Maggie Freeling (33:29)
It seems they formed their theory that David Thorne recruited someone to kill Yvonne and then looked for evidence to support that theory. We know the police were getting desperate from the psychic interview. Eventually, the case fell right in their lap. Starting with Rose. If her building manager hadn't called the police to say Rose knew something, the police may never have known about Joe. After that, the pieces all fell into place. Rose and Chris told the police about Joe telling them he was in town to murder a girl. Joe told the police about Sam Pegg, his best friend. Sam told the police that Joe was telling her months ahead of time about this. The Enochs confirmed Joe had no money until he saw David. David's alibi had holes in it. It's all right there, but yet all of us have been drawn to the case. Because the arrests came from a notoriously corrupt department with detectives that had less than stellar reputations, an abotched crime scene and Brady violations, and multiple people who could have done this, who were never looked into. And all of this corroborated by their own police records. The trial left what I would certainly consider reasonable doubt. There was no conclusive physical evidence linking Joe to the scene. Had the jurors heard from George Hale, the neighbor who saw an unknown man leave Yvonne's house after she was dead, perhaps the verdict would have been different. But they didn't. They didn't know about Hale because the prosecution didn't tell them. Despite being obligated to disclose information like that. If David's team had called an expert to refute the state's evidence, maybe we wouldn't be here. But none of that happened. And if there's one thing I can say for sure about this case, it's that David Thorne did not get a fair trial. And there are still lingering questions we may never get answers to. The crime scene certainly does not match Joe's statement. And neither does the knife which, remember, didn't have any blood on it. Why has Joe's story changed so many times? It's possible today he's confused by how many people have questioned him, asked him different versions, told him different stories. He doesn't know what's true anymore. But I do know that Joe believes he is the kind, caring person we heard so much about who was severely abused and just wanted someone to love him. And in this case, David, was that someone? I think Joe did go there with the folding knife. The only folding knife of that kind bought that year, on March 31, 1999, at the exact time Joe said he bought it. But after Chris Campbell made fun of him and said, who are you going to kill with that, he ditched it and used the kitchen knife. That's why there was no blood on the folding knife, and that's why a kitchen knife was missing, because Jo used it for me. That's a reasonable explanation for some of the lingering questions. Others may just never be answered. And so we have no new evidence pointing to innocence. And once someone is convicted by a jury, it's nearly impossible, impossible to get out without that new evidence. So there was nowhere left for us to go. After the investigation, the billboards expired and came down and the tip line was shut off. I have recovered since 2021. After losing trust in myself, I dusted off my shame, picked up my head, and kept going at what I know. I'm good at finding the truth and telling stories. I went on to win a Pulitzer for my reporting on mandatory minimums and juvenile lifers in the podcast Suave in 2022. Since then, I've learned about and poured my heart and soul into reporting on countless innocent people in prison and telling their stories. A conservative estimate is that there are more than 20,000 innocent people in prison, but experts say numbers are more likely in the hundreds of thousands. One of those people. I recently released a new investigation on, the first since Yvonne's called Graves county, where not only do I get it right, but much of my reporting and series was inspired by processing the aftermath of getting it wrong. I found a case where a journalist got it wrong like I did, yet he refuses to speak to me or acknowledge his mistakes or worse. I think it's crucial to talk about our fallibilities as journalists. Not only does it keep us honest, but it keeps us humble and human. And ultimately, at the end of all this, there was a woman, a mother, a friend, a daughter who was brutally murdered, and her family has had to live with that for going on three decades and a police department who did them no justice, allowing countless people to spend time and resources looking into what was very likely correct, but so poorly investigated it left too many questions for confidence. We went into this in part to get justice for Yvonne Lane and her family. They deserve to know the truth. And now I think the truth was there the whole time. I believed this was very likely a wrongful conviction. So did many others. Meaning we also believed that there was something, someone else out there getting away with Yvonne's murder. That's why I recruited investigators to take a look. But now we believe that broken clock was right and Yvonne's friends and family finally deserve to have their mother, daughter and loved one rest in peace. If the police had just done their job, if they hadn't left so much room for doubt, I believe Yvonne's family would not have had the worst moment of their lives brought up countless times for nearly three decades. And I want to repeat discussions about whether Yvonne was or was not a sex worker or a dancer or used drugs are important to the case. But beyond that, it doesn't matter. Her life was worth more than a pair of Nike shoes and some Rollerblades. Regardless of what choices she made in her life and her children, I hope at least that Yvonne's five boys can conclude what they want and remember her how they want. Tony, Vinnie, Brandon, Trenton and Preston deserve that. If you could correct everything that's been said about her, what do you want people to know?
