POLITICS OF MURDER-Margo Nash

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the crime. Yet none of that mattered, because powers beyond his Somerville neighborhood decided that Eddie needed to be guilty. The timing of this case did not bode well for Eddie. A movement hoping to stop the supposed rise of young super predators was sweeping the nation, and juvenile offenders were the targets. Both the Massachusetts governor in an elected district attorney who personally litigated this case, supported juvenile justice reform,

and both aspired to higher offices. Eddie O'Brien's case garnered both local and nottional publicity. He was a youthful Irish Catholic boy. Next door his grandfather was the retired chief of the Somerville Police Department. Court TV covered the trial in adult court gavel to gavel, calling it the Altboy Murder Case. His highly publicized case changed the juvenile laws in Massachusetts. Other states began to follow suit. But did

the justice system fail Eddie? That's the contention of author Attorney Margot Nash in her explosive expose The Politics of Murder. Appointed Eddie's guardian ad litem, Nash attended every court session eventually gained access to all his files. Now, after painstaking research and examination of each step of the investigation, trial transcripts, and the forensic evidence, Nash makes the case that Eddie could not have committed the crime and that other viable

suspects were never properly considered. The book that we're featuring this evening is the politics of Murder with my special guest, journalist and author and attorney Margo Nash. Welcome to the program and thank you for agreeing to this interview.

litem is. Give us that background, and give us your background as a lawyer before as an introduction to how you came to this case.

a mayor. And in this particular case, Eddie's attorneys asked for the appointment about guardian ed Letham for various reasons, and the judge appointed me to help Eddie navigate his way through the system he was in the juvenile system at that particular point, to help him understand the proceedings

and various things that were happening to him. My background is that I graduated from law school in nineteen eighty three and for five years I was an attorney with the State Department of Social Services, where I prosecuted abuse in neglect cases. And I then went into private practice and did a number of different areas of law, one of which was juvenile law, another was divorce and child custody.

And I also was certified by the court after taking certain courses required courses to be a guardian ned lightem tactics, a guardian dead item, so that I could protect children's rights in the court system.

years before. Eddie's Father's name is ed. So tell us a little bit about who Eddie's family was, the members of his family, and tell us about the Downing family which was right across the street before we talk about this little neighborhood a little ways out.

were five children in the house. Eddie had an older sister named Jean Eddie Jessica was twelve at the time, two little girls named Mary and Meghan three years old and three months old at the time of the incident. So that's who was living in the Eddie O'Brien house. And Papa, the grandfather, the chief, was in the house. As you said, There was a birthday party for him

the week before this incident. He had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and he was not well and he would die not too long after Eddie's arrest of cancer. Across the street, the Downings, they purchased a house whereas the O'Brien family had lived in that house for at least one generation so far. The Downing family moved into that house when Janet married her husband, Paul Senior. At the time of the incident, Paul and Janet were divorced, had been divorced, I believe Paul. I know Paul was

remarried at that point and lived in another town. Janet lived there with. Janet had four children. The oldest was Carrie Anne, and then Aaron, and then the twin boys, Ryan and Paul Junior were fifteen sixteen years old at the time and in the house. The only child that was not in the home at the time living in the home was Carrie Anne. The family. I'm sorry to go ahead, I say that I'll wait for your question.

they were renters there for about five years. Since they had a daughter who was married, who had not been married when they first moved there. They were only renters there for about five years.

And Janet came over in that hot morning and brought her coffee, and she wanted to talk to Gina because Gina had worked in a union office for a utility company all of her life and knew a lot about

labor relations and about unions and about employee rights. And Janet was concerned because she felt she was being pushed out of her job at a local health insurance facility where she was a clerical worker, and she wanted Gina to review her performance reviews and to give her an opinion as to whether or not she should try to fight the potential discharge that she thought was coming, and that's what her initial purpose was when she came over.

During the day, Gina's daughter, Danny came in and there was some discussion about her going out that and Janet immediately remarked, you know that she should be careful where she goes at night, because three months before this, a young girl named Deanna Kremons had been brutally murdered just blocks from where this house is. And no, they had never they still have not charged anybody with that murder,

or they don't know who killed Deanna Cremons. She's been dead now almost twenty three years, so that was much

on everybody's mind. And after Danny left the room, Gina explained to to Janet Downing that Danny was friends with Deanna Kremens, and that was upsetting, you know, And she was still very upset about that, and at which point Janet said, if anything like that ever happens to me, I want you to promise me, Gina, that you will investigate, investigate, investigate, And she pounded her fist into her other into the palm of her other hand and saying, investigate, investigate, investigate,

and I would never kill myself, and even if it looks like an accident, promise me that you'll have the police investigate. And Gina was taken aback and she said, my god, is something are you afraid of something? Is something happening? And why would you even say that? And she then explained that she was afraid of someone, and she explained why she was afraid of this person. And this person happened to be a family member of hers who she felt was following her and was trying to

terrorize her. And she believed that he had been coming in and out of her house while she was at work and moving things around, taking her personal diary from the nightstand. Another parrowing incident which had happened maybe several weeks before that, when she was coming home from work.

The family member who she was afraid of worked for a cab company, and she was coming down a one way street and suddenly she was surrounded by these cabs and there was one on either side of her, one in front of her, one behind her, flashing in their bright lights it was dark out, honking their horns and penning her in and she said she was so scared. All she could do was look straight ahead and try not to hit one of the cabs. And it was

this family member's cab company. And she was absolutely unhinged by that incident, and it really really terrified her. And as I said, another incident, she found a personal diary missing from her night table. She couldn't figure out what had happened to it, and she had actually went over to her house to get it to bring it to

Gina's to show her. And then she said that several weeks after the diary went missing, this family member, her brother in law, she was getting in her car again from work and he was standing beside her car, and she looked up and she was startled, and he had the diary in his hand and he handed it to her and he said he had found it on the street somewhere, you know, that was absolutely not plausible. That scared her. And then she said to Geena, do you notice do you ever notice cabs here at my house

when I'm not home? And Gina said, there's a cab every day in your driveway. He's here all the time. Gina knew this brother in law because the brother in law had lived with Janet and her family for a year. When they became homeless, they moved into Janet's den, and her sister and her brother in law and their baby moved into the den and lived with them for a year.

And it was in March of two thousand, I'm sorry, of nineteen ninety five that Janet had to ask them to leave the house because, according to Janet, the brother in law was dealing drugs to the neighborhood children from her basement and she would not tolerate that. And he

was very angry at being asked to leave. And she had asked him many times to get her keys back, and he said he didn't have them, that he lost them, but apparently it would appear that he still had them because he was in her house every day when the children were at school, and she was gone. Gina saw him there. So that is a lot of what they talked.

So carry Inn at the time of her mother's murder was living in a women's shelter with her baby.

They didn't hear janets and typical barking dog. So what was their reaction other than noting that they heard something, What did they do? And tell us what happens? What they soon see? Ed O'Brien, Tricia's husband, tell us what happens after they notice and shortly after what happens involving the senior Ed O'Brien.

pool the cool or down. They played out there for a while and when they came they were going back in the house to have birthday cake and both Christina there was a clock right over the cellar stairway as you walk in the back door. It was right there. Both of them noted that it was about ten after eight,

eight fifteen when they walked in the house. They went to the dining room to change the baby, the mother, Christina and Virginia directly, and the baby went to the dining room, and the dining room wall is the wall that is the party wall to the Downing home where they were changing the baby, they heard what sounded like somebody crashing down the stairs or falling down the stairs at Janet Downing's home, and Christina was so alarmed. She said, oh my god, did you hear that? Should we do something?

And they stopped for a minute to listen, and Virginia said, you know, their dog barks at everything and not barking, so I think it's probably okay, or the dog would be barking. So the fact that the dog wasn't barking gave them some reassurance that everything was okay, that it wasn't anything untoward. But they were very clear, and they

both were very clear about what time this happened. And then they had the birthday cake, they had the celebration, and they packed up the baby and Christina and her husband and the baby left at about nine o'clock and she Virginia went in to do the dishes. They had heard nothing after that bang, and she noticed when she turned on the water to do the dishes at nine o'clock that there was no water pressure. This was a constant problem that they had in the house, and they'd

had for five years. When anybody was using the water on the downing side of the house, there was no pressure on the wrectless side of the house. So she said it took five minutes to fill up the spaghetti pot with sudsy water to let it soak, and then do all the dishes and the cake dishes and all of that stuff. She said it took a long time for her to finish the dishes. It was nine thirty or after nine thirty by the time she finished the dishes, and the entire time there was no water pressure in

her house. She went into the living room. She was sitting on the couch. Barry was watching television, and she was there for she doesn't know how long, she said, sometime a short time after she finished the dishes and went into the living room, she saw and heard Big At O'Brien as he's known in the neighborhood, run by their front window and say, Barry, come and help me.

There's something wrong. And they both rushed out of the house and followed him into the downing house, and when they got inside the downing house, they saw Janet lying in a pool of blood in her dining room and she appeared to be deceased. And at that just at that moment, Ryan, who was Eddie's best friend and one of the twin sons, started to come into the house and his roller blades in Virginia was in her bare

feet and she stepped on it. What was a picture frame that had fallen in the struggle that Janet had had, and she hoped she hadn't cut her foot or broken the glass, but she knew she had to get Ryan out of that house, and so she took him outside and ed called the police.

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of the police to secure the scene. The police officer who was there would not let the EMTs in in the beginning because he determined by his own calculation by going over to the body and feeling for a pulse in her neck, that she was deceased. She was cold to the touch, that's what he said, and that there was no hope of reviving her, so that he would try to preserved the scene. At some point he changed

his mind and he let them in. So the EMTs came in, three or four of them, and they cut her clothes off and they they you know, they intubated her, they did cp R on her, and finally they put her on a stretcher to carry her out of the house, and she was there was so much blood that it was drifting down off of the stretcher and they had to stop at some point and secure the stretchers so that they wouldn't just have a trail of blood wherever they were going. She was stabbed ninety eight times.

they also she was terribly bruised. Her ear was bruised, her chin was bruised, she was beaten, and there was blood up and down the stairs, the last four or five stairs, on the wall, on the baseboard, on the stairs, in the in the entrance to the dining room, and then a huge amount of blood in the dining room. They determined that she had been she had struggled, and that she had tried to find her way into the

dining room. They believed that she tried to turn the light on or off, it's unclear which way it was when when she was found and they found her, and they determined that the person had at the perpetrator had at this time undressed her, stabbed the bra and then replaced the bra back on her. Because the bra was on her, but it was not hooked in the back.

What was his description which seemed out of whack for out of out of the norm for the considering the temperature. So tell us what she saw and what she thought at that time.

go back to my porch. And just as she was on her porch, she saw Bartie Ortiz, who is janice brother in law. He used to live with her, walking up from the direction of Janet's backyard, passed his cab and his cab was penned in by the ambulances and first responders, the fire trucks and police cars, so that he had been parked there obviously before they got there. And they got there about two minutes after ten, and

she she saw him. He walked over to her house, and she said, it was the hottest, muggiest night, and he looked like he had just stepped out of a shower and he was, you know, very well groomed. And he claimed that he'd been driving cab and he claimed that his dispatcher called him and told him that his sister in law had been murdered. And this is seconds

after Janet was still in out. Her body was still in the house and they were still working on her, so she had by no means been dead, and that seemed very odd to Gina that he should do that. Then he asked to borrow her phone, and he borrowed the phone and he said that he had called it. I can't remember quite who he said he had called, but I think his words were, well, she's officially dead now, but she hadn't even been transported to mass General, which

is where she was declared dead. So it was very, very very odd his behavior and his comments about the state that Janet was in, and the fact that his car was parked there before the first responders, So it appeared from what Gina could could see that he had been there and had been at the scene long before anybody anybody was called.

really bad. And she said, well, and then apparently he called it a tow truck, and the tow truck came and got the cab. And I don't know, actually whatever happened about his keys. I have been told that they were retrieved by the police and returned to him, but I don't know that for a fact.

need to know any of that. That's all they needed to know right now, was they didn't need to know anything else. They needed to know what time Janet had left her house and was that the last time she saw her? And that was it. She said, I have a lot of information about this. She was with me all day and they said, no, we're all set. That's

all we need to know right now. And then for a year she Gina called the Detective Bureau to try to get them to interview her and to tell them that she had information she thought was relevant, and they just said, we have all the information we need. Thank you.

He didn't know she was on her side and he and he didn't know, he didn't know what had happened to her. So he went over to her and he knelt down and he he he, and he shook her and he said, Janet, Janet, are you okay? Are you okay? And and she didn't respond, and she felt funny, and he turned her over and that's when he saw all the stab wounds in her chest and he realized that she was terribly terribly not you know, injured, and not

by simply falling down. He then stood up and turned to go back out the front door, and it was he didn't know where this person came from. It seemed like he had come from behind the front door, he said. But a person who had a nylon stocking over his head confronted him with a huge knife and told him to close the inner door that he had come through,

the inner fourier door. And Eddie backed himself up to that door and closed it with his hand, and the guy held the knife to his neck and he said, you know, if you tell anybody what you've seen, I know where you live, and I know, and I'll kill

your whole family. At that point, they both the perpetrator and Eddie heard the knock at the door of the three friends who had shown up at nine to twenty, and after the three boys stopped knocking, he told Eddie, you know, to get out of there, and you know, just get out of here and don't say anything, and if you say anything, I know where you live to kill your old family. So Eddie took off. He ran through the kitchen, down the cellar stairs and ran straight

out the back cellar door, which was wide open. It was already wide open, and he ran through there. In fact, he didn't want to go turn right and go into onto Hamlet Street because he was afraid the perpetrator might have gone out the front door and be running down Hamlet Street and he would get him and kill him. So he ran into the bushes and they were behind Janet's house, and that's when the three boys who had

been knocking at the front door moved. Three friends of Eddie's and Ryan moved towards the backyard and heard the rustling of Eddie and the bushes, and Eddie jumped out of the bushes and ran down Hamlet Street. And that was at nine twenty. As I said, so, Eddie had left his house telling his father that he was going to burger king, and he decided he would stop to

see if Ryan was home. Yet Ryan had gone swimming, and he knocked on the window encountered that scene that I just described, and that was at nine point fifteen. He left his house at nine fifteen, and at nine twenty the boys knocked on the door, and that's why the guy told him to get out. So for Eddie to have committed this is why it's ludicrous to think

that Eddie could have committed. One of the reasons why it's ludicrous because Eddie would have had five minutes to walk across This is twenty five yards away, and Eddie's spots on the front porch. Most of the neighbors are on their front porch. The whole neighborhood is out to walk across the twenty five yards fifty two feet. I think it is across the street. Murder his neighbor in five minutes, not going to drop of blood on him and flee out the back door without all within five

minutes is just that. It makes absolutely no sense.

which is where he worked. And it was on that little walk that he gets confronted by two teenagers to say give me allion money. He gives him seventeen dollars and he and one and the guy says, well, I think you looked at my face and now I'm going to have to cut you, and sort of lunged at him with the knife, and he grabbed a knife, and he thinks that's where he got cut. But he you know,

he doesn't remember feeling that he got cut anywhere. I mean, he doesn't remember getting hurt in the bushes, which he did. He was not in a he was in a complete state of shock the entire time. You also say, too unbelievable. How many how many fifteen year old boys see their best friend's mother murdered and within another half an hour get mugged. I mean, the chances are a gazillion to one. And as an attorney, it's like you cringe when you hear that, because you think, I will never get a

jury to believe that. You know, and sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, and it's very very hard to deal with. And no one ever believed the mugging story. That's how Eddie became a suspect. You asked me, what evidence did they have? They had no evidence whatsoever. The only evidence they had was that after Eddie got mugged, he walked into the store where he worked, and they called the police to report the mugging, handed Eddie the phone. So that this is at about ten o'clock that he

was mugged. So that's exactly when the first responders are getting to Janet Downing's house and finding her murdered. So they patching these calls, they learn through their radios that Eddie has a cut on his hand at midnight, convenient, and Janet Downing is stabbed. Therefore we should look at Eddie. That is basically what happened, because when the police came and looked at the empts came, they looked at Eddie's hand. They said there was no blood. He wasn't bleeding, He

didn't have any blood on his hands, you know. They said, you know, we think you're okay to just go home. They let Then the police drove him home, and it was his grandfather who said, no, you need to go to the hospital and you need to get a technis shot if nothing else, And so his family drove him

up to the hospital. And it was then that the summer of a police dispatched somebody from the District Attorney's office and somebody from Somerville up to the hospital where Eddie was being seen for the cut on his hand and swabbed the blood on his legs.

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Eddie O'Brien came to be the number one suspect. Let's talk about what happens to Eddie O'Brien immediately after, and you can start introducing some of the legal people that are responsible for Eddie O'Brien being arrested. Shortly after this little bit of information comes to light. For those people, the.

not returned. He was not going to tell the police anything because he was terrified that his family was in jeopardy. His mother had just had a baby, his grandfather was dying. He you know, family would have to leave the residence. He just you know, so he did not tell the

truth to the police. It was some time later that they they, as I said, they swabbed the blood on his legs and they claim they allege I don't know because we haven't tested it to but they alleged that one of those one swap one drop of blood on his shin tested as an AB type blood and his blood was oh and Janet Downings was AB. Now they never did DNA on it. We never determined if it

was Janet Downing's blood or not. But they determined that because that blood was a match, and his fingerprints were found in Janet Downing's blood on the back of that door when he closed the door, that not only was he the prime suspect, he was the one and only suspect from the minute he called in to the police, from midnight convenient until he was tried and convicted two years later. They never ever.

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care of her children. And that was all the info that Gina had that the police said they didn't need.

the court. The court ordered a psychological evaluation until the psychologist submitted his report in December and said, you know what's striking is the absence of motive and uh, it was once that report was submitted and the district attorney realized what trouble he was in, even though he doesn't have to prove motives, immediately came up with theories of a motive. And his theory started with that Eddie had an unusual interest in in Janet Downing, that he was

more curious about her than he should have been. And then it evolved into that this interest had a sexual overtime to it. And you know, by the middle of the of this, the transfer hearings and the course that this case took in the juvenile court, you know he was he was a full blown sexual predator essentially, is what they were trying to say. And that of course never never held water with anybody and was not ever presented at his adult trial because it was just not provable.

Uh there there, you know, but they went with the most they went. By the time they got to the adult court and did the adult trial, they went back to he had an unusual interest in her.

I mean, yeah, I'm sorry, District Attorney Riley. And at the same time, Governor Well was seeking to run for a Senate seat and mister Riley was seeking to run for the Attorney General's office in preparation for eventually running for governor. And this was a perfect storm, a perfect cause to come to the people with that you know, we're going to get tough on juvenile crime and we

support these laws. So that the law used to be that if you were under the age of sixteen, that the government had if you were between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, you could not be charged with murder and adult court if you were sixteen or sixteen and above, the government could come in and prove that you were not a good candidate for rehabilitation and asked that you

be transferred to adult court. While Eddie was in the system, those laws changed, and they changed as a direct result of this case and some others that had occurred in downtown Boston, and so that eventually what we ended up was with the law that juveniles as young as fourteen can be tried in adult court, and that it was their obligation to prove to a juvenile judge if they were between fourteen and sixteen, it was the juveniles obligation to prove that he could be rehabilitated. So you can

see what the conundrum was for Eddie O'Brien. He had to prove that he could be rehabilitated from a murder he didn't commit. Plus, they were creating a whole new juvenile court system, and so the courts were in flux. And then there was split sentencing where you could they could sentence you and you do part of your time as a juvenile part of your time as an adult. And Eddie was one of the first people to be

uh to be subjected to that law. And the governor was vocal in his support of that law as Eddie's case was pending and referring to the case, and the governor was appointing judges to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts who would who would rule on that case, and and and he was appearing in rallies with the Downing family standing beside him, and it was pretty spectacular.

to change his clothes hide his old, sweaty clothes. And then you know, anybody who committed the person who committed this crime, or the people that committed this crime, if it was more than one person were covered in blood head to toe, in their hair, under their fingernails, on their eyes, on their eye lashes, they would take more than a shower to get the blood off of you.

So he's claiming that he walked out of this scene covered in blood somehow put in his old clothes without getting any blood on them, and without having the opportunity to shower. And it was just ludicrous, ludicrous. So and the timeline, you know, I mean, how how he's ignoring the timeline, he's ignoring the fact that there's no suggestion

that he ever changed clothes. People saw him at nine p fifteen in these clothes, They saw him at ten o'clock in these clothes, and there was no change of clothes, and they're also ignoring the fact that he didn't have time to do any of the things that needed to be done in order to change his clothes and murder somebody and then come out with out any blood not only on his clothes, but on him anywhere at least around his cuticles, under his fingernails. Nothing.

other people at some time previous to this. The Again, it's the wounds that Janet Downing suffered, Some of them were up to four inches deep, which would have meant that and the knife Eddie had had two hilts, not just one. They found one hilp, so that the perpetrator, if he used Eddie's knife, or if Eddie were the perpetrator had used the knife, he would have had to have downing with a three inch knife and gone one inch into the handle with one of the hilts still

on it. And there was no evidence of any markings of that kind, no bruising around any of the stab wounds that she had, and some of them were four inches deep. One wound went through her chest, severed two ribs and punctured her lung and went into her liver. I believe that's how deep it was. You just can't do that with a three inch blade. It was five eighths of an inch wide, and some of the wounds were twice that wide, So it didn't make any sense

that that would be the murder weapon. But that's what he went with. That's and he got his conviction with them.

judge in these transfer cases. So the transfer is to see if he's going to be raised to adult court. Judge Paul Hefferman as the judge. How does it proceed with Judge Paul Hefferman before we talk about jump ahead, that tell us what he said at the time, what he was asked to do at the time.

the court psychiatrist appointed by the court. Judge Heffernan determined that he should remain in the juvenile system, where if found guilty, he would have done time in ju juvenile detention until his twenty first birthday, at which point he would have been transferred to an adult jail or prison for another fifteen years after that. In other words, even if if he'd been found guilty as a juvenile and Judge Heffernan had not been removed from the case, he

would be out of jail by now. He'd be free. Judge Heffernan. However, a week after he made his decision, he was called by a fellow judge who told him that the judges above them had made it clear that unless he changed his opinion, he would be removed from the case. Judge Heffernan, and thank God for Judge Heffernan, because he's the only one who tried to stop this train wreck. Judge Heffernan's response was, I would rather walk naked through Sullivan's station than change my opinion. Let them

do what they have to do. And he just sat back. And so the District Attorney appealed the heffern In decision and asked that heffer be removed. The Supreme Court sent it back to Judge Heffernan to consider additional evidence. Judge Heffernan. The district attorney presented a motion for rechoosal, asking Judge

Heffernan to step down. Judge Heffernan denied that he refused to step down and he said they would proceed with taking new evidence as ordered by the Supreme Court, and at which point the District Attorney appealed the judge's denial of his motion up to the Supreme Court, who had already considered he had asked already to have Judge Heffernan removed, and the Supreme Court declined to do that, although they had been told that he was going to be removed,

and so after the second appeal and Judge Heffernan refused to voluntarily recuse himself, the Supreme Court ordered him off the case.

the governor had other aspirations as well well. This is you talk about to make a claim of manipulation.

they want done politically because it's not it's wrong legally. Yes, so Ja Zoel's a good guy, is what I wanted to say right.

a travesty of justice. And also with this doctor Richard Barnum, and something very interesting legally adding making a forty one page report assessing whether he can be rehabilitated, Eddie O'Brien, but just addendum and then so explain them the actual manipulation that you describe with Riley and with this Barnum and what they want to do and how they twist some information and try they do not get it through with Hefferman, but they're still always trying to get a

certain amount of information tell us about that manipulation and what that information is that they've tried to squeeze out of.

very confusing situation. And d A. Riley immediately met with him and and told him, oh, oh, well, then you don't know about the fact that that that he was questioned when some of his friends put a mailbox on fire, And you don't know about all the things that we

should have told you about. There was a laundry list of things that he came forward with that he had every opportunity to talk to Barnum about at any point during his three month investigation, But only after he submitted his report did he determine that these things should be shared with doctor Barnum. They were completely in my opinion, this is all my opinions based on what I see

as the evidence. He gave Barnum a list of things that would be troublesome, for instance, some allegations of watching women undress and being concerned about whether or not Janet Downing was having a lesbian relationship with one of the one of her best friends, or things, you know, just things that would were of absolutely no consequence or import or relationship to this case that he suddenly decided to

throw into the mix. And essentially, uh, he the district Attorney Riley, had Barnum go and interview all these people to give him these stories. Uh. And none of those stories were ever proven to be true, and none of them were ever ever raised at his actual trial because they were not based in fact. So uh, that's you know, it's best basically trying to create a motive, and that's what he was trying to do.

so the public's view. And I think I pointed this out when I showed that virtually there was only one person in a pool of two hundred and seventy five people who were considered for jury duty in this case that had not heard about this case. Thirty three percent of those people had already decided he was guilty and had to be excused without a piece of evidence being heard. The case against him was a foregone conclusion. It had

been tried in the press by that point. And I asked Barnum about that, and I asked him about why he changed his opinion, because in his addendum to his report, which was twice as long as his original report, he decided no, Eddie O'Brien wasn't amenable to rehabilitation, and that just never sat right. I mean, that felt to me that he was capitulating to the political pressure that he was feeling. He was the director of a court clinic at that point, he was a government employee, etc. He

said to me that yes, he felt the political pressure. Basically, he changed his opinion because by the time this Eddie was we got to this point in the proceedings, Eddie was now seventeen years old, not fifteen when he first met him, and he would be aging out of the juvenile system at eighteen now, so that there was no point to talk about rehabilitation because by the time his adult trial took place, he would be too old to

be in the juvenile system. So, I mean, I just I asked him, why didn't you just say that, Why didn't you just say, you know, I don't need to write an addendum. I can just tell you that there's no system that can provide rehabilitation if he needs rehabilitation in the time that he has left in the juvenile system.

And he said, that's a very good point. Maybe that's what I should have said, because essentially it raised the whole course of the case because once he wrote that addendum, Heffrinon refused to accept that addendum into evidence, and that's what started the appeal process, and that's what the Supreme Court remanded the case for to say that Judge Heffernan

should consider Barnum's addendum. That's why that's sent back. And I believe that the judges in authority were hoping that Heffrinon would quietly step away voluntarily, and he was not going to do that. He was not going to betray his moral stance that he had made the right decision and I'm not going to capitulate to political power.

for their safety. H And finally after two weeks he told them and he said, listen, I did go in there. But anyway, that all of the DNA that was found, that that was attribute built to Eddie was consistent with his story, completely consistent with his story. The DNA under Janet's fingernails, Eddie is excluded as the primary source of that DNA. There's a DNA of Janet and another DNA unidentified DNA on the alleged murder weapon, the alleged hilt

of the knife that they found, the metal piece. Eddie was completely excluded from as a contributor to DNA on that, But there is an unidentified male DNA on that hilt and Janet Downing's DNA, so he is not tied to the murder weapon by DNA. He is not tied to under Janet's fingernails, which is the first source of DNA that they looked for, because that's what she bought for her life with. They didn't even test the DNA under her fingernails until right before the adult trial. I think, well,

I don't know, I don't know why. My opinion again, is they didn't do it because they knew it would not be Eddie's and they wanted to wait until the last possible moment before they revealed that that DNA was not hers, and their expert witness testified that it basically, in her opinion, the DNA was inconclusive, which is not allowed into evidence. If it's inconclusive, it's not allowed into evidence. So it never should have gone in if it was inconclusive.

There's definitely identifiable DNA that is not Eddie's on the murder weapon.

as I said, uh, the jurors. Jurors were overwhelmed with it and and uh, and it was it was very confusing. His own attorney did not capitalize on the fact that Eddie's DNA was absent from the two most important places that it should have been found, either in his opening or his closing statement. He alluded to it in his cross examination, but frankly, it appeared to me that he didn't understand that Eddie's DNA was excluded from this. He got the reports very late, and I don't think he

was completely familiar with them for what they meant. He didn't have his own expert to explain them to him. The only real thing they came out at trial was that there was on the hilt of the knife the DNA was identifiable, and it was not Eddie's. As to Janet's fingernails, that was never really an issue at trial. It just slipped by and slipped in as inconclusive. But in fact the report is clear that he is excluded, it's not inconclusive, and I didn't have the report at

the time. I didn't know that. I didn't know that until I read it this year when I was writing the book. His parents didn't know that until I read it this year when I was writing the book. Many of these things were complete revelations to me, and I had been with the case since the very beginning. I did not understand that I had no access to the reports.

I wasn't given the reports or the evidence, and I trusted that his attorney was doing what he needed to do and was presenting whatever evidence in Eddie's favor there was. But in fact, there was a lot of evidence in Eddie's favor, including the fact that there was communication between the District Attorney's office and the laboratory where they did a preliminary DNA test on the help of the knife

A year four. At EA's trial, herman at his DNA was not on it, and he stopped all further testing until further notice, but didn't tell the defense that they had done a preliminary test, and then they told the trial judged that they had just sent that hilt out for testing. A couple of weeks into July of the before his September trial, when in fact that had been sent out for testing a year before and they knew his DNA was not on it and was not going

to come up on it. So the final report issued saying his DNA was not on it, but that was news to his defense attorney. It was only me comparing the reports and the correspondence between the lab and the district Attorney's office that I realized they learned that his DNA wasn't on that a year before that, and then they ordered all further testing seek to cease so that they didn't have to produce a report and that would have gone into the juvenile case.

himself through voracious reading. He reads tons of history books. Is he stays current on political issues, and he's very, very opinionated about political issues and has very strong feelings about things. He's got a wonderful sense of humor. When I first met Eddie, he was a little kid. He blushed every time I talked to him. Okay, cheeks would turn bright red. He would stare at his sneakers, he would smile. You know, he just he was a child.

He was he was such a young adolescent, you know, with no experience whatsoever in the ways of the world. His neighborhood was a pretty protected little neighborhood, and you know, and he had a little group of friends that he hung with since he was a toddler. You know, his life was completely different. He was incarcerated with violent juveniles who had murdered and who would murder again. He was with kids who had mental health problems, learning disabilities, all

kinds of behavioral issues. That's where he grew up. That's where he learned, and you know, that's who he had to socialize with. And he does not call jail the real world. He knows what the real world is. The real world is his friend are his friends and his family outside of prison. They have stuck by him completely for the last twenty one plus years. He talks to his parents every single day on the phone. I think twice a day. He speaks to his siblings every day,

one or more of them. He's a godfather to his nieces and nephews, not nephews, no nephews. Yet the babies come to visit him. They know him his uncle Eddie. He you know, he has just done everything he can to remain as socialized as he can with people from the outside. He deals with life the way you have to deal with it. You have to take it one day at a time. Nothing is guaranteed. And he said that was the most important lesson he learned. When he

arrived in a dope prison. Some old timers took him under their wing, and they taught him how to do time. And that's what he said to me. He said, I wouldn't have made it if they hadn't taught me how this, how to do time. He's patient, you know, he is funny. He he loves to joke around. He loves to call, he loves to find call me out when I'm wrong, and and and uh, you know, needle me about it. He argues with me. Sometimes, he gets angry with me if I don't agree with him. Sometimes he you know,

he's a normal kid. He's not a kid now, he's a man. He's thirty six years old, he's got gray hair. He's not that little kid anymore. He knows. He's very, very why so wise. He's so much wiser than I was at thirty six. And he was so much younger at fifteen than I was at fifteen. It's unbelievable. But he's just a wonderful guy. He proudly, proudly calls himself a Roman Catholic. He belongs to a Rosary group. He goes to the ass every Sunday. He's never stopped doing that.

These are not things he does because he hopes to get paroles someday, because he knows that's not going to happen for him. He does these things because this is what makes his life worth living.

really not no representation. He's never filed anything. He got a direct appeal automatically, because everybody who sentenced to life without parole gets an automatic appeal. That's the only thing he's really filed. He has many, many, many appellate, very very strong appellate issues in that legal issues that that will be brought to life, I'm sure by his legal team, and they're working very hard at that as we speak.

So it's an open case and and you know, I would I just can't wait until there is some some more movement, and I would love to see the case, the investigation reopened, because I don't I want to know who is it that killed Janet Downing, and I would

hope that her family wants to know that. And I know that they've been convinced that this that Eddie must be the true murderer because he was convicted and because they were told that, but they weren't told all of the things that I discovered when I went through the entire file. And I think the Janet Downing deserves that much respect that that we would find her a real killer and bring her real killer to justice. Now that

may or may not free Eddie. There are lots of stories of people confessing to murders that other people are doing time for and the court's still not letting them out. You know, it's a very arbitrary and uphill situation trying to undo a wrongful conviction. But I have every confidence in the world that that's going to happen in this case.

And I know that because I've you know, I know Eddie, and I know Eddie can stick with something until the right thing happens, and he I just believe, you know, I believe that this is going to happen, and I believe he is going to be returned to a normal life. And if I didn't believe that, I would have a really hard time putting my head on the pillow every night.