Why Cold Cases Can Lead To Wrongful Convictions

Although glorified in popular culture, Cold Cases can present perils for innocent defendants.

Few topics in true crime garner as much attention as cold cases. There were two TV series by that name, long since canceled. One of them, Cold Case Files, endures as a popular Apple podcast, joining nearly ninety other shows on the topic with such titles as Ice Cold Case, Cold and Missing, Cold Case Detective, and Cold Case Crackers. Most episodes focus on a case where a culprit is finally found and punished for a crime the police could not seem to solve.

But there is one aspect of cold case investigations you will not hear about in any of these podcasts—that many have led to wrongful convictions. The National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) keeps a database with 614 individuals cleared of charges after DNA analysis. Forty-six were put on trial several years after the crime was committed, and the police had hit a brick wall in developing new evidence.

Almost all the cold cases in the database involve “Official Misconduct” from police and prosecutors, but unlike other wrongful convictions, most of the defendants (60%) were white. There were other aspects to their prosecution that they had in common, which I’ll call the Cold Case Wrongful Conviction Syndrome.

I learned about this phenomenon when I wrote Submerged, a book about the 1993 murder of sixteen-year-old Rayna Rison in La Porte, Indiana. She was abducted from her after-school job and found a month later submerged in a rural pond. Her supposedly unsolved homicide became one of the state’s most notorious cold cases. In 2013, the police arrested her middle school boyfriend, Jason Tibbs, and wrongfully convicted him one year later. He is still in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

Some quirks set Tibbs apart from other defendants in the NRE database. The prosecutorial misconduct in his case began decades earlier. In 1998, a grand jury indicted Rison’s brother-in-law, Raymond McCarty, for her murder after hearing from seventy witnesses. McCarty had always been the prime suspect because he had been convicted for molesting and impregnating Rayna three years earlier and was reported to have been assaulting her again shortly before her death. However, the Rison family staunchly defended McCarty, which is why it took five years before the authorities brought the case to a grand jury. But in 1999, La Porte County Prosecuting Attorney Robert Beckman dropped the charges, shocking experienced homicide detectives and prosecutors who had worked on the investigation. None of them had been consulted before Beckman made his decision. Some believe he dropped the charges as revenge against his predecessor who had fired him when he served as her deputy prosecutor. The McCarty indictment had been a hallmark of her tenure.

Unfortunately for Tibbs, he has become another example of how an innocent man can be convicted of murder without physical evidence. The Cold Case Wrongful Conviction Syndrome played no small part in his demise.

The investigation in these cases often starts with what the NRE calls a “Jailhouse Informant.” Days after the local paper published an article about a program to cut sentences in return for information about unsolved homicides, Rickey Hammons, a convicted murderer, contacted the police with an outlandish story about seeing Tibbs and his sister’s boyfriend with Rayna’s dead body while he was hiding in the family pole barn. The police, no doubt anxious to resolve the famous cold case, chose to ignore the outlandish accusations Hammons made against innocent people during the investigation of his own homicide case. Back then, in a taped interview, his sister had told police that Hammons was a “pathological liar.”

Last fall, in another wrongful conviction built around a jailhouse snitch, DNA evidence exonerated Green Bay, WI, brothers David and Robert Bintz. In February, they filed claims seeking $2 million in compensation from the state.

Once Jason Tibbs’s case came to trial, he suffered a frequent factor in the syndrome—“Inadequate Legal Defense.” His private attorneys, highly paid by his last employer, failed to do the minimal research on Hammons that would have surely impeached him as the State’s star witness. Police “Witness Tampering” is another part of the syndrome, and in Tibb’s case, a remarkable document revealed how it was done. After Eric Freeman, his alleged accomplice, signed an immunity agreement, two detectives spent 3.5 hours spoonfeeding him details about the murder he didn’t know. The session was recorded, but Tibbs’s attorneys, flummoxed by the judge, failed to enter the 140-page transcript as evidence, which meant neither the jury nor the appellate courts would consider it.

During Freeman’s interview, which was more indoctrination than interrogation, La Porte Deputy Prosecutor Christopher Fronk sat outside the conference room where it was conducted. Questions arise about why he didn’t lead the session himself or call those detectives to the stand. His conduct during the trial featured other elements of prosecutorial and official misconduct as defined by the database. He “Withheld Exculpatory Evidence” that would have impeached Freeman’s testimony. He also, quite simply, lied in court, misrepresenting witness testimony in his closing argument. He had Tibbs declare in the pole barn, “If I can’t have her, nobody can.” The words made good headlines the next day, but neither Hammons nor Freeman mentioned them or anything like them in their first interviews.

The perils for cold case defendants were most pronounced with Tibbs’s alibi witnesses. At the time of the crime, they had cleared him as a suspect in reports filed by local, county, and state detectives. But twenty-one years later, these same people couldn’t remember all that happened one Friday night so long ago. The judge ruled their reports to police as hearsay and would not allow them to be entered as evidence, even in one case where a crucial witness no longer remembered where she lived because of a medical condition. Others developed false memories about seeing Tibbs with “Missing” posters on the night of the abduction before they knew anything had happened to Rison. In fact, those posters had been printed by her father the next day, which is when Tibbs first learned that his friend was missing. With the passage of time, these misidentifications are not unusual and occur in 20% of the NRE cold cases. Still, Tibbs’s lawyers were unprepared to counter the poster testimony.

Tibbs’s freedom now depends on good counsel to handle his appeal for post-conviction relief based on new evidence, which includes DNA and a murder weapon tied to McCarty's job. It has been reported that Notre Dame Law School’s Exoneration Justice Clinic has been investigating his case. Should they succeed with his appeal, Tibbs will find an additional punishment awaits. The cold case podcasts and their websites show no interest in updating their previous broadcasts when featured villains have been cleared. Even after DNA exoneration, the wrongful convictions live on as a testament to dogged detective work and law enforcement’s determination that no crime goes unpunished.