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The Crimes that Built America | Murder: True Crime Stories
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- [00:01]
Sarah and Courtney
Hey guys, we have exciting news. Crime House plus and True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or you can binge all of them right now ad free with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page. Hey guys, it's Sarah and it's me, Courtney. We're excited to share a bonus episode with you. This week, True Crime Stories from Crime House is marking America's 250th with a four part limited series called the Crimes that Built America. Four turning points in our history. The case behind Miranda Rights, the murders that created the FBI, the era that gave us criminal profiling, and the murder of Adam Walsh that built America's missing children movement. We have episode one for you right now. It's about the case that created the Miranda rights. Want the full series today? Join Crime House plus to binge all four ad free or follow True Crime Stories to hear a new episode free every Monday until July 4th. And as a Crime House plus member, you'll also get every episode of the final hours early and ad free. Free. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page.
- [01:44]
Carter Roy
This is crime house. You probably know the words by heart. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. They're on every cop show, every crime movie. They've been read aloud during every arrest in America for almost 60 years. Or at least they're supposed to be. They're called Miranda Rights. What you may not know is that Miranda Rights are named after a real person or what he did to earn his place on that card. In 1963, a 22 year old career criminal named Ernesto Miranda kidnapped in 1883 woman named Patricia Weir off a sidewalk in Phoenix, Arizona and assaulted her in the desert. He was caught, confessed and sentenced to 20 to 30 years in prison. Three years later, the Supreme Court of the United States threw out his conviction. Not because he was innocent, but because of how he'd been questioned. The case that bears his name changed the rules for every police interrogation in America. Thirteen years after that, Ernesto Miranda was murdered in a bar fight in downtown Phoenix. And the man who killed him was the first person in American history protected by the law that bore Miranda's name. This is the story of the most famous sentence in American law, where it came from, who paid for it, and the strange, dark afterlife of the man who gave it his name. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. Hi, I'm Carter Roy and this is True Crime Stories, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Today we're starting a brand new four week series in honor of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. It's called the Crimes that Built America. Over the course of four Mondays on the Murder True Crime Stories feed, we're covering the cases that built the American criminal justice system as we know it. For tragedies that led to greater protections for everyone. Miranda writes the FBI criminal profiling, the system that protects and advocates for missing children. Each one exists because of a specific crime, a specific family, and a specific moment when the country decided enough was enough. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow the show. If you're a Crime House plus subscriber. All four episodes are available right now completely ad free. If you haven't joined yet, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Stories show page or on Apple Podcasts. You'll get part one and Part two at the same time. Plus exclusive bonus content. For our first episode of the Crimes that Built America, I'm covering the case of Ernesto Miranda. In 1963, Miranda was a 22 year old dock loader in Phoenix, Arizona with a long juvenile record. That March, he kidnapped and attacked an 18 year old woman who was walking home from work. He was arrested, interrogated and confessed. What happened next would change the criminal justice system forever and give us constitutional protections known as Miranda Rights. All that and more coming up. Phoenix in the early 1960s was a fast growing desert city of about 400,000 people and it was segregated north to south by Van Buren Street. White families live north of it, Mexican American families live south and the line between them was almost never crossed. Downtown was where everyone met. It had the shops, the diners, the buses, the movie theaters. The biggest theater in the city was the Paramount on East Washington street. In March of 1963, to kill a Mockingbird had been on the marquee for weeks. When the last show let out at 11pm the ushers and concession girls would clean up the lobby and catch the bus home. One of them was an 18 year old named Patricia Weird, who everyone called Trish. Trish was the second of four daughters born in Phoenix in 1945. She was quiet and shy and the kind of girl who said yes, ma' am and no ma' am, because that was how her mother had raised her. She wore her hair short, dressed conservatively, and was saving every paycheck from the Paramount for secretarial school. Her father, Merrill Weird, had worked as a custodian at the Goodyear Aircraft plant outside Phoenix. He died in 1961 when Trish was 16. Trish, who'd always been close to him, became even more reserved. Her mother, Zeola, started taking on extra work to keep up with the bills. Her older sister Ann, had recently married and she and her new husband had moved into the family home to help with the rent. The house was on the north side of Phoenix in a developing area, three blocks from the bus stop at 7th street and Marlette Avenue. Empty lots, new construction, families with kids. To get home from work, Trish walked two blocks south from the Paramount to 7th street, caught the northbound bus, rode for about 15 minutes, got off at Marlette and walked the last three blocks home. She'd done it five nights a week for months. On the night of Saturday, March 2, 1963, she got off her shift around 11:30pm she walked her usual route to the bus stop with a co worker. Just before midnight, the bus pulled up at 7th and Marlette and Trish stepped off. The neighborhood was still under construction. The sidewalks were dark and quiet. She started walking the three blocks toward home. That's when she heard a car behind her. The vehicle slowed. A few seconds later, it stopped. The driver's door opened and a man got out and started walking up the sidewalk after her. Trish kept walking. The man caught up to her and grabbed her around the waist from behind. He said, if you don't scream, I won't hurt you. That was a lie. He dragged her to the car and pushed her into the backseat, tied her ankles together and her wrists behind her back. He told her to stay quiet for about 20 minutes. He drove north out of the city and into the desert. He pulled off the road. Then he raped her in the backseat, took the $4 from her purse and drove back toward town. He let her out of the car about four blocks from her house. He told her to pray for him. Then he drove away. Trish walked the four blocks home in shock. By the time she got there, her hands were still shaking and her wrists were still raw from the rope. Her sister Ann was up waiting and Trish had said she'd be home by midnight. When Trish told her what had happened and didn't ask questions, she just picked up the phone and called the police. By the time the officers arrived, Trish was sitting at the kitchen table, barely able to speak. Her clothes were torn. The rope marks on her wrists hadn't faded. Her mom was awake by then and she begged Trish not to file a report. Zeola was a Depression era woman who'd been raised to believe that sexual assault was something a young woman never recovered from, that people wouldn't want to hire her, that no man would want to marry her. Trish made the report anyway. The officers took her to Good Samaritan Hospital, a few miles north of downtown. A doctor examined her and confirmed that she had been assaulted. Trish gave her statement to a 27 year old detective named Carol Cooley, who'd been with Phoenix PD for five years. She described her attacker, about 25 years old, Mexican or maybe Italian, around 5 foot 11, slim build, short curly black hair, dark rimmed glasses. And she described his car. A faded green older model sedan, a Packard with a piece of rope hanging across the back of the front seat that she'd been able to see when she was tied up behind it. Cooley wrote it all down and told Trish he'd be in touch. But for the next week, nothing happened. Trish stayed home for a few days. By midweek, she decided to go back to work. Ann's husband drove her to the Paramount in the evenings and waited at the bus stop to pick her up at the end of her shift. Between the drop off and the pickup, he'd cruised the neighborhood looking for the car Trish had described to him. On the night of March 10, eight days after Trish was attacked, he found it. He was waiting at the bus stop when a faded green sedan turned onto Marlette Avenue and disappeared into the dark. The car matched Trish's description exactly. He didn't catch the full license plate, but he got most of it. Three letters and a few digits. He went to the Phoenix PD the next morning and gave them to Cooley. On March 11, 1963, Detective Cooley went to the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division and pulled records on every Packard with plates matching the partial Trish's brother in law had given them. He got a hit on a 1953 Packard owned by a Mesa housewife named Twyla Hoffman. Her plate was one digit off from the partial. Trish's brother in law had misread it. In the dark the next day, March 12, Cooley and his partner, a detective named Wilfred Young, drove out to the Hoffman address in Mesa. The house was vacant. The neighbors told them the people who'd lived there had moved a few days earlier, taking their things in a truck marked United Produce. Cooley and Young got in touch with the company and learned that Twyla's common law husband, a man named Ernesto Miranda, worked there. He'd just moved his family to a new address in Phoenix, and according to the Mesa police, he had quite a juvenile record. From there, the pieces came together. Ernesto had been born, born in Mesa on March 9, 1941. His father was a house painter who'd immigrated from Mexico. His mother had died when Ernesto was six. His father had remarried not long after. Ernesto, who went by Ernie as a kid, never got along with his stepmother. By eighth grade, he was already in trouble. His first felony conviction, a burglary, came at 14. The next year he was sent to the Arizona State Industrial School for Boys, the state's reform school. He was released, sent back and released again. At 17, he moved to Los Angeles where he was arrested on suspicion of armed robbery and what police described as a sex offense. He spent two and a half years in custody. Eventually he was released and sent back to Arizona, where he enlisted in the Army. That did not go well. Miranda spent six months of his 15 month enlistment in military jail at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He was locked up for repeatedly going AWOL and for what the army described as Peeping Tom offenses. They ordered him into psychiatric counseling, but he only went to one session. In 1959, the army gave up on him. He was discharged. With no work, no plan and no place to go, Miranda drifted east. He was jailed for vagrancy in Texas, arrested in Nashville for driving a stolen car, and served a year in a federal prison in California for taking it across state lines. When he was released in 1961, he stayed in California where he met a 29 year old son, separated mother of two named Twyla Hoffman. They started living together and under California law, their relationship counted as a Common law marriage. They moved back to Arizona, and by 1962, they had a daughter of their own. Miranda found work as a night shift dock loader at United Produce. His co workers liked him. His boss called him a hard worker to anyone who saw him during the day. Miranda was a quiet young father with a steady job and a baby on his hip. But Phoenix PD already had a thick file on him. Multiple women in his neighborhood had reported being followed, grabbed and propositioned. He matched the description in several of the cases, but none of the charges had ever stuck. Whatever Twyla might have known about Miranda's record from before they met, she didn't know about the local file or what he'd done to Trish. But Detectives Cooley and Young did, and they were closing in. On March 13, they drove to the new address on West Mariposa Avenue in Phoenix. A faded green 1953 Packard was sitting in the driveway, plate matching Twyla's MVD record. Through the open back window, Cooley could see a piece of rope running across the back of the front seat. Twyla answered the door. The detectives asked if Ernesta was home. She said he was asleep and went to wake him. A few minutes later, Miranda came out fully dressed. The detectives asked him to come with them to the stairs station for questioning. He didn't ask why. He didn't ask for a lawyer. He didn't ask if he had to. He just said yes and got in the car.
- [17:47]
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- [18:52]
Carter Roy
On the morning of March 13, 1963, Phoenix police brought 22 year old Ernesto Miranda to their downtown headquarters on First Avenue Detectives Cooley and Young led him to a small room and asked him to wait while they prepared a lineup. Three other men were brought in alongside Miranda. All Hispanic, all roughly the same height and build, all wearing the same prison issue clothing. Then they went and got Trish Weir. She stood behind a one way window with Cooley. He asked her if she recognized any of the men as her attacker. She wasn't sure. The man who had attacked her had been wearing dark rimmed glasses. None of these men were. And it had been nighttime in the desert. She told Cooley that the man in position number one looked similar to her attacker. But she couldn't say for sure. The man in position number one was Ernesto Miranda. Cooley took Trish out of the room. Then he walked back into the interrogation room where Miranda was waiting. Miranda asked, how did I do? Cooley looked at him and said, not good. That wasn't true. Trish hadn't actually identified anyone. She just said she thought Miranda may have been her attacker. But he didn't know that. And even before the lineup, Cooley and Young had already decided to say Trish had picked him out. They also weren't going to tell him he had the right to remain silent. They weren't going to tell him he had the right to a lawyer. They weren't going to read him any rights at all. Because In March of 1963, anywhere in America, the police were not required to. For the next two hours, Cooley and Young questioned Miranda alone. The room had no windows. Miranda hadn't slept since the previous afternoon before his night shift at United Produce. He had no food, no water, no lawyer. The detectives kept asking. He kept denying. Then two hours in, he confessed. He confessed to everything. Not just the rape of Patricia Weir on March 2, but eight other crimes over the past two years, including a robbery and an attempted rape. He wrote it all down. Then Cooley gave him a Phoenix PD form to copy his statement onto. The form had a pre printed paragraph across the top. I do hereby swear that I make this statement voluntarily and of my own free will, with no threats and coercion or promises of immunity, and with full knowledge of my legal rights, understanding any statement I make may be used against me. Miranda signed it. He had no idea what those legal rights were. Then Cooley left the room and brought Trish back in. She'd spent the past hour and a half waiting in an office down the hall, trying not to cry. Now Cooley was walking her into a room where her attacker was sitting in a chair across a TABLE. He pointed at Miranda and asked, is this the man? Trish would later say it was the worst moment of the entire ordeal. Being in the same room with him, being looked at by him. She didn't answer right away. Cooley turned to Miranda. Is this the girl? Miranda looked up at her. That's the girl, he said. What had just happened in that room would never happen. Today it's called a show up. And modern eyewitness identification research has shown it is one of the least reliable methods of of identification ever practiced, especially after a confession, when every police cue pushes the witness toward the answer they want. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in two separate cases that this kind of identification was unconstitutionally suggestive. Bringing a witness face to face with a single suspect inside a police station and asking, is this the person? Was no longer allowed. But in 1963, it was standard. It's hard to overstate in 2026 what a police interrogation back then actually looked like. The Supreme Court had outlawed confessions extracted by torture in 1936. The ruling came after Mississippi police had hung a black suspect from a tree and beaten two others until they confessed. But everything short of physical torture was still on the table. Sleep deprivation, bright lights, lying about evidence, telling the suspect that their family would suffer if they didn't talk, telling them they had already been identified. The two hours Cooley and Young spent with Miranda were the gentler version of all this. They didn't beat him or threaten him, they just lied to him. And because he didn't know his rights, that confession came out the other side. On March 14, Miranda was charged with first degree rape and kidnapping. He was held in the Maricopa County Jail. The trial was set for mid June. The court appointed Miranda an attorney, a 73 year old Phoenix lawyer named Alvin Moore with 40 years of criminal defense experience. Moore visited Miranda in jail, listened to his account of the interrogation, and decided to fight the confession. Moore's argument was specific because Miranda wasn't told he had the right to refuse to remain silent or to ask for a lawyer. His confession was involuntary. The trial began on June 20, 1963, before Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Yale McFate Moore filed a motion to suppress the confession. McFate overruled him and the confession went to the jury. Trish testified, walking the jury through what had happened to her. On the night of March 2, Cooley and Young testified about the interrogation. The signed confession was read aloud, allowed. The jury deliberated for five hours. On June 27, they convicted Miranda on both counts of rape and kidnapping. McFate sentenced him to 20 to 30 years on each charge to run concurrently. Miranda was transferred to the Arizona State Prison at Florence, about 60 miles southeast of Phoenix. Moore appealed. The Arizona Supreme Court rejected the appeal, ruling that Miranda's constitutional rights had not been violated because he hadn't specifically asked for a lawyer. In June of 1965, two years into his sentence, Miranda decided to take his case higher. From his cell at Florence, he hand wrote a petition to the United States Supreme Court asking for review of his case. It was rejected. That could have been the end of the story, but it wasn't because of a 35 year old attorney named Robert Corcoran. Corcoran ran the Phoenix branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU had been waiting for almost two years for the right case to take to the Supreme Court to challenge the way police interrogations were conducted in America. The previous test case, called Escobedo vs. Illinois, had been decided in 1964. In Escobedo, the Supreme Court had ruled that a suspect named Danny Escobedo had been entitled to a lawyer during his interrogation because he had specifically asked for one and the police had refused. The ruling was narrow and lower courts couldn't agree on how to apply it. Some required warnings up front. Others said it only kicked in when the Suspect asked. By 1965, more than 150 cases challenging police interrogations under Escobedo were pending in courts around the country. The Supreme Court needed a clean case with with a clear set of facts to come back and settle what Escobedo had meant. Corcoran had been reading the Arizona Supreme Court's ruling in Miranda's appeal and thought he'd found it. He wrote to Miranda's lawyer, Alvin Moore, but Moore said he was too sick to keep going. So Corcoran, who'd never argued a case at the Supreme Court level, picked up the phone and called the best criminal defense attorney in Phoenix. His name was John J. Flynn. He was 41 years old, a partner at Lewis and Roca on one of the largest firms in Arizona. He agreed to take the case pro bono. Then he asked his partner, John P. Frank, to help. Frank was a constitutional law specialist who had clerked for Justice Hugo Black on the Supreme Court itself. Together with two associates, he and Flynn wrote a petition asking the U.S. supreme Court to take the case in November of 1965. The court agreed. Ernesto Miranda didn't know it yet, but his case was going all the way to Washington D.C. and his name would become synonymous with one of the Most well known legal terms in America. The Supreme Court that received Miranda versus Arizona in 1966 was one of the most ambitious courts in American history. Chief Justice Earl Warren had taken over in 1953. Under his leadership, the court spent the next decade rewriting American constitutional law. In 1954, they outlawed school segregation in Brown v. Board of education. And in 1963, they gave every felony defendant a right to a lawyer in Gideon v. Wainwright. Miranda's case was the next, and the court bundled it with three others. They all involved suspects who'd confronted confessed in police interrogations without being told they had the right to remain silent. Oral arguments began on February 28, 1966. John Flynn, the Phoenix defense attorney Corcoran had recruited, argued first. His argument was about the fifth Amendment, the part of the Constitution that protects people from being forced to testify against themselves. Flynn argued that a police confession was a kind of testimony and a confession given by a man who hadn't been told he could refuse to give it wasn't really voluntary. It was coerced. When the state of Arizona argued the opposite, their lawyer warned the justices that reading suspects their rights would seriously obstruct public safety. He said criminals would simply ask for lawyers and refused to talk. The number of confessions would crash. Cases would go unsolved. Because one of the bundled cases was federal, the United States weighed in two. Its lawyer was Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall, who had argued Brown v. Board of education 12 years earlier. Now, on behalf of the Johnson administration, he sided with Arizona. Marshall said the government simply couldn't afford to appoint a lawyer for every poor person who was accused of a crime. Oral arguments wrapped up the next day. The decision came down on June 13, 1966, by a vote of 5 to 4. The Supreme Court ruled in Miranda's favorite. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the 60 page majority opinion. It said that police interrogation was coercive by nature. A locked room, an armed officer, a suspect alone, often without sleep, often confused about what was happening. Warren wrote that the fifth amendment right against self incrimination was useless to a suspect who who didn't know they had it, especially in that environment. So police would have to spell it out before any questioning began. Then he laid out for the first time in American history what police were required to say. The person in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed that he has the right to remain silent and that that anything he says will be used against him in court. He must be clearly informed that he has the right to consult with a lawyer and to have the lawyer with him during interrogation and that if he is indigent, a lawyer will be appointed to represent him. It became known as the Miranda Warning. Within a year, every police department in America had printed a version of it on a small laminated card, the size of a baseball card that officers were required to carry. By the late 1960s, the warning had been recited so many times on television that millions of Americans could repeat it from memory. Ernesto Miranda heard the decision read on a radio in the prison library at Florence. He had won, but he wasn't free, and the decision overturned his conviction. But Arizona was still allowed to retry him. The retrial began in February 1967. It had been delayed so that Trish, now 21 and married, could give birth to her first child before testifying. This time, the prosecution didn't have a confession, but they did have Twyla Hoffman. She and Miranda had separated since his first trial and were now in a custody battle over their daughter, who was around five years old. Under Arizona law, Miranda was still the child's legal father. But Twyla wanted that to change, so she went to the prosecution with a story. Shortly after Miranda's arrest in 1963, she'd visited him in jail and he had confessed the crime to her. Whether her testimony was true or motivated by the custody fight is something Miranda's defenders would argue about for the rest of his life. But the jury believed her. They deliberated for less than an hour and a half, and on March 1, 1967, Miranda was convicted again. The judge handed him the same sentence, 20 to 30 years. Miranda came up for parole four times between 1967 and 1972. He was denied every time. On his fifth application, in December of 1972, the Arizona Board of Pardons and Paroles granted it. He walked out of Arizona State Prison on December 18, 1972. He was 31 years old. He moved back to the Phoenix neighborhood. He'd grown up around an area downtown known as the Deuce. It was a skid row of single room occupancy hotels, taverns, pool halls and day labor agencies. He worked occasionally as a delivery driver. He spent most of his time at the bars. He also made a small business out of his own name. By 1960, 1973, Phoenix police officers were carrying Miranda warning cards in their breast pockets. Miranda figured out that if he showed up at the Maricopa county courthouse in the police station, officers and lawyers would pay him a dollar or two to sign one. He'd write Ernesto Miranda underneath the words. You have the right to remain silent, he started doing it daily. He'd make four, five dollars. He'd spend most of it at the bar. But he still couldn't stay out of trouble. By 1975, the arrests were piling up. Driving without a license, possession of a firearm by a felon. The firearm charge was dropped, but it had violated his parole. He went back to Arizona State State Prison for another year and was paroled again in late 1975. Two months later, he went back to the Deuce. And on the afternoon of January 31, 1976, he walked into a bar called La Amopola. He sat down to play poker with two other men, both Mexican nationals, visiting Phoenix without papers. The game ran for a couple of hours. There was money on the table. Somewhere around 6pm, one of the other players accused Miranda of cheating. The argument turned into a fist fight. Miranda beat up both men, then walked back to the bar's bathroom to wash the blood off his hands. While he was in there, the two men talked. According to a bartender who watched the whole thing, one of the men, later identified as 24 year old Fernando Samorro Rodriguez, handed a knife to the other man. Rodriguez told the other man to, quote, finish it with this. Then he walked out the back door of the bar. When Miranda came out of the bathroom, the second man was waiting for him. He was 23 year old Esequio Moreno Perez. He stabbed Miranda once in the chest and once in the abdomen, then ran. Miranda was taken by ambulance to Good Samaritan Hospital, the same hospital where Trish Weir had been examined. He was pronounced dead on arrival. The Phoenix police officer who searched his body found several signed Miranda warning cards in his wallet. Her didn't make it far. An eyewitness had seen him stab Miranda. Phoenix PD picked him up that night and brought him to the same downtown station where 13 years earlier, Carol Cooley and Wilfred Young had interrogated Ernesto Miranda. This time, the arresting officer pulled out a small laminated card. He read, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Perez exercised those rights. He refused to speak. Without a confession and with only one eyewitness, the Maricopa County Attorney's office decided they didn't have enough to charge him. Phoenix PD released him within hours. By the next morning, he had checked out of the downtown hotel where he was staying and was on his way to Mexico. Ultimately, he was formally charged with Murder in absentia on February 4, 1976. He has never been located. Fernando Samoro Rodriguez, the man who handed Perez the knife, was picked up separately. The county attorney's office decided there wasn't enough evidence to charge him with anything either. He was turned over to immigration authorities and deported. Nobody was ever convicted of the murder of Ernesto Miranda. But the man who killed him was one of the first people in American history protected by the law that bore Miranda's name. Ernesto Miranda was buried in the Mesa City Cemetery near his mother. Twyla Hoffman raised her three children. She remarried and lived quietly until her death in 2006. By then, the Miranda warning had become the most quoted sentence in American law. It's read aloud in some version every time an American is arrested. It's recited on every cop show, in every legal drama, and every police procedural ever made for television. It's part of the American vernacular in a way that almost no other legal phrase ever has been. But it hasn't gone unchallenged. In 1968, Congress passed a law trying to override it. A law sat mostly unused for 32 years. In 2000, the Supreme Court struck it down in a 7:2 decision written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who had spent his entire career criticizing Miranda and ended up cementing it. The decision has been narrowed over the years. Police can question a suspect briefly, without warnings, if there is an immediate public safety concern. And police can keep questioning a suspect who hasn't clearly asked for a lawyer or refused to talk. But the core has held without a Miranda warning, what you say in a police interrogation generally can't be used against you. And here's where the police were wrong. They had warned that Miranda would crash confession rates. Studies done since 1966 have found it didn't. Most suspects, even after being told they have the right to remain silent, talk anyway. What changed wasn't whether people confessed. It was whether what they said could be used. Patricia Weir, the 18 year old who walked off a bus on the night of March 2, 1963, spent the next 56 years of her life under a pseudonym. Back then, Phoenix newspapers had agreed not to print her name. She finished secretarial school, married Charles Shumway and had a family. She lived as an anonymous woman whose private story was attached to one of the most famous legal decisions in American history. In 2019, a film producer named George Colbert tracked her down and asked for her permission to tell her story. She gave it. She let her name be printed in 2023, when the film called Miranda's victim was released, she gave interviews. She even appeared in a cameo in the wedding scene of her own life story. When asked why she had finally come forward, she said it was because she wanted other women who had been through the same thing as her to know that they could survive it, that a life was still possible afterward, that justice, even the imperfect kind, was worth fighting for. There's an irony in this story that's hard to miss. The man whose name is on the most famous protection in American criminal law was a violent, predatory man. He attacked an 18 year old woman walking home from work on a Saturday night. He didn't deserve sympathy. But the law that bears his name wasn't written for sympathetic figures. It was written for everyone. The warning read to the man who killed Ernesto Miranda is the same warning read to everyone taken into custody today. For most of American history, that door was closed and you were alone. And whatever happened in that room was whatever the police decided. On June 13, 1966, that changed. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next Monday for part two of our series on the Crimes that Built America. It's the story of the Osage Nation murders. Dozens of killings in 1920s Oklahoma that forced the federal government to build the FBI. And you'll still get all our normal episodes every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday completely ad free. No waiting for part two plus ad free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertofsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Cassidy Dillon and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening.
- [46:23]
Sarah and Courtney
That was episode one of the Crimes that Built America from Murder True Crime Stories the next three cases the murders that built the FBI, the prison interviews that built criminal profiling, and the abduction that built America's Missing Children movement are available right now ad free on Crime House Plus. Join to binge the rest ad free or follow Murder True Crime Stories to hear a new episode free every Monday until July 4th. And as a Crime House plus member, you'll also get every episode of the final hours early and advanced. Free to join go to Crime House plus or tap try free at the top of this show's page in Apple Podcasts.