Speaker 1: There's someone I regally should tell you about. At this
Speaker 1: point in the story. Let me take you back to
Speaker 1: that hot Chicago summer of eighty nine. President Reagan is
Speaker 1: just handed over the reigns of power to George H.
Speaker 1: W and Bette Midler's wind beneath my wings is riding
Speaker 1: high in the charts. Twenty four year old Dana Feitler
Speaker 1: has succumbed to the brutal gunshot wound to her head.
Speaker 1: The police are searching for her murder, and they have
Speaker 1: their sights on an assemblage of the usual suspects, but
Speaker 1: no evidence to work with until that is, a promising
Speaker 1: witness comes forward, and then well you know this bit.
Speaker 1: The statements pile up until the big switcher room witness
Speaker 1: becomes prime suspect, and after a positive ID from a
Speaker 1: dog walker who saw Dana moments before the attack, Lee
Speaker 1: Harris is arrested, convicted, and sent away for life. Except
Speaker 1: that's not the whole story. See before Lee even entered
Speaker 1: the picture, there was another suspect in the Dana Fightler case.
Speaker 1: That summer night, a security guard named Damon Prestige is
Speaker 1: out doing his routine rounds in the Gold Coast twice,
Speaker 1: he sees a man with a distinct limp acting real strange.
Speaker 1: First the guy threatens him honky top, motherfucker, you're gonna
Speaker 1: die tonight, and then later he sees the same man
Speaker 1: down in alleyway trying to evade eye contact. And then
Speaker 1: there was the dog walk. She'd id'd Lee in a lineup,
Speaker 1: but see, that was not the first id she made
Speaker 1: in the case. When she initially came forward saying she
Speaker 1: had seen Dana Fightler with three black men, the first
Speaker 1: thing the police did, long before Lee was even on
Speaker 1: the scene, would show her a photo array of seven
Speaker 1: black men they already had on file. Immediately, she points
Speaker 1: to someone, a notorious Atticut with a violent rep who
Speaker 1: stalked the area, and as it happened, he had a
Speaker 1: limp from an old gunshot. One the dog walker instantly
Speaker 1: recognizes him as the one who was holding Dana's hand.
Speaker 1: How sure are you, they ask her, nine point five
Speaker 1: out of ten. Over in Cabrini, there were rumors that
Speaker 1: a local hooligan had been bragging about murdering a white
Speaker 1: lady for drug money. Two people had even come forward
Speaker 1: with statements to the police, but when police brought him
Speaker 1: in He denied being involved. His lie detector test indicated deception,
Speaker 1: but he had an alibi, his girlfriend, and she passed hers.
Speaker 1: Police went to search her apartment anyway, and when they did,
Speaker 1: found several pieces of clothing belonging to her boyfriend, including
Speaker 1: a blood spattered red sweatshirt. But by this point the
Speaker 1: police were already elbow deep with Lee turning out statement
Speaker 1: after statement en route to twenty two. The man with
Speaker 1: the limp, he was never mentioned again. I'm dack stilln
Speaker 1: loss and from iHeart Podcasts, this is Crying Wolf episode five.
Speaker 1: The alternate suspect.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, he had an alibi, but it wasn't
Speaker 2: an unbreakable alibi. It wasn't a very good one.
Speaker 1: This is the Andrea Line lawyer extraordinary, the Angel of
Speaker 1: death Row. You heard from her in the last episode.
Speaker 2: You know, I mean, frankly, the only alibi I like
Speaker 2: is my client's in jail at the time. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's really hard to and even that they'll still charge
Speaker 2: you or only I've had that happen.
Speaker 1: As you know, she was one of the lawyers Rappingly
Speaker 1: during his trial back in nineteen ninety two. Back then,
Speaker 1: it was obvious to her that the alternate suspect, let's
Speaker 1: call him Tony, and his alibi required some further scrutiny.
Speaker 2: Normally, you are at home with your family. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's a normal thing, but there's an automatic suspicion that
Speaker 2: that person's going to lie for you, and they never
Speaker 2: suspected her. We tried to talk to her and she
Speaker 2: refused to talk to us. You know, we can't make
Speaker 2: anyone talk to us, which is the defense. We can't
Speaker 2: force them to talk to us. So if they say
Speaker 2: they don't want to talk to.
Speaker 1: Us, we have to leave. Andrea was clear Tony was
Speaker 1: their guy.
Speaker 2: I was sure of it, and I became more sure
Speaker 2: of it as time went on. I wasn't sure who
Speaker 2: did it with him. I had an idea. We you know,
Speaker 2: we ran his sheet and we saw co defendants on
Speaker 2: other cases with him, and we figured probably saying group.
Speaker 2: But you know, we didn't have arrest power. We couldn't
Speaker 2: make him or the girlfriend talk to us, and the
Speaker 2: police just let it go. I don't understand why. I
Speaker 2: really do not understand why.
Speaker 1: It's sobering to you hear just how easily the cops
Speaker 1: gave up when Andrew was so sure, but maybe there
Speaker 1: was another path. Andrea and her partner Shelby Prussac couldn't
Speaker 1: push back on their alibi. But they still had the
Speaker 1: blood spatters on the red sweatshirt. Could they get them
Speaker 1: tested to see if they belonged to Dana Feiler?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: I mean, one of the things is at the time,
Speaker 2: DNA was not in the criminal justice system.
Speaker 4: It was new.
Speaker 2: The ability to identify someone or exclude someone just wasn't
Speaker 2: available to the defense.
Speaker 1: The tests available at the time, secretor tests were pretty crude. Basically,
Speaker 1: they could only tell you a blood type. The best
Speaker 1: you could hope for was an exclusion, but more often
Speaker 1: than not they came back inconclusive. This time was no different,
Speaker 1: So it.
Speaker 4: Was a wash.
Speaker 2: It didn't prove anything one way or the other.
Speaker 1: Turns out the bloody sweatshirt story had more lives than
Speaker 1: a cat. Now, I'm gonna need you to buckle in
Speaker 1: because this is a bit of a story and it's
Speaker 1: also kind of wild. As you might imagine, Lee had
Speaker 1: plenty of time to ponder the sweatshirt situation in prison,
Speaker 1: and then one day, while in Juliet, he is quite
Speaker 1: literally confronted with it. Remember Tony the sweatshirt's owner. He's
Speaker 1: standing right in front of him, and he has something
Speaker 1: extraordinary to say, Sorry, I got you into my mess.
Speaker 1: Lee is floored. This is basically a confessional, and so
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one, nine years into his jail sentence,
Speaker 1: Lee decides it's high time to get that sweatshirt tested again.
Speaker 1: The technology has advanced leaps and bounds in the past decade.
Speaker 1: Secret or tests have given way to forensic DNA testing,
Speaker 1: and real life exonerations are happening because of it, nearly
Speaker 1: one hundred in the United States by this point. Still,
Speaker 1: it takes the State of Illinois a whole three years
Speaker 1: to think on it, until eventually, in two thousand and
Speaker 1: four they agree to a retest, except the sample is
Speaker 1: well missing, but the state has an excuse at the ready.
Speaker 1: It's not quite the Doggate my homework, but near enough.
Speaker 1: Records show the sweater is with Andrea Lyon. Now, just
Speaker 1: to be clear, it is highly implausible that cuttings of
Speaker 1: any kind would go to a defense attorney. But you know,
Speaker 1: for the sake of argument, I checked with Andrea that
Speaker 1: are some nonsense.
Speaker 2: They did not no, it was missing because they whatever
Speaker 2: they did with it, they put it in a file
Speaker 2: or and garbage can or whatever whatever happen.
Speaker 1: The fact remained the sample was missing, and so the
Speaker 1: state goes for option B, test the periphery of the
Speaker 1: sample on the sweatshirt, which they do have, and cross
Speaker 1: match it with DNA samples from Dana Fightler's parents. The result,
Speaker 1: the blood spatters are not Dana Fightler's. In other words,
Speaker 1: no helpful, Lee Harris, the one and only piece of
Speaker 1: physical evidence is another dead end? Or is it.
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: Jennifer Blag doesn't hire often, but when she does she picks, well.
Speaker 5: We can probably turn it off. I wouldn't barlet me.
Speaker 5: Does this turn it off? Jay or Jennifer? I come
Speaker 5: to my wife's name.
Speaker 1: Meet Eric Bisbee, Jennifer Blag's one and only full time
Speaker 1: staff member.
Speaker 5: I mean, Jennifer and Jennifer and I have more like
Speaker 5: a more of a mother and son relationship because I mean,
Speaker 5: I've known her for so long and she's you know,
Speaker 5: you shouldn't eat that. When I smoke, you should quit smoking.
Speaker 5: She was on me forever about quitting smoking. And we
Speaker 5: just get along really naturally. Our skill sets work together.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 5: I'm more like science technical minded and she's better the
Speaker 5: talking and the writing and all the stuff that lawyers
Speaker 5: should be good at.
Speaker 1: For the record, Eric is a very good lawyer. See
Speaker 1: he says technical minded. What he means more specifically, is
Speaker 1: DNA and understanding DNA evidence. It's pure math. His nerve
Speaker 1: brain just gets pulled in by that kind of stuff
Speaker 1: and the results can literally be life changing.
Speaker 5: It's actually the golden standard. Really, if you look at
Speaker 5: across the field of wrongful convictions, we had all these
Speaker 5: DNA exonerations where you know, everyone had to acknowledge that's
Speaker 5: not the right guy. We got the wrong guy. So really,
Speaker 5: DNA revolutionized how criminal justice is handled in almost every aspect.
Speaker 1: I want to give a chilling but powerful example of
Speaker 1: what Eric is talking about. In April nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: just two months before Dana Fightler was shot, another young
Speaker 1: woman's brutal attack had rocked the nation. Twenty eight year
Speaker 1: old Tricia Miley was out jogging in Central Park when
Speaker 1: she was brutally attacked and raped. The location and the
Speaker 1: level of brutality was shocking. Parents around the country, including
Speaker 1: Dana Fhightlers, told their daughters not to go out alone
Speaker 1: at night. A forty two year old businessman by the
Speaker 1: name of Donald Trump was so incensed he spent eighty
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars on four full page ads in New
Speaker 1: York's top four newspapers calling for the execution of the
Speaker 1: black and Latino boys arrested for the attack, a group
Speaker 1: dubbed the Central Park Five. I was roughly the same
Speaker 1: age as the boys, and remember being frightened by the
Speaker 1: dark reality that they were going to spend the rest
Speaker 1: of their lives in a cell. But then time passed,
Speaker 1: we all forgot about them. Little did anyone know that
Speaker 1: thirteen years later, in two thousand and two, a DNA
Speaker 1: test would confirm their innocence. The real perpetrator was Matthias rayis,
Speaker 1: a serial rapist already behind bars. The convictions for the
Speaker 1: five boys, now like me, young men, were dismissed in
Speaker 1: an instant. Fast forward to twenty and sixteen, when Jennifer
Speaker 1: drops the Lee Harris files on Eric's desk. The first
Speaker 1: thing he's drawn to is that sweatshirt DNA result. This
Speaker 1: is not Dana Pheitler's blood. See, he is not sure
Speaker 1: he agrees with it.
Speaker 5: And so when I got on the case, I started
Speaker 5: looking at it. I thought it seems entirely possible that
Speaker 5: that actually is her blood.
Speaker 1: DNA evidence is great when it has been well preserved.
Speaker 5: Because what we're dealing with here is a sweatshirt potentially
Speaker 5: has the victims of blood on it, and it's been
Speaker 5: sitting for a long time. So the longer it sits,
Speaker 5: it's the possibility that it degrades. You can't get a
Speaker 5: good sample. And so in this case the DNA match,
Speaker 5: should I believe all but two locations.
Speaker 1: In other words, according to Eric's analytical brain, there was
Speaker 1: still a chance that the blood on the sweatshirt did
Speaker 1: belong to Dana Peitler. All they had to do was
Speaker 1: find those original samples. They had gone to huge links
Speaker 1: in the early two thousands to no avail. But this
Speaker 1: task had Jennifer Blagg written all over it.
Speaker 6: So if you look at a diagram the sweatshirt, it
Speaker 6: had little holes all over it from where the technician
Speaker 6: cut out the cuttings. So then I had to go
Speaker 6: down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out where
Speaker 6: the cuttings could be.
Speaker 1: Back in the early two thousands, the folks handling forensic
Speaker 1: testing for the CPD were the CPD. More precisely, the
Speaker 1: Chicago Crime Lab. Now, think about that for a second.
Speaker 1: The same department that made the arrest was also running
Speaker 1: the science meant to prove the arrest correct. Conflict of interest.
Speaker 1: Of course, cpd entered the lab already knowing the story
Speaker 1: it wanted the evidence to tell. And we all know
Speaker 1: how the bias, conscious or not, has a way of
Speaker 1: seeping into the work. That's changed now today third party
Speaker 1: labs are used, But there was one thing that you
Speaker 1: could count on with police labs back in the day. Paperwork,
Speaker 1: a meticulous record for every scrap of evidence, what they
Speaker 1: call the chain of custody.
Speaker 6: So the Chicago Police have an evidence technician that calms
Speaker 6: takes the evidence, takes pictures of the evidence, and then
Speaker 6: inventories at signs an inventory slip at the Chicago Police
Speaker 6: Department where it's inventoried. Then when it's checked out to
Speaker 6: do anything. Everywhere that evidence goes, there's paper documenting where it.
Speaker 1: Went, except when they forget their reports. Deep down, one
Speaker 1: of her rabbit holes were discovered that from time to
Speaker 1: time the crime lab omitted their paperwork on previous cases.
Speaker 1: So maybe even if there was no paperwork, there was
Speaker 1: a chance the evidence was still hiding somewhere. It was
Speaker 1: a long shot, but worth it.
Speaker 6: I knew that if we could have DNA evidence that
Speaker 6: had fighters the victim's blood on his shirt, that would
Speaker 6: that would be it in the story.
Speaker 1: An instant exoneration for Lee, not only because it would
Speaker 1: implicate someone else, but also because well, it would also
Speaker 1: discredit his twenty two statements.
Speaker 6: Lee's statements never mentioned this alternate suspect he mentioned to
Speaker 6: other people that he was with, so it would show
Speaker 6: conclusively that his statements were false. So if I could
Speaker 6: prove that the alternate suspect had her blood on his shirt,
Speaker 6: there was other evidence to point to him, and it
Speaker 6: would refute Lee's statement, and it would be enough.
Speaker 1: To get Lee out. After all the events of the
Speaker 1: past weeks, the sweet high of the Tolls recantation followed
Speaker 1: by this devastating crash when he learned it didn't change
Speaker 1: Lee's fate, Robert knows he needs to temper his friend's spirits,
Speaker 1: keep him believing in something anything, and Robert being well Robert,
Speaker 1: he already has a plan, a documentary, one all about
Speaker 1: Lee's story, the perfect addition to the Freely Media franchise,
Speaker 1: something to put on YouTube hook in more supporters and
Speaker 1: most important, more journalists hunting for their latest scoop shrewe
Speaker 1: to form. Robert has been gathering lots of material and
Speaker 1: now he needs some input from the star.
Speaker 3: Awesome.
Speaker 7: Let me take this phone call here an inmate, laun
Speaker 7: thank you for using the curis. You may start the
Speaker 7: conversation now, Ale, Hi, how are you?
Speaker 1: This can only mean one thing from now on, every
Speaker 1: phone phone call is potential content.
Speaker 4: They speak clearly and into the phone.
Speaker 3: Can you hear me? Now?
Speaker 8: Yeah, I can hear you. Just just make sure you
Speaker 8: speak clearly and into the phone. I've got a cool project.
Speaker 1: Lee doesn't take the baby. He has other things on
Speaker 1: his mind.
Speaker 3: Oh man, hell of it get started at about this morning. No,
Speaker 3: we had a storm up to it and go all
Speaker 3: to shad off the roof right above where I'm sleeping.
Speaker 1: A freak storm is flooded Lee's side of the prison.
Speaker 1: He's had to be moved.
Speaker 3: So they just poved me a few minutes ago. So
Speaker 3: another plot of this part of the institution I didn't
Speaker 3: even know exists. And it's crazy as hell. That's like
Speaker 3: being in the nut all these things.
Speaker 4: Credication, Well, that's all right. Well, Hopefully they're calm, I said,
Speaker 4: hopefully they're calm.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I don't know. They walking around like
Speaker 3: Sandie's that they looking at be real brains. There you go.
Speaker 1: Hey, Rob is ever patient, but the clock is ticking.
Speaker 1: It's time to get down to business.
Speaker 8: So with that being said, you know, I'm gonna ask
Speaker 8: a couple of questions and and just and we'll go
Speaker 8: from there. So regarding the Dana Feiler murder, how did
Speaker 8: you get involved?
Speaker 3: Well, what happened? Well, a murder happened. This is work
Speaker 3: with down. We think we know who did it. Well,
Speaker 3: we need your help, help with OLCO. And we went
Speaker 3: from there. It was down all the week.
Speaker 8: And what was the incentive on your part to help
Speaker 8: these police?
Speaker 3: Well, number one, they with my friend. And number two,
Speaker 3: here's the thing about interviewing people, something we all learned
Speaker 3: the hard way.
Speaker 1: They don't always give you the right answers.
Speaker 4: Was it twenty thousand or was it twenty five thousand?
Speaker 3: It was it was twenty thouves.
Speaker 1: A sensitive interviewer can attempt to gently nudge their subject.
Speaker 4: Well, I don't I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 8: So twenty thousand was promised or was it twenty five thousand.
Speaker 1: But you can only take the horse to the water.
Speaker 3: It was twenty thouves. May probably twenty thouves.
Speaker 1: Okay, So reporter Rob changes tech to a subject that
Speaker 1: he knows Lee will deliver on.
Speaker 8: But what I would like you to do is I'd
Speaker 8: like to get you recorded. You know, uh, maybe you
Speaker 8: say hi. My name is Lee Harris. I was born
Speaker 8: in whatever whatever, I grew up in Gabrini Green, and
Speaker 8: just talk about it, talk about the main streets of
Speaker 8: Kabriny Green and what it was like.
Speaker 4: And that's going to be the intro to the movie.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, okay, I can do it, all right, So
Speaker 3: when did you want to do that?
Speaker 4: Right now?
Speaker 9: You know?
Speaker 3: I uh? I a hoven Cabrini in the early sixties,
Speaker 3: all right, went to the world famouite cool, vacational as fool.
Speaker 1: Home life, meanwhile, was what he referred to as controlled chaos.
Speaker 1: Lee shared a four bedroom apartment with his mother, who
Speaker 1: cleaned holmes part time, and his five brothers. His father,
Speaker 1: a mechanic who drank too much, was only ever a
Speaker 1: fleeting presence. Money was very tight. Little Lee sought solace
Speaker 1: singing in church Choir and later on with the ladies.
Speaker 3: I think Cabrini was a course of challenge because we
Speaker 3: had h that I want to feel. We had the
Speaker 3: poor folk at three four blocks the Wayne, we had
Speaker 3: the rich halfman. They didn't want the guy took the
Speaker 3: projects released vitory in that area I left they were
Speaker 3: working for.
Speaker 1: Remember, Kabrini was just a short walk away from the
Speaker 1: Gold Coast, one of America's wealthiest neighborhoods back then, which
Speaker 1: made it a good place to earn some money. So
Speaker 1: every day Lee would cross the poetically named Division Street
Speaker 1: to reach his wealthy clients.
Speaker 3: Both of our work, game of the other flat absolutely.
Speaker 1: Put on the other side of the tracks was a
Speaker 1: world away.
Speaker 3: Life, and to breed was raw. The great projects, it's
Speaker 3: the white projects, but the white purojects didn't like the
Speaker 3: rig projects with the rig projects, didn't like the Royals,
Speaker 3: the lawyalnits. It was.
Speaker 1: It was a fac The reds and whites were the
Speaker 1: high rise towers, twenty three of them in total, some
Speaker 1: up to nineteen stories tall. And then there were the
Speaker 1: row houses nearly six hundred. Whichever one you happened to
Speaker 1: live in became your default tribal identity.
Speaker 3: The bringing was a war though, and the only thing
Speaker 3: that really I bet that kept the just sound or softball.
Speaker 1: Yes, softball invented in Chicago in the late nineteenth century
Speaker 1: by George Hancock. Baseball with a larger ball and a
Speaker 1: smaller field the ideal inner city leisure sport.
Speaker 3: And we had a thing that we referred to as
Speaker 3: postal organization through recreation, and we developed football league. And
Speaker 3: what we got was we made post of the gas.
Speaker 3: The fel war would felt the play together. That way
Speaker 3: they if you get killed, if you don't want to
Speaker 3: kill your game, baby, if you better to.
Speaker 1: Win a game, put competing gang members on the same
Speaker 1: soft bull side. It was as ingenious as it was audacious.
Speaker 3: You know. We we were able to have probably was
Speaker 3: able to keep a lot of fitness down.
Speaker 1: While they didn't on the field once the game was
Speaker 1: over and.
Speaker 3: Then it was business and years all over that that
Speaker 3: was great. That was great, But a capital person that
Speaker 3: rolled up and down the business street, they would have
Speaker 3: no idea what was going on behind the wallmost fire.
Speaker 1: Alongside the softball league and coaching the girls softball teams,
Speaker 1: Lee would busy himself every year with another very Cabrini
Speaker 1: sporting event.
Speaker 3: We started what we call the sabretty Green Black collect Well,
Speaker 3: we had regular Olympic events and we actually had athlete
Speaker 3: uh for once a year. That's like they was going
Speaker 3: to the Olympics. So that was what. That was a
Speaker 3: big That was a big game. So you know, lifeless, lifeless, Uh,
Speaker 3: what's pretty good.
Speaker 1: This is the thing outsiders never understood about Cabrini. They
Speaker 1: saw the news, the crime stats and assumed it was
Speaker 1: a twenty four to seven horror show. For some people,
Speaker 1: the film Candy Man, a literal horror show, was their
Speaker 1: only vision of the place. And yes, it could be
Speaker 1: a war zone, but even in war, everyday life carried on,
Speaker 1: and within its harsh conditions, consciousness and creativity thrived. The
Speaker 1: musicians Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler were raised there in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties and pointed to their upbringings as a
Speaker 1: source of their sound and social commentary. It was also
Speaker 1: fertile ground for activists by Marion Stamps, who was instrumental
Speaker 1: in the election of Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor,
Speaker 1: as well as other future politicians.
Speaker 3: Jesse White was there, oh Gosh Favis to Saya. The
Speaker 3: former president of the county Ford George Dutt was fair.
Speaker 3: Mike Biegel, he was there and they all knew out
Speaker 3: Fito that garyon and I was in the.
Speaker 1: Mix for Chicagoans. Jesse White is a living legend, an
Speaker 1: Army paratrooper and minor league baseball player. As a youth
Speaker 1: worker inside Cabrini, he founded the Jesse White Tumbling Team,
Speaker 1: a national phenomenon tumblers performing at presidential inaugurations, stealing scenes
Speaker 1: in Hollywood films, holding court at NBA halftimes. In nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight, Jesse White became Illinois's first black Secretary of State,
Speaker 1: a position he held for twenty five years until stepping
Speaker 1: down in twenty twenty three. And back in the day,
Speaker 1: Lee helped drive the kids around, So yeah, he was
Speaker 1: in the mix. Thanks to his community work, Lee was
Speaker 1: on talking terms with some pretty high profile politicians, including
Speaker 1: foot in Chicago's first female mayor, Jane Byrne. Back in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one, when the violence was in an all
Speaker 1: time high in Cabrini, thirty seven shootings in three months,
Speaker 1: she announced too much media fanfare that she would be
Speaker 1: moving in for as long as it takes to clean
Speaker 1: it up.
Speaker 3: When the bear moved in and she she looked at
Speaker 3: me as they leave. You don't think I really gotta
Speaker 3: live here? Yeah? I could have been here, But do
Speaker 3: you actually think I'm gonna live here? Get a a
Speaker 3: cold cold farrand about four o'clock, play overlooking Kabrini and
Speaker 3: she'll come here, baby one quite a week and stay
Speaker 3: for a few animals. But under the couple of doctors
Speaker 3: she got out of it. Get up bold, it was,
Speaker 3: it was, it was veteran.
Speaker 1: At one point, Lee appeared poised to become an alderman
Speaker 1: think city council person, and his rep in the community
Speaker 1: had earned him a neat nickname, Sole Brother Executive.
Speaker 3: That our whole for executive. And he's gonna be He's
Speaker 3: gonna be. Okay, he's gonna he's gonna be.
Speaker 1: Intense. Tragedy marked Lee's life early and repeatedly. His mother
Speaker 1: committed suicide in his early twenties. Two years later, cirrhosis
Speaker 1: claimed his father. In just two years before Lee's arrest,
Speaker 1: his brother was murdered. City politics offered him a way
Speaker 1: to channel his pain and loss into his community, and
Speaker 1: what a remarkable achievement that would have been, but that
Speaker 1: future was not Lee's to claim. And then there was
Speaker 1: the police.
Speaker 3: The police they transis was was felt in the area
Speaker 3: because they was in the area a lot, by the fact,
Speaker 3: was against the police.
Speaker 1: That's right. Lee's softball league was open to gang members
Speaker 1: and cops.
Speaker 3: They used to line up to play the police is
Speaker 3: go fall because they were good. We were good. They
Speaker 3: were good. That was one of the ways that they
Speaker 3: got along. We were playing off fall the three views
Speaker 3: after the game, and that's how I've had a lot
Speaker 3: of idiots that get oh damn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you heard right. Lee played softball with the very
Speaker 1: cops who put them away.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think that's about it. That's pretty good. I'm getting
Speaker 4: excited about this movie thing.
Speaker 8: By having all these bits and pieces that I can
Speaker 8: put together, it's it's gonna be it's almost gonna be
Speaker 8: like a real movie.
Speaker 3: Really.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean I've got I've got at least an.
Speaker 8: Hour's worth of stuff, you know. All right, we'll hang
Speaker 8: in there and have a good way. And uh, I'm
Speaker 8: doing the best I can though, anyway, Yeah, thank you you.
Speaker 3: Next week probably come.
Speaker 8: Up, Okay, we'll do okay, all right, now nah you
Speaker 8: twuly you likewise all right, bye bye a leaf.
Speaker 1: As Rob gets down to editing Lee's best soundbites, Jennifer
Speaker 1: and Eric have already found something interesting with the DNA,
Speaker 1: not the sweatshirt sample, but a tantalizing piece of information
Speaker 1: about the person who did the testing. Back in two
Speaker 1: thousand and four. DNA labs are typically overseen by a
Speaker 1: forensic pathologist, an expert whose word can tip the balance
Speaker 1: between guilt and innocence. In Chicago, that role once belonged
Speaker 1: to a woman named Pam Fish. She routinely testified to
Speaker 1: the reliability of her findings, but in three separate wrongful
Speaker 1: conviction cases, defense attorneys discovered a troubling pattern. On the stand.
Speaker 1: Fish had described her test results as inconclusive, Yet when
Speaker 1: defense attorneys got their hands on her notes and pride
Speaker 1: them open, a totally different story emerged. The results weren't
Speaker 1: inconclusive at all, they were exclusionary. And then Robert does
Speaker 1: some digging of his own. He looks at another Zuli
Speaker 1: case that also has DNA evidence. The boyfriend and girlfriend
Speaker 1: who the hotshot lawyer had also been repping the ones
Speaker 1: who claimed Zuli had coerced them into a false confession.
Speaker 8: You know who the forensic pathologist was, Fish, You got it.
Speaker 3: Unbelievable that woman was Yeah, Hey, whatever the state, whatever
Speaker 3: the fate. Don't look a doo. That's what she did.
Speaker 4: The Notorious Fish.
Speaker 9: The Notorious Fish Crying Wolf is an iHeart and Clockwork
Speaker 9: Films podcast in association with Chalk and Blade.
Speaker 1: I'm your Dax Devlin Ross. The series producer is Sarah Stolart's.
Speaker 1: The senior producer is Laura Hyde. The series script is
Speaker 1: written by me and by Sarah Stolart's. Bonus episodes are
Speaker 1: written and produced by Me Dax Devlin Ross. Our executive
Speaker 1: producers are Christina Everett for iHeart Podcasts, Naomi Harvey and
Speaker 1: Jamie Cohen for Clockwork Films, and Ruth Barnes and Jason
Speaker 1: Phipps for Chalk and Blade. Sound design is by Kenny
Speaker 1: Koziak and George dre bing Hicks. Our theme music is
Speaker 1: by Kenny Koziak. Additional production support from Stephen Pate.