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Welcome back, Crime Junkies.
I'm still your host, Ashley Flowers.
And I'm still Britt.
Let me jump right back into our story, right where we left off in part one.
And if you haven't listened to that yet, you're definitely going to want to do that first.
Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
Otherwise, you won't know what's going on.
But if you have, dive in with us, won't you?
Water's fine. When we left off, four men had been convicted of the murder of three Texas teenagers.
The cop who put them away had become a celebrated hero.
But, and isn't there always a but, for those who looked closely at the case, there were holes.
It wasn't nearly as solid as clickbait headlines might lead you to believe.
And no one was leading the charge for the men's exoneration harder than the mother of one of the men on death row.
This is Lake Waco part two.
For all the confessions, the bite mark evidence, the jailhouse informants, David Spence never wavered on his innocence.
And though his word clearly held no weight with the jury, David's mother Juanita White stood steadfast by her son's side.
He may have committed other crimes by no means was her son an angel, but like David's lawyers, she believed in his innocence here in this case.
A mother's opinion doesn't tend to go very far once a jury has spoken.
So there were very few people by her side as she tried to fight for her son in the months after the final Lake Waco trial.
There was a PI and one of David's trial lawyers who both believed in Juanita and in David.
And they would take her calls if she heard rumors or if she got tips about her son's case.
Specifics may have been TBD, but she was determined to learn every last detail of what actually happened that night.
And she stopped at nothing, even hanging out in some questionable places, spending her free time in Waco's seediest establishments, cozying up to Waco's seediest people, people who could have been involved in the murders or people who knew people who could have been involved.
But in the time since the trials, there hadn't really been anything that was going to move the needle.
Not until one day in 1986, when like manna from the heavens, Juanita and David got a letter that they believed would finally prove his innocence.
The letter writer was a guy named Robert Snelson.
He was one of the jailhouse informants who had testified against David and helped put him on death row.
His specific testimony had to do with overhearing David bragging about doing something particularly cruel to one of the victims, which was big because the act was accurate.
It was something that the jury was made to believe Robert would have only known about if he heard it from the real killer, i .e.
David. But in this letter, Robert told David and Juanita that his entire story, every last bit of his testimony was false.
He made it up and he'd eventually say that all of the informants made up their stories too because they were getting breaks in their own cases in exchange.
Of course they were.
But worse than it just being fabricated, some of the other informants say that the whole thing was orchestrated by none other than Truman Simons.
They said that Simons had been doling out favors to the inmates of the MacLennan County Jail like he was freaking Oprah.
You get a break, you get a break, everybody gets up, right?
But obviously, he only Oprah'd the ones who were willing to play ball.
Very much like a you -scratch -my -back, I'll -scratch -yours kind of thing.
The mission of course had been to book David Spence a one -way ticket to the busiest execution chamber in the country, which mission accomplished.
Wait, I thought this dude just had like a random job as a corrections officer, like how is he getting them breaks and stuff?
You're not the first to ask that question.
Every time this gets brought up, he's like, come on guys, like I don't have the power to dismiss anyone's charges like I'm just Joe Schmoe working as a security guard in the jail.
Like major like aw shucks vibes.
But who does have the power to cut breaks and dismiss charges?
DA Vic Feazell, who is team Joe Schmoe all day long, basically is like the co -captain.
So if Juanita was on a mission to prove her son's innocence before this letter sent her into overdrive.
According to Michael Hall, she got the letter to the trial lawyer of David's, this guy named Russ Hunt, who like I said, was like 100 % a true believer.
So Hunt makes copies of this letter and starts firing it off to anyone that mattered in the case, including the US attorney.
And he agreed with Juanita that this could be major, it could be the thing to get her son off death row.
Juanita also called up the PI that she would bring every time she had something good.
And on Friday, February 28th, 1986, she called them and said she had it.
She knew what happened and she had a witness.
But within a matter of days of making that call, Juanita was found murdered in her home.
No, when officers first responded to the scene of a suspicious death, I don't think the connection or at least I don't suspect that the connection was initially made right off the bat.
Like Juanita, as you know, Juanita and her son don't share the same last name.
And there'd probably been a few dozen cases if not more that had happened in between then and now.
Like the Waco case was over and done with in the public's mind, definitely in Waco PD's mind.
So it's not that strange that when Detective Jan Price is dispatched to Juanita's house, she's not thinking like, oh, I'm going to that convicted murderer's mother's house.
Like to her, this could be any other homicide.
But there is something that bothers her about this homicide almost right away.
It's obvious how the killer got in, the door is open, it's busted, a visible shoe print left behind.
And inside Juanita is lying on her bed, naked, her body exposed and bloodied.
From the looks of things, she put up a fight.
I mean, there are marks on her body and one of her ear lobes is even torn.
But zooming out to take an inventory of the scene, Price sees a purse on the floor with its contents all scattered around it.
But it doesn't seem like much is missing.
I mean, not from the purse, not from the home.
Though, I mean, there really isn't even much worth stealing.
Even the victim's car, which had been taken, is found abandoned a mile or so away.
So it's all of this that gives Price this feeling of strangeness about the case.
Like something just feels off.
Why would someone break into this house in the first place?
Juanita clearly wasn't a wealthy woman and nothing about the house suggested otherwise.
The only obviously ponable item is the TV and that's untouched.
In fact, it's almost like all the, I don't know the right word, like all the criminal activity was limited to just one room.
And it was the room that Juanita was in and that's presumably her bedroom.
Could the motive be sexual?
I mean, you mentioned that she was naked, right?
It definitely could be.
And they're going to process the scene and find out and do an autopsy like full investigation.
That'll tell them for sure.
So her body is sent off, crime scene texts process the scene and somewhere along the way, Price does end up learning whose mom this is, which makes the next thing that happens extra eerie.
Michael Hall writes that just seven hours after the last text have cleared out of the house, Price is called back to the same house, this time on report of a break -in.
Now I can't find who reported it.
I know that Juanita lived alone, so it could have been a neighbor or Juanita's other son, Steve.
Ultimately, it's not important.
What's important is that Price jumps in her car, heads to Juanita's house for the second time in a matter of hours.
And as soon as the house is cleared, she takes a look around and still not a damn thing of value is missing.
So I've even seen scenarios where people come in and like take advantage of the fact that, you know, it was a crime scene, obviously no one's home.
Right. Nothing is missing again.
In fact, the house doesn't even look any different than it had when she had left, except for one room.
So just like how the first time everything seemed to be focused on Juanita's room, this time it appears that the person who broke in only spent time in David's room, which by the looks of things had become home to, but just boxes of documents, including I would imagine some of life's random records,
pay stub tax returns, insurance policies, like that kind of thing.
But also everything Juanita had pertaining to David's convictions and her life diving deep into Waco's underworld to vindicate him.
The boxes in this room had clearly been rummaged through.
There were discarded papers scattered all over the floor that for sure were not there just hours ago.
So what are the odds that someone broke into a house right after it was an active crime scene, just to look at some papers?
There are no coincidences in criminal investigations.
This one feels far too big.
Price thinks it's way more likely that someone came back and was looking for something very specific.
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Now, had it not been for Juanita's due diligence before her murder, trying to figure out what that specific thing was that someone was looking for would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
But because David's lawyer had made so many copies of the jailhouse informant letter and had started sending them out by the time price is looking into this, I mean, day one word had already trickled down from the higher ups to local law enforcement circles that the letter could be what the killer was looking
for. But why killer if the letter is already out there?
Because maybe the person didn't know it was.
Or even if they thought it might get out.
I mean, Juanita had the original, not just a photocopy.
So maybe the goal was to get that.
Like a piece of bigger importance?
Yeah. Or it could be to get something else.
Price doesn't really know yet.
All she knows is this is feeling all kinds of hinky.
And that feeling gets stronger over the next day or two when she gets word from a little birdie that someone not even from her agency has been pestering the Dallas County Emmys Office for preliminary findings on Juanita's autopsy.
And her gut, and a little process of elimination, tells her it is either someone from the district attorney's office or someone from the sheriff's office.
And whoever it is, they're not getting some big scoop because when the report does come in, there are no big bombshells.
Juanita's cause of death was a combination of blunt force injuries and asphyxiation.
A sexual assault kit was performed.
And although there was no hope for DNA testing in 1986, it does confirm that a sexual assault took place.
Price tries not to let the secret snoop bug her too much.
Like she's got her own work to do.
Or at least she did before the whole rug ends up getting pulled out from underneath her.
Because according to Michael Hall, who reported again the crap out of this case and brought a lot of this nonsense to light, within a week, D .A.
Fazell swoops in and is like, you know what?
We're gonna take the case from here.
Thank you very much.
And like, I'm gonna put my main man, Truman Simons, on it.
Well, that's a choice.
And now someone does throw Price a bone here and they like let her keep working the case for Waco.
But it's gonna be a joint production.
Teamwork makes the dream work.
Except in this context, it also makes Price nervous as hell because Simons might be a hero to most Texans, but the men and women who work side by side with him or tried to at WPD have a totally different perception.
The Simons stories that are shared around the station sound more like war stories than anything else.
Like zero out of 10 do not recommend.
So she's a bit apprehensive about working with the man, but she's going to give it the good old college try.
Red flag number one pops up in the very first conversation when Simons is like, good news, already got this, solved the case.
Of course. He tells price that his old pal, Officer Dennis Bayer, was told by an informant that they saw a black man getting out of Juanita's car when it was abandoned.
And when he did some follow up with his informants, they had a name for the guy, Calvin Washington.
Calvin is a 31 year old with a record who is luckily already in custody for something to do with a stolen car.
And then things get a little fuzzy.
So remember how I said Juanita had marks on her when she was found?
Yeah. The like, like defensive ones.
Okay. Yeah. So at some point, someone decided that those were bite marks.
Oh, much, much, much, much, much later, Simon says that price called them bite marks.
I don't think she agrees with that.
But somehow it is decided that they are bite marks or at least potential bite marks.
Then if you ask Simons how it went, he'll say that he looped price in and then they mutually decided that they should get a mold from Calvin.
But price strongly disagrees, basically says that he went rogue already had the mold when they had their very first conversation about this.
I'm sorry, I am team Jan.
Price. Yeah. Someone's lying, right?
Like, who is like the big question with some very big consequences?
Yeah. Like, also team jam.
But regardless of where you or me or any of the crime trickies fall at the moment, Simons and Price do end up agreeing that they should take the mold they now have to an expert.
I don't know if Homer, the first guy they used in last episode is busy or what.
But a Dallas based forensic odontologist Jim Hale comes to the rescue.
He says, yep, you're totally right.
Whoever spotted these first.
We still don't know.
The injuries in this autopsy photo are bite marks.
And drumroll, please.
The bite marks are a match to Calvin.
But that doesn't mean he acted alone because now Simon starts hearing another name from his informants, a 19 year old named Joe Sidney Williams.
This dude is supposedly Calvin's like crime buddy.
And all of this must feel a little convenient for price because she goes to the courthouse to see what favors are being exchanged with informants for them coming forward.
Right. What's the incentive?
And what she finds is that a whole lot of Simons informants are getting their charges just straight up dismissed.
But she has to find out on her own because she learns that he's been telling his informants not to talk to her if she comes by.
So so much for that joint effort.
She's part of the team.
Yes, she's getting peaked and for good reason.
So this is where their joint effort really splinters.
The Joe Sidney Williams guy gets himself arrested pretty soon thereafter, which makes it all the easier for Simons to dig into him.
And while he doubles down there, Price is looking in an entirely different direction.
Just a few months after Juanita's death, top of May 1986, another local woman is brutally attacked by an intruder in her home.
She is sexually assaulted, attacked with a hammer and left for dead.
Now, it's not exactly the same as Juanita's murder.
The hammer is new, but she was practically Juanita's neighbor.
Like these two lived just blocks apart.
But there is one major difference between the two cases.
The victim in this second case survives.
Oh my God. And when she regains consciousness, she names her attacker.
It was her granddaughter's boyfriend, Benny Carroll.
Now for Price, these crimes are too similar, not to at least consider the possibility that this Benny Carroll is behind them both.
But when she takes it all to Simons, he basically tells her to kick rocks.
Like instead he just wants to go get a bite.
But I thought the bite marks already matched Calvin's mold.
Well, Jim Hale said it was Calvin, but I guess Simons shows Joe's mold to that OG odontologist guy Homer.
And Homer's like, oh, it matches Joe.
But I don't even know why he got in the first place.
Yeah. Like I guess how can it match both other than like they're all teased?
Well, I mean, because bite mark analysis, like as we know now is basically like.
But more to your point, I don't know what Simons is up to here.
Most of his moves seem calculated, at least in retrospect, but this one kind of at least for me, like defies explanation.
I don't unless someone told him like the first one didn't work and he like just had to come up with like, I can't make it make sense with what I have.
Either way, apparently what he's got is all you need in 1980s Waco because in July of 1986, Fezell holds a press conference to announce that a grand jury has returned murder indictments against both Calvin Washington and Joe Sidney Williams, which is another win for the Waco good guys, according to
Simons. Although if you ask me, the most notable thing about this press conference is who isn't there.
Hall writes that WPD investigators decline invitations, including price.
She's not supporting it.
Christ thinks that Calvin and Joe are just the fall guys, but she doesn't get it.
Why the are Simons and Fezell so hell bent on pinning this on them.
Now that Fezell has indictments, she may not get the chance to find out because once again, her investigation is ripped out from under her, which okay, fine.
Now she's got free time and she decides to use her free time to informally dig into Waco's most dynamic crime fighting duo.
And for a while she keeps this like low key.
But after Joe is convicted, Chief Scott, remember him, he takes stock and is like, Hey, price love what you're doing at the place.
I think we should make your investigation like official.
Let's put it on the books.
He even gives her a partner, Officer Frank Turk.
He wants them to focus 100 % of their attention on this project.
And let's just say the stuff that price and Turk start to uncover isn't a great look for Simons or Fezell privileges and dismissals and conjugal visits.
One example, an inmate who agrees to testify against Calvin in December is promised that his murder charges will be dropped as a thank you murder.
Murder and they are his murder charges because they're they're so dead set on these other two guys who might have actually been a murderer.
Yeah, at this point, there is no deescalating things.
Michael Hall writes that almost within days of Chief Scott making prices investigation official, Fezell subpoenas, both of them, Chief Scott and Officer Price to appear before a grand jury that he hasn't paneled to investigate them because he later says that their investigation is akin to witness tampering.
Yeah. So he kind of backs price into a little bit of a corner and gets her to agree to briefly pause her investigation until after Calvin's trial the following month.
So basically like let us find this guy guilty and then do whatever you want to do.
Let us find this guy guilty that these guys that you're investigating say like, well, the guy who the guy who's invested told her to stop is the guy she's investigating.
Right. Deep breath.
And listen, she is as pissed as we are and she hasn't forgotten what's at the root of this whole thing.
And neither have we.
So stay with me here.
I have not led you astray the same day that Fezell drags her before his grand jury.
She walks right up to him, looks him square in the face and says point blank, when I'm done with the white case, I'm going to look into the lake murders.
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Like Joe before him, Calvin is convicted in December, where Joe's guilty verdict was based on shady bite mark evidence and the testimony of informants with killer deals.
Calvin's is basically based just on informant testimony.
It all feels like deja vu all over again, right?
Doesn't sound too far off from some other murders that we've talked about, but these guys are at least spared the death penalty.
The convictions are bad news for everyone who believes two men were just railroaded for a crime they didn't commit.
But it at least means the investigation into how it happened is back on.
Everywhere they look, Price and Turk find evidence of shady conduct by Simons and Fazell, and that goes all the way back to where we started with Lake Waco and the case against Spence Deeb and the Melendez brothers.
But try as they might the Lake Waco one is hard to crack, mostly because of how shady all the informants were in the case.
It is hard to decide what was real.
At one point, Price tries to get the FBI and the U .S.
Attorney to take a look, but neither is interested.
So Price is left to just watch, feeling like her hands are tied when she knows an injustice has just been done.
And in her gut, she has no doubts about Calvin and Joe's innocence, but she also finds herself hoping that the Lake Waco convictions get overturned too.
More, she tells Hall that she hopes the truth.
Whatever it is, whoever it implicates can come out in retrials.
Because while they've been deep in Juanita's case, appeals in the Lake Waco case have been happening.
Not long after he was sent to death row, Munir kind of started to wonder if putting his faith in lawyers had really served him all that well.
And at some point, he decided that he was just going to learn how to lawyer better than the lawyer's lawyer.
Like how hard could it possibly be?
Boys do it. And then I said, how hard can it be?
Boys do it. But for real, if you find yourself already convicted and on death row, literally you might not have much to lose.
I am still sticking by our crime junkie rule.
Like, always get a lawyer.
There's a saying that I've heard from my attorney friends over and over, a man who represents himself has a fool for a client.
That is our position and we're sticking to it.
But also there is an exception to every rule.
And somehow Munir keeps being the exception because he spends more than six years on death row hunched over on his self -war reading, like the most tedious books from the law library.
Hall says that he'll even type out legal documents, verbatim, just trying to internalize the writing style and the cadence more or less.
And when he feels good and ready, he types up a writ of habeas corpus that's over 100 pages long.
He sends it off to the Texas court of criminal appeals.
He waits, he waits some more and some more and some more and some more and he effing wins.
He completely on his own, he himself and him gets his conviction overturned.
The court finds that hearsay was improperly admitted in his original trials and the man is entitled to a do -over, which is great.
But it wasn't all hearsay.
I mean, how does he explain like the insurance policy he had on Gayle?
He doesn't have to in this habeas corpus filing.
Like again, this is a technicality filing and this is jumping ahead a little bit, but it does end up coming up at his retrial.
As with everything from Simons, we only had part of the story on this policy because apparently turns out Munir took out similar policies on all of his employees.
Like it wasn't just Gayle.
Does he list himself as the common husband of all his employees too though?
I know. I don't have an answer to that one.
That's the sticking point that I cannot answer and like I've looked up and down.
I cannot find an answer for that piece of it.
I don't know. But let me get back to where we are in the story.
So he's granted a new trial, but David Gilbert and Tony aren't so fortunate.
And while Munir has been studying and writing his way off death row, David's execution date, which was set for 17th 1991, it's rapidly approaching.
And by now he is something of a broken man.
Hall has this really vivid description of a scene that David's ex -wife witnesses during a visit.
And I kind of condensed it a little bit, but Hall writes, quote, The inmate had taken his mother's death hard.
After a visit, he'd stood in the prison yard and screamed at the sky in anguish.
Are you real? Is my mother with you?
And I'm sure a lot of people are going to feel a lot of ways about that.
But like, there's something about this.
It's just sad. Like it's sad for every single person who was touched by this awful tragic story and whatever your opinions are about David's guilt or innocence, death penalty or no death penalty.
There is just so much loss and tragedy compounded in this story.
It just doesn't feel like it ends and the lines between the good ones and the bad ones aren't nearly as clear as we think they are.
But don't expect the theme song to start playing here.
We are not finished, not even close.
As David's execution date gets mirror and mirror over the summer of 1991, a nonprofit that provides death row inmates pro bono representation called the Texas Resource Center enters the picture.
TRC is slam, always to infinity and beyond.
And to say its attorneys are chronically overworked is an understatement.
It is crisis after crisis after crisis with zero breaks in between.
And I think it goes without saying that the stakes are high, always.
On occasion, they'll have to recruit local attorneys to kind of jump in and help been made out and kind of outsource things if you will.
But the problem with this one is they can't find anyone willing to represent David Spence.
I mean, like, we all know what he's in there for.
Right. It's not incomprehensible that no one wants to touch his case with a 15 -foot pole.
Right. And especially if you only know the case from the outside.
He is this murderous monster.
But if you know it from the inside, I can see why people would be like standoffish too.
Like, this isn't something you might want to get tangled up in.
So it takes a minute, but his case is finally assigned to a couple of in -house attorneys on Labor Day of 1991.
That is cutting it close.
Dangerously. His new lawyers are Rob Owen and Raul Shoneman.
And one thing you get used to real fast when you represent death row inmates is making peace with your clients being guilty AF most of the time, much of the time, some of the time.
Often they're the worst of the worst.
But when they open David's file, they expect no different.
I don't know what tips them off first, but it doesn't take a couple of legal geniuses to figure out that if you whittle it down to its core, the case against David is snitches and bite marks, bite marks and snitches.
As far as I can tell, the Texas Forensic Science Commission doesn't cast doubt on bite mark evidence until 2016.
But, you know, defense attorneys and criminal appellate attorneys were a little ahead of the curve just based on their day to day.
So I think as a community, they're starting to be a little skeptical or at least like asking questions like, hey, like pushing at it a little bit.
Yeah, we all get that forensic odontology is like, maybe make believe, right?
Like we're just going to wink, wink, nod, nod this thing.
Or should we maybe like say something and even beyond the junk science, Rob and Raul also start to realize that a ton of evidence wasn't disclosed to David's defense team, which is a problem.
A Brady violation problem.
Yeah. And let me give you an example.
But first I need to give you just a bit of a refresher because for some of you, this was a whole week ago.
So real quick, rewind.
Hit him with a clip from last week.
You see, investigators start to notice some patterns in the tips that are getting called in.
And patterns might not even be the best word.
Let's call them like themes.
And we've been doing this for a while.
We kind of know that the line between a lead in a rumor can be about as clear as mud.
But where there's smoke, there is often fire.
And there is one theme that is throwing up smoke signals left and right.
And it's about the kid's supposed drug use.
And I should be specific here.
Kenneth's name is the one that seems to always be mentioned.
Supposedly, he was known to heavily misuse drugs.
Have any of the families mentioned anything about this?
No, they talk to all of them.
They're not aware of this.
It's just coming in on like tip lines.
On the tip lines. But some of these tips get pretty specific, like names and whatnot.
And one of the more specific rumors going around about Kenneth is that he owed like three grand to a local drug dealer named Terry Lee Harper or TAB as they call him.
But TAB was said to be running out of patience with Kenneth.
Now TAB and law enforcement go way back.
But the thing is TAB's never been suspected of anything like this.
Like dude's always been more of a high misdemeanor low felony kind of guy.
And this would be like a hell of a first murder.
Like zero to 100. Right.
But no one's ruling him out just because of that, especially because TAB himself has been going around taking credit for the murders.
And listen, people bragging about murdering people when they didn't to look tough or cool or whatever.
It might sound bananas, but it honestly doesn't even register for me anymore.
Like we've seen this so many times.
Especially if he's like trying to muscle money out of people, like kind of puff himself up.
Right. So I'm not ready to zero in on him just based on that.
But there is this other interesting little tidbit.
So it turns out TAB was spotted at Caney Park that night that they were killed by multiple people.
Uh, sounds like they need to talk to TAB.
Well, here's the thing.
Just as this TAB stuff is starting to gain momentum, there is a wrench thrown in this theory.
The TAB's results come back in early August.
And according to reporting by Bill Moore, those kids were clean as a whistle.
All three of them, they didn't have so much as a sip of beer in their system.
Which makes a $3 ,000 drug that seem a little far ahead.
Far, exactly. And honestly, I think the results almost take the wind out of investigators sales a little bit or a lot of it.
Because on September 9th, when good old Sergeant Simons, Moses passed Detective Selina's desk and starts kind of thumbing through the Lake Waco case file that's just sitting out because he can't help himself, he finds a document in there indicating that as of September 3rd, the Lake Waco cases have been
classified as quote unquote officially inactive.
September 3rd of...
So back then, they dropped that lead like a hot potato for pick your favorite reason.
Well, it turns out none of the witness reports about him being at Caney Park or him bragging about doing a triple murder were disclosed until much later.
And then there's also a strange polygraph with Kenneth's dad that wasn't disclosed.
Now, we know polygraphs are polygraphs are polygraphs are polygraphs.
That's the disclaimer.
But it's interesting.
So I do want to address it just real fast because if you look it up, you're going to see this.
So there was a shortish period of time that Kenneth's dad, Richard was drawing some extra scrutiny because of discrepancies about when he first went to the parks to look for the kids.
So he sat for this polygraph, which Hall writes was 12 days after the kids were killed, quote, the polygraph was ultimately inconclusive, yet decidedly strange.
According to the report, Franks had become extremely upset toward the end of the test.
Oh, God, I was with them every minute all night when they were killed, he saw.
I don't have any guilt feelings about causing their deaths, end quote.
What? Listen, so I do want to point something out about that, because it feels very weird to you and me and I think a lot of people.
But there is someone whose opinion matters so much more than ours.
I think in this case, and that's the opinion of Jill's mom, Nancy, at our request, members of Jill's family, her mom, Nancy, her aunt Jan, as well as her brother Brad and sister Monica, even cousin Jenny, they were all so kind to answer some questions that we sent them about Jill.
We wanted to know who she was, how her death affected them, that kind of thing.
And honestly, they did so much more than just answer questions.
Despite Nancy and Jan both being in their 80s, despite this bringing up absolutely devastating memories, despite it all being extremely sensitive, despite the fact that they don't even all agree on the details big and small, they all got together on a Sunday afternoon and talked through their questions
for hours. And their conversation was so raw and so honest and so loving.
And I'm going to expand on a lot of that later.
But what I want to draw attention to here is Nancy's perspective on this thing, on what Richard supposedly said.
And she said, quote, You could say, I didn't take a polygraph, but you could say I felt the same thing Frank did.
I felt all that night while she wasn't coming home that something bad was happening.
At that point, I was awake all night and I can equate to Frank Frank saying what he said about being with them all night to how I was with Jill all night, end quote.
And I think that the grace she extends to him knowing the depth of the pain that he was feeling in those moments.
She's one of only six people who can.
I think that's, I think that's lovely.
And I, I'm just gonna let Nancy's words be the last one on that subject, because I think she gets the biggest say.
Definitely. So knowing that there were these serious potential Brady violations out there, a last minute stay of execution is granted and David's execution date is pushed back to December 19.
Now that they've got a tiny bit of breathing room, Rob and Raul decide to start tracking down informants seeing if any more are ready to recant.
And they start with a guy named Jesse Ivy.
Sure enough, Jesse tells them that his testimony about hearing David confess was just straight up nonsense.
He also says that he was the guy Simons counted on to spread information to other potential informants.
Hall quotes his words, you could say that Truman Simons and Ned Butler put the facts of the case in my mouth.
And I put them into the mouths of the other guys in the jail.
Oh my God. Another guy named Kevin Michael also signs an affidavit for them says that Simons routinely fed him confidential case information and then acted shocked just shocked.
I tell you when Kevin regurgitated the quote unquote confidential information in later witness statements.
And these types of witness recantations continue at quite a clip.
The next year and a half are a grueling series of raised and dashed hopes.
Somewhere around August of 1992, Rob Owens leaves TRC for another opportunity.
So another attorney named Joel Schwartz jumps in to help.
And meanwhile, in the background of all of these almost deaths, Rowell had started visiting Tony and Gilbert in prison.
Both tell him straight up that anything they said or testified to implicating David was false, but they won't agree to formally recant.
In fact, both are scheduled to testify for the prosecution again in Munir's retrial that set for December of 1992.
What are they afraid of when it comes to like recanting?
I mean, I think it's like I think it's twofold.
First, I mean, they've seen the system conspire against them.
They've literally seen it all go wrong.
I mean, they don't have faith in the thing working like it's supposed to not when the wrong people are in charge, but that's just the half of it.
The other half is this very vague suggestion from Simons and Fezell that they're going to go easy when Gilbert and Tony come up before the parole board if they play ball.
So more breaks. More breaks, it sounds like.
And there is this third thing too.
Remember that so far, no one has been convicted for Raylene's murder.
Oh, not David, not Munir, not Tony and Gilbert.
So if the parole carrot doesn't work, then it's the stick.
The great state of Texas agree not to seek the ultimate death penalty against the brothers for Jill and Kenneth's death, but they've got lucky number three just like sitting in their back pocket.
So Gilbert and Tony have their own butts to think about.
But in a huge miscalculation, I'm sure as a reward for staying on their best behavior, Gilbert and Tony were allowed to see each other for the first time in a decade leading up to this.
And this is literally right before Munir's retrial is about to start.
That's why they're like in the same facility, in the same city, even at all.
And something about having this meeting together changes their minds.
Whatever is going to happen will happen, but they're not going to perjure themselves again to put an innocent guy on death row again.
They both refuse to testify.
And this time Munir gets acquitted, which comes as a huge shock to everybody, but no one more than Simons and Fezel.
In the wake of the acquittal, Raul and Joel even start hearing from members of law enforcement who had doubted the case against like all these four men all along, they say.
Okay, could have used you guys talking, speaking up anything years ago.
Yeah, but these are folks from Waco PD, Horton and Chief Scott, obviously Price, although she wasn't around during the investigation.
So it's like, you know, better late than never, I don't know.
Okay. And then of course, you also have all the people who like the first time around were like, rejecting the David Munir, Melinda's brother's path in the first place.
And sure, Chief Scott is who trusted Simons with the case, but he was also in charge when Simons got humiliated because Munir was released after that marathon polygraph way back when.
And if you remember, Horton had been furious when Simons detained Munir in the first place, he like yelled at him and bear in front of all of like the cool kids, told him they like fucked up the whole thing.
But I mean, like I couldn't agree more, like you could have made a bigger fuss back then.
I get that you said something but like you also kind of just like let it happen.
Yeah. But again, better late than never.
And with cooperating codefendants and jailhouse informants kind of dropping like flies, Ryle and Joel see Homer Campbell's bite mark testimony as their last big hurdle, like the last thing that still needs to be discredited.
They put together a panel of five expert odontologists to participate in this blind experiment trying to match anonymous dental molds to the autopsy photos that supposedly showed bite marks.
And one of the molds is David's.
I'm quote, one said the photos were of such poor quality that he refused to compare them against the molds.
A second wrote that the marks were more likely than not made by insects or artifacts.
If the purpose of the exercise he continued was to match these marks to a set of teeth, it borders on the unbelievable.
A third thought that some contusions on one body were probable human bite marks, but he couldn't match any of the molds to them.
Two others did match a mark to one of the molds, but it was not Spencer's.
It belonged to a housewife from Phillipsburg, Kansas.
Interesting experiment, huh?
So I mean, needless to say, the housewife from Kansas isn't some legit suspect who's flown under the radar all these years.
Right. She just is the proof of how bogus this quote unquote science really is.
So these results along with 15 different deposition transcripts are submitted to the court.
Hopes are genuinely high for the first time in a long time.
I think about David screaming up to the sky asking if God is real and in these moments with every new law enforcement officer on his side, every new witness who recant, it might feel like someone really is up there making sure the wrongs get righted, but they don't get serious about your skin with products
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It's determined by the none of what they submitted warrants a new trial.
And eventually, David's execution date is scheduled again for April 3 1997.
As hope dwindles fast, someone reaches out to a wealthy Texas businessman by the name of Brian Pardo and he actually takes an interest in David's case.
Bob Herbert explains Pardo's involvement in one of his three New York Times opinion pieces about David's case.
And he basically says that he got involved kind of being like, Okay, I'm gonna fun this thing until I find evidence that he's guilty and then I'm out.
But there was never any of that evidence.
He basically came out the other side being like, there is no freaking way that this guy did this.
And that is how a conservative pro death penalty businessman from Texas finds himself sparing no expense to try and save the life of a twice convicted triple murderer, which means that David's ragtag team suddenly has access to more resources than he ever could have hoped for.
But by then it's too late.
On April 3 1997, David Spence is strapped to a gurney.
He makes a few final statements to the family members of the victims.
The Austin American Statesman reports he says quote, I want you to understand I speak the truth when I say I didn't kill your kids.
I understand your pain.
I swear I haven't killed anyone.
To his own family, he expresses his love and within minutes, he's gone.
Gilbert dies in prison only a year later of complications from an illness.
Munir dies from cancer, a free man in 1999.
And Tony died in prison in 2017.
Wait, wait, is that just the end of the story at the end of this episode?
I was expecting more fight, more, more change.
I mean, yeah, like I would have loved if there was something we can, we could do but like there are too many stories that don't have happy endings.
I mean, most of the stories don't.
I mean, it's why our justice system needs to be fixed.
It's why we have to take seriously the cases where there is something we can do when we can do it.
I mean, it's why journalism like halls is so important because he was the one talking about this during a time when something could have been done.
I mean, at least for Tony.
And this is why elections matter.
Like this is coming out later.
Brett, you and I are recording this the day after the presidential election.
The big ones matter.
The small ones matter.
Who is your DA? Do you even know?
That's the person who holds the power.
If your mother dies under suspicious circumstances, if you get wrongfully convicted for a crime, who's your sheriff?
Who's your mayor? Who may choose your chief of police?
Right. As for Calvin and Joe, where we started this episode, Joe's conviction was overturned in 1993.
And in 2000 after DNA testing conclusively proved that Price was right all along, that Benny Carroll was responsible for Juanita White's murder.
That's when Calvin finally received a pardon from the governor.
And I so wish I could tie this up nice and neat with a pretty bow on top, but I can't.
Was Juanita's death just when she felt like she was close to exposing Simons and Fezell really just an awful coincidence.
What drove Simons and Fezell to so stubbornly insists that Calvin and Joe were their guys.
Like, was it ego? Was it misconduct?
Maleficent's. I don't know.
I wish I did, but I don't.
Even after David's execution, a renowned investigative journalist named Fred Dannon couldn't let this case go.
And he spent the next few years deeply obsessed to the point of it becoming all consuming.
At one point he realized that much of the evidence from Munir's 1993 retrial was actually still in the possession of the special prosecutor and that he could get it from him with the consent of a family member.
So Dannon reached out to Jill's aunt Jan, who agreed to help.
Cindy V. Culp writes for TexasBar .com that while some of the items, like beer cans found near the kids, hairs found on their bodies, while those have been tested and failed to produce any major discoveries, other evidence was never tested.
Things like the shoelaces and the torn terrycloth shirt used to bind the kids, which those items get sent to a California lab overseen by a man named Edward Blake.
Now, unfortunately, the testing available at the time that they got sent didn't provide anything meaningful, like no meaningful results.
So they kind of just had to play the waiting game a bit, but no one forgot about this by any means.
However, fast forward to when the technology was there.
By this point, the lab was unaccredited and like, sketch because the lab refused to release the items to an accredited lab that could do YSTR testing.
Can I do that? Like they don't own crime scene evidence.
It's both. Apparently they were trying to claim that it was like it constituted as their work product.
It's again, bullshit.
Yeah. So they try and hold on to it for a while.
During 2001, Jan arranged for Dannon to come and meet the whole family and explain what he'd been doing, the issues that he had been having with the untested evidence, all of it, because it really was just like him and Jan up to this point.
And this meeting shook many of Jill's family members to their core because a lot of them had believed all along that justice had been served and hearing all of the issues that we just spent the last 30, 40 minutes going over left them a little, I mean a little, a lot rattled.
The rug got pulled out from under them.
And they were wanting answers.
So Dannon started working with one of David Spence's lawyers.
We haven't talked about him yet.
Another guy had come in at some point, this guy's named Walter Reeves and they worked together to get that evidence that was at the one lab being held up.
They get it moved to an accredited lab.
They successfully did that in late 2012.
They got it moved to a lab called Arkansas Genomics in Little Rock.
But then Dannon just like dropped off the grid.
What? Yes. So this is where like, we had to do our own little crime drinking investigating.
So because we started this whole thing talking to Jill Stanley, they told us they had no idea how to get in touch with him or what needs to be done to allow them to obtain any evidence that might still provide answers.
They said they have no idea where the evidence even is now.
So I did not, I could not end the episode that way.
I was like, we have to figure it out.
And I actually do have two answers.
Okay, so we tried to locate the Arkansas Genomics, but it turns out that they've since shut down.
According to someone that our team spoke with at the Arkansas Secretary of State's office, Arkansas Genomics has not filed any annual reports or paid any fees since 2014.
So 10 years. Yeah. And like only two years after the stuff was sent there.
So we went and spoke with the company's registered agent and she indicated that she doesn't know whatever happened with the evidence.
She said that she'd pass a message along to the former owner, who is also her ex -husband.
We never heard back from him.
But we did have luck finding Dannon.
Although it took some like serious digging.
So we sent a message through his literary agent and then a few hours later he called one of our reporters on WhatsApp from his home in Mexico where he is.
And what he said is that the evidence was transferred to another lab, but he wouldn't tell us which one.
He says that he's still haunted by the case and has recently started digging into it again.
So again, we are in touch with him.
We're trying to find more.
And we're trying to make sure he, again, we don't need to know it, but we're trying to make sure he and Jill have a connection point again.
So that at least the family feels like they know where the stuff is, what can be done, and that it actually have some confidence in it actually starts moving forward.
So like, I'm excited that Jill's family at least has that connection point again.
And the evidence isn't just like lost in the ether.
Jill's family are excited to be connected to him again, and they are left with doubts as they've tried to piece together more and more in the decades since Jill's murder.
People that they trusted to get justice for Jill have left them with questions that just can't be answered.
Her brother Brad, for instance, can't stop thinking about a truck that Carlton Stowers.
If you remember, he's the author of the book on this case, Careless Whispers.
Apparently he had purchased this truck after David Spence's second trial.
Reporting by Bob Herbert in the New York Times says that the truck had belonged to Gilbert and was at one point thought to have been the vehicle used to transport the bodies to the park where they were found, according to Gilbert and Tony's testimony, at least at the time.
Now, I think they were able to show that the truck was miles away being repaired that night, like completely out of mission.
But still, Carlton purchased it, gave it to Simons, which I think is just weird in and of itself.
It's again like, are you trying to?
Is it a gift? Are you like protecting evidence within it?
Or protecting the fact that there's not evidence in it?
Apparently it sat on his property for like several years until ironically around the time DNA became widely used in forensics, then all of a sudden he sold it to a junk dealer who crushed it.
Yeah, Brad doesn't like that Truman Simons even had the truck in the first place.
But the fact that it was destroyed really rubs him the wrong way.
But like, unfortunately, he's not even around to ask anymore because Simons died in 2021.
And of course, there is the question.
If it wasn't Munir, David, Gilbert and Tony, then who was it?
I think and it's just my opinion here, that there are other people and theories early on that got overlooked or just weren't vetted properly.
Like remember Tab Harper, that alleged drug dealer with connections to Kenneth, who was like seen in the park.
So he actually died by suicide in 1994 after as Hall explains, he was involved in a different knife attack.
This one was on an older couple.
And then there's two other guys that I can't help wonder about.
Maybe people who had connections to Tab.
They're people who David's defense team had wanted to present as alternate suspects at his first trial.
One of them was a guy named Ronnie Brayton.
He had been seen in bloody clothes that night, including by his own stepmom who testified that he'd shown up at her house unannounced in the early morning hours demanding to use her washing machine to clean said bloody clothes.
Oh, and could he borrow his dad's knife because he'd lost his night fishing at Lake Waco the night before.
Now she ended up recanting her testimony the day after she gave it.
So what does it mean?
I don't know. The other guy he wanted to bring up was James Bishop.
He apparently left Waco right after the murders, only to be convicted of a brutal sexual assault and attempted double murder of two teenage girls on a beach in California, which took place just months later.
But the reason these didn't get presented in that first trial is because the judge shot it down before the trial even started, which is all to say tunnel vision is a dangerous thing to have when people's lives are on the line.
So who knows what might have happened if egos weren't as big and finding the truth was more important than being right or being the guy to solve it in a week.
Now, some people don't have the same questions or doubts that we do or that the public might have.
Like Jill's mom Nancy feels that she has the answers she needs today.
All these years later, she believes that the case was solved back in the 80s.
And though her family members are less sure, what comes through so profoundly is the love and grace that they have for each other and for Jill.
Jill's sister Monica, who feels very differently from her mom, recognizes that Nancy's faith in the only resolution available is also Nancy's peace.
And she is so, so thankful her mom at least has that.
Here is how Nancy addresses the question of closure directly.
She said, quote, I find it sad that my family has suspicions and doubts about the whole crime scene in case.
And it makes me wonder if God has given me something to help with me be able to stand living with this, that I don't have the urge and the desperate need to find out any more than I think I already know.
And y 'all do. And I feel bad for that.
I wish y 'all didn't have the doubts that you have, but I want you to understand I really feel like I was given the gift to be able to live my life since that night.
And I'm kind of at peace with everything.
I don't have those swirling thoughts anymore.
What if or why not, or this or that the other?
What did all happen?
I don't have the answers.
I just know I don't have them.
I don't have those doubts.
We also asked Nancy what she wants people to know about Jill.
She said, quote, Number one, she was beautiful.
Number two, she was loving.
And number three, she was my sweet baby.
And I was so looking forward to seeing her grow up, see what she would become.
She was just a normal teenage girl, loving the things that teenagers love to do.
And I miss her every day.
You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, crime junkie podcast .com.
And you can follow us on Instagram at crime junkie podcast.
We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.
And don't forget to go to our website, crime junkie podcast .com for more info about crime junkie tour.
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Crime junkie is an audio check production.
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