Step into the world of power, loyalty, and luck.
I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.
With family, canoli's and spins mean everything.
Now you want to get mixed up in the family.
Business, Introducing the Godfather at champacasino dot com. Test your luck in the shadowy world at the Godfather slot.
Someday I will call upon you to do a service for me.
Play the Godfather now at champacasino dot com.
Welcome to the Family vdW group. No purchase necessary. I believe we're braveitted by loss. He terms and conditions eighteen plus.
Hey guys, it is Ryan. I'm not sure if you know this about me, but I'm a bit of a fun fanatic when I can. I like to work, but I like fun too. It's a thing, and now the truth is out there, I can tell you about my favorite place to have fun, Chumba Casino. They have hundreds of social casino style games to choose from, with new games released each week. You can play for free, anytime, anywhere, and each day brings a new chance to collect daily bonuses.
So join me and the fun. Sign up now at Chumba sino dot com.
Don't work necessary dapod obverbe by Lost Terms Conditions eighteen plus.
You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker VTK every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Good evening in September of nineteen ninety, in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, sixteen year old Lisa Pruett, a poetry lover and member of a church youth group, was on her way to a midnight tryst with her boyfriend when she was viciously stabbed to death only thirty feet from the boy's home. The murder cast a palpable gloom over the upscale community and sparked accusations, theories, and rumors
among Lisa's friends and peers. Together, they wove a damning narrative that circled back to a likely suspect, weird high school outcast Kevin Young. Without a shred of evidence, the teen was arrested, charged and tried for the crime. His eventual acquittal didn't squelch the anger and outrage among those
who believed that Kevin fell away with murder. With a fresh perspective and painstaking research called from police files, sport records, transcripts, uncollected evidence, and new interviews, James Renner reconstructs the events leading up to and following that heartbreaking night. What emerges is a portrait of a community seething with dark undercurrents, its single minded authorities, protective status conscious parents, and the deeply peer pressured teens within Lisa's circle who had the
capacity for such unchecked violence. What monsters still lurk in the dark After more than thirty years, Questions like these continue to fester among the community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, still deeply scarred by wounds that remain hidden, unspoken, and unhealed. The book that we're featuring this evening is Little Crazy Children, a true crime tragedy of lost innocence, with my special guest, investigative journalist and author, James Renner. Welcome back to the
program and thank you very much for this interview. James Renner, Hey.
Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to be back.
Thank you so much and congratulations on this truly extraordinary book.
Thank you very much.
Let's get to discussing, of course, Shaker Heights, Ohio. You say, to the east of Cleveland is a town, Shaker Heights, with its own utopia.
Shaker Heights. It's a weird little community unity on the east side of Cleveland. It's affluent, but it's located just past the ghetto, just past the rough part of Cleveland. You find this wonderful little neighborhood called Shaker Heights, and it's unlike any other. It was actually planned and plotted out by a pair of eccentric brothers named the Van Swarigans about one hundred years ago, and they were local businessmen.
They actually built Terminal Tower, which gives Cleveland its iconic look, and they were looking to build a new community outside of Cleveland for the elite who could have their families out there. And at the time the land was owned by the Shakers, the religious group the Shakers, which are an interesting subset religion in that they believe in abstinence completely.
So you'll have these little communities of Shakers that pop up, but they don't last long, right, because they don't reproduce and so the Van Swagens saw that the Shakers were kind of on their way out, and they offered to buy that whole little community. And that's why it's called
Shaker Heights. And it was kind of like, you know, what what Walt Disney had planned for his utopias done in like near Disney World in Florida, a planned community that the streets don't they kind of meander around these these nice ovals. All the houses have really large lawns. It's just a it's a beautiful little place. But it's because of that, it's it's a little weird too. And
you know, the community prides themselves in integration. They you know, even the sons and daughters of these elite families of lawyers and doctors and politicians, they would send there, at least in the nineties when this story takes place, they would send their kids to the public school, which was which was integrated. So you know, they would give loans to African American families to move into certain places of
the town. And that was really kind of a tricky way of keeping the numbers of African American families in chech So it looked like integration, but really it was a plan to make it not really as integrated as it could have been. So there's Shaker Heights. It's this people might remember the setting from that popular book that came out a few years ago, Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ing. She was actually a student of Shaker Heights High Who and she was a few years younger than
Lisa Prewit. Lisa Prewit, the young woman who was murdered, who the story centers around, and everything that came after it. She was sixteen years old and the day of her murder, she had just gotten her driver's license. She was very excited. She was madly in love at the time with a young man named Dan Dreyfert. Dan was kind of a
troubled kid. He was a talented musician. He already it was playing with a band of his playing local gigs, and had some issues and was in a psychiatric ward for about a month and actually was released the day that Lisa was murdered, and they'd been away for so long, they made plans for Lisa to sneak out of her house that night and ride her bike over to Dan's house, and that's that's how she ends up there.
Let's talk about September thirteenth, nineteen ninety. You write that there's an officer Edward Curtin and he gets a call from Dan Dreyford. And so what does the Dan Dreyford say when the police arrive? What's the story he has to tell?
Yeah, so the police get a call about twelve thirty. They get a number of calls, actually neighbors and houses around the corner of Lee and South Woodland, which is a major intersection in Checker Heights, and that's Dan's family owns a mansion basically on that corner. A number of people call the police and say they heard a woman screaming, and the police respond. They also they respond at first and don't see anything, and then they kind of go
back to their patrols. And then Dan Dreyford calls them and says, hey, look, my girlfriend was supposed to come over and meet with me, but she never showed and I think she might be the woman who was screaming. And so the officers go to Dan's house and he's
standing outside. Dan is sixteen at the time. He doesn't at this point doesn't want his parents to know about any of this, so he kind of meets the police outside and takes them over to where he said he found Lisa's bike and it's popped up against the bushes, just off the sidewalk, and the police say, okay, why don't you go back in the house. We'll come get you. They do a sweep of the neighborhood, they walk around
for a while, they get this. Actually an important part of the story is they have another officer shows up with a canine unit dog that's really good. It's sniffing out since and takes the dog over to the bike, picks up a cent and takes the officers around the block to the road behind Lee, which is called Sedgwick, and then kind of loses the scent and they come back through the backyard of the Dreyford's neighbors and at the corner of their backyard, at the edge of Dreyford's property,
they find Lisa's body and she's just died. She's been stabbed I think like nineteen twenty times. And they find her half clothed. Her pants are down around one leg and her shirt has been pushed up. And that's basically when the story begins.
Dan Dreyford says some in retrospector at least at the time for police some suspicious statements regarding Yeah.
The first thing he tells them is, hey, my fingerprints are probably on this, which at that point, as far as he's told police, he doesn't know what happened to Lisa. He tells them he believes she might have been abducted or taken, So it's a weird thing to say, you know. He's aware that that bike might be part of a crime scene, and he's concerned that his fingerprints might be on it. He tells them the fingerprints are on it because he moved the bike because he wasn't sure it
was Lisa's at first. He also gives a couple different stories about whether or not his parents knew that Lisa was coming over, you know, he tells dispatch one thing, he tells the police another. Eventually they wake up, his father comes out and they talk to his parents as well. Eventually they all end up at the police station. Once Lisa's body is found and Dan is interviewed that night. His father's interviewed the next morning, and the investigation begins in earnest the next day.
Now police go to Gary Pruett, Lisa Prewitt's father. You write about that reaction and what Gary has to say and the family reaction.
Yeah, it's very sad all around for the Pruits. They had three children, Lisa's younger brother I think it was a younger brother. She had a brother who died as a child, and there was I think health complications in that instance. So they had already lost one kid. And Lisa was a very good kid as far as I found. She was just just a really smart, energetic, you know,
just an empathetic young woman. And the police, of course, they once they found her body, they drove out to the Pruitz and woke up the parents and her father, Gary came down and they said, hey, do you know
where your daughter is? And he said, oh, she's upstairs sleeping, and they said, please go check, and he went upstairs and found that she was not there, that her bed was empty, and then they discovered that her bike was missing, and so then the police were pretty sure that that's, you know, the body they found was in fact Lisa at that time, and then she was identified shortly thereafter, and it was just devastating for the Pruits.
Now let's get back to Dan Dreyfert and his father as well. That you say, they ended up at the station for questioning. Who was the detective in charge.
The detective in charge was a man named Thomas Gray, and he just happened to be the detective that got the case. I think it was his turn. He was the detective on duty at the time. However it happened it became his case, which in hindsight was unlucky. It was his first case of that magnitude, and he hadn't been a police officer for too long. And the reason he became a police officer, he told them, was because it paid better than being a line cook.
You know.
He had no lifelong aspiration to the police officer or even a detective. He worked at Popeye's Chicken in Louisiana for a while and worked restaurant chops in the Cleveland so kind of a weird background. And he became his case, and he started investigating with another officer, another detective, but he was really the main force behind it, and he's the one that interviewed Dan Dreyford that night and got his statement on the record.
There.
Now, in terms of cooperation, the father and the son laurering up before this interview, were they cooperative? And what did Tom Gray elicit in terms of a statement from Dan Dryford.
It really worked in their favor, both Dan Dreyford and his dad, I think his dad's names Robert. They were very cooperative with police and they allowed Dan to be questioned. Dan gave a very lengthy statement, and then his father did too, and then eventually his mother. So they were very cooperative with police, which went a long way with the whole thing. I think it's what made Detective Gray feel that it wasn't Dan that was involved in this murder. So, you know, he he got a lot out of Dan
that night. You know, he'd come to find out that Dan kept a lot from him, But he basically got a timeline of that day. You know, Dan talks about getting out of the hospital where his father had had him committed. His father worked at Cleveland Clinic and had his son committed to the same hospital where he worked, and he had been there for about a month. That day, he got out around lunchtime, went to school surprisedly, so
she was very happy to see him. Then he hung out with some friends and then Lisa came over to his house. Her father brought her over. I think it was like seven pm that night, sometime around there, to visit real quickly before her flute lesson. And she was excited because she had just gotten her driver's license that day, and so she was only at the Dreyferts. I think for you know, ten fifteen minutes, and you know they I think they kissed and you know, got caught up.
And that's basically when they made plans. She told him that she would sneak out and ride her bike over to his house about twelve thirty. So then she leaves with her father and goes home, has a nice dinner, and in fact, she does sneak out. Now. Dan then tells the police, oh, I forgot she was coming over, which anybody who's been a teenage boy knows how ridiculous
that that sounds. You've been away from your girlfriend for a month, and you're telling me that you forgot that she's going to sneak out and meet up with you that night. It doesn't quite work. And then he says he was in his room when he heard the screaming.
He opened the window, the screaming continued. Then he woke up as his dad was already kind of awake because he heard the screams too, and his father sent him out to see what it was, and he says he went out, didn't see anything, so he came back in told his dad, you know, he didn't see anything, and then he's like, oh, and that's when I remember that
she was coming over. So after his father went back to sleep, he snuck out at the house and he says that's when he found her bike and called the police.
Now tell us about Dan Dreyford, and he talks about all his friends that he had invited over to his home earlier in the evening and what they were I guess planning to do, but also that he had a friend named Tex Workman, and Tex Workman had talked to a person named Kevin Young that night. Let's talk about Dan Dreyford's story about what went on that night at the at the coffee shop.
Yeah. Sure, So every time the police spoke with Dan, he would reveal a little bit more about that day. And because the first time he spoke with him, he didn't he wasn't complete about what happened that day. So, like I said, he had been in the hospital for a month and Lisa wasn't the only one. That's supposed to come over that night and stink out of their house. He called a number of his friends and invited them over, and he had planned to have what's called a horobo party.
Back in the nineties, kids who wanted to get high but couldn't get the illegal stuff would go to the corner store and buy powerful cough medicine like robotussin, So that's why they called it robo And if you drank more than like half a bottle of robotussin with the with the big ingredients in it, they it would make you trip for a little while. So that's what Dan was really into. So he has some friends. He actually had written to Lisa and asked her to pick up
some robotussin formed. So yeah, he invited at least three or four of his friends and then tells the police that each and every one of them called him later that night and said they weren't going to come over, so which strikes me as a little odd too. And one point of the day, this man, a young man, teenage boy comes over to Dan's house to visit with him. And this man is called this guy is called Tex Workmen. You know, they called him. Texts and Tex is dating
at the time. Dan's older sister, Debbie Nebbe, though is away at college. She goes to she was going to ou which is about three hours away from Shaker Heights, and the text comes over to visit with Dan. Dan says, hey, could you run out get some cigarettes. You can keep the change or vice versa. Text wanted some cigarettes and
was going to bring back change for Danny. In any event, Text goes to get cigarettes and he already knows Dan has told him that Lisa is sneaking out of the house to come visit him that night and says, Hey, I've got some other people coming over. If you want to hang too, you're welcome to be at this party with us. So Tex goes out to Shaker Square to pick up some cigarettes and while he's there, and that's just a couple miles from Dan's house, so he takes
Dan's bike rides his bike over to Shaker Square. He also visits the coffee shop there in the coffee shops called Arabica, and he stops in and bumps into another mutual friend of theirs, young man named Kevin Young. Kevin Young's a little bit older, he had just graduated high school and was starting his freshman year at Ohio State University.
Who's going to start that next Monday? So this is the Thursday before that, and so Tex hangs out with Kevin and says, hey, Kevin, you know, Lisa's sneaking out of her house and going to hook up with Dan tonight. And Kevin knew him both and was kind of mad at Dan at the time, so said some unsavory things and I don't know, call him a jerk or something. And so now Kevin has this knowledge, right, so from tech, you know, it's that telephone game. More and more people
are aware that Lisa's sneaking out of her house. So that becomes important because the day after the murder, a number of Dan's friends go to the police and say, it can't be our friend. He's such a good guy. And the police are like, well, who do you think could possibly do something like this? And everybody said, well, it's got to be the weird kid in school, Kevin Young. You know, he wears black and listens to Metallica and plays D and D And Kevin was a bit of
a problem. Hid you know this This happened in nineteen ninety I think if this were to happen today, pretty obvious to me that Kevin would have been on the spectrum, on the autism spectrum somewhere. He had a hard time relating to his peers. He had these loud outbursts in public and would cause these little scenes. So I think that's what was going on with him. I'm no psychiatrist, but i do have a son who's on the spectrum, so I'm very aware of the way that you know,
people on the spectrum behave in act. So just strikes me that that's what it was. So in any event, the friends say, you got to look into Kevin Young. And then when they found out that Kevin had spoken to texts and would have had knowledge that Lisa was stinking out, they were like, oh wow, this is that.
They thought that that was really good circumstantial evidence, and at some point Detective Gray and his colleagues became become convinced that it is Kevin Young, that it had to be Kevin Young, and they don't really look at any
suspects after that. But to this day, there's no physical evidence that has ever linked Kevin to that crime scene or to Lisa, and in fact, all the circumstantial evidence they have basically rules Kevin Young out as a suspect, but that didn't keep him keep them from going after him. Kevin was eventually charged with Lisa's murder, indicted, and he went to trial in the summer of nineteen ninety three.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop for a second for these messages.
Okay, round two, Name something that's not boring.
Laundry, a book club, computer solitaire.
Huh oh, Sorry, we were looking for Chumba casino to chum. That's right, chumbacasino dot com as over one hundred casino style games joined today and play for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Chum Chumbacasino dot com, Pluster, the Nations, the plus He Wentsie retails.
Now you've jumped head to the trial. But we have to assess as you do, as you write, how the police decided and how they underwent their breaking of Kevin Young.
They had spoken to all the friends, including Dan Dreyford, but also the other friends and what they had to say, so they got supporting in their mind, circumstantial evidence of things that would fit that Kevin Young would fit for this In terms of a violent background and things that he had said that incriminated him and involved him in this murder.
Some of the friends said that they had overheard him saying he was going to kill Dan and Lisa, that he was mad. That kind of goes back to when Dan started dating Lisa and he was jealous, I think jealous more of Lisa's time that she was spending with Dan, because he considered Dan a good friend. And you know, there were these overheard conversations Arabica in which he shouted that he was going to kill Dan. I don't think
he ever really said that. I think it was more something along the lines of I'm you know, I'm going
to beat him up or whatever. That never regardless, that never happened, or you know, there was never any sort of altercation between him and Dan Dreyfert and down the road when more and more evidence came out, it appears that during his rants that were overheard about these threats, he wasn't talking about Dan and Lisa, but Dan and this other girl named Becca who Dan had kind of also been seeing on the side and made out with this girl, and she was supposed to go to prom
with Evan and so there was some weirdness there, and it was likely he was talking about Dan and Becka and not Dan and Lisa. But anyways, he becomes a suspect for that and a number of other things that just went terribly wrong. For instance, at the time Shaker Heights was hiring for prosecutors. They were looking for a new prosecutor and they interviewed like ten candidates and one of these was a lawyer from Columbus, and during his interview he's like, oh, yeah, by the way, I see
you guys are going after Kevin Young. You know, I'm friends with his lawyer down in Columbus, and his lawyer told me that Kevin did it. And in that interview, everybody kind of freaks out because, you know what, even if that were true, he's breaking attorney client privilege. People could be disbarred for that. But they send out the police, they do an investigation, they taught. They go down and talk to this lawyer Kevin had and he's like, well,
what are you talking about. He's like, I kinda know that guy in passing, but he's not a friend of mine and I certainly wouldn't tell him anything like that, and it's not true. Anyways, and what the police said, even in their reports. The police that went down to Columbus and talked to him, they're like, look, I think this guy's just making up a story so that he can get this job. But that really went a long
way with Gray, I think. And he's like, well, if his lawyer is saying he did it, then he must really be guilty. So that just kind of that was another nail in the coffin for Kevin. So they do a couple of weird things. Shaker Heights eventually consults with a very famous psychologist out of the University of Syracuse. Syracuse University, Myron Murray is his name, and he's consulted with the FBI in a number of cases. He was
the consultant for Waco. He says he's good at profiling these type of killers, and so they consult with him, and Myron Murray gives them advice on how to break Kevin and even says in this recorded conversation like, look, you know, the boyfriend makes a pretty good suspect too, don't you think. And the police are like, yeah, case could be made against the boyfriend, but right now we're
looking at Kevin and the psychologist, doctor Myron Murray. He says, well, okay, He's like, even if it's not, here's how you get him to confess to it, and so what a crazy thing to say. But anyways, the police go down, the detectives go down. In the interview Kevin Young, Detective Gray himself interviews Kevin Young in order to try to force him into confessing to this crime, and shows up at his dorm room one night. I think they show up
at about eight pm. They take him to a local hotel and they've got a guy with a light detector box, you know, light detector machine there waiting and Gray first interrogates Kevin and this interrogation goes on for more than
twenty four hours. It's insane, and sometime in the middle of the night, like round two three o'clock in the morning, that gave him his first light detector test, and the guy that's operating the machine, also a police officer, says that he thinks he's being untruthful, which eventually I consult with the leading polygraph people in the state of Ohio who tell me that the way he conducted the test
was inadmissible. Anyways, he did it wrong, so you've got this bad test going on, and so to give him, like I think, they actually give him three different tests over those twenty four hours and tell him that he's being untruthful. But at no point does Kevin Young confess to the crime. He doesn't break although he is essentially driven kind of crazy and ends up in the mental hospital a day later because of this interrogation.
It's very interesting and we never really get an explanation. But Kevin Young's father is in an attorney, not a criminal defense attorney, but he's an established attorney. And you really chronicle is the underhanded techniques of Detective Gray and the other detectives that were all formed. We're all grouped together to be able to successfully try to get a
confession was their main goal. Now, the thing is is that these unhanded techniques that you chronicle, it's amazing all of the things that they violated in that they asked him who they thought had killed Lisa Pruitt, What did he have to say in that regard, and why was Tech's workman sort of not interesting to both defense and prosecution in this case.
It's interesting, right because tex is certainly a suspect. He knew Lisa was coming over, and he doesn't really have an alibi. He says that he left Dan's house at about eleven thirty and then walked to get a take a bus back to his house, but then the bus doesn't He says, the bus doesn't show up for forty five minutes, and he doesn't get home until well after
the time of the murder. But Tex is a wild card in this whole thing, and both the prosecutors in the defense didn't really want to bring him in because it really complicates the whole thing a little bit, especially for a jury. And one of the things the defense attorney told me, the defense attorney he got a really great defense attorney, a guy named Mark Devan, who essentially saved him at least for a couple decades. And Devan told me, he's like, look, our strategy was to show
that Kevin was not the best suspect. Dan Driver was much better suspect than he was, So you can't just throw things at the wall. For the jury, we couldn't give them a number of suspects. We had to concentrate on one. And Dan was a better suspect than Text. So Text has always been kind of a wild card in this whole thing. What's interesting to me is, yes, Kevin Young's father was an attorney with a very prestigious law firm in Cleveland. But again we're talking Shaker Heights.
You can't throw a rock in Shaker Heights without hitting an attorney or a doctor or a politician of some sort. So all these kids, their parents were lawyers or something. But his father worked at the law firm, and at some point in time, and mind you, if the father has one inkling that his son really could have done this, he never would have as a lawyer, never would have
let him speak to police. And he never kept Kevin from talking to the police because he knew Kevin couldn't do it, because Kevin was playing video games with his father until one am the night of the murder. But at some point time the whole thing becomes so crazy. The fathers like, look, just charge him so that we can get this to court, where you know, where things are logical. Again, you know, court has a procedure, it's logical.
Everything you guys are doing is illogical and insane. So just charge him already, which you know, I think goes a long way to showing that the father was never, never, for one second did he think that Evin could have done this.
Now, what's I think most important in this confession that he tried to get was that the statements that Detective Gray made to Kevin Young near the end of this statement without getting a confession, and he was frustrated about that. What was this implicit threat that he made to Kevin Young? And obviously that would have been an important threat to a young man.
Yeah, the detective tells Kevin, look, you have to confess to this so that you because we're going to charge you, but if you cooperate with us, we're not going to put you to death because in the state of Ohio there's the death penalty and I don't know that this necessarily would have applied, but Kevin didn't know that, and the detective wanted him to know that if he didn't cooperate with them, if he didn't confess to this, he'd still get arrested, still be charged, but now he'd face
the death penalty. So he's got that hanging number his head and he's like, by the way, you can't stay at college because this is going to be on your mind. We're going to come after you. Anyways, and you can't go home because everybody back in Shaker Heights already knows you did it. So he just ruined, I mean, just broke this kid's mind.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop for a second to hear from our sponsor. Ritual knows that it's impossible to get all the nutrients your body needs just from your diet. Ritual has created a multivitamin that can supply your body with all the nutrients it needs that are missing from your diet. My wife Lisa, and I started to take Ritual just based on the real search they'd done to create their multivitamin in the first place.
It's been a few years now, we both appreciate the monthly delivery and we both continue to rely on Ritual Multivitamin every day with nine key nutrients in two capsules per day. Their unique bedlet in oil is even patented. Ritual's Essential for Women eighteen plus is one of the few women's multis that's USP verified, meaning what's on the label is what's in the formula. It's also soy free, gluten free, vegan friendly, and formulated without GMOs. Instead of
striving for perfect health, aim for supporting foundational health. Great news Ritual is offering my listeners ten percent off during your first three months. Visit ritual dot com slash murder to start Ritual or at Essential for women eighteen plus to your subscription. Today we talked about the effect of this twenty four hour ordeal for this young man, with these threats to his livelihood and trying to tell him that no matter what he said, that he was guilty
of killing Lisa Pruitt. So what happens after in terms of hospitalization.
So Kevin is admitted into a mental hospital, a psychiatric ward in Cleveland. I think it was Laurel Wood at the time, one of the big ones up here. And I think he stays there for again at least a month, and the local media make a big deal about that. The police tell everybody that his parents are hiding him in a psychiatric unit, that he you know, that he's not crazy, that he doesn't need to be there, but that's their way of keeping him away from being interviewed
by police. So while he's there, he meets with his father, and that's when he meets the lawyer, Marke Devan, and it looks for a moment like the police are going to charge him, that they don't because they don't have
the evidence. They do serve warrants on his home. They find some writing that he's done, you know, one seemed to be a possible suicide note, and he had attempted suicide in the past, and there were some very alarming things he had written about his mother and just he was an angry kid, but nothing that connected him to Lisa in any way. They collected blood and hair samples
from him, none of that match what they had. The case kind of went cold for a couple of years, and then a woman who was at that psychiatric unit with Kevin that month came forward and said, oh, Kevin confessed to me that he did murder Lisa, And she was interviewed by a local TV station and then that's how they were able to finally get an indictment against Kevin and charge him with the murder.
Along the way, police have press conferences and press releases that seem irresponsible in retrospect. Can you tell us about.
Oh my gosh, yeah, I mean again, I don't think it's something that could happen today, But you know, nothing like this had been tried at least not in northeast Ohio back then. Here's what they did. The police and prosecutors held a press conference at one point and said, hey, look, we know who did it. Kevin Young killed Lisa Pruitt. But the prosecutors saying, we don't have enough evidence to assure that will win in court, so we just want
you to know that Kevin killed Lisa. And it was so basically they've convicted him in the court of public opinion without having without allowing him a fair trial. I mean, it was just it was nutty. And that's when that kind of fell apart because they got called out by a couple of decent journalists in town that were like, this is not how we do things in the United States. This is not this is not kosher, this is not fair.
Mark Devn has got is an illustrious, high profile lawyer with a crowd past. But Mark Devan, when he looked at the transcripts overall, what was his uh, what was his conclusion and what was his attitude about this, the press and the police's behavior.
You know, Devan said something interesting to me. You know, he actually hoped that Kevin was guilty, and it really upset him. After he met Kevin and looked at the records and saw everything laid out. When he realized that Kevin was innocent, said, that's the worst thing for a lawyer, because it's then your responsibility to save them, and if they go to prison, it's because you've failed. So that was really alarming to him to know that Kevin was
innocent here. So he was very passionate about about it. He fought against the police and prosecutors trying to withhold, you know, trying to keep this indictment from happening. And then when it did, he hired his own investigators because he realized that it was up to him to find the real killer if they could, as a way to save Kevin, and they got I think his investigator got really close to who I think did it. He was
like one interview away. One of the things his investigation kicked up that becomes very important is that in the weeks leading up to Lisa's murder, there were a number of homes on Lee and Sedgwick that rode the runs parallel behind it that were broken into. There was a prowler in the neighborhood that was breaking into houses, not really stealing money, but stealing like trinkets and things, forcing his way through a skylight, cutting through screens to get in.
And eventually I found out who that person was, and I do believe that person was responsible for Lisa's murder.
This private eye Sheridan also uncovered spoke to another person at the coffee shop, Stephan Ravello, another worker there, and he told them something very very interesting about the conversation that supposed Texts and Kevin Young had, but also that there was other people present that night.
Exactly right. That's the big part that Sheridan got wasn't not able to follow through all the way. So the whole reason that the police at first looked at Kevin Young was that Kevin was aware that Lisa was sneaking out right, because he met up with text at Arabica at that coffee shop and text poled Kevin that Lisa was coming over. It turns out there there was one other young man in that coffee shop at the time who was near enough to overhear that conversation, and that
young man's name was David Brannigan. And David Branigan is very interesting, you know. So I had kind of eventually found that out that Okay, David Brannigan was there too, just like Kevin Young, he would have known Lisa was stinking out. Let's look into David a little bit. And so I started reaching out to David's He had a girlfriend at the time who was his alibi, and she's like, look, they told me I was his alibi. But he definitely could have left my house in enough time to get
to Lisa and intercept her. And in fact, David Brannigan lived on Sedgwick, the road behind Lee, so he would have passed it on the way home. In fact, he goes to police the day after the murder and says, you know, I bumped into a black man at the bus stop who mentioned Lisa's murder. I bet it was him. You should look into this guy. And if you know anything about Jaker Heights, you point the finger at a
black man, you get the police's attention pretty quickly. When the police followed up, they realized that Brannigan essentially places himself at the scene of the murder at around the time it happens, because he said he saw the police with the canine unit looking around the neighborhood. And that's very important to me because that says that, yes, he was there. He knew about the canine unit, but the police didn't see him, So he's somewhere in hiding watching this,
so he's right there when everything's going down. He says he went home then his mom was awake and talked to his mom for a little while, and then took a shower and went to bed. When the police followed up on that, they found out, no, mom wasn't really awake. She was asleep when he got home, so he has no alibi. He took a shower that night. He collected knives. He had a collection of knives like the type that could have been used to stab Lisa, And they never
did find the murder weapon. They never did find that. So what really brought it home to me was I tracked him down and found out that he had died. He had died in twenty seventeen. He had essentially drank himself to death. But he was living with a woman and he had a daughter with her, so it was basically a common law wife. He had been living with her for like seven or eight years. So I went to her thinking that she'd just slammed the door in my face. She invited me in. We got to talking
and eventually I asked her a question, point blank. I said, do you think Dan killed Lisa pru It? And she thought for a second. She said, let me tell you a story. Said, when Dan was in pre school, a boy pushed him down on the playground and he didn't react. He didn't hit the kid or anything. He didn't do anything. But then at lunch he made a point to sit next to this kid and when the kid wasn't watching, when the kid wasn't looking, he poured commeic bleach into
the powder into the kid's sandwich. Well, the kid must die. So I think, do I think brand Agan David Branigan? Do I think do you think he killed Lisa? Yeah, you said it wouldn't doubt it.
Let's get back to the saving of Kevin Young and then the demise of Kevin Young. You say that the van launched a brave and very very talented defense of Kevin Young, and some of the highlights were breaking those witnesses that apparently he had confessed to while he was at the psychiatric hospital. Tell us just a little bit about what really broke that trial, what really made it a success for Kevin Young?
Well, the prosecution put up witness after witness. You know, a lot of these were local kids in the neighborhood who had these stories about Kevin Young threatening Dan and Lisa at first, and de Van showed that. Well, you know, they'd get on stand and they'd say, I heard Kevin Young threaten Dan Dreyfert, like, you know, Goodie Proctor was dancing with the devil type of stuff, and Devan would basically he's like, did you really did you really hear that?
And they're like, well, I didn't hear it, but somebody told me about it. So a lot of that became hearsay, and then oh, well, I don't know that he was really talking about Lisa. So one by one, you know, they were either lying or exaggerating their stories. And then it gets to the so called confession. This woman who was a patient at the mental hospital Kevin was staying, who said that he confessed to her one night that
he killed Lisa. And turns out that like a moment before the so called confession, this woman has a hallucination about her father being a pow in World War two or Korea somewhere and was being tortured and so she's screaming, and she goes out to the break room. After this this hallucination, that's when Kevin Young comes up and confesses. But then she doesn't go to the police or tell the staff or anything. She doesn't do anything with it.
A couple of years later when she sees a local journalist covering the death of Lisa Pruitt, and she calls him and arranges for this interview. And her first call is to this TV news reporter, not the police. And then she says, oh, I you know, but I know this is true because I wrote it down in my diary. And so Devan brings out the diary and weirdly, the page that mentions this confession doesn't match up with the page. It's not the same type of paper as the rest
of the journal. It looks like it's been it's been written in past tense, like it was written long after the event and placed in the book. And so it all just kind of falls apart on the stand anyway, Like, how in the world would you consider a witness's statement as at all all if it's coming from a patient in a mental hospital. It's just the whole thing's crazy.
This this is an opportunity to stop for a second for these messages.
Step into the world of power, loyalty and luck.
I'm going to make him an offer you can't refuse.
We're family, Canoli's and spins mean everything.
Now you want to get mixed up in the family business.
Introducing the Godfather at Champa Casino dot com. Test your luck in the shadowy world of the Godfather slot.
Some day I will call upon you to do a service for me.
Please the Godfather now at Champacasino dot com.
Welcome to the Family vdW group. Nope't is necessary. If we were bravited by loss he terms and conditions eighteen plus.
You say this trial was it was very, very interesting, and you chronicle the whole thing and all of the again the friends of Lisa and Dan Dreyford and the neighborhood were witnesses, but also people that lived behind the Dreyford mansion, the residence, and also the But the police didn't bother to have any physical evidence at this trial almost whatsoever, and so it was not a hard verdict for the jury to give him a not guilty and he was acquitted of the crime.
After this long, very very public trial. Kevin Young is found not guilty. He's acquitted, so great, He's got his life back, he thinks. And then the next day the Plain Dealer, the biggest paper in the region at the time, I think they were like a million people that were reading it on a daily basis or something, comes out with an article that says, well, if the jury had heard everything that wasn't allowed in court, they would have
found him guilty of the murder. So it's like he thinks his life is saved, and then the very next day the local paper just completely ruins it. And he's so distraught he drives out and climbs onto a bridge over a very busy highway in Cleveland, about to commit suicide. A police officer happens to be driving by, sees it, stops the car, gets out, and is able to talk Kevin down. And so again he ends up in the mental hospital for a little while. But who wouldn't.
After that, you write about eventually speaking with Kevin Young briefly tell us about that encounter.
I met Kevin Young once when I was a reporter for the weekly paper, the Village Voice paper out of Cleveland, about fifteen years ago or so, I had written. I was writing a piece on Lisa Pruett, and I wanted to talk to him. I ended up talking to him for a little bit, and the thing he was most upset about was he had moved on with his life and was trying to he was running a He was just such a brilliant mind, but he ended up the best he could do was run this business where he
painted houses and eked out a living that way. And he said the thing that upset him the most was the Internet, you know, and the Internet wasn't really a thing during his trial in ninety three, but into the late nineties, he couldn't get a date. He'd have a date with a woman and go really well, and then she'd go home and google his name and all the stuff with Lisa Prewood will come up, and then she'd say, I just can't do this, you know, I can't do it.
So it just.
Destroyed this guy's life. And you could tell the pain he was in, you know, when I spoke to him, he was very, very upset.
Tell us what happens eventually with Kevin Young.
Just like a number of people in this story, along with text workmen, you know, he has issues with alcohol. Kevin ends up also essentially drinking himself to death. He is found dead in his apartment in twenty seventeen, and you know, the autopsy reveals the cirrhosis of the liver along with other other things. He had gotten caught up in cracked cocaine as well, you know, just everything he could do to alleviate this stress that he was going through.
And so yeah, he passed away in twenty seventeen before I started writing this book in twenty twenty.
Tell us about the circumstances in which you began to write this book, and before we talk about David Brannigan and his connection to a crime you described from nineteen eighty five, which was occurred eight houses away from the Dreyford mansion in nineteen eighty five, and David Brannigan was a witness in that case.
So I knew at some point I wanted to write a book about this. So slowly, over the years I had had masked. I put up public records requests until I got pretty much all the documents from the prosecutor's office in the city and the trial transcripts, and eventually met with de Van Kevin's lawyer. But I massed all these documents, and then COVID hit and suddenly I had nothing else to do. I was stuck at home, so I said, well, if I'm going to write about this,
it's probably got to be now. So I opened those boxes. My intention going into it was to exonerate Kevin Young in the court of public opinion and to show that
the boyfriend was the most likely suspect. And I got a couple weeks into research when I started uncovering this stuff with David Brand again and realized that wait, there was another young man at the scene of the crime that night that the police that prosecutors knew about but kind of kept quiet, and he's you know, once I started looking into his background, all this other stuff came out.
There's this other There was a double homicide that occurred five years before Lisa's murder, and it happened eight doors north of the Dryver's residence, so same block. There was an older couple that was stabbed to death in their home one night early. It was like, it was like a nine to nine thirty PM on a Friday evening, and so I said, well, I better look at those records. And I had been avoiding it because there was a man sitting in prison for those murders, a guy named
Donnie Sok who had been convicted of it. So I'm like, well, those are solved, you know, what's the point of looking into it. But at some point it became undeniable that there was some sort of connection going on here, so I pulled the records and lo and behold, the only witness to the murder, or the only witness for the police,
was young man named David Branigan. David lived in a house directly behind her cat corner behind the Order residents Dorothy and Philip Porter were their victims, and Brannigan admits to breaking into the property next door to the Porters the night of the murder. Bran Agan, eventually I come to find out, was the young man who was breaking into homes on that block. So he said he broke into the property next door with a couple bodies to set off fireworks and then they saw this again, very
similar story. Said he saw a black man run out of the back door of the Porter's house at the time of the murder and chased them away, and you know, they ran back home. And that story doesn't make sense for a lot of reasons. One, the door was locked from the inside when the police discovered the Porter's bodies, so the killer could not have gone out the back door.
The point of entry or Porter's killers was a small window in the kitchen that you know some that he had cut through the screen and entered the window like was Brannigan's mo and it appeared to be a burglary. Interrupted that Dorothy Porter likely heard something, came into the kitchen, saw the killer and that's when he overpowdered her and killed her. He stabs her and then strangles her with
the quart of an iron in the basement. And certainly Brannigan has motive for that, because if he's breaking in the house and gets caught, you know, Dorothy's going to recognize him as the neighbor kid. So why is there a guy sitting in prison for this. That's kind of
a longer story, but I'll make it real short. Donnie Sokei had been in prison for theft and his mother was dying of cancer and he concocted this story, said he was involved in the Porter's murders because he thought that he could arrange a deal with the prosecutors to get him out of prison by confessing to this other crime and unfortunately talked himself into a much bigger sentence, you know, like you know, I think eventually he ended
up getting eight hundred and eight eight years. But his story is so called confession to police, and he since recanted this confession. It's just ridiculous on the surface because he said he had a he and his father decided to kill the porters because Philip was once an editor at the Plaine Dealer and written terrible things about the Hell's Angels biker gang, and his dad dad was in the gang, and was upset about that, as if that's
a thing. And they said they had a getaway driver who parked on Lee Road for half an hour while they went in and did the murder. Well, that's just if you're from Shaker Heights, you know that can't possibly be true, because there is no parking on Lee Road to this day. It's a very busy. It's a throughway between it gets to Cleveland, so it's always busy. And if you're parking in this no parking area on a very busy street, you're going to get noticed by police
within like five minutes. So it's just just a made up story. So you know, I come to believe that David Branagan is not only responsible for least Pruit's murder, but the double homicide of Dorothy and Philip Porter as well.
Regarding the title of this book, the Little Crazy Children, you write at the end of this book, you know who killed Kevin?
Yeah, the little crazy children of Shaker Heights.
Did you know?
They ruined his life because they thought they were righteous, and they thought they could bend the truth because it had to be Kevin in order to honor their friends. And it destroyed the kid's life. And so Kevin, did you know, he self medicated and drank to feel good, and eventually that gilled is his body.
Let's talk about just a little bit about Spring twenty nineteen in the Porchline Project and your book True Crime Addict came out in twenty sixteen. But tell us about this nonprofit, the porch Like Project.
Yeah.
So I became frustrated at some point that I was writing about all these cold cases and not being able to solve them with books. So I formed a nonprofit called the Portite Project, and we raise money for new DNA testing and genetic genealogy for cold cases in Ohio, not just homicides, but also John and Jane Doe cases,
and we got really lucky out of the gate. Our first case was the nineteen eighty seven homicide of Barbara Blatnek, teenage girl who was abducted from Garfield Heights and whose body was found near Blossom Music Center in Kiga Falls. And I reached out to the police in Kiga Falls and said, hey, I think the case might be solvable with genetic genealogy, and we're really you know, I'm willing
to pay for the whole thing. So he said, all right, let's give it a try, and eventually got a profile from underneath Barbara's fingernails, and genetic genealogists in California took
a look at it. We're able to trace profile of the killer to a family to three brothers in Cleveland, the Zastnic brothers, and then it seemed to be one particular brother who was most likely a guy named James Zastonic, and the police pulled some fresh DNA from his trash and compared it with the original profile, and sure enough it was a match, and so he was arrested in May of twenty twenty when we were still in lockdown
here and was going to trial. He ended up dying of cancer before they got to trial, though, but at least the family had some closure to that, as much as closure as possible with these things. Yes, and since then we've worked about five other cases. We've got I think four or five in the works, and keep pretty busy with the Portraite project stuff.
Absolutely great work.
Kudos to you for that.
Thank you in your organization. Thanks.
I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about Little Crazy Children, a true crime tragedy of lost innocence. Those people that might want to take a look more about this, can you tell us about a website, social media and your podcast?
Yeah? Sure. The best place for information about any of this is James Renner dot com. It has links to everything else I do and these stories I cut, and yes, I do have two podcasts. One is called The Philosophy of Crime. It's kind of like the cosmos of true crime I like to call it looks at the big questions of true crime, like why are we so obsessed with it? And it does profiling really work? It goes to classical philosophy for answers. I do one season of
that podcast every year, six episodes every year. But I also have a weekly podcast called True Crime This Week that wraps up all the big stories and true crime that you might have missed, and that comes out every Friday morning.
Well, thank you very much, Little Crazy Children, the true crime Tragedy of Lost Innocence. Thank you so much for this interview, and you have a great evening, James Renner.
Thanks so much. Dan, it's always a pleasure.
Thank you.