The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - Just Say You’re Sorry | 5. The Serial Killer Whisperer

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

A young law student called Ashely is the first to read Driskill’s letter and becomes obsessed with his story. The Innocence Project of Texas take his case and begin working to find evidence that could clear his name. Chammah hunts down crucial leads throwing serious doubt on the informant’s story and on the forensic sketch that led Holland to Driskill in the first place. Holland's star, though, is still rising. He takes on a case that will make him famous, drawing dozens of confessions from America’s most prolific serial killer, Samuel Little. Subscribe to The Binge to get all episodes of Smoke Screen: Just Say You’re Sorry ad-free right now. Click ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. A Somethin’ Else, The Marshall Project & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. The Bench.

Before we start, a warning that this episode contains descriptions of violence. Please listen with care. This time on Just Say You're Sorry. It starts with Ashley frantically telling me and Mike, holy shit, you're not going to believe this. That whole timeline is so shaky. Nobody can say how long she had been dead. He's just sort of a Greek tragedy, you know, because like you want that person to be a hero, and then he's just got this hubris. We're going to start this episode far from Texas, in another state that also has a strong sense of identity and mythology.

California. We're just an hour's drive north of Hollywood, but you wouldn't know it, because prisons tend to look the same wherever they are. A journalist named Jillian Lauren is entering one for the first time. The big gate closes behind you, you know, they gave me a whole lot of shit at the metal detector because of my nose ring. I had to, like, pry my nose ring out. I had a bloody nose.

And my underwire. I had to chew my underwire out of my bra. It was a very feral kind of first introduction to a men's maximum security prison. After all that, Jillian enters a visitation room to interview a prisoner. So he's an old man in a wheelchair. I was a foot from his face. He did something that is very common with narcissists,

talk very quietly. Talk very quietly. His name is Samuel Little He's 78 years old and soft-spoken He's been convicted of three murders But a detective has told Jillian We think he killed other people too Nothing's been proven

So Jillian's just a reporter with a good lead She knows she needs him to trust her Somehow she figures out how to make him laugh It turns out they both like boxing is just a reporter with a good lead. She knows she needs him to trust her. Somehow she figures out how to make him laugh. It turns out they both like boxing. And then... Sam started confessing to me. It was

quite a remarkable moment that I guess I didn't think was going to happen. It was one of these things I jumped into because it sounded really exciting. And also I felt politically and like emotionally motivated. He reveals that he killed numerous women.

A lot of them were sex workers. Jillian had done sex work herself and she felt lucky to have survived. So she feels a sense of mission to these women, who the police and society seem to have ignored. She spends hours with Little, every weekend. He calls her at home. I made myself essential to him.

I mean, I gave up my soul. I talk to him every day. Over more than a month, he confesses to roughly two dozen murders, spanning decades. There's a lot of detail. He tells her what he remembers playing on the radio or about a particular smell in the air. He can draw pictures of many of his victims' faces. But he doesn't know their names. And Jillian doesn't have the resources to match all of these claims to known cases and see if they're true.

And then she finds out she's not the only person visiting this elderly prisoner. And then he starts going, oh yeah, there's a space cowboy. There's a space cowboy named Jimmy. My friend Jimmy. You and Jimmy, you're my only friends. My friend Jimmy. You and Jimmy. You're my only friends. And I'm like, oh, shit. Texas Ranger James Holland doesn't go by the name Jimmy to most people,

but he does with Samuel Little, who he calls Sammy in return. Holland has also been trying to get Little to confess to long-ago murders, and this is the case that will send his career into the stratosphere. From Something Else, The Marshall Project, and Sony Music Entertainment, I'm Maurice Chama, and this is Smokescreen. Just say you're sorry. Episode 5, The Serial Killer Whisperer. Last time, we heard how Larry Driscoll, under the weight of his own confession, and the news that there was a jailhouse informant

ready to testify against him, pleaded no contest to the murder of Bobby Sue Hill. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. But he is still protesting his innocence. Desperate for help, he writes a letter to the Innocence Project of Texas

and waits, wondering if anyone will ever read it. The letter was about two pages long, and it's written in very nice handwriting. I do remember noting that. That letter lands on the desk of a young law student. Her name is Ashley Fletcher. Ever since I was a little girl, I thought that I wanted to be a lawyer. It probably started with watching Legally Blonde. By 2019, she's at the Texas A&M University School of Law in Fort Worth and choosing what to focus on.

I thought that one would be really interesting and have a good impact on somebody's life. So I signed up to take the Innocence Project Clinic. This is common at law schools. Innocence Projects get a deluge of letters from prisoners. So they run special classes for the students to help them find the cases where they might actually be able to help. And Ashley gets assigned the letter from Larry Driscoll. Dear sir, I am actually innocent of this charge, first degree murder.

This case is the first time... In the letter, Driscoll outlines the key reasons he thinks a judge might take a second look at his conviction. I wish the Texas Ranger would have relented in his attack on me when I asked if I needed an attorney. His interrogation lasted three hours the first day with only one bathroom break and one cup of water for the duration. I did not fit the description. I appreciate your earliest response. Sincerely, Larry Driscoll. Ashley is pretty new to law, but she knows these letters tend to sound similar and that some of the authors might not be innocent at all, just desperate. But this letter sticks out, in part because it has a notable addition, a big stack of transcripts from the interrogation. Ashley takes all of it home. Probably all through the night, I had this big ottoman, and I was kind of hunched over to the couch, just reading this binder where I had all the transcripts printed out and highlighting the crazy quotes that I thought were the most shocking things that Ranger Holland said.

What shocks Ashley the most is the way that, as she sees it, Holland uses seemingly innocuous parts of Driscoll's personal history to his own advantage. Which, for Driscoll, was religion, and the fact that he was a vet, and he served our country, and was taught to trust authority. And so he was more vulnerable to the tactics that Holland used. And I think Holland knew that. So she goes to Mike Ware and Jesse Freud, who are teaching the class. You heard from Mike in episode one. He runs the Innocence Project of Texas. Jesse is a criminal defense lawyer who works in Waco, but she's also just like Ashley only a few years ahead. She started working on wrongful conviction cases as a law

student herself. It starts with Ashley frantically telling me and Mike, holy shit, you're not going to believe this. Just the urgency in her voice when she told us this. And it really just really took over our class. She was like, this isn't right. I mean, she was almost traumatized, I think, by what she was seeing going on. You know, the more I listened to her, I thought, you know, this is a reasonable, rational reaction to what we're reading about here. Once we look at it and see kind of the red flags that Ashley saw, the statements were kind of oddly characterized as confessional in nature, when I think if you listen closely again over and over, Larry immediately recants in a way, if you want to call it that, by saying, but I don't, if I did this, I don't remember. To me, if the Texas Rangers are involved, there's a red flag.

Mike was a defense lawyer in the 1980s during what was maybe the most embarrassing debacle involving the Rangers in recent history. The case of Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas became famous as America's most prolific serial killer. He said he'd killed hundreds of people. But it turned out he was lying, probably for attention. Lucas even said he'd driven to Japan to kill someone. Lucas now claims it was law officers themselves that gave him the tools necessary to make up all of those some 600 bogus confessions.

The task force, the convictions, the whole three-ring circus had been based on Henry's evil imagination. The Rangers claim they were just facilitating interviews by other cops, but it was a huge blow to their reputation, a big waste of time and money. And worse, victims' families had been given answers only to have them ripped away again. It's not a chapter the Rangers like to remember, but it's one that sticks out to people like Mike.

And it makes him a little skeptical of the whole Ranger mythology. Through my experience, it seems like they always come in and just kind of screw things up. So Mike and Jesse decide to go deeper. They plan a visit to Larry Driscoll, and they invite Ashley to join them. I was very excited to go and that something was actually happening on the case and that this was actually going to go somewhere, that finally we were going to listen to somebody whose case was so crazy, somebody had finally looked at it. But I don't think it was as exciting once I got there as I thought it was going to be.

It was becoming more real. Driscoll doesn't seem especially excited to see them. He comes off to Ashley as maybe a little suspicious of them. How I left was like, okay, we've got a lot more proving ourselves to do. He doesn't trust us yet. We weren't just going to walk in there and save the day. You know, that was not going to happen.

Getting an innocence project to take your case is a massive achievement, but it's far from a get-out-of-jail-free card. In reality, once you've been convicted, you're always facing an uphill battle to get free. Prisoners have very few opportunities to fight their cases in court. But the Innocence Project of Texas team comes away from the meeting ready to go all in. They start by driving to the key locations in the case, including East Lancaster Street, where Bobby Sue Hill was abducted. We went out to the scene and looked around the scene of where she supposedly got picked up. We looked at the scene where the body was found. They're in a similar position to James Holland and other detectives who tackled this case,

trying to make headway in a part of Fort Worth where nobody sticks around for long. But it's kind of chasing a ghost out there. They do, however, notice some issues with the original timeline of the murder. That whole timeline is so shaky because everybody's so indefinite. Nobody can say how long she had been dead. They actually find one of Bobby Sue Hill's aunts. This woman had told police that she saw Hill alive after the official date she was abducted. Could that be true? Maybe. As we've discussed, memories are often hazy and incomplete and contradictory. So then they look for physical evidence from the case. It turns out that there was some. A cigarette butt found by Hill's body was tested for DNA and led to a suspect. This was not Larry Driscoll. This was one of the dead ends before Driscoll was brought in.

But perhaps DNA holds more answers. One of the easiest ways to show that somebody is actually innocent is to show that their biological material, their DNA, is not where it should be if they were the true perpetrator of this. And so some of the items that we've looked into testing and are in the process of testing is like the duct tape from the bag that was secured over Bobby's body. I believe we've also asked to have tested a number of samples from her sexual assault kit. And none of this stuff was tested way back? None of this stuff was tested.

Why? Because you had a confession. You don't need DNA when you have a confession. That is wild to me. In Holland's own report, he does say they've sent that evidence for testing, but I couldn't find anything about the results. Jesse thinks that because of the confession, the order was either canceled or not added to the files. So now Mike and Jesse go to the Parker County District Attorney, who prosecuted the case, and they ask,

can we run new DNA tests? The DA agrees. Prosecutors don't always do that without a fight, so this is a success in and of itself. I said, okay, but, you know, you're going to pay for it. And we said, yeah, we're going to pay for it. I reached out to the DA, Jeff Swain, about the DNA testing. He responded that nearly all of the evidence had already been tested for DNA.

But because the body was found in running water, there was never really a chance of recovering much to begin with. So for the DA, all the necessary work was done years ago. And none of this new testing is likely to move the needle. While for Mike and Jesse, these tests still represent Driscoll's best chance of freedom. Only time will tell. But there are other things the Innocence Project of Texas can do. Like tell me about the case.

The more light we could shine on this case, the better. Someone with their own investigative perspective could help. We need to do whatever we can to sort of shake this loose, because if the system just, you know, follows its normal course, nothing is ever going to happen on the case. So that's why Mike tipped me off to Driscoll's story. He knew I might follow different threads than what occurred to his own team. But he also told me I wouldn't be the only journalist interested in James Holland. While Mike was starting to look into the case, he saw a piece published in the Los Angeles Times. It was about Holland. The newspaper called him a, quote,

serial killer whisperer. There's this article about, you know, Ranger Holland and his, you know, miraculous miracle of solving all these 100 cases or so from this one guy named Little. So it's not a coincidence that he's the same guy in this case. He is obviously in the confession business.

So while Larry Driscoll is sitting in prison, Holland's star is rising. And that's thanks to another man, the prisoner in California named Samuel Little. Holland has worked his magic on this hardened criminal. Little is now confessing his way towards that title that we just can't seem to let go of, America's most prolific serial killer. While Larry Driscoll's life is standing still, waiting in prison, writing his letters to the Innocence Project of Texas, Texas Ranger James Holland is nonstop.

A few months after interrogating Driscoll, he gets a confession from Christopher Axe, who we met in the last episode. Then, Holland begins an incredible professional run. Later that year, 2015, another guy is convicted after having confessed to Holland. It was a murder committed in 1968. Prosecutors say it's one of the longest gaps between crime and conviction in American history. The next year, Holland convinces a serial killer named William Lewis Reese

to confess to multiple murders, but also to tell him where some of the bodies are buried. I talked to the mother of one of these victims. She had waited nearly 20 years for answers. She called Holland her hero. But even the Reese case is small compared with Holland's next one. In 2017, he's at a conference. He's teaching interrogation techniques.

A detective tells him about Samuel Little. Remember, Little is in prison in California for several murders, but he is suspected of many more. Detectives are having trouble getting him to talk. Holland learns of some potential Texas victims that justify going to California to meet Little. And this is how he meets the journalist, Jillian Lauren. I thought he was wild. Like, I really thought he was kind of a cowboy.

I mean, you know, whether or not he was raised wearing those boots, I mean, I'm pretty sure he, like, wrestled and killed whatever they made him out of. As we heard earlier, Jillian is also interviewing Sam Little, and for the same reason, to get him to confess. Her own life story couldn't be more different than Holland's. Before she was a journalist, in the early 1990s, Jillian was a sex worker, Her own life story couldn't be more different than Holland's. Before she was a journalist in the early 1990s, Jillian was a sex worker, but not on the streets. She was paid as a kind of escort for the Prince of Brunei.

She wrote a memoir about it. An irrelevant fact that I can't not mention here is that she's now married to Scott Schreiner. He's the bass player for the band Weezer. She does radiate rock and roll glamour. Picture piercings, tattoos, hoop earrings. As different as she is from Holland, they share this rare experience of interviewing the same difficult-to-crack serial killer. She sees up close Holland's biggest career success, his star turn, and the reason that for so many people, he's such a hero. Remember, some people think Samuel Little got away with his crimes because nobody cared about his victims. You know, I was sort of starry-eyed for the, you know, American hero, the cowboy.

And also, like, here's my white knight, right? Like, he's fighting for marginalized populations of women who were ignored. And, you know, and that's really my heart. When Holland first learns that she's on his turf, he calls her. I got this Texas call. And so I sat down on my front steps, and I took the call, and it was Jim. And he said, I heard you've been talking to my boy Sammy. So she agrees to help him.

She shares what she's learned from the serial killer. Holland is trying to connect these various claims to real cases to see if they match any unsolved murders floating around in old police department files. Samuel Little seems to have such a great memory of his horrible acts, but is any of this stuff true? Sometime later, Jillian and her husband are at a movie premiere.

She told me his band Weezer did some of the music. So I guess the Weezer thing was relevant after all. Scott and I went to the opening of a movie that his music was in. Oh, it was Cars 2. Yeah, it was Cars 2. A quick shout out to our fact checker, Natsumi Ajisaka, who told me it wasn't Cars 2. Yeah, it was Cars 2. A quick shout out to our fact checker, Natsumi Ajisaka, who told me it wasn't Cars 2. That movie is far too old for this to make sense.

I told Jillian this and she said, oops, it could have been Frozen 2, which also has a Weezer song. Or maybe it was the Grammys. To be honest, it was kind of a relief to talk about a memory error with such low stakes. And really the lesson here is Jillian's on a lot of red carpets. So anyway, here's her memory. And it was whack, like it was big. That's a lot of celebrities. It was like a lot of flashes.

And I had our little kid on my hip. And I get this call from Texas. And like I went and like hid behind a column, and it was Jim, and he said to me, we found her. He said, we found her. They had successfully linked up Little's claims with a cold case, a woman, Agatha White Buffalo, who had been found dead outside a tannery in 1973. The clues Little had been giving out, including the strange smell of the tannery, helped connect the dots. The family was getting an answer after all this time. I just remember him saying, you know, we got her.

And I was like, really? You got her? And he was like, yeah, Jillian, we got her. And I think that was probably my best moment I ever had with Jim. And so surreal with the surroundings and memorable. I also imagine that moment from Holland's perspective. He's calling a glamorous journalist at some Hollywood event. He's come a long way from dingy interrogation rooms in small Texas towns. I wish I'd been able to witness this relationship between the ranger and the journalist. On the one hand, she told me he'd get angry at her, telling her to, quote, stay out of his way. James Holland and I yelled at each other. I

have never had a professional relationship like that. Jim was probably the most challenging and interesting professional relationship of my life. But you can also hear the affection in her voice. She mentioned that he would never say the words marijuana or weed. It was always like grass or something. He talks like he's a fed at Woodstock, you know? A fed at Woodstock. I love that phrase. She learns that he didn't grow up in Texas, so she teases him about the whole cowboy thing.

You know, he told me that he grew up outside of Chicago, so he really, like, wore this cowboy mythology with a choice. This version of James Holland sounds very different from the one I'd encountered in the Driscoll and Axe cases. Those guys were free, living their lives, so Holland had to somehow convince them to confess, even though it might put them in prison. But Samuel Little was already in prison, so Holland's style is less about pressure and more about persuasion.

They eat pizza and drink milkshakes. He massages Little's ego, giving him a feeling of power and control, even suggesting he could move him to a nicer lockup and in style. He was like, I can get you out of here, you know, get you on a fancy plane. You're totally in control of this whole thing. You are the captain of the ship. I just, I'm very impressed by you. I mean, how can you let this work you've done go unnoticed, go unseen?

Holland will do anything. Like, there's something compelling about it and something just really scary. He is very, very smart man and an incredibly fast critical thinker. This is from conversations Jillian had with Holland when they compared their interviewing techniques. In the confessions of Sammy and Jimmy, you know, that rapport

was painful for me as a woman, but also I had respect for it. Jillian says that Holland would sometimes appeal to Little's misogyny, sort of get on his level and say terrible things about women too. He is like, okay, so tell me, who's the fattest bitch

you ever killed? Come on. They're like, and then he did what to her? Nah. Like, oh, oh, bitch. Oh, man. I hate that. You know, they fuck with you.

Into this almost like gross, like bro-y style. It was so bro. I said, what do you think the families are going to say? And he said, I think they want the black and white son of a bitch who's going to solve the murder he said, I think they want the black and white son of a bitch who's going to solve the murder of their family member. And I think if they want somebody to sit with them and pray with them and cry with them, they can find someone else. I'm going to go solve this case. This actually reminded me of a moment in the Driscoll case

when Holland says demeaning things about Bobby Sue Hill. But maybe with certain killers, that's what you've got to do, perform this whole callous act. Perhaps that actually is a service to the victim's families. And Holland's methods were clearly effective. According to the FBI, Sam Little confessed to 93 murders between 1970 and 2005. They've confirmed at least 50 of them,

rendering him, to quote the FBI, the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history. Over the course of 700 hours of interviews while in prison for murdering three women, Little confessed to Texas Ranger James Holland that he'd killed many more. What city did you kill the most in? Miami and Los Angeles. And how many did you kill in Los Angeles?

Los Angeles, approximately 20. So the Los Angeles Times dubs Holland the serial killer whisperer and runs this photo of him in his office, surrounded by Sam Little's drawings of women. Holland does an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS. Wow. These are all of his drawings. These are all his. The first thing I picked up on is how wicked smart he was.

Smart. Oh, like genius. But of course, a certain set of Texans hear about all this and immediately think of that old con artist, Henry Lee Lucas. Most prolific serial killer in history. Haven't we seen this movie before? Jim was very careful to not repeat that. Like, we spoke about it specifically.

So do I think every single one of the confessions is exactly true? No. But I think Sam did his best for most of them. Nobody has proven that Sam Little lied, or that James Holland or Gillian Lauren were in any way duped. Samuel Little died in December 2020. So any further truths won't come from him. Of course, as a good journalist, Jillian Lauren wanted to know why I was looking into James Holland.

I told her all about the Larry Driscoll case. I was curious to hear what she made of the claim that Holland had elicited a false confession. From what I know of him, I don't believe Jim would intentionally coerce a confession. This lines up with the impression I get. Nothing I've seen or read suggests Holland at any point thought he might have an innocent man.

But Jillian does believe he could have got it wrong. It's so sad for me to say, because, you know, I sort of had the same starry eyes about him that everyone did. He's just sort of a Greek tragedy, you know, because, like, you want that person to be a hero, and then he's just got this hubris. He's an Icarus. He like is thrilling to watch, but then you're like, ah, you're a little close to the sun there, buddy.

I think she knows I'm going to find that description of Holland compelling. We live in the age of the anti-hero. We all like to hear about larger-than-life people whose flaws are as interesting as their accomplishments. But it can also sort of blind you, because nobody operates in a vacuum. To take just the example of Samuel Little, there were all these other departments working on those cases. When you zoom out further,

you see how people are the product of their environments. Holland spent his career at the Texas Department of Public Safety, where he had bosses, he had trainings, he was given certain tools. He didn't invent the Reed technique or the idea of buttering up a serial killer. Throughout his cases, as far as we can tell, he followed the rules. But other people wrote the rules. And by 2021, with the Innocence Project of Texas working for Larry Driscoll, some of these rules were starting to be questioned.

A few state lawmakers across the country were beginning to talk about a ban on lying during interrogations. A lot of police departments were turning away from the read technique. And in Texas, there was a movement to ban one of the Rangers' major tools. It's one Holland relied on to identify Driscoll as a suspect in the first place. Forensic hypnosis. As I go deeper and deeper into the Driscoll case, there are times when I feel stuck. The analysis from the Innocence Project of Texas is compelling. They see a wrongful conviction based on a false confession, obtained by an arrogant ranger with tunnel vision.

And we know about Chris Axe, who confessed to the same ranger, but then had his charges dropped because DNA pointed to someone else. But as I learn more about Holland, I see that he is a hero to a lot of people, and often for good reason. Could he really have messed up this investigation so badly that an innocent man went to prison? In other words, am I the one messing up? I've been here before. There are always moments working on a story like this where you begin to doubt everything you think you know. And there are two elements of the case against Driscoll that are still bothering me. I need to look at both of them in more detail.

First, the evidence from the jailhouse informant, the man who says Driscoll confessed to him in the yard at the jail. And then the eyewitness, Michael Harden, who says he saw Bobby Sue Hill being abducted. It was his descriptions that led Holland to Driscoll in the first place. How solid were those descriptions? I'm going to start with the informant, who we're calling John. In the last episode, we heard how he claimed Driscoll confessed to him in the wreckyard of the jail. He was not supposed to be around any inmates because Larry has a bad habit of discussing his case.

So we went to wreck and we were sitting there talking and he actually told me that he did do it. Driscoll said it never happened. I don't know what to do with that. And it's a crucial piece of the puzzle, because when Driscoll agrees to take the plea deal, he believes that John is going to testify against him. So I mentioned the quandary to a journalist in Austin named Pamela Koloff. She's a friend of mine and a bit of a local legend when it comes to reporting on the criminal justice system. She's written extensively about jailhouse a bit of a local legend when it comes to reporting on the criminal justice system. She's written extensively about jailhouse informants.

Pamela tells me, But then she says that John's story is suspicious. Because nobody walks up to a random person in jail and says, here's what I was accused of, much less I did it. That's just not a thing. So why would John have made up this whole story? Well, what if he stood to benefit in some way? On Pamela's advice, I start making public records requests and build a timeline of John's case alongside Driscoll's. First, I get the recording of John talking to investigators.

And it doesn't take long to notice red flags. Here's John. And he told me that he passed the lie detector test by sitting on his legs ahead of time that caused his nerves to go in some kind of reaction or something to cause him to pass. His story makes no sense. In reality, Driscoll failed a polygraph. If Driscoll really did admit to John that he committed the murder, why would he lie about passing a polygraph? Then, buried in a mountain of documents, I find an email from a prosecutor to John's lawyer.

It shows they offered John a prison sentence that was likely more favorable than it would have been otherwise in exchange for telling the story about Driscoll at his murder trial. Armed with this new information, I look for John himself. I find him on Facebook and ask him about what happened. He writes back that Driscoll did confess to him, but then he says that in the end, he actually backed out. He refused to testify

against Driscoll. Why would he do that? That was his ticket to a lighter sentence, right? He writes back, I didn't know enough about his situation. Cryptic. Then I ask, did they offer you any help with your own case? He says, nope. That's a lie. I have the email proving it. But then he stops responding. He ghosts me. The takeaway? We can't prove John was lying, but his story is really flimsy, and he probably stood to benefit from telling it. One more piece of Driscoll's conviction unravels. But that still leaves one final lead I need to follow. Why was Driscoll in the interrogation room in the first place? It all stems from the one eyewitness, Michael Harden, and his description of the man who abducted his girlfriend. Back in episode two, we heard how Harden provided descriptions of the man.

He did this twice, in 2005 and 2014. Remember how these two sketches differed a lot. The old 2005 sketch shows a man with a wide face, strong eyebrows, and a dark mustache. The face in the later sketch, from 2014, has slimmed down, the mustache has almost disappeared, and a pair of eyeglasses has appeared out of nowhere. This second sketch is also age-progressed, meaning they've tried to account for how the face would have changed over 10 years. The vehicle that Bobby Soohill was abducted in also transforms. It goes from a minivan with lots of windows in 2005 to a big work van, mostly without windows, in 2014.

All these changes are crucial, because the later version is arguably a closer fit to Driscoll and the van that he once drove. And it was only after seeing this later sketch that Gene Burks, the pawn shop owner, called in the tip to Holland, pointing him towards Driscoll. I decide to try and track Harden down. This time, it takes a lot more than simply sending a message on Facebook.

But eventually, I find him. How you doing? Hey, how you doing? Good, good to see you. Was this about my girl, my ex-girl? Yeah, this is about Bobby. Harden is in jail. He's been arrested on a nonviolent drug charge.

I show him the sketches. He looked more Hispanic. Do you remember the man, the real man, having a mustache? I remember him having a mustache. Like this? No, kind of like me and you. More like me and you. Like filled out with the beard, I see.

See, that guy there looks a lot pudgier, a lot older. I mean, because I noticed that this guy doesn't really have any kind of beard. No. So, but you said that he did have a bit of a beard. Yeah. Like a goatee. Goatee? Oh, a goatee.

Okay. Okay. That's helpful. Overall, Hardin stands by the second sketch over the first. But you can hear that his memory is perhaps even more hazy now. Is it a beard? Is it a mustache? Is it a goatee? Assuming he's telling the truth about what he remembers, and not everyone thinks he is,

how do we know which memory, which face, and which van is more accurate? I need to take a closer look at how the second sketch came about. Five. Lexi Moore came about. Remember this? This is Victor Patton hypnotizing Harden before the second sketch. Before working on this case, I had heard of forensic hypnosis, and I imagined it to be something from a long time ago, maybe the 1970s. But the fact that it was used in 2014 really stands out to me. I want to know how useful it is as a technique.

Is it possible that it led to a more reliable sketch the second time around? We all think of hypnosis as a truth serum. It's not a truth serum. But we think of it that way because of TV shows and movies where, you know, someone gets hypnotized and then they reveal some deep secret that they were keeping, you know, locked deep inside for a long time. This is Lauren McGaughy.

She writes for the Dallas Morning News. Her reporting has found that forensic hypnosis started in California in the 1970s and spread across the country. Then, over the next four decades, it was debunked by scientists and attacked by lawyers and abandoned in much of the country. But not Texas. Texas has kind of held on to it as long as humanly possible, whereas something like half of the states as of 2020 had either banned the practice

or significantly curtailed its use. Texas had kind of doubled down on it. And this goes, too, for the Texas Rangers. They logged their use of hypnotism, and McGaughy found records of it being used at least 1,800 times over 40 years. But as we know by now, memories are extremely fragile and open to manipulation. McGaughy talked to a lot of psychologists and learned how hypnosis risks changing our memories. There is some proof that you are more highly suggestible under hypnosis. Someone can actually create false memories or fill in the gaps of memories with things that didn't happen.

If you recall something under hypnosis, people have the tendency to believe that that memory is true even more. McGaughy found cases in which the stakes were shockingly high. There was a man on death row named Charles Flores. His lawyers said the only reason he was there was because a witness had been hypnotized and then picked him out of a lineup. Flores had nearly been executed. He still might be. It was actually McGaughy who tipped me off to the Chris Axe case. She also knew about the Driscoll case, and she's highly critical. Bringing someone in 10 years after they saw someone drive away in a white van

and having them try to tap back into that memory is highly problematic. The further away from a memory you get, the fuzzier it gets. With this context, the fact that Hardin stands by his second sketch is not surprising. If it's more recent, then it probably better matches what's in his mind. But the details changing like this, it's such a red flag, suggesting his memory might have been contaminated. So to recap, the single witness is hypnotized, a process known to risk changing memories, after 10 years where the memory could have been contaminated anyway. And this gives us a sketch. And by the way, drawing a face from a description? Not an exact science in the first place. One expert told me, our facial recognition is worse than we think. And this guy has seen thousands of faces since the abduction. But then this all just happens to lead to exactly the right person?

I mean, if Driscoll was the right guy, then finding him this way would have been like winning the lottery. This all leaves me wondering why hypnosis is still a tool in police use when it's associated with such risks. McGaughy asked a bunch of police about it. They said, yes, it helped them crack cases or they believed they were cracking cases using hypnosis and that's all that matters.

That was kind of the bottom line for them, whatever works. But a lot of them, especially the diehard proponents here in Texas, you know, they really, really, truly do believe in it. They spoke about it almost as like a religious experience, that you had to put your trust in the tool. And if you did that, and if you pursued your cases in the right way, you know, miracles could happen.

When I spoke to Texas Ranger Victor Patton, who hypnotized Michael Harden, it wasn't like that. He didn't pretend hypnosis delivered miracles. Hypnosis is a fairly simple process. It's not rocket science. He just said, this is effectively a way to get witnesses to relax and carefully dig up their memories.

And maybe they'll remember something new. Hypnosis is a tool. And if done correctly, you don't feed anybody information. Any information you get comes from them. I mean, at the very worst, you get more information than you had when you started. Or you don't get anything. When Lauren McGaughy's series came out in the Dallas Morning News in 2020, it caused a huge stir.

There was a battle at the Texas Statehouse as legislators tried to ban the use of hypnosis before the governor vetoed the bill. But McGaughy's articles did have a serious impact on the Rangers. In January 2021, the Rangers formally ended their hypnosis program. They confirmed that they are no longer going to be training individuals in hypnosis and that they will not be using hypnosis in any further criminal investigations. But these changes, they only look towards the future. When the Texas Rangers did away with their hypnosis program, nothing happened to the people who were already in prison and were sent there with the help of hypnosis. Which means none of this can really help Driscoll.

January 14th, 2022 marked seven years since his arrest. And while he's been stuck in a cell, his life on hold, he has painful reminders of what he's missing. Births, weddings, funerals. He gets a letter telling him his sister has died, and his wife decides to move on. And then my Dear John letter from my ex-wife now. I can't get used to calling her ex-wife.

I've been married for 40 years. What was it like for you getting this Dear John letter from her? I was upset. Cried some. But that's part of life. When I've been with her longer than I've been single. And you think, what could I have done different or otherwise?

He knows he's going to get out in 2030, when he'll be nearing 70 years old. I'm thinking about how Ashley Fletcher, the law student who got the Innocence Project to take this case, had thought he'd be excited when they visited. But instead, she got this sense of hopelessness from him. At any time I get down time, you start thinking. And sometimes you can't get this thing to shut the heck off. All I can think of is the man upstairs playing. And he knows I didn't do it, and he'll take care of this in his time.

So by early 2022, the Innocence Project of Texas is trying to test the DNA from the crime scene. In January, I publish an article about the case for the Marshall Project. I harbor naive hopes that the searing power of my reporting will somehow trigger a wave of soul-searching among the Rangers and the prosecutors. But, of course, my article is met with silence from the authorities. Driscoll is still polite to me, but I can tell he's impatient. But then his lawyers,

Jesse Freud and Mike Ware, have a realization. All that time passing has actually changed something for Driscoll. So much time has passed that he's eligible for parole. But it's unlikely he'll get it. Driscoll is claiming he's innocent. Parole boards have often been resistant to letting people out early when they make that claim.

They want you to say how sorry you are for your crime. And you can't do that if you're maintaining that you didn't commit it at all. From my point of view, it seems like a long shot. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles is famously stingy. I've seen them fail to step in even when someone was going to be executed, and there's a good chance they're innocent. But Jesse Freud has an old friend who specializes in these parole applications. So what the hell?

They put in a bid for Driscoll. And wait to see what happens. How are you? I'm good. I'm up at a seminar in New York. So there's really good news. That's next time on Just Say You're Sorry. To be continued... The senior producer is Tom Fuller. The producer is Georgia Mills. Peggy Sutton is the story editor. Dave Anderson is the executive producer and editor.

And Shika Ayers is the development producer. Akiba Solomon and I are the executive producers for The Marshall Project, where Susan Shira is editor-in-chief. The production manager is Ike Egbetola. And fact-checking is by Natsumi Ajisaka. Graham Reynolds composed the original music. Thank you. This series drew in part on my 2022 article for The Marshall Project, Anatomy of a Murder Confession. With thanks to Jez Nelson, Ruth Baldwin, and Susan Shira.