I don't know if there's a Just Got Out of Prison playbook, but if there is, at least one chapter ought to be dedicated to Lee Harris.

The first day after his release and the Burger party, he did a big podcast interview detailing his whole story.

On day two, he and his son Jermaine had tickets for a Bulls game.

A crowd twenty thousand strong of screaming basketball fans might have been overwhelming for anyone else, but Lee was all in.

Cheezing it up with a selfie in front of the Jordan statue, and on the way up to his seats in the Harris Club, he gets chatting to a woman she had heard his whole story on the podcast the day before.

I can't believe you're really him.

Yeah, it's me.

He had a date for church by the fourth quarter.

True story.

There were the long nights in Chicago bars, barbecues at friends' houses, hanging out with his new girl and Row, and a particularly iconic night with Jennifer to a favorite bar, the Whiskey Girl Tavern.

Let's just say there was a dance off.

Then there were the long days at the local softball tournaments, part commentating the games, part chatting and eating pizza, or simply watching the world go by on a deck chair brought especially for the occasion.

Just like riding a bike, once he was around people, that switch went straight back on.

Lee was even a guest of honor at the first National Wrongful Conviction Day, hosted by then State's Attorney and fellow Cabrini greener Kim Fox.

Away from the excitement of the city, Lee spent weeks and weeks at Rob's farm down in Del Rio, slipping naturally into a slower pace of life.

Beer in hand.

He'd watch Rob, ten to the animals work at his house, or cruise around the neighborhood, meeting the name Babrah's, making new friends.

Succumb Thanksgiving that November in twenty twenty three, after just eight months of freedom, Lee had a whole lot to give thanks for, but that Thanksgiving was to be his first and his last.

Just a few hours after posing for a family photo carving the turkey, he was found on the floor by his young niece.

He'd collapsed in the early hours of the morning.

Not yet a year out of that thirty three year prison term.

Aged sixty eight, Lee Harris was gone.

He died of natural causes.

I'm Dak Steven Ross and from iHeartMedia.

This is Crying Wolf, episode ten, Gone Fishing.

At about three point thirty in the morning after Thanksgiving, I received a phone call from Lee's girlfriend Roe, and I answered the phone.

I said hello, and she just said he's gone.

I said what she said, he's gone?

I said what she goes, Lee's dead.

He's dead, and then she hung up the phone.

When he passed away, I didn't get it stopped.

It's stopped making sense.

How could that happen?

How could this be?

And it was just everything ended, just like that snap of the fingers.

It was done.

No more plans, no more brother in life.

The first thing that Rob does is called Jennifer, and then he does the only thing he knows how.

There's tons of blocks of limestone laying outside his house, left over from construction, rough shards, all different sizes.

He gets a small handguard that fills it with the stone and takes it into a far pocket of woodland on his property.

In the morning.

I'd wake up and I'd fill up the cart and then I'd just come here and dump it, go back.

Can get more.

I couldn't do it anymore.

The next day, I'd do it again, and I'd do it again, and I do it again, And after about a week I was moved to all the stone here.

Even though all the pieces were so jagged, so different in size, an evenly shape pyramid structure nearly six feet tall began to appear in the clearing.

This pile, it's got to be three tons, was moved by hand, and it was me grieving.

Lee's the only thing.

I could do.

So it's like a memorial, you know.

I come back here and I see this pile of rocks, and I know why it's there, from the first dump of stones all the way to where it's at.

Now, I know it's here, and when I see it, I know why.

The strange thing is Robert had been worried, sick that Lee would disappear out of his life, but for totally different reasons.

I was always worried in the back of my mind that once we got Lee out of prison, should that day come, he wouldn't want to speak with me any any longer.

You worried about that because he.

Wouldn't need me in prison.

He needed me.

He was a captive audience, and Lee and I.

We didn't have much in common other than this big fight that we got ourselves into, but I knew I wanted to be there.

I want to be part of the victory.

And I wanted him in my life because because he showed me the kind of love that a parent shows to their child, especially when I was hurting.

I was just nervous that he'd be bored to me, or not want to hang out, or I wasn't exciting enough.

And within just within days, weeks, a month, I realized that we're pretty tight.

We're pretty close even after prison.

He wanted me in his life very much, and we spoke every day.

Every single day we spoke.

Robert need not have worried.

Within days of being released, Lee was on a plane with him back to Texas, slowly but surely getting inducted into a del rio pace of life.

Lee loved to sit outside on a on a swinging bench in front of my house and just talk to his friends all day from there.

What are the animals?

Was he an animal guy?

Yeah?

Yeah, he started.

He started playing with the animals.

He renamed them or learned their names, and for he knowed he was holding the dog up by the paws and dancing around with it.

And there were his buddies.

He made buddies with all of them.

Max he was his favorite.

Sometimes Lee would venture out.

I'd come home for lunch from work, and all of a sudden, I'd passed Lee on the road as he's on a cellphone talking to his buddy, driving around the golf cart.

It was a trip.

It was funny, it was fun.

And sometimes he would just come out and watch me work, whether I was clearing a ditch or cutting a tree or feeding animals, you know, And that's one of the things like I let him.

I let him feed the horses and goats sometimes because he liked to, he wanted to, But for the most part, I just told him, relax, that's your job.

Just relax, hang out, let's have fun, and whatever you want to do, we'll do.

One of least favorite places to hang out was on the far edges of Robert's plot of land, past where the stone Pyramid now stands, and down by beautiful creek with a view straight into Mexico.

So I don't know if you see that hill or there, that's the Loma de la Cruz.

That's where the last Indian battle was fought here in del Rio.

Here you find arrowheads.

We're walking all over right here, all the Indian tools.

Yeah, he loved it.

I mean we'd get that little grill going there and I'd either cooked some steaks or cook some burgers and dogs, or got to skill it over there.

I can sometimes cook some eggs and breakfast burritos, and yeah, we'd come back here and eat.

Yeah, he liked it back here.

He loved it.

Come seeing my creek.

Yeah, anything that I had, what was mine was Lee's.

So quiet back here, Oh yeah, so quiet.

We liked the fish.

So he'd come back here with a fishing pollen fish.

But Lee would sit pretty much for yours, standing right over there and just.

Throw his line out.

What can you catch out here?

You can catch bass, you can catch guar, you can catch crappie, you can catch carp you can catch filapia.

Even there's tilapia in here.

They were simple and happy times, sitting chatting, watching and fishing, just being.

But the scars of prolonged incarceration were still fresh.

They were the physical ailments, the pneumonia that made it hard to breathe, the days when his legs wouldn't work, and then there were his ways.

What's funny about Lee, though, is early on I learned that I kind of need to think for us.

Lee wouldn't tell me he was hungry.

He wouldn't say, I'm hungry, bro, let's go get something to eat.

I'd say, hey, Lee, are you hungry?

Let's say what are you thinking?

I said, what do you want?

He's He's like, whatever you want, And he wouldn't know how to say yes.

So I pretty much had to make the decisions.

But I knew how to tell if I needed to start cooking some food.

What do you attribute that to?

I attribute that to him not making choices for thirty years.

Everything was put in front of him.

This is what you're gonna have for lunch, is what you're gonna have for dinner.

You know.

He was scheduled, he was programmed, and he can't just walk away from that and also be able to do these for yourself.

That's what I learned.

Night times were especially hard.

He laid down on the bed and got out of the bed and laid down on the floor, slept on the floor.

The bed was too soft for him.

It took him.

It took him a long time to be able to sleep in the bed, so he transitioned from the floor to a reclining chair that I had, and then from the reclining chair he was able to sleep in the bed.

Even so, when Lee eventually said goodbye he made his way back to Chicago after a month on the farm, Robert felt confident his friend would be fine back in Chicago.

Jennifer Blagg had felt much less confident.

I've done this long enough to know that it's also going to be very difficult for Lee and the people who get out, and the expectations and how much I mean thirty three years, right, It's just an incredible amount of time to be in a cell not witnessing the changes in society.

So I try to say to Robert, he's going to have a hard time, Like this is going to be difficult as well, and Robert was He was like, no, it's going to be awesome, right.

I mean, I don't want to speak out a turn, but that was my perception.

And in the months after the release, Jennifer saw a very different side of Lee than Robert did.

We had a lot of struggles and we had a lot of anxiety, and he would call me and talk to me about how he was feeling.

And I don't know if he was sharing it with other people.

I don't know, but like just afraid, and I think he was overwhelmed.

He would call me, called me several times crying and just saying it was all too much.

But even in public, Lee wasn't fooling everyone, you know.

My girlfriend always said that she looked in his eyes and saw someone who was terrorized, so scared, so fearful.

The night we went to dinner where we left and my girlfriend said, he is, he is scared to death.

We mek terrorizing the world.

My god, It's like it's it is overwhelming.

It's not a unique experience for all my clients are feel that way.

Lee had a different kind of personality and a whole lot of other things going on in.

His makeup, in his DNA who he wasn't a person that made it difficult.

I think for him.

Lee may have died of natural causes, but there was nothing natural about what he was dealing with.

I'm not sure.

I don't know what we could have done, but I could.

You know, I just had to bag Hi.

Lee.

We need to get a therapist.

Lee, You've got to go to group, you know, what can we do?

And Lee was always on, you know, except a few times that he called me and he was very raw with me, but otherwise he was on.

Like when he went to church with hundreds of people in the congregation and the pastor unexpectedly asked him up on stage.

Brother Lee, you get up and say something to the people.

And he got up and like he didn't know he was gonna talk, and it was like unbelievable and unbelievable speech, just incredible.

He very much wanted everybody to be happy with him.

He didn't want to disappoint anybody.

He could not say no.

He could not, like, did not understand the concept at all.

When you don't know how to say no, and as Rob found out, when it comes to your own needs, you don't know how to say yes.

What is left his his death is uh.

It's impacted me in ways.

It's hard for me to really think about it and talk about it without getting upset.

I worked so hard for Lee's story to have a happy ending.

It's just so sad.

I don't know if I have fully come to terms with how deeply I have been impacted by his death.

But here's the thing about grief, it shows up real different for different people.

So that first day after Lee died, while Robert was hauling limestone down in Del Rio, Jennifer was online and ready to drop some hard cash.

After he died, I bought the Pedalton the next day.

The next day, yeah, because he.

Died the day after Thanksgiving early early in the morning.

Might bought it that day.

I'd want to one a long time.

And it's like, I'm not a person typically that buys stuff to cope with my feelings, but I bought that to cope with my feelings.

You know.

I was like, I'm gonna ride the shit out of that bike, and I have a really, really enjoyed it.

It's kind of become a Black Friday tradition.

I have a fancy coffee machine, like an espresso latte making revel fanciness, and I bought that on the anniversary of his death.

Just weeks before Lee died on Thanksgiving, he'd gone to the very first Wrongful Conviction Day, a luncheon in Chicago that Kim Fox, then the state's attorney, hosted to acknowledge the pain and the lives unrivaled by decades of injustice Kim was the one who had ultimately authorized Lee's release, and in one of those Chicago twists that feels almost scripted, she'd grown up in Kabrini Green too.

She knew what that place had made and unmade.

She knew the hundreds of Lee's who never made it out, so when she saw him there that day, she had to speak to him.

I walk in and there's just a crowd of folks, and I don't remember who brought him over to me, but he was one of the first people that I had seen that day, and they set his name, and the tear immediately began to fall, and we embraced, and I told him I was glad to see him.

I asked how he was doing, which is, I don't know.

It's an awkward question to ask someone who has spent decades in prison for a crown that they didn't commit, who is launched back into a world that is dramatically different from the world that he once knew.

Perhaps it was because Kim was also from Cabrini.

Perhaps it was just no longer possible to hide the pain.

But in that very public space, he did open up, and so he.

And I shared for a moment because he told me, I'm struggling, having a difficult I don't recognize anything.

I don't recognize it.

The loss of sense of home was something that I appreciated as well.

Where we grew up, where we lived in Cabrini Green, you know, one of the most notorious public housing projects in the country was demolished.

The last of the high rises were taken down in twenty eleven.

Those high rises, the backdropped to all of Lee's life, the good, the bad, the beautiful, the brutal, were gone, bulldozed, erased.

The families who once filled them scattered across the city.

What's left now is a bear and wind swept no man's land, where memory hangs heavier than the buildings ever did.

And in that landscape of loss, Kim Fox's voice mattered.

She was important enough to be on Jennifer's immediate call list.

Jennifer called me maybe that Monday or Tuesday after Thanksgiving to tell me that Lee had passed away.

And I was shocked because I remembered vividly a sharing for that moment at the luncheon, him fighting in me that he was scared that things were different, and my absolute hope and desire after meeting him.

That it would work out.

Kim is no longer States Attorney, but overturning wrongful convictions was a core principle of her tenure.

Now in twenty twenty five, over thirty five years after Lee was arrested, I wondered what she thought about how far the city of Chicago had come.

Where we are is a acceptance that our criminal justice system here in Cook County has failed many, many, many families, not just Leif's family, but the victim of a horrific murder who doesn't have justice in this and where the pleas of poor black and brown marginalized pace people who have been the subject of these wrongful convictions, The subject of unlawful policing went silent, that people weren't believing them, it was easy to dismiss their claims.

And where we are today is an acceptance that this thing failed miserably, and there's a universal acceptance here that what happened to Lee is not an outlier.

That is real.

And I'm hoping as a culture, we're very mindful that wanting an answer in the absence of evidence is how you get a Lee Harris.

Six months After he got out of prison, Lee filed a civil lawsuit against the City of Chicago, Cook County, and former States Attorney Cheryl Cesario for their role in his wrongful conviction.

Eleven police officers were also on the list.

James Ward and John McHugh, Lee's so called friends, who had attended his wedding, were amongst them.

Top of the life no surprises here was Detective Richard Zuli.

Naturally, Jennifer Blagg was part of the legal team who put the case together.

When Lee died, his son Germaine carried the case forward.

Jennifer had been fired up to finally face Richard Zulian court, but she would be kept waiting.

In October twenty twenty four, just days before Zuli was due to be deposed, the city settled with a four million dollar payout.

The city's payout amounted to just under one hundred and twenty thousand dollars for every year of Lee's incarceration.

It should have been more.

The average settlement payout is half a million per year, but tragically, Lee's death diminished the value of the settlement, as he was not able to testify that his confession was false, giving very little way.

The city called the settlement a cost effective solution compared with the likely three million dollars in defense cost at a potential trial.

Nevertheless, it was a win for Lee, and if it had to come after his death, crucially, it was enough to elicit a further response from the Feightler family.

Following the news, Dana's father, Robert was quoted in the Chicago Sun Times.

I'm sorry that somebody was punished for a crime he didn't do.

How can I feel good about that my daughter was murdered.

That's something you don't get over.

But to punish the wrong person is terrible and frankly, when he was put in jail, it doesn't bring our daughter back.

It's late March twenty twenty five.

A local softball tournament is in full swing at Harrison Park on the South side of Chicago.

The famous icy winter is still hanging on for dear life, but the sun is out giving energy to the players in black and orange.

One of them is Lee's son, Jermaine Harris.

It's the middle of a game, but Jermaine runs over to say hi.

Meeting him is like meeting a ghost.

First off, he looks just like his dad and then he opens his mouth.

If people tell you they see a lot of you, a lot of him and you.

A lot, especially because this raspy voice, Oh it's the voice.

And until I talked to him on the phone.

Oh you hear us talk like on the record, and you're like wow.

Jermaine is carrying on the Harris tradition with an absolute obsession with softball.

Most Saturdays and often week nights, come rain or shine, He's here playing the league for hours at a time.

I'd actually never seen this sport being played before, but it's amazing to watch the sportsmanship, the camaraderie, and sometimes the sheer brutality.

I see one guy get his fingerstepped on so bad the crack is audible from where I'm standing.

That bitch broke.

Another player screams looking back at me.

But you watch, he'll be back to carry on with the cast before the game is up.

And nothing's soft about softball.

Seeing this, I immediately understood why this sport could be so powerful in a place like a Brinny Green, why Lee spends so much time bringing people together in this way, and how even competing gangsters might forget their differences, at least on the pitch.

In a brief window between games, Jermaine comes and sits with me on a park bench to talk about his father.

I knew he was going through a lot, so he was helthwise, so he was he's I watched the spreadoles and life, so you have to play the sad clown sometimes.

So some days you can tell this back in his knee is killing them and it's heart.

But he gets around and everybody expects lead to beat the life of the party, and he never failed.

He needs to be on.

He's never been off, so he carries that way for everybody.

So I don't want to say relieved, but I know he felt relief.

Aside the anxiety.

Lee had battled multiple physical ailments.

There was the pneumonia that he left prison with.

There were the countless trips to the hospital when his legs wouldn't work, where his heart was weak.

Whatever happened, I know he got to be out.

He got to be free.

He got to walk into a bar again and all the drinks all him and everybody listen to him.

He's got to be the lead every show like he liked it.

I took a day to be as sad as I wanted to be drunk, probably way too much.

And then the day after that he account left the ball with somebody and I gotta pigure it out.

Jermaine carries more.

Now.

A few weeks after Lee passed, he became a father to a daughter.

When we spoke, she was almost too full of that early light that makes you believe the world might turn out differently this time.

And it's both beautiful and unbearably tragic to picture Lee as a grandfather, a whole lineage opening just as his life closed.

So Saturday, still morning, what would your dad be doing right now?

So if it was a Saturday morning to day, especially with the weather like this, he's outside, he's like pack mitcheer.

He'll probably be talking to someone, talking to that guy like where'd you get your sweater?

For life, You'll be talking to the person you would at least expect him to be speaking to.

If he had three beers, he'll probably hand it out too.

And those thre be talking like they've been together for that whole life.

And you're wondering for the next six months, how do you meet the guy from the park.

And now it's like Uncle Edward.

Now, so I've got a new uncle based off a choice encounter because he was outside.

I wish he was here to tell his story because he doesn't wait, but not that he's electric like you would have been way off script by now.

You guys would have been talking about God those boy like halfway.

Through the thing, he would be interviewing you.

I've seen him do it, Hey, I still don't know how he does it.

He's remarkable man, He's just back.

Then they get a fighting with his personality.

I appreciate that.

There's Mark Coleman France.

Witten got time served for France last year.

When you do the kind of work Jennifer does, when the winds are hard fought and can turn on a diamond to tragedies, it can be hard to remember why you're even here in the first place.

It could be hard to keep going.

So she's come up with a unique kind of motivational ritual.

John was one of my second exoneration.

Every case she wins earns her a bottle of the prisoner red wine.

Once the contents are drunk, the name of the exignery is written on the cork and added to a large round glass jar, which lives on her mantelpiece.

By now, it's quite the collection.

Lee Harris, Lee Harris, that Cork in particular hit kind of different.

So Lee's case changed me as a person, I think, and it changed my work as an attorney because when I first started this work, I believe that the the goal was to get somebody out of jail.

Then over time I saw the difficulty that my clients had assimilating into society, and I I started wanting to have a different goal where I helped guys assimilate more.

And then with Lee's case, I did everything I could.

I felt like UH to try to help him assimilate into society, and I felt that it was a failure and I I couldn't keep doing this and working as hard as I do, and I had to change the lens I was viewing my work through.

I had to have a paradigm shift.

Rather than focusing on the big things, it was valuing the small, everyday things.

Every time I talk to somebody, if I'm genuine, every time I care is a win.

Every time I walk away from a situation where someone believes in their case better because of me or whatever, is it positive.

So there's that that every time I talk to somebody if I am compassionate, if I listen, if I care, that actually matters just as much as filing the petition or the actual achievements somehow I have for the client.

Don't you worry.

She's still thinking big, just a different kind of big.

Then the other thing that I've really started trying to focus on more that really a near impossible gole in that I'm thinking about it, but just trying to effectuate change.

Have my work have meaning for other people other than my client.

Each case she works on becomes part of a wider mission.

All that work that went into filing Lee's case, finding those patterns in Chicago Police department, Jennifer is using to build her other cases.

So I'm building on an argument that hopefully will help other defendants with the end goal change the Chicago Police departm have Richard Zulei be accountable, have some impact in a broader sense.

Even if Lee Harris is dead, He's still a quirk in this container.

My work matters.

Since knowing Lee, Jennifer has taken on three more Zuli cases.

At the time of recording their ongoing she hasn't given up hope of finally facing him in court.

Richard zuli has never been convicted of any crimes and is denied all wrongdoing related to these allegations.

We contacted mister Zulie through his legal team for comment and received no response.

Through all of this, the pain, the regrets, the drive to do more.

When it comes to remembering Lee, Jennifer is left with an overwhelming feeling of joy.

Believe was just a wonderful person to be with, very very very very gregarious.

It was a lot of fun.

It's something her and Roberts share.

Even though I had such short time with Lee, every moment was a good moment, Every moment was rewarding.

I definitely have a little bit of ego about it.

I could watch Lee walk down the street, eat a cheeseburger, go to the store, buy something, and realize that wouldn't have happened if I didn't cross his path.

But that's not why I did it.

I did it because it was the right thing to do.

And I know if I were in that situation, God forbid, fighting for my life, stuck in a prison, I'd want somebody out there fighting just as hard as I focked for him.

When I try to draw a conclusion to all this, and ask myself, what does this mean?

Was it worth it?

Would I do it again?

I sometimes find myself changing the answer, so I'm still still figuring it out.

There's a part of me that is so selfish that I believe that Lee would still be alive if you were still in prison.

I wish you were there, because then I'd still have them.

The lesson in this is be a good friend.

Be the best friend.

Be the best friend you possibly can be, because you never know when you're gonna need someone else.

I wanted their story to be told.

You have such an amazing story of friendship, such an amazing story to friendship and love, perseverance and dedication and so many wonderful things.

It's like a shawshake, but it's true.

What, Frank, can you think about that you talked to on the phone for probably an hour every day, no matter where they went, no matter what they did, they talked on the phone every day.

You have one minute left.

So there's one thank you for being here, bro, Thank you man.

I I ain't going anywhere I've been.

Here's too damn long.

All right, hop talk to you later.

All right, man, hang in there, buddy, Okay, why are you taking it easy to hang in their Lee find out all right by nor.

The caller had hung up.

Even after Richard Zulei retired as a detective in two thousand and seven, he never left the force.

To this day, he works as an executive officer for Lions Police Department, a suburb of Chicago.

He's seventy nine.

James Ward and John mchw the officers that attended Lee's wedding and first introduced him to Richard Zuli, have both passed away.

In twenty four, twenty five, thanks to the payout from Lee's Sibyl case, Jennifer was finally able to make a lifelong dream come true by becoming the owner of a cozy woodland getaway in Lakeside, Michigan, a place to unwind on weekends to distress from her legal work.

She goes frequently with her dogs or her girlfriend, and the name above the door Lee's cottage.

Diana Seppielli, the dog walker who identified Lee in that lineup back in nineteen eighty nine, wrote to us to say she was quote not one hundred percent short was him.

She told us it was someone else she had been focusing on that night In nineteen eighty nine.

The man she saw holding Dana Fightler's hand.

She said, the man holding her hand.

When I walked by them, I could have made a positive ID because I had focused on him.

He was taller and he was not in the lineup.

As far as I know, he is still a free man.

As for Robert, believe it or not, he started making regular prison calls again, this time to a man named Bertie who's been serving over forty years for murdy.

He swears he didn't commit.

He was in prison with Lee and became one of his closest friends.

One of the first things Lee did when he was released was to put Robert's number on Bertie's call list.

Nice touch, Lee, Robert, and Birdie have joined forces, and at the time of recording, his case has been accepted at the Illinois Supreme Court.

The good fight continues.

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

I'm your host Dax Devlyn Ross.

The Serious producer is Sarah Stolart's.

The senior producer is Laura Hyde.

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

Bonus episodes are written and produced by me 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.

Thanks to Carolyn Shery Levin from Reviewed and Cleared for her legal review and advice throughout the series.