WEBVTT - #171 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - Walter Ogrod 0:00:02.759 --> 0:00:06.160 Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer. 0:00:06.280 --> 0:00:07.400 And I'm Steve Drisen. 0:00:08.440 --> 0:00:11.040 Today we'll bring you to Philadelphia for the story of 0:00:11.119 --> 0:00:14.000 Walter Ogrod. Walter was sent to death row for a 0:00:14.080 --> 0:00:17.319 murder who didn't commit by an old school Philly justice 0:00:17.360 --> 0:00:21.480 system that was better known for injustice. Walter spent decades 0:00:21.520 --> 0:00:25.400 in prison until a new wave of reform minded prosecutors 0:00:25.480 --> 0:00:29.600 went looking for the truth behind his conviction. Walter's story 0:00:29.600 --> 0:00:33.559 gives Steph and me hope that real reform is really possible. 0:00:45.720 --> 0:00:48.479 So I was born and raised in Philadelphia, and a 0:00:48.479 --> 0:00:51.479 few years ago Laura and I took a trip there 0:00:51.560 --> 0:00:55.760 for work. I'm very proud of Philadelphia and I like 0:00:55.880 --> 0:00:58.840 to show off the city. And there was this place 0:00:59.120 --> 0:01:03.080 that I had to take Laura too. It's not Constitution. 0:01:02.560 --> 0:01:04.600 Hall, okay, not the Liberty Bell. 0:01:04.680 --> 0:01:07.320 It's the Eastern State Penitentiary. 0:01:07.800 --> 0:01:10.120 So you drive me to downtown Philly and there's this 0:01:10.560 --> 0:01:14.880 rundown relic of a prison that's crumbling. It's covered in cobwebs. 0:01:14.880 --> 0:01:16.560 It's almost like a haunted house in the middle of 0:01:16.600 --> 0:01:19.200 downtown Philadelphia. It's not used any longer. 0:01:19.360 --> 0:01:22.639 It was built in eighteen twenty nine, but it's. 0:01:22.520 --> 0:01:26.800 Been preserved there as this incredible monument against mass incarceration. 0:01:27.200 --> 0:01:29.959 It's my favorite place to go because it fits the 0:01:29.959 --> 0:01:34.759 city's personality and history so well. This is the city 0:01:34.760 --> 0:01:40.440 with an unbelievable history of injustice, mass incarceration, and corruption 0:01:40.680 --> 0:01:44.080 within the criminal justice system. And this history of injustice 0:01:44.240 --> 0:01:46.839 it peaked when I was a child in the sixties 0:01:46.880 --> 0:01:50.240 and nineteen seventies. This was the time when Frank Rizzo 0:01:50.440 --> 0:01:52.400 was the police chief and then he was the mayor. 0:01:52.840 --> 0:01:55.960 He controlled the city and he sent out a message 0:01:55.960 --> 0:02:00.280 that when police officers coerced confessions, he had their best. 0:02:00.400 --> 0:02:03.680 You know, just like Eastern State Penitentiary. Frank Rizzo has 0:02:03.680 --> 0:02:06.560 become this symbol for the heaviest of hands in the 0:02:06.600 --> 0:02:08.720 criminal justice system, for the way it can just come 0:02:08.760 --> 0:02:11.880 down on the backs of people, especially people without power. 0:02:12.280 --> 0:02:14.640 And that's exactly what we see in today's story, the 0:02:14.680 --> 0:02:22.880 story of Walter Ogrod. Today's story starts in Northeast Philadelphia. 0:02:23.240 --> 0:02:25.800 It's a working class part of Philly. The side streets 0:02:25.800 --> 0:02:28.440 are lined with bungalows and the main drags are lined 0:02:28.440 --> 0:02:31.760 with discount big box stores. The Northeast is an outlying 0:02:31.800 --> 0:02:34.760 area pretty far from downtown where the courthouses and police 0:02:34.760 --> 0:02:37.960 department are found. It even tried to secede once from 0:02:38.000 --> 0:02:40.280 the rest of the city. But when it comes to 0:02:40.280 --> 0:02:44.480 criminal justice, the Northeast is Philadelphia through and through. It's 0:02:44.520 --> 0:02:48.360 a full participant in the city's policing machine. When our 0:02:48.400 --> 0:02:52.320 story starts in nineteen eighty eight, that machine was notoriously 0:02:52.440 --> 0:03:01.359 harsh and way too often couldn't deliver real justice. It's 0:03:01.440 --> 0:03:03.919 July nineteen eighty eight, and on one of Northeast Phillies' 0:03:03.960 --> 0:03:06.960 side streets lived the family of a little girl, four 0:03:07.040 --> 0:03:10.200 year old Barbara Jeane Horn. On the twelfth of July, 0:03:10.360 --> 0:03:13.640 Barbara Jane went missing sometime around two o'clock that afternoon. 0:03:14.240 --> 0:03:17.440 By five point thirty, a neighbor peeked inside a discarded 0:03:17.480 --> 0:03:20.760 television box that was sitting outside on a curb next 0:03:20.760 --> 0:03:24.440 to some trash cans. Inside the box was Barbara Jean 0:03:24.919 --> 0:03:28.760 and she was dead. She was unclothed, her hair was wet, 0:03:29.160 --> 0:03:33.200 and she'd been struck five times on the head. It 0:03:33.240 --> 0:03:36.800 was a horrendous crime. Police swarmed the block and found 0:03:36.840 --> 0:03:41.000 four eyewitnesses who'd seen a man earlier that afternoon dragging 0:03:41.000 --> 0:03:44.600 a cardboard box down the sidewalk. The eyewitnesses all gave 0:03:44.720 --> 0:03:48.160 roughly the same description. They'd seen a man with brown hair, 0:03:48.440 --> 0:03:52.200 around thirty years old, somewhere between five six and five nine, 0:03:52.560 --> 0:03:55.600 with a medium build. It was a pretty good description, 0:03:55.840 --> 0:03:59.680 but police weren't able to generate any real leads. After 0:03:59.680 --> 0:04:02.680 several months, Barbara Jean's murder was featured on the TV 0:04:02.760 --> 0:04:06.480 show Unsolved Mysteries and a police tip line was set up. 0:04:07.000 --> 0:04:10.080 Close to a thousand tips were phoned in, but police 0:04:10.120 --> 0:04:13.720 still couldn't solve the case after almost four years. In 0:04:13.920 --> 0:04:17.440 early nineteen ninety two, the case was reassigned to a 0:04:17.520 --> 0:04:21.080 new group of Philly detectives, and these new cops seemed 0:04:21.120 --> 0:04:24.200 to have no difficulty picking a suspect, a twenty three 0:04:24.279 --> 0:04:28.760 year old man named Walter Ogrod. Walter was a round shoulders, 0:04:28.839 --> 0:04:31.360 thick glasses kind of guy who lived across the street 0:04:31.360 --> 0:04:35.120 from Barbara Jean's family. He was black haired, six foot one, 0:04:35.360 --> 0:04:38.680 two hundred and twenty pounds, not exactly the short, slim 0:04:38.720 --> 0:04:41.960 man who'd been seen dragging that box. Walter had no 0:04:42.000 --> 0:04:44.320 criminal record at all, but he did have a record 0:04:44.360 --> 0:04:49.159 of profound learning disabilities over the years, professionals who evaluated 0:04:49.240 --> 0:04:54.120 him used words like extreme dependency and social inadequacy. His 0:04:54.200 --> 0:04:57.480 teachers said that Walter was no troublemaker. He'd only ever 0:04:57.520 --> 0:04:59.480 get in trouble because he was in the wrong place 0:04:59.640 --> 0:05:03.240 at the time. For Walter Ogrod, the wrong place at 0:05:03.240 --> 0:05:07.000 the wrong time was a Philadelphia interrogation room on April fifth, 0:05:07.040 --> 0:05:11.320 nineteen ninety two. That morning, police called Walter's house and 0:05:11.400 --> 0:05:13.839 left a message asking him to come in for questioning 0:05:13.960 --> 0:05:17.919 about Barbara Jeane. He wasn't a suspect, they said, he 0:05:18.040 --> 0:05:19.600 was an informational witness. 0:05:20.240 --> 0:05:23.560 This happens all the time. But this is a ruse. 0:05:24.240 --> 0:05:27.760 There's already a plan afoot. Police officers don't view that 0:05:27.920 --> 0:05:32.000 person as a witness. They view that person as a suspect. 0:05:32.480 --> 0:05:37.080 It's a ruse because it creates a context in which 0:05:37.120 --> 0:05:41.520 the confession is going to be viewed as voluntary. He 0:05:41.680 --> 0:05:44.040 drove down to the police station on his own accord. 0:05:44.320 --> 0:05:47.120 We told him that the door is open and he 0:05:47.120 --> 0:05:50.560 can leave at any time that he wants. All of 0:05:50.600 --> 0:05:54.440 these tactics we see over and over again, and oftentimes 0:05:54.480 --> 0:05:58.560 it's the first step down the road to a false confession. 0:05:59.400 --> 0:06:02.520 Walter was to help first chance he got At about 0:06:02.600 --> 0:06:06.599 one thirty that afternoon, Walter drove himself to the Philadelphia 0:06:06.640 --> 0:06:11.719 Police Administration Building. It's an imposing, severe nineteen sixties era 0:06:11.800 --> 0:06:15.120 complex that Philadelphians call the Roundhouse. 0:06:15.520 --> 0:06:19.520 The confession was one of police officer's main tools to 0:06:19.640 --> 0:06:21.760 solve cases that were still open. 0:06:22.200 --> 0:06:25.760 There were experts in breaking people, and the Roundhouse is 0:06:25.760 --> 0:06:27.000 where the breaking happened. 0:06:27.080 --> 0:06:30.640 It's the seat of police power in the city. 0:06:31.200 --> 0:06:33.800 Walter showed up to the Roundhouse ready to cooperate, but 0:06:33.960 --> 0:06:37.720 wiped out. He had just finished an eighteen hour shift 0:06:38.040 --> 0:06:41.600 driving a bakery truck around a three hundred mile delivery route, 0:06:41.960 --> 0:06:43.880 and he'd been awake for twelve hours. 0:06:43.920 --> 0:06:47.400 Before that, he had been up for like thirty hours. 0:06:47.440 --> 0:06:52.120 He was exhausted. He came into the interrogation room expecting 0:06:52.480 --> 0:06:56.400 to be providing information that was helpful to the police, 0:06:56.520 --> 0:06:59.760 and he got hit with an avalanche. 0:07:00.240 --> 0:07:03.239 At the Roundhouse, police put Walter into a back room 0:07:03.520 --> 0:07:06.120 where the table and chairs were bolted to the floor. 0:07:06.600 --> 0:07:10.200 That's where he'd face fourteen hours of interrogation. 0:07:10.960 --> 0:07:13.440 If you go without sleep for some period of time, 0:07:13.920 --> 0:07:20.160 it clouds your ability to make rational decisions and leads 0:07:20.320 --> 0:07:24.680 people to agree to things that they otherwise would never 0:07:24.760 --> 0:07:30.840 agree to. And Walter had cognitive disabilities too, so these 0:07:30.960 --> 0:07:34.040 twin issues made him an easy mark. 0:07:35.360 --> 0:07:38.760 Now, the interrogation wasn't recorded, so we have no objective 0:07:38.800 --> 0:07:41.760 record of what happened in the room. But Walter has 0:07:41.800 --> 0:07:44.960 given a very detailed account of the interrogation. So here 0:07:45.000 --> 0:07:49.200 we go. According to Walter, police started by asking where 0:07:49.240 --> 0:07:52.720 he'd been four years ago on the day Barbara Jean disappeared. 0:07:53.360 --> 0:07:56.119 He went to work, he said. After he got home, 0:07:56.200 --> 0:07:59.760 he remembered seeing Barbara Jean's stepfather going door to door 0:08:00.000 --> 0:08:03.240 looking for her. But these answers didn't seem to satisfy 0:08:03.280 --> 0:08:07.160 the police. Walter started to feel strange. Why were the 0:08:07.200 --> 0:08:10.560 cops so interested in him? He stood up tried to 0:08:10.640 --> 0:08:14.400 leave the room, but he says, his interrogators blocked the door. 0:08:15.600 --> 0:08:18.760 The police handcuffed Walter to the chair and started showing 0:08:18.840 --> 0:08:21.960 him photos of Barbara Jean's dead body in the cardboard box. 0:08:22.560 --> 0:08:26.440 We think you did this, they said, Walter says. Police 0:08:26.480 --> 0:08:29.640 told him witnesses had identified him as the perpetrator, even 0:08:29.680 --> 0:08:33.440 though no one actually had, and when Walter insisted he 0:08:33.520 --> 0:08:36.440 was innocent, the police told him he must be blocking 0:08:36.600 --> 0:08:40.280 memories of the murder. They wrote down a description of 0:08:40.360 --> 0:08:43.280 how they thought Walter had committed the crime. If you 0:08:43.320 --> 0:08:46.079 don't sign this confession, they said, we're going to take 0:08:46.120 --> 0:08:48.400 you downstairs and we're going to put you in a 0:08:48.440 --> 0:08:51.199 cell with a bunch of black people. We're going to 0:08:51.240 --> 0:08:53.760 tell them you killed a bunch of black children, and 0:08:53.800 --> 0:08:57.120 then we're going to see what happens, except, of course, 0:08:57.360 --> 0:08:58.720 they didn't use the word black. 0:09:00.320 --> 0:09:03.880 This is the old school police department, the department built 0:09:03.920 --> 0:09:07.760 by Frank Rizzo, who was an unabashed racist. I mean, 0:09:07.800 --> 0:09:11.160 when he ran for mayor, he would hand out buttons 0:09:11.200 --> 0:09:15.439 to his supporters that said vote white. It's no surprise 0:09:15.600 --> 0:09:21.640 in this context that Walter Ogrod's interrogation was saturated with racism. 0:09:21.960 --> 0:09:24.559 By three point thirty in the morning, Walter had had enough. 0:09:25.000 --> 0:09:28.520 He signed each page of a sixteen page confession, all 0:09:28.559 --> 0:09:31.760 of which had been written out by the police. According 0:09:31.800 --> 0:09:35.240 to the confession, Walter lured Barbara Jean into his basement, 0:09:35.559 --> 0:09:38.520 where he tried to molest her. When she resisted, he 0:09:38.559 --> 0:09:40.679 flew into a rage and hit her on the head 0:09:41.000 --> 0:09:43.920 with a two foot long metal bar from his weight 0:09:44.000 --> 0:09:47.079 set he rinsed off her body, hit her clothes in 0:09:47.120 --> 0:09:49.960 a crawl space, and put her in the cardboard box. 0:09:50.840 --> 0:09:53.480 It was a brutal statement enough to get Walter booked 0:09:53.480 --> 0:09:57.240 into jail and charged with murder, but by seven am 0:09:57.360 --> 0:10:01.199 Walter was recanting. He called an atturn from jail totally 0:10:01.200 --> 0:10:03.839 distraught and said that police were telling him that he'd 0:10:03.920 --> 0:10:06.240 killed a little girl and had a mental block about it. 0:10:06.640 --> 0:10:09.959 Walter said he didn't do it. When the lawyer asked 0:10:09.960 --> 0:10:13.040 why he hadn't called earlier, Walter explained that he had 0:10:13.160 --> 0:10:16.439 requested a lawyer during the interrogation, but the police had 0:10:16.480 --> 0:10:18.760 said they'd have to put him in jail until the 0:10:18.840 --> 0:10:22.520 lawyer came, and in the meantime the inmates would kill him. 0:10:22.679 --> 0:10:24.760 That was more than enough to dissuade Walter. 0:10:26.280 --> 0:10:28.480 You might be asking yourself, how can they do that? 0:10:28.880 --> 0:10:31.800 Aren't they supposed to stop when a suspect asked for 0:10:31.840 --> 0:10:34.480 the right to counsel? And the answer to that question 0:10:34.640 --> 0:10:38.680 is yes, that's the one bright line rule of interrogation. 0:10:39.280 --> 0:10:42.720 Suspect asked for a lawyer, police officers shut up until 0:10:42.720 --> 0:10:46.120 a lawyer comes into the room. But they could get 0:10:46.160 --> 0:10:49.320 away with it because there's no recording of this transaction. 0:10:49.760 --> 0:10:52.840 Police officers are going to say he never asked for 0:10:52.920 --> 0:10:56.439 a lawyer, and in Philadelphia in a court of law 0:10:56.720 --> 0:11:05.079 during this time, nobody's going to believe Walter Ogrid. 0:11:09.040 --> 0:11:12.240 Walter's trial for first degree murder began in October nineteen 0:11:12.320 --> 0:11:15.800 ninety three. The only evidence against him was his confession, 0:11:16.120 --> 0:11:18.960 and there was plenty of reason to disbelieve it. The 0:11:19.000 --> 0:11:22.320 confession claimed that Walter had hidden Barbara Jean's clothes in 0:11:22.400 --> 0:11:25.600 his crawl space, but Walter's defense pointed out that no 0:11:25.679 --> 0:11:29.760 clothes had been found there. A psychiatrist testified about Walter's 0:11:29.800 --> 0:11:33.600 limitations and said the confession wasn't written in Walter's style 0:11:33.640 --> 0:11:37.080 of speaking, and when Walter took the stand to proclaim 0:11:37.160 --> 0:11:40.520 his own innocence, it was pretty clear the confession was 0:11:40.520 --> 0:11:44.679 written in words he'd never use. On November fourth, nineteen 0:11:44.760 --> 0:11:48.960 ninety three, the jury announced its verdict not guilty. 0:11:50.720 --> 0:11:53.080 The jury acquitted Walter Ogrid. 0:11:53.240 --> 0:11:55.800 Let's say that one more time. The jury found Walter 0:11:55.920 --> 0:11:58.760 not guilty. I mean, we almost never see this in 0:11:58.800 --> 0:11:59.680 confession cases. 0:12:00.000 --> 0:12:02.600 He is a rare event. It's like a total eclipse 0:12:02.600 --> 0:12:03.320 of the sun. 0:12:03.360 --> 0:12:05.480 For a moment. It looked like Walter was going home, 0:12:05.920 --> 0:12:08.840 but as soon as the acquittal was announced, one juror 0:12:09.000 --> 0:12:12.480 changed everything. He stood up and announced, I do not 0:12:12.679 --> 0:12:16.760 agree with the verdict. The courtroom erupted and the judge 0:12:16.760 --> 0:12:20.000 declared a mistrial. In the end, the jury had hung 0:12:20.520 --> 0:12:24.000 eleven in favor of acquittal, one in favor of conviction. 0:12:25.000 --> 0:12:27.720 After the trial, one of the eleven jurors who believed 0:12:27.760 --> 0:12:30.840 in Walter's innocence told the media that he saw gaping 0:12:31.000 --> 0:12:34.720 holes in the prosecution's case. I didn't put much stock 0:12:34.880 --> 0:12:38.000 in the confession, he said, I wanted to see evidence. 0:12:39.080 --> 0:12:42.360 Walter was retried in nineteen ninety six, and this time 0:12:42.440 --> 0:12:45.679 the prosecutors filled the holes in their case. They had 0:12:45.720 --> 0:12:50.559 recruited a notorious jailhouse snitch, a man named John Hall, 0:12:50.760 --> 0:12:52.720 who was locked up in the same jail as Walter. 0:12:53.360 --> 0:12:56.720 Hall had a miles long track record of claiming to 0:12:56.760 --> 0:13:00.480 overhear other inmates confess to their crimes and at least 0:13:00.559 --> 0:13:04.600 twelve different homicide cases. He told the authorities about these 0:13:04.679 --> 0:13:08.880 supposed confessions in exchange for benefits like reductions in his 0:13:08.960 --> 0:13:13.080 sentence for his apparently priest like ability to hear confessions. 0:13:13.480 --> 0:13:16.240 Hall was nicknamed the Monseignor. 0:13:16.280 --> 0:13:21.559 He would read newspaper articles about these stories and then 0:13:21.760 --> 0:13:26.360 claim that this suspect confessed to him, and he did 0:13:26.360 --> 0:13:29.800 it because he was getting something in return, he would 0:13:29.800 --> 0:13:33.559 get a cut. In his sentence, he was a con man, 0:13:33.640 --> 0:13:37.360 he was a liar, and the fact that prosecutors were 0:13:37.440 --> 0:13:42.320 willing to use this man over and over again speaks 0:13:42.720 --> 0:13:48.640 volumes about this unholy alliance between police officers and prosecutors 0:13:48.720 --> 0:13:49.640 in Philadelphia. 0:13:50.160 --> 0:13:53.040 This partnership with such a prolific snitch had helped the 0:13:53.040 --> 0:13:56.840 Philly DA's office win a steady stream of convictions, but 0:13:56.920 --> 0:14:00.000 by the time of Walter Ogrod's second trial, the monster 0:14:00.480 --> 0:14:04.680 had accumulated such a reputation that even prosecutors realized he 0:14:04.760 --> 0:14:06.200 had no credibility left. 0:14:06.760 --> 0:14:12.679 The baggage around John Hall was so heavy that the 0:14:12.720 --> 0:14:17.040 prosecutors couldn't use him in this case. So what did 0:14:17.120 --> 0:14:22.320 Hall do? Hall trained another inmate in the details of 0:14:22.440 --> 0:14:27.800 Walter's story and used that inmate to be the snitch. 0:14:28.040 --> 0:14:31.160 He wasn't the only priest there to take confessions. 0:14:30.640 --> 0:14:34.560 That's right. He turned the jail and prison system in 0:14:34.880 --> 0:14:38.800 Pennsylvania into a seminary. 0:14:37.760 --> 0:14:41.320 For Walter's second trial. Prosecutors got around their usual star 0:14:41.400 --> 0:14:45.520 witnesses credibility problem by calling a different inmate to testify. 0:14:46.160 --> 0:14:49.760 Ja Wolchansky was an acolyte of John Hall, and Jay 0:14:49.920 --> 0:14:52.440 was all too happy to take the monseignor's place on 0:14:52.480 --> 0:14:56.000 the witness stand. At trial, Jay testified that Walter had 0:14:56.000 --> 0:14:59.280 confessed to him in jail. For good measure, Jay added 0:14:59.320 --> 0:15:02.440 a story about Walter, describing what happened when his own 0:15:02.480 --> 0:15:06.000 mom asked if he'd killed Barbara Jean. According to Jay, 0:15:06.240 --> 0:15:08.960 Walter told his mom, damn right, I did, and if 0:15:09.000 --> 0:15:11.040 you know what's best for you, you'll keep quiet. 0:15:12.600 --> 0:15:13.320 Believe it or not. 0:15:13.720 --> 0:15:17.320 This is enough. Based on Jay's snitch testimony and on 0:15:17.360 --> 0:15:20.880 the confession, Walter Ogrod was convicted of the murder of 0:15:20.880 --> 0:15:24.760 Barbara Jane Horn on October eighth, nineteen ninety six. The 0:15:24.840 --> 0:15:28.040 next day, it took this jury less than ninety minutes 0:15:28.280 --> 0:15:31.600 to sentence Walter Ogrod to death and off Walter went 0:15:32.120 --> 0:15:39.520 to death row. Walter's case went through years of appeals 0:15:39.640 --> 0:15:42.640 to no avail. Eventually, a team of lawyers from the 0:15:42.640 --> 0:15:46.400 Federal Community Defender Office in Philadelphia, along with attorneys from 0:15:46.400 --> 0:15:50.320 a local law firm, began to reinvestigate Walter's case. In 0:15:50.360 --> 0:15:53.480 twenty eleven, they filed a post conviction petition with some 0:15:53.600 --> 0:15:58.000 blockbuster pieces of evidence attached. First, the petition took down 0:15:58.040 --> 0:16:02.320 the snitches. It included an affid david from the Monseigneur himself, 0:16:02.600 --> 0:16:05.680 John Hall, who said that his buddy Jay wol Chansky 0:16:05.840 --> 0:16:09.320 never really talked to Walter in any detail at all. Instead, 0:16:09.440 --> 0:16:12.200 the Monseigneur had told Jay what to say about Walter. 0:16:12.680 --> 0:16:16.880 The Monseigneur finally had his come to Jesus moment, he 0:16:16.960 --> 0:16:20.160 admitted that he had lied about Walter Ogrod. 0:16:20.680 --> 0:16:24.600 After the Monseigneur died, his widow also submitted an affidavit 0:16:24.640 --> 0:16:28.400 spilling details about the snitch scheme. Turns out she was 0:16:28.440 --> 0:16:32.280 an accomplice in fabricating the Monseigneur's confessions. It was her 0:16:32.480 --> 0:16:35.760 newspaper research that served as the basis for his stories. 0:16:36.280 --> 0:16:39.000 But when it came to Walter's case, she couldn't find 0:16:39.120 --> 0:16:42.320 much information in the papers, so she wrote Walter a letter, 0:16:42.720 --> 0:16:47.960 pretending to be a stripper, asking for information about his case. Walter, 0:16:48.080 --> 0:16:51.160 of course, never confessed anything to her. The story of 0:16:51.200 --> 0:16:55.000 his guilt was all made up. As for Walter's confession. 0:16:55.320 --> 0:16:57.800 The lawyers pointed out that Barbara Jean didn't have the 0:16:57.880 --> 0:17:00.560 kind of skull fracture as you'd expect if she had 0:17:00.600 --> 0:17:02.640 actually been hit over the head with a weight bar. 0:17:03.120 --> 0:17:05.680 The confession just didn't match the facts of the case, 0:17:06.400 --> 0:17:09.560 and it seemed there was a reason for that. The 0:17:09.600 --> 0:17:13.480 same officer who interrogated Walter had been implicated in at 0:17:13.560 --> 0:17:17.240 least two other false confession cases. One involved a man 0:17:17.280 --> 0:17:20.200 who'd confessed to raping a seventy seven year old woman, 0:17:20.560 --> 0:17:23.080 and another involved a man who confessed to killing a 0:17:23.080 --> 0:17:26.840 local businessman. For closing those cases, the Philly police gave 0:17:26.960 --> 0:17:31.000 this officer the nickname Detective Perfect. Thankfully, both of these 0:17:31.080 --> 0:17:35.879 wrongfully convicted men were later exonerated, and Detective Perfects record 0:17:36.040 --> 0:17:37.280 was deservedly tarnished. 0:17:37.640 --> 0:17:41.640 The detective who took Walter Ograd's confession was a golden 0:17:41.720 --> 0:17:46.679 boy in the Philadelphia Police Department, and he claimed to 0:17:46.720 --> 0:17:51.080 have a ninety five percent success rate in getting confessions 0:17:51.119 --> 0:17:52.160 to close cases. 0:17:52.680 --> 0:17:55.080 There's a great quote from a journalist who followed this 0:17:55.200 --> 0:17:59.080 case very closely, man named Tom Lowenstein, who said, you know, 0:17:59.200 --> 0:18:01.920 having a ninety five percent clearance rate for a homicide 0:18:01.960 --> 0:18:05.480 detective is kind of like Mark maguire hitting seventy five 0:18:05.480 --> 0:18:07.760 home runs. You got to ask, did he do it 0:18:07.800 --> 0:18:09.320 honestly exactly? 0:18:09.440 --> 0:18:13.399 When you see detectives claiming to have that high of 0:18:13.440 --> 0:18:16.359 a confession rate, you know there's a lot of false 0:18:16.400 --> 0:18:17.920 confessions in that mix. 0:18:20.800 --> 0:18:23.880 The post conviction lawyers had presented a pretty compelling case 0:18:23.920 --> 0:18:28.520 for Walter's innocence. Nonetheless, seven years later, in twenty seventeen, 0:18:28.920 --> 0:18:31.920 the court still had not issued a ruling. But while 0:18:31.960 --> 0:18:37.720 Walter's case was stalled, Philadelphia began to change. In twenty seventeen, 0:18:37.800 --> 0:18:42.000 the people of Philadelphia elected a new unlikely district attorney, 0:18:42.440 --> 0:18:46.480 Larry Krasner. Larry was a civil rights lawyer who made 0:18:46.480 --> 0:18:50.359 his name suing the Philadelphia police for misconduct. He was 0:18:50.400 --> 0:18:54.560 elected on a wave of neighborhood activism led by Philadelphians 0:18:54.560 --> 0:18:57.600 of color who were angry at the authorities for years 0:18:57.600 --> 0:19:01.240 of abuse and neglect. Larry Krasner quickly came to define 0:19:01.320 --> 0:19:04.160 a new vision of what it meant to be a prosecutor. 0:19:04.640 --> 0:19:07.560 He did not believe in the death penalty, he did 0:19:07.600 --> 0:19:11.280 not believe in knee jerk mass incarceration, and he did 0:19:11.320 --> 0:19:14.679 not believe in keeping innocent men and women in prison. 0:19:15.880 --> 0:19:18.520 Here's our friend Carrie Wood, who works in the part 0:19:18.520 --> 0:19:23.280 of Larry Krasner's office dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions. Before 0:19:23.280 --> 0:19:26.240 she joined his office, she was a wrongful conviction lawyer 0:19:26.480 --> 0:19:29.360 like us who worked at the Ohio Innocence Project. 0:19:30.320 --> 0:19:34.600 Larry Krasner was really thinking about the system differently and 0:19:34.680 --> 0:19:39.280 wanting to return to her role of truth seeker and 0:19:39.359 --> 0:19:43.800 representing the whole community, not just a particular swath of it. 0:19:44.320 --> 0:19:46.920 That was really something that made me change my mind 0:19:46.960 --> 0:19:49.200 about wanting to work in a DA's office. 0:19:49.520 --> 0:19:52.399 Carrie has crossed over to the prosecution side with the 0:19:52.440 --> 0:19:55.320 goal of changing it, and we're pretty proud of her. 0:19:55.760 --> 0:19:59.480 Unfortunately, one of the biggest roadblocks to getting justice were 0:19:59.480 --> 0:20:04.399 often secutor's offices. I thought that coming to a DA's office, 0:20:04.400 --> 0:20:07.639 I might actually be able to make a difference to 0:20:07.840 --> 0:20:10.840 right past wrongs and to use those past wrongs to 0:20:10.880 --> 0:20:12.920 point to practices that needed to change. 0:20:13.440 --> 0:20:17.080 After Carrie began working in the Philadelphia Conviction Integrity Unit, 0:20:17.440 --> 0:20:20.920 one of the first cases assigned to her was Walter Ogrod. 0:20:21.320 --> 0:20:24.960 Walter's attorneys had pointed out that Barbara jen Horn didn't 0:20:25.000 --> 0:20:29.320 have any skull fractures, and Walter's initial confession was that 0:20:29.760 --> 0:20:31.639 he had a hit her over the head with a 0:20:31.720 --> 0:20:37.160 large weight bar. That was certainly something that sounded worth investigating. 0:20:37.680 --> 0:20:41.000 Carrie and her colleagues dove into Walter's case and what 0:20:41.080 --> 0:20:42.520 they found was revealing. 0:20:43.000 --> 0:20:47.000 We began to identify documents that looked like they had 0:20:47.040 --> 0:20:49.560 not been turned over to defense counsel at the time 0:20:49.600 --> 0:20:53.480 of the original trial. One of the things that really 0:20:53.560 --> 0:20:58.480 jumped out at me was notes from the prosecutor about 0:20:59.080 --> 0:21:00.720 what the actual tries cause. 0:21:00.480 --> 0:21:01.119 Of death was. 0:21:02.119 --> 0:21:06.080 In those notes, it says Barbara Jane Horn had not 0:21:06.240 --> 0:21:08.720 died from a blow to the head. The most likely 0:21:08.760 --> 0:21:12.080 scenario was that she had been suffocated. So that particular 0:21:12.200 --> 0:21:15.760 note in the file, once we came across it, was 0:21:16.760 --> 0:21:17.760 a pretty big deal. 0:21:18.160 --> 0:21:22.040 The state had known all along that Walter's confession, which 0:21:22.080 --> 0:21:25.920 didn't mention smothering once, was not true, even as it 0:21:26.040 --> 0:21:29.119 sought to execute him. In fact, a new review of 0:21:29.160 --> 0:21:32.159 the autopsy revealed that whatever did strike Barberaging in the 0:21:32.200 --> 0:21:35.840 head was light weight and thin in profile. It definitely 0:21:35.880 --> 0:21:39.600 wasn't the heavy weight bar that Walter's confession described. That 0:21:39.760 --> 0:21:42.479 was enough for Carrie and the Conviction Integrity Unit to 0:21:42.480 --> 0:21:45.920 do DNA testing on the liquid that the morgueuld use 0:21:46.040 --> 0:21:47.480 to wash Barbara Jean's body. 0:21:47.800 --> 0:21:50.280 What else can Barbara gen tell me about what happened 0:21:50.280 --> 0:21:52.760 to her that maybe was missed at the time. 0:21:53.160 --> 0:21:56.920 The result they found a full male DNA profile. That 0:21:56.960 --> 0:22:00.680 profile didn't match anyone in the state or national DNA atabases, 0:22:01.040 --> 0:22:04.280 but one thing was clear. The DNA definitely did not 0:22:04.400 --> 0:22:07.720 belong to Walter Ogrod. And unlike in so many of 0:22:07.760 --> 0:22:11.880 the stories we tell on this podcast, these prosecutors understood 0:22:11.920 --> 0:22:15.640 what a DNA exclusion like this meant. It was undeniable 0:22:15.720 --> 0:22:20.639 proof that Walter had been wrongfully convicted. On February twenty eighth, 0:22:20.680 --> 0:22:23.639 twenty twenty, Carrie and her team filed a motion to 0:22:23.680 --> 0:22:26.960 throw out Walter's conviction. The evidence used to convict him, 0:22:27.040 --> 0:22:32.000 she wrote, was false, unreliable, and incomplete. Instead, she stated 0:22:32.280 --> 0:22:38.560 Walter Ogrod was very likely innocent. For Walter to win 0:22:38.640 --> 0:22:42.040 exoneration and leave death row, though it wasn't enough for 0:22:42.119 --> 0:22:45.320 the DA's office to declare him innocent, the judge had 0:22:45.359 --> 0:22:49.080 to agree to exonerate him or Walter wasn't going anywhere. 0:22:49.640 --> 0:22:53.480 This judge was a former prosecutor herself. She'd tried homicide 0:22:53.560 --> 0:22:56.879 cases alongside another prosecutor who later became the judge who 0:22:56.920 --> 0:23:02.280 presided over Walter's conviction. These two judges epitomized Philadelphia's old Guard, 0:23:02.600 --> 0:23:06.520 both its harshness and its cronyism. So when the office 0:23:06.520 --> 0:23:12.080 of Larry Krasner, that new reformer DA declared Walter Ogrod innocent, well, 0:23:12.240 --> 0:23:14.719 the case encountered some major resistance. 0:23:15.400 --> 0:23:20.280 Once we had concluded our investigation, we were originally scheduled 0:23:20.480 --> 0:23:22.199 to have a hearing in front of the judge, but 0:23:22.480 --> 0:23:24.800 unfortunately COVID happened. 0:23:35.400 --> 0:23:39.800 COVID nineteen hit Pennsylvania only a few weeks after prosecutors 0:23:39.840 --> 0:23:43.480 asked the court to throw out Walter's conviction. Court operations 0:23:43.480 --> 0:23:46.800 slowed way down. The judge had scheduled a March twenty 0:23:46.800 --> 0:23:50.560 seventh hearing on Walter's case, but halfway through March she 0:23:50.720 --> 0:23:54.880 canceled it. She was too busy. Her clerk informed Walter's lawyers, 0:23:55.200 --> 0:23:58.200 and Walter's case was no more important than any other. 0:23:58.920 --> 0:24:00.919 It is more important and then any other. This is 0:24:00.960 --> 0:24:04.840 a case where the district attorney is saying, we believe 0:24:04.920 --> 0:24:09.639 this man is innocent that almost never happens. She put 0:24:09.680 --> 0:24:13.639 Walter's life at risk. Prisons are a peatri dish for 0:24:13.680 --> 0:24:18.800 this virus. COVID should have been a reason for fast 0:24:18.840 --> 0:24:22.280 tracking this, not an excuse for delaying it. 0:24:22.680 --> 0:24:25.879 But while the judge was delaying the hearing, Walter Ogrod, 0:24:25.960 --> 0:24:30.040 then fifty five years old, was falling ill. According to 0:24:30.080 --> 0:24:33.440 his lawyers, Walter spiked one hundred and three degree temperature 0:24:33.800 --> 0:24:36.639 and developed breathing problems that made him feel like he 0:24:36.720 --> 0:24:40.440