The Other Story

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Everything They Missed

Episode 5: "The Other Story"
Host: Stephanie Tinsley
Date: October 2, 2025

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Overview

This riveting episode delves deep into the 2007 Memphis murder of Danny Harris—a case long considered solved, but possibly far from it. Host Stephanie Tinsley retraces overlooked evidence, chases untold family secrets, and explores new testimonies that place two women, Tammy Vance and her daughter Sarah Lucas, at the heart of the mystery. With the involvement of the Tennessee Innocence Project and new revelations from Harris’s extended network, the episode uncovers the messy, human side of a story that was never truly aired.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The People Behind the Case (00:30–02:42)

• Stephanie sets the tone, warning listeners that only those already convicted are suspects, and others named are not officially implicated.
• She tracks down ex-cellmates of Tammy Vance (Danny Harris’s associate) to understand her character.

  “She really wasn't a nice person. I'm just gonna be honest with you.” — Anonymous Former Cellmate (00:51)

• Discovery: Tammy, while incarcerated, had nightmares about someone named Wayne.

  “She would holler that name out in her sleep.” — Former Cellmate (02:01)

The Podcast's Origin & the Innocence Project (03:43–08:26)

• Stephanie reveals her partnership with Jason Gishner, the head of the Tennessee Innocence Project. Jason weighs the risks of media exposure for ongoing cases:

  “It's almost always good for our organization...to get these stories out in the world. It's not always good for the case.” — Jason Gishner (04:19)

• He finally agrees to let Stephanie investigate, reserving the right to stop her if necessary.

Reconstructing the Timeline: Evidence vs. Testimony (08:26–12:32)

• Jason describes how Innocence Project staff assembled physical and testimonial evidence:
  • Cell tower data shows movements of key people on the morning of the murder.
  • Tammy and Sarah’s accounts diverge sharply, but the phone evidence supports Tammy’s story as to their whereabouts.

  “When you map where the phone is and you compare it to Tammy Vance's testimony, it's spot on... We know for a fact Sarah Lucas was at the DMV in West Memphis, Arkansas.” — Jason Gishner (11:13)

  • There is no evidence Andrew Hayes, the man convicted, was present.

The Breakthrough: Family Testimony and a Volatile Confrontation (13:23–17:57)

• Investigator Mark Caudell uncovers volatile new content—a raw call with Sarah Lucas herself:

  “If this shit don't stop, I was to sue the pants out of your little justice system. Do you understand me?” — Sarah Lucas (13:53)

• Sarah adamantly denies involvement, vents about Tammy, and, notably, rapidly vanishes after the conversation.
• Both Sarah and her family air dirty laundry; threats and deep-rooted family grudges surface.

  “I don't know if this man's innocent, but I know I am... She was running around. And that was before she did this. There was a 300 people she slept with.” — Sarah Lucas (17:29)

Family Secrets and New Evidence (21:03–27:05)

• Key people in the Vance family have died, complicating the investigation.
• Trey Landers (Heather’s ex-husband) describes a family history of deceit and theft.

  “The grandfather was telling me about his own daughter stealing from him...don't let them come in your house and all that, because they'll rob you blind.” — Trey Landers (23:15)

• Trey's son Tyler finds a crucial lost letter from Tammy implicating Sarah:

  “Sarah hit him over the head with a hammer, poured kerosene on his body, stuffed his mouth with a rag... took his checks...The letter is kind of what...kicked my thought process off of, okay, Sarah is the murderer and is walking the streets.” — Tyler Landers (26:21)

• Another recovered letter from Tammy to Sarah admits to having “protected you from ever, ever going to jail or prison and let an innocent man take your place.”

The Search for Sarah (29:13–31:51)

• As Stephanie tries every avenue to find Sarah Lucas, Sarah’s stepsister Ruby delivers condemning character testimony:

  “Sarah is very evil, very conniving... She'll do whatever she has to do to get what she wants. It doesn't matter. She'll kill for it.” — Ruby (30:00)

• Friends attempt to contact Sarah via Facebook—Sarah reportedly replies, hinting at a potential future confrontation.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments with Timestamps

• "She really wasn't a nice person. I'm just gonna be honest with you."
  — Anonymous Former Cellmate (00:51)
• “She would holler that name [Wayne] out in her sleep.”
  — Anonymous Former Cellmate (02:01)
• “It's almost always good...to get these stories out in the world. It's not always good for the case.”
  — Jason Gishner (04:19)
• “I truly believe the reason that Andrew got convicted is because the jury never got to hear the physical evidence that would...support or call into doubt one of the stories.”
  — Jason Gishner (06:26)
• “If this shit don't stop, I was to sue the pants out of your little justice system. Do you understand me?”
  — Sarah Lucas (13:53)
• “Sarah, I protected you from ever, ever going to jail or prison and let an innocent man take your place. I'm not even sorry I did that...”
  — Tammy Vance, letter cited by Stephanie (27:05)
• “Sarah is very evil, very conniving...She'll kill for it. She'll steal it. She'll do whatever she has to do to get what she wants.”
  — Ruby (30:00)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 00:30–02:42: Introducing Tammy Vance’s reputation via former cellmate interviews.
• 03:43–08:26: Stephanie’s partnership with Jason Gishner and the Innocence Project.
• 08:26–12:32: Technical breakdown of cell record evidence vs. testimonies.
• 13:23–17:57: Confrontational call with Sarah Lucas.
• 21:03–27:05: Family history, lost letters, and the crux of new evidence.
• 29:13–30:53: Ruby’s damning testimony about Sarah’s character.

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Summary Flow & Tone

The episode weaves murder-mystery investigation with testament to family dysfunction, broken trust, and the high emotional stakes of wrongful conviction. Raw, unpolished exhibits—calls, letters, and interviews—bring a sense of urgency and human nuance. Stephanie Tinsley’s tone is persistent and empathetic, while those she interviews are alternately defensive, bitter, and haunted.

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Conclusion

"Everything They Missed: The Other Story" lays out an alternate narrative of the Danny Harris murder—one implying a potentially wrongful conviction and an untold story shielded by family loyalty and fear. With physical evidence, candid family admissions, and the looming presence of Sarah Lucas, this episode stands as a case study in both investigative tenacity and the elusive, fractured nature of justice when family secrets and systemic oversights collide.

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Transcript

[Stephanie Tinsley]

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[Stephanie Tinsley]

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[Stephanie Tinsley]

The following story discusses individuals connected to the case of Danny Harris. Except for those previously convicted in this matter, no one mentioned in this series has been officially named a suspect, person of interest, or found guilty of any crime related to his death.

[Anonymous Former Cellmate]

We was cellmates, and I had to put her out of my cell because she was stealing from me. What was she stealing from you? She really wasn't a nice person. I'm just gonna be honest with you.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

Months into the investigation, drowning in interrogation manuals and police files, it dawned on me. None of those pages were going to tell me who Tammy Vance really was or Sarah Lucas, the people who might actually sit at the center of this murder. I realized if I wanted answers, I needed to step back into the messiness of people, especially the ones who had never been asked.

[Anonymous Former Cellmate]

Nobody really talked to her in the prison just because she wasn't very nice. No, she stole from everyone.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

After some digging, I finally tracked down Tammy's old prison records from the Tennessee Prison for Women. Then I started dialing. One by one, I called her former cellmates. Almost all of them shut me down. Except this one, who asked to remain anonymous.

[Anonymous Former Cellmate]

Do you know if Tammy ever mentioned a man named Andrew or Wayne? Wayne. Now, I remember that name. But the only reason I remember that I believe she used to have nightmares with that name. She would holler that name out in her sleep. Wow.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

She tells me it was a cinderblock cell. Metal bunks jammed against the wall with a thin plastic mat for a mattress, two dented drawers, and a crooked bookshelf that held almost nothing. That's the space where they got to know each other. That's where she heard Tammy crying out in her sleep in the middle of the night. The name Wayne.

[Anonymous Former Cellmate]

Did she talk about that Sarah had killed the man and not Wayne? I don't want to answer that. Okay. I understand. I would love for you to, but, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people would. So you're just afraid that if you got involved, nobody knows what kind of connection she has in the street? So you'd be afraid of her daughter? I don't know, honey. Like I told you, there's. There's. A lot riding on that. You know, I was behind those gates with some scary people, and those people had connections in the free world that people wouldn't think they had. And as bad as she talked about her daughter, I don't understand why she's not already locked up. Just from other things.

[Jason Gishner]

Foreign.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

I'm Stephanie Tinsley, and this is everything they missed. Episode 5 the Other Story.

[Jason Gishner]

The tension that we always have when we're deciding about whether we're going to do media. When it's over and done with, it's easy. But while it's pending, it's always. I'm always asking the question, why are we doing this?

[Stephanie Tinsley]

I had called Jason Gishner, an attorney before. That's how I introduced him, which technically is true. But what I didn't say is that he's also the head of the Tennessee Innocence Project.

[Jason Gishner]

It's almost always good for our organization and for people who do innocence work in general to get these stories out in the world. It's not always good for the case. And sometimes there's tension between those two things. And what's good for the case always wins.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

You might have heard the Innocence Project, the group fighting to undo wrongful convictions. They're spread across the country. But here's what most don't realize. It's not one big machine. Each state runs its own nonprofit, raising its own money, working its own cases. Sometimes they share resources, but what they really share is the weight. My husband Mark put it best. Files sit on lawyers desks for Innocence Project lawyers, it's lives.

[Jason Gishner]

So I definitely see real value in it. But it still makes me nervous.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

This was my first call with Jason about a year ago, when I floated the idea of a podcast. At the time, he didn't exactly sign off on it.

[Jason Gishner]

Yeah, I mean, it's an easy yes for me to say, talk about a case that we've already litigated and the client's been exonerated. And you can talk to them, you can have access to them, you know.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

So how about this? Would you be okay with us swinging by your office and just kind of talking just a little more in detail about what we're thinking?

[Jason Gishner]

You guys are welcome to come by.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

I would love to come by. Okay. A few days after that call, I was in Jason's office flipping through case files. But every file he showed me was already resolved. The person exonerated, case closed. That wasn't what I wanted. I told him I wanted something alive, a case I could chase. Jason paused. He had that look people get when they're deciding whether to open a door they may not be able to close, that's when he turned his screen toward me with a PowerPoint. It was Andrew's story.

[Jason Gishner]

I truly believe the reason that Andrew got convicted is because the jury never got to hear the physical evidence that would either support or call into doubt. One of the stories, when you match up the cell tower records, the phone records, the bank records, the pawn shop records. Right. When you put those in context with Tammy's story versus Sarah's story, well, the evidence backs up one story and refutes another story. But the jury heard very little of that information. And what they heard about it, I was hooked.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

And more importantly, Jason said yes to the case, kind of. He slid a thumb drive containing all the files in the case across his desk to me, but he said he was reserving the right to shut down my investigation at any time.

[Jason Gishner]

What makes me nervous about reporters is that I don't want them putting this out in the world yet. And I'm worried if you turn them onto this, they're gonna write a story about it.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

But what's the bad. What's the. With shining a light on like. So are you afraid that the truth.

[Jason Gishner]

Of it is, Stephanie, is that normally we avoid it. You know, we kind of keep everything internal until we are ready to put it out in the world. And I think there are a lot of great things that can come out of doing this, but I am constantly thinking about and nervous about if any aspect of this could adversely affect Andrew.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

Giving Jason the power to shut it down wasn't how I pictured launching a podcast, but I saw the potential. If Andrew was truly innocent, and I was beginning to lean that way, maybe there was still a chance to set things right. So I agreed, and Jason turned me loose on everything.

[Jason Gishner]

So we came up with the strategy early on. Well, let's figure out if there's evidence out in the world that's going to give us an answer as to which one of these stories rings more true. So there's a couple different ways that you bring an innocence case back into court in Tennessee after all of these years have passed. One of them is new scientific evidence. One of the ways you can get back into court is by filing what's called an error quorum nobis petition, which is when you have new evidence that's not scientific in nature. So what do I mean by that? I mean someone else confessing to a crime, a video of somebody else committing a crime. Not DNA evidence, not medical evidence, not Scientific evidence on false confessions or bad identifications. Right. So what we've got in this case is we have science and non science.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

One of the first pieces of evidence they collected were Danny's phone records. We touched on those before. But Jason and his team went further. They dug up the records from the towers themselves that gave them geolocation data, a map of where Danny's phone was really pinging and who he was connected to in those moments.

[Jason Gishner]

And this stuff was not all that well organized. It was just a lot of information. So what we tried to do was let's take everything we have, let's piece together the morning of the murder, and let's piece together the weeks following the murder and. And let's see what connections we come across as we start to do this. So early on, what we tried to figure out is where are all of the relevant people the morning of the crime? And the information we had to go off of was Tammy Vance testified at trial and said, this is what we did that morning. Her testimony was essentially, I had spent the night at the apartment in Cordova with Mr. Harris. Early the next morning, we got up, we picked up my daughter in Memphis, Sarah Lucas, at the house she was living on, on a street called Sacala. And then the three of us went together and we drove out to West Memphis, Arkansas to get state IDs. On the way back, we stopped at a Burger King, and then we went back to Mr. Harris's apartment. Sarah Lucas testified at trial that she didn't remember anything about any of that, and she wasn't with these people that morning. And that was the extent pretty much of what she had to say about all of it. We said, well, how can we figure out if what Tammy Vance is saying is accurate? What objective information independent of these statements might give us some guidance on that? So we knew we had cell tower records showing us where Danny Harris phone was on the morning of the murder, because the police had pinged his phone to figure out its location throughout that morning. And lo and behold, when you map where the phone is and you compare it to Tammy Vance's testimony, it's spot on. What we also have is the state ID that Sarah Lucas got in West Memphis, Arkansas on the morning of the murder. So we know for a fact she was at the DMV in West Memphis, Arkansas. We know for a fact that Danny Harris's cell phone is at that same location the morning of his murder. So then what happens after that is Tammy Vance testifies that they drive back, they stop at a Burger King. There appears to be evidence from the cell tower records that there's a stop that looks pretty close to where a Burger King still is. And then after that, we see the cell phone go straight back to Cordova to Mr. Harris apartment. We never see it stop at Sakala. Dropping off. There's never a stop on the way home where we see Sarah Lucas dropped off.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

And then there was one other detail.

[Jason Gishner]

There is nothing on there that shows stops by where Andrew Hayes lives.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

As they untangled the records, Jason says they started making other moves.

[Jason Gishner]

When we do one of these investigations, one of the strategic decisions we made is, well, let's see what's happened in the years that have followed. Let's see if Sara Lucas has talked about this. Let's see if her family knows anything about it. So our investigator, Mark Caudell, started going around and figuring out which one of her family members was still alive and who could we talk to. We knew that there were nieces and nephews that were still around and they lived all over the country. We also thought maybe we might be able to get access to old letters or communications that might exist between Sarah and Tammy. Anything that could shed further light on what people knew about this.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

That's when he hit play on a tape I thought I'd never hear. And I have to warn you, it's raw and vulgar and shocking and it's been sealed off from the public for years. Never broadcast or shared. Until now. Because Jason's team didn't just stack up affidavits from Sarah's family. They landed a call with Sarah herself.

[Sarah Lucas]

My nephew. Let me explain to you. The that's sitting in jail did what he did. If this shit don't stop, I was to sue the pants out of your little justice system. Do you understand me?

[Mark Caudell]

You could feel free to sue whoever you'd like, but our investigation will continue.

[Trey Landers]

You.

[Sarah Lucas]

For what? I didn't do anything.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

Well, it's still our invest in 2023, the Tennessee Innocence Project tapped Memphis defense attorney Mark Caudell to chase the story's loose ends. He started with tracking down members of Tammy and Sarah's family. Some would talk, but the ones that did warned him if Sarah caught wind of this, she'd retaliate. Then out of the blue, while Mark was on mid drive on the open highway, she did.

[Sarah Lucas]

And who exactly are you?

[Mark Caudell]

Well, you apparently know who I am if you're calling me.

[Sarah Lucas]

No, I just knew that my niece Bracey, that you spoke with said that you were justice something.

[Mark Caudell]

Yeah, I work with The Tennessee Innocence Project.

[Sarah Lucas]

And you're going to get him out of there. And he killed an animal.

[Mark Caudell]

That's to be determined.

[Sarah Lucas]

But you're running around running my name all through towns and states. I'm gonna sue the out of y'.

[Trey Landers]

All.

[Sarah Lucas]

Okay, that is slander. Do you understand that?

[Mark Caudell]

I haven't said you've done anything.

[Sarah Lucas]

Okay, well, they're telling me that you're asking questions about me. For what? That was closed years ago with Mullins and everybody else.

[Mark Caudell]

Well, it's open again.

[Sarah Lucas]

And who let you open it?

[Mark Caudell]

We opened it. And, you know, we're just doing an investigation right now.

[Sarah Lucas]

You know, I'm just trying to live my life. My mom put me in a bunch of shit because she was a piece of shit is what my mother was. She put my sister Heather, that passed away on November 2 of a year ago, in jail for lies. Okay, you don't know Tammy Jean Vance at all. And you don't know the little she run around with and every dick she stuffed and all over town to get her way. I do. I'm her daughter. She was but a piece of mother and grandmother.

[Trey Landers]

Oh.

[Sarah Lucas]

I mean, why are you asking questions about me, though?

[Mark Caudell]

Because I'm conducting an investigation.

[Sarah Lucas]

And who else are you asking questions about? Am I the only one?

[Mark Caudell]

I'm not able to tell you that.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

I'm letting this tape roll because it's wild. The way I hear it, Sarah sounds paranoid. And when I hear paranoia, I can't help but think it's tied to fear or to a secret. Mark Caudell stays quiet, gives her space.

[Sarah Lucas]

Jamie went around running her mouth wherever I picked on about it. I can't ever just be in peace like. I'm tired of this. I was a daddy's girl, so I didn't give a fuck if Tammy lived or died, to be honest with you. And she died two days before my birthday. And they didn't fathe me. Cause she's a cunt.

[Mark Caudell]

Well, I mean, I can tell you this. I mean, as part of our investigation. It's not that we are trying to prove who did it. We are trying to show that there is a very good chance that Mr. Hayes did not do it.

[Sarah Lucas]

So I don't know that I can tell you this much. Tammy was an awful individual. My dad lives next door to me and he can't stand her name even. She stole from him. She did so many things, Mr. Mark. You don't have a clue. I don't know if this man's innocent, but I know I am. I don't know. She was running around. And that was before she did this. There was a 300 people she slept with.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

Sarah goes off on her mother, calls her psychotic, claims the family are liars. She swears she's innocent, says she can't lie, and claims her memory is a blur. It feels like she's talking in circles. And when Mark picks up on that, he tries a different angle. He asks to meet her face to face.

[Sarah Lucas]

Sorry I went off. I'm just tired of all this. I mean, I'm stuck in the middle of something that I didn't do because my mother got mad at me because I didn't film my ass to make sure she had money. So she started this whole thing up because of that.

[Mark Caudell]

Okay, well, all right. Like I said, I'll give you a call once I have a better understanding of when we'll be coming out.

[Sarah Lucas]

All right, thank you.

[Jason Gishner]

Thank you.

[Mark Caudell]

Byebye.

[Trey Landers]

Byebye.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

Sarah never called back. She just changed her number, packed her bags and vanished. No one has spoken to her since. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. Description it's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.

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[Mark Caudell]

If she knew there was a podcast. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how she would react to that or how she will react to it once it comes out. I mean, does she even Listen to podcasts? Probably not.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

When I left the Innocence Project office, I poured over everything Jason gave me. There was a lot. But what grabbed me were the affidavits, statements from Sarah Lucas and Tammy Vance's family that were almost unbelievable. And defense investigator Mark Caudell was who first gathered them.

[Mark Caudell]

One of the first people that I wanted to talk to was. Was Tammy. And then I found out that she had passed away. And then I wanted to talk to Snow and found that she had passed away. And then by the time we got really into the case, Heather had passed away. And that's the problem with all of these cases. It was old enough to where a lot of the key witnesses were no longer alive. We could only do the next best thing, which is talk to all the people that were close to Heather, which is what we did.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

As a reminder, Heather is Tammy's other daughter, and she was one of the very first calls on Danny's phone after the murder.

[Mark Caudell]

So I believe I talked to Trey first about what he knew about Heather. I knew they had been married, but I didn't know when that relationship had ended. And so, from talking to Trey, I got a lot more information that I had anticipated because he knew a lot more about the whole Vance family going back decades.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

Again, I'm reading through these statements Mark collected from Tammy's family, and I was in shock. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. But in the back of my mind, I was wondering if they would still hold by those words today, because if they did, if there's no wavering, no flakiness, it would speak volumes about the truth behind what they'd said back then. Mark Caudell assured me they'd be more than willing to talk.

[Anonymous Former Cellmate]

People in your family think that it was Tammy and Sarah that killed Danny?

[Trey Landers]

Oh, yeah.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

Trey Landers lives just outside of Memphis. For a while, he was married to Heather Vance. And when I asked him about the family, he had plenty of stories.

[Trey Landers]

Tammy was more the instigator and, like, do this and let's do this, and. Because she's the one that stole the money from her mama and daddy.

[Anonymous Former Cellmate]

So they never really had real jobs.

[Trey Landers]

No. Shortly after I married, I met the grandparents, and the grandfather was telling me about his own daughter stealing from him, you know, and he said, until you not like them. I said, oh, hell no. I said, I don't know much about them. He said, yeah. He said, don't have no dealings with them. Don't let them live with you. Don't let them come in your House and all that, because they'll rob you blind. And sure enough, you know, that's when started getting stolen from me.

[Anonymous Former Cellmate]

And did you ever meet Sarah?

[Trey Landers]

Oh, yeah, unfortunately, yeah. I didn't have hardly two words, fake to her, because I can't stand her. I don't like her. I don't trust her. I didn't want her in my house. I didn't even want to know where the hell I lived.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

Trey told me the break ins were ongoing. And one night, he says he even caught Sarah in the act. He had had enough, divorced Heather, and put as much distance as he could between himself and the Vance family. But distance doesn't erase what he saw up close. So I asked Trey, did he think Tammy or Sarah could be the kind of person to commit this crime?

[Trey Landers]

Sarah, this. Her demeanor and the way she acted. I wouldn't put it past her because she just that type. She would just get hysterical sometimes, just, what. What the hell's wrong with you? You know, and. And fly off the handle real quick.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

I asked who else might really know Sarah well enough to answer that question.

[Trey Landers]

All I know is what Tyler has told me.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

Tyler is Trey's son, and he said it was no problem making an introduction.

[Trey Landers]

Sarah's my aunt, and Tammy was my grandma.

[Anonymous Former Cellmate]

And your mom, unfortunately, has passed away.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

Yes, unfortunately, Tyler was just a teenager when it all went down. At first, I worried reaching out might stir up old wounds, but they assured me it was okay. And honestly, I needed to talk to him. Because according to his dad, six years after the murder, Tyler came across something damning, something the jury never heard, something that pointed to Sarah.

[Trey Landers]

I was at my mom's for one summer, and she had a letter from my grandma on the table. And I read it, and Tammy had.

[Anonymous Former Cellmate]

Written it to your mom, Heather. Yes.

[Trey Landers]

I just happened to seen the letter on the table, and I knew it was from my grandma. I was like, oh, cool. She wrote my mom. I had no idea what the. What the letter was gonna say at all. And then I read it, and I was like, oh. I knew when I read it, I was like, oh, damn. In my head. She was like, okay, fuck it. I'm gonna just say what all happened that night and leave no detail out.

[Anonymous Former Cellmate]

What did the letter say? Do you remember?

[Trey Landers]

Pretty much just Sarah hit him over the head with a hammer, poured kerosene on his body, stuffed his mouth with a rag. And then they would go in and out of his house, taking things. His TV being one of the things they got. Took his checks, and it baffles me every day how Sarah somehow escaped all that. The letter is kind of what? What, like, kicked my thought process off of, okay, Sarah is the murderer and is walking the streets.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

I asked Tyler if he still had the letter, but he told me it was gone, lost with most of his mother's belongings. However, there was another letter, one the Innocence Project collected, written by Tammy to Sarah. And in it, there's a line that stopped me cold. It read in quotes, sarah, I protected you from ever, ever going to jail or prison and let an innocent man take your place. I'm not even sorry I did that, because I never want to be with one of my girls in jail or prison. End quote. Stack all of it together. This letter, the affidavits from the family, the cell tower records, and Sarah's reputation. This is the new evidence the Innocence Project believes could crack the foundation of Andrew's conviction. They bound it in a packet called a PC, ecn, a post conviction petition, a writ of error, quorum nobis, in plain English, a formal plea to the judge to reopen the case, to reconsider. If the judge agreed, the case would move to the District Attorney's office. The DA could back a new trial or fight it. Either way, Jason would finally have a chance to make an oral argument on Andrew's behalf. It was in motion, but nothing was guaranteed. It could be accepted, or it could be tossed out in a heartbeat. Another detour in an already 18 year agonizing road for people who deserve the truth. I kept asking myself, how far would this go? How many more family members would step forward to point the finger at Sarah? At what point does it stop being testimony and start sounding like a chorus? And how many voices does it take before someone in power decides it's enough? Weighing all of it, I felt like there had to be something more. A Hail Mary still out there waiting to be thrown. Something undeniable. It all came back to Sarah. The other story I needed to find a way to reach her.

[Trey Landers]

I do not have her number, but Ruby would definitely know more about how to get in contact with Sarah than I would.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

I thanked Tyler. And like clockwork, just as I hang up, a text lights up my screen. It reads, hello, this is Ruby. I can tell you more about Sarah.

[Anonymous Former Cellmate]

I believe wholeheartedly that she was a main lead in that situation, because the way she bragged about it when it happened. So she bragged about the murder to you? She bragged about it to everybody. She thought it was hilarious.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

Ruby is Sarah's stepsister, who, like the rest of the family had plenty to openly say.

[Anonymous Former Cellmate]

He was brutally murdered. It. I mean, it was. It was brutal. And you think that she's capable of all that? She is. Trust me. The Sarah that everybody sees at first is not the Sarah that's underneath all that. Sarah is very evil, very conniving. She's gonna do anything she can to get what she wants. It doesn't matter. She'll kill for it. She'll steal it. She'll do whatever she has to do to get what she wants. And that goes from money to drugs to a pair of tennis shoes. Okay? I believe she needs to be put where she belongs, and that's in prison for killing the man. And I'll tell you straight up, let me know that y' all looking for her to arrest her, and I will personally drive five hours to find her.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

I jump at the offer. Ruby says although they're related, she hadn't heard from Sarah in a while. She changes her number often, but I didn't want to sit around and wait. The petition was filed. The clock was ticking. I was talking about my mission to find Sarah night and day when my friend Elizabeth called.

[Sarah Lucas]

So we were talking about Sarah, and I decided to go down that Facebook rabbit hole.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

I was looking at all of her.

[Sarah Lucas]

Friends and noticed that we had a mutual connection. I was blown away. But I reached out to that person to see if they would message Sarah. Send a message from us, from you. And they said they would, so they did. And Sarah messaged back.

[Stephanie Tinsley]

Thank you for listening to everything they missed. If you want more before next week's episode, follow me on social media hestephanetinsley for extended interviews and deeper details into the story. And visit us [e-mail] to see photos, videos, or leave a voice message for me on our tip line if you think you have information to help this case. Also, don't forget to follow, rate and review this show. It helps more than you know.