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Speaker 4: You are now listening to True Murder, The most Shocking
Speaker 4: Killers in True crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 4: written about them, Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker, DTK. Every
Speaker 4: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 4: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 4: journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 3: Good evening, This is your host Dan Zupanski for the
Speaker 3: program True Murder, The most shocking Killers in true crime
Speaker 3: History and the authors that have written about them. In
Speaker 3: June nineteen eighty three, Doug and Peggy Ryan, their ten
Speaker 3: year old daughter and eleven year old house guests, were
Speaker 3: brutally murdered in Chino Hills, California. Two days before. Kevin
Speaker 3: Cooper had escaped from a nearby prison and hid in
Speaker 3: a vacant house one hundred and twenty five yards below
Speaker 3: the murdered family's hilltop house. After the San Bernardino Sheriff's
Speaker 3: Department established that he had hid there, it focused on
Speaker 3: him as the lone assailant, despite numerous eyewitness report reports
Speaker 3: that implicated three white men as the perpetrators Kevin Cooper
Speaker 3: was convicted of the murders in nineteen eighty five and
Speaker 3: has been on death row at San Quentin since then.
Speaker 3: Scapegoat shows how the Sheriff's office and the District Attorney's
Speaker 3: office s Bernardino County framed him for the horrific murders,
Speaker 3: and how the justice system has failed him at almost
Speaker 3: every turn in his long drawn out appeal process. As
Speaker 3: O'Connor's shocking but thorough investigation shows, the sheriff's department discarded
Speaker 3: information that pointed at other perpetrators, destroyed evidence that exculpitated
Speaker 3: exculpated Cooper in planet evidence that implicated him. If we're
Speaker 3: not for a court ordered moratorium on executions in California
Speaker 3: over the lethal injection controversy, Cooper, with no appeals remaining,
Speaker 3: would have been executed.
Speaker 5: The book that we're.
Speaker 3: Featuring this evening is Scapegoat, the Chin o' Hill Murders
Speaker 3: and the Framing of Kevin Cooper, by my guest journalist
Speaker 3: and author Jay Patrick O'Connor. Welcome back to the program,
Speaker 3: and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Jay Patrick O'Connor.
Speaker 6: Thank you, Den. It's great to be back on your show.
Speaker 5: Thank you very much.
Speaker 3: It's going to be a great hour interview for our
Speaker 3: audience and for myself as well. This is a great book.
Speaker 3: Now let's go back just like you, very much like
Speaker 3: you do in the book, Let's go back to Chino' Hills.
Speaker 3: Describe this community for us, tell us where it is
Speaker 3: in California for those people that might not know they're
Speaker 3: tuning in from other places in America and elsewhere, and
Speaker 3: also tell us about the Ryans of Chino Hills.
Speaker 6: Okay, Chino Hills is forty five miles east of Los Angeles,
Speaker 6: Los Angeles County. It's the biggest county in the lower
Speaker 6: forty eight states, and its biggest by far. It's as
Speaker 6: large as nine states in the United States. Right. It's humongous.
Speaker 6: There's eleven substations in the the you know, the sheriff,
Speaker 6: the Sheriff's San Bernardo Sheriff's office has eleven substations. It's huge.
Speaker 6: And the Ryans they lived in this little corner of
Speaker 6: San Bernardino County called Chino Hills. They were Arabian. They
Speaker 6: lived in an Arabian horse community. They had a hilltop house,
Speaker 6: a hilltop ranch house, and their neighbors all raised like
Speaker 6: they did, Arabian horses, right, and they were chiropractors by trade.
Speaker 6: They're both forty one years old, Doug and Peggy Ryan,
Speaker 6: and they had these they had two children, Jessica and
Speaker 6: Josh ten and eight and a half. And they lived
Speaker 6: in this, you know of kind of idyllic life that
Speaker 6: they had going there. They were doing exactly what they
Speaker 6: wanted to be doing, raising Peggy. Peggy was devoted to
Speaker 6: showing and raising, breeding and showing these Arabian horses. And
Speaker 6: Doug worked as a chiropractor at a clinic and nearby
Speaker 6: nearby clinic Santa Anna. So that's kind of the scene.
Speaker 6: That's what's worth. That's where they are. And down the road,
Speaker 6: three miles down the road from Chino Hills is a
Speaker 6: very large prison complex called the California Institute for Men,
Speaker 6: which houses forty five hundred or so felons. Anybody any wanting,
Speaker 6: anybody convicted of a crime in southern California is processed
Speaker 6: through the California Institute for Men. And Kevin Cooper was
Speaker 6: arrested in nineteen eighty three on the basis of uh
Speaker 6: two burglaries in Los Angeles. The city of Los Angeles.
Speaker 6: But when he was arrested, he was he gave him
Speaker 6: a phony, an idea that he'd stolen from a inmate
Speaker 6: in a hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Pennsylvania. Right, this
Speaker 6: is a kind of, you know, it kind of a
Speaker 6: screwed up case. But when they when they arrest him,
Speaker 6: he shows this, he shows this false height ID and
Speaker 6: the guy's name was David Troupman. And when they processing
Speaker 6: and when when they put him on trial for the burglaries,
Speaker 6: he just does a plea. He pleads to you know,
Speaker 6: I think he pled the four years to run consecutively
Speaker 6: under the name of David Trautman. So when they're processing
Speaker 6: Kevin cooper at at Chino, at Chino at the California
Speaker 6: Institute for Men, and they process him as David Trautman,
Speaker 6: who had no arrest in California because he never set
Speaker 6: foot in California. He lives in Pennsylvania. And so they
Speaker 6: put him in minimum security. And the first day he
Speaker 6: was in minimum security, I mean he slept there one night,
Speaker 6: and then next morning or excuse me, next afternoon, he
Speaker 6: walks out. He just walks out the front door of
Speaker 6: through a hole of the fence. There's no guards on
Speaker 6: the perimeter here, and he walks his way through countryside
Speaker 6: to you know, three miles down. He comes into this
Speaker 6: Arabian horse country and he finds this garage that looks
Speaker 6: like it's the door slightly open, and he opens it up.
Speaker 6: Nobody seems to be in the house, and he holds
Speaker 6: up there for two days. And this house is one
Speaker 6: hundred and twenty five yards below the Ryan's house. It's
Speaker 6: such a steep hill though, that he can't even see
Speaker 6: the Ryan's house from where he is. It's just straight up.
Speaker 6: I've been there. It's just impossible, particularly that time of
Speaker 6: year when this was June of nineteen eighty three, when
Speaker 6: all the trees are in bloom. You can't see you
Speaker 6: couldn't see the place. But anyway, that's where he is.
Speaker 6: And the Ryans are Ryan's and their daughter and a
Speaker 6: house guest are brutally murdered on a Saturday night, around
Speaker 6: midnight on June the fifth, nineteen eighty three. And when
Speaker 6: they find out that Cooper had holed up in this
Speaker 6: house for two days, as you said in your introduction,
Speaker 6: the Sam Bernardino Homicide Department, they just fixed in, fixed
Speaker 6: in on him. As the you know here, they said, well,
Speaker 6: this makes a lot of sense. Here's an escape convict,
Speaker 6: and they just made him their number one suspect and
Speaker 6: in fact said he was the one.
Speaker 3: Now let's let's go back pat because I think we're
Speaker 3: gonna We've got to make sure that we our audience
Speaker 3: understands this as well. Now to be fair too, as
Speaker 3: well as that Kevin Cooper has a sort of a
Speaker 3: history and that sort of he has a history of
Speaker 3: escaping and running away, and you've you've provided that he does,
Speaker 3: so you can talk about that. But what I wanted
Speaker 3: to make sure that we understand is that what is
Speaker 3: Kevin Cooper's background. Okay, he pled guilty to burglary, he's
Speaker 3: using an assumed name, but tell us about a little
Speaker 3: bit more about Kevin Cooper and his criminal past, so
Speaker 3: that we have a good idea if Kevin Cooper, even
Speaker 3: in our minds, could be capable of such murders. And
Speaker 3: it is very important later on and obviously, well.
Speaker 6: Kevin since age you know, I hate to say this,
Speaker 6: I mean I really do, but since age seven or eight,
Speaker 6: he was stealing things and at age thirteen or so
Speaker 6: he started getting arrested for stealing things. He would break
Speaker 6: into empty buildings, empty houses, and he had a proclivity
Speaker 6: for stealing cars. One time, when I interviewed him, I said,
Speaker 6: how many cars have you did you steal? Kevin? He said,
Speaker 6: I hate to tell you this, but I stole it
Speaker 6: over two hundred cars.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 6: So he is a at the time. I mean, he's
Speaker 6: twenty five when this terrible crime happens. He's a career
Speaker 6: criminal since age Jesus, I'd say thirteen at least. And
Speaker 6: at one point he was he was he was in
Speaker 6: prison in Pennsylvania on one of these work release programs
Speaker 6: where you get out off the grounds, and he walked
Speaker 6: away from that prison. He was like twenty two at
Speaker 6: the time. He just walked off from the from the job.
Speaker 6: You know, he's on the city street. He just walked
Speaker 6: off and escape. And so they caught him and they
Speaker 6: added twelve months to his sentence and he served that
Speaker 6: in more of a maximum security kind of penitentiary, and
Speaker 6: then he was caught again. After he was paroled, he
Speaker 6: got caught again at age twenty four for stealing stuff.
Speaker 6: And before they they were gonna he was convicted, he
Speaker 6: pled out. He pled out, It pled out, but before
Speaker 6: they could sentence him, he either feigned or contended that
Speaker 6: he had he was having hallucinations or some of that sort.
Speaker 6: And so the judge asked, said he should be sent
Speaker 6: to this mental hospital, state mental hospital in Pennsylvania for
Speaker 6: pre sentencing evaluation. And he was there for like three weeks,
Speaker 6: and from there he just walked out one night and escaped.
Speaker 6: He walked out through a window on a bowling now
Speaker 6: they had in this place, and escaped again. So this
Speaker 6: was his second escape. Now, the point about him using
Speaker 6: this phony idea of David Trutman was that had had
Speaker 6: it been known in California that this guy had escaped
Speaker 6: twice from Pennsylvania penitentiaries or state mental hospitals, he would
Speaker 6: have been put in maximum security, right but as the
Speaker 6: as known as David Trumpman, with no other record other
Speaker 6: than these two burglaries, he was classified as a minimum
Speaker 6: security risk. And you know, I mean the first day
Speaker 6: he's in minimum security, the first night after he sleeps there,
Speaker 6: he walks away again.
Speaker 3: Now, was there any and did he indicate any other
Speaker 3: prisoners that he was going to escape.
Speaker 6: Or did you just now didn't?
Speaker 5: Sorry?
Speaker 3: What did he do for those two days now he
Speaker 3: goes he finds this what you call a garage, and yeah.
Speaker 6: My garage. He sees this garage door slightly at Jarry.
Speaker 6: He opens it up and then they seize there's you know,
Speaker 6: it's him. I mean, there's nobody in the garage. And
Speaker 6: then he kind of opens the door of the kitchen
Speaker 6: and he doesn't see anybody in there. Now, this is
Speaker 6: a house that has periodically lived in a matter of fact,
Speaker 6: the woman who had lived in there for like the
Speaker 6: last seven eight months had just moved out the day before.
Speaker 6: This is really you know, like you know, you talk
Speaker 6: about being the wrong place at the wrong time. If
Speaker 6: any of these things had changed slightly, Kevin would have
Speaker 6: never been in this house. I'll say the woman had
Speaker 6: left two days later instead of the day she did leave,
Speaker 6: he would have never gone into the house because it
Speaker 6: was occupied. But she left, and so he found the
Speaker 6: house to be empty and on. So this is a Friday,
Speaker 6: Friday night, and then Saturday morning, about ten o'clock, a
Speaker 6: woman who does live there, like you know, she comes in.
Speaker 6: She and her husband live there like one week in
Speaker 6: a month, and they have stuff in the one and
Speaker 6: there's there's four bedrooms only one of the bedrooms has
Speaker 6: anything in it, a bed and some closet with toiletries
Speaker 6: in the bathroom. She comes in to get her sweater
Speaker 6: on Saturday morning about ten o'clock and Kevin now realizes
Speaker 6: that this is no longer a safe place for him
Speaker 6: to be right, so he makes up his mind that
Speaker 6: that night he will leave at dark. Now he is
Speaker 6: the only black person in Chino Hills, so he waits
Speaker 6: for dark and he begins the hitchhike to to the
Speaker 6: United States the Mexico Mexico border down near Tiawana, right,
Speaker 6: and he takes He catches two rides to get him there,
Speaker 6: doesn't he doesn't have a dime on him. He spends
Speaker 6: the night in the bus station on the United States
Speaker 6: side of the border, and the next morning, typical Kevin,
Speaker 6: he takes he robs a woman, takes a person of
Speaker 6: a woman's It's kind of lucky for him. It's got
Speaker 6: one hundred and five dollars in quarters in these rolls
Speaker 6: inside this person about forty dollars in cash, right, so
Speaker 6: he now has enough money to actually get by for
Speaker 6: a few days. He crosses the border into Tijuana and
Speaker 6: he buys himself a room he rents a room and
Speaker 6: it's for six dollars a night in a hotel in Tijwan.
Speaker 6: So that's around you know, that's that's the next day.
Speaker 6: This will be Sunday. Now that night I said, these
Speaker 6: murders happened around midnight. The Ryan's and all the other
Speaker 6: people who lived in this area of Chino Hills, they
Speaker 6: are all horse people of one sort of one sort
Speaker 6: of another. There was a couple that drove off that
Speaker 6: was dropping off a trainer after a day at the races.
Speaker 6: They dropped a trainer off on the only road that
Speaker 6: leads away from the Ryansill Top house. This one road
Speaker 6: comes down and these people are after they dropped him off.
Speaker 6: They're waiting to come out the driveway and they can't
Speaker 6: come out because there's this car just barreling down this road.
Speaker 6: And they look in the car and they see three
Speaker 6: white men and what is it? Turns out to be
Speaker 6: the Ryan family. This is the murdered family. They're stolen
Speaker 6: station wagon. They see a station wagon, they see three
Speaker 6: white people in it. So when the murders are announced,
Speaker 6: when it becomes big news the next day, this is
Speaker 6: the biggest crime, by the way in San Bernardino County
Speaker 6: History number one. It's his big. It's more brutal, it's
Speaker 6: more gross than the Tate, you know, the Manson murder,
Speaker 6: Manson murders, the Tate LaBianca murders. These are worse to
Speaker 6: the crowd brutality of these murders. So anyway, this couple
Speaker 6: calls in the next day and says they sell three
Speaker 6: white guys in a car.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 6: The Ryans had an the Ryans, besides their daughter, they
Speaker 6: had this eight and a half year old son named Josh,
Speaker 6: and he was left for dead that night. And all
Speaker 6: this occurred in the master bedroom. He's left for dead
Speaker 6: with his throat slashed ear to ear, he's got a
Speaker 6: hatchet one in his back, he's he's got a knife
Speaker 6: wound in his chest, collapses along. The perpetrators think he's dead.
Speaker 6: And but anyway, he survives this, miraculously survives. And the
Speaker 6: next morning, around noon, the father of the other boy
Speaker 6: who's there it's just spending the night, he discovers what's happening.
Speaker 6: He can look through the master bedroom and he sees
Speaker 6: this terrible scene. But he also can see that Josh
Speaker 6: can move. So Josh makes a small movement and the
Speaker 6: father comes in and Josh can't speak, and they call
Speaker 6: nine one one. They airvak him to a nearby hospital
Speaker 6: and at the emergency room they've devised this communications system
Speaker 6: of a chart with all the letters of the alphabet
Speaker 6: and the letters one through nine, I mean, the numbers
Speaker 6: one through nine and the words yes and no. And
Speaker 6: so they take him through his name, his address, his
Speaker 6: phone number. He gets all this stuff right. Then they
Speaker 6: say who attacks you? And he laboriously goes through this
Speaker 6: process of identifying three white men. So this is on Sunday,
Speaker 6: and this would be the next morning, this couple would
Speaker 6: call in about three white men. So we had these
Speaker 6: two eyewitness identifications of three white men involved in the
Speaker 6: Ryan murders, you know, right out there on day one.
Speaker 5: Okay, excuse me.
Speaker 3: Now, now you've you've alluded to these murders. And anybody
Speaker 3: that's going to buy this book is going to get
Speaker 3: these details on anybody listening to this program can handle
Speaker 3: those details. Details are important because later it's contented. Obviously
Speaker 3: we're talking about that that Kevin Cooper alone, alone, assailant,
Speaker 3: killed these four people.
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Speaker 3: All of these people killed them, So describe the crime
Speaker 3: scene itself, including the very again very rare occurrence of
Speaker 3: posing and displaying these bodies, which again is in criminal profiling,
Speaker 3: indicate again a very rare creature. So tell us exactly
Speaker 3: what this crime scene entails, because this will be important
Speaker 3: when we try to, you know, perceive whether Kevin Cooper
Speaker 3: was capable of this or these other three people.
Speaker 6: Well, number one, Kevin Cooper is one hundred and fifty pounds.
Speaker 6: He's six foot tall, but he's very thin. Doug Ryan
Speaker 6: is six foot one, two hundred and ninety pounds. I mean,
Speaker 6: excuse me, one hundred and ninety pounds. He's an ex
Speaker 6: marine MP, you know, one of these really tough marines.
Speaker 6: You have to you have to be able to handle
Speaker 6: yourself to be an MP, because that's what you do.
Speaker 6: You handle other marines. You arrest other marines, right, okay.
Speaker 6: And his wife is five foot eight, one hundred and
Speaker 6: forty five pounds, and she is the one who raises
Speaker 6: these enormous Arabian horses. She trains them, she lists bells,
Speaker 6: of hey, she's an incredibly strong person. Both these Ryans
Speaker 6: have loaded weapons in their master bedroom. Beggy has a
Speaker 6: ruger pistol. Doug has a loaded rifle with a scope.
Speaker 6: I mean these guns are found right after their bodies
Speaker 6: are discovered, these weapons are loaded all right. The scene.
Speaker 6: There's blood everywhere in this room. It's incredible, as I
Speaker 6: said it was, It's worse than I don't care what
Speaker 6: people think about the Tate Lapianca merkers murders. These are worse.
Speaker 6: There's blood everywhere. There's blood on every single thing in
Speaker 6: this room. This is a royal battlefield where these people
Speaker 6: fought for their lives like fiends. They have twenty five
Speaker 6: defensive wounds on all the people in this all the
Speaker 6: people in this attack, Doug and Peggy Ryan have all
Speaker 6: these defensive wounds in their hands and their arms. The
Speaker 6: little girl, she has the most defensive wounds. She fought,
Speaker 6: She fought as hard as she could fight. So they're
Speaker 6: this battle going on in here. The little girl makes
Speaker 6: it outside the house for a while. She actually was
Speaker 6: able to get outside and be brought back in. So
Speaker 6: anybody who would say that one perpetrator could have done
Speaker 6: this is just you know, ignoring every single thing you
Speaker 6: anybody else would just deduce, is that it's an impossibility.
Speaker 3: The people go ahead sting, so the weapon re used
Speaker 3: as well as that there's a hatchet.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and the other thing. The other it's so counterintuitive
Speaker 6: to the degree. Here here you've got the murder weapons
Speaker 6: are a hatchet, you know what some people call an axe,
Speaker 6: but it's a hatchet or an axe, okay. And then
Speaker 6: there's two knives. The uh the medical examiner when he
Speaker 6: examined the bodies at the crime scene and then he
Speaker 6: did the autopsies, he said that least two knives had
Speaker 6: to be involved. When this became inconvenient for the county
Speaker 6: prosecutor to you know, having now four weapons because another
Speaker 6: weapon used was an ice pick, when it became inconvenient
Speaker 6: to have two knives, the medical examiner, even though we
Speaker 6: turned down any notion that there was there could have
Speaker 6: been one knive inolved one knife involved.
Speaker 5: It's right.
Speaker 6: In his report he could not see the possibility of
Speaker 6: one knife. It had to be two because of the
Speaker 6: different kinds of cuts to these knives made. But at
Speaker 6: the preliminary hearing he backs away, he says there's two knives.
Speaker 6: And then they have a recess and the preliminary hearing
Speaker 6: and district attorney takes him to another room. He comes
Speaker 6: back on the stand under oath and says, all right,
Speaker 6: it's one knife. But anyway, despite that so you've got
Speaker 6: three weapons that they admit to, and here's the picture.
Speaker 6: You've got this one assailant. Why would he or what's
Speaker 6: the why would he or how could he use three
Speaker 6: weapons of one time? Where where where are these weapons?
Speaker 6: If two of them are in his hands, where's the
Speaker 6: other one?
Speaker 3: And where did he get them from? Is there any
Speaker 3: idea where he might have got them from?
Speaker 6: Well, they like to think that there is. They think
Speaker 6: that the uh, the axe was taken from the hide
Speaker 6: out house where Cooper held up. That was one of
Speaker 6: their great connective things. And this whole thing was that
Speaker 6: the acts used the murder of the Ryans was taken
Speaker 6: from the hide out house where Cooper was right. And
Speaker 6: also they tried to allege that one of the that
Speaker 6: the knife was. That turned out to be totally bogus.
Speaker 6: The guy said his knife was in another whole part
Speaker 6: of you know, he kept his main house, not in
Speaker 6: this little house where he went one week and every
Speaker 6: you know, one week and every month. So the idea
Speaker 6: that one person could or would use three or four
Speaker 6: weapons is just absurd. And all these people, by the way,
Speaker 6: all the victims had this was they were attacked, that
Speaker 6: they were attacked by two people at one time. I
Speaker 6: can tell you that they had hatchet wounds and knife wounds.
Speaker 6: All the victims had these terrible hatchet wounds and knife
Speaker 6: ones had delivered with great force. I mean they were
Speaker 6: there were three amputations, There were like twenty bones broken,
Speaker 6: there were concussions, there was it was a terrible, terrible thing.
Speaker 6: There were one hundred and forty four different wounds inflicted
Speaker 6: on these on these four four victims.
Speaker 3: And was there any was there any robbery motive? Was
Speaker 3: there anything stolen?
Speaker 6: This n You know, here's a guy that you know.
Speaker 6: Their whole theory was that Cooper stole the Uh he
Speaker 6: killed these people in order to steal their car and
Speaker 6: make his getaway. And yet on the counter of the
Speaker 6: in the home, right on the kitchen counter is uh
Speaker 6: cash dollar bills, you know, fives and ones and some change,
Speaker 6: and then Peggy Ryan's purse there's over forty dollars in
Speaker 6: cash and all these credit cards, you know, like twelve
Speaker 6: credit cards. Doug Ryan had had had money in his
Speaker 6: pants pockets. None of this is touched. I mean it's
Speaker 6: sitting there right on the counter. It's not even touched.
Speaker 6: So here's a guy that doesn't have a dime doing
Speaker 6: dime to his name, just you know, just escape from prison.
Speaker 6: There's no money in prison. You can't the prisoner has money.
Speaker 6: They may have stamps, but they don't have money. So
Speaker 6: Cooper would go in there. The theory was he had
Speaker 6: to kill him, you know, to get the car. Well,
Speaker 6: the Ryans left their keys in their car every single night.
Speaker 6: They and they had two vehicles. They had a station
Speaker 6: wagon and they had a truck, a pickup truck. When
Speaker 6: you know, the murders are discovered, they go out to
Speaker 6: the Ryan's pickup truck. The keys are sitting, you know,
Speaker 6: right in the ignition. And then the people, all the
Speaker 6: neighbors said, oh yeah, they kept their keys, always kept
Speaker 6: their keys right in the car. So Cooper, and I
Speaker 6: mentioned to you before, had stolen over two hundred cars
Speaker 6: in his life. He wants to steal a car, he doesn't,
Speaker 6: I mean the key. He'd he'd go look at the
Speaker 6: car first, the keys are inady, he just drive off,
Speaker 6: sure and say thank you very much. How How would
Speaker 6: how would going into this house and killing this whole family,
Speaker 6: leaving their son for dead and not taking any of
Speaker 6: the valuable things in here. How would that help his
Speaker 6: how would that help Cooper in any way?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Now, the thing is that you say the police
Speaker 3: and the obviously the district attorneys involved in the in
Speaker 3: the prosecution right away. So they're involved very much in
Speaker 3: the investigation from day one as well, or very very on.
Speaker 3: What is their idea, what's Kevin Cooper's motive in their mind?
Speaker 3: And why are they ignoring Why do you think or
Speaker 3: what does it seem why they were ignoring these eyewitness
Speaker 3: reports that there's three white guys.
Speaker 6: I think they made a number one. They were you know,
Speaker 6: this happened on a Sunday, and they don't have their
Speaker 6: a team. They're a team from the lab or they're
Speaker 6: a team in terms of homicide investigators engaged immediately, so
Speaker 6: they allow this crime scene to be just totally corrupted.
Speaker 6: Right in the first twenty four hours, over seventy people
Speaker 6: trapes through and a lot of them did this. Forty
Speaker 6: of them did it while the bodies are still in
Speaker 6: the room. Everybody came down to see this. The whole
Speaker 6: DA's office, all the all the brass from the San
Speaker 6: Bernardinos County Sheriff's office, they all came down to see this.
Speaker 6: This is as I said to you, Dan, this is
Speaker 6: the biggest crime in the history of this county. So
Speaker 6: they just totally, you know, contaminate, can contaminate this crime scene,
Speaker 6: and they do. They botch it so badly that on
Speaker 6: the day that they find his bodies on a Sunday
Speaker 6: on Monday, they kind of kind cover their tracks by
Speaker 6: the way they're using the there's blood in both the
Speaker 6: Ryan's bathrooms, which shows me that had to be more
Speaker 6: than one person. You mean, if you're one person, you
Speaker 6: wouldn't go into two bathrooms to wash off. One would
Speaker 6: be enough. Well, these cops there, these brass these cops
Speaker 6: that are there, they don't put a portage on out
Speaker 6: in front. They use the Ryan's bathroom their second bathroom
Speaker 6: where there's blood evidence in the bathroom. They eat at
Speaker 6: the they eat at the Ryan's dining room table. Yeah,
Speaker 6: they so so they they've they've just they're incompetent. So
Speaker 6: they they now have a big problem on their hands.
Speaker 6: They they and they sent over this this crime lab
Speaker 6: team that there's all this blood here, and they don't
Speaker 6: get right. They could have recreated this whole crime scene
Speaker 6: at least the movements of the body like Doug For example,
Speaker 6: the father, he made it on his feet from one
Speaker 6: side of the bed to the other and then back
Speaker 6: to his own side. I mean, he's mobile through this attack.
Speaker 6: And this is one big dude. They could have really shown,
Speaker 6: you know, all this, They could have shown the mother's movements.
Speaker 6: But when they took the samples, they just put them
Speaker 6: all together, like you know, they'd take samples from three
Speaker 6: or four different places and put them in one damn thing,
Speaker 6: and you know, therefore lose all the value of the samples.
Speaker 6: They were just incompetent. They had people there that've been
Speaker 6: there like ten months and had never been in a
Speaker 6: multiple murder crime scene before, didn't know how, didn't know
Speaker 6: what to do. So I think, you know, dawned on
Speaker 6: them that they had they had really screwed it up.
Speaker 6: And then out of out of nowhere comes this incredible
Speaker 6: break to them that an escape convict has holed up
Speaker 6: one hundred and twenty five yards down below this house,
Speaker 6: and their problems are solved.
Speaker 5: Now, how did they find out he was at this house?
Speaker 6: Well, the people were that whole neighborhood were nervous as hell,
Speaker 6: so that the guy that actually owned that house, he
Speaker 6: asked the cops to go in and look at it.
Speaker 6: Like the second day, like a Tuesday, he had the
Speaker 6: cops go through the house and they sent two homicide
Speaker 6: detectives through it, and they didn't find anything. They looked
Speaker 6: in every room. They had their guns drawn when they
Speaker 6: went through these rooms, so they reported nothing. And then
Speaker 6: the next day the guy sends in his own people
Speaker 6: like these are all these guys are ranchers. They raised
Speaker 6: these horses. He sends in like his foreman and an
Speaker 6: assistant to him. And now in one of the bedrooms
Speaker 6: they find a hatchet sheath sheath you know the thing
Speaker 6: that covers up a hatchet on the floor, and they
Speaker 6: find a bloody, bloody button from a prison jacket on
Speaker 6: the floor. Now, I remember I just said the day before,
Speaker 6: two homicides had taken with their guns drawn, went through there,
Speaker 6: didn't find anything of evidentiary value. And the very next day, hello,
Speaker 6: we find a hatchet sheath and a bloody prison jacket
Speaker 6: button in the bedroom. So once they find that, you know,
Speaker 6: I put fine in quotes quote unquote, they found it.
Speaker 6: Cooper's now the man and the sheriff, the sheriff of
Speaker 6: sam Bernandina and goes on you know, the news conference
Speaker 6: and says we've identified the assailant. It's a lone assailant
Speaker 6: and he's escapee Kevin Cooper. Now, Cooper had gone to
Speaker 6: Mexico that night, as I mentioned, he'd hitch tig down
Speaker 6: there and had to sleep in a bus depot and
Speaker 6: then he stole the money, et cetera. That night, his
Speaker 6: girlfriend from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania calls him up and said that
Speaker 6: he was wanted for questioning in conjunction with the murders
Speaker 6: of a family and the girl. The girlfriend said in
Speaker 6: a weird, weird part of California, or and then you know,
Speaker 6: a weird name part to California with Chino Hills. She
Speaker 6: never heard of Chino Hills nowhere, has hardly anybody else. So, uh,
Speaker 6: this is the first he's heard of this. And that
Speaker 6: night he sees his mugshot on TV in Tijuana. So
Speaker 6: from Cooper, the next next day or so, he goes
Speaker 6: to eighty miles south, catches a bus and goes eighty
Speaker 6: miles south. Uh, further into Mexico and try to get
Speaker 6: a little further away, but he takes it. He takes
Speaker 6: this job just for room and board on a old Rick,
Speaker 6: could he boat? The guy's kind of a guy. The
Speaker 6: guy is kind of a drug runner between Costa Rica
Speaker 6: and the United States. He likes to he likes to
Speaker 6: go down and get these big old pounds of marijuana.
Speaker 6: And he he enlisted Cooper to help him, like paint
Speaker 6: the boat and get it. It's an old wooden boat.
Speaker 6: Uh to do this? So Cooper just what the signs
Speaker 6: on with this guy and this guy? It eventually comes
Speaker 6: back to the United States and Uh, after eight weeks
Speaker 6: Cooper being on the lamb avoiding the biggest man hunting
Speaker 6: California history, he is arrested in uh Sans in southern California,
Speaker 6: you know if I forget the name of the town.
Speaker 6: But he's arrested in in the United States and south
Speaker 6: southern California and then brought back to brought back to
Speaker 6: Chino Hills where you know they would eventually go on
Speaker 6: try what was.
Speaker 3: The questioning like with police, did he lawyer up immediately
Speaker 3: or what?
Speaker 5: What was what did he do?
Speaker 6: No, he didn't lawyer up. He was assigned a public defender.
Speaker 6: U in every county in California, there's the county pays
Speaker 6: for an office of public defender.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 6: And if you're indigen indigen, if you can't afford your
Speaker 6: own lawyer, you are assigned a public defender. And they
Speaker 6: assigned him a guy named David Nagas, and he was
Speaker 6: he was the public defender.
Speaker 3: What was his experience This is a death penalty state
Speaker 3: and a death penel the case, right, what's his experience,
Speaker 3: if any, in those types of.
Speaker 6: Case He had some, He had some. He'd had about,
Speaker 6: I think experience in about ten capital cases. He told me.
Speaker 6: He told me that he he'd done well in like
Speaker 6: half of them and not so well in another half.
Speaker 6: His problem in this case, probably his probably had in
Speaker 6: this case was there was all this discovery that they
Speaker 6: turned over to You know that the prosecution is required
Speaker 6: under these so called Brady rules to turn over all
Speaker 6: their discovery to the defense. And it was stacks of
Speaker 6: it was thousands and thousands of pages of discovery. Well,
Speaker 6: this public defender, he refused the judges offered to have
Speaker 6: assistant counsel or to have paralegals or any of this.
Speaker 6: He just wanted to do it by himself. So he
Speaker 6: never got around the reading the discovery. He was instead
Speaker 6: kind of boning up, making himself into kind of a
Speaker 6: blood a cerology expert. He thought that was where the
Speaker 6: rebber would meet. The road was on these blood things.
Speaker 6: In the trial. Blood evidence matters, And so he didn't
Speaker 6: read the discovery and didn't find out that a woman
Speaker 6: had turned in these bloody coveralls right that her boyfriend
Speaker 6: had left in her the bottom part of a walking
Speaker 6: closet the night of the Chino Hills murders. He'd come
Speaker 6: home about three in the morning, and he just stayed
Speaker 6: long enough to change out of these bloody coveralls that
Speaker 6: had Arabian horse hair on the lower pant legs and
Speaker 6: then get and then leave the house. He was there
Speaker 6: like ten minutes. And so she turned these in the
Speaker 6: day they announced Cooper as the loan assailant. This woman
Speaker 6: turned in these bloody coveralls.
Speaker 3: Interesting and she told.
Speaker 6: Him that she had a She she said, I want
Speaker 6: to I want to be I want to talk to
Speaker 6: a homicide detective. The guy they sent out was a
Speaker 6: property clerk and property deputy. And she said, I've got
Speaker 6: quite a bit more to tell you. I've got these
Speaker 6: over coveralls which I'm giving to you, but I've got
Speaker 6: a lot more to tell you about my boyfriend. But
Speaker 6: the the deputy comes back, the property clerk comes back.
Speaker 6: He writes this report says that the woman wants to
Speaker 6: speak to homicide. Well, homicide never contacts her. What she
Speaker 6: would have told him was the boyfriend was a convicted murderer.
Speaker 6: He had just been released a year before on a
Speaker 6: he admitted murdering a seventeen year old girl. That's part
Speaker 6: of a gang hit that he'd done, and he turned
Speaker 6: into gang leader. He turned states everything.
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Speaker 6: Lost and turned in the gang leader, and for that
Speaker 6: he got a four and a half year sentence on
Speaker 6: a second degree murdered charge. Even though he was the
Speaker 6: murderer yeah, all right, So she says that, plus his
Speaker 6: hatchet's missing. She said, I went and looked at his
Speaker 6: tool belt. All his tools are there except for his hatchet.
Speaker 6: In three, she would have said, if they'd ever talked
Speaker 6: to her, he was instead of he had on the coveralls,
Speaker 6: but he didn't have on the tan T shirt that
Speaker 6: he had on when he left the house that day. Right,
Speaker 6: and the cops found outside, you know, down the roof
Speaker 6: in the line is about a mile and a half
Speaker 6: down as a bar. And outside this bar, not far
Speaker 6: from this bar, they found a bloody tan T shirt.
Speaker 6: And this woman said, she said it was fruit of
Speaker 6: the loom, size medium, and it has a pocket in
Speaker 6: the front. Well, that's exactly the T shirt that they
Speaker 6: they found outside this bar right the day or you know,
Speaker 6: two days after the murders. They found this shirt, this
Speaker 6: bloody shirt, so she had it. They could have wrapped
Speaker 6: this case up. They could have wrapped this case up
Speaker 6: the very day they said Cooper was the war and
Speaker 6: they could have wrapped it up. But nobody ever came
Speaker 6: out to see the woman.
Speaker 3: Now, in your your investigation, this Furrow guy, Lee Furrow.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he's the guy. He's the boyfriend. You say, the
Speaker 6: convicted murderer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's already a convicted murderer. And and it makes
Speaker 3: a lot of sense too, because, like you say, it
Speaker 3: was a gang initiation hit or a gang hit that
Speaker 3: he did, and uh so, so would he be capable
Speaker 3: of something like this? But what was the theory that
Speaker 3: why they did this? And who did he supposedly do
Speaker 3: this hit with?
Speaker 6: Well, well, I can't say who he did it with.
Speaker 6: I mean, I mean, I could guess, but I don't
Speaker 6: think it's fair to guess. The only thing I know
Speaker 6: is that his girlfriend turned in his bloody coveralls and
Speaker 6: said his hatchet was missing and his tan T shirt
Speaker 6: was missing. So I'm fairly I'm willing to say that
Speaker 6: that that Lee Ferrow looks awfully good for this crime.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 6: He lives in Cape Maine, New Jersey, now a long
Speaker 6: way from California.
Speaker 3: All Right.
Speaker 6: The other two perpetrators, I don't know. One of them
Speaker 6: was alleged to be a guy named Kenneth Kuhn who's
Speaker 6: now dead. He allegedly confessed to another guy that he
Speaker 6: was he was in he was in lockdown. They were
Speaker 6: in lockdown or in the hole together, and he said
Speaker 6: he was the driver of the car involved in Chino
Speaker 6: Hills murders. He said it was an Aryan Brotherhood hit
Speaker 6: and they hit the wrong house and it was three guys.
Speaker 6: Why guys that did it? Now that I don't know about,
Speaker 6: I have a hard time with that. I can't picture
Speaker 6: this Furrow being in the Aryan Brotherhood because he was
Speaker 6: a rat. I mentioned to you that he turned in
Speaker 6: the gang leader and he wants state's evidence. Yeah, I
Speaker 6: think Furrows served almost all this time in administrative custody
Speaker 6: where they put rats, you know, so they're not killed
Speaker 6: while they're in prison. Sure, I'm just I'm using kind
Speaker 6: of prison lingo here. But when I call him a rat,
Speaker 6: that mean he's a snitch.
Speaker 5: Yeah, hisn't makes sense.
Speaker 6: It makes sense to stay alive in prison is very
Speaker 6: small if he's in the general population, and Aryan Brotherhood
Speaker 6: they have a big thing about not snitching. So I
Speaker 6: can't picture. To me, this doesn't make sense. You know,
Speaker 6: a lot of things don't make sense. You know, the
Speaker 6: whole theory about Cooper being involved in this doesn't make sense.
Speaker 6: And this being an Aryan Brotherhood thing to me doesn't
Speaker 6: make sense.
Speaker 3: Right now, they proceed to trial with Kevin Cooper as
Speaker 3: their their focus, and everybody else goes by.
Speaker 6: The wayside, right, everybody else is given a free pass.
Speaker 3: And you you chronicle very accurate or very well that
Speaker 3: the lawyer defense lawyer really really dropped the ball with
Speaker 3: not having the kind of assistance he would he would
Speaker 3: find necessary to be able to defend Kevin Cooper properly.
Speaker 3: So he made that initial mistake. What are some of
Speaker 3: the other mistakes and tell us basically what the prosecution
Speaker 3: case hinges on, because he's got five or six things here,
Speaker 3: including and police explain because this is important too, the
Speaker 3: shoe prints and these keads pros to tell us about that.
Speaker 6: Well, they didn't. This is wholly a circumstantial case against Cooper.
Speaker 6: They didn't have much. They they said there was one
Speaker 6: tiny and I mean tiny, I mean minuscule drop of
Speaker 6: blood and that was far from the scene of the
Speaker 6: far from the scene of the action, all down the
Speaker 6: hallway from the master bedroom toward the living room, I
Speaker 6: mean at the bottom of the base of the wall.
Speaker 6: There was this one tiny drop of blood that they
Speaker 6: alleged came that matched Cooper and the two. Their biggest
Speaker 6: thing was there was shoe prints on a spa cover
Speaker 6: and on a bed sheet from the Ryans Ryan's master
Speaker 6: bedroom that matched the shoe that's distributed at the California
Speaker 6: Institute for Men, this prison where Cooper was. We called
Speaker 6: pro kid prokeead dudes, so that was a big thing.
Speaker 6: They at trial, they tried, they they tried to say
Speaker 6: that the I mean they did say they established that
Speaker 6: the pro kid dudes were only only available in these
Speaker 6: intitutions such as prisons, that they were a prison issued shoe.
Speaker 6: You couldn't buy them retail. So if a pro cad
Speaker 6: dude showed up, a print showed up, it was highly
Speaker 6: likely that it came from a prisoner. And we had
Speaker 6: a prisoner who escaped and admitted to being in this
Speaker 6: house below, So that was kind of the That was
Speaker 6: the biggest thing they had, was this the pro kids. Now,
Speaker 6: the warden of the Chino Hills Prison she heard about
Speaker 6: this in the news. She read about the newspaper that
Speaker 6: they were making this claim that these pro kid dudes
Speaker 6: were special issue. So she researched that, she had her
Speaker 6: staff research the issue, and it turns out they just
Speaker 6: buy these things like everybody else does. Through this like
Speaker 6: a catalog like a serious catalog. So they're available at
Speaker 6: retail all over there, all over the state of California.
Speaker 6: They're one of the biggest sellers in New York and Chicago.
Speaker 6: This shoe was very popular retail and there was nothing
Speaker 6: special issue about him. So she calls up that head
Speaker 6: of homicide and says, you know, I hear what you're
Speaker 6: saying in the newspaper at the preliminary hearing, but it's
Speaker 6: not true. These shoes, there's nothing special about them. But nonetheless,
Speaker 6: at the trial that they just ignored her, put her,
Speaker 6: put her, you know, just discarded that and didn't turn
Speaker 6: over to the defense that she'd said this. So a trial,
Speaker 6: they they established this special issue shoe. So this really
Speaker 6: implicates Cooper. That's what they call inculpatory evidence. I mean,
Speaker 6: this really includes him. There you go, you're a prisoner,
Speaker 6: and this shoe prints only made by shoes coming from
Speaker 6: a prison. So that was huge that in the little
Speaker 6: little tiny drop of blood that they totally manufactured. The
Speaker 6: By the way that the print on the spa write
Speaker 6: about this in the book, the print on the spa
Speaker 6: and the print on the sheet, they weren't seen by anybody.
Speaker 6: These were the people the people who were there, the
Speaker 6: professionals that they did send over their homicide detectives. Nobody
Speaker 6: noticed anything like this. It's only when it gets to
Speaker 6: this lab, the head guy in the lab. And this
Speaker 6: is kind of you know, it is hard to believe.
Speaker 6: It's brutal, but it's true that the head guy in
Speaker 6: the lab is stealing. It's a heroin addict. He is stealing.
Speaker 6: He gets caught stealing five pounds of heroin, which has
Speaker 6: a street value of like, you know, I don't know,
Speaker 6: three hundred thousand dollars. He he is the head of
Speaker 6: the crime lab, and he's the one that comes up
Speaker 6: with this little drop of blood and he comes up
Speaker 6: with the footprint on the sheet that nobody else had seen. Yeah,
Speaker 6: so that's what you're dealing with here. The sheriff at
Speaker 6: the time. By the way, the whole chapter about this guy,
Speaker 6: he's stealing. From the time he takes over that he's
Speaker 6: the sheriff for eight years, he steals. He admits the
Speaker 6: stealing over five hundred illegal guns out of the property room.
Speaker 6: You know, guns that are a lot of them are
Speaker 6: banned in California, abandoned the United States. You know, they're
Speaker 6: confiscated during different things on anyone of this guy is
Speaker 6: a super thief and stealing these guns, and then the
Speaker 6: guy running the crime lab is a heroin addict, and
Speaker 6: neither one of them get.
Speaker 3: You know, the.
Speaker 6: Sheriff he's retired. When they prosecute him, he gets, he
Speaker 6: gets nothing. He didn't get one day of jail time
Speaker 6: for stealing five hundred and forty guns. A lot of
Speaker 6: people of the newspaper said he stole over eight hundred,
Speaker 6: but they got he admitted to stealing over five hundred.
Speaker 6: The guy that stole the five pounds they got caught
Speaker 6: stealing the five pounds, he's just let go. No no
Speaker 6: prossecut cution at all. You know, if they'd have prosecuted him,
Speaker 6: I mean he's got the whole thing, he could have
Speaker 6: blown up the whole Kevin Cooper k saying, oh, yeah, well,
Speaker 6: I here's so they didn't prosecute him. So this place
Speaker 6: is corrupt. And this is one of the things I
Speaker 6: think that I'm finding out now right about these cases
Speaker 6: is that it you know, it's it's not like there's
Speaker 6: one or two bad apples involved. To get to frame
Speaker 6: an innocent person, The whole place has to be corrupt
Speaker 6: from the top down. You have to have a corrupt sheriff,
Speaker 6: you have to have corrupt homicide detectives, the crime lab
Speaker 6: has to be totally corrupt, the medical examiner has to
Speaker 6: be UH has to be corrupt, and the prosecuting, the
Speaker 6: turning has to be complicit. Would way with all this
Speaker 6: corruption's going on right under his nose?
Speaker 5: Why would all of these people?
Speaker 3: That's what conspiracies have a hard time for most people
Speaker 3: to believe that. I know everybody, everybody will will risk
Speaker 3: their own career and their own their their own career
Speaker 3: and reputation by going along. Now, explain that because you
Speaker 3: chronicle the this phenomena that you say, this doesn't just happen,
Speaker 3: It happens quite often. Where do you think, really, what
Speaker 3: does it manifest itself from?
Speaker 5: What?
Speaker 3: What is it coming from? Obviously prosecution believes that they
Speaker 3: have guilty people, or is it is in this particular
Speaker 3: case it was convenient?
Speaker 5: Is there some racism? Will tell us? What? Why would
Speaker 5: all these people go along with this?
Speaker 3: What was the real motivation?
Speaker 6: Down? It's kind of top down, it's the way it's
Speaker 6: it's a culture. It's a culture of corruption. Uh, this
Speaker 6: is the county where where they would take you know,
Speaker 6: when you know, they would bust these drug guys and
Speaker 6: they would take their cash, not just their drugs, but
Speaker 6: they'd take any cash they could that they would you know,
Speaker 6: take their cars, take their cash. But they particularly like
Speaker 6: to get their cash. And so they had the slush
Speaker 6: fund in this county. I mean, I'm talking about the
Speaker 6: sheriff running a slush fund where he would hand out
Speaker 6: to like four or five different people these checks for
Speaker 6: two or three hundred dollars a month, year in and
Speaker 6: year out. These guys would get it and they'd have
Speaker 6: little like parties with it, you know, a little Friday
Speaker 6: night gets together where they take care of you know.
Speaker 6: This is that kind of county that it was. This
Speaker 6: county was really bad.
Speaker 3: But to be fair, everybody that's watched Sopranos and that
Speaker 3: knows about slush funds. And there's a big difference between
Speaker 3: somebody taking what cops good cops believe, taking wages from criminals.
Speaker 3: I mean, taking a little bit of money that no
Speaker 3: one gets hurt. But framing an innocent man for murder
Speaker 3: is different, you know, it's it's different. I could see
Speaker 3: people wanting to make extra cash and seeing this extra
Speaker 3: cash as being victimless victimless crime. But to actually frame
Speaker 3: someone here has to have a different motivation than you know,
Speaker 3: business as usual. There has to have been some motivation here.
Speaker 3: This this Kevin Cooper is not, say, a killer that
Speaker 3: got away with murder, and so why don't we just
Speaker 3: prosecute him now when we have the opportunity. You see
Speaker 3: that in a lot of cases. But what do you
Speaker 3: think really was in this particular? Was it a matter
Speaker 3: of convenience? They bungled, so they were covering their tracks, and.
Speaker 6: I think so, I think so, Dan, that was basically it.
Speaker 6: They had totally lost their ability to actually do anything
Speaker 6: in terms of the crime scene. Now, if they'd have
Speaker 6: gone out and interviewed the woman had turned in the
Speaker 6: bloody coverall, so they could have started all over again,
Speaker 6: But they didn't go out and interview it.
Speaker 3: Right. Yeah, it's now the idea with once they had
Speaker 3: their focus and they were focusing on Kevin Cooper, you
Speaker 3: say that there was a crucial moment in the trial too.
Speaker 3: There was a bunch of them, but one where the prosecution,
Speaker 3: as per the rules, divulged the information and discovery. But
Speaker 3: you say, because it was done a little bit later.
Speaker 3: It created quite a problem for the defense. Explain that
Speaker 3: event to our audience.
Speaker 6: Well, I think you might be talking about the guy
Speaker 6: that there was a guy in a prison in Vacaville
Speaker 6: who mentioned that his cellmate had confessed to him about
Speaker 6: being involved in the Chino Hills murders. Right now. He
Speaker 6: did this like twelve days before the defense turned this
Speaker 6: so called confession over to the Excuse me, the prosecution
Speaker 6: turn it over to the defense. And they should have
Speaker 6: turned it over, you know, like the next day, the
Speaker 6: first day they knew about it. That's those are called
Speaker 6: the Brady rules. But they held it. They held it
Speaker 6: back for twelve days and they didn't give it to
Speaker 6: the to the defense until the day that Kevin Cooper
Speaker 6: was scheduled to testify in his own defense. So the
Speaker 6: public defender didn't want to stop the momentum of the trial,
Speaker 6: and the judge offered him the suspended trial right there,
Speaker 6: and he just made this terrible tactical mistake, I guess,
Speaker 6: a strategic mistake, not stopping the trial and going out
Speaker 6: and personally interviewing this guy about this claim that there
Speaker 6: was an aryan brotherhood deal. Instead, he just proceeded right on,
Speaker 6: and the jury never got The jury never heard one
Speaker 6: thing about an Aryan Brotherhood hit or anybody else confessing
Speaker 6: to the to the crime. Never he never made it
Speaker 6: to the jury. Rible mistake, and.
Speaker 3: He contended later that he just didn't want to confuse
Speaker 3: He figured he had his focus for the jury to
Speaker 3: look at. He didn't want to further confuse them with
Speaker 3: another alternative sort of theory to what happened.
Speaker 6: That's what he says. However, this would have been iceen
Speaker 6: on the cake in terms of the theory that he
Speaker 6: was advancing, that there was something we haven't talked about. Tonight,
Speaker 6: after these murders, three white guys show up in this
Speaker 6: bar down down the road, a mine and a half
Speaker 6: down the road. They come in there around midnight and
Speaker 6: they're either strung out on drugs. I think they're both.
Speaker 6: I think they're on drugs, and they're drunk both and
Speaker 6: they're obnoxious. One of the guys can't even keep his
Speaker 6: head up off the table. But while they're there, they
Speaker 6: see that two of the guys they approach there's three
Speaker 6: very attractive white women in this bar, and they approach
Speaker 6: him and one of them has on a low cut blouse,
Speaker 6: and so these guys are kind of frisky. And but
Speaker 6: one of the women, one of the three women, is
Speaker 6: a phlebotomist, the person who draws blood for a living.
Speaker 6: And she says to that these two guys who approach,
Speaker 6: she says, I hope you don't I hope you don't
Speaker 6: realize this, but you're covered in blood. You've got blood
Speaker 6: all over your face, all over your arms, your clothes.
Speaker 6: And they give a very weird look to her, and
Speaker 6: very soon after that they leave, right and then we
Speaker 6: find out and the day or so later, there's a
Speaker 6: tan T shirt thrown on one side of this road
Speaker 6: outside the bar, and on the other side of the
Speaker 6: bar is a blue T shirt, bloody blue T shirt.
Speaker 6: These are found a day apart, so we have the
Speaker 6: you know, and the prosecution never turns over the bloody
Speaker 6: blue T shirt. It hides that, it turns in the
Speaker 6: tan T shirt, but it hides the blue T shirt
Speaker 6: because you know, Kevin Cooper couldn't be expected to wear
Speaker 6: two T shirts. No, so they hide that. This is
Speaker 6: what I'm talking about, that neither they destroy the evidence
Speaker 6: that would have they wouldn't even have been able to
Speaker 6: put Kevin on trial, if they'd have turned over the
Speaker 6: evidence that they had, you know, the two T shirts,
Speaker 6: the bloody coveralls which they threw in a dumpster. They
Speaker 6: they destroyed before the defense ever got to see him.
Speaker 3: Now, what about another crucial thing, you know, this incredible story.
Speaker 3: If this isn't enough already, this destroying of evidence and
Speaker 3: conveniently delaying the revealing of evidence to the defense, they
Speaker 3: already know that this guy's got a handicap already, so
Speaker 3: they're playing to that. But we talked about Josh Ryan,
Speaker 3: the lone survivor, young man, obviously traumatized, but there was
Speaker 3: the initial statement about the three men. Now, another interesting
Speaker 3: point was that there was no composite drawing ever made
Speaker 3: of any suspects. Now, what did the police end up
Speaker 3: doing or what happens with Josh's testimony? How does his
Speaker 3: memory reconfigure or how does his memory change during this.
Speaker 6: He takes a there's assign a homicide detective to sit
Speaker 6: with him. He's in the hospital for fifteen days, making
Speaker 6: this miraculous recovery. It really is that he could get
Speaker 6: out there in fifteen days, right, and this detective sits
Speaker 6: with him every day, almost all day and kind of
Speaker 6: turns Josh from thinking that this detective knows in his
Speaker 6: heart of hearts that Kevin Cooper is the killer, and
Speaker 6: he just keeps working on Josh on this. Now, Josh
Speaker 6: doesn't buy this right away. The fact is he's in there.
Speaker 6: One night, he's in there going cards with a deputy sheriff.
Speaker 6: He's they guard Josh twenty four hours a day because
Speaker 6: they're afraid that since he's a survivor, that there will
Speaker 6: be an attempt to kill him. Right, so, he's playing
Speaker 6: his card game called you know with his deputy and
Speaker 6: a commercial break of anyway they break, they show up.
Speaker 6: Mugshot at Kevin Cooper flashes up and Josh says to
Speaker 6: the deputy, that's not the guy, that's not him. And
Speaker 6: so this this guy tells the homicide detective who's sitting
Speaker 6: with Cooper. The next day, he tells him this, and
Speaker 6: that goes over like a lead balloon. And another day
Speaker 6: or two goes by and Josh is sitting there with
Speaker 6: his grandmother and Cooper's picture comes up again and the
Speaker 6: grandmother says, Josh, is that the man who attacks your family?
Speaker 6: And he said no. Now, this guy, the detective keeps
Speaker 6: working with Josh. He does an extensive interview with Josh.
Speaker 6: Josh uses the phrase they did this, they did that,
Speaker 6: they approached, they attack all this, and this guy writes
Speaker 6: up a report that never references plural. His whole report is,
Speaker 6: you know, one person. He changes what this kid says.
Speaker 6: There's a psychiatrist from the hospital who's allowed to be
Speaker 6: in this interview to protect Josh's interest because Josh is
Speaker 6: eight and a half years old. He needs somebody that
Speaker 6: the cops wouldn't let the grandmother sit in on it.
Speaker 6: So this psychiatrist sitting in there, he's taking notes and
Speaker 6: he keeps writing down these references today, they snuck up
Speaker 6: on me, they did this, they hit me in the head.
Speaker 6: He's writing this stuff down, but this cop keeps writing
Speaker 6: down singular right, never mentions that there's multiple assailants. So
Speaker 6: when you know, Josh never testifies a trial. He's too
Speaker 6: young to testify, too traumatized. So they just tape a statement.
Speaker 6: They go to his grandmother's house and they take a
Speaker 6: statement from him, and Josh is so damn confused by
Speaker 6: this time. He's like, he's like almost tenures. He's ten
Speaker 6: years old now and he's had all this he can
Speaker 6: deal with, and he has this terrible sense of guilt, etc.
Speaker 6: And he wants to please the cops. And so he says,
Speaker 6: all he saw was a shadow on the wall. He
Speaker 6: didn't see three white guys anymore. He just saw a
Speaker 6: shadow on the wall. He's a no, no, no, no
Speaker 6: help to Cooper. Right later on a psychiatrist when Cooper
Speaker 6: was about Cooper was about to be executed in two
Speaker 6: thousand and four. The psychiatrist who took care of Josh
Speaker 6: on a private basis, hired by his grandmother. She said
Speaker 6: that she'd asked Josh at one and she's writing a
Speaker 6: letter of clemency letter to Governor Schwarzenegger, and she says
Speaker 6: that Josh made the switch from the three white three
Speaker 6: white guys to Cooper because he said I I I
Speaker 6: asked him about it. He said, well, I always thought
Speaker 6: it was the three white guys, but then I found
Speaker 6: out on TV it was Cooper. Yeah, but anyway. Cooper
Speaker 6: was saved from execution in two thousand and four by
Speaker 6: a last minute appeal to the ninth Ninth Circuit Court
Speaker 6: of Appeals. UH. He came within three hours and forty
Speaker 6: five minutes of being executed and now there's a moratorium
Speaker 6: on the death penalty on on on executions in California's
Speaker 6: benefacts since two thousand and six. It will be at
Speaker 6: least an effect through all of this year and probably
Speaker 6: most of next year if they were if they were
Speaker 6: to reinstate the death penalty, Cooper would be number five
Speaker 6: on the list. Well, they based the list on your
Speaker 6: your date of conviction.
Speaker 3: What do you think the chances are that they will
Speaker 3: abolish the death penalty very much like Illinois has.
Speaker 6: Well, they've got an initiative in California ad this November
Speaker 6: to abolish the death penalty. I wouldn't vote for it
Speaker 6: if I were there because it's got some terrible provisions
Speaker 6: to it in terms of if you're a death row inmate,
Speaker 6: they're just terrible provisions. But I think it'll probably go through,
Speaker 6: even though it's very punitive and way overkilled in terms
Speaker 6: of what could have been done.
Speaker 3: Right now, what is the stat this of does he
Speaker 3: does Kevin Cooper have any chance of appeal at whatsoever
Speaker 3: and where he does?
Speaker 6: But it's a very high standard. Now he has to
Speaker 6: come up with information that wasn't wasn't possible to be
Speaker 6: known before. Now that would be so convincing, so compelling
Speaker 6: that in a year would have acqudited him based on it.
Speaker 6: So let's say he's represented by the largest law firm
Speaker 6: in the San Francisco area. It's international law firm called
Speaker 6: rig r ic Ka Fabulous Group, thirteen hundred lawyers worldwide,
Speaker 6: and they've hired a former FBI agent with twenty five
Speaker 6: years experience to reinvestigate the case. Now, if he could,
Speaker 6: if he could find something that you couldn't have found
Speaker 6: before through due through due diligence, that is so compelling.
Speaker 6: Let's say he finds, you know, five of these homicide detectives,
Speaker 6: should say, yeah, this was a big conspiracy and we
Speaker 6: just frame the shit out of this guy. If he
Speaker 6: could find that that that would be compelling.
Speaker 3: Well, even DNA evidence, but according to what you uncovered,
Speaker 3: there was a lot of evidence destroyed obviously in eighty five.
Speaker 3: They were just it was just sort of the inception
Speaker 3: of DNA testing, And yeah, so DNA is not really
Speaker 3: a possibility. And even that is that can qualify as
Speaker 3: compelling new evidence, but not necessarily either. So, but in
Speaker 3: this particular case, there isn't any chance of any DNA evidence.
Speaker 6: That right, Well, there there would have been, and then
Speaker 6: there should have been there there was, there is, there was.
Speaker 6: We could have Cooper's attorneys could have proven that they planted.
Speaker 6: We never get it. We didn't get into this. But
Speaker 6: when Cooper had that T shirt planted testing in two
Speaker 6: thousand and two, they found his blood on the T
Speaker 6: shirt when they when they when they tested it in
Speaker 6: nineteen eighty three, they said it only had the blood
Speaker 6: of Doug Ryan on it, and Cooper wanted it tested
Speaker 6: for the DNA as you know, like armpit DNA from
Speaker 6: sweat or something like that. He wanted them to see
Speaker 6: if they could find somebody else's DNA on it, and
Speaker 6: instead they found his DNA on it. So then and
Speaker 6: then two years later, Cooper's attorneys find out that the
Speaker 6: bloods the blood they had taken from Cooper and the
Speaker 6: day a couple of days after he was arrested in
Speaker 6: nineteen eighty three, this this little blood vile they take.
Speaker 6: They put your blood in a vial. They took a
Speaker 6: swab from that not related to any of this stuff
Speaker 6: I'm talking about right now, but related to something else,
Speaker 6: and they sent it off to this lab in Pennsylvania,
Speaker 6: Independent Lab and the lab wrote back and said, this
Speaker 6: blood has the DNA of at least at least two
Speaker 6: people in it. So this was kind of really solid
Speaker 6: information that they'd taken Cooper's blood and planeted on his shirt,
Speaker 6: and then to make it look like the vial still
Speaker 6: had was full, they put somebody else's blood in it.
Speaker 6: But the federal judge in San Diego, Judge Marilyn Huff,
Speaker 6: who I can't believe can go to sleep at night,
Speaker 6: she wouldn't allow any pursuit of how this blood was
Speaker 6: contaminated by somebody else's DNA, and she wouldn't allow any
Speaker 6: real testing of the tan T shirt to show that.
Speaker 6: You know, when you take blood out of a vial,
Speaker 6: they have these preservatives to keep a blood from coagulating,
Speaker 6: from breaking down. Sure, they had to put preservatives in
Speaker 6: it to keep it and it'll last for years. That way,
Speaker 6: the defense oric wanted to show that the T shirt
Speaker 6: this would have This would have sent Cooper home, by
Speaker 6: the way, if they'd have been able to show this
Speaker 6: that they had high levels of the preservative on the
Speaker 6: on the blood on the T shirt, meaning that he
Speaker 6: come from a vial, not from shuit from anybody's anybody else. Well,
Speaker 6: the judge just wouldn't let him test it, right, She
Speaker 6: forwarded them at every every way she could, and then
Speaker 6: she ruled that that kind of testing is called anyway,
Speaker 6: the preservative testing isn't valid, when in fact it's totally
Speaker 6: valid used all over the United States. Sure, she just
Speaker 6: ruled that it wasn't valid, and blah blah blah. She
Speaker 6: was just terrible. Cooper should be out right now. I mean,
Speaker 6: he should have been freed at least given a new trial.
Speaker 6: And any time any innocent people get a new trial,
Speaker 6: they get to go home because they're framed the first time.
Speaker 6: You can't frame him twice, Yeah, can't be done.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you know all the wires.
Speaker 6: And the chiefs that frame them the first time, they're gone.
Speaker 6: These people are dead, you know. Twenty eight years.
Speaker 3: Later, incredible, twenty eight years later, he's still there and
Speaker 3: I mean we're we're still talking about this, and he
Speaker 3: still has some other legal avenues open to him.
Speaker 6: He does, but I say a very high bar. He's
Speaker 6: got a really the agent and Oric have to really
Speaker 6: come up with something that would be jaw dropping.
Speaker 3: Well, you know the thing is, Pat, I think that
Speaker 3: books like yourself like that you've written here about the
Speaker 3: Chino Hill murders and outlining all the evidence that you've
Speaker 3: brought up and why the case is bad and rotten
Speaker 3: to the core.
Speaker 5: And of course you're.
Speaker 3: You're making some strong claims, very very strong claims, accusing
Speaker 3: allegations that they know this is a frame job. Now
Speaker 3: if you as you know, I mean, Kevin Cooper doesn't
Speaker 3: seem to be getting the attention of celebrities backing him
Speaker 3: on this. But when did this book come out? And
Speaker 3: then how has it been the response so far? How
Speaker 3: you know, how attentive are people to this case as
Speaker 3: a as a product of you having this book out
Speaker 3: it's called Skateboard.
Speaker 6: Well, the book came out of February the first. If
Speaker 6: the book's doing pretty well, this is this won't probably
Speaker 6: make much make being very meaningful to people who don't
Speaker 6: follow the book industry, but there are you know, there
Speaker 6: are three million books out there. And the other day
Speaker 6: I looked at Amazon rates all the books, the so
Speaker 6: called bestsellers on Amazon, and this book, this won't sound
Speaker 6: very very big, but it was up to thirty two
Speaker 6: thousand today it's like, you know, six hundred and fifty
Speaker 6: one thousand, but the other day it was at thirty
Speaker 6: two thousand, which was But anyway, that's the high ranking
Speaker 6: there's there's when you consider there's three million books and
Speaker 6: you're thirty two thousand, that's not too bad. But there's
Speaker 6: very few books dan that actually, you know, unless you're
Speaker 6: a big time you know, you know, John Grisham, scotch Rowe,
Speaker 6: you know what. You could name you and I could
Speaker 6: sit here and name twenty five big authors who sell
Speaker 6: you know, Patterson blah blah blah. But people like people
Speaker 6: like me who write books, they just really it's a
Speaker 6: tight it's a tight little deal. And death row cases.
Speaker 6: I wrote a book about Mumia Abu Jamal, who was
Speaker 6: and who was until he was taken up death row
Speaker 6: about three months ago, the most famous death row prisoner
Speaker 6: in the world, and that was a hard sell, really
Speaker 6: hard sell. People just this isn't an area that people
Speaker 6: really want to you know, it's not your mainstream subject,
Speaker 6: let's put it that way.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think though, it's interesting that you get a
Speaker 3: true crime audience that's interested in these types of cases
Speaker 3: where people are wrongly convicted. So I think it's it's
Speaker 3: an interesting audience that certainly applods when these people are
Speaker 3: around and there.
Speaker 6: Is a big true crime audience. There really is. But
Speaker 6: you know, like the publisher that I had the Moomia
Speaker 6: book and for this book, neither one of them has
Speaker 6: spent one dollar on an advertisement.
Speaker 3: No. Well, I mean advertising is gone by the way
Speaker 3: of the Dodo bird it because it doesn't it can't
Speaker 3: be proven to be effective and it's very, very expensive.
Speaker 3: So you know, people would like you to basically promote
Speaker 3: your book, and.
Speaker 6: I know, so that's what I think.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think the thing is, I think I
Speaker 3: think that's the way it ought to be too as well.
Speaker 3: But I think, you know, my my motto is that
Speaker 3: true crime apart me. Crime may not pay, but hopefully
Speaker 3: true crime will. You know, so in terms of people
Speaker 3: put a lot as you.
Speaker 6: Know, I have the website Crime Magazine, Yes, Timemagazine dot com.
Speaker 6: I've been running that since nineteen ninety eight. Now we
Speaker 6: get nothing but true crime buffs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, it's a fine site. I was honored
Speaker 3: to be included with the site. And you have some
Speaker 3: great stories on there, and the audience is it's a
Speaker 3: great setup too, because it's again you're way ahead of
Speaker 3: the way ahead of everybody else, because you've already made
Speaker 3: that step to be accessible all the time, archived and
Speaker 3: so that people can access these stories at any time
Speaker 3: at their leisure. And you know, so I think that
Speaker 3: this type of radio is the same sort of thing
Speaker 3: where you have you're basically just looking at the future.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just gonna be more so that this
Speaker 3: move towards the Internet. And so it's a great site
Speaker 3: for true crime fans to be able to access these
Speaker 3: stories because it's very much that there is a sort
Speaker 3: of a community that knows good from not bad, and
Speaker 3: not bad from not very good, and they have a
Speaker 3: voracious appetite for stories. And because there is such a
Speaker 3: historical perspective, it's not just I think a lot of
Speaker 3: people so I'm not into true crime. They're very much
Speaker 3: historical accounts of.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we do a lot of historical crimes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So well, I want to thank you very much for
Speaker 3: coming on and talking about your latest book, Scapegoat. This
Speaker 3: is the Chino Hill murders and the framing of Kevin
Speaker 3: Cooper Jay Patrick O'Connor. And how can they get this
Speaker 3: book as an ebook form as we.
Speaker 6: Can not yet It will be soon, but I don't know,
Speaker 6: maybe another month or two. But it's available on Amazon,
Speaker 6: you know, and Barnes and Noble Books, a million at
Speaker 6: all the major you know, United States sites, Internet sites,
Speaker 6: and it's available. It's dis kind of pretty well at Amazon.
Speaker 6: It's like the the cover price is twenty five dollars,
Speaker 6: but Amazon sells it for eighteen.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it's a good price too. And I mean
Speaker 3: it's a it's a it's a bigger your publisher has
Speaker 3: moved towards putting it in the bigger print, the bold print,
Speaker 3: the bigger size, the six point nine I believe it is.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's an agreeable book, yeah, yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 6: a user friendly book.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, it goes a great package too. So and
Speaker 3: great story, I mean great story.
Speaker 6: I mean it's a terrible story, it really is. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I'm so, you know, it's a painful story.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then and like I say, the audience for true
Speaker 3: crime I think is very much behind the prosecution the
Speaker 3: vast majority of time. But it's nice to have this
Speaker 3: balance so that we.
Speaker 5: See that, you know, despite what it looks like, lots.
Speaker 3: Of times cases are wrongful convictions. And so again we
Speaker 3: can applaud the the brilliant, you know, the brilliant prosecutor,
Speaker 3: the brave prosecutor. But sometimes it's over zealous and in
Speaker 3: this case, downright a travesty of justice. So I want
Speaker 3: to thank you very much for doing that. And I'm
Speaker 3: sure that the Kevin Cooper and the Kevin Cooper's of
Speaker 3: the world appreciate somebody like yourself being a strong advocate
Speaker 3: for them and their their cases for justice.
Speaker 6: So all right, Dan, well, thanks so much for having
Speaker 6: me on your program.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you very much, and you have a good night,
Speaker 3: and I hope to talk to you again soon.
Speaker 6: Thank you, all right, thanks so much, good night,