SCAPEGOAT-THE CHINO HILLS MURDERS-J. Patrick O'Conner

the murdered family's hilltop house. After the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department established that he had hid there, it focused on him as the lone assailant, despite numerous eyewitness report reports that implicated three white men as the perpetrators Kevin Cooper was convicted of the murders in nineteen eighty five and has been on death row at San Quentin since then.

Scapegoat shows how the Sheriff's office and the District Attorney's office s Bernardino County framed him for the horrific murders, and how the justice system has failed him at almost every turn in his long drawn out appeal process. As O'Connor's shocking but thorough investigation shows, the sheriff's department discarded information that pointed at other perpetrators, destroyed evidence that exculpitated

exculpated Cooper in planet evidence that implicated him. If we're not for a court ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal injection controversy, Cooper, with no appeals remaining, would have been executed.

lived in an Arabian horse community. They had a hilltop house, a hilltop ranch house, and their neighbors all raised like they did, Arabian horses, right, and they were chiropractors by trade. They're both forty one years old, Doug and Peggy Ryan, and they had these they had two children, Jessica and Josh ten and eight and a half. And they lived in this, you know of kind of idyllic life that they had going there. They were doing exactly what they

wanted to be doing, raising Peggy. Peggy was devoted to showing and raising, breeding and showing these Arabian horses. And Doug worked as a chiropractor at a clinic and nearby nearby clinic Santa Anna. So that's kind of the scene. That's what's worth. That's where they are. And down the road, three miles down the road from Chino Hills is a very large prison complex called the California Institute for Men,

which houses forty five hundred or so felons. Anybody any wanting, anybody convicted of a crime in southern California is processed through the California Institute for Men. And Kevin Cooper was arrested in nineteen eighty three on the basis of uh two burglaries in Los Angeles. The city of Los Angeles. But when he was arrested, he was he gave him a phony, an idea that he'd stolen from a inmate in a hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Pennsylvania. Right, this is a kind of, you know, it kind of a

screwed up case. But when they when they arrest him, he shows this, he shows this false height ID and the guy's name was David Troupman. And when they processing and when when they put him on trial for the burglaries, he just does a plea. He pleads to you know, I think he pled the four years to run consecutively

under the name of David Trautman. So when they're processing Kevin cooper at at Chino, at Chino at the California Institute for Men, and they process him as David Trautman, who had no arrest in California because he never set foot in California. He lives in Pennsylvania. And so they put him in minimum security. And the first day he was in minimum security, I mean he slept there one night, and then next morning or excuse me, next afternoon, he walks out. He just walks out the front door of

through a hole of the fence. There's no guards on the perimeter here, and he walks his way through countryside to you know, three miles down. He comes into this Arabian horse country and he finds this garage that looks like it's the door slightly open, and he opens it up. Nobody seems to be in the house, and he holds up there for two days. And this house is one hundred and twenty five yards below the Ryan's house. It's such a steep hill though, that he can't even see

the Ryan's house from where he is. It's just straight up. I've been there. It's just impossible, particularly that time of year when this was June of nineteen eighty three, when all the trees are in bloom. You can't see you couldn't see the place. But anyway, that's where he is. And the Ryans are Ryan's and their daughter and a house guest are brutally murdered on a Saturday night, around

midnight on June the fifth, nineteen eighty three. And when they find out that Cooper had holed up in this house for two days, as you said in your introduction, the Sam Bernardino Homicide Department, they just fixed in, fixed in on him. As the you know here, they said, well, this makes a lot of sense. Here's an escape convict, and they just made him their number one suspect and in fact said he was the one.

Kevin Cooper's background. Okay, he pled guilty to burglary, he's using an assumed name, but tell us about a little bit more about Kevin Cooper and his criminal past, so that we have a good idea if Kevin Cooper, even in our minds, could be capable of such murders. And it is very important later on and obviously, well.

off and escape. And so they caught him and they added twelve months to his sentence and he served that in more of a maximum security kind of penitentiary, and then he was caught again. After he was paroled, he got caught again at age twenty four for stealing stuff. And before they they were gonna he was convicted, he pled out. He pled out, It pled out, but before they could sentence him, he either feigned or contended that he had he was having hallucinations or some of that sort.

And so the judge asked, said he should be sent to this mental hospital, state mental hospital in Pennsylvania for pre sentencing evaluation. And he was there for like three weeks, and from there he just walked out one night and escaped. He walked out through a window on a bowling now they had in this place, and escaped again. So this

was his second escape. Now, the point about him using this phony idea of David Trutman was that had had it been known in California that this guy had escaped twice from Pennsylvania penitentiaries or state mental hospitals, he would have been put in maximum security, right but as the as known as David Trumpman, with no other record other than these two burglaries, he was classified as a minimum

security risk. And you know, I mean the first day he's in minimum security, the first night after he sleeps there, he walks away again.

about being the wrong place at the wrong time. If any of these things had changed slightly, Kevin would have never been in this house. I'll say the woman had left two days later instead of the day she did leave, he would have never gone into the house because it was occupied. But she left, and so he found the house to be empty and on. So this is a Friday, Friday night, and then Saturday morning, about ten o'clock, a woman who does live there, like you know, she comes in.

She and her husband live there like one week in a month, and they have stuff in the one and there's there's four bedrooms only one of the bedrooms has anything in it, a bed and some closet with toiletries in the bathroom. She comes in to get her sweater on Saturday morning about ten o'clock and Kevin now realizes that this is no longer a safe place for him to be right, so he makes up his mind that

that night he will leave at dark. Now he is the only black person in Chino Hills, so he waits for dark and he begins the hitchhike to to the United States the Mexico Mexico border down near Tiawana, right, and he takes He catches two rides to get him there, doesn't he doesn't have a dime on him. He spends the night in the bus station on the United States side of the border, and the next morning, typical Kevin, he takes he robs a woman, takes a person of

a woman's It's kind of lucky for him. It's got one hundred and five dollars in quarters in these rolls inside this person about forty dollars in cash, right, so he now has enough money to actually get by for a few days. He crosses the border into Tijuana and he buys himself a room he rents a room and it's for six dollars a night in a hotel in Tijwan. So that's around you know, that's that's the next day. This will be Sunday. Now that night I said, these

murders happened around midnight. The Ryan's and all the other people who lived in this area of Chino Hills, they are all horse people of one sort of one sort of another. There was a couple that drove off that was dropping off a trainer after a day at the races. They dropped a trainer off on the only road that leads away from the Ryansill Top house. This one road comes down and these people are after they dropped him off.

They're waiting to come out the driveway and they can't come out because there's this car just barreling down this road. And they look in the car and they see three white men and what is it? Turns out to be the Ryan family. This is the murdered family. They're stolen station wagon. They see a station wagon, they see three white people in it. So when the murders are announced, when it becomes big news the next day, this is the biggest crime, by the way in San Bernardino County

History number one. It's his big. It's more brutal, it's more gross than the Tate, you know, the Manson murder, Manson murders, the Tate LaBianca murders. These are worse to the crowd brutality of these murders. So anyway, this couple calls in the next day and says they sell three white guys in a car.

And but anyway, he survives this, miraculously survives. And the next morning, around noon, the father of the other boy who's there it's just spending the night, he discovers what's happening. He can look through the master bedroom and he sees this terrible scene. But he also can see that Josh can move. So Josh makes a small movement and the father comes in and Josh can't speak, and they call

nine one one. They airvak him to a nearby hospital and at the emergency room they've devised this communications system of a chart with all the letters of the alphabet and the letters one through nine, I mean, the numbers one through nine and the words yes and no. And so they take him through his name, his address, his phone number. He gets all this stuff right. Then they say who attacks you? And he laboriously goes through this

process of identifying three white men. So this is on Sunday, and this would be the next morning, this couple would call in about three white men. So we had these two eyewitness identifications of three white men involved in the Ryan murders, you know, right out there on day one.

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And his wife is five foot eight, one hundred and forty five pounds, and she is the one who raises these enormous Arabian horses. She trains them, she lists bells, of hey, she's an incredibly strong person. Both these Ryans have loaded weapons in their master bedroom. Beggy has a ruger pistol. Doug has a loaded rifle with a scope. I mean these guns are found right after their bodies are discovered, these weapons are loaded all right. The scene.

There's blood everywhere in this room. It's incredible, as I said it was, It's worse than I don't care what people think about the Tate Lapianca merkers murders. These are worse. There's blood everywhere. There's blood on every single thing in this room. This is a royal battlefield where these people fought for their lives like fiends. They have twenty five defensive wounds on all the people in this all the people in this attack, Doug and Peggy Ryan have all

these defensive wounds in their hands and their arms. The little girl, she has the most defensive wounds. She fought, She fought as hard as she could fight. So they're this battle going on in here. The little girl makes it outside the house for a while. She actually was able to get outside and be brought back in. So anybody who would say that one perpetrator could have done this is just you know, ignoring every single thing you anybody else would just deduce, is that it's an impossibility.

to be involved. When this became inconvenient for the county prosecutor to you know, having now four weapons because another weapon used was an ice pick, when it became inconvenient to have two knives, the medical examiner, even though we turned down any notion that there was there could have been one knive inolved one knife involved.

You've got this one assailant. Why would he or what's the why would he or how could he use three weapons of one time? Where where where are these weapons? If two of them are in his hands, where's the other one?

The guy said his knife was in another whole part of you know, he kept his main house, not in this little house where he went one week and every you know, one week and every month. So the idea that one person could or would use three or four weapons is just absurd. And all these people, by the way, all the victims had this was they were attacked, that they were attacked by two people at one time. I can tell you that they had hatchet wounds and knife wounds.

All the victims had these terrible hatchet wounds and knife ones had delivered with great force. I mean they were there were three amputations, There were like twenty bones broken, there were concussions, there was it was a terrible, terrible thing. There were one hundred and forty four different wounds inflicted on these on these four four victims.

pants pockets. None of this is touched. I mean it's sitting there right on the counter. It's not even touched. So here's a guy that doesn't have a dime doing dime to his name, just you know, just escape from prison. There's no money in prison. You can't the prisoner has money. They may have stamps, but they don't have money. So Cooper would go in there. The theory was he had to kill him, you know, to get the car. Well, the Ryans left their keys in their car every single night.

They and they had two vehicles. They had a station wagon and they had a truck, a pickup truck. When you know, the murders are discovered, they go out to the Ryan's pickup truck. The keys are sitting, you know, right in the ignition. And then the people, all the neighbors said, oh yeah, they kept their keys, always kept their keys right in the car. So Cooper, and I mentioned to you before, had stolen over two hundred cars in his life. He wants to steal a car, he doesn't,

I mean the key. He'd he'd go look at the car first, the keys are inady, he just drive off, sure and say thank you very much. How How would how would going into this house and killing this whole family, leaving their son for dead and not taking any of the valuable things in here. How would that help his how would that help Cooper in any way?

the room. Everybody came down to see this. The whole DA's office, all the all the brass from the San Bernardinos County Sheriff's office, they all came down to see this. This is as I said to you, Dan, this is the biggest crime in the history of this county. So they just totally, you know, contaminate, can contaminate this crime scene,

and they do. They botch it so badly that on the day that they find his bodies on a Sunday on Monday, they kind of kind cover their tracks by the way they're using the there's blood in both the Ryan's bathrooms, which shows me that had to be more than one person. You mean, if you're one person, you wouldn't go into two bathrooms to wash off. One would be enough. Well, these cops there, these brass these cops that are there, they don't put a portage on out

in front. They use the Ryan's bathroom their second bathroom where there's blood evidence in the bathroom. They eat at the they eat at the Ryan's dining room table. Yeah, they so so they they've they've just they're incompetent. So they they now have a big problem on their hands. They they and they sent over this this crime lab team that there's all this blood here, and they don't

get right. They could have recreated this whole crime scene at least the movements of the body like Doug For example, the father, he made it on his feet from one side of the bed to the other and then back to his own side. I mean, he's mobile through this attack. And this is one big dude. They could have really shown, you know, all this, They could have shown the mother's movements.

But when they took the samples, they just put them all together, like you know, they'd take samples from three or four different places and put them in one damn thing, and you know, therefore lose all the value of the samples. They were just incompetent. They had people there that've been there like ten months and had never been in a multiple murder crime scene before, didn't know how, didn't know what to do. So I think, you know, dawned on them that they had they had really screwed it up.

And then out of out of nowhere comes this incredible break to them that an escape convict has holed up one hundred and twenty five yards down below this house, and their problems are solved.

like these are all these guys are ranchers. They raised these horses. He sends in like his foreman and an assistant to him. And now in one of the bedrooms they find a hatchet sheath sheath you know the thing that covers up a hatchet on the floor, and they find a bloody, bloody button from a prison jacket on the floor. Now, I remember I just said the day before, two homicides had taken with their guns drawn, went through there,

didn't find anything of evidentiary value. And the very next day, hello, we find a hatchet sheath and a bloody prison jacket button in the bedroom. So once they find that, you know, I put fine in quotes quote unquote, they found it. Cooper's now the man and the sheriff, the sheriff of sam Bernandina and goes on you know, the news conference and says we've identified the assailant. It's a lone assailant

and he's escapee Kevin Cooper. Now, Cooper had gone to Mexico that night, as I mentioned, he'd hitch tig down there and had to sleep in a bus depot and then he stole the money, et cetera. That night, his girlfriend from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania calls him up and said that he was wanted for questioning in conjunction with the murders of a family and the girl. The girlfriend said in a weird, weird part of California, or and then you know, a weird name part to California with Chino Hills. She

never heard of Chino Hills nowhere, has hardly anybody else. So, uh, this is the first he's heard of this. And that night he sees his mugshot on TV in Tijuana. So from Cooper, the next next day or so, he goes to eighty miles south, catches a bus and goes eighty miles south. Uh, further into Mexico and try to get a little further away, but he takes it. He takes this job just for room and board on a old Rick,

could he boat? The guy's kind of a guy. The guy is kind of a drug runner between Costa Rica and the United States. He likes to he likes to go down and get these big old pounds of marijuana. And he he enlisted Cooper to help him, like paint the boat and get it. It's an old wooden boat. Uh to do this? So Cooper just what the signs

on with this guy and this guy? It eventually comes back to the United States and Uh, after eight weeks Cooper being on the lamb avoiding the biggest man hunting California history, he is arrested in uh Sans in southern California, you know if I forget the name of the town. But he's arrested in in the United States and south southern California and then brought back to brought back to Chino Hills where you know they would eventually go on try what was.

it was thousands and thousands of pages of discovery. Well, this public defender, he refused the judges offered to have assistant counsel or to have paralegals or any of this. He just wanted to do it by himself. So he never got around the reading the discovery. He was instead kind of boning up, making himself into kind of a blood a cerology expert. He thought that was where the rebber would meet. The road was on these blood things.

In the trial. Blood evidence matters, And so he didn't read the discovery and didn't find out that a woman had turned in these bloody coveralls right that her boyfriend had left in her the bottom part of a walking closet the night of the Chino Hills murders. He'd come home about three in the morning, and he just stayed long enough to change out of these bloody coveralls that had Arabian horse hair on the lower pant legs and then get and then leave the house. He was there

like ten minutes. And so she turned these in the day they announced Cooper as the loan assailant. This woman turned in these bloody coveralls.

speak to homicide. Well, homicide never contacts her. What she would have told him was the boyfriend was a convicted murderer. He had just been released a year before on a he admitted murdering a seventeen year old girl. That's part of a gang hit that he'd done, and he turned into gang leader. He turned states everything.

he had on when he left the house that day. Right, and the cops found outside, you know, down the roof in the line is about a mile and a half down as a bar. And outside this bar, not far from this bar, they found a bloody tan T shirt. And this woman said, she said it was fruit of the loom, size medium, and it has a pocket in the front. Well, that's exactly the T shirt that they they found outside this bar right the day or you know, two days after the murders. They found this shirt, this

bloody shirt, so she had it. They could have wrapped this case up. They could have wrapped this case up the very day they said Cooper was the war and they could have wrapped it up. But nobody ever came out to see the woman.

I have a hard time with that. I can't picture this Furrow being in the Aryan Brotherhood because he was a rat. I mentioned to you that he turned in the gang leader and he wants state's evidence. Yeah, I think Furrows served almost all this time in administrative custody where they put rats, you know, so they're not killed while they're in prison. Sure, I'm just I'm using kind of prison lingo here. But when I call him a rat, that mean he's a snitch.

So he made that initial mistake. What are some of the other mistakes and tell us basically what the prosecution case hinges on, because he's got five or six things here, including and police explain because this is important too, the shoe prints and these keads pros to tell us about that.

alleged came that matched Cooper and the two. Their biggest thing was there was shoe prints on a spa cover and on a bed sheet from the Ryans Ryan's master bedroom that matched the shoe that's distributed at the California Institute for Men, this prison where Cooper was. We called pro kid prokeead dudes, so that was a big thing.

They at trial, they tried, they they tried to say that the I mean they did say they established that the pro kid dudes were only only available in these intitutions such as prisons, that they were a prison issued shoe. You couldn't buy them retail. So if a pro cad dude showed up, a print showed up, it was highly likely that it came from a prisoner. And we had a prisoner who escaped and admitted to being in this house below, So that was kind of the That was

the biggest thing they had, was this the pro kids. Now, the warden of the Chino Hills Prison she heard about this in the news. She read about the newspaper that they were making this claim that these pro kid dudes were special issue. So she researched that, she had her staff research the issue, and it turns out they just buy these things like everybody else does. Through this like a catalog like a serious catalog. So they're available at retail all over there, all over the state of California.

They're one of the biggest sellers in New York and Chicago. This shoe was very popular retail and there was nothing special issue about him. So she calls up that head of homicide and says, you know, I hear what you're saying in the newspaper at the preliminary hearing, but it's not true. These shoes, there's nothing special about them. But nonetheless, at the trial that they just ignored her, put her, put her, you know, just discarded that and didn't turn

over to the defense that she'd said this. So a trial, they they established this special issue shoe. So this really implicates Cooper. That's what they call inculpatory evidence. I mean, this really includes him. There you go, you're a prisoner, and this shoe prints only made by shoes coming from a prison. So that was huge that in the little

little tiny drop of blood that they totally manufactured. The By the way that the print on the spa write about this in the book, the print on the spa and the print on the sheet, they weren't seen by anybody. These were the people the people who were there, the professionals that they did send over their homicide detectives. Nobody noticed anything like this. It's only when it gets to this lab, the head guy in the lab. And this is kind of you know, it is hard to believe.

It's brutal, but it's true that the head guy in the lab is stealing. It's a heroin addict. He is stealing. He gets caught stealing five pounds of heroin, which has a street value of like, you know, I don't know, three hundred thousand dollars. He he is the head of the crime lab, and he's the one that comes up with this little drop of blood and he comes up with the footprint on the sheet that nobody else had seen. Yeah, so that's what you're dealing with here. The sheriff at

the time. By the way, the whole chapter about this guy, he's stealing. From the time he takes over that he's the sheriff for eight years, he steals. He admits the stealing over five hundred illegal guns out of the property room. You know, guns that are a lot of them are

banned in California, abandoned the United States. You know, they're confiscated during different things on anyone of this guy is a super thief and stealing these guns, and then the guy running the crime lab is a heroin addict, and neither one of them get.

prossecut cution at all. You know, if they'd have prosecuted him, I mean he's got the whole thing, he could have blown up the whole Kevin Cooper k saying, oh, yeah, well, I here's so they didn't prosecute him. So this place is corrupt. And this is one of the things I think that I'm finding out now right about these cases is that it you know, it's it's not like there's one or two bad apples involved. To get to frame an innocent person, The whole place has to be corrupt

from the top down. You have to have a corrupt sheriff, you have to have corrupt homicide detectives, the crime lab has to be totally corrupt, the medical examiner has to be UH has to be corrupt, and the prosecuting, the turning has to be complicit. Would way with all this corruption's going on right under his nose?

fund in this county. I mean, I'm talking about the sheriff running a slush fund where he would hand out to like four or five different people these checks for two or three hundred dollars a month, year in and year out. These guys would get it and they'd have little like parties with it, you know, a little Friday night gets together where they take care of you know. This is that kind of county that it was. This county was really bad.

cash as being victimless victimless crime. But to actually frame someone here has to have a different motivation than you know, business as usual. There has to have been some motivation here. This this Kevin Cooper is not, say, a killer that got away with murder, and so why don't we just prosecute him now when we have the opportunity. You see that in a lot of cases. But what do you think really was in this particular? Was it a matter

of convenience? They bungled, so they were covering their tracks, and.

the Brady rules. But they held it. They held it back for twelve days and they didn't give it to the to the defense until the day that Kevin Cooper

was scheduled to testify in his own defense. So the public defender didn't want to stop the momentum of the trial, and the judge offered him the suspended trial right there, and he just made this terrible tactical mistake, I guess, a strategic mistake, not stopping the trial and going out and personally interviewing this guy about this claim that there

was an aryan brotherhood deal. Instead, he just proceeded right on, and the jury never got The jury never heard one thing about an Aryan Brotherhood hit or anybody else confessing to the to the crime. Never he never made it to the jury. Rible mistake, and.

head up off the table. But while they're there, they see that two of the guys they approach there's three very attractive white women in this bar, and they approach him and one of them has on a low cut blouse, and so these guys are kind of frisky. And but one of the women, one of the three women, is a phlebotomist, the person who draws blood for a living. And she says to that these two guys who approach, she says, I hope you don't I hope you don't

realize this, but you're covered in blood. You've got blood all over your face, all over your arms, your clothes. And they give a very weird look to her, and very soon after that they leave, right and then we find out and the day or so later, there's a tan T shirt thrown on one side of this road outside the bar, and on the other side of the bar is a blue T shirt, bloody blue T shirt. These are found a day apart, so we have the you know, and the prosecution never turns over the bloody

blue T shirt. It hides that, it turns in the tan T shirt, but it hides the blue T shirt because you know, Kevin Cooper couldn't be expected to wear two T shirts. No, so they hide that. This is what I'm talking about, that neither they destroy the evidence that would have they wouldn't even have been able to put Kevin on trial, if they'd have turned over the evidence that they had, you know, the two T shirts,

the bloody coveralls which they threw in a dumpster. They they destroyed before the defense ever got to see him.

the initial statement about the three men. Now, another interesting point was that there was no composite drawing ever made of any suspects. Now, what did the police end up doing or what happens with Josh's testimony? How does his memory reconfigure or how does his memory change during this.

One night, he's in there going cards with a deputy sheriff. He's they guard Josh twenty four hours a day because they're afraid that since he's a survivor, that there will be an attempt to kill him. Right, so, he's playing his card game called you know with his deputy and a commercial break of anyway they break, they show up. Mugshot at Kevin Cooper flashes up and Josh says to the deputy, that's not the guy, that's not him. And so this this guy tells the homicide detective who's sitting

with Cooper. The next day, he tells him this, and that goes over like a lead balloon. And another day or two goes by and Josh is sitting there with his grandmother and Cooper's picture comes up again and the grandmother says, Josh, is that the man who attacks your family? And he said no. Now, this guy, the detective keeps working with Josh. He does an extensive interview with Josh. Josh uses the phrase they did this, they did that, they approached, they attack all this, and this guy writes

up a report that never references plural. His whole report is, you know, one person. He changes what this kid says. There's a psychiatrist from the hospital who's allowed to be in this interview to protect Josh's interest because Josh is eight and a half years old. He needs somebody that the cops wouldn't let the grandmother sit in on it.

So this psychiatrist sitting in there, he's taking notes and he keeps writing down these references today, they snuck up on me, they did this, they hit me in the head. He's writing this stuff down, but this cop keeps writing down singular right, never mentions that there's multiple assailants. So when you know, Josh never testifies a trial. He's too young to testify, too traumatized. So they just tape a statement.

They go to his grandmother's house and they take a statement from him, and Josh is so damn confused by this time. He's like, he's like almost tenures. He's ten years old now and he's had all this he can deal with, and he has this terrible sense of guilt, etc. And he wants to please the cops. And so he says, all he saw was a shadow on the wall. He didn't see three white guys anymore. He just saw a shadow on the wall. He's a no, no, no, no

help to Cooper. Right later on a psychiatrist when Cooper was about Cooper was about to be executed in two thousand and four. The psychiatrist who took care of Josh on a private basis, hired by his grandmother. She said that she'd asked Josh at one and she's writing a letter of clemency letter to Governor Schwarzenegger, and she says that Josh made the switch from the three white three white guys to Cooper because he said I I I

asked him about it. He said, well, I always thought it was the three white guys, but then I found out on TV it was Cooper. Yeah, but anyway. Cooper was saved from execution in two thousand and four by a last minute appeal to the ninth Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. UH. He came within three hours and forty five minutes of being executed and now there's a moratorium on the death penalty on on on executions in California's

benefacts since two thousand and six. It will be at least an effect through all of this year and probably most of next year if they were if they were to reinstate the death penalty, Cooper would be number five on the list. Well, they based the list on your your date of conviction.

years experience to reinvestigate the case. Now, if he could, if he could find something that you couldn't have found before through due through due diligence, that is so compelling. Let's say he finds, you know, five of these homicide detectives, should say, yeah, this was a big conspiracy and we just frame the shit out of this guy. If he could find that that that would be compelling.

We never get it. We didn't get into this. But when Cooper had that T shirt planted testing in two thousand and two, they found his blood on the T shirt when they when they when they tested it in nineteen eighty three, they said it only had the blood of Doug Ryan on it, and Cooper wanted it tested for the DNA as you know, like armpit DNA from sweat or something like that. He wanted them to see if they could find somebody else's DNA on it, and

instead they found his DNA on it. So then and then two years later, Cooper's attorneys find out that the bloods the blood they had taken from Cooper and the day a couple of days after he was arrested in nineteen eighty three, this this little blood vile they take.

They put your blood in a vial. They took a swab from that not related to any of this stuff I'm talking about right now, but related to something else, and they sent it off to this lab in Pennsylvania, Independent Lab and the lab wrote back and said, this blood has the DNA of at least at least two

people in it. So this was kind of really solid information that they'd taken Cooper's blood and planeted on his shirt, and then to make it look like the vial still had was full, they put somebody else's blood in it. But the federal judge in San Diego, Judge Marilyn Huff, who I can't believe can go to sleep at night, she wouldn't allow any pursuit of how this blood was contaminated by somebody else's DNA, and she wouldn't allow any real testing of the tan T shirt to show that.

You know, when you take blood out of a vial, they have these preservatives to keep a blood from coagulating, from breaking down. Sure, they had to put preservatives in it to keep it and it'll last for years. That way, the defense oric wanted to show that the T shirt this would have This would have sent Cooper home, by the way, if they'd have been able to show this that they had high levels of the preservative on the on the blood on the T shirt, meaning that he

come from a vial, not from shuit from anybody's anybody else. Well, the judge just wouldn't let him test it, right, She forwarded them at every every way she could, and then she ruled that that kind of testing is called anyway, the preservative testing isn't valid, when in fact it's totally valid used all over the United States. Sure, she just ruled that it wasn't valid, and blah blah blah. She

was just terrible. Cooper should be out right now. I mean, he should have been freed at least given a new trial. And any time any innocent people get a new trial, they get to go home because they're framed the first time. You can't frame him twice, Yeah, can't be done.

are three million books out there. And the other day I looked at Amazon rates all the books, the so called bestsellers on Amazon, and this book, this won't sound very very big, but it was up to thirty two thousand today it's like, you know, six hundred and fifty one thousand, but the other day it was at thirty two thousand, which was But anyway, that's the high ranking there's there's when you consider there's three million books and

you're thirty two thousand, that's not too bad. But there's very few books dan that actually, you know, unless you're a big time you know, you know, John Grisham, scotch Rowe, you know what. You could name you and I could sit here and name twenty five big authors who sell you know, Patterson blah blah blah. But people like people like me who write books, they just really it's a tight it's a tight little deal. And death row cases.

I wrote a book about Mumia Abu Jamal, who was and who was until he was taken up death row about three months ago, the most famous death row prisoner in the world, and that was a hard sell, really hard sell. People just this isn't an area that people really want to you know, it's not your mainstream subject, let's put it that way.

at their leisure. And you know, so I think that this type of radio is the same sort of thing where you have you're basically just looking at the future. I mean, it's just gonna be more so that this move towards the Internet. And so it's a great site for true crime fans to be able to access these stories because it's very much that there is a sort of a community that knows good from not bad, and not bad from not very good, and they have a

voracious appetite for stories. And because there is such a historical perspective, it's not just I think a lot of people so I'm not into true crime. They're very much historical accounts of.