There's someone I regally should tell you about.

At this point in the story.

Let me take you back to that hot Chicago summer of eighty nine.

President Reagan is just handed over the reigns of power to George H.

W and Bette Midler's wind beneath my wings is riding high in the charts.

Twenty four year old Dana Feitler has succumbed to the brutal gunshot wound to her head.

The police are searching for her murder, and they have their sights on an assemblage of the usual suspects, but no evidence to work with until that is, a promising witness comes forward, and then well you know this bit.

The statements pile up until the big switcher room witness becomes prime suspect, and after a positive ID from a dog walker who saw Dana moments before the attack, Lee Harris is arrested, convicted, and sent away for life.

Except that's not the whole story.

See before Lee even entered the picture, there was another suspect in the Dana Fightler case.

That summer night, a security guard named Damon Prestige is out doing his routine rounds in the Gold Coast twice, he sees a man with a distinct limp acting real strange.

First the guy threatens him honky top, motherfucker, you're gonna die tonight, and then later he sees the same man down in alleyway trying to evade eye contact.

And then there was the dog walk.

She'd id'd Lee in a lineup, but see, that was not the first id she made in the case.

When she initially came forward saying she had seen Dana Fightler with three black men, the first thing the police did, long before Lee was even on the scene, would show her a photo array of seven black men they already had on file.

Immediately, she points to someone, a notorious Atticut with a violent rep who stalked the area, and as it happened, he had a limp from an old gunshot.

One the dog walker instantly recognizes him as the one who was holding Dana's hand.

How sure are you, they ask her, nine point five out of ten.

Over in Cabrini, there were rumors that a local hooligan had been bragging about murdering a white lady for drug money.

Two people had even come forward with statements to the police, but when police brought him in He denied being involved.

His lie detector test indicated deception, but he had an alibi, his girlfriend, and she passed hers.

Police went to search her apartment anyway, and when they did, found several pieces of clothing belonging to her boyfriend, including a blood spattered red sweatshirt.

But by this point the police were already elbow deep with Lee turning out statement after statement en route to twenty two.

The man with the limp, he was never mentioned again.

I'm dack stilln loss and from iHeart Podcasts, this is Crying Wolf episode five.

The alternate suspect.

Well, I mean, he had an alibi, but it wasn't an unbreakable alibi.

It wasn't a very good one.

This is the Andrea Line lawyer extraordinary, the Angel of death Row.

You heard from her in the last episode.

You know, I mean, frankly, the only alibi I like is my client's in jail at the time.

I mean, it's really hard to and even that they'll still charge you or only I've had that happen.

As you know, she was one of the lawyers Rappingly during his trial back in nineteen ninety two.

Back then, it was obvious to her that the alternate suspect, let's call him Tony, and his alibi required some further scrutiny.

Normally, you are at home with your family.

I mean, that's a normal thing, but there's an automatic suspicion that that person's going to lie for you, and they never suspected her.

We tried to talk to her and she refused to talk to us.

You know, we can't make anyone talk to us, which is the defense.

We can't force them to talk to us.

So if they say they don't want to talk to.

Us, we have to leave.

Andrea was clear Tony was their guy.

I was sure of it, and I became more sure of it as time went on.

I wasn't sure who did it with him.

I had an idea.

We you know, we ran his sheet and we saw co defendants on other cases with him, and we figured probably saying group.

But you know, we didn't have arrest power.

We couldn't make him or the girlfriend talk to us, and the police just let it go.

I don't understand why.

I really do not understand why.

It's sobering to you hear just how easily the cops gave up when Andrew was so sure, but maybe there was another path.

Andrea and her partner Shelby Prussac couldn't push back on their alibi.

But they still had the blood spatters on the red sweatshirt.

Could they get them tested to see if they belonged to Dana Feiler?

Well?

I mean, one of the things is at the time, DNA was not in the criminal justice system.

It was new.

The ability to identify someone or exclude someone just wasn't available to the defense.

The tests available at the time, secretor tests were pretty crude.

Basically, they could only tell you a blood type.

The best you could hope for was an exclusion, but more often than not they came back inconclusive.

This time was no different, So it.

Was a wash.

It didn't prove anything one way or the other.

Turns out the bloody sweatshirt story had more lives than a cat.

Now, I'm gonna need you to buckle in because this is a bit of a story and it's also kind of wild.

As you might imagine, Lee had plenty of time to ponder the sweatshirt situation in prison, and then one day, while in Juliet, he is quite literally confronted with it.

Remember Tony the sweatshirt's owner.

He's standing right in front of him, and he has something extraordinary to say, Sorry, I got you into my mess.

Lee is floored.

This is basically a confessional, and so in two thousand and one, nine years into his jail sentence, Lee decides it's high time to get that sweatshirt tested again.

The technology has advanced leaps and bounds in the past decade.

Secret or tests have given way to forensic DNA testing, and real life exonerations are happening because of it, nearly one hundred in the United States by this point.

Still, it takes the State of Illinois a whole three years to think on it, until eventually, in two thousand and four they agree to a retest, except the sample is well missing, but the state has an excuse at the ready.

It's not quite the Doggate my homework, but near enough.

Records show the sweater is with Andrea Lyon.

Now, just to be clear, it is highly implausible that cuttings of any kind would go to a defense attorney.

But you know, for the sake of argument, I checked with Andrea that are some nonsense.

They did not no, it was missing because they whatever they did with it, they put it in a file or and garbage can or whatever whatever happen.

The fact remained the sample was missing, and so the state goes for option B, test the periphery of the sample on the sweatshirt, which they do have, and cross match it with DNA samples from Dana Fightler's parents.

The result, the blood spatters are not Dana Fightler's.

In other words, no helpful, Lee Harris, the one and only piece of physical evidence is another dead end?

Or is it.

Now?

Jennifer Blag doesn't hire often, but when she does she picks, well.

We can probably turn it off.

I wouldn't barlet me.

Does this turn it off?

Jay or Jennifer?

I come to my wife's name.

Meet Eric Bisbee, Jennifer Blag's one and only full time staff member.

I mean, Jennifer and Jennifer and I have more like a more of a mother and son relationship because I mean, I've known her for so long and she's you know, you shouldn't eat that.

When I smoke, you should quit smoking.

She was on me forever about quitting smoking.

And we just get along really naturally.

Our skill sets work together.

Well.

I'm more like science technical minded and she's better the talking and the writing and all the stuff that lawyers should be good at.

For the record, Eric is a very good lawyer.

See he says technical minded.

What he means more specifically, is DNA and understanding DNA evidence.

It's pure math.

His nerve brain just gets pulled in by that kind of stuff and the results can literally be life changing.

It's actually the golden standard.

Really, if you look at across the field of wrongful convictions, we had all these DNA exonerations where you know, everyone had to acknowledge that's not the right guy.

We got the wrong guy.

So really, DNA revolutionized how criminal justice is handled in almost every aspect.

I want to give a chilling but powerful example of what Eric is talking about.

In April nineteen eighty nine, just two months before Dana Fightler was shot, another young woman's brutal attack had rocked the nation.

Twenty eight year old Tricia Miley was out jogging in Central Park when she was brutally attacked and raped.

The location and the level of brutality was shocking.

Parents around the country, including Dana Fhightlers, told their daughters not to go out alone at night.

A forty two year old businessman by the name of Donald Trump was so incensed he spent eighty five thousand dollars on four full page ads in New York's top four newspapers calling for the execution of the black and Latino boys arrested for the attack, a group dubbed the Central Park Five.

I was roughly the same age as the boys, and remember being frightened by the dark reality that they were going to spend the rest of their lives in a cell.

But then time passed, we all forgot about them.

Little did anyone know that thirteen years later, in two thousand and two, a DNA test would confirm their innocence.

The real perpetrator was Matthias rayis, a serial rapist already behind bars.

The convictions for the five boys, now like me, young men, were dismissed in an instant.

Fast forward to twenty and sixteen, when Jennifer drops the Lee Harris files on Eric's desk.

The first thing he's drawn to is that sweatshirt DNA result.

This is not Dana Pheitler's blood.

See, he is not sure he agrees with it.

And so when I got on the case, I started looking at it.

I thought it seems entirely possible that that actually is her blood.

DNA evidence is great when it has been well preserved.

Because what we're dealing with here is a sweatshirt potentially has the victims of blood on it, and it's been sitting for a long time.

So the longer it sits, it's the possibility that it degrades.

You can't get a good sample.

And so in this case the DNA match, should I believe all but two locations.

In other words, according to Eric's analytical brain, there was still a chance that the blood on the sweatshirt did belong to Dana Peitler.

All they had to do was find those original samples.

They had gone to huge links in the early two thousands to no avail.

But this task had Jennifer Blagg written all over it.

So if you look at a diagram the sweatshirt, it had little holes all over it from where the technician cut out the cuttings.

So then I had to go down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out where the cuttings could be.

Back in the early two thousands, the folks handling forensic testing for the CPD were the CPD.

More precisely, the Chicago Crime Lab.

Now, think about that for a second.

The same department that made the arrest was also running the science meant to prove the arrest correct.

Conflict of interest.

Of course, cpd entered the lab already knowing the story it wanted the evidence to tell.

And we all know how the bias, conscious or not, has a way of seeping into the work.

That's changed now today third party labs are used, But there was one thing that you could count on with police labs back in the day.

Paperwork, a meticulous record for every scrap of evidence, what they call the chain of custody.

So the Chicago Police have an evidence technician that calms takes the evidence, takes pictures of the evidence, and then inventories at signs an inventory slip at the Chicago Police Department where it's inventoried.

Then when it's checked out to do anything.

Everywhere that evidence goes, there's paper documenting where it.

Went, except when they forget their reports.

Deep down, one of her rabbit holes were discovered that from time to time the crime lab omitted their paperwork on previous cases.

So maybe even if there was no paperwork, there was a chance the evidence was still hiding somewhere.

It was a long shot, but worth it.

I knew that if we could have DNA evidence that had fighters the victim's blood on his shirt, that would that would be it in the story.

An instant exoneration for Lee, not only because it would implicate someone else, but also because well, it would also discredit his twenty two statements.

Lee's statements never mentioned this alternate suspect he mentioned to other people that he was with, so it would show conclusively that his statements were false.

So if I could prove that the alternate suspect had her blood on his shirt, there was other evidence to point to him, and it would refute Lee's statement, and it would be enough.

To get Lee out.

After all the events of the past weeks, the sweet high of the Tolls recantation followed by this devastating crash when he learned it didn't change Lee's fate, Robert knows he needs to temper his friend's spirits, keep him believing in something anything, and Robert being well Robert, he already has a plan, a documentary, one all about Lee's story, the perfect addition to the Freely Media franchise, something to put on YouTube hook in more supporters and most important, more journalists hunting for their latest scoop shrewe to form.

Robert has been gathering lots of material and now he needs some input from the star.

Awesome.

Let me take this phone call here an inmate, laun thank you for using the curis.

You may start the conversation now, Ale, Hi, how are you?

This can only mean one thing from now on, every phone phone call is potential content.

They speak clearly and into the phone.

Can you hear me?

Now?

Yeah, I can hear you.

Just just make sure you speak clearly and into the phone.

I've got a cool project.

Lee doesn't take the baby.

He has other things on his mind.

Oh man, hell of it get started at about this morning.

No, we had a storm up to it and go all to shad off the roof right above where I'm sleeping.

A freak storm is flooded Lee's side of the prison.

He's had to be moved.

So they just poved me a few minutes ago.

So another plot of this part of the institution I didn't even know exists.

And it's crazy as hell.

That's like being in the nut all these things.

Credication, Well, that's all right.

Well, Hopefully they're calm, I said, hopefully they're calm.

Well, I mean, I don't know.

They walking around like Sandie's that they looking at be real brains.

There you go.

Hey, Rob is ever patient, but the clock is ticking.

It's time to get down to business.

So with that being said, you know, I'm gonna ask a couple of questions and and just and we'll go from there.

So regarding the Dana Feiler murder, how did you get involved?

Well, what happened?

Well, a murder happened.

This is work with down.

We think we know who did it.

Well, we need your help, help with OLCO.

And we went from there.

It was down all the week.

And what was the incentive on your part to help these police?

Well, number one, they with my friend.

And number two, here's the thing about interviewing people, something we all learned the hard way.

They don't always give you the right answers.

Was it twenty thousand or was it twenty five thousand?

It was it was twenty thouves.

A sensitive interviewer can attempt to gently nudge their subject.

Well, I don't I don't know, I don't know.

So twenty thousand was promised or was it twenty five thousand.

But you can only take the horse to the water.

It was twenty thouves.

May probably twenty thouves.

Okay, So reporter Rob changes tech to a subject that he knows Lee will deliver on.

But what I would like you to do is I'd like to get you recorded.

You know, uh, maybe you say hi.

My name is Lee Harris.

I was born in whatever whatever, I grew up in Gabrini Green, and just talk about it, talk about the main streets of Kabriny Green and what it was like.

And that's going to be the intro to the movie.

Okay, okay, okay, I can do it, all right, So when did you want to do that?

Right now?

You know?

I uh?

I a hoven Cabrini in the early sixties, all right, went to the world famouite cool, vacational as fool.

Home life, meanwhile, was what he referred to as controlled chaos.

Lee shared a four bedroom apartment with his mother, who cleaned holmes part time, and his five brothers.

His father, a mechanic who drank too much, was only ever a fleeting presence.

Money was very tight.

Little Lee sought solace singing in church Choir and later on with the ladies.

I think Cabrini was a course of challenge because we had h that I want to feel.

We had the poor folk at three four blocks the Wayne, we had the rich halfman.

They didn't want the guy took the projects released vitory in that area I left they were working for.

Remember, Kabrini was just a short walk away from the Gold Coast, one of America's wealthiest neighborhoods back then, which made it a good place to earn some money.

So every day Lee would cross the poetically named Division Street to reach his wealthy clients.

Both of our work, game of the other flat absolutely.

Put on the other side of the tracks was a world away.

Life, and to breed was raw.

The great projects, it's the white projects, but the white purojects didn't like the rig projects with the rig projects, didn't like the Royals, the lawyalnits.

It was.

It was a fac The reds and whites were the high rise towers, twenty three of them in total, some up to nineteen stories tall.

And then there were the row houses nearly six hundred.

Whichever one you happened to live in became your default tribal identity.

The bringing was a war though, and the only thing that really I bet that kept the just sound or softball.

Yes, softball invented in Chicago in the late nineteenth century by George Hancock.

Baseball with a larger ball and a smaller field the ideal inner city leisure sport.

And we had a thing that we referred to as postal organization through recreation, and we developed football league.

And what we got was we made post of the gas.

The fel war would felt the play together.

That way they if you get killed, if you don't want to kill your game, baby, if you better to.

Win a game, put competing gang members on the same soft bull side.

It was as ingenious as it was audacious.

You know.

We we were able to have probably was able to keep a lot of fitness down.

While they didn't on the field once the game was over and.

Then it was business and years all over that that was great.

That was great, But a capital person that rolled up and down the business street, they would have no idea what was going on behind the wallmost fire.

Alongside the softball league and coaching the girls softball teams, Lee would busy himself every year with another very Cabrini sporting event.

We started what we call the sabretty Green Black collect Well, we had regular Olympic events and we actually had athlete uh for once a year.

That's like they was going to the Olympics.

So that was what.

That was a big That was a big game.

So you know, lifeless, lifeless, Uh, what's pretty good.

This is the thing outsiders never understood about Cabrini.

They saw the news, the crime stats and assumed it was a twenty four to seven horror show.

For some people, the film Candy Man, a literal horror show, was their only vision of the place.

And yes, it could be a war zone, but even in war, everyday life carried on, and within its harsh conditions, consciousness and creativity thrived.

The musicians Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler were raised there in the nineteen fifties and pointed to their upbringings as a source of their sound and social commentary.

It was also fertile ground for activists by Marion Stamps, who was instrumental in the election of Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor, as well as other future politicians.

Jesse White was there, oh Gosh Favis to Saya.

The former president of the county Ford George Dutt was fair.

Mike Biegel, he was there and they all knew out Fito that garyon and I was in the.

Mix for Chicagoans.

Jesse White is a living legend, an Army paratrooper and minor league baseball player.

As a youth worker inside Cabrini, he founded the Jesse White Tumbling Team, a national phenomenon tumblers performing at presidential inaugurations, stealing scenes in Hollywood films, holding court at NBA halftimes.

In nineteen ninety eight, Jesse White became Illinois's first black Secretary of State, a position he held for twenty five years until stepping down in twenty twenty three.

And back in the day, Lee helped drive the kids around, So yeah, he was in the mix.

Thanks to his community work, Lee was on talking terms with some pretty high profile politicians, including foot in Chicago's first female mayor, Jane Byrne.

Back in nineteen eighty one, when the violence was in an all time high in Cabrini, thirty seven shootings in three months, she announced too much media fanfare that she would be moving in for as long as it takes to clean it up.

When the bear moved in and she she looked at me as they leave.

You don't think I really gotta live here?

Yeah?

I could have been here, But do you actually think I'm gonna live here?

Get a a cold cold farrand about four o'clock, play overlooking Kabrini and she'll come here, baby one quite a week and stay for a few animals.

But under the couple of doctors she got out of it.

Get up bold, it was, it was, it was veteran.

At one point, Lee appeared poised to become an alderman think city council person, and his rep in the community had earned him a neat nickname, Sole Brother Executive.

That our whole for executive.

And he's gonna be He's gonna be.

Okay, he's gonna he's gonna be.

Intense.

Tragedy marked Lee's life early and repeatedly.

His mother committed suicide in his early twenties.

Two years later, cirrhosis claimed his father.

In just two years before Lee's arrest, his brother was murdered.

City politics offered him a way to channel his pain and loss into his community, and what a remarkable achievement that would have been, but that future was not Lee's to claim.

And then there was the police.

The police they transis was was felt in the area because they was in the area a lot, by the fact, was against the police.

That's right.

Lee's softball league was open to gang members and cops.

They used to line up to play the police is go fall because they were good.

We were good.

They were good.

That was one of the ways that they got along.

We were playing off fall the three views after the game, and that's how I've had a lot of idiots that get oh damn.

Yeah, you heard right.

Lee played softball with the very cops who put them away.

Yeah.

I think that's about it.

That's pretty good.

I'm getting excited about this movie thing.

By having all these bits and pieces that I can put together, it's it's gonna be it's almost gonna be like a real movie.

Really.

Yeah, yeah, I mean I've got I've got at least an.

Hour's worth of stuff, you know.

All right, we'll hang in there and have a good way.

And uh, I'm doing the best I can though, anyway, Yeah, thank you you.

Next week probably come.

Up, Okay, we'll do okay, all right, now nah you twuly you likewise all right, bye bye a leaf.

As Rob gets down to editing Lee's best soundbites, Jennifer and Eric have already found something interesting with the DNA, not the sweatshirt sample, but a tantalizing piece of information about the person who did the testing.

Back in two thousand and four.

DNA labs are typically overseen by a forensic pathologist, an expert whose word can tip the balance between guilt and innocence.

In Chicago, that role once belonged to a woman named Pam Fish.

She routinely testified to the reliability of her findings, but in three separate wrongful conviction cases, defense attorneys discovered a troubling pattern.

On the stand.

Fish had described her test results as inconclusive, Yet when defense attorneys got their hands on her notes and pride them open, a totally different story emerged.

The results weren't inconclusive at all, they were exclusionary.

And then Robert does some digging of his own.

He looks at another Zuli case that also has DNA evidence.

The boyfriend and girlfriend who the hotshot lawyer had also been repping the ones who claimed Zuli had coerced them into a false confession.

You know who the forensic pathologist was, Fish, You got it.

Unbelievable that woman was Yeah, Hey, whatever the state, whatever the fate.

Don't look a doo.

That's what she did.

The Notorious Fish.

The Notorious Fish Crying Wolf is an iHeart and Clockwork Films podcast in association with Chalk and Blade.

I'm your Dax Devlin Ross.

The series producer is Sarah Stolart's.

The senior producer is Laura Hyde.

The series script is written by me and by Sarah Stolart's.

Bonus episodes are written and produced by Me Dax Devlin Ross.

Our executive producers are Christina Everett for iHeart Podcasts, Naomi Harvey and Jamie Cohen for Clockwork Films, and Ruth Barnes and Jason Phipps for Chalk and Blade.

Sound design is by Kenny Koziak and George dre bing Hicks.

Our theme music is by Kenny Koziak.

Additional production support from Stephen Pate.