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The Bra That Waited 15 Years · Creepy Horror Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: There is a bicycle alone in a field. No rider,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: no explanation. Just the pre-dawn dark of Indianapolis, and an
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: object that should be somewhere else entirely. Detective Earl Cooper,
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Indianapolis PD Homicides, arrived at that field in the early
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: hours and understood immediately what the bicycle meant, the way
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: the mochila had been thrown, its contents scattered across the grass,
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: the angle at which the textbooks had landed. None of
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: it was accidental. Someone had pulled that bicycle to a stop,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: and whoever was riding it had not walked away. The
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: case that followed would consume 11 and a half years
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: of Cooper's professional life. He would keep a photograph of
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: the victim on his desk for the entirety of that time,
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: and when he finally retired after 31 years on the force,
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: the case was still unsolved. That detail, an 11-year investigation
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: ending without an arrest, would matter less than another detail
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: buried in the same evidence room. A piece of clothing,
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: collected from that field in 1989, never tested. Lisa Summers
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: was 18 years old on June 15th, 1989. She clocked
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: out of her job at a fast food restaurant at 12.24
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: in the morning, which is a fact that matters because
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: of what it implies. She worked the late shift. She
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: always worked the late shift. and she always rode her
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: bicycle home. Afterward, that was the life she had built
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: at 18. Not a car, not a cab. A bicycle
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: and a backpack, and the assumption that the same route
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: she had taken a hundred times would work one more time.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: She was carrying school textbooks that night. That detail stopped me,
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: cold when I first read this case. She worked nights
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: to support her mother, and took classes during the day,
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: and she carried both things home with her. Because that
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: was the rhythm of her life. Because that was the
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: rhythm of her life. The job and the school, the
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: uniform and the books folded into a single ride home
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: through the dark streets of Indianapolis. Her mother, Dorothy Summers,
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: was sick. They lived together in an apartment near the
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: area where Lisa worked. Dorothy could not support herself, so
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Lisa did it for both of them. They had a
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: newspaper route they ran together, which is the kind of
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: image that is hard to hold onto once you know
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: how this ends. Two women, mother and daughter, distributing papers
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: in the early morning before the rest of the neighborhood
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: woke up. Lisa had two best friends from adolescence, Billy
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: Hicks and Julie Williams. They had stayed close, the three
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: of them, in the way that certain friendships survive the
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: awkward drift of growing up. Billy and Julie would remember
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: in the years that followed that Lisa always went home
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: to her mother after a shift. She never missed it.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: On the night of June 14th, into the early hours
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: of June 15th, Lisa left work, got on her bicycle,
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: and rode toward the intersection of 34th and 38th Street.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: Somewhere along that route, near an open field, she stopped,
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: or was stopped. The field was not a shortcut anyone
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: needed to take. It sat between two streets with no
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: particular advantage. The kind of space that exists in older
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: city neighborhoods. An undeveloped lot. Low grass. No lighting. Dorothy
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: reported Lisa missing four or five days before the body
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: was found. By the time police located Lisa in that field,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: the condition of the remains indicated she had been there
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: since shortly after she disappeared. She had been dragged into
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: the open space, sexually assaulted, and strangled. The responding officers
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: found the bicycle where the attacker had left it, close
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: to the road. The mochila had been overturned. Its contents
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: spread across the ground. Her uniform was torn. Her bra
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: had been separated from her body and left in the
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: grass nearby. There was a cigarette butt near the remains.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: There were traces of blood and semen on the ground.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: Detective Cooper documented all of it. The bra was bagged
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: and labelled, and placed in evidence storage with every other
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: item recovered from that field. It would stay there, untouched,
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: for 15 years. Cooper worked the case through witness interviews,
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: polygraph examinations, and a DNA sample obtained in the early
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: 90s from the man who, along with a friend, had
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: been the one to find Lisa's body. That man had
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: a noticeable limp, a chronic injury that gave him a
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: distinctive walk, the kind of walk that people in a
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: neighborhood remember because not many people move that way. His
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: name was David Ashworth, and on the morning the body
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: was discovered, it was Ashworth who had suggested that he
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: and his friend cut across the field instead of taking
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: the entrance half a block away. Cooper noted the limp.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: He noted the suggestion to cross the field. He noted
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: that Ashworth failed the polygraph, and then He was handed
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: a DNA result that was inconclusive. The body had been
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: exposed to the elements for several days. The samples too
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: degraded to produce a match. And the one piece of
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: evidence that could have answered everything was filed away in
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: a box. No one would open again for over a decade.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: David Ashworth walked out of Indianapolis and the case went cold.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Charlotte Ledbetter was not someone who forgot faces. She had
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: known the Ashworth family for years, well enough that when
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: she spotted a man walking alone near 34th Street in
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: the early hours of that June morning, she recognized him immediately.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: What she could not explain, not then, not later, was
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: the state he was in. It was after six in
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: the morning. Ashworth was on foot, moving slowly, his limp
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: more pronounced than usual. His clothes were dirty, There were
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: scratches visible on his skin. When Charlotte pulled over and
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: offered him a ride, he got in without meeting her eyes.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: He did not explain where he had been. He asked her, specifically,
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: to drop him at the back door of his house,
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: not the front, the back, so that Diane would not
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: see him come in. Charlotte said yes. She dropped him off,
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: and for a while, she did not think much more
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: about it. That same morning, Ashworth called a friend, a
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: man who later told investigators that Ashworth was not normally
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: someone who woke up early or made plans before sunrise.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: But that morning, Ashworth called and suggested they go watch planes,
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: and on the way, he proposed they cut through an
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: open field instead of using the entrance half a block away.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: The friend agreed. They walked through the grass, and that
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: is when they found Lisa Summers, or rather, That is
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: when David Ashworth led someone else to her. Detective Earl
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: Cooper arrived at the scene and noted that one of
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: the two men who reported the body had a noticeable limp.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: He filed that observation. He also noted the field itself,
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: the way the grass was pressed down in a path
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: that moved away from the road. The mochila overturned, the
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: textbooks scattered, the bicycle was still there. None of it
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: looked like a random discovery. It looked like a sight
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: someone already knew Two women, who had been stranded near
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: that intersection, in the late hours of June 14th, told
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: investigators they had seen a man with a limp speaking
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: to a bust. Girl on a bicycle. The girl had
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: disappeared behind a rise in the ground. The man had
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: not followed the same path. They had not thought much
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: of it at the time. By the time they spoke
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: to Cooper, several days had passed and the details were
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: softening at the edges. Cooper had enough to make Ashworth
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: a person of interest. Not enough to arrest him, Ashworth
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: agreed to a polygraph. He failed it. Cooper noted that
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: the polygraph was not admissible in court and could not
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: be used to compel anything further. What it did was confirm, privately,
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: what the evidence was already suggesting. Then came the DNA.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: The scene had yielded a cigarette butt near the body
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: and biological material from the assault. Both were collected immediately.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: and submitted for analysis in 1989. The lab returned an
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: inconclusive result. The body had been exposed for several days
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: before discovery. Degradation had done its work. The samples were
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: not sufficient to generate a profile that could stand up
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: to comparison. Cooper requested a voluntary blood and saliva sample
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: from Ashworth. Ashworth agreed. The samples were compared. The result
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: came back the same way. Inconclusive. there was not enough
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: intact genetic material from the scene to produce a definitive match.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: For a man under investigation, it was a technical lifeline.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: And then Diane gave her statement. She told investigators that
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: David had come home between midnight and 12.30, the night
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: of June 14th. She was specific. She was consistent. She
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: was his alibi. And for years, that alibi held the
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: rational explanation. stopped working here because Charlotte Ledbetter's account placed
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Ashworth walking alone near 34th Street after six in the morning,
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: dirty and scratched, and asking to be dropped at the
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: back of his own house. And Diane had said he
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: was home, by 1230. Those two accounts could not both
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: be true. Six hours existed between them that nobody could
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: account for. Cooper pressed. Ashworth offered multiple versions of where
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: he had been and what had happened to him. He
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: said he had been in a fight. Then he said
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: he had passed out. Then He said he had fallen
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: into some bushes. Each version arrived when the previous one
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: failed to satisfy. None of them explained the scratches in
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: a way that matched their depth or distribution. None of
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: them explained why a man who had allegedly been home
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: since 1230 was being picked up on foot at six
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: in the morning near the site where a woman had
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: been murdered. Cooper worked the case for 11 and a
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: half years. He retired from the Indianapolis Police Department After
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: 31 years of service, the case did not close. He
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: kept Lisa's photograph on his desk for every one of
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: those years. By 2004, the case had been cold for
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: 15 years. Detective Bill Rogers was assigned to the Indianapolis
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: PD Cold Case Unit around that time. When the Lisa
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Summers file landed in front of him, he did not
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: begin with the suspects or the interviews. He began with
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: the evidence boxes. He went through everything that had been
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: collected at the scene in 1989, item by item, and
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: he asked a single question about each one. Had it
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: been tested? Most of it had. The cigarette butt tested, inconclusive.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: The biological material tested, inconclusive. The clothing items processed, nothing actionable.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: And then Rogers reached the braw. It had been collected
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: on the morning the body was discovered. It had been logged, packaged,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: and stored for 15 years. It had sat in that
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: evidence box without ever being submitted for DNA analysis. Not
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: because someone had decided against it. Because no one had
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: gotten to it. Rogers sent it to the lab. What
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: the technicians found inside the garment was a single microscopic
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: drop of blood. Not on the fabric surface. On the interior.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: in a location that required direct physical contact to deposit.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: The sample was small enough that it had survived 15
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: years in storage without the degradation that had destroyed the
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: earlier samples. The lab ran the profile. They ran it
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: against the cigarette butt. Both samples identified the same contributor,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: David Ashworth. Not a partial match. Not a possible contributor.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: The majority contributor in both samples. Ashworth had told investigators,
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: during earlier questioning... That he had never been closer than
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: 10 to 15 feet from the body. That he had
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: not touched anything. That his DNA would not be found
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: at that scene. There is no version of this story
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: where everything makes sense, except one. Rogers coordinated with Deputy
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: Prosecutor Denise Robinson. A warrant was prepared. Ashworth had left
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: Indiana years after the murder. He was located in Lakeland, Florida.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: working for an irrigation company. Rogers traveled there with agents
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: from the Polk County Sheriff's Department. When they found him,
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: he looked like someone who had spent 16 years not
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: expecting a knock on the door. And then there was Diane.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: After the divorce, after years had passed, and she was
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: living in another state, Diane Ashworth told investigators what she
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: had not told Cooper. She said that on the night
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: of June 14th into the 15th, David had not come
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: home at 12.30. She said he had come home at 6.30
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: in the morning, maybe 7. She said she had lied
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: the first time. She said she had been afraid. The
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: five and a half hours she had erased with a
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: single false statement were now back from 12.24 in the morning.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: When Lisa clocked out of work to 6.30 when Ashworth
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: finally came through his back door. Every minute of that
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: window was unaccounted for. The scratches, the dirt, the back door,
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: Charlotte's account, the field, the bra. Everything pointed the same direction.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: And Ashworth, sitting across from Rogers in an interrogation room
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: in Florida, looked at the laboratory document placed in front
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: of him and said, I can tell you your test
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: is wrong because it wasn't me. There are cases where
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: the evidence is circumstantial. and the doubt is reasonable. This
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: was not that kind of case, and yet something about
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: it resists. Clean resolution, not in the courtroom, where the
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: jury needed less than an hour, but in the mind
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: of anyone who follows the chain of events from beginning
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: to end. Consider what Ashworth did the morning after the murder.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: He called a friend who would later confirm that Ashworth
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: was not someone who woke up early or made spontaneous plans.
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: He proposed a specific activity. He chose a specific route.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: He guided that friend across a field that he had
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: reason to know better than anyone. And when they found
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: the body, Ashworth stood there and reported it. He came back.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: That is the detail that investigators found hardest to set aside.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Not because it added to the forensic case, which was
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: already built, but because of what it implies about the
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: person who did it. Returning to the scene is documented
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: in violent crime cases. Returning and bringing someone with you.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: And standing there while that person discovers what you left behind,
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: that is, something else. Investigators who reviewed the case offered
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: no single explanation for why someone would do that. The
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: answers that exist are all uncomfortable. Dorothy Summers had spent
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: 16 years waiting for one piece of information. A name.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: She had reported her daughter missing four or five days
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: before the body was found. She had buried Lisa without
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: knowing who had taken her. She had watched the investigation
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: stall and restart and stall again. She had seen the
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: DNA come back, inconclusive. She had been told more than
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: once that the case was not closed, but was not moving.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: Dorothy died in July of 2006. The warrant for Ashworth's
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: arrest was still months away. What does it mean that
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: the person who could have answered her question was, for
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: all those years, reachable, living, working, breathing, While she was not,
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: investigators do not typically answer that question. The record does
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: not answer it. What remains is the arithmetic of it.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: 16 years between the crime and the conviction and Dorothy
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: Summers ran out of time by a margin of less
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: than two years. Billy Hicks and Julie Williams were still
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: alive when the verdict came in. The three of them
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: had been inseparable as teenagers. Lisa, Billy, Julie, three friends,
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: who moved through the world as a unit. After June
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: of 1989, that unit was two. They went to the
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: cemetery after the verdict. They did not describe what they
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: said there. Some things are not for the record. David
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Ashworth never confessed. He maintained, through interrogation and through trial,
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: that the evidence was wrong and that he was not responsible.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: Sixty years of prison. is the legal answer to that position.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: But the legal answer and the complete answer are not
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: always the same thing. What he said to Lisa Summers
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: in that field, what words, what approach, what he used
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: to stop her, is not in any document. It is
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: not in the trial record. It is not in the
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: interrogation transcript. It is the one thing the evidence cannot recover.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: The one part of that night that belonged entirely to
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: two people, and only one of them lived to carry it.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: The bra sat in that evidence box for 15 years.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: The answer was there the whole time, waiting for someone
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: to look. Rogers flew to Lakeland, Florida, with an arrest
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: warrant and coordinates for a man who had spent nearly
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: two decades believing the distance was enough. David Ashworth was
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: working for an irrigation company. When detectives from the Polk
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: County Sheriff's Department helped take him into custody, he did
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: not run. He did not appear surprised. He simply looked
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: at Rogers, and when confronted with the laboratory document confirming
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: his DNA as the majority contributor on both the cigarette
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: butt and the interior of Lisa's bra, said, I can
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: tell you your test is wrong because it wasn't me.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: That was the last thing Ashworth said that anyone was
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: required to take seriously. The trial began. In March of 2008,
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: 19 years after Lisa Summers clocked out of work at 12.24
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: in the morning with schoolbooks in her backpack, it lasted
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: three days. The jury deliberated for less than an hour.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: There is something in that number, less than one hour,
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: that says everything the verdict itself does not need to say.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: Twelve people heard the full weight of what David Ashworth
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: had spent 19 years constructing. The alibi from a frightened wife,
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: the story about falling into bushes, the claim that he
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: never got within 10 to 15 feet of the body.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: They heard Charlotte Lee better describe picking him up before dawn,
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: scratched and dirty, and asking to be dropped at the
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: back door so Diane wouldn't see him. They heard that
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: he had been the one to suggest crossing that field.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: They took less than 60 minutes to decide. 60 years.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: That was the sentence. Dorothy Summers never heard it. She
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: died in July of 2006, 18 months before the verdict,
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: while the warrant was still being processed. and Ashworth was
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: still watering lawns in Florida. She had spent 17 years
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: reporting her daughter missing before the body was found, then
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: waiting for a name, then watching that name disappear into
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: inconclusive lab results and relocated suspects and cold case backlogs.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: She waded through all of it. She did not make
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: it to the other side. There is no version of
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: this story where that fact stops being what it is.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: Billy Hicks and Julie Williams, Lisa's two closest friends, the
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: ones who had known her since they were teenagers, went
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: to the cemetery after the verdict. They went together. Whatever
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: they said there, no record captures it, and it doesn't
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: need to. Some things are complete without a transcript. When
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: I read about what happened in that courtroom, the detail
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: that stayed with me longest wasn't the sentence. It was
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: the jury, less than an hour, for a case that
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: took more than 16 years. Detective Earl Cooper retired after
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: 31 years with the Indianapolis Police Department. He worked the
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: Lisa Summers case for 11 and a half of those years.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: Before he left, he kept her photograph on his desk,
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: not in a drawer, not in the file, on his desk,
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: where he could see it. Every day, he sat down
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: to work. He said he could hear her. He said
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: she told him to catch the man who killed her.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: He retired without doing it. That was the only thing
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: in 31 years he called a regret. Bill Rogers found
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: the bra in an evidence box. It had been collected
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: in 1989, sealed, catalogued, and never submitted for DNA testing.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: It sat there for 15 years while the case went cold,
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: while Dorothy grew older and sicker, while David Ashworth put
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: miles between himself and Indianapolis. The answer was in a
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: box the whole time, a microscopic drop of blood on
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: the inside of a piece of fabric, smaller than anything
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: visible to the unaided eye, preserved better than any technology
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: of 1989 could have guaranteed. The body is always the
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: last thing to stop telling the truth. Ashworth never confessed.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: What he said to Lisa in that open field near
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: 34th and 38th Street, what words he used, what he
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: told her to make her stop, is not in any record.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: It never will be. That piece of the night of
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: June 15th, 1989, remains exactly where Ashworth left it, unspoken,
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: in the dark, in a field that is still there.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: Lisa's photograph is no longer on Earl Cooper's desk. This
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: show is made by Oboe Media.