Previously on death and deceit in Alliance.
To me, from what I understand of the case, stuff just didn't make sense.
The guy I knew they came into the post office that drew up his hand away and grinned all the time, and he was the nicest guy ever. I thought, no, this can't be.
He said that they put him in a room and they changed him to the wall by his arm and spit on him, and they told him that they wanted him to confess.
Red Turby, a nationally non criminal forensics expert, pipped apart what he calls a botched cake simpthing's missing.
I can't understand.
There's got to be more.
He could have paid off his entire eighteen years of child support with a check. Why didn't the prosecution turn this over on? What is going on here? So it makes you feel like there's more to the story.
This is death and deceit and alliance. A real time investigation into whether David Thorne killed Yvonne Lane Maggie Freeling On the morning of April first, nineteen ninety nine. Before the lifeless body of yvon Lane was found, a neighbor was walking by nine to sixteen Divine Street. Twenty year old George Hale said he was walking to McDonald's around nine thirty ten am when he heard puppies barking from Yvonne's home.
So I just glanced over therecause I heard a budget.
Puppies and out comes this guy.
A guy came out with a trash bag. That's all I see. You just glance, yeah, thank you that track.
So remember the puppies were outside on the balcony. George described the man he saw leaving the house with a trash bag as being in his mid to late twenties, about one hundred and eighty pounds and about five foot nine, wearing a T shirt and blue jeans, with medium length hair.
And you hear the puppies crying. You look over and look over and you see this guy caught on which door? Do you remember which was?
This is a private investigator for David Thorne interviewing George Hale.
It was a bottom door, and I was like, it's like a porch or something that comes over the door a little bit.
Yeah, like a diact or something came out of the bottom down there right underneath that. That death.
Now this is significant because it's an eyewitness account of a person leaving the crime scene just hours before Yvon's body was found, yet hours after she was believed to have been killed. George said that he again walked by Yvon's house later in the day at five to ten pm and saw police there. That's when he said he realized a crime was being investigated, so he waved over some officers and gave a statement right then about the
person he saw leaving the house. The next day, the police asked him to the station.
He launches the books of them.
But they took you down to the department and yeah, it was that next day they did that, Yeah, next day.
Okay, Yeah, they look through books of pictures. Did they show you any pictures in particular?
Just ohos you know, just out of this big each book.
So just like TV until you see if you yeah, because you did you feel.
At that point that you would have recognized I would.
I was lucky. I see a set Okay, I saw huh that I thought I saw came out of the house. Okay.
So in other words, you thought you could have recognized yeah something, if you'd have seen this picture, you would have remembered because it was real fresh in your mind that it was that guy.
He said he did not see the man he spotted outside of Yvonne's building in the photo book. It's unclear whose mugshots were shown to him, and that's because the police made no records that were aware of of their interview with George Hale. In fact, George Hale's name never came up at trial or in any of the documents that police and prosecutors gave to David's defense team.
This man was in a house with a dead body and was either cleaning up for the killer or was the killer. It's very suspicious. This was like a paragraph and a police report that was not turned over.
This is Beth Carris. She's a legal analyst and former assistant DA in Manhattan, and if her voice sounds familiar, you probably recognize her from TV. She was with Court TV for nineteen years, covering cases including OJ Simpson, Scott Peterson, and Casey Anthony. Beth came across David's case a few years ago when Dwayne Pullman, the local reporter and TV news anchor and Ohio, reached out to a friend of hers.
And so my friend said, look, you know my Ohio friend, reporter says, there's a here. This guy's you know, didn't do it. He's locked up. And the side story, which we kind of wanted to get into it as the focus was the woman who would marry David Sue Gless. She's a lovely person. I got to know her, visited with her. We still are in contact.
And that's how I met Beth through Sue, David's wife. Of course, I had known of and seen Beth on TV for years, so speaking with her for this was pretty cool. Beth Hatt spent a ton of time looking into David's case with her friend for a potential TV show.
You know, I visited David and Joe Welts in two different prisons, and then I had extensive phone calls with both of them. We did go to the courthouse. We did get to look at all the evidence. They pulled out all the evidence for us.
Unfortunately, the show fell through. But Beth had already done so much legwork, so she's a wealth of information on the case. Plus I was interested did to hear her perspective as a former prosecutor.
I read a lot of transcripts, and I was reading the trial transcript and you got to understand that when you have my background as a prosecutor, that police and prosecutors are not in the business of arresting and trying innocent people. Yes, it happens, but the vast majority of people who go through the system, they're guilty. Okay.
Beth said she started with the assumption that the prosecutors got it right. She went through the entire trial and flagged a lot of the same things I did, things that just didn't make sense to either of us.
The most crucial piece that jumped out at me was what came out post conviction, and that's when the defense got one of the police reports that was prepared close in time to the murder that was based on notes taken by a comp at the scene.
This was the police note that was taken about what George Hale saw the morning Yvon's body was discovered, and
it was only found after David's conviction. During his appeal, David received all his files from trial, including the prosecution's file, and that's when he saw the name George Hale, which shouldn't have happened because the state was supposed to turn over all relevant documents or discovery before the trial, and yet it wasn't until after the conviction that anyone got the report, mentioning what George Hale said he saw.
The fact that it was never turned over to the defense is shocking.
At that time, David's appeal team also believed this was a bombshell. Not only was it a due process violation, which alone could win a retrial, but it seemed there was also a person of interest the police never looked at, and George Hale could potentially identify that person. So David's investigator found George Hale.
It's George here.
My name is Mike Durkin.
I like to talk to me.
He's not in any couple or anything.
He's kind of hey, buddy, he's got a manager of truth that I talked to him.
Oh that's all right, I'm kind of cold.
George Jrkin explains to George why he was there.
Now, after this.
Case was all done, the family still pursuing that we got the police report.
Or they mentioned they had talked to you. We never had your name. We never I can show you.
We never.
We never knew, we never knew existed until we got a copy of this police reported you.
Now you already heard some of the interview earlier, George described what he saw outside Yvonne's house the morning her body was found, and the police were interested. According to George, the police actually tried to hypnotize him in hopes of jogging his memory to better describe the mystery man with the trash bag, but to no avail. George also told Durkin that he had met with Sue before. Sue, David's wife, an amateur investigator, had gone over to George's house and shown him three photos.
You've seen a picture she brought you a picture of David and Wels some other three of them. Three of them, and those weren't any of the guys you saw, because you would kind of remember the days that you saw, Okay.
George said that the man you saw leaving the house that morning was not David or Joe. For starters, George said the man was around five foot nine. Joe and David are both over six feet tall. Here's Beth again, So who's this man?
I mean that that is the one key part of this case that just never like never saw right with me, Like something is wrong here, something is really wrong. It makes me question why that report wasn't provided to the defense, like, what's what's up with that and why it wasn't further investigated? So it makes me feel like there's more to the story.
In his post conviction appeals, David's attorney questioned the two lead detectives, Samson and Mucklow, about George Hale. Here's Detective Samson, all right, this is a Lion.
Police Department lineup forum or George Ale, and he was given a lineup and he did not recognize anybody in the lineup.
Now clarify point for me, please.
Lineup would have pictures on it.
Sure, what happened?
Where where's that document?
Well, normally what we do on our lineup is we put the lineup together and we photo copy all the pictures in the lineup. Okay, then the pictures are put back in they because we used polaroids at that time, the photographs will be put back in the booking books. But the lineup itself should have been photocopied as to who was in the lineup.
But there were no photocopies of the people in the lineups.
Know, if it's not in records, we didn't do it.
You didn't do a lineup.
No, we did the lineup.
We just didn't copy it, so you.
Didn't retain any uh retaining record of very very possible.
In other words, the lineup should have been documented, but if it was, that documentation disappeared and this didn't just happen once. There were actually two lineups. Neither had photos of the participants, despite the fact that regulations require they be included. And the participants in these lineups, one person in particular is very interesting and we'll get to that later.
They were given to the prosecutor's office for their business. They wanted the two lineups we had. We gave him to the attorneys.
One thing George said could be of importance was that the man he saw leaving the house walked through the yard to the west.
And then he think he would have run this qu Yeah, okay, so that would be to the west. I just wanted to make sure your direction was.
Right there and whose yard touched Vonn's to the west side of the house. Jim, remember, Jim, was that last person we know about to see Yvonne alive. He was seen at five point thirty with her smashing soda cans in her driveway. Jim said he was over there to see the puppies and then said afterwards he went on a bike ride and then was at work by ten pm. Again, from what we know, the police did not follow up on Jim as a suspect. There's no record of a
formal interview with him, and he never testified. And there may be a reason why Jim was not followed up on. His brother in law is an Alliance police officer who was at the scene the day after the murder. That officer told me his only involvement in the case was peripheral and that Jim was only questioned because he lived nearby.
And investigators interviewed all of Yvonne's neighbors, but the last person known to have seen Yvonne alive was the brother in law of an Alliance officer and he was never questioned in any detail. This really makes me wonder about the cops and there are other reasons.
There was a former policeman that she was afraid of.
Okay, this is Tanya Lane, Yvonne's mother. She said that in September nineteen ninety eight, Yvonne was stopped by the police for a traffic infraction. Officer Quintin Artists pulled yvon over for driving with a suspended license and quote fictitious plates. He took her to the station and processed her. When she left, he kept her license. In a police interview with Tanya, she recounted what Yvonne said happened next.
She told me that he came in the house on the pretext of giving her her driver's license. He had your driver's license, he said he was going to give it back to her, and then he got in the house and he started taking advances and having his hands all over her as what she said. And she said, then.
By the way, Officer Artists was not in uniform that day, and Yvonne says she was afraid.
What kind of She.
Was afraid that he would come back.
And Artists did come back, and he kept harassing Yvonne, according to what police were told, and Artist was no stranger to sexual harassment. One woman filed a complaint with the police, saying that when Artists was booking her, he asked, I have to take your picture. Do you want to do this with or without your clothes on? He then allegedly went on to inquire if her bra and panties
were Matching. Also said that after this incident, Artists began stopping by her home to quote see how she was doing. There were several other similar complaints filed by women in Alliance. Artists was charged with aggravate and menacing for another incident, and he was let go from the Alliance Police Department. He's now a registered sex offender. To me, a picture starts to emerge, cops circling around Yvonn behaving inappropriately and what's more, I don't see that artist was ever questioned
in relation to Yvonne's death. Sometimes frustrated sexual suitors can lash out, though as artist, the person George Hale saw not likely. Artist is black and the person George saw is white. The size description also doesn't match. But in terms of cops behaving badly, an Alliance Artists wasn't an outlier. In fact, the Alliance Police Department has a history of corruption. In the late nineties, after a ten month audit, it was discovered that more than fourteen thousand dollars worth of
money and drugs was missing from the evidence room. The audit also found that there were at least six shotguns missing from the department. The Alliance Police Chief, James Black, and eight officers were found responsible for the missing money and drugs, and were suspended pending the investigation. After he was suspended, Chief Black allegedly threatened auditors. One auditor had said in a police report that Black told the auditors that they should get out before quote it gets dark.
The auditor said Black made reference to the recent disappearance of a construction worker and said the chief implied this might also happen to the auditors. So, according to this report, Alliance cops were capable of real violence or at least threatening it. Going back to George Hale, we found there were actually two lineups given to George. Eventually David's team managed to get photos of the participants. The second lineup,
George didn't id anyone, including David. But George said there was another lineup the day before, and in that one he did identify someone. But there's no record of who that was, none that we or Beth or any of the lawyers could find. But Duyne Pullman, the investigative TV reporter, got to the bottom of it.
Did you find somebody you recognized? I did point out somebody, Hale says.
Detectives told him later the picture he pointed out was that of an Alliance police officer.
Maybe that's why the state didn't tell David's lawyers about George Hale. Duyne Pullman asked one of the detectives on Yvonne's case, Detective Leach, about this.
John Leech was a key detective in the case.
Did you know who he identified?
No, I don't. There's a police officer that's before the investigation.
The detective tried to respond.
Well, like I said, I do remember it coming down to the point that he was not a reliable witness. Reliable or not. George Hale never testified in the murder trial.
Some cops had suspicions of their own. Detectives. Mucklow and Sampson actually went to a psychic, and it's not what the psychic said to them, but what they told the psychic about their own brothers in blue. That is truly shocking, coming up on death and deceit in alliance.
I'm curious, why is you know so many cops you never asked about that.
I wondered about it.
She was possibly seeing a police.
Officer to live in.
Say he was a hot mess, anger and rage, very people scare me. He scared me, and supposedly she told linem Glaughlin's mother that the youngest child maybe this policeman's son.
You know.
In terms of the police force, my god, I had eight or nine names of officers who were potential sexual partners.
Death and Deceit in Alliance is produced and reported by me Maggie Freeling, with editorial consulting from Amber Hunt. Aaron Case is our legal researcher. Our executive producer is Steve Fishman. Our engineer and production coordinator is Austin Smith. Eric Axelrod is our assistant producer.