Latest / Crime Incident / The Killer's Name Was on the Collar: The David Camm Case

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The Killer's Name Was on the Collar: The David Camm Case · Crime Incident

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On the night of September 28, 2000, a former Indiana
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: state trooper named David Cam came home from a pickup
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: basketball game at his church and found his wife and
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: his two young children shot to death in the garage.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: He grabbed a phone and screened at his old police
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: post to get everybody out to his house now. Three
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: days later, the men he had called for help arrested
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: him for the murders. That is the whole case in
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: three sentences, and I want you to hold on to
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: the shape of it, because this episode is not going
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: to work the way these stories usually work. I am
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: going to tell you this case twice. The first time,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: I will tell it exactly the way the state of
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: Indiana told it, the way it was built, brick by brick,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: into two separate murder convictions. The second time, I will
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: take that same case apart in front of you, piece
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: by piece, using nothing but the evidence, until you can
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: see what was actually standing underneath it the entire time.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Because David Cam was innocent, he was acquitted of every
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: count in 2013, after 13 years in custody, and another
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: man is serving 225 years for killing his family. The
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: question this episode asks is not who did it. We
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: know who did it. The question is how a system
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: full of trained professionals looked at the wrong man for
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: so long and what it cost. But before either version
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: of the case, the people, because the case swallowed them
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: and they deserve to come first. Kimberly Cam, Kim to everyone,
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: was 35 years old. She was a senior accountant at
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: an insurance company in Louisville, the kind of person who
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: kept other people's numbers straight for a living. and then
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: went to church on Sunday, and kept the books there too,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: as treasurer of Georgetown Community Church. She had married David
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: in 1989, when they moved into the house on Lockhart Road,
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: in Georgetown, Indiana, a quiet semi-rural suburb 14 miles west
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: of Louisville. People who knew her said it felt like
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: a new beginning, and that Kim was proud of that home.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: The road itself was named for David's extended family, the Lockharts,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: who had been rooted in Floyd County for generations. She
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: was living, quite literally, on family ground, Bradley was seven,
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: second grade at Graceland Christian School, swim club, mini basketball
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: league at the church, the kind of little boy whose
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: week was organized around practices. On the last evening of
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: his life, he was doing the most ordinary thing in
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: his world, finishing swim practice while his mom waited to
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: drive him home. Jill was five, kindergarten, same school as
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: her big brother. She was in the backseat of her
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: mother's Ford Bronco that night, strapped into her seat the
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: way you strap in a five-year-old, and that is where
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: she died And I'm going to ask you to remember
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: that seatbelt, because it comes back later in a way
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: that decided this entire case. And I want you to
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: see the geography, because it matters. Lockhart Road sits in open,
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: semi-rural country. Woods and farmland pressing close to the houses.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: In the days around the murders, one neighbor saw an
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: unfamiliar vehicle cruising slowly past the cam house. Another later
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: recalled a similar vehicle parked off a nearby road, several
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: hundred yards away. Close enough that a man could leave
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: it and move through the trees to the house without
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: being seen. Nobody knew what to make of those sightings
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: in 2000. Keep them in your pocket. At about 7
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: o'clock that evening, Kim picked up Brad from swim practice
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: with Jill in the car. Witnesses put them at the
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: pool until about a quarter past 7. Neighbors saw the
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Bronco turn onto Lockhart Road around 7.35. One neighbor heard
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: a woman's voice in distress around 7.40. And sometime in
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: that window, in the attached garage of their own home, Kim, Brad,
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: and Jill were shot to death. Kim and Jill were
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: shot in the head. Brad was shot through the torso,
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: a wound that severed his spine. A forensic witness would
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: later say the evidence suggested that seven-year-old boy was likely
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: looking down the barrel of the gun when it fired. Now,
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: the case as the state first told it. David Cam
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: was a former trooper of the Indiana State Police. He
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: had left the force just four months earlier to work
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: for his uncle's business. On that night, He said he
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: had been three miles away, playing his regular weekly basketball
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: game at the Georgetown Community Church gym from about 7
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: until after 9. He said he drove home, pulled in,
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: and found the garage lit and his family dead. He
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: said he saw Kim on the garage floor, saw Jill
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: upright in her seat, and saw Brad draped over the
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: back seat as though he had been trying to get away.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: He said Brad still felt warm, so he climbed through
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: the Bronco, pulled his son out, laid him on the floor,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: and tried CPR on a boy who could not be saved.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: and then, instead of dialing 911, he called the Indiana
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: State Police post at Sellersburg directly, his old post, and
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: screamed for help. The audio of that call survives. It
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: is not a calm man reading a script. It is
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: a man shouting that his wife and kids are dead,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: demanding to speak to post command right now, begging everybody
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: to get out to his house. Several of the people
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: who answered were his own former colleagues. His explanation for
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: calling them instead of 911, years later, was simple. These
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: are my people. I needed help. He was taken in
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: that same night, And shortly after midnight, in the early
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: hours of September 29th, two detectives sat him down for
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: a recorded interview while technicians processed his garage. He described
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: kissing Kim goodbye that morning, telling Jill to have a
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: good day. He was describing the last ordinary morning of
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: his life to men who were already measuring him for
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: a cell. To the investigators who arrived that night, almost
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: everything in that account read as suspicion. Why call your
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: old post instead of 911? Why was the scene the
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: way it was? Kim was on the garage floor partially undressed,
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: and her shoes and socks had been removed and placed, carefully,
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: on the roof of the Bronco. To the state, that
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: staging suggested something domestic, something personal, something a husband might arrange.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Within 72 hours, the theory hardened. Cam had come home,
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: killed his family, attempted to clean the scene, and then
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: performed the role of the grieving father. And the state
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: believed it had science. A man named Rob Stites examined
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: the T-shirt Cam had been wearing and told police he
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: saw high-velocity impact spatter on the hem, Understand what that
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: phrase means, because the whole first version of this case
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: balances on it. High-velocity impact spatter is the mist of
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: microscopic blood droplets blown outward by a gunshot. If that
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: is truly what was on David Cam's shirt, then he
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: was standing within a few feet of his daughter at
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: the moment she was shot. Stites also reported signs of
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: a cleanup at the scene. On the strength of that analysis,
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: on October 1, 2000, three days after he found his family,
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: before they had even been buried, David Cam was arrested.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: He stood at a memorial service for his wife and children,
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: publicly pleaded for the killer to come forward, and days
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: after finding his family he was in handcuffs. There were
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: problems with the timeline, but the state solved them the
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: way a story gets solved when the ending has already
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: been chosen. The original time of death estimate was around 9.30,
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: which fit a killer coming home from basketball. When 11
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: separate witnesses confirmed Cam was in the gym until after 9,
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: the theory shifted. He killed them before the game. When
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: a phone record from the house seemed to show a
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: call at 7.19 that undercut his account, it fit. When
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: the autopsies later moved the time of death to around
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: 8 o'clock, squarely inside the basketball game, the theory shifted again.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: He slipped out mid-game, drove home, murdered his family, and
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: returned to the court without anyone noticing. Do you see
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: the pattern forming? The suspect stayed fixed, the facts rotated
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: around him. At trial in 2002, the state added motive.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: Prosecutors put roughly a dozen women on the stand who
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: described affairs with Cam or advances by him. The picture
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: painted for the jury was a faithless husband, a man
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: whose marriage was a lie, and jurors were invited to
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: walk from adultery to triple murder. On March 17, 2002,
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: they did. Guilty on all three counts. 195 years. That
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: conviction was overturned on appeal in 2004 because the parade
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: of affair testimony had nothing legally to do with the murders.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: and had unfairly poisoned the jury. So the state tried again,
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: and this is the part of the first version I
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: most need you to sit with. With the affairs barred,
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: the new prosecutor needed a new motive, and the one
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: he chose was an accusation that the Indiana Supreme Court
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: would later find had no competent evidence behind it at all,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: that Cam had molested his own five-year-old daughter and killed
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: the family to hide it. The entire basis was a
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: finding of blunt force trauma that a defense medical examiner
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: said was consistent with the violence of the attack itself.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: It did not matter. In 2006, a second jury convicted
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: David Cam again, life without parole. Twice tried, twice convicted.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: Two juries, two judges, two prosecutors, dozens of witnesses. That
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: is the case the state of Indiana told, and if
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: this podcast had existed in 2006, that might have been
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: the episode, the trooper who slaughtered his family and almost
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: got away with it. Now let me tell you the
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: case again. Same garage, same night, same evidence. told honestly
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: this time. Start with the man the first version needed
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: you to believe in, Rob Stites, the expert whose spatter
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: analysis put Cam in handcuffs in 72 hours. Rob Stites
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: was not a bloodstain pattern analyst. He was a crime
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: scene photographer sent to Indiana by an outside consultant the
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: prosecutor had hired. He had no formal training in bloodstain
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: pattern analysis. At retrial, the defense established that he was
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: not a qualified expert and that his credentials had been misrepresented.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: The finding that drove the arrest of a man three
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: days after his family was murdered, the finding that set
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: every wheel of this machine turning, came from someone with
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: no qualifications to make it. The cleanup, he reported, it
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: never held up either. That is the foundation stone of
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: the first version of this case, and it is hollow.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: What about the shirt itself? The entire physical case against
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: David Cam came down to eight tiny bloodstains on the
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: hem of his t-shirt. Jill's blood, each stain smaller than
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: a pinhead. The state's experts called them high-velocity impact spatter.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: The defense's experts, including nationally recognized analysts, called them transfer stains,
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: left when the shirt brushed against Jill's hair as Cam
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: leaned through the Bronco to pull his dying son out
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: and attempt CPR. Remember the seatbelt I asked you to keep?
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: Jill was still strapped in. Her father climbed past her,
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: put his knee on the seat, and her head slumped
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: forward against his shirt. Eight dots of blood. Roughly a
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: dozen experts across the litigation split down the middle, arguing
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: over whether those dots were missed from a gunshot or
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: a smear from a rescue. This case is now cited
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: in the national debate over bloodstain pattern analysis for exactly
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: that reason. When the sum total of your physical evidence
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: can be read as proof of murder or proof of
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: a father trying to save his son, depending on which
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: hired analyst is talking, you do not have physical evidence.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: You have an argument wearing a lab coat. The phone
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: record that undercut his alibi? Indiana's tangle of time zones
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: had produced an error of exactly one hour. The call
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: logged at 7.19 was actually made at 6.19. When everyone
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: agrees the family was alive and David was home, the
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: damning call never happened. The time of death? The blood
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: on the driveway had already coagulated in a way that
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: indicated the murders happened well before 9. The autopsies put
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: death at around 8 o'clock, and from 7 until after 9,
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: 11 witnesses, his own church basketball group, had David Cam
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: on the court. Not one witness saw him leave. The
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: state's final theory required him to slip out of a
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: game with 11 people, drive home, Execute his wife and children.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: Stage the scene. Avoid transferring any meaningful evidence. Drive back
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: and rejoin the game. All inside a window no one noticed.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: That was the story required to keep the suspect fixed.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: And now the spring at the center of this case.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: The piece of evidence that was sitting in that garage
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: from the very first night. Under Brad's body in the Bronco,
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: there was a gray sweatshirt. Prison issue. On the collar,
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: a handwritten name. Backbone. It did not belong to anyone
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: in the Cam family. In the dim garage it was
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: overlooked so completely that it was swept into the body
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: bag with the seven-year-old boy it lay beneath. Think about
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: that for a second. The single most important object in
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: this entire case spent the first hours of the investigation
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: literally underneath one of the victims, and then years in
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: the system, while the state built and rebuilt its case
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: against the father. There was DNA on that collar. It
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: was run through the offender database early on, improperly, and
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: came back with nothing. And there it sat. Through the
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: first trial, through the first conviction, through the appeal, a
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: stranger's prison sweatshirt under a murdered child, and the working
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: theory never moved. In February 2005, after the first conviction
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: had been thrown out, the DNA from that collar was
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: finally run properly. It matched a man named Charles Darnell Boney.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: Boney was a serial armed robber with a documented history
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: of attacking women, and his signature was so specific it
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: reads like fiction, he targeted women's shoes and feet. He
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: had served prison time for exactly that conduct. His nickname,
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: the name written on that collar, was Backbone, and he
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: had been released on parole roughly two months before the
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: Cam family was murdered. Now go back to the garage.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: Kim Cam was found partially undressed, with bruising on her feet,
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: her knees, her elbows, and her shoes and socks removed
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: and placed on the roof of the Bronco. The first
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: version of this case told you that was a husband
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: staging a scene. In 2000, no one connected the staged
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: shoes to any known offender signature. The connection only surfaced
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: after the DNA match, because nobody was looking for anyone
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: but David Cam. The detail the state used to make
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: a widower look guilty was, in plain sight, the calling
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: card of a paroled predator with a foot fetish, and
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: the proof of his identity was stitched into a collar
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: under Brad's body the whole time. It got worse for
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: the original theory, fast. Boney's palm print turned up on
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: the Bronco. He denied ever being at the scene, then
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: failed a polygraph. then claimed he had donated the sweatshirt
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: to charity. And then, once the print made denial impossible,
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: he produced a story. He had merely sold Cam a
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: gun that night, wrapped in the sweatshirt, and Cam was
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: the shooter. His timeline for that story conflicted with the
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: state's own estimated time of death. And here is a
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: detail that tells you how compromised this prosecution had become.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: The original prosecutor, the one who hired the consultant who
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: sent the unqualified Stites, had himself briefly served as Boney's
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: defense attorney in the past and acknowledged discussing the case
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: with him before Boney became a suspect. The man who
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: built the case against David Cam had a professional history
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: with the man whose DNA was on the murder scene.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: So what did the state do when the real killer's DNA, print,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: signature and lies were finally on the table? You might
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: expect the case against Cam to collapse. Instead, the state
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: absorbed the new killer into the old theory. Boney was tried.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: convicted of all three murders and conspiracy in January 2006
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: and sentenced to 225 years. And David Cam was tried
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: a second time as his supposed co-conspirator on the molestation
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: theory the Indiana Supreme Court would later demolish. Even with
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: Boney convicted, the machine could not let go of its
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: first suspect. That second conviction was reversed in 2009, the
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: court finding the record contained no competent evidence for its
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: central premise. The third trial came in 2012 and 2013.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: And by then the science had one more thing to say.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: Touch DNA, a technique sensitive enough to read the microscopic
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: skin cells left by a hand, was applied to the
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: victim's clothing. Boney's DNA was on Kim's sweater and underwear.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: Boney's DNA was on Jill's shirt. The man who swore
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: under oath that he never touched the victims had left
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: himself on their clothes. Boney testified against Cam anyway, telling
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: the jury Cam lured him there and pulled the trigger,
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: and the state argued a new motive. life insurance, its
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: fourth motive theory by my count. Late in that trial,
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: the judge even allowed the jury to convict on an
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: aiding and abetting theory, meaning Cam could be found guilty
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: even if he never fired a shot. An instruction his
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: own defense attorney argued was the state quietly admitting that
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: its blood spatter case, the case that started everything, had failed.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: The jury heard all of it. On October 24, 2013,
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: they found David Cam not guilty on every count, Even
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: the special prosecutor admitted afterward that the touch DNA in
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Boney's own testimony had changed the landscape. The defense put
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: it more bluntly, attributing the verdict to a lack of evidence.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Cam walked out of the courthouse a free man, 13
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: years after he called his old post for help, and
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: became the suspect instead of the witness. Told once, this
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: was the story of a monstrous husband undone by science.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: Told honestly, it is the story of a rush to
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: judgment held together by an unqualified expert, a time zone
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: clerical error. a shifting time of death, four rotating motive theories,
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: and eight specks of blood, while the actual killer's sweatshirt
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: waited in the evidence system with his name on the collar.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: Every single pillar of the first version failed, not weakened, failed.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: What did it cost? Start with money. Because money is
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: the part institutions understand. The three trials cost Floyd County
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: an estimated $ 4. 5 million. In April 2022, The state of
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: Indiana paid David Cam $ 4. 6 million to settle his federal
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: lawsuit over the wrongful prosecution, a suit that laid out
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: the tunnel vision, the unqualified spatter claim, and the mishandled
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: DNA that let the real killer sit unexamined for over
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: four years. Taxpayers effectively paid twice, once to convict an
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: innocent man and once to compensate him for it. Then
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: count what money does not reach. David Cam spent 13
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: years in custody. He was never able to simply be
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: the widower and the grieving father, never had a single
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: day of mourning that was not also a day of accusation.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Kim's parents sat through three trials across 13 years, and
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: when it ended, some of her relatives still believed the
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: acquitted man was guilty, a wound inside the family that
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: no verdict can close. And Charles Boney, from prison where
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: he is serving his 225 years... gave an interview in
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: 2018 in which he called himself a changed man, insisted
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: he never pulled the trigger, and predicted he will walk
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: free one day. The jury that heard his story under
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: oath did not believe him. The courts have not touched
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: his conviction, but the confidence is instructive, because for four
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: and a half years, the system's confidence belonged to him too.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: Every month the state spent staring at David Cam was
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: a month Charles Boney spent as a free man, two
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: months out of prison when he followed a mother and
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: two children into their garage. If you take one thing
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: from this episode, let it be this. The first version
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: of this case was never really built on evidence. It
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: was built on a decision made in 72 hours that
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: the man who found the bodies was the man who
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: made them. And then everything after that was construction. The
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: blood mist that was actually a father's rescue attempt. The
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: stage shoes that were actually a predator's signature. The damning
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: phone call that was actually a time zone. When the
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: decision comes first, evidence stops being a test and becomes
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: a supply. Three people deserved better. A 35-year-old accountant who
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: kept her church's books. A 7-year-old boy who had just
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: left swim practice. A 5-year-old girl still buckled into her seat.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: Their killer has a name, and it was written on
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: his collar, in their garage, from the very first night.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: Next time, a case that inverts this one. Not an
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: innocent man convicted by bad science, but a guilty one
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: protected for years by good manners. A man whose neighbors, colleagues,
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: and church all vouched for him while the proof sat
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: in his own house. And the question is not how
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: investigators got the wrong man, but how long everyone helped
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: the right one hide. Thank you for listening.