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Season Five Home for the Holidays 18
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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 Content Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
Podcast Milestone and Case Introduction
00:00:22
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
00:00:29
Speaker
So at the time we get to this one, we're like 20 episodes in and we put together all of this content. And I always like wonder like, am I going to mess up and we're going to have you look at episodes from something we've done in the past. And I realized how many wrongful conviction cases there are. I don't know if you've ever just gone and looked at a list of them. There's so.
00:00:47
Speaker
many of them. I would say this ranks up there and being one of the most tragic ones. It's an older case and I do want to say ahead of time that there's a lot of sources to this one.
The 1967 Florida Tragedy Unfolds
00:01:00
Speaker
Victims of the State is a source. our Orlando Sentinel, the Miami Herald, the Daytona Beach Morning Journal, the Death Penalty Center for Information.
00:01:09
Speaker
the Journal of American Legal Studies, the New Times of out of Broward Palm Beach, early Reuters, I think I said the Palm Beach Post, Boca Raton News, Sarasota Herald Tribune, and of course the National Registry of Exonerations plays into this one. This case is a Florida case and it's from 1967. Had you ever heard of this one before? No, I hadn't.
00:01:32
Speaker
It comes out of DeSoto County, Florida, Arcadia specifically. This is a multiple murder charge. It's a reported crime date of 1967 and the perpetrator or alleged perpetrator, who was later exonerated, they're convicted in 1968 and they're sentenced to death. The contributing factors to this were perjury or false accusation and official misconduct. There was no DNA that contributed to the exonerations here.
00:01:58
Speaker
But the person we're talking about today is a black male who at the time of the reported crime was 31 years old. And I got to be honest, this case is absolutely like horrifying as a parent. Crime itself kind of goes like this. On October 25th of 1967, seven children ranging in age from two to eight, they consumed food poisoned with Parathian. Sixes of the children end up dying that day, and the six kids that died that day are Betty, who was age eight, Alice, who's age seven, Susie, who's age six, Doreen, who's age five, Vanessa, who's age four,
00:02:41
Speaker
James Jr., who's age two, and the seventh child, Diane, who was three years old, died the next day. There's so many children here. So all of them died? Yeah, all of them end up dying. Okay. Yeah. These children belong to a woman named Annie Mae Richardson and her husband, who is James Joseph Richardson. Now, Betty and Alice were from Annie Mae's previous marriage, so they're the oldest, Betty and Alice are.
00:03:11
Speaker
The other five kids, James Joseph Richardson is the father. The night before, Annie Mae Richardson had prepared lunch for these kids. And the lunch was made up of beans, rice, and grits. This meal that she prepares, it gets placed on a locked refrigerator overnight.
00:03:29
Speaker
And in the morning, the Richards leave and go to work. They work in the Orange groves about 16 miles away from their home. They have a neighbor named Bessie Reese, and Bessie Reese comes over to help take care of the kids while James and Annie Mae go to work.
Investigation and Suspicion
00:03:44
Speaker
The four older kids, so Betty, Alice, Susie, and Doreen, they're enrolled in school, but they come home for lunch in the afternoon when they head back to school after lunch.
00:03:56
Speaker
Their teachers noticed that they were showing some strange symptoms. The teacher contacts the principal and the principal immediately takes these kids to the hospital. Thinking about the other kids, one of the teachers from the school, they go to the house to check on the other kids and they find that they are showing the same symptoms. So they take between the school and home, all seven kids end up going to the hospital. And Bessie reads on the teacher to make sure that someone goes to talk to the parents to let them know that one of their children is ill and that they need one of the parents to come to the hospital. So James and Annie Mae, they leave the groves and they head to the hospital.
00:04:37
Speaker
They don't realize that it's not one of their children. It's all seven of them. And by the time they take off for the hospital, six of their seven children are already dead. One of the officers from the Arcadia Police Department, who's the first to arrive at the hospital, is a guy named Joseph Minoffin. he determines that all of these sick kids are from the same family. So he goes to their home, which is an apartment building, and the idea is he wants to search for and find and quarantine any potential poison that might be in the house. When he gets to the apartment, he doesn't find anything that seems like it would be poisonous, except for an insect spray.
00:05:17
Speaker
And reading the ingredients, he did not believe that it could have been the cause of the children's poisoning. So he goes back to the hospital. Arcadia Police Chief Richard Bernard and the DeSoto County Sheriff, who at the time was Frank Klein, they then joined law enforcement officers in looking around the apartment. And Joseph Minoffin, he comes back for a second examination and he finds other officers there. The sheriff and the police chief go into this apartment and they notice that there's a very strong smell, but they don't find any sign of poison. Sheriff Klein believes that the poison could potentially be a pesticide. So he goes behind the apartment building to this maintenance shed that's back there and he searches there, but he doesn't find any poison there either.
00:06:10
Speaker
As news starts to spread that all of these children from this one family are in the hospital and dying, reporters start to come to this area to cover this breaking news. Now, Arcadia, Florida is a tiny place at the time. Even today,
00:06:26
Speaker
I think as of 2020, it had about 7,200 people thereabouts. um It's a very small place. It is a city inn and the county seat of DeSoto County, Florida. When the reporters start coming in, the police chief and the law enforcement officers, they are asked a lot of questions about what's going on and they don't make any preliminary statements. There's a prosecuting attorney for DeSoto County He does come and he responds to the reporters. He gives them some accounts of what's going on with the investigation at the house. The next morning, after the death of the last child, Diane, who was the three-year-old, a two-pound sack of a substance called Parafian, P-A-R-A-T-H-I-O-N, is discovered in the shed.
00:07:14
Speaker
So the police chief and the sheriff and all of the people that are working with them, including the prosecuting attorney, they agree that this bag had not been there the day before. And the premises had been thoroughly searched multiple times by multiple law enforcement officers from At this point, what is
Trial and Conviction of James Richardson
00:07:33
Speaker
essentially three agencies? Because you've got the prosecuting attorney's office, you've got the county sheriff's office, and you've got the ah city police. They're all searching this apartment. They've searched this shed. It wasn't there. They think that whoever has placed this sack of this substance there is probably the person who ended up poisoning his children. There are conflicting reports on how it was found and how it ends up in the hands of law enforcement.
00:07:59
Speaker
Men often, the first officer that had arrived, he ends up being told by Bessie Reese, who's essentially the babysitter, that Charlie Smith, who's a resident of Arcadia's quarters, has discovered this sack of poison. So when he goes to ask Barnard, who called in this discovery to the police station, he's then informed by the police chief that It came as an anonymous mail caller's tip to the station. The next day, the police chief and John Treadwell III, who is the prosecuting attorney's local assistant, they come out and tell reporters that James Joseph Richardson had been discussing insurance policies for the children the night before their deaths. Somehow, it's determined that the insurance salesman
00:08:44
Speaker
George Purvis had talked to Richardson just hours before the children were poisoned. And according to authorities and the statements they released to the press, James Richardson and George Purvis give conflicting stories on these policies. For a couple of days, there's no additional evidence found.
00:09:01
Speaker
And there's no more releases. On Sunday, they hold a funeral for the children. And obviously, Annie Richardson and James Richardson are devastated that they have lost all seven children. This funeral with these seven kids makes national news, magazines pick it up, television picks it up, radio networks cover this funeral. This puts Sheriff Klein at the center of nationwide attention. And Chief Barnard later tells attorney Mark Lane that Klein saw this as a chance to make a big name for himself and he needed to make an arrest real bad. As far as I can tell, this becomes like an early super cop situation. Does that make sense? Well, I don't know that it's early as much as it is more broadly focused because there was nationwide attention. But I think that there have been super cops since the beginning of time and so to speak. And it's just, I mean, everybody has that innate desire.
00:09:58
Speaker
Right. Yeah. They want to solve a thing. They want to be the hero. Sure. And if you do that for your career, it becomes even more amplified and you could find yourself in a position to do so. Right. I would agree with that. Yeah. Two days after this funeral on Sunday, Sheriff Klein charges James Richardson with murder in the first degree. Police Chief Bernard points out that there's just no case against this man. That's his words. And he's talking about James Richardson. Treadwell,
00:10:28
Speaker
He is the one who's going to have to prosecute this if the case goes to trial, but from his perspective, he's looking at it just like Police Chief Bernard. So the murder warrants end up being dropped, but they're going to hold the Richardson's and formally charged them with child neglect. All right, so these policies are talking about digging into this for a second. George DeSoto had been talking to the family over a couple of days about getting $500 policies on each of the children, $1,000 policy on Anne, and then two thousand dollars a $2,000 policy on James. So these are not, like it's a lot of money for the time, it's a lot of money for this family, but it's really not
00:11:19
Speaker
that much money in the grand scheme of things. When they drop this in terms of the the murder warrant and they bring up the child neglect, they create a crazy situation. So, the murder warrants end up being dropped. They've charged both the Richardsons formally with childhood. So, they end up with a coroner's inquest being summoned to substantiate evidence already on hand.
00:11:45
Speaker
So, you've got kind of two factions developing here. On one side, you have the assistant, James Treadwell, and Police Chief Bernard. On the other side, you have the sheriff, Frank Klein, and then you have Judge Hayes, who's going to come into all of this. At a press conference after they've tried to figure out how to to charge these people, just days after the funeral in fact, they end up with Frank Klein announcing that for some reason he says James Richardson had five other children dying under mysterious circumstances in another Florida city.
00:12:22
Speaker
And he says at this press conference that the motive was to collect this insurance money on the children. He says at the time that it would total almost $14,000. Judge Hayes, joining with Frank Klein, he says that both James Richardson and his wife, Annie, had taken lie detector tests. The results had showed that James Richardson had knowledge of the poisoning.
00:12:46
Speaker
And as far as he was concerned, it indicated that James Richardson was guilty. The coroner's jury, they hold a hearing on November 2nd of 1967. I'm emphasizing that for a second because it happens in such a quick period of time. Basically, the only thing that happened between these children dying and the coroner's jury and all these press conferences is a funeral in Hallow. So Judge Hayes says at this coroner's jury, we're meeting today to instruct Sheriff Frank Klein to file murder charges against James Richardson. This statement, because of him being a prominent citizen and a judge in Arcadia, this tiny place with this handpicked jury of local people, it carries considerable weight.
00:13:31
Speaker
Judge Hayes had been a judge in Arcadia for more than 30 years. So pretty much no matter what's happening here, there's going to be a trial. We end up with Frank Klein going to a grand jury. He takes the bag of poison. He takes the insurance card. And he also brings witnesses who said that James Richardson appeared unusually calm and not upset over When he did that before this coroner's jury, we only end up with him being indicted on the charge of murdering one child. And I want to point that out because it's kind of important. Over the next week or so, three different jailhouse informants come forward and they tell authorities that James Richardson had confessed to having put this poison in the children's food.
00:14:21
Speaker
A lawyer who's a 30-year-old white guy named John Robinson, he starts to read the media coverage of these Arcadia, quote, murders.
00:14:32
Speaker
And he believes that the case is being handled unfairly in the press because he sees Judge Hayes talking and realizes that Judge Hayes repeatedly and constantly
Legal Challenges and Contesting the Verdict
00:14:45
Speaker
claiming that James Richardson is guilty is going to affect how this case goes. So John Robinson, he reaches out to people who know the Richardson family. They tell him in these like very brief interviews that he's doing about James Richardson, they say that James Richardson is a family man, and they don't believe that he would or could kill his children. So then John Robinson calls up the president of the NAACP in Florida. It's a guy named Joel Atkins. He convinces Joel Atkins, who was the senior pastor of Zion Hill a Ministry Baptist Church,
00:15:21
Speaker
that the NAACP chapter in Arcadia should ask James Richardson whether he wanted to be represented by them, and they could give him a list of potential lawyers. And Richardson decided that he would let the NAACP represent him, and he ends up choosing John Robinson to be his attorney. Robinson goes to talk to James Richardson while he's being held in the county jail before the trial took place.
00:15:50
Speaker
And James Richardson is adamant that he did not kill his children. And he tells Robinson that he loved his children very much and he would never do this. He also mentions to Robinson that Sheriff Klein has been pushing him around and calling him racial slurs. And in his own words, he says that he's been questioning him in a very mean way every day.
00:16:14
Speaker
Sheriff Klein had told James Richardson that he would be let off easy if he would just confess to the crime. But Richardson denied having ever harmed any of his children. So talking to a man named Ernell Washington, who's another prisoner in the jail at the time,
00:16:31
Speaker
John Robinson discovers that Sheriff Klein has placed an eavesdropping device in James Richardson's cell, and whenever John Robinson is going in there to talk to James Richardson, he's being recorded. So Robinson finds the microphone and removes it, and he lets Sheriff Klein know that he's found it. Robinson files a writ of habeas corpus after examining the available evidence and finding nothing substantial that could indicate that James Richardson is guilty. The bond had began at $100,000 and Robinson goes about trying to contest the bond and get a lower bond set. After some negotiations, the bail is reduced down to $7,500 and Robinson is able to work with local people to get James Richardson released on bail. At trial,
00:17:24
Speaker
We have Ernell Washington. We have a man named James Weaver and a man named James Cunningham. They had all been cellmates with Richardson in the Arcadia jail. They said that James had admitted to them that he had killed the children.
00:17:37
Speaker
Now, the judge at the time had revoked his bail and they ordered Richardson to go back into the jail. A change of venue is requested for the trial to take place in Fort Myers. Attempts by John Robinson to move the trial to a potentially fairer county, like someplace where maybe the locals won't have as much influence, are all denied.
00:18:03
Speaker
And on May 27, 1968, in the Lee County Courthouse, the trial begins. Despite numerous challenges and all of Robinson's efforts, they end up with an all white jury. And we kind of know how that's going to go in Florida at the time that this is happening. During the trial, the most sensational development comes from Sheriff Klein.
00:18:28
Speaker
Sheriff Klein claims that there's evidence that at least three of Richardson's children had been killed in another county and a further three who had become ill but died. Bessie Reese gives evidence that she had divided up the meal into seven equal parts once the children came home from school at around five minutes to twelve.
00:18:49
Speaker
For his part, James Treadwell, who was conducting the examination of Bessie Rees, he establishes that she had been on parole at the time, but he didn't ask what charge she had been convicted on. James Treadwell did not want the jury to find out that she had been on parole for having murdered her husband. That seems like kind of a big deal to me.
00:19:13
Speaker
There's no other questions about her involvement in the preparation of this food. And when asked about finding the sack of poison, the paratheon, Bessie Reeves became more specific. She claimed that Charlie Smith had wanted to look for the sack and had gone straight to the shed and pulled a board off of the window discovering the sack. She used this to imply that Charlie Smith had prior knowledge of the location of this poison.
00:19:40
Speaker
She said that an unknown woman had seen them retrieving the sack and called in to the authorities. Charlie Smith was in the courtroom during this testimony, but he was not asked to testify at the time. The next witness after Bessie Rees was Gerald Purvis. So Gerald Purvis is his insurance salesman. According to him, he had called on James Richardson in household at on the 24th of October. They don't really establish in the course of this testimony whether he has been invited or if he has been out like as ah operating as a door-to-door salesman. We don't really see as many door-to-door salesman today, but it was very prevalent at this time. I can say with a little bit of certainty under the other circumstances, it seems unlikely that the family invited an insurance salesman out. I would tend to agree with you there.
00:20:33
Speaker
So he testified that he talked about the family's plans with Mr. Richardson, but that James could not pay the necessary premiums at the time. So Gerald Purvis decided that he would come back in a few weeks. Treadwell, in the course of questioning him, he insisted that Gerald Purvis had left with the impression that there would be a policy in place.
00:20:55
Speaker
but Gerald Purvis, for his part, he adamantly denies this. so Next, they bring on a pathologist, and then they bring on a chemist. and They conclude that the children had, in fact, died from this organic phosphate known as paratheon, and that it had it had been found in their stomachs and on the utensils in the Richardson apartment.
00:21:16
Speaker
There are several law enforcement officers that we've already talked about that include the police chief, include Sheriff Klein, and includes the first on the scene, James Minnoffin. They testified that they had searched the shed and that they had not seen the bag of poison there on October the 25th. Charlie Smith then testifies about finding the bag of Paratheon in the shed. His story lines up with Bessie Reese's and he's quickly excused.
00:21:42
Speaker
So the jury then retires to consider the evidence. And after about a half hour of deliberations on May 31st, 1968, they return with a unanimous verdict. So they find a unanimous verdict of guilty of death with premeditation at the hands of James Richardson and party or parties unknown. So they come back with a guilty verdict on murders for these children. They also recommend the death penalty for James Richardson.
00:22:11
Speaker
At this point in time, for some reason, Judge Hayes is recorded as having arrested Charlie Smith as a material witness and setting bond to him for $2,000. They do not arrest any other witnesses. But the idea, I think, of what they were headed for there is they were going to call Charlie Smith the per party or parties unknown. Because obviously, if James Richardson is at work when all of this happens, he has to have someone to assist him in some way here.
00:22:42
Speaker
Like an unnamed co-conspirator. Well, okay, but... It's confusing. Well, I mean, it sort of is, but it also sort of isn't. Do you think that this was the plan all along and that's why they didn't call him as a witness? No, they do call him as a witness. They just don't call him the backup Bessie Reese right away.
00:23:03
Speaker
That's what I mean. Do you think that's why? Cause they were going to try and pass. So my question is like none of the testimony that you've covered so far has had anything to do with Richard said ever having made the food, served the food, anything like that. So the idea is that Ann made the food and then James Richardson poisoned it.
00:23:31
Speaker
And Bessie re-served it without knowing it had been poisoned. Right. They don't establish it by evidence. It's a story that the prosecutor tells and the jury believes. I understand that. Now, one interesting part of this is it comes out as, you know, the food was made the night before and put in a locked refrigerator. Correct.
00:23:52
Speaker
It's weird to lock your refrigerator. At the time, I think it was in a more common area. So the the idea was it was locked off just to just because it was locked off. It's not something that's that's all that ah confusing. It sounds confusing in 2024. I don't know that it would have been back then. Sure. And I take that into consideration. But to me, it seems like, to me, it lends more towards the fact that Anne would have realized that Joseph was poisoning the food.
00:24:22
Speaker
Right. So Richardson is sentenced to die. After all this takes place, the police chief, Bernard, he still believes that there's no case against Richardson. He is right there with you. He does not see anything here that like dignifies Richardson having been convicted and sentenced to death.
00:24:40
Speaker
Without implicating somebody that, through the testimony given at least, had contact with the food, right? Right. It seems odd, but I mean, it is what it is at this point. Well, there is some sensational stuff. I don't know if you want to go into all of that. So the the jailhouse informants, the two that end up coming in to testify,
00:25:03
Speaker
There's three originally, two come in to testify. One of them said that James Richardson had been angry at his wife because she had been having an affair with Bessie Reese, who's the babysitter. This is never verified. It's only brought about in terms of this one informant talking about it.
00:25:19
Speaker
The other informant, they get that both of these guys had received reductions in their prison sentences, by the way. He said that James Richardson told him that he put the poison in the food. So one says he put the poison in the food, the other one says his wife was having an affair with the babysitter. The third informant before trial This is terrible to even talk about this, but he was shot to death, but his statement was read for the jury, and it basically verified the other two statements.
Exoneration Efforts and Richardson's Release
00:25:47
Speaker
What was being said about other children having been dead? I don't even know. It doesn't come up in the paperwork here in any way that's meaningful. I think that that was just garbage. yeah i think this I think Frank Klein was a terrible sheriff, and and that we're just he's just piling it all for the press.
00:26:03
Speaker
So like the worst combination in my research and experience in looking into cases, especially like farther back cases like this is in the 60s and the 70s even into the 80s is a super cop wannabe and a snitch that won't quit. Correct. That is like the worst combination ever but it's very strange looking back on this now it wasn't said once or twice I think it was said three times that like there were other children in other counties that were
00:26:41
Speaker
It shows up in the news media at least 18 times. Okay. And so like, it makes it look like this guy's like having kids and killing them like in multiple places, but that's not what happened at all. Nor would that it's ridiculous, but they skip over the part where the babysitter was suspected of killing her husband, right? Yeah. Or maybe she was convicted of it. I don't even know.
00:27:05
Speaker
She was on parole for killing her husband. Okay. And so that gets skipped over, right? But like they're making up kids that Mr. Richardson had killed. Correct. So Richardson sent us to die. He spends the next five years on death row. He's ultimately saved by the US Supreme Court ruling in 1972 and the case of Furman versus Georgia.
00:27:27
Speaker
which you and I have talked about on here before, but the holding there was, this is a huge deal in terms of the history of the death penalty, this 1972 holding. It was that the arbitrary, inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the 8th and 14th Amendments and would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Ultimately, while this has some changes to it over the years,
00:27:52
Speaker
In this case, it's going to save the life of James Richardson. You know what? I actually, through our work on exoneration cases, I feel like there was a whole lot of merit behind that ruling with regard to the biasness of the doling out of the death penalty to black men.
00:28:12
Speaker
Yeah, there have been subsequent developments since Furman versus Georgia. but You could go and look at Woodson versus North Carolina, Roberts versus Louisiana, Coker versus Georgia. They've come up along with, I think we did United States versus Miller or Miller versus Alabama at one point, Kennedy versus Louisiana, Roper versus Simmons, Ford versus Wainwright.
00:28:33
Speaker
And then we did a case about intellectually disabled folks a long time ago, and that holding was Atkins versus Virginia. So we talked about multiple different ways the death penalty has been shaped by other holdings. The one that ultimately saves the life of James Richardson is Sherman versus Georgia. And he gets his sentence commuted to life in prison. And it's the same thing that we've talked about in an earlier case that's actually kind of confusing to read.
00:28:59
Speaker
His death sentence and is ultimately commuted to life in prison with term parole eligibility, meaning he has to serve a certain amount of time, and then he's eligible for parole. There's a guy named Mark Lane that comes into play here. He's an internationally known trial attorney and author. He had been to see James Richardson on death row, and in his opinion, many clues had been overlooked or hidden that would have pointed to James Richardson being out and out innocent.
00:29:29
Speaker
James Richardson asked Mark Lane to represent him. And Mark Lane did a pretty exhaustive investigation. And in 1970, he published findings in a book called Arcadia. His findings were, he revealed that the babysitter Bessie Reese was a convicted murderer.
00:29:52
Speaker
And he indicated that James Richardson and any mate Richardson were innocent. At the time of the children's murders, with Reese being on parole for killing her ex-husband using poison, the prosecution had hid this fact and tried very hard to keep it from coming up with a trial. Little had been done to pursue her involvement at all with the children's deaths.
00:30:15
Speaker
including the fact that she had given them the food and that she had initially lied saying she didn't go into the apartment that day. There's some problems with this case along the way that kind of stymied the efforts. And as of 1988, Bessie Reese is suffering from Alzheimer's disease and she's in a nursing home in Arcadia. But According to people around her, she had confessed to the murders of these children more than 100 times. Her confessions were never taken seriously because of her having Alzheimer's. She ends up dying in 1992. The last surviving witness to James Richardson's alleged jail cell confession recanted his testimony saying that he had been offered a lighter sentence in return for the testimony and he felt like he needed to do it. Overall,
00:31:03
Speaker
It's determined that the investigation into the children's deaths had been inadequate. There were leads that were never pursued, critical questions that were never answered, and inconsistencies that were never resolved. A man who had been dating the prosecutor's assistant, Treadwell, he met with Mark Lane and his wife at a town meeting called in the silence and free James Richardson. He took one of the three copies of the complete original file in the case and he gave it to Mark Lane. Lane had met with the council for the governor of Florida. He turned the entire file over to the governor and he asked for a full investigation and a hearing on the rich on the rich. So the governor at that time would have been Robert Martinez. He had a ah he appointed the state's attorney from Miami Dade County.
00:31:52
Speaker
who we all know, was Janet Reno. He appointed her as a special prosecutor in an investigation. A number of months thereafter, October 25th, 1989, a hearing ends up being held in Arcadia. It's in the same courthouse where James Richardson was originally convicted 21 years earlier. So Mark Lane appears on behalf of Richardson and Janet Reno appears on behalf of the state of Florida. Lane argues his case. Janet Reno She agrees that there has been an an injustice done here and the wrong person has kind of been convicted of these crimes. So during this hearing, she cites that there's been Brady material that's been withheld from the defense.
00:32:34
Speaker
and that there were six separate ah elements of exculpatory evidence that were withheld. In her opinion, she found that there was evidence of a cover-up by Sheriff Frank Klein, the state's attorney of the time, Frank Schaub, Treadwell, his assistant, as well as the local judge, Judge Hayes.
00:32:54
Speaker
So on April 25th, 1989, after looking at all of the evidence presented by both sides, they began to note inconsistencies and they realized that 20 years ago, there had been a pretty serious injustice done in terms of whether James Richardson had received a fair trial. So retired circuit judge Clifton Kelly, he says that he had not received a fair trial and he releases them into the custody of his attorneys, which included Mark Lane and local counsel.
00:33:22
Speaker
After his release in 1989, James Richardson goes to work for nutritionist Dick Gregory, who's kind of a ah ah popular ah personality at the time, at a health resort in Fort Walton Beach.
00:33:39
Speaker
Now, Dick Gregory had spoken out for Richardson multiple times and he had been part of sort of a ah wave of celebrities that were supporting James Richardson being released.
00:33:54
Speaker
So the attorneys in this end up filing a lawsuit against the Soto County for the wrongful prosecution of James Richardson. They settle it out for $150,000. And on August 25th of 2008, after all the legal claims have been rejected ah based upon the precedent of prosecutorial immunity, James Richardson files a claim under Florida's Wrongful Conviction Compensation Law.
00:34:21
Speaker
which provides compensation for wrongful imprisonment of 50 grand a year. His life had not gone great since he'd gotten out of jail in 1989. The job at the health resort in Fort Walton beat him ended. He suffered multiple severe heart problems which were attributed to poor medical care in prison, kind stress and prison food, and grief from having lost seven members of his family and been accused of having murdered them. He had open heart surgery in prison. Now, he and Annie May, she stayed with him the whole time that he was in jail.
00:34:59
Speaker
But eventually they get divorced. The settlement by the county, it ultimately ends up paying the cost of his local lawyers. Richardson had been in prison for so long that he had become eligible for Social Security by the time it was released, by the way. And in August of 1995, he had a heart attack at his home.
00:35:18
Speaker
So at this point in time, he was flown out to Wichita, Kansas to be looked at to see if there was something they could do for him. He has emergency treatment there. He ends up getting an angioplasty. And one of the people that's involved in that is Dr. Joseph Galatia. He ends up offering Richardson a job as a caretaker on his ranch. He lives on his ranch for the next 18 years, but he ends up passing away in Wichita in September of 2023 at the age of 87.
00:35:47
Speaker
One of the things I found really interesting about this case, and then I'll get your thoughts on the case overall. In 2014, Rick Scott signed into law a House bill known as 227, which provided compensation to a wrongfully incarcerated person who was convicted in sentence prior to December 31st, 1979, who would otherwise be exempt from other state provisions for compensation because the case had been reversed by a special prosecutor's review and a null prosecute ah rather than being overturned by a court. Does that make sense?
00:36:23
Speaker
Yes. The law was so narrowly circumscribed that it was likely that
Impact and Reflections on the Case
00:36:30
Speaker
James Richardson will be the only individual to ever be eligible for compensation under it.
00:36:37
Speaker
He was expected to receive $1.2 million dollars for it. In 2016, he received his first check toward compensation, which would total $50,000 a year for each year of his wrongful imprisonment. There was ah one place that you could go and watch about this. There's a documentary film. I think it's actually on YouTube now.
00:36:56
Speaker
But it's called Time Simply Passes. And it's telling the story of his life while he's waiting for the vote to give him compensation and to sign this into law. This case made me so angry. Just throwing that out there. Why? This guy lost seven children in a day and got put in jail for their murder.
00:37:20
Speaker
I feel like it may be the most drastic case of, you know, the day that changed everything that we see sort of just kind of casually presented. Yeah. So you don't normally hear about seven children dying all at once for the most part of of the same family. You don't. It is very, very rare.
00:37:44
Speaker
There's a lot about this case that just on its face, if you were, you could pick, you can be the police chief, you can be the judge, you could be the sheriff, whoever you want to be. You can be the reporter or the insurance salesman. It doesn't really matter. But if you're a bystander here and you hear that, what's the very first thing that comes to mind? What do you mean? If I hear, what's the first thing I'm Like, hey, did you hear that all seven Richardson children died at the hospital? What do you think to yourself? I wouldn't i wouldn't i would not know how to respond to that. I would think how crazy is it. I would think it would have been a car accident. Well, OK, that would make sense, right? Yeah, I could go with that, a car accident. OK, let me say it like this.
00:38:39
Speaker
All seven Richardson children had to be rushed to the hospital. They were all DOA except one who died a little bit later. Was there a fire? Okay. Nothing comes to mind about murder. No. Okay. And so. No, seven kids being killed. Like is I do not jump to murder.
00:39:01
Speaker
Okay, let's say it like this. Did you hear that the children at the Richardson house got violently ill and then all died at the hospital? What do you think?
00:39:16
Speaker
I think lead, I think asbestos, I think what could have been in their house that could have killed them. And? I don't think
Exploring Alternative Theories
00:39:24
Speaker
murder. Possibly food poisoning? Food poisoning could be a thing. Yes, I think a number of things. Murder is not it. Murder by a parent is not it. It would be extreme if it was some sort of family side. Right. And so to me, that's sort of where this starts down the wrong path. Right. Granted, it It's interesting that they went after the dad. When he really had nothing to do with that, they made a leap there that didn't even make sense. Well, and okay, so, you know, we don't actually know what happened. The implication would be from the hundreds of confessions that perhaps it was the babysitter because she actually had poisoned her husband.
00:40:09
Speaker
Okay, so here's a story with her and I think she's responsible for the something happened in another county where Klein isn't listening enough to the prosecutor and what he's saying. Okay. The reason I say that is because digging into her background and this presented one case in like the summaries of this. Here's what I found out about her. So first of all,
00:40:30
Speaker
She had three husbands. The first husband, she poisoned him. She doesn't get charged for that, but but he dies after she prepares a meal that he eats. He dies. Okay. Oh, and so nobody jumps to the conclusion that he was poisoned by a person? Right. Okay. So her second husband leaves her for a cousin of James Richardson. She goes and shoots him.
00:40:55
Speaker
but she claims self-defense. She's charged, she ends up with a manslaughter charge, and she gets out on parole. So at the time this crime has happened, she is on parole for shooting her second husband after her first husband died from basically exactly what happened to these children. And I think Treadwell, because early on, Treadwell doesn't think they can prosecute this case.
00:41:20
Speaker
And I think he is telling Kline, look, there's some issues in another county related to all of this with Richardson's cousin. I think that they're not like true like Frank Kline's not the brightest you know bulb in the bush. And while Treadwell is trying to explain it to him, I think he thinks Richardson has done something in another county and starts spitting out these stories about other dead children.
00:41:48
Speaker
I don't find any record of other dead children. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. um But what I do find is that Bessie Reese appears to have killed her first husband.
00:42:02
Speaker
and definitely is tried for killing her second husband who had run away and she ends up with a motive for inflicting harm on the Richardson family because that second husband had left her for someone related to the Richardson. Well, I don't necessarily think that's the motive. I would, it could be.
00:42:20
Speaker
But I would just as easily say that the neighbor defacto babysitter was tired of having to take care of another family's seven children. She was, by all accounts, the defacto babysitter. She happened to be there and so these kids come home from school, she's feeding them.
00:42:39
Speaker
And it seems like perhaps she was tired of doing that and decided to just go ahead and put the pesticide in the hog gel gravy right that she served the children on top of their rice and beans that their mother had prepared for them. Yes.
00:42:56
Speaker
And to me, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, obviously she had some problems sometimes, especially if she had like early onset Alzheimer's, right? Yeah. Overreactions like poisoning children, like it doesn't quite register the gravity of the situation for people who are suffering from cognitive problems like that, right? Yeah.
00:43:20
Speaker
taking out frustrations in exaggerated ways, it won't register. I don't know that that's what happened here. I do also believe, though, that it's weird that they willfully ignored her repeated confessions as her being out of her mind.
00:43:39
Speaker
yeah That's weird, right? Yep. Now, from a traditional crime point of view, this would be a domestic situation. I'm fairly certain and maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think I've ever heard of a father poisoning his children. um Poisoning generally tends not to be meant, yeah.
00:44:01
Speaker
Exactly. It's women. Women use poison because it's a covert and usually not messy method, right? Correct. Not to mention, like especially in the 60s, women would have control over food, right? i mean Correct. I say it that way. I don't really mean that it it. It's more like they cook the food. That's why it's amazing to me that you've got two women, one who cook the food
00:44:34
Speaker
the other who served the food, women are traditionally speaking more likely to poison their victims and they charge a man ye who didn't touch the food. Yeah, this was not like this is not an area where we've lost a lot of the gene pool recently. Like in space and time, like Sheriff Frank Klein, he's not really doing a lot for for the state at the time.
00:45:03
Speaker
If you were to step back from now, or even if you're just a bystander back then, it's odd that it immediately goes to, oh, the father murdered them all. ah It is weird. It's really weird.
00:45:25
Speaker
And you know, if you think about this, or this was before like, even like Ted Bundy. Yeah. Although I will say Bessie Reese's name, if you go hunting, she's in the serial killer databases that are available on the internet where they kind of half asked how they put things together 20 years ago. She's in there and people recognize that she was a serial killer. They contribute. Including these children. Yep. They contribute 11 victims. Who are the others?
00:45:53
Speaker
I don't know, like just putting this story together is complicated from the perspective of like, if you go read this story on the internet, I think I've given you the closest thing to the real story in what I just gave. But I had to pull it from eight different sources that at times directly contradict each other with little details. Right. And it gets really confusing. And I get stuck on things like when I hear the other children that were that he killed that died.
00:46:26
Speaker
yeah in other counties, I actually like get stuck on that. And so I miss everything in between there and where I realized that that didn't really happen, right? The way that they're putting that information out there is irresponsible.
00:46:40
Speaker
Oh, I totally agree. I wanted to cover this one from the perspective of it's a wild ride. There are some things that take place around the holidays. He does get out. I know he didn't have anything to do with it because of how all of this shook out. He had kind of a cloud hanging over his head. And I feel awful. This is a culmination of a terrible case. When you go to read the court documents even, Florida makes it kind of hard for you to get the real ones. And I know other people have covered this case out there somewhere.
00:47:10
Speaker
But the coverage that I've read of it and trying to put it all together, I kept coming across little things that were slightly wrong or slightly different and trying to get to the very bottom of it. The only thing I know for sure is that Bessie Reese was probably a serial killer. Yeah, maybe. I think it's going to be a different kind though. Like, I don't think she like meticulous. She's more of an arsenic and old lace kind of story. Do you know that story? Yeah, I think so.
00:47:40
Speaker
So she was known as Big Mama. She took care of kids. Arsenic and Old Lace is this old play by ah Joseph Kesselring. And these two little creepy people, women, um they run this, ah it's like a bed and breakfast or an inn, whatever you wanna call it. And ultimately, that like the it's a lot of um of murder by poison.
00:48:08
Speaker
And when you watch that show, like you could easily make like a Southern black version of that show and it would read like Bessie Reese's life.
00:48:21
Speaker
Right, and yeah, well, I don't know to what extent beyond these children, but I can actually, I mean, I can picture what she's like. I can picture the scenario where like she's completely, you know, sure that this is the right thing for her to be doing at the moment she's doing it. Yeah. And she's doing it because she's become this de facto babysitter and she can't get out of it for whatever reason.
00:48:50
Speaker
um And things like this happened, but there are better ways to handle it, obviously. um And she felt guilt because that's why she was confessing replete repeatedly. Yeah. Well, i don't I don't have a lot more on this one. I wanted to include it in the Home for the Holidays episodes. um If you have anything else, I'm glad and to chat about it a little more, but like it's not a super long one. It's just a really weird one.
00:49:17
Speaker
It is a weird case. um i I feel like there is a whole lot that went wrong here and it would have been um very easily easy to Just kind of use the, I don't even know if you'd call them standards, but like you know the last person that was seen with the kids includes somebody that had actually come into contact with the food. like All the the like basic principles of like who killed someone, it's like they skipped right over them. And it seems like that could have saved a lot of people a lot of grief.
00:49:56
Speaker
um I cannot even imagine what Joseph Richardson went through. I feel like it's all that is an unimaginable situation to go from you know, having a family, working and, you know, just having life to losing all seven of your children instantaneously practically yeah on just a normal day and then going to jail for it and being sentenced to death and having not done anything.
00:50:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's pretty unimaginable. And i I have no doubt that that is it probably directly caused him ah to have the heart problems that he had. Oh, it yeah, yeah, yeah. It was definitely the reason he had a heart attack. Yep. 100%. Well,
00:50:56
Speaker
this is another one in the books. This is how we're deep into home for the holidays with this one. It is absolutely terrifying one, but We will be back with a couple more episodes between now and Christmas Day.
00:51:16
Speaker
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00:53:23
Speaker
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00:54:15
Speaker
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00:55:20
Speaker
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