April 16, 2025 • 59 mins
In this week's episode, Paul and Kate investigate a landmark case from 1963. What starts with a woman's abduction ends with an investigation that changes police procedure to this day.
Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/4buCoMc
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 (00:03):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried Bones.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how are you.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I'm doing well. We've got Easter coming up. What kind
of Easter traditions do you guys having Do you celebrate Easter?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
First of all, you know, we would do when the
kids were younger, we would do the Easter basket and
hide the eggs type of thing. Even like when I
was a kid, you know, I was born and raised Catholic,
you know, so of course Easter was a big deal
and going to Mass and stuff. But now my kids
are older, I think my wife will get them some
(01:33):
basket with chocolates in it, and that's about it.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Oh, they don't look for Easter eggs anymore, not even
like the plastic kind of Easter eggs.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
No, thank god.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Do you know that My mom would do hard boiled
eggs and I wouldye them, and then she would hide them.
But she would hide them, I feel like, the night before,
and then they were sitting out until noon or one
o'clock the next day, and then she would use them
for deviled eggs. And I think, decades later, I said,
I don't think this is a good idea. I should
(02:07):
boiled eggs sit out for that long? I mean, you
know better than I do. That doesn't seem like a
good idea to me.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
I don't know, because one of the interesting things, you know,
I eat a lot of eggs. You know, eggs are
my staple for breakfast. But it's like here in the
United States, we refrigerate our eggs. Over in Europe they don't. Yeah, true,
you know, so if you boil them, you know, maybe
there's no reason to have to keep them refrigerated. So
(02:34):
maybe they're fine up to a certain point. I'm guessing
that's all it is at this point.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
So my mom is kind of exonerated from having any
bad poisoning me after you say that we could maybe
like keep them outside. Issue number two with leaving the
eggs out all night is we have so many raccoons
and deer that jump our f and bugs and dirt
and snakes and everything. I still say it was bad parenting.
(03:02):
I love my mom, but that was not a great idea.
I feel like because she would hide an egg and
then she didn't know where the egg went, and I said,
that's because a raccoon probably took it, And now you
want me to eat it.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yeah, no, for sure, But man, you're harsh. Bad parenting.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Huh oh, maybe not parenting, fit boy, I do. Parenting
fails pretty much constantly. I think every day. I think
I just did about an hour and a half ago.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Actually, I think we all do.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Actually, so we hide plastic eggs and the kids, you know,
will hunt around for them and stuff, and they still
do it, and you know, we'll have sort of a
traditional Easter afternoon dinner. We're not religious at all, so
it's mostly about the bunny rabbit. My grandfather, who was
my dad's father, lived in Missouri. He was a carpenter,
(03:49):
and he was married to my granny for decades and
decades and decades, and they were the ones I feel
like I told you in another case, those were the
grandparents who slept in separate beds, which I found, even
at eight weird. I didn't understand it. And you know,
they had twin beds and they were on the other
side of the room, which I don't know what that means.
I mean, I would think they would be closer together,
(04:10):
but they had twin beds. My papa had like a
massive it was like four acres garden, all vegetables. They
had a root cellar, all this stuff in Missouri, and
he used to tell me that he was going to
sit outside with a gun and chase off the Easter Bunny.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Of course, I just thought, you're so mean.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
I mean, I know he was kind of a farmer type,
but I mean I get it. You know, nobody wants
their garden invaded, but the Easter bunny really Papa.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah, well, at least he wasn't out on the porch
with a shotgun when Santa Claus was going to come. Now,
we would have potentially a homicide.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, and absolutely, well, I mean, you know that strange
man creeping along your roof. Yes, he probably hadn't thought
about that. He just wanted to scare me a little bit,
I think, And I just thought, it's a bunny rabbit.
Let him have the lettuce. I mean, you know, I
know he chased off animals. So I had an interesting family.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Sounds like it.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Well, I am taking you to nineteen sixty three Arizona,
and this is a case that, on the surface seems
I think fairly simple, but it was a landmark case.
And you'll find out why. I try to find stories where,
you know, we can say this is the reason why
we have X, Y and Z. Remember the story about
(05:24):
the man who was accused of sexual assault sneaking into
somebody's house and he left his fingerprints in fresh paint,
and that became the landmark case the first time that
fingerprinting was introduced in court. So this is sort of
that kind of case. So as we go along, you know,
this case changes quite a bit to reflect why it's
(05:45):
important today.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Okay, Well, so relatively speaking, it's a more recent case.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
It's like brand new, it's like yesterday for us.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah, no, for sure, it's just what five years before
I was born.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
So you keep dating yourself. I like a guy who
does that though. I mean, you know, you're proud of
your age, and I'll lend me too.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
It's better than the alternative, right, And you know.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
What, my mom says that. Now, I'm going to really
give my mom some props. My mom says that every time,
you know, she says, well, I have friends who don't
want to disclose their age, and I'm proud of it
because you know, a lot of people don't make it
to you know, my mom's age was about eighty. She's
going to be eighty two this year, so I would
be bragging about that too. Yeah, I'll brag about fifty fifty.
(06:27):
I'm happy to have made it this far.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
I've got you beat you, do I know? I know? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Okay, let's go ahead and set the scene for the story.
We are, as I said before, in nineteen sixty three, Arizona.
This is going to be a landmark case. A warning.
There is a lot involving a sexual assault. You all
know that we try to handle this with a lot
of sensitivity, and Paul does a great job talking about this.
(06:56):
So I just want to give you a warning straight
off the top. So here is the crime. We're going
to jump right into it before midnight, shortly before midnight,
March second, nineteen sixty three. We are in Phoenix. An
eighteen year old woman is heading home from her job
at the concession counter at a local movie theater. She
takes a city bus to a stop that's about three
(07:19):
blocks away from her home, where she lives with her
mother and her sister and her sister's husband. The time
when this happened is a little murky because the woman
says this happened before midnight on March second, but the
police filed the report on March third, so it gets
a little confusing. But we're gonna go with March second.
(07:41):
She will be the victim of a sexual assault, and
I am not going to identify her because it's nineteen
sixty three and I would hope she's still around, so
we're going to leave out her name. But I don't
think it's difficult to find. In the nineteen sixties. Phoenix
is in the middle of it's a huge building boom,
(08:02):
and she lives in a development that's still under construction,
so the sidewalks are dark, they don't seem to have
street lights. She's coming home very late by herself. She
can hear a car pulling up behind her. She kind
of ignores it and keeps walking. The driver gets out
of the car and he runs up behind her and
grabs her by the waist. She says that he presses
(08:24):
something sharp up against the back of her neck. He says,
if you don't scream, I won't hurt you, and she
goes with him and he puts her in the car's
back seat. And before I kind of get to what happens,
I wanted to ask a question because I feel like
I don't know what the current guidance is. If you
(08:46):
are approached by a stranger and he says get into
the car and he does have a weapon or doesn't
have a weapon. I feel like growing up I heard comply,
that's how you stay alive, because otherwise she you right there,
or he'll force you in and it'll be a really
bad situation, even worse situation. But I feel also like
(09:07):
I've heard quite a bit about no matter what you do,
and I think this is what they teach in schools
to kids. No matter what you do, don't get in
a car with somebody, fight, scream whatever it is, even
if they have a gun pointed out, you don't do it.
So what's your understanding of what the guidance would be
from safety experts with this, Well.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
It's not my understanding. I will tell you from my
casework experience, you never ever let yourself be taken to
a secondary location. I don't care if they've got a gun,
I don't care if they've got a knife. What they're
going to do to you at that secondary location is
going to be far worse and being shot or stabbed
or killed at that contact spot. With my other podcast,
(09:49):
small Town Dicks with Yardley, Dan and Dave, Dan, Dave
and I are coming out law enforcement. We all tell
our listeners don't go to a secondary location. Don't let
let yourself get bound. You know, if you are having
somebody who is trying to force you into a vehicle,
you fight, you kick, you go dead weight, You make
(10:12):
it as hard as possible, and you want to draw
as much attention as possible so somebody else can either
come to your aid or at least get law enforcement rolling.
And oftentimes the offender is not expecting that. He's thinking
you're going to comply with the gun or the knife,
and now all of a sudden. He's got a fight
(10:34):
on his hands. He's got a lot of noise being made.
There's a good chance at that offender will run off
some won't you know. But that is you know, straight up,
because I've just seen what happens to victims when they
go to a secondary location.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Well, luckily this woman survives, but her ordeal is awful.
He has something sharp up against the back of her neck.
He says, if you don't scream, I won't hurt you.
He puts her in the back seat of his car,
binds her ankles together with rope. He also ties her
hands behind her back. He drives about twenty minutes into
(11:09):
the desert, remember in Arizona, and he rapes her and
then he says something odd. He says, pray for me,
and drops her back off in her neighborhood. You know.
She of course goes home, tells her family what happened.
They call the police, doing all the right things. When
the investigators come, she can give a description of the car,
but not the make and model, and she says that
(11:32):
the car was either gray or a light green sedan
with a dark upholstered interior that has stripes, which is
great that she sounds so specific there, but she can't
give a description of the offender. I don't know if
it's because of trauma or he's masked, but you know,
this is what ends up happening. So what do you
(11:53):
think so far based on all of this.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Well, there's plenty of examples where these sexually motivated offenders
abduct their victims, sexually assault them, and then take them back,
either to the abduction location or to some other location
and drop them off. At least within this offender's mind
(12:16):
right now, he doesn't have the homicidal ideations, at least
not yet. If he is unmasked and is letting this
victim go, you know, that's that's interesting because he's not
taking you know, in nineteen sixty three, most certainly would
be aware that this victim is going to be talking
(12:36):
to law enforcement and likely would be able to provide
a pretty accurate description of him. So it kind of
tells me a little bit about this offender that he's
not being as as careful as he should if he
wants to continue to get away, either get away with
this particular crime or to continue to offend. You know,
because this type of offender, you know, abducting strangers and
(12:58):
sexually assaulting them. That general is considered a predatory type crime,
and they do that over and over and over again.
In some ways, he's kind of almost rolling the dice
and willingly so to where maybe, you know, especially with
the statement pray for me, you know, he knows that
he has a fantasy life that society does not agree with,
(13:21):
that he's committing a crime. He wants to be caught,
but he's not willing to give himself up.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Okay, what happens next disturbs me, of course, you know,
anything involving is a sexual assault disturbs me. But what
the police do next I had not heard, and maybe
you have. The survivor goes to the station to be
interviewed and they make her take a polygraph test. Have
you heard that before?
Speaker 2 (13:49):
I hate to say it, but this is this is
an era in which law enforcement did a lot of
victim blaming. I saw it over and over again from
cases out of the nineteen six nineteen seventies, and here,
right off the bat, they are telling this victim, well,
you got to prove yourself that you're telling the truth. Right.
(14:09):
It very much was this misogynistic type of mentality that
law enforcement had back in the day. And remember nineteen
sixty three, law enforcement's all male, very few females are working.
There almost was a you know, mindset, well, you shouldn't
have dressed that way, and that is what's happening to
(14:30):
this victim here.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Yeah, first of all, let's go back and talk about
polygraph tests in general, which we know are unreliable from
American sherlock. You know, I can't remember what year it was,
but it was like nineteen twenty five. I think that
in that time period where even the Supreme Court said
these should not be admitted in court. You know, this
is not reliable enough because so much can change your
(14:53):
heart rate, your pulse, everything can change based on medication,
how you're feeling that. I mean, you know, a host
of things that can't be attributed to lying. I think
you and I have talked about that. It's an effective
interrogation technique, but certainly not something that can point definitively
to someone's guilt.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
It's a tool, Yeah, that's all it is, you know,
and you know, poligraphers will you know, pretty much defend
their results, but also they recognize the variables that can
skew the results. Oftentimes what we get an investigation from
a polygraph because the person that's being hooked up to
the instrument, they now are in a position to where,
(15:36):
oh shit, they're going to know if I'm lying. And
so sometimes certain individuals will now tell the truth. Other
individuals will just straight up continue to lie. But it
locks them into statements, and some of the most valuable
investigative statements come out of the polygraph interview. You get
(15:58):
questioned while you're hooked up to the instrument. Polygrapher goes off,
he comes back, he's got instrument readouts, and he says, okay, Paul,
you answered these questions right, but I have concern about
this question. The next thing, you know, somebody is just like, well,
you know, trying to make something up in order to
say why the instrument is thrown off. And then a
discussion follows, and next thing you know, they're making admissions,
(16:19):
which now the homicide investigators or sexual assault investigators go, okay,
we got the right guy. Now we need to do
we need to do some follow up. It's a tool,
you know, There's no way you can you know, affect
an arrest based off of failing a polygraph.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Well it is inconclusive. And in two thousand and five,
I thought this was interesting. In two thousand and five, right,
so twenty years ago, the Violence Against Women Act withdrew
some federal funding from states that still required rape survivors
to take polygraph tests. So this is what's stunning to me.
As it stands, at least twenty five states have since
(16:58):
banned this practice. This leaves the other states who still
do it, And that's incredible to me. I just had
never heard that before, so that it's good to know,
you know, that this is something that gives me a
lot of context, that this is something you know that
happened in the past.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
You know. And I do just want to say, you know, obviously,
when you have a victim come in, you have to
listen to that victim and take what they are saying
as being fact. Right, this is what they experienced. However,
we do have victims lie. They make up things, you know,
and so as you investigate, if you do find out
(17:36):
this victim is likely lying, then of course you have
to figure out, well, what is going on here, but
to treat like in this case, this victim straight off
the bat to hook somebody up to a polygraph before
even hearing what happened and starting the investigation is just
straight up wrong, right, And she's.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Not accusing anybody yet. I mean, it's not like there's
some wealthy, you know, young man whose life is on
the line because this woman is accusing him of something.
There isn't even an investigation yet. This is her, you know,
a contention, So okay, let's move on. So there was
a detailed interior description of the car, but not the exterior.
(18:16):
But the description of the car matches descriptions that have
been given to the police in reports of other assaults.
She says it was a gray or a light green
sedan with dark upholstered interior that had stripes. I mean,
that still seems kind of vague, But people who have
been survivors of other similar attacks are coming back with
(18:39):
the same description of the car. So does that seem
reliable to you? I mean, police are going to really
lean into this too well.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
I think in terms of, you know, is it reliable
necessarily to be able to link these crimes together conclusively? No,
you know, what is the prevalence of this style interior
at this point in time? But in terms of this
is a detail of if these if these crimes are
similar enough to where these all these victims are saying
(19:09):
I was inside the offender's vehicle and this is what
the interior of the vehicle look like, then it is
a characteristic where you have to consider this may be
the same offender. Now if you have other behaviors, how
these women are abducted, you know, how he is sexually
assaulting them, what his appearance is like, and all these
seem to be within sort of a you'd say it's
(19:31):
a bracket, you know, in terms of each characteristic falls
within a bracket where it doesn't deviate too much from
each other. Then you go, okay, there's a good likelihood
that we have a serial rapist on the loose here.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
So the police cannot find this car. And about a
week later after this woman's attack, this woman's brother in
law has been escorting her to and from the bus
ever since the rape happened. At some point, he spots
a car that matches his sister in law's description. The
car leaves before the woman's bus arrives, but comes back.
(20:11):
Once the woman and the brother in law are there together,
she confirms that it looks like the right car, and
he runs after it, but the car speeds away once
he sees somebody as chasing him, and the brother in law,
thank goodness, jots down a partial plate number. This car
turns out to be a nineteen fifty three Packard and
it's registered to a woman. But she lives with a
(20:33):
man who is twenty three and his name is Arnisto.
I can tell you about Arnisto. I can talk about
what ends up happening when police locate him. And remember
this is a very significant case and you're going to
find out in just a bit.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Well, I think, you know. I think the first comment
is is that you know, the victim being able to say, hey,
that looks like the car. It's basically okay, this looks
like the make and model car that the offender used
that she was put into. And I'm assuming that they
must have been close enough to the vehicle possibly to
be able to see, oh, it's got the striped upholstery
on the inside. So she's not saying that guy looks
(21:10):
like the guy that's actually assaulted me. She's saying, that
looks like the car. Okay, So it's most certainly something
where it's okay, that's good. Now we have an understanding
of the making model that the offender was using, potentially
and a nineteen fifty three packard you know, I'm I
know of the packard vehicles. I don't think they were
(21:32):
exceptionally common, but that would be something that I would
be kind of wanting to know as an investigator. Is okay,
So is this just a you know, we have a
ton of these, you know, driving around the city, or
is this something that is relatively rare that I don't know,
but I would want I would be wanting to dig
into that before I put a lot of weight on.
You know, the person that has access to this vehicle
(21:54):
is possibly her attacker. So that's probably the first observation
that I have. And then you know, the registered owner
being a woman, Well, we know a woman isn't the
one that is attacking the victim. But we have a
twenty three year old male, you know, our nesto. So, now,
based off of what the victim could recount about her offender,
(22:14):
does this our nesto seem to match? I know you
said that she could not remember much about the physical
characteristics of this offender.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah, not at all. I mean she did at the
time that she couldn't recall anything specific, but for.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Law enforcements, there seems to be other cases that are
matching this victim's case in terms of the vehicle. So
what are these other victims saying about the you know,
the physical characteristics of their offender, and does our Nesto
match that. That's kind of what I would be looking
at if I'm considering these cases as being related.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
I'll tell you because I do have descriptions of what
happens in these other cases too, and we can kind
of see that. On March thirteenth, nineteen sixty three, the
police come to his house where he lives, or Nesta's house,
and ask him to come down for questioning. According to
the police, or Nesto is friendly and helpful, unbothered, and
he talks freely with the police. This seems unusual to me,
(23:13):
and I don't know if he is the person. I
don't know if this is someone who thinks he can
out smart the police and you know, just sort of
kind of skate through this, but you know he is
he is someone who does not seem alarmed by the
fact that he's being brought in for questioning. For it
sounds like at least one sexual assault, and I'm assuming
they're going to try to tie him to the others.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Sure, but there are plenty of people that respond that way. Okay,
you really can't draw conclusions. You're just noting that he
seems cooperative. You know, he does not seem nervous, so
you know, maybe he doesn't have anything to do with this.
But then there are offenders that when they've been pulled in,
that's the way they are.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Well, before I get to the interrogation, let me just
tell you a little bit about him. He was born
in Arizona to a very poverty stricken family. His mother
died when he was young, and he had a lot
of brushes with the law when he was a kid.
He was sent to a reform school when he was
a teenager. He had some prior rest in California, though
he wasn't convicted. It doesn't sound like anything violent. He
(24:13):
lived sort of an itinerant lifestyle in his late teens
and early twenties, which means he hopped around from place
to place and job to job, so he didn't have
roots anywhere. He was convicted in Tennacy for driving a
stolen car. When he is being questioned for this sexual
assault by the Phoenix Police. He's working nights on a
(24:33):
loading dock for a produce company and that's what we
know about Ernesto. So, you know, the brushes with the law.
We've talked about that before, that certain rushes with the
law are alarming to you, at least when we talk
about psychopathy and the potential for violence of somebody later on.
But these things, you know, he's twenty three, stolen car,
(24:55):
nothing violent. Is this anything that would alarm you as
an investigator when you're looking at this case, because right now,
all it is is he's got a car that people
are saying might have been involved in, you know, the
offender being a rapist.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
No, you know, all of it seems to be minor.
You know, many people have this level of criminality, you know,
so it doesn't mean doesn't point to anything that would
indicate that, you know, he potentially is a serial rapist
or a capable of sexual assault. If he has priors
as as I think I've talked about before, If he
has prior sexual assault, particularly sexual assaults on strangers, you know,
(25:34):
predatory type crime, then that is more of a red
flag in terms of his past criminality indicating Okay, he's
capable of this type of crime. And we know these
types of fenders have a tendency to be recidivous, they
have a tendency to continue committing these types of crimes.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Okay, now I'm going to have questions about police conduct
just in general, when you're interrogating somebody, whether this is
sort of commonplace or not. Here's point number one, and
you tell me what you think. They take er Nesto
to a very small interrogation room. You know, they want
to try to figure out if he's even the right guy,
because he does not seem bothered at all that he's there.
(26:13):
So it's described this interrogation room is described more like
a cubicle twelve feet squared cubicle, and they refer to
it as the sweat room. Are you allowed water? Can
you go to the bathroom? Is that one call? Still?
One phone call? Still a thing?
Speaker 2 (26:28):
You know? There's when when somebody's brought in to be interviewed,
there is a level of expected treatment. You know, you're
not bringing somebody in to you know, put them in
essentially a jail cell. Typically, yes, he had a part
(26:48):
of a proper interview is where you're ensuring that the
subject is reasonably comfortable. Today, law enforcement needs to be
mindful of the suspects perception. Now under this circumstance, at
this point in time, I don't think you said he
(27:08):
was arrested. He was asked to come down to the station.
He is voluntarily there in this day and age, under
this set of circumstances. You know, at any point, he
can decide to get up and leave, and he has
to have that perception of the capability to get up
(27:29):
and leave when he is there voluntarily.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
So Smarty, tell me what Ernesto's last name is, Miranda. Yep,
this is the Miranda Rights case, nineteen sixty three. Yes,
I can't believe it took till nineteen sixty three to
sort all this out. But it's an interesting case.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
No, for sure, you know, but this there is a reason,
because of this case, why people that are in a
custodial situation, whether they've been told that they are in custody,
or they perceive that they are in custody, that they
need to be told their rights. And it's because of
(28:11):
this case.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Well, now we're going to find out why. So he
is questioned for two hours and he denies the rape
and several other crimes that police are trying to pin
him on basically just based on the description of his car,
which does not seem like a wild description, but I
guess it is. So they're trying to pin him on
a bunch of different things. So police put him in
(28:34):
a lineup. Now we need to talk about lineups. Police
put him in a lineup, and the young woman eighteen
year old who was raped, as well as another woman
identify him out of four men, but they say they're
not positive. I mean, my notes say that the young
woman really couldn't give him a description, so I don't
know what would have changed. And then talk about how
(28:56):
lineups work. Are they the same as in the sixties, we'll.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
See well, and this is where whether you're dealing with
a photo lineup or you're doing this in person type
of lineup is Nowadays there are criteria that these lineups
have to meet in order for them to be to
have any level of veracity. In terms of if the victim,
(29:23):
like in this case, is able to pick somebody out
of the lineup. There isn't anything that would have swayed
the victim to point at the person that law enforcement
is considering the suspect. But let's say Ernesto is you know,
I don't know his size. Let's say he's five six,
one hundred and fifty pounds, clean shaven, and the other
(29:44):
three men in this lineup are all above six foot
and they have facial hair. You know, it's that type
of thing. And those were some of the things that
was happening, you know, back in the day, in order
to get that witness or that victim to point at
the person that law enforcement has kind of keyed in on,
in order for law enforcement to write up a report
(30:06):
saying suspect was picked out of a photo lineup, and
now they're putting that in a probable cause affidavit for
arrest for that crime.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
So let's talk about the other case. There was another
woman who identified him in this lineup, but said, you know,
I'm not one hundred percent sure. The circumstances from her
case were that she was grabbed at knife point while
she was going to her car at night from her
job as a bank teller. He put her in the
front bench of her own car, drove a short distance,
(30:37):
and she was assaulted but not raped, and robbed of
eight dollars. This seems different.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
It is tough when you have disparate crimes like this.
Now you have an abduction of females. In both instances,
you have these females being kidnapped, they're being moved to
a different location. Okay, there's similarities there, just because one
case doesn't end in sexual assault and it turns out
(31:05):
to be essentially a robbery of eight dollars. You know,
eight dollars is taken by force or fear by this offender.
Serial rapists will also commit this type of crime and
not sexually assault somebody, So you can't eliminate them as
not being related. But I think to your point, yes,
you can't necessarily say they are related because there isn't
(31:26):
enough circumstances, behaviors, et cetera that are unique enough to say, yes,
this appears to be the same individual, the same offender.
It's just something you have to consider. You know, offenders
commit multiple types of crimes, so that's just what happens.
And you know, you take a look at Ernesto's criminal pass,
(31:47):
this robbery of eight dollars seems to be more in
line with the types of petty crimes that he's committing
even though the kidnapp is serious. That's that's a massive,
major felony that's going on there. But to take the
eight dollars seems inline, like with maybe some of these
petty theft arrests that he possibly had in his criminal past.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Yeah. So remember it was a lineup of Ernesto and
three other men, and they said it looks like him,
but we're not one hundred percent sure. That's not what
the police tell Ernesto and they say that he has
been positively identified by these two women, and he immediately confesses.
Now two hours of interrogation. We don't know what that
(32:29):
involved in. I don't know if about Phoenix, Arizona in
the sixties, if this was the third degree or what happened.
But he didn't break until these two women positively identified him.
I know police can lie, right, I mean how much
can they lie? When you're interrogating somebody, you're trying to
trap them.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
You can lie to the person you're talking to, you know,
with the expectation that if the person's innocent, they will
stand their ground and in essence tell the interviewer you're wrong.
You know that wasn't me. I did not you know,
attack those women or whatever. But we do see with
select types of suspects that will cave in to an
(33:11):
interrogation when they are told lies. You know, So it
is a balance. You know that. This is where you
have you have an offender, Hey, we've got your DNA.
In this case, in this sexual assault, the innocent person
is expected to say, I don't know how that got there. Now,
guilty guys say the same thing, right, but you expect
(33:32):
that person, the innocent person, to stand their ground. But
then you have to evaluate the individual you're talking to.
And we know individuals that are intellectually challenged, that have
certain personalities, that are of a certain age, et cetera,
are more susceptible to caving in, either to being under
the influence of the interrogator or to caving into the circumstances.
(33:56):
If I just tell them what they want to hear,
maybe I'll be let go.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
I've heard circumstances where people say they were interrogated for
so long, almost days, where they start questioning whether they
were involved or not. I don't remember the stat from
the Innocence Project, but it's something like twenty five percent.
I think wrongful convictions come from false confessions.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
No, for sure, you know. And it's interesting in California
so that the read interview technique, which has been taught
forever and it originated out of the Chicago area, has
been shown to generate false confessions. And so in California,
I know there's one DA. I think it's Elderiddle County DA.
(34:39):
I was listening to him at a conference talk about
how he was championing banning the use of this read
interrogation technique in California, and I think he was successful.
I'm not entirely sure I know where that's at, in
part because it does cause susceptible individuals to falsely confess
to something they didn't do. You know. It's just way
(35:00):
that these individuals are manipulated, you know. So it's a balance,
you know, you want to get the truth out of
the person, and we know people will lie to protect
themselves from the crimes that they've committed. So you have
to somehow figure out a way in order to get
those facts out or at least get them to make
statements that are incriminating that a prosecutor can use. But
(35:24):
at what point do you draw the line in terms
of what you're willing to do in order to get
those statements out of that particular suspect.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Well, this prosecutor you were talking about, can you draw
briefly a contrast between the read interrogation technique and what
should be done if you have somebody who's intellectually challenged.
I mean, what's the different, what's the right and the wrong?
What does the read technique do that's so manipulative that
gets these wrongful.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Convictions fundamentally sort of like what you're hearing here in
the Miranda case in terms of you know, very confrontation,
making up these these lies, you know, really trying to
persuade the individual down a certain tract. You know, back
in the day before this case, law enforcement was really
(36:13):
heavy handed in terms of how they would interrogate individuals.
She's talk about, you know, being you know, kept awake
for long hours while you are being questioned over and
over again. And part of the questioning with this tactic
is just re asking the questions over and over again
over the course of many hours to where now the
(36:34):
person's getting frustrated and so now they're going to go, well,
my cooperation up to this point isn't working, So now
I'm going to give them what they want, you know,
and now they've just confessed to a crime. And then
what I've seen, in fact, I consulted on an innocence
project case and I won't go into the details, but
fundamentally what law enforcement was doing back in the day,
(36:56):
and this was not back in nineteen sixty three. This
is back in the nineteen nineties. But this particular agency,
with this particular couple of interviewers, what they do is
they in essence, tell the suspect the details and make
the suspect tell those details about the crime back. And
then the investigator is the one that's typing up this
(37:18):
is what the suspect said, and there's no recording, and
then they make the suspect sign that you told us this, right, yes,
I told you that, and that suspect just now has
confessed to a crime, and it is so inappropriate.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Well, what's hard about this case of Ernesto Miranda is
he is guilty. He's about to give a full confession.
Not only that he's going to identify the woman that
he attacked, but you know the way that the police
handle it and what they have him sign. We have
to get a little technical here. That's why this case
was so important. So he signs a form. He says
(37:57):
in the forum, he's twenty three. His highest level of
education is eighth grade. And this is his written statement.
He said, seeing a girl walking up the street, stopped
a little head of her, got out of the car,
walked toward her, grabbed her by the arm and asked
her to get in car. Got in car without force,
tight her hands at ankles, drove away for a few miles, stopped,
(38:19):
asked to take clothes off, did not asked me to
take her home. I started to take clothes off without
any force, and with cooperation, asked her to lay down,
and she did. Could not get penis into vagina, got
about half an inch in, told her to get closed
back on, drove her home, and I couldn't say I
was sorry for what I had done, but I asked
(38:40):
for her to pray for me. So that's what he said,
and on the form he wrote this statement. On it
said with full knowledge of my rights, even though he
was never informed of any rights. And that's where this
case is. So what do you think about that? First
his confession? What do you think about the confession? Did
he write the well here's the thing, Paul, I mean,
(39:01):
we have a verbatim. There's no punctuation, almost no punctuation
in here, you know, And I don't know if he
actually wrote it, wrote it in eighth grade. You would
think he would be able to, but it's I don't know.
You're right, it's hard to tell.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Well, well, this is sort of like that Innocence project.
Is you know, what had he been told about the crime?
When I'm assessing statements, and I do this all the
time in cold cases, is I'm assessing, okay, what what
did law enforcement know? How did they know it? Is
this something that during the interviews law enforcement, during their
interrogator phase, they're now confronting him with facts and you
(39:39):
know this fact you tried to raper but you only
could get in so far. Well, now he's fed that detail.
At what point during the interview is the the person
being interviewed bringing up this level of detail. And I know,
when I evaluate a case, I'm off and taking a
(40:00):
look at the crime scene and the physical evidence and
interpreting that. And many investigators don't know how to interpret,
you know, do like a crime scene reconstruction, so they
never bring those types of details up to the suspect
that they're talking to. But when I see a suspect
say something during that interview that matches up with what
(40:21):
I am seeing in the physical evidence, I'm going, oh,
he literally knows something that even the investigators don't know.
Now I'm putting a ton of veracity on that type
of detail. So, you know, statement analysis in terms of
assessing you know, like what Arnesto is saying, you know,
that's where Okay, who's writing this? At what stage is
(40:43):
he writing? This? Is towards the end of the interrogation?
Was this recorded? Was this? Were these details that he
was fed by the detectives during an interrogation, and now
he's just regurgitating them because he just wants to be done.
Remember what I said. You know, they're selecting individuals in
our society that are more susceptible to these types of
interrogative tactics and will falsely confess. One of those is
(41:07):
going to be that kind of that limited intellectual aspect.
Ernesto has an eighth grade education and he's twenty three
years old. He's satisfying one of those characteristics of yea,
he might be susceptible. Now I'm not saying, you know
that he's innocent of these crimes. But what I am
saying is is that there's a reason why this became
a landmark case.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Well, let me tell you how we keep going here.
He identifies the eighteen year old woman that we started
the story with who he sexually assaulted, and then he said,
I also did a robbery and an attempted robbery. He said,
in both of those cases, the women have been assaulted
but escaped before being raped. The robbery was eight dollars
(41:51):
and he took it from a survivor who is a
bank teller. After this statement, he's arrested and booked in
the Maricopa County jail. The prosecutor ends up filing charges
on the rape and the robbery, not like the attempted robbery.
So there were three cases that they were interested in
with him. Again the detail about the bank teller, and
(42:14):
you know a couple of other details. But right because
of this is a Miranda case. The Miranda case, we
have to think about what investigators did to get this information,
so they're untrustworthy unfortunately.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Well, you know, and part of what I want to
hear from Miranda, you know, as he's giving his statements
is I want to hear his perspective on how the
crime was committed. Not what I'm hearing you telling me
is well, these are the types of statements that the
victim would be saying. I want to hear his perspective.
(42:47):
I initially saw this victim at this location. I followed
her until we got to this particular location. I got out,
I went around this corner of the front of my car.
You know something where he's walking through committing the crime
versus regurgitating. She was a bank teller. Well, law enforcement
knows she's a bank teller, right, you know, I need
(43:11):
to hear something sort of outside of what I've heard
so far. I you know, of course I'm familiar with
you know why Miranda exists. I'm not real familiar with
the crimes that Miranda committed. To get to the point
to where now we have this landmark case.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Right, I'll tell you more about these trials. There's two trials,
because remember there is a robbery and then there's the rape.
So he goes on trial for the robbery first in
June of nineteen sixty three. It takes a day. He
has a court appointed attorney who follows emotion indicating that
he intends to plead insanity, and the court has two
(43:50):
psychiatrists examine him. One of the psychiatrists says that he
has an emotional illness that the psychiatrist classifies as a
quote schizophrenic reaction of the chronic undifferentiated type. At the
same time, he concludes that Miranda was unaware of his
actions but aware that he did something wrong. Meantime, the
(44:11):
other psychiatrist says he's just immature and unstable and he
doesn't see any evidence of psychosis. So we have the
arresting officer and the woman who was robbed testify and
the jury comes back with the unanimous guilty verdict. That afternoon.
They're waiting on what happens with the rape trial to
deal with sentencing, and the rape trial is the next day.
(44:33):
I want to definitely talk about the diagnosis from one
of the psychiatrists about schizophrenia, because you know, you are
talking about vulnerable people and being subjected to unethical interrogation techniques,
so so far, what are you hearing in this because
he confessed to the robbery as well as you know,
(44:54):
these other crimes too.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Yeah, you know, it's it's really tough, you know, to
assess kind of the mental health aspect and how that
plays into this case. Most certainly, I'm familiar with schizophrenia,
but in terms of wherever he's at a long sort
of this spectrum a schizophrenia. He's twenty three, we know generally,
(45:21):
you know, in the early twenties. Oftentimes this is when
schizophrenia starts to manifest itself and then it progresses from
that point. I can only right now speculate from my
dvantage point that, yeah, schizophrenia may be something that would
influence Miranda in terms of how he interacts under an
(45:42):
interrogator setting. I mean that is way outside my level
of expertise. You know, for me, what I'm assessing a
let's say prime and we start talking psychosis. You know,
a psychotic offender, a true disorganized offender that has mental
health issue that is so extreme they're unaware that they
(46:03):
are committing a crime that is wrong. This is your
true insanity. I can't form any type of opinion. Does
you know Miranda fall within that type of vendor. You
have one of the psychiatrists saying he's not at the
level of a psychosis, right, I think that's what you said. However,
both psychiatrists, though somewhat different in their opinions, are saying
(46:26):
he does have some sort of mental health aspect to him,
you know, and so that kind of underscores from my perspective. Okay,
he is a vulnerable suspect, and so the interview of
somebody like that needs to be handled in a different
way than likely it was handled in terms of a
hardcore interrogation.
Speaker 1 (46:47):
Here's the rape trial. It happens the next day. The
defense tries to shake the survivor's story. She is very
consistent and believable. The lawyer, for lack of a better phrase,
completely fucks up his attorney so states Exhibit one is
Miranda's signed statement which admitted to the rape. But his
(47:08):
own attorney calls it a confession. No one else in
the court has called it a confession. They say it's
a statement. So the prosecutor, at the very end in
his closing statement set even his own attorney, says he's confessed,
and this is that. So I mean, this will of
course set up a pretty decent appeal from Miranda. But
the defense doesn't dispute the validity of this confession statement thing,
(47:32):
And within minutes the jury comes back with a guilty
verdict and he sentenced to twenty to thirty years for
each count the kidnapping and the rape, and he's also
sentenced to twenty five years for the robbery. If this
man's last name were not Miranda, this would be the
end of our story. But in the sixties, lawyers and
activists had already started being critical of you know, what
(47:55):
the constitutional rights are when you are being interrogated by
the police. And that's why this case turns into a
big case. So in sixty three, the original lawyer who
defended Miranda is a guy named Alvin Moore. He files
an appeal. And there are other cases involving coerced or
improperly attained confessions that have drawn a lot of national
(48:17):
attention and established the right for an attorney during interrogations
under the sixth Amendment. So Moore's basis for this appeal
to the Arizona Supreme Court is that his confession was
improperly received as evidence. The state Supreme Court disagrees and
they uphold the conviction. But there is a lot more
happening here where eventually, I mean, just to kind of
(48:40):
shorthand this you know, this takes a very windy road
and the ACLU gets involved. There's another case in California
with the California Supreme Court, and that court ruled that
before a suspect is interrogated, he has to be expressly
informed of his right to an attorney, and Miranda wasn't.
(49:01):
So Arizona and California were contradicting each other as a
matter of constitutional law. And this is where Robert Corkran,
the retired attorney, decides to step in and he takes
over the case. Now do you want to do a
shorthand of what happens or what do you I mean,
this is such a massive case. We don't know if
he's guilty, but it sure sounds like it to me.
(49:22):
But that's not the point, you know. The point is
establishing your rights, you know, and everybody, even guilty people,
need rights.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
I know of the Miranda case, but in terms of
the legal path up to the Supreme Court, not familiar
with that at all. You know, fundamentally, my training when
I was with law enforcement, you know, was with Miranda.
Of course, you're informing the person that you're interviewing of
their rights, you know, the right to remain silent the
(49:51):
right to have an attorney. But the primary criteria that
impacts law enforcement needing to inform this person of their
rights is the custodial status. Is this person in custody
which means they are not free to leave? Or does
a person have perception of custody? And I believe this
(50:12):
isn't necessarily addressed under the miranda case. There's other case
law related to perception of custody. So as an example,
the way you set, let's say a suspect up in
an interview room and now you have two big burly
detectives that are between that suspect and the door, and
that suspect has just been told you can leave any time,
(50:36):
but he has to push through these two cops. Maybe
one of the cops is in uniform. That person has
a perception I'm not free to leave. So under that
set of circumstances, this is where now law enforcement is going, Okay,
generally good, you know, and there's a balance. You know,
you don't want to mirandize somebody if you don't have to,
or now you just have told this person shut up.
(50:59):
You want this person to cooperate, But if you recognize, okay,
this person is talking to me voluntarily, and they're free
to leave, but there might be a perception that on
their part that they're not free to leave because maybe
the way our station house is set up. You know,
you air on the side of caution, and you mirandize
them right and hope that that person is still going
(51:22):
to want to be able to cooperate and provide statements
so you can further your investigation. There's almost a tactical
way of having to approach. You have to assess your suspect,
the situation that you're talking to the suspect, and whether
or not it truly does require to mirandize them or not,
or is it in the gray area yep? And then
generally it's sort of like, oh, you better err on
(51:44):
the side of caution, because if you don't, pretty much
you have just killed the case. If they find out
that you should have mirandized them.
Speaker 1 (51:51):
This goes all the way to the Supreme Court. And
there has to be clarity because there are a lot
of cases that are now coming forward where people are saying,
you're talking about intimidation with the police. A lot of
the arguments are I'm not educated enough to know, you know,
Paul holds the banker probably knows his rights, but Miranda didn't.
And so what the Supreme Court eventually votes five to four,
(52:14):
you know, in favor of They essentially say that if
the Constitution only protects Americans who are educated enough to
know their rights, then not all Americans are protected. So
you know, this is, like I said, a five to
four decision, and in response, police departments across the country
give out those cards to their personnel with language to
(52:34):
inform suspects of their rights. You know, the Supreme Court
didn't prescribe any specific language, but this is where the
little speech that the police will give you if you're
under arrest. Miranda's conviction is overturned and that drives me crazy.
But he goes on trial again in Arizona in nineteen
sixty seven. This is only for the rape and the kidnapping,
(52:56):
since the robbery didn't go to the Supreme Court and
his original confession is not admitted as evidence. He has
tried under a false name because Miranda is very famous
now and his estranged girlfriend, the woman who had been
living with him, testifies against him, and he has found
guilty in sentenced to twenty to thirty years in prison.
(53:17):
Eventually he applies and has denied parole four times. He
is granted in nineteen seventy two parole, So he serves
about nine years in prison, and he violates this parole
with a lot of misdemeanors, goes back to prison for
another five years. He's released in seventy five, and he
is stabbed to death at a bar in nineteen seventy
(53:40):
five after he's released.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
Yeah, that sounds vaguely familiar. I think I may have
heard that at some point, but most certainly most of
what you just told me about, you know, Miranda's back
and forth with prison and parole, I did not know.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
Yeah, so you know, he ends up at this bar
and he gets into an argument and he's stabbed in
the chest in the net can. He dies within minutes,
you know. I mean a little side note, They find
the guy who did it. They inform them of his
rights in Spanish because he doesn't speak English. So that's
how evolved they became. So they inform aim of his
rights in Spanish, and he waves his rights and he
(54:14):
tells Billie, you know that he didn't do it, and
they don't arrest him. So, I mean, the irony here
is is he waves his rights, he denies that he
did this, he had some injuries, and the police let
him go. And when they go back to find him again,
when employees say we can identify him, he's gone. He's
in Mexico.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
And this is the suspect in Miranda's homicide.
Speaker 1 (54:35):
Yes, so he's gone where his family lives. He's in
the wind. So the murder of Ernesto Miranda. You know,
no one was ever arrested for the murder of Ernesto Miranda.
And I mean this story. Of course, I'm familiar with
miranda rights, but I did not know the backstory of it.
I know this is not our traditional true crime, But
(54:56):
like I said, I'm always interested in why cases are.
You know, case law is established and you know where
different things come from in our history, and this was
an interesting case.
Speaker 2 (55:07):
Well yeah, no, for sure, it's a landmark case. It's
you know, it's one of those things you know there's
for law enforcement, there are select individuals, you know, just
whether they're patrol guys or investigators. They love staying on
top of the case law and they often I can
think of one guy who is a DA investigator. He
would give training to the other investigators, Hey, this is
(55:30):
the curt this was just a Supreme Court decision, or
here's a California appellate decision, because you need to know,
you know what changes. You go through the police academy
and you're told about Miranda, but then there's other case
law that have modified Miranda, right, so you have to
stay on top of that. And there are people that
(55:50):
fortunately that do that and that of course, you know,
the prosecutors, your attorneys are the ones that are really
the experts. You know. So if law enforcement, if an
invest stigator ever has a question about the legality of
let's say a certain type of search, you know, you
ring up your local prosecutor and you run the facts
by them and say, hey does this work?
Speaker 1 (56:12):
You know before you do it and you screw something up.
Speaker 2 (56:15):
Absolutely, you know, And and that's where, you know, one
of the reasons I enjoy the cold case side is
things are slow. They're slow moving, right, they're decades old.
Speaker 1 (56:27):
You don't have that public pressure, right.
Speaker 2 (56:29):
You don't have you know. I don't think people truly
appreciate whether it's a patrol officer that's responding to an
active crime or an investigator investigating an after crime. How
many decisions they have to make on the fly, and
they have to make those decisions based on what the
current case law is. It's not something that they necessarily
(56:50):
have received a bunch of training on, you know. So
this is part of the evolution as you go through
your career of seeing how laws change over time. And
it's not necessarily in the penal code. It's something that
is now. You know, the attorney for the sheriff's office sed, hey,
there's new California Supreme Court has just come out with this,
(57:12):
and so even though you've been doing it this way
up until today, tomorrow, you need it to do it
this way, you know, and you have to make that
adjustment or you potentially could have a case thrown out.
Speaker 1 (57:21):
Yeah. Well, like I said, not our normal type of story,
but important and I love learning about where things come from.
Next week, I can almost guarantee we're not going to
be talking about Miranda rights, probably because from the eighteen
hundreds and they ain't have any rights, so itus you'd
(57:41):
be lucky to survive interrogation. But you know, we will
have a case that definitely has some deep history. So
I hope you look forward to it.
Speaker 2 (57:50):
Paul I always do and another great job today, Kate.
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (57:55):
Thank you, Paul, I see you next week.
Speaker 2 (57:57):
Sounds good.
Speaker 1 (58:01):
This has been an exactly right production.
Speaker 2 (58:04):
For our sources and show notes go to Exactlyrightmedia dot
com slash Buried Bones sources.
Speaker 1 (58:09):
Our senior producer is Alexis Mrosi.
Speaker 2 (58:12):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (58:17):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 2 (58:19):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (58:22):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (58:24):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark, and Danielle Kramer.
Speaker 1 (58:28):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
buried Bones pod.
Speaker 2 (58:34):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now.
Speaker 1 (58:40):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life Solving America's
Cold Cases is also available now.
Speaker 2 (58:47):
Listen to Baried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried Bones.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how are you.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I'm doing well. We've got Easter coming up. What kind
of Easter traditions do you guys having Do you celebrate Easter?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
First of all, you know, we would do when the
kids were younger, we would do the Easter basket and
hide the eggs type of thing. Even like when I
was a kid, you know, I was born and raised Catholic,
you know, so of course Easter was a big deal
and going to Mass and stuff. But now my kids
are older, I think my wife will get them some
(01:33):
basket with chocolates in it, and that's about it.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Oh, they don't look for Easter eggs anymore, not even
like the plastic kind of Easter eggs.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
No, thank god.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Do you know that My mom would do hard boiled
eggs and I wouldye them, and then she would hide them.
But she would hide them, I feel like, the night before,
and then they were sitting out until noon or one
o'clock the next day, and then she would use them
for deviled eggs. And I think, decades later, I said,
I don't think this is a good idea. I should
(02:07):
boiled eggs sit out for that long? I mean, you
know better than I do. That doesn't seem like a
good idea to me.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
I don't know, because one of the interesting things, you know,
I eat a lot of eggs. You know, eggs are
my staple for breakfast. But it's like here in the
United States, we refrigerate our eggs. Over in Europe they don't. Yeah, true,
you know, so if you boil them, you know, maybe
there's no reason to have to keep them refrigerated. So
(02:34):
maybe they're fine up to a certain point. I'm guessing
that's all it is at this point.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
So my mom is kind of exonerated from having any
bad poisoning me after you say that we could maybe
like keep them outside. Issue number two with leaving the
eggs out all night is we have so many raccoons
and deer that jump our f and bugs and dirt
and snakes and everything. I still say it was bad parenting.
(03:02):
I love my mom, but that was not a great idea.
I feel like because she would hide an egg and
then she didn't know where the egg went, and I said,
that's because a raccoon probably took it, And now you
want me to eat it.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yeah, no, for sure, But man, you're harsh. Bad parenting.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Huh oh, maybe not parenting, fit boy, I do. Parenting
fails pretty much constantly. I think every day. I think
I just did about an hour and a half ago.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Actually, I think we all do.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Actually, so we hide plastic eggs and the kids, you know,
will hunt around for them and stuff, and they still
do it, and you know, we'll have sort of a
traditional Easter afternoon dinner. We're not religious at all, so
it's mostly about the bunny rabbit. My grandfather, who was
my dad's father, lived in Missouri. He was a carpenter,
(03:49):
and he was married to my granny for decades and
decades and decades, and they were the ones I feel
like I told you in another case, those were the
grandparents who slept in separate beds, which I found, even
at eight weird. I didn't understand it. And you know,
they had twin beds and they were on the other
side of the room, which I don't know what that means.
I mean, I would think they would be closer together,
(04:10):
but they had twin beds. My papa had like a
massive it was like four acres garden, all vegetables. They
had a root cellar, all this stuff in Missouri, and
he used to tell me that he was going to
sit outside with a gun and chase off the Easter Bunny.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Of course, I just thought, you're so mean.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
I mean, I know he was kind of a farmer type,
but I mean I get it. You know, nobody wants
their garden invaded, but the Easter bunny really Papa.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah, well, at least he wasn't out on the porch
with a shotgun when Santa Claus was going to come. Now,
we would have potentially a homicide.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, and absolutely, well, I mean, you know that strange
man creeping along your roof. Yes, he probably hadn't thought
about that. He just wanted to scare me a little bit,
I think, And I just thought, it's a bunny rabbit.
Let him have the lettuce. I mean, you know, I
know he chased off animals. So I had an interesting family.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Sounds like it.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Well, I am taking you to nineteen sixty three Arizona,
and this is a case that, on the surface seems
I think fairly simple, but it was a landmark case.
And you'll find out why. I try to find stories where,
you know, we can say this is the reason why
we have X, Y and Z. Remember the story about
(05:24):
the man who was accused of sexual assault sneaking into
somebody's house and he left his fingerprints in fresh paint,
and that became the landmark case the first time that
fingerprinting was introduced in court. So this is sort of
that kind of case. So as we go along, you know,
this case changes quite a bit to reflect why it's
(05:45):
important today.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Okay, Well, so relatively speaking, it's a more recent case.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
It's like brand new, it's like yesterday for us.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah, no, for sure, it's just what five years before
I was born.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
So you keep dating yourself. I like a guy who
does that though. I mean, you know, you're proud of
your age, and I'll lend me too.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
It's better than the alternative, right, And you know.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
What, my mom says that. Now, I'm going to really
give my mom some props. My mom says that every time,
you know, she says, well, I have friends who don't
want to disclose their age, and I'm proud of it
because you know, a lot of people don't make it
to you know, my mom's age was about eighty. She's
going to be eighty two this year, so I would
be bragging about that too. Yeah, I'll brag about fifty fifty.
(06:27):
I'm happy to have made it this far.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
I've got you beat you, do I know? I know? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Okay, let's go ahead and set the scene for the story.
We are, as I said before, in nineteen sixty three, Arizona.
This is going to be a landmark case. A warning.
There is a lot involving a sexual assault. You all
know that we try to handle this with a lot
of sensitivity, and Paul does a great job talking about this.
(06:56):
So I just want to give you a warning straight
off the top. So here is the crime. We're going
to jump right into it before midnight, shortly before midnight,
March second, nineteen sixty three. We are in Phoenix. An
eighteen year old woman is heading home from her job
at the concession counter at a local movie theater. She
takes a city bus to a stop that's about three
(07:19):
blocks away from her home, where she lives with her
mother and her sister and her sister's husband. The time
when this happened is a little murky because the woman
says this happened before midnight on March second, but the
police filed the report on March third, so it gets
a little confusing. But we're gonna go with March second.
(07:41):
She will be the victim of a sexual assault, and
I am not going to identify her because it's nineteen
sixty three and I would hope she's still around, so
we're going to leave out her name. But I don't
think it's difficult to find. In the nineteen sixties. Phoenix
is in the middle of it's a huge building boom,
(08:02):
and she lives in a development that's still under construction,
so the sidewalks are dark, they don't seem to have
street lights. She's coming home very late by herself. She
can hear a car pulling up behind her. She kind
of ignores it and keeps walking. The driver gets out
of the car and he runs up behind her and
grabs her by the waist. She says that he presses
(08:24):
something sharp up against the back of her neck. He says,
if you don't scream, I won't hurt you, and she
goes with him and he puts her in the car's
back seat. And before I kind of get to what happens,
I wanted to ask a question because I feel like
I don't know what the current guidance is. If you
(08:46):
are approached by a stranger and he says get into
the car and he does have a weapon or doesn't
have a weapon. I feel like growing up I heard comply,
that's how you stay alive, because otherwise she you right there,
or he'll force you in and it'll be a really
bad situation, even worse situation. But I feel also like
(09:07):
I've heard quite a bit about no matter what you do,
and I think this is what they teach in schools
to kids. No matter what you do, don't get in
a car with somebody, fight, scream whatever it is, even
if they have a gun pointed out, you don't do it.
So what's your understanding of what the guidance would be
from safety experts with this, Well.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
It's not my understanding. I will tell you from my
casework experience, you never ever let yourself be taken to
a secondary location. I don't care if they've got a gun,
I don't care if they've got a knife. What they're
going to do to you at that secondary location is
going to be far worse and being shot or stabbed
or killed at that contact spot. With my other podcast,
(09:49):
small Town Dicks with Yardley, Dan and Dave, Dan, Dave
and I are coming out law enforcement. We all tell
our listeners don't go to a secondary location. Don't let
let yourself get bound. You know, if you are having
somebody who is trying to force you into a vehicle,
you fight, you kick, you go dead weight, You make
(10:12):
it as hard as possible, and you want to draw
as much attention as possible so somebody else can either
come to your aid or at least get law enforcement rolling.
And oftentimes the offender is not expecting that. He's thinking
you're going to comply with the gun or the knife,
and now all of a sudden. He's got a fight
(10:34):
on his hands. He's got a lot of noise being made.
There's a good chance at that offender will run off
some won't you know. But that is you know, straight up,
because I've just seen what happens to victims when they
go to a secondary location.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Well, luckily this woman survives, but her ordeal is awful.
He has something sharp up against the back of her neck.
He says, if you don't scream, I won't hurt you.
He puts her in the back seat of his car,
binds her ankles together with rope. He also ties her
hands behind her back. He drives about twenty minutes into
(11:09):
the desert, remember in Arizona, and he rapes her and
then he says something odd. He says, pray for me,
and drops her back off in her neighborhood. You know.
She of course goes home, tells her family what happened.
They call the police, doing all the right things. When
the investigators come, she can give a description of the car,
but not the make and model, and she says that
(11:32):
the car was either gray or a light green sedan
with a dark upholstered interior that has stripes, which is
great that she sounds so specific there, but she can't
give a description of the offender. I don't know if
it's because of trauma or he's masked, but you know,
this is what ends up happening. So what do you
(11:53):
think so far based on all of this.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Well, there's plenty of examples where these sexually motivated offenders
abduct their victims, sexually assault them, and then take them back,
either to the abduction location or to some other location
and drop them off. At least within this offender's mind
(12:16):
right now, he doesn't have the homicidal ideations, at least
not yet. If he is unmasked and is letting this
victim go, you know, that's that's interesting because he's not
taking you know, in nineteen sixty three, most certainly would
be aware that this victim is going to be talking
(12:36):
to law enforcement and likely would be able to provide
a pretty accurate description of him. So it kind of
tells me a little bit about this offender that he's
not being as as careful as he should if he
wants to continue to get away, either get away with
this particular crime or to continue to offend. You know,
because this type of offender, you know, abducting strangers and
(12:58):
sexually assaulting them. That general is considered a predatory type crime,
and they do that over and over and over again.
In some ways, he's kind of almost rolling the dice
and willingly so to where maybe, you know, especially with
the statement pray for me, you know, he knows that
he has a fantasy life that society does not agree with,
(13:21):
that he's committing a crime. He wants to be caught,
but he's not willing to give himself up.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Okay, what happens next disturbs me, of course, you know,
anything involving is a sexual assault disturbs me. But what
the police do next I had not heard, and maybe
you have. The survivor goes to the station to be
interviewed and they make her take a polygraph test. Have
you heard that before?
Speaker 2 (13:49):
I hate to say it, but this is this is
an era in which law enforcement did a lot of
victim blaming. I saw it over and over again from
cases out of the nineteen six nineteen seventies, and here,
right off the bat, they are telling this victim, well,
you got to prove yourself that you're telling the truth. Right.
(14:09):
It very much was this misogynistic type of mentality that
law enforcement had back in the day. And remember nineteen
sixty three, law enforcement's all male, very few females are working.
There almost was a you know, mindset, well, you shouldn't
have dressed that way, and that is what's happening to
(14:30):
this victim here.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Yeah, first of all, let's go back and talk about
polygraph tests in general, which we know are unreliable from
American sherlock. You know, I can't remember what year it was,
but it was like nineteen twenty five. I think that
in that time period where even the Supreme Court said
these should not be admitted in court. You know, this
is not reliable enough because so much can change your
(14:53):
heart rate, your pulse, everything can change based on medication,
how you're feeling that. I mean, you know, a host
of things that can't be attributed to lying. I think
you and I have talked about that. It's an effective
interrogation technique, but certainly not something that can point definitively
to someone's guilt.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
It's a tool, Yeah, that's all it is, you know,
and you know, poligraphers will you know, pretty much defend
their results, but also they recognize the variables that can
skew the results. Oftentimes what we get an investigation from
a polygraph because the person that's being hooked up to
the instrument, they now are in a position to where,
(15:36):
oh shit, they're going to know if I'm lying. And
so sometimes certain individuals will now tell the truth. Other
individuals will just straight up continue to lie. But it
locks them into statements, and some of the most valuable
investigative statements come out of the polygraph interview. You get
(15:58):
questioned while you're hooked up to the instrument. Polygrapher goes off,
he comes back, he's got instrument readouts, and he says, okay, Paul,
you answered these questions right, but I have concern about
this question. The next thing, you know, somebody is just like, well,
you know, trying to make something up in order to
say why the instrument is thrown off. And then a
discussion follows, and next thing you know, they're making admissions,
(16:19):
which now the homicide investigators or sexual assault investigators go, okay,
we got the right guy. Now we need to do
we need to do some follow up. It's a tool,
you know, There's no way you can you know, affect
an arrest based off of failing a polygraph.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Well it is inconclusive. And in two thousand and five,
I thought this was interesting. In two thousand and five, right,
so twenty years ago, the Violence Against Women Act withdrew
some federal funding from states that still required rape survivors
to take polygraph tests. So this is what's stunning to me.
As it stands, at least twenty five states have since
(16:58):
banned this practice. This leaves the other states who still
do it, And that's incredible to me. I just had
never heard that before, so that it's good to know,
you know, that this is something that gives me a
lot of context, that this is something you know that
happened in the past.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
You know. And I do just want to say, you know, obviously,
when you have a victim come in, you have to
listen to that victim and take what they are saying
as being fact. Right, this is what they experienced. However,
we do have victims lie. They make up things, you know,
and so as you investigate, if you do find out
(17:36):
this victim is likely lying, then of course you have
to figure out, well, what is going on here, but
to treat like in this case, this victim straight off
the bat to hook somebody up to a polygraph before
even hearing what happened and starting the investigation is just
straight up wrong, right, And she's.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Not accusing anybody yet. I mean, it's not like there's
some wealthy, you know, young man whose life is on
the line because this woman is accusing him of something.
There isn't even an investigation yet. This is her, you know,
a contention, So okay, let's move on. So there was
a detailed interior description of the car, but not the exterior.
(18:16):
But the description of the car matches descriptions that have
been given to the police in reports of other assaults.
She says it was a gray or a light green
sedan with dark upholstered interior that had stripes. I mean,
that still seems kind of vague, But people who have
been survivors of other similar attacks are coming back with
(18:39):
the same description of the car. So does that seem
reliable to you? I mean, police are going to really
lean into this too well.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
I think in terms of, you know, is it reliable
necessarily to be able to link these crimes together conclusively? No,
you know, what is the prevalence of this style interior
at this point in time? But in terms of this
is a detail of if these if these crimes are
similar enough to where these all these victims are saying
(19:09):
I was inside the offender's vehicle and this is what
the interior of the vehicle look like, then it is
a characteristic where you have to consider this may be
the same offender. Now if you have other behaviors, how
these women are abducted, you know, how he is sexually
assaulting them, what his appearance is like, and all these
seem to be within sort of a you'd say it's
(19:31):
a bracket, you know, in terms of each characteristic falls
within a bracket where it doesn't deviate too much from
each other. Then you go, okay, there's a good likelihood
that we have a serial rapist on the loose here.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
So the police cannot find this car. And about a
week later after this woman's attack, this woman's brother in
law has been escorting her to and from the bus
ever since the rape happened. At some point, he spots
a car that matches his sister in law's description. The
car leaves before the woman's bus arrives, but comes back.
(20:11):
Once the woman and the brother in law are there together,
she confirms that it looks like the right car, and
he runs after it, but the car speeds away once
he sees somebody as chasing him, and the brother in law,
thank goodness, jots down a partial plate number. This car
turns out to be a nineteen fifty three Packard and
it's registered to a woman. But she lives with a
(20:33):
man who is twenty three and his name is Arnisto.
I can tell you about Arnisto. I can talk about
what ends up happening when police locate him. And remember
this is a very significant case and you're going to
find out in just a bit.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Well, I think, you know. I think the first comment
is is that you know, the victim being able to say, hey,
that looks like the car. It's basically okay, this looks
like the make and model car that the offender used
that she was put into. And I'm assuming that they
must have been close enough to the vehicle possibly to
be able to see, oh, it's got the striped upholstery
on the inside. So she's not saying that guy looks
(21:10):
like the guy that's actually assaulted me. She's saying, that
looks like the car. Okay, So it's most certainly something
where it's okay, that's good. Now we have an understanding
of the making model that the offender was using, potentially
and a nineteen fifty three packard you know, I'm I
know of the packard vehicles. I don't think they were
(21:32):
exceptionally common, but that would be something that I would
be kind of wanting to know as an investigator. Is okay,
So is this just a you know, we have a
ton of these, you know, driving around the city, or
is this something that is relatively rare that I don't know,
but I would want I would be wanting to dig
into that before I put a lot of weight on.
You know, the person that has access to this vehicle
(21:54):
is possibly her attacker. So that's probably the first observation
that I have. And then you know, the registered owner
being a woman, Well, we know a woman isn't the
one that is attacking the victim. But we have a
twenty three year old male, you know, our nesto. So, now,
based off of what the victim could recount about her offender,
(22:14):
does this our nesto seem to match? I know you
said that she could not remember much about the physical
characteristics of this offender.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah, not at all. I mean she did at the
time that she couldn't recall anything specific, but for.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Law enforcements, there seems to be other cases that are
matching this victim's case in terms of the vehicle. So
what are these other victims saying about the you know,
the physical characteristics of their offender, and does our Nesto
match that. That's kind of what I would be looking
at if I'm considering these cases as being related.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
I'll tell you because I do have descriptions of what
happens in these other cases too, and we can kind
of see that. On March thirteenth, nineteen sixty three, the
police come to his house where he lives, or Nesta's house,
and ask him to come down for questioning. According to
the police, or Nesto is friendly and helpful, unbothered, and
he talks freely with the police. This seems unusual to me,
(23:13):
and I don't know if he is the person. I
don't know if this is someone who thinks he can
out smart the police and you know, just sort of
kind of skate through this, but you know he is
he is someone who does not seem alarmed by the
fact that he's being brought in for questioning. For it
sounds like at least one sexual assault, and I'm assuming
they're going to try to tie him to the others.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Sure, but there are plenty of people that respond that way. Okay,
you really can't draw conclusions. You're just noting that he
seems cooperative. You know, he does not seem nervous, so
you know, maybe he doesn't have anything to do with this.
But then there are offenders that when they've been pulled in,
that's the way they are.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Well, before I get to the interrogation, let me just
tell you a little bit about him. He was born
in Arizona to a very poverty stricken family. His mother
died when he was young, and he had a lot
of brushes with the law when he was a kid.
He was sent to a reform school when he was
a teenager. He had some prior rest in California, though
he wasn't convicted. It doesn't sound like anything violent. He
(24:13):
lived sort of an itinerant lifestyle in his late teens
and early twenties, which means he hopped around from place
to place and job to job, so he didn't have
roots anywhere. He was convicted in Tennacy for driving a
stolen car. When he is being questioned for this sexual
assault by the Phoenix Police. He's working nights on a
(24:33):
loading dock for a produce company and that's what we
know about Ernesto. So, you know, the brushes with the law.
We've talked about that before, that certain rushes with the
law are alarming to you, at least when we talk
about psychopathy and the potential for violence of somebody later on.
But these things, you know, he's twenty three, stolen car,
(24:55):
nothing violent. Is this anything that would alarm you as
an investigator when you're looking at this case, because right now,
all it is is he's got a car that people
are saying might have been involved in, you know, the
offender being a rapist.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
No, you know, all of it seems to be minor.
You know, many people have this level of criminality, you know,
so it doesn't mean doesn't point to anything that would
indicate that, you know, he potentially is a serial rapist
or a capable of sexual assault. If he has priors
as as I think I've talked about before, If he
has prior sexual assault, particularly sexual assaults on strangers, you know,
(25:34):
predatory type crime, then that is more of a red
flag in terms of his past criminality indicating Okay, he's
capable of this type of crime. And we know these
types of fenders have a tendency to be recidivous, they
have a tendency to continue committing these types of crimes.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Okay, now I'm going to have questions about police conduct
just in general, when you're interrogating somebody, whether this is
sort of commonplace or not. Here's point number one, and
you tell me what you think. They take er Nesto
to a very small interrogation room. You know, they want
to try to figure out if he's even the right guy,
because he does not seem bothered at all that he's there.
(26:13):
So it's described this interrogation room is described more like
a cubicle twelve feet squared cubicle, and they refer to
it as the sweat room. Are you allowed water? Can
you go to the bathroom? Is that one call? Still?
One phone call? Still a thing?
Speaker 2 (26:28):
You know? There's when when somebody's brought in to be interviewed,
there is a level of expected treatment. You know, you're
not bringing somebody in to you know, put them in
essentially a jail cell. Typically, yes, he had a part
(26:48):
of a proper interview is where you're ensuring that the
subject is reasonably comfortable. Today, law enforcement needs to be
mindful of the suspects perception. Now under this circumstance, at
this point in time, I don't think you said he
(27:08):
was arrested. He was asked to come down to the station.
He is voluntarily there in this day and age, under
this set of circumstances. You know, at any point, he
can decide to get up and leave, and he has
to have that perception of the capability to get up
(27:29):
and leave when he is there voluntarily.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
So Smarty, tell me what Ernesto's last name is, Miranda. Yep,
this is the Miranda Rights case, nineteen sixty three. Yes,
I can't believe it took till nineteen sixty three to
sort all this out. But it's an interesting case.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
No, for sure, you know, but this there is a reason,
because of this case, why people that are in a
custodial situation, whether they've been told that they are in custody,
or they perceive that they are in custody, that they
need to be told their rights. And it's because of
(28:11):
this case.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Well, now we're going to find out why. So he
is questioned for two hours and he denies the rape
and several other crimes that police are trying to pin
him on basically just based on the description of his car,
which does not seem like a wild description, but I
guess it is. So they're trying to pin him on
a bunch of different things. So police put him in
(28:34):
a lineup. Now we need to talk about lineups. Police
put him in a lineup, and the young woman eighteen
year old who was raped, as well as another woman
identify him out of four men, but they say they're
not positive. I mean, my notes say that the young
woman really couldn't give him a description, so I don't
know what would have changed. And then talk about how
(28:56):
lineups work. Are they the same as in the sixties, we'll.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
See well, and this is where whether you're dealing with
a photo lineup or you're doing this in person type
of lineup is Nowadays there are criteria that these lineups
have to meet in order for them to be to
have any level of veracity. In terms of if the victim,
(29:23):
like in this case, is able to pick somebody out
of the lineup. There isn't anything that would have swayed
the victim to point at the person that law enforcement
is considering the suspect. But let's say Ernesto is you know,
I don't know his size. Let's say he's five six,
one hundred and fifty pounds, clean shaven, and the other
(29:44):
three men in this lineup are all above six foot
and they have facial hair. You know, it's that type
of thing. And those were some of the things that
was happening, you know, back in the day, in order
to get that witness or that victim to point at
the person that law enforcement has kind of keyed in on,
in order for law enforcement to write up a report
(30:06):
saying suspect was picked out of a photo lineup, and
now they're putting that in a probable cause affidavit for
arrest for that crime.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
So let's talk about the other case. There was another
woman who identified him in this lineup, but said, you know,
I'm not one hundred percent sure. The circumstances from her
case were that she was grabbed at knife point while
she was going to her car at night from her
job as a bank teller. He put her in the
front bench of her own car, drove a short distance,
(30:37):
and she was assaulted but not raped, and robbed of
eight dollars. This seems different.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
It is tough when you have disparate crimes like this.
Now you have an abduction of females. In both instances,
you have these females being kidnapped, they're being moved to
a different location. Okay, there's similarities there, just because one
case doesn't end in sexual assault and it turns out
(31:05):
to be essentially a robbery of eight dollars. You know,
eight dollars is taken by force or fear by this offender.
Serial rapists will also commit this type of crime and
not sexually assault somebody, So you can't eliminate them as
not being related. But I think to your point, yes,
you can't necessarily say they are related because there isn't
(31:26):
enough circumstances, behaviors, et cetera that are unique enough to say, yes,
this appears to be the same individual, the same offender.
It's just something you have to consider. You know, offenders
commit multiple types of crimes, so that's just what happens.
And you know, you take a look at Ernesto's criminal pass,
(31:47):
this robbery of eight dollars seems to be more in
line with the types of petty crimes that he's committing
even though the kidnapp is serious. That's that's a massive,
major felony that's going on there. But to take the
eight dollars seems inline, like with maybe some of these
petty theft arrests that he possibly had in his criminal past.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Yeah. So remember it was a lineup of Ernesto and
three other men, and they said it looks like him,
but we're not one hundred percent sure. That's not what
the police tell Ernesto and they say that he has
been positively identified by these two women, and he immediately confesses.
Now two hours of interrogation. We don't know what that
(32:29):
involved in. I don't know if about Phoenix, Arizona in
the sixties, if this was the third degree or what happened.
But he didn't break until these two women positively identified him.
I know police can lie, right, I mean how much
can they lie? When you're interrogating somebody, you're trying to
trap them.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
You can lie to the person you're talking to, you know,
with the expectation that if the person's innocent, they will
stand their ground and in essence tell the interviewer you're wrong.
You know that wasn't me. I did not you know,
attack those women or whatever. But we do see with
select types of suspects that will cave in to an
(33:11):
interrogation when they are told lies. You know, So it
is a balance. You know that. This is where you
have you have an offender, Hey, we've got your DNA.
In this case, in this sexual assault, the innocent person
is expected to say, I don't know how that got there. Now,
guilty guys say the same thing, right, but you expect
(33:32):
that person, the innocent person, to stand their ground. But
then you have to evaluate the individual you're talking to.
And we know individuals that are intellectually challenged, that have
certain personalities, that are of a certain age, et cetera,
are more susceptible to caving in, either to being under
the influence of the interrogator or to caving into the circumstances.
(33:56):
If I just tell them what they want to hear,
maybe I'll be let go.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
I've heard circumstances where people say they were interrogated for
so long, almost days, where they start questioning whether they
were involved or not. I don't remember the stat from
the Innocence Project, but it's something like twenty five percent.
I think wrongful convictions come from false confessions.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
No, for sure, you know. And it's interesting in California
so that the read interview technique, which has been taught
forever and it originated out of the Chicago area, has
been shown to generate false confessions. And so in California,
I know there's one DA. I think it's Elderiddle County DA.
(34:39):
I was listening to him at a conference talk about
how he was championing banning the use of this read
interrogation technique in California, and I think he was successful.
I'm not entirely sure I know where that's at, in
part because it does cause susceptible individuals to falsely confess
to something they didn't do. You know. It's just way
(35:00):
that these individuals are manipulated, you know. So it's a balance,
you know, you want to get the truth out of
the person, and we know people will lie to protect
themselves from the crimes that they've committed. So you have
to somehow figure out a way in order to get
those facts out or at least get them to make
statements that are incriminating that a prosecutor can use. But
(35:24):
at what point do you draw the line in terms
of what you're willing to do in order to get
those statements out of that particular suspect.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Well, this prosecutor you were talking about, can you draw
briefly a contrast between the read interrogation technique and what
should be done if you have somebody who's intellectually challenged.
I mean, what's the different, what's the right and the wrong?
What does the read technique do that's so manipulative that
gets these wrongful.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Convictions fundamentally sort of like what you're hearing here in
the Miranda case in terms of you know, very confrontation,
making up these these lies, you know, really trying to
persuade the individual down a certain tract. You know, back
in the day before this case, law enforcement was really
(36:13):
heavy handed in terms of how they would interrogate individuals.
She's talk about, you know, being you know, kept awake
for long hours while you are being questioned over and
over again. And part of the questioning with this tactic
is just re asking the questions over and over again
over the course of many hours to where now the
(36:34):
person's getting frustrated and so now they're going to go, well,
my cooperation up to this point isn't working, So now
I'm going to give them what they want, you know,
and now they've just confessed to a crime. And then
what I've seen, in fact, I consulted on an innocence
project case and I won't go into the details, but
fundamentally what law enforcement was doing back in the day,
(36:56):
and this was not back in nineteen sixty three. This
is back in the nineteen nineties. But this particular agency,
with this particular couple of interviewers, what they do is
they in essence, tell the suspect the details and make
the suspect tell those details about the crime back. And
then the investigator is the one that's typing up this
(37:18):
is what the suspect said, and there's no recording, and
then they make the suspect sign that you told us this, right, yes,
I told you that, and that suspect just now has
confessed to a crime, and it is so inappropriate.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Well, what's hard about this case of Ernesto Miranda is
he is guilty. He's about to give a full confession.
Not only that he's going to identify the woman that
he attacked, but you know the way that the police
handle it and what they have him sign. We have
to get a little technical here. That's why this case
was so important. So he signs a form. He says
(37:57):
in the forum, he's twenty three. His highest level of
education is eighth grade. And this is his written statement.
He said, seeing a girl walking up the street, stopped
a little head of her, got out of the car,
walked toward her, grabbed her by the arm and asked
her to get in car. Got in car without force,
tight her hands at ankles, drove away for a few miles, stopped,
(38:19):
asked to take clothes off, did not asked me to
take her home. I started to take clothes off without
any force, and with cooperation, asked her to lay down,
and she did. Could not get penis into vagina, got
about half an inch in, told her to get closed
back on, drove her home, and I couldn't say I
was sorry for what I had done, but I asked
(38:40):
for her to pray for me. So that's what he said,
and on the form he wrote this statement. On it
said with full knowledge of my rights, even though he
was never informed of any rights. And that's where this
case is. So what do you think about that? First
his confession? What do you think about the confession? Did
he write the well here's the thing, Paul, I mean,
(39:01):
we have a verbatim. There's no punctuation, almost no punctuation
in here, you know, And I don't know if he
actually wrote it, wrote it in eighth grade. You would
think he would be able to, but it's I don't know.
You're right, it's hard to tell.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Well, well, this is sort of like that Innocence project.
Is you know, what had he been told about the crime?
When I'm assessing statements, and I do this all the
time in cold cases, is I'm assessing, okay, what what
did law enforcement know? How did they know it? Is
this something that during the interviews law enforcement, during their
interrogator phase, they're now confronting him with facts and you
(39:39):
know this fact you tried to raper but you only
could get in so far. Well, now he's fed that detail.
At what point during the interview is the the person
being interviewed bringing up this level of detail. And I know,
when I evaluate a case, I'm off and taking a
(40:00):
look at the crime scene and the physical evidence and
interpreting that. And many investigators don't know how to interpret,
you know, do like a crime scene reconstruction, so they
never bring those types of details up to the suspect
that they're talking to. But when I see a suspect
say something during that interview that matches up with what
(40:21):
I am seeing in the physical evidence, I'm going, oh,
he literally knows something that even the investigators don't know.
Now I'm putting a ton of veracity on that type
of detail. So, you know, statement analysis in terms of
assessing you know, like what Arnesto is saying, you know,
that's where Okay, who's writing this? At what stage is
(40:43):
he writing? This? Is towards the end of the interrogation?
Was this recorded? Was this? Were these details that he
was fed by the detectives during an interrogation, and now
he's just regurgitating them because he just wants to be done.
Remember what I said. You know, they're selecting individuals in
our society that are more susceptible to these types of
interrogative tactics and will falsely confess. One of those is
(41:07):
going to be that kind of that limited intellectual aspect.
Ernesto has an eighth grade education and he's twenty three
years old. He's satisfying one of those characteristics of yea,
he might be susceptible. Now I'm not saying, you know
that he's innocent of these crimes. But what I am
saying is is that there's a reason why this became
a landmark case.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Well, let me tell you how we keep going here.
He identifies the eighteen year old woman that we started
the story with who he sexually assaulted, and then he said,
I also did a robbery and an attempted robbery. He said,
in both of those cases, the women have been assaulted
but escaped before being raped. The robbery was eight dollars
(41:51):
and he took it from a survivor who is a
bank teller. After this statement, he's arrested and booked in
the Maricopa County jail. The prosecutor ends up filing charges
on the rape and the robbery, not like the attempted robbery.
So there were three cases that they were interested in
with him. Again the detail about the bank teller, and
(42:14):
you know a couple of other details. But right because
of this is a Miranda case. The Miranda case, we
have to think about what investigators did to get this information,
so they're untrustworthy unfortunately.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Well, you know, and part of what I want to
hear from Miranda, you know, as he's giving his statements
is I want to hear his perspective on how the
crime was committed. Not what I'm hearing you telling me
is well, these are the types of statements that the
victim would be saying. I want to hear his perspective.
(42:47):
I initially saw this victim at this location. I followed
her until we got to this particular location. I got out,
I went around this corner of the front of my car.
You know something where he's walking through committing the crime
versus regurgitating. She was a bank teller. Well, law enforcement
knows she's a bank teller, right, you know, I need
(43:11):
to hear something sort of outside of what I've heard
so far. I you know, of course I'm familiar with
you know why Miranda exists. I'm not real familiar with
the crimes that Miranda committed. To get to the point
to where now we have this landmark case.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Right, I'll tell you more about these trials. There's two trials,
because remember there is a robbery and then there's the rape.
So he goes on trial for the robbery first in
June of nineteen sixty three. It takes a day. He
has a court appointed attorney who follows emotion indicating that
he intends to plead insanity, and the court has two
(43:50):
psychiatrists examine him. One of the psychiatrists says that he
has an emotional illness that the psychiatrist classifies as a
quote schizophrenic reaction of the chronic undifferentiated type. At the
same time, he concludes that Miranda was unaware of his
actions but aware that he did something wrong. Meantime, the
(44:11):
other psychiatrist says he's just immature and unstable and he
doesn't see any evidence of psychosis. So we have the
arresting officer and the woman who was robbed testify and
the jury comes back with the unanimous guilty verdict. That afternoon.
They're waiting on what happens with the rape trial to
deal with sentencing, and the rape trial is the next day.
(44:33):
I want to definitely talk about the diagnosis from one
of the psychiatrists about schizophrenia, because you know, you are
talking about vulnerable people and being subjected to unethical interrogation techniques,
so so far, what are you hearing in this because
he confessed to the robbery as well as you know,
(44:54):
these other crimes too.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Yeah, you know, it's it's really tough, you know, to
assess kind of the mental health aspect and how that
plays into this case. Most certainly, I'm familiar with schizophrenia,
but in terms of wherever he's at a long sort
of this spectrum a schizophrenia. He's twenty three, we know generally,
(45:21):
you know, in the early twenties. Oftentimes this is when
schizophrenia starts to manifest itself and then it progresses from
that point. I can only right now speculate from my
dvantage point that, yeah, schizophrenia may be something that would
influence Miranda in terms of how he interacts under an
(45:42):
interrogator setting. I mean that is way outside my level
of expertise. You know, for me, what I'm assessing a
let's say prime and we start talking psychosis. You know,
a psychotic offender, a true disorganized offender that has mental
health issue that is so extreme they're unaware that they
(46:03):
are committing a crime that is wrong. This is your
true insanity. I can't form any type of opinion. Does
you know Miranda fall within that type of vendor. You
have one of the psychiatrists saying he's not at the
level of a psychosis, right, I think that's what you said. However,
both psychiatrists, though somewhat different in their opinions, are saying
(46:26):
he does have some sort of mental health aspect to him,
you know, and so that kind of underscores from my perspective. Okay,
he is a vulnerable suspect, and so the interview of
somebody like that needs to be handled in a different
way than likely it was handled in terms of a
hardcore interrogation.
Speaker 1 (46:47):
Here's the rape trial. It happens the next day. The
defense tries to shake the survivor's story. She is very
consistent and believable. The lawyer, for lack of a better phrase,
completely fucks up his attorney so states Exhibit one is
Miranda's signed statement which admitted to the rape. But his
(47:08):
own attorney calls it a confession. No one else in
the court has called it a confession. They say it's
a statement. So the prosecutor, at the very end in
his closing statement set even his own attorney, says he's confessed,
and this is that. So I mean, this will of
course set up a pretty decent appeal from Miranda. But
the defense doesn't dispute the validity of this confession statement thing,
(47:32):
And within minutes the jury comes back with a guilty
verdict and he sentenced to twenty to thirty years for
each count the kidnapping and the rape, and he's also
sentenced to twenty five years for the robbery. If this
man's last name were not Miranda, this would be the
end of our story. But in the sixties, lawyers and
activists had already started being critical of you know, what
(47:55):
the constitutional rights are when you are being interrogated by
the police. And that's why this case turns into a
big case. So in sixty three, the original lawyer who
defended Miranda is a guy named Alvin Moore. He files
an appeal. And there are other cases involving coerced or
improperly attained confessions that have drawn a lot of national
(48:17):
attention and established the right for an attorney during interrogations
under the sixth Amendment. So Moore's basis for this appeal
to the Arizona Supreme Court is that his confession was
improperly received as evidence. The state Supreme Court disagrees and
they uphold the conviction. But there is a lot more
happening here where eventually, I mean, just to kind of
(48:40):
shorthand this you know, this takes a very windy road
and the ACLU gets involved. There's another case in California
with the California Supreme Court, and that court ruled that
before a suspect is interrogated, he has to be expressly
informed of his right to an attorney, and Miranda wasn't.
(49:01):
So Arizona and California were contradicting each other as a
matter of constitutional law. And this is where Robert Corkran,
the retired attorney, decides to step in and he takes
over the case. Now do you want to do a
shorthand of what happens or what do you I mean,
this is such a massive case. We don't know if
he's guilty, but it sure sounds like it to me.
(49:22):
But that's not the point, you know. The point is
establishing your rights, you know, and everybody, even guilty people,
need rights.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
I know of the Miranda case, but in terms of
the legal path up to the Supreme Court, not familiar
with that at all. You know, fundamentally, my training when
I was with law enforcement, you know, was with Miranda.
Of course, you're informing the person that you're interviewing of
their rights, you know, the right to remain silent the
(49:51):
right to have an attorney. But the primary criteria that
impacts law enforcement needing to inform this person of their
rights is the custodial status. Is this person in custody
which means they are not free to leave? Or does
a person have perception of custody? And I believe this
(50:12):
isn't necessarily addressed under the miranda case. There's other case
law related to perception of custody. So as an example,
the way you set, let's say a suspect up in
an interview room and now you have two big burly
detectives that are between that suspect and the door, and
that suspect has just been told you can leave any time,
(50:36):
but he has to push through these two cops. Maybe
one of the cops is in uniform. That person has
a perception I'm not free to leave. So under that
set of circumstances, this is where now law enforcement is going, Okay,
generally good, you know, and there's a balance. You know,
you don't want to mirandize somebody if you don't have to,
or now you just have told this person shut up.
(50:59):
You want this person to cooperate, But if you recognize, okay,
this person is talking to me voluntarily, and they're free
to leave, but there might be a perception that on
their part that they're not free to leave because maybe
the way our station house is set up. You know,
you air on the side of caution, and you mirandize
them right and hope that that person is still going
(51:22):
to want to be able to cooperate and provide statements
so you can further your investigation. There's almost a tactical
way of having to approach. You have to assess your suspect,
the situation that you're talking to the suspect, and whether
or not it truly does require to mirandize them or not,
or is it in the gray area yep? And then
generally it's sort of like, oh, you better err on
(51:44):
the side of caution, because if you don't, pretty much
you have just killed the case. If they find out
that you should have mirandized them.
Speaker 1 (51:51):
This goes all the way to the Supreme Court. And
there has to be clarity because there are a lot
of cases that are now coming forward where people are saying,
you're talking about intimidation with the police. A lot of
the arguments are I'm not educated enough to know, you know,
Paul holds the banker probably knows his rights, but Miranda didn't.
And so what the Supreme Court eventually votes five to four,
(52:14):
you know, in favor of They essentially say that if
the Constitution only protects Americans who are educated enough to
know their rights, then not all Americans are protected. So
you know, this is, like I said, a five to
four decision, and in response, police departments across the country
give out those cards to their personnel with language to
(52:34):
inform suspects of their rights. You know, the Supreme Court
didn't prescribe any specific language, but this is where the
little speech that the police will give you if you're
under arrest. Miranda's conviction is overturned and that drives me crazy.
But he goes on trial again in Arizona in nineteen
sixty seven. This is only for the rape and the kidnapping,
(52:56):
since the robbery didn't go to the Supreme Court and
his original confession is not admitted as evidence. He has
tried under a false name because Miranda is very famous
now and his estranged girlfriend, the woman who had been
living with him, testifies against him, and he has found
guilty in sentenced to twenty to thirty years in prison.
(53:17):
Eventually he applies and has denied parole four times. He
is granted in nineteen seventy two parole, So he serves
about nine years in prison, and he violates this parole
with a lot of misdemeanors, goes back to prison for
another five years. He's released in seventy five, and he
is stabbed to death at a bar in nineteen seventy
(53:40):
five after he's released.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
Yeah, that sounds vaguely familiar. I think I may have
heard that at some point, but most certainly most of
what you just told me about, you know, Miranda's back
and forth with prison and parole, I did not know.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
Yeah, so you know, he ends up at this bar
and he gets into an argument and he's stabbed in
the chest in the net can. He dies within minutes,
you know. I mean a little side note, They find
the guy who did it. They inform them of his
rights in Spanish because he doesn't speak English. So that's
how evolved they became. So they inform aim of his
rights in Spanish, and he waves his rights and he
(54:14):
tells Billie, you know that he didn't do it, and
they don't arrest him. So, I mean, the irony here
is is he waves his rights, he denies that he
did this, he had some injuries, and the police let
him go. And when they go back to find him again,
when employees say we can identify him, he's gone. He's
in Mexico.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
And this is the suspect in Miranda's homicide.
Speaker 1 (54:35):
Yes, so he's gone where his family lives. He's in
the wind. So the murder of Ernesto Miranda. You know,
no one was ever arrested for the murder of Ernesto Miranda.
And I mean this story. Of course, I'm familiar with
miranda rights, but I did not know the backstory of it.
I know this is not our traditional true crime, But
(54:56):
like I said, I'm always interested in why cases are.
You know, case law is established and you know where
different things come from in our history, and this was
an interesting case.
Speaker 2 (55:07):
Well yeah, no, for sure, it's a landmark case. It's
you know, it's one of those things you know there's
for law enforcement, there are select individuals, you know, just
whether they're patrol guys or investigators. They love staying on
top of the case law and they often I can
think of one guy who is a DA investigator. He
would give training to the other investigators, Hey, this is
(55:30):
the curt this was just a Supreme Court decision, or
here's a California appellate decision, because you need to know,
you know what changes. You go through the police academy
and you're told about Miranda, but then there's other case
law that have modified Miranda, right, so you have to
stay on top of that. And there are people that
(55:50):
fortunately that do that and that of course, you know,
the prosecutors, your attorneys are the ones that are really
the experts. You know. So if law enforcement, if an
invest stigator ever has a question about the legality of
let's say a certain type of search, you know, you
ring up your local prosecutor and you run the facts
by them and say, hey does this work?
Speaker 1 (56:12):
You know before you do it and you screw something up.
Speaker 2 (56:15):
Absolutely, you know, And and that's where, you know, one
of the reasons I enjoy the cold case side is
things are slow. They're slow moving, right, they're decades old.
Speaker 1 (56:27):
You don't have that public pressure, right.
Speaker 2 (56:29):
You don't have you know. I don't think people truly
appreciate whether it's a patrol officer that's responding to an
active crime or an investigator investigating an after crime. How
many decisions they have to make on the fly, and
they have to make those decisions based on what the
current case law is. It's not something that they necessarily
(56:50):
have received a bunch of training on, you know. So
this is part of the evolution as you go through
your career of seeing how laws change over time. And
it's not necessarily in the penal code. It's something that
is now. You know, the attorney for the sheriff's office sed, hey,
there's new California Supreme Court has just come out with this,
(57:12):
and so even though you've been doing it this way
up until today, tomorrow, you need it to do it
this way, you know, and you have to make that
adjustment or you potentially could have a case thrown out.
Speaker 1 (57:21):
Yeah. Well, like I said, not our normal type of story,
but important and I love learning about where things come from.
Next week, I can almost guarantee we're not going to
be talking about Miranda rights, probably because from the eighteen
hundreds and they ain't have any rights, so itus you'd
(57:41):
be lucky to survive interrogation. But you know, we will
have a case that definitely has some deep history. So
I hope you look forward to it.
Speaker 2 (57:50):
Paul I always do and another great job today, Kate.
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (57:55):
Thank you, Paul, I see you next week.
Speaker 2 (57:57):
Sounds good.
Speaker 1 (58:01):
This has been an exactly right production.
Speaker 2 (58:04):
For our sources and show notes go to Exactlyrightmedia dot
com slash Buried Bones sources.
Speaker 1 (58:09):
Our senior producer is Alexis Mrosi.
Speaker 2 (58:12):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (58:17):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 2 (58:19):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (58:22):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (58:24):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark, and Danielle Kramer.
Speaker 1 (58:28):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
buried Bones pod.
Speaker 2 (58:34):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now.
Speaker 1 (58:40):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life Solving America's
Cold Cases is also available now.
Speaker 2 (58:47):
Listen to Baried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Kate Winkler Dawson
Paul Holes
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
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
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.