Speaker 1: I came from a beautiful neighborhood, had a beautiful life.
Speaker 2: I went to sleep because September seventh was the first
Speaker 2: day of my high school year. I was going to
Speaker 2: be a senior.
Speaker 1: At twenty two, I was set to start college.
Speaker 2: I woke up and my life was never the same again.
Speaker 1: Cops came out with guns drawn, and I never saw
Speaker 1: freedom ever since after that. It's like roach motw Once
Speaker 1: you get in, you and I can't mouth.
Speaker 2: This is wrongful conviction with Jason pom a true rock
Speaker 2: star of the innocence movement, Keith Allen Harward along with
Speaker 2: one of his attorneys on Salisman of the Great Firm
Speaker 2: of Scatting. Keith, you were just a pretty much a
Speaker 2: regular guy from from the Carolinas serving in the navy.
Speaker 2: Uh in Virginia at the time, Is that right?
Speaker 1: Yes, I was stationed in uh Newport News at the time.
Speaker 1: I was on aircraft care being built at the shipyard.
Speaker 1: Is there? And Uh, that's where it all all kind
Speaker 1: of took place fell apart.
Speaker 2: So Keith was in the navy, had been serving for
Speaker 2: three years on the ship and uh, it's sort of
Speaker 2: interesting how you got to that point In the first place.
Speaker 1: You know, at that time it was six drugs and
Speaker 1: rock and roll, and I was kind of involved all
Speaker 1: of them, and who wasn't. Yeah, and I got tired
Speaker 1: of that lifestyle. It was just it just caught up
Speaker 1: with me and I needed a change. So I sided
Speaker 1: one day I will joined the military. So I went
Speaker 1: to the old Post officer in Greensboro and I sided.
Speaker 1: The first door I come into recruiting office. It was
Speaker 1: going to be the door where I was going to
Speaker 1: walk into and that's the first door was in the door.
Speaker 1: So I walked in there and signed up and went
Speaker 1: pretty quick.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: They wanted you know, well, we delay you for sixty days.
Speaker 1: So I said, no, I want to go. So the
Speaker 1: next day I was in Charlotte day Fees taking the test,
Speaker 1: and the next day I was sitting in Chicago, Illinois
Speaker 1: at boot camp. So it was a matter of three
Speaker 1: days I was in it.
Speaker 2: That's some radical fixing going on there. I mean, some
Speaker 2: people like me would have just walked into AA and
Speaker 2: been like, hey, you know, change of life, but you
Speaker 2: decided to take it to the extreme.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean to be able to get away from everything,
Speaker 1: you've got to get away from everything, and you know,
Speaker 1: friends or friends and come on, man, let's go. You know,
Speaker 1: if I'm away from that, then I can't be influenced.
Speaker 1: So that was my thinking. I got out of town
Speaker 1: and started unnew. Well maybe things would work out.
Speaker 2: So there you are, serving in the navy and a
Speaker 2: horrible crime takes place pretty close to the shipyard. Is
Speaker 2: that right? Right?
Speaker 1: It was just on a few blocks away from the
Speaker 1: gate to the shipyards.
Speaker 2: And it was it was sort of like what we
Speaker 2: would call now a home invasion, right, somebody broke into
Speaker 2: a home.
Speaker 1: The husband was killed, and after he was they were
Speaker 1: in bed together and he came in and beat the
Speaker 1: husband with a crowbar and just you know, it just
Speaker 1: tore him up. And when he was done doing that,
Speaker 1: then he took hold of the wife and sexual assault
Speaker 1: for several hours.
Speaker 2: Truly horrible situation. Yeah, it had to be. So they
Speaker 2: didn't have any information other than that she had said
Speaker 2: that the perpetrator was wearing a sailor's uniform. Is that right, right? Right?
Speaker 1: So that's what cleued them into the shipyards, you know,
Speaker 1: because the Newport News shipyards is away from Norfolk, which
Speaker 1: is normally where you would find sailors and uh, that's
Speaker 1: what clue the men was the fact that he was
Speaker 1: wearing a uniform. So apparently he had to be on
Speaker 1: one of the ships or submarines that were there being
Speaker 1: repaired or built at the shipyard.
Speaker 2: How many sailors are on the ship.
Speaker 1: Well, the crew of the of aircraft carreer we're after
Speaker 1: air wing somewhere a back three to five. But it
Speaker 1: was being built, so it's probably two to three thousand guys.
Speaker 2: A lot of guys for the cops to try to
Speaker 2: figure this one out. Right, it's a tough one. So
Speaker 2: months had gone by, right, and there's a lot of pressure, right,
Speaker 2: nobody wants people take it very personally when someone's home
Speaker 2: is invaded. I know I do when I read a
Speaker 2: story about that in the paper. Everyone can relate because
Speaker 2: everyone has a home. There's pressure on the cops. There's pressure.
Speaker 2: They got to solve this, they got to get it there.
Speaker 2: And there was even some politicians involved. And let's turn
Speaker 2: to you don for a second. How did they land
Speaker 2: on Keith? Of these thousands of guys.
Speaker 3: The rape victim had told the police that during the rape,
Speaker 3: the rapist had bitten her on the leg a few
Speaker 3: times and the police took photographs of these bite marks
Speaker 3: that appeared on her leg, which were essentially bruises from
Speaker 3: the rapist teeth. And so, because the police suspected that
Speaker 3: one of the sailors on this ship, the USS Carl Vincent,
Speaker 3: was the rapist, they started looking at the dental records
Speaker 3: of hundreds and maybe thousands of these sailors, and they
Speaker 3: were trying to narrow down this big group of people
Speaker 3: to a smaller group, and one of the people who's
Speaker 3: you know, records they looked at was Keith's. But when
Speaker 3: they looked at his records the first time they even
Speaker 3: took an impression of his mouth, the dentist excluded Keith.
Speaker 3: They said he was among the people who didn't match.
Speaker 3: And so they kept looking for, you know, other suspects,
Speaker 3: and that went on for a while.
Speaker 2: But then something happened that led to Keith being to
Speaker 2: them taking a renewed interest in looking at Keith, even
Speaker 2: though they had had a professional, someone who was supposedly
Speaker 2: certified and would have been qualified to give this opinion
Speaker 2: to say that it wasn't him.
Speaker 1: I had a girlfriend and we had gotten into a
Speaker 1: fight and I bit her own the shoulder and the
Speaker 1: police took her to the hospital to check her out,
Speaker 1: and that's apparently when the light bulb went off that
Speaker 1: you know, hey, we gotta bite or here. You know,
Speaker 1: they were looking for somebody for a long time. And
Speaker 1: then when the police found out and work got to
Speaker 1: the detectives or whoever, that's when the light came home
Speaker 1: for them and went on me. They pushed it so
Speaker 1: I would show up at court for two reasons. One
Speaker 1: the victim was in the audience, whatever you call it,
Speaker 1: and also they wanted to get more impressions of my teeth.
Speaker 1: I didn't know either one of these.
Speaker 2: After having brought in on the charge in the first place,
Speaker 2: you couldn't go back home where you were living with
Speaker 2: her because you had just had this altercation and she
Speaker 2: was an alcoholic and the whole situation was crazy. So
Speaker 2: where'd you so tell the story about where'd you go
Speaker 2: to sleep?
Speaker 1: That I had no place to go, So I slept
Speaker 1: in a dumpster.
Speaker 2: But it was a particular dumpster, yeah it was.
Speaker 3: It was a high end dumpster.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. There was a hat manufacturer and made baseball caps,
Speaker 1: and they had a dumpster was filling nothing but material.
Speaker 1: It was no food or anything in it. It was
Speaker 1: all style foam and foam, rubber and cloth and that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. So it was, you know, right outside
Speaker 1: the shipyard gate. I would walk by and I would
Speaker 1: notice all this material laying on the ground, and I'd
Speaker 1: stopped one time because cheap hats. It got the little
Speaker 1: plastic things that you popped the size and with. And
Speaker 1: I saw him on the ground and mine had broke
Speaker 1: on my hat, so I went over and picked one up.
Speaker 1: I just opened the dumpstrup look and said, man, this
Speaker 1: place is nice. I wonder why there's nobody else living here,
Speaker 1: you know kind of thing. So that night I thought, well,
Speaker 1: you know, that was a close place to go. It
Speaker 1: was close to the shipyard. It was pweening the house
Speaker 1: where I was living at apartment in the shipyard. So
Speaker 1: that's where I stayed.
Speaker 3: Even though Keith now became a suspect because of this,
Speaker 3: you know, this fight with his girlfriend. During a fight,
Speaker 3: he really didn't match the descript description of the that
Speaker 3: the victim gave because she said that the rapist was
Speaker 3: nineteen years old, nineteen twenty years old, clean shaven, baby faced.
Speaker 3: Keith was twenty six years old, had a mustache, and
Speaker 3: he had a not a beard like but he had
Speaker 3: a heavy, you know, five o'clock shadow type, you know,
Speaker 3: in the air.
Speaker 1: She said his head hair was radish. Mom was brown.
Speaker 3: So Keith didn't he didn't match the description. But in
Speaker 3: a lot of these cases, once the police and law enforcement,
Speaker 3: you know, focus on somebody, they they don't pay attention
Speaker 3: to the things that suggests that they got the wrong person.
Speaker 3: And Keith, he did not meet the description of the
Speaker 3: rapist in this case.
Speaker 2: They've decided they want Keith locked up. They're going to
Speaker 2: solve this case. We had this bad science, right, We
Speaker 2: had bitemark evidence, which we now know has been completely discredited.
Speaker 2: There was a recent study of dentists, forensic dentist and
Speaker 2: odeontologists in which they found that the error raid was
Speaker 2: ninety one percent junk science. Really, we had also another element,
Speaker 2: which was which involved hypnosis, which sounds I'm sure to
Speaker 2: the audience are going, no, we can't, that's ridiculous. You
Speaker 2: can't have hypnosis in a capital murder case, because yours
Speaker 2: was a capital murder case. Is that right? So let's
Speaker 2: talk a little bit about that and the element that
Speaker 2: this hypnotism played.
Speaker 3: This crime got a lot of publicity and actually, you know,
Speaker 3: the news media published, you know, it was on TV
Speaker 3: and radio, and this this shipyard security guard heard the
Speaker 3: story about a murder and a rape that had happened
Speaker 3: just a couple blocks away from the shipyard. And he
Speaker 3: actually was eating dinner at his home that night and
Speaker 3: heard it on the radio and he said to his wife,
Speaker 3: I think I saw someone suspicious. So he went down
Speaker 3: to the police and they interviewed him, and he told
Speaker 3: the police that he saw a guy who looked like
Speaker 3: he was drunk, came to the gate to pass through,
Speaker 3: you know, had to show a badge, but the guy did.
Speaker 3: The guard didn't remember, you know, the name, or didn't
Speaker 3: look at the name, but that the guy. He remembered
Speaker 3: the guy because he had blood splat would look like
Speaker 3: blood splattered all over his uniform. Later on six months,
Speaker 3: during the next couple months, they hypnotized this guy to
Speaker 3: try to get more information. And it was not uncommon
Speaker 3: back in the day for the police to hypnotize witnesses
Speaker 3: to see if they could remember more. The problem is
Speaker 3: that that can really ruin someone's memory. It can change
Speaker 3: someone's memory the hypnotism. It can have them fill in
Speaker 3: gaps say things that they didn't actually remember, and so
Speaker 3: it's really unreliable and it can corrupt the whole process.
Speaker 3: So the shipyard security guard had given a description that
Speaker 3: was vague, but he was shown a composite drawing that
Speaker 3: the victim, the rape victim, had done with a police
Speaker 3: you know, artist, and she had said that that person
Speaker 3: looked ninety she was ninety five percent sure that that's
Speaker 3: what the rapists looked like, or some very high percentage.
Speaker 3: And they showed it to the shipyard security guard and
Speaker 3: he said, yeah, that looks like seventy five percent like
Speaker 3: the guy I saw walking into the shipyard. That composite
Speaker 3: drawing had no mustache, because the victim has said that
Speaker 3: the rapist was babyfaced. But after this guy was hypnotized,
Speaker 3: he changed his story. He changed the time that he
Speaker 3: said that he saw the guy. Now it was closer
Speaker 3: to five o'clock, which matched, you know, with the time
Speaker 3: that the rapist might have been coming back on the
Speaker 3: ship's convenient And then he later was shown a photograph
Speaker 3: or maybe a series of photos, including Keith's photo, after
Speaker 3: the police focused on Keith, and he picked Keith's photograph
Speaker 3: out and said that was the guy that I saw.
Speaker 1: They didn't have anything to go with. There was really
Speaker 1: no evidence in this trial. You know, there was no
Speaker 1: finger prance, there were you know, there was there was
Speaker 1: hardly nothing to go other than this bike mark stuff.
Speaker 1: That's what they you know, that's what they were relying on,
Speaker 1: and you know, like you said, it was unreliable.
Speaker 3: Keith actually had sort of an alibi because the victim
Speaker 3: had told the police that earlier in the day. You know,
Speaker 3: she was tacked at two o'clock in the morning, but
Speaker 3: the day before she had taken her kids to the
Speaker 3: swimming pool because this was in September, and there was
Speaker 3: a guy that she saw when she was getting in
Speaker 3: the car with her kids who was hitch hiking, and
Speaker 3: he was a sailor and he was angry that she
Speaker 3: didn't pick him up hitchhiking, so he swore at her
Speaker 3: and flipped her off. And she then said when she
Speaker 3: got home from swimming with her kids later, she saw
Speaker 3: what she thought was the same guy looking over her
Speaker 3: fence in her backyard. And when she told the police
Speaker 3: the next day, when you know, when they were interviewing
Speaker 3: her after the rape, she said she was pretty sure
Speaker 3: that the sailor she had seen the day before was
Speaker 3: her rapist and at the time that she saw the
Speaker 3: guy the second time looking over her back fence was
Speaker 3: at six pm. That's what she told the police. And
Speaker 3: at six pm Keith had an alibi. He was at
Speaker 3: an alcohol education course he had signed in. The person
Speaker 3: who ran the course remembered Keith and verified that he
Speaker 3: was there in Norfolk, not in Newport News in Norfolk
Speaker 3: at the time that she saw the guy who looked
Speaker 3: like her rapist. Researchers who look at wrongful conviction cases
Speaker 3: they identify the same problems that happen in these cases
Speaker 3: over and over and over again, and there's about six
Speaker 3: of them that commonly occur, and one of them is
Speaker 3: poor representation by defense lawyers. In Keith's case, he actually
Speaker 3: hit the trifecta in a bad way because he had
Speaker 3: three of the common problems that arise in these wrongful
Speaker 3: conviction cases happened in his case junk science, misidentification, and
Speaker 3: the third one is prosecutorial and police misconduct that happens
Speaker 3: in a lot of cases, and in keith case, we
Speaker 3: haven't talked about that yet except for the hypnosis, but
Speaker 3: there was misconduct by law enforcement in his case, right.
Speaker 2: So he did certainly hit the wrong kind of try
Speaker 2: fact that you can't hit it any worse, and ended
Speaker 2: up serving thirty three years in prison. And let's let's
Speaker 2: talk about that, Keith. Every day's got to be held.
Speaker 2: But I mean, I don't want to put words in
Speaker 2: your mouth because you share it.
Speaker 1: No, no, And people always say that, you know, they can't imagine,
Speaker 1: and it's with a good heart they say that, but
Speaker 1: truly they can't. You know, unless you've been there, you
Speaker 1: just don't. You just don't know. But what got me
Speaker 1: through was the fact that I knew I was innocent
Speaker 1: from day one, and I had hoped that they would
Speaker 1: discover it because, like I told you before, this is
Speaker 1: the United States of America. People don't get convicted for
Speaker 1: crimes they did not do. But they do, and I'm
Speaker 1: one of them. So all through the process of a trial,
Speaker 1: and even until I was in prison for a while,
Speaker 1: I was thinking, well, they're gonna figure this out. You know,
Speaker 1: they made a mistake, They're gonna figure this out. It
Speaker 1: didn't happen. But what got me through was was the
Speaker 1: fact that Okay, they already convicted me, they put me
Speaker 1: in prison, but I wasn't gonna allow those criminals. And
Speaker 1: when I speak of criminals, I'm talking about the the
Speaker 1: police officers and the prosecutors, the actual criminals of this case,
Speaker 1: besides a fellow that did it. I wasn't gonna let
Speaker 1: them exact another second from me. They had me, but
Speaker 1: they weren't gonna get my mind. And if I allowed
Speaker 1: them to make me punish myself even farther or do
Speaker 1: anything disruptive in my life, even though I was in prison,
Speaker 1: I was given them more, and I wasn't gonna give
Speaker 1: no more. I wasn't gonna do it.
Speaker 2: That's like a very spiritual approach.
Speaker 1: Well, it's a lot of staring at walls and wondering, Wow,
Speaker 1: what what just happened? I mean again, you can't you
Speaker 1: can't fathom what it's like. It's like, what this happened.
Speaker 1: It's like a car wreck, you know, once all the
Speaker 1: movement is stopped and you're sitting there behind the wheel
Speaker 1: with an airbag under your chin, you're thinking wow.
Speaker 3: So Keith wrote to the Innocence Project. I think it
Speaker 3: might have been sometime in like two thousand and eight
Speaker 3: or something like that.
Speaker 1: I didn't know the existed. I was in prison. I
Speaker 1: didn't know these outfits existed. In another inmates said, hey, man,
Speaker 1: your story is so crazy, why'd you give the Inciance
Speaker 1: Project to try and write them a letter? So I
Speaker 1: wrote them a letter and said, hey, you know, there
Speaker 1: was no evidence. They convicted me on blite mark evidence alone.
Speaker 1: I didn't do it, you know, And that basically what
Speaker 1: the letter was, you know, you know, will you think right?
Speaker 3: So his letter got to the Innocence Project in New York.
Speaker 3: But they get letters from inmates all over the country,
Speaker 3: thousands of.
Speaker 2: Letters at least two months.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they have a backlog of several thousand inmates, you know,
Speaker 3: who've written to them, who they haven't yet had a
Speaker 3: chance or at that point hadn't had a chance to
Speaker 3: look at. The Innocence Project was looking at bitemark cases
Speaker 3: because it is junk science, and there have been twenty
Speaker 3: four now with Keith, twenty five people who had been
Speaker 3: indicted based on bitemark evidence and were later exonerated. So
Speaker 3: they were looking for cases that involved bite marks. So
Speaker 3: Keith's file got plucked from the middle or somewhere in
Speaker 3: the stack and put up to the top for someone
Speaker 3: to look at. And one of the law students I
Speaker 3: think or interns discovered that the evidence from Keith's case
Speaker 3: was still in existence, you know, the physical evidence like that.
Speaker 1: Which is the great marriage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now you've gotten engaged. The Innocence Project has gone
Speaker 2: to scatt and right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they reached out to me because.
Speaker 2: Which is like bringing in the big guns exactly, I mean.
Speaker 3: And we put together this team and we started working
Speaker 3: with the Innocence Project because they'd found the evidence. It
Speaker 3: was this little box called a rape kit that has
Speaker 3: you know, swabs from the victim, you know, and and
Speaker 3: other evidence that the crime scene folks had taken and
Speaker 3: had been taken from the autopsy and the rape exam.
Speaker 3: And they were in the process of arranging to have
Speaker 3: that tested, and to their credit, the prosecutor or the
Speaker 3: current prosecutor down in Newport News, agreed to have the
Speaker 3: evidence tested.
Speaker 2: That's good to hear. When you were first made aware
Speaker 2: of Keith's case by the NISS Project, how long did
Speaker 2: it take before you realized that you had an innocent
Speaker 2: man on your hands?
Speaker 3: You know, I've done a lot of this kind of work.
Speaker 3: And when we started looking into his case and we
Speaker 3: read the transcripts and we realized how weak a case
Speaker 3: of you know, the evidence was the only evidence that
Speaker 3: the prosecutors used against Keith was this bitemark expert testimony,
Speaker 3: which at the time was thought to be an actual
Speaker 3: science that had validity, that was reliable, and you know
Speaker 3: a bunch of experts. There were two experts who testified
Speaker 3: in court and said that.
Speaker 2: And there are four others. Well, I think about that,
Speaker 2: right if you're in a jury and you're sitting there
Speaker 2: and you go, wow, this guy's a forensic diss and
Speaker 2: he's got that. But we know now that it's really
Speaker 2: an unregulated, uh sort of practice. It's not certified by
Speaker 2: any particular You can be a forensic od On toleraniologist,
Speaker 2: but basically you get certified by your friends.
Speaker 1: Pretty much show up at the Shart and Old Friday,
Speaker 1: you know, Sunday to give you a diploma.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's really well, here's the thing, you know,
Speaker 2: it's terrible.
Speaker 3: This science was actually developed not for use in court,
Speaker 3: like in a case for Keith, but when there's like
Speaker 3: a mass disaster and they find the remains of victims
Speaker 3: and included in the remains or you know, the teeth
Speaker 3: and the jaw, and then they want to try to
Speaker 3: identify that person. So they think they know who the
Speaker 3: victims are, but they're not sure who's who. Then they
Speaker 3: can look at dental records, but that's looking at, you know,
Speaker 3: someone's full set of teeth, like thirty two teeth in
Speaker 3: a john comparing that to X rays or other dental records.
Speaker 3: It's very different doing that, which is noble work. You
Speaker 3: know people who do that. But it's very different when
Speaker 3: you try to say, based on a blurry photograph of
Speaker 3: a woman's shin to look at that where you know,
Speaker 3: if someone bites another person, maybe only four teeth make
Speaker 3: the bite marks six or two or whatever. Then to
Speaker 3: say with almost certainty that the person who bit that
Speaker 3: victim's leg was Keith Harwood is a very different matter.
Speaker 2: No, I've seen a case where they the bite bark
Speaker 2: evidence was the primary cause of the conviction, and it
Speaker 2: turned out later on that it wasn't even a human
Speaker 2: it was animal bibars. The victim had been thrown in
Speaker 2: a scar inver a scar.
Speaker 1: One of the guys testified that it was a bike Martin.
Speaker 1: It turned out to be a scar from injury. But
Speaker 1: that's what swayed that jury. So is when that character.
Speaker 1: Levigne is his name, and when he started getting up
Speaker 1: and giving all his props, he helped go. He went
Speaker 1: to Argentina for the mingle at, you know, the Nazi
Speaker 1: criminal guy when they found a skull and tried identify
Speaker 1: that he was involved with that. There was an airplane
Speaker 1: crash in Hawaii, I think in seventy nine. He went
Speaker 1: to identify remains there. So he's up there and his
Speaker 1: arms are waving around, and the smoke starts to come
Speaker 1: and the lights and stuff, and you think, wow, we're
Speaker 1: not in Kansas anymore. I e. The Wizard of Oz.
Speaker 1: The jury is like, you know, they're sopping up the drool. Sure,
Speaker 1: and he says so the state brought him in. Sure
Speaker 1: that if he say so, he's got to be and.
Speaker 3: He said it with almost near certain He said that
Speaker 3: there was a very very very very high probability that
Speaker 3: Keith was the person who caused those bite marks. And
Speaker 3: another expert came in and said, there's nobody else in
Speaker 3: the world. There's maybe he didn't say the world, but
Speaker 3: there's nobody else who could have caused these bite marks
Speaker 3: rather than other than Keith's dental impressions, which means it
Speaker 3: was Keith. I said before that there was you know,
Speaker 3: misconduct by law enforcement on the rape kit. At the
Speaker 3: time of this trial, and at the time of the crime,
Speaker 3: they had a syrologist, someone who specializes in analyzing blood
Speaker 3: and other body fluids, examined the samples from the rape victim,
Speaker 3: including you know, vaginal samples, and they found semen on
Speaker 3: the victim's thoughts and on the vaginal swabs and other
Speaker 3: swabs that were taken, and they tested it for blood
Speaker 3: blood type. Because at the time there was no DNA testing.
Speaker 3: This was nineteen eighty three, his first trial, and then
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty six, his second trial, there was no DNA
Speaker 3: evidence report. So the roologist examined the evidence and issued
Speaker 3: a report, and the report said that on the swabs
Speaker 3: from the rape kit that it was inconclusive that they
Speaker 3: couldn't identify on the critical swabs the blood type and
Speaker 3: therefore it could have been Keith or it might not
Speaker 3: have been Keith. And that's what he testified to at trial. Well,
Speaker 3: when the Innocence Project in Scadden got involved in the case,
Speaker 3: we asked for records and among the records that we
Speaker 3: asked for, and again to the credit of the prosecutor.
Speaker 3: He was agreed to turn over information that had never
Speaker 3: been turned over before. We got the lab notes from
Speaker 3: the analyst. So he had issued a like a three
Speaker 3: page official report that essentially said no blood typing could
Speaker 3: be done on those critical swabs. But in his notes,
Speaker 3: in his lab notes, it showed that he did get
Speaker 3: a blood type that was not Keith's. It was Type
Speaker 3: old blood and Keith is Type A blood.
Speaker 2: So he I just got the chills.
Speaker 1: If that would have been brought up at court, where
Speaker 1: it wouldn't have been a court, it wouldn't have been
Speaker 1: a trial.
Speaker 2: So now you've got your you've got your evidence, you've
Speaker 2: done you've done the digging, right, you and your team,
Speaker 2: the Innocence Project and their team. You've met with Keith
Speaker 2: by now, right, and anybody that would meet him knows
Speaker 2: that he might be capable of telling a bad joke,
Speaker 2: but that's probably the worst crime that he's going to commit,
Speaker 2: you know. So, So now take us to that moment
Speaker 2: of justice finally being served.
Speaker 3: Sure, so, we had DNA testing done on the evidence
Speaker 3: that the Innocence Project had found, and the DNA results
Speaker 3: came back. First, they showed that the the rape sample
Speaker 3: evidence didn't match Keith, that there was an unknown male
Speaker 3: profile that didn't match Keith. Then we needed to do
Speaker 3: more testing because the victim was married and her husband
Speaker 3: was murdered, and we needed to make sure that the
Speaker 3: seamen samples that were DNA tested didn't belong to him.
Speaker 3: And there was more DNA testing done, so we knew
Speaker 3: we had an innocent guy all along. Now we had
Speaker 3: DNA evidence, which I think you know, pretty much conclusively
Speaker 3: proved that, but we needed to make sure it wasn't
Speaker 3: matching the husband. And we got the test results back
Speaker 3: right as we had just filed the petition saying we had,
Speaker 3: you know, preliminary results, and the new testing not only
Speaker 3: showed that it wasn't Keith's DNA, it wasn't the victim's
Speaker 3: husband's DNA, but it showed whose DNA it was. The
Speaker 3: police originally suspected that a sailor on the USS Carl
Speaker 3: Vincent committed this crime. They were right about that because
Speaker 3: the DNA matched a guy who was a sailor on
Speaker 3: the USS Carl Vincent. His name is Jerry Kroty, and
Speaker 3: after he left the Navy he went on with his life.
Speaker 3: Keith was in prison and he ended up Jerry Krotty
Speaker 3: committing other crimes, and he was in prison in Ohio
Speaker 3: for an abduction, which is another word for a kidnapping.
Speaker 3: He also had convictions for breaking into houses and he
Speaker 3: died in prison in two thousand and six, ten years before.
Speaker 3: His DNA was matched in multiple places on the victim
Speaker 3: from the rape kit, on her clothing she put on
Speaker 3: a T shirt after the rape. His DNA was found
Speaker 3: on the T shirt. His DNA was found on a
Speaker 3: towel that she wrapped around her after the rape. When
Speaker 3: the police came, she was wearing a towel and the
Speaker 3: rapist had put karate. Now we know his name is Karate.
Speaker 3: He had put a diaper, one of her children's diapers
Speaker 3: over her face when he was raping her, and his
Speaker 3: DNA was found on that daper. So there's absolutely no
Speaker 3: doubt that he was the rapist.
Speaker 1: Now consider her situation. Now she thinks the rapist is
Speaker 1: in prison me, so she can relax a little bit
Speaker 1: because he's not going to come back. Years later, thirty
Speaker 1: four years later, she finds out no, he was still
Speaker 1: out there running around and could have come back at
Speaker 1: any time, and she's got to relive this because those
Speaker 1: criminals in Newport News wanted a conviction, not the truth.
Speaker 1: So now all these years later, it comes back up,
Speaker 1: it's brought. It's like scrabbing a scab. She's got to
Speaker 1: relive that whole rape thing because it's on the news,
Speaker 1: it's everywhere that I'm being exonerated that I didn't do
Speaker 1: it right.
Speaker 2: The guy who did this horrible thing to her family, right.
Speaker 1: Could have still been out there and done more, and
Speaker 1: he did, but he could have come back. And for
Speaker 1: that woman, I feel for her. She was re victimized
Speaker 1: by those criminals in Newport News, by them shortcutting and
Speaker 1: taking the easy way out, by not trying to find
Speaker 1: the right person. The guy Karate that did it was
Speaker 1: a wall when all his testing was going on about
Speaker 1: the bick marks and stuff. So what they do, Well,
Speaker 1: he's gone. We ain't got time to look for him.
Speaker 1: We got the guy here he is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So and that's that's what happens.
Speaker 1: They're dead, all of them. But the rologists are gone now,
Speaker 1: the prosecutor, you know, and it's all about ego with them,
Speaker 1: you know, they get a hold of something. The detective
Speaker 1: in my case, spinner, After that I was convicted. He
Speaker 1: took one of the moles and went to a foundry
Speaker 1: and had brass a brass mold of my teethmaid to
Speaker 1: make a paperweight wow for his desk. Now, how is
Speaker 1: that knowing what he did that I didn't do it?
Speaker 2: He had to know, Keith. You know, I'm a big
Speaker 2: fan of yours and I just I listened to you
Speaker 2: talk and I'm frankly in awe. Is there anything else,
Speaker 2: any closing thoughts you want to share with the audience.
Speaker 1: These organizations exist, the incent Projects, and people don't know
Speaker 1: about them. I mean, you turn the TV on and
Speaker 1: they want Sally Scruthers wants you to give dog money
Speaker 1: for dogs and stuff like that. But these organizations are no.
Speaker 1: I was in prison and didn't know about the Innocent Project.
Speaker 1: I had no clue and I was in prison of
Speaker 1: all places. We should know about these things. So the
Speaker 1: word needs to get out and people need to help.
Speaker 1: Because my heroes they get up every day, they washed
Speaker 1: their face, they brush their teeth and then put the
Speaker 1: capes on and then go out and save the people.
Speaker 1: And that's the kind of people that we all should.
Speaker 2: Be about it. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review.
Speaker 2: Wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps. And I'm
Speaker 2: a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really
Speaker 2: hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause
Speaker 2: and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocenceproject
Speaker 2: dot org to learn how to donate and get involved.
Speaker 2: I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and
Speaker 2: Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three
Speaker 2: time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow
Speaker 2: us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at
Speaker 2: Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a
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Speaker 2: Company Number one