Murder in Illinois is a production of iHeartRadio. At this point, it was April of twenty twenty one, and the last email I'd received from Christopher Vaughan began with Lauren, I'm so sorry to have wasted your time. I am done with the podcast. That email ended with I thank you for your compassion and your willingness to help. I wish you all the best, Chris. This was an unexpected and
unfortunate turn, especially in light of the potential insight. Chris's five page letter provided something I conveyed to his parents on April first. It's so strange that he sent that to me, because today I got my first shot of the vaccine, so I'm that much closer to being able to visit with him. And I think you were right. You both said that he knows what to expect from life.
Right now, well digitally.
That's why he hasn't called us this week, because he's been.
Overthinking going through it. Going through a new trial is like pulling chief with him. He doesn't want to go back to Joli yet. He doesn't want to bring up the loss of his children again. He doesn't want to point a finger at Kim and then he gets scared. He doesn't want to put hope out there. He thought that he was not good enough to take care and watch over and save his children, and he doesn't want it out there again that he was unable to do that. For him, time has stood still.
That might be.
Fourteen years later, but for him, I think he's just rerunning it all the time.
Well, like Gale said, he has nothing to do twenty four to seven but think about this, and he's got anxiety about going through this all again.
Well, there are other avenues for post conviction relief other than a trial.
Okay, that would help, because right now Chris only sees a retrial. I know that if we could actually get to talk to him, visit him, and it would help things a lot.
I was becoming increasingly convinced that Bond's version, as laid out in the letter, provided answers to issues I'd personally had with both the prosecution and the defensive scenarios of the events. I have been through everything with a fine toothcomb. They theorize how he did it, but they can't explain why there is no blood trail from the passenger side if he was shot on one side and he was standing. On the other he would have had to have walked
around the car. Are either the front or the back? None of it makes sense. They proved motive, but they never proved that he did it. Forensics are explained by his version of what happened that day. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and this is murder in Illinois.
Gange Dilloy.
Cry Gange feel ground.
Well, that's disappointing, yes, but understandable. I reached out to Bill to discuss Chris's email about no longer moving forward. There have been parts of his memories that he's kept really hidden from himself and locked away for a long time, and now they're all out there. He had to put them on the page, and now he's living with them on a daily basis. I told his parents that I was going to keep corresponding with him and just ask
that he meet with me. At least his version of the events really seems to explain the forensics of the car. If his letter ends up being backed up by your crime scene reconstruction, is there another option other than going through another trial, perhaps going to the ag or to the governor.
Yeah, I mean, it's a lot on all of these avenues are just extremely difficult, but executive clemency it stands a better chance than going back.
To wil County.
Executive clemency would be a possible way of avoiding another trial. It referred to the general powers of the President and of governors to pardon, grant, amnesty, communion, or reprieve to individuals who've been convicted. Two days after that discussion, Gale and Pierre called with news they'd finally heard from Chris. I immediately reached back out to Bill. They spoke to Chris.
They said, he cannot give up on himself, and he cannot quit until he has sat with us in person and we've talked to him about his other options and he's back on board.
That's great, That is a positive development.
Yeah, he's stirred up all these feelings and emotions and memories, and on many levels, I think he's come to the conclusion that it would be easier to just stay where he is and live what he knows.
He just has resigned himself to just isolating, and it's good that his parents were able to get through to it.
Another obstacle would be getting Chris to agree to share the information in that deeply personal letter he'd sent his parents. It is also the only eyewitness account of the events that day, and if it does end up overlapping seamlessly with the forensics in terms of recreating the crime scene, it's ultimately the key to getting him out, and so we need to address it.
It's an incredibly difficult cases, it is, but having his cooperation is essential.
Absolutely. It becomes very clear that he was incapable or unwilling to defend himself until this point. So it is a breakthrough, you know, it's as if he was challenging people to figure it out without his help.
Yeah.
My next step was to reach out for advice to a prominent force in the innocence community, Jason Flam, the host of the Wrongful Conviction podcast that bears his name. Our pads actually crossed a few years back when I picked up a freelance producing job for the Doctor Phil Show solely for the chance to meet Flom in person. As it turned out, he was listening to Murder in Oregon, one of my previous podcasts at the time, and we've
stayed in touch since. As an aside, Jason's three decades of work in the field of justice, reform is as impressive as his day job as a record label executive. He's launched the careers of acts like Matchbox twenty, Katy Perry, and Lord. He's a truly impressive, inspiring guy.
I am the founding board member of the Innocence Project in New York, not the founder by any means, but the founding board member of Big Difference. The founders, of course,
are Parry Schech and Peter Neufeld. I don't remember the exact case, but I turned on the TV and there was the story that the Innocence Project, which was a brand new organization back then, had found the DNA in a case of a guy who was about to be executed, and at sort of the last hour, had ridden in like the Avengers and proven that this man was innocent. Not only did he not get execute it, but he was freed. And I thought, that's the most amazing, craziest
shit I've ever heard. It never occurred to me back then that innocent people went to prison.
That was thirty years ago, and ever since, Flohm has become a power full voice for the powerless and voiceless, and well versed in the misconception surrounding wrongful convictions.
There's growing awareness, for sure about the scourge of wrongful convictions, but I think it's probably hard for the human mind, or the American mind, to process the idea that it's as common as it is, because if you accept that, then you have to also understand that it could happen to you. The fact is, it happens all the damn time, and social scientists different studies have estimated between four and seven percent of people in prison are innocent in America,
some say as high as ten percent. I personally think it may be higher because it's the guilty plea problem, and that doesn't even take into account the huge number of people that are in jail who haven't been convicted of anything.
Flom is all too familiar with the most sobering statistics about our legal system, in particular pre conviction incarceration.
Almost five hundred thousand people in jail right now as we're talking who haven't been convicted of anything, and the majority of those people are actually innocent. So when you add all those numbers together, you get to a really high number of people that are actually innocent. I mean, over two hundred thousand seems to be very likely two hundred thousand people innocent of the crimes for which they're
serving time or awaiting trial is nuts. And every one of them has a story and had dreams and hopes and aspirations as a family of some sort. It's a massive, massive problem. But I'm super humbled and grateful that people listen to my podcast and are learning and getting involved, and change is coming. It's happening right now.
Change and reform he's dedicated to making sure also addresses the treatment of people after they've served their sentences.
Yeah, there's almost an analogy I would draw where you've probably seen these cities and counties where they take the spots where homeless people sleep at night, and they put spikes on the benches and things. I mean, isn't it bad enough that these people are without a place to live, and now we're going to take away what little comfort they may have been able to find under a bridge
or god knows where. And it's sort of like the same thing we do with people coming out of prison, innocent or guilty, right where we should be providing them with the tools that they need to re enter society, to be able to go back to their community, to their family, to their school and have a chance, a real chance at rebuilding their life. Instead, we put up
roadblocks at every turn. Basically, they have to live a life of purity and sanctity and perfection and promptness, and they have to be on time for their parole officer and whatever. They can't you need a poppy seat bagel because they'll fail a drug test and otherwise they're going back to jail. And of course there's all the other barriers right into employment and housing.
That's the other thing. I think that there is this naivete, this misconception that if someone is innocent and you can prove it, that they're automatically welcomed back into society led out of prison. And it's a huge hurdle. And that's why I'm reaching out to you, because in the case with Chris Vaughan, I didn't want to reach out to you actually until I felt that I could very clearly articulate why I needed your advice and why I needed
your guidance and your help in this. With Chris's knowledge and his parent support, I'd sent Jason Bond's five page letter. In addition to extensive background information, crime scene reports, depositions, and build Clutter's twenty ten detailed summary, which made the case for murder suicide based on forensic evidence.
I often think that the only thing worse than being wrongfully convicted and sent to prison for the rest of your life or death row, or any any variation of that, is being wrongfully convicted of murdering a relative, particularly a child, your own child, or a parent or sibling. I guess, but something about the child or the parent is particularly difficult for me to process. Arresting him at the funeral
is just particularly six scenario. And you know, but it goes on all the time, right, It's like, what are the authorities kicking people's doors allegedly looking for drugs? If you're looking for drugs, why not wait till somebody emerges from the house in the morning and arrest them. Then you know. But it's all it's all just backwards, and it's all designed for maximum cruelty and abuse. That's the system that we're in, and he unfortunately caught the very worst of all of it.
I wanted Flohm's seasoned opinion to weigh in on the one I was finally ready to voice.
The letter.
Honestly, it's like you take an overlay, and all the missing puzzle pieces just materialized and you could see for the first time the clear picture, and it just makes the whole thing that much more tragic. Actually, on so many levels.
Jason.
You have the defense theory, which didn't make sense because they wanted to believe the reason why he couldn't remember anything was dissociative amnesia, and that he was in the car when the kids were shot, and that he rolled forward in kind of a frozen state, and that he sat back into her blood. None of that made sense.
But the prosecution's theory made no more sense, and it wasn't until you get his letter and you realize that he was behind the car, heard this explosion inside the car, that as he was opening the driver's side she shot him once, tried to get back in, she shot again,
and then shot herself. So when he sat back down into the driver's seat and turned around to check on the kids, her blood was all over his back, but her body was also slumped, and in his panic, he thought, I'll drive to go get help, and in doing so, he tried to pull her belt which she had taken off, and his blood from his wounded left wrist was all over the belt, and his hands were shaking so much while he was trying to buckle her in because she
was also blocking that buckle, that the blood pooled on the council and then he gave up because he was shaking, and it retracted and went back and he got out of the car. But that's why none of his blood is on the exterior perimeter back or front of the car. If he had shot her, there would have been blood all over him and he would have had to have walked around. And it wasn't until Chris wrote the letter which I had shared with you, that I started this
thinking what if he were innocent? And now I sincerely feel he is. Chris Vaughn allowed himself to be convicted. He was incapable or unwilling for fourteen years to adequately defend himself. In many levels, it's just this perfect storm of tunnel vision, confirmation, bias, character assassination, and then blood splatter evidence, which it's this interpretive science, which is like
reading an ink block. Blood spatter expert Paul Kish was utilized by the prosecution to contend that the blood spatter evidence did not conform with Vaughn having left the vehicle before his wife was shot, due to the presence of his blood on the seat belt console and droplets on the passenger side. Obviously, Kish wasn't privy to Bond's latest revelations, but even at the time of the trial, Kish conceded that he couldn't rule out murder suicide based on the
blood evidence either. Here again is Jason Flamm.
Let's talk about blood spatter because I think people watch Dexter, they watch CSI or whatever they watch, and they have this totally unrealistic view. Because the National Academy of Sciences, right, the real thing, right, the people who we should hold in the highest regard, in two thousand and nine did a very intensive study real scientific integrity, and they were
extremely critical of a number of the junk sciences. But I think they saved some of their strongest words for blood spatter, and among other things, that this blood spatter analysis is more subjective than substantive.
It's whatever you want to say, and it can be used to prove whatever you want to prove given most scenarios.
No, you're absolutely right. It is the probably the worst of all the junk sciences, and to call it a science is ridiculous. Right, you can take a forty hour course to become a bloodstained pattern analyst and then you can actually go and testify in court. It's ridiculous. It's absurd because the people are getting up and testifying as experts forty hours. What can you learn in forty hours.
Almost nothing. There's nothing scientific about it. It's foolishness, that's what it is, except for the fact that the consequences are so extremely serious and real. So that should have been the end of it. It should never have been used again after that was made clear. But again the courts fall back on themselves and the system protects itself.
It doesn't protect the people. It doesn't work for the Chris Bonds, it doesn't work for any of the people it's supposed to work for, which are the people whose lives are in the hands of the system that is supposed to protect their rights and all of our rights. And once once it starts down a road and that television sets in, as you said, Lauren, they will find ways to railroad you and they just put these blinders
on and it doesn't matter. And as I was listening to you talk, it occurred to me that Chris is exactly the person that we were referencing a few minutes ago, right, because he didn't believe that he could be wrongfully convicted, which is why he didn't really mount the defense. First of all, this poor guy's just lost his entire family. He's just seen his entire family dead in front of
his eyes. Right, he saw his kids murdered like seconds earlier, bleeding to death whatever the backseat of his car, and then his wife. Now grant that he wasn't badly hurt, but I've never been shot. I'm sure it's kind of traumatic. To be shot twice and then find your family dead is something nobody should ever have to go through. And
it's unbelievable to even imagine what the hell. And it's also disgusting for us to think that we know how someone should or should not act that has been through that.
And yeah, you're right, he was on his demeanor. He didn't act the way he should. I think that he didn't want to implicate his wife because he felt guilt that he thought that his actions drove her to do something so horrific and out of character.
And you know, in my view, he's guilty of being maybe not the best husband. But I'm not going to sit there and judge him, and I would say that no one else really should either. We don't know what was going on in their relationship or in their home, and that is also not a crime. It might be a moral failing, but it's not a crime. And also that I think he was in a certain way protecting the reputation of the woman that he had been married to.
But this also reminds me, Lauren of, in a certain way, the case that we covered on wrongful Conviction, the Larry Delile case, right where Larry was in his car with his four kids and his wife, gas pedal jammed and the car went screaming into the river off a dock, and he and his wife I don't think they could swim, but they managed to get out, and the kids were tragically drowned. And then started this narrative where he's not emotional enough, the press is stalking him at his house.
He's they were sitting outside, he and his wife having an iced t or a beer or something. Now, he was on a lot of medications after this. He was taking so many pills to try to deal with this unimaginable trauma. But they wanted to believe what they wanted to believe, and I think in that case, people couldn't process the idea that this car could have malfunctioned in
such a way with such awful consequences. So even when the evidence emerged that is in fact exactly what happened, and even when it became clear that one hundred and seventeen I think other cars of this exact same make and model had been recalled because the accelerator jammed. And even though his wife said the accelerator jammed, the story got out there in the media that he had confessed. That's debatable, but Larry is still in prison now thirty
I think it was nineteen eighty nine. So yeah, this unfortunately is going back to what your question from earlier. This is terribly, terribly common, and we need to overhaul the system. And you know, Lady Justice, with the scales, it's not a realistic depiction at all of our system. Yeah.
I know, this concept that justice is blind.
I think it's deaf, and it's interesting as it relates to this case, right to the advant case, because you know, another thing that I think is really not in the public consciousness is that science and justice are practically opposite.
Right.
Science is based on the analysis of data and information that is processed in a way that is scientific, and justice is based on precedent. Right. So while science moves forward, justice looks backward. And some of these junk sciences are similar in certain ways, right, just as with bitemark evidence. And so what I mean by that is a judge will look at a case and say, well, there's another
court that ruled that bite marks are okay. Even though you have a huge body of evidence that you've just presented that shows that bite marks are as unscientific as could be, I'm going to allow it because another court allowed it. Justice should be about making sure that, whilst mistakes will always be made, that we minimize those mistakes, and that people who don't do their jobs. And that
extends to the defense bar as well. If you have a defender public or private who shows up drunk or doesn't mount any defense re client, or is corrupt in any way, they should be disbarred, just like an other profession's and it almost never happens on the other side. On the prosecution side, we know that police and prosecutors lie with impunity, as do Unfortunately many forensic examiners. They either lie or they just don't know what they're talking about.
And while there are many cases worthy of Jason's help, he agreed to explore whether Vaughn's was worthy of re examination.
That's unbelievable. Yeah, Kafka meets Victor Hugo in the worst possible ways, and I feel, as you do, compelled to want to help him.
Next, I LinkedIn with Bill Clutter to discuss more details about the case.
Sergeant Gary Lawson had already formed an opinion from day one that Chris Vaughn committed the murder of his wife and three kids. Sergeant Lawson's theory just conflicted with the ballistic evidence. We conducted our own examination of the Ford expedition, and Tom Bevell, our bloodstained expert, notices that in the back of the Ford Expedition, behind where the children were seated, there's a third seat and there was a bullet lodged,
and so he asked to get a doll rod. He put it through the back of the seat where Cassandra was seated in the middle of the two other children, and pushed it through the third seat where the bullet was lodged. It showed that the shot that killed Cassandra was fired from the passengers seat, and then Luke Caid, who was a ballistic expert, inspected the vehicle again with laser and so clearly that shot came from where Kim
was seated. And the irony about this whole case the state doesn't they acknowledge that the crime scene evidence suggests a murder suicide, but that Chris Vaughn was this mastermind, that he was so smart that he read this article in PI magazine, which you know they fingerprinted. His fingerprints weren't on it, and the article was the cover story about it was a detective from New York City. It
dealt with staging a murder to look like a suicide. Well, the example that he was writing about was some case where a woman had been strangled to death by the killer and then the killer stages it to look like she had hung herself and committed suicide, totally separate, and so they tried to infer and to argue with the jury that somehow, but it's all confirmatory biased. The police see that article, they say, ah, he must have staged it to look like a suicide. But that was their case.
Yeah, bail and I want to say that this is sadly, tragically not an uncommon narrative right where law enforcement decides that the person who they claim to be the perpetrator is both a deranged psychopath and a criminal mastermind.
Right.
I believe when it's caught up along with the media shit storm and the heightened emotions around a case like this, it's like the thing just grows and everyone is able to put on the same set of blinders and go, yep, that must be what happened. To any trainee investigator or first year law student, or someone who even watches TV crime shows. You could look at us and go, no,
just no, that's not how this could have happened. The prosecutor, I'm sure, would have had the jurors in the palm of his hand as he or she presented this narrative because they don't want to believe that mom killed the kids and there's nobody alive to blame.
But to challenge Bond's conviction, both the state scenario and the one recently conveyed in Chris's letter would need to be scientifically tested to know which one aligned with ballistic and blood evidence. In regards to the crime scene.
The state's theory that Paul Kish testified to that Kim was her seat belt was buckled when she was shot and killed, but that Chris unbuckled it to somehow stage the crime scene. I always felt all along that would have been virtually impossible. The way her body was positioned. He would actually have to move her body to try to unbuckle her seat belt it was buckled. And then the second thing is her blood would be somewhere on that seat belt as that seat belt's retracting. So that's
one scenario that we'll test. But the other one is whether Chris the act of trying to buckle her in which he describes in his statement.
Bill Clutter believes by demonstrating how each scene unfolded and by testing which scenario is supported by the actual crime scene evidence, he can call Vaughn's guilt into question. Jason Plomm agreed that there was enough reasonable doubt to question Vaughan's conviction and to warrant mounting a crime scene reconstruction.
Because there's this freaking thing in the Constitution where it says innocent until proven guilty, and there's that other thing about reasonable doubt. I don't know how and when that went out the window. But we need to restore those principles.
But crime scene reconstructions cost money. Bill Clutter had applied for a fund that could potentially cover the costs of one for Vaughn and was waiting for news on that grunt.
If there's anything that I can do, if there's a financial support, if there's a need for a task that you can't get the money for it, I mean, I will just call it.
Here's what I want to do, and I'll send you the grant. But we're going for the grant too, fun the crime scene reconstruction. I'd like to get this crime scene reconstruction done by August.
Well, you know, let me know. I'm I'm happy to write a check if that's what's needed. You know, I've been lucky enough to make some money and this is what I decided choose to spend it.
And suddenly, with that act of unexpected generosity, Christopher Vaughan's conviction was that much closer to getting a very real and very significant chance for reevaluation. It was about this time that we uncovered a potentially troubling timeline concerning Christopher Vaughn's indictment in July of two thousand and seven, Bill was going back through the discovery from the Vaughnd case and happened upon a phone record memo regarding a conversation between the state and its DNA testing lab.
The decision to arrest Christopher Vaughan was made on Friday, June twenty second. He was arrested the next day, right before the funerals for his family were to begin, and
that decision really focused on two issues. One was Chris's inability to remember how his wife's blood was transferred to the back right side of his jacket and the belief that he had staged the crime scene by unbuckling his wife's seat belt, and that was based on Bob Deal's observations that there was a large saturation stain on his wife's passenger seat belt that appeared consistent with her bleeding onto the seat belt. That assumption turned out to be
wrong and it was disproved by DNA testing. All of the blood turned out to be Chris's blood, and that wasn't discovered until about a week after they arrested Chris when the DNA results came back.
So what day did the DNA results come back and what did they show and who was aware? Pay close attention to the timeline and details you're about to hear.
We obtain a phone conversation log that was kept by the crime lab. The general practice of the forensic scientists or to keep telephone logs of contacts with investigators and
even private investigators like myself. On June twenty seventh of two thousand and seven, at around ten am, Kelly Crachnach from the Joliette Crime Lab contacted Sergeant Gary Lawson and she gave him a verbal report of the DNA results, which included one of the stains on the passenger seat belt, and that stain turned out to be Chris's blood, not Kimberly's blood as they first believed.
So I'm reading it now and it says reason for call. Ten am, June twenty seventh, two thousand and seven, I called to speak to Gary Lawson. I gave him verbal DNA results on the latest batch of exhibits. He asked me to inform the State's Attorney's office. I'll give them a call period and then what happens. She had left a message and that would have been according to the memo. At ten thirty five am, and then what happened.
And then she got a call back by both Jim Glascal, the state's attorney, and his assistant, John Connor, And that was at two o'clock. And there was a later call at four just to confirm whether they wanted the statistical analysis of the DNA and this is the probability of the DNA, and that occurred around four pm.
So it is your understanding that they should have known whose blood was on the retracted belt at that point.
At that point, yes, based on the DNA results that were given to them.
Christopher Vaughan was indicted the following month. An indictment requires the state prosecutor to go in front of a grand jury and present evidence of the alleged crime and ask the grand jury to bring charges against the defendant. All capital crimes and those for which the death penalty as
a punishment must be presented by indictment. You're about to hear the exact transcript from the closed grand jury testimony that was presented on July twenty fifth, two thousand and seven, nearly a month after it was known that the DNA results on the retracted belt belonged to Christopher, not Kimberly Vaughan.
This is where Sergeant Lawson testified before the grand jury which ultimately indicted Chris and there was a series of questions. He was asked about the seat belt.
I will read the part of the female prosecutor and.
This is one of the other prosecutors, Leah Norbitt, and she's talking about the crime scene investors.
They looked at the seat belt right, yes, and on that seat belt as if the seat belt were pulled to be seat belted. Someone in correct, there was blood on that seat belt, was there not?
Yes, it was.
And when Kimberly Vaughan was found by the paramedics and by the police, she was not wearing a seat belt. That's correct, and that is significant because she was wearing that seat belt when she was shot.
That's correct.
What's problematic from your viewpoint about that testimony in front of a grand jury, which means, if I'm not mistaken, that he could not have been cross examined. It was closed, right.
The problem is is that they've got DNA testing that contradicts their initial assumption that this was Kim's blood, and the DNA testing contradicts that initial assumption. So you can't say, based on the DNA testing that she was seatbelted when she was shot, because her blood wasn't on the seat belt. That's the problem with that testimony.
Well, they would have had verbal confirmation of the DNA results a month earlier, on the twenty seventh of June, but when would they have had written confirmation?
And this is where it becomes problematic because after Sergeant Lawson gives that testimony, there's a DNA report that stated the day after, which is July twenty six, two thousand and seven. But the problem is we found in discovery that same report had been actually dated July third, two thousand and seven, three weeks before he gave that testimony. And on that report there was dated July third, There was in handwritten notes draft at the top and on
each page. So it appears that it gives sergeant loss and plausible deniability about the results of the DNA having it dated the day after he testified at the grand jury, and the report was actually dated July third, about three weeks before he testified, and so it really raises all kinds of questions as to who directed the DNA analyst Kelly Craajenek to mark draft. If that's her handwriting, what was the purpose of marking a draft.
Was there any difference between the version that's marked draft on the third of July and the final version, which is dated the day after the closed grand jury testimony.
The only difference is the day. The reports are identical. The conclusions of the DNA results are identical. The only thing that's different is that changing of the date on the report.
How do you characterize that.
It smells of fraud. That's what it smells to me. It really deserves further investigation and to get to the bottom of why that report was manipulated. I've never seen it in my thirty five years of investigating for police reports and forensic labs. I've never seen this ever in my career, and so it really begs the question why was it done and who directed.
It to be done.
Why would the date have been changed to the day after loss and testified when it was known that he had this information a month before that time. If this was done intentionally, it does give the appearance that, in order to secure Christopher Vaughn's indictment, the prosecution was trying to hide the fact that this information was known at the time of loss and testimony. I reached out to the office of the Will County States Attorney to request
four clarification. After sending two emails, I followed up by phone and was informed by James Glasgow's director of public Affairs that mister Glasgow was not interested in providing a statement or response. With that in mind, I wanted to speak to a legal expert and get their thoughts. Richard Kling is a clinical professor of law in Chicago at the Kent College of Law and a practicing defense lawyer.
What are your thoughts just on the fact of Will County State's attorney seeking a grand jury indictment as opposed to a preliminary hearing.
In most of the murder cases, the state's attorney generally takes it to the grand jury. It's not unusual in my experience. The vast majority of murder cases and sex cases are taken directly to the grand jury.
Although the DNA testing had disproven the initial theory that Kimberly Vaughn was wearing her safety belt when she was shot allegedly, Sergeant Gary Lawson appeared before the grand jury and testimony was elicited that suggested that Kimberly Vaughn was wearing the seat belt at the time of her death. Having read over that transcript, how would you characterize that testimony in light of the fact that he knew the results a month before.
It certainly erroneous, Whether it was mistakenly erroneous or intentionally erroneus. Obviously I can't get into somebody else's mind, but it was certainly a mistake to bring that in front of the grand jury the way it was.
Would you categorize it as misleading?
Well, it is misleading to the grand jury. Realistically, they didn't have the full story.
And I know that in Illinois police are were and are allowed to lie to a suspect during interrogations to coerce our confession or secure a confession. I should say, is there any scenario in which an officer of the law would be allowed to lie on the witness stand?
Absolutely? Not that the law is abundant. Police officers are not allowed to lie to grand juris.
Kling was already very familiar with the Christopher Vaughn case and investigating Innocent's efforts on his behalf. For him, it called to mind another famous Illinois case which we referenced in a previous episode that led to the abolishment of the death penalty in Illinois and involved the vilification of another investigator, much along the lines of Bob Dial's experience.
The parallels are spookily similar to the extent that Mike Callahan, who was the state police officer when forty eight Hours, was going to do a piece about Randy's tidel he was asked by the state Police to investigate, essentially to
make sure that they were covered. And what happened with Callahan is that he ended up finding out that the state police had screwed around with a lot of stuff, as well as the local police, and he eventually went from being a decorated lieutenant in charge of the whole
district to writing traffic tickets. In I fifty five, the parallels are very similar to the extent of the state police was asked to do an investigation to make sure that the Witleck title came went well, and when Palahan came to the conclusion it didn't go well, he ended up getting xed. And it's similar here.
Ultimately, former Illinois State Police investigator Michael Callahan would vile a civil lawsuit which determined his constitutional rights had been violated by his superiors. He wrote a book detailing his experience called Too Politically Sensitive. As mentioned previously, the two men convicted for murders they did not commit, HERB Whitlock and Randy Stidle, were ultimately released as a result of the corruption a misconduct Callahan uncovered. Stitle had been imprisoned
for seventeen years, Whitlock for twenty one. Back to Richard Klang.
Yeah, I think the bottom line is, I would hope is that the state police, as well as the rest of the world, is not interested in having somebody who was innocent convicted, and hopefully they would want to reopen it and hopefully the result for mister Vaughan will be the same that it was for Whitlock.
Ands title, Richard Kling is very clear on where he stands in regards to Christopher.
I was a public defender in Cook County for ten years. In November, I will have been practicing fifty years. I've tried over five hundred murder jury cases, including DNA, so I'm not just speaking from the standpoint of academia. I'm speaking from the standpoint of being in the trenches, and I think it's a case that needs to be reevaluated.
Cay you he the.
Gry out O feel the ground holding load?
Are you.
On the next Murder in Illinois? I finally meet Christopher Vaughn in person. Right as we get closer to the prison is absolutely pouring quorks of lightning before Bill Clutter takes on meticulously mounting an ambitious crime scene reconstruction. We're all going to get the visual of every scenario, and that's important that we'll put Bond's version of events to the test.
As you pull back these layers, it becomes so painfully obvious.
Murder in Illinois is a production of iHeartRadio. Executive producers are Lauren Bright Pacheco and Taylor Chackoine. Written by Lauren Brett Pacheco and Matthew Riddle, Story editing by Matthew Riddle, editing and sound design by Van Tyre and Taylor Chaqoine. Featuring music by Cicada Rhythm with new compositions engineered and mixed by Van Tyre and Taylor Chackoine.
You see the Ground.
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