Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - Devil in the Ditch | 6. All This Evidence

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

The investigation into Presh’s murder had more resources than most. So why was no one ever arrested? Larrison dives into what went wrong and discusses the clue that one detective swears is the key to solving the crime. Unlock all episodes of Witnessed, ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I grew up watching her play at the old downtown dive bar one block east. And I mean, grew up. If you could drive yourself there, you didn't get carted. This afternoon, though, I'm seeing her because she's a friend of Richards, and believes he was unfairly targeted. Hey! Hey! Hey! Come on in!

Thank you! It's very nice to be trying my ass. Right, I look like a joke. I clean up for y'all. No, it looks great. I don't know about my exact- This is a joke. It looks like we interrupted a jam session. Instruments everywhere. Eden's husband plays the trombone.

There's brass, guitars, and in a sunroom off to the side of the living room. Eden's baby grand piano. Even though I've known who she is for decades, this is the first time we've actually sat down and talked. She has long hair and she's wearing a floral skater dress and sneakers. As we get settled in, she sits in a chair with her legs folded under her. She's casual and comfortable on a mic. I'm a lifelong resident of Greenville, Mississippi, and I live right down the street.

Not even two blocks from Richard and his mom Charlotte. I'd reached out to Eden for two reasons. First, Richard told me I should, that she would vouch for him. But also because I'd seen her name and my aunt's journals from right after the murder. She wrote that one evening after Richard's second polygraph, the one he, quote, failed, Richard had told his mom that he was going for a walk, but then he was gone for several hours. No one could find him.

When he finally reappeared that night, he said he'd been down in Edens' house. I remember him being just dropped as he was upset at the direction that the investigation was taking. And I recall him describing to me how upsetting it was because the police will cope into believing that they need your help.

And then before you know it, they're accusing you of murdering your aunt. Yeah, he was awfully upset about it. He just felt like he had been misled by them. He was cooperating as much as possible. And then all of a sudden, kind of, they turned the tables on him. And I remember him telling me that the cops had asked, did you have some kind of a beef with your aunt?

I mean, I hate to say it to be, it's almost comical to me to even think about this. It seems ridiculous as much as he loves family and as family oriented as he is, the cops were trying to railroad him at the time. Eden sees the suspicion around Richard, much like Richard does. as he is, the cops were trying to railroad him at the time. Eden sees the suspicion around Richard, much like Richard does. The police took aim at him because he was an easy target.

Richard has said as much to me as well. I think people want to blame somebody when bad things happen. He's not a kind of everyday run-of-the-mill sort of guy. He's an eccentric kind of a guy. He still lives with his mother. A person who would become a cop probably can't really relate to his lifestyle. He's a little bit different than a lot of the people you'd meet around here. He's got some different kind of an idea about the world. He doesn't really fit into a good model here. So I would imagine that somebody conducting an investigation would say, hmm, this is a, this guy's weird, you

know, because he's not a policeman or maybe he doesn't go fishing or hunting or do this stuff that people around here do. It's not just the police. As we've established, Richard's differences have dogged him his whole life. I think that, you know, he's tried to carry on, but it's hard when you lose part of your family and then some of the community thinks you did something awful to. It is kind of ruined his life. You know, now, no matter how it ever gets resolved, he will have suffered as if he did it. It's just been to me yet another crime on the whole family.

Look, he's not a murderer. And if he did it, he wouldn't be able to hide it all. He would have a very guilty conscience. He would have admitted it. You know, there'd be a little spider of blood on something in his car. It just doesn't add up to me. You know, I saw it. It just seems like they would have found some kind of evidence. You look for evidence and then try to find the person. You don't find the person and then look for the evidence anyway. But since it seems that they were finding the person and then

looking for the evidence, couldn't they find any? From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Witnessed, all this evidence. I'm Larison Campbell. Eden wasn't the first person to say the police messed up the case. Regardless of what you think happened to my grandmother, Prash, the one thing I keep hearing from all kinds of people around the case is that this wasn't a thorough enough investigation. But Eden was the first person who told me that she thinks Richard's life had been destroyed over this. Even Richard is reluctant to see it that way. He says, no one thinks about it anymore, even though they do.

And it's important to keep this in mind. In our legal system, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. You all know that. It's civics 101. But let's walk through it. Typically, a person becomes a criminal defendant when police and prosecutors have enough evidence, witness

testimony, something physical, whatever to charge them with a crime. But that person in the eyes of the law is still innocent, which is why a beat cop can't just arrest someone and voila, they're a criminal. The state has to prove it. But what if that case never makes it to court? Because what if the police never have enough evidence to make an arrest? That's what happened in my grandmother's case.

So officially, legally, her murder is unsolved, the killer unknown. But is the mind really okay accepting the unknown? Or does it start working overtime to finish a story investigator stopped writing? In my grandmother's case, we know what the mind does. But here's the damnedest part. Because the state never tried to convict anyone, no one's had a chance to be acquitted either. Which means that outside the courtroom, ordinary people can still point fingers. They can say someone is a murderer because they don't have to prove it. They only have to believe it.

It's human nature, but that doesn't make it right. Trial by rumor, conviction by whispers and side eye glances isn't justice. It's a cruel game. So why wasn't there ever enough to make an arrest? We keep hearing that this investigation had access to more resources than the average green will murder. Were those resources used? If all this evidence was collected, what happened to it?

And what do we know about where the investigation stands today? Here's what I do know. The state crime lab collected evidence of precious house and later collected items from Richard. I called up someone named Pam Miller one night. She was at precious house the day after the murder with the state crime lab. At the time, Pam's job was going to crime scenes. She was an investigator for the District Attorney's Office.

She knows the process for collecting evidence. She knows the kind of evidence prosecutors need to make their case. And she knows what makes a good investigator. I think they're open-minded that anything can be a piece of evidence and they're willing to take the time and be meticulous as they process and work a scene. It's very stressful to actually work as saying, because you know when you leave that saying, you may have left the piece of evidence that was going to convict the person. And it's really hard. It was always stressful to me.

I never wanted to release it. Meaning she wanted to wait as long as possible before taking down the police tape to allow the public or family back into the crime scene or in this case precious house. Can we just hold it? Can I take a break and let's come back? Because you just don't know. And you're hoping in the meantime something's going to come in, the people doing the footwork outside of the scene are going to develop something that's going to help you on the inside while you're still working it. That's going to say, oh, this is what happened.

So now I really know and I can follow those sequence of events, but it doesn't, I mean, most of the time that doesn't happen. By the time police released Prussia's house back to our family, investigators have collected a lot of evidence. They'd pulled fingerprints. They'd sent off items like precious emptied purse. They'd bagged potential murder weapons, like the small hammer, and that brass candlestick.

They'd rolled up the rugs from her sunroom and sent them off along with her clothes and that bloody dish towel that somebody placed over her face. Greenville police have their own in-house lab, but it was pretty limited in the types of evidence they could process. Prince, dried blood, the state crime lab, however, could do it all. They're very thorough. I really felt like the evidence collected at the scene was going to lead to something. I can understand why she'd feel that way. I've seen the evidence logs from both the police and the state crime lab.

Well over 100 pages, some with multiple items. Along with the interviews we've done with investigators, they help create a timeline of the investigation. That's how I know the small hammer was collected from precious kitchen drawer that first night, and immediately sent away to be tested for blood and prints. And how we know that on June 23rd, it came back clean. The likely murder weapon, the candlestick, was collected four days after the murder. The crime lab found a trace amount of blood on it, but it wasn't enough to test without

destroying the sample. Then, more than two years after the murder, the state crime lab in Biloxi sent Greenville police to reports. They listed items of evidence like photos and precious clothing. And the report said these items were destroyed during Hurricane Katrina, before ever being tested. Pam didn't know this. Do you know why the evidence would have hung out

in Balexie for two years? Nope, I have no idea why I was there that long unless, well, the crime lab was constantly had a backlog. I don't think that we had the resources in the state or they weren't allocated to pay analysts what they needed to make to be here. Mississippi State Crime Lab has been plagued by understaffing for decades.

When I toured its storage room a few years back, I remember aisles and aisles of evidence just sitting there in bags and trays. I asked the Greenville police detective where he's Spratlin about this. He usually takes wild. I mean, sometimes I forgot I sent something down there. Spratlin thinks sometimes police overload the labs

with unnecessary requests. They just send it. They didn't do the crime lab. Send it to the crime lab. They get them all jacked up down there because they got all this stuff. Investigators also collected items from Richard. They took some of his clothing to examine for blood.

And they took three pairs of his shoes to compare to the partial shoe prints found at the scene, the one outside in the garden, and the one in the kitchen. They didn't get a match. The lab determined that the partial shoe prints were too partial to even compare, but the shoes were potentially useful for another reason. The person walked through the blood splatters,

who were here, I had half splatters back on them too. From the documentation I have, the lab tested at least two of the three pairs of shoes for blood. They came back negative. But police took some time to collect Richard's shoes. They took his phila-high tops the week after the murder, and they waited another two weeks to collect his Reeboks in converse. When I bring this up to Pam...

They collected the first pair of shoes, and he knew that there was something to compare shoes to. He did not keep that pair of shoes. This, of course, was bad for the investigation, but it also did damage to Richard. Let's say Richard's items had been collected in one fell swoop at the time of his first interview, right after the murder, and everything had come back clean. Well, that would have been a problem for the theory that Richard killed Prash. But because that didn't happen, because he wasn't immediately

excluded, he's been treated by some investigators and most of his family, like he has to prove his innocence. The exact opposite of how the actual system works. Pam sounds almost apologetic, Richard, was put in this situation. I have a lot of unanswered questions myself. I felt like it was solvable, but I was never 100% It was the person everybody thought it was. Never was. I have not been 100% yet. So I'm sure I'm not the favorite of the families.

I just can't ever go all in until I'm convinced. And I was never convinced. I can't go all in either. Pam had lots of meetings with my one aunt who had collected binders of notes and evidence on the case. Um, if I was on trial, I wouldn't want circumstantial evidence. That was convicted. Me and it happens all the time. Sadly, I've seen it.

I know in her mind she's thinking, it happens all the time. Let's arrest him, let's move forward. Obviously, it wasn't even enough for the district attorney to say we have enough to present. We don't even have enough to do anything with. And sometimes that's all you ever have. brings you award-winning investigations year-round. Infiltrate an international network of Neo-Nazi extremists. Yeah, granted with racist language. Discover the true story of the CIA's attempts at mind control. Their objective was to wipe my memory.

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Empieza hoy mismo en MailChimp.com. Vas a venderte a tus públicos de marcas competidoras en número globales de clientes en 2021-2022. de marcas competidoras en número de globales de clientes en 2020-2022. By early 2004, so about six or seven months after the murder. My dad and his sisters had lost confidence in the Greenville police investigation. Here's my Aunt Martha. It looked to me like they had, here's what you do if you have a murder investigation. Now you go do this piece, you go do this piece, you do this piece, y'all go out and talk to whoever's here

in the family, but there did not seem to be any collaborative look of even what you might visually imagine as a bulletin board putting up sticky notes of, okay, what have we got so far? What we've got so far are sticky notes on people's individual notepads and nobody's, that's the feeling I got. Nobody was putting it together.

That to me was a huge problem. So they decided they weren't going to wait on police. They'd solve this themselves. My dad's other sister began to put together those binders and type up timelines. My dad interviewed anyone he thought might be a witness. I just wanted to try to pull together as much so-called evidence as we could while memories were fresh. And I did do a lot. I spent a whale of a lot of time, including interviews that I didn't record,

but would dictate notes of afterwards. They do this for the better part of a year. And then they decided they needed to hand it over to someone who would actually know what to do with it. So they hired a private investigator, Ken Wincher. He came highly recommended. He had a three-decade career in law enforcement, including running investigations for Greenville Police in the 1980s, and extensive experience in crime scene analysis, especially fingerprints. I mean, so many people I spoke to in law enforcement for this story raved about him. He was my latent fingerprint and major crime scene. He trained me in those. He was really, he was a great, great asset to the department.

Whatever Ken Winner says, I go with it. That's the way I feel about him. Oh, every says I go with it. Ken the the way I feel about him. Oh, every says I go with it. Ken the PI was already familiar with the case before he got the gig because he had just retired from his position as head of the Mississippi State Crime Lab. Here's Ken. They wanted our crime scene unit to come in and assist the Breville Police Department. And of course, you know, when they said who it was, I mean, automatically knew who they were talking about. The investigation started out a little bit unorthodox

because you had all those different entities working on it and kind of going in their own direction. But later on, and that's how I ended up involved in it. Did that help or hurt the investigation? Well, it hurt it in the beginning because normally in any death investigation, within the first 48, 72 hours, it's critical as far as gathering information

and getting a direction to go in. When you've got, people going in three or four different directions, and really not collaborating with each other, that caused a little bit of confusion because they were all doing their own thing. I ran this by the original investigator on the case, former detective Ricky Spratlin. Remember, he was with the Greenville Police Department,

the lead agency on precious case. No, the more the man, just if you find out something, let me know. But Sheriff's Detective Kelvin McKenzie said it didn't always feel that way. The Sheriff's Department was there as the secondary agency to assist the police department. Sheriff's Department should chief law enforcement. I never wanted to take over their cases.

We always wanted to help them and them help, but we always wanted to work together. As the years went by, that didn't work out so well. Everybody was scared somebody else was stepping on their toes or whatever. Ken, the private investigator, would be the remedy to this. He was hired to pull all these threads into one cohesive investigation. He knew the Sheriff's Department. He'd worked for the Greenville police. Hell, he'd run the state crime lab.

If anyone could get a bird's eye view of the whole operation, it's Ken. What you ended up having was basically three different investigative files. The Rainbow Police Department had theirs. The Sheriff's Department had theirs and then MBI had theirs. Sometimes police, you know, they formulate a theory in their mind and then they try to make the crime fit their theory. And that's just optional what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to follow the evidence. The Gravel Police Department investigators, they decided that it had to be just one of these random young black men that she had got to come do some work in her yard and then come back later to rob her and escalate it into violence. As a result of it, they had several different names in their file.

I had to spend a lot of time following up and they were all just dead in. I do know, because as you heard a couple episodes ago, that's exactly what I found when I tried to look into that angle. A lot of names and no connections to the crime scene. What's interesting is Eden, Richard's musician friend, just told us she wondered if some investigators targeted Richard, then tried to find evidence against him. Ken is saying something different, that the problem is Greenville Police decided it was an anonymous black man and wasted time trying to find evidence to fit that theory. It was real simple, you know, my words.

And I think that that, you know, that was easy. Which Ken says was, quote, fantastic for Richard. And, you know, if he's ever charged, then that's going to be his defense. There's no doubt about it. I didn't do it. Some random black guy did it. Richard, of course, has never been charged. But that is his explanation.

Verbatim. Mainly what I knew about was the forensic investigation, the crime scene part of it. The shoe prints, the blood spatter, the fingerprints. The drawer, where the tile came from that was over a face in the kitchen. One of the biggest areas of interest for investigators for everyone really has been the dish towel placed over Prussia's face.

Since the person who covered her face is likely the same person who killed her, my aunt's files contain copies of memos that police detective Ricky Spratlin wrote in the early weeks of the investigation. According to the memos, three days after Prussia's murder, Spratlin goes back to the crime scene to desfer Prince himself.

He focuses on two areas of the kitchen. The first is the kitchen drawer where Prussia kept her tools, like that small hammer. The second is the drawer where Prussia kept her dish towels. Spratlin writes in his memo that he's able to pull prints from both drawers. Two months later, police send those prints and others collected to the crime lab.

The lab runs them through AFIS, the National fingerprint database. No matches. Though an AFIS search is limited just to people already in the database, that means people who've had their fingerprints taken by the police or some other government agency. Then, Ken comes on board one year later and he gets the police files. He tells me he's surprised to discover that police stopped at the fingerprint analysis

with the AFA database. That's a huge screw up, Ken says, because Greenville police detectives should have also asked the lab to compare the prints they found at the scene to all the prints of people police might be looking into. Because those people might not be in the database. But Ken says that in Precious Case,

Spratlin did not ask the lab to do this. He put them in a packet and put them in in their file. Nobody knew anything about them for, you know, basically, for a year. That's when I found a fingerprint packet. And obviously looking at them, I knew that there were prints of a value and the location of those prints, obviously, very incriminating. Spratland and Nizy would have done that.

Stuck the prints back in the file without a thorough analysis. But according to the evidence documents I have, nothing shows the prints were compared to people, police interviewed, until a full year after the murder. When can came on board? Which does line up with what Ken says. Of course, the information I have may not be complete. It's the kind of thing I'd love to check against whatever is in precious file. But Greenville police have refused to answer a single question about this case. Ken says when he gets the file a year after the murder, he does his own side-by-side comparison

with seven people police interviewed, including Richard and Charlotte. By the way, the lab wrote that Charlotte's prints were unusable, which means they were never compared against any found at the crime scene. Anyway, Ken compares the prints and gets just one match, Richard. According to Ken, Richard's prints were on both the tool drawer where the hammer was found, and they were on the dish towel drawer. Remember, Ken trained in fingerprint analysis. He tells me it's kind of this thing. Ken then asked the crime lab to do a comparison, too? And they also get one match, Richard.

But according to the evidence sheet I have, Richard's prints were only found on one drawer, the kitchen drawer with the hammer, the tool drawer. The evidence sheet doesn't mention even receiving prints from the other drawer, the one with the dish towels. By the way, I asked Richard about this. It doesn't mention even receiving prints from the other drawer, the one with the dish towels. By the way, I asked Richard about this. He said he isn't surprised as prints were on the tool drawer. He'd been by to fix precious TV several weeks before the murder.

Of course, there's plenty of debate in my family about whether Richard was at precious house all the time, much less helping her fix things. But even if he weren't, again, there's nothing in the tool, hairmer drawer that connects to precious murder. When we tell Ken about the prints that were found on the tool drawer, he says, sure, maybe they were there. But even so, he's adamant that Richard's prints were also on the drawer where the dishcloths were kept.

The towel drawer. The one that could have been linked to her murder. I asked Ken if he could have gotten confused. Maybe it's the Prince from the tool drawer he remembered? Tool drawer and towel drawer do sound an awful lot alike. But Ken says no. Richard's Prince matched ones from the dish towel drawer. He's sure of it.

He told me that if we got precious police file, the information linking Richard to the towel drawer should be in there. But of course, the police won't give us the file. The prints of Richard's that are allegedly on the dish towel drawer are the big reason Ken suspects Richard. The positioning of them and the fact that it came from that draw where the dish towel came out of it. I'm convinced he did it. Now, can we prove it? He's never going to admit it. But if it were reasonable for Richard's Prince to be on the tool drawer, wouldn't it also be reasonable to find one on the towel drawer? He basically had a right to be in that house, you know? Sure he opened up the drawers before, you know?

A print'll stay on something for a long time unless it's curbed off. It was his aunt's house, the aunt he lived two blocks away from. When I asked Richard, he says he'd actually plunge precious sink in the months before her death, and probably would have grabbed a dish towel to dry his hands. I asked him if anyone else could corroborate the existence of these prints, but he said he kept a tight lid on that information. He did not want a risk Richard finding out. I knew that if we didn't approach it the right way, If we didn't approach it the right way that he could basically give some kind of bullshit excuse to be honest with you, that would discount the value of those branches for it where

they were. Unless somebody has told him since then, he still don't know it. He does know it now, as I mentioned above. I wanted to be sure Richard had a chance to respond to any allegations against him. But Ken told me the fingerprint isn't the only reason he strongly suspects Richard killed Prush. Richard can says, had access, and a reason. You look for somebody who has obviously motives. You look for somebody who has opportunity, and you look for somebody that has opportunity and you look for somebody

that has the means. So we're back to my family's theory that Richard and Prussia were angry with each other, that Richard had time to go to Prussia's house and that Prussia would have let him in. Ken told me that at the end of his investigation, he turned everything he found, including the towel drawer prints, over to the district attorney's office. And he expected the case to move forward. But it didn't. I come to Ken with some skepticism.

Regardless of his experience, he's not looking at this murder as a police detective or the head of the crime lab. Here, he's a private investigator hired by my family, a private citizen. In my aunt's journal, she details all of her conversations with Ken. And in the early ones, Ken did tell her he wasn't all that sure Richard did this. That fingerprint, he told me, changed his mind. But is this enough to be certain someone committed murder? Can it supposed to be the guy to solve this, the best in the business?

My family listened to him. I told you family. It is this. I told the DA. I believe that as much as in any case that I've ever worked. The story of this investigation is a story of bits of information, pieced together by different people. One of those bits of information comes from Charlotte's phone records, which police subpoenaed not long after precious murder. It's an interesting timeline of that day, of what time Charlotte was in the house and who she talked to, and it's what my dad used as a guide for who he interviewed.

One of those people was Ann Dana. At the time she was staying with BJ, BJ was the hairstylist, Prussian Charlotte, had plans to visit the day the Prussian died. Now Charlotte, remember, has always said that she in Prussian planned their visit for 4pm. But Ann told my dad that they had actually been expecting Charlotte to impress earlier in the day, like 1 o'clock. And we'll later sign a sworn affidavit saying all of this. Of course Anne could be mistaken. But my dad also interviewed other friends, Charlotte called, who confirmed she was looking for pressure earlier that afternoon.

So what would be the reason for changing the timeline? I don't know. But what's most frustrating about all of this is that it seems like something the police would at least want to look into. But when my dad spoke to Ann and BJ a full year after the murder, they told him they'd never even hurt the police.

And the police never questioned Charlotte about this discrepancy according to the transcripts of three interviews with her. Another disappointing thing. Another reason people aren't confident in this investigation. Warning, this podcast contains juicy tales of a super dysfunctional family. Brothers betraying brothers, friends becoming enemies,

and a mother trying her best to keep everything from falling apart. No, this isn't a reality TV rewatch. I'm Dan Jones, your host, and this is one of my all-time favorite true stories. Join me on a trip to the Middle Ages to meet history's most dangerous dynasty, the Plant Adjunents. This season, the plots are thicker, the ambitions greater, and the betrayals are even more devious in the epic saga of the family that shaped our world. From something else in Sony Music Entertainment, this is History, a dynasty to die for, Season 2.

Listen and follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Adam McCay, Director, Writer and most importantly, Podcast Host. In the first season of our show, Death at the Wind, we explored a series of tragic deaths from the wild world of 80s basketball. This season we're going back further to the 50s, the aftermath of World War II,

and a series of tragedies in Hollywood will tell stories of trailblazing actors who lived fast and die young. I hope you'll join us on Death on the Lot. On my last trip to Greenville that summer, after I spoke to Eden, the blues musician, I visited Charlotte at the hospital. She was in the ICU, recovering from surgery to repair her broken hip after her 4th of July fall. I wasn't surprised to find her asleep.

Surgery the day before I'd gone well, I'd heard, but it was still surgery, on a 101-year-old, and it was late by the time I got to her, almost 9 o'clock. The hospital room was private but small. Enough space for a chair in her hospital bed with all the wires and tubes and machines. She wasn't on a ventilator at this point, just an oxygen tube to her nose, and I could hear the pumps' mechanical buzz. Otherwise, it was quiet. A minute later, Charlotte opened her eyes. She recognized me right away, but she was in a lot of pain.

I tried to joke with her while we waited on her nurse to adjust her meds. I went through a goody bag of things the hospital had put together for her. I pulled out tissues, mouthwash, shampoo. Let's see what else you have. Let's see if we have a comb for your hair. Oh. Don't be going. It's going to be this.

How did you wind up here? I got up on my chair. She said she'd woken up to use the restroom and fell before she could reach her walker. I had to walk her. I was going to get in the way. I missed the walker. That was four o'clock in the morning. At four in the morning she says she missed her walker and fell.

Richard couldn't get her up by himself. So she slept on the floor. You could call an ambulance for you if I were you. She says she begged Richard to call her nurse to help, but he didn't want to disturb her. Oh, he wouldn't. Well, I slept on the floor alone. That's how awful. I'm so sorry to hear that.

She's saying Richard left her to sleep on the floor all night. That sounds monstrous. You left her 101-year-old mother on the ground all night. Around 7am, three hours after Charlotte's fall, Richard called a family friend, asking for help getting Charlotte off the floor. So I checked in with a friend who told me a slightly different version of events.

Richard did wait three hours until daylight to call for help, but when the friend arrived, Charlotte was the one who didn't want Richard to call for an ambulance. She wanted him to call her nurse, but Richard thought it was too early in the morning to wake someone up. Richard says this is true. He thought 4 a.m. was way too early to call for help and wanted to wait until 6. Though he actually waited until 7.

Once they had Charlotte up, they did check in with the nurse. Richard told me that she's the one who finally called the ambulance. Still, this seems to be a pattern for Charlotte. When I first saw her, she complained to me that Richard had only popped his head into the room that day and wouldn't stay long. She says she wished he'd sit with her more. I need to take a seat. He can't?

I'm making an extra setting. Yeah. But the nurse told me he'd been in and out all day. So what is Charlotte doing here? Why didn't she tell me that she's the one who said not to call an ambulance? Did she forget? Does she think she'll get more sympathy

if Richard looks worse? And why did Richard make Charlotte wait three hours before he would call someone for help. I don't know, but this is part of their dynamic nobody can really understand. It works on me. I feel a lot of compassion for Charlotte in this moment. Charlotte's accident wasn't the only thing on her mind during our visit. It's clear she had an agenda for our conversation. Something I've come to refer to as Charlotte's greatest hits. These are the points she's made to me again and again since our interview back in March. Point one is that we come from a fine Greenville family.

You're my grandfather, your mother's grandfather. Point two is about my uncle Claude, my aunt and's husband. Over the last 20 years, Charlotte has become convinced that Claude's the one who turned the family against Richard and her, that he is the main reason people think Richard killed Prash. He is a much stuttered all that method. Something about Charlotte, forgetting to invite his daughter to be in the Debbie Tantball and him holding a grudge?

I ran this by my uncle. He was surprised to hear Charlotte's take, especially since his daughter was in the Debbie Tantball that year. But what Charlotte tells me is that Claude is not allowed to darken the door of her funeral. He's not invited. Let's hope we don't have to make that decision for a while. The third point comes from this one that Richard did not kill Prash, that they had a loving

relationship. I have a beautiful red eye. That he was with Charlotte the whole day Prash died. It's literally me on the hatch. It's everybody for the younger half. It's not everybody for the younger half. There's a bigger point here, of course, that Charlotte is making with her greatest tuts. And it's about our family. A reminder that we all descended from the same fine people

and are therefore fine people ourselves. That this fine family was always close, especially Richard and Prash. And that when there was a rift, it was caused by someone who married into our family, my uncle. Worth noting that for Charlotte, the solution to the rift is not to forgive or at least move on as she so desperately wants everyone who suspects Richard to do, but to simply redraw the lines that were drawn after Prussia's death. Her family on one side,

everyone else on the other. Eventually Charlotte's pain medicines kick in, so I decide to let her sleep. As I go, I feel torn, as I lately do when I spend time with her. On the one hand, I can't agree with anything she's just said. On the other hand, she is the closest thing I have to a living grandparent. And I love her.

I want to let you get some rest because this is absolutely wonderful. I'll be back tomorrow. Okay? You know what I feel better? Oh, it's so quick in to see you. Long before I started working on this story, back when this podcast was just an idea I debated with friends, I knew what I wanted to call it. Devil in the Ditch.

For the game I played as a kid. But also for the feeling that it represented. The same feeling that I had right now, that question of what if one of the safest parts of my life would turn out to be the most dangerous. So I was surprised when I visited with Richard and Charlotte in March, and this game was the first thing out of Richard's mouth. I've never told them the title, and I was surprised again as I said goodbye to Charlotte for what would turn out to be the last time, that these were the last words she ever said to me. Devlin the ditch. Next time on Witnessed, Devlin the ditch. You describe your

sort of research and your efforts as an obsession. I went through the garbage at their house and I wanted to sample one thing of his handwriting. When a psychic got involved, I think that caused me to lose even more enthusiasm. A family tries to know the unknowable. I began personally to question whether proving they did it was the same thing as finding the truth. ad free right now by subscribing to the Benj, our new podcast channel. Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get Benj access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts. All ad free.

Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a Benj drop of a brand new series. That's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listing now by clicking subscribe. At the top of the witness, devil in the ditch show page on Apple Podcasts, or visit getthebenj.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Witnessed is a production of Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, Devil in the Ditch was reported and hosted by me, Larison Campbell. Lindsey Kilbride is the senior producer, and Shiba Joseph is the associate producer. The story editor is Sean Flynn.

Studio recording by E-Win Lai Tremuen and Shiba Joseph. Sound design mixing and original music by Garrett Tiedemann, additional music by APM and Blue Dot Sessions, additional field recording by Johnny Kaufman and Ambreel Crutchfeld, fact checking by Ben Kaelin, special thanks to Emily Martinez and our operations team Doug Slaywin, Alia Papers, Destiny Dingle, Ashley Warren, and Savina Mora. The executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriotis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Shere.

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