Latest / 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories / David and the Shoe Bandit

Transcript

David and the Shoe Bandit · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:13
  Discretion is advised. This is ten minute murder. On the evening of September
• 0:38
  twenty eighth, two thousand, Davidkam was on his way home from playing basketball
• 0:43
  with a group of his friends. By the time he entered the garage of
• 0:46
  the family home, he knew that something was wrong, really wrong. His
• 0:51
  wife, Kim was unresponsive on the garage floor in a pool of her own
• 0:56
  blood. She had been shot in the head, and immediately David knew that
• 1:00
  she was dead. Next to Kim's body, the passenger door of the family
• 1:03
  truck was open. David searched the vehicle frantically for their two children, seven
• 1:10
  year old Brad and five year old Jill. He didn't have to look for
• 1:14
  long. Jill was in the back seat of the truck, her seat belt
• 1:18
  still tightly buckled. Just like her mother. She had been fatally shot in
• 1:23
  the head. Brad was lying motionless, leaning against the back of the driver's
• 1:29
  seat, as if he had been trying to escape from the attacker. David
• 1:33
  realized that his son's skin was still warm to the touch, despite the bullet
• 1:37
  wound in his chest. Hoping that he could at least save one of his
• 1:41
  family members, David dragged Brad out of the car and laid him on the
• 1:44
  garage floor, then attempted CPR. At that time, he had no way
• 1:49
  of knowing that the bullet had passed through Brad's chest, severing his spinal cord.
• 1:53
  After several minutes, he gave up and called the police. David cam
• 1:59
  knew the police well. He'd actually worked as a state trooper until a few
• 2:04
  months before this day, when he'd retired to work for his family's business instead.
• 2:09
  It was why, in his state of panic, that he completely bypassed
• 2:14
  nine one one and called on his former co workers. Get everybody out to
• 2:19
  my house now, he screamed in the phone. My wife and kids are
• 2:23
  dead. In his grief, David never stopped to consider the thought that his
• 2:27
  old colleagues might not be his allies. He didn't consider the first theory that
• 2:32
  the police would want to look into. If only one person survives of family
• 2:38
  annihilation, they are almost always the killer. The evidence stacked up against him.
• 2:45
  Forensic testing of his clothes revealed that his shirt was spotted with his daughter,
• 2:49
  Jill's blood. During Jill's autopsy, signs of trauma were found on her
• 2:53
  genitals. The medical examiner said that there were two possible explanations. Either Jill
• 3:00
  had recently fallen onto something which had caused bruising to her genital area, or
• 3:05
  she had been sexually assaulted. David's mother in law, Janie, was sure
• 3:08
  that Jill would have told somebody if she was being molested, unless the person
• 3:14
  molesting her was her own father. Investigators were also suspicious about how David behaved
• 3:21
  after finding the bodies. They thought it was strange that he'd called his old
• 3:24
  co workers instead of dialing nine to one one, and despite David's explanations,
• 3:30
  they couldn't understand why he had left Jill and Kim's bodies where he found them,
• 3:35
  but he tried to revive his son with CPR. Then bombshell when they
• 3:40
  discovered that David had been cheating on Kim with multiple women. It just added
• 3:46
  even more fuel to the fire. That following Sunday, the police asked David
• 3:51
  to come in for further questioning. When he got there, he never left
• 3:55
  the station. Shortly after his arrival, he was arrested and charged with first
• 4:00
  degree murders of Kim, Brad and Jill. He wasn't allowed to attend the
• 4:04
  funeral, but the police permitted him to view the bodies of his family.
• 4:09
  During the five minute long viewing, he was supervised by fifteen officers and kept
• 4:15
  in handcuffs. By the time David's trial began, members of his family were
• 4:19
  being threatened by members of the public who were convinced that he was guilty.
• 4:25
  Somebody found his brother's phone number and left a message saying, quote, if
• 4:29
  your brother gets out of jail, I've got a bullet for you, a
• 4:32
  bullet for your uncle, a bullet for your attorney, and a bullet for
• 4:36
  him. All eleven people whom David played basketball with the day of the murders
• 4:42
  testified at the trial. Each of them insisted that David had been his normal
• 4:47
  self that night. They had not noticed any blood stains on his clothes,
• 4:51
  and they were certain that he had not snuck away from the basketball court at
• 4:56
  any point. Several women whom David had slept with also testified about the affairs
• 5:00
  they had with him, affairs that the state argued were the motive for the
• 5:05
  killings. David decided to take the stand and testify himself, but the evidence
• 5:12
  was stacked against him. At the conclusion of the trial, he was found
• 5:15
  guilty of three counts of first degree murder and sentenced to almost two hundred years
• 5:21
  in prison. He appealed the sentence, and the Indiana Supreme Court ended up
• 5:27
  agreeing with his argument. The only thing the state had proven is that he
• 5:30
  was a terrible husband that had been unfaithful to his wife. The charges were
• 5:34
  filed against David again, and the county prosecutor made an announcement he planned to
• 5:41
  reinvestigate the case with fresh eyes. David's own family, who still believed he
• 5:46
  was innocent, were relieved. While reinvestigating the case, officers discovered one thing
• 5:51
  that evidence technicians had failed to test. A sweatshirt had been found underneath Brad's
• 5:58
  body belonged to any of the Kam family members. In fact, they had
• 6:03
  never seen it before that night because it was a Department of Corrections sweatshirt.
• 6:09
  It contained the DNA of an unknown man, which had not been analyzed before
• 6:14
  the trial. How do you miss something like this unless you already had your
• 6:17
  mind made up who the killer was. It's almost as if they investigated not
• 6:23
  to find evidence of who killed David Kam's family, but to find evidence to
• 6:27
  support their thought that David was the one that annihilated his own family. The
• 6:32
  DNA and the sweatshirt belonged to a felon named Charles Boney, who had been
• 6:39
  nicknamed the Shoe Bandit for his habit of taking shoes of the women that he
• 6:44
  assaulted. It matched a strange detail about the scene of the Kam family murders.
• 6:49
  Kim's shoes had been taken off of her feet and placed on top of
• 6:53
  the truck. The word backbone was written on the inside of the sweatshirt's collar.
• 7:00
  It was what Charles Bonney's fellow convicts had called him during his time in
• 7:02
  prison. After serving his eleven year sentence, Charles had been released less than
• 7:09
  a year before the Cam family was killed. An unknown handprint on the side
• 7:13
  of the truck also matched Charles, placing him at the scene of the crime.
• 7:18
  When Charles was questioned about the case, he tried to insist that he
• 7:21
  had never in his life met the Cams. After realizing that he had left
• 7:26
  both a piece of clothing and a handprint at the scene of the crime,
• 7:30
  he tried a different tactic. This time, he gave a statement about how
• 7:33
  he'd met David several months beforehand. Because David asked Charles to buy him a
• 7:39
  gun. Shortly afterwards, David asked for a second gun. Then the two
• 7:45
  men had met at the cam family home shortly before the murders took place.
• 7:49
  Charles said he handed over the gun, which he had wrapped in his own
• 7:54
  sweatshirt, and shortly afterwards he heard the sound of David shooting Kim, Brad
• 7:59
  and Jim. It wasn't the exoneration that David and his family had hoped for.
• 8:05
  Now David was still being charged with the murders, but so was Charles.
• 8:09
  In their simultaneous trials, Charles the shoe bandit was found guilty and received
• 8:16
  a two hundred and twenty five year prison sentence. Meanwhile, the prosecution are
• 8:20
  now arguing that David hadn't killed his family because of infidelity. He killed him
• 8:24
  because his wife found out that he was molesting his daughter. For the second
• 8:28
  time, David was found guilty, but the verdict was overturned due to lack
• 8:33
  of proof that David molested his daughter. David's third trial began in August of
• 8:39
  twenty thirteen. This time the state wanted it to be final, so the
• 8:43
  judge forbade anybody from testifying about either Jill's supposed molestation or David's infidelity. Instead,
• 8:52
  the prosecution focused on the eight spots of Jill's blood that had been found
• 8:56
  on David's shirt. Charles Boney giving the same story about how he'd handed David
• 9:03
  the gun and then David had turned and shot each of his family members one
• 9:07
  by one. He added that after the murders, David had come out of
• 9:11
  the garage and tried to shoot him as well. This time, the jury
• 9:16
  only took ten hours to reach their decision. After three trials and thirteen years,
• 9:22
  David Kam was found not guilty of murdering his family. He wore his
• 9:26
  wedding ring for a month after his release and then finally removed it for good.
• 9:33
  Eventually, David was employed as a caseworker for a non profit organization that
• 9:37
  advocates for people who have been wrongly convicted of a crime. In twenty twenty
• 9:41
  two, the state of Indiana paid out a four point six million dollar settlement
• 9:46
  in response to David's claims that he had been maliciously prosecuted and wrongfully imprisoned.
• 9:54
  David's family and the State of Indiana have agreed that he is innocent of the
• 9:58
  murder charges. Kim's family have never changed their minds to this day. They
• 10:03
  believe that he was the killer and that the man who murdered Kim, Brad
• 10:09
  and Jill is now walking free. That's ten minute Murder for today, brief
• 10:24
  and bingeable true crime. I'm Joe, that's my name. I'm the host,
• 10:28
  and thank you so much for listening. And I know what you're thinking
• 10:31
  already. This episode seems a little different. It sounds a little bit different,
• 10:35
  then, yeah, it does. The reason is I got a new
• 10:39
  mouse pad. I spilled a drink on the other one and it got sticky.
• 10:43
  It was a soda, so I replaced it. Now all good.
• 10:46
  It didn't affect the sounds. I'm just making that part up, but I
• 10:50
  did get a new mouse pad, and I am also if it pleases the
• 10:54
  court cutting back on soda. I've been mixing in a lot more water into
• 10:58
  what I'm drinking. I'm told that helps to make you feel better, look
• 11:03
  better, and be better. The jury is still out on that one,
• 11:07
  but I'm happy to give it a try. And hey, if you're brand
• 11:09
  new to listening to ten Minute Murder, maybe this is your first or second
• 11:13
  episode. Welcome please hit subscribe wherever you're listening right now, and know that
• 11:16
  if you're listening on YouTube, not all the episodes are there. Some of
• 11:22
  them are there, most of them are there, but not all of them
• 11:24
  there are. We're approaching four hundred now. I think that could be a
• 11:28
  made up number, but I think that's about where we are. Getting closer
• 11:31
  to four hundred episodes, and every one of them are going to be on
• 11:35
  podcasts, listening apps like Apple, Spotify, and even Audible. You can
• 11:39
  listen to them on Audible and incidentally those places, you can also leave positive
• 11:45
  feedback if you'd like. Positive feedback helps this show grow, So leave a
• 11:48
  rating and review on any of those platforms anyone that it's possible. Honestly,
• 11:52
  anyway, I feel like I'm talking in circles. Now. That's the end
• 11:56
  of the episode. Thank you so much for listening to ten Minute Murder. Goodbye,