March 18, 2020 • 32 mins
What do police do when a confession starts falling apart? Double down...or fix it up?
Sometimes farm life isn’t as tranquil as it seems... Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin take us to small-town Nebraska where two murders shattered a peaceful Easter Sunday. The story of Matt Livers is a major plot-twister: a coerced confession, dirty cops, planted evidence, and a mysterious clue that led police to a pair of natural born killers.
To donate, learn more, or get involved, go to https://www.centeronwrongfulconvictions.org/
Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co No1.
Learn more and get involved at https://www.wrongfulconvictionpodcast.com/false-confessions
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I
writer and I'm Steve Drisen. Sometimes farm life isn't as
tranquil as it seems. Today we take you to small town, Nebraska,
where to murders shattered a peaceful Easter Sunday. This is
the story of Matt Liver's, a case with more plot
twists than I've ever seen. A coerced confession, dirty cops
(00:25):
who planted evidence, and a mysterious clue that led to
a pair of natural born killers. This story gives Tarantino
a run for his money. Horrible crimes can happen anywhere,
(00:45):
even where you least expect it. And if you've learned
one thing by listening to this podcast, I hope it's
that false confessions can also happen anywhere and any time.
I want them to learn a second thing, it's that
a confession is only as good as the evidence the
corroborates it. And in this case, it looked like there
was perfect corroboration. There was evidence that seemed to prove
(01:07):
the confession true. But what happens when new evidence surfaces
that causes the confession to unravel? That makes the narrative
seem to be false. What do you do in a
case like this starts falling apart? Do you double down?
Or do you fix it up? Today's story begins in Murdoch, Nebraska.
(01:31):
It's a tiny town about halfway between Lincoln and Omaha.
Murdoch is barely more than a few dozen homes, surrounded
by fields of corn and the occasional outlying farmhouse. The
population just two hundred and sixty nine people, only sixty
six families, and one of Murdoch's most respected families was
the Stokes, headed by Wayne and Sharman Stoke, both in
(01:54):
their mid fifties. When our story starts on Easter Sunday
two thousand six. Wayne and Sharman were good people, god fearing,
well known Murdock residents who lived in an immaculate farmhouse
near town. Wayne was a successful businessman for years, he'd
run the Stoke Hay Company, growing bundling selling hay to
all the local farmers, and Sharman was a teacher's aide.
(02:17):
She ran a popular cake business out of their home.
So it's that Easter Sunday, April sixteen, two thousand sex
it unfolded like many holidays for the Stokes. It was
a family occasion. That morning, Wayne and Sharman went to church,
followed by Easter traditions. Right they had brunch with their family.
They had an Easter egg hunt with their grandkids. It
(02:38):
was a lovely but unremarkable day, and Wayne and Sharman
went to sleep that night in their farmhouse as usual.
The next day, April seventeenth, rolls around. Wayne and Sharman
are early risers, but when their adult son, Andy arrives
at the farmhouse about nine am, he doesn't see any
sign of his parents. He goes inside. He moves through
(02:58):
the tidy but sile first floor. He goes upstairs and
he finds the worst, his dad's body in a blood
spattered second floor hallway. Wayne's head had nearly been blown
away by a gunshot last Now, Amy calls the police
and the Cass County Police arrived. Murdoch's Way too small
to have its own police force, and soon enough investigators
(03:22):
find a double tragedy. Not only is Wayne dead, but
Sharman's body is found in the bedroom, wedged between the
bedside and the wall. She's been shot in the head too,
and a phone cort is wrapped around her body like
maybe she'd been trying to call for help. This was
a double murder of the worst kind, something that Murdoch,
Nebraska had never seen before. Seasoned crime scene veterans and
(03:45):
officers in the area looked at this crime scene and
it made them physically ill. They had never seen so
much carnage before, certainly not in Murdoch, Nebraska exactly. So
as local police are assessing this scene, processing this trauma
that they're seeing in front of them, they realize they're
in a bit over their heads, so they call in
(04:06):
the big guns. They call in the Crime Scene Investigation
Division of the Douglas County Sheriff's Office. It's basically the
state's leading crime scene forensic experts. Now, the investigators find
several items of interest at the scene. They find shells
from a twelve gage shotgun that are littered around the
whole area. They find a silver flashlight with blood on it,
(04:28):
and sitting in the Silks driveway. There's a red and
silver marijuana pipe. Now, both the flashlight and the marijuana
pipe are potentially DNA testable. There's also a damaged window
in the Stokes laundry room. It suggests that maybe somebody
had broken into the house, and inside police observe in
the blood spray that had been left on the wall,
(04:49):
there's a human silhouette. It implies that there had been
two people present, one to shoot and one to get
sprayed by all that blood. What a visual blood spray
to human silhouette exactly. It's It's like a movie scene.
And on the otherwise spotless kitchen floor, police find a
golden ring with an unusual inscription, an inscription that didn't
(05:13):
seem to relate to anyone in the Stoke family. It
said love Always, Corey and Ryan. There's no signs that
anything's been stolen from the house. Wayne and Charman's children
can't pinpoint anything that seems to be missing. That leads
the police officers to believe that this crime was not
some random break in, but that it was personal, that
(05:37):
it was an act of vengeance, and that whoever slaughtered
the Stokes had an exe to grind with them. Police
start asking Stoke family relatives who might have wanted to
harm Wayne and Sharman, and some of Sharman's family members
start wondering out loud about the person they thought of
as the black sheep of the family Sharman's nephew Matt Livers.
(06:01):
Matt was twenty eight years old and had no criminal
record whatsoever, but he'd had his share of challenges because
of his severe mental limitations. Matt had struggled with getting
through school as a boy and trying to hold down
a job as an adult. The Stokes were a family
that prided themselves on their success and by their standards,
Matt Liver's stuck out like a sore thumb. He'd also
(06:24):
argued recently with Wayne and Sharman about whether he was
getting a sufficient share of a family inheritance, and it
was this feud that made police focus on Matt as
a suspect in the Stokes murder. At about ten forty
five pm on the day that the Stokes bodies are discovered,
the police decided to interview Matt Liver's The interrogation lasts
(06:46):
four hours until almost three o'clock in the morning, but
Matt tells the cops he's there to cooperate and he
has only good things to say about the Stokes. He
downplays this idea of a family feud, and that makes
officers bitious, and he does what many people who are
innocent do he says, I want to cooperate. Take my DNA,
(07:07):
take my hair, take my saliva, take my fingerprints. I'll
even come back for a polygraph. I had nothing to
do with this. I'm an open book and based on
all that, for the time being, Matt Liver's is released. Meanwhile,
the police are interviewing others too, and they do get
a lead. Right there's a local newspaper carrier who tells
(07:30):
the police that he had seen a car parked near
the Stokes property on the morning of the murders. It's
a tan four door midsize sedan. Now, this guy doesn't
know whether the vehicle was related to the crime or not,
but he did recall seeing an OH in the license plate. Now,
Matt Liver's drives a red convertible, but his cousin, Will
(07:52):
Sampson drove a tan four door Ford Contour, which made
investigators become suspicious. Now, Will's Contour didn't have an O
in its license plate, but oddly enough, it had been
professionally cleaned and detailed right after the murders, and that
gave the police reason enough to want to search Will's car.
(08:14):
They even go to the auto detail shop itself. They
go through the vacuum bags that were used when Will's
card was cleaned, but they find zero incriminating evidence. Now
this is strange. The crime scene was incredibly bloody. It
would have been almost impossible even for the most professional
detailers to erase every molecule of evidence, but the investigators
(08:36):
found nothing. Despite all this, police are still suspicious. Now
they discover that Will Samson, the guy who owns the contour,
did have an alibi on Eastern night, which is when
the crime presumably occurred. But Nick Sampson, another one of
Matt Liver's cousins, did not have an alibi, and soon enough,
Matt Liver's and Nick Sampson become the prime suspects. Fast
(09:08):
forward to eight days after the Stokes bodies are discovered.
It's April. Police ask Matt to come in for questioning
a second time, but this time they take him an
hour away to the Cass County Law Enforcement Center. He
is held there for questioning a total of eleven hours,
most of it video recording. Now Matt doesn't know it
(09:29):
at the time, but he wasn't going to return home
for months because here comes the interrogation. The line of
questioning designed to break, Matt Liver's we're gonna watching after
your years, you were involved in it. We need to
know what happened. As typical in these interrogations, the investigators
(09:53):
start by accusing that of killing his aunt and uncle.
It's not whether or not you committed this crime, they say,
we already know that. You have to tell us why
you committed this crime, and Matt denies it right He says,
I'm not that kind of person. All I remember is
sleeping in my bed that night. He goes on to
(10:15):
deny and deny and deny eighty six times, and then,
just as in so many other cases, he offers to
try to prove his own innocence. He agrees to take
a polygraph, which the police build up to him as
fool proof that you're lost about. Matt takes the exam.
He's excited. He thinks he's going to pass the exam
(10:37):
and this will all be over, But the polygrapher comes
into the room and tells him that he had failed
this test miserably. This way, when he continues denying his involvement,
the police can point to his test results as evidence
of his guilt. They tell him that these polygraph charts
leave absolutely no doubt and holding the results in his hand,
(11:01):
the Nebraska State Patrol officer says to mattution, we ask
you a question that specifically has to do with the
death of Wayne, you fly off the chart. Now, this
is a lie. Like in so many of these other cases,
Matt did not actually fail this polygraph exam. It was
confirmed after the fact by a polygraph expert. But we
(11:24):
know as always that police are allowed to lie during interrogations,
and that's what they're doing here, lying to him about
lying again. It's like seeing the same script play out
over and over and over again. In these stories. The
whole point is to bring Matt Liver's down to this
place of hopelessness. Nebraska is a death penalty state, so
(11:46):
what do the interrogators do. They introduce the idea to
Matt that he's going to get the death penalty unless
he confesses to this crime. If he doesn't, then they
promise him they're going to go the hard route, and
they get graphic, they get specific. When I first saw
this tape, my jaw dropped. Matt Liver's is told by
(12:07):
one of the Cast County investigators that he's going to
personally make sure that Matt is executed for this crime.
If he doesn't confess, I do, and you're meant to
me exactly what you've done. I'm gonna do my best
to hang your ass. I'm going to do my level
best to hang your ass from the highest tree. You
(12:31):
are done, I will go after the death penalty. They're
reciting all the different ways the death penalty can be administered,
electric chair, gas, lethal injection. They tell him his asses
on the line, and you're in the frying pan right now.
Push and push until I get everything I mean to
make this. Make no mistake about it. Matt is beginning
(12:54):
to break down, and make no mistake about this as well.
These investigators know that Matt has intellectual disabilities exactly. He's
giving them these really clear signals during the interrogation that
he's limited. At one point, one of the police says
to him, you know many people have tried and failed
to outsmartest. Matt turns to him and assures him that
(13:17):
he's not trying to do that. I'm dumb as a brick,
he says. And when one of the interrogators urges Matt
to confess, to stand up and to be a man,
Matt takes him literally. He is a concrete thinker, and
he interprets that to actually mean that he's going to
stand up and get up out of his chair. These
are terribly frightening, terribly coercive interrogation tactics, and it's not
(13:41):
the way someone with these kinds of disabilities should be questioned.
I am so tired of law enforcement officers pretending that
they didn't know the person they were interrogating had some disabilities.
This wilful ignorance on their part has got to stop.
There were strong signs that they were dealing with somebody
(14:02):
who was disabled, and they just treated him like he
was any other normal adult, and they plowed ahead and
used the same tactics and got false confessions away. This
is a high profile case. This pressure builds actually goes
on for about six and a half hours until we
(14:24):
start to see signs that Matt is finally beginning to
crack under the pressure. He looks up at his interrogators
and he says, all I want to do is go
home now. The interrogators take that as their cue and
they start telling Matt that he must have been tired
of being put down, shut out, kept out, of the
family inheritance by his aunt and uncle, and slowly Matt
(14:47):
begins to respond affirmatively agree with a series of leading
questions from officers who literally start walking him through the story.
The truth is, you got a gun, right or wrong? Right,
and you took that gun back to your uncle Wayne
and aunt Sharman's house, right right. Eventually they come around
(15:08):
to the murder itself, and you fired a shot at
your uncle Wayne. Matt gives a series of one word
wrote answers, agreeing to the suggestions of these interrogators about
how this crime took place. All the answers to these questions,
they've scripted it, and Matt is just agreeing to it.
(15:30):
You know, you listen to this and you get the
impression that if the next question was and this crime
happened on the moon, right, Matt, he would say right too.
He was that much under their controls in our house
after hours. Originally, he takes soul responsibility for the murders,
but remember, these investigators have good reason to think that
at least two people were involved in the crime, right
(15:53):
because of the silhouette and the blood sprayed wall. So
after another lengthy series of questioning, Matt finally imp Kate's
his cousin, Nick Sampson too, saying that it was Nick
that gave him the murder weapon and the keys to
the Ford Contour. Based on this statement, both Matt Liver's
(16:15):
and Nick Sampson are arrested and charged with murder. Now,
the very next day, Matt is facing yet another polygraph exam.
Right questioning is continuing for him even after he's arrested
and charged. But the very next day he can'ts on
videotape the whole thing. He says, you know, I've just
been making things up to satisfy you guys and basically
(16:36):
fitting in answers to what you guys have been asking.
He later explained to a court appointed psychologist that he
confessed because he wanted to go home. Case closed. This
is front page news in both Lincoln and in We
got our men exactly. They're facing charges both in the
(16:57):
courtroom and the court of public opinion, but the case
against them is problematic because there's no physical evidence implicating them.
Police try to match those twelve gage casings that they
found at the crime scene to a shotgun that they
found in Nick Sampson's bedroom, but there is no match.
What about the marijuana pipe that they found in the
Stokes driveway, Well, there was DNA on it and it
(17:20):
excluded both Matt and Nick. And the same thing goes
for that strange golden ring that was found in the
Stokes kitchen. It did contain DNA from two unknown people,
but that DNA did not belong to Nick or Matt.
The police were in desperate need of some corroboration for
Matt Liver's confession. So what do they do? They call
(17:41):
in David co Fode. Now, David Kofode was the commander
of the Douglas County Sheriff c s I Unit. He's
widely viewed as a statewide law enforcement hero. He was
also a shameless self promoter. He was not only a
legend in law enforcement circles, but he was also a
(18:01):
legend in his own mind right. David was a guy
who had the magic touch. He had a reputation for
closing cases by finding forensic evidence that all the other
officers had overlooked. And David co Fote was brought in
and asked to take a second look at will Samson's
forward contour. Now, co Fote examines the contour personally and
(18:24):
true to his reputation, he claims to have found blood
under the dash. He swabs the blood and it tests positive.
The blood belongs to Wayne Stoke. The case against matt
Iver's and Nick Sampson just became devastating, or so it seemed. Meanwhile,
other officers were continuing their investigation and they focused on
(18:46):
that strange golden ring from the Stokes kitchen. Now, there
were two marks on that ring. The first one was
the inscription that we already talked about, Love Always, Corey
and Ryan. But there was also a jeweler's mark on
the inside of that ring, a mark made by the manufacturer,
and police were able to trace that mark to a
jeweler in New York. This jewelry business is going out
(19:10):
of business, and the Nebraska investigator calls up and gets
a woman on the phone who was closing down the office,
and she says, can you help me track this ring?
Where did this ring go after it was manufactured? And
do you have any idea about this inscription? And on
the day before this jeweler is literally closing its doors
(19:30):
in New York, it's employees tell investigators that that ring
was shipped off to a Walmart in beaver Dam, Wisconsin,
where it was hurchased by a woman named Corey for
her boyfriend Ryan. Had this phone call come a day later,
they may never have been able to trace that rank,
and we might never know who actually killed Wayne and
(19:52):
Sharmon Stoke. It was a miracle, was a break, and
it was a break that was generated by really good
police work, unbelievable that traces ring them from Nebraska to
New York to Wisconsin, where they discovered the story about
Gregory Fester and Jessica Reid stealing the truck in which
the ring had been left. Now, who are these two?
(20:12):
Jessica Reid grew up in Wisconsin in a small town
called Horicon. Jessica was an honors student when she fell
in love with greg who was an older, really troubled teenager.
And the more detectives dug into Greg and Jessica, the
more there was to learn. It turns out they'd stolen
a twelve gage shotgun and the pickup truck where Corey
(20:32):
and Ryan had left that golden ring. Greg and Jessica
had gone on a drug fueled interstate crime spree, breaking
into houses in rural Iowa and Nebraska, They eventually ran
out of money and abandoned the truck in Louisiana on
April eighteenth. Somehow they made it back to Wisconsin, where
they were arrested a week later for car theft. Police
(20:55):
questioned Greg and Jessica and began connecting the dots. According
to Jessica, she and Greg started their bender in Wisconsin
and we're passing through Nebraska when the truck began running
out of gas. They were tired, cranky, coming down from
a cough syrup high and looking for a house to rob.
That's when Greg and Jessica came across the Stoke Holme
(21:16):
in Murdoch. Greg goes in through a downstairs window, Jessica said,
and he lets her in at the front door. They
go upstairs and are confronted by Wayne and Sharman Stoke.
Greg lift up his shotgun and he fires once at Wayne,
hitting him in the knee. He and Jessica back out
of the room. They get into the hallway and Jessica
(21:38):
looks at Greg and says, do something. So one of
them goes back into the room, we don't know which one,
and finish his Wayne off with a shotgun blastic close
range to the back of his head. Meanwhile, Sharmon is
calling the police, and one of these two natural born
(22:00):
killers opens fire and charman and shoots her in the
face and her body falls down next to the bed
and it's wedged between the bed and the wall. Greg
and Jessica don't steal a thing. They just get out
of that farmhouse, get back into their vehicle, and drive
off into the night. Now, Jessica's story smacked of truth,
(22:31):
and it was soon corroborated. Wisconsin detectives in Jessica and
Greg's DNA to Nebraska and lo and behold, their DNA
was consistent with the DNA on the marijuana pipe and
on the Golden Ring. Investigators also found Wayne Stokes blood
in the truck and on clothes and shoes that had
belonged to both Greg and Jessica. They even found a
(22:53):
chilling entry in Jessica Read's diary, I killed someone, She wrote,
I loved it. I wish I could do it all
the time. And they find a cigarette box in Jessica's
home containing a letter to Greg and has spent twelve
gage shell casing from the murders. In the letters, she wrote,
this was something I did for you for you to
(23:15):
love me as much as I love you. This is
a crazy story. It's something straight out of Natural Born Killers.
This was a thrill kill by two drug craze teens
who actually thought they were in Iowa, not Nebraska. Needless
to say, the discovery of Jessica and Greg up ends
the case against Matt Livers and Nick Sampson. After Jessica
(23:38):
and Greg are arrested and implicated in the Stoke murders,
Nebraska investigators travel out to Wisconsin to question them, and
they do so because Jessica and Greg are telling a
story that doesn't involve Matt Livers and Nick Sampson, so
they played the same card they played with Livers. Wisconsin
(23:58):
is not a death penalty stage, they say, but Nebraska is.
And if you don't come clean to having committed this
crime with Matt and Nick, we're gonna seek the death
penalty against you as well. And for a brief moment,
Jessica comes up with a wild story about how she
had met Nick Sampson at a bar and had gone
(24:19):
with them into the Stoke house. But she immediately were
cants once those Nebraska investigators leave the room. As soon
as she's alone with this Wisconsin investigator. She says to him,
these guys keep wanting me to pin this murder on
two people I have never met. During one of my
(24:40):
many searches of cases with the words false confession, I
came upon this case and I knew the psychologist who
had been hired by Matt Liver's attorney, Julie Bear. So
I reached out to Julie and played a sort of
behind the scenes consulting role. She didn't need me. This
case was beginning to crash on its own. That psychologist
(25:03):
Steve knew. His name is Scott Bressler. Scott's report for
the defense team gave a fuller picture of the motivations
behind Matt's confession. I have results that clearly showed that
Matt was very vulnerable and low functioning and had personality
characteristics in which he wants to please other people, wants
(25:24):
to be complying with other people, and has a very
low tolerance for stress. And when he didn't do well
on particular kinds of tests, it's because he didn't understand it,
so he would make up stuff, which is interesting because
he confabulated the whole scenario that the police took Cookline
and Sinker, which they thought indicated that he was guilty.
(25:45):
Scott also presented his analysis of Matt's personality to an
expert from the prosecution side, and that expert was shocked
by what he saw and he said, Oh my god,
I think that this is a real false confession. It
becomes clear Jessica and Gregg committed this crime on their own.
So I'm off this meeting with the prosecuting attorney and
(26:06):
he's visibly emotionally shaken by everything that's happened. Right after
that meeting ended, he announced his decision to release math.
So I was right there when Matt walked out of jail,
who and all the press were there and saw match
reaction to seeing his family, and of course he gave
me a big hug and thanked me. It was a
(26:28):
very emotional same. You know, this case shows the difference
between bad police work and good police work. On the
one hand, we have cops trying to solve this case
by breaking an obviously vulnerable man through an insanely coercive interrogation.
Compare that to the gumshoe investigator who focused on the
(26:49):
physical evidence. That investigator traced the golden ring to the
New York Jewelers, which led to the Wisconsin Walmart, which
led to Corey and Ryan and their pickup truck getting stolen,
the ring in the glove compartment, and that twisted path
finally ends with Greg and Jessica. That's great police work,
and we know it's great because in fact, Greg and
(27:10):
Jessica's DNA and forensic evidence was found all over the scene.
We know they're guilty because the science tells us that
they are. Without that dogged investigative work, these two young
men very well might have been on death row. Both
Jessica and Greg went on to be prosecuted for the
murders of Wayne and Sharman Stoke. They were convicted and
(27:33):
sentenced to life in prison. But hang on a second,
because there's one other question here, right, what about that
blood stain in the forward contour? How did that bloodstain
get there if the car had nothing to do with
this crime. Well, it turns out the blood had been
planted by none other than the States Star crime scene
investigator himself, David co Fode. Turns out the guy with
(27:56):
the magic touch was in this case a little more
than a odd. Nebraska prosecutors ended up charging co Fode
with planting that blood in the contour. He was convicted
and sentenced to spend between twenty months and four years
behind bars. Prosecutors called it poetic justice. Let's talk a
little bit about David cofone because he's one of the
(28:18):
interesting figures in this case. You know, why would someone
do something like this. He literally framed two innocent men
by claiming that he had found Wayne Stokes blood in
the contour. This is what happens when someone believes the
end that they're pursuing is just, and that therefore they
(28:38):
can cut corners and do unethical things in service of
the just goal. I don't buy that he did this
because he never imagined that that confession would be false.
So we figured, I'll just strengthen the case and I'll
get away with it and I'll be a hero and
nobody will think twice about it. But he got caught,
(29:00):
Thank god for that. I helped Matt Livers get an
attorney to bring a civil suit against the Cass County
officers and the others involved in his arrest. When that
case settled, something was said by Nebraska Attorney General John
Brunning that bothers me to this day. He said, the
(29:23):
only reason we're settling the civil suit is because of
David Coopodes criminal activity. My investigators did nothing wrong here.
They acted honorably. Nothing could be further from the truth.
They threatened Matt Liver's with the death penalty to get
him to confess. They threatened Jessica Reed with the death
(29:43):
penalty to get her to implicate Livers and Sampson. There's
nothing honorable here about what these detectives did. Jessica Reid
was more honorable than they were. She told the truth
I believe it or not. In the Annual False Confessions
(30:04):
there are other cases of people who have been wrongfully convicted,
only later to be exonerated when it turns out the
people on a multi state crimes where you're responsible. I mean,
that's the interesting thing about so many cases that we're
talking about on this podcast, because you have innocent people
going down for these horrific crimes based on false confessions,
(30:27):
while people who really need to be stopped right, whether
they're serial rapists, serial killers, rights are out there doing
terrible things while the innocent person does their time. Justice
was eventually done here, but for Matt and for Nick
scars remain. Matt moved to Texas, but the legacy of
these murders still haunts him. His relationship with Nick and
(30:50):
other family members has been forever fraid. Nick Sampson drifted
apart from his cousin. He could never accept that Matt
had falsely implicated him during that interrogation. Both of them
sued the state of Nebraska and ended up recovering some
compensation for their ordeal, although of course nothing can properly
repay them for the harm that they underwent. Matt, Nick,
(31:13):
you both endured ordeals that would test anyone. Your stories
stand both as a warning for those police officers who
want to breach trust and cut corners, but also as
a testament to the justice that can be brought by
good police work, the work done by those who trace
that golden ring. To Greg and Jessica, we wish you
peace and happy futures. Thanks for listening as we've told
(31:39):
the story of Matt Livers and Nick Samson. Next week,
we're going to tackle the story of Tana Porra, a
story that hails all the way from New Zealand. Because
falesse confessions aren't just a problem here in the US,
It's a global problem until them. Thanks for listening to
Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a
(32:03):
production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
Company Number One. Special thanks to our executive producer Jason
Flom and the team at Signal Company Number one Executive
producer Kevin Wardace, Senior Producer and Pope, and additional production
and editing by Connor Hall. Our music was composed by
j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter
(32:26):
at Laura night Rider and you can follow me on
Twitter at s Driven. For more information on the show,
visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com and be sure to
follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook
at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I
writer and I'm Steve Drisen. Sometimes farm life isn't as
tranquil as it seems. Today we take you to small town, Nebraska,
where to murders shattered a peaceful Easter Sunday. This is
the story of Matt Liver's, a case with more plot
twists than I've ever seen. A coerced confession, dirty cops
(00:25):
who planted evidence, and a mysterious clue that led to
a pair of natural born killers. This story gives Tarantino
a run for his money. Horrible crimes can happen anywhere,
(00:45):
even where you least expect it. And if you've learned
one thing by listening to this podcast, I hope it's
that false confessions can also happen anywhere and any time.
I want them to learn a second thing, it's that
a confession is only as good as the evidence the
corroborates it. And in this case, it looked like there
was perfect corroboration. There was evidence that seemed to prove
(01:07):
the confession true. But what happens when new evidence surfaces
that causes the confession to unravel? That makes the narrative
seem to be false. What do you do in a
case like this starts falling apart? Do you double down?
Or do you fix it up? Today's story begins in Murdoch, Nebraska.
(01:31):
It's a tiny town about halfway between Lincoln and Omaha.
Murdoch is barely more than a few dozen homes, surrounded
by fields of corn and the occasional outlying farmhouse. The
population just two hundred and sixty nine people, only sixty
six families, and one of Murdoch's most respected families was
the Stokes, headed by Wayne and Sharman Stoke, both in
(01:54):
their mid fifties. When our story starts on Easter Sunday
two thousand six. Wayne and Sharman were good people, god fearing,
well known Murdock residents who lived in an immaculate farmhouse
near town. Wayne was a successful businessman for years, he'd
run the Stoke Hay Company, growing bundling selling hay to
all the local farmers, and Sharman was a teacher's aide.
(02:17):
She ran a popular cake business out of their home.
So it's that Easter Sunday, April sixteen, two thousand sex
it unfolded like many holidays for the Stokes. It was
a family occasion. That morning, Wayne and Sharman went to church,
followed by Easter traditions. Right they had brunch with their family.
They had an Easter egg hunt with their grandkids. It
(02:38):
was a lovely but unremarkable day, and Wayne and Sharman
went to sleep that night in their farmhouse as usual.
The next day, April seventeenth, rolls around. Wayne and Sharman
are early risers, but when their adult son, Andy arrives
at the farmhouse about nine am, he doesn't see any
sign of his parents. He goes inside. He moves through
(02:58):
the tidy but sile first floor. He goes upstairs and
he finds the worst, his dad's body in a blood
spattered second floor hallway. Wayne's head had nearly been blown
away by a gunshot last Now, Amy calls the police
and the Cass County Police arrived. Murdoch's Way too small
to have its own police force, and soon enough investigators
(03:22):
find a double tragedy. Not only is Wayne dead, but
Sharman's body is found in the bedroom, wedged between the
bedside and the wall. She's been shot in the head too,
and a phone cort is wrapped around her body like
maybe she'd been trying to call for help. This was
a double murder of the worst kind, something that Murdoch,
Nebraska had never seen before. Seasoned crime scene veterans and
(03:45):
officers in the area looked at this crime scene and
it made them physically ill. They had never seen so
much carnage before, certainly not in Murdoch, Nebraska exactly. So
as local police are assessing this scene, processing this trauma
that they're seeing in front of them, they realize they're
in a bit over their heads, so they call in
(04:06):
the big guns. They call in the Crime Scene Investigation
Division of the Douglas County Sheriff's Office. It's basically the
state's leading crime scene forensic experts. Now, the investigators find
several items of interest at the scene. They find shells
from a twelve gage shotgun that are littered around the
whole area. They find a silver flashlight with blood on it,
(04:28):
and sitting in the Silks driveway. There's a red and
silver marijuana pipe. Now, both the flashlight and the marijuana
pipe are potentially DNA testable. There's also a damaged window
in the Stokes laundry room. It suggests that maybe somebody
had broken into the house, and inside police observe in
the blood spray that had been left on the wall,
(04:49):
there's a human silhouette. It implies that there had been
two people present, one to shoot and one to get
sprayed by all that blood. What a visual blood spray
to human silhouette exactly. It's It's like a movie scene.
And on the otherwise spotless kitchen floor, police find a
golden ring with an unusual inscription, an inscription that didn't
(05:13):
seem to relate to anyone in the Stoke family. It
said love Always, Corey and Ryan. There's no signs that
anything's been stolen from the house. Wayne and Charman's children
can't pinpoint anything that seems to be missing. That leads
the police officers to believe that this crime was not
some random break in, but that it was personal, that
(05:37):
it was an act of vengeance, and that whoever slaughtered
the Stokes had an exe to grind with them. Police
start asking Stoke family relatives who might have wanted to
harm Wayne and Sharman, and some of Sharman's family members
start wondering out loud about the person they thought of
as the black sheep of the family Sharman's nephew Matt Livers.
(06:01):
Matt was twenty eight years old and had no criminal
record whatsoever, but he'd had his share of challenges because
of his severe mental limitations. Matt had struggled with getting
through school as a boy and trying to hold down
a job as an adult. The Stokes were a family
that prided themselves on their success and by their standards,
Matt Liver's stuck out like a sore thumb. He'd also
(06:24):
argued recently with Wayne and Sharman about whether he was
getting a sufficient share of a family inheritance, and it
was this feud that made police focus on Matt as
a suspect in the Stokes murder. At about ten forty
five pm on the day that the Stokes bodies are discovered,
the police decided to interview Matt Liver's The interrogation lasts
(06:46):
four hours until almost three o'clock in the morning, but
Matt tells the cops he's there to cooperate and he
has only good things to say about the Stokes. He
downplays this idea of a family feud, and that makes
officers bitious, and he does what many people who are
innocent do he says, I want to cooperate. Take my DNA,
(07:07):
take my hair, take my saliva, take my fingerprints. I'll
even come back for a polygraph. I had nothing to
do with this. I'm an open book and based on
all that, for the time being, Matt Liver's is released. Meanwhile,
the police are interviewing others too, and they do get
a lead. Right there's a local newspaper carrier who tells
(07:30):
the police that he had seen a car parked near
the Stokes property on the morning of the murders. It's
a tan four door midsize sedan. Now, this guy doesn't
know whether the vehicle was related to the crime or not,
but he did recall seeing an OH in the license plate. Now,
Matt Liver's drives a red convertible, but his cousin, Will
(07:52):
Sampson drove a tan four door Ford Contour, which made
investigators become suspicious. Now, Will's Contour didn't have an O
in its license plate, but oddly enough, it had been
professionally cleaned and detailed right after the murders, and that
gave the police reason enough to want to search Will's car.
(08:14):
They even go to the auto detail shop itself. They
go through the vacuum bags that were used when Will's
card was cleaned, but they find zero incriminating evidence. Now
this is strange. The crime scene was incredibly bloody. It
would have been almost impossible even for the most professional
detailers to erase every molecule of evidence, but the investigators
(08:36):
found nothing. Despite all this, police are still suspicious. Now
they discover that Will Samson, the guy who owns the contour,
did have an alibi on Eastern night, which is when
the crime presumably occurred. But Nick Sampson, another one of
Matt Liver's cousins, did not have an alibi, and soon enough,
Matt Liver's and Nick Sampson become the prime suspects. Fast
(09:08):
forward to eight days after the Stokes bodies are discovered.
It's April. Police ask Matt to come in for questioning
a second time, but this time they take him an
hour away to the Cass County Law Enforcement Center. He
is held there for questioning a total of eleven hours,
most of it video recording. Now Matt doesn't know it
(09:29):
at the time, but he wasn't going to return home
for months because here comes the interrogation. The line of
questioning designed to break, Matt Liver's we're gonna watching after
your years, you were involved in it. We need to
know what happened. As typical in these interrogations, the investigators
(09:53):
start by accusing that of killing his aunt and uncle.
It's not whether or not you committed this crime, they say,
we already know that. You have to tell us why
you committed this crime, and Matt denies it right He says,
I'm not that kind of person. All I remember is
sleeping in my bed that night. He goes on to
(10:15):
deny and deny and deny eighty six times, and then,
just as in so many other cases, he offers to
try to prove his own innocence. He agrees to take
a polygraph, which the police build up to him as
fool proof that you're lost about. Matt takes the exam.
He's excited. He thinks he's going to pass the exam
(10:37):
and this will all be over, But the polygrapher comes
into the room and tells him that he had failed
this test miserably. This way, when he continues denying his involvement,
the police can point to his test results as evidence
of his guilt. They tell him that these polygraph charts
leave absolutely no doubt and holding the results in his hand,
(11:01):
the Nebraska State Patrol officer says to mattution, we ask
you a question that specifically has to do with the
death of Wayne, you fly off the chart. Now, this
is a lie. Like in so many of these other cases,
Matt did not actually fail this polygraph exam. It was
confirmed after the fact by a polygraph expert. But we
(11:24):
know as always that police are allowed to lie during interrogations,
and that's what they're doing here, lying to him about
lying again. It's like seeing the same script play out
over and over and over again. In these stories. The
whole point is to bring Matt Liver's down to this
place of hopelessness. Nebraska is a death penalty state, so
(11:46):
what do the interrogators do. They introduce the idea to
Matt that he's going to get the death penalty unless
he confesses to this crime. If he doesn't, then they
promise him they're going to go the hard route, and
they get graphic, they get specific. When I first saw
this tape, my jaw dropped. Matt Liver's is told by
(12:07):
one of the Cast County investigators that he's going to
personally make sure that Matt is executed for this crime.
If he doesn't confess, I do, and you're meant to
me exactly what you've done. I'm gonna do my best
to hang your ass. I'm going to do my level
best to hang your ass from the highest tree. You
(12:31):
are done, I will go after the death penalty. They're
reciting all the different ways the death penalty can be administered,
electric chair, gas, lethal injection. They tell him his asses
on the line, and you're in the frying pan right now.
Push and push until I get everything I mean to
make this. Make no mistake about it. Matt is beginning
(12:54):
to break down, and make no mistake about this as well.
These investigators know that Matt has intellectual disabilities exactly. He's
giving them these really clear signals during the interrogation that
he's limited. At one point, one of the police says
to him, you know many people have tried and failed
to outsmartest. Matt turns to him and assures him that
(13:17):
he's not trying to do that. I'm dumb as a brick,
he says. And when one of the interrogators urges Matt
to confess, to stand up and to be a man,
Matt takes him literally. He is a concrete thinker, and
he interprets that to actually mean that he's going to
stand up and get up out of his chair. These
are terribly frightening, terribly coercive interrogation tactics, and it's not
(13:41):
the way someone with these kinds of disabilities should be questioned.
I am so tired of law enforcement officers pretending that
they didn't know the person they were interrogating had some disabilities.
This wilful ignorance on their part has got to stop.
There were strong signs that they were dealing with somebody
(14:02):
who was disabled, and they just treated him like he
was any other normal adult, and they plowed ahead and
used the same tactics and got false confessions away. This
is a high profile case. This pressure builds actually goes
on for about six and a half hours until we
(14:24):
start to see signs that Matt is finally beginning to
crack under the pressure. He looks up at his interrogators
and he says, all I want to do is go
home now. The interrogators take that as their cue and
they start telling Matt that he must have been tired
of being put down, shut out, kept out, of the
family inheritance by his aunt and uncle, and slowly Matt
(14:47):
begins to respond affirmatively agree with a series of leading
questions from officers who literally start walking him through the story.
The truth is, you got a gun, right or wrong? Right,
and you took that gun back to your uncle Wayne
and aunt Sharman's house, right right. Eventually they come around
(15:08):
to the murder itself, and you fired a shot at
your uncle Wayne. Matt gives a series of one word
wrote answers, agreeing to the suggestions of these interrogators about
how this crime took place. All the answers to these questions,
they've scripted it, and Matt is just agreeing to it.
(15:30):
You know, you listen to this and you get the
impression that if the next question was and this crime
happened on the moon, right, Matt, he would say right too.
He was that much under their controls in our house
after hours. Originally, he takes soul responsibility for the murders,
but remember, these investigators have good reason to think that
at least two people were involved in the crime, right
(15:53):
because of the silhouette and the blood sprayed wall. So
after another lengthy series of questioning, Matt finally imp Kate's
his cousin, Nick Sampson too, saying that it was Nick
that gave him the murder weapon and the keys to
the Ford Contour. Based on this statement, both Matt Liver's
(16:15):
and Nick Sampson are arrested and charged with murder. Now,
the very next day, Matt is facing yet another polygraph exam.
Right questioning is continuing for him even after he's arrested
and charged. But the very next day he can'ts on
videotape the whole thing. He says, you know, I've just
been making things up to satisfy you guys and basically
(16:36):
fitting in answers to what you guys have been asking.
He later explained to a court appointed psychologist that he
confessed because he wanted to go home. Case closed. This
is front page news in both Lincoln and in We
got our men exactly. They're facing charges both in the
(16:57):
courtroom and the court of public opinion, but the case
against them is problematic because there's no physical evidence implicating them.
Police try to match those twelve gage casings that they
found at the crime scene to a shotgun that they
found in Nick Sampson's bedroom, but there is no match.
What about the marijuana pipe that they found in the
Stokes driveway, Well, there was DNA on it and it
(17:20):
excluded both Matt and Nick. And the same thing goes
for that strange golden ring that was found in the
Stokes kitchen. It did contain DNA from two unknown people,
but that DNA did not belong to Nick or Matt.
The police were in desperate need of some corroboration for
Matt Liver's confession. So what do they do? They call
(17:41):
in David co Fode. Now, David Kofode was the commander
of the Douglas County Sheriff c s I Unit. He's
widely viewed as a statewide law enforcement hero. He was
also a shameless self promoter. He was not only a
legend in law enforcement circles, but he was also a
(18:01):
legend in his own mind right. David was a guy
who had the magic touch. He had a reputation for
closing cases by finding forensic evidence that all the other
officers had overlooked. And David co Fote was brought in
and asked to take a second look at will Samson's
forward contour. Now, co Fote examines the contour personally and
(18:24):
true to his reputation, he claims to have found blood
under the dash. He swabs the blood and it tests positive.
The blood belongs to Wayne Stoke. The case against matt
Iver's and Nick Sampson just became devastating, or so it seemed. Meanwhile,
other officers were continuing their investigation and they focused on
(18:46):
that strange golden ring from the Stokes kitchen. Now, there
were two marks on that ring. The first one was
the inscription that we already talked about, Love Always, Corey
and Ryan. But there was also a jeweler's mark on
the inside of that ring, a mark made by the manufacturer,
and police were able to trace that mark to a
jeweler in New York. This jewelry business is going out
(19:10):
of business, and the Nebraska investigator calls up and gets
a woman on the phone who was closing down the office,
and she says, can you help me track this ring?
Where did this ring go after it was manufactured? And
do you have any idea about this inscription? And on
the day before this jeweler is literally closing its doors
(19:30):
in New York, it's employees tell investigators that that ring
was shipped off to a Walmart in beaver Dam, Wisconsin,
where it was hurchased by a woman named Corey for
her boyfriend Ryan. Had this phone call come a day later,
they may never have been able to trace that rank,
and we might never know who actually killed Wayne and
(19:52):
Sharmon Stoke. It was a miracle, was a break, and
it was a break that was generated by really good
police work, unbelievable that traces ring them from Nebraska to
New York to Wisconsin, where they discovered the story about
Gregory Fester and Jessica Reid stealing the truck in which
the ring had been left. Now, who are these two?
(20:12):
Jessica Reid grew up in Wisconsin in a small town
called Horicon. Jessica was an honors student when she fell
in love with greg who was an older, really troubled teenager.
And the more detectives dug into Greg and Jessica, the
more there was to learn. It turns out they'd stolen
a twelve gage shotgun and the pickup truck where Corey
(20:32):
and Ryan had left that golden ring. Greg and Jessica
had gone on a drug fueled interstate crime spree, breaking
into houses in rural Iowa and Nebraska, They eventually ran
out of money and abandoned the truck in Louisiana on
April eighteenth. Somehow they made it back to Wisconsin, where
they were arrested a week later for car theft. Police
(20:55):
questioned Greg and Jessica and began connecting the dots. According
to Jessica, she and Greg started their bender in Wisconsin
and we're passing through Nebraska when the truck began running
out of gas. They were tired, cranky, coming down from
a cough syrup high and looking for a house to rob.
That's when Greg and Jessica came across the Stoke Holme
(21:16):
in Murdoch. Greg goes in through a downstairs window, Jessica said,
and he lets her in at the front door. They
go upstairs and are confronted by Wayne and Sharman Stoke.
Greg lift up his shotgun and he fires once at Wayne,
hitting him in the knee. He and Jessica back out
of the room. They get into the hallway and Jessica
(21:38):
looks at Greg and says, do something. So one of
them goes back into the room, we don't know which one,
and finish his Wayne off with a shotgun blastic close
range to the back of his head. Meanwhile, Sharmon is
calling the police, and one of these two natural born
(22:00):
killers opens fire and charman and shoots her in the
face and her body falls down next to the bed
and it's wedged between the bed and the wall. Greg
and Jessica don't steal a thing. They just get out
of that farmhouse, get back into their vehicle, and drive
off into the night. Now, Jessica's story smacked of truth,
(22:31):
and it was soon corroborated. Wisconsin detectives in Jessica and
Greg's DNA to Nebraska and lo and behold, their DNA
was consistent with the DNA on the marijuana pipe and
on the Golden Ring. Investigators also found Wayne Stokes blood
in the truck and on clothes and shoes that had
belonged to both Greg and Jessica. They even found a
(22:53):
chilling entry in Jessica Read's diary, I killed someone, She wrote,
I loved it. I wish I could do it all
the time. And they find a cigarette box in Jessica's
home containing a letter to Greg and has spent twelve
gage shell casing from the murders. In the letters, she wrote,
this was something I did for you for you to
(23:15):
love me as much as I love you. This is
a crazy story. It's something straight out of Natural Born Killers.
This was a thrill kill by two drug craze teens
who actually thought they were in Iowa, not Nebraska. Needless
to say, the discovery of Jessica and Greg up ends
the case against Matt Livers and Nick Sampson. After Jessica
(23:38):
and Greg are arrested and implicated in the Stoke murders,
Nebraska investigators travel out to Wisconsin to question them, and
they do so because Jessica and Greg are telling a
story that doesn't involve Matt Livers and Nick Sampson, so
they played the same card they played with Livers. Wisconsin
(23:58):
is not a death penalty stage, they say, but Nebraska is.
And if you don't come clean to having committed this
crime with Matt and Nick, we're gonna seek the death
penalty against you as well. And for a brief moment,
Jessica comes up with a wild story about how she
had met Nick Sampson at a bar and had gone
(24:19):
with them into the Stoke house. But she immediately were
cants once those Nebraska investigators leave the room. As soon
as she's alone with this Wisconsin investigator. She says to him,
these guys keep wanting me to pin this murder on
two people I have never met. During one of my
(24:40):
many searches of cases with the words false confession, I
came upon this case and I knew the psychologist who
had been hired by Matt Liver's attorney, Julie Bear. So
I reached out to Julie and played a sort of
behind the scenes consulting role. She didn't need me. This
case was beginning to crash on its own. That psychologist
(25:03):
Steve knew. His name is Scott Bressler. Scott's report for
the defense team gave a fuller picture of the motivations
behind Matt's confession. I have results that clearly showed that
Matt was very vulnerable and low functioning and had personality
characteristics in which he wants to please other people, wants
(25:24):
to be complying with other people, and has a very
low tolerance for stress. And when he didn't do well
on particular kinds of tests, it's because he didn't understand it,
so he would make up stuff, which is interesting because
he confabulated the whole scenario that the police took Cookline
and Sinker, which they thought indicated that he was guilty.
(25:45):
Scott also presented his analysis of Matt's personality to an
expert from the prosecution side, and that expert was shocked
by what he saw and he said, Oh my god,
I think that this is a real false confession. It
becomes clear Jessica and Gregg committed this crime on their own.
So I'm off this meeting with the prosecuting attorney and
(26:06):
he's visibly emotionally shaken by everything that's happened. Right after
that meeting ended, he announced his decision to release math.
So I was right there when Matt walked out of jail,
who and all the press were there and saw match
reaction to seeing his family, and of course he gave
me a big hug and thanked me. It was a
(26:28):
very emotional same. You know, this case shows the difference
between bad police work and good police work. On the
one hand, we have cops trying to solve this case
by breaking an obviously vulnerable man through an insanely coercive interrogation.
Compare that to the gumshoe investigator who focused on the
(26:49):
physical evidence. That investigator traced the golden ring to the
New York Jewelers, which led to the Wisconsin Walmart, which
led to Corey and Ryan and their pickup truck getting stolen,
the ring in the glove compartment, and that twisted path
finally ends with Greg and Jessica. That's great police work,
and we know it's great because in fact, Greg and
(27:10):
Jessica's DNA and forensic evidence was found all over the scene.
We know they're guilty because the science tells us that
they are. Without that dogged investigative work, these two young
men very well might have been on death row. Both
Jessica and Greg went on to be prosecuted for the
murders of Wayne and Sharman Stoke. They were convicted and
(27:33):
sentenced to life in prison. But hang on a second,
because there's one other question here, right, what about that
blood stain in the forward contour? How did that bloodstain
get there if the car had nothing to do with
this crime. Well, it turns out the blood had been
planted by none other than the States Star crime scene
investigator himself, David co Fode. Turns out the guy with
(27:56):
the magic touch was in this case a little more
than a odd. Nebraska prosecutors ended up charging co Fode
with planting that blood in the contour. He was convicted
and sentenced to spend between twenty months and four years
behind bars. Prosecutors called it poetic justice. Let's talk a
little bit about David cofone because he's one of the
(28:18):
interesting figures in this case. You know, why would someone
do something like this. He literally framed two innocent men
by claiming that he had found Wayne Stokes blood in
the contour. This is what happens when someone believes the
end that they're pursuing is just, and that therefore they
(28:38):
can cut corners and do unethical things in service of
the just goal. I don't buy that he did this
because he never imagined that that confession would be false.
So we figured, I'll just strengthen the case and I'll
get away with it and I'll be a hero and
nobody will think twice about it. But he got caught,
(29:00):
Thank god for that. I helped Matt Livers get an
attorney to bring a civil suit against the Cass County
officers and the others involved in his arrest. When that
case settled, something was said by Nebraska Attorney General John
Brunning that bothers me to this day. He said, the
(29:23):
only reason we're settling the civil suit is because of
David Coopodes criminal activity. My investigators did nothing wrong here.
They acted honorably. Nothing could be further from the truth.
They threatened Matt Liver's with the death penalty to get
him to confess. They threatened Jessica Reed with the death
(29:43):
penalty to get her to implicate Livers and Sampson. There's
nothing honorable here about what these detectives did. Jessica Reid
was more honorable than they were. She told the truth
I believe it or not. In the Annual False Confessions
(30:04):
there are other cases of people who have been wrongfully convicted,
only later to be exonerated when it turns out the
people on a multi state crimes where you're responsible. I mean,
that's the interesting thing about so many cases that we're
talking about on this podcast, because you have innocent people
going down for these horrific crimes based on false confessions,
(30:27):
while people who really need to be stopped right, whether
they're serial rapists, serial killers, rights are out there doing
terrible things while the innocent person does their time. Justice
was eventually done here, but for Matt and for Nick
scars remain. Matt moved to Texas, but the legacy of
these murders still haunts him. His relationship with Nick and
(30:50):
other family members has been forever fraid. Nick Sampson drifted
apart from his cousin. He could never accept that Matt
had falsely implicated him during that interrogation. Both of them
sued the state of Nebraska and ended up recovering some
compensation for their ordeal, although of course nothing can properly
repay them for the harm that they underwent. Matt, Nick,
(31:13):
you both endured ordeals that would test anyone. Your stories
stand both as a warning for those police officers who
want to breach trust and cut corners, but also as
a testament to the justice that can be brought by
good police work, the work done by those who trace
that golden ring. To Greg and Jessica, we wish you
peace and happy futures. Thanks for listening as we've told
(31:39):
the story of Matt Livers and Nick Samson. Next week,
we're going to tackle the story of Tana Porra, a
story that hails all the way from New Zealand. Because
falesse confessions aren't just a problem here in the US,
It's a global problem until them. Thanks for listening to
Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a
(32:03):
production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
Company Number One. Special thanks to our executive producer Jason
Flom and the team at Signal Company Number one Executive
producer Kevin Wardace, Senior Producer and Pope, and additional production
and editing by Connor Hall. Our music was composed by
j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter
(32:26):
at Laura night Rider and you can follow me on
Twitter at s Driven. For more information on the show,
visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com and be sure to
follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook
at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!