Transcript of Murder at the Bike Shop | Sidebar 5

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Hello and welcome to this week's Sidebar. We're here to discuss episode 5 of Season 3 of Proof. As always, I'm with Jacinda and Kevin, and we're here to answer questions and talk about what happened behind the scenes with this episode. Hey, guys.

Hey, Susan. How are you?

Hey, Susan.

Do you believe that Scott's love of the song Butterfly was proof of his guilt of murder? Just curious.

Well, obviously.

As soon as I heard the song, I was convinced right then and there. That was it.

It did make me think about if people looked at my Spotify playlist and the songs I listened to, what they would think about me.

There was some evidence that I can see why it'd be compelling against Scott. But in his trial, they also brought all this stuff that to me just seems like it never should have been talked about in the first place. Like the flowers heard about and how Stacey supposedly said that Scott confessed to killing Earl O'Burn, putting flowers on his grave, and flowers weren't seen in his grave, and therefore had to be Scott because no one else would do it. But for one thing, if you go on find thegrave. Com and look up the O'Burn's grave, there's a photo of flowers on it. So clearly someone out there is putting flowers on his grave.

Yeah. Also, I don't think it's hard to imagine. I know they didn't have a lot of friends or any friends, and they didn't have family. But there were a lot of people, a lot of customers, a lot of people who knew them and liked them. It's not crazy to think some random person put flowers on his grave.

It's not crazy to think a random person put flowers on his grave. You don't know why people would do something like that, but they do stuff like that. It's what happens when people die.

We know Scott couldn't put the flowers there because the timing of Stacy's story doesn't work for it. Based on what Karen Raymond says, when she saw the flowers, it just literally cannot be Scott.

Because if he confessed a few days later after the murder and was like, I put flowers on his grave, and Karen Raymond didn't see flowers until a year later. They're not the same flowers.

We also heard a bit more about the other witnesses at trial, including Amy Kennedy, who was a girlfriend of a friend of Scott's. We were not able to speak to her ourselves. We spoke to her boyfriend at the time who told us that to his recollection, nothing she said about Scott being abusive towards Stacey was true. Nothing about him constantly threatening to kill her. She testified he just did not remember any of that ever happening.

It was nothing he ever witnessed missed himself. He never saw Scott hurt Stacey or lay a hand on her or threaten her or anything.

I'm a bit rung true to him. But the other thing that I remember about sitting down with Hollis is I was on that trip with the two of you, and we were sitting in his house, and he was just a nice, soft-spoken person, but incredibly surprised by everything that we were telling him was said. Completely taken aback by it.

He clearly didn't want to slander his acts. He was trying to be delicate about how he phrased things.

Yeah, no, absolutely. He didn't want to, but he was... I wish that we had recorded that interview so people could see his facial expressions at how surprised he was by the suggestion that Scott would have threatened Stacey like that because he was confused by the suggestion even.

Yeah, he was like, No way. If I even thought that was happening, he would have done something about it. That's probably why he wasn't called to testify, but he would have been a great witness for the defense.

Amy's other testimony was that she was once driving by the bike shop and heard Scott say, I robbed that place once. We'll get more into Amy's story here in later episodes. But even if this was totally true, which it could have been, It's not the damning evidence that Fenton portrayed it as. I mean, Scott had, in fact, robbed that place once. That's why he lost his job there.

Yeah, when he was a teenager, he took a bike.

We talked to a lot of ex-employees who mentioned this arrangement going to the bike shop. They would need to to get a bike. And Earl or Johnny would say, Here, we'll just take money out of your paycheck each week. Get a bike, and you got one now. That part of Scott's story is totally true. I know it sounds a little weird about how it operated there, but in this case, yes, Scott definitely took a bike that was not being offered to him, so he stole it. But it's nothing going to be a prelude to a homicide of the sort that happened here.

No, right. It's a low-level employee-type theft, which a lot of businesses deal with type thing. He took more than was offered. That's absolutely completely wrong what he did, but it's not like he broke in in the middle of the night and stole money. It's a very different scenario. He was also, what, 14, 15 at the time?

Yeah, somewhere between 14, 15.

From the people we talked to, he's not the only one who is doing stuff like that. Again, doesn't justify it, doesn't make it right.

It was a pretty regular occurrence from the sounds of it. There were lots of employees stealing from the bike shop.

It also sounds like from the people we talked to that Johnny was the one between Johnny and Earl. Johnny was the one who'd be like, Yeah, I'll take it out of your paycheck, and then probably never would.

I probably wouldn't take out the paycheck. It's been how. Yeah.

And Earl is the one who would make sure you paid him back.

But if Johnny gave you this deal, you'd probably never get the money taken out your paycheck, and that was just how it was. We also heard this episode about what the theory is here, how supposedly Scott did this murder. The idea that the droid can mix him on is that in the middle of the night, Earl O'Burn came out of his little locked-up fortress and just got some fresh air, wandered around the parking lot in a little alley there. And by luck, Scott was driving around, saw him, decided to use the chance to go in the open door, and in the process, killed him.

Now, if you think about that, we know now that Earl would not have opened the door for anyone he didn't know, and Earl would not just be out walking around. But if you're sitting in the jury box and you hear the story that Earl went outside for fresh air, Scott happened to be driving by, it was a moment of opportunity, that actually makes sense. You could see that happening.

The abstract.

Yeah. But what doesn't make sense is that sometime earlier, we don't know when earlier, he was... Earl was out there and was seen with a blonde man and it was- A different guy entirely.

He left and Earl was fine.

Yeah.

Well, one of the takeaways for me is, and Karen Raymond had said it earlier in the season, but just the shock that she experienced at the notion that Earl had been out walking around outside and that another employee, James Long, had testified to that.

Yeah.

That was unsettling for her because she didn't believe it. She said in the episode, I don't believe it.

He wouldn't even leave. Sometimes Karen would be the last employee to leave, and he wouldn't even leave the building far enough to walk her to the car. The idea that he's out there at midnight, 12: 45, walking around for fresh air, she does not believe that would happen.

What did she say in episode one? Yeah, he would lock us out. He would walk her in the door and lock her out.

He would shine a light down the path, but that was about it.

She mentioned he'd occasionally gone from his locked-up residence into the bike shop, but she would tell him not to even do that. That was even a rarity because even that felt dangerous to him.

Yeah, and to be clear, that means inside. He didn't have to leave.

Yeah. Same building.

Same building. To unlock your bedroom door and walk down the hall to the bike shop. That was it, not to leave the bike shop.

Another witness to testify to Scott's trial that we didn't talk much about in the episode was Scott himself. He took the stand in his own defense. We didn't really get into it because nothing that notable was said. What he said on the stand is basically what he's told us in conversations. He talked about the bondo, he talked about... I mean, yeah, the same things you've heard Scott say on the episode is the same thing he said on trial. But Finn's closing was that Scott's the only one here with an interest in anything, and therefore, you shouldn't believe him because he has his own motive to lie.

Yeah. Of course, anything he's saying on the stand isn't true because he's trying to come up with excuses. But it is curious. I'd love to know why they decided to have Scott testify. Typically, that doesn't happen. Maybe he wanted to, but it's an interesting strategy.

I could see in this case, maybe having him testify for a few certain quick points, but that didn't even effectively come out of trial. Things like his version of the bondo stick. Maybe you would want him to say that because that's not going to be from any other witness. He says that, but not in a way that's effective, not in a way the jury is going to really get it. If I was in that case, I would want to have brought in a bondo stick to show the jury, Here's what this could look like. Here's what Scott's talking about. Visualize it for yourself.

You'd want to see it so they know what they're talking about. I guess when there's not a whole lot of evidence, it really does become a story between if you believe Stacey or you believe Scott, and I guess maybe they thought Scott would present better.

That's possible. But by all accounts, Stacey did pretty good on the stand. She had a lot of stuff being peached by, and her past wasn't great, but she seems to have come off credibly in court. In the end, of course, the jury convicts on this idea that Scott broke into the bike shop and robbed it and took the bank bags and boxes of coins. Only, as it turns out, those things were never stolen. Yeah, the bank bags, they were still there in the morning when the body was found. The boxes of coins may be in the photos. It's harder to say because there's all the boxes in that shop. But James Long, one of the employees, says in his statement that those boxes were there when he and Laurie Scott found the body. There's no evidence that those things were taken. There's no evidence that anything was taken, but we know for a fact those things weren't because they're documented to be there the next day.

Seeing the bank bags and the evidence photos is that moment in season 2 when we found the necklaces at the courthouse. It's like, wait a minute, it's right here.

But it's not even... Scott knew. Scott has seen it before. He's like, I promise you guys, when you get the crime scene photos, you're going to see that the bank bag is there. We didn't have the crime scene photos at the time. It took us months. Once we got the crime scene photos from the police department, he was right. They're right there, just sitting there.

It's one of those incredibly disturbing and sad things. I mean, the whole premise of the case is that he stole this particular thing, and it's right there. And he knew.

It's not a mix up. It's not like, Oh, there's more bank bags. The missing bank bags were described in detail. It's the tannish olive greeny one, so safari safari, and the black bank bag. That's the two bank bags on the desk. We also even have notes. What Karen Naiman said then is that one bag was used to take cash to the bank every single day. It'd be empty. The other bag was used to hold cash to make change for customers, and it'd have about $100 or so in it. According to some notes in the police file, they did, in fact, check those bags and found that one was empty and one had about $100 in cash in it. Yeah, they were clearly there that morning, and some officer saw them and went through them and knew they were there.

And somehow everybody missed that.

Yeah, somehow the lead detective didn't know they were there and never learned it and never made its way into any reports. So this myth took over that these things were taken.

But what's so perplexing then is that, I mean, presumably, the original detectives and the cold case detectives are looking at the crime scene photos and say, Wait a minute, they're right here.

All I can imagine is that if they saw those photos, they didn't process that they were the exact same ones and that they matched the key details from Karen's first statement, way back in '88, about what was missing. How does this even happen? How does these bank bags go missing? I have a guess, and it's based on some really weird evidence practices by the Kalamazoo Police Department. We know that when Detective Jenkins got there, the lead detective in the case, he got there later in the day, and about around noon or so, he and Karen went through and documented things. He finds some other money, a box of Canadian coins and some random monetary bits and pieces, and he takes them with him, and he creates a new case number as a found property log and puts them under there. They are no longer part of the homicide file. It's just a separate found property file for some money found at the bike shop. We do have a record of that. I think before he got there, the first hour or two before he arrives, an officer went through the bike shop, did the same thing, collected the money, and put it in a found property case number separate from the homicide.

Somehow no one ever spoke to correlate the two and realized that, Oh, wait, there was money here. It's just been put aside in a different case number. That's the only thing I could imagine could have happened. Because we know from the Kalamazoo Gazette that literally an officer told someone in the media that morning, Oh, yeah, we found some money here. So it wasn't the best, but probably.

That's just a theory, but it could explain why those money bags were never traced again.

And yes, we did try and request other case numbers to find something like that happened. What was the absurd thousands of dollars request we were cited to do that?

Oh, yeah.

It was like many thousands of dollars to even get the list of case numbers that could possibly contain this found property if it exists.

It just strikes me as so disturbing. The picture of the bag is there. It's right there.

Fenton keeps saying during trial, closing, opening, We know Stacey's telling the truth. Because she can describe the bank bags that Scott stole. No one pointed out. If someone had just said, Hold up.

It's right here.

It's right here.

It wasn't actually stolen.

Right. It would have changed everything for He couldn't have brought the bank bag in through the window or anywhere because it was still in the bike shop.

If he had a bank bag, it didn't come from the bike shop. He robbed somewhere else. He did rob somewhere.

That's right.

It makes me feel so sad for Scott. I guess it could not have been brought up on appeal because the photos were available to- I think it could have been, but that's another question.

Sometimes you shake your head and you're saying, How did everybody miss it? This is one of those situations where it seems It was like, Everybody missed it. It was right there.

Well, no way to know now.

When we talked to Richard Madison and showed him, he looked surprised to see the bank rise.

He looked more than surprised. He looked a little bit like, Oh, shit.

Yeah, he did. He looked like, Oh, shit. I think his comment was, It really felt like a good case at the time.

You could see his brain turning. He's like, Oh, oh. I mean, it didn't convince him Scott's innocent, far from it, as far as we're aware. But he knew why this mattered, and he could see in real-time as he's looking at those pictures. They're like, Hmm, that's confusing.

I mean, if anyone had seen those, it would have changed the course of their investigation, I would think, both at the time and the cold case.

It's not just Seeing the bags. It's seeing the bags and knowing they're the exact match for what Stacey said. I'm pretty sure the cold case detectives did see those pictures of bags. It does not seem like they realized that they were, in fact, the same bags that were supposedly stolen.

Right. And the fact that Karen Raymond is saying there were only two bags.

Yeah. There weren't more. Well, he said that, yeah.

There weren't more bags. It's not like they had six of these bags that said safari safari, and he could have taken one. There wasn't another one that said that.

Yeah, and that's what's heartbreaking. No one on Scott's team noticed it to bring it up.

So one of the things that Scott's defense attorney argued in closing was that the song Butterfly, the one that the prosecutor said was about murder and Scott's guilt over it, was actually about Scott with drug addiction. There's no evidence Scott had a drug addiction. There's no evidence that Scott was involved in drugs at the time or that was motivating him in any way. But that was the way that the defense attorney explained the way his love of the song. Not just like, Oh, it's just a song he loved. It was, Oh, he connected with us so much not because of murder, because of drugs.

Well, even Stacey said that he wasn't into drugs.

Yeah. She hit her own drug use from him because he wasn't into it. Anyway, I got curious, Okay, what is the song about? Since that's apparently what the attorneys here think is the key point. I spoke to Heather Thompson, who was the singer, songwriter for Tapping the Vane, who wrote the song, and asked her what it was really about.

My name is Heather Thompson, and I'm the singer from Tapping the Vane.

What music is Tapping the vein?

It's dark rock with hip hop electronic elements underneath. Sad, sad, sad lyrics, generally.

And the song Butterfly, when did that come out? When was that written?

That was written in late 1995, early 1996.

I'm I'd mentioned to you when we talked online about how that song played a role in this case, the defendant, Scott Baldwin, was apparently obsessed with the song. He just really liked it and played it apparently 24/7. And what the prosecution said was that the song was about a murder because in the case that he was convicted of, a man was beaten and laid down in his bed, bed area, and died, which they said matched in the lyrics in the song. Right.

It's not about murder at all.

Do you know what it is about?

I do because I wrote it.

What was it about?

So it was about I generally don't like to talk about what the songs are about just because people, in music in general, like to extract their own meaning. However, for the sake of what you're doing, it's about sexual abuse and incest within a family and the The shame that the victim feels, even though, obviously, it's not their fault, but the shame that the victim feels. So blood isn't literal blood in my bed. Certainly, when there's physical damage to somebody, blood is left behind. But in this case, it was not meant as literal blood. It was more the aftermath, the shame of the damage that had been done to this person.

I'd wondered if that was... That was my... When I read the lyrics, that's what I went to. It definitely seemed like a song where the finger is singing about something done to them, not something they did.

Absolutely. How long was the info wrongfully convicted?

Twenty-five years.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Susan, that's a terrible It was a terrible story.

The fact that you use your song to convict him shocked me when I first read the transcript.

I've never, ever heard about this. If I had heard about it, I would have contacted someone.

Yeah. Your music is usually not my style, but when I was working on this and the song, I started listening. It really did get into my head. I just play on the repeat. I can see why you liked it.

Oh, thanks.

What else should I listen to?

What stuff do you like?

I'm not really a music person. It's awful to say.

Okay. We'll listen to one called Bury Me. It's pretty.

I'll do that.

And, yeah, listen to that one.

I will do. All right. Well, well, well, well, thank you so much. I appreciate your time.

All right. Thanks, Susan. Thank you so much.

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When there's not a lot of evidence, you're grasping at straws. You take song lyrics or you take flowers at a grave or whatever it is. None of that is really evidence. It's not even really great circumstantial evidence.

But it also helps you portray his character in a bad light, getting there, talking about the waitresses and the cheating on his wife and all that.

Yeah. I mean, it starts to become more plausible to assume these things if you can create this aura that he's not a particularly good person.

He did lie about playing bass for the band, so he's a liar. Therefore, he's a murderer. Okay, so he also told me, he's like, we had a conversation. He's like, I also gave the Waitresses a different CD I made of me playing a Creed CD. He played the cover or bass on a Creed song and gave that to Waitresses. He was like, prosecution didn't bring that up, did they? We also heard in this week's episode about the case of Hyland Sterling, who had the same defense attorney that also worked in Scott's case. Hyland was convicted of a 1995 murder of his friend. There is a a lot of colorful personalities going on in that case, but we tried to summarize it in the episode to break it down. I mean, from Hyland's point of view, he was acting weird after his friend died, but he said that's because his friend was also his accomplice in a botched bank robbery.

He was trying not to get caught for another crime.

Yeah. While I can see why his behavior would be described as weird, it also doesn't sound to me like it even makes him look that guilty necessarily. I mean, it was used that way at his trial, but he shows up at the house and he's like, Where's the money that you knew Rob had? Where's the book where he wrote about our plans to do crimes? If he had done the murder, if Hyland had actually gone in the house and killed his friend, wouldn't he have taken the book with him? Why would he leave the book behind?

Yeah, I thought the same thing, right? Not just grab the book and the money right there and then.

The money was gone, but presumably, in this theory where Hyland was the killer, he forgot to get the blue book that talks about their crimes.

Why come back when the police are still at the scene?

Yeah, he just went over there because he says that Rob wasn't returning pages, and he was like, What are you doing, man? And only found out that way.

It's obviously just a crazy situation for him. He's committed this other crime. He's obviously nervous about somebody finding out about that. But I was so taken aback by the story when you all presented it at first because it's yet another case, the cold case team, where a key witness has changed their story.

Before we talk about that, can I just point out, Kevin, that I think you just said, Y'all.

Rome is finally rubbing off on him.

Rome and Susan are rubbing off on you. Yeah, that's- But yeah, a key witness changes their story, and it's the details. Police, again, that are overlooked.

Although it's not exactly a detail to have the only possible eyewitness go from saying, I don't recognize Highland at all. He doesn't look like whoever I saw at the house this morning, to saying, No, I told the police right then and there at the crime scene. That guy looks like the guy I saw at the house. This is another common theme in the cold cases. A lot of the cold cases, to make their case, rely on convincing the jury that the original detectives were a bunch of fucking idiots. There's not a nice way to put it. That requires you to believe that the original detectives were just horrendously just gross failures. Otherwise, these cases don't work.

I remember when we were all working on the Jeff Titis case, that coming to that conclusion that that's what they were saying. They were just they're ripping these guys, just about how terrible they were at their jobs.

Look at these cops. They had the eyewitness at the scene saying, This guy right here looks like the killer. And they didn't even write it down.

Right.

They didn't even arrest him right there or question him.

They didn't even acknowledge it. Instead, they took this witness down to the station, gave him a lineup, and didn't include the black guy at the scene he's pointing out in the lineup.

Hyland Sterling's picture, the one picture with hair, it's a- It's a dirty trick.

It's a dirty trick. He's being transferred. So that picture, we're pretty came from when he was transferred from federal custody for the bank robbery to a Kalamazoo jail. While in transition and while... He was not shaving his head every day like he likes to do. So he had a little bit of hair, not even that much, but there's hair in his head.

Because he couldn't shave it because it never raised early, he said. But it seems like a dirty trick. It seems disingenuous to present it that way. It doesn't seem like a quest for the truth anyway.

No. It was never brought to the jury. Don't use this photo to assume that's what Hyland ever would look in 1995.

I think it's the first story we've ever done together that involves male strippers.

It is the first, yeah. First for me anyway.

I wish Mildred was still around because I'd love to hear her story.

I would love from reading her statement, I want to talk to Mildred.

I want to have a drink with Mildred. What is she saying?

I absolutely would love a drink with Mildred.

She's like, '78?

'78, yeah. Mildred, this is a total side note, but reading her reports, we know that she knew exactly what she was getting money for. She knew she was giving money to them so they could buy this nightclub and do their nightclub stuff. But when the police come to talk to her about it, there's a whole side story about that, she pretends that... She's like, Oh, they told me it was for a youth center that they're building. No, the home girl knew exactly what it was for, and she was trying to cover her.

A youth center?

Yeah, that was what it was like. She was like, Oh, they told me they wanted to build a youth center for people, for teenagers to hang out and do good things. That's why I was giving them money.

Maybe she just determines what a youth center is a little differently, She got these 20-year-old guys.

Yeah. So yeah, no, Mildred told her to have a drink with her. But anyway. Next week, episode 6, we talk about an alternate suspect. See you guys then.

You've been listening to Proof Sidebar, a podcast by Red Marble Media in Association with Glassbox Media. So Send us your questions and comments at proofcrimepod@gmail. Com. Follow us everywhere with the handle @proofcrimepod and on our website, proofcrimepod. Com. Thanks so much for listening.

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