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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker VTK
Speaker 5: every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 5: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 5: your host, journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 6: Good evening in September of nineteen ninety, in the Cleveland
Speaker 6: suburb of Shaker Heights, sixteen year old Lisa Pruett, a
Speaker 6: poetry lover and member of a church youth group, was
Speaker 6: on her way to a midnight tryst with her boyfriend
Speaker 6: when she was viciously stabbed to death only thirty feet
Speaker 6: from the boy's home. The murder cast a palpable gloom
Speaker 6: over the upscale community and sparked accusations, theories, and rumors
Speaker 6: among Lisa's friends and peers. Together, they wove a damning
Speaker 6: narrative that circled back to a likely suspect, weird high
Speaker 6: school outcast Kevin Young. Without a shred of evidence, the
Speaker 6: teen was arrested, charged and tried for the crime. His
Speaker 6: eventual acquittal didn't squelch the anger and outrage among those
Speaker 6: who believed that Kevin fell away with murder. With a
Speaker 6: fresh perspective and painstaking research called from police files, sport records, transcripts,
Speaker 6: uncollected evidence, and new interviews, James Renner reconstructs the events
Speaker 6: leading up to and following that heartbreaking night. What emerges
Speaker 6: is a portrait of a community seething with dark undercurrents,
Speaker 6: its single minded authorities, protective status conscious parents, and the
Speaker 6: deeply peer pressured teens within Lisa's circle who had the
Speaker 6: capacity for such unchecked violence. What monsters still lurk in
Speaker 6: the dark After more than thirty years, Questions like these
Speaker 6: continue to fester among the community of Shaker Heights, Ohio,
Speaker 6: still deeply scarred by wounds that remain hidden, unspoken, and unhealed.
Speaker 6: The book that we're featuring this evening is Little Crazy Children,
Speaker 6: a true crime tragedy of lost innocence, with my special guest,
Speaker 6: investigative journalist and author, James Renner. Welcome back to the
Speaker 6: program and thank you very much for this interview. James Renner, Hey.
Speaker 7: Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to be back.
Speaker 6: Thank you so much and congratulations on this truly extraordinary book.
Speaker 7: Thank you very much.
Speaker 6: Let's get to discussing, of course, Shaker Heights, Ohio. You say,
Speaker 6: to the east of Cleveland is a town, Shaker Heights,
Speaker 6: with its own utopia.
Speaker 7: Shaker Heights. It's a weird little community unity on the
Speaker 7: east side of Cleveland. It's affluent, but it's located just
Speaker 7: past the ghetto, just past the rough part of Cleveland.
Speaker 7: You find this wonderful little neighborhood called Shaker Heights, and
Speaker 7: it's unlike any other. It was actually planned and plotted
Speaker 7: out by a pair of eccentric brothers named the Van
Speaker 7: Swarigans about one hundred years ago, and they were local businessmen.
Speaker 7: They actually built Terminal Tower, which gives Cleveland its iconic look,
Speaker 7: and they were looking to build a new community outside
Speaker 7: of Cleveland for the elite who could have their families
Speaker 7: out there. And at the time the land was owned
Speaker 7: by the Shakers, the religious group the Shakers, which are
Speaker 7: an interesting subset religion in that they believe in abstinence completely.
Speaker 7: So you'll have these little communities of Shakers that pop up,
Speaker 7: but they don't last long, right, because they don't reproduce
Speaker 7: and so the Van Swagens saw that the Shakers were
Speaker 7: kind of on their way out, and they offered to
Speaker 7: buy that whole little community. And that's why it's called
Speaker 7: Shaker Heights. And it was kind of like, you know,
Speaker 7: what what Walt Disney had planned for his utopias done
Speaker 7: in like near Disney World in Florida, a planned community
Speaker 7: that the streets don't they kind of meander around these
Speaker 7: these nice ovals. All the houses have really large lawns.
Speaker 7: It's just a it's a beautiful little place. But it's
Speaker 7: because of that, it's it's a little weird too. And
Speaker 7: you know, the community prides themselves in integration. They you know,
Speaker 7: even the sons and daughters of these elite families of
Speaker 7: lawyers and doctors and politicians, they would send there, at
Speaker 7: least in the nineties when this story takes place, they
Speaker 7: would send their kids to the public school, which was
Speaker 7: which was integrated. So you know, they would give loans
Speaker 7: to African American families to move into certain places of
Speaker 7: the town. And that was really kind of a tricky
Speaker 7: way of keeping the numbers of African American families in
Speaker 7: chech So it looked like integration, but really it was
Speaker 7: a plan to make it not really as integrated as
Speaker 7: it could have been. So there's Shaker Heights. It's this
Speaker 7: people might remember the setting from that popular book that
Speaker 7: came out a few years ago, Little Fires Everywhere, by
Speaker 7: Celeste Ing. She was actually a student of Shaker Heights
Speaker 7: High Who and she was a few years younger than
Speaker 7: Lisa Prewit. Lisa Prewit, the young woman who was murdered,
Speaker 7: who the story centers around, and everything that came after it.
Speaker 7: She was sixteen years old and the day of her murder,
Speaker 7: she had just gotten her driver's license. She was very excited.
Speaker 7: She was madly in love at the time with a
Speaker 7: young man named Dan Dreyfert. Dan was kind of a
Speaker 7: troubled kid. He was a talented musician. He already it
Speaker 7: was playing with a band of his playing local gigs,
Speaker 7: and had some issues and was in a psychiatric ward
Speaker 7: for about a month and actually was released the day
Speaker 7: that Lisa was murdered, and they'd been away for so long,
Speaker 7: they made plans for Lisa to sneak out of her
Speaker 7: house that night and ride her bike over to Dan's house,
Speaker 7: and that's that's how she ends up there.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about September thirteenth, nineteen ninety. You write that
Speaker 6: there's an officer Edward Curtin and he gets a call
Speaker 6: from Dan Dreyford. And so what does the Dan Dreyford
Speaker 6: say when the police arrive? What's the story he has
Speaker 6: to tell?
Speaker 7: Yeah, so the police get a call about twelve thirty.
Speaker 7: They get a number of calls, actually neighbors and houses
Speaker 7: around the corner of Lee and South Woodland, which is
Speaker 7: a major intersection in Checker Heights, and that's Dan's family
Speaker 7: owns a mansion basically on that corner. A number of
Speaker 7: people call the police and say they heard a woman screaming,
Speaker 7: and the police respond. They also they respond at first
Speaker 7: and don't see anything, and then they kind of go
Speaker 7: back to their patrols. And then Dan Dreyford calls them
Speaker 7: and says, hey, look, my girlfriend was supposed to come
Speaker 7: over and meet with me, but she never showed and
Speaker 7: I think she might be the woman who was screaming.
Speaker 7: And so the officers go to Dan's house and he's
Speaker 7: standing outside. Dan is sixteen at the time. He doesn't
Speaker 7: at this point doesn't want his parents to know about
Speaker 7: any of this, so he kind of meets the police
Speaker 7: outside and takes them over to where he said he
Speaker 7: found Lisa's bike and it's popped up against the bushes,
Speaker 7: just off the sidewalk, and the police say, okay, why
Speaker 7: don't you go back in the house. We'll come get you.
Speaker 7: They do a sweep of the neighborhood, they walk around
Speaker 7: for a while, they get this. Actually an important part
Speaker 7: of the story is they have another officer shows up
Speaker 7: with a canine unit dog that's really good. It's sniffing
Speaker 7: out since and takes the dog over to the bike,
Speaker 7: picks up a cent and takes the officers around the
Speaker 7: block to the road behind Lee, which is called Sedgwick,
Speaker 7: and then kind of loses the scent and they come
Speaker 7: back through the backyard of the Dreyford's neighbors and at
Speaker 7: the corner of their backyard, at the edge of Dreyford's property,
Speaker 7: they find Lisa's body and she's just died. She's been
Speaker 7: stabbed I think like nineteen twenty times. And they find
Speaker 7: her half clothed. Her pants are down around one leg
Speaker 7: and her shirt has been pushed up. And that's basically
Speaker 7: when the story begins.
Speaker 6: Dan Dreyford says some in retrospector at least at the
Speaker 6: time for police some suspicious statements regarding Yeah.
Speaker 7: The first thing he tells them is, hey, my fingerprints
Speaker 7: are probably on this, which at that point, as far
Speaker 7: as he's told police, he doesn't know what happened to Lisa.
Speaker 7: He tells them he believes she might have been abducted
Speaker 7: or taken, So it's a weird thing to say, you know.
Speaker 7: He's aware that that bike might be part of a
Speaker 7: crime scene, and he's concerned that his fingerprints might be
Speaker 7: on it. He tells them the fingerprints are on it
Speaker 7: because he moved the bike because he wasn't sure it
Speaker 7: was Lisa's at first. He also gives a couple different
Speaker 7: stories about whether or not his parents knew that Lisa
Speaker 7: was coming over, you know, he tells dispatch one thing,
Speaker 7: he tells the police another. Eventually they wake up, his
Speaker 7: father comes out and they talk to his parents as well.
Speaker 7: Eventually they all end up at the police station. Once
Speaker 7: Lisa's body is found and Dan is interviewed that night.
Speaker 7: His father's interviewed the next morning, and the investigation begins
Speaker 7: in earnest the next day.
Speaker 6: Now police go to Gary Pruett, Lisa Prewitt's father. You
Speaker 6: write about that reaction and what Gary has to say
Speaker 6: and the family reaction.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's very sad all around for the Pruits. They
Speaker 7: had three children, Lisa's younger brother I think it was
Speaker 7: a younger brother. She had a brother who died as
Speaker 7: a child, and there was I think health complications in
Speaker 7: that instance. So they had already lost one kid. And
Speaker 7: Lisa was a very good kid as far as I found.
Speaker 7: She was just just a really smart, energetic, you know,
Speaker 7: just an empathetic young woman. And the police, of course,
Speaker 7: they once they found her body, they drove out to
Speaker 7: the Pruitz and woke up the parents and her father,
Speaker 7: Gary came down and they said, hey, do you know
Speaker 7: where your daughter is? And he said, oh, she's upstairs sleeping,
Speaker 7: and they said, please go check, and he went upstairs
Speaker 7: and found that she was not there, that her bed
Speaker 7: was empty, and then they discovered that her bike was missing,
Speaker 7: and so then the police were pretty sure that that's,
Speaker 7: you know, the body they found was in fact Lisa
Speaker 7: at that time, and then she was identified shortly thereafter,
Speaker 7: and it was just devastating for the Pruits.
Speaker 6: Now let's get back to Dan Dreyfert and his father
Speaker 6: as well. That you say, they ended up at the
Speaker 6: station for questioning. Who was the detective in charge.
Speaker 7: The detective in charge was a man named Thomas Gray,
Speaker 7: and he just happened to be the detective that got
Speaker 7: the case. I think it was his turn. He was
Speaker 7: the detective on duty at the time. However it happened
Speaker 7: it became his case, which in hindsight was unlucky. It
Speaker 7: was his first case of that magnitude, and he hadn't
Speaker 7: been a police officer for too long. And the reason
Speaker 7: he became a police officer, he told them, was because
Speaker 7: it paid better than being a line cook.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 7: He had no lifelong aspiration to the police officer or
Speaker 7: even a detective. He worked at Popeye's Chicken in Louisiana
Speaker 7: for a while and worked restaurant chops in the Cleveland
Speaker 7: so kind of a weird background. And he became his case,
Speaker 7: and he started investigating with another officer, another detective, but
Speaker 7: he was really the main force behind it, and he's
Speaker 7: the one that interviewed Dan Dreyford that night and got
Speaker 7: his statement on the record.
Speaker 5: There.
Speaker 6: Now, in terms of cooperation, the father and the son
Speaker 6: laurering up before this interview, were they cooperative? And what
Speaker 6: did Tom Gray elicit in terms of a statement from
Speaker 6: Dan Dryford.
Speaker 7: It really worked in their favor, both Dan Dreyford and
Speaker 7: his dad, I think his dad's names Robert. They were
Speaker 7: very cooperative with police and they allowed Dan to be questioned.
Speaker 7: Dan gave a very lengthy statement, and then his father
Speaker 7: did too, and then eventually his mother. So they were
Speaker 7: very cooperative with police, which went a long way with
Speaker 7: the whole thing. I think it's what made Detective Gray
Speaker 7: feel that it wasn't Dan that was involved in this murder. So,
Speaker 7: you know, he he got a lot out of Dan
Speaker 7: that night. You know, he'd come to find out that
Speaker 7: Dan kept a lot from him, But he basically got
Speaker 7: a timeline of that day. You know, Dan talks about
Speaker 7: getting out of the hospital where his father had had
Speaker 7: him committed. His father worked at Cleveland Clinic and had
Speaker 7: his son committed to the same hospital where he worked,
Speaker 7: and he had been there for about a month. That day,
Speaker 7: he got out around lunchtime, went to school surprisedly, so
Speaker 7: she was very happy to see him. Then he hung
Speaker 7: out with some friends and then Lisa came over to
Speaker 7: his house. Her father brought her over. I think it
Speaker 7: was like seven pm that night, sometime around there, to
Speaker 7: visit real quickly before her flute lesson. And she was
Speaker 7: excited because she had just gotten her driver's license that day,
Speaker 7: and so she was only at the Dreyferts. I think
Speaker 7: for you know, ten fifteen minutes, and you know they
Speaker 7: I think they kissed and you know, got caught up.
Speaker 7: And that's basically when they made plans. She told him
Speaker 7: that she would sneak out and ride her bike over
Speaker 7: to his house about twelve thirty. So then she leaves
Speaker 7: with her father and goes home, has a nice dinner,
Speaker 7: and in fact, she does sneak out. Now. Dan then
Speaker 7: tells the police, oh, I forgot she was coming over,
Speaker 7: which anybody who's been a teenage boy knows how ridiculous
Speaker 7: that that sounds. You've been away from your girlfriend for
Speaker 7: a month, and you're telling me that you forgot that
Speaker 7: she's going to sneak out and meet up with you
Speaker 7: that night. It doesn't quite work. And then he says
Speaker 7: he was in his room when he heard the screaming.
Speaker 7: He opened the window, the screaming continued. Then he woke
Speaker 7: up as his dad was already kind of awake because
Speaker 7: he heard the screams too, and his father sent him
Speaker 7: out to see what it was, and he says he
Speaker 7: went out, didn't see anything, so he came back in
Speaker 7: told his dad, you know, he didn't see anything, and
Speaker 7: then he's like, oh, and that's when I remember that
Speaker 7: she was coming over. So after his father went back
Speaker 7: to sleep, he snuck out at the house and he
Speaker 7: says that's when he found her bike and called the police.
Speaker 6: Now tell us about Dan Dreyford, and he talks about
Speaker 6: all his friends that he had invited over to his
Speaker 6: home earlier in the evening and what they were I
Speaker 6: guess planning to do, but also that he had a
Speaker 6: friend named Tex Workman, and Tex Workman had talked to
Speaker 6: a person named Kevin Young that night. Let's talk about
Speaker 6: Dan Dreyford's story about what went on that night at
Speaker 6: the at the coffee shop.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Sure, So every time the police spoke with Dan,
Speaker 7: he would reveal a little bit more about that day.
Speaker 7: And because the first time he spoke with him, he
Speaker 7: didn't he wasn't complete about what happened that day. So,
Speaker 7: like I said, he had been in the hospital for
Speaker 7: a month and Lisa wasn't the only one. That's supposed
Speaker 7: to come over that night and stink out of their house.
Speaker 7: He called a number of his friends and invited them over,
Speaker 7: and he had planned to have what's called a horobo party.
Speaker 7: Back in the nineties, kids who wanted to get high
Speaker 7: but couldn't get the illegal stuff would go to the
Speaker 7: corner store and buy powerful cough medicine like robotussin, So
Speaker 7: that's why they called it robo And if you drank
Speaker 7: more than like half a bottle of robotussin with the
Speaker 7: with the big ingredients in it, they it would make
Speaker 7: you trip for a little while. So that's what Dan
Speaker 7: was really into. So he has some friends. He actually
Speaker 7: had written to Lisa and asked her to pick up
Speaker 7: some robotussin formed. So yeah, he invited at least three
Speaker 7: or four of his friends and then tells the police
Speaker 7: that each and every one of them called him later
Speaker 7: that night and said they weren't going to come over,
Speaker 7: so which strikes me as a little odd too. And
Speaker 7: one point of the day, this man, a young man,
Speaker 7: teenage boy comes over to Dan's house to visit with him.
Speaker 7: And this man is called this guy is called Tex Workmen.
Speaker 7: You know, they called him. Texts and Tex is dating
Speaker 7: at the time. Dan's older sister, Debbie Nebbe, though is
Speaker 7: away at college. She goes to she was going to
Speaker 7: ou which is about three hours away from Shaker Heights,
Speaker 7: and the text comes over to visit with Dan. Dan says, hey,
Speaker 7: could you run out get some cigarettes. You can keep
Speaker 7: the change or vice versa. Text wanted some cigarettes and
Speaker 7: was going to bring back change for Danny. In any event,
Speaker 7: Text goes to get cigarettes and he already knows Dan
Speaker 7: has told him that Lisa is sneaking out of the
Speaker 7: house to come visit him that night and says, Hey,
Speaker 7: I've got some other people coming over. If you want
Speaker 7: to hang too, you're welcome to be at this party
Speaker 7: with us. So Tex goes out to Shaker Square to
Speaker 7: pick up some cigarettes and while he's there, and that's
Speaker 7: just a couple miles from Dan's house, so he takes
Speaker 7: Dan's bike rides his bike over to Shaker Square. He
Speaker 7: also visits the coffee shop there in the coffee shops
Speaker 7: called Arabica, and he stops in and bumps into another
Speaker 7: mutual friend of theirs, young man named Kevin Young. Kevin
Speaker 7: Young's a little bit older, he had just graduated high
Speaker 7: school and was starting his freshman year at Ohio State University.
Speaker 7: Who's going to start that next Monday? So this is
Speaker 7: the Thursday before that, and so Tex hangs out with
Speaker 7: Kevin and says, hey, Kevin, you know, Lisa's sneaking out
Speaker 7: of her house and going to hook up with Dan tonight.
Speaker 7: And Kevin knew him both and was kind of mad
Speaker 7: at Dan at the time, so said some unsavory things
Speaker 7: and I don't know, call him a jerk or something.
Speaker 7: And so now Kevin has this knowledge, right, so from tech,
Speaker 7: you know, it's that telephone game. More and more people
Speaker 7: are aware that Lisa's sneaking out of her house. So
Speaker 7: that becomes important because the day after the murder, a
Speaker 7: number of Dan's friends go to the police and say,
Speaker 7: it can't be our friend. He's such a good guy.
Speaker 7: And the police are like, well, who do you think
Speaker 7: could possibly do something like this? And everybody said, well,
Speaker 7: it's got to be the weird kid in school, Kevin Young.
Speaker 7: You know, he wears black and listens to Metallica and
Speaker 7: plays D and D And Kevin was a bit of
Speaker 7: a problem. Hid you know this This happened in nineteen
Speaker 7: ninety I think if this were to happen today, pretty
Speaker 7: obvious to me that Kevin would have been on the spectrum,
Speaker 7: on the autism spectrum somewhere. He had a hard time
Speaker 7: relating to his peers. He had these loud outbursts in
Speaker 7: public and would cause these little scenes. So I think
Speaker 7: that's what was going on with him. I'm no psychiatrist,
Speaker 7: but i do have a son who's on the spectrum,
Speaker 7: so I'm very aware of the way that you know,
Speaker 7: people on the spectrum behave in act. So just strikes
Speaker 7: me that that's what it was. So in any event,
Speaker 7: the friends say, you got to look into Kevin Young.
Speaker 7: And then when they found out that Kevin had spoken
Speaker 7: to texts and would have had knowledge that Lisa was
Speaker 7: stinking out, they were like, oh wow, this is that.
Speaker 7: They thought that that was really good circumstantial evidence, and
Speaker 7: at some point Detective Gray and his colleagues became become
Speaker 7: convinced that it is Kevin Young, that it had to
Speaker 7: be Kevin Young, and they don't really look at any
Speaker 7: suspects after that. But to this day, there's no physical
Speaker 7: evidence that has ever linked Kevin to that crime scene
Speaker 7: or to Lisa, and in fact, all the circumstantial evidence
Speaker 7: they have basically rules Kevin Young out as a suspect,
Speaker 7: but that didn't keep him keep them from going after him.
Speaker 7: Kevin was eventually charged with Lisa's murder, indicted, and he
Speaker 7: went to trial in the summer of nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 6: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop for a
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Speaker 6: Now you've jumped head to the trial. But we have
Speaker 6: to assess as you do, as you write, how the
Speaker 6: police decided and how they underwent their breaking of Kevin Young.
Speaker 6: They had spoken to all the friends, including Dan Dreyford,
Speaker 6: but also the other friends and what they had to say,
Speaker 6: so they got supporting in their mind, circumstantial evidence of
Speaker 6: things that would fit that Kevin Young would fit for
Speaker 6: this In terms of a violent background and things that
Speaker 6: he had said that incriminated him and involved him in
Speaker 6: this murder.
Speaker 7: Some of the friends said that they had overheard him
Speaker 7: saying he was going to kill Dan and Lisa, that
Speaker 7: he was mad. That kind of goes back to when
Speaker 7: Dan started dating Lisa and he was jealous, I think
Speaker 7: jealous more of Lisa's time that she was spending with Dan,
Speaker 7: because he considered Dan a good friend. And you know,
Speaker 7: there were these overheard conversations Arabica in which he shouted
Speaker 7: that he was going to kill Dan. I don't think
Speaker 7: he ever really said that. I think it was more
Speaker 7: something along the lines of I'm you know, I'm going
Speaker 7: to beat him up or whatever. That never regardless, that
Speaker 7: never happened, or you know, there was never any sort
Speaker 7: of altercation between him and Dan Dreyfert and down the
Speaker 7: road when more and more evidence came out, it appears
Speaker 7: that during his rants that were overheard about these threats,
Speaker 7: he wasn't talking about Dan and Lisa, but Dan and
Speaker 7: this other girl named Becca who Dan had kind of
Speaker 7: also been seeing on the side and made out with
Speaker 7: this girl, and she was supposed to go to prom
Speaker 7: with Evan and so there was some weirdness there, and
Speaker 7: it was likely he was talking about Dan and Becka
Speaker 7: and not Dan and Lisa. But anyways, he becomes a
Speaker 7: suspect for that and a number of other things that
Speaker 7: just went terribly wrong. For instance, at the time Shaker
Speaker 7: Heights was hiring for prosecutors. They were looking for a
Speaker 7: new prosecutor and they interviewed like ten candidates and one
Speaker 7: of these was a lawyer from Columbus, and during his
Speaker 7: interview he's like, oh, yeah, by the way, I see
Speaker 7: you guys are going after Kevin Young. You know, I'm
Speaker 7: friends with his lawyer down in Columbus, and his lawyer
Speaker 7: told me that Kevin did it. And in that interview,
Speaker 7: everybody kind of freaks out because, you know what, even
Speaker 7: if that were true, he's breaking attorney client privilege. People
Speaker 7: could be disbarred for that. But they send out the police,
Speaker 7: they do an investigation, they taught. They go down and
Speaker 7: talk to this lawyer Kevin had and he's like, well,
Speaker 7: what are you talking about. He's like, I kinda know
Speaker 7: that guy in passing, but he's not a friend of
Speaker 7: mine and I certainly wouldn't tell him anything like that,
Speaker 7: and it's not true. Anyways, and what the police said,
Speaker 7: even in their reports. The police that went down to
Speaker 7: Columbus and talked to him, they're like, look, I think
Speaker 7: this guy's just making up a story so that he
Speaker 7: can get this job. But that really went a long
Speaker 7: way with Gray, I think. And he's like, well, if
Speaker 7: his lawyer is saying he did it, then he must
Speaker 7: really be guilty. So that just kind of that was
Speaker 7: another nail in the coffin for Kevin. So they do
Speaker 7: a couple of weird things. Shaker Heights eventually consults with
Speaker 7: a very famous psychologist out of the University of Syracuse.
Speaker 7: Syracuse University, Myron Murray is his name, and he's consulted
Speaker 7: with the FBI in a number of cases. He was
Speaker 7: the consultant for Waco. He says he's good at profiling
Speaker 7: these type of killers, and so they consult with him,
Speaker 7: and Myron Murray gives them advice on how to break
Speaker 7: Kevin and even says in this recorded conversation like, look,
Speaker 7: you know, the boyfriend makes a pretty good suspect too,
Speaker 7: don't you think. And the police are like, yeah, case
Speaker 7: could be made against the boyfriend, but right now we're
Speaker 7: looking at Kevin and the psychologist, doctor Myron Murray. He says, well, okay,
Speaker 7: He's like, even if it's not, here's how you get
Speaker 7: him to confess to it, and so what a crazy
Speaker 7: thing to say. But anyways, the police go down, the
Speaker 7: detectives go down. In the interview Kevin Young, Detective Gray
Speaker 7: himself interviews Kevin Young in order to try to force
Speaker 7: him into confessing to this crime, and shows up at
Speaker 7: his dorm room one night. I think they show up
Speaker 7: at about eight pm. They take him to a local
Speaker 7: hotel and they've got a guy with a light detector box,
Speaker 7: you know, light detector machine there waiting and Gray first
Speaker 7: interrogates Kevin and this interrogation goes on for more than
Speaker 7: twenty four hours. It's insane, and sometime in the middle
Speaker 7: of the night, like round two three o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 7: that gave him his first light detector test, and the
Speaker 7: guy that's operating the machine, also a police officer, says
Speaker 7: that he thinks he's being untruthful, which eventually I consult
Speaker 7: with the leading polygraph people in the state of Ohio
Speaker 7: who tell me that the way he conducted the test
Speaker 7: was inadmissible. Anyways, he did it wrong, so you've got
Speaker 7: this bad test going on, and so to give him,
Speaker 7: like I think, they actually give him three different tests
Speaker 7: over those twenty four hours and tell him that he's
Speaker 7: being untruthful. But at no point does Kevin Young confess
Speaker 7: to the crime. He doesn't break although he is essentially
Speaker 7: driven kind of crazy and ends up in the mental
Speaker 7: hospital a day later because of this interrogation.
Speaker 6: It's very interesting and we never really get an explanation.
Speaker 6: But Kevin Young's father is in an attorney, not a
Speaker 6: criminal defense attorney, but he's an established attorney. And you
Speaker 6: really chronicle is the underhanded techniques of Detective Gray and
Speaker 6: the other detectives that were all formed. We're all grouped
Speaker 6: together to be able to successfully try to get a
Speaker 6: confession was their main goal. Now, the thing is is
Speaker 6: that these unhanded techniques that you chronicle, it's amazing all
Speaker 6: of the things that they violated in that they asked
Speaker 6: him who they thought had killed Lisa Pruitt, What did
Speaker 6: he have to say in that regard, and why was
Speaker 6: Tech's workman sort of not interesting to both defense and
Speaker 6: prosecution in this case.
Speaker 7: It's interesting, right because tex is certainly a suspect. He
Speaker 7: knew Lisa was coming over, and he doesn't really have
Speaker 7: an alibi. He says that he left Dan's house at
Speaker 7: about eleven thirty and then walked to get a take
Speaker 7: a bus back to his house, but then the bus
Speaker 7: doesn't He says, the bus doesn't show up for forty
Speaker 7: five minutes, and he doesn't get home until well after
Speaker 7: the time of the murder. But Tex is a wild
Speaker 7: card in this whole thing, and both the prosecutors in
Speaker 7: the defense didn't really want to bring him in because
Speaker 7: it really complicates the whole thing a little bit, especially
Speaker 7: for a jury. And one of the things the defense
Speaker 7: attorney told me, the defense attorney he got a really
Speaker 7: great defense attorney, a guy named Mark Devan, who essentially
Speaker 7: saved him at least for a couple decades. And Devan
Speaker 7: told me, he's like, look, our strategy was to show
Speaker 7: that Kevin was not the best suspect. Dan Driver was
Speaker 7: much better suspect than he was, So you can't just
Speaker 7: throw things at the wall. For the jury, we couldn't
Speaker 7: give them a number of suspects. We had to concentrate
Speaker 7: on one. And Dan was a better suspect than Text.
Speaker 7: So Text has always been kind of a wild card
Speaker 7: in this whole thing. What's interesting to me is, yes,
Speaker 7: Kevin Young's father was an attorney with a very prestigious
Speaker 7: law firm in Cleveland. But again we're talking Shaker Heights.
Speaker 7: You can't throw a rock in Shaker Heights without hitting
Speaker 7: an attorney or a doctor or a politician of some sort.
Speaker 7: So all these kids, their parents were lawyers or something.
Speaker 7: But his father worked at the law firm, and at
Speaker 7: some point in time, and mind you, if the father
Speaker 7: has one inkling that his son really could have done this,
Speaker 7: he never would have as a lawyer, never would have
Speaker 7: let him speak to police. And he never kept Kevin
Speaker 7: from talking to the police because he knew Kevin couldn't
Speaker 7: do it, because Kevin was playing video games with his
Speaker 7: father until one am the night of the murder. But
Speaker 7: at some point time the whole thing becomes so crazy.
Speaker 7: The fathers like, look, just charge him so that we
Speaker 7: can get this to court, where you know, where things
Speaker 7: are logical. Again, you know, court has a procedure, it's logical.
Speaker 7: Everything you guys are doing is illogical and insane. So
Speaker 7: just charge him already, which you know, I think goes
Speaker 7: a long way to showing that the father was never, never,
Speaker 7: for one second did he think that Evin could have
Speaker 7: done this.
Speaker 6: Now, what's I think most important in this confession that
Speaker 6: he tried to get was that the statements that Detective
Speaker 6: Gray made to Kevin Young near the end of this
Speaker 6: statement without getting a confession, and he was frustrated about that.
Speaker 6: What was this implicit threat that he made to Kevin Young?
Speaker 6: And obviously that would have been an important threat to
Speaker 6: a young man.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the detective tells Kevin, look, you have to confess
Speaker 7: to this so that you because we're going to charge you,
Speaker 7: but if you cooperate with us, we're not going to
Speaker 7: put you to death because in the state of Ohio
Speaker 7: there's the death penalty and I don't know that this
Speaker 7: necessarily would have applied, but Kevin didn't know that, and
Speaker 7: the detective wanted him to know that if he didn't
Speaker 7: cooperate with them, if he didn't confess to this, he'd
Speaker 7: still get arrested, still be charged, but now he'd face
Speaker 7: the death penalty. So he's got that hanging number his
Speaker 7: head and he's like, by the way, you can't stay
Speaker 7: at college because this is going to be on your mind.
Speaker 7: We're going to come after you. Anyways, and you can't
Speaker 7: go home because everybody back in Shaker Heights already knows
Speaker 7: you did it. So he just ruined, I mean, just
Speaker 7: broke this kid's mind.
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Speaker 6: to your subscription. Today we talked about the effect of
Speaker 6: this twenty four hour ordeal for this young man, with
Speaker 6: these threats to his livelihood and trying to tell him
Speaker 6: that no matter what he said, that he was guilty
Speaker 6: of killing Lisa Pruitt. So what happens after in terms
Speaker 6: of hospitalization.
Speaker 7: So Kevin is admitted into a mental hospital, a psychiatric
Speaker 7: ward in Cleveland. I think it was Laurel Wood at
Speaker 7: the time, one of the big ones up here. And
Speaker 7: I think he stays there for again at least a month,
Speaker 7: and the local media make a big deal about that.
Speaker 7: The police tell everybody that his parents are hiding him
Speaker 7: in a psychiatric unit, that he you know, that he's
Speaker 7: not crazy, that he doesn't need to be there, but
Speaker 7: that's their way of keeping him away from being interviewed
Speaker 7: by police. So while he's there, he meets with his father,
Speaker 7: and that's when he meets the lawyer, Marke Devan, and
Speaker 7: it looks for a moment like the police are going
Speaker 7: to charge him, that they don't because they don't have
Speaker 7: the evidence. They do serve warrants on his home. They
Speaker 7: find some writing that he's done, you know, one seemed
Speaker 7: to be a possible suicide note, and he had attempted
Speaker 7: suicide in the past, and there were some very alarming
Speaker 7: things he had written about his mother and just he
Speaker 7: was an angry kid, but nothing that connected him to
Speaker 7: Lisa in any way. They collected blood and hair samples
Speaker 7: from him, none of that match what they had. The
Speaker 7: case kind of went cold for a couple of years,
Speaker 7: and then a woman who was at that psychiatric unit
Speaker 7: with Kevin that month came forward and said, oh, Kevin
Speaker 7: confessed to me that he did murder Lisa, And she
Speaker 7: was interviewed by a local TV station and then that's
Speaker 7: how they were able to finally get an indictment against
Speaker 7: Kevin and charge him with the murder.
Speaker 6: Along the way, police have press conferences and press releases
Speaker 6: that seem irresponsible in retrospect. Can you tell us about.
Speaker 7: Oh my gosh, yeah, I mean again, I don't think
Speaker 7: it's something that could happen today, But you know, nothing
Speaker 7: like this had been tried at least not in northeast
Speaker 7: Ohio back then. Here's what they did. The police and
Speaker 7: prosecutors held a press conference at one point and said, hey, look,
Speaker 7: we know who did it. Kevin Young killed Lisa Pruitt.
Speaker 7: But the prosecutors saying, we don't have enough evidence to
Speaker 7: assure that will win in court, so we just want
Speaker 7: you to know that Kevin killed Lisa. And it was
Speaker 7: so basically they've convicted him in the court of public
Speaker 7: opinion without having without allowing him a fair trial. I mean,
Speaker 7: it was just it was nutty. And that's when that
Speaker 7: kind of fell apart because they got called out by
Speaker 7: a couple of decent journalists in town that were like,
Speaker 7: this is not how we do things in the United States.
Speaker 7: This is not this is not kosher, this is not fair.
Speaker 6: Mark Devn has got is an illustrious, high profile lawyer
Speaker 6: with a crowd past. But Mark Devan, when he looked
Speaker 6: at the transcripts overall, what was his uh, what was
Speaker 6: his conclusion and what was his attitude about this, the
Speaker 6: press and the police's behavior.
Speaker 7: You know, Devan said something interesting to me. You know,
Speaker 7: he actually hoped that Kevin was guilty, and it really
Speaker 7: upset him. After he met Kevin and looked at the
Speaker 7: records and saw everything laid out. When he realized that
Speaker 7: Kevin was innocent, said, that's the worst thing for a lawyer,
Speaker 7: because it's then your responsibility to save them, and if
Speaker 7: they go to prison, it's because you've failed. So that
Speaker 7: was really alarming to him to know that Kevin was
Speaker 7: innocent here. So he was very passionate about about it.
Speaker 7: He fought against the police and prosecutors trying to withhold,
Speaker 7: you know, trying to keep this indictment from happening. And
Speaker 7: then when it did, he hired his own investigators because
Speaker 7: he realized that it was up to him to find
Speaker 7: the real killer if they could, as a way to
Speaker 7: save Kevin, and they got I think his investigator got
Speaker 7: really close to who I think did it. He was
Speaker 7: like one interview away. One of the things his investigation
Speaker 7: kicked up that becomes very important is that in the
Speaker 7: weeks leading up to Lisa's murder, there were a number
Speaker 7: of homes on Lee and Sedgwick that rode the runs
Speaker 7: parallel behind it that were broken into. There was a
Speaker 7: prowler in the neighborhood that was breaking into houses, not
Speaker 7: really stealing money, but stealing like trinkets and things, forcing
Speaker 7: his way through a skylight, cutting through screens to get in.
Speaker 7: And eventually I found out who that person was, and
Speaker 7: I do believe that person was responsible for Lisa's murder.
Speaker 6: This private eye Sheridan also uncovered spoke to another person
Speaker 6: at the coffee shop, Stephan Ravello, another worker there, and
Speaker 6: he told them something very very interesting about the conversation
Speaker 6: that supposed Texts and Kevin Young had, but also that
Speaker 6: there was other people present that night.
Speaker 7: Exactly right. That's the big part that Sheridan got wasn't
Speaker 7: not able to follow through all the way. So the
Speaker 7: whole reason that the police at first looked at Kevin
Speaker 7: Young was that Kevin was aware that Lisa was sneaking
Speaker 7: out right, because he met up with text at Arabica
Speaker 7: at that coffee shop and text poled Kevin that Lisa
Speaker 7: was coming over. It turns out there there was one
Speaker 7: other young man in that coffee shop at the time
Speaker 7: who was near enough to overhear that conversation, and that
Speaker 7: young man's name was David Brannigan. And David Branigan is
Speaker 7: very interesting, you know. So I had kind of eventually
Speaker 7: found that out that Okay, David Brannigan was there too,
Speaker 7: just like Kevin Young, he would have known Lisa was
Speaker 7: stinking out. Let's look into David a little bit. And
Speaker 7: so I started reaching out to David's He had a
Speaker 7: girlfriend at the time who was his alibi, and she's like, look,
Speaker 7: they told me I was his alibi. But he definitely
Speaker 7: could have left my house in enough time to get
Speaker 7: to Lisa and intercept her. And in fact, David Brannigan
Speaker 7: lived on Sedgwick, the road behind Lee, so he would
Speaker 7: have passed it on the way home. In fact, he
Speaker 7: goes to police the day after the murder and says,
Speaker 7: you know, I bumped into a black man at the
Speaker 7: bus stop who mentioned Lisa's murder. I bet it was him.
Speaker 7: You should look into this guy. And if you know
Speaker 7: anything about Jaker Heights, you point the finger at a
Speaker 7: black man, you get the police's attention pretty quickly. When
Speaker 7: the police followed up, they realized that Brannigan essentially places
Speaker 7: himself at the scene of the murder at around the
Speaker 7: time it happens, because he said he saw the police
Speaker 7: with the canine unit looking around the neighborhood. And that's
Speaker 7: very important to me because that says that, yes, he
Speaker 7: was there. He knew about the canine unit, but the
Speaker 7: police didn't see him, So he's somewhere in hiding watching this,
Speaker 7: so he's right there when everything's going down. He says
Speaker 7: he went home then his mom was awake and talked
Speaker 7: to his mom for a little while, and then took
Speaker 7: a shower and went to bed. When the police followed
Speaker 7: up on that, they found out, no, mom wasn't really awake.
Speaker 7: She was asleep when he got home, so he has
Speaker 7: no alibi. He took a shower that night. He collected knives.
Speaker 7: He had a collection of knives like the type that
Speaker 7: could have been used to stab Lisa, And they never
Speaker 7: did find the murder weapon. They never did find that.
Speaker 7: So what really brought it home to me was I
Speaker 7: tracked him down and found out that he had died.
Speaker 7: He had died in twenty seventeen. He had essentially drank
Speaker 7: himself to death. But he was living with a woman
Speaker 7: and he had a daughter with her, so it was
Speaker 7: basically a common law wife. He had been living with
Speaker 7: her for like seven or eight years. So I went
Speaker 7: to her thinking that she'd just slammed the door in
Speaker 7: my face. She invited me in. We got to talking
Speaker 7: and eventually I asked her a question, point blank. I said,
Speaker 7: do you think Dan killed Lisa pru It? And she
Speaker 7: thought for a second. She said, let me tell you
Speaker 7: a story. Said, when Dan was in pre school, a
Speaker 7: boy pushed him down on the playground and he didn't react.
Speaker 7: He didn't hit the kid or anything. He didn't do anything.
Speaker 7: But then at lunch he made a point to sit
Speaker 7: next to this kid and when the kid wasn't watching,
Speaker 7: when the kid wasn't looking, he poured commeic bleach into
Speaker 7: the powder into the kid's sandwich. Well, the kid must die.
Speaker 7: So I think, do I think brand Agan David Branigan?
Speaker 7: Do I think do you think he killed Lisa? Yeah,
Speaker 7: you said it wouldn't doubt it.
Speaker 6: Let's get back to the saving of Kevin Young and
Speaker 6: then the demise of Kevin Young. You say that the
Speaker 6: van launched a brave and very very talented defense of
Speaker 6: Kevin Young, and some of the highlights were breaking those
Speaker 6: witnesses that apparently he had confessed to while he was
Speaker 6: at the psychiatric hospital. Tell us just a little bit
Speaker 6: about what really broke that trial, what really made it
Speaker 6: a success for Kevin Young?
Speaker 7: Well, the prosecution put up witness after witness. You know,
Speaker 7: a lot of these were local kids in the neighborhood
Speaker 7: who had these stories about Kevin Young threatening Dan and
Speaker 7: Lisa at first, and de Van showed that. Well, you know,
Speaker 7: they'd get on stand and they'd say, I heard Kevin
Speaker 7: Young threaten Dan Dreyfert, like, you know, Goodie Proctor was
Speaker 7: dancing with the devil type of stuff, and Devan would
Speaker 7: basically he's like, did you really did you really hear that?
Speaker 7: And they're like, well, I didn't hear it, but somebody
Speaker 7: told me about it. So a lot of that became hearsay,
Speaker 7: and then oh, well, I don't know that he was
Speaker 7: really talking about Lisa. So one by one, you know,
Speaker 7: they were either lying or exaggerating their stories. And then
Speaker 7: it gets to the so called confession. This woman who
Speaker 7: was a patient at the mental hospital Kevin was staying,
Speaker 7: who said that he confessed to her one night that
Speaker 7: he killed Lisa. And turns out that like a moment
Speaker 7: before the so called confession, this woman has a hallucination
Speaker 7: about her father being a pow in World War two
Speaker 7: or Korea somewhere and was being tortured and so she's screaming,
Speaker 7: and she goes out to the break room. After this
Speaker 7: this hallucination, that's when Kevin Young comes up and confesses.
Speaker 7: But then she doesn't go to the police or tell
Speaker 7: the staff or anything. She doesn't do anything with it.
Speaker 7: A couple of years later when she sees a local
Speaker 7: journalist covering the death of Lisa Pruitt, and she calls
Speaker 7: him and arranges for this interview. And her first call
Speaker 7: is to this TV news reporter, not the police. And
Speaker 7: then she says, oh, I you know, but I know
Speaker 7: this is true because I wrote it down in my diary.
Speaker 7: And so Devan brings out the diary and weirdly, the
Speaker 7: page that mentions this confession doesn't match up with the page.
Speaker 7: It's not the same type of paper as the rest
Speaker 7: of the journal. It looks like it's been it's been
Speaker 7: written in past tense, like it was written long after
Speaker 7: the event and placed in the book. And so it
Speaker 7: all just kind of falls apart on the stand anyway, Like,
Speaker 7: how in the world would you consider a witness's statement
Speaker 7: as at all all if it's coming from a patient
Speaker 7: in a mental hospital. It's just the whole thing's crazy.
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Speaker 6: You say this trial was it was very, very interesting,
Speaker 6: and you chronicle the whole thing and all of the
Speaker 6: again the friends of Lisa and Dan Dreyford and the
Speaker 6: neighborhood were witnesses, but also people that lived behind the
Speaker 6: Dreyford mansion, the residence, and also the But the police
Speaker 6: didn't bother to have any physical evidence at this trial
Speaker 6: almost whatsoever, and so it was not a hard verdict
Speaker 6: for the jury to give him a not guilty and
Speaker 6: he was acquitted of the crime.
Speaker 7: After this long, very very public trial. Kevin Young is
Speaker 7: found not guilty. He's acquitted, so great, He's got his
Speaker 7: life back, he thinks. And then the next day the
Speaker 7: Plain Dealer, the biggest paper in the region at the time,
Speaker 7: I think they were like a million people that were
Speaker 7: reading it on a daily basis or something, comes out
Speaker 7: with an article that says, well, if the jury had
Speaker 7: heard everything that wasn't allowed in court, they would have
Speaker 7: found him guilty of the murder. So it's like he
Speaker 7: thinks his life is saved, and then the very next
Speaker 7: day the local paper just completely ruins it. And he's
Speaker 7: so distraught he drives out and climbs onto a bridge
Speaker 7: over a very busy highway in Cleveland, about to commit suicide.
Speaker 7: A police officer happens to be driving by, sees it,
Speaker 7: stops the car, gets out, and is able to talk
Speaker 7: Kevin down. And so again he ends up in the
Speaker 7: mental hospital for a little while. But who wouldn't.
Speaker 6: After that, you write about eventually speaking with Kevin Young
Speaker 6: briefly tell us about that encounter.
Speaker 7: I met Kevin Young once when I was a reporter
Speaker 7: for the weekly paper, the Village Voice paper out of Cleveland,
Speaker 7: about fifteen years ago or so, I had written. I
Speaker 7: was writing a piece on Lisa Pruett, and I wanted
Speaker 7: to talk to him. I ended up talking to him
Speaker 7: for a little bit, and the thing he was most
Speaker 7: upset about was he had moved on with his life
Speaker 7: and was trying to he was running a He was
Speaker 7: just such a brilliant mind, but he ended up the
Speaker 7: best he could do was run this business where he
Speaker 7: painted houses and eked out a living that way. And
Speaker 7: he said the thing that upset him the most was
Speaker 7: the Internet, you know, and the Internet wasn't really a
Speaker 7: thing during his trial in ninety three, but into the
Speaker 7: late nineties, he couldn't get a date. He'd have a
Speaker 7: date with a woman and go really well, and then
Speaker 7: she'd go home and google his name and all the
Speaker 7: stuff with Lisa Prewood will come up, and then she'd say,
Speaker 7: I just can't do this, you know, I can't do it.
Speaker 5: So it just.
Speaker 7: Destroyed this guy's life. And you could tell the pain
Speaker 7: he was in, you know, when I spoke to him,
Speaker 7: he was very, very upset.
Speaker 6: Tell us what happens eventually with Kevin Young.
Speaker 7: Just like a number of people in this story, along
Speaker 7: with text workmen, you know, he has issues with alcohol.
Speaker 7: Kevin ends up also essentially drinking himself to death. He
Speaker 7: is found dead in his apartment in twenty seventeen, and
Speaker 7: you know, the autopsy reveals the cirrhosis of the liver
Speaker 7: along with other other things. He had gotten caught up
Speaker 7: in cracked cocaine as well, you know, just everything he
Speaker 7: could do to alleviate this stress that he was going through.
Speaker 7: And so yeah, he passed away in twenty seventeen before
Speaker 7: I started writing this book in twenty twenty.
Speaker 6: Tell us about the circumstances in which you began to
Speaker 6: write this book, and before we talk about David Brannigan
Speaker 6: and his connection to a crime you described from nineteen
Speaker 6: eighty five, which was occurred eight houses away from the
Speaker 6: Dreyford mansion in nineteen eighty five, and David Brannigan was
Speaker 6: a witness in that case.
Speaker 7: So I knew at some point I wanted to write
Speaker 7: a book about this. So slowly, over the years I
Speaker 7: had had masked. I put up public records requests until
Speaker 7: I got pretty much all the documents from the prosecutor's
Speaker 7: office in the city and the trial transcripts, and eventually
Speaker 7: met with de Van Kevin's lawyer. But I massed all
Speaker 7: these documents, and then COVID hit and suddenly I had
Speaker 7: nothing else to do. I was stuck at home, so
Speaker 7: I said, well, if I'm going to write about this,
Speaker 7: it's probably got to be now. So I opened those boxes.
Speaker 7: My intention going into it was to exonerate Kevin Young
Speaker 7: in the court of public opinion and to show that
Speaker 7: the boyfriend was the most likely suspect. And I got
Speaker 7: a couple weeks into research when I started uncovering this
Speaker 7: stuff with David Brand again and realized that wait, there
Speaker 7: was another young man at the scene of the crime
Speaker 7: that night that the police that prosecutors knew about but
Speaker 7: kind of kept quiet, and he's you know, once I
Speaker 7: started looking into his background, all this other stuff came out.
Speaker 7: There's this other There was a double homicide that occurred
Speaker 7: five years before Lisa's murder, and it happened eight doors
Speaker 7: north of the Dryver's residence, so same block. There was
Speaker 7: an older couple that was stabbed to death in their
Speaker 7: home one night early. It was like, it was like
Speaker 7: a nine to nine thirty PM on a Friday evening,
Speaker 7: and so I said, well, I better look at those records.
Speaker 7: And I had been avoiding it because there was a
Speaker 7: man sitting in prison for those murders, a guy named
Speaker 7: Donnie Sok who had been convicted of it. So I'm like, well,
Speaker 7: those are solved, you know, what's the point of looking
Speaker 7: into it. But at some point it became undeniable that
Speaker 7: there was some sort of connection going on here, so
Speaker 7: I pulled the records and lo and behold, the only
Speaker 7: witness to the murder, or the only witness for the police,
Speaker 7: was young man named David Branigan. David lived in a
Speaker 7: house directly behind her cat corner behind the Order residents
Speaker 7: Dorothy and Philip Porter were their victims, and Brannigan admits
Speaker 7: to breaking into the property next door to the Porters
Speaker 7: the night of the murder. Bran Agan, eventually I come
Speaker 7: to find out, was the young man who was breaking
Speaker 7: into homes on that block. So he said he broke
Speaker 7: into the property next door with a couple bodies to
Speaker 7: set off fireworks and then they saw this again, very
Speaker 7: similar story. Said he saw a black man run out
Speaker 7: of the back door of the Porter's house at the
Speaker 7: time of the murder and chased them away, and you know,
Speaker 7: they ran back home. And that story doesn't make sense
Speaker 7: for a lot of reasons. One, the door was locked
Speaker 7: from the inside when the police discovered the Porter's bodies,
Speaker 7: so the killer could not have gone out the back door.
Speaker 7: The point of entry or Porter's killers was a small
Speaker 7: window in the kitchen that you know some that he
Speaker 7: had cut through the screen and entered the window like
Speaker 7: was Brannigan's mo and it appeared to be a burglary.
Speaker 7: Interrupted that Dorothy Porter likely heard something, came into the kitchen,
Speaker 7: saw the killer and that's when he overpowdered her and
Speaker 7: killed her. He stabs her and then strangles her with
Speaker 7: the quart of an iron in the basement. And certainly
Speaker 7: Brannigan has motive for that, because if he's breaking in
Speaker 7: the house and gets caught, you know, Dorothy's going to
Speaker 7: recognize him as the neighbor kid. So why is there
Speaker 7: a guy sitting in prison for this. That's kind of
Speaker 7: a longer story, but I'll make it real short. Donnie
Speaker 7: Sokei had been in prison for theft and his mother
Speaker 7: was dying of cancer and he concocted this story, said
Speaker 7: he was involved in the Porter's murders because he thought
Speaker 7: that he could arrange a deal with the prosecutors to
Speaker 7: get him out of prison by confessing to this other
Speaker 7: crime and unfortunately talked himself into a much bigger sentence,
Speaker 7: you know, like you know, I think eventually he ended
Speaker 7: up getting eight hundred and eight eight years. But his
Speaker 7: story is so called confession to police, and he since
Speaker 7: recanted this confession. It's just ridiculous on the surface because
Speaker 7: he said he had a he and his father decided
Speaker 7: to kill the porters because Philip was once an editor
Speaker 7: at the Plaine Dealer and written terrible things about the
Speaker 7: Hell's Angels biker gang, and his dad dad was in
Speaker 7: the gang, and was upset about that, as if that's
Speaker 7: a thing. And they said they had a getaway driver
Speaker 7: who parked on Lee Road for half an hour while
Speaker 7: they went in and did the murder. Well, that's just
Speaker 7: if you're from Shaker Heights, you know that can't possibly
Speaker 7: be true, because there is no parking on Lee Road
Speaker 7: to this day. It's a very busy. It's a throughway
Speaker 7: between it gets to Cleveland, so it's always busy. And
Speaker 7: if you're parking in this no parking area on a
Speaker 7: very busy street, you're going to get noticed by police
Speaker 7: within like five minutes. So it's just just a made
Speaker 7: up story. So you know, I come to believe that
Speaker 7: David Branagan is not only responsible for least Pruit's murder,
Speaker 7: but the double homicide of Dorothy and Philip Porter as well.
Speaker 6: Regarding the title of this book, the Little Crazy Children,
Speaker 6: you write at the end of this book, you know
Speaker 6: who killed Kevin?
Speaker 7: Yeah, the little crazy children of Shaker Heights.
Speaker 1: Did you know?
Speaker 7: They ruined his life because they thought they were righteous,
Speaker 7: and they thought they could bend the truth because it
Speaker 7: had to be Kevin in order to honor their friends.
Speaker 7: And it destroyed the kid's life. And so Kevin, did
Speaker 7: you know, he self medicated and drank to feel good,
Speaker 7: and eventually that gilled is his body.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about just a little bit about Spring twenty
Speaker 6: nineteen in the Porchline Project and your book True Crime
Speaker 6: Addict came out in twenty sixteen. But tell us about
Speaker 6: this nonprofit, the porch Like Project.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So I became frustrated at some point that I was
Speaker 7: writing about all these cold cases and not being able
Speaker 7: to solve them with books. So I formed a nonprofit
Speaker 7: called the Portite Project, and we raise money for new
Speaker 7: DNA testing and genetic genealogy for cold cases in Ohio,
Speaker 7: not just homicides, but also John and Jane Doe cases,
Speaker 7: and we got really lucky out of the gate. Our
Speaker 7: first case was the nineteen eighty seven homicide of Barbara Blatnek,
Speaker 7: teenage girl who was abducted from Garfield Heights and whose
Speaker 7: body was found near Blossom Music Center in Kiga Falls.
Speaker 7: And I reached out to the police in Kiga Falls
Speaker 7: and said, hey, I think the case might be solvable
Speaker 7: with genetic genealogy, and we're really you know, I'm willing
Speaker 7: to pay for the whole thing. So he said, all right,
Speaker 7: let's give it a try, and eventually got a profile
Speaker 7: from underneath Barbara's fingernails, and genetic genealogists in California took
Speaker 7: a look at it. We're able to trace profile of
Speaker 7: the killer to a family to three brothers in Cleveland,
Speaker 7: the Zastnic brothers, and then it seemed to be one
Speaker 7: particular brother who was most likely a guy named James Zastonic,
Speaker 7: and the police pulled some fresh DNA from his trash
Speaker 7: and compared it with the original profile, and sure enough
Speaker 7: it was a match, and so he was arrested in
Speaker 7: May of twenty twenty when we were still in lockdown
Speaker 7: here and was going to trial. He ended up dying
Speaker 7: of cancer before they got to trial, though, but at
Speaker 7: least the family had some closure to that, as much
Speaker 7: as closure as possible with these things. Yes, and since
Speaker 7: then we've worked about five other cases. We've got I
Speaker 7: think four or five in the works, and keep pretty
Speaker 7: busy with the Portraite project stuff.
Speaker 6: Absolutely great work.
Speaker 2: Kudos to you for that.
Speaker 7: Thank you in your organization. Thanks.
Speaker 6: I want to thank you very much for coming on
Speaker 6: and talking about Little Crazy Children, a true crime tragedy
Speaker 6: of lost innocence. Those people that might want to take
Speaker 6: a look more about this, can you tell us about
Speaker 6: a website, social media and your podcast?
Speaker 7: Yeah? Sure. The best place for information about any of
Speaker 7: this is James Renner dot com. It has links to
Speaker 7: everything else I do and these stories I cut, and yes,
Speaker 7: I do have two podcasts. One is called The Philosophy
Speaker 7: of Crime. It's kind of like the cosmos of true
Speaker 7: crime I like to call it looks at the big
Speaker 7: questions of true crime, like why are we so obsessed
Speaker 7: with it? And it does profiling really work? It goes
Speaker 7: to classical philosophy for answers. I do one season of
Speaker 7: that podcast every year, six episodes every year. But I
Speaker 7: also have a weekly podcast called True Crime This Week
Speaker 7: that wraps up all the big stories and true crime
Speaker 7: that you might have missed, and that comes out every
Speaker 7: Friday morning.
Speaker 6: Well, thank you very much, Little Crazy Children, the true
Speaker 6: crime Tragedy of Lost Innocence. Thank you so much for
Speaker 6: this interview, and you have a great evening, James Renner.
Speaker 7: Thanks so much. Dan, it's always a pleasure.
Speaker 6: Thank you.