Bloody Lies

John Ferak

Description

The remote farming community of Murdock, Nebraska, seemed to be the least likely setting for one of the heartland's most ruthless and bloody double murders in decades. In fact, the little town had gone more than a century without a single homicide. But on the night of Easter 2006, Wayne and Sharmon Stock were brutally murdered in their home. The murders garnered sensational frontpage headlines and drew immediate statewide attention. Practically everybody around Murdock was filled with fear, panic, and outrage. Who killed Wayne and Sharmon Stock? What was the motive? The Stocks were the essence of Nebraska's all-American farm family, self-made, God-fearing, and of high moral character. Barely a week into this double murder investigation, two arrests brought a sense of relief to the victims' family and to local residents. The case appeared to fall neatly into place when a tiny speck of murder victim Wayne Stock's blood appeared in the alleged getaway car.Then, an obscure clue left at the crime scene took the investigation down a totally different path, stretching into Iowa, Louisiana, New York, Texas, and Wisconsin. By the time this investigation was over, the charges against the original suspects were dismissed and two new individuals emerged from the shadows. Author John Ferak covered the Stock murders from the very beginning, including all of the trial proceedings. When the criminal prosecution finally ended in 2007, he remained puzzled by one nagging question: Why was the blood of victim Wayne Stock in a car that was ultimately proven to have no connection to the murders?Over the next few years, the astonishing "bloody lies" were revealed, culminating in a law enforcement scandal that turned the case on its head and destroyed the career of Nebraska's celebrated CSI director, David Kofoed.

Sujets

• Droit et juridique
• True crime
• Forensic science
• Pathology

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 19 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612778440
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

BLOODY LIES
BLOODY LIES
A CSI Scandal in the Heartland
JOHN FERAK
FOREWORD BY MAURICE POSSLEY
Black Squirrel Books™
an imprint of The Kent State University Press
Kent, Ohio 44242        www.KentStateUniversityPress.com
BLACK SQUIRREL BOOKS™
Frisky, industrious black squirrels are a familiar sight on the Kent State University campus and the inspiration for Black Squirrel Books™, a trade imprint of The Kent State University Press www.KentStateUniversityPress.com
© 2014 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2013043208
ISBN 978-1-60635-197-0
Manufactured in the United States of America
Every effort has been made to obtain permission from persons interviewed by the author who are quoted in this book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ferak, John, 1973–
Bloody lies : a CSI scandal in the heartland / John Ferak.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60635-197-0 (pbk.) ∞
1. Murder—Nebraska—Case studies. 2. Criminal investigation—Nebraska—Case studies. 3. Evidence fabrication—Nebraska—Case studies. 4. Judicial error—Nebraska—Case studies. I. Title.
HV6533.N2F47 2014
364.152′3092—dc23
2013043208
18  17  16  15  14        5  4  3  2  1
To my wife, Andrea
CONTENTS
Foreword by Maurice Possley
Acknowledgments
1 Easter Massacres
2 Legend
3 Suspect
4 Mystery Car
5 No Luck
6 Case Solved
7 Blood
8 Odd Find
9 Ring of Truth
10 Leopold and Loeb
11 Wisconsin
12 Diary
13 Conspiracy
14 Ransom Theory
15 Tipster
16 Freedom
17 Judgment
18 Finder
19 Deep Throat
20 Smell Test
21 Tarnished
22 Blunder
23 Underdog
24 Evidence
25 Phantom
26 Verdict
27 The Cop
Epilogue
Notes
Index
FOREWORD
Maurice Possley
For most citizens, it is counterintuitive, at the very least, that an innocent person who is not insane or subjected to torture or physical abuse would falsely confess to a crime. That is one of the reasons the issue of false confessions remains a vastly misunderstood or unappreciated issue in the American system of criminal justice.
As an investigative journalist at the Chicago Tribune , I, along with two other reporters, focused on this issue in a series of articles about false and coerced confessions in Cook County. One of the articles detailed the case of Daniel Taylor, who was arrested at age seventeen for a double murder. After hours of interrogation by Chicago police detectives, Taylor gave a confession that was transcribed by a court reporter. Only then did Taylor realize that he had been in jail at the time of the crime.
Did that prompt police to question whether the confession was false? It did not. Instead, the detectives set about undermining the jail records and producing false reports to buttress the confession. In 1995, Daniel was convicted by a jury that ultimately could not accept that he had confessed to a crime he did not commit.
The Chicago Tribune investigated the case in 2001 and found new evidence of his innocence, including a man who was in jail with him at the time of the crime. But prosecutors refused to acknowledge that Taylor’s confession was false. It was not until the summer of 2013 that the state finally conceded Taylor was innocent and dismissed the case—more than twenty years after his arrest.
Sadly, Taylor’s case is not an anomaly. As senior researcher at the National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of Michigan Law School and Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, I have become acutely aware of just how prolific the problem actually is. As of September 2013, the Registry listed more than 1,220 wrongful convictions in the United States since 1989. A total of 152 of these were the result of false confessions, and three out of every four involved homicides.

That is only part of the picture, however. Another eighty-seven exonerated defendants who did not falsely confess were implicated by false confessions from actual or potential codefendants. This adds up to a grim total of 239 innocent defendants convicted by false confessions—cases that account for about 20 percent of all known exonerations.
There are three basic types of false confessions that researchers identify: voluntary, internalized, and compliant.
A voluntary confession usually is given by someone who is mentally ill (for example, John Karr in the JonBenét Ramsey murder case), who is seeking publicity, or who is trying to cover up for the true guilty party. For example, in 1990 in Idaho, Laverne Pavlinac read about a murder and decided to implicate her boyfriend as a way of ending their relationship. She would end up implicating herself as well, and both she and her boyfriend were convicted of murder. Four years later, they were exonerated when the real killer confessed to the crime.
Secondarily, there are confessions made when individuals come to actually believe that they committed the crime; these are also known as internalized confessions. In 1998, after hours of intense questioning by police, fourteen-year-old Michael Crowe confessed to stabbing his twelve-year-old sister to death. The interrogation, which was recorded, shows a distraught Crowe at the soul-crushing moment when he came to believe that he actually killed his own sister but didn’t remember doing so.
These are not the norm, however, in the realm of false confessions. The most common form of false confession occurs when a suspect, despite the knowledge that he or she is innocent, breaks down and tells the interrogators what the suspect believes they want to hear simply because he or she wants to end the interrogation. This may occur in as little as a few hours or after as long as two or three days of interrogation.
Suspects sometimes say they were physically abused, but typically the pressure is exerted psychologically through threats, cajoling, and promises. Calvin Ollins, a fourteen-year-old with an IQ of 70, confessed to taking part in an abduction, rape, and murder of a medical student in Chicago in 1986 because “The police told me that I was helping them solve the case and that if I signed the confession, they would let me go.” Of course, the police didn’t let Calvin go and instead used his conviction to send him to prison for life without parole before he was exonerated by DNA testing fifteen years later.
The power of a confession in the criminal justice system cannot be underestimated. Such is their sway on juries that confessions become the bedrock of convictions despite evidence that points to other suspects or that should eliminate the defendants who have falsely confessed. And once a defendant is convicted, legal opportunities to overturn the convictions are lessened significantly.
John Ferak’s Bloody Lies provides an intimate look into the dark abyss of the criminal justice system where false confessions are spawned. Drawing upon extensive access to court records and numerous interviews, Ferak takes readers into a world that while seemingly counterintuitive, is nonetheless very real and pockmarked by corrupt and misguided police officers.
I first became acquainted with John when he was a reporter for the Omaha World-Herald and was covering the investigation of the 2006 murders of Wayne and Sharmon Stock of Murdock, Nebraska, and how their nephew, Matthew, confessed to their murders. His reporting exposed serious flaws and injustice in the case.
John’s book presents readers with an in-depth look into an egregious—though, sadly, not atypical—example of how detectives put on blinders and wrestle a confession from a suspect they believe is guilty. One investigator put it this way to Matt Livers, a special education student: “I will go after the death penalty. I’ll push and I’ll push and I’ll push and I will do everything I have to, to make sure you go down hard for this.”
For readers intrigued by the workings of the criminal justice system as well as for those unfamiliar with it, Bloody Lies will take you on a journey that will provide new insights into the most disturbing problem of false confessions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It took more than three years to research, write, revise, and assemble the sad but very important story that became Bloody Lies: A CSI Scandal in the Heartland .
Various entities and several individuals deserve to be singled out for helping to make this book possible:
The Omaha World-Herald for the opportunity to report on the 2006 tragedies in Murdock and also allowing me considerable time to further investigate the many twists and turns in this remarkable case. All told, I produced more than one hundred noteworthy stories about the case from 2006 to 2012.
Bill Pfeffer, Omaha criminal defense attorney, for hounding me several years ago to write a book about the Murdock case.
Those who served as a tremendous resource over these past several years and greatly assisted in my investigative research efforts to accurately compile this book:
Jerry Soucie, Nebraska criminal defense attorney.
Steven A. Drizin, clinical professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law, associate director of Bluhm Legal Clinic, and director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern School of Law.
Locke E. Bowman, clinical professor of law at Northwestern University and director of the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center in Chicago.
Maren Chaloupka, the plaintiff’s trial lawyer, in Scottsbluff, Nebraska.
Dr. Scott A. Bresler, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati, clinical director of the Risk Management Center in the Division of Forensic Psychiatry, and director of Inpatient Psychology at University Hospital.
Maurice Possley, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of The Brown’s Chicken Massacre , for writing an excellent Foreword that gives true-crime readers more enlightenment and a deeper understanding regarding the police’s role in causing false confessions