Transcript of Listen Now: Suspect

Criminal Attorney fans, on behalf of everyone at WNDYRI, we wanted to thank you for listening. The next episode of Criminal Attorney is coming out next week. But in the meantime, we wanted to tell you about another series you should check out, called Suspect. In October 2008, the residents of the Valleyview Apartment Complex in Redman, Washington, held a Halloween party. Dozens of people in costume, mingled, drank, and danced. But before the night was over, one of them was murdered. The police had a suspect. His The story kept changing. His DNA was at the crime scene. When he finally came in for questioning, the detectives felt they were a breath away from a confession, but that never happened. So the police focused their attention on another man, a man with a criminal record whose DNA was also found at the crime scene, and he just so happened to be the only Black man at the party. Suspect is a true crime mini-series about cutting edge forensic science and mislaid justice. It's about race and policing, and ultimately, the kinds of weighty decisions that cops and prosecutors make every day, decisions that once made change lives forever and are almost impossible to reverse.

You're about to hear the first episode of Suspect. You can binge all 10 episodes of Suspect exclusively and add free on WNDRI Plus. Start your free trial in the WNDRI app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify today. And thanks for listening.

Website Media. About five years ago, in the fall of 2016, I received a message from an inmate at a jail in Seattle. The email read, There's a guy here who says that the state has been illegally detaining him for some six years due to his alleged DNA. You can go online and check him out. He says he's innocent. I've written about the criminal justice system for about a decade now, and I've gotten used to these types of letters. But this one was different. At the time, I just published a long magazine article about something called TouchDNA. Traces of Human Matter so small that they could be carried third-hand onto the scene of a crime. And what I'd learned writing that article was that while DNA is treated in popular culture like a truth meter, a guilt meter, in reality, DNA evidence has to be interpreted by human beings. Human beings who have biases, prejudices, human beings who make mistakes. So what if the guy in Seattle was innocent? Soon, he and I were exchanging letters. His often began with a mental self-evaluation, rendered in looping handwriting. I've been under a lot of stress, and this depression is getting the best of me, he wrote.

He shared details of his life. He told me about sitting in his cell, listening to his home team, the Seahawks. Play in the Super Bowl. He talked about other inmates, like the notorious serial killer he'd seen in the cafeteria. And he talked about his upcoming trial. As we spoke, a picture started coming into focus of a Halloween party in the town of Redmond, of the murder of one of the hosts, and of the young man who had been charged with the crime, charged almost entirely on the basis of DNA evidence that seemed contradictory at best. A few months later, I was on a flight to Seattle. I am rolling. Okay, awesome. All right, so we are walking towards the Valleyview apartment. Wait, are we being interviewed right now? Is that okay? I'm a journalist. Okay. I'm working on a story about a party and murder that happened here a long time ago. What I'd end up finding in the months and years to come was one of those things journalists spend their lives waiting for, a story in which all the major players wanted to talk, needed to talk. Cops, prosecutors, forensic analysts, witnesses, jurors, all were still living with the events of a single night in 2008.

All were searching for answers in a case that had provided so few.

I was like, Who are all these people? I was like, What are you talking about? You murdered this girl. I was like, What girl? I was like, How do you not know this stuff? They're manipulating evidence, and this is just a microcosm of what happens on a daily basis in America.

Who do we look at?

Do we look at you?

Would you do something like this? Where's the smoking gun?

In Deliberation, that's all we talked about.

This case is one of those roller coaster rides where it's like, No, he did it for sure. No, for sure he did it. And we'd be divided in the detective unit.

I'm telling you to come clean right now and tell the truth. Because the thing you're trying to carry around with you is going to tear you apart. You can't hold on to something like that, man. See how it's fallen apart? And it's It's like time you just got to tell us what happened.

What makes you want to talk to us about it? Isn't it hard as hell to relive all of this again? I don't know. It's because it's not resolved..