament going on, or
there's a ton of kids and families. I mean, there's
moms and dads there, and so we'd like to think
that a sexual predator or a child rapist or killer
is going to look like a monster from a movie,
but they probably look like a soccer dad or just

(21:56):
somebody who's at the public park. So there's no way
of saying, oh, you know, this guy was so scary looking,
he was so suspicious looking, because there's thousands of people there.
There are men and women and children, and so it's
you would have to do something pretty grand to stand

(22:18):
out amongst those people. Again, at the playground, how many
parents were not at the field where their kids were
playing and instead we're sitting there watching the playground like
a hog. Probably not many, because everyone's kind of centered
around that playground, but also watching the soccer field where
their other child's playing. And so I just don't think

(22:39):
anybody had sharp eyes on the playground. What if someone
walked by with a dog on a leash and just
gently walked by and said, hey, you want to pet
my puppy. Come when you'll come walk the puppy with
me and walked off, or oh, did you see that
ball over there by the woods? Come help me get
that ball in the woods. And just as they're walking
by and just take this little one and walk keep walking.

(23:02):
Who would beat their eye and think that's not her dad,
you know, unless they were looking and hearing and watching
that interaction. Specifically, if I just saw a little girl
and a younger or average age man walking away, I
would think that's that little girl's dad or uncle or
coach or something like that. So that situation is just
so scary to think of from this perspective, because predators

(23:24):
don't stand out. That's how they're successful at getting people
to look the other way, or to do things under
the noses of people who are watching.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
Yeah, I'm guessing you ever this person was, it was
probably someone very nondescript, not someone that you would just
look at and say, ooh, look at that creepy guy
over there. That's not someone I want hanging around children.
And they were likely able to blend into a crowd,
and that might be why they were able to lure
Ashley an abductor without anyone seeing anything.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
It's scary to think that some predators seem to be
the best profilers, like they're able to pick just the kid,
and they're able to blend in so seamlessly that nobody
notices and nobody can clock like what their monstrous intentions
are now Well, there are some wrongful conviction cases where
it's obvious the authorities knew they were railroading an innocent person.

(24:16):
I have no problem believing that the authorities in this
case genuinely believe that Michael Blair was the right guy,
even putting aside his past record for crimes against children.
He first showed up on the police's radar by driving
by the murder scene several times. He had a flyer
for Ashley's disappearance in his vehicle and a stuffed bunny,

(24:37):
which totally fits the profile of a sexual predator using
toys to lure children. Blair's alibi on the day of
the crime was that he was sleeping in his apartment
alone and there was a period of several hours where
no other eyewitnesses could account for his whereabouts. Blair's roommate
verified that he returned home and found Blair sleeping at
four thirty pm, and while the timeframe for Lair to

(25:00):
have murdered Ashley and make it back to his apartment
by four point thirty would have been tight. It was
not impossible, since forensic science was nowhere near as advanced
back then as it is today. I'm sure it was
easy to believe that the Charles Lynch's testimony about the
hair and fiber evidence linking Blair to the crime was legitimate. However,

(25:21):
the one thing about the prosecution's case which I did
find a bit unethical was placing so much emphasis on
some clump of hairs found at Jack Carter Park and
having experts testify that the hairs were consistent with Ashley
and Blair. This location was two miles away from Carpenter Park,
and since there was no evidence that either of them

(25:43):
went to that park to begin with, the clump of
hairs likely had no connection to the case. If this
crime had taken place in the era before DNA testing,
I don't think there's much chance that Blair would have
been exonerated, but DNA evidence doesn't lie. Though the Colin
County District Attorney's office was initially reluctant to acknowledge that

(26:04):
they may have convicted the wrong man, to their credit,
they did finally change their tune once it became obvious
that none of the forensic evidence matched Blair. I'm sure
the knowledge that Blair was going to remain incarcerated for
his other crimes made the decision to overturn his death
sentence much easier.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (26:23):
Absolutely, And when you do have the DNA evidence, it's
not guaranteed, but it's much easier to say, hey, look
we got it wrong. It's not an argument at that point,
and so I think it gave peace of saying he's
going to get exonerated for this, but don't worry, he
can't be released. But I have to go back to
when you're talking about the testimonies. You know, by default,

(26:44):
if you think about the way our justice system is designed,
it's quote innocent until proven guilty. But by the time
you walk into a courtroom in a prison jumpsuit or
you know you're being called the main suspect, the jury
already believes that the state must have gotten it right,
or you wouldn't have gotten that far because we all
know of cases that should have been brought to prosecution

(27:06):
and they weren't. And so if it makes it that far,
the jury already thinks. I'm pretty sure the state knows
what they're doing, and so there is an inclination to
trust everything that prosecution witnesses say, everything that forensic experts
say from a prosecution standpoint, and to automatically cast doubt
or lower the significance of any defense witness or defense

(27:29):
expert that's put on the stand. And so just by
the nature of our justice system, you're in trouble if
you're sitting in the defendant seat. And then here at
the time, remember, we didn't know as much information about
the subjective nature of forensic science, about this junk science
that comes about. And even today, if you called one

(27:52):
of us up to the stand to testify about issues
with eyewitness identification, but a woman gets up and says,
I'm one hundred percent sure, and she has tears in
her eyes, I will never forget the face of this man,
and she's one hundred percent sure. On the day of trial,
even with scientific evidence showing a jury why that's not
one hundred percent, I still think jurors, as human beings

(28:16):
and not scientists, are going to side with the emotional,
the kind of normal nature that the prosecution tells the
truth that the prosecution is always right and the defense
is just trying to get their person off. So it's
really complicated.

Speaker 1 (28:31):
Is that like the Ronald Cotton case? It was it Ronald.

Speaker 4 (28:33):
Cotton so great.

Speaker 3 (28:34):
Ronald Cotton is one of the best best cases to
look at for a wrongful conviction.

Speaker 4 (28:38):
Yes, Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
And I'm sure even though the jury would never admit this,
I bet they were influenced by the fact that all
of Blair's crimes against children, his sexual offenses were introduced
during the trials. So they're thinking to themselves, I'm supposed
to remain unbiased. I'm supposed to only look at the
evidence which alleges that he killed Ashley. But I'm sure
in the back of their mind certain things. There's no
way I want to let this man back on the

(29:02):
streets because he's obviously, even if he didn't commit this crime,
he's still a danger to society. So if the killer
wasn't Blair, then who really did abduct and murder Ashley? Well,
ironically enough, Blair's defense team spent years pointing the finger
at Josh Crowley, an alternate suspect who also turned out
to be innocent. Again, I can totally see why people

(29:23):
would believe that Crowley was capable of this crime. He
had a previous history of child molestation and had fled
to Texas from South Carolina to avoid those pending charges,
and unlike Blair, Crowley could definitively be placed in Carpenter
Park since he was refereeing the soccer games that day.
Crowley was briefly questioned by police during the initial stages

(29:44):
of the investigation, prompting him to immediately leave town. But
as suspicious as that look, I'm sure that was due
to the fact that he was wanted on other charges
in South Carolina. When questioned about his potential involvement in
Ashley's murder, Crowley kept pleading the fil amendment, but when
all was said and done, the DNA evidence did not
match him either. Strangely enough, even though Crowley was not

(30:08):
involved in Ashley's murder, his very presence in the park
that day was another strong argument for Ashley's laws. Here
was a lot to child molester who somehow managed to
obtain a job refereeing children soccer games, So that was
probably another sign that stronger measures needed to be taken.

Speaker 3 (30:26):
It's really really interesting when you look at what sex
offenders are able to do what they're able to qualify for,
and then some of the things that they're not allowed
to do, and some of them just are nonsensical. And
then you think of loopholes and things like this where
you know, like parent teacher conferences. Right, so if a
parent's a convicted sex offender and it's a direct event

(30:47):
related to their child, open house, parent teacher conferences, whatever,
they can come up to the school for a school
event pertaining to their child, Well that is legitimately an
event designed around children. And so there's all these very
complex and you know nuances, and here you have someone who, oh,
there's a child's soccer game, I'm going to referee the

(31:08):
children's soccer games. No hard pass. That should not be allowed.
He shouldn't be allowed near the children's park. All of
those things should have disqualified him from that position. But again,
even though he's a dangerous offender, he was not the
one who killed Ashley, and he was one of the
suspects that was on the radar. I think them looking

(31:29):
at the small list around that area of child sex
offenders only is where they fell short. We said it
on the last episode, But what if it was someone
not from the area. What if it's someone who had
never been convicted or caught for their crimes against children?
What if that's why and how they were able to
escalate their crimes and get away with it for so
long is because they're an established criminal who's never been caught.

Speaker 4 (31:53):
So that small scope.

Speaker 3 (31:55):
Yes, there's people that you should look at, But if
you only look at convicted sex offenders, what about the
ones who have successfully gotten away?

Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yeah, because there were a thousand people in the park
that day, and I do think there's a good chance
that besides Crowley, there were probably other sex offenders there,
and some of them probably did not have records at
that point and were completely under the radar. So it
would not surprise me at all if the same thing
applies to Ashley's killer.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
It now seems like authorities now leaned towards the real
killer being a man known only as suspect number four,
But since this person has been deceased for two decades,
they have elected not to publicly disclose his identity without
conclusive evidence. I know that following Blair's exoneration, Barry Sheck,
who was quoted as saying that the apparent real perpetrator

(32:42):
had no record, though it's unclear if he was specifically
referring to Suspect number four. If that's true, then this
man obviously slipped through the cracks. There are definitely some
things about him which looks suspicious as hell, particularly how
he made sure to get at a burial plot as
close as possible to Ashley's grave and fabricated a story

(33:05):
about having his own child abducted and murdered in a
manner which was disturbingly similar to what happened to Ashley.
All that being said, there have been a number of
documented cases involving missing and murdered children in which a
potential suspect popped up on the radar because they seemed
to have a creepy obsession with the crime, but then
it later turned out that they had no involvement. You

(33:27):
could also apply this same logic to Michael Blair, because
the only reason he even got implicated in Ashley's case
to begin with was because he kept driving past the
murder scene. So even those Suspect number four seemed to
have his own unhealthy obsession with Ashley, that doesn't necessarily
mean he killed her, and the physical evidence does not
conclusively link him to the crime.

Speaker 3 (33:49):
And that's another fact they're tying a lot of these
men to they knew Ashley, they went to church with Ashley,
they had a familiarity with Ashley. I don't think that's
what happened in this case. I think someone said, Hmm,
if I want to take a child, where should I
go a very populated area so that I'm not actually
seen or alone with children. There's going to be so

(34:10):
many people, no one will be paying attention. I'm going
to look for a child who doesn't seem to have
any parents close by, or who seems distracted, or who
looks like I don't know my type, and see if
I can get her. I know the child that responds
to me. And so I don't think he knew Ashley.
I think this was a crime of opportunity and something

(34:31):
that happened very quickly, and it was an emo that
he had successfully done many times, and Ashley just so
happened to be there and be the right kind of
kid that he could take.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
Yeah, and it might be a thing where I'm going
to go to a park where all these kids are,
I'm going to look for one who's alone, not being
watched for by any adults. And because Ashley just happened
to be playing on a swing set by herself without
her parents watching her, she became the wrong victim who
is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
And it's so scary too to think about the fact
that we know so much about these perpetrators. We think
about like the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit and how they've
studied all of these murderers and serial rapists and child
predators and they found all these different commonalities. But just
to think about for a second that we only know

(35:18):
these things about people who were caught, those people that
made mistakes. The ones that didn't make mistakes, we don't
know anything about.

Speaker 2 (35:26):
Yeah, And it just makes you wonder, is Ashley's killer
someone who got away with it indefinitely and was never
arrested for any crime because they just kept managing to
get away with it. So the details about the DNA
evidence are a bit confusing. It's been stated that suspect
number four was excluded as the source of the DNA
on the hairs found on Ashley's body and the skin

(35:47):
underneath their fingernails, but could not be excluded as the
source of the male DNA found on Ashley's shoes. We
can't even be one hundred percent certain if the DNA
on the shoes belonged to the killer, but since it
was not consistent with ashley father or brother, there's a
good chance it is the perpetrators. But what's particularly interesting
to me is that DNA profiles for two separate males

(36:09):
were apparently found on the skin under Ashley's fingernails. So
does this mean that multiple people were responsible for Ashley's murder?
This is what makes me ponder the possibility that suspect
number four was involved in the crime but had an
unidentified accomplice who might still be out there somewhere. Of course,
the best case scenario is that suspect number four committed

(36:29):
the crime alone. Since he's now deceased and cannot harm
anyone else, there's a compelling, circumstantial case against them. But
it seems that with the evidence they have available, investigators
just cannot definitively prove or disprove that suspect number four
is connected to the crime. But luckily, as I'm sure
you're well aware, the crime fighting technique known as genetic

(36:50):
genealogy has helped close the books on a number of
cold cases these past several years. In some of these cases,
the perpetrator was already dead, but genealogy was able to
link them to the crime and prove beyond a shadow
of a doubt that they did it. So I think
the best chance of achieving closure in Ashley's case would
be to upload the DNA evidence they have to a

(37:12):
genealogy database and see if it leads to anyone. This
could be the best strategy for figuring out whether suspect
number four was involved in this crime, and if there
were multiple perpetrators.

Speaker 3 (37:23):
Could you imagine if there were two perpetrators and you
have a man who walks by and he's like, have
you seen a white dog? And she's like no, And
he says, oh my gosh, can you do me a favor?
Can you look in those bushes over there or in
the woods right there. I'm going to go over here.
Can you look in the woods there and come back
and tell me if you see my white dog?

Speaker 4 (37:42):
I'm so sad.

Speaker 3 (37:43):
And she walks towards where he tells her to walk,
and then there's somebody else who's grabbing her and then
they meet up. So I mean it is possible that
there's a ruse of two men who are hurting and
taking children and each have a different role in the process.

Speaker 4 (37:57):
It would be amazing if genetic genails. She was used here.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
And one last thing. Only two and a half years
after Ashley's murder, another similar crime took place in Texas,
which also led to the passing of new legislation named
after the victim. On January thirteenth, nineteen ninety six, nine
year old Amber Hagerman was abducted while she was out
riding her bicycle, and her murdered body was found four

(38:24):
days later. As you probably know, this crime led to
the implementation of the Amber Alert program, which as a
means of spreading the word about child abductions as quickly
as possible. Amber's murder is still unsolved, and while there
is no evidence to link this crime to Ashley's murder,
the fact that it took place in Arlington, just over

(38:45):
forty miles away from Plano, has led to speculation that
the same perpetrator could have been responsible for killing both girls.
But until these crimes are solved, the possibilities are endless.

Speaker 4 (38:57):
It's so sad.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
That's exactly what we were saying earlier. You have the
risk now are these two girls linked? Are there four
other girls? Are there ten other girls? How many children
were hurt or killed by the person who who killed Ashley?
So without knowing the right person, they were given a
free pass because Blair was arrested for this crime. It's

(39:20):
absolutely heartbreaking.

Speaker 2 (39:23):
If by chance, Ashley Estelle and Amber Hagerman's killer are
the same person. Amber's murder took place after Blair had
already been convicted and sent to death Rose, So I'm
sure the perpetrator felt more enabled thinking that they got
away with it once, so they'll have no problems getting
away with it again. So if you have been to
have any information about the unsolved murder of Ashley Estelle,

(39:44):
please contact the appropriate authorities. Jules Ashley any final thoughts
on this case.

Speaker 3 (39:50):
It's heartbreaking when you think about the grief in this case,
and it's not just isolated to the horrific horror that
family experienced. Think about the grief of your child being
hurt by someone and then murdered, the unfair guilt that
that family placed on themselves because they were at this

(40:13):
public facility, The way friends and family felt when they said, hey,
we were there, what if we missed something right, But
then this feeling that we're getting justice for her, we're
getting at least accountability for the person who killed her,
and feeling that we're going to go through all the
horror of a trial. Hear these horrific details, get this

(40:33):
man put behind bars, and you step back and you
start to say, now we have to.

Speaker 4 (40:36):
Fight to heal.

Speaker 3 (40:38):
And then you find out it wasn't him, and so
that kind of you know, the how the world is
unfair and doesn't work and the justice system failed you,
and the fear of how many other little girls could
have been hurt and who did it?

Speaker 4 (40:52):
All of those things add to.

Speaker 3 (40:54):
The weight of grief on the family, on the friends,
on the community. And then again, like we said, we
don't know, oh how far reaching the implications are here,
because because the right killer knew I got away with it,
I have a successful MO and this probably wasn't the
first time he heard a child that he continued to
likely offend after that. And so my gut turns when

(41:16):
I think of a case like this where someone thought
I got away with it. I wonder who else I
could hurt And it's horrifying. My heart breaks for everyone
involved and for the community as a whole as well.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
Not having that resolution and not knowing who the real
killer is and if this suspect number four is indeed involved,
and not having that conclusive evidence, it just leaves that
gaping hole where some kind of closure or resolution should be,
not closure, because we talked about that so often that
it truly really isn't such thing as closure. But what

(41:52):
I find really striking here is just this idea that
Blair was driving past where Ashley's house was. He had
a flyer about her disappearance. And it makes me think
how many other cases that are like this, where you've
got either serial murderers or rapists, child predators, and they're

(42:13):
studying the work of others that are like them, maybe
to gain inside and information, maybe they get off on
it on some level. And how many other cases have
they been implicated Like we'd mentioned earlier about the Orange
Socks slash Deborah Jackson case where Henry Lee Lucas had
admitted to that. And it's really interesting to think that

(42:35):
there could be and also horrifying to think that there
could be all of these cases out there where you
have the wrong person incarcerated on the real killer or
child abductor or rapist got away with it because the
person that was maybe having some evidence to do with it,
or not direct evidence, it would be maybe circumstantial things

(42:57):
like a flyer, they were just a fan, or they
were just a admiring that work, and they were a
bad person, kind of like Blair is here. It just
feels like so much time was wasted because of that,
and we are at a different place as far as
forensic evidence goes today, so I would truly hope that
that wouldn't happen in present, But the details of this

(43:17):
case were just really mind boggling.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yeah. I remember when I was looking for cases for
us to discuss and I was thinking, we haven't done
a wrongful conviction case in a while. What's a unique
one that we can discuss with Ashley? And this one
is stowed out from the others because we have one
where someone was convicted and sent to death row for
a horrific murder who is undeniably a bad person who
has committed some other horrific crimes, but was conclusively proven

(43:43):
innocent of this particular crime. And it's just kind of
a story where just so many things went horribly wrong,
where even though you can kind of understand why a
jury would convict Blair, because if you look at his background,
you look at the suspicious things he did, you can
understand why so many people legitimately believed that he was
the real killer. Yet at the same time, he kind

(44:05):
of started this mess because he was the one who
drew the police's attention by driving by Ashley's murder scenes
several times and acting very strangely. And of course he
was convicted on evidence that we now know as junct science.
But I think that the people in power did legitimately
think they were doing the right thing at the time
and that they had found the right guy. And of

(44:25):
course it also put this whole state of Texas and
their board of Pardons and Paroles under scrutiny, because, no
matter what you think of his involvement in this particular crime,
he got off as easy. He should have served at
least ten years in jail for attempting to abduct and
sexually assault and eleven year old girl, but he was
released after only serving eighteen months. So that was another

(44:47):
outrage because he was put in a position to harm
other children, even though we never should have. So all
these years later, they have found other potential suspects, like
suspect number four, who could be the real killer of Ashley,
but they've just never been able to conclusively prove it
because they don't have that one piece of definitive forensic evidence.

(45:08):
But then you just realize that, well, if this crime
had happened today, I think Blair would be cleared as
a suspect very quickly because DNA testing has advanced so much,
and that they would be able to perform a proper
investigation and potentially find the real perpetrator. But unfortunately, because
over thirty years have passed, we still don't know who
is responsible. But I do hope that one of these

(45:30):
days they do perform genetic genealogy, put the offenders DNA
into a database, and then maybe make a conclusive match
and figure out who did this. And even if this
person like Suspect number four, has already passed away, at
least they can say with one hundred percent certainty who
the killer was and finally close the books on this
one for good.

Speaker 5 (45:51):
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit
about the Trailment cold patreon.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Yes, the trail Cold patreon has been around for three
years now, and we offer the standard bonus features like
early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers
and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up
with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars
tier Tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in
which I talk about cases which are not featured on

(46:17):
the Trail went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to
Patreon and if you join our highest tier tier three,
the ten dollar tier. One of the features we offer
is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsaved Mysteries,
where you can download an audio file and then boot
up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or
YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in

(46:40):
the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about
the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very
first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to
download a commentary track in which I make more smart
ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join
Tier three.

Speaker 5 (46:59):
So I go to let you know a little bit
about the Jules and Nashty patreons. So there's early ad
free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our
Pathwent Chili mini's, which are always over an hour, so
they're not very mini, but they're just too short to
turn into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those,
so we hope you'll check out those patreons. We'll link
them in the show notes.

Speaker 2 (47:19):
So I want to thank you all for listening, and
any chance you have to share us on social media
with a friend or to rate and review is greatly
appreciate it. You can email us at The Pathwentchili at
gmail dot com. You can reach us on Twitter at
the Pathwin. So until next time, be sure to bundle
up because cold trails and chili pass Call for warm
clothing

Speaker 1 (47:38):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy