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Season Five Home for the Holidays 4
79 Plays12 days ago
In Today’s Episode, we put together our Home for the Holiday cases.
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Sources:
Various News Sources Mentioned by Name
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Case Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:22
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
00:00:30
Speaker
Normally when we do like the holiday episodes, I try and sort of stick to cases that like are pretty much unknown. But once in a while I find what particularly when we're dealing with like the wrongful conviction cases.
00:00:48
Speaker
I find one and I look at it and I'll set it aside, but something about it was interesting enough that it like stayed in the pile of cases that I know i know you get tired of me sending you a note full of 40 things we're going to do for the holidays. But this one was not on my original list, but it had a couple of interesting things. I came back around and I mentioned all of that because this case has been covered.
00:01:15
Speaker
And I think sometimes it's helpful to do those, especially when people can then go and like look at the other materials about them. I know we're covering John Gordon Purves, and there's a there's like a paperback book that you can read about him.
Connection to Popular Media
00:01:31
Speaker
he's not this episode but but but you can go get that book on amazon for like a dollar or two and some people will go search it out and like that's really the only material other than a few news articles but i i did feel like john gordon pervis was a case worth covering And then I looked at this one and I was like, okay, this has a major book and it has like a major movie. And it's got this like it's got these attachments to a pretty well-known author to the point that like there's a like a Netflix limited series about it. But when I was looking back through it, I was like, all right, we're gonna cover this one. And people just have to give me a pass on it being sort of known.
00:02:14
Speaker
Now, this is a ah case out of Oklahoma. Had you, like, independent of us looking at this, had you ever heard of this one before? Yes, I have.
00:02:26
Speaker
Okay. So, this case, it's out of Pontotic. county ok oklahoma And I know you and I had looked around at some different cases in Oklahoma and considered some ways to present them before. It's one of the first like big cases that like I think of when I think of Oklahoma. um It's a very strange case.
00:02:50
Speaker
It takes place in like the the crime takes place in 1982 and then it takes a few years and they get a conviction and then it obviously we're covering sort of home for the holidays again. It it rolls out over time that like maybe the conviction was not great.
00:03:10
Speaker
Now, there's two people involved here. We're kind of focused in on one of them, but there's two of them. ah The first person's name is Ronald Keith Williamson. And it's he and his friend, Dennis Fritz, that are involved in this crime.
Crime Details and Initial Investigation
00:03:30
Speaker
So on December 8th of 1982, Debbie Carter, and she's known as Debbie Sue,
00:03:39
Speaker
She has gone to a place called The Coach Light. And this is a bar in Ada, Oklahoma that Ronald Williamson or Ron Williamson went to quite a bit. She is found raped and murdered. Five years after this murder,
00:04:01
Speaker
Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz, they're arrested on some interesting information and they both end up having separate trials. Now, I mentioned that there was information out there that you could go and look up about this case. The biggest piece of information out there in terms of how this all unfolded is a book by John Grisham.
00:04:31
Speaker
And that book is called The Innocent Man. Now, it later gets a man into a six-part documentary series and it sort of focuses on Ron Williamson's life. But pulling from that book and from the University of Michigan Law School Registry of Exonerations ah and and pulling some stuff together, we can tell you like a little bit about this story, and I think people will find it interesting. So early in the morning of December 8th, Debbie Sue, she's 21 years old, and she's what they call at the time a cocktail waitress. As far as I'm concerned, she's just like a bar waitress. She's found in the bedroom of a garage apartment in Ada, Oklahoma, and she had been beaten, raped, and suffocated.
00:05:31
Speaker
You can go over and you can look up on Find Law and Justia, J-U-S-T-I-A, and they have the story as told by just the appellate process. And I'm starting with a 1997 document out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The title of that document was Ronald Keith Williamson versus Ronald Ward at all, so there's a lot of other names on there.
00:05:59
Speaker
And here's sort of the general underlying circumstances that we're following along with. The murder of Debbie Sue Carter occurred in 1982. twenty one year old The 21 year old was found dead in her apartment. The door had been broken open. The crime scene shown showed signs of a struggle. Police found a washcloth had been forced into Debbie Sue's mouth and there was a ligature around her neck.
00:06:28
Speaker
They concluded that Debbie Sue had been sexually assaulted and suffocated. From the scene, police recovered latent fingerprints, hair, and they found a bloody fingerprint on the wall of the bedroom in which the body had been located. The only latent prints that were identified were those of the victim and an ADA police detective who was investigating the crime.
00:06:57
Speaker
In a 1983 report, a state fingerprint expert concluded that the bloody fingerprint did not match that of the victim and it did not match Ron Williamson, who was a suspect at that time. Debbie Sue had worked at the Coach Light Club and the murder took place after she left the club in the early morning hours of December 8th, 1982.
00:07:23
Speaker
It was known to police that Mr. Williamson and Dennis Fritz were known to frequent the club. One witness placed Mr. Williamson at the club the night of the murder. So Ron Williamson was first interviewed by the detectives in March of 1983.
00:07:42
Speaker
So you're talking early March is going to be roughly 12 weeks after the crime. Ron denies any involvement and he agrees to provide hair and saliva samples. His mother ends up being his alibi. She testifies that he was home that night by 10 PM.
00:07:59
Speaker
Over the course of 1983, Ron Williamson is interviewed multiple times by the ADA Oklahoma Police and by agents from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation or the OSPI. Twice, he sat down and he took polygraph examinations.
00:08:18
Speaker
And twice, those polygraph examinations were concluded to be inconclusive.
Defense Challenges and Trial
00:08:24
Speaker
From Ron Williams' perspective, he continued to assert that he knew nothing about what had happened to Debbie Sue. From October of 1984 through January of 1985, Ron ends up incarcerated in the county jail on a bad check charge. Has nothing to do with the crime.
00:08:41
Speaker
But in August of 1985, Charles Amos of the Mental Health Services of Southern Oklahoma, he determines that Ron was not competent to stand trial on the bad check charge. So in September, a state district judge in that case, they rule him incompetent and they send him over to Eastern State Hospital. In October of 1985,
00:09:06
Speaker
A Dr. R. Garcia, who is the chief forensic psychiatrist at Eastern State Hospital, they issue an opinion and they state that Ron, he is competent and they return him for trial. In February of 1986, Terri Holland, who had been incarcerated in the same county jail while Ron was being held there a year earlier, she informs the district attorney that she had heard Ron confessing to the murder when they were there in the jail together. So on May 1st of 1987, Debbie Sue's body is exhumed and they take another set of her fingerprints. The state fingerprint expert, he changes his opinion and he concludes that the bloody print that's found in the bedroom matches Debbie Sue. So on May 8th of 1987,
00:10:02
Speaker
Ron Williamson is arrested. He's held in the county jail for 24 hours. And he gives a statement to an agent named Gary Rogers of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. And in this statement, he describes the dream in which he had committed the murder. He had also allegedly related the contents of a similar dream to a county jailer on May the 22nd. Neither of these statements is recorded. And in September of 1987, another man named Ricky Joe Simmons, he confesses to killing Debbie Sue in a statement that was videotaped by police. So Ron Williamson, in April of 1988,
00:10:48
Speaker
He's tried and convicted for Devisu's murder. At the time, he was represented by appointed counsel. Specifically, named here is one W.B. Ward. W.B. Ward was an experienced criminal attorney who was a sole practitioner, like he owned his own shingle. Mr. Ward had moved the court for additional counsel, citing the seriousness of the charges against Ron Williamson and the complexity and time-consuming nature of the case. The court grants this motion.
00:11:22
Speaker
and appoints co-counsel. But the co-counsel withdraws from the case as an attorney for Ron Williamson three weeks before the trial because co-counsel has accepted an appointment as an assistant district attorney. On the record, it reveals that W.B. Ward found representing Ron Williamson was demanding and difficult.
00:11:46
Speaker
At a preliminary hearing, Ron became abusive and violent and he overturned the counsel table and threatened his co-defendant, Dennis. He was physically restrained and the hearing ultimately proceeded without his presence. So Mr. Ward makes a motion to withdraw as Ron Williams counsel.
00:12:12
Speaker
And I want to point this out that this is just one of the interesting things about this. Debbie Ward is blind. So he states in an affidavit to the court, because of my previous experience with Ron Williamson, I had expected some trouble possibly during trial. Consequently, I arranged to have my son sit behind him during the trial with instructions to quote, bring him to the ground end quote, if he made any sudden move toward me.
00:12:45
Speaker
On the whole, I have found my representation of Mr. Williamson to be an extremely unpleasant experience, and I was glad to get this case over with. Okay. We've talked about this before. I think it's a difficult situation where attorneys find themselves being attacked by their counsel to say the least. Would you agree? I would not put myself in that position for sure. I mean, I realize that he wasn't necessarily allowed to leave this position, but it would be very uncomfortable.
00:13:19
Speaker
Right, and you and I looking at this over, like, looking at cases over the last few years, we've come across multiple instances, and I think we've talked about a few of them here, where officers of the court, there was a judge in Nevada, we dealt with one case for Taylor's business and attacked her attorney. It changes the whole tenor of the proceedings, but I think the conclusion that you and I ultimately came to is there's a strong possibility that whatever's happening there,
00:13:49
Speaker
could potentially have nothing to do with guilt or innocence at the case at hand. Actually, I feel like it could, um ah well, so the connotation would be that, you know, oh, he's a violent guy, right? Right, right. He certainly committed this crime. What if he's just mad because he's been accused of a crime he didn't commit? Right. um And we, depending on your exposure to people,
00:14:18
Speaker
you can get a sense of either one of those things, right? Yeah. While I would have a tendency to be very calm and try to get through the situation, I could see where other people wouldn't react that way and would be very ill and aggravated to be facing something they had absolutely nothing to do with, right? Yeah.
00:14:43
Speaker
I do also see why ah attorney Ward was in a, I don't know, he was just in a very, he was very concerned for his own wellbeing. And I feel like with everything else stacked against him like that, that's a very difficult spot. I'm sure he did the best he could, but I wonder if things might not have been different with a different attorney.
Conviction and Appeals
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah, so Ward continues to document this. and one At one point, he's writing it to the court and he's attempting to obtain witness names from the state. And he ends up stating to the state trial court, which it would be the judge at this point.
00:15:28
Speaker
He said, if the court, please, we're not trying a man that's charged with running a stop sign. He's charged with the most serious offense covered by the statutes of the state of Oklahoma. I'm a court appointed lawyer. As you all know, I don't intend to spend any more time.
00:15:44
Speaker
And that is necessary on this, but I also intend to do a proper job of it. He further states in a subsequent motion, judge, I've got to make a living here. I can't spend all of my time on this case. Court records from that time reveal that in addition to having difficulty with Ron Williamson, Mr. Ward had spent 21 and a half hours preparing for just a preliminary hearing. He had spent 32 hours at the preliminary hearing. He had spent 14 hours on trial motions.
00:16:13
Speaker
and 43 and a half hours preparing for trial with a 45-hour trial. He was paid the maximum fee at the time. What do you think that was? Not enough. $3,200. Yeah. Let's see. I'm going to tell you how um um how much that is an hour, but you can keep talking. Okay. Ward puts together everything he can here, and he becomes a part of this in a way that's actually quite strange.
00:16:45
Speaker
Ultimately, I think they were operating on a deficit if you I'm not knocking the fact that he was a blind attorney. I just feel like when you lose your co council, and you have these difficulties where it sounds like Ron Williamson is sort of generally not cooperative. I think that it makes it a little crazy for a judge to intervene or the state to not kind of point at it and be like, isn't it obvious that this is related to this crime? Now that didn't turn out to necessarily be the case. When you put it all together and look at like how W.B. Ward defended Williamson,
00:17:30
Speaker
Everything here is kind of based on some really flimsy evidence. Now, what they discover along the way is that Williamson is having some withdrawals from alcohol. Williamson was a minor league ball player. He had been playing with a minor league team affiliated with the Oakland Athletics and a team with like one of the farm teams for the New York Yankees. But he had lasting pain from a shoulder injury that had occurred while he was playing baseball.
00:18:01
Speaker
And that pain carries over when he sort of washes out of playing baseball and returns home. And he deals with it by becoming basically ah an alcoholic. Right. Self-medicating. Yeah, he's self-medicating. And he he struggles with what I think would be pretty normal depression related to that part of things. Sure. um It's $20.51 an hour.
00:18:32
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. So think about that for a moment. um He is on trial for its first degree murder, right? Yeah. It's a capital case and his attorney ultimately is making $20 and 51 cent an hour. Now, personally,
00:18:53
Speaker
I feel like even the arguments that the defense attorney ah is having with the judge, ah they're very disheartening.
00:19:05
Speaker
Can you imagine being the de defendant listening to your attorney complain about like not having been paid enough? I mean, he does say he's going to do a good job and you know, he would be ethically bound to defend him, right? Yeah. This is a difficult case for like a completely calm, not afraid of their client attorney who can see everything that's happening, right? Yeah. And so I can only imagine how the attorney felt on the other end of that and getting paid $20.51 an hour. it That doesn't really seem like what you go to law school for.
00:19:45
Speaker
No, it's not at all. So here's how here's how we end up with, at the University of Michigan Law School exoneration, here's how we end up kind of taking a look at this case. So this is Oklahoma case in Pontotoc County. It's murder with an additional charge of sexual assault. The reported crime dates 1982. He ends up being convicted in 1988 and the sentence was death.
00:20:12
Speaker
Now, Ron Williamson for his part at the time was a white male who was 29 years old. And it does turn out that this is gonna be a wrongful conviction. The contributing factors they list are ah false confession, false or misleading forensic evidence, perjury, or false accusation, official misconduct, and inadequate legal defense. And they do cite DNA as being a contributing factor. Also at the time we have Dennis Fritz, he's in the same boat. Now he ends up with a life sentence.
00:20:48
Speaker
And his contributing factors, he's a white male, he's 33. The specific contributing factors are false or misleading forensic evidence and perjury or false accusation. So this is kind of a double whammy here. This is a case where two guys are going to go down. Now, for the court's part, the document that I was pulling from,
00:21:12
Speaker
They look at it and they basically state that Ron Williamson has been arguing that he was deprived of his right to the effective assistance of counsel in numerous respects. For the purposes of his appeal here in the document I pulled today,
00:21:28
Speaker
They are only addressing two contentions. The first is his assertion that W.B. Ward was incompetent in failing to investigate and make use of his history of mental problems. And secondly, his assertion that W.B. Ward was incompetent in failing to investigate and present to the jury Ricky Simmons' confession.
00:21:49
Speaker
So because we conclude that the district court was correct in ruling that counsel's actions on those two matters had violated Mr. Williamson's Sixth Amendment rights, we're not going to go any further with this to reach any remaining arguments on appeal. So that means they're pushing this back so that he can get a new trial.
00:22:09
Speaker
Now, you've got 50 different reasons that like all of this is going to go down, but we're only going to look at these two and that's enough for us. So they do find that what's happening with W.B. Ward is probably problematic from the perspective that this Ricky Simmons tape should have come in and that they weren't looking at the fact that something was off with Ron Williamson in terms of potential mental illness or mental disorder.
00:22:43
Speaker
Depending on where you read about this case, I will say that they get some they get some things slightly different. So I'm gonna pull from this part of the story just from the National Registry of Exonerations, because they talk about some of the other sources here. Okay, the prosecution presented evidence that Debbie Sue had complained to a friend that Fritz and Williamson, or Ron and Dennis,
00:23:11
Speaker
they looked at her in a way that, quote, made her nervous. Now, they're not charged until a long time later. Specifically, they're charged after there's an incorrect analysis of fingerprints at the scene. There's an inmate that comes along that was sharing a cell with Fritz.
00:23:32
Speaker
And that inmate states that Dennis Fritz had confessed to this murder. Subsequently, this jailhouse snitch gives a two hour taped interview revealing what Dennis Fritz has confessed to him. This confession came one day before the prosecution would have been forced to drop the charges against Fritz.
00:23:52
Speaker
Then they have another informant that testifies that she heard Ron threaten to harm that informant's mother, just like he had Debbie Sue. So Ron had also been seen at the bar the night of the murder, this is according to a couple of different witnesses, but they hone in on this one guy whose name is Glenn Gore. So just to recap this for a second, the two people that are convicted One sentence to death, one sentence to life are Ron Williamson. He's the baseball player that we're talking about. And Dennis Freds. The victim is Debbie Sue Carter. We've got Ricky Simmons who has come along and he has confessed
00:24:37
Speaker
to this murder. And now we've got a witness name here, and that witness, his name is Glenn Gore. In additional trial evidence, and Michigan brings this up here, so I'm going to mention it again. Additionally, police had said that Ron Williamson told them he had a dream about this crime. So John Grisham in the book, The Innocent Man, he recounts that police quoted Williamson as saying, okay, I had a dream about killing Debbie. I was on her. I had a cord around her neck. I stabbed her. I frequently was pulling the rope tight around her neck. Although seconds later, the officer said that Ron Williamson said, I would never confess. And he requested a lawyer.
00:25:23
Speaker
This statement was treated by the prosecution as a full blown confession. Now they do forensic testing on the scene and on Debbie's body.
Exoneration through DNA Evidence
00:25:35
Speaker
Several items of evidence are linked back to Fritz and Williamson because they recover 17 hairs. And I don't, we've talked about this on the show. Do you remember the time that hair match analysis was being debunked? This would have been 20 years before that.
00:25:53
Speaker
Right, well, yeah, exactly. So one of the things that comes up in the court documents and in the Michigan profile, and obviously in the innocent man, is that the semen evidence suggested that the perpetrators were non-secreters. This used to be a huge deal in crime fiction.
00:26:10
Speaker
So Fritz and Williamson were described as being non-secreters. So that plus the hairs further links them to this. Now, Dennis Fritz, for his part, he said he couldn't remember where he was when the crime occurred because five years had gone by. Most of Ron Williamson's initial appeals are denied. But he slides in this federal petition for rid of habeas corpus. And in 1995, a federal judge grants that petition and he orders a new trial.
00:26:41
Speaker
The reason the judge orders it is because he held that the prosecution had failed to disclose the 1983 videotape of himself making exculpatory statements after taking a polygraph examination as well as a tape of another suspect admitting he committed the crime. So they put together the video of Ron Williamson talking and the Ricky Simmons video and the exculpatory statements that had been made, and they basically say, look, he's got to have a new trial for all of this. They did find that Ward had provided an inadequate legal defense by failing to develop any evidence of Williamson's mental problems because the trial court had not addressed it in any way. The appellate court felt like the trial court would have ordered a competency hearing if Ward had asked for it. So all this time,
00:27:36
Speaker
Dennis Fritz's appeals are also being denied. He ends up reaching out to the Innocence Project. And at that time, everyone learns that the physical evidence is going to be tested ah due to the federal ruling in Ron Williamson's case. So because they're both tried for this, even though they're tried separate, they're both able to potentially benefit from this evidence.
00:28:02
Speaker
So, dentists for its attorneys at the Innocence Project, they file in on it with an injunction to ask that the evidence not be totally consumed until the two cases are joined with regard to DNA testing. Now, do you understand like that concept in today's terms, I guess? Yeah. So the cases have been severed.
00:28:26
Speaker
Right. Which means there usually that's something that a lot of attorneys want. They want the cases to have to be like they don't want to be sitting at the table with another set of attorneys on another defend and if they can avoid it. So once you sever it, the judge has to sever the cases.
00:28:46
Speaker
And then what what they're really asking for here, Dennis Fritz's attorneys, is they want the cases put back together so that all of the evidence will count both ways to both defendants. Right. And honestly, it seems like, I don't know that they would necessarily have to do that now. that's what Yeah, that's what I was going to say. that's It's kind of unique. There's a report now and the report could then be entered.
00:29:14
Speaker
and Yeah. I guess if it was going to be somehow prejudicial against one or the other one. Okay, so I gave you like a list of people here. Yes. So we have these videos. One is of Ron Williamson, one is of Ricky Simmons, then we get Dennis Fritz. The DNA testing reveals that sperm found at the crime scene on and in the victim's body matches someone that we've talked about. Of those three names, who do you think it matches? None of them. Yeah, none of them. Further testing proves that of those 17 hairs that had been labeled as being matching evidence to prove that Fritz and Williamson had been here, guess how many of those hairs matched Fritz and Williamson or Simmons?
00:30:04
Speaker
None. Right. The profile obtained from this semen evidence matches Glyn Gore. Glyn Gore is the guy who was in the bar and who put Williamson there right before the crime occurred. So he was the witness that was used? He was the witness that they had been using. Which to me makes way more sense because, well, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, so Glyn Gore,
00:30:34
Speaker
He had testified against both of them. Well, and he was the last person seen with the victim. He was the last person seen with the victim. And there was a witness who had come forward and said that they had seen Glenn Gore arguing arguing with Debbie Sue Carter on the night of her death. The police do interview him, but he wasn't fingerprinted. He didn't give saliva samples and he didn't give hair samples. So Glenn Gore,
00:31:02
Speaker
weirdly, you know, cause this tends to happen. He ends up going to prison anyways on another violent crime. While all this testing is going on, Glenn Gore is in prison, but he's on work release. So according to these sources, when he hears that testing has been done, he escapes from his work release.
00:31:32
Speaker
and it takes them a little while to apprehend him. Now, in April of 1999, the courts look at all this, and they, the state, their attorneys, and the court, they let Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson out. Ron Williamson had, at that point in time, he had come within five days of being executed. The two of them had spent 11 years each in prison.
00:32:02
Speaker
That is a long time. It actually doesn't seem that long compared to some of the exonerations we've seen, but I mean, yeah, I would agree. A day is too long for an innocent person to be, especially on death row, right? Yeah. there something that This case is interesting because um the timing of it, so if you sort of wander in your mind back to the late 90s,
00:32:28
Speaker
yeah This would be 1999. So this case would have been a big deal in the like sort of little bit of mainstream media about true crime there was at that point in time. It would, yeah.
00:32:41
Speaker
um and so You have a situation where like, oh, these guys were wrongfully con convicted. One of them was sent to death row. He came within five days of dying, but it's okay because they finally got it all sorted out and the DNA proved they didn't do it, right? ye And so it's sort of a roller coaster ride, right? oh yeah um Especially with some of the other contributing factors that come into play with regard to you know how he had an angry temper, his attorney, um
00:33:13
Speaker
may have needed additional assistance in such a work intensive capital murder case that he didn't
Impact on Legal System
00:33:22
Speaker
get. i He went through a process and probably, um you know, more appeals were denied than should have been, possibly. Yeah. um And, you know, so anyway, this would be this is one of those initial cases where we start to see the undoing of a lot of the junk science, right the hair, the fingerprints, whatever else there is. I feel like they worked with what they had. right yeah I know that
00:34:01
Speaker
hair and fingerprints and other things that you're just physically comparing. um I feel like that those are subjective interpretations, right? Yeah. And it's very easy to say like, oh, this hair does look like, you know, one of these guys and this other hair looks like the other guys.
00:34:23
Speaker
And it could very well be true and it still could, the hairs could have nothing to do with the people they just matched it to, right? Yeah. But the timing of this is interesting and it's cases like this, this is a truly terrible case. It's odd any time and maybe it's just because we get to look back on it and like we're not you know trying to work our way through it. But to me, you know having the last person seen with the victim testifying against the guys that had say they had nothing to do with it, except i mean he did i mean he had a conversation about dreaming about killing her or whatever.
00:35:04
Speaker
And so that wasn't great, right? That's right exactly why you don't need to talk to the police in this type of situation. Because, you know, at the end of the day, these two guys were factually innocent, right? They had nothing to do with this crime. And Williamson was, you know, within five days of his execution until he was suddenly released from prison.
00:35:26
Speaker
Yeah, and so the way this kind of, it doesn't get great for Ron after that. So when Ron is released from prison, he is already, let me see if I get this right. they freed They're freed on April 15th of 1999.
00:35:45
Speaker
So Ron was born at 53, 99 minus 53, 40. He's 46 years old. So Ron Williamson is 46 years old when he's freed. And by the way, he was the 78th inmate that had been exonerated from death row since 1973. At the time ah of the article in November, 2010, he was number 78. I thought that was interesting. So he doesn't live much longer.
00:36:12
Speaker
he They do end up suing the city of Ada and the state of Oklahoma, and they they get ah they get a little bit of money out of it.
Aftermath for Williamson and Fritz
00:36:22
Speaker
and For a long time after they were exonerated, the residents of Ada, Oklahoma, of which they're weirdly or not a lot of, um they believed that Ron and Dennis were guilty.
00:36:37
Speaker
but Both of them, after they're released, they have reported that they believe that the prosecutor, Bill Peterson, and the Ada Police Department would try to bring them to trial again.
00:36:54
Speaker
now Ron Williamson had a ah long history of drug and alcohol abuse, but it is believed that Thorazine and other ah prescription medications that he had been given while in prison may have also caused him to have cirrhosis. And five years after his release, while he's in a nursing home, Ron Williamson dies.
00:37:18
Speaker
Now, it's interesting because John Grisham read his obituary in the New York Times, and that's what made him write the book about Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz.
00:37:30
Speaker
Now, Glenn Gore, he does end up coming to trial. They basically use the exact same evidence. So like you were saying, this is sort of on the precipice of a lot of things in true crime. Well, one of those things that it's on the precipice of is they discover, well, you know, we've got these reports, we can use these.
00:37:50
Speaker
So they do end up using the exact same evidence from Dennis Fritz's case and from Ron Williamson's case. The evidence proved that Glenn Gore had left his DNA all over the scene. And on June 24th of 2003, a jury can convicts him of first-degree murder and they sentenced him to death. But that death sentence is overturned two years later.
00:38:15
Speaker
He gets a second trial and on June 21, 2006, he is found guilty and sentenced to life without parole. Now, this was required because the jury at the time for the second trial, they deadlocked on sentencing. When you don't have a unanimous sentencing recommendation, the judge has to automatically choose life without parole over death.
00:38:38
Speaker
So Tom Landreth sentenced them to that. And he's still alive. I looked him up the other day. He was still alive as of the time that we were recording this. He had been in Mac Alford Correction Center. He'd actually already been in there since July of 1987.
00:38:54
Speaker
now This first-degree murder charge was his worst offense, but basically since 1985 or so, he had been on the police's radar with major felonies, and he had been sentenced like time and again to five years here, four years there. Eventually, he could send us to 40 years in 1987.
00:39:17
Speaker
and He wasn't going to get out anyways, but they were at least able to keep him in there for the rest of his life. Well, not to mention like the victim deserved justice. Correct. I agree. You don't really hear a whole lot now.
Gore's Conviction and Sentence
00:39:31
Speaker
Of course, I'm not really sure where we are as far as you you hear about guys like you were just talking about, uh,
00:39:40
Speaker
ah glen gore And you know, oh, he was, he did bad things and he was in and out of jail. And then finally he was in jail years before it was discovered that he was actually responsible for this heinous murder that that these two men were convicted of, right? And they were completely innocent of, which by the way, two guys, right? I mean, this doesn't seem like a crime that two guys committed. I'm just saying. Yeah. But this was a time in history where it wasn't as readily known that like two guys don't commit this type of murder. Right. please Okay. So I don't really know as far as I feel like now it's safe to say like, you're not going to have somebody who's getting several sentences of more than, you know, just some sort of petty misdemeanor time or whatever. And
00:40:30
Speaker
have them in and out, right? doesn't Isn't what is that right? I mean, because to me it seems like they basically either you're not gonna get much time and it's only gonna happen once or like you're going to jail for the rest of your life. That's what it seems like happens.
00:40:47
Speaker
today you mean? Yeah. Oh, I think there's lots of people in between there. It depends on the types of crime. But if you're referring like to the, like the violent crimes, like where someone is up for attempted murder or serious assault, you really only get one or two bites at the apple and then they kind of that That next sentence is not going to be, especially if there's any element of sexual assault in this day and age attached to a kidnapping or like some kind of attempted murder or assault with a deadly weapon and inflicting serious injury with intent to kill. The sentences get lengthy like first or second time now.
00:41:22
Speaker
Right. Well, and that's what I'm saying. Like ah you're you're right. i I should clarify. I'm not sure if Glenn Gore's earlier convictions, they might have been nonviolent crimes. No, they were violent, but they were like pointing a gun, burglary. I mean, they, they qualify in some level as being violent, but then suddenly we have a murder and a rape. that would be much more serious. That kind of pattern of behavior demonstrates, which is exactly why today, violent criminals, they get, I mean, if you call it a chance, you you have an um everyone has the opportunity to not commit violent crime, right?
00:42:03
Speaker
100%, yeah. once you Once you commit a violent crime most of the time, especially with DNA evidence or some other sort of undisputable evidence, video of the crime or DNA or whatever, it's unlikely you're going to have the opportunity to commit another violent crime.
00:42:21
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like that stems from some of these cases where people got so many chances, right? I don't know if that's appropriate. I do realize that that would be a balance to be struck. Violent criminals need to be punished. Some of the other stuff, though, I mean,
00:42:39
Speaker
I don't know. I feel like there's a whole lot happening that this sort of, to me, at least for for my knowledge, this sort of marks the beginning of this sort of revolution, right? Oh, yeah.
Legacy and Further Readings
00:42:53
Speaker
Yeah, there is a little bit of good news in here from what I read. And this is in the, ah one of the books. Now it's not great for Ron Williamson, but Dennis Fritz, he goes back to Kansas city and he gets reunited with his daughter in 2006. Now he publishes his own account of this. It's called journey toward justice. Now I could not find a great source for where to get that, but I'm sure if you hump enough, you could get that.
00:43:20
Speaker
And I will say, I wanted to point this out about the book itself. Now, while all this is going on, i this is just one of those things I looked at and I was like, that's really weird. Do you ever look at an area and go, how is that happening in that area? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think so. Ada, Oklahoma is a county seat in Pontot Duck County. As of the 2020 United States Census, there were 16,000 people in Ada, Oklahoma.
00:43:49
Speaker
Got me? Yep. Okay, so in the subplots of the book, An Innocent Man, and in the docuseries, they talk about the police and the district attorney's office during that time.
00:44:03
Speaker
Like, so these are not like the main part of the book. The main part of the book is about Ron and Dennis and Debbie Sue. They do highlight Ricky and they do highlight Glenn. But there's the false conviction, trial and sentencing of Tommy Ward and Carl Fontenot. That's in the abduction, rape and purported murder of Denise Harroway.
00:44:27
Speaker
They also talk about the false conviction or wrongful conviction of Greg Wilholt in the rape and murder of his estranged wife, Kathy Wilholt. So at one point in time, all of these men, except for Dennis, so Ron Williamson, Tommy world tommy Ward, Carl Fontenot, and Greg Wilholt, they're all in the same death row.
00:44:56
Speaker
If you want to read about the cases related to Tommy Ward, specifically what is thought to have been Denise Haraway, ah which includes Carl Fontenot, there's another book that had come out in 1987 by Robert Mayer. It's called The Dreams of Ada. And I thought it was interesting that a town with 16,000 people has this much going on. There's a little bit of a skew happening. It has to be.
00:45:24
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think people are paying as much ah attention there as are somebody is paying too much attention or something something's happening. Yeah, because that's crazy. Most places with 16,000 people aren't even going to have like one person on death row ever. Yeah.
00:45:41
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, so those so those are some other things you can read about there. The Dreams of Ada by Robert Mayer. You can find that one pretty easily. and there were ah okay I think I found PDFs of it online. If you want to support the author, there are ways to do that, like on Amazon or the booksellers. And then Dennis Fritz's book, Journey to Justice. like i think those are I think those are definitely worthwhile stories to dig into. And I have nothing against Oklahoma. I'm not i'm not bashing Oklahoma with all this. I was just curious. Oh, no.
00:46:10
Speaker
No, it's just always interesting when you start seeing these different things happening, right? Yeah. Special consideration was given to True Crime XS by LabratiCreations.com. If you have a moment in your favorite app, please go on and give us a review or a five-star rating. It helps us get noticed in the crowd. This is True Crime XS.
00:48:25
Speaker
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00:49:18
Speaker
True Crime XS is brought to you by John and Meg. It's written produced, edited, and posted by John and Meg. You can always support True Crime Access through patreon.com or if you have a story you'd like them to cover, you can reach them at truecrimeaccess.com. Thank you for joining us.
00:49:48
Speaker
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