Hey, Southern Fried listeners, I want to tell you about a podcast that
I think you'll enjoy called Suspect. Five Shots in the Dark. This latest
season looks at a case with two victims, one murdered in cold blood and
one imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. It follows Leon Benson's story,
a man who spent more than half of his life a total of twenty four
years in an Indiana state prison for the murder of Casey Shane, a man
he never met. Casey was murdered in the middle of an August night,
shot point blank while idling in his Dodge pickup truck in North Indianapolis. There
was no physical evidence, no known motive, and no one coming forward with
information except one woman who swears to this day she saw Leon Detroit Benson pulled
the trigger. He was sentenced to sixty years in prison, all because one
person swore they saw something. But what if she was wrong? From Wondery
and Campside Media comes season three of the hit podcast Suspect. This is a
story of a botched police investigation, the dangers of shaky eyewitness testimony in a
community who feared law enforcement with good reason. I'm about to play a clip
from Suspect five Shots in the Dark while you're listening follow Suspect wherever you get
your podcasts. You can binge Suspect ad free on Wondery Plus, find Wondery
Plus in the Wondering app or on Apple Podcasts. A long time ago,
I remember watching an episode of Oprah about eyewitness testimony. I actually I haven't
been able to find the episode in question online. This would have been like
three decades ago, when I was a kid home from school watching TV.
It's entirely possible. I imagine parts of it, but in my memory,
Oprah, without telling anyone, has this guy run on stage and snatch up
a purse belonging to one of the panelists. And then afterwards Oprah asks everyone
to identify the thief, but no one can. Each person Oprah asks they've
got a different answer as to what the guy looked like. I don't remember
how the show ended. I probably went off and played some duck hunt,
but it lodged in my head. As I got older, started working in
journalism and writing about the criminal justice system, it would periodically pop back into
my head, a reminder of just how fallible the human eye and memory can
be. So wait, let me just back up. Okay, tell me
when you first noticed the truck. Oh, probably like it was maybe a
block and a half north of there, but it was just driving down Pennsylvania
passed where I was out of my vehindle. Do you think it stopped and
then went around again or do you think it just went by? You went
around and came back around. The Oprah segment came to mind the first time
I heard this tape, which was recorded near Indianapolis in twenty twenty two.
The details aren't really important, not yet. For now. All you need
to know is that the first voice belongs to Laura Basilon. She's a law
professor. The second voice belongs to a woman named Christy Schmidt. And yeah,
those are wind chimes in the background. Nice right, Okay, So
car stops, you don't think about it. That's you hear something that sounds
like firecrackers that turns out to be gunshots. You look up, and what's
the first thing you remember seeing when you looked up? Just the gentleman outside
the drug on the sidewalk, Yeah, on the sidewalk on the passenger side.
Can you describe whatever you remember him looking like? You know, I
really couldn't you know, like anything that you remember, I would say,
all I can really remember probably blackmail, And I remember I believe it's black
pants with white stripes on him. This blackmail was about one hundred and fifty
feet from Christy. It was early morning, dark and misty. Still Later,
Christie goes to a police station and picks a face out of a photo
array. There's the shooter. She says, do you remember how you felt
when you were looking at the pictures and what kind of a situation that was
were you? How are you feeling? Well? You know, I guess
for lack of better I don't know, nervous, uneasy, but you know,
but you know I don't and have never in twenty four years have I
even thought that I could have identified it wrong. And what makes you confident?
You know? I have to say that was one time that face literally
jumped off that paper at me. I mean, it was basically went right
back to that night. And I don't I don't doubt one bit that I
that I made a false accusation about it or anything else. Well, Christy's
saying it sounds so unambiguous, so certain, certain enough that it would lead
to an arrest, an indictment, a guilty verdict, and a sentence of
sixty years. But here's the thing. It was almost certainly wrong. What
interests me most about that wrongness is not its rarity, but its commonness.
Dig deep enough into any questionable conviction, and you'll inevitably find small errors that,
over time have accrued their own terrible power, like a pellette of ice
that becomes a snowball that becomes an avalanche. This is a story about one
of those cases. But it's also a story about how difficult, how nearly
impossible, it can be to dig a person out again, even when nearly
everyone involved believes it's the right thing to do. Bench suspect ad Free Unwondering
Plus. Find Wondering Plus in the Wondering app or on Apple Podcasts.