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Speaker 2: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 2: Killers in True crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 2: written about him Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 2: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 2: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 2: host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 3: Good Evening. Criminal defense lawyer Lisa Peebles was taken aback
Speaker 3: by a secretly recorded phone call and police interrogation video
Speaker 3: that surfaced in a twenty year old kidnapping case. They
Speaker 3: held the stench of a cover up. She recruited in
Speaker 3: a vest negative reporter to help unearth the truth and
Speaker 3: exonerate Gary Thibodeaux, the man convicted in the nineteen ninety
Speaker 3: four kidnapping and murder of eighteen year old Heidi Allen.
Speaker 3: Scrapped justice and a teen informant exposes the underbelly of
Speaker 3: a system built more for finality than justice. It's the
Speaker 3: true story of people's pursuit of new evidence against three
Speaker 3: new suspects and her discovery that Heidie had lived a
Speaker 3: double life convenience store cashier and undercover informant. The sheriff's
Speaker 3: office hid the truth about her death as the real
Speaker 3: killers Rome Free. Peebles became a de facto prosecutor to
Speaker 3: prove their guilt in Gary's innocence, as Heidie's family stood
Speaker 3: by the sheriff, who remains were likely secreted right under
Speaker 3: their noses, probably inside a scrap van and ship to
Speaker 3: a car shredder in Canada. The book that we're featuring
Speaker 3: this evening is Scrapped Justice and the team informant with
Speaker 3: my Rush. Your guests, Lisa Peebles and John O'Brien, Welcome
Speaker 3: to the program, and thank you so much for this interview.
Speaker 3: Lisa Peebles and John O'Brien.
Speaker 4: Thanks Dan, thank you, thank you so much.
Speaker 3: This is an incredible story. As I mentioned, this is
Speaker 3: an extraordinary Let's get right to your background, Lisa, and
Speaker 3: before we talk about your background, John, just for our
Speaker 3: audience to understand who you were before this incredible April third,
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety four event.
Speaker 4: Be sure.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm the federal Public Defender for the Northern District
Speaker 5: of New York and I've been working in this office
Speaker 5: and the capacity as a defense attorney for twenty two years.
Speaker 5: When Gary's case was brought to my attention, a colleague
Speaker 5: of mine had been in private practice and she had
Speaker 5: been representing him when new evidence servest. By that time,
Speaker 5: I was the head of the office, so that's when
Speaker 5: we started exploring avenues to pursue on behalf of Gary
Speaker 5: when that new evidence came to our attention. I sit
Speaker 5: in Syracuse, New York, and the case involving the kidnapping
Speaker 5: of Heidi Allen happened in Oswego County, which is about
Speaker 5: forty five minutes from Syracuse. In the Oswego County is
Speaker 5: located within the Northern District of New York, which is
Speaker 5: part of the territory that our office covers.
Speaker 3: Your background, John, Yeah, So, I.
Speaker 4: Was a reporter for the newspaper in Syracuse for thirty years.
Speaker 4: I last ten years I was there. I was an
Speaker 4: investigative reporter and one of the one of the things
Speaker 4: I covered was federal court. So I would often harass
Speaker 4: Lisa whenever I saw her and said, hey, you got
Speaker 4: any stories for me? And she was very friendly and nice,
Speaker 4: but she often said no. But then one day she said, hey,
Speaker 4: I have something brewing that you might you're definitely going
Speaker 4: to know about. And it took months for me to
Speaker 4: finally get out get it out of her about this
Speaker 4: new evidence in the Heidilan case, which was a very
Speaker 4: big case in not just Swego County but all of
Speaker 4: central New York for years.
Speaker 3: Tell us John about Easter Sunday morning, April third, nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety four and the DNW convenience store and a person
Speaker 3: at that store flagging down a passing deputy. Take us back.
Speaker 4: So, Heidi Allen was an eighteen year old cashier who
Speaker 4: worked at the D ANDW and Easter morning customers came
Speaker 4: in and realized that they were trying to buy their
Speaker 4: paper or whatever items they were buying, realized there was
Speaker 4: no clerk there, and they looked around the store, and
Speaker 4: one man realized that there might be a problem. They
Speaker 4: saw her keys on the counter, I believe, and then
Speaker 4: he went outside and flagged down a passing sheriff's deputy
Speaker 4: who came in and then looked again for the cashier
Speaker 4: for Heidi and couldn't find her. And that's when they
Speaker 4: realized something may something untoward may have happened.
Speaker 3: Now, how did police proceed with this, and they say
Speaker 3: they already had somebody flag down a deputy. So how
Speaker 3: did the police proceed with finding out what had happened
Speaker 3: to this woman?
Speaker 4: Well, they pretty quickly cordoned off the area as a
Speaker 4: possible crime scene, and then they began a search. Within
Speaker 4: an hour and a half, they started searching in the area,
Speaker 4: and the search grew as people in the area found out.
Speaker 4: Her family was told that she's missing, they got involved.
Speaker 4: They quickly. The family did put up missing posters for Heidi.
Speaker 4: The sheriff's office got search teams together and found no
Speaker 4: sign of her. Her car was left there in the
Speaker 4: parking lot, and it looked like she something must have
Speaker 4: happened to her. They the Sheriff's office that day was
Speaker 4: contacted by the New York State Police, which has a
Speaker 4: lot more resources available and more experienced the death fears.
Speaker 4: The sheriff themselves, Charles Nellis, told the state Police, we
Speaker 4: got this, we're handling it. So the state police backed
Speaker 4: off and did not get involved. One thing that Sheriff's
Speaker 4: office did not do, which most police departments would do,
Speaker 4: and it just makes common sense. They did not set
Speaker 4: up roadblocks anywhere that first day, So it was kind
Speaker 4: of odd.
Speaker 3: M hm. Now, Lisa, how did what did police think
Speaker 3: they discovered or what did did they discover? And then
Speaker 3: where was their investigation leading in terms of suspects?
Speaker 5: Almost immediately initially, they did notice a treadmark in the
Speaker 5: near the front entrance of the store, so they did
Speaker 5: take an imprint of the treadmark, but aside from that,
Speaker 5: there was no real evidence to even suggest that she
Speaker 5: was forced, that Heidi had been forcibly taken. Her keys
Speaker 5: were on the counter, along with her purse, and as
Speaker 5: John mentioned, her car was in the parking lot, so
Speaker 5: they didn't have a whole lot to go on. They
Speaker 5: set up a command center early on and the missing posters.
Speaker 5: As John suggested, the family knew she wouldn't have run
Speaker 5: off because she had a close relationship with a boyfriend
Speaker 5: who had been with her earlier that morning at the
Speaker 5: store with her she had plans to meet up with
Speaker 5: his family for Easter dinner. They knew right away that,
Speaker 5: you know, some something like John mentioned, sinister must have
Speaker 5: happened or something was you know, something was definitely wrong.
Speaker 5: But early on they had zero leads. They were really
Speaker 5: just scrambling trying to figure out what could have happened
Speaker 5: to her as far as you know, as far as
Speaker 5: the Sheriff's department was concerned. When they actually started kind
Speaker 5: of targeting Richard Thibodeaux. He was a gentleman who had
Speaker 5: gone into the store and made the last purchase. But
Speaker 5: at the time they didn't know who made the last purchase.
Speaker 5: They saw a purchase of two packs of cigarettes on
Speaker 5: the register at seven point forty two. That was the
Speaker 5: time that was on the register tape, so they had
Speaker 5: they knew the time of the last purchase. They had
Speaker 5: the treadmark in front of the store, and they had
Speaker 5: an individual who had come forward saying he was at
Speaker 5: the and walked past a gentleman in a van, but
Speaker 5: you know, and sort of describe he had a baseball
Speaker 5: hat on, but didn't see anybody else in the van
Speaker 5: or any anything of that nature. So it wasn't until
Speaker 5: a couple weeks later where they put out a reward
Speaker 5: for twenty thousand dollars and an eyewitness then came forward
Speaker 5: and said, and his name was Christopher Bivens. He said
Speaker 5: he was driving by the store and he saw two men.
Speaker 5: One was a burly, heavy set individual taller than the
Speaker 5: victim putting a girl in a bear hug and forcing
Speaker 5: her into a van, and that there was another person
Speaker 5: who he described as possibly older, who opened the door
Speaker 5: and put her in the van, but he didn't stop.
Speaker 5: He kept going and he never came forward until the
Speaker 5: reward money went out, and he was provided a photo
Speaker 5: of the van, and he said it was the right
Speaker 5: style but the wrong color, and that was his first
Speaker 5: statement to police. And he described the individual the men
Speaker 5: involved as being over five eleven or six foot tall.
Speaker 5: And then they took him by Richard's van and again
Speaker 5: he said he wasn't sure, but they told him to
Speaker 5: go home and sleep on it, which and then call
Speaker 5: him and let him know in the morning, because he
Speaker 5: said maybe he was eighty percent sure. By the time
Speaker 5: the Sheriff's department was done showing Richard's van three or
Speaker 5: four times to Christopher Bivens, he was then one hundred
Speaker 5: percent sure that that was the van he saw that
Speaker 5: day when he was driving by the DNW there is
Speaker 5: That's how Richard became They identified him as the person
Speaker 5: with the last purchase. But I would note that Richard
Speaker 5: called that mourning shortly after the kidnapping, when he saw
Speaker 5: a scroll across the television set that the convenience store
Speaker 5: worker had been as missing, and he called the Sheriff's
Speaker 5: department to identify himself as having been at the store
Speaker 5: that morning. And it was by ten o'clock when Sheriff's
Speaker 5: deputy Van Patten showed up to Richard Thibodeau's relative's house
Speaker 5: where they were having an Easter celebration, where they took
Speaker 5: a statement from Richard, and the van was there in
Speaker 5: the driveway, and he also showed the pack of cigarettes
Speaker 5: that he had purchased that morning and he gave a statement.
Speaker 5: So that's essentially how Richard became on the radar screen
Speaker 5: of the Sheriff's department as a possible suspect in the case.
Speaker 4: Yes, not exactly the exactly the actions of a kidnapper
Speaker 4: to call the police and say, hey, I was.
Speaker 3: There right now. When is it that you find out
Speaker 3: or when is it public knowledge or rumor that Heidi
Speaker 3: was a undercover informant?
Speaker 5: So early on, I was not involved in the case
Speaker 5: at all, and what I would see as snippets, and
Speaker 5: I was a young attorney when that when Heidi was kidnapped,
Speaker 5: and I remembered reading something about two brothers being suspects,
Speaker 5: and not much more was revealed other than that there
Speaker 5: was rumors because of a report that one of the
Speaker 5: defense lawyers for Richard Thibodeaux, which was Bill Walsh, he
Speaker 5: saw in a report there was a reference to Heidi
Speaker 5: Allen being an informant and that her informant file would
Speaker 5: be locked up in a safe location within the Sheriff's department.
Speaker 5: And when that was brought to the court's attention during
Speaker 5: the early stages after the Thibodeaux brothers were arrested, they
Speaker 5: wanted to know where's this file. We want to know
Speaker 5: this file, and they were told and it was publicly
Speaker 5: put out there. Well, the sheriff's deputy who wrote that
Speaker 5: was mistaken because there is no file and she was
Speaker 5: never an informant, and that was the information that was
Speaker 5: relaid to the defense attorneys. So that is where it
Speaker 5: ended that they were asserting that that was a mistake,
Speaker 5: that she wasn't an informant and there was no file,
Speaker 5: and for all those years that's what will believed.
Speaker 3: Now tell us how she became a drug informant as
Speaker 3: you discover.
Speaker 4: Well that will be probably John, you take that part, okay, Yeah,
Speaker 4: So she was fifteen years old and she was babysitting
Speaker 4: for her cousin's young daughter, one year old daughter, I believe, uh,
Speaker 4: and she went Heidi took the child with her to
Speaker 4: a drinking party and left the child in the car,
Speaker 4: and the police were notified and she was they were
Speaker 4: investigating her, possibly going to charge her with dagering the
Speaker 4: welfare of a child and you know, possibly facing charges
Speaker 4: in the family corps because Heidi was under sixteen. But
Speaker 4: instead of that her Heidi's uncle, Russell Sturtz, who was
Speaker 4: a town judge and a knew some of the deputies
Speaker 4: personally there were whose friends with them. He went to
Speaker 4: the sheriff's office and said, look, instead of getting having
Speaker 4: her charge with any how about she worked as a
Speaker 4: confidential informant for you in drug cases. And and that's
Speaker 4: what happened. But of course that didn't come up back then,
Speaker 4: that connection and then she that's how she started. She
Speaker 4: was like sixteen when she started. So she then she
Speaker 4: started handing over information about drug drug dealers in the area.
Speaker 3: And you found that this was an unusual age for
Speaker 3: confidential informants to be employed by police, wasn't it.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, we talked to other police agencies who said
Speaker 4: that absolutely they have never, had, never, and never would
Speaker 4: use someone that young. It's just too dangerous. But if well, well,
Speaker 4: the we checked the DEA standard operating procedures and on cases,
Speaker 4: and they said that if they if the DEA agent
Speaker 4: ever wanted to use anyone under eighteen as an undercover informant,
Speaker 4: they would have to get special permission and the parents
Speaker 4: would have to be involved. And an expert I talked
Speaker 4: to said that if they ever did, they would be
Speaker 4: very careful to have keep a tight rain on that
Speaker 4: person so that they could protect them and HEIGHTI got
Speaker 4: none of that. And the kin Sheriff's Office, we looked
Speaker 4: at their standard operating procedures, they had nothing about protecting
Speaker 4: underage or other informants, and nothing about how old an
Speaker 4: informant had to be.
Speaker 5: Yeah. In fact, her identity as an informant was exposed
Speaker 5: because the handling deputy and charge dropped her file, her polaroid,
Speaker 5: her pedigree information. All of that was dis dropped in
Speaker 5: the parking lot, ironically in the place she was working
Speaker 5: as a convenience store cashier, so that information was picked
Speaker 5: up from the parking lot. The Sheriff's department was called
Speaker 5: and they retrieved those documents and took them back to
Speaker 5: the Sheriff's department. But at no time was Heidi even
Speaker 5: told that her identity had been exposed in that parking lot.
Speaker 5: And it got out and people it became common to
Speaker 5: those people in the community, particularly in the drug universe,
Speaker 5: that Heidi was an informant, and she was labeled a rat.
Speaker 3: Now you write that, well, police know this, Police know
Speaker 3: of her role as a police informant, and they obviously
Speaker 3: know that Van Patten, one of the officers or sheriff deputies,
Speaker 3: dropped her information in the parking lot where she worked. Now,
Speaker 3: despite that, how do police continue their investigation and focus
Speaker 3: on the Thibodeaux brothers.
Speaker 5: Well, I'd say this too, just to be clear that
Speaker 5: when that information about Heidi had been dropped in the
Speaker 5: parking lot, she wasn't working there yet. It was almost
Speaker 5: about a year and a half before she even started
Speaker 5: working at the convenience store that her information had been exposed.
Speaker 5: So it just was kind of ironic that it happened
Speaker 5: in the very parking lot where she would eventually wind
Speaker 5: up working. In terms of why that information was brushed
Speaker 5: aside the best I can gather. First of all, the
Speaker 5: Sheriff's Department would never want to be responsible for someone's abduction,
Speaker 5: particularly if they were the ones that were careless or
Speaker 5: reckless with her information. But also they were of the
Speaker 5: opinion that they didn't really use her in the capacity
Speaker 5: as quote unquote and informant, so therefore they weren't really
Speaker 5: worried about the fact that they exposed her identity, which
Speaker 5: sort of is beside the point, because people that know
Speaker 5: about her identity or having been signed up as an
Speaker 5: informant aren't going to know or care in what capacity
Speaker 5: they were using her. They're just going to know that
Speaker 5: she's working with the Sheriff's Department. It puts her at risk.
Speaker 5: It was kind of lost on them. They wanted to
Speaker 5: just kind of brush it under the rug and act
Speaker 5: as if it was not a big deal, and then
Speaker 5: not to tell her and or her family members, including
Speaker 5: as far as I can tell, they never told her
Speaker 5: uncle Russell Sturtz that they had done that either, so
Speaker 5: you know, in all respects it was just a real
Speaker 5: reckless thing that they did, and then thereafter failed to
Speaker 5: take any actions or proactive steps to ensure her safety
Speaker 5: or to even let her know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and on that point about you know that they
Speaker 4: claimed that she never really was an informant. We have
Speaker 4: interviews of it at least three people, her boyfriend, a coworker,
Speaker 4: and a close friend who said that Heidi was telling
Speaker 4: them that she was concerned about the informing she was doing.
Speaker 4: She was concerned about a certain dangerous sky nearby. She
Speaker 4: was concerned the sheriff's elves wanted to use her in
Speaker 4: more serious drugs cases, and she expressed a lot of
Speaker 4: concern about that leading up to the kidnapping. So for
Speaker 4: them to say that we never used her, these people
Speaker 4: aren't making this up. One of them was the niece
Speaker 4: of the then under sheriff who later became Sheriff Mo Todd,
Speaker 4: and she, after the kidnapping, told her uncle about Hedi's
Speaker 4: concerns about informing, and the sheriff, according to her, just
Speaker 4: brushed it off. The under sheriff at the time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we also had a witness who we subpoened. We
Speaker 5: had to force into court because Van Patten showed up
Speaker 5: and his place of employment and was sniffing around asking
Speaker 5: if he had any information about drug dealing. Because they
Speaker 5: had a female informant that was about to make a
Speaker 5: big bus and this witness was quoted as saying, and
Speaker 5: then wham, Heidi went missing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it was he said it was in the
Speaker 4: New Haven area, which is right where the story is,
Speaker 4: New Haven, New York. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So let's get to how finally Gary and Dick Thibodeaux
Speaker 3: are charged for this kidnapping. Tell us, I mean, I
Speaker 3: know we're fast forward through a lot of information, but
Speaker 3: how does it get to this point? And tell us
Speaker 3: a little bit about the actual arrest?
Speaker 4: Lisa, you want to do it, John, go ahead? Okay, Well,
Speaker 4: so Lisa talks about this witness, Chris Bevans, who whose
Speaker 4: testimony or who met whose whose statements changed a lot
Speaker 4: over time. But because of him, the Sheriff's off as
Speaker 4: really focused on first Dick Thibodeaux, because they just got
Speaker 4: him to say basically that that was likely the ban
Speaker 4: he saw that Vivin saw that day. So they they
Speaker 4: Dick was driving with his brother in law one day
Speaker 4: and the cops swarmed over him, guns pointed and arrested him. Gary.
Speaker 4: They needed to have two people, and they found out
Speaker 4: that they had a brother because Bivens said he saw
Speaker 4: two guys, and so they didn't have enough Gary. So
Speaker 4: what they they arrested him, Well, they picked him up
Speaker 4: on a drug charge out of Massachusetts which was pending
Speaker 4: against Gary and his girlfriend, Sharon Raposa. So they had
Speaker 4: they picked him up and had him extradited to Massachusetts,
Speaker 4: which is it was a misdemeanor drug charge, which lawyers
Speaker 4: I've talked you said, that's unheard of to be extradited
Speaker 4: for that. But they got him into a jail in Massachusetts,
Speaker 4: and when he was released from there, they tracked down
Speaker 4: a couple of inmates who were near him in jail
Speaker 4: and got them to say that Gary had made admissions
Speaker 4: about about the kidnapping and he was then charged.
Speaker 5: They were and they weren't. Yeah, and it wasn't admissions.
Speaker 5: It was incriminating statements. It wasn't they had They didn't.
Speaker 5: They never said that he admitted being involved in the kidnapping.
Speaker 5: And the interesting part about that was these particular inmates
Speaker 5: were listening to Gary on the phone with his family
Speaker 5: trying to find out what was going on because he
Speaker 5: knew at that point that he was a suspect. Because
Speaker 5: it's it made the p papers and they were executing
Speaker 5: search warrants at his property and they were searching an
Speaker 5: old furnace with all these ashes and burn particles. So
Speaker 5: he was getting this information and he was relaying it
Speaker 5: because they were trying to find out why he was
Speaker 5: in and he was explaining that he was targeted as
Speaker 5: a suspect in this kidnapping. And these two particular inmates
Speaker 5: thereafter were approached by sheriff's deputies after Gary and Sharon
Speaker 5: were released on the misdemeanor drug possession charges that they
Speaker 5: had pending out Massachusetts. So Gary was already home, Sharon
Speaker 5: was already home, and the sheriff's deputies tried to find
Speaker 5: out who was in the facility with Gary, and as
Speaker 5: John mentioned, they said, he made incriminating statements like she
Speaker 5: they won't find her because she's Heidie's dead, or she
Speaker 5: was killed with a fold up army type shovel. Which
Speaker 5: we point out in the book was the case was
Speaker 5: happening simultaneous with the O. J. Simpson case and the investigation,
Speaker 5: and it was ironic because in the newspaper clippings they
Speaker 5: mentioned a fold up army type shovel that they were
Speaker 5: testing for DNA evidence, and in the O J. Simpson case.
Speaker 5: So then that became this army fulled up shovel that
Speaker 5: you know, Gary said she was hit with or something
Speaker 5: of that to that, you know, hinting around that that's
Speaker 5: what was used to kill Heidi Allen. So that's how
Speaker 5: Gary wound up being arrested. The only evidence that they
Speaker 5: had there was nobody that plays Gary at the store.
Speaker 5: No one identifies Gary ever being there. It was just
Speaker 5: these two jailhouse informants who made these statements that thereafter
Speaker 5: provided the Sheriff's department with evidence to you know, if
Speaker 5: you want to call it, that, to arrest Gary and
Speaker 5: charge him along with Dick.
Speaker 4: And as is often the case, like almost always the case,
Speaker 4: these in it's got a deal on their own pending
Speaker 4: charges in exchange for their testimony. Yep, and something else.
Speaker 4: Now you take this, Can I just say one more thing?
Speaker 4: One more thing, just sure, Goad, Well, just the least
Speaker 4: that pointed out that Gary was never nobody has placed
Speaker 4: in there, and that there was almost no evidence. The
Speaker 4: Sheriff's office also did a complete sweep of the van
Speaker 4: for anything, looking for anything that would link Heidi to it, hair,
Speaker 4: blood or whatever, so lot of it they could find nothing,
Speaker 4: so nothing of her in there at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, despite no forensic evidence tying Gary or Dick to
Speaker 3: this at all. With Gary was the first person to
Speaker 3: go to trial, and Dick would go second. You read
Speaker 3: the trial transcripts, if you were in that courtroom at
Speaker 3: that time, what would you have what would you have
Speaker 3: guessed would have been the outcome? Based on the proceedings themselves, Lisa.
Speaker 5: Well, I would say that they clearly didn't prove guilt
Speaker 5: beyond a reasonable doubt based on the information that was
Speaker 5: presented to and the evidence presented to the jury. And
Speaker 5: we since the conviction. John actually interviewed one of the
Speaker 5: jurors who said, well, we figured he must have done
Speaker 5: something that the sheriff must know something we don't know,
Speaker 5: because why would they have arrested him, So they voted guilty.
Speaker 5: I mean that was sort of the mindset of the
Speaker 5: jurors thinking, well, something must have happened because you know.
Speaker 5: And then of course Christopher Bivens was testifying that he
Speaker 5: was one hundred percent confident that that was the van
Speaker 5: he saw, although his testimony was completely incredible when you
Speaker 5: look at what he originally stated when he called, when
Speaker 5: he made his first call, in how his you know,
Speaker 5: his test, his statements kind of evolved. So that was it.
Speaker 5: That was a sum total of their evidence and the
Speaker 5: mentality of the jurors at the time, and the community
Speaker 5: outrage that this eighteen year old young woman was kidnapped.
Speaker 5: You know, that's how they viewed it. And I think
Speaker 5: that if I were looking at the record, there clearly
Speaker 5: was not enough evidence to suggest that Gary had anything
Speaker 5: to do. There was no motive. They could never point
Speaker 5: to a single reason why Gary and or Richard would
Speaker 5: have ever been involved in the kidnapping of Heidi Allen.
Speaker 4: And I could say I lived in the area that's
Speaker 4: in Mexico, New York, which is right near Newhaven back then,
Speaker 4: and I remember I didn't wasn't covering it as a reporter,
Speaker 4: but I remember the talk in town was, well, he's
Speaker 4: going to be before the verdict came in, he's going
Speaker 4: to be acquitted. It's just they haven't presented any evidence,
Speaker 4: and you know, we're just stunned that he was convicted.
Speaker 4: One that was most stunned was Gary himself. And there's
Speaker 4: a picture in the book of his reaction. He throws
Speaker 4: his head back, his mouth is open, he's just absolutely
Speaker 4: blown away. And again, this juror I interviewed years later.
Speaker 4: You know, she even said that the jailhouse snitches really
Speaker 4: weren't had no effect on them. They just really thought, well,
Speaker 4: this is the police brought him here, they charged him,
Speaker 4: they must be guilty, which of course is not the
Speaker 4: standard at all credible, you know, but.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, I'll apologize. I was just going to mention
Speaker 5: that jailhouse informants do increase the likelihood of conviction, even
Speaker 5: though in the back of the juror's mind they may
Speaker 5: not think that they're that credible, but they do in
Speaker 5: fact rely on the testimony of jailhouse informants. Even though
Speaker 5: I think it cuts again there, you know what they
Speaker 5: would really believe in what they would want in terms
Speaker 5: of evidence. It does unfortunately have a greater greater impact
Speaker 5: than you would think.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And on that point, we interviewed Lisa, and I
Speaker 4: interviewed a former assistant DA in the Oswego County DIA's office,
Speaker 4: who said that the assistant DA who handled this case,
Speaker 4: Donald god, had a reputation for using jail house informants
Speaker 4: in almost every case, and the prisoners, the inmates all
Speaker 4: knew about it. They knew, Hey, you want to cut
Speaker 4: a deel, this guy is the guy to go to.
Speaker 4: So they had an incentive makeup make up claims that
Speaker 4: another inmate confessed to them.
Speaker 3: You right too. That One of the important things that
Speaker 3: happened in this trial was and then the investigation was
Speaker 3: that Chris Bivens testimony changed as terms of the high
Speaker 3: description of the suspects that he reported, yes, yeah, a.
Speaker 5: Thing about that. Yeah. And and the interesting thing is
Speaker 5: Richard and Gary are both shorter than Heidi Allen. And
Speaker 5: there you could not mistake somebody behind Heidi Allen putting
Speaker 5: her in a bear hug. And the description that Vivins
Speaker 5: gives is that the suspect was taller than Heidi Allen,
Speaker 5: which was eleven n five eleven.
Speaker 4: He had he initially put the guys at six foot
Speaker 4: and even over six foot by the end, but one
Speaker 4: time he was done, he had shrunk him down to
Speaker 4: like five seven, which is Gary and Richard is five
Speaker 4: five six five five, nowhere near what he was saying.
Speaker 4: And that was that that really changed over time with
Speaker 4: some coaxing from the sheriff of the theaters.
Speaker 3: Now with this as well, Dick, his brother Richard was
Speaker 3: supposed to go second. So what happens in his trial,
Speaker 3: and he has the benefit of not having jailhouse informants
Speaker 3: as part of the information against him.
Speaker 4: Right he was he was acquitted, and again, like I said,
Speaker 4: the big, huge difference was no jailhouse informants. But Dick,
Speaker 4: once Gary was convicted, he assumed, Okay, I'm next, They're
Speaker 4: going to convict me. He had no hope because he
Speaker 4: knew that the evidence wasn't there. But this other jury
Speaker 4: convicted his brother anyway, so they Dick had been out
Speaker 4: on bail when Gary was convicted. The person who posted
Speaker 4: the bail wanted it back because he might they fund
Speaker 4: might flee. He was arrested again and went to trial,
Speaker 4: but he was acquitted. And I did talk to his
Speaker 4: jurors years later, who I think I thought to five
Speaker 4: or six of them who were stunned that by the
Speaker 4: lack of evidence. They were actually very kind of upset
Speaker 4: about it. How could you charge this guy? And they
Speaker 4: questioned how the other jury could possibly convict Gary.
Speaker 5: And the other note that Richard had a bit of
Speaker 5: an advantage over Gary is that right before Gary was
Speaker 5: going to be sentenced, there was information that was leaked
Speaker 5: to the defense team to disclose the fact that Heidi
Speaker 5: Allen had kept a couple of diaries and those diaries
Speaker 5: hadn't been turned over to the defense, So the defense
Speaker 5: made a motion for a mistrial and thought sanctions and
Speaker 5: alleged Brady violations, and the court took the diaries, looked
Speaker 5: at them and basically suggested that the Thibodeaus were not
Speaker 5: ever mentioned in the diary, but it was private information
Speaker 5: and he wasn't inclined to turn it over and didn't
Speaker 5: believe it was Brady. So in Richard's trial, the defense
Speaker 5: attorney was able to argue to the jury, look, Heidi
Speaker 5: kept diary and the Thibodaus were never mentioned in any
Speaker 5: of her diaries as to suggests that she had no
Speaker 5: contact or issues with the Thibodeaux brothers, so he had
Speaker 5: that advantage. And second, he also had a report that
Speaker 5: was the information about Heidi's informant status being exposed and
Speaker 5: dropped in the parking lot of the DNW, although he
Speaker 5: did not he was not given her informant file, and
Speaker 5: they were downplaying the fact that he was an informant,
Speaker 5: and they were arguing that she was never used as
Speaker 5: an informant. But they never turned over the polaroid picture,
Speaker 5: the pedigree, or the index card to Richard's attorney either.
Speaker 5: But he did have a suggestion that would point to
Speaker 5: somebody else. So Richard had an advantage over Gary as
Speaker 5: far as you know, the arguments to be made as
Speaker 5: to why it wasn't the Thibodeaux because as I mentioned before,
Speaker 5: there was no motive and they couldn't point to a
Speaker 5: motive that as to why the Thibodaus would ever have
Speaker 5: been involved in kidnapping Heidi Allen.
Speaker 3: Now you write about Randy Bianco, and she got involved
Speaker 3: in Gary's case shortly after he was convicted. She handled
Speaker 3: the appeal. Yes, tell me a little bit about Brittany
Speaker 3: Link and Randy Bianco's efforts.
Speaker 5: You want to take that chance, Well, I'll go ahead
Speaker 5: of this. Well, she was a young girl who lived
Speaker 5: across the street from Gary. It was actually kind of
Speaker 5: kitty corner, It wasn't directly across the street. And several
Speaker 5: months after Gary was charged, she came forward and said
Speaker 5: that she remembered waking up, going into the bathroom and
Speaker 5: going back to bed, and she looked out the window
Speaker 5: and she said she saw Richard's van and Gary's driveway,
Speaker 5: and it was shortly before that Easter morning, Yeah, the
Speaker 5: morning that Heidi was kidnapped. She's looking out her bedroom
Speaker 5: window saying that she saw Richard's van and Gary's driveway.
Speaker 5: So she testified during the trial, and basically what the
Speaker 5: DA's office the prosecutors attempting to do is to put
Speaker 5: Richard at Gary's house to kind of put them together
Speaker 5: Easter morning, because there was no witness that saw Gary
Speaker 5: anywhere near the DNW. So after Gary was convicted, Brandy
Speaker 5: had information to suggest that Britney Link was recanting, and
Speaker 5: her along with an investigator, videotaped Britney Link saying that
Speaker 5: she thought maybe it was a dream, and whenever she
Speaker 5: would say that it was a dream, the prosecutor said, well,
Speaker 5: if I were you, kiddo, I wouldn't say that, And
Speaker 5: she said that she felt pressured and that she doesn't
Speaker 5: really know because she had seen Richard's van over there
Speaker 5: on different days and it may not have been Easter morning,
Speaker 5: and that if it were Easter morning, she probably would
Speaker 5: have gone to get her Easter basket, but she didn't
Speaker 5: that morning. She went back to bed, so it was
Speaker 5: a pretty powerful recantation of what she had testified to
Speaker 5: in court, and it was videotaped, and Randy made emotion
Speaker 5: and again seeking a mistrial, and that motion was denied,
Speaker 5: and Britney Link recanted her recantation and said that, you know,
Speaker 5: Randy pressured her into saying that, but unfortunately or fortunately
Speaker 5: for Randy, she videotaped it and clearly there was no
Speaker 5: pressuring of any kind whatsoever. But the judge again just
Speaker 5: denied the defense request and that was the end of
Speaker 5: it as far as Brittany Link, and then Randy pursued
Speaker 5: the appeal with the Fourth Department.
Speaker 4: The amazing part of that, ad Lisa, go ahead, John,
Speaker 4: Now I just said, the amazing part of that not
Speaker 4: only was that that Brittany recanted, but the story that
Speaker 4: she told about the prosecutor Donald did over and over
Speaker 4: kind of hinting at her. You know, let's not talk
Speaker 4: about thinking that it was a dream or that it
Speaker 4: was a different day, and you know, he's the he's
Speaker 4: he looks really bad in this scenario. But go ahead,
Speaker 4: Lisa with what happened after that, Well.
Speaker 5: It was just you know, and then she Randy handled
Speaker 5: the appeal and the Fourth apartment denied the appeal and
Speaker 5: furthermore added that there was overwhelming evidence against Gary and
Speaker 5: that you know that the diaries weren't Brady material. While
Speaker 5: they didn't even have the diaries because Donald Dodd didn't
Speaker 5: the diaries never made it to the appellate court, so
Speaker 5: nobody read those diaries. But they decided that there was
Speaker 5: overwhelming evidence and that was that. And then Randy went
Speaker 5: to the Court of Appeals seeking leave to appeal, and
Speaker 5: they refused to hear the case. So she never made
Speaker 5: it to the Court of Appeals, which is the highest
Speaker 5: court in New York. And then she filed a habeas
Speaker 5: petition again arguing that his constitutional rights Brady violations regarding
Speaker 5: the diaries and again, and she was also attacking the
Speaker 5: statute under which Gary was convicted that there was a
Speaker 5: presumption of death for the first toe kidnapping in New
Speaker 5: York State. Neither one of those arguments prevailed, and after
Speaker 5: that his avenues had been exhausted.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so ited to talk about Brady mat So
Speaker 4: you've mentioned that a couple of times. Just real quick,
Speaker 4: Brady material is.
Speaker 3: Let's u says, as an opportunity, sorry, Lisa and John,
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Speaker 3: we were talking about Bianco Randy Bianco losing the appeal,
Speaker 3: and in the book you are exposing and showing the
Speaker 3: reader and now our listeners that there was this manipulation
Speaker 3: by the prosecution and some funny business from the Sheriff's
Speaker 3: department in this weega there, Let's talk about how you
Speaker 3: get involved, Lisa, and after that, how John you become
Speaker 3: so inextricably involved.
Speaker 5: Okay, sure, So in twenty thirteen, Randy was in private
Speaker 5: practice and I had a vacancy in my office and
Speaker 5: she applied for the position as an assistant federal public
Speaker 5: defender and I hired her. So she sold her practice
Speaker 5: because she had been an experienced criminal defense lawyer for
Speaker 5: many years and she had a solid reputation, and she
Speaker 5: also had a ticket business. So she sold her practice
Speaker 5: and came to work for me. Probably six months into
Speaker 5: working for me, she came into my office, upset because
Speaker 5: she heard that a woman was trying to reach her
Speaker 5: and called her old number from her old law office,
Speaker 5: and it went to the individuals that purchased her business
Speaker 5: and had information regarding Gary Gary's case that would exonerate him,
Speaker 5: and apparently, well what happened was that information was relayed
Speaker 5: to the DA's office, and at the time the DA
Speaker 5: was Greg Oaks, and they bypassed Randy and she didn't
Speaker 5: know about it. She just happened to you call get it.
Speaker 5: It just happened to come up in conversation that this
Speaker 5: woman had been looking for. When Randy found that out,
Speaker 5: she tried to get a hold of Greg Oaks, who
Speaker 5: then refused to give her the information, and he said,
Speaker 5: the woman doesn't want to talk to you. And Randy
Speaker 5: was outraged because the woman tried to reach her, so
Speaker 5: why wouldn't she want to talk to her, But in
Speaker 5: any event, he agreed to follow up on this new
Speaker 5: information and keep her in the loop. So meanwhile, I
Speaker 5: didn't really have much to do with what was going on.
Speaker 5: She would occasionally come in and kind of update me
Speaker 5: into what she was being told by the DA's office.
Speaker 5: And then one day she got a packet of information,
Speaker 5: a lot of CDs and came to the office and
Speaker 5: they said, we're not doing anything with the new information.
Speaker 5: It's not credible and the witness who came forward is incredible.
Speaker 5: So Randy had a lot of CDs to listen to.
Speaker 5: So my investigator at the time thought he would listen
Speaker 5: to him when he had a minute, and that's when
Speaker 5: he heard the monitored call and listened to interrogation of
Speaker 5: a woman who was involved in this monitored call making
Speaker 5: admissions about what she knew regarding Heidie's disappearance. And then
Speaker 5: Randy was up in arms and came back to me.
Speaker 5: And I didn't know how I could get involved in
Speaker 5: the case because it was a state case and we
Speaker 5: were federal defenders. So we tried to recruit lawyers to
Speaker 5: take the case. It was an enormous undertaking and it
Speaker 5: would be very difficult to do because it would essentially
Speaker 5: be a pro bono situation. There is very was broken.
Speaker 5: He's been in prison all these years, he had no
Speaker 5: he didn't have a nicoldup to his name, So you know,
Speaker 5: we lingered, and my investigator and I had tried to
Speaker 5: do some different things that he had suggested to maybe
Speaker 5: kind of, you know, really get the ball rolling, so
Speaker 5: that maybe we could get the interest of a local
Speaker 5: attorney and maybe somebody would take on the cause. And
Speaker 5: of course the Innocent Project wouldn't take it because we
Speaker 5: didn't have there's no body, no DNA, So it was
Speaker 5: just going to be a lot of investigation, a lot
Speaker 5: of work, a lot and a huge undertaking. So we
Speaker 5: finally my investigator suggested, you know, why don't you call
Speaker 5: the paper and let them expose this. And we thought
Speaker 5: about it for a while, and I was a little
Speaker 5: reluctant initially, but then when I realized, here we have
Speaker 5: this innocent man sitting in prison, and I was so
Speaker 5: blown away by what I was listening to and what
Speaker 5: I was seeing that I just couldn't sit back and
Speaker 5: not do anything with this information. So I passed it
Speaker 5: along to On and John right away, you know, and
Speaker 5: he'll tell you what he was doing, but you know,
Speaker 5: he confronted one of the jail house informants off the bat,
Speaker 5: and then John learned about Dick having his case file
Speaker 5: in a shed. So my investigator and I ran over
Speaker 5: to the house and we grabbed all these boxes because
Speaker 5: I wanted to go through his file and see if
Speaker 5: there was anything in there that wasn't in Gary's file.
Speaker 5: That's where I discovered the reports regarding Heidi's informant information
Speaker 5: being dropped in the parking lot. When I asked Randy
Speaker 5: whether she'd ever heard of such a thing, she was
Speaker 5: blown away because she had never heard about Heidi being
Speaker 5: an informant or that her information had been dropped in
Speaker 5: the parking lot. Only that, you know, they denied she
Speaker 5: was ever an informant. So that's when I went to
Speaker 5: my chief judge and asked whether I could be appointed
Speaker 5: in the case because I believed constitutional violations had taken
Speaker 5: place that weren't previously brought up because they weren't known
Speaker 5: when Randy filed the original habeas petition and family or
Speaker 5: at federal court regarding the diaries and the attack on
Speaker 5: the actual statute. So he said yes, and I said, well,
Speaker 5: I have to go into state court likely because we
Speaker 5: have to exhaust all of the state court remedies before
Speaker 5: we can bring into federal court. And the chief judge
Speaker 5: appointed me and allowed me to get involved in this case.
Speaker 5: So meanwhile John's doing his investigation and now I'm on
Speaker 5: the case and we're doing our investigation, and that's kind
Speaker 5: of how it all sort of began.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I'll play with how I got involved. Like
Speaker 4: I said, Lisa was a source of mine and I
Speaker 4: always bugger for, you know, good cases. And then one
Speaker 4: day she called me and said, I do have one
Speaker 4: that This was probably early twenty fourteen, months after she
Speaker 4: Randy had heard about this and witness and she told
Speaker 4: Lisa told me then okay, Heidi Allen, and I got
Speaker 4: my ears perked up. And it took me another couple
Speaker 4: of months to get her to say. She called me
Speaker 4: and said, just I can't tell you what it is.
Speaker 4: I just want you to come over to my office
Speaker 4: and listen to something. So of course I ran right over,
Speaker 4: and I at least have played for me recording the
Speaker 4: recording of the phone call between the new witness who
Speaker 4: came forward, Tanya Priest, and this woman Jennifer Westcott. The
Speaker 4: Sheriff's office had set up the call, they were monitoring it,
Speaker 4: and Tanya I was working with them, but Jennifer didn't
Speaker 4: know if she was talking to anyone but this friend.
Speaker 4: And I sat there and listened to Jennifer Westcott say
Speaker 4: things like they wouldn't even bring her Heidi in the house.
Speaker 4: They made her sit in the van. She said, this
Speaker 4: thing has been in my head all these years. There's
Speaker 4: no way I would tell I would ever tell the
Speaker 4: investig because I don't want to open that can of worms.
Speaker 4: And I was, you know, flabbergasted. This was the first
Speaker 4: time that someone, to my knowledge ever knew said something
Speaker 4: that they knew what happened to Heidi after she was kidnapped. Right, uh,
Speaker 4: and then Lisa. Then Lisa also said, now you've got
Speaker 4: to watch this interrogation video that the sheriff's investigator had
Speaker 4: this Jennifer Westcott. After the call, they called her in
Speaker 4: to interrogate interrogate her about it. And this investigator, Petrotsky,
Speaker 4: did a good job of getting Jennifer to to base
Speaker 4: the heat, but she absolutely lied about that phone call,
Speaker 4: so she didn't know was recorded. Then he confronts her
Speaker 4: and says, well, this is this is what you said.
Speaker 4: And she is blown away. She's taken aback. She thinks
Speaker 4: she's in big trouble because they have the recording. But
Speaker 4: at the end of that video, Petrotsky just says, no,
Speaker 4: no problem, You're not gonna be in trouble. I'm just gonna,
Speaker 4: We're gonna, We're going to squash this is what he said.
Speaker 4: So I knew two things at that point. One is
Speaker 4: that the Thibodeaux were absolutely innocent and that the Sheriff's
Speaker 4: office was covering it up. So I was just rev
Speaker 4: ready to go, and then I started my investigation. Lisa
Speaker 4: did hers. We would talk back and forth and not
Speaker 4: share everything, but we're sort of working together and apart.
Speaker 3: After that, you went to your editor John at the
Speaker 3: Post Standard, and at first you write that he assigned
Speaker 3: you to do this. He said, yeah, go ahead, but
Speaker 3: cover these other cases as well, and he had no
Speaker 3: idea how you could really focus on this properly. And
Speaker 3: then a week later your editor came to you and said,
Speaker 3: look at this is important. Don't do anything else, go
Speaker 3: for this.
Speaker 4: Which was surprising because this was at a time when
Speaker 4: the hold A newspaper business was in a evil and
Speaker 4: they were just trying to get quick stories up as
Speaker 4: fast as possible. Whereas back two or three years earlier,
Speaker 4: we would have they would have quickly put taken me
Speaker 4: off everything else but this. So yes, they did give
Speaker 4: me free reign to just through nothing. But this. It
Speaker 4: was a full time job from there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So Lisa, what do you do on John? What
Speaker 3: do you do in terms of this information that you
Speaker 3: now have this information, this new information? Uh, Lisa, what
Speaker 3: do you do? You think it's enough to be able
Speaker 3: to get another hearing and how do you proceed with that?
Speaker 5: Yeah? So I thought the phone call in and of itself,
Speaker 5: in combination with the interrogation and Jennifer Westcutt's obvious lies
Speaker 5: throughout questioning by Petrowski, would be funny to get Gary
Speaker 5: a new trial because there wasn't any evidence against him
Speaker 5: to begin with. And now we have somebody admitting that,
Speaker 5: you know, they brought her over high over to her
Speaker 5: house but made her sit in the van. And it
Speaker 5: wasn't the Thibodaux. It was these three new suspects that
Speaker 5: were mentioned in this phone call. So at that point
Speaker 5: I felt like we have enough. We were then trying
Speaker 5: to find out if we could find a cabin in
Speaker 5: the woods based on the statement by the witness who
Speaker 5: had come forward, who initiated or who they monitored the
Speaker 5: call with Jennifer Westcott. So we were spending a lot
Speaker 5: of time trying to figure out where there was a
Speaker 5: cabin in the woods and whether or not we could
Speaker 5: find out, you know, if her, in fact, Heidie's remains
Speaker 5: were out there, because that would that would really clinch
Speaker 5: it for us. So we were trying to do that
Speaker 5: and it just so happened that when John published his
Speaker 5: first story, a witness called and said, oh, there is
Speaker 5: another cabin. My son built a cabin of years back,
Speaker 5: and it's right across the street on Rice Road, which
Speaker 5: is exactly where the witness had come forward and said
Speaker 5: Westcott was staying and there was a cabin. So it
Speaker 5: was it was sort of matching up with where this
Speaker 5: Kanya priest when she came forward, suggested that Steen, one
Speaker 5: of the three new suspects, said Heidi had been taken
Speaker 5: to and chopped up and put under floorboards. So John,
Speaker 5: you can kind of take over from there, and that's where,
Speaker 5: you know, we kind of really started coming together trying
Speaker 5: to find out if we could get, you know, find
Speaker 5: Heidi's remains.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so Lisa's investigator, Dick Harman, and I went together.
Speaker 4: We decided it would work better to try to find
Speaker 4: this cabin, and we interviewed people in the neighborhood who
Speaker 4: pointed us to one cabin, and then then there was nothing.
Speaker 4: We dug it up. There was nothing there, and that's
Speaker 4: when I published my first story about the new evidence,
Speaker 4: and like Lisa said, I got a text I think
Speaker 4: from this woman who's talked about this father cabin. So
Speaker 4: we agreed. We quickly went out there. Harman and I did,
Speaker 4: and we got to that cabin and found it was
Speaker 4: completely disheveled, dug up. Someone had been there recently, which
Speaker 4: we just freaked out. We thought, okay, because of the
Speaker 4: story that I published, maybe the kidnappers came out here
Speaker 4: and got what they wanted got maybe possibly remained or
Speaker 4: something that didn't turn off to be the reason it
Speaker 4: was dug up. But we so right at the scene.
Speaker 4: We called the police and then Greg Oaks the DA
Speaker 4: to get out there because we didn't want to be
Speaker 4: accused of doing anything improper. So Oak came out. It
Speaker 4: took a long time for him, I think, to convince
Speaker 4: the Sheriff's office to come out because it was based
Speaker 4: on the newspaper and the public Defender's office information. They
Speaker 4: finally came out and they dug around and.
Speaker 3: Uh. They used a.
Speaker 4: State police cadaver or dog, which alerted to the scent
Speaker 4: of human remains. Near the cabin, right next to the cabin.
Speaker 4: But they they they sifted through that there, didn't find anything,
Speaker 4: and just they left. I will say that they all
Speaker 4: they what they left behind were things like a mattress
Speaker 4: and some carpets and you know wood that could have
Speaker 4: you know, had Hee's blood on them, he said, would
Speaker 4: have been a bloody scene. And they just left them,
Speaker 4: never tested them, and they never they never took soil samples.
Speaker 4: This is key that said that they never brought anything
Speaker 4: back to test for chemicals that that would have you know,
Speaker 4: been would have been in the soil from heii's body.
Speaker 4: Just left it. They did the most basic rudimentary search
Speaker 4: and found nothing and said, okay, we're done.
Speaker 5: Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And on that note, you know the fresh digging around,
Speaker 5: we obviously know who was involved with that, but whether
Speaker 5: someone was there digging around prior to that. For example,
Speaker 5: Westcott was interviewed in twenty Her original interview was in
Speaker 5: twenty fourteen, so twenty thirteen or twenty thirteen, excuse me.
Speaker 5: So when she was interviewed in twenty thirteen, she told
Speaker 5: one of the new suspects, the boyfriend that she was
Speaker 5: with at the time, Heidi was abducted. That you know,
Speaker 5: she had been interviewed about the Heidie Allen case. I
Speaker 5: mean she let them know that. So there was no
Speaker 5: effort on the part of the Sheriff's department to search
Speaker 5: for a cabin based on the information. And then Westcott
Speaker 5: has knowledge that there's this new information that someone's coming forward,
Speaker 5: and so we don't know what happened between her interview
Speaker 5: in March of twenty thirteen and fast forward to August
Speaker 5: of twenty fourteen when the Sheriff's Department started doing this
Speaker 5: dig at Rice Road at the cabin and again, and
Speaker 5: as John mentioned, they didn't do any sort of soil
Speaker 5: sample testing where the dog alerted, which would have been
Speaker 5: important because the gases and the decomposition of the human
Speaker 5: body would have certainly revealed whether or not more accurate
Speaker 5: before they started digging around and sifting through all the
Speaker 5: dirt and diluting it whether in fact there were human
Speaker 5: remains there. But again the dog alerted to it.
Speaker 3: So that Jesus as an opportunity, John Lisa, just for
Speaker 3: a second, the stop for these messages.
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Speaker 3: Now, we talked about that police should have done things
Speaker 3: like tested that soil for human remains. But what we
Speaker 3: haven't talked about is the general conversation between all of
Speaker 3: these people that you get to talk in bits and pieces,
Speaker 3: and especially from the transcripts from Wescott talking about that
Speaker 3: she's still afraid of these peop people. Let's talk about
Speaker 3: James Steen, Roger Breckinridge, and Michael Bowrier. And as you
Speaker 3: write in the book, Michael Borier was the guy that
Speaker 3: would go in to the D and W and get
Speaker 3: Heidi to make him blt every time she was on shift.
Speaker 3: So let's talk about James Steen and Roger Breckinridge and
Speaker 3: Michael Boyer.
Speaker 5: Okay, so those were the three named new suspects based
Speaker 5: on the statement by Tanya Priest who came forward and
Speaker 5: taking Steen first. He was the one that was spouting
Speaker 5: off to Tanya Priest that he knew what happened to
Speaker 5: Heidi Allen, that she was a rat, and that they
Speaker 5: kidnapped her using Michael Boor's van, and that they chopped
Speaker 5: her up, put her under the floorboards of a cabin
Speaker 5: and you know, nobody'll he'll never go to prison or
Speaker 5: do a day in and for what they did to
Speaker 5: Heidi Allen, and he so much has bragged about it
Speaker 5: to other people. It wasn't just Tanya Priest. There were
Speaker 5: individuals that were disconnected to Tanya Priest where he made
Speaker 5: similar claims that Heidi was a rat and that he
Speaker 5: was taking care of her because you know she or
Speaker 5: even disposing of her body on behalf of a motorcycle gang.
Speaker 5: He had mentioned to one of our witnesses that we called.
Speaker 5: But important to note is that when he was making
Speaker 5: these statements about Heidi Allen, he was in sense that
Speaker 5: his estranged wife and he were having marital problems and
Speaker 5: he was threatening to kill her and as part of that,
Speaker 5: he was basically bragging that he you know, don't think
Speaker 5: that I won't because I've already done it, you know.
Speaker 5: And in fact, he did kill his estranged wife along
Speaker 5: with his cousin because they were seeing each other, and
Speaker 5: he went and while his young child was walking around
Speaker 5: in a diaper at the place where the mother was staying,
Speaker 5: he execution style shot and killed both of them. And
Speaker 5: he was holed up in this department while the Sheriff's
Speaker 5: department was negotiating him to come out and turn himself in.
Speaker 5: And John, you might want to take over on that
Speaker 5: part of the James Stein thing, what you discovered during
Speaker 5: the investigation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that was in twenty ten, right, Lisa, twenty.
Speaker 5: Ten minute that was nomber of double murders yep.
Speaker 4: September twenty ten. So when I got involved in this
Speaker 4: in the Heidi case, I filed a freedom information request
Speaker 4: with the DA's office and the Sheriff's office for everything
Speaker 4: on Steen's murder, the twenty double murders that he committed
Speaker 4: in twenty ten, including the all the texts and phone
Speaker 4: calls he made over a period, and the jail calls,
Speaker 4: the recordings of him talking looking through the texts that
Speaker 4: came in his phone, and I noticed one that was
Speaker 4: minutes after he killed his ex strange wife and his cousin,
Speaker 4: and it said Heidi question mark Chow And it just
Speaker 4: jumped out at me, like why, what could that be about?
Speaker 4: And we would find out later that that came from
Speaker 4: the phone of a guy he was hanging, he was
Speaker 4: drinking with the night before. And there's no other Heidi
Speaker 4: in Stein's life. He testified to that there's no other
Speaker 4: heid he it could possibly be. But the guy who
Speaker 4: sent it was belligerent with me and the sheriff's office
Speaker 4: and interviewed him that he didn't know was about. And
Speaker 4: but that is an unanswered question, what did that mean?
Speaker 4: And this is the guy, the guy who sent it
Speaker 4: is the guy who Steen borrowed his truck the night
Speaker 4: before and drove the truck to the scene where he
Speaker 4: committed the murders.
Speaker 5: Yes, Stein drove this guy's truck. And this guy wakes
Speaker 5: up in the morning and sees this crime scene tape
Speaker 5: and his truck like right in the middle of on
Speaker 5: the media coverage, and that's what prompted him to shoot
Speaker 5: the text. He tried calling Stein because you see him
Speaker 5: this call and then that's when the text message was sent.
Speaker 5: But during the course of the hearing they could not
Speaker 5: explain it, and then they were denying having sent it
Speaker 5: and having received it or no memory of it, etc.
Speaker 5: So there was never any explanation provided with regard to
Speaker 5: what that meant and why he sent it. But it's obvious.
Speaker 4: So then that's Stein. And then Breckinridge was a guy
Speaker 4: who had known Stein and done drugs with him for years,
Speaker 4: had all kinds of criminal history and he would hang
Speaker 4: out with Stein and Border and he was dating living
Speaker 4: well dating this Jennifer Westcott who was in the call
Speaker 4: made That was involvement that phone call, right, and he
Speaker 4: uh was kind of a low life.
Speaker 3: So then what was their connection? What was their connection
Speaker 3: to the scrap yard? Oh?
Speaker 4: Good point. Yes, they both all three all three would
Speaker 4: would bring scrap cars to the to a scrap yard
Speaker 4: in Volney, New York that was owned by the Mertaw family.
Speaker 4: So they were all involved in that. That'd be Breckinridge,
Speaker 4: Steam and Border, so they knew each other that way
Speaker 4: and that that was that was going on for years.
Speaker 5: Steam did a lot of the transport of the crushed
Speaker 5: cars to different scrapyard in Canada, and Roger kind of
Speaker 5: hung around at the scrap yard and worked there, and
Speaker 5: Borr learned that scrapping steel or cars was profitable and started,
Speaker 5: you know, kind of nosing around the scrap yard. We
Speaker 5: also had him from to suggest that there were a
Speaker 5: lot of drugs that were flowing in and around the
Speaker 5: scrapyard in Lawney.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you endeavors to talk to all of these people, John,
Speaker 3: and but who do you target and to who do
Speaker 3: you think is the best bet out of the three
Speaker 3: to be able to give you information? And how do
Speaker 3: you plan on approaching him?
Speaker 4: Well, so when I started out, I thought, well, Stein
Speaker 4: was he was sentenced to uh life in prison without
Speaker 4: the possibility of parole. So I thought, here's a guy,
Speaker 4: he has nothing to lose. So I wrote him a
Speaker 4: couple of letters trying to get him to, you know,
Speaker 4: to do the right thing. You know, you're you've made
Speaker 4: some bad decisions in your life, but you can do
Speaker 4: one good thing. And uh he wrote back and denied
Speaker 4: any anything and everything and called ten your priest a
Speaker 4: big liar. And so I got nowhere with him, and
Speaker 4: then I tracked down Michael Boorr at he was living
Speaker 4: in a an r V on Ellen Road, you know,
Speaker 4: kind of ironically same west name as the victim here.
Speaker 4: And I confronted him. I recorded the interview. He he
Speaker 4: when I eventually told him, look, you're being someone said
Speaker 4: you were involved in this, you were part of this kidnapping,
Speaker 4: he denied it up and down, and you know, he
Speaker 4: was upset with me for asking. And he did acknowledge
Speaker 4: that he knew that Heidi's out. Heidi, Heidi's informant cart
Speaker 4: had been dropped in the parking lot. And I said, well,
Speaker 4: how did you know that it wasn't public? He said, oh,
Speaker 4: it came out in the in the media. I said, no,
Speaker 4: it didn't. It absolutely did not. And he said, oh,
Speaker 4: well it came out in the trial then, and I
Speaker 4: said no, I looked at the transcript, Garies, Transcript's not
Speaker 4: in there. And then he said, oh, word of mouth, Mutt.
Speaker 4: So he admitted he heard word of mouth back then
Speaker 4: that Heidi was an informant and this is the guy
Speaker 4: who was dealing drugs that Lisa. Lisa confronted him after that,
Speaker 4: and she can tell you about that. She did by herself.
Speaker 5: So yeah, we knew that. Michael Bohr had talked to
Speaker 5: investigators after Westcott's phone monitor call with priests, and we listened.
Speaker 5: I listened to the audio of that, and I couldn't
Speaker 5: believe some of the information that he was giving and
Speaker 5: the lack of follow up. He said that the reason
Speaker 5: he could not have been involved in the kidnapping of
Speaker 5: Heidie Ellen is because the ten commandment stal shall not kill.
Speaker 5: And he has a daughter the same age as Heidi,
Speaker 5: and he couldn't believe that an eighteen year old young
Speaker 5: girl would come missing. And oh, by the way, I
Speaker 5: wrote a lot about the case, and I collected a
Speaker 5: lot of articles, and he takes the sheriff's deputies over
Speaker 5: to his trailer and has this box of information that
Speaker 5: he collected in a lot of writings that he created
Speaker 5: about the case and theories that he wrote, and gave
Speaker 5: that to the sheriff's deputies. So they were chalking him
Speaker 5: up to a crazy person, that he's mentally ill, that
Speaker 5: he injected himself into the investigation. He was calling in
Speaker 5: falls leads, and obviously, as you mentioned before, he was
Speaker 5: in the store almost daily getting DLT sandwiches. So I
Speaker 5: decided it was time to confront him. I didn't really know.
Speaker 5: I thought maybe Stein was the mastermind. Maybe Bor they
Speaker 5: were using him, you know, as a driver because he
Speaker 5: had a van. So I decide to meet up with him,
Speaker 5: and actually he was willing to meet up with me.
Speaker 5: And the first thing I said to him was, you know, well,
Speaker 5: I think you were involved in this. I think you
Speaker 5: did it. And then he's like, you do, Well, maybe
Speaker 5: I shouldn't be talking to you then. But he then
Speaker 5: sat down and kind of talked to me for three hours,
Speaker 5: and he told me his background was off limits. He
Speaker 5: was not going to talk about anything involving his family
Speaker 5: or his personal life, but he would provide me with
Speaker 5: all these various theories about what he thought happened. And
Speaker 5: at one point he made a statement and I looked
Speaker 5: at him and I have this kind of look on
Speaker 5: my face, like a smirk, and he basically told me
Speaker 5: to wipe that smirk off my face, and it really
Speaker 5: kind of made the hair on the back of my
Speaker 5: next stand up and I thought, well, I should probably
Speaker 5: end this because we were in the lack of a
Speaker 5: off track betting place that was not exactly I guess,
Speaker 5: the best place to meet somebody like him. So we
Speaker 5: parted ways, and I was convinced that there was so
Speaker 5: much more to this guy, because none of this made sense.
Speaker 5: And I made a letter request to the court seeking
Speaker 5: or asking or requesting that the DA's office and or
Speaker 5: Sheriff's department further investigate Michael Bohrer. I mean, does he
Speaker 5: have a daughter Allen's age? What's this background? Because we
Speaker 5: ran at check and we didn't get much from a
Speaker 5: criminal history standpoint in New York. So we got feedback
Speaker 5: from the judge who said, if you want to do
Speaker 5: the investigation of Michael Bore, you can do it at
Speaker 5: your own expense. They're not required to do it. And
Speaker 5: by the way, the DA's office just thought he was
Speaker 5: a crazy person. So I noticed that his social Security
Speaker 5: number had been issued out of Wisconsin. So I asked
Speaker 5: Dick com and my investigator to run a criminal history
Speaker 5: check to see whether there were any convictions that Michael
Speaker 5: Bore might have out of Wisconsin. And this is right
Speaker 5: before we were going to be having this evidentiary hearing
Speaker 5: to see if Gury could get a new trial based
Speaker 5: on the new evidence. And it came back that, sure enough,
Speaker 5: he had a conviction for unlawful imprisonment and another disorderly conduct,
Speaker 5: but we couldn't figure out what it was because when
Speaker 5: we were calling the police department that had made the arrest,
Speaker 5: they said that they don't have the records anymore. They
Speaker 5: were destroyed. And then we called the court and they
Speaker 5: said they couldn't find anything on it. So I was
Speaker 5: sort of left wondering what this was all about, and
Speaker 5: I knew he would I didn't. I kind of wanted
Speaker 5: to confront him about this and try to explain to
Speaker 5: me what this was about. I also learned I did
Speaker 5: a lot of digging into his family background, that you know,
Speaker 5: he and his brother were adopted, he had an adopted brother,
Speaker 5: and that he did have you know, siblings and other
Speaker 5: people around the country, and I was trying to reach
Speaker 5: out and make contact with them. And I also learned
Speaker 5: he had an ext wife and he did have two daughters.
Speaker 5: So I we we went to court and I'm confronting
Speaker 5: him with the information about the conviction, and the court
Speaker 5: would not allow me to ask any questions and about it,
Speaker 5: and then he did allow me to say. I asked
Speaker 5: him what he had any violence passed violent history against women,
Speaker 5: to which he answered, no, I never hit any woman
Speaker 5: or punched any woman. Ors was his answer. The judge
Speaker 5: would not allow me to explore or to ask him
Speaker 5: any other questions about his background or personal history. By
Speaker 5: the time the hearing was adjourned for a couple of weeks,
Speaker 5: I was incensed because I felt like there was so
Speaker 5: much more and I couldn't figure out what actually had happened.
Speaker 5: And that's when kind of we blew open. Michael bore we. Finally,
Speaker 5: I demanded that we get a hold of the court
Speaker 5: and find out there had to be records. There had
Speaker 5: to be some sort of record about what actually happened.
Speaker 5: And then we saw that he had a brother who
Speaker 5: had also been charged, which is why the court said
Speaker 5: they couldn't find the records of the lawful imprisonment. They
Speaker 5: were looking it was under the wrong name, John Boorr.
Speaker 5: So we located John Bourr in Erie, Pennsylvania. We made
Speaker 5: a bee line out there. We found him at a
Speaker 5: resid eventual sort of nursing home setting, and he proceeded
Speaker 5: to tell me the most unbelievable account of what had
Speaker 5: taken place. I was shocked. They had followed a woman
Speaker 5: home from her place of employment after she went out
Speaker 5: to grab a bike to eat. It was one o'clock
Speaker 5: in the morning. They boxed her in and her apartment complex.
Speaker 5: Michael got out of the car, went up behind her
Speaker 5: and grabbed her and tried stuffing her in the backseat
Speaker 5: of this yellow Mustang he was driving while John Borr
Speaker 5: was reaching in the back trying to grab her in.
Speaker 5: She provided enough leverage on the top of the car
Speaker 5: where she was able to break loose. Because they realized
Speaker 5: people in the apartment building were kind of she was
Speaker 5: making The victim was making enough noise to where lives
Speaker 5: were starting to go on, so they let her go.
Speaker 5: She ran in told her brother, who happened to be
Speaker 5: at her apartment. They called the police and they were
Speaker 5: able to catch them and arrest him. So for that
Speaker 5: they fled guilty to a misdemeanor and received a sentence
Speaker 5: of three years probation. And apparently before that, the disorderly
Speaker 5: conduct involved another woman that Michael Borr was following home
Speaker 5: from work and tried to rammer off the road, and
Speaker 5: he got out of his car when she was at
Speaker 5: a stop sign and started pounding on the windows, and
Speaker 5: she was so hysterical she drove right to a police
Speaker 5: station where there was a security officer outside the building
Speaker 5: and he was able to see Michael Borr circle back
Speaker 5: around and kind of look, and they were able to
Speaker 5: identify him and arrest him. And in that case, he
Speaker 5: fled to a disorderly conduct. So that was the basis
Speaker 5: for those two convictions. So we provide that information to
Speaker 5: the District Attorney's office, thinking, oh, this is just blown
Speaker 5: the whole case open. I mean, this has got to
Speaker 5: be something, you know, in light of the admissions the
Speaker 5: fallse sleeves that he called in all the writings that
Speaker 5: he made. You know, he made admissions to somebody at
Speaker 5: a tavern about how DISTRAUGHTI has been all these years
Speaker 5: us and knowing what happened, Yeah about Heidi. So we
Speaker 5: you know, I was really convinced that, wow, this is it,
Speaker 5: this is you know, they were so wrong about him,
Speaker 5: and they did no investigation, and here we have all
Speaker 5: this stuff. So of course that wasn't exactly what happened.
Speaker 5: Said Lisa said, he had a pit in his stomach
Speaker 5: and he wasn't sure what he was going to do,
Speaker 5: and he wanted to do the right thing. And if
Speaker 5: Gary's innocent, he wants to be the first one to
Speaker 5: make sure he doesn't do another day in prison. But
Speaker 5: but then when I flew in the victim to testify
Speaker 5: during the hearing about what happened, he objected that it
Speaker 5: wasn't relevant, and that it would be like saying, anyone
Speaker 5: you know who commits a burglary thereafter would be a
Speaker 5: suspect in any other burglary. And my response to that was,
Speaker 5: kidnappings of this nature, this brazen, emboldened sort of attack,
Speaker 5: where you're just grabbing a woman and stuffing or in
Speaker 5: the backseat of your car, is not something that's very
Speaker 5: common at all, and it's very unusual in the manner
Speaker 5: in which they were. The eyewitnesses were even talking about
Speaker 5: how this brute force was used to stuff hedy in
Speaker 5: the back of the van. You know, I don't know
Speaker 5: how in the coincidence that he was half a mile
Speaker 5: down the road and was in the store every day
Speaker 5: and knew that he was an informant and by the way,
Speaker 5: was involved in slinging drugs in the Oswego County area,
Speaker 5: all of those things and calling in of course, the
Speaker 5: falls leads. It wasn't just in a vacuum, Oh jeez,
Speaker 5: he'd tried to kidnap or an abduct a woman one time,
Speaker 5: there was more to it than that, and then of
Speaker 5: course after we knew something else happened and Beacons he
Speaker 5: was never arrested for it, but he was a suspect
Speaker 5: in the prosecution found that a woman who had been
Speaker 5: beaten over the head and the duplex that he owned,
Speaker 5: and he happened to quote discover her identified him as
Speaker 5: being the last person there and wanting to raper before
Speaker 5: she went unconscious and didn't remember who had hit her
Speaker 5: in the head and she was left, you know, she
Speaker 5: was They called it a doa initially because they didn't
Speaker 5: think she was going to survive. She went through seven
Speaker 5: brain surgeries, but to this day she you know, the
Speaker 5: last person. She believe she was running from Michael Boor
Speaker 5: throughout the apartment and that's the last thing she remembers.
Speaker 5: So right, that's pretty much the background of the three
Speaker 5: new suspects and the information that we were you know,
Speaker 5: trying to elicit throughout the courses of hearing.
Speaker 3: In twenty seventeen, Lisa, you were trying to petition New
Speaker 3: York's highest court and you said at this time that
Speaker 3: Gary was on boro time. So tell us you had
Speaker 3: met Gary and visited with Gary and told them about
Speaker 3: the new evidence, and tell us about the state of
Speaker 3: Gary and what he was like living in there for
Speaker 3: twenty years, and more about this highest court preparation.
Speaker 5: Sure, so when I first met Gary, I didn't realize
Speaker 5: how frail he would look because I hadn't met him before.
Speaker 5: I'd seen pictures from the media accounts, but I didn't
Speaker 5: I had never met him. And by the time I
Speaker 5: met him, he was really thin, and it winded him
Speaker 5: just to walk across the yard to get to the
Speaker 5: attorney visitation room. He had big old glasses on, and
Speaker 5: he was, you know, really struggling to breathe, but very
Speaker 5: happy that somebody took an interest in his case after
Speaker 5: all these years, because he by then he had given
Speaker 5: up all hope that he would ever be released. So
Speaker 5: he was just really hoping to die because it was
Speaker 5: the only way he believed he would be free. And
Speaker 5: as time went on, I got to know rather well,
Speaker 5: and he would write letters, and he was very funny
Speaker 5: and sarcastic and had a different sense of humor. But
Speaker 5: he was very likable and very funny considering he was
Speaker 5: in prison for something he didn't do. All those years,
Speaker 5: he was not a bitter person. He said, by the
Speaker 5: time I met him, he had already gotten over that
Speaker 5: part of it and just accepted his fate and realized that,
Speaker 5: you know, there's nothing more he can do. So he
Speaker 5: was just trying to make the best of it. And
Speaker 5: he had been working in the tailor shop. So as
Speaker 5: the case was progressing through the court system and he
Speaker 5: attended the hearing, he was seeing what was going on
Speaker 5: and the rulings that we were getting and the denial
Speaker 5: of being able to call witnesses, and at some point
Speaker 5: it reached it reached a point where he felt so
Speaker 5: discouraged and it was just going to happen all over again,
Speaker 5: and he was going to he didn't want to be
Speaker 5: at the hearing anymore. He had, you know, requested that
Speaker 5: I not make him sit through it. It was hard
Speaker 5: for him because he was he was he was frail,
Speaker 5: He had a bad back he had placed in his ankle.
Speaker 5: In the first day of the hearing, the sheriffs made
Speaker 5: him go down the set of stairs with his leg
Speaker 5: shackles on and his arms cuffed, his hands coughed together,
Speaker 5: and he lost his footing tripped and fell down the stairs.
Speaker 5: And why they didn't allow him to go down the
Speaker 5: elevator is beyond me, but they didn't, and he really
Speaker 5: hurt his back when he fell. So he was very
Speaker 5: uncomfortable and it was a shame. But as I was,
Speaker 5: as we were going through the appeal process, every time
Speaker 5: I would go visit aary and give him an update,
Speaker 5: he was increasingly looking more frail and his breathing was
Speaker 5: becoming more labored, And at one point I just looked
Speaker 5: at him and I was shocked at how fast he
Speaker 5: was declining. I could see that he was on borrowed time,
Speaker 5: and I felt like it was the race against time
Speaker 5: to actually provide give him news that he had been
Speaker 5: exonerated or that it was at least going to be
Speaker 5: granted a new trial. So yeah, I was becoming more
Speaker 5: and more concerned that he wasn't going to make it
Speaker 5: through the whole process. And then when we lost, we
Speaker 5: had at a Pellet division and we had one judge
Speaker 5: who dissented but wrote amazing descending opinion. It really kind
Speaker 5: of refueled me. Recharged. Okay, here we have a judge
Speaker 5: who believes and Gary's innocent. He's somebody who followed what
Speaker 5: the new evidence meant and he believes Gary deserves a
Speaker 5: new trial. So here we go. We're going to go
Speaker 5: to the Court of Appeals. And a lot of what
Speaker 5: I was being told is, hey, it's almost impossible to
Speaker 5: get your case heard at that level. And I wasn't
Speaker 5: going to hear of that. We were just going to
Speaker 5: put our best foot forward. And we got the news
Speaker 5: the Court of Appeals has decided to hear the case.
Speaker 5: We were beyond thrilled because I thought, Okay, this is it,
Speaker 5: you know, this is a level where we're going to
Speaker 5: get released for Gary. And then we get the decision
Speaker 5: back four to three. We lost, but again the descent
Speaker 5: was an amazing decision and much longer and much more
Speaker 5: detailed and much more analysis than the majority opinion. But
Speaker 5: I had to go to Gary and tell him that
Speaker 5: we have one more avenue to pursue at the Court
Speaker 5: of Appeals, and then it's into federal court, which is
Speaker 5: where we were originally thinking we would have to go anyway.
Speaker 5: But this process took so long. You know, here we
Speaker 5: start in twenty fourteen, now we're at twenty seventeen, and
Speaker 5: now we're twenty eighteen, and and Gary is just you know,
Speaker 5: just skeletal by then and not even able to breathe
Speaker 5: on his own. So it was it was sad and
Speaker 5: frustrating and disheartening. And you know, I just had wanted
Speaker 5: Gary to be able to hang on as long as possible,
Speaker 5: but I just knew that there was absolutely no chance
Speaker 5: that he could make it through a federal habeas petition.
Speaker 3: Tell us about his passing, and we hadn't mentioned his
Speaker 3: wife when she passed away.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Sharon passed away when she was undergoing surgery while
Speaker 5: Gary was in prison, shortly after they got married. I
Speaker 5: don't They weren't married very long. They did get married
Speaker 5: after after Gary had been convicted, So that and for
Speaker 5: you know, so that was Gary. It was a ninety
Speaker 5: sixth I believe John if I'm not, Yes.
Speaker 4: I think that's right. I think that's right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that's right. And and you know, he
Speaker 5: had to learn about Sharon passing while he was in prison.
Speaker 5: And then by the time we were with the Court
Speaker 5: of Appeals, I had hired John as an investigator for
Speaker 5: our office at the Federal Public Defender's Office because he
Speaker 5: was seeking an early or a buyout because he had
Speaker 5: been he had been at the paper for more than
Speaker 5: thirty years, like he mentioned, and he was looking to
Speaker 5: you know, it was time for him, he felt, and
Speaker 5: we had an opening. So together we would frequently go
Speaker 5: keep Gary updated about his case, and we were with
Speaker 5: him a day before he passed, and it was really
Speaker 5: very hard. It was really hard to watch. We were
Speaker 5: there with his brother Richard he went and then his
Speaker 5: niece was also there, and you know, it was just
Speaker 5: really heartbreaking and sad. And I felt like I let
Speaker 5: him down because I'd kept promising him that we would
Speaker 5: win and we were going to keep going, and I
Speaker 5: just felt like I promised him something I wasn't able
Speaker 5: to live on, and I just it really tore me up,
Speaker 5: which is why we wanted to capture all of the
Speaker 5: events of what took place in the best possible way,
Speaker 5: in all all in one place for people to understand
Speaker 5: what happened throughout this process and how the system failed Gary.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And can I just say there were a couple
Speaker 4: there were a lot of moments throughout this investigation that
Speaker 4: I thought, Okay, this is it, this is it. One
Speaker 4: was when Lisa brought two more cadaver dogs back with
Speaker 4: the with their handlers, and those two dogs expertly trained
Speaker 4: also alerted for the scent of human remains. The other
Speaker 4: time that I thought this is this is huge, it's
Speaker 4: going to be it's going to push us over the
Speaker 4: edge was during the dig that the Sheriff's office did
Speaker 4: of the cabin site. Jennifer Wescott texted to a friend
Speaker 4: that I don't care what people are saying. I'm not
Speaker 4: saying nothing about it. I will not be the next
Speaker 4: one dead in a box in the woods. And that's
Speaker 4: that's her writing to someone thinking the whole world isn't watching.
Speaker 4: But there are a lot of moments like that. But
Speaker 4: unfortunately the people on your side, the prosecutors, the prosecutor
Speaker 4: Greg Oakes, just did not do the right thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's an incredible tale. I want to thank you
Speaker 3: so much Lisa Peebles and John O'Brien for coming on
Speaker 3: and talking about Scrapped Justice and a team and fortant
Speaker 3: informant For those that might want to take a look
Speaker 3: at this, I know this is on Amazon and Barnes
Speaker 3: and Noble, but is there a Facebook page or a
Speaker 3: website or anything they might take. I'll take a look
Speaker 3: at this further.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we have an author's page on Facebook. It's called
Speaker 4: Scrapped Justice and a Team format and and our publishers
Speaker 4: is a black Rose Writing. You can get the book
Speaker 4: there or obviously on Amazon, Barnes and Noble of other places.
Speaker 4: And if people read it and they want to write
Speaker 4: a review, we'd be happy. We'd love to hear from people.
Speaker 3: Absolutely again, thank you so much Lisa Peebles and John
Speaker 3: O'Brien for this Scrapped Justice and the Team informant. This
Speaker 3: is a remarkable expose and an extraordinary book. Thank you
Speaker 3: so much for this review. We both have a great evening.
Speaker 4: Thank you, good night,