Criminal - This is Criminal

Episode Date: September 9, 2016

To celebrate Criminal's 50th episode, we check in with some of our most memorable guests including Fran Schindler from Episode 17: "Final Exit," Dan Stevenson from Episode 15: "He's Neutral," Corporal Scott Foster from Episode 29: "Officer Talon," and Marian Tolan from Episode 18: "695-BGK." 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. 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

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. At one time, I was in a co-ed prison. That was really nice, you know, for a drug addict girl.

Why? Why was it really nice? Well, there was about 200 women and 800 men. That's why. I mean, I would just be whoever's girlfriend had the dope. That's what girls do when they're drug addicts. A lot. She just kind of rolls her eyes, and she opens the door real slowly, and she grabs she grabs like a couple of hundreds and a couple of fifties and I could see clear as day that it wasn't all of anything and she puts the envelope

and she slides it back and I didn't even pick it up I just looked at it and I said you can this is one of the only times I ever actually spoke during a robbery I said you can do better than that and she puts her you you know, hands up, you know, kind of like this shrug motion, palms up, and she goes, that's all I got. You know, it's a little fun sometimes to see how people react when they have that morphine in them. Owls are one of the only birds in the world that have microscopic feathers that go all the way down their legs, down their toes, on their feet, all the way to the talons. And they look like little fibers.

Not feathers like you're thinking, but fibers. And before I could explain how I was going to search her, she started undressing in the middle of the parking lot to give me back the petrified wood. Just massive amounts came down out of her chest. Yes, very much so. This concept about somebody killing a tree and then getting prosecuted for it is just not, I mean, that just doesn't happen at all. I mean, you never hear about that. He said, young man, you don't know half of the story.

I said, what are you talking about? He said, well, I'm the officer who caught the killers who killed your mom. For the past two and a half years, we've brought you stories of people who, as we like to say, have done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. And we've met absolutely fascinating people. People like Mr. Pete, a man who lived his entire life locked away from the world in a hospital for leprosy patients. A hospital that was briefly also a minimum security prison. Mr. Pete told us he hoped to die there.

I'm told to be getting out now. I'm almost 85 years old. So this is it. Put me in a nice shady pecan tree. You plan to be buried at Carville here? Yeah. You have your choice. I know my family are not going to take me home. It costs too much money to ship the body.

Pete did not get his wish to live the remainder of his life there, but he's doing well in a nursing home in Baton Rouge. We checked in on him and learned he fared the recent floods just fine. And people like Tommy Wall, a man who spent more than 100 days in jail because of a wrongful child pornography charge. Every time someone sees his face, they say he's Tommy Wall. That's the boy they arrested. Even though they may know or they may not know, he can never live it down. You just don't have a charge of pedophilia and outlive it. You just can't outlive that.

When we left Tommy, he hadn't even been out of jail for two months. He was having trouble leaving the house. He'd drive down the street, change his mind and turn around and go home. He felt incredibly alienated. But people had started reaching out to him over text message. Can you read it? Well, it was. It says, Hey, buddy, wishing you best Merry freaking Christmas.

And then she goes to say, I have thought about you for months, and I hope you are doing well. I really, truly hope your holidays are special for 2015. And God bless you. Keep your head up. Love you. Hope to see you soon.

That was a year and a half ago. Tommy now has a new job with a building company. His old job never did hire him back. This week he wrote to us, slowly I'm getting back after the damage. I have no complaints. You press forward. So here we are, 50 episodes in. And for our 50th, we're marking the occasion by checking back in with some of our most memorable guests from the last couple of years. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. To choose which stories we'd revisit, we asked you to tell us who you'd most like to hear from again.

So that's what we have for you today. Let's start with one of our most popular episodes, number 15. It's called He's Neutral, and it's about a man in Oakland, California, who was fed up with crime in his neighborhood. People buying and selling drugs, sex workers. But what annoyed Dan Stevenson the most was the junk, mattresses and furniture and garbage just piling up outside of his house. Here's a little bit from that episode. So you would wake up in the morning sometimes to like eight feet, to like an eight-foot pile of crap.

Yeah, yeah. And if the city didn't come fast enough, it could get higher. Because once you have, it's like a magnet. Once you've got a stack of stuff, other people think, oh, there's an idea. And they keep stacking it. So what did you decide to do about it? Well, that was, that is a good question. Lou and I discussed this for quite some time,

and we came up with the idea of a Buddha, to put a Buddha there. Are you Buddhist? No, we have nothing to do with Buddhism at all. But you figured if there's one thing that might help here, it's Buddha. Well, yeah, because he's neutral. I mean, if we threw Christ up there, he's controversial. Everybody's got a deal about him. But Buddha, nobody seems to be that perturbed in general about a Buddha.

So Dan and Lou had made up their minds, and it turns out they had a lot of options. You know, we looked at the different ones, and she picked out one that she liked the most. Because, you know, they come out of a concrete cast. So some of them look more mellow than others. Lou went off to Ace Hardware and picked one out. Which, you know, she brought home and I liked him. You know, he looked cool to me.

And then he sat in the basement for about three or four months because I couldn't figure out a way to put him over there without having him stolen or ruined. And those things would have really pissed me off. So finally I came up with a plan. Dan attached the Buddha to the concrete. And what happened is that little by little, the Buddha became more and more ornately decorated, was painted, and then painted again. He has a house around him, and flags and flowers, incense.

It became a real shrine, a gathering place for members of Oakland's Vietnamese Buddhist community, which is mostly the work of one family. Here's Veena Vo and her husband, with some translating help from their son, Cook Vo. Veena comes every morning at 7 a.m. to pray. Every day, morning, 7 o'clock. Every day, one day, two times. 7 o'clock and 4 o'clock. 6 o'clock, I go home. Every day. I make over here.

I make, me and my husband make over here. In the past, Mr. Dan put Buddha in the rock, you know? me and my husband make over here. My dad says all day to Dan here, we ask the city council to let us build the shrine to make it all happen. We ask all the neighbors as well to help us put this together so we can have a peaceful shrine here and make the neighbors calm down a little bit so we can have a peaceful shrine here and make the neighbors calm down a little bit so we can have a peaceful mindness and tranquility.

The Vo family keeps the shrine in beautiful condition, sweeping and tidying. Since this episode aired, many of you have visited the Buddha and sent us photos, so we've been able to watch it as it gets more elaborate. Here's what Dan told us about the whole situation the first time we spoke with him. How many people are coming on a daily basis, would you say, to see the Buddha? Oh, at least 70.

A day? A day, yeah. And then there's also the tourist thing. They'll knock on my door, and they're from Minneapolis, and somebody on Facebook posted something. You know, they want to take my picture with them in front of the booth. It's just for me, you know, as cynical as I am, this is like, what is happening? But that's not the end of the story. Oh, the crime has pretty much disappeared in a sense. The drug dealing

definitely is gone, and so is the prostitution. I mean, there's none, zero, within quite a distance from our area now. But it's a slow process that I didn't really notice it happening, and didn't even think of it in those terms until I read it in the paper. In September, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle did a story on Dan and the Buddha and asked the Oakland Police Department for the updated crime statistics for the neighborhood. Here's what he wrote.

Since 2012, when worshipers began showing up for daily prayers, overall year-to-date crime has dropped by 82%. We checked in with Dan a few weeks ago. We're still living in the same house, yes. And Buddha and Buddha's activities have grown exponentially, I guess. So he's very big in town so there's every once in a while somebody will knock on the door and come in and tell me that they're working on trying to find a

new home for the Buddha legally they're they've got some suits I understand against the Buddha being there because it's public property technically. And I mean, this is the new thing. They're not going to tear him out yet. They just want to have a new home. Like I have anything to say about it one way or the other. And I tell them, I don't think you understand the magnitude of Buddha being there, but do whatever you think you got to do. I mean, that's out of my hands.

So even though this is on public land, you kind of did it illegally, putting it out there. You are still sort of seen as the owner. Well, it seems that way. I mean, I tried to explain it to the city that the shrine's there because it's there. And that's where it is. It's not something you move to someplace else and everybody's going to traipse over there. He's there for some reason. I mean, you know, originally I put him in there to stop the garbage and all that kind of stuff,

which that works. So, I mean, I'm done. So whether you like it or not, you're the keeper of the Buddha. Oh, goodness. You're stuck with him. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, that's the role that seems to have been laid down there. Are you kind of famous?

It kind of feels like you're a little bit famous. A little bit famous. I don't know about that. That's pretty funny, though. A little bit famous. What's that mean? I think it's probably better than a lot famous. I think all you'd ever want would be a little bit famous.

Yeah, well, there's no money in it, I'll tell you that much. One other little update is that Dan says a second Buddha has popped up a few blocks away. It's not as fancy, and Dan says he has no idea who could have installed it. I am known as an exit guide. I sit with people who have made a decision and made a choice to end their lives on their own terms. When we first heard about Fran Schindler, her previous life as a nurse, and her life now as an exit guide, we knew that we wanted to talk to her. Not just because her work seemed so interesting, but also because of the fact that she was possibly doing

something illegal. We asked her to join us at our live show in Durham, North Carolina, in early 2015 for a conversation, which we recorded. I'm a volunteer with an organization that supports an individual's right to choose to end their lives if they are mentally competent and suffering intolerably from a physical illness. So they call, you go through a rather rigorous process to make sure that everything's above board. And then you go there and what you do is act as a guide to educate and help them understand what the process will be. But what happens when you go is that what your organization has found to be the most effective, peaceful, whatever word you might like to use, way, is to place a, an individual will place a bag over their head, and that bag will be connected in some

way to a source of gas, which will create a peaceful death. How long does it take for someone to die in that manner? Our preferred method is, as you say, the use of an inert gas that requires the use of a hood. It is easy, it's 100% effective, and it's peaceful. Once a person pulls that hood down over their head, they are unconscious in 5 to 10 seconds. That's all they know. And they will die within 15 to 20 minutes when their entire brain and brainstem shuts down. How many deaths have you been present for? I have been a compassionate presence at the bedside of 30 people. Since we spoke with Fran a year and a half ago, the number of people she sat with at their death has climbed to almost 40. She's 77 now, still traveling all

around the country, sitting with people in the last moments of their lives. And things have changed since we last spoke. Our preferred method remains theated with air, so it is no longer effective. The Final Exit Network is now recommending the use of nitrogen, which Fran says is as effective as helium was and works the same way. One of her most recent cases was with a woman with ALS. She was pretty far gone before they really decided what she had. But she was paralyzed from the waist down. But by the time we got there, she still had full functioning of her hands and arms and could do everything. But while all this was going on, before she knew about us, she tried to end her life.

And I'm not going to say what she used, but she was smart. She's a trained nurse. She tried three times. The first time she was out for a while, and her husband promised her that he wouldn't call EMS or anything. He would just be there for her while she woke up. And then they kind of regrouped until she felt a little stronger. She tried again, upping things, and she was out longer. She still woke up. And he sat at home with her through all of this alone. She tried one more time. And she was out four days. And that man sat in the house waiting for his wife to die. And he said he was terrified. He said, I went down there one time, he said,

and I almost thought I would have to put a pillow over her face. And she opened her eyes and he couldn't do it. And she woke up again after four days. I do not know how this woman was not already brain dead, but she wasn't. She woke up. She's just fine. She learned about us from her son who happened to work for the sheriff's department in the town we were in. That gave me a start. Oh my God, this guy works for law enforcement? Nope. They contacted us. I visited them.

And actually, I only waited two days from the first visit until I went back. She wanted to go the minute I got there. I said, we can't do that. You've got to be absolutely sure about all of this. And she said, I just don't think I can ever get dead. And so I said, I promise you, you will be dead. And I promise you, I will never leave you until I am absolutely certain that you are dead. And her husband was so relieved, I cannot tell you, he had tears in his eyes. He thought that we were just going to come there and talk to them, and then we would leave,

and he would be alone with her again. But there have been some legal challenges. In May of 2015, a Minnesota court ruled that the Final Exit Network had assisted in a suicide based on speech alone, that providing instructions was blueprint enough to be considered assisting. The court found that the Final Exit Network had committed a felony by not only assisting a suicide, but also interfering with the death scene. They were ordered to pay $33,000 in fines. The thing about that verdict being rendered makes it such that some states that still have the words advising and encouraging in their statute could come after us just for speaking with someone if they chose to do that. So when Fran was contacted by a woman in Minnesota, she realized she was going to need to be creative.

The woman's name is Faith Riverstone. She's 47 years old and suffering from phrenotemporal dementia. She came to my house. I had her stay at my home. I educated her in my home. Everything she needed to know. So because of this legal ruling, you couldn't actually talk to her about any of these things that deal with death or end of life in the state of Minnesota. She had to come to North Carolina. That's right.

And then did you bring her back to Minnesota? Yes, I did. We went back on the plane. I stay in touch with her by phone. And I will know when she wants to end her life, she will have to find a place outside of Minnesota to end her life. She talked about she wished she could go someplace where there was a nice lake and woods and she could have several days of just enjoying the quiet and the woods and the lake and then she would end her life. Wherever she goes, I will go with her. She knows that. I will not abandon her. I don't know when this will be. She will have to call it herself.

And she calls me, so she's still mentally competent. She knows who I am. She can call me. So, so far, so good. Fran says she gets a lot of messages from people seeking her help. Many come in the middle of the night. And while she has to turn away most everyone, she does respond. And all I can say is I am so sorry for your suffering and the tragic

circumstances this disease has caused in your life. However, the legal risk to the network is simply too great and we cannot offer you any services. And you know what? Very often, they write back and say, thank you for responding to me. Go figure. I mean, they want to be heard, at least. © transcript Emily Beynon This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. issues should you ultimately watch out for. And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life.

So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Almost a year after we first spoke with Fran, we drove out to Haw River, North Carolina, to meet two police dogs named Talon and Vader, and their owner, Corporal Scott Foster of the Hillsborough Police Department. We had no idea what to expect. I certainly never thought that I would end the day in a gigantic padded suit, basically offering myself up as bait during attack training. We went because we'd read that Scott had retired his police dog Talonon and was just a few months into working with his new dog, Vader. The dogs did their best to live together at Scott's home, along with a third German shepherd, a female named Dutch. Here's a little bit from that first meeting. Can you imagine if Talon saw Vader and you drive away in the police car? It would have to be heartbreaking. And that's why I go to such extent with the different kennels and the different parts of my

yard, just to make sure it doesn't happen. So, you know, it may be silly to a certain point that, you know, I'm putting, you know, human emotions on an animal that may not feel it, but I don't want him to see Vader in equipment that he would recognize and me in a uniform that he would recognize leaving in what at one time was his car. And in terms of keeping them kind of separate, I mean, it's like you're living these two lives. It's like you're cheating on Talon with Vader. Yeah, it's funny you should say that because there has been different times that it has happened where I've slipped up and one's potentially seen me with the other one.

It's that very feeling like you just described. It's almost like, oops, I got caught, you know, kind of thing. But honestly, I think it's worth it. They put so much into protecting me, serving the community. And I just really feel that I owe it to them to try to do everything I can, and especially Talon, to, you know, let him hold on to that dignity that he had for so long. Scott just put his house on the market. He says he doesn't think his place has enough room for all the dogs, which seems a little wild, because it actually looks like a dog paradise. But Scott says until maybe one day, when Talon and Vader can be together,

he wants to make sure they both have enough room, so neither one feels like they're getting the bum deal. This is really nice down here. This is all yours. Yeah, this is all my property. This was truly the selling point, more so even than the house. So the update is that Scott and his family actually did move to accommodate the dogs. We drove out to the new house, which is on a huge piece of property with lots of trees for shade. And the biggest thing thing a creek for swimming

so before i would have to you know the two kennels i had i would have to walk them past each other um the way my yard was laid out before and so now there's really no need to even walk them past with his kennel being in the front it just works out really well tyler she's? She's okay. She's okay. Okay. So would you say the dogs were the real impetus for the move? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, the dogs were the only reason for the move, to be honest with you. We were really happy with that house, but it just wasn't working out in the neighborhood, and I felt like the dogs weren't able to just get out and just enjoy themselves, you know, like they can here. Even though I had sort of a big, a big lot there, you know, I like the idea of them just being able just to run, especially in the woods.

I'll take you to their swimming hole. Come here Dutch. Come here. So these dogs have spent their summer swimming? Yes, exactly. Yeah, nearly almost daily. And do you still, are you still training with Talon as though, you know, just to keep him sharp? Because it's something he did enjoy for so many years and it doesn't hurt anything. So if it can kind of keep his mind occupied or make him feel like he's still serving a purpose, you know, it's well worth it. And daily, you know, again, daily I let them out. They spend more time out of the kennel than they do in the woods. They both just absolutely love being in the woods.

Maybe to Talon it harkens back to his patrol days, you know, being in the woods. Their kennels are now on opposite sides of the house. Vader stays in a kennel that's close to Scott's police car so that Talon never has to see Vader going to work. And Talon and Dutch live in the backyard in a kennel next to the woods with a direct view of the pool. So I think we talked last time about maybe the potential that one day Talon and Vader could meet and be pals. And how is that going? I wish that could be the happy ending. You know, I wish that I could follow up with that story and say they're best friends now. And, you know, Talon's taking Vader

under his wing and trying to teach him, but that's not the case. I still know that there's going to be a fight if I put them together. So it would only be self-serving to me. I don't think it would be any good for them. So I just, I try to resist even attempting it. When I was in the ambulance, I was telling the EMTs, I was like, you know, what about my parents? Where are my parents? Like, I need my parents. And they just kept pushing me down, cutting my shirt open, you know, putting the oxygen mask on me. And then, obviously, you know, they put me out.

But when I came to, I remember someone squeezing my hand. I kind of opened my eyes a little bit, and I saw that it was my parents. And I was so drugged up, I couldn't keep my eyes open. And I remember my mom saying, do you remember what happened? And I shook my head yes. And she said, everything? And I shook my head yes. The way Robbie Toland's family describes it,

he and his cousin were just walking up to their home after a late night meal. So why is Toland now hospitalized, a police officer's bullet lodged in his liver? It's a question sparking allegations of racism in this mostly white Houston suburb of Bel Air. In December of 2008, 23-year-old Robbie Toland was shot in the chest at close range by a white police officer. Robbie Toland is African American.

The shooting took place in Robbie's own driveway in front of his parents. We went to Texas to interview the Tolan family, and the episode about them is called 695 BGK. Here's a part of it. My wife has fought every step of the way. Every time we got turned down, she went to the next step. That step got turned down, we went to the next step. I feel that Bel Air figured that we've got some black people here, they're going to go away. He's been proven not guilty, it's going to die down. But they don't know my wife.

In October of 2013, they appealed again, this time to the U.S. Supreme Court. About 10,000 petitions are submitted to the Supreme Court every year. They only take on about 80, and they took the Toland's case. In May of 2014, all nine justices agreed unanimously, which is remarkable in its own right, that the Fifth Circuit was wrong to dismiss the Toland's case. It's called an error correction. Basically, the justices criticized the Fifth Circuit

for only considering Sergeant Cotton's version of events and not what Robby and Marion say happened. So they will get to tell their story to a jury. That was where we left off. In September of 2015, the Tolan family did go back to court. Here's Robbie's mother, Marion Tolan, with the update. We were scheduled to go to trial on September the 15th. And on the 11th, at a pre-trial hearing, the judge dismissed our... dismissed the city, our claim against the city. And then on Sunday, we filed a motion to have her recuse herself, which made her more angry. So on that Monday, the 14th of September, she dismissed our expert witnesses.

She would not allow Ken Griffey Jr. to give a testimony. You know, she dismissed all our expert witnesses, but she didn't dismiss the city's, you know, the officer's expert witnesses. Can you imagine? So what did you decide to do? Well, I wanted to fight. Robbie couldn't take it anymore. And he basically had a breakdown. And he couldn't.

He said, it's already been seven years, and we're not going to get justice, and he settled. The family accepted a settlement of $110,000 from the city of Bel Air. You know, with his emotional state so fragile by then, you know, he had just taken all he could take. So you could have made the choice to go to a jury, but you felt because they had taken many of the witnesses off the table, and it would only have been Robbie, and Robbie was feeling overwhelmed, that you would settle. That's right. That's right. And it was never about the money anyway. It was about fighting for justice. It was about, you know, so many people who are victims to police brutality don't have the means to fight, you know, or even willing to fight. And we were willing.

I was willing to fight. But at the end of the day, Robbie still has a bullet in his liver. He still lives with the scars, emotional scars and physical scars. And we couldn't put him through that again. How is Robbie now? He's still, you know, he's still bruised and damaged. And every time there's another case and you're like, wow, when is it going to change? When are things going to get better for our kids?

It might not be in our lifetime, but we're going to, we're plugging away. When Sergeant Jeffrey Cotton, the man who shot Robbie Tolan, left the courthouse, he told reporters, I'm just glad it's over. So that's it for our 50th. Thanks very much for listening. We'll be back with a new story in a couple of weeks. We want to say thanks to some people who've helped us tremendously behind the scenes. Thanks to Eric Menel. He was with us when we launched this thing and he's missed. And to Carol Jackson, Russ Henry, Freddie Jenkins, Becky Martinez, and David Brower.

And thanks to everyone at Radiotopia, especially Carrie Hoffman, Roman Mars, Kathleen Unwin, and Julie Shapiro. Thank you. makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best podcasts around. Shows like The Memory Palace, hosted by Nate DiMaio. The Memory Palace is a show about history, but it's so much more than that. In these tiny, perfect little episodes, Nate holds forgotten aspects of American life up to the light.

They're fascinating and somehow full of emotion in unexpected ways. Go listen. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. And thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia from PRX. is in use to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox Cosmetic if you have a

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