Hi, listeners, I want to tell you about a podcast that we think you'll enjoy called Suspect. Five Shots in the Dark. This latest season looks at a case with two victims, one murdered in cold blood and one in prison for a crime he didn't commit. It follows Leon Benson's story, a man who spent more than half of his life a total of twenty four years in an Indiana state prison for the murder of Casey Shane, a
man he never met. Casey was murdered in the middle of an August night, shot point blank while idling in his Dodge pickup truck in North Indianapolis. There was no physical evidence, no known motive, and no one coming forward with information except one woman who swears to this day she saw Leon Detroit Benson pull the trigger. He was sentenced to sixty years in prison, all because one person swore they saw something. But what if she was wrong?
From Wondery and Campside Media comes season three of the hit podcast Suspect. This is a story of a botched police investigation, the dangers of shaky eyewitness testimony, and a community who feared law enforcement with good reason. I'm about to play a clip from Suspect five Shots in the Dark while you're listening follow Suspect wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge Suspect add free on Wondery Plus, find Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
A long time ago, I remember watching an episode of Oprah about eyewitness testimony. Actually haven't been able to find the episode in question online. This would have been like three decades ago when I was a kid home from school watching TV. It's entirely possible, I imagine parts of it, but in my memory, Oprah, without telling anyone, has this guy run on stage and snatch up a purse belonging to one of the panelists. And then afterwards Oprah asks
everyone to identify the thief, but no one can. Each person Oprah asks they've got a different answer as to what the guy looked like. I don't remember how the show ended. I probably went off and played some duck hunt, but it lodged in my head. As I got older, started working in journalism and writing about the criminal justice system, it would periodically pop back into my head, a reminder of just how fallible the human eye and memory can be.
So wait, let me just back up. Okay, tell me when you first noticed the.
Truck, eh, probably liked it was maybe a block and a half north up there, but it was just riding down something in the past where I was out of my.
Hind of LA.
Do you think it stopped and then went around again or do you think it just went by you went around and came back around.
The Oprah segment came to mind the first time I heard this tape, which was recorded near Indianapolis in twenty twenty two. The details aren't really important, not yet. For now. All you need to know is that the first voice belongs to Laura Basilon. She's a law professor. The second voice belongs to a woman named Christy Schmidt. And yeah, those are wind chimes in the background.
Nice right, Okay, So car stops, you don't think about it. That's you hear something that sounds like firecrackers that turns out to be gunshots. You look up, and what's the first thing you remember seeing when you looked up?
Just the gentleman outside the truck on the sidewalk, Yeah, on the sidewalk on the passenger side. Can you describe whatever you remember him looking like? You know, I really couldn't.
You know anything that you remember?
I would say, all I can really remember probably blackmail, And I remember I believe it was black pants with white stripes on him.
This black mail was about one hundred and fifty feet from Christy. It was early morning, dark and misty. Still. Later, Christy goes to a police station and picks a face out of a photo array. There's the shooter.
She says, do you remember how you felt when you were looking at the pictures? And what kind of a situation that was?
Were you?
How are you feeling?
Well? You know, I guess for lack of better I don't know, nervous, uneasy, but you know, but you know I don't and have never in twenty four years have I even thought that I could have identified it wrong.
And what makes you confident?
You know? I have to said that was one time that face literally jumped off that paper at me. I mean, it was basically went right back to the And I don't doubt one bit that I made a false accusation about it or anything else.
Well, Christy's saying here it sounds so unambiguous, so certain, certain enough that it would lead to an arrest, an indictment, a guilty verdict and a sentence of sixty years. But here's the thing. It was almost certainly wrong. What interests me most about that wrongness is not its rarity, but its commonness. Dig deep enough into any questionable conviction, and you'll inevitably find small errors that, over time have accrued their own terrible power, like a pellet of ice that
becomes a snowball that becomes an avalanche. This is a story about one of those cases. But it's also a story about how difficult, how nearly impossible, it can be to dig a person out again, even when nearly everyone involved believes it's the right thing to do.
Binge suspect add free on Wondery Plus. Find Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts.