1:55

assault.

2:01

Listener discretion is advised.

2:09

There's all these times where Driscoll almost gets

2:11

there. He says, Hey, I think I should call

2:13

my friend Charlie. My friend, he's a lawyer

2:16

and Holland says, Oh, well, you could if you want to.

2:18

I'm not here to stop you, but I don't think Charlie's going to

2:20

help you. I think we're going to help you. I remember

2:22

almost like grabbing my hand, just being like, Larry, what are you

2:24

doing? Call Charlie.

2:33

I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction

2:35

author and journalism professor in Austin,

2:37

Texas. I'm also the host of the historical

2:40

true crime podcast, 10 fold war wicked, and

2:42

the co-host of the podcast, buried

2:45

bones on exactly right. I've

2:47

traveled around the world interviewing people

2:49

for the show and they are all excellent

2:51

writers. They've had so many great true

2:53

crime stories. And now we want to tell

2:56

you those stories with details that

2:58

have never been published. 10 fold war

3:00

wicked presents wicked words is

3:02

about the choices that writers make good

3:04

and bad. It's a deep dive

3:07

into the stories behind the stories.

3:11

The Marshall project is a fantastic

3:13

nonprofit news organization. And

3:15

my friend Maurice Shema is

3:18

one of its best reporters. He hosts

3:20

a podcast called smoke screen. Just

3:23

say you're sorry. It tells the story

3:25

of a brutal murder of a woman who

3:27

was disparaged by the police to

3:29

secure a suspect. And that's just

3:32

the beginning of the questionable techniques

3:34

used by the investigators as well as

3:37

the Texas Rangers. So

3:40

let's first talk about the construction

3:43

of this piece because to say

3:45

it's an article or a podcast

3:47

tied to it is too simplistic. Tell me

3:49

what you created in your

3:52

piece, which is called Anatomy of a Murder Confession. Kind

3:54

of describe

3:55

for listeners what you're doing before

3:57

we talk about the actual story, which is unbelievable.

3:59

I mean, I am primarily a writer,

4:02

but I know that writing isn't the only

4:04

way that people take in information. And this is

4:06

primarily a story about memory

4:09

and how faulty all memories can be, and the

4:12

risks that come with kind of exploiting

4:15

the falsiness of our memories in the criminal justice

4:17

system. And I wanted the

4:19

writing to try to capture that, but I also

4:21

knew that there were other ways to capture it too. In the Marshall

4:23

Project, we created a kind of multimedia

4:26

experience where you're reading an article,

4:28

but you're also looking at

4:30

visuals where, for example, it's

4:33

a van on a straight corner and the van flips

4:35

through multiple different iterations to mimic

4:37

the way that someone's memory of that van changed

4:40

over time, right? It looked one way and then 10

4:42

years later it looked a different way.

4:43

Tell me the purpose of the Marshall

4:45

Project because, you know, people who

4:48

are listening to our show are used to hearing

4:50

from people who are independent authors

4:52

with publishing houses or at the New Yorker.

4:55

So this feels different. Could you

4:57

consider the Marshall Project to be

5:00

like an advocacy program and you're

5:02

a journalist within it? Because I always

5:04

think of the Marshall Project as people who are really

5:06

digging into wrongful convictions, which seems

5:09

like advocacy to me.

5:10

Yeah, it's a very good question. I mean, there's always been

5:12

an element of journalism that advocates

5:15

for kind of a better world in a general

5:17

sense, you know, whether that's a more transparent

5:20

society, a society with more

5:22

equality, fewer disparities

5:24

of race and gender. But we do really see

5:26

ourselves as journalists first. The Marshall Project was

5:28

founded by a former editor in chief

5:30

of the New York Times, a guy named Bill Keller with

5:33

a former hedge fund manager, Neil Barsky,

5:35

who was just really amped up about the injustices

5:38

in the criminal justice system. And the mission

5:40

statement is very broad. It's

5:42

to create a sense of urgency around that system

5:45

and to tell stories that help the public

5:47

kind of understand what the problems are

5:49

in the system and potential solutions.

5:52

We're not advocates in the sense of taking positions

5:54

on individual policies or candidates. We

5:57

don't advocate for any particular thing, but we

5:59

advocate for it. for the things that I think all journalists do

6:01

to an extent, which is more justice

6:04

in the world and more equality

6:06

and more transparency. To that

6:08

end, I think we're in line with a certain generation

6:11

of investigative journalism outlets like

6:13

ProPublica or The Texas Tribune

6:16

that really see the kind of public service

6:18

mission as the number one thing before

6:21

entertaining people, before telling

6:23

a story. We want people to understand

6:26

the system, and then we think, okay,

6:28

what stories are going to help people

6:30

understand the system better? That's really,

6:32

I think, how I came to this story

6:35

and how I felt like the story was sort of

6:37

special. Is that on the one hand, it's a twisty

6:40

true crime narrative with lots of exciting

6:42

surprises in it. On the other

6:44

hand, it features all kinds of lessons

6:47

about the reality of wrongful

6:49

convictions in the United States, false confessions,

6:52

how it is that psychology works in

6:54

the way that detectives do their work. And

6:56

finally, I'll say that I do a lot of stories

6:59

on wrongful convictions, innocent people who go to prison, but

7:01

I and my colleagues also probably the

7:03

majority of our work is on people who are guilty.

7:06

And the questions are not, did they do it? The

7:08

questions are, should prison conditions

7:10

be this awful? Or should police, let's

7:13

say, send a canine to

7:15

maul someone who was selling drugs

7:17

on the corner? The questions can get very complex

7:20

and rich beyond the question of,

7:22

is an innocent person in prison?

7:23

I mean, you and I initially talked about this. You

7:26

asked me, where should we start? Should we start

7:29

with the victim, which in this case

7:31

is Bobby Sue Hill, or do we start

7:33

from the point of view of someone who's arguably

7:36

another victim in this case, which would be the

7:38

suspect, right? So when we're

7:40

talking about this case, where does it

7:42

make the most sense to start? Can we talk about

7:44

where we are and the time period?

7:47

This starts in 2005. Many of us listening

7:49

probably were alive at the time. We're in a small

7:52

town called Alito, Texas, A-L-E-D-O,

7:55

which is in a rural county called Parker

7:57

County. It's about an hour.

8:00

west of Fort Worth, the

8:02

Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. And it's

8:04

where the suburbs give way to

8:07

vast rolling fields. There are

8:09

a lot of peach farms out there. It's a really

8:11

kind of lovely, beautiful area. And

8:13

within Alito, this one, this

8:16

county, there's a rural area that

8:18

has a road in the trees where

8:20

there's a lot of really large houses. It's very

8:22

beautiful. Somebody once described it to me as,

8:25

if you live in Fort Worth and want a mansion but can't

8:27

afford a mansion, this is the street you go live

8:29

in out in the country where the property is

8:31

cheap and you can have a mansion. So imagine

8:33

a bunch of houses that are really spread out and really,

8:36

really big and pretty. In March 2005, there

8:38

are two teenage boys who

8:41

are hiking around. I imagine

8:43

it's a day they have off from school

8:46

and they are in this creek

8:48

bed and they find a pair of trash

8:51

bags and they see what

8:53

looks like an ear coming out of one of the trash

8:55

bags and they realize, oh my God, this is a body. So

8:58

they sprint, I imagine the kind of panic that

9:00

would set in if this were me as a high school kid, they

9:03

sprint to a house nearby, they

9:05

call 911, the Parker County

9:07

Sheriff's Office, descends on the area

9:10

and basically has the body of a woman

9:12

they figure out. They put out alerts

9:15

to other law enforcement and eventually it goes

9:17

on the local news in the region

9:19

that this woman has been found and they

9:21

can't identify her but she has a pair of

9:24

tattoos that are very specific on

9:26

her shoulders. And

9:28

a number of her family calls in and says, that's Bobby

9:30

Suhill. And so now they know who

9:32

she is and they start to investigate who is

9:35

this woman and what

9:37

circumstances could possibly have led her to

9:39

be so brutally raped and murdered

9:41

and strangled and left for

9:43

dead out here in this creek. My own

9:46

investigation as a reporter kind of

9:48

mirrored, I remember feeling like, oh, this

9:50

is what I'm doing. It's similar to what the

9:53

sheriff's deputies were doing at the very outset, which is

9:55

just the question of who is this woman and

9:57

her family shared with those officers

10:00

with me some detail and it is a

10:02

really sort of tragic story that I spent

10:04

a lot of time trying to put together

10:07

because I felt like earlier versions

10:09

of the story that appeared in local newspapers and

10:12

police records in the courts really

10:15

limited her and put her in

10:17

this very specific box where it was easy to

10:19

it really almost degraded her memory. So

10:22

Babi Suhel was a young woman from the Fort Worth area.

10:25

She fell in love with her high school sweetheart

10:27

who was a immigrant family from Southeast

10:30

Asia and she dropped

10:32

out of high school to marry him. They had five kids

10:34

together and there was also a

10:36

sort of dark strain in her family history.

10:39

She had a cousin who had done sex work and

10:41

had died of AIDS years earlier.

10:43

My understanding is that she had a really contentious

10:45

relationship with her own mother and

10:48

sex work was sort of accepted almost in the family

10:50

and so she falls into with

10:53

her husband even though they have five kids they

10:55

fall into using drugs together harder

10:57

and harder drugs and then

10:59

tragically he dies in a car accident

11:02

and she's left she's in her 20s she

11:04

has five kids and she descends into

11:09

drug use and sex work in Fort Worth.

11:12

Her five kids moved in with the husband

11:14

who had died his family and

11:16

she is living with you

11:19

know a boyfriend in a derelict

11:21

motels on the outskirts of downtown Fort

11:24

Worth. There is this street

11:26

called East Lancaster that runs off

11:28

of downtown that is just famous. I mean

11:30

I've been to grew up in Fort Worth who say

11:32

that's where the sex workers are that's where the drugs are

11:35

that's where there's all those little hotels

11:37

and shelters for un-hosed people

11:40

and that's where she is and her cousins were

11:42

described going and driving down the street looking

11:44

for Babi finding her trying to convince her

11:46

to come home eventually she

11:49

calls her oldest daughter who's

11:51

in I think middle or high school

11:53

at this point and basically says like

11:55

I'd like to come back and live with you all. I think

11:57

the most tragic element

12:00

of this is that I

12:02

found another cousin of hers who was now in prison

12:04

himself, sort of speaking of this like nerve thread

12:06

in the family, and he said basically that

12:08

she felt like a failure as a mother and she kind of

12:11

drowned in that sense of failure in drugs.

12:13

One version of this is she abandoned her children, but another

12:15

version is she didn't feel like she could be a proper

12:18

mother to them. She didn't feel like she'd had the

12:20

right kind of mother in herself. But then we know

12:22

that she was about to try to go back and live with them

12:24

and about to try to pick herself up and get out of this lifestyle,

12:27

and instead they have to identify her body. It

12:30

took a lot of work to kind of get that story,

12:32

but I felt like it was really

12:34

necessary to understand the full scope

12:37

of the tragedy that is this case.

12:38

What was the other reporting like

12:41

on her life story in contrast to

12:44

all of the deep research you clearly did

12:45

on her life story? Oh, it was half a sentence.

12:48

It was sex worker found. In the court

12:50

records, there was a little bit of a sense

12:52

that the detectives were almost

12:55

disparaging her in order to solve the case, and

12:57

you can debate whether this was okay for them to do,

12:59

but they would talk to suspects and say, well,

13:01

you know, she wasn't the daughter of a senator, so

13:03

like go ahead, basically go ahead and confess

13:05

because you're not going to get a harsh punishment because

13:08

no one cared about this woman. And so the family

13:10

members I reached just said, I think we're ambivalent

13:12

because on the one hand, they were

13:14

displeased with elements of my reporting, which

13:16

we'll get into. It's very complex.

13:19

But on the other hand, they wanted the world to know that

13:21

there was so much more to this person, that she loved

13:23

her kids, that she had this incredible sense

13:26

of humor, and she really was an incredible

13:28

mother to these young kids before she kind of

13:30

got in her own head and fell off

13:32

the track.

13:33

So in 2005, Bobby Sue Hill

13:36

is saying, I am ready to get my

13:38

life together. I'd like to come back. What

13:40

happens next that changes everything?

13:42

So her body is found.

13:44

And there's a question immediately for law

13:46

enforcement, which is, how did

13:48

a woman who was last seen on the

13:51

streets of East Lancaster in downtown Fort

13:53

Worth end up in a ditch an hour away

13:56

in a rural area pretty soon through

13:58

just, you know, running. the different investigative

14:01

leads in downtown St. Louis. They find

14:03

a man who was her boyfriend at the time. They

14:06

often refer to him as a pimp. I have wrestled

14:08

with whether that word is fair. It seems

14:10

like she was doing sex work. He was also

14:12

using drugs and mowing lawns to try

14:14

to make ends meet. And they were living together

14:17

and he was protecting her from Johns

14:19

in certain scenarios. I interviewed him myself

14:22

and the story that he says to investigators

14:25

is, I was with Bobby when she

14:28

was abducted. I saw

14:30

her be abducted. There was a John

14:32

who came, he was driving a white van and

14:35

he stopped at this little intersection.

14:37

He drove back and forth a few times. There was something a little

14:40

bit uneasy or sketchy about it. I didn't

14:42

feel totally trustworthy, but she said, no, it's

14:44

okay, I'm gonna go do this job. And so

14:46

she disappears into the van. He

14:48

follows the van as it drives over to a side

14:51

street. And then at some

14:53

point after a few minutes, he's standing

14:55

there, the boyfriend, his name is Michael Hardin. And

14:58

he sees a face

15:00

pop up in the window of a man whose eyes

15:02

got wide and recognizes him, the

15:04

protector boyfriend figure from the previous

15:07

interaction and kind of flips

15:09

out and throws the van into

15:11

gear and speeds off with it. And he doesn't

15:13

see Bobby Suhill's face. So for all he knows,

15:16

she's already been killed in the van at this

15:18

point. We don't have any exact time to death to know

15:20

when it happened. But that is the story

15:22

that he tells to investigators. Investigators

15:25

do what they do. They set him up with

15:27

a sketch artist who draws

15:29

an image of that face.

15:31

So the police believe him,

15:33

Michael, the boyfriend who

15:36

is also her protector. I mean, this does not

15:38

seem

15:38

like a credible witness to me. How

15:40

do we know he's not involved? My

15:42

sense is that they decided that they believed

15:45

him, that his story was broadly corroborated,

15:48

although this was a whole universe of people whose memories

15:50

were tainted by drug use. And

15:53

in my own investigation of the

15:55

case, the one kind of point

15:57

in his favor, so to speak, is that...

16:00

A, his story has remained remarkably consistent

16:02

in certain ways, but B, it is

16:05

impossible to imagine how or why

16:07

if he was involved, she would have

16:09

ended up in this ditch an hour west

16:12

in this small town that people in the plain

16:14

texture wouldn't necessarily know. That

16:16

said, it is entirely possible that

16:18

he's lying. And in fact, later

16:21

on in this case, an investigator who's

16:23

looking into it finds an aunt and

16:25

asks the aunt, when was the last time you spoke

16:28

to her? And she gives a date. And it's in fact after

16:30

the date that he gave that she was abducted.

16:33

So it's also possible that his

16:35

story isn't exactly wrong, but

16:37

that she wanted to get away from him

16:39

and she did get away. And then her death had nothing

16:42

to do with this white van and this man that he

16:44

saw drive off with her. Everything

16:46

is an option still. And I think a claim

16:48

that a lot of lawyers working on the case now

16:50

have made to me is that basically this case

16:53

was never going to be an easy one to solve. And I think her

16:55

family acknowledged that too. This was

16:57

a murder committed in a scenario where

17:00

people are looking out for themselves. There's a culture

17:02

of being opposed to snitching. So it's, yes,

17:05

reasonable to assume that the boyfriend could have

17:07

been involved, reasonable to assume that his entire

17:09

story is just faulty, reasonable to assume

17:11

he made it up to protect someone else. When

17:14

I interviewed him and kind of got into this world, I mean,

17:16

I tracked him down to one of these derelict hotels

17:19

in Fort Worth. I mean, everything was

17:21

just so depressing and desperate

17:23

in terms of the circumstances that

17:26

it felt like there was a whole universe of things I didn't know

17:28

in terms of who's protecting whom with what story. So

17:31

Michael sits down with a sketch

17:34

artist in 2005 once his

17:36

girlfriend is discovered in her body, discovered.

17:39

He sits down and he works with the sketch

17:41

artist. What does this man look like who's

17:43

in this

17:43

white van? So according to Hardin,

17:46

to Michael Hardin, the boyfriend, the man in

17:48

the white van has a big bushy mustache.

17:51

He's kind of got a bit of a receding hairline.

17:53

If you were to look at this photo

17:56

in passing, you might think this is a Latino man.

17:58

You might think that he's, you know, a Mexican hair. although,

18:00

you know, sketches are an art

18:03

as much as a science. But this is all to say that

18:05

the sketch does not lead to any suspects,

18:08

to any matches. And around this time,

18:10

I should say there is a suspect

18:12

that emerges because he reports

18:15

that his white van was stolen. In a nearby

18:17

town, a man named Tim Dawson basically

18:20

calls the police and says, a sex worker stole

18:22

my white van. Threads of that sound similar

18:24

to this case, right? So they bring him

18:26

in, they ask him about the details. He

18:29

claims that he was with a sex worker and she stole

18:31

his van. And he claims to have

18:33

no knowledge of Bobby Suhill, no nothing

18:35

about this case. Added to the

18:38

mysteriousness, he lives in Weatherford,

18:40

Texas, which is the county seat of Parker County,

18:43

which is just a stone's throw from Alito. So

18:45

he also lives somewhat near the

18:47

place her body was found. He's

18:49

been arrested in the past for various

18:51

violence. He basically has

18:53

no knowledge and they don't press him, or

18:56

at least at a certain point they just give up on pressing him because

18:58

he says, I know nothing about this. And

19:00

his connection is circumstantially fairly

19:04

strong, but they kind of reach a

19:06

barrier in the investigation. And

19:08

at that point, the case goes entirely cold.

19:11

So to situate this in history, over

19:13

the last 20 years, the number of cold cases

19:15

has been going up because the number of homicides

19:17

that are solved has been going down. And

19:20

this case just kind of enters that ocean of

19:23

unsolved cases out there that Texas

19:25

law enforcement hopes to solve someday, but

19:27

it's not exactly prioritizing.

19:30

Why is that? That's such an odd statistic. You

19:32

would think with more

19:35

advances in forensic science

19:37

that you would be solving more cases instead

19:40

of fewer.

19:41

I think a distrust of the police sometimes makes

19:43

it hard for them to actually solve it. So you look at a case

19:45

like this. I imagine many of those people in

19:48

Fort Worth who were around Bobby Sue Hill

19:50

and her boyfriend at the time don't trust the police, or

19:53

are less likely to talk to them

19:55

about what they saw and heard. For

19:57

all of the advances in forensics,

20:00

genealogy, etc. These

20:02

are expensive and time-intensive processes.

20:04

You know, any one case takes a lot

20:06

of effort to solve. And

20:09

as law enforcement officers have told me that their

20:11

departments are just generally cash-strapped

20:13

and just kind of honestly have to jump

20:15

to the next one every every day. So if

20:18

there's a new murder, they have to start solving that one. And

20:20

some cases are allowed to go cold. To

20:22

combat that problem, and this is where the next

20:24

element of our story comes in, the

20:26

Texas Rangers decided to

20:29

create a basically unsolved crime

20:32

cold case unit. Now the Texas Rangers,

20:34

or the 1% of listeners who have never heard

20:36

of them, are this 200-year-old law

20:38

enforcement agency in Texas that

20:41

have kind of almost mythical ties to

20:43

the early history of Texas. They existed

20:46

even before Texas was a state. They are

20:49

associated with all kinds of atrocities in

20:51

the 1800s. But by the early 2000s are treated as

20:53

this elite, almost like SBI, meet

20:59

CIA element of the

21:02

Texas Department of Public Safety, which is our statewide

21:04

law enforcement body. And

21:07

typically the best of the best among

21:09

the highway patrol troopers are elevated

21:11

to the position of being the Texas Ranger. There's 160

21:14

and change across the state.

21:17

And in the early 2000s, they decide

21:19

to create a unsolved crimes

21:22

cold case unit that they say is going to

21:24

use the best of the new forensic

21:26

tools that we have to try to solve cases.

21:29

Around 2013, 2014, there's a small break in

21:33

the case of Bobby Zu Hill. There was a cigarette

21:36

butt that was found near her body in the ditch

21:38

in Perker County. And there's

21:41

a DNA hit on the cigarette butt that it matches

21:43

a woman. That woman is

21:45

brought in for questioning. She is from

21:47

the audio. It's clear, sort of horrified

21:49

by Bobby Zu Hill's death and claims, I

21:51

know nothing about it. She says I had this

21:53

one boyfriend who tried to strangle me this one

21:55

time they go and interview him. He

21:58

says, I don't know nothing about nothing. Again,

22:01

you talk about distrust of the police, and there's really

22:03

nothing to pin anything on

22:05

him or her beyond just that tiny bit of DNA

22:07

on a cigarette bit, which to be fair, they

22:10

could have thrown into the same ditch a

22:13

week or a year later, and the

22:15

connection to the body is not particularly tight.

22:18

Around that time, though, the Texas Rangers have really

22:20

amped up their cold case unit, and a Texas

22:22

Ranger named James Holland comes into

22:24

the picture to try to solve

22:27

this case again. He's been in a trial, and he

22:29

says, well, this cigarette butt has gone nowhere, but why

22:31

don't we try Tim Dawson again?

22:33

Remember, he's the one who had described having

22:35

his white man stolen. And basically,

22:38

Holland at this point, he's been a Texas Ranger

22:40

for five to 10 years. I

22:42

think he became one in 2008. He's

22:44

developing this reputation for being really,

22:47

really good at interrogations, for being

22:50

the guy who walks into the room and spends

22:52

the hours and gets a conviction every time.

22:55

So he starts to try to solve the case again. He goes

22:57

back to Tim Dawson, and they spend a few

22:59

hours together. Dawson continues

23:02

to say, I have no knowledge of any

23:04

of this. This is in fact the interview where

23:06

Holland says, well, Bobby Suho wasn't exactly

23:09

a debutante, cream of society, so go

23:11

ahead and confess and no one will care. I

23:13

interviewed Tim Dawson, and he told me that

23:16

when a microphone was not going, he said to

23:18

Holland, well, if you care about closing

23:20

this case so bad, I didn't do it, you didn't

23:23

do it. Why don't you take the friggin'

23:25

charge? Basically just sitting

23:27

in the face in a way. And Holland gives

23:29

up. But this is where things get really

23:32

strange. Holland then goes back

23:34

to Michael Hardin, the boyfriend,

23:36

and he interviews him again. And

23:39

he starts to use these techniques that

23:41

are meant to get Hardin

23:44

to really remember things that

23:46

at this point have happened 10 years in the past. And

23:48

so there's really interesting language

23:51

where he says, let's run through the events and

23:53

backwards chronology and let's

23:55

imagine you're high up on a telephone

23:58

pole looking down at the scene. You know, these

24:00

are tools that I did a lot of research on

24:02

them to understand how accepted they are. And

24:05

elements of them are very accepted by psychologists

24:07

at being good at kind of relaxing

24:09

your brain into a state where you can pick up some

24:12

memories that you maybe didn't realize

24:14

were in there. But it also raises

24:17

a risk of confabulation,

24:19

of kind of inventing something and then having that become

24:22

your memory. And then Holland

24:24

says, well, we want to try this other thing, which is

24:26

to hypnotize you.

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26:57

What year are we in when

26:59

we have James Holland, the Texas

27:01

Ranger, is now talking

27:03

to Michael, the boyfriend, trying to figure out

27:06

what happened and sort of it sounds like

27:08

he's trying to do some memory

27:10

tricks with him to take him back in time. And

27:12

this is in late 2014. At

27:15

this point, the Texas Rangers have been

27:17

using hypnosis to try to solve crimes

27:20

for 20, 30 years. At this

27:22

point, psychologists, researchers

27:25

are basically screaming, this is really

27:27

risky. So hypnosis, I mean, it sounds

27:29

like we all think of sort of a party trick or

27:32

getting you to quit smoking with hypnotist.

27:35

In the context of law enforcement,

27:38

it's really about relaxing

27:40

the witness or if it's in the case, maybe

27:42

a sexual assault, the victim, and getting

27:44

them into this sort of hyper relaxed state

27:47

where they are just really,

27:49

really focused, laser focused on

27:51

the sort of pictures in their heads from

27:54

the past. Right. So there's this video

27:56

of a Texas Ranger hypnotist

27:59

coming in. to Michael, the boyfriend,

28:01

and counting down from a high number, and

28:05

imagining you're on a beach and

28:07

there's stuff about going through a doorway

28:10

and grains of sand, and this weird

28:12

language that is meant to get them into this

28:14

relaxed state. And the audio is a little bit unsatisfying

28:17

because at a certain point, Michael is just mumbling

28:20

and you imagine you're super relaxed and you're

28:22

mumbling your memories. Now, why

28:24

is this risky? What researchers have

28:27

told me is that when you're in that really

28:29

relaxed state, you're also kind of suggestible.

28:32

So the Texas Ranger may

28:34

do his best not to give you new

28:36

information, but if

28:38

you're not careful, you may just kind of invent

28:40

something in your mind. We

28:42

all, if you just imagine you've got a memory,

28:45

if you just try to like hypothesize

28:47

like, oh, was the t-shirt red or was it green? And

28:49

you kind of go with red. And then the

28:52

more time you spend on that, the more the

28:54

red t-shirt gets kind of locked into your memory

28:56

and suddenly you remember it definitively

28:59

as a red t-shirt. And so the

29:01

problem isn't just that you have potentially false

29:03

memories, it's that you become more confident in your

29:05

false memories. So he comes out

29:07

of hypnosis. He gets back in the room with Texas

29:10

Ranger James Holland and a new

29:13

forensic sketch artist. So remember

29:16

in 2005, he had spoken to one

29:19

and now he is back again

29:21

with the sketch artist, a new sketch artist, and

29:23

describes the face of a man. And we have

29:26

basically an entirely new face. It looks

29:28

nothing like the 2005 face. If

29:30

you had thought the 2005 face sort of looked like a

29:32

Latino man, this new man is pretty

29:35

definitely looks like a white man, middle

29:37

age, flat top haircut, the bushy

29:39

mustache has disappeared and you now have what

29:41

looks like a little bit of five o'clock shadow.

29:44

The face is definitely more gaunt

29:47

in a way, just like Hollywood cheeks a little

29:49

bit. In addition, and this

29:51

is I think where I was really particularly fascinated

29:54

as well, the van changes. So

29:56

in 2005, we were talking about a...

29:59

Minivan, Michael said, yeah, the guy drove

30:02

a Minivan, it had a bunch of windows on the sides.

30:04

It had a very long pointed

30:07

sort of nose at the front hood

30:09

was very long. So you have an image in your

30:11

head, right? Nine years later, following

30:14

the hypnosis, following all these memory tricks

30:16

that the Texas Rangers are using, he says,

30:19

actually it was a big

30:22

work van. So the color hasn't changed, it's so

30:24

white, but it's now a big boxy work van.

30:26

One of those ones that has like no windows on the sides

30:29

and a very squish front hood. So

30:32

two different, entirely different white vans. Now,

30:35

part of the reporting and research of this was

30:37

looking at the materials and then also going

30:40

to researchers who have done

30:42

studies of human memory and eyewitness

30:45

identification and confessions, et cetera,

30:48

and asked them, like, what

30:50

do you make of this? And basically they

30:52

said, well, knowing nothing about this case, I

30:54

can just tell you that memory never gets better over time,

30:56

it only gets worse. There's no way

30:59

that this man, nine years after the crime,

31:01

producing more accurate representation

31:03

of what happened than he did in the immediate aftermath.

31:05

So treat the new sketch and

31:08

the new van with tremendous

31:11

skepticism. The Texas Rangers, instead

31:14

of being skeptical, take one more

31:16

step, they take that face, and

31:18

remember, 10 years have passed, they use aging

31:21

technology. So you know how when you

31:23

look at them, in the old days it was on a milk

31:25

cart and you'd have the missing child and they would run

31:27

it through some computer program to imagine

31:29

what the kid looked like five years later. They

31:32

do something similar with the face of

31:34

the perpetrator in this case, where they

31:37

age the suspect's face, and this

31:39

is a flyer that goes out

31:41

to other law enforcement and eventually

31:44

to the media and to the public. And so

31:46

in newspapers in the Greater

31:49

Fort Worth area, you have these images

31:51

of the hypnosis-induced sketch

31:53

and hypnosis-induced van that are now there

31:57

for the public to see.

31:58

One of the things that I'd like you to talk about talk about now

32:01

would be one of the top reasons

32:03

we know that people are wrongfully convicted

32:06

is witness misidentification. Going

32:08

back to the idea

32:11

that he first had a sketch of someone who

32:13

was Latino, also cross-racial

32:16

misidentification is pretty common

32:18

too. Even at the onset when

32:20

they have a sketch artist in 2005

32:23

talking to Michael, how reliable

32:25

do we think that would

32:28

have been even at the time someone

32:30

who's going through like a trauma, his girlfriend

32:32

is taken away in this van, he sees

32:35

this guy for a second. It's still

32:37

valuable to have a sketch, but is

32:39

it also not dangerous to

32:41

have a sketch of someone who is

32:43

sort of a generic

32:46

sketch of someone of a different

32:48

race? Mm-hmm.

32:49

Oh, absolutely. There

32:51

is a long history in this country of

32:54

tragedies in which someone commits

32:56

a crime and someone else goes

32:58

to prison because either a witness or in

33:00

some cases even more tragically the victim themselves,

33:03

if it's a sexual assault, misidentifies

33:06

who did it. And typically

33:08

you see this in the realm of lineup

33:11

identifications, right? Where let's

33:13

say you have a white woman who was sexually

33:15

assaulted and it was a black man who did it and

33:18

the police bring in a lineup of five

33:21

black men from the same neighborhood. We

33:23

just know, and this is not really to denigrate

33:26

the victims in these cases, we just know that

33:28

human memory is faulty and that that

33:30

is a problem that the criminal justice system

33:32

has to confront and

33:35

well-meaning investigators are doing their best to

33:37

deal with it. But in earlier areas where the science

33:40

was not as robust or where police

33:42

were putting, getting convictions over,

33:45

getting the accurate truth, you

33:47

just had a lot of scenarios where the victim

33:50

or a witness picked someone out of the lineup and then they

33:52

become the lead suspect and then they are coerced

33:55

in whatever way to be convicted,

33:58

to be wrongly convicted of a crime and sometimes...

33:59

years or decades in prison for it.

34:02

So let's go back to this

34:04

brand new sketch of the white man, middle-aged,

34:07

flat-top haircut. First,

34:09

does this look like Tim Dawson? I'm assuming not,

34:12

the guy who originally owned a van.

34:14

You know, I'm going to pause

34:16

and say that this was a moment where

34:18

I had to just check humbly my own

34:20

subjectiveness because, like, it doesn't

34:22

look like it, doesn't not, but does it

34:24

really? No. I mean, the sketch is so

34:27

generic. And Tim Dawson

34:29

also just kind of looks like a middle-aged white guy. I

34:31

will say Tim Dawson looks nothing at the 2015 sketch

34:35

at all, but the 2015 sketch,

34:37

like, he doesn't not look like him. Something

34:39

I really want to be careful of in this is to not

34:42

just sort of cast undue suspicion on

34:44

Tim Dawson. I don't recall him having a

34:46

solid alibi, but the links to the

34:48

crime were still very circumstantial unlimited.

34:51

So there's no reason to think that he secretly did

34:53

it and is out there. But the sketch

34:55

goes out there, and this is where the

34:57

story takes what I've described as like a very

34:59

small town turn. It goes out in a newspaper

35:02

called the Weatherford Democrat, and there's

35:04

a man named Gene Burks who

35:06

runs a pawn shop in Weatherford. There's

35:09

a guy who comes into his pawn shop frequently named

35:11

Larry Driscoll. Gene knows Larry

35:13

not only because he comes into the pawn shop to

35:15

buy things or sell things, but also because

35:17

he is the handyman for Gene's

35:19

neighbor. So you imagine Gene goes out to pick up the newspaper

35:22

and he frequently sees Larry Driscoll mowing his neighbor's

35:24

lawn. They wave, they know each other. Weatherford's

35:27

got

35:28

fewer than 50,000 people in it. It's

35:30

a small place where everyone knows everyone. And

35:32

Gene Burks told me that

35:34

he gets the Weatherford Democrat

35:37

and he just sits in his pawn shop all day

35:39

on the counter and he keeps looking at it and he keeps

35:41

thinking, that kind of looks familiar. And then eventually

35:43

it snaps in his mind and he goes, that kind of looks like

35:45

Larry. And again, as I said before,

35:48

doesn't look like Larry. Well, it's subjective. Like, it

35:50

doesn't not, but it's like two

35:52

white men in their 40s and 50s. Like,

35:54

it's pretty blurry. He

35:57

shows to his wife, does you think that looks like Larry

35:59

Driscoll? She goes in. I'm not really shows

36:02

other people in the pawn shop. They're like, maybe but

36:05

it's enough that Jean calls to

36:07

the Texas Rangers Jean himself also

36:09

struck me as a someone who maybe

36:12

maybe reason and watches a lot of true crime

36:14

and and has a kind of Let

36:17

me just say like has a certain confidence about his ability

36:19

to like do the police's work for them So

36:21

he Googles Larry's house

36:24

where the body was found and discovers that they're

36:26

like less than a mile from each other And it

36:28

was like oh, wow, that's compelling. So he called

36:30

the Texas Rangers He gets through to James

36:32

Holland and he says, you know, I think this kind

36:34

of looks like Larry Driscoll And so Texas Ranger

36:37

James Holland looks into Driscoll and finds

36:39

out that yes He lives near the crime scene and

36:42

his day job is actually that he works

36:44

in addition to being a handyman For

36:47

the local jail and so the

36:49

jail will like send inmates out

36:51

to do like roadworks, you know Mo

36:54

medians and the highway whatever and he

36:56

oversees that so he's a actually a licensed

36:58

jailer Holland drives

36:59

over to this barn

37:02

where Larry is working and Basically,

37:05

he just approaches Larry Driscoll and says I want

37:07

to talk to you we think you might be able to help us

37:09

solve a crime and This

37:11

is the beginning of two very

37:14

dramatic days of interrogation in which

37:17

Larry is pulled from saying I know

37:20

nothing about this to a full

37:22

confession to the murder of Bobby Superhill and

37:25

A huge part of my reporting is understanding

37:27

how that happened and is there any

37:29

reason to believe Larry's confession?

37:32

Wow, and that's another thing that we know

37:34

is a very large portion

37:36

of people who have been wrongfully convicted

37:40

are there because of false confessions and

37:42

I think that oftentimes people I encounter

37:44

say Well, they wouldn't confess if they weren't guilty,

37:47

which is bullshit people confess when

37:49

they are innocent They do especially when they

37:51

don't call an attorney. I

37:52

agree that it's bullshit I also

37:55

I think came into this story knowing

37:57

that that was a common sentiment and and having

37:59

a real

37:59

empathy for that sentiment

38:02

because, like, I get it intuitively. It

38:04

feels so weird because all of us cannot

38:06

imagine that we would confess to a crime we didn't commit.

38:09

And I think actually Larry Driscoll would have said, I would

38:11

have never confessed to a crime that I didn't commit until

38:14

I was in the room at this ranger and going through this process. And

38:17

so part of why I wanted to tell this story

38:19

and go deep into it was that I thought it was just

38:21

an incredibly valuable case study

38:23

or illustration of what these

38:26

tactics look like when they're being used

38:28

in their full manipulative power.

38:31

When Larry Driscoll is being interrogated

38:33

by the Texas ranger James Holland

38:36

based on the sketch, based

38:39

on this armchair detective who says

38:41

this guy lived very close to where

38:44

Bobby Sue Hill's body was found, and that's

38:47

about it. What techniques

38:49

is Holland using to be

38:52

able to elicit a confession out of somebody

38:54

who I'm going to assume, you're going to tell me,

38:56

was actually innocent?

38:57

It's really fascinating. The way that I came

38:59

into the story just for context is

39:02

that I was told about this case by

39:04

the Innocence Project of Texas. I had gotten to

39:06

know the lead lawyer there who

39:08

had taken on Larry Driscoll's case and fully believed

39:10

in his innocence. As a result of talking

39:13

to him about it, I sent Larry a letter. Larry

39:15

sent me back a letter. Eventually I go out to the prison

39:17

where he is and interview him length

39:20

about this. And the way that he

39:22

tells the story, the Texas ranger

39:24

approached him in the barn and said, we think

39:26

you may be able to help us. And then that turns into,

39:29

we think you may have witnessed something.

39:32

And Larry at this point says,

39:34

well, sure, it's possible I witnessed something and didn't

39:36

realize it. And the story at first

39:38

is, you know, maybe you were

39:40

in the area and picked

39:43

up this woman and were one of the last

39:45

people to see her alive. And so we need your help.

39:48

And Larry rocks his brain and says, well,

39:50

I don't really remember ever being in that area. And

39:53

this is the point at which the first crucial

39:55

technique starts to show up. And that is deception

39:57

or lies. So it's entirely legal.

40:00

for law enforcement telling lies to suspects

40:02

in the interrogation room. And law enforcement says we

40:04

need to do this, basically, to catch the guilty. And

40:07

the lie at first is,

40:09

well, there's a record that the

40:12

local police have you around the

40:14

time and place of the crime, that you were

40:17

in a white van driving around

40:19

and you were on a list of men that was known to

40:21

select sex workers, or at least your license plate was

40:23

on there. Maybe they made a mistake. Maybe you're not

40:26

that guy, but help us out here.

40:28

Why would you be on that list? So

40:30

Larry starts thinking, well, why would I be on that list?

40:33

And he starts racking his brain, like, when have I been in that

40:35

area?

40:36

And keep in mind, this is all lies. It's

40:38

BS. There's no record of him being in that time

40:40

and place. But the lie is enough to get

40:42

Larry sort of imagining,

40:45

okay, I guess there was this one time

40:47

when my dad had fallen on hard times and

40:49

was in an observation room, he had shelter around

40:52

that area and I went to visit him. And then,

40:54

you know, I guess I was doing some

40:56

contract work and I guess I bid on some jobs and

40:58

I had some houses near there. But I think

41:00

I was always driving a blue truck, not a white van,

41:03

right? So you see this process of him rocking

41:05

his brain

41:06

and the more he then produces,

41:09

the more Holland, the Texas Ranger

41:11

thinks, oh, wait a minute, this guy was lying to me

41:13

before. He knows more than he's letting on and

41:15

I'm starting to pull the truth out of him, right? So

41:17

there's this dance that starts to go on and

41:20

lies are the way that Holland starts

41:22

to kind of pull it out. But over time,

41:24

he starts to ratchet up the pressure and he says, well,

41:26

we think you can help us solve this crime, but

41:29

we want to be absolutely sure that, you

41:31

know, you're telling us the full truth. So would

41:33

you be willing to take voluntarily a polygraph?

41:36

At this point, Larry says, well, you know,

41:38

maybe I need a lawyer. Do you think I might need a lawyer?

41:41

He doesn't explicitly ask for one. So it's just

41:43

vague enough that the Ranger says, well,

41:46

we don't think a lawyer is going to help you. You just need to

41:48

help us, you know, search your memory and

41:50

take the polygraph, you know, I'm sure you're going to ace

41:52

it, but let's just do the polygraph

41:54

to be sure. Larry says, all right. So

41:56

he takes it and one of the questions is, did you cause

41:58

the death of this woman?

41:59

Bobby Subhill, and he says no. And then

42:02

the polygrapher says, uh-oh,

42:04

this is a lie. And Larry's

42:06

like, how is that possible? I don't think I killed

42:08

anybody. I have no memory of killing anyone. And

42:11

Holland says, well, sometimes your body remembers

42:13

things that your brain doesn't remember. In

42:15

reality, we know that polygraph tests

42:18

are notoriously unreliable. They're not admissible

42:20

in court. They're intimidating, though, and that's

42:22

the point. That's absolutely it. It's intimidating.

42:25

And so suddenly, Larry starts to think, oh my god,

42:29

there's these little moments in his mind where he thinks, is

42:31

it possible I killed this moment and just

42:33

don't remember it? I can't imagine

42:35

that. I try to imagine just the

42:37

experience of trying to reckon

42:40

with the idea that you could have killed somebody, that you're a murderer

42:42

and don't remember it. That would be very head spinning

42:44

and really destabilizing. It's important

42:46

to remember that the Texas Rangers are considered

42:49

the elite of the elite. And Larry Driscoll

42:51

has lived in Texas most of his life. He knows this. And

42:54

another suspect once said to me, well, the Texas Rangers

42:56

said I did it. I guess I must have done it because

42:59

they get their man and they're always right. And so Driscoll's also

43:02

got the prestige of the Texas

43:04

Rangers sort of painting the

43:06

picture here. And eventually, Holland

43:08

moves into a couple more

43:11

tactics. One is hypothetical

43:13

language. So he says, well, let's just

43:15

say hypothetically, we're shooting the

43:17

shit here. We're bullshitting. Let's

43:19

just say you did do it. What

43:22

would have happened? How would this have gone

43:24

down? You're in the van and

43:26

the story emerges that Holland

43:28

is advancing that tries to sort of

43:30

let Larry off the hook, which is to

43:32

say, hey, maybe she

43:35

got in the van. You were gonna pay

43:37

her for a good time. And then this black

43:39

man, her boyfriend, Michael Harden, shows

43:42

up at the window and you get scared and you freak

43:45

out and you go into a kind of military mode.

43:47

And Larry's a veteran. So he thinks

43:49

this will appeal to him. You snap into

43:51

a kind of, I don't know, big PTSD

43:54

trauma thing and you kill her and you

43:56

freak out. And then you go dump the body by your house.

43:59

Any kind of. is throwing these little

44:01

possibilities at Larry and Larry keeps being

44:04

like, I guess it's possible, but I don't remember

44:06

any of this. But over time,

44:08

the hours pile up, the exhaustion

44:10

piles up, the sense of hopelessness, and

44:12

that you're never getting out of this room until you confess. All

44:15

of that piles up and eventually Larry

44:17

gives in and says, sure, okay,

44:19

but still I don't remember it. So he confesses,

44:22

but it's a very weak confession.

44:24

I think about this. My dad and I, you know, my dad

44:26

was a criminal law professor at UT for decades

44:29

and we would talk about this all the time. And

44:31

he would say he wished, I

44:33

think it was three things he would say, I

44:36

wish that everyone knew you had a right to

44:38

an attorney. He would tell my friends

44:40

and me, if you ever get stopped by the police,

44:43

you need to call an attorney. Innocent people

44:45

call attorneys. He said, I wish

44:47

people knew that police could lie

44:50

to get information out of you, to not believe everything

44:52

that the police are saying, if this is something that's serious

44:54

and they're bringing you down and that there are

44:57

people who can help you that all

44:59

is not lost, that, you know, the criminal

45:01

justice system can work, but

45:03

you have a right to an attorney and you need

45:05

that. That innocent people do talk

45:08

to attorneys, which I thought was always great

45:10

advice.

45:10

It is good advice. And it's advice that I heard

45:12

many times and was rattling around in my

45:14

brain as I listened to these tapes. So I

45:17

got something like, I don't know,

45:19

six seven hours of, of interrogation

45:21

audio of Holland and Driscoll together. And there's

45:24

all these times where Driscoll almost gets there.

45:26

He says, Hey, I think I should call my friend

45:28

Charlie. And Holland says, well, wait, who's Charlie?

45:31

And Driscoll says, Oh, he's my friend. He's a lawyer. And

45:33

Holland says, Oh, well, you could if you want to. I'm not

45:35

here to stop you, but I don't think Charlie's going to help you. I

45:37

think we're going to help you. And I'm

45:40

listening to

45:40

this years later. And just, I remember almost

45:42

like grabbing my hand, just being like, Larry, what are

45:44

you doing? Call Charlie. And

45:46

granted, I also think it's worth noting

45:48

here that at no point in my reporting,

45:51

has it ever come off that Texas Ranger

45:53

Holland thought he was coercing

45:56

an innocent person into a false confession. I

45:58

think that he.

46:00

had convinced himself that

46:02

Larry Driscoll had committed this murder and

46:04

it was a problem of if anything

46:06

tunnel vision of you know

46:09

shutting off the little question marks in your

46:11

brain that are like wait this isn't adding up and just

46:13

saying well like look I've got this guy look he keeps

46:16

offering new memories look now he's

46:18

even willing to go down this road and talk hypothetically

46:20

and eventually Larry breaks and

46:22

confesses and then you know he's arrested

46:25

and his life transforms he goes from overseeing

46:28

jail inmates to being a jail inmate

46:30

he sits in prison

46:32

for two plus years and

46:34

is confronted with this problem of

46:37

I want to go to trial but I just don't

46:39

think a jury is ever going to believe

46:42

me that I confessed to a crime I didn't commit in the same

46:44

way that you and I talked about how most people

46:46

think that's impossible Larry Driscoll was confronting

46:49

you know this jury in in rural

46:51

parker county of his peers who

46:53

he just thought were we're never going to believe

46:55

that that he falsely confessed to this crime

46:58

so he ends up taking a no

47:01

contest plea which means that he's

47:03

not exactly acknowledging

47:04

guilt but he is acknowledging the strength

47:06

of the case against him and he takes a 15-year

47:09

sentence and goes to prison

47:11

does Michael Harden look at him and say

47:13

yeah that's him that's the guy with the

47:15

wide eyes that I saw looking at me

47:17

before he took off with my girlfriend in the van

47:19

well

47:19

first of all and shockingly

47:22

to me the cops never go to him with a picture

47:24

of Larry Driscoll no okay after

47:26

he's hypnotized and he was

47:28

actually in jail at this point on like a low-level drug

47:30

charge after the hypnosis session all that that gets

47:32

sketched they never go back to him and check the

47:34

picture of Larry Driscoll with him I did

47:37

it though so that all was 2015 I'm

47:39

coming into this case to report 2020-2021 and I do find uh Harden at

47:44

this little motel he was very hard

47:46

to find but once I found him I pulled up

47:48

on my phone a picture of Larry Driscoll and I said what

47:51

do

47:51

you think this is him and and just stared

47:53

at it for a while and just goes maybe

47:56

nah like he just

47:59

hems and haws and hedges because, and I

48:01

feel for him, you know? This is

48:03

the man you saw for like two seconds, 15 years

48:05

ago. Since then

48:07

you've been asked to give a sketch twice, you've been hypnotized.

48:11

Different race. Different race. You've

48:14

been in and out of jail. You've had your

48:16

own troubles in life. You've seen,

48:18

this is to quote one psychologist, you've seen thousands

48:20

of faces in the interim. So,

48:23

you know, does it look like him? It

48:25

doesn't not, but it's hardly a dead ringer.

48:28

So Larry Driscoll

48:29

has taken 15 years and

48:32

he settles in, where is he, Huntsville? He settles

48:35

into prison life.

48:36

Yeah, it's in a tiny town

48:38

called Woodville, about an hour from Huntsville, where

48:40

it's just like, it's not a prison night ever. This

48:42

was really sad to me. I went to prison

48:44

to interview him and I talked to the warden and

48:47

she said I was the first journalist she could ever

48:49

remember coming to interview a prisoner. It

48:51

gives you a taste of just how cut off these places are. Wow.

48:54

So yeah, he settles into his time, but

48:57

he also starts writing

48:59

letters to the Innocence Project of Texas.

49:02

Eventually his case makes

49:04

it to the desk of a law student

49:06

actually in Fort Worth, a woman named Ashley

49:08

Fletcher, who's really a kind of under-sung

49:10

hero of this story. Ashley's

49:13

in law school, like any other law student,

49:16

she signs up for the Innocence Project Clinic

49:18

and one of the jobs they give the law students is to

49:20

just sift their cases that come into

49:22

them as like a first past

49:25

screening before the lawyers look at it. This

49:28

case sort of sticks out a little bit because Larry

49:30

has access to and sends her a full

49:33

transcript of his interrogation of

49:35

his exchange with Holland. And she describes

49:38

to me just sort of like hunkering dinner in her couch for hours

49:40

and reading it and just being horrified and

49:43

sort of going to her law professor

49:45

who also runs the Innocence Project of Texas and

49:48

the way he describes the story, he's like, she

49:50

seemed traumatized by what she'd read. You

49:52

know, that there was just, she was horrified by

49:54

this confession and then I read it, I listened to

49:56

the tapes and it felt like Innocence

49:59

Project lawyers, the last 10, 20 years

50:01

working on false confession cases and finding what

50:03

are all the tricks and tools that

50:06

the cops can use to coerce one. And

50:08

this was just chock full of all the worst

50:10

practices. So Larry

50:12

has been working with the Innocence Project of Texas. And

50:15

late 2022, there

50:17

was a shocking development in the case

50:19

where Larry had been in prison for

50:21

so long that he was actually eligible for parole. And

50:23

in a rare moment of surprise,

50:26

the parole board basically bought

50:28

into his claims of innocence

50:30

enough to say, you're not dangerous to anybody,

50:33

you can go home on parole. Wow. He gets

50:35

out, but he's still living, you know, with the ankle monitor,

50:37

his movements are very restricted. And

50:39

so he's still trying to clear his name. Meanwhile,

50:42

James Holland, the Texas Ranger has gone on to

50:44

fame and success. He took all confessions

50:46

from a famous serial killer in California

50:49

named Samuel Little. It's a name that may be familiar

50:51

to some listeners. Where the case stands now

50:53

is that the Innocence Project of Texas

50:55

is trying to retest all

50:57

the DNA from the case, some of which hadn't

50:59

been tested or hadn't been tested with the current

51:03

level of scientific advancement in terms

51:05

of what's possible with DNA, right, where you can take

51:07

very small amounts and kind

51:10

of zoom in and blow them up and connect them to people.

51:13

So I think the silver bullet hope

51:15

for Larry and his lawyers is that some

51:18

DNA is going to match, you know, some

51:20

known perpetrator who was killing

51:23

women at this time and place. But

51:25

in lieu of that, it is hard

51:27

to imagine what it would take to

51:31

get the right person. And

51:33

so part of the tragedy here is that the

51:36

law enforcement process was just so

51:39

messed up that it almost like clouds

51:41

our ability to get the actual truth.

51:43

What does Bobby Sue

51:45

Hill's family think? Do they think

51:47

that Larry is the one who killed her

51:49

or do they believe he was innocent?

51:51

So Bobby Sewell has a large family.

51:54

She had five kids, she had a brother, she

51:56

had lots of aunts and uncles and cousins.

51:59

And I've only I've only reached a few of them.

52:01

Many of them declined to talk to me at the outset,

52:04

and then many of them also declined to talk to me after

52:06

my article came out. And I think that's largely

52:09

because the few who did talk to me have

52:11

no reason to doubt at this point that Larry Driscoll

52:13

did it. They believe in his guilt. They've gone on this

52:15

horrible journey where, you know, Bobby

52:18

Seville is murdered, and then the case goes

52:20

cold, and they basically think this is never going

52:22

to get solved. No one cares. And then

52:24

the Texas Rangers come along in 2015 and say, not

52:28

the guy. We found him. And this is shocking

52:30

to the family. This is how they describe it to me. I

52:32

mean, they just never thought this was going to get solved. So

52:35

here comes the solution. And so

52:37

then eight years later, the Innocence Project

52:39

of Texas is showing up. A journalist, me,

52:42

is showing up saying, you know, there's some real

52:44

flaws in this that you should be aware

52:46

of. And it was really sort of tricky for me in terms

52:48

of the ethics and just the human morality

52:51

of how to approach

52:53

this with the family to say,

52:56

you're entitled to your privacy. You don't need

52:58

to talk to me if you don't want to. I want

53:00

to give readers a sense of who Bobby Seville

53:03

was beyond the two sentences

53:05

about her being a sex worker in these old articles. Some

53:08

family members said, yes, OK, we want to tell you all

53:10

about her.

53:11

But there's a long way of saying that they still

53:13

at least publicly believe in Larry's

53:16

guilt. And if that is starting to change,

53:18

I don't know yet. Lastly, I'll

53:20

say that because I spoke

53:22

with so few of them, I

53:25

wanted to understand what it is they're confronting.

53:29

There's a really interesting organization called Healing

53:31

Justice that works therapeutically with

53:33

families who have

53:36

lost a loved one to murder, but the

53:38

case ends up being a wrongful conviction. So it's a very

53:40

unique and rough and complex

53:42

experience for people. And so I ended up interviewing

53:45

this organization and some of the families they've

53:47

been working with about what that's like

53:49

because it's this double trauma. You lose

53:51

your loved one. Then you

53:53

think you have the answer. And then the answer gets ripped

53:56

away again, you're back to square one. And so

53:58

ultimate tragedy in this case is that it's a crime. is that

54:01

law enforcement handled it in such a way that

54:04

her family now has to lose the promise

54:06

of a solution and go back to not knowing who

54:09

killed her and also whether that person may

54:11

still be out there.

54:13

Is there a suspicion that

54:15

this person is a serial killer? Is there

54:17

anything else sort of connected? I know that we've mentioned

54:19

a few things, but do profilers, do

54:21

you think, think this is indicative

54:24

of someone who has done this before

54:27

or has done this since?

54:29

Yes. And the reason for

54:31

that is not that any elite

54:33

profiler has come into the case, but

54:35

Texas Ranger Holland himself indicated

54:38

in his reports, suspicion that, well,

54:40

he, in his case, he thought Larry committed

54:42

these kinds of crimes. But there were two other

54:45

women around this time. There

54:47

was one other woman who was a sex worker

54:49

who was found dead in a creek, similar

54:52

to the one that Bobby Suhole was found in, but

54:54

actually in Fort Worth itself. The

54:57

same rough time, the same rough MO.

55:00

And then there's a woman who told

55:02

police at the time, yeah, there was

55:04

this guy who took me in his van

55:06

and he started driving on the highway

55:09

in the direction of, you know, Weatherford,

55:11

Alito, the places where Bobby Suhole

55:14

was found. And he

55:16

basically pulled a knife on me and was

55:18

like, trying to basically rape me and coerce

55:20

me. And at one inter,

55:23

I think I was like a spotlight or an ex-nost

55:25

the highway. And I managed to like basically

55:27

push the door open and get out of the van and escape.

55:30

She described that man, but, you know, again,

55:32

there weren't a lot of like really specific details

55:34

that you could tie to anyone. She said he wore like

55:36

a tie, like he was almost like a cleaned

55:38

up businessman type suit. In theory,

55:40

you know, this could lead somewhere. Maybe there

55:42

was like a known serial killer who was wearing a tie

55:45

or something. Yeah, there are these little threads

55:47

out there that you kind of see long

55:50

in the reports law enforcement sort of gave up on because

55:52

they just couldn't get any further with it. And

55:54

then the more time passes, as we know with cold cases,

55:57

the harder it is to find these witnesses

55:59

again. This woman, it's hard

56:01

to know where she is now or how to find her.

56:04

Sometimes they weren't even using their real names. Yeah,

56:06

I think there is still some hope for solving

56:09

who killed Bobby Sue Hill. But

56:11

as with any of these cases, the more time goes by, the

56:14

harder a lift it is and the more time and effort

56:16

and resources it takes to solve.

56:17

This case as a conclusion seems

56:20

to me to have all of the pitfalls of

56:22

wrongful conviction. You've got

56:25

cross-racial misidentification, you've

56:27

got a false confession, you've

56:29

got bad science, hypnosis,

56:33

and a polygraph on top of it. It's like

56:35

every check mark you can think of of

56:37

a wrongful conviction. What

56:39

is the big message that

56:41

you want listeners and readers to take

56:43

away from the story?

56:45

Well, one is call a lawyer.

56:47

Yeah, that's my message too.

56:48

If you're ever picked up, this

56:51

is the news you can use element of this

56:53

case. It's like call a lawyer, don't

56:56

be like Larry Driscoll. But I also think

56:58

a big takeaway is that in

57:00

this era, there's more and more cold cases.

57:03

There's increasingly an industry

57:05

of profilers of well-meaning

57:08

law enforcement across the country who are

57:10

trying to solve these old cases.

57:13

I think that there's sometimes an incentive

57:16

with these old cases to do the Hail Mary

57:18

pass, and to take really big risks

57:21

with some of the tools that we use to try to

57:23

solve them. Those tools include

57:26

the hypnosis, the sketch art,

57:28

the coercive interrogation techniques. I

57:32

think a big lesson here is that we need to just take

57:34

care on risk. Be careful about

57:37

just throwing all of these tools

57:39

at the wall and seeing what sticks, because some of

57:42

these tools are manipulative

57:44

and problematic in the sense that they can

57:46

lead to the wrong person. We have to

57:49

reckon with how much risk as

57:51

a society are we willing to take on some of these Hail

57:54

Mary cold cases to not

57:56

do things that risk putting innocent people

57:58

in prison, and just getting

57:59

closure for the sake of closure without getting the truth.

58:13

If you love historical true crime stories,

58:15

check out the audio versions of my books,

58:17

The Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and

58:20

American Sherlock. This has been an Exactly

58:22

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58:24

is Alexis Amorosi. Our associate

58:27

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58:30

episode was mixed by John Bradley.

58:32

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58:34

by Nick Toga. Executive produced

58:37

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58:39

and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words

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