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582: #582 Guest Host Conor Hall with Brian Pippitt · Wrongful Conviction Podcasts

• 00:00:04 Speaker 1: Hello again. It's Connor Hall, the senior producer for Wrongful Conviction with another update and more behind the scenes insights. And today we're talking about Brian Pippott, an episode that I had the privilege of hosting. And that's not why we're listening to this today, that's just a coincidence. There's an actual update to be had. Now, this case came to me from another innocent man's advocate. If you remember John Juca, his mother Doreen, she is the total badass that is known as Mother Justice. She had sent me an article and introduced me to the journalist who wrote it, a guy named Ted Ham, and it was all about, you know, Brian's case and how Minnesota's Conviction Review Unit under Attorney General Keith Ellison had done a two year investigation and they concluded that Brian was factually innocent. But the local district attorney in Aiken County, a guy named James Rats can't make that shit it up, had welched on his agreement to go along with the CRU's ruling. So the media started getting involved, including us. Now, this was all in the late summer fall of twenty twenty four, when Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz was running for vice president, which likely made his team and maybe the entire team, wary of weighing in on anything that could be controversial, like dispensing justice. In Brian's case shouldn't be controversial anyway. Now, had they won that election, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, who's half Ojibwe, same tribe as Brian, she would have become governor, and who knows, maybe she'd take an interest. But that's not how the cookie crumbled. So after the election, Brian's team filed for clemency with the Waltz admin and in April twenty twenty five, Minnesota's Clemency Review Commission, on the basis of Brian's credible evidence of innocence, voted six to one in favor of commutation to time served. Next step was a hearing with the Pardon Board, which has three members, the Governor, the Attorney General, and the Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. Now we already knew that Keith Ellison was convinced of Brian's innocence, so this came down to the Chief Justice and Tim Waltz. Now, after years of watching Jason at work, the guy is a master advocate. I mean, he basically took all the skills from his actual profession advocating for artists, and he uses those skills for the innocent. It's amazing to watch, like, I mean, even being around him. He's like this like vortex of like connections in this world. And I am not that. But it made me think, you know, what could I? What could little old me do? 00:02:40 Speaker 2: Right? 00:02:41 Speaker 1: So I started thinking about how I could reach either one of them, the Chief Justice or Tim Waltz. Right, who the hell am I? Anyway? We had just covered Leonard Peltier, whose advocate Holly Maccaro was very effective, and she is also ojaboy like Brian and the Lieutenant Governor. Funny enough, Holly had just taken a consulting job with Peggy flannagainst senatorial campaign. That primary is August eleventh, twenty twenty six. But I digress. So I sent Holly the podcast and filled her in on everything and begged her to speak with Peggy, who maybe she could convince to lobby Governor Waltz on Brian's behalf, or maybe even Holly, could you know, cross paths with him and corner him and give him the elevator pitch. Now, I'm not sure what she was able to do, what effect any of this had. But on September twenty fourth, twenty twenty five, the Pardon Board held a hearing and Governor Waltz chose to commute brian sentence. Now, the Clemency Reviewed Commission's recommendation was time served, but Governor Waltz, who had reelection on his mind, well, he chose to just make him parole eligible. It's a shame how electoral politics can cause so much caution and compromise when it comes to justice, probably because us, you know, the enemies of justice are so happy to manipulate low information voters. But I digress again. At this hearing, Waltz made a comment that I'm going to paraphrase. It's something like, moments ago, mister Pippott was serving a life sentence. Now he'll be home by the new year. Interesting that he was so confident in what the Parole Board was still yet to do that December, and then Brian was finally released on January eighth, twenty twenty six. Around that time, Minnesota was really going through it and still is. The current DOJ has made misleading and racially charged allegations about childcare fraud schemes while withholding federal funding. And I guess we'll find out how much water any of these cases hold. But it's been so disruptive that Tim Waltz dropped out of the governor's race. And perhaps even more consequential, the same DOJ has refused to renew the federal grant that helped fund Minnesota's Conviction Review Unit. Attorney General Keith Ellison had to shut it down. There is no more Minnesota Conviction Review Unit. Luckily, Keith Allison was able to reunite Brian Pippot with his family and his tribe, while so many more will just continue to face an even steeper uphill battle. On February twenty fourth, nineteen ninety eight, eighty four year old Minnesotan Evelyn Mallin was discovered in her ransacked bedroom, strangled and beaten to death. Her small apartment was attached to her convenience store, but the store was undisturbed, including any signs of forced entry. There was a broken basement window, but it appeared to have been broken from the inside out. Yet, instead of focusing on personal or business relations with access to keys, the investigation targeted an Indigenous man named Brian Pippott and four of his male relatives, despite no evidence connecting them to the scene, credible alibis, and an equally incredible theory of guilt. One of them made a statement. Two more pled. One was acquitted, but Brian wasn't so lucky. This is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction, where we have a story about a group of indigenous men about an hour's drive north of Minneapolis Saint Paul, the Malas Band of Vojabwee to be exact, but the theory of their involvement in the murder was so lazy and full of holes that authorities must have known it was also full of something else. And joining us to tell his story, still in a Minnesota prison is Brian Pippott. Welcome. Brian helped tell this story an attorney and investigator from probably the original innocence organization in this country, Centurion Ministries Jim Cousins Welcome, well, thank you, And before we even begin with Brian's personal history, I'd like to recognize the history of the Malax Band of Ojibwe, as well as their relations throughout the area, whose roots are on the East Coast. But as Europeans began their continental conquest about five hundred years ago, the Ojibwe were forced into a nomadic lifestyle. They eventually allied themselves with the French in the Seven Years War, a relationship evidenced even by the name Malaks It's French for a Thousand Lakes, a reference to the Great Lakes area in which the Ojibwe eventually settled a little over two hundred years ago and where they were later recognized by the US government as a sovereign nation. Spread among various reservations, some of which were in Aiken County, Minnesota. 00:08:00 Speaker 3: Well, Aikin County includes the town or city of Acn itself, and about twenty miles from there is a town called McGregor. That's where there's a small Native American reservation called the Sandy Lake Reservation. I understand that there's a fair degree of tension between the white community, law enforcement authorities from the Acon County Sheriff's office, and the Native American community. 00:08:25 Speaker 1: That tension has made headlines in recent years as the current sheriff, Daniel Geida, it appears, has accepted financial support from an oil conglomerate called Enbridge, and then it just so happens that protesters were treated pretty roughly for seeking to protect clean drinking water in the area where Brian was raised. 00:08:47 Speaker 4: Yes McGregor, mistrict, IWO of Malacc's Sandy Lake Indian Reservation. We moved up from the late eighties to Sandy Lake and my mother she rented a carcel I end up there for a dollar for fifty years and had a house built. She kept adding on to the house. She wanted a place for everyone, and we all lived in the households around the Sandy Lake area. Had some brothers and they have all passed and rest. Some good times going swimming in the lakes, calling fish and going hunt trapping with my uncles in the wintertime, harvesting deer, using everything of the tier, and giving finish for the deer and afer into Mexico. 00:09:34 Speaker 1: Despite ugly efforts to the contrary, the Ojuboy and other indigenous nations have been able to maintain their culture and self governance well. Folks like Ojiboy Elder Marge Anderson were able to make strides for their nations with the US government, like the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of nineteen eighty eight, which brought much needed economic opportunities to their nation. In fact, on February twenty third, ninety eight, Brian had accompanied his nephew, Michael Mus Squattis to an interview at one of those casinos. 00:10:06 Speaker 4: Yeah, Mike Squattus, my sister Anita's son. He had a job interview that day and ponded radio for I don't know, thirty dollars or something for some extra money to go to a casino. I didn't drive at that time that I had arrived with him and my other nephew, Brandon. 00:10:28 Speaker 1: By all accounts, the trio returned to the area around eight thirty PM, and Brian was home for the night by ten. Then the following morning, February twenty fourth, nineteen ninety eight, eighty four year old Evelyn Mallin's body was discovered in her bedroom in nearby tiny Shamrock Township. 00:10:46 Speaker 3: The building is very small and houses not only her bedroom, but also a little convenience store that has so three point two beer and cigarettes and other sundry items and piecing together so some of the witness testimony, she's probably murdered the night before, sometime between ten and ten thirty in the morning. Her daughter, Norma Horner, went to the store with her boyfriend, Gerald Horsemen, and they knocked on the door, They knocked on the windows, they didn't get a response. They went around to the back door. There was a skeleton key broken off from the inside of the back door, so they couldn't open it, so they called nine to one one Aken County Sheriff's department. Kick in the back door. They find Evelyn Male and the victim in her bedroom. That she was strangled and beaten rather savagely, and there was fecal matter on her too. Now that may have been that she evacuated as a result of being strangled and beaten, but there's some other theories that who theever the assailant was took some fecal matter from a little there's a bowl. I mean, there was no indoor plumbing in the store and through that on her. I don't know whether that's true or not. But they didn't see her immediately because her bedroom was ransacked. Were thrown all over the place and she was tossed off her ben There was a mattress on top of her, and then they went around throughout the building. They noted that the front end door locks were locked. They noted that a basement window was broken and the store portion is utterly untouched. 00:12:17 Speaker 4: The back room was ripped apart, like whoever did that was looking for something particular. 00:12:24 Speaker 3: Thereafter, they interviewed Gerald Horseman and Norma Horner. Gerald Horseman was responsible for some of the inventory in the little store, and he told them at the time that there was no beer, no cigarettes missing. Subsequently, Merle Maylin, the victim's son, came up from his home in New Mexico several days after the murder. Theoretically there was some cash in a white envelope that she used to keep that he thought was missing. 00:12:53 Speaker 1: Initially, Gerald Horseman thought so too, as well as a checkbook, but both turned up. Merle Mallin continued to allege that other items were missing. 00:13:03 Speaker 4: There is a mention of guns missing, biers, televisions, all kinds of stuff, and they were flying over the reservation looking in the swamps for the stuff. And then oh no, this wasn't missing. This was a missing messing was missing at at trial and he said, oh, we've fold them money. 00:13:22 Speaker 1: But Merle Maelan has always maintained that beer, cigarettes, and a gun were stolen, which propped up the state's theory a robbery turned homicide, despite what Horsemen, who actually kept the store's inventory, has maintained all along that the store was undisturbed and no store items were missing. Interestingly, one of the alternative suspects was Merle's son, Mark Mallin. 00:13:48 Speaker 3: The mourning of the murder, relatives actually pointed toward her grandson, Mark Maelan, and he would help her at the store too, so he had access to the store, and that he could be violent, particularly he was on something, and that Evelyn Malan used to give him money, and a couple of weeks before this incident, Mark Maelan asked her for four or five hundred dollars and it was one of the first times when she had refused him money. Others subsequently had said, we know that he's been rough with his grandmother before, and he knows where she hides money in the store, but law enforcement didn't really follow up on that thread. Another alternative suspect was a man by the name of Terry Pete. He evidently was somebody that Evelyn Maylan was afraid of, and she expressed that fear to some others that bad news is back in town. He had been released from being incarcerated, and he had asked her to buy some propane on credit and she had refused. He subsequently perished when his trailer caught fire. Several months later. 00:14:47 Speaker 1: But before the death of Terry Pete, as well as the specter of missing cash had dissipated, the rumor mill in Aiken County was quite active. 00:14:56 Speaker 3: There were rampant rumors, some of which are clearly untrue, that the assailants cut off her finger to take her ring off her, the assailants sexually assaulted her. I heard it was the miss Squades. I heard it was this person. I heard it was that person. And so mister Bijurga from the BCA, which is the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension the equivalent of an FBI for the state, and Bruce Beck from the Aiken County Sheriff's Office went over to interview Michael Mus Squads, Keith MS Squades, and Brandon Ms Squaddies as well. They're all the nephews of Brian Pippott. This is within I think a week of the murder. 00:15:34 Speaker 4: And they looked at Keith and checked his body for scrapes and marks. He didn't have any, and they asked him where he was. He said he was at home, and they asked Mike where he was. 00:15:47 Speaker 3: Michael Musquades says, what day is this now? Oh, that was the day I had my interview down at the Grand Casino. Brandon and my uncle Brian Pippott went with me as well. The authorities knew this now. They later interrogated Brandon Misquatis, who was fifteen at the time, in a very coercive interview where they kept saying to him, we know you were there. Your relatives have said you were there. Come clean, and he said, no, I wasn't there. I wasn't there. I was at the casino. They later acknowledged that his alibi was correct. So that's the same alibi that Brian Pippott has. So the alibi was established quite early on. 00:16:23 Speaker 1: Nevertheless, after a year had gone by, Terry Pete had passed, while Merle Mallin kept the specter of a robbery alive, and the rumor mill led investigators to Brian Pippott, his nephews Raymond and Keith Musquattis, as well as his cousins Neil King and Don Hill. 00:16:39 Speaker 3: Right after an award had been offered, Don Hill started a rumor that Brian Pippott said something along the lines of oh, she was already dead when I went in there. And then eventually Don Hill starts naming a few of these people that ultimately are selected as the assailants. And as they started to narrow down some of these rumors, they used tactics of saying to one so and so said you were there. Now you need to help yourself by saying you were there and admitting to things, and the first person to the trough gets the best meal or something. That was the line they used. 00:17:16 Speaker 4: Yes they live, threatening all your younger kids with long term prison sends. 00:17:24 Speaker 3: And so there was a carousel of interrogations of various people until they got somebody to say, okay, I was there, and that was Raymond Misquades. He had a couple of felonies pending, and there had been some rumors about him being there and not being there, and he is recanted completely and fully, genuinely, in detail and with specificity, and if you look at his various statements, I actually have a chart as to how they changed over time, you can tell he wasn't there. 00:17:56 Speaker 1: Raymond first said that around seven pm they arrived at the Dollar Lie door and Brian had kicked in the front door. Both elements not true, so his story had to change alongside the state's narrative until they were the same. 00:18:11 Speaker 3: The state's theory is that these five men were driving around drunk and decided that they were going to go to the Dollar Lake store. The store was closed with The allegation is that Keith Musquades was able to get through a basement window, which, by the way, would have entailed removing panes of glass the little pieces of wood that separate the panes, reaching in and removing two wooden slats that were nailed across the window, Squeeze down through the window, walk across a sandy basement floor, come up through a trap door, which, as far as we know, he would have no idea existed. 00:18:48 Speaker 4: Everybody forgets to mention that there was a chair on top of that trap door and it was webbed up against the window sill. It was in the police report that the police removed the chair from a trap door to get down to the basement. 00:19:03 Speaker 1: So the back door was inoperable, the front door was dead bolted shut, and their suspects didn't have access to keys. Yet this basement entry theory was still chosen despite its impossibility, and I guess since the front door was definitely not kicked in, Raymond changed his story from Brian kicking in the front door to an intoxicated Keith Musquattis wiggling through a jagged basement window. And remember they examined him just days after the crime, and he didn't have a scratch. 00:19:33 Speaker 3: He said that Keith Musquades cut himself going through the window, but Keith Msquaddes had no cuts on him. There's no evidence anywhere that anyone went through that window, no fabric, no blood, no skin. There is some cat blood, so I guess a cat couldn't get through there without cutting itself, so he theoretically comes up opens up the trap door. Raymond says that they all came in and out through the front door, But we now know that the front door was locked with a dead bolt, that you needed a CA to operate. 00:20:01 Speaker 1: Even with the alleged gymnastics, the theory still doesn't work without a front door key, but not according to BCA investigator David Bjurga. 00:20:10 Speaker 3: Mister Bjurga was questioned about that lock at the grand jury. He was asked, you can't get in and out of that door without locking the dead bolt. Is that right? He said, well, that's right, we don't believe it was locked. Why do you think that, Well, because Raymonds, Squades and Don Hill said they went through the door, so it couldn't have been locked. Well, that's completely circular logic. That's not saying anything about the forensics or the physics of the scene. 00:20:31 Speaker 4: Again with the door, prosecutor on it around and evaded the question, said, well, I can't go into that because it's from the investigation. 00:20:43 Speaker 3: The theory on the door was that the dead bolt lock wasn't really locked. That was just the lock on the door handle that you could lock by pulling it shut. There's no merit to that whatsoever. The first responders all reported that door locked. The crime scene photograph shows that the dead bolt door locked. I had a forensic locksmith examined that photograph. He said, that's clearly a dead bolt and it's clearly locked. And when they took photographs of the lock when they disassembled it, they didn't show the actual bolt portion of it because that would show you that what you see in that photograph a dead bolt clearly locked. There's no real getting around that now they've lost the lock. 00:21:23 Speaker 1: However, Raymond was not aware of those damning specifics in real life or in the statements he was making. 00:21:30 Speaker 3: He said that he stayed in the car but he heard a crash. They come out with beer and cigarettes, and Brian comes out with some kind of bag with what they thought was a weapon in it, and the theory is that they then went back to Raymond's father's house and Keith Musquades and Brian Pippott confessed that they had killed Evelyn maelon Or when she came out of her bedroom, but she didn't come out of her. 00:21:53 Speaker 1: Bedroom, according to other interviewees, BCA investigator David Bijerga routinely inserted the unfounded element into his questioning that the victim had discovered the assailants in the store and so they had to put her down, but the store was undisturbed, no signs of a struggle, according to both police reports and Gerald Horseman, who also maintained that no store items were missing. But instead Raymond conformed his statement to include unsubstantiated claims from Merle Mallin, the father of the only alternative suspect, about a stolen gun, cigarettes, and beer. Mallin also testified that his mother wasn't able to lock the door, something that it appears he forgot, he had said when interviewed years later by a post conviction investigator, and again at a two thousand and six PCR hearing, when he said that she could in fact lock the door. And there's even more nonsense to unravel. 00:22:47 Speaker 3: Ramus Squade said they went to an abandoned house that used to be his father's on the Sandy Lake Reservation, which was probably abandoned the last time he had been there years ago, but had since been remodeled, and had resident said it. He said that they were all driving a gold Tornado, but no such car existed, so almost nothing he said matched with reality. 00:23:24 Speaker 4: It was arrested. I was a year later or something, and it wasn't really a significant time for me to remember anything. So I told him, well, I don't know where I was. And it wasn't until I had to report and my mother came to visit me, and she said, oh yeah, that's that they had loaned event for the job interview, and then he wrote along and they said, oh yeah, okay, Well I would have a Tom's ticket for that data, and I called my investigator and he went over there and he's sure enough there was a pontic. And it wasn't until later on that I was getting the discovery papers that I realized that the East, Mike and Brandon, and my mother all confirmed my alibi. 00:24:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, in all likelihood this was you know, somebody that was related to her or had access to a key. 00:24:19 Speaker 4: Right. Yeah. I remember sitting in the shell and reading a discovery and I said, huh, this is an inside job. And the police didn't pick up on that. They didn't pick up on the doors being locked, didn't pick up on the chair being on top of the trap door, even the atops he had report. I thought, well, this person had a lot of anger towards her. 00:24:43 Speaker 1: But that, along with the gaping holes in Raymond's and the state's narrative, appear to have been ignored, as Raymond was offered five years and his other charges dropped to become the state star witness against his four relatives. 00:24:57 Speaker 3: Keith Msquades, Brian and Neil King deny having anything to do with it, and denies that to this day they did get a sort of confession from Don Hill, except for it kept changing and changing and changing. He was going to testify and he would get five years and they would forgive some sexual assault colonies. He never did testify because they recognized that nothing this guy said was true, even though he still got the deal, which was I think less than five years. Same with Raymond. 00:25:23 Speaker 1: Meanwhile, Brian, Neil, and Keith awaited trial in jail, with proceedings taking place between nineteen ninety nine and two thousand and one. 00:25:32 Speaker 3: Keith misquades he had a first degree sexual assault case pending against him. They dismissed that in exchange for his Alfred plea on the murder. I think it was manslaughter. He had nothing to do with it. He has an alibi as well. But he takes this plea on the theory that you know, I might be able to survive prison better if I'm a murderer as opposed to sexual assault. So he takes an Alfred plea. But then he tries to withdraw his plea within I think two weeks, and that's denied, so he serves I think fifteen years. 00:26:05 Speaker 1: So only Neil and Brian couldn't be coerced into a plea deal. 00:26:09 Speaker 3: Neil King has tried first, and he is acquitted by the judge at the conclusion of the state's evidence on two grounds. One that the only incriminating testimony against him was Raymond Masquattes, who was an accomplice, and in Minnesota you need corroborating evidence in addition to accomplice evidence. And the other thing is that Raymond musquad said Neil King he was drunk in the backseat of the car, So there was no clear evidence that, even under Raymond's story, that Neil King had gone in and participated in the actual homicide or burglary. But in any event, he was acquitted based on the principle that there was no corroborating evidence. 00:26:46 Speaker 4: So the state right away started interviewing all my filmates and trying to threaten them and hitting them to say something against me. 00:26:56 Speaker 1: And they found jail house snitch. 00:26:58 Speaker 3: The jail house snitch is a guy by the of Peter Arnaldi. It's a longtime con man, fraudster. And so Brian been told this guy knows his way around the court system. And Brian said, I've been wrongfully charged here. I mean, I said, what should I do? And he showed him the criminal complaint. 00:27:14 Speaker 4: Asked him to look at it, and I tell him what I'm being charged with, and then he said, well, let me take this to the own and I'm thinking, okay, well no, I'm going to need that back side grab it, BacT and that's the last. I'm not saying that Arnaldi until a couple of years later when he was strolls into the courtroom wearing the street clothes and I didn't know that he was in federal custody for bank robbery. And then we had to play with the system and then work it to his advantage. 00:27:45 Speaker 3: Peter Arnaldi subsequently says that Brian confessed this crime to me. The majority of what he attests to was in the criminal complaint which Brian had showed him, but he completely misconstrued it. He said they stuffed Kleenex in her mouth to stifle her screams. And he got that because the criminal complaint in the autopsy said that she had soft tissue injuries around her mouth. 00:28:12 Speaker 1: Wow. But the county attorney, Bradley Rhodes, felt comfortable presenting this failure in reading comprehension as corroborating evidence. Rhodes has since been disbarred for unrelated reasons. In addition, Brian's original judge had become ill, resulting in a mistrial and a change of venue. Then his original attorney, Chris Davis, chose this moment to retire, so. 00:28:40 Speaker 4: He appointed me another attorney. That attorney had never tried a murder case. I had a new investigator. I think that was his first case. So I had two people that really didn't know much about how to present a case. 00:28:56 Speaker 3: Tom Mrtha, he was the defense counsel in this case. He was a year and a half out of law school. This case was dumped on and there was a change of venues so it was up in International Falls, right on the Canadian border. So he had to drive up there and a station wagon with the files in the back, without much support. 00:29:15 Speaker 4: And I think they knew what they were doing. Minnesota's prejudice against stative Americans and the part that you go up north, the more prenduice there. They had me at the tip of the state. 00:29:26 Speaker 3: Here's an interesting thing too. Before the trial started, the judge brought the prosecutor in and Tom Earth and Brian in and said, look, can we do a deal here. 00:29:36 Speaker 4: Prosecutor said, well, we'll take life off the table. I'll give you seventeen or eighteen years, something like that, and then a judge because, well, I'll tell you this, I don't care what he's offering you. I'll give you seven years. And I already had two years in. I thought, well three years left, and I said, well, that's an excellent deal. And if I was guilty, I would but I'm not guilty and I can't see myself admitting to something that I didn't do. 00:30:05 Speaker 1: So they moved ahead with trial in January two thousand and one, presenting the now congealed but still erroneous narrative through Raymond Asquattis, and to impeach him. Brian urged Tom Murtha to ask about the condition of the house to which they allegedly fled in the aftermath. 00:30:22 Speaker 4: And he described it as a hole, born out, born down party house, windows broke, red, shag carpeting, brown, experior, and the house was enoughing like that it had been remodeled. My brother was living in there with his girlfriend Mary Bleagan at the time, so that couldn't have been possible. The police knew this, the. 00:30:48 Speaker 1: Sheriff knew this, yet this false narrative was still presented. Unfortunately, Tom Murtha had not yet uncovered all the internal inconsistencies in blatant falsehoods, including the basement entry theory. 00:31:03 Speaker 3: The forensic technician from the BCA who testified to that did so in an extremely superficial way. He just said the point of entry was this window. There was no analysis done. Two different experts have reviewed the forensics and the physical evidence surrounding that window independently. They came to the conclusion that the window entry was staged, that the wooden slats were pried off from the inside with a tool. There's tool marks, that the muntains that separate the panes were removed and placed neatly in a spot where they wouldn't have fallen. Two panes of glass were removed and placed outside. The other pane was broken, but the glass from that was actually in the window well, which means it was broken from the inside. And then there was large pieces of that pane that were placed again not where they would have fallen, in fact where they could not have fallen. 00:31:56 Speaker 1: So it appears that someone broke this window out from the inside. It may have been staged, or maybe had nothing to do with this crime at all. It's unclear, but what is clear is the implausibility of an unscathed entrance through this basement window. 00:32:12 Speaker 3: There was a screw protruding into the area of the window that you would have caught something on if you had gone through there. Where the muntins were broken, there were pointed pieces that would have caught somebody's fabric if they had gone through there. There was no footprints or any sign that anybody landed on the boxes below. Nothing from the window well, which had leaves and pine needles and so forth, was discovered beneath the window. There's no set of footprints that lead from the window over to the trap door. So there's no forensic evidence supporting the idea that somebody went through this window other than the window was open, and all of the forensic evidence is that nobody did in fact go through the window. No part of that case with stands scrutiny in any respect, forensically, physically, the objective evidence. 00:33:05 Speaker 1: And let's not forget the chair blocking the trap door, or the currently misplaced dead bolt that was locked and required a key, which would have destroyed the state's theory. But none of it was discovered by his trial attorney and pointed out to the jury. 00:33:21 Speaker 3: In fairness to Tom Mirtha, he had not tried a felony case before. I'm not even sure he tried any cases before, but he did put on a defense. He called Michael Musquade, says to the alibi the pawnshop operator to authenticate the pawnshop ticket. 00:33:35 Speaker 4: I had a charge account stick gas at the local gas station in town. I had a bart tab. 00:33:41 Speaker 3: And then the prosecute tried to argue that he fabricated this alibi while he was awaiting trial with his relatives. Unfortunately, his attorney at the time didn't make the point that they knew about this alibi back in March of nineteen ninety eight, so he didn't fabricate it. And they said, well, when we asked him about but he was doing that day, he didn't come up with the alibi. And Brian's answer to that is, I didn't know exactly what day this murder occurred. I had nothing to do with it, so I didn't necessarily put together that I was at the casino until my nephews told me that, and my mother, Agnes Chief, said, hey, wait a minute, you don't you have a pawn receipt from that day. 00:34:17 Speaker 4: None of that came in and they call the head of security for Malax Casino and he says, yeah, we don't have any record of mister Pippott being at the casino, And that was all just for show because they knew that no records exist because they were changing the security systems at that time. There was no evidence linking me or any of us to the crime, no motivation that they said motive didn't have a factor in Minnesota courts, and the only thing I had was my nephew testifying and the jail house in Foreman. 00:34:54 Speaker 3: Peter Arnaldi said that Brian felt a great deal of remorse about what had happened, that they had killed this lady as part of a burglary and he was going to try and get his relatives to conjure an alibi for him, and that they arrived in his mother's van and they had gone in and robbed the place of beer and cigarettes and murdered Evelyn Maillen. He did have to admit that Brian had showed him the criminal complaint and that's of course where the soft tissue injuries were disclosed, which were not kleenex. 00:35:26 Speaker 4: Seemed like he was a professional. Even I thought, Wow, this guy. He really found what he's talking about. If I was a jurior, I believe I think we impeached Arnaldy and it really didn't matter to the jury. They you now, like Native Americans up there in northern Minnesota was at the tip of the state. They don't even like help tighters. 00:35:50 Speaker 1: I mean, did you have hope that when they came back from you know, deliberation, that things might go your way. 00:35:56 Speaker 4: No, my attorney did. And then he said, well, what are you going to do when you get out. I said, well, this thing is not over it. I looked at the Karian that I could read their micro expression, I'm not planning on anything. And I believe it was three days later that they came back to guilty verdicts. And I think Judge was so mad at me that I didn't take his seven year offer that he gave me a double maximum sentence of two light sentences without the possibility of parole. I got sent to the water prison and the garage a treaty according to your crime to mine was a heinous crime against an old lady. So didn't treat me very fairly. I ended up in the hole quite a bit. Fell off kind of targeted pass the time by work, doing anything you can, staying as busy as a chance. I do that right now to billop a routine, a routine that a call every day and really draw off course. And I did stay as I can, and it helped past the time. 00:37:21 Speaker 1: Of course, part of that time was passed by appealing his conviction, which was upheld, but his sentence was ruled to be improper and he was resentced to one life term with parole eligibility. Meanwhile, he filed for post conviction relief and was granted a hearing in two thousand and six. 00:37:40 Speaker 3: The evidence that was presented there was they said there was a false evidence about the door lock, that Merle Maylon testified that she wasn't able to lock the door at the trial, but then he admitted that she could lock the door, so that was one element. They had an ineffective assistance of counsel claim. They had an updated from Keith Musquad saying that he wasn't there and that he knew that Brian came back from the casino that night at like ten something. Then there was a victim's advocate who had talked to Ray on the phone. But some time after the trial, and Ray had said, I just told him what they wanted to hear to get out of this, but they couldn't find him testify. A guy by the name of Craig Lacari was housed with Brian Pippott and Peter Arnaldi, and he said that Arnaldi had told him that Brian said he was innocent, that he had never said anything about Brian confessing. 00:38:32 Speaker 4: We pointed out the flaws in Arnaldi's testimony, saying that there was twilve paper steps in her mouth and the complained said soft tissue injuries, and somehow he converted that into tissue paper being put in her mouth, and they ignored it. 00:38:53 Speaker 3: That was an affidavid from Lacari. The judge wouldn't rid him out. They didn't have Peter Arnaldi testify, they didn't have all the forensic experts that we've assembled testified. They didn't have Neil King testify. So it was really a pretty tepid presentation and it was denied and appealed and denied. 00:39:11 Speaker 1: At which point Brian began looking for meaningful pro bono help. 00:39:15 Speaker 3: Brian Pippott had written to Centurion, so I went out with two other members and we interviewed him, and everything he told me turned out to be true. It took me quite a long time to find Raymond Squaddes, but when I found him, he was forthcoming about his having not told the truth. I also found Peter Arnaldi initially said, well, you know, they raped her, and I said, Peter, I have the autopsy report. Whoever did this didn't rape her, So oh my god. I always thought that you know these you know, he wasn't charitable about what he called them, went in and raped. 00:39:45 Speaker 4: This old lady. 00:39:46 Speaker 3: He said, I think I have it all wrong. 00:39:48 Speaker 1: Perhaps this was just how Arnaldi internally justified his false testimony for personal gain. Either way, Jim continued his investigation, moving on to Neil King. 00:40:00 Speaker 3: Neil King said the basis of his defense was that he was drunk in the backseat of the car, and that wasn't even really the truth. He wasn't even there at all, but he didn't want that disrupted. He felt that Brian Pippott had implicated him, so he didn't want to help him even though that wasn't the truth. But he gave us a declaration saying he wasn't there at all. Keith Musquades gave us a declaration saying he wasn't there at all. And then I have this forensic evidence, locksmith, the two different crime scene specialists, and so I put together an application to the CRU in January of twenty twenty two. It was about seventy five pages long, doing an analysis of the different stories that Raymond told, showing photographs of the lock and the store supported that with an eight hundred page appendix. So the CRU took the application they started their own investigation. There's a couple of aspects of that I think we're worth mentioning too, and that is Jim Rats, the County Attorney at the onset of the CRI investigation, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Attorney General's Office and CRU, and from what I understand, he asked for a phrase in that memorandum of understanding that said, I'm paraphrasing it in the event that I don't want to support the recommendation of the CRU, as the county attorney, if I don't want to execute that recommendation, then in that event I agree that I will surrender jurisdiction to the Attorney General's Office. 00:41:18 Speaker 1: So it's fair to assume that the county Attorney waived jurisdiction and that the Attorney General's Office Conviction Review Unit has the final say. 00:41:26 Speaker 3: And I have to say that their investigation is astonishing in how thorough it is. They were able to get in to interview Don Hill in the psychiatric facility, something I was not able to do. They reviewed literally thousands of documents. They interviewed either twenty five or twenty six witnesses recorded interviews. There was no leading questions. They discovered an alibi witness for Keith Musquades, who I was unable to find. They interviewed the forensic specialists, they retained an expert of their own with respect to the confession, and ultimately they issued a report that was one hundred and eighty pages long with nine hundred footnotes to source materials. And the guy who did the majority of the investigative work for the cRIO was an Assistant Attorney General by the name of Carmel Leone, and at the end of the investigation they prepared a draft report that was reviewed not only by Carmel Leone's immediate boss, Carrie Spurling, but by her boss, the Deputy Attorney General, David Voyd. They presented a draft as a courtesy to the BCA and to the county attorney and to sheriff guide and said we're inviting you to make comments on this. And the response was an extremely hostile one, and so they they're contesting it, even though they don't have any inherent standing to do that. 00:42:49 Speaker 4: I have nothing to hut. I waive attorney client privilege because I knew the county assigned and agreelan to go along with the firings. And so I've been waiting for two and a half years for this investigation to unfold. And then April I found out that, Hey, they found the truth. He found everything that was going on. This investigation was so thorough. They found stuff that we didn't even plan. And yes, the county didn't like that. 00:43:20 Speaker 3: The sheriff was very hostile. He said that two courts had already had judged this case. Of course that doesn't mean anything because everything that we've produced, no court judge or jury hasn't it hurt any of this material. And then he said something along the lines of you have to prove to me beyond reasonable doubt that he didn't do this, and I don't think you're going to be able to do that. He also said, at one point, you never did a reenactment of anybody going through that window, So how do you know that somebody couldn't get through the window. And then he also said something along the lines up, I knew Keith Musquades from years ago. He's a very athletic guy. He could have gotten through the window. The position has never been that it's physically impossible for someone to get through the window. It's tough. It's that nobody did go through the window, given the forensic evidence at the scene. And when Carmen Leone said something along the line said, well there. 00:44:07 Speaker 1: Was cat blood there. 00:44:08 Speaker 3: You know, I guess a cat couldn't get through it because I've lived with cats all my life. I know cat's going to cut itself. So Carmen said to him, well, how do you think the cat blood got there? This is the mentality we're dealing with. He said, I think the Misquatties went out and killed a cat and put its blood on there to put us off the track. 00:44:24 Speaker 1: Yeah, sounds reasonable. 00:44:25 Speaker 3: The BCA said we're going to do our own investigation, and they hired three outside people. Sup was the experts. I don't know what the terms of those agreements are, and their motivation is undisguised that the purpose of their parallel investigation is to find something, anything, that they can use to discredit the CRU report, and so far their investigation, when you compare it to what the CRU did, is laughable. I mean, they interviewed George Horseman, but they didn't record it, and they got a summary of a statement from him, and what it was clear was that they were trying to get him to move off of his his steadfast position that no beer, no cigarettes were missing. The store portion of the building was untouched, and they evidently they got him to look at some photographs and say, well, maybe there were some cegarets there that are missing, and I guess he kind of went, well, maybe, you know. Then they did a reenactment of someone making their way through the window. They were able to show that somebody could physically make their way through the window, but without the nail protruding, without the glass in it, without the munting parts. Even then the kid who was going through it caught his shirt on the wooden. 00:45:31 Speaker 1: Frame, which has always been the misunderstanding. The issue is in whether someone could get through the window, but whether they could do it without leaving any evidence behind. Not even a cat could do it. 00:45:43 Speaker 3: Now, we labored under the impression that Jim rats the county attorney. He's a man of his word, because we could have been advancing our case through the court system as opposed to going through the cru which took two years. So he's renegged on that. He hasn't given any reason for that other than I think he's getting pressure from his sheriff there and maybe the BCA. So we filed a seventy five page petition with the Aiken County Court. We've asked for some discovery. I want to know what's going on with the so called consultants from the BCA. I want that DNA testing evidence from the BCA. There's a wallet that we believe the assailant touched, the cuttings from the nightgown. Evidently there was some material under her fingernails. We understand last January, when the Attorney General's Office was investigating the case, person from the BCA contacted Carmen Leones and said there's insufficient mail DNA under her fingernails to warrant any further testing. So I have requested those test materials. There's evidently a quant test done. There must have been enough there for them to determine that it was mail DNA, and thus far they have not been forthcoming with providing that to us. And so the defense to our petition, our seventy five page petition was nine page reply by the county attorney. It has some allegations that are demonstrably false, and it basically relies in kind of an amalgam of some technical claims. Well, this has already been adjudged. What are we doing here? That's the extent of what they've put in to defend against this. 00:47:18 Speaker 1: But there is a way to circumvent them. 00:47:20 Speaker 3: Tim Walls has the power to take the case from the county attorney and give it to Keith Ellison. He will not do that without Keith Ellison formally asking him to do that. I think with the election pending, there's little appetite to do that. Keith Ellison also has to maintain working relationships with the various county attorneys and taking this from the county attorney could be problematic for him. 00:47:45 Speaker 1: Although I wish this was treated with the urgency it deserves. After November twenty twenty four, either Tim Waltz or Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, who happens to be of the White Earth Band of Ojaboy, will be able to power Keith Ellison to do what is right. We have linked to petition in the episode description to show your support, and with that we go to our closing, in which I'm going to thank our guests for joining us today and then just sit back and lock it up as they share their final thoughts. 00:48:15 Speaker 3: The bottom line is that Brian Pippott was not there. He had no involvement in this case. He doesn't know who did it, and he's been wrongfully charged and convicted and the authorities at this point are not treating him fairly. Law enforcement's so called investigation of this, I have to say, is a discredit to law enforcement because it's not an honest investigation, and by that I mean the BCA and sheriff guide his investigation. The man should be let out, he's innocent. Anybody who's looked at this case in any real detail, which is my organization, the Attorney General's Office and Mitchell Hamlin Law School Clinic studied the case and did a pretty comprehensive job themselves determined that he is factually innocent, that he languishes in prison, has been there for twenty five years, his relatives have died in the meantime. Let the man out. 00:49:10 Speaker 4: I'd like to thank Jim Cousins and Centurion Ministries for helping me throughout the years, and the FAAU for highly time. I'm in the truth. What's got me through this twenty six years? Hope that the truths will come out? And then it has, and as a state prosecutor, he fells and he knows the truth. And I can't understand why he will not ask for this case because the way it was explained to me is that the other prosecutors will get mad because he took the case away from accounting. Well, he's doing what's right. His job is not about making friends keeping friends, whether people will like what he does, it's his job, and this is something he could do. Sixty two years old. Native Americans don't have at that lone of a lifespan, and I don't want to die in prison. I have this belief that your soul stays where you die, and then I don't want my soul standing around prison for trinity, and I want it to be around family and around nature. Where field connection. I figure I've got ten years left at the most I want to live life were sent to be lived. 00:50:38 Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. 00:50:40 Speaker 1: You can listen to this. 00:50:41 Speaker 2: And all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Cliber. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One. 00:51:14 Speaker 1: We have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed by the individuals featured in this show are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good.