Transcript of The Girl in the Blue Mustang - Ep. 5: Revelations

It's generally accepted wisdom among those who toil for justice, who give up nights and weekends and children's birthday parties in service of the dead, that sometimes what a stallcase needs most is a set of fresh eyes, eyes that may see what others missed. A service the Eerlik's father and son, felt morally compelled to provide.

As Clint put it, It was painful to see a man whom I knew was innocent, whom I knew had served our country locked in a cage like an animal.

But it is equally true that people don't generally like to be told when they're wrong. So when a tough case is finally all done and dusted and the guilty party has been tried and convicted and sent away, fresh eyes are not always so welcome. No matter how bright or perceptive, especially Especially to those like the O'Keefe's for whom that long-sought conviction was as important as breathing, given the horrors that had descended upon them, beginning with that awful moment in Michelle's Blue Mustang all those years ago. But the desert winds blew as ever, year after year, and the seasons came and went, and new families grew up around them, and Mike and Pat O'Keefe did what they had to do to put some life back together. Rather. Not easy, as Pat told me. Not easy at all. But you make accommodations to this, this continuing pain that you feel, that you just have to find a place for it and live with it?

I think you work through it. You don't really close the book like people say, Oh, you'd be so happy when everything's all done. Michelle will still be gone. We'll still miss her, but we learn to get through each day.

Best to look outward now, said Mike.

Based on what we've learned, if we can go help others who've gone through, heaven forbid, similar tragedies, I think that's probably a big part of our mission in life from here on.

Anyway, there was Jason, a son anyone would be proud of. Jason, the budding baseball prospect, the future lawyer, and a young man who told us he was determined to rise above the ugliness somehow.

There's going to be a time in my life when I'm going to have to find it deep down in my heart to forgive him.

It was the way things were post-verdict, said Mike.

You've got to characterize a new normal in your life because what normal has been is no longer normal.

In this episode, it's all beyond normal as a family clings to its one certainty that the guilty man was convicted. Well, Jeff Eerlich puts his considerable reputation on the line in an attempt to tear those very certainties asunder. For the sake of a man he'd only just met.

The fact that you can just, at 25, have your life taken away from you for no reason is a very frightening prospect.

And he's not yet a journey son, minds from nuggets of truth buried in an old episode of Dateland.

I knew that Ray Jannings was sitting in a cell, that he was away from his children, and I couldn't enjoy life because I knew that this injustice that existed.

As the airbags buried themselves in the old evidence files and read and reread police reports and interviews and conclusions that might have been right, but maybe were wrong, a whole different story began to emerge. A story you have not yet heard. There would be consequences.

This one incident, as vicious as it is, it's had a huge ripple effect. People's lives have been changed forever.

I'm Keith Morison, and this is The Girl in the Blue Mustang, a podcast from Dateland, episode 5, revelations. I could not stop thinking about Job, Old Testament Job, as I sat with Mike and Pat O'Keefe and talked about Well, everything, really. The memories.

The whole thing took its toll on both of us. I think certainly caused depression throughout her family. Pat, myself, and Jason, of course. So it's just a terrible thing to go through.

Well, and each of you would remind the other of all that. Yes, and finally, there was only one solution, least for them. Early one spring, four years after that third and final trial, Pat and Michael Keefe filed for divorce. They weren't angry. They didn't dislike each other. They just found it easier to live apart. Mike moved up to the mountains about an hour away, moved into a rental with Jason, the son who had been giving him and Pat reasons to feel good again. Jason had turned out to be a fine baseball player, a pitcher with prospects. His pitching coach was the same man who taught baseball great Randy Johnson. And one day, as Mike watched Jason work out alongside a pro pitcher, that coach turned to Mike and spoke.

He had a big poster of Randy Johnson over in the corner of his facility. He says, I want you to think about this. Randy Johnson makes $350,000 a week. In five years, you could be there. And what was really touching is Jason got back up on the man and started throwing the other pitcher, looked over at him, and he I was a kid. He's never said that to me. So it was just as a dad, proud moment, things.

More proud moments to come? Maybe. Jason was scouted by the Dodgers and the Padres. And who knew? Some pro-career seemed to beckon. And then one day, it was a freak thing, really. One in a million accident. An elevator gave way beneath him. His injuries were not life-threatening, but baseball was not so likely after that. And there was pain, a lot of it. Pain and medication.

This doctor, for some reason, described him fentanyl and morphine at the same time. Oh, ouch. And fairly strong doses of each. Anyway, he was just basically taking the drugs as prescribed. Just over did it with it. But But the drugs have basically taken over his life. It had been a situation where this kid also had the world on his string. Through the injuries and the drugs, you saw this kid go from an all-American kid to a recluse who just hung out in his room most of the time. Most of the while, he'd go do something with me, occasionally go out with one of his friends, but not completely changed his character.

In one cold day in November, 2014, Michael Keefe returned from work and found Jason's lifeless body on the floor, an overdose. Let's just look up the sky and say, Why me, God, a lot.

Oh, my gosh. People say, Do you pray? And I go, Well, I don't only pray, but I end up having some loud discussions with Jesus when I do pray. And so it changed my whole perspective on things. I'm sure a lot of people disagree with it, but it is what it is. And however those people are disagreeing with me, I went through what I've been through.

This was Stalwart Jason, who'd kept them going through all those trials I know for a fact, Raman Lee Jennings killed my sister. Jason, who had studied law so he could be a sword for justice, just like Michael Blake, the prosecutor protector who had gone to trial three times for the sake of his sister, Michelle. Jason was dead. No children now. Unimaginable, really.

I can't tell you. It takes you to a low... No one can characterize what low is until you go through something like that.

So perhaps it was a blessing of sorts that the O'Keefe had no idea that a few months after Jason's death, a civil attorney and his son turned their fresh eyes toward the murder of Michelle. But then, neither did the Eilish know what the O'Keefe had been going through. No, they were focused on facts and evidence. And to borrow another biblical title, on revelations. The thing of it was, and this the Eilix encountered again and again and again in the old files. Raymond Jennings just could not seem to keep his mouth shut during the investigation. Talk, talk, talk. That's what he did, willingly and repeatedly. His own mouth was what made him a suspect soon after the murder of Michelle O'Keefe, because what he described, what he said he saw with his own two eyes, could only have been seen by the killer. Here is how he explained it to me long after his conviction.

These are things that I should have never spoke on because I didn't know. I'm not an expert in these things. You were guessing? Oh, absolutely. Just based upon what I observed.

This is the guy who talked too much.

Absolutely.

Because you were saying things you thought you knew, but you didn't have a clue.

I didn't have a clue.

From the files, the Eilix deduced that the conviction of Jennings was based, almost entirely, on the things that he said. Prosecutor Michael Blake always acknowledged there was no physical evidence that could pin the murder on Jennings. It was all circumstantial. By the time the Eilix got involved, Jennings had evolved a philosophical way of looking at it.

It is funny how people react to different situations when it's trauma involved. You and I can look at the same thing, and you can see something totally different than what I see.

When I talked to Raymond Jennings, I was struck by how remarkably patient he was and polite, affable. If there was bitterness, it did not show. Rather, he seemed endlessly, if naively, optimistic.

I just tell everybody I'm a short-timer. At no point in my 11 years did I tell anybody that I got life in prison, and that's it, that's it, I'm done.

But you were done.

No, I wasn't.

You never felt that way.

I never felt that way.

Well, perhaps. But the Eilix wanted to see the facts, all the facts. So they gathered together every bit of evidence they could lay their hands on, most of it in police reports and recorded interviews, legal filings, public information available to anybody if they'd ask. Stacks of paper rode the elevator to their sixth floor lookout over LA San Fernando Valley. And page by page, they dug through it all, looking for anything that would either prove Clint's suspicions had been wrong all along, and it really was a proper conviction or something. They didn't know quite what that was. But pretty soon they began to find things, things that didn't seem right. There was no doubt, none whatsoever, that the weapon used to kill Michel was a nine-millimetre gun. And yet no amount of searching produced a scintilla of evidence that Jennings ever owned a nine-millimetre. Oh, he did own a gun. It was a 308. But again, it was all in the file. He did not have it with him the That night, Michelle was killed. It was against the security company's rules. Besides, the detectives never did recover the 9 millimeter murder weapon, not on Jennings nor anywhere around the crime scene.

And this was weird, thought the Eilix. They didn't even check to see if Jennings actually fired a gun that night. They could easily have done that, but they didn't. This is Jeff Eilix.

If they had swabbed Ray's hands for gunshot residue or searched him or his car and found that there was no gun, then there wouldn't have been a case. So the detective work at the beginning wasn't very good.

Mind you, that first night, police considered Jennings to be a witness, not a person of interest. Still, some things were tested, some things were not. Later, they did collect Jennings uniform, standard-issue security guard outfit, the one Jennings was wearing that night. Now that, the police did test for gunshot residue, and there wasn't any, not a grain on the uniform. Also, no pseudo-stippling curious phenomenon, stippling. It should have happened to Jennings had he been the shooter, but it didn't, as Jeff explained.

If Ray Jennings had been the shooter, and since the shooter had, according to the prosecution, fired the first shot into the ground at his feet, there would be this phenomenon known as pseudo-stippling, which is a shrapnel from the bullet and the asphalt that would tear holes through his pants and possibly his legs. And so the absence of pseudo-stippling is more evidence that shows in the same way that the absence of gunshot residue on the cuffs of his jacket shows that he didn't fire a gun that night. He didn't shoot a bullet into the ground at his feet that night.

Which is pretty powerful evidence. If he didn't fire a gun, he didn't kill her.

Exactly.

The Eilix also looked in vain for evidence that Jennings had been in Michelle's car. Things like hair and fibers and fingerprints, DNA, that thing. But there was nothing like that. Nothing at all. Except there should have been if the prosecutor's theory of the crime, how it happened and why it happened, was true. The Eilix read in the transcript that prosecutor Blake told the jury The crime was most likely a sex assault. And in fact, he called to the stand a well-known FBI behavioral specialist named Mark Safferick to back him up.

I believe that the motive for this crime was a sexual assault, that The offender intended a sexual assault. It wasn't well thought out, and it escalated. It went bad quickly, and it escalated into a homicide.

One thing it was not, said Blake to the jury, was a robbery gone wrong. How did he know? Because valuable items were left in Michelle's car, her purse, for one thing, and separately, a wallet with $110 in it, along with credit cards. Surely a robber would have taken those things. So the prosecutor's perfectly reasonable deduction, it wasn't a robbery, it was an attempted sexual assault. But then the analyst came across a police report, and Well, that changed everything. There were photos which revealed that Michelle's wallet was not in her purse. It had fallen into a gap under her seat, where a thief in a hurry wouldn't have it.

Very hard to see at night in a dark parking lot in a dark car. And her glove box was open. It looked like the car had been ransacked. Someone was probably looking for that money in her purse, and they couldn't find it. So to say, Oh, it wasn't taken, didn't make sense.

Here's what did make sense to the Eilix, based on the police reports, something called a situational felony murder.

The situational felony murder happens when a youthful offender, someone at the beginning of their criminal career, is committing a crime, and then it's interrupted by a car alarm, and Ray Jennings heard the car alarm, and then they panic, shoot the victim, and leave.

But Jeff Eerlik wasn't a criminal attorney. He wasn't used to poking around crime scenes for evidence of situational felony murders.

So I hired a retired profiler and said, What do you think? And he said, Well, it does fit those criteria. So we verified things by hiring experts, and mostly we just looked at the record and found the inconsistencies.

Of course, the ex-FBI man, Mark Safferick, was an expert, too. So maybe, thought the Eilix, maybe Safferick didn't have all the facts before him when he offered the jury his opinions. This is Jeff Eilix's son, Clint.

One of the issues was whether it had been appropriate to allow Mr. Safferick to testify about his theory of the crime. Okay. Because there was, in essence, no evidence to support it. It was just his imagination about what happened.

Like a happy eye profiler, and here's what he would think.

Exactly. I think that criminal profiling is a great investigative tool, and that it is a horrible form of evidence to try to convict someone and put them in prison.

But the other possibility, the botched robbery motive, rejected by the prosecutor. The Eilix figured that robbery motive made sense for a particular reason. Right around the time Michelle was murdered, the park and ride was struggling with a festering a gang problem. And what do you know? Right there in the files, Jeff Eilix said they found this.

Just weeks after the murder, there was an anonymous tip that was called into the Antelope Valley Press that then was reported to the sheriffs and investigated that said that this was a gang-related attempted carjacking that went bad, that there were people in the parking lot who were in the parking lot to steal hubcaps or rims or whatever else they could do, that they tried to steal Michelle O'Keefe's Mustang, that she resisted, and they shot her and left. It was a very specific tip.

But it never went anywhere. Besides, by then, Ray Jennings was suspect number one and only. No matter how deeply the Eilish dug into the investigation, they came up with the same answer. None of the actual evidence implicated Ray Jennings. The case was built on interpretations like Jennings behavior, Night of the murder. Jennings told investigators he saw signs Michelle may still have been alive, but didn't rest your aid. And that, prosecutor Blake told the jury, made Jennings look like a guilty man. But not so, said Jeff Eerlich. As an unarmed security guard, Jennings had been trained to stay back and call police in the event of a shooting.

Ray acted utterly appropriately, and that's another thing that I think is wrong with the case, that the prosecution used the fact that he acted consistently with his training as evidence that he was guilty.

But they also went and looked from every possible position in that lot where he was, and he should have seen, said the police, what happened. So if he was telling the truth, he would have been able to tell them something more more than he did. And if he was lying, well, obviously, that was cover.

If he wanted to lie, all he would have had to do is say, I saw some guy wearing a sweatshirt and a hoodie, firing a gun. And then I ducked down, and then when I looked up again, he was gone. He could have just made up a story. He didn't make up a story.

In that way, many more bits and pieces piled up on the Eilix desk. The pile grew into a thick binder. Each discovery carefully explained, each one pointing to Jennings' innocence. But something was missing, too. It seemed like there were blanks in the investigation's paper trail, things that should have been there that weren't. Kind of like they were reading a book with missing pages. Except maybe those pages were never there in the first place because somebody overlooked evidence? Maybe. Evidence that might reveal who murdered Michelle O'Keefe in her blue Mustang on that cold, wind-sweat night in the desert. In the summer of 2015, record rains coursed down the parched embankment at Palm Hills Park and Ride, made rivulence through the place Michelle O'Keefe was murdered and passed the empty spot where once a Memorial cross marked her passing. Seventy miles to the south in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, the rain beat at the windows of Jeff Ehrlich's Law Office. Well, inside, Jeff and son Clint stared long and hard at a name, Victoria Richardson. And who was she? A key witness in the trial of Raymond Jennings, for one thing. She, you may recall, said she was sitting in a car in the park and ride net of the murder.

Where was that exactly? Eleven spaces from Michelle's Blue Mustang, she told detectives. And from that vantage, she said she saw a security guard walk by and then moments later heard some strange tapping noises. At the time, the detectives made what seemed an obvious deduction. Those tapping noises must have been Jenny shooting Michelle. The Eilings weren't so sure about that. For one thing, they discovered Victoria had quite the record. Drug dealing, violence, etc. So maybe not entirely reliable. Still, they were quite sure this Victoria Richardson had to be an important clue. In fact, she had admitted to the original detective something quite remarkable, that she and three other people were sitting in her parked car smoking marijuana and listening to music at the time of the shooting. But who were those three people? Did they see something? Did they do something? Jeff Eerlik.

To me, what is the most remarkable thing about the case is that they didn't do any background check into any of those people.

They didn't talk to any of them? No, nothing.

And had they done that, the whole tenor of the case would look considerably different.

Isn't one of the rules when in doubt, talk to all about?

Even their profiling expert, Mr. Saffrick, said that it was in comment on the police to talk to all the people in the car, and they didn't do that. They never run a background check on those people. Two of those people were in prison when the charges were filed against Ray Jennings. And the essence of the prosecution prosecution case is that Ray must have been guilty because there was no one else there who could have committed the crime.

Well. Yes. I don't even know what to say to that. Clinton Jeff Eerlich concluded that police and prosecutors had been blinded by their own theory of the crime, that Raymond Jennings was the killer.

It has a name, Tunnelvision, and it's a form of confirmation bias. And in prosecutors, It happens in virtually every wrongful conviction. They just locked in on him, and they just couldn't bring themselves to consider anyone else. It's a tragedy.

Clint Eerlich told me what happened that night should have become obvious to investigators. How would you categorize this crime?

An attempted car jacking gone wrong?

Simple as that.

Simple as that.

The Eerlings had seen enough. They were outraged by the investigation and the trial and the conviction of a man they believed was innocent. But the legal options available to them were almost nil. The only possible remedy, given that Jennings had lost his appeals, was a habeas petition And that was something Jeff Eerlich, with all his civil law experience, had never filed before. It's Greek for bring me the body, a way to get a conflict before a higher court for review of their case. The Eilichs knew all too well the the way these petitions almost always went, in a word, badly. And we watched these things go through the courts. Time and again with people who were actually innocent in prison, and it takes sometimes decades. Years. Yes. So that was what you were facing? Yes. And you knew it, and you were prepared to go for it anyway?

Yes. I didn't see a choice.

But that process could not only take years. It would cost big money. And the odds of getting Jennings out of prison were daunting. A million to one. But then, out of the blue came a gift from the unlikeliest of places. June 29th, 2015, Los Angeles County district Attorney, Jackie Lacy, proudly stepped up to the podium, wearing a cool pink suit and a string of pearls. She'd called in the press to announce the formation of a ground-breaking unit called the CRU, shorthand for Conviction Review Unit. Its mission? To investigate credible claims of innocence. The man standing at Lacy's side of the podium was the CRU's new director, Ken Lynch. Broad smile, broad shoulders. He was the former supervisor of LA's gang unit. Jeff could barely wait to share the news with his son, Clint. No need for a habeas petition. No need for a long, tilted federal court windmills. They were going to write a letter.

He came to me and said, We need to contact these people. And I agreed immediately because we had been hoping that there was some way to reach out and to explain, Look, we think you've made a really, really bad mistake. And so the idea that we could go directly to the DA's office and say, Please take a look at this, that that was very appealing.

Mind you, they knew theirs would like to be one of hundreds, maybe thousands of appeals to this new conviction review unit. One letter was the only shot they had, and Raymond Jennings' fate hung on every word.

And so we put together this critique, and Clint was clearly the architect of the point by point. But it took us months to craft, and we did it collaboratively.

I wrote the majority of the letter. I the argument. My father wrote the facts. I wrote the introduction. He wrote the conclusion.

One of the beauties of working with him is that he and I tend to write in the same voice. It's very difficult to look at something and say, Oh, Jeff wrote that. Clint wrote that. And so we collaborate very well together.

October second, 2015. At their office on Ventura Boulevard, they assembled their meticulously prepared 34-page letter. They included a six-inch stack of photocopies called a Compendium of Evidence. And off it went. Ray Jennings' fate with it. The package is tripped by Messenger to the district Attorney's Conviction Review Unit. It was a short one, just a 20-minute drive down the 101 to West Temple Street in downtown LA. Time to wait. Anything could happen. Anything at all. Next on the Girl and the Blue Mustang.

I literally just started praying as hard as I could.

Someone important, buried deep in the evidence.

And all they had to do was take his name and run a background check, and they would have said, Oh, my goodness.

There is a document containing that word again, revelations. A murder more than two decades old was not finished with LA. Not yet. The Girl and the Blue Mustang is a production of Dateland and NBC News. Scott Fraser is a producer. Brian Drew, David Varga, and John Foster are audio editors. Thomas Kemmen is assistant audio editor. Keanu Reid is associate producer. Adam Gorfane is co-executive producer. Liz Cole is executive producer. And David is senior executive producer. From BBC News Audio, Bryson Barnes is technical director. Sound mixing by Bob Mallory. Nina Bisbano is associate producer.