Hi is see Fishman.

I hope you're enjoying Death in the Seat in Alliance.

We've got a bonus episode coming for you.

It's not going to be this Tuesday.

It's gonna be the following Friday.

Please look for it.

Maggie Freeling is going to be our guest.

She's bringing along Danny, one of the Private Eyes, and we're gonna go deep both in the plot and on how Maggie feels, how Maggie feels about feeling so publicly.

Okay, please tune in.

Previously on Death and Deceit in Alliance.

You know, I think there's a lot of questions that have never been asked of him.

Who was he really?

And I don't want him to try to bullshit us.

You know, when you leave an interview and you feel like you've shared more information than the person who's fighting for their life, there's a reason behind that.

And I said a point blank did that happen?

No?

And then he changed the subject pretty quickly.

Man, Then.

That's fine.

You know, we know memories on tape recorders.

Just tell us what you do remember.

And he left out he was not going to bring up the fact that he was with Joe at the innings.

Yeah, hello, is this mister Toole, Charlie Toole.

I don't know who's this.

This is death and Deceit and Alliance, a real time investigation into whether David Thorne killed Yvonne Lane.

I'm Maggie Freeling.

Hi, Banky, Hi.

How are you?

I'm good?

How are you?

Oh?

I wish I could be better.

This case has destroyed me.

I told you, well you did so, I guess told you.

After we get home from our meeting with David Thorne, I called one of the only other people who has put as much time and effort into this as we did, Dwayne Pullman, the award winning investigative TV journalist.

If you remember, I spoke to Dwayne at the beginning of the season and he warned me this case would consume me and it did.

Yeah.

So, you know, we've you know, been doing this for about a year now, and uh have come to some really interesting findings that I just wanted to let you know about and just see if you had any insight on anything.

I wanted to see if you could help process it all or let us know if we were totally off base.

Well, you you know, you spent a very very good amount of time on it and had some you know, really interesting thoughts last time.

So it's been the being of my existence, trust me.

Yeah.

Well, I uh, I've had a full emotional meltdown over it.

So I guess you know.

We talked to everybody we could all the key.

I started telling Dwayne about everyone we spoke to, plenty of whom didn't make it into the podcast.

We also put up three billboards directing people with information to an anonymous tip line, and we tracked down every lead that came from that.

I told him about Chris Campbell that we were always told he's a snitch and an informant, but we didn't find that.

We also talked about Rose, and.

Rose said too.

Rose sent a text that said, I'm not talking to you, but I stand by what I said.

And that's just interesting.

I mean, so this sounds, yeah, I know, what is starting to sound like.

The guys spoke to the Enochs who said they stood by everything they said at trial.

In fact, they told the guys they're scared of Joe getting out because they're convinced he's a murderer.

These are the people who took him in and cared for him.

I told Dwayne how once we were on the ground in Alliance, we realized that it's nearly impossible for the tiny Alliance police force, where a lead investigator had only worked one homicide case ever, could have somehow mastermind a multi town cover up and convinced all these people who didn't know each other to lie.

Sure, maybe people in Alliance were afraid of the police department, but all these other people from different towns who didn't know each other to all be coerced to lie against two kids for what.

Dwayne agreed, it's not very Okham's razor.

And then I brought up sam Peg, who was really the turning point for the guys.

She sticks by it too, and she's like, I don't think Joe did it.

I love him, I don't think he did this, but he did tell me this.

She still said that Joe told her before the murder David wanted him to kill Yvaughan, and after the murder that Joe said he did.

It get too contemporaneous then, and continuing that's interesting, that's pretty important.

I mean, And after that we were like, all right, it seems pretty clear Joe was involved.

Whether he blacked out and didn't.

Remember being his involvement and how made up stories, right, it's just like he It's very unlikely that Joe was not involved at this point.

So if we believe Joe.

Was involved, then we have to look at did he do it on his own or did someone else.

In the Enox testimony, they say when Joe came to live with them on March twenty seventh, he only had fifty cents to his name.

Karen Enoch testified to buying Joe five dollars cigarettes because he couldn't afford anything.

The night of the murder March thirty first, when he got dropped at the mall, Joe told the Enox he was going to clean out David's grandpa's garage.

David told me that never happened.

There was no garage cleanout.

Plus, we know that David was at shoot fighting and mostly accounted for that night and none of it involved or left time for garage cleaning.

But in the days after the murder, the Enox testified that Joe was waiting around for David to give him money for a garage cleaning, which, according to David, never happened.

All three Enochs say in the days after the murder, Has David come by with my money?

Has David come by with my money?

The Enochs in their statements say he had fifty cents before the murder, like he had no money.

They were buying him cigarettes.

So somehow he comes up with this money, which points to someone paid him for something.

Sure, and I remember that was absolutely yeah, yeah, yeah, that all makes sense.

A few days later, on April fifth, the Enoch said that David stopped by their house.

He and Joe talked in the car and after that conversation, the Enoch said Joe was ready to go shopping.

He asked their daughter, Summer Enoch, to take him.

The next day, Summer took Joe shopping.

We went to k there n he Kent and he bet a pair of ringer blades and a pair of work booth competer gonnas.

Start working with my cousin Abby.

We went to school and after where he got.

Fax and he bet a pair of Nike shoes and I want did I tell you about there?

And he wanted to hurry up and change into his new tennis.

Shoes and he took Kicks old tennis shoes back and Ike paid that he had on and he put them in the bag and he changed and put a new parents back then, and he said he wanted to hurry up and hur them shoes away.

And I said, manage to say why when we get home?

He said, no, I want to get rid of him.

Neck told that how much she take peached them?

How about you?

I want to say, is it a coincidence that this kid, who didn't even have enough money to buy cigarettes was talking for days about David coming by to pay him for something David said never happened, and then after he sees David suddenly spends around two hundred dollars shopping.

I don't know.

I literally I could not say, yes, David Thornton did this.

I don't think you know.

I would never want to ruin a man's chance at freedom if he didn't do this.

I think there's enough, if there, but what is the percentage of that he keeps getting?

As they say, it gets worser and worser.

And it's true David's own conversation with the guys made things worse.

When he was given a chance to speak for himself without looking at timelines or having Sue explain things couldn't do it.

It's not up for debate whether he was with Joe the day of the murder.

The Enochs are credible.

Yet David, he.

Fully removed Joe from that day.

He has built a counter narrative and every part of his day removes Joe.

And so they finally circle back after letting him talk and whatever and go.

But David, we know you're with Joe at five o'clock.

At the Nuchs.

Oh yeah, you know what, I guess.

I did run into him.

I was buying a soda.

It's valuable information.

A lot of this is.

Freaking good on you, man.

Here's what we're paying attention to.

And this is where the pis are really crucial.

Here is you look for continuity, and you look for clarity, and you look for a lack of obfuscation and stuff like that, all the stuff that you know we do intuitively.

He's failing every measure.

Isn't he.

I told Dwayne how David's explanation of when he knew Yvonne was selling sex kept shifting to me.

He said he didn't know until after she died.

But David told the guys he knew when he was taking her to those conventions.

What Yvonne was doing.

I told Dwayne how even when David did acknowledge that he saw Joe the day of the murder, the story was different than what it had been in the past.

I also told him about Angie's allegations and the incidents of violence David did not voluntarily divulge, and that he minimized.

It's excellent work there, you did.

It's just.

It's just really shook me.

You know, Like, but truth is what truth is, isn't it.

I mean, that's the whole job here.

If Chris Campbell stands by the story, Sam stands by the story, do you have contemporaneous and continuing verification and then we have a hidden domestic violence situation which was violent?

Holy shit?

So this sounds Sam, you know, I know what it's starting to sound like.

You can hear the sadness in Duyne's voice too, Maggie.

Let me be clear on it.

You know, I've always tied my belief in this that at some point, some way, the truth will reveal itself.

And I've tried and tried and tried, and I'm pretty good at what I do and couldn't do this.

So this has haunted me I told you that, you know, I'm thankful that you're doing what you're doing, especially on the level God.

I mean, my loyalty is to truth, it's not to individuals.

The time, given all the input and given all of the the points of reference, I concentrated on an ft UP murder scene and an ft UP trial.

That was the right call, And.

I agree with Duyne here.

That's why we were all drawn to this case in the first place.

This was a sloppy investigation conducted at a botched crime scene by inexperienced and frankly problematic officers, followed by a trial that left room for a lot of reasonable doubt.

And in a court of law, people cannot be convicted if there is reasonable doubt.

But you know, we were inconclusive on whether he did it.

There was enough doubt about it, obviously, But the point is, you know, we took some runs at it and there were big questions.

For example, we still don't know who Yvonne's neighbor George Hale saw leaving her house the morning after the murder, and there's still the Brady violation.

The prosecution withheld George Hale's statement from David's defense team though the guys feel sure that the person George Hale saw was likely not the killer.

As I've said before, her house was highly trafficked enough that a person could have been totally separate from the murder.

Could have been a friend who was supposed to stop by in the morning for a coffee, stumbled on her dead body and fled.

Or maybe it was an officer with a scheduled sex appointment who preemptively cleaned up any evidence of having had relations with her, not to cover up her murder necessarily, but maybe just to save his job.

We raised the.

Questions, they're getting answered, at least in part thanks to your work.

I mean, do I feel itchy about it?

I feel itchy about all parts of this.

Yeah, and I always have from the minute I started.

Yeah, Maggie, I think you know this.

I'm not like, I'm just supporting.

The truth is the truth, whether we are comfortable with it or not, that's what it is.

And if things don't add up, they don't add up.

And sorry, that's one of those indications.

I mean, he, on all appearances, seems to be a nice, kind of all American boy.

Does any now and man you know or an older man but you know, it's not about appearances and it's not about charm.

It's about the truth.

But you know, as I absorb it, all I really care about is the closure of it all.

And I mean, you know, I can't imagine have you can't Sue yet?

And what was her reaction at this point?

The answer was yes, Sue, David's wife, an advocate, had been told, but not by me.

After everything we found or hadn't found, John and Danny decided they could not take David's case.

Remember, all of this was preliminary work to see if there was enough meat to David's claim of innocence to invest more time and money into the case.

And after a year of research, hundreds of hours, invested five trips to Ohio, two separate prison interviews, tip lines, billboards, we found absolutely nothing that could help prove David or Joe's innocence, and what we did find was more damning than helpful.

The guys wrote David and Joe explaining their position and had a long phone call with Sue explaining everything they told her.

Anytime she wanted to call or ask questions, they'd be there.

I told her the same thing, and I was for a while up until this episode when she stopped speaking to me.

No one expects Sue, who invested most of her life, including years of marriage, and who went nearly bankrupt trying to help her husband, to accept our conclusion.

It's clear she's frustrated with the outcome and looking for flaws in our investigation, saying we didn't do enough and didn't follow the new leads we found.

But truthfully, the guys didn't see a reason to start going down that road when nothing pointed us away from Joe.

That's why they did this investigation to see if it was worth it.

Still, I can't blame Sue.

This isn't just another investigation for her.

It's her life, and all I can say is that I get it, and if she ever reaches a point where she wants to talk it over, I'll be here.

To be clear, John and Danny are not labeling David Thorn a killer, and neither am I.

Any case adopted by any innocence project has to have evidence, something new, something missed to help clear the person convicted.

We can't find that in this case.

So while the guys packed it up and moved on to other cases, I still couldn't.

Hey going on?

You can hear me?

Yeah?

Okay, awesome?

How are you?

I just do?

I decided I still needed to give David one last chance to explain to me what happened.

Why was the story he told me different than what he told the guys.

Was he lying?

Why did he omit?

Joe?

Maybe he had a good explanation.

Why did the guys leave there feeling the way they did?

So you know, you could tell me your side of it, like that's I want to hear your side of their great.

Things, Jiggins.

My only problem was whenever they start to ask me a question, I started to answer, as I'm in the answer, then something I say or a secondary question comes up, and then like the flow of the conversation was kind of convoluted, I guess, because then I'm you know, I'm just chasing my puts on the answered.

David said, John and Danny were confusing him, asking one question on top of another.

But I've heard them do dozens of interviews.

You've heard it too.

That's not their style.

Their slow, methodical and even played dumb.

As Danny likes to say, Colombo the person to get the answers, badgering is just not their style.

And on top of that, David had his attorney present.

It was a legal visit.

If the guys had been steamrolling him, certainly she would have stopped it.

That's why she was there.

I told David he needed to find a better explanation for why he couldn't answer questions because I wasn't buying it.

So he tried explaining why he had multiple versions for how he wound up with Joe on the thirty first after initially omitting him, and not.

Be honest, I'd blended two different events.

But then I guess, for lack of a better way of saying, in my defense, the time that they're questioning me of is before anything ever happened.

So to me, that's just another normal day in my life.

I don't know how else they explain it.

There was nothing exciting going on, nothing to be truly remembered.

That's just bluffing something out for months prior and trying to play, trying to put it together.

But remember, on April second, the day after Yvonne's body was found, David was in the precinct with his attorney for questioning.

That's just two days after he would have been with Joe.

It's unlikely he just forgot about that, especially when he's being pressed for an alibi.

Here's one of our first conversations.

By the time they started talking to me, I'm going in to try to help them figure this out, and all of a sudden they're telling me, you know, help us, help you, and I don't need the help, don't you know.

What I mean.

I'm here to help you.

And then whenever I saw that they were actually looking at me, then that's whenever I had well, actually, my grandfather contacted and attorney.

The David knew immediately he was a suspect, and usually that means you start scrambling for an alibi?

What was I doing when this person was killed?

So they know it wasn't me.

Imagine someone ask you today, what were you doing on some nondescript day two months ago?

Of course you'd struggle.

But the first time David was asked to recount his day was the day after Yvonne's body was found.

And if he was racking his brain for an alibi what he was doing that day, surely being with Joe and the cub would have popped into his head.

Granted, David didn't answer those questions.

At the time, his lawyer shut down the interview, but he knew he needed to get that information ready.

He was suspect number one in a murder case who at some point might have to argue his innocence.

I mean, their big hang up it wasn't even the blending.

It was that you were not going to say you were with Joe that day at the Enoch And they said, they asked you multiple, multiple times, what your.

David like shipping there, because is what they kept asking me is saying that I was there beforehand, And I said, I was never there beforehand because that was the first time that I was ever there, because that's the first time that I ever met Karen.

Because David went on to talk about something completely different, so I circled back.

That's not the issue though.

Their issue was they said, lay out your timeline of that day.

That day, you know, you were in the Enochs driveway at five o'clock whisked the lion, And they said they asked you multiple times, and they finally said, well, you.

Were with Joe that day and you They did not like that you were not going to tell them you were with Joe that day.

See, I don't get that.

Whenever they asked me what I was doing by the time I left, I told them I said, I don't know exactly what time that I was there.

Other than that I never said I wasn't there.

But you did, you, David, That's what they're saying.

You didn't tell them that you kept omitting that information.

I mean, why else was I there?

Though that's nothing given them.

It looks like you're trying to actively not put yourself with the person who likely did this.

They said, they asked you multiple times, what else happened?

What else happened?

He starts circling again, and they.

Said, it said, you didn't see Joe, And then you said, oh, yeah, I.

Saw Joe because on that one they were asking me about the money from UH summer, and I said I didn't give any money to him whenever I saw him.

And they said, so you saw him, and I said yeah.

But I don't think at the time that they're saying because that part I don't recall.

You know, this one piffic day, I think.

But and then he asked me going back to the thing, So it wasn't that I was denying being there, because that's the only reason I was there because I happened right, reason to be at the Enochs other than Joe, because I don't know there are people from Adam.

Right, which yeah, exactly.

I mean, that was just their hang up that you weren't going to tell them that you were there even though they knew you were there.

I didn't deny it, that's just it.

I didn't.

I still don't understand.

How, but that's how they felt.

The whole conversation was, is you weren't giving information.

They had to pull information out of you, is how they felt.

Yeah, but I don't know what it is that you want me to say to you unless you asked me the question.

The timeline of your day?

They said, what is the timeline of your day?

You know you were at the Enochs.

Why didn't you put that in your timeline?

It wasn't my timeline.

They said, you did not tell them you were with when you were laying out the timeline.

And then finally, after all the circling, I.

Don't know that I have to tell them that I'm standing there with him because that's the only reason that I'm there.

But you do, David, You have to tell them everything.

They asked you to tell them everything, and that's their problem is you didn't tell them anything.

They said.

They left that conversation feeling like they told you more than you told them.

I mean, I don't know.

I'm sorry that they feel that way, but I was just trying to answer the questions as they came, and that was that.

David said he didn't tell them he was in the Enochs driveway with Joe just hours before Yvonne was killed as part of the timeline.

They asked him to lay out because he didn't know he had to.

My hope of David fighting for his innocence was out the window.

Do you want to tell your side of the Angie story?

David denied the allegations Angie made and gave an explanation for why, according to him, she made it all up.

He said that she had started dating someone new her now husband.

I don't know if he found out or when he found out that they were already engaged, and she paid for a hotel on Ralph five for us to go to whenever they were dating.

He said that the reason Angie lied about it all is because her now husband told her to because he was pissed she cheated on him with David years earlier.

According to David, this is why she made up multiple incidents of abuse.

However, David did admit to something.

He admitted to shooting out the car tires while Angie was in the car, like she claimed.

Well, Angie said it was four tires.

David said, actually it was just one.

But let me repeat.

He admitted to shooting at a car that a woman his girlfriend was sitting in.

But she was leaving in my car, and I mean, after all, it was my car.

And then I asked David why his story about the sex work changed, So I.

Guess one of my questions though, you specifically told me, but I will send you the tape that you had no idea why she was going to conventions and when you told the guys, you told the guys that you knew why she was going and you just had to put it out of your mind.

That was afterwards.

Her and I went together twice when I was taking her for the conventions and everything, I had no idea when her and I got back together after Brandon is when she came queen.

Okay, they said it was very clear that you said no I told them.

Why you were because they asked me what it was like for me being with her on the second time around.

I had to put that out of my mind because that was part of whether her and I were really getting get together and be together the second time around.

That's where we aired out all of our dirty laundryf with each other.

But then whenever they asked me if I knew, yeah, I knew not whenever we were together the first time, but I knew the second time.

So if this is confusing for you, it's confusing for me too.

I've never been able to get a straight answer on when he knew about the conversations and why he told the guys he knew exactly why he was dropping her off, and why he told me he had no idea.

David had written a letter to me at the end of August saying, had I known Yvonne was working conventions, then yes, I would have tried to get custody.

I'd have led with that, no questions asked.

Who would subject their child to a revolving door of unknown people and access And this is just incredible because David did know.

Now I'm thinking if the police got this right, maybe the motive wasn't about money or paying Yvonne child support.

Maybe it was that David did not want his son to be in that kind of environment.

Maybe David had a decent, I guess noble motive.

David's grandfather said David wanted custody in his police interview after April seventh, but added that David couldn't prove Yvonne an unfit mother because the kids were always clean and the house was clean.

So was David just desperate enough to get custody of Brandon that he had Yvonne killed.

The more we dug, the more we found out that David seemed to have minimized or omitted some pretty key details.

That he was with Joe the day Yvonne died, that he'd been violent or alleged to be violent towards women in the past, that he knew about Yvonne's sex work.

And at first all of this may seem innocuous, but when you start piecing it together, it's not.

Key stories fit together.

The police were not sophisticated enough to mastermind a cover up.

John Danny and I discussed this.

Yeah, I mean sometimes the bubblin idiots get it right.

By axit well, a broken clock is right twice a day.

It seems they formed their theory that David Thorn recruited someone to Killy Vaughan, and then looked for evidence to support the theory.

We know the police were getting desperate from the psychic interview.

Eventually the case fell right in their lap, starting with Rose.

If her building manager hadn't called the police to say Rose knew something, the police may never have known about Joe.

After that, the pieces all fell into place.

Rose and Chris told the police about Joe, telling them he was in town to murder a girl.

Joe told the police about Sam Peg, his best friend.

Sam told the police that Joe was telling her months ahead of time about this.

The Enuchs confirmed Joe had no money until he saw David.

David's alibi had holes in it.

It's all right there, But yet all of us have been drawn to the case because the arrests came from a notoriously corrupt department with detectives that had less than stellar reputations, and a botched crime scene and Brady violations, and multiple people who could have done this who were never looked into, and all of this corroborated by their own police records.

The trial left what I would certainly consider reasonable doubt.

There was no conclusive physical evidence linking Joe to the scene.

Had the jurors heard from George Hale, the neighbor who saw an unknown man leave Yvonne's house after she was dead, perhaps the verdict would have been different.

But they didn't.

They didn't know about Hale because the prosecution didn't tell them, despite being obligated to disclose information like that.

If David's team had called an expert to refute the state's evidence, maybe we wouldn't be here.

But none of that happened.

And if there's one thing I can say for sure about this case, it's that David Thorne did not get a fair trial, and there are still lingering questions we may never get answers to the crime scene certainly does not match Joe's statement, and neither does a knife, which remember, didn't have any blood on it.

Why has Joe's story changed so many times?

It's possible today he's confused by how many people have questioned him, asked him different versions, told him different stories.

He doesn't know what's true anymore.

But I do know that Joe believes He is the kind caring person we heard so much about who was severely abused and just wanted someone to love him, and in this case, David was that someone.

I think Joe did go there with the folding knife, the only folding knife of that kind bought that year on March thirty first, nineteen ninety nine, at the exact time Joe said he bought it, but after Chris Campbell made fun of him and said, who are you going to kill with that?

He ditched it and used the kitchen knife.

That's why there was no blood on the folding knife, and that's why a kitchen knife was missing, because Joe used it for me.

That's a reasonable explanation for some of the lingering questions.

Others may just never be answered.

And so we have no new evidence pointing to innocence.

And once someone is convicted by a jury, it's nearly impossible to get out without that new evidence.

So there was nowhere left for us to go after the investigation.

The billboards expired and came down, and the tip line was shut off.

I have recovered since twenty twenty one.

After losing trust in myself, I dusted off my shame, picked up my head and kept going at what I know.

I'm good at finding the truth and telling stories.

I went on to win a Pulitzer for my reporting on mandatory minimums and juvenile lifers in the podcast Suave in twenty twenty two.

Since then, I've learned about and poured my heart and soul into reporting on countless innocent people in prison and telling their stories.

A conservative estimate is that there are more than twenty thousand innocent people in prison, but experts say numbers are more likely in the hundreds of thousands.

One of those people.

I recently released a new investigation on the first since Yvonne's, called Graves County, where not only do I get it right, but much of my reporting and series was inspired by processing the aftermath of getting it wrong.

I found a case where a journalist got it wrong like I did, yet he refuses to speak to me or acknowledge his mistakes or worse.

I think it's crucial to talk about our fallibilities as journalists.

Not only does it keep us honest, but it keeps us humble and human.

And ultimately, at the end of all this, there was a woman, a mother, a friend, a daughter who was brutally murdered, and her family has had to live with that for going on three decades, and a police department who did them no justice, allowing countless people to spend time and resources looking into what was very likely correct, but so poorly investigated it left too many questions for confidence.

We went into this in part to get justice for Yvonne Lane and her family.

They deserve to know the truth, and now I think the truth was there.

The whole time, I believed this was very very likely a wrongful conviction.

So did many others, meaning we also believed that there was someone else out there getting away with Yvonne's murder.

That's why I recruited investigators to take a look.

But now we believe that broken clock was right, and Yvonne's friends and family finally deserve to have their mother, daughter, and loved one rest in peace.

If the police had just done their job, if they hadn't left so much room for doubt, I believe Yvonne's family would not have had the worst moment of their lives brought up countless times for nearly three decades, and I want to repeat discussions about whether Yvonne was or was not a sex worker or a dancer, or use drugs are important to the case, but beyond that, it doesn't matter.

Her life was worth more than a pair of Nikke shoes and some roller blades, regardless of what choices she made in her life and her children.

I hope at least that Evonne's five boys can conclude what they want and remember her how they want.

Tony, Vinnie, Brandon, Trenton and Preston deserve that.

If you could correct everything that's been said about her.

What do you want people to know?

I think that's the thing what I did for from a lot of people.

Honestly, I don't I really know you the damn what they think about her?

I know how I feeled about her.

Why do I kill what anyone else thinks?

Whether she slept the people, dnsely with people, whether she did drugs andrew drugs.

Why do I kill anyone?

Thanks for me?

Well, what do you think about her?

I loved her, she was crazy, A loved her.

Death and deceit In The Alliance is produced and reported by me Maggie Freeling, with editorial consulting from Amber Hunt.

Aaron Case is our legal researcher, our executive producer is Steve Fishman.

Our engineer and production coordinator is Austin Smith.

Eric Axelrod is our assistant producer.