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590: #590 Jason Flom with Jens Soering · Wrongful Conviction Podcasts

• 00:00:04 Speaker 1: This is Jason Flom with an update on Jens Ziering's case. In 1990, Jens and his then-girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom, were convicted of murdering her parents in their Bedford County, Virginia home. After 33 years, four months, and seven days in prison, Jens was finally paroled and deported back to Germany in 2019. On February 17th of this year, Jens' legal team filed a new actual innocence petition citing DNA analysis that they say excludes him and identifies two unknown male profiles. 00:00:41 Speaker 2: The petition also. 00:00:42 Speaker 1: Includes information from the victim's granddaughter, Sheena Hasem, and has raised questions about other family members and inconsistencies in the case. 00:00:53 Speaker 3: The DNA tests are reliable. It's not Jens Ziering. It is most likely two other people, one with blood group O, one with blood group AB. And now comes Sheena Hasen and does the familial DNA. And that shows that her male relatives cannot be excluded. So the jury hears Yen Tsering is excluded, but Sheena's male relatives cannot be excluded. That doesn't mean they did it. The question is only, the legal question is, if a jury were to hear all of this, would that not lead to a reasonable doubt? 00:01:37 Speaker 1: On August 6th, the court ordered the Attorney General to respond. What that response could mean for Jens' four-decade-long fight to clear his name? 00:01:46 Speaker 2: Well, that remains to be seen, but we remain hopeful. 00:01:52 Speaker 3: I'm looking forward to the process as it unfolds in the coming months. And I'm hopeful that my case get the consideration it deserves after actually now 40 years since my arrest and 41 years since the crime. I think this is now actually my best chance yet of getting justice. And I'm really excited about that. And I'm thankful to Sheena Hasem, who's had a lot of courage to go public with this. And I'm thankful to Elliot Harding, my new attorney, and all the other people who've supported me For ages. I'm grateful to all of these people for helping me. 00:02:31 Speaker 4: Hello. 00:02:42 Speaker 5: This is a prepaid debit call from... Yes, Zerling. 00:02:47 Speaker 6: An inmate at Virginia Department of Corrections, Buckingham Correctional. 00:02:52 Speaker 5: To accept this call, press zero. To refuse this call... This call is from. 00:02:58 Speaker 7: A correction facility and is subject to monitoring and recording. Thank you for using GTL. 00:03:05 Speaker 1: Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom. 00:03:08 Speaker 2: That's me. I'm your host. 00:03:09 Speaker 1: And today we have an episode that is going to rock your world. We have three guests today. I'm going to save the best for last. But we have John Grisham in the studio with us. John, welcome. 00:03:23 Speaker 8: Delighted to be here. 00:03:24 Speaker 1: And Sheriff Chip Harding of Albemarle County. 00:03:27 Speaker 9: Yes, sir. 00:03:27 Speaker 2: Good to be here. Virginia. 00:03:29 Speaker 1: And on the phone is Jens Soering, one of the most remarkable people I know, and one of the most extraordinary cases of injustice that we've ever covered on this show. So Jens, as I always say, I'm happy you're here, but I'm sorry you're here. 00:03:45 Speaker 5: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate this, Jason. And thanks to Chip and John as well. 00:03:52 Speaker 1: So this is a A case that takes us back to the 80s, believe it or not. A case that has all the makings of a John Grisham novel, actually. Because this goes back to Jens, when you were first an exchange student from Germany, a brilliant young scholar from everything I'm told. This is a Jefferson scholar, a freshman at the University of Virginia. Jens, do you want to take us back there and tell us how this started? 00:04:25 Speaker 5: Sure. This was in 1984, in the fall. I arrived at the University of Virginia as a freshman. They called first-year students there. And I met a young woman there who was two and a half years older than I was, Elizabeth Hayson. And we were both in the same dormitory. She had entered the university late because she had had an adventurous... youth. She had gone to an English boarding school and run away with her girlfriend to Europe, things like that. And so she came to UVA quite a bit older than the rest of us in that dormitory. 00:05:06 Speaker 6: And I was. 00:05:09 Speaker 5: Not an American citizen. My father was a German diplomat. That's why I was living in the United States. And her family came from South Africa and from Canada. So we were drawn to each other as being foreigners, you know, not Americans. And in the course of that fall semester in 1984, we fell in love. And, you know, it was quite a surprise to everybody else in the dormitory because she was very experienced and very mature. And I was, I guess, a nerd, an uber-nerd. 00:05:51 Speaker 10: And virgin to boot. 00:05:52 Speaker 5: So she was my very first girlfriend. 00:05:55 Speaker 1: You're a German Uber version nerd. It's quite a combination, Jens. And she was a beautiful young woman, a striking woman, who anyone in your situation would have probably fallen head over heels for, considering the circumstances. But it was, of course, a fateful, star-crossed love affair. 00:06:12 Speaker 5: Yes, and it was a very short-lived love affair as well. Three months after we started dating, or maybe four months, We went to Washington, D.C. to spend a weekend together, and in the course of that weekend, she told me that she was still using drugs, which she had previously told me she had stopped doing, and that she needed to use our rental car to run some drugs from Washington, D.C. to her dealer, who was also a university student back in Charlottesville. And I wanted to come along, But she wouldn't let me because she said that I was such a nerd. No drug dealer would want to do business around me. So she drove off in the car by herself and came back eight hours later and told me she had killed her parents. And she said that the drugs had made her do it and they had deserved it anyway. And if I didn't help her, she would be executed. She would be back then they used a lecture chair. She said that they would fry her. And she said that I should be her alibi and tell the police that she was with me in Washington. And I told her that that would never, ever work because the police never believed boyfriends or husbands or wives, people like that. So I came up with this brilliant idea, um, based on Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, of all things, um, I would take the blame for her. I would take the rap for her and save her life. That was based on a character in the Charles Dickens novel. Sidney Carton did that in this novel. The difference was that in the novel, that particular character actually did get executed, whereas my father was a German diplomat. I thought I had diplomatic immunity. I thought that I could take the blame for her crime, and all that would happen with me was that I would be sent back to Germany and put in prison there, in a juvenile prison, for about 10 years. And I thought that giving 10 years of my life was worth saving her life from the electric, too. 00:08:41 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:08:44 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:08:45 Speaker 1: It's sort of a twisted nobility. People do crazy things for love all the time. And we were talking about this earlier, Jens, and I said that it's such a strange fate that you happen to have only been with one woman and she turned out to be the devil. 00:08:59 Speaker 5: You know, calling her the devil is a little oversimplified. She was later diagnosed with a very severe personality disorder. So she actually had serious mental health issues. And, of course, she claimed that her mother had sexually abused her with the knowledge and cooperation of her father. And, you know, there's some indications that may have actually been true. Of course, we'll never know for sure now. But she was a troubled young woman. 00:09:33 Speaker 1: As things developed, you initially were not suspects, but then at some point you decided to make a getaway. And this is back in the days when For people who don't remember, in the 80s, you could sort of travel the world under a different name, and it wasn't so tightly monitored or regulated. And so you guys went around the world and ultimately ended up in England. And that's when things began to go wrong, right, because you were ultimately arrested for passing bad checks. and then we get to the point where the false confessions come in, or your false confessions. 00:10:05 Speaker 5: So the police took both Elizabeth and me back from the jail to the police station, and they actually wrote into the police station logbook that I was to be held incommunicado. In other words, I was to be isolated from the outside world and not given access to my lawyer. And that's exactly what they did. For four days, they interrogated me. Four days. Many, many hours. Dozens and dozens and dozens of hours. And then finally, on the fourth day, I decided to keep my promise to Elizabeth that I had made 15 months earlier, and I decided to take the blame for what she did. And that's what I did. I told them the story that she and I had cooked up. And, of course, that false confession contained many mistakes that the real killer would not have made. I described the clothing of one victim incorrectly. And I placed the other victim in the wrong room. And there were numerous mistakes like that, which... I should have alerted the police to the fact that I might not be telling the truth. In addition to that, of course, at that time, the police who were interrogating me were in possession of an FBI crime scene profile by one of the people who invented crime scene profiling, one of the leading special agents. And that profile said that the crime. 00:11:45 Speaker 10: Had been committed. 00:11:47 Speaker 5: by a woman in a close relationship to the victims. And of course, I was a man, and I didn't know the victims at the one time for 20 minutes. So they should have known that the story I was telling them was not true. And then, of course, the other thing that happened is that just a couple of hours after I told the police that I did it, Elizabeth told the police that she did it. She said, I did it myself. I got off on it. And I did it myself. I got off on it. I did it myself. I got off on it. But by that stage, the police had decided that I was the guilty one. So they actually let her withdraw that confession, which is hilarious in a way, because they found her fingerprints at the crime scene and not mine. And, you know, it's quite incredible. 00:12:45 Speaker 10: That they let her withdraw that confession. 00:12:47 Speaker 5: But they did. And so they ended up charging me with being the killer, and they charged her with being the accomplice. And in 1990, they put me on trial and convicted me of something that I did not do. 00:13:03 Speaker 1: And I do want to bring John and Chip into the conversation now, too, just to talk about this scenario that took place in England and the immediate aftermath of it. John, You were a criminal defense lawyer in your younger years. 00:13:18 Speaker 8: Yeah, it goes back to a confession, false confession. There's no other proof to convict Jens of the murder. So all they have is a false confession. And with any false confession case, what you would hope that the authorities do is once they manage to extract the confession, whatever tactics they use to do that, is that they will match it up to the physical evidence. to see if it in fact matches. And false confessions virtually never match up because there are too many details or specifics in the murder, the method of murder, the place, the blood, the blood splatter, the clothing, the room, whatever. There's a whole fingerprints, footprints. There's a long list of items that, you know, police go through in any investigation. And with a false confession, it's usually fairly simple to realize once you start matching the confession, given by somebody who wasn't there, it's impossible for them to remember all the details that the real killer would actually know. Where he left the bodies, how he killed them, who did what, what was on the kitchen table, what was knocked over, what was spilled. These are all fairly common sense. In Yen's case, there were so many discrepancies between his confession and the actual physical crime scene, you just want to scream and say, why didn't somebody put these together, match them up. And what frustrates me is when you get to trial and you have what you think should be a competent defense lawyer who cannot walk through the confession step by step by step and show the discrepancies between the confession and the actual crime scene. I'm not sure if this was done or attempted in Yen's case, but it certainly was not effective. And so that's That's where we always start in a false confession case is let's match it up with the proof, and it never matches up. 00:15:15 Speaker 1: It never does, and this was a crazy case because on top of all the other factors that led to his wrongful conviction, I think there was an inherent bias. I can't prove this because of the fact that it was Bedford County, which ironically is the county that lost more soldiers in World War II to the Germans per capita than anywhere else in the United States. It's why the World War II memorial is there. And so I think that there's at least an argument that the odds were stacked against Jens from the beginning. I want to bring Sheriff Harding into the conversation. Sheriff Harding, you've been in law enforcement for several decades, four decades, right? I mean, his resume is nuts when you look at the number of accreditations he has and the number of awards he's won. And he's one of the most accomplished people in law enforcement in the United States. And you've dived into this case with all guns blazing, so to speak, and You've examined this evidence 18 ways till Sunday. Is it theoretically possible that Jens committed this crime? Is it possible? 00:16:11 Speaker 9: I mean, he could have been dropped down from a spaceship and done it. But is it logical he was there when these murders occurred? Extremely unlikely he was there. There's nothing that puts him there other than this false confession. And as John was saying earlier, the confession didn't match the crime scene when you look at it. I mean, there was some huge discrepancies that weren't followed up. You had a young investigator, his first homicide case he'd ever investigated. And I'm reading a transcript going, you've got to be kidding me. You didn't do any follow-up. Plus, they didn't tape the confession. So when he gets to court, very skillfully, the prosecutor only asked questions that were consistent with the crime scene and the event and omitted the inconsistencies. And as John was pointing out, he had a very, very ineffective defense attorney that didn't bring that to the attention of the jury. 00:17:03 Speaker 5: As far as details that corroborate the confession, at the time of the trial, the prosecutor pointed out to the jury 26 times that the police found. 00:17:19 Speaker 10: Some O-type blood at the crime scene, and that I was the only person involved in the case who had type O blood. The victims did not have typo blood, and my girlfriend did not have typo blood. 00:17:34 Speaker 5: The only person involved in the case with typo blood was me, is what the prosecutor told the jury 26 times. And it would take another two and a half decades to find out, through DNA testing, that indeed that was typo blood that was left by somebody else. So the fact that seemed to corroborate the confessions at the time of the trial, is now shown to actually disprove the confession. Skip can talk more about that. 00:18:07 Speaker 1: Sheriff Harding, what percentage of the population has this type of blood? I think it's about 45%, isn't it? Yeah, it's pretty high. 00:18:13 Speaker 5: Right. 00:18:13 Speaker 1: So, I mean, that really is, I mean, it's a ridiculous thing to try to pin anything on, but yet the prosecutor mentioned it 26 times. It's also worth mentioning that Jens' lead trial lawyer was disbarred a few years after your wrongful conviction. And he was disbarred because of mental illness. Drugs were a factor in all of this. And it was shown that he was suffering from this during the time of your trial. So that's just another important thing to recognize. This is a nightmare that no one can imagine living through. You had been in jail in England for quite some time before you even came to trial. You had nothing in your life experience that would prepare you for any of this. 00:18:52 Speaker 4: And. 00:18:53 Speaker 1: Now here you are in the grip of the justice system in Virginia. It's sort of an arch-villain, right? And what was this like for you to go through this? 00:19:05 Speaker 5: At that stage in 1990, I had already been in prison for four years, fighting extradition from England to the United States. For most of those four years, I was convinced, and all my lawyers were convinced, and everybody thought that I would definitely be sentenced to death. So I spent four years in prison, in effect, psychologically, on death row. Everybody, including my own team, told me that I had no chance of avoiding the electric, too. And then at the last minute, that was avoided. We won an appeal at the European Court of Human Rights, and I was brought back to America. 00:19:46 Speaker 4: And. 00:19:47 Speaker 5: That sort of thing has an effect on you psychologically. living in prison for four years believing that you're going to die pretty gruesomely in the electric tube then I got brought back to Virginia everybody hated me everybody was convinced I was guilty and it was really it was scary And I did not handle it well. I did not handle it well. But, again, you have to look at this against the background of my having just spent three years under imminent threat of death, then coming into this new atmosphere, and having to see Elizabeth Hasen, the woman that I had sacrificed myself for, get up on the stand and torture herself and tell all these lies to put me away in prison. And when I say that she perjured herself, that's not just a claim I make. 26 years later, she actually admitted that in a newspaper interview. She admitted that she perjured herself at that trial. But at that time, nobody knew that, and nobody cared. They just wanted a witness to point the finger at me, and she did that job. She pointed the finger at me, and that, and my own false confession... And the type of blood, that's what did me in. 00:21:10 Speaker 1: And the sock print, of course, was a ridiculous piece of evidence that no serious person should have ever even, it shouldn't have been allowed in court, and it shouldn't have been, and the way that it was done was very devious. And Sheriff Harding, I want to talk to you because it's interesting to me that, you know, Jens has assembled this remarkable team, and it's a great credit to him. And you're an interesting character in this because you're a conservative guy, a guy who's obviously a law and order guy. And yet you have devoted yourself selflessly and spent time that you could have been doing anything else to hundreds of hours to this case. So can you talk about that? And then can you talk about the actual forensic evidence? 00:21:49 Speaker 11: Right. 00:21:49 Speaker 9: Well, his attorney, Stephen Rosenfield, asked me to take a look at part of the pardon petition to see if I could find a way to strengthen it or to see if he's missed something in it. And I told Steve at the beginning, I felt like Yens was guilty based on everything I'd seen. I know Governor Kaine had tried to send him back to Germany. I was opposed to that because I felt like he was guilty. He shouldn't have been given any special consideration just because he was a German. So Steve gave me the case. He said it won't take but a couple hours. Well, I ended up taking a bunch of stuff home at night. My wife thought I lost my mind because I spent basically the whole weekend at the dining room table covered with material that Steve gave me. And I said, oh, my God, this is nothing like what was representative. In conclusion, I ended up writing a 19-page letter to the governor breaking down the closing arguments of the case. That's the strength of the government's case, last bite. 00:22:38 Speaker 2: At the apple. 00:22:40 Speaker 9: I broke that down, and then after that was published, I had another investigator work with me for 25 years, said, let me help a former FBI agent that I know that I worked another case with, jumped in. One of the original Bedford investigators said he felt like Jens had been railroaded, and was innocent also. So the four of us have been working it collectively. We've given a couple thousand hours. And you want to talk briefly about the forensics. The old blood was very powerful, as was mentioned. And I will say, if I was on that jury, I would have convicted him based on the way the evidence was represented so skillfully by the prosecutor. 00:23:17 Speaker 1: The old blood now we know absolutely. 00:23:19 Speaker 9: No one can test the fact that it's not Yinser and he's not been detected in the crime scene but two other males. One with AB blood and one with O blood had been detected in the crime scene, and we have not identified those people. In my opinion, Bedford County should consider having an open homicide investigation. Then you look at the next piece of evidence that was pretty powerful. The Commonwealth originally got a certificate of analysis from the State Bureau of Forensics saying that the shoe and sock size was consistent with a 6 1⁄2 to 7 1⁄2 woman's shoe or a man's 5 or 6 shoe. Well, they originally had, and this just blew my mind, they originally had a small female as a prime suspect in this thing. And the prosecutor wrote a letter, we got a copy of it, attached with a draft affidavit saying that he wanted this woman's blood, fingerprints, and shoe impressions because her shoe was consistent with what was in the crime scene. Now, you turn around and go to trial, you don't hear anything. The defense attorney brings nothing up. 00:24:18 Speaker 1: They bring in. 00:24:19 Speaker 9: A non-qualified individual to testify. He did what we like to refer to as a magic trick, created an overlay of an impression of Yen's foot and said it basically fits like a glove. Reminds you of OJ. And he was even instructed he could not testify as an expert. But when you look at the closing arguments of the prosecutor, he says it can only fit one man. One man in the world could this fit. And he points at Yen Tsering. And we know that's hoopla. That's junk evidence. And the same man that put this on in front of the jury, Robert Halett, did the same thing in another case where a man was given the death penalty. And thank God it took a few years. He did not get executed. DNA proved he absolutely didn't do it. So here you have the same junk science being used again. There was a juror that gave an affidavit to the attorneys that said it was tied 6-6 in the jury room. They wanted to take a look at the sock and shoe evidence again. And he said, that's what turned the tide. And we know now that's ludicrous. They're really two parts. You've got a false confession and you also have a false alibi. You've got Elizabeth who claims she stayed at the hotel room. And when Jens came back, she said Jens comes back that night after midnight in a sheet covered in blood from head to toe in the rental vehicle. And Jens asked her to clean it up with Coca-Cola. Yet, That vehicle was tested with luminol, and I've never had a case where blood had been present, even bleach had gotten it all out. No indication of any blood at all, and it was testimony from the folks at the rental agency that the car was in immaculate condition, no signs of any Coca-Cola. We have since learned, and digging in the little limited information we can see, that there was actually blood found in the trap of the shower of the master bedroom in And that shower wall illuminated like 4th of July. So it gives us the impression as investigators, at least one of the participants in this homicide took a shower. So why would he be covered in blood from head to toe? 00:26:17 Speaker 2: It's impossible. 00:26:18 Speaker 1: Sheriff Harding, on top of all the other evidence and FBI agents like Ed Salzbach who came forward and others to say that there had been evidence that had been hidden or not turned over, not disclosed in the way that the law mandates that it must be, there's also the In chapter 18 of the book, A Far, Far Better Thing, there's the story of the car in the woods, right? Which would, again, you would think that this alone would be enough to send Jens home. And I'm going to quote from the book again. In 2011, Tony Buchanan, the retired owner of a Lynchburg area auto transmission shop, said that three to five months after the murders in 1985, a car was towed into his shop for repairs. Its undercarriage matted with grass and mud as if it had been sitting in the woods for a while. The tow truck driver told Buchanan the two-door Chevrolet belonged to, quote, some college kids. And here's the important part. He said in a sworn statement that when he looked inside, he saw that the floorboard on the driver's side was, quote, full of dried blood. Beside the console between the front seats, also covered in dried blood, was a single-edged hunting-type knife, the same type that was used to kill the Hasems. Now, I'm sitting here. I've got chills just reading that. And, you know, he this same guy testified or swore and affidavit that Jens was not one of the people that returned the car. Elizabeth was one and somebody else was the other. But yet here we go again. 00:27:40 Speaker 9: Yeah, he claims just a shame so much time has passed. He claimed that he called and spoke to Ricky Gardner, who was the lead investigator, now chief deputy in Bedford, and told him about this. Gardner denies that, says it didn't happen. So, so much time has passed. 00:27:54 Speaker 12: Some of the. 00:27:55 Speaker 9: Investigators did work that lead, and we kind of ran it out because time was not on our side. We tried to find any documentation, real material, checks, and all that kind of stuff. The banks just don't have it from back in 1985. But if they'd been followed up on properly at the time, same way if they had sent investigators to the hotel they'd stayed at, it had cleared it up right away that Jens was there. 00:28:17 Speaker 1: She wasn't. 00:28:18 Speaker 9: His story of what he purchased was consistent with the hotel bill. But she said she purchased when she stayed there. It was very inconsistent, way over what the bill showed in it. And there were three or four more things that Elizabeth says that occurred we can disprove with her alibi. But, you know, the bottom line that's most frustrating for me is everything that has come out of that woman's mouth is provable that she's lying or it's highly suspect she's lying. We've looked very hard at everything that Jens has said, and we have not caught him in a lie. 00:29:04 Speaker 1: We're talking about a case in which a couple was brutally murdered, stabbed multiple times, each of them very bloody crime scene, rich with biological evidence from the actual killers. In theory, you also had a logical explanation for this in that Elizabeth had said multiple times that she had been sexually abused by her mother, that her father may have been involved in this in some way. There was a clear motive in that sense. You had drugs, which no one ever claimed that you were on drugs, but we know that she was doing hard drugs and that she was running with a very nefarious. crew back then and would have had access to the type of people who might commit a murder like this. People who knew you back then, including some people from law enforcement, said that it was, even Elizabeth said it was ludicrous to think that you could have committed a brutal crime like this because you're not a physically imposing guy. You would have had to overpower two adults. None of it ever made any sense, and it should have been relatively simple. And now, of course, so many people have weighed in on this, including Chuck Reed, one of the original investigators in the case, who has said in emphatic terms that it could not have been you, that he doesn't believe it was you, and yet we still find ourselves in this situation where we're still all trying to get you out. 00:30:21 Speaker 5: Well, it's been very, very difficult for me, especially over the last two and a half years, since the pardon petition was submitted based on the DNA evidence. It's been really difficult for me because for 30 years, we thought there was no DNA evidence in this case that could prove my innocence. And then after 30 years in prison, it was actually I, on the phone, with my lawyer, Steve Rosenfield, flipping through some old forensic reports. I found the DNA evidence. And You know, that's what the pardon petition is based on, but two and a half years later, we cannot get anybody to act on it. And that's, you know, for 30 years, I was wishing for DNA, and then I finally get the DNA evidence, and then nobody's willing to listen or accept it or do anything about it. 00:31:21 Speaker 1: Maybe you guys can try to give me some insight as to why this case is such a difficult one to resolve in the face of such overwhelming evidence of innocence. How do you explain this? 00:31:36 Speaker 8: I'll touch on it. I can't explain it. And I think you know, Jason, from your work in the innocence world, as frustrating as this is, it's not unusual. We've had cases before where we have to fight tooth and nail to obtain DNA testing for one of our clients. And we get the DNA testing, all the objections of the local prosecutors and local law enforcement. We get the DNA testing. It clears our client slash inmate, whatever. And so he's cleared. 00:32:11 Speaker 12: Okay. 00:32:12 Speaker 8: Then it takes a year procedurally to get him out. Oftentimes the prosecutor will say, well, I don't really believe the DNA results. We're going to try you again. And so they bring him back to the local jail where they can keep him forever. Again, as frustrating as it is, I'm ashamed to say it's not that unusual. 00:32:33 Speaker 9: Most frustrating for me is that law enforcement, I'm in law enforcement, and I hope I'm respected in law enforcement. I'm a sitting sheriff, and yet the sitting sheriff in Bedford County refuses to meet with me and even discuss the case. The lead investigator won't meet with the four of us who've given thousands of hours pro bono. We don't have anything in it. We're just looking for justice. We ask for one hour, and he says he doesn't have time. However, we do have him caught on videotape saying a few years ago, this happened 30 years ago. He was convicted in court. Why do we need to go any further then? And I think that's the attitude, which is it's really shut down from an investigative standpoint. We've not had access to the investigative files or any further testing because I'm out of my jurisdiction and getting absolutely no cooperation from Bedford. 00:33:18 Speaker 1: Yeah, they won't even allow you to test the DNA of two guys that we know are in for committing similar crimes in another county in Virginia. We have no idea whether they committed this crime or not, but there's some reason to believe that they would. 00:33:31 Speaker 9: These two guys knifed a man multiple times to death within. 00:33:35 Speaker 12: A few days. 00:33:35 Speaker 9: And that far from the Hasem residence where those victims were located. And these two folks, one of them at least, was killed. according to his background that we've read, was involved in heavy drugs in the Lynchburg area, as we believe Elizabeth was. She was an admitted heroin user. And DNA should be in the data bank. They're both doing life for that murder. And we simply ask, would you take those profiles, compare them to the crime scene, and the state says you can't do it, the jurisdiction where the offense occurred, they have to request it. 00:34:07 Speaker 1: And to our knowledge, they're not doing anything. Which is just remarkable, right? When you think about the idea that they just refused to test something that can only prove like one way or another, either these guys did it or they didn't. Why wouldn't we want to know? 00:34:18 Speaker 9: We want to know from an investigative standpoint, do we want to keep following those two guys as a lead or can they be excluded based on the DNA? Very simply, it would take about three or four minutes to compare those barcodes. It's so frustrating. I'm used to working in my own jurisdiction. If I want something tested, I ask a lab to do it. They do it. If I want to search one, I get it. If I have witnesses, and we have two or three people that need to be interviewed in this case who refuse to cooperate whatsoever, I don't have any grand jury authority to serve a subpoena on them. So I really feel for the Innocence Project. I see what they go through now. Now that I'm on the other side of the fence, I feel like you're operating with both hands tied behind your back. Everything's working against you. So you've got to put a lot more work and effort into it than you really should and try to get to the truth, which we all should want. But apparently, we don't all always want the truth and justice. 00:35:09 Speaker 1: Something I want to touch on before I turn over to John for a second, which is that back in 2008 or 9, with the support of Bishop Sullivan and other luminaries, both religious and political figures, Governor Kaine granted a conditional pardon, I guess you would say, that would have allowed you to go back to Germany. And then as literally as you were packing your bags, the new governor came in. Governor McDonnell, and he revoked, for the first time in the then 234-year history of Virginia, he revoked the previous governor's order and decided that you would be kept in prison. 00:35:45 Speaker 8: I think in Yin's case, though, we are pressing ahead, cautiously optimistic that the right people are listening to us. We are almost sanctimonious in our belief that we are right, and we're not going to stop, slow down, or be quiet. And, you know, we have several avenues left. It's not hopeless by any means. We don't view it as hopeless. We think we can smell victory. 00:36:12 Speaker 5: John was just speaking about the multiple avenues available. Most innocence cases have only one real option, and that's a pardon. And that's usually a full pardon. And that makes it very difficult because somebody has to admit that they made a terrible mistake. My case is a little bit unusual in that the state actually has three options. They have the option of an absolute pardon, which would be to declare my innocence and actually admit what really happened, which was that this is a wrongful conviction. But they have two other options. They have a conditional pardon, which would be not to say I'm actually innocent, just to say there's a lot of questions and a lot of doubts. You can't be sure. And then there's a third option, and that would be parole. So one of the mystifying things about my case in comparison to other cases is that they have a whole smorgasbord of options to choose from. Full pardon or absolute pardon, conditional pardon, and then parole. And they're choosing not to exercise any of these options. And I find that troubling. 00:37:24 Speaker 1: I recently met Dr. Phil, who, before he became the TV star that's known and loved by millions, had been putting his various degrees in psychology and medicine to good use in. 00:37:33 Speaker 2: His jury consultancy business, Courtroom Sciences. 00:37:37 Speaker 6: Dr. 00:37:37 Speaker 1: Phil, as you know, advocates for the wrongfully convicted. He's been doing it for a long time. So, as you can imagine, we hit it off and decided to sit down for an interview. The crazy thing was, during that interview, Jens happened to call me, as he did over the last several years, not infrequently. 00:37:54 Speaker 2: When he called, it turned. 00:37:56 Speaker 1: Out to be a really powerful meeting of the minds, and we sensed immediately that Dr. Phil might be able to help him and us work through this parole board stalemate that we've been stuck in for such an interminably long time. 00:38:13 Speaker 12: Jens, you've been in how long now? 00:38:16 Speaker 6: 33 years, 6 months, and 13 days. 00:38:21 Speaker 12: Good Lord. What's the stumbling block with the appellate courts, with the people that have the ability to grant clemency? What do they tell you is the reason you're still in jail? 00:38:34 Speaker 6: That's one of the problems. We're not getting any communication. The problem is that from the very beginning, from the 1980s, this was a very high-profile crime. So a lot of politicians used it in political campaigns to get themselves elected and reelected, basically by beating up on me. The last instance of that was in late 2015. So that lasted for 29 years. One politician after another tried to curry the voters' favor by saying that Jens Turing is a monster. And then after 30 years the DNA comes out and the DNA shows that the very same blood samples that they used to convict me with at my trial in 1990 once they'd been DNA tested, turned out to be somebody else's blood, not mine. And everybody in Virginia who's been beating up on me, all the politicians who've been beating up on me for all these decades, now look stupid. And it's very, very difficult to admit you've made a mistake. And that appears to be the problem in Virginia. If they admit that I'm innocent, then they're basically admitting that a long line of politicians going back to the 1980s were just dead wrong. 00:40:04 Speaker 1: That being said, Jens, I don't want to leave this out. We feel like there's light at the very near end of the tunnel, potentially. We won't believe it till we see it. But, you know, John Grisham has made this a very personal cause, arguably the most prominent Virginian of these times. And so have so many others. And the parole board is actually run by Adrienne Bennett, who is a, you know, by I think by anybody's definition, she's a person who believes in fairness. And now the whole state has gone blue. So we're post-election and we're all hoping that Governor Northam is going to do the right thing and that either the parole board will see clear to send Jens back to Germany to live out his days making speeches, writing books as he does, contributing to society. I've made the point again and again that in these 33 plus years in prison, Jens, how many infractions have you had? 00:41:03 Speaker 5: Not one. 00:41:03 Speaker 6: Not a single infraction in 33 and a half years. 00:41:06 Speaker 1: Can you imagine? 00:41:07 Speaker 12: That's virtually impossible. You must not go to the TV room at night. 00:41:10 Speaker 6: I work out a lot. I've been told it's either unique or nearly unique by prison staff members. But, of course, that's all well and good. Ultimately, what really matters, though, is, you know, I didn't do this. I did not kill Derek and Nancy Hazen. I didn't find out about it until afterwards. You know, my only role in this was this terrible mistake of trying to save Elizabeth's life from execution back then in the electric chair. The key reason to let me go is not because I didn't break any prison rules. The key reason to let me go is because I did not do this. And it's not just me saying it. It's the DNA saying it. We have two national experts and a bunch of law enforcement officers who've looked at the DNA and the evidence in this case, and they've all come to the same conclusion. It wasn't me. The evidence points at two other men who have not been identified. There's blood and DNA from two other men at that crime scene, as well as Elizabeth's fingerprints and her side print of hers. And of course, she said she did it. 00:42:28 Speaker 12: That's obviously not been enough. What do you think's missing? 00:42:32 Speaker 6: No, I mean, I think in any other state that would have been enough. 00:42:36 Speaker 12: But you're not in any other state. You're in this state. What do you think's missing? 00:42:42 Speaker 6: Political courage and... I think now after the election on November 5th, when the Democrats took over the General Assembly here in Virginia, there's no longer any reason for the Democratic governor and the Democratic parole board to fear releasing me. And I hope that'll happen soon. It's been a long time. My petition has been pending for more than three years. So it's time to make a decision. 00:43:15 Speaker 12: Well, it's way past time to make a decision, but can I give you a couple of thoughts about this? 00:43:20 Speaker 4: Uh-huh. 00:43:22 Speaker 12: I just say this from having been in the system for a long, long time. What has to happen is we've got to find a way to give them a face-saving way out of this, a face-saving way to say yes instead of no. Now you're before the Pardon and Parole Board, right? What is the narrative to them? where their currency is met in saying, okay, enough's enough, too much is too much, this is too much, we need to turn this man loose. What is the narrative that they've not heard before? Because you've got to give these people something to hang their hat on so they can defend it when they're asked questions about it, so there is a public position they can take that's face-saving. This is a high-profile case, which is sweet poison. It's high profile and everybody knows about it. That's the good news. Everybody knows about it. That's the bad news. 00:44:18 Speaker 1: We've gotten to a place now, I believe, where Republican governors have granted dozens or even hundreds of clemencies and pardons. President Obama in his last flourish there granted 1,700. And there's not a peep from any side. There's nobody going, oh, these crazy people are letting all these people. Nobody, it's not a thing anymore. I don't think it even makes the, you know, in Yen's case, because it was a high profile case, Maybe it makes the news for a day or two. 00:44:44 Speaker 6: Let me just interrupt you briefly and say that they're locking us up for count. While they're doing that, I want to address briefly Dr. Phil's question about a narrative that could be used to change people's minds. None of the people who are making the decision today are in any way responsible for the mistakes that were originally made 33 years ago. They're fixing the problem. And the United States has... advanced in those 33 years, and the issue of wrongful convictions is now much more widely understood. Back then, the idea that somebody innocent might get convicted would seem far-fetched. I think nowadays it's much more widely accepted. The other thing is that there have been some high-profile wrongful convictions here in Virginia prior to mine. Most recently, the Norfolk Four case, which received national attention, which also involved false confessions and DNA. And I think that's the narrative that I think they can hang their hat on in this particular case. In this case, all they really had was my false confession and the type O blood at the crime scene. And the prosecutor told the jury 26 times that the only person who could have left that type O blood was Jens Soering. And he made a mistake because they simply didn't have DNA back then. 30 years later, they DNA test that typo blood, and it turns out it's somebody else's. It was not possible to know this back then. They did the best they could back in the 1980s and 1990s. They did the best they could with the technology they had. All they had was blood typing. But now they have new technology, DNA, and it turns out that, yes, that was typo blood at the crime scene, But it was not my type O blood. 43% of the population have type O blood. But the DNA is different. It's somebody else's blood. So that's the narrative that I would say can swing this. 00:46:55 Speaker 12: That's pretty damn compelling. 00:46:57 Speaker 6: Ultimately, every wrongful conviction is about admitting that somebody screwed up big time. And, you know, there's only so far you can help them with that. They're going to have to man up and admit that. But the people who are being asked to fix the problem now were not the people who made the mistake back then. This is a governor who was in college when I was in college. He was a few years ahead of me, but he's not responsible for what happened back then. He was going to med school when my life was exploding. Thank you for using GTL. 00:47:41 Speaker 1: And now I can share with you some really, really incredible news. Jens Ziering has finally been granted parole. I heard this news. I was on a train to Delaware to give a talk about criminal justice reform. And I got a call about five o'clock in the afternoon. Now, I had recently done an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. And at the very end of the interview, the reporter. 00:48:07 Speaker 2: Asked me, do you ever cry? And I said, truthfully, no, only at the movies. 00:48:13 Speaker 1: Well, I'm not ashamed to tell you now that I didn't make it through that phone call without breaking down. And it's funny because I called the sheriff not too long. At first, I called Amanda Knox. Amanda, of course, has done work on behalf of Jens for quite a while now and did a whole season of her podcast, The Truth About True Crime. on the Yen Zuren case. And I called Amanda, and we cried together. Oh, Yen. 00:48:43 Speaker 7: I mean, Yen's just such a special person. 00:48:46 Speaker 11: And, I mean, everyone who's innocent deserves to get out as soon as possible. I mean, I've just been on the other end of the line with Yen talking about the day that he gets out, and, like, knowing that, like, I know what it feels like to, like, fantasize about that day and not knowing if. 00:49:04 Speaker 7: It's going to happen, and I didn't know if it was going to happen for him. Wow. And now, you know, he has asked me to, you know, be his big sister, which doesn't because I'm way younger than him. 00:49:22 Speaker 11: But, like, he said, like, I'm going to need you to be my big sister and help walk. 00:49:26 Speaker 7: Me through this, like, process of being a free person. And I was like, dude, I'm there. And now I get to be him. So it's really exciting. I think that he may end up getting... you know, pardon, um, you know, but it's better to get pardoned from the outside than the inside. 00:49:47 Speaker 5: Yes. 00:49:47 Speaker 11: 100%. 00:49:47 Speaker 7: He has so much more life that he can live. He can fight the fight from out here now and he can do it with help and he can not be alone. It's, it's a big difference. So, yeah, I'm just so excited for him. Um, getting him out is what needed to happen. I can't remember the last time I cried. 00:50:08 Speaker 5: Oh, that's, Yeah, so it's good to have you here. 00:50:12 Speaker 7: Hey, Amanda, where are you right now? I'm actually standing outside of the athletic club. I was about to go jog on the elliptical. Like, now I don't even know what to fucking do with myself. Okay, well, if you get any news, let me know. 00:50:29 Speaker 1: Amanda, as soon as he calls me, I'll come to you and invite you. Okay. 00:50:35 Speaker 7: Because I'm so, so happy for him, and I just hope that he's okay right now and that he's not alone right now. 00:51:02 Speaker 1: You know, Rachel Ryan is one of the hosts of Small Town Big Crime, a deep dive serial podcast about Yen Zuring and the haste of murders, including an investigation into the two unknown sources of DNA at the crime scene. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts, but don't wait. 00:51:17 Speaker 2: Subscribe now. 00:51:18 Speaker 1: She was just about to interview Chip Harding when the news had started trickling into us and the details were still a little unclear. The sound was rolling on Chip as he took my call. 00:51:29 Speaker 5: Testing. 00:51:33 Speaker 9: I'm going to put my phone over here. 00:51:38 Speaker 6: Hey, Jason. 00:51:42 Speaker 9: You know, it's kind of breaking right now. 00:51:44 Speaker 7: I called Rosenfield. 00:51:45 Speaker 5: He hadn't heard. 00:51:46 Speaker 2: Bernadette just sent a thing out. 00:51:50 Speaker 4: You got that. 00:51:52 Speaker 7: Oh, okay. 00:51:55 Speaker 5: Oh, we know. 00:51:55 Speaker 9: They'd both be turned over to ICE and be deported. I guess she's going back to Canada, I guess, and he'll be going back to Germany. 00:52:03 Speaker 12: And Steve Rosenfield hadn't been notified. 00:52:05 Speaker 6: We assume Jens knows. 00:52:07 Speaker 9: I mean, because she sent a thank you from Jens, so I guess he's been told. 00:52:11 Speaker 1: Kind of an odd way to handle something like this. 00:52:14 Speaker 2: So there's no keeping it as a secret right now? 00:52:16 Speaker 5: No, no. 00:52:17 Speaker 1: The Associated Press has it now. And it's confirmed. 00:52:21 Speaker 12: Holy shit. 00:52:23 Speaker 5: Yes. 00:52:23 Speaker 4: Horrible. 00:52:27 Speaker 5: Oh, my God, this is incredible. Well, Chip, I'm glad. 00:52:32 Speaker 1: I'm talking to you second, because I just spoke to Amanda, and I was literally crying like a baby. 00:52:37 Speaker 6: Yeah, well, you going to get me? 00:52:38 Speaker 7: They're getting ready to interview me on camera, so let me talk to you. 00:52:47 Speaker 1: A little while. 00:52:47 Speaker 2: All right, bye-bye. How are you feeling? 00:52:51 Speaker 7: Great. 00:52:55 Speaker 3: I'm ecstatic. 00:52:56 Speaker 9: I mean, what a great thing. 00:52:58 Speaker 12: To have him. 00:52:59 Speaker 2: He's been locked up for 33 years. 00:53:02 Speaker 9: He's missed his 20s, his 30s, and his 40s, so it's time. 00:53:05 Speaker 2: It's time to let him go. 00:53:07 Speaker 5: Now, she's also been granted parole, we understand. 00:53:09 Speaker 9: I understand she has been granted parole, and as a law enforcement officer, I don't have any objection to that either. If she was, in fact, sexually abused by her mom, if that was the case, I think if it had gone that route back when she originally went to trial, this whole thing would have turned out differently. 00:53:29 Speaker 1: I mean, this came out in sort of a strange, I mean, this was reported by the media before you were notified. 00:53:33 Speaker 12: It was. 00:53:34 Speaker 9: Yeah, I immediately, I got a call from someone in the media asking my reaction, and I didn't know to what. And he told me, and I immediately called his primary attorney, Stephen Rosenfield, who's given probably 4,000 hours on his case, and he had not heard. So we were quite shocked that it came out through the media first. But we're not complaining because it appears he's going home. 00:53:59 Speaker 5: And that is, I mean, you've put years and hours, how long? 00:54:03 Speaker 9: Yeah, I probably put, let me, a thousand hours in on it now. I'm not looking for any credit. There's tons of people who have given this young man hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours because they believe in his innocence. 00:54:15 Speaker 5: Yeah, it's an emotional thing. 00:54:19 Speaker 7: Thank you so much. 00:54:21 Speaker 1: I am beyond happy to announce that Jens is officially out of ICE custody and out of custody period, and he's finally back home in his home country of Germany, which he hasn't seen, or, you know, come to think of it, he hasn't even seen a tree, ponder that for a second, of any kind since 1986. And just to put some context behind that, the fucking Berlin Wall was up the last time he was there, and we were all smack dab in the middle of the threat of full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia. 00:54:50 Speaker 2: But anyway. 00:54:51 Speaker 1: Jens is finally able to make the most of his life, and I know that all of us that have played roles large and small in his newfound freedom can't wait to celebrate with him. 00:55:00 Speaker 2: I'll leave you with the. 00:55:01 Speaker 1: Remainder of our original interview, and of course the closing arguments, which I must say, sounds a hell of a lot better coming from what we now know is a free man's mouth. 00:55:11 Speaker 5: I had a really, really bad trial lawyer who was essentially disbarred, like you mentioned. But I've also had really, really fantastic lawyers fighting for me, including former Deputy Attorney General Dale Starling Marshall, also Dale Powell, and who's in the movie, and, of course, Steve Rosenfield, who has suffered with me for, I don't know, so many years, and Steve Northup. You know, they're just, you know, lawyers get a lot of blame, but there are some really, really fantastic human beings working as lawyers. And then, you know, these last few years, I've had wonderful people like you and John Gresham and Mike Sheen, you know, people who really have no important and better things to do with their life than to worry about me, you know, stepping into my life and trying to help me. That's been really, really encouraging. It's given me hope. And it gives me hope to, you know, try to hold on a little while longer, you know, to see whether this can be resolved in some way, shape, or form before I die of old age. Because I've been in here for. 00:56:26 Speaker 10: I can tell you exactly, 11,945 days. 00:56:28 Speaker 11: Okay? 00:56:28 Speaker 5: 11,945 days I've been in here. 32 years, 8 months, and 11 days. And it hasn't been easy, but that's what's carried me. 00:56:51 Speaker 1: You do have an extraordinary team, including the leaders of Germany, past and present. I want to tell the audience there's the movie Killing for Love, and the book is A Far, Far Better Thing by Jens Zürich and Bill Sizemore, A Far, Far Better Thing. And then this is part of the show that we've become known for. It's, I think, everyone's favorite part of the show. It's mine. And this is a part of the show where I get to thank our guests. In this case, of course, John Grisham. John, thanks for being here. And Sheriff Harding, Sheriff Chip Harving of Albemarle County. Of course, you, Jens, thanks for participating in this and sharing your thoughts and experience and educating our audience. I want to turn it over to each of you just for brief closing thoughts. And of course, we'll end with you, Jens. Anyway, John, final thoughts. 00:57:46 Speaker 8: As far as... Yeah, I've said it before. These wrongful conviction stories are always compelling and tempting from my point of view to write about them, to tell the fantastic stories, as sad as they are, but to also hopefully raise awareness. I hope there's a happy ending. We believe there's going to be a happy ending because we're all working hard with a game plan to get Jens out and get him back to Germany. And Jens and I have this... kind of a running gag that one day soon we're going to be drinking a beer together in Munich at Oktoberfest. 00:58:25 Speaker 1: I'm coming too. And by the way, he and I have the same deal. So, you know, I don't want to make you not feel special, but we've got the same arrangement. 00:58:31 Speaker 2: Me too, and he's got you. 00:58:32 Speaker 9: Paying for it, John. 00:58:33 Speaker 8: We're all invited. We're all invited to Oktoberfest. 00:58:35 Speaker 2: That's right. 00:58:36 Speaker 1: Sheriff Harding, final thoughts. 00:58:39 Speaker 9: Until I got involved in this kind of work, I always thought that you were found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But it looks like in America, once you're found guilty... To be found innocent or pardoned, it almost has to be you're innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt. The standard is way too high. It's shameful for me to have 50 years in the justice system and to see the pushback, not just in this case, but I've read 300 or 400 cases from prosecutors and law enforcement that don't... man up and step up and admit they make mistakes and seek the truth. And no one is ever held accountable. In the first 250 cases that Brandon Garrett examined, in many cases prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence and so did law enforcement. In that one single case, did one officer ever go to trial or spend one day in jail? So if we can't police ourselves, how do we anticipate the public's going to have the confidence in us to police them? 00:59:39 Speaker 1: And now, saving the best for last, Jens, your final thoughts. 00:59:45 Speaker 5: Thank you. I think it's important for your audience to realize that there are an estimated 100,000 wrongfully convicted prisoners in the United States. That's a small city, and I'm far from the only one. I'm really, really so grateful to the three of you, John Grisham, Chip Harding, and Jason Flom, for drawing attention to my case. But let's not forget the other 99,999 victims of miscarriages of justice One of the things that I really would hope for is that if I'm ever released, I can maybe help draw attention to all those other people and work towards systemic changes so that things like this don't happen to other people in the future. This is something to think about. There's 100,000 innocent people in prison in the United States. somebody should be really bothered by that. And I hope your audience thinks about them as well. And I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak today and talk about my case. Thank you. 01:01:12 Speaker 1: Jens, you have all my respect. I look forward to working with you. And I'll see you for Oktoberfest. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. 01:01:31 Speaker 2: It really helps. 01:01:32 Speaker 1: And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project, and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to innocenceproject.org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wardus. The music in the show is by three-time Oscar-nominated composer, Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at wrongfulconviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One.