S1: Bonus Ep 3 - Bobby Cumber

In the last two episodes of American Homicide, we shared the story of Maria Marshall. In nineteen eighty four, Maria was murdered at a rest stop off the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey. The same night Maria was killed, a man named Bobby Cumber was bowling with his wife some fourteen hundred miles away. Bobby Cumber did not murder Maria Marshall. The police knew it. Even the Marshall family knew it. So why did Bobby spend twenty years in

It was kind of like a mom and pop kind of hardware store.

Journalist Judy Peep wrote about Bobby Cumber.

Bobby, at the time was living in Louisiana, even though Bobby was originally from New Jersey.

Things in Louisiana moved a little slower than in New Jersey, and Bobby was okay with that, But sitting still just wasn't in his DNA.

Bobby always worked. He likes working. He likes being told what to do. He was a little guy that did his job and kept out of the way.

In nineteen eighty four, the soft spoken Bobby Cumber was forty six years old. He stood five feet eight inches tall and barely weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. Soaking wet. He and his wife, Mara lived in a modest, one story home with their daughter and two dogs.

They were both quiet people. They didn't drink, they bowled, They liked going on drives in the country. They lived a very quiet life.

That simple and modest life fit Bobby like a glove.

He was the sweetest little guy, humble, accommodating, and gullible, with terrible luck.

So let's talk about Bobby's luck. Growing up, he dreamed of being a sailor, so at age seventeen, he dropped out of high school and went to enlist with the Navy.

Well, he went into the wrong door at the recruiting station and ended up with the Air Force instead. He ended up serving twenty years in the Air Force when what he really wanted to do was be in the Navy. That's Bobby. Anyone else probably would faunt that, but Bobby didn't, because Bobby doesn't fight.

Not only did he have a twenty one year career in the Air Force, he also fought in the Vietnam War. Then there was his wedding to Myra.

They got married Brida in the thirteenth They went to Dallas for their honeymoon for three days in a brain the entire three.

Days after their wedding, Bobby adopted Myra's daughter, Becky.

She didn't know that she'd been adopted. She thought it was her birth father, and she found out in the newspaper.

That newspaper article ran during Bobby's trial in nineteen eighty six. We'll circle back to that trial in a bit. So back in the spring of nineteen eighty four, you could say Bobby's simple and quiet life in Louisiana had gotten a little too quiet.

His wife was paying attention to their daughter because she was having trouble in school, so he felt a little neglected, and he came back to New Jersey.

Bobby was the oldest of seven and returned to his hometown of perth Amboid, New Jersey to visit one of his brothers.

And he ran into his high school girlfriend who invited him to her daughter's graduation in Tom's River. Bobby was flattered, so of course he went. He always did. The city we do.

Tom's River is an upper middle class suburb along the Jersey Shore, and that party was filled with the who's who of Tom's River. As luck would have it, Bobby wound up sitting next to Robert and Maria Marshall, Yes, the same couple we talked about in the previous two episodes.

Robert Marshall sold insurance and iras and did very well. He was an attractive man with a very attractive wife and three teenage sons who were all championship swimmers, and she was swim team mom of the Year.

Robert and Maria Marshall were at that party because they lived next door to Bobby's ex girlfriend, and Robert Marshall struck up a conversation with Bobby.

And he was very flattered that a big shot in his mind like Robert Marsha would pay attention to him at all.

That night, the smooth talking Robert Marshall did what he did best.

Marshall first tried to Solomon Ira, because that was Robert Marshall, and then Marshall asked Bobby if he could find him a private detective.

Robert Marshall said he needed someone to investigate some of his missing gambling winnings, and since people in Tom's River talked, he wanted to hire an out of town PI.

It never did make any sense because if you wanted to go out of town, there's certainly private detectives in New York and Philadelphia. You don't have to go to Louisiana to get a detective.

Not to mention, Bobby was a clerk and bookkeeper at a hardware store. He didn't have those kind of connections.

But Bobby being Bobby, never questioned it. Somebody asked him for a favor, so he said he would look around and ask around down in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was working at the time.

A few days later, Bobby put Robert Marshall in touch with a regular at the hardware store, a former cop turned private detective named Billy Wayne McKinnon. The strange thing is, even after Bobby connected the two, Robert Marshall kept calling. Sometimes Robert Marshall would try to sell Bobby and Ira. Other calls were simply messages he wanted Bobby to pass to the private detective Billy Way McKinnon.

They used him's message shop, tell so and so to call me. Tell McKinnon to call me.

Over the summer of nineteen eighty four, Robert Marshall made thirty one calls to Bobby Cumber. It got to the point where Bobby politely told Robert to call Billy Way McKinnon directly, but the calls continued until the day before Maria Marshall's murder. That was the last time Robert Marshall called Bobby Cumber.

Marshall made phone calls on his office phone to Bobby Cumber, and within two weeks of the murder, the police sound phone calls immediately.

Maria Marshall was murdered in early September of nineteen eighty four. When the police went through her husband's phone records, they found his calls to Bobby Cumber.

Bobby was arrested and held for forty eight hours without charges, without food, and without any kind of video or audio recording. While the police hammered him, they were sure that he had something to do with it, but Bobby didn't.

What Bobby didn't know was that Robert Marshall, the popular guy he met at a party a couple months earlier, had been living a double life.

Robert Marshall he had a gambling problem, He had a girlfriend and he wanted out, and he had just in the months before the murder up to his wife's life insurance to a million and a half. Marshall was in debt and he wanted his wife to pay for it with her life.

And that's what Robert Marshall did. He may have said he was looking for an out of state private detective, but what he was really looking for was someone to kill his wife, Maria. And when the police learned Bobby Comber connected Robert Marshall to Billy Waing McKinnon, they believed Bobby, at the very least knew something about the murder plot, but he.

Had no idea really what was going on.

Bobby told the police all he had done was write down simple phone messages from Robert Marshall and passed them on to Billy Wing McKinnon. The police didn't believe him and charged him with conspiracy to commit murder. I'm not guilty of this crime. I just want to go back to losing and lived out the rest of my life, put my family. That was the voice of Bobby Cumber, who sat in a New Jersey jail awaiting his trial.

I conclude there's nothing in the grand jury transcript to indicate that the Cumber knew there was going to be a murder.

So Judge Greenberg dismissed the charges and let Bobby return home a freeman.

On the suggestion of his attorney at the time, Bobby filed a thirty million dollar wrongful of rest suit against the state of New Jersey.

Along with false imprisonment. Bobby sued for mental abuse and some physical problems he developed while in jail.

He also thought somebody should pay his wages at the hardware store for the year he was in jail before his trial.

And if you had us for inflation, Bobby's thirty million dollar lawsuit from nineteen eighty five would be around eighty seven million dollars today.

He admitted, Okay, maybe he got a little greedy, but he didn't take the thirty million his lawyer did.

In nineteen eighty five, Bobby's lawyer told the Shreveport Journal, the important thing here is that the justice system works, and by the end of nineteen eighty five, Bobby's lawyer would eat those words. After Judge Greenberg dismissed the charges against Bobby, the Ocean County prosecutors appealed that decision, and that's when Bobby's bad luck reared its ugly head again.

The State Supreme Court ram stated to charges.

Think about that. You're arrested for a crime you didn't commit. A judge then throws out the charges, and then another judge puts them back on. Even the prosecutor seemed surprised by the court's decision.

They knew their case was very weak. So the assistant prosecutor offered Bobby a deal. If he would plead to conspiracy to commit insurance fraud, he could go home with time served and he would be done with it.

On paper, it was a simple deal, but there was one big catch.

If Bobby did that, the thirty million dollars wrongful of rest suit goes away.

It seems like bringing back these charges was a retaliation from the state against Bobby's lawsuit. I can't help but to wonder what would have happened if his lawyer wasn't so greedy and he had asked for less money. Either way, Bobby wasn't about to admit to doing something he didn't do. That's what I'm not guilty, and my attorney said, okay, we'll go to trial.

Nobody can believe he did that. It was terrible advice, and his lawyer is famous among New Jersey lawyers for that advice.

As Judy wrote in one of her articles, Bobby was naive to the point of lunacy, and his string of bad luck was far from over. Bobby Cumber had a choice. He could plead guilty to conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and get released from jail, or he could take his chances in the courtroom.

His lawyer told him, if you think you're innocent, I think we should go for it.

Journalist Judy Pete wrote about Bobby Cumber, who went for it and took his case to court. His trial featured the same judge who initially threw out the charges against Bobby. You can't help but to feel optimistic about that.

By the time that Bobby went to court, everybody was sick to death as the story.

It was the summer of nineteen eighty six, and the story of Maria Marshall had been from page news for nearly two years. By then, Maria's husband, Robert Marshall, had been convicted of hiring a hitman to kill her. But here's the thing. Both Robert Marshall and one of the guys he hired to kill Maria backed up Bobby's story.

Marshall always said that Bobby knew nothing, But Marshall did not testify on Bobby's trial because he was a convicted murderer on death row, not exactly a star witness.

But the jury did hear from Billy Way McKinnon. He was the guy Robert Marshall originally hired to kill his wife.

Billy Wayne McKinnon was insisting that Bobby knew nothing about the whole plot. He said specifically that he didn't tell Bobby because he didn't want to share the money with him.

Robert Marshall paid Billy Wayne tens of thousands of dollars to kill Maria Marshall, and he wanted that money for himself. But the prosecution put a new Jersey State detective on the stand whose testimony hurt Bobby.

They said he confessed, but he didn't know what he was confessing to. He thought he was confessing to insurance fraud. And they never let him have a lawyer, of course, because when she charged somebody, they have to have a lawyer. But you don't have to give him a lawyer until they're charged. This was the basis primarily of why the judge originally threw out the charges against him. They had no motive, they had no opportunity, they had no money trail.

Those phone calls between Robert Marshall and Bobby Cumber were important.

There were thirty one calls. They were all short phone calls.

The defense didn't dispute these calls, but they argued most of them lasted a few seconds.

The problem with the telephone calls was that back in that time, in nineteen eighty four, the phone company did not keep track of the timing below a minute, So any call that was either five seconds or ten seconds or fifty nine seconds still registered as a minute, so they had no way to say, well, the total conversation was tell so and so to call me. They had no proof of that.

During closing arguments, the prosecutor told the jury Bobby had to have known something about the murder plot. He said, nobody is that stupid. And listen to what Bobby's defense layer said. In response, He stood before the jury, pointed towards his client and said he was a simple, silly, foolish, and limited piece of flesh who will never amount anything more than a hardware store clerk.

Ultimately, it came down to the jury was asked to believe that Bobby was that goable. New Jersey's a fairly cynical state, and they just didn't believe it. They couldn't believe he didn't know anything, so they convicted him as an accessory to conspiracy to commit murder.

That left the wide eyed a naive hardware clerk from Louisiana stunned, and Bobby's lawyer absolutely lost it.

His lawyer just fell apart and then burst into tears. He couldn't believe it. It destroyed his reputation, it destroyed him practically. He realized he had made a horrible mistake, but really didn't have the wherewithal to fix it.

Judge Greenberg, the same judge who a year earlier had dismissed the charges against Bobby, now had to pose a sentence on him.

I gave mister cumber and the minimum sentence that you could give, which was thirty years.

You can hear the heartache in Judge Greenberg's voice thirty years, but keep in mind his hands were tied.

The thing is that the year before, New Jersey had passed a mandatory minimum sentencing law that said an accessory to any major crime would have to serve the same sentence as the players, whether they had actually committed the crime or not. So Bobby, who had never really done anything, hadn't even jaywalked, was convicted and sentenced to the maximum, which was thirty years in prison without the possibility of.

Prole Bobby did the math and figured out his release state would be in twenty fifteen. He'd be released on the same day of his wedding Innsary.

Bobby just went to prison. He ran out of appeals after about fourteen fifteen years, and by the time I entered the whole story, that's where Bobby was.

Judy learned of Bobby's story during a meeting with Judge Greenberg, the man who sentenced Bobby.

He actually said, you know, there's one case that always bothered me, Bobby Cumbers case. He absolutely believed that Bobby shouldn't have spent a day in jail or in prison. It sort of stunned me because sitting judges under New Jersey law are not allowed to discuss any case they'd had. However, he was on the border of retirement, and I think that he had always felt bad about it. So I went back and I looked it up, and I realized horrible injustice had been done to Bobby and just about

In nineteen ninety nine, Judy made her first visit to New Jersey State Prison in trent where Bobby was held.

Trenton State was New Jersey's worst prison. Its most dangerous criminals were housed in trend.

She describes her meeting like something you'd see on TV. A small booth divided by thick glass with a phone on each side. When Bobby shuffled in, his hair was gray. He was blind in his right eye after a botched eye surgery, and he had heart problems. Just walking up a flight of stairs gave him chest pains, but none of that seemed to bother him.

He smiled and said, it's nice to see you. I've been waiting to tell somebody my.

Story, and that's what Bobby did. He shared everything from the party where he met the marshals to his thirty million dollars wrongful of rest lawsuit, to his trial and unlikely conviction.

He told me how hard it was on his family. A lost their house, they lost their jobs, they lost everything. Myra his wife, she got death threats. No one would hire her. The only reason they even survived during that period was that Bobby had a pension from the Air Force. The only money they had besides the pension was his daughter Becky, clean toilets and the local library. That whole family is the collateral damage of Bobby.

Even Bobby's siblings in New Jersey refused to.

See him ever since he was convicted. His entire family in the New Jersey side, who were close enough to visit, disowned him. No one would write to him or visit him.

Bobby's wife and daughter back in Louisiana, where all he had left. If you remember, Bobby adopted Becky, and that was something Becky had to learn from a newspaper article. During Bobby's trial.

His daughter was bullied in school. She was thrown off of cheerleading because she was related to a degenerate. Is what everybody told her.

Every Sunday, Bobby talked with Myra and Becky on the phone, but they had never been to see him.

Now, Bobby would not allow them to visit him in prison. He didn't want them to see him locked up, so instead they wrote letters, more than two thousand letters.

In her letters, Myra tried to stay positive, but of course it wasn't easy.

There were daves, it was hard to breathe, it was so awful, but she never considered divorcing him because he was her husband and her marriage vow said for better or worse, and she figured, hopefully this was the worst it was going to get. One of the things that Myra said was she wasn't hopeless, but she was helpless. There was nothing she could do about this. Even though she knew it was wrong, there was nothing she could do.

Bobby's new lawyers tried everything to get him released, but they all got denied.

Here we have a pathologically nice guy with terrible luck, which again has sort of dogged him his entire life. And this guy ends up spending the bulk of his adult life in the worst prison in one of the worst states in the country. And it was so obvious the injustice and important people like the judge, even the prosecutors at a certain point no longer fought letting Bobby out of jail, but nobody would go that extra distance to fix it. That broke my heart.

Judy's first article about Bobby, titled Flawed Judgment, ran in nineteen ninety nine.

I got into journalism to help people. I thought that if you gave people the facts that you would actually right wrongs that didn't happen very much my career maybe three times that I can remember, and Bobby was the one. I don't say we were friends, but I felt very protective of Bobby.

Along with writing a handful of articles, Judy teamed up with Judge Greenberg in hopes of drumming up support for Bobby's release.

The Judge and I talked to a couple of sixth grade classes and we told him about Bobby, and they were outraged and started a letter writing campaign. To the governor, and these are twelve year olds. You know, as adults, we are just too jaded to appreciate the world's Bobby Combers. Luckily, there's still kids out there who can appreciate.

That those letters the kids wrote to New Jersey's governor were done for a reason.

The only chance that he had then was to have the governor of New Jersey commune descents.

A handful of New Jersey governors came and left office, but no one would help Bobby until two thousand and six.

At that time, the head of the Senate, the state Senate took over as acting governor, a guy by the name of Cody.

On his very last day as acting governor, Richard Cody took action.

He's the one who finally signed the clembency petition and made it very clear that justice was never served in Bobby Cumber's case and ordered the state to get him out of prison.

Governor Cody told reporters, it's about time we did the right thing and let the poor guy go. So the governor called Bobby's wife to share the good news, but she didn't answer. She had a dentist appointment that day. Of course, she did a few days later, Bobby was on a plane headed home. Nearly twenty years after a jury convicted Bobby Cumber for conspiracy to commit murder, acting New Jersey Governor Richard Cody granted Bobby clemency in two

Frankly, I don't think there are very many cases like Bobby Kember. Bobby was the very first person under the law to be sentenced to the Managa to amitten him them as an accomplice.

By then, Bobby had served nearly twenty years of his mandatory thirty year sentence.

I just wanted this poor little schmoe to go home. That's all I ever wanted.

Well, Bobby sat in prison. A book and even a mini series had been made about Maria Marshall's murder. Neither of them mentioned Bobby by name. Even the prison guards didn't know what Bobby was in for.

Nobody really paid attention to him. He was just the other guy, a little squirt.

Judy was with Bobby on his plane ride home from prison to Louisiana. Bobby was now sixty eight years old, and in those twenty years the world had changed.

He couldn't believe how much coffee costs six dollars a cup. It was thirty five cents a cup when he went to prison. Or cell phones, the whole concept of cell phones.

Judy described Bobby like a kid on Christmas morning.

He was excited. He had a brown paper bag in his lap. That was all his possessions. What few letters he could have said, were in that little brown paper bag.

Those letters from his wife Mara were all Bobby had from the last twenty years. Everything else He had lost.

His hair, color, his sight, his dog's, his house, his help. I said, you know who do you blame? And he said, who is there to blame? That was the one that really struck me. Bobby just an assigned blame. We never did.

Bobby didn't even blame his lawyer, who, by the way, stopped practicing criminal law after Bobby's trial.

That was the last criminal case that he handled. He gave up criminal law after that and became an estate lawyer.

His lawyer told Judy he regretted not pressuring Bobby into taking the original plea deal prosecutors offered. He also admitted that Bobby's case seemed like a sure thing.

He thought he'd caught the case of the lifetime.

When Bobby's flight landed in Shreveport, he grabbed his paper bag filled with Myra's letters and headed for the exit to meet her. Remember, they had not seen each other in twenty years. They're about to be reunited.

He was extremely happy and also sad because now was the time as far as he was concerned, to put his family's life back together.

Bobby held onto the railing from the jet bridge to the gate. Well, Judy followed behind.

So he get to the end, and I thought he was going to cry.

And at the gate, Bobby didn't see Myra or his daughter Becky waiting.

For him, and he said, they should be here. Where are they? And he didn't realize nine to eleven had happened while he was in prison. They don't allow people to come to the gates anymore. When I explained that to him, he said, of course, there are a lot of things I'm going to have to learn. I can do that. I'm a patient man.

The last time Myra and Becky had seen Bobby was in nineteen eighty six, when he was being led out of the courtroom in handcuffs.

When he finally did meet them, they just ugged and cried. Bobby had trouble stopping crying. He cried through most of the day.

Judy rode with Bobby, Myra, and Becky to Bobby's new home. Myra had to sell their old house to pay for Bobby's legal bills.

I would go into the kitchen periodically and one of them would follow me in, usually bursting into tears and telling me how bad it had been and how bad they felt for Bobby.

There were a lot of new things.

He saw his grandson for the very first time. Becky got married and had a child that she named after Bobby. It just rounded out everything well.

Bobby was in prison, his wife and daughter had gone to college and become social workers. Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe it was their way of learning how to process their feelings.

Bobby sat at the table and kind of gave a speech of it's my job to draw this out of you. I need to help make you the best I can. You're my family, and I love you. That was it. Then we went to dinner, and they didn't want to talk about it at dinner because they were in a crowded place, and they still the habit of hiding who Bobby was from the rest of the world that Myra and Becky lived in. It was just ingrained in them.

And as the years passed, Judy continued to hear from Bobby and his family.

You know, I think I got some Christmas cards from them, but I thought it was time for me to bow out of Bobby.

And the Combers must have felt the same way, because those cards eventually stopped coming.

It was time for them to move on with their life, and I was the reminder of what.

Was After being released from prison, Bobby Cumber lived another fifteen years until he passed away in twenty twenty two. Bobby Cumber was eighty three years old. Bobby's obituary was short, sweet and simple. It said he enjoyed bowling and caring for his dogs. My team did reach out to Bobby's wife and daughter, even his attorney, but we never heard back. In speaking with Judy, Bobby was special and loved by many. He lived his life in service to others, and.

He did everything everybody told him to. You know, he joined the wrong military. He served in Vietnam and Saigon during the Fall of Saigon.

Bobby Cumber served his country and it did not serve him.

Bobby is a very important footnote in judicial history as one of the most unlikely prosecutions that anyone had ever seen.

Next Time on American Homicide, a woman found murdered in her home leads investigator to her alleged stalker, a married cop. But there's so much more to this story. I'm Sloane Glass. We'll head to Louisiana for the story of Janor Gillery. That's next time on American Homicide. You can contact the American Homicide team by emailing us at American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. That's American Homicide Pod at gmail