Criminal - The Six

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

In 1989, three people confessed to participating in a murder. Eventually, a total of six people were arrested. But when DNA tests were run on crime scene evidence almost 20 years later - the results showed that none of them had been there at all. This episode picks up where our last episode left off. If you haven't heard the first part yet - we recommend going back and listening to that first. It’s called Type B. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, members-only merch, and more. Learn more and sign up here. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode picks up where our last episode left off. If you haven't heard the first part yet, we recommend going back and listening to that first. It's called Type B. This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Please use discretion. In 1985, a 68-year-old woman named Helen Wilson was found dead in her apartment in Beatrice,

Nebraska. Six people were eventually arrested for her murder. Only one of the six had refused to give any sort of cooperation to law enforcement, and that was Joseph Light. Joe Dugan worked as a reporter in Nebraska for almost 30 years. He had maintained he was innocent. He had nothing to do with it. Joseph White pleaded not guilty, and his trial began in the fall of 1989. Two of the other people who'd been arrested,

Kathy Gonzalez and Tom Winslow, pleaded no contest. They said they weren't there. Three of the others who'd been arrested pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Joseph White. Joanne Taylor, James Dean, and Deborah Sheldon. If they cooperated and would give testimony against White, they would get reduced sentences. All three people who testified had told police they were there on the night of the murder. What did they, Deborah Sheldon, James Dean, and Joanne Taylor, what did they say when

they got on the stand? Their testimony essentially said that they broke into Helen Wilson's apartment with the intention of robbing an old woman. They were looking for money. These were people who had, at best, worked marginal dead-end jobs, so that was supposed to be the motive. Essentially, they attacked Mrs. Wilson. Joseph White and Thomas Winslow raped her,

and they testified that Joanne Taylor put a pillow over Mrs. Wilson's face, which caused her to suffocate to death. But all three had changed their stories multiple times. Did the defense question their stories at all, their credibility? They did. In his opening statements, Joseph White's attorney talked about how two of the three people testifying, Deborah Sheldon and James Dean, only remembered details of the murder through their dreams. He also talked about how Joanne Taylor had changed her story and about how there is no physical evidence that proved that Joseph White was at the scene. He said, quote, He did a good job of trying to raise reasonable doubt in the mind of jurors about the testimony of the three. Deputy Burt Searcy also testified at the trial.

He said that when he arrested Joseph White in 1989, he admitted he'd been in Beatrice at the time of the murder, but he also said that he had denied knowing anything about what happened. On the last day of the trial, Joseph White was called to testify.

He denied that he'd been involved in the murder. The county attorney then handed him a photo of Helen Wilson and asked him if he knew what it was. He responded, a picture of an old woman. And by the account of the defense attorney who represented White, he said the air just went out of the room when Joseph answered in that way. You had, you know, a couple dozen members of Helen Wilson's family were in the courtroom during the trial, had been there throughout the entire trial. It was a very full courtroom, and people were just, he said it was just dead silent after White answered the question in that way.

There had been all of this testimony about the horrible crime and injuries that Helen Wilson had suffered during her attack leading to her death. And for White to just not even acknowledge who she was, was regarded as a severe mistake on his part. A day later, he was convicted of first-degree murder. In Nebraska, at that time and still today, if you're convicted of first-degree murder, there are only two sentences.

One is life in prison. The other is the death penalty. And in Nebraska, life means life. There isn't the possibility of parole on a first-degree murder conviction. Joseph White got life in prison. At his sentencing, Joseph White told the judge, even if it takes 30 years, I am going to prove my innocence. His mother had read a book about how DNA testing in its nascent period had been used not only to convict criminals, but also to exonerate those who were wrongly accused.

And his mother had shared that book with him, and he had brought it to the attention of his defense attorney. And at the sentencing hearing, Joseph did ask for DNA testing through his attorney, but it was not granted. The county prosecutor argued that DNA testing was still too new of a technology to be admissible in court. He also said that he thought the samples might have been too old to be tested. He also felt that the $350 cost of a DNA test was more than the county could afford. Joseph Light appealed his conviction, but it was upheld by the Nebraska Supreme Court. He was sent to the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln.

Joseph, while he's serving in prison, he works prison jobs, which pay, I think when he started, they paid like 30 cents an hour. He worked in woodshops and did other jobs he could do. And so he started saving his prison earnings and started contacting lawyers to look into his case. The first lawyer he hired didn't work out. Then he found a recent law school graduate who did a lot of research but didn't make much headway. And then in 2001, 11 years into his prison sentence, Nebraska passed a new law.

It allowed people convicted of a crime to petition to have DNA testing done on old crime scene evidence. And then after the DNA testing act is passed by the legislature in 2001, Joseph really starts kind of focusing and hoping that that will provide an avenue. He reached out to a new lawyer named Doug Stratton. And he agrees to go down to the state pen and meet with Joseph White. Doug Stratton later said that he didn't intend to take Joseph's case, but he was going to the state penitentiary that day anyway. He sits down to meet with Joe, and Joseph convinces him of his innocence in a fairly short conversation. Doug Stratton would testify and tell people after that meeting he walked out of there thinking there was something about this guy that I believe him, I believe he's innocent.

It seemed like he was telling the truth. Doug was just convinced he was telling the truth when he said, I wasn't there. and there was something about this guy that I believe him. I believe he's innocent. It seemed like he was telling the truth. Doug was just convinced he was telling the truth when he said, I wasn't there. Lawyer Jeffrey Patterson. And so Doug realized that based on what Joseph told him, the DNA testing would be what would either exonerate Joseph or prove that he was there. Tom Winslow, another person arrested for Helen Wilson's murder, who had pleaded no contest, was also still in prison. He'd been given a 50-year sentence. Doug Stratton went to talk with him, too. And when Tom came into the interview room, Doug stood up and introduced himself, and he told Tom,

I've been talking with Joseph White, and he tells me he wasn't there, and I believe him. And the way Doug describes it, Tom just broke down crying and said, I wasn't there either, but nobody would believe me. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. In 2005, Joseph White and Tom Winslow filed motions to have pieces of evidence from Helen Wilson's apartment tested for DNA. The evidence had been sitting in the Beatrice Police Department basement for 20 years. They had done the original investigation in 1985. The sheriff's office took it over in 1989.

And yet it was the police department that had saved that physical evidence. And so, does the DNA get tested? Not at first. The same county attorney who had prosecuted Joseph White was still in office. He had argued against testing the evidence in 1989, and now he argued against it again. A district court judge agreed, saying that even if the DNA evidence didn't match Joseph White or Tom Winslow,

it wouldn't be enough to prove that they hadn't murdered her. It eventually goes to the Nebraska Supreme Court, and the Nebraska Supreme Court, and the Nebraska Supreme Court overturns the lower court's order and says, run the tests. Several pieces of evidence were tested, and in the summer of 2008, the results came back. There was DNA found on the items, but it didn't match Joseph White or Tom Winslow. I, like almost everyone else, thought, oh, okay, these two guys did not rape Helen Wilson, which means there must have been another person.

I don't think anybody thought that they weren't there. Catherine Huddle was working in Beatrice, the local newspaper, that summer, when the DNA results became public. You know, five out of the six had pleaded either guilty or no contest. So you thought, okay, this is interesting, but it doesn't change all that much. Right. But Joseph White and Tom Winslow's lawyers argued that they should be released from prison as soon as possible.

I mean, it didn't, it could not have happened the way the three eyewitnesses testified. The county decided to do more DNA testing on the rest of the evidence from the crime scene. A second round of tests was conducted involving about 40 different items. And then those results came back, and they showed not only did the DNA testing exclude White and Winslow, it also excluded the third male, James Dean, who was in the apartment, supposedly in the apartment. And it also excluded the three women who were in the apartment, Joanne Taylor, Kathy Gonzalez, and Debbie Sheldon. So all of the six who had been convicted of this crime,

none of them could be included as contributors of the DNA. But the tests did find one match. All of the DNA had come from a single person, a man named Bruce Allen Smith. We'll be right back. Are you looking to eat healthier Thank you. According to Noom, losing weight has less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology. Noom is the weight loss management program that focuses on the science behind food cravings and building sustainable eating habits. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology-based approach.

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And he kept saying, I don't care what happens, I'm going to get laid tonight. A friend of his drove him back to Beatrice and dropped him off on a street corner a few blocks south of Helen Wilson's apartment. Shortly after the murder, the police heard that Bruce Allen Smith had been near Helen Wilson's apartment that night and that he'd been seen with scratches on his face and hands the next day.

They tracked him down. He was in Oklahoma City by then. He gave blood and hair samples to local police. And what they're looking for is type B blood, and they are looking for not only just type B blood, but also B blood with a non-secreter status. The Oklahoma City lab runs tests on Smith's blood, and it comes back type B, but at that it is secreter.

And so because of the secreter designation, he is eliminated as a suspect. But the blood test was wrong. Later, the forensic chemist who ran that test, a woman named Joyce Gilchrist, was fired from the Oklahoma City Police Department. The FBI had found that she'd misidentified evidence and made serious mistakes in some of her cases. She denied it and was never charged with a crime. One of the lingering questions when you look at the case is why didn't

Nebraska have those samples retested here? I mean, why didn't anybody think? I wonder, I mean, he's type B. We have him blocks away from Wilson's apartment that, you know, the night of the murder. In fact, they had determined that Bruce Allen Smith's grandmother had lived in the same apartment building. And there was, you know, so Smith had been in that apartment building prior to this. He knew the apartment building at least to some degree. And so they had all of the supporting evidence and why no one thought to say, let's run, let's test his blood one more time.

By the time police matched Bruce Allen Smith's DNA to Helen Wilson's murder in 2008, he'd been dead for 16 years. He'd been arrested over the years for theft, drug possession, and rape, and died in 1992. In 2008, a task force was put together to look again at the 1989 investigation, the evidence from the apartment, and the new DNA results. You've got to remember it's a small apartment, right? And there's furniture tipped over, and there's conflict in there. And if you add Bruce Allen Smith to the mix, you've now got eight people in this very small apartment having quite a tussle. And yet, not a single speck of DNA from any of the six is found in the apartment.

Joseph White, Tom Winslow, and Joanne Taylor were still in prison for Helen Wilson's murder. The other three had already served their sentences and had been released. The task force included members of the Beatrice Police Department, the Sheriff's Office, the Nebraska State Patrol, and representatives from the county. The Gage County prosecutor in 2008 was a member of the task force. And he told me that he remembers clear as a bell that, you know, all these prosecutors and all these cops are in this room. And they'd gone over all this stuff. And they suddenly looked at each other and said, oh, my God, these people didn't do this. We've got to get them out of jail.

In the fall of 2008, Joseph White, Tom Winslow, and Joanne Taylor were released. Altogether, the six people convicted of Helen Wilson's murder had spent more than 70 years in prison. As Joseph White walked down the courthouse steps on the day of his release, reporter Joe Dugan walked with him. I was struck by he was not overly emotional. He didn't hug his attorney or have a big, huge smile on his face. He said, it's been a long, hard road, and I'm glad it's over. On his first day out of prison, Joseph White ate a cheeseburger at McDonald's and bought a cell phone at Walmart. He got on a Greyhound bus to go visit a Buddhist monk who he'd met while in prison, and then got on a plane back to his hometown in Alabama. What did he say about listening to what the others had said happened that night? You know, was he shocked that they had made up this story?

He just said, I, you know, essentially I'm paraphrasing, but he said, they were afraid. I understand fear. And he was disappointed, obviously, but he didn't blame them. He didn't hold anger or resentment toward those who had testified against him. And I was just shocked by that response. When people feel trapped, when they're threatened, they will confess to something they didn't do. And another note is all of their, the defense attorneys,

I mean, it sounded like these clients were guilty. So I think in good faith that the defense attorney said, hey, they've got you on this. You either plead and you get, you know, a moderate sentence or you run the risk of going on death row. Joanne Taylor told Joe Dugan in an interview, quote, I was dumb, and I did what I had to do to save my life. She told him she was never in Helen Wilson's apartment,

she hadn't seen Joseph White and Tom Winslow attacking Helen Wilson, and that she had said she was there because investigators had told her they had evidence that proved her guilty. In early 2009, the task force went before the Nebraska Board of Pardons. After looking at all of the evidence in the case and reexamining the 1989 investigation, they found that the so-called Beatrice Six could not have been in the apartment on the night of the murder. Quote,

Not beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond all doubt. It was the first time that anyone in Nebraska had been exonerated because of DNA evidence. At that time, Nebraska never had a DNA exoneration case and had no mechanism for people who were wrongly accused and convicted of crimes to seek compensation as a result of that. The Nebraska state legislature quickly passed a law that would provide compensation to people who had been wrongly convicted. The maximum payout was $500,000. They awarded $500,000 to Joseph White on the grounds that he had never admitted guilt and he had not testified or given incriminating statements

against the others. They later paid settlements to the other five, too. I think in the end, Nebraska paid out a combined total of $2 million to all of the six. Joseph White got a job working at a factory. He got engaged to his high school sweetheart and reconnected with a son who was a baby when he went to prison. And then in 2011, a few months after he was awarded the settlement from the state, he was killed in a workplace accident. He was 48. His mother told reporter Joe Dugan, I was so glad that he had this time of happiness and freedom.

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It's never too late to try new things. And it's never too late to reinvent yourself the all-new reimagined nissan kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure from the design and styling to the performance all the way to features like the boast personal plus sound system you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new reimagined nissan kicks learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. Before his death, Joseph Light and several of the others had filed a federal lawsuit

arguing that their civil rights had been violated by the investigation. They sued Gage County and several of the people who had led the investigation in 1989, like Sheriff's Deputy Burt Searcy and part-time deputy Wayne Price, who had also worked as a psychologist. In law school, you're told, sue everybody. And so we ended up suing a lot of people and then getting evidence back to see what their involvement in it was. Lawyer Jeffrey Patterson. And what we had to show was that the investigators were deliberately indifferent

to our client's known constitutional rights. Lawyers for the six argued that Bert Searcy knew that he had unreliable witnesses and that the physical evidence found at the scene did not perfectly match the suspects. They also argued that he had coached or coerced several of the six to supply false evidence against each other. They argued that Wayne Price had taken advantage of his relationship as a therapist with two of the six, and that he had encouraged several of them to essentially invent evidence in their dreams. And the lawsuit argued that the county should be held liable too, because the sheriff of Gage County had instituted policies

which had let it all happen. The case took years to work through the courts. It finally went to trial in 2014. I believed all along that there was no possibility of settling, and the reason why is that the people in Gage County were just adamant that Joseph White and Tom Winslow raped and murdered Mrs. Wilson, and they were not going to back away from it. Even after the Beatrice Six were officially pardoned by the state of Nebraska, there were

people who still believed that they had been there on the night of the murder. In 2014, Helen Wilson's daughter, Jan Hausman, spoke with reporter Joe Dugan. She said, quote, How can you be wrongly convicted when you plead guilty? I feel like they were there, and I'll never feel any different. Obviously, this crime was just devastating for their family. Helen was deeply loved and cared for.

And so for having thought for almost 20 years that the killers were behind bars and now being told that the case didn't happen the way it had been testified to in a court of law, I think they were in shock. They were like, oh, we got closure. You know, after all those years, they finally found out who killed our grandmother, our aunt, our mom, and now they're taking that away from us. So I think there was a lot of anger. Because it would have been just too wild that you would have had someone confess to something that they didn't have anything to do with. Yeah, it's hard for you or I to believe, and it's not our mom who was

murdered. It's hard to believe, and I can't stress enough how much they trusted Burt Searcy. And Burt was still telling them that he was right. He also, you know, spread the belief and the theory that Bruce Allen Smith was just a seventh perpetrator and it didn't show at all that the others didn't have something to do with it. And I think there was a fair amount of skepticism among people in Gage County, especially anybody who had connection to law enforcement or the Wilson family. At the same time, one of the Beatrice Six, Deborah Sheldon, still believed that she'd been there on the night of the murder. She wrote in her pardon application,

I was present and observed Joseph White and Thomas Winslow on top of Helen Wilson. Debbie kept saying, well, I can still see being there. And in fact, Joanne Taylor, to this day, has visions of holding a pillow over Mrs. Wilson's face, something that Joanne understands is not true, is part of a delusion, but it's still something that she can visualize. Both of them have a history of mental illness and intellectual disabilities, so Debbie Sheldon is probably the most puzzling and difficult to understand, except that she does have some mental disabilities, and she's highly prone to suggestion as well. During the civil trial, Sheriff's Deputy Bert Searcy testified about the 1989 investigation that he had led. He said he wasn't only focused on the physical evidence. He said he was following leads as they came up. He also said it was common for suspects to lie or change their stories during interrogations.

The jury deliberated for three days, but they couldn't come to a unanimous agreement about each claim. The judge declared a mistrial. The Beatrice Six decided to try again. Two years later, they had another trial. Bert Searcy took the stand again. He essentially, you know, defended his investigation. He didn't remember a lot of the, a lot of answers to a lot of the questions. That was sort of his fallback, you know, response. I don't recall, I don't recall, I don't recall. But when he did answer,

he always answered in a sort of defiant fashion that, you know, indicated that he had stood behind his investigation. During his testimony, Burt Searcy said that he had not carried out a reckless investigation or manufactured evidence. Lawyer Jeffrey Patterson asked Burt Searcy about factual errors in his informant's statement. The informant, a local teenager, told him that Joanne Taylor had confessed to her at 7.30 on the morning after the murder, while police cars were outside Helen Wilson's apartment. But the police weren't actually called until hours later. Burt Searcy said he hadn't investigated the factual errors before using them to obtain warrants for Joanne Taylor and Joseph White's arrests. And Searcy defended the errors.

He claimed that he knew that these errors were wrong, but that he included them because that's what he was told. And I just thought that was astounding that, you know, here he was admitting that he was submitting information that he knew was factually incorrect in order to get the court's blessing to arrest these people. I think the county argued, tried to argue that Burt Searcy's investigation followed the standards of the time and based upon the limits of forensics and so on and so forth. But Deputy Searcy admitted that he gave no consideration to the crime scene evidence. His investigation was really about a sharp focus on proving the guilt of these people because he had a theory.

Bert Searcy said on the stand that there was more to the investigation than just forensics. And he said, quote, there were seven people involved. Wayne Price, who had interacted with some of the six as both a psychologist and a sheriff's deputy, also testified. He felt he always identified himself as a sheriff's investigator whenever he was talking to any of the six. So he tried to absolve himself by saying that he was always a sheriff's investigator, not a therapist, not a psychologist, even though he'd had professional therapeutic

relationships with a couple of these defendants. So in their minds, I'm not sure what they were thinking. They certainly could have seen him as a doctor who was there to help them. In fact, he's, you know, gathering evidence that will help convict them. And he also sort of said, I had this ancillary role. I was not an investigator. I was just there to sort of advise and help these six recover their memories. There was also discussion about the Type B blood. Lawyers for the six said that in 1989,

tests had shown that the Type B blood they'd found at the scene didn't completely match the one suspect they'd arrested with Type B blood, Kathy Gonzalez. And yet that was never sort of explored or explained in the 1989 trial of Joseph White. And all of that information really became clear. I thought the plaintiffs did, you know, just a tremendous job of showing that there was ample evidence in 1989 to raise doubt, to even bring a prosecution against any of these six people. The biggest thing for, at least for the White family, and for Tom Winslow, and Joanne and Kathy too, was to prove to the world that they were innocent, that they didn't do this. Because again, people in Gage County were just adamant that they did. In their closing arguments, a lawyer for Bert Searcy and the other defendants from the county said,

Deputy Searcy did the best job he could do with what he had. One of the lawyers for the Beatrice Six said that the jury should decide that, quote, this must never happen again, that the harm is too catastrophic.

This time, the jury came to a unanimous decision. They agreed with the six on many of their claims that the investigators from the Gage County Sheriff's Office had conducted a reckless investigation and had manufactured false evidence. This was not just simply negligence. The actions of the Gage County Sheriff's Department, you know, shocked the conscience. And when you think about the tremendous power that we afford to our law enforcement system and our criminal justice system, and when it goes awry, it can go terribly awry,

and the system is tremendously reluctant to admit its mistakes. Bert Searcy and Wayne Price were held liable, as was Gage County. In total, the jury awarded the six more than $28 million. And there were lots of discussions that this could literally bankrupt the county. The county appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the court decided not to hear the case. And in 2019, the jury's decision in favor of the Six was upheld. Almost universally, people in Gage County felt that this was, you know, that they

were being wronged. It was wrong for them to have to pay this huge sum of money for something that had happened so long ago. Now, I'm going to tell you this. My clients know a little bit more about paying for something that somebody else did than anybody in Gage County knows. The county raised property and sales taxes. They got money from their insurance carriers. And they started making payments to the six. Do you think that at the time the investigators really believed that they had solved this?

You know, that they had gotten all of the parts and they were showing how it fit together? I certainly believe that Bert Searcy believed that Joseph and Tom raped Mrs. Wilson, no matter what the forensic evidence said. I'm convinced that he believed that, even though it is an impossibility. I believe that they thought that Joanne was involved in somehow, because Joanne just had a really bad reputation when she was in Beatrice in 1982 and 83. And the other ones, they just were just collateral damage trying to find somebody with type B blood. We reached out to Bert Searcy, and he declined to comment.

The county made its final payments to the six in March of 2023. Two months before the final payment, Kathy Gonzalez, the last of the six to be arrested, and the only one with type B blood, died at the age of 62. Her obituary said she faced adversity that never really left her alone, yet she always refused to let it define her. I think something that Kathy Gonzalez said to me sums it all up better than anything I could say. I drove out and knocked on her door, and she let me in. We talked for three or four hours.

And at the end of the interview, she looked at me and she said, they needed a bunch of disposable people, and it was us. ¶¶ ¶¶ Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, Gabrielle Burbey, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Catherine Huddle and Joe Dugan co-reported a Lincoln Journal Star series about the Beatrice Six in 2009 called

Presumed Guilty. We've got a link to it on our website. Special thanks to Nanfu Wong, whose documentary series about the Beatrice Six is called Mind Over Murder You can watch it on HBO Max Julian Alexander makes original illustrations

for each episode of Criminal You can see them at thisiscriminal.com And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus. Once you sign up, you can listen to criminal episodes without any ads, and you'll get bonus episodes with me and criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr, too. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus.

We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation.

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