Speaker 1: Previously on death and deceit in Alliance.
Speaker 2: To me, from what I understand of the case, stuff
Speaker 2: just didn't make sense.
Speaker 3: The guy I knew they came into the post office
Speaker 3: that drew up his hand away and grinned all the time,
Speaker 3: and he was the nicest guy ever. I thought, no,
Speaker 3: this can't be.
Speaker 4: He said that they put him in a room and
Speaker 4: they changed him to the wall by his arm and
Speaker 4: spit on him, and they told him that they wanted
Speaker 4: him to confess.
Speaker 2: Red Turby, a nationally non criminal forensics expert, pipped apart
Speaker 2: what he calls a botched cake simpthing's missing.
Speaker 3: I can't understand.
Speaker 4: There's got to be more.
Speaker 5: He could have paid off his entire eighteen years of
Speaker 5: child support with a check. Why didn't the prosecution turn
Speaker 5: this over on? What is going on here? So it
Speaker 5: makes you feel like there's more to the story.
Speaker 1: This is death and deceit and alliance. A real time
Speaker 1: investigation into whether David Thorne killed Yvonne Lane Maggie Freeling
Speaker 1: On the morning of April first, nineteen ninety nine. Before
Speaker 1: the lifeless body of yvon Lane was found, a neighbor
Speaker 1: was walking by nine to sixteen Divine Street. Twenty year
Speaker 1: old George Hale said he was walking to McDonald's around
Speaker 1: nine thirty ten am when he heard puppies barking from
Speaker 1: Yvonne's home.
Speaker 6: So I just glanced over therecause I heard a budget.
Speaker 3: Puppies and out comes this guy.
Speaker 6: A guy came out with a trash bag. That's all
Speaker 6: I see. You just glance, yeah, thank you that track.
Speaker 1: So remember the puppies were outside on the balcony. George
Speaker 1: described the man he saw leaving the house with a
Speaker 1: trash bag as being in his mid to late twenties,
Speaker 1: about one hundred and eighty pounds and about five foot nine,
Speaker 1: wearing a T shirt and blue jeans, with medium length hair.
Speaker 3: And you hear the puppies crying. You look over and
Speaker 3: look over and you see this guy caught on which door?
Speaker 3: Do you remember which was?
Speaker 1: This is a private investigator for David Thorne interviewing George Hale.
Speaker 7: It was a bottom door, and I was like, it's
Speaker 7: like a porch or something that comes over the door
Speaker 7: a little bit.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like a diact or something came out of the
Speaker 6: bottom down there right underneath that. That death.
Speaker 1: Now this is significant because it's an eyewitness account of
Speaker 1: a person leaving the crime scene just hours before Yvon's
Speaker 1: body was found, yet hours after she was believed to
Speaker 1: have been killed. George said that he again walked by
Speaker 1: Yvon's house later in the day at five to ten
Speaker 1: pm and saw police there. That's when he said he
Speaker 1: realized a crime was being investigated, so he waved over
Speaker 1: some officers and gave a statement right then about the
Speaker 1: person he saw leaving the house. The next day, the
Speaker 1: police asked him to the station.
Speaker 6: He launches the books of them.
Speaker 7: But they took you down to the department and yeah,
Speaker 7: it was that next day they did that, Yeah, next day.
Speaker 3: Okay, Yeah, they look through books of pictures. Did they
Speaker 3: show you any pictures in particular?
Speaker 6: Just ohos you know, just out of this big each book.
Speaker 7: So just like TV until you see if you yeah,
Speaker 7: because you did you feel.
Speaker 3: At that point that you would have recognized I would.
Speaker 6: I was lucky. I see a set Okay, I saw
Speaker 6: huh that I thought I saw came out of the house. Okay.
Speaker 7: So in other words, you thought you could have recognized
Speaker 7: yeah something, if you'd have seen this picture, you would
Speaker 7: have remembered because it was real fresh in your mind
Speaker 7: that it was that guy.
Speaker 1: He said he did not see the man he spotted
Speaker 1: outside of Yvonne's building in the photo book. It's unclear
Speaker 1: whose mugshots were shown to him, and that's because the
Speaker 1: police made no records that were aware of of their
Speaker 1: interview with George Hale. In fact, George Hale's name never
Speaker 1: came up at trial or in any of the documents
Speaker 1: that police and prosecutors gave to David's defense team.
Speaker 5: This man was in a house with a dead body
Speaker 5: and was either cleaning up for the killer or was
Speaker 5: the killer. It's very suspicious. This was like a paragraph
Speaker 5: and a police report that was not turned over.
Speaker 1: This is Beth Carris. She's a legal analyst and former
Speaker 1: assistant DA in Manhattan, and if her voice sounds familiar,
Speaker 1: you probably recognize her from TV. She was with Court
Speaker 1: TV for nineteen years, covering cases including OJ Simpson, Scott Peterson,
Speaker 1: and Casey Anthony. Beth came across David's case a few
Speaker 1: years ago when Dwayne Pullman, the local reporter and TV
Speaker 1: news anchor and Ohio, reached out to a friend of hers.
Speaker 5: And so my friend said, look, you know my Ohio friend,
Speaker 5: reporter says, there's a here. This guy's you know, didn't
Speaker 5: do it. He's locked up. And the side story, which
Speaker 5: we kind of wanted to get into it as the
Speaker 5: focus was the woman who would marry David Sue Gless.
Speaker 5: She's a lovely person. I got to know her, visited
Speaker 5: with her. We still are in contact.
Speaker 1: And that's how I met Beth through Sue, David's wife.
Speaker 1: Of course, I had known of and seen Beth on
Speaker 1: TV for years, so speaking with her for this was
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Beth Hatt spent a ton of time looking
Speaker 1: into David's case with her friend for a potential TV show.
Speaker 5: You know, I visited David and Joe Welts in two
Speaker 5: different prisons, and then I had extensive phone calls with
Speaker 5: both of them. We did go to the courthouse. We
Speaker 5: did get to look at all the evidence. They pulled
Speaker 5: out all the evidence for us.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, the show fell through. But Beth had already done
Speaker 1: so much legwork, so she's a wealth of information on
Speaker 1: the case. Plus I was interested did to hear her
Speaker 1: perspective as a former prosecutor.
Speaker 5: I read a lot of transcripts, and I was reading
Speaker 5: the trial transcript and you got to understand that when
Speaker 5: you have my background as a prosecutor, that police and
Speaker 5: prosecutors are not in the business of arresting and trying
Speaker 5: innocent people. Yes, it happens, but the vast majority of
Speaker 5: people who go through the system, they're guilty. Okay.
Speaker 1: Beth said she started with the assumption that the prosecutors
Speaker 1: got it right. She went through the entire trial and
Speaker 1: flagged a lot of the same things I did, things
Speaker 1: that just didn't make sense to either of us.
Speaker 5: The most crucial piece that jumped out at me was
Speaker 5: what came out post conviction, and that's when the defense
Speaker 5: got one of the police reports that was prepared close
Speaker 5: in time to the murder that was based on notes
Speaker 5: taken by a comp at the scene.
Speaker 1: This was the police note that was taken about what
Speaker 1: George Hale saw the morning Yvon's body was discovered, and
Speaker 1: it was only found after David's conviction. During his appeal,
Speaker 1: David received all his files from trial, including the prosecution's file,
Speaker 1: and that's when he saw the name George Hale, which
Speaker 1: shouldn't have happened because the state was supposed to turn
Speaker 1: over all relevant documents or discovery before the trial, and
Speaker 1: yet it wasn't until after the conviction that anyone got
Speaker 1: the report, mentioning what George Hale said he saw.
Speaker 5: The fact that it was never turned over to the
Speaker 5: defense is shocking.
Speaker 1: At that time, David's appeal team also believed this was
Speaker 1: a bombshell. Not only was it a due process violation,
Speaker 1: which alone could win a retrial, but it seemed there
Speaker 1: was also a person of interest the police never looked at,
Speaker 1: and George Hale could potentially identify that person. So David's
Speaker 1: investigator found George Hale.
Speaker 6: It's George here.
Speaker 3: My name is Mike Durkin.
Speaker 6: I like to talk to me.
Speaker 3: He's not in any couple or anything.
Speaker 7: He's kind of hey, buddy, he's got a manager of
Speaker 7: truth that I talked to him.
Speaker 3: Oh that's all right, I'm kind of cold.
Speaker 1: George Jrkin explains to George why he was there.
Speaker 3: Now, after this.
Speaker 7: Case was all done, the family still pursuing that we
Speaker 7: got the police report.
Speaker 3: Or they mentioned they had talked to you. We never
Speaker 3: had your name. We never I can show you.
Speaker 6: We never.
Speaker 7: We never knew, we never knew existed until we got
Speaker 7: a copy of this police reported you.
Speaker 1: Now you already heard some of the interview earlier, George
Speaker 1: described what he saw outside Yvonne's house the morning her
Speaker 1: body was found, and the police were interested. According to George,
Speaker 1: the police actually tried to hypnotize him in hopes of
Speaker 1: jogging his memory to better describe the mystery man with
Speaker 1: the trash bag, but to no avail. George also told
Speaker 1: Durkin that he had met with Sue before. Sue, David's wife,
Speaker 1: an amateur investigator, had gone over to George's house and
Speaker 1: shown him three photos.
Speaker 7: You've seen a picture she brought you a picture of
Speaker 7: David and Wels some other three of them. Three of them,
Speaker 7: and those weren't any of the guys you saw, because
Speaker 7: you would kind of remember the days that you saw, Okay.
Speaker 1: George said that the man you saw leaving the house
Speaker 1: that morning was not David or Joe. For starters, George
Speaker 1: said the man was around five foot nine. Joe and
Speaker 1: David are both over six feet tall. Here's Beth again,
Speaker 1: So who's this man?
Speaker 5: I mean that that is the one key part of
Speaker 5: this case that just never like never saw right with me,
Speaker 5: Like something is wrong here, something is really wrong. It
Speaker 5: makes me question why that report wasn't provided to the defense, like,
Speaker 5: what's what's up with that and why it wasn't further investigated?
Speaker 5: So it makes me feel like there's more to the story.
Speaker 1: In his post conviction appeals, David's attorney questioned the two
Speaker 1: lead detectives, Samson and Mucklow, about George Hale. Here's Detective Samson,
Speaker 1: all right, this is a Lion.
Speaker 8: Police Department lineup forum or George Ale, and he was
Speaker 8: given a lineup and he did not recognize anybody in
Speaker 8: the lineup.
Speaker 3: Now clarify point for me, please.
Speaker 8: Lineup would have pictures on it.
Speaker 5: Sure, what happened?
Speaker 1: Where where's that document?
Speaker 8: Well, normally what we do on our lineup is we
Speaker 8: put the lineup together and we photo copy all the
Speaker 8: pictures in the lineup. Okay, then the pictures are put
Speaker 8: back in they because we used polaroids at that time,
Speaker 8: the photographs will be put back in the booking books.
Speaker 8: But the lineup itself should have been photocopied as to
Speaker 8: who was in the lineup.
Speaker 1: But there were no photocopies of the people in the lineups.
Speaker 3: Know, if it's not in records, we didn't do it.
Speaker 6: You didn't do a lineup.
Speaker 8: No, we did the lineup.
Speaker 3: We just didn't copy it, so you.
Speaker 8: Didn't retain any uh retaining record of very very possible.
Speaker 1: In other words, the lineup should have been documented, but
Speaker 1: if it was, that documentation disappeared and this didn't just
Speaker 1: happen once. There were actually two lineups. Neither had photos
Speaker 1: of the participants, despite the fact that regulations require they
Speaker 1: be included. And the participants in these lineups, one person
Speaker 1: in particular is very interesting and we'll get to that later.
Speaker 8: They were given to the prosecutor's office for their business.
Speaker 8: They wanted the two lineups we had. We gave him
Speaker 8: to the attorneys.
Speaker 1: One thing George said could be of importance was that
Speaker 1: the man he saw leaving the house walked through the
Speaker 1: yard to the west.
Speaker 3: And then he think he would have run this qu Yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: so that would be to the west. I just wanted
Speaker 3: to make sure your direction was.
Speaker 1: Right there and whose yard touched Vonn's to the west
Speaker 1: side of the house. Jim, remember, Jim, was that last
Speaker 1: person we know about to see Yvonne alive. He was
Speaker 1: seen at five point thirty with her smashing soda cans
Speaker 1: in her driveway. Jim said he was over there to
Speaker 1: see the puppies and then said afterwards he went on
Speaker 1: a bike ride and then was at work by ten pm. Again,
Speaker 1: from what we know, the police did not follow up
Speaker 1: on Jim as a suspect. There's no record of a
Speaker 1: formal interview with him, and he never testified. And there
Speaker 1: may be a reason why Jim was not followed up on.
Speaker 1: His brother in law is an Alliance police officer who
Speaker 1: was at the scene the day after the murder. That
Speaker 1: officer told me his only involvement in the case was
Speaker 1: peripheral and that Jim was only questioned because he lived nearby.
Speaker 1: And investigators interviewed all of Yvonne's neighbors, but the last
Speaker 1: person known to have seen Yvonne alive was the brother
Speaker 1: in law of an Alliance officer and he was never
Speaker 1: questioned in any detail. This really makes me wonder about
Speaker 1: the cops and there are other reasons.
Speaker 4: There was a former policeman that she was afraid of.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is Tanya Lane, Yvonne's mother. She said that
Speaker 1: in September nineteen ninety eight, Yvonne was stopped by the
Speaker 1: police for a traffic infraction. Officer Quintin Artists pulled yvon
Speaker 1: over for driving with a suspended license and quote fictitious plates.
Speaker 1: He took her to the station and processed her. When
Speaker 1: she left, he kept her license. In a police interview
Speaker 1: with Tanya, she recounted what Yvonne said happened next.
Speaker 4: She told me that he came in the house on
Speaker 4: the pretext of giving her her driver's license. He had
Speaker 4: your driver's license, he said he was going to give
Speaker 4: it back to her, and then he got in the
Speaker 4: house and he started taking advances and having his hands
Speaker 4: all over her as what she said. And she said, then.
Speaker 1: By the way, Officer Artists was not in uniform that day,
Speaker 1: and Yvonne says she was afraid.
Speaker 6: What kind of She.
Speaker 4: Was afraid that he would come back.
Speaker 1: And Artists did come back, and he kept harassing Yvonne,
Speaker 1: according to what police were told, and Artist was no
Speaker 1: stranger to sexual harassment. One woman filed a complaint with
Speaker 1: the police, saying that when Artists was booking her, he asked,
Speaker 1: I have to take your picture. Do you want to
Speaker 1: do this with or without your clothes on? He then
Speaker 1: allegedly went on to inquire if her bra and panties
Speaker 1: were Matching. Also said that after this incident, Artists began
Speaker 1: stopping by her home to quote see how she was doing.
Speaker 1: There were several other similar complaints filed by women in Alliance.
Speaker 1: Artists was charged with aggravate and menacing for another incident,
Speaker 1: and he was let go from the Alliance Police Department.
Speaker 1: He's now a registered sex offender. To me, a picture
Speaker 1: starts to emerge, cops circling around Yvonn behaving inappropriately and
Speaker 1: what's more, I don't see that artist was ever questioned
Speaker 1: in relation to Yvonne's death. Sometimes frustrated sexual suitors can
Speaker 1: lash out, though as artist, the person George Hale saw
Speaker 1: not likely. Artist is black and the person George saw
Speaker 1: is white. The size description also doesn't match. But in
Speaker 1: terms of cops behaving badly, an Alliance Artists wasn't an outlier.
Speaker 1: In fact, the Alliance Police Department has a history of corruption.
Speaker 1: In the late nineties, after a ten month audit, it
Speaker 1: was discovered that more than fourteen thousand dollars worth of
Speaker 1: money and drugs was missing from the evidence room. The
Speaker 1: audit also found that there were at least six shotguns
Speaker 1: missing from the department. The Alliance Police Chief, James Black,
Speaker 1: and eight officers were found responsible for the missing money
Speaker 1: and drugs, and were suspended pending the investigation. After he
Speaker 1: was suspended, Chief Black allegedly threatened auditors. One auditor had
Speaker 1: said in a police report that Black told the auditors
Speaker 1: that they should get out before quote it gets dark.
Speaker 1: The auditor said Black made reference to the recent disappearance
Speaker 1: of a construction worker and said the chief implied this
Speaker 1: might also happen to the auditors. So, according to this report,
Speaker 1: Alliance cops were capable of real violence or at least
Speaker 1: threatening it. Going back to George Hale, we found there
Speaker 1: were actually two lineups given to George. Eventually David's team
Speaker 1: managed to get photos of the participants. The second lineup,
Speaker 1: George didn't id anyone, including David. But George said there
Speaker 1: was another lineup the day before, and in that one
Speaker 1: he did identify someone. But there's no record of who
Speaker 1: that was, none that we or Beth or any of
Speaker 1: the lawyers could find. But Duyne Pullman, the investigative TV reporter,
Speaker 1: got to the bottom of it.
Speaker 6: Did you find somebody you recognized? I did point out somebody,
Speaker 6: Hale says.
Speaker 2: Detectives told him later the picture he pointed out was
Speaker 2: that of an Alliance police officer.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's why the state didn't tell David's lawyers about
Speaker 1: George Hale. Duyne Pullman asked one of the detectives on
Speaker 1: Yvonne's case, Detective Leach, about this.
Speaker 2: John Leech was a key detective in the case.
Speaker 4: Did you know who he identified?
Speaker 6: No, I don't. There's a police officer that's before the investigation.
Speaker 1: The detective tried to respond.
Speaker 2: Well, like I said, I do remember it coming down
Speaker 2: to the point that he was not a reliable witness.
Speaker 2: Reliable or not. George Hale never testified in the murder trial.
Speaker 1: Some cops had suspicions of their own. Detectives. Mucklow and
Speaker 1: Sampson actually went to a psychic, and it's not what
Speaker 1: the psychic said to them, but what they told the
Speaker 1: psychic about their own brothers in blue. That is truly shocking,
Speaker 1: coming up on death and deceit in alliance.
Speaker 4: I'm curious, why is you know so many cops you
Speaker 4: never asked about that.
Speaker 3: I wondered about it.
Speaker 8: She was possibly seeing a police.
Speaker 3: Officer to live in.
Speaker 2: Say he was a hot mess, anger and rage, very
Speaker 2: people scare me. He scared me, and supposedly she told
Speaker 2: linem Glaughlin's mother that the youngest child maybe this policeman's son.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 2: In terms of the police force, my god, I had
Speaker 2: eight or nine names of officers who were potential sexual partners.
Speaker 1: Death and Deceit in Alliance is produced and reported by
Speaker 1: me Maggie Freeling, with editorial consulting from Amber Hunt. Aaron
Speaker 1: Case is our legal researcher. Our executive producer is Steve Fishman.
Speaker 1: Our engineer and production coordinator is Austin Smith. Eric Axelrod
Speaker 1: is our assistant producer.