SCRAPPED-Lisa Peebles and John O'Brien

and I have a question for you. What do you do when you win?

a system built more for finality than justice. It's the true story of people's pursuit of new evidence against three new suspects and her discovery that Heidie had lived a double life convenience store cashier and undercover informant. The sheriff's office hid the truth about her death as the real

killers Rome Free. Peebles became a de facto prosecutor to prove their guilt in Gary's innocence, as Heidie's family stood by the sheriff, who remains were likely secreted right under their noses, probably inside a scrap van and ship to a car shredder in Canada. The book that we're featuring this evening is Scrapped Justice and the team informant with my Rush. Your guests, Lisa Peebles and John O'Brien, Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview.

Lisa Peebles and John O'Brien.

when that new evidence came to our attention. I sit in Syracuse, New York, and the case involving the kidnapping of Heidi Allen happened in Oswego County, which is about forty five minutes from Syracuse. In the Oswego County is located within the Northern District of New York, which is part of the territory that our office covers.

to know about. And it took months for me to finally get out get it out of her about this new evidence in the Heidilan case, which was a very big case in not just Swego County but all of central New York for years.

for Heidi and couldn't find her. And that's when they realized something may something untoward may have happened.

sign of her. Her car was left there in the parking lot, and it looked like she something must have happened to her. They the Sheriff's office that day was contacted by the New York State Police, which has a lot more resources available and more experienced the death fears. The sheriff themselves, Charles Nellis, told the state Police, we got this, we're handling it. So the state police backed

off and did not get involved. One thing that Sheriff's office did not do, which most police departments would do, and it just makes common sense. They did not set up roadblocks anywhere that first day, So it was kind of odd.

As John suggested, the family knew she wouldn't have run off because she had a close relationship with a boyfriend who had been with her earlier that morning at the store with her she had plans to meet up with his family for Easter dinner. They knew right away that, you know, some something like John mentioned, sinister must have happened or something was you know, something was definitely wrong.

But early on they had zero leads. They were really just scrambling trying to figure out what could have happened to her as far as you know, as far as the Sheriff's department was concerned. When they actually started kind of targeting Richard Thibodeaux. He was a gentleman who had gone into the store and made the last purchase. But at the time they didn't know who made the last purchase. They saw a purchase of two packs of cigarettes on

the register at seven point forty two. That was the time that was on the register tape, so they had they knew the time of the last purchase. They had the treadmark in front of the store, and they had an individual who had come forward saying he was at the and walked past a gentleman in a van, but you know, and sort of describe he had a baseball hat on, but didn't see anybody else in the van

or any anything of that nature. So it wasn't until a couple weeks later where they put out a reward for twenty thousand dollars and an eyewitness then came forward and said, and his name was Christopher Bivens. He said he was driving by the store and he saw two men.

One was a burly, heavy set individual taller than the victim putting a girl in a bear hug and forcing her into a van, and that there was another person who he described as possibly older, who opened the door and put her in the van, but he didn't stop. He kept going and he never came forward until the reward money went out, and he was provided a photo of the van, and he said it was the right style but the wrong color, and that was his first

statement to police. And he described the individual the men involved as being over five eleven or six foot tall. And then they took him by Richard's van and again he said he wasn't sure, but they told him to go home and sleep on it, which and then call him and let him know in the morning, because he

said maybe he was eighty percent sure. By the time the Sheriff's department was done showing Richard's van three or four times to Christopher Bivens, he was then one hundred percent sure that that was the van he saw that day when he was driving by the DNW there is That's how Richard became They identified him as the person

with the last purchase. But I would note that Richard called that mourning shortly after the kidnapping, when he saw a scroll across the television set that the convenience store worker had been as missing, and he called the Sheriff's department to identify himself as having been at the store

that morning. And it was by ten o'clock when Sheriff's deputy Van Patten showed up to Richard Thibodeau's relative's house where they were having an Easter celebration, where they took a statement from Richard, and the van was there in the driveway, and he also showed the pack of cigarettes that he had purchased that morning and he gave a statement. So that's essentially how Richard became on the radar screen of the Sheriff's department as a possible suspect in the case.

be locked up in a safe location within the Sheriff's department. And when that was brought to the court's attention during the early stages after the Thibodeaux brothers were arrested, they wanted to know where's this file. We want to know this file, and they were told and it was publicly put out there. Well, the sheriff's deputy who wrote that was mistaken because there is no file and she was never an informant, and that was the information that was

relaid to the defense attorneys. So that is where it ended that they were asserting that that was a mistake, that she wasn't an informant and there was no file, and for all those years that's what will believed.

in the family corps because Heidi was under sixteen. But instead of that her Heidi's uncle, Russell Sturtz, who was a town judge and a knew some of the deputies personally there were whose friends with them. He went to the sheriff's office and said, look, instead of getting having her charge with any how about she worked as a confidential informant for you in drug cases. And and that's what happened. But of course that didn't come up back then,

that connection and then she that's how she started. She was like sixteen when she started. So she then she started handing over information about drug drug dealers in the area.

would have to be involved. And an expert I talked to said that if they ever did, they would be very careful to have keep a tight rain on that person so that they could protect them and HEIGHTI got none of that. And the kin Sheriff's Office, we looked at their standard operating procedures, they had nothing about protecting underage or other informants, and nothing about how old an informant had to be.

the Sheriff's department. But at no time was Heidi even told that her identity had been exposed in that parking lot. And it got out and people it became common to those people in the community, particularly in the drug universe, that Heidi was an informant, and she was labeled a rat.

aside the best I can gather. First of all, the Sheriff's Department would never want to be responsible for someone's abduction, particularly if they were the ones that were careless or

reckless with her information. But also they were of the opinion that they didn't really use her in the capacity as quote unquote and informant, so therefore they weren't really worried about the fact that they exposed her identity, which sort of is beside the point, because people that know about her identity or having been signed up as an informant aren't going to know or care in what capacity they were using her. They're just going to know that

she's working with the Sheriff's Department. It puts her at risk.

It was kind of lost on them. They wanted to just kind of brush it under the rug and act as if it was not a big deal, and then not to tell her and or her family members, including as far as I can tell, they never told her uncle Russell Sturtz that they had done that either, so you know, in all respects it was just a real reckless thing that they did, and then thereafter failed to take any actions or proactive steps to ensure her safety or to even let her know.

concern about that leading up to the kidnapping. So for them to say that we never used her, these people aren't making this up. One of them was the niece of the then under sheriff who later became Sheriff Mo Todd, and she, after the kidnapping, told her uncle about Hedi's concerns about informing, and the sheriff, according to her, just brushed it off. The under sheriff at the time.

They needed to have two people, and they found out that they had a brother because Bivens said he saw two guys, and so they didn't have enough Gary. So what they they arrested him, Well, they picked him up on a drug charge out of Massachusetts which was pending against Gary and his girlfriend, Sharon Raposa. So they had they picked him up and had him extradited to Massachusetts, which is it was a misdemeanor drug charge, which lawyers I've talked you said, that's unheard of to be extradited

for that. But they got him into a jail in Massachusetts, and when he was released from there, they tracked down a couple of inmates who were near him in jail and got them to say that Gary had made admissions about about the kidnapping and he was then charged.

knew at that point that he was a suspect. Because it's it made the p papers and they were executing search warrants at his property and they were searching an old furnace with all these ashes and burn particles. So he was getting this information and he was relaying it because they were trying to find out why he was in and he was explaining that he was targeted as

a suspect in this kidnapping. And these two particular inmates thereafter were approached by sheriff's deputies after Gary and Sharon were released on the misdemeanor drug possession charges that they had pending out Massachusetts. So Gary was already home, Sharon was already home, and the sheriff's deputies tried to find out who was in the facility with Gary, and as John mentioned, they said, he made incriminating statements like she they won't find her because she's Heidie's dead, or she

was killed with a fold up army type shovel. Which we point out in the book was the case was happening simultaneous with the O. J. Simpson case and the investigation, and it was ironic because in the newspaper clippings they mentioned a fold up army type shovel that they were testing for DNA evidence, and in the O J. Simpson case. So then that became this army fulled up shovel that you know, Gary said she was hit with or something of that to that, you know, hinting around that that's

what was used to kill Heidi Allen. So that's how Gary wound up being arrested. The only evidence that they had there was nobody that plays Gary at the store. No one identifies Gary ever being there. It was just these two jailhouse informants who made these statements that thereafter provided the Sheriff's department with evidence to you know, if you want to call it, that, to arrest Gary and charge him along with Dick.

in there, and that there was almost no evidence. The Sheriff's office also did a complete sweep of the van for anything, looking for anything that would link Heidi to it, hair, blood or whatever, so lot of it they could find nothing, so nothing of her in there at all.

I mean that was sort of the mindset of the jurors thinking, well, something must have happened because you know. And then of course Christopher Bivens was testifying that he was one hundred percent confident that that was the van he saw, although his testimony was completely incredible when you look at what he originally stated when he called, when he made his first call, in how his you know, his test, his statements kind of evolved. So that was it.

That was a sum total of their evidence and the mentality of the jurors at the time, and the community outrage that this eighteen year old young woman was kidnapped. You know, that's how they viewed it. And I think that if I were looking at the record, there clearly was not enough evidence to suggest that Gary had anything to do. There was no motive. They could never point to a single reason why Gary and or Richard would have ever been involved in the kidnapping of Heidi Allen.

a picture in the book of his reaction. He throws his head back, his mouth is open, he's just absolutely blown away. And again, this juror I interviewed years later. You know, she even said that the jailhouse snitches really weren't had no effect on them. They just really thought, well, this is the police brought him here, they charged him, they must be guilty, which of course is not the standard at all credible, you know, but.

but he was acquitted. And I did talk to his jurors years later, who I think I thought to five or six of them who were stunned that by the lack of evidence. They were actually very kind of upset about it. How could you charge this guy? And they questioned how the other jury could possibly convict Gary.

ever mentioned in the diary, but it was private information and he wasn't inclined to turn it over and didn't believe it was Brady. So in Richard's trial, the defense attorney was able to argue to the jury, look, Heidi kept diary and the Thibodaus were never mentioned in any of her diaries as to suggests that she had no contact or issues with the Thibodeaux brothers, so he had

that advantage. And second, he also had a report that was the information about Heidi's informant status being exposed and dropped in the parking lot of the DNW, although he did not he was not given her informant file, and they were downplaying the fact that he was an informant, and they were arguing that she was never used as an informant. But they never turned over the polaroid picture, the pedigree, or the index card to Richard's attorney either.

But he did have a suggestion that would point to somebody else. So Richard had an advantage over Gary as far as you know, the arguments to be made as to why it wasn't the Thibodeaux because as I mentioned before, there was no motive and they couldn't point to a motive that as to why the Thibodaus would ever have been involved in kidnapping Heidi Allen.

morning that Heidi was kidnapped. She's looking out her bedroom window saying that she saw Richard's van and Gary's driveway. So she testified during the trial, and basically what the DA's office the prosecutors attempting to do is to put Richard at Gary's house to kind of put them together Easter morning, because there was no witness that saw Gary

anywhere near the DNW. So after Gary was convicted, Brandy had information to suggest that Britney Link was recanting, and her along with an investigator, videotaped Britney Link saying that she thought maybe it was a dream, and whenever she would say that it was a dream, the prosecutor said, well, if I were you, kiddo, I wouldn't say that, And she said that she felt pressured and that she doesn't really know because she had seen Richard's van over there

on different days and it may not have been Easter morning, and that if it were Easter morning, she probably would have gone to get her Easter basket, but she didn't

that morning. She went back to bed, so it was a pretty powerful recantation of what she had testified to in court, and it was videotaped, and Randy made emotion and again seeking a mistrial, and that motion was denied, and Britney Link recanted her recantation and said that, you know, Randy pressured her into saying that, but unfortunately or fortunately for Randy, she videotaped it and clearly there was no

pressuring of any kind whatsoever. But the judge again just denied the defense request and that was the end of it as far as Brittany Link, and then Randy pursued the appeal with the Fourth Department.

overwhelming evidence and that was that. And then Randy went to the Court of Appeals seeking leave to appeal, and they refused to hear the case. So she never made it to the Court of Appeals, which is the highest

court in New York. And then she filed a habeas petition again arguing that his constitutional rights Brady violations regarding the diaries and again, and she was also attacking the statute under which Gary was convicted that there was a presumption of death for the first toe kidnapping in New York State. Neither one of those arguments prevailed, and after that his avenues had been exhausted.

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ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. Now, Lisa and John, we were talking about Bianco Randy Bianco losing the appeal, and in the book you are exposing and showing the reader and now our listeners that there was this manipulation by the prosecution and some funny business from the Sheriff's department in this weega there, Let's talk about how you get involved, Lisa, and after that, how John you become so inextricably involved.

and came to work for me. Probably six months into working for me, she came into my office, upset because she heard that a woman was trying to reach her and called her old number from her old law office, and it went to the individuals that purchased her business and had information regarding Gary Gary's case that would exonerate him, and apparently, well what happened was that information was relayed to the DA's office, and at the time the DA was Greg Oaks, and they bypassed Randy and she didn't

know about it. She just happened to you call get it. It just happened to come up in conversation that this woman had been looking for. When Randy found that out, she tried to get a hold of Greg Oaks, who then refused to give her the information, and he said, the woman doesn't want to talk to you. And Randy was outraged because the woman tried to reach her, so why wouldn't she want to talk to her, But in any event, he agreed to follow up on this new

information and keep her in the loop. So meanwhile, I didn't really have much to do with what was going on. She would occasionally come in and kind of update me into what she was being told by the DA's office. And then one day she got a packet of information, a lot of CDs and came to the office and they said, we're not doing anything with the new information. It's not credible and the witness who came forward is incredible. So Randy had a lot of CDs to listen to.

So my investigator at the time thought he would listen to him when he had a minute, and that's when he heard the monitored call and listened to interrogation of a woman who was involved in this monitored call making admissions about what she knew regarding Heidie's disappearance. And then Randy was up in arms and came back to me. And I didn't know how I could get involved in the case because it was a state case and we were federal defenders. So we tried to recruit lawyers to

take the case. It was an enormous undertaking and it would be very difficult to do because it would essentially be a pro bono situation. There is very was broken. He's been in prison all these years, he had no he didn't have a nicoldup to his name, So you know, we lingered, and my investigator and I had tried to do some different things that he had suggested to maybe kind of, you know, really get the ball rolling, so that maybe we could get the interest of a local

attorney and maybe somebody would take on the cause. And of course the Innocent Project wouldn't take it because we didn't have there's no body, no DNA, So it was just going to be a lot of investigation, a lot of work, a lot and a huge undertaking. So we finally my investigator suggested, you know, why don't you call

the paper and let them expose this. And we thought about it for a while, and I was a little reluctant initially, but then when I realized, here we have this innocent man sitting in prison, and I was so blown away by what I was listening to and what I was seeing that I just couldn't sit back and

not do anything with this information. So I passed it along to On and John right away, you know, and he'll tell you what he was doing, but you know, he confronted one of the jail house informants off the bat, and then John learned about Dick having his case file in a shed. So my investigator and I ran over to the house and we grabbed all these boxes because I wanted to go through his file and see if there was anything in there that wasn't in Gary's file.

That's where I discovered the reports regarding Heidi's informant information being dropped in the parking lot. When I asked Randy whether she'd ever heard of such a thing, she was blown away because she had never heard about Heidi being an informant or that her information had been dropped in the parking lot. Only that, you know, they denied she

was ever an informant. So that's when I went to my chief judge and asked whether I could be appointed in the case because I believed constitutional violations had taken place that weren't previously brought up because they weren't known when Randy filed the original habeas petition and family or at federal court regarding the diaries and the attack on

the actual statute. So he said yes, and I said, well, I have to go into state court likely because we have to exhaust all of the state court remedies before we can bring into federal court. And the chief judge appointed me and allowed me to get involved in this case. So meanwhile John's doing his investigation and now I'm on the case and we're doing our investigation, and that's kind of how it all sort of began.

I just want you to come over to my office and listen to something. So of course I ran right over, and I at least have played for me recording the recording of the phone call between the new witness who came forward, Tanya Priest, and this woman Jennifer Westcott. The Sheriff's office had set up the call, they were monitoring it, and Tanya I was working with them, but Jennifer didn't know if she was talking to anyone but this friend.

And I sat there and listened to Jennifer Westcott say things like they wouldn't even bring her Heidi in the house. They made her sit in the van. She said, this thing has been in my head all these years. There's no way I would tell I would ever tell the investig because I don't want to open that can of worms. And I was, you know, flabbergasted. This was the first time that someone, to my knowledge ever knew said something that they knew what happened to Heidi after she was kidnapped. Right, uh,

and then Lisa. Then Lisa also said, now you've got to watch this interrogation video that the sheriff's investigator had this Jennifer Westcott. After the call, they called her in to interrogate interrogate her about it. And this investigator, Petrotsky, did a good job of getting Jennifer to to base the heat, but she absolutely lied about that phone call, so she didn't know was recorded. Then he confronts her and says, well, this is this is what you said.

And she is blown away. She's taken aback. She thinks she's in big trouble because they have the recording. But at the end of that video, Petrotsky just says, no, no problem, You're not gonna be in trouble. I'm just gonna, We're gonna, We're going to squash this is what he said. So I knew two things at that point. One is that the Thibodeaux were absolutely innocent and that the Sheriff's office was covering it up. So I was just rev ready to go, and then I started my investigation. Lisa

did hers. We would talk back and forth and not share everything, but we're sort of working together and apart.

were mentioned in this phone call. So at that point I felt like we have enough. We were then trying to find out if we could find a cabin in the woods based on the statement by the witness who had come forward, who initiated or who they monitored the

call with Jennifer Westcott. So we were spending a lot of time trying to figure out where there was a cabin in the woods and whether or not we could find out, you know, if her, in fact, Heidie's remains were out there, because that would that would really clinch it for us. So we were trying to do that and it just so happened that when John published his first story, a witness called and said, oh, there is

another cabin. My son built a cabin of years back, and it's right across the street on Rice Road, which is exactly where the witness had come forward and said Westcott was staying and there was a cabin. So it was it was sort of matching up with where this Kanya priest when she came forward, suggested that Steen, one of the three new suspects, said Heidi had been taken

to and chopped up and put under floorboards. So John, you can kind of take over from there, and that's where, you know, we kind of really started coming together trying to find out if we could get, you know, find Heidi's remains.

we agreed. We quickly went out there. Harman and I did, and we got to that cabin and found it was completely disheveled, dug up. Someone had been there recently, which we just freaked out. We thought, okay, because of the story that I published, maybe the kidnappers came out here and got what they wanted got maybe possibly remained or something that didn't turn off to be the reason it was dug up. But we so right at the scene.

We called the police and then Greg Oaks the DA to get out there because we didn't want to be accused of doing anything improper. So Oak came out. It took a long time for him, I think, to convince the Sheriff's office to come out because it was based on the newspaper and the public Defender's office information. They finally came out and they dug around and.

This is key that said that they never brought anything back to test for chemicals that that would have you know, been would have been in the soil from heii's body. Just left it. They did the most basic rudimentary search and found nothing and said, okay, we're done.

she had been interviewed about the Heidie Allen case. I mean she let them know that. So there was no effort on the part of the Sheriff's department to search

for a cabin based on the information. And then Westcott has knowledge that there's this new information that someone's coming forward, and so we don't know what happened between her interview in March of twenty thirteen and fast forward to August of twenty fourteen when the Sheriff's Department started doing this dig at Rice Road at the cabin and again, and as John mentioned, they didn't do any sort of soil sample testing where the dog alerted, which would have been

important because the gases and the decomposition of the human body would have certainly revealed whether or not more accurate before they started digging around and sifting through all the dirt and diluting it whether in fact there were human remains there. But again the dog alerted to it.

James Steen, Roger Breckinridge, and Michael Bowrier. And as you write in the book, Michael Borier was the guy that would go in to the D and W and get Heidi to make him blt every time she was on shift. So let's talk about James Steen and Roger Breckinridge and Michael Boyer.

taking Steen first. He was the one that was spouting off to Tanya Priest that he knew what happened to Heidi Allen, that she was a rat, and that they kidnapped her using Michael Boor's van, and that they chopped her up, put her under the floorboards of a cabin and you know, nobody'll he'll never go to prison or do a day in and for what they did to Heidi Allen, and he so much has bragged about it

to other people. It wasn't just Tanya Priest. There were individuals that were disconnected to Tanya Priest where he made similar claims that Heidi was a rat and that he was taking care of her because you know she or even disposing of her body on behalf of a motorcycle gang. He had mentioned to one of our witnesses that we called.

But important to note is that when he was making these statements about Heidi Allen, he was in sense that his estranged wife and he were having marital problems and he was threatening to kill her and as part of that, he was basically bragging that he you know, don't think that I won't because I've already done it, you know.

And in fact, he did kill his estranged wife along with his cousin because they were seeing each other, and he went and while his young child was walking around in a diaper at the place where the mother was staying, he execution style shot and killed both of them. And he was holed up in this department while the Sheriff's department was negotiating him to come out and turn himself in.

And John, you might want to take over on that part of the James Stein thing, what you discovered during the investigation.

minutes after he killed his ex strange wife and his cousin, and it said Heidi question mark Chow And it just jumped out at me, like why, what could that be about? And we would find out later that that came from the phone of a guy he was hanging, he was drinking with the night before. And there's no other Heidi in Stein's life. He testified to that there's no other heid he it could possibly be. But the guy who sent it was belligerent with me and the sheriff's office

and interviewed him that he didn't know was about. And but that is an unanswered question, what did that mean? And this is the guy, the guy who sent it is the guy who Steen borrowed his truck the night before and drove the truck to the scene where he committed the murders.

But during the course of the hearing they could not explain it, and then they were denying having sent it and having received it or no memory of it, etc. So there was never any explanation provided with regard to what that meant and why he sent it. But it's obvious.

big liar. And so I got nowhere with him, and then I tracked down Michael Boorr at he was living in a an r V on Ellen Road, you know, kind of ironically same west name as the victim here. And I confronted him. I recorded the interview. He he when I eventually told him, look, you're being someone said you were involved in this, you were part of this kidnapping, he denied it up and down, and you know, he was upset with me for asking. And he did acknowledge

that he knew that Heidi's out. Heidi, Heidi's informant cart had been dropped in the parking lot. And I said, well, how did you know that it wasn't public? He said, oh, it came out in the in the media. I said, no, it didn't. It absolutely did not. And he said, oh, well it came out in the trial then, and I said no, I looked at the transcript, Garies, Transcript's not in there. And then he said, oh, word of mouth, Mutt.

So he admitted he heard word of mouth back then that Heidi was an informant and this is the guy who was dealing drugs that Lisa. Lisa confronted him after that, and she can tell you about that. She did by herself.

girl would come missing. And oh, by the way, I wrote a lot about the case, and I collected a lot of articles, and he takes the sheriff's deputies over to his trailer and has this box of information that he collected in a lot of writings that he created about the case and theories that he wrote, and gave that to the sheriff's deputies. So they were chalking him up to a crazy person, that he's mentally ill, that

he injected himself into the investigation. He was calling in falls leads, and obviously, as you mentioned before, he was in the store almost daily getting DLT sandwiches. So I decided it was time to confront him. I didn't really know. I thought maybe Stein was the mastermind. Maybe Bor they were using him, you know, as a driver because he had a van. So I decide to meet up with him, and actually he was willing to meet up with me. And the first thing I said to him was, you know, well,

I think you were involved in this. I think you did it. And then he's like, you do, Well, maybe I shouldn't be talking to you then. But he then sat down and kind of talked to me for three hours, and he told me his background was off limits. He was not going to talk about anything involving his family or his personal life, but he would provide me with

all these various theories about what he thought happened. And at one point he made a statement and I looked at him and I have this kind of look on my face, like a smirk, and he basically told me to wipe that smirk off my face, and it really kind of made the hair on the back of my next stand up and I thought, well, I should probably end this because we were in the lack of a off track betting place that was not exactly I guess,

the best place to meet somebody like him. So we parted ways, and I was convinced that there was so much more to this guy, because none of this made sense. And I made a letter request to the court seeking or asking or requesting that the DA's office and or Sheriff's department further investigate Michael Bohrer. I mean, does he have a daughter Allen's age? What's this background? Because we ran at check and we didn't get much from a

criminal history standpoint in New York. So we got feedback from the judge who said, if you want to do the investigation of Michael Bore, you can do it at your own expense. They're not required to do it. And by the way, the DA's office just thought he was a crazy person. So I noticed that his social Security number had been issued out of Wisconsin. So I asked Dick com and my investigator to run a criminal history check to see whether there were any convictions that Michael

Bore might have out of Wisconsin. And this is right before we were going to be having this evidentiary hearing to see if Gury could get a new trial based on the new evidence. And it came back that, sure enough, he had a conviction for unlawful imprisonment and another disorderly conduct, but we couldn't figure out what it was because when we were calling the police department that had made the arrest, they said that they don't have the records anymore. They

were destroyed. And then we called the court and they said they couldn't find anything on it. So I was sort of left wondering what this was all about, and I knew he would I didn't. I kind of wanted to confront him about this and try to explain to

me what this was about. I also learned I did a lot of digging into his family background, that you know, he and his brother were adopted, he had an adopted brother, and that he did have you know, siblings and other people around the country, and I was trying to reach out and make contact with them. And I also learned he had an ext wife and he did have two daughters.

So I we we went to court and I'm confronting him with the information about the conviction, and the court would not allow me to ask any questions and about it, and then he did allow me to say. I asked him what he had any violence passed violent history against women, to which he answered, no, I never hit any woman or punched any woman. Ors was his answer. The judge would not allow me to explore or to ask him

any other questions about his background or personal history. By the time the hearing was adjourned for a couple of weeks, I was incensed because I felt like there was so much more and I couldn't figure out what actually had happened. And that's when kind of we blew open. Michael bore we. Finally, I demanded that we get a hold of the court and find out there had to be records. There had to be some sort of record about what actually happened.

And then we saw that he had a brother who had also been charged, which is why the court said they couldn't find the records of the lawful imprisonment. They were looking it was under the wrong name, John Boorr. So we located John Bourr in Erie, Pennsylvania. We made a bee line out there. We found him at a resid eventual sort of nursing home setting, and he proceeded to tell me the most unbelievable account of what had

taken place. I was shocked. They had followed a woman home from her place of employment after she went out to grab a bike to eat. It was one o'clock in the morning. They boxed her in and her apartment complex. Michael got out of the car, went up behind her and grabbed her and tried stuffing her in the backseat of this yellow Mustang he was driving while John Borr was reaching in the back trying to grab her in. She provided enough leverage on the top of the car

where she was able to break loose. Because they realized people in the apartment building were kind of she was making The victim was making enough noise to where lives were starting to go on, so they let her go. She ran in told her brother, who happened to be at her apartment. They called the police and they were able to catch them and arrest him. So for that they fled guilty to a misdemeanor and received a sentence

of three years probation. And apparently before that, the disorderly conduct involved another woman that Michael Borr was following home from work and tried to rammer off the road, and he got out of his car when she was at a stop sign and started pounding on the windows, and she was so hysterical she drove right to a police station where there was a security officer outside the building and he was able to see Michael Borr circle back around and kind of look, and they were able to

identify him and arrest him. And in that case, he fled to a disorderly conduct. So that was the basis for those two convictions. So we provide that information to the District Attorney's office, thinking, oh, this is just blown the whole case open. I mean, this has got to be something, you know, in light of the admissions the fallse sleeves that he called in all the writings that he made. You know, he made admissions to somebody at a tavern about how DISTRAUGHTI has been all these years

us and knowing what happened, Yeah about Heidi. So we you know, I was really convinced that, wow, this is it, this is you know, they were so wrong about him, and they did no investigation, and here we have all this stuff. So of course that wasn't exactly what happened. Said Lisa said, he had a pit in his stomach and he wasn't sure what he was going to do, and he wanted to do the right thing. And if Gary's innocent, he wants to be the first one to

make sure he doesn't do another day in prison. But but then when I flew in the victim to testify during the hearing about what happened, he objected that it wasn't relevant, and that it would be like saying, anyone you know who commits a burglary thereafter would be a

suspect in any other burglary. And my response to that was, kidnappings of this nature, this brazen, emboldened sort of attack, where you're just grabbing a woman and stuffing or in the backseat of your car, is not something that's very common at all, and it's very unusual in the manner in which they were. The eyewitnesses were even talking about how this brute force was used to stuff hedy in

the back of the van. You know, I don't know how in the coincidence that he was half a mile down the road and was in the store every day and knew that he was an informant and by the way, was involved in slinging drugs in the Oswego County area, all of those things and calling in of course, the

falls leads. It wasn't just in a vacuum, Oh jeez, he'd tried to kidnap or an abduct a woman one time, there was more to it than that, and then of course after we knew something else happened and Beacons he was never arrested for it, but he was a suspect in the prosecution found that a woman who had been beaten over the head and the duplex that he owned, and he happened to quote discover her identified him as being the last person there and wanting to raper before

she went unconscious and didn't remember who had hit her in the head and she was left, you know, she was They called it a doa initially because they didn't think she was going to survive. She went through seven brain surgeries, but to this day she you know, the last person. She believe she was running from Michael Boor throughout the apartment and that's the last thing she remembers.

So right, that's pretty much the background of the three new suspects and the information that we were you know, trying to elicit throughout the courses of hearing.

attorney visitation room. He had big old glasses on, and he was, you know, really struggling to breathe, but very happy that somebody took an interest in his case after all these years, because he by then he had given up all hope that he would ever be released. So he was just really hoping to die because it was the only way he believed he would be free. And as time went on, I got to know rather well, and he would write letters, and he was very funny

and sarcastic and had a different sense of humor. But he was very likable and very funny considering he was in prison for something he didn't do. All those years, he was not a bitter person. He said, by the time I met him, he had already gotten over that part of it and just accepted his fate and realized that, you know, there's nothing more he can do. So he was just trying to make the best of it. And

he had been working in the tailor shop. So as the case was progressing through the court system and he attended the hearing, he was seeing what was going on and the rulings that we were getting and the denial of being able to call witnesses, and at some point it reached it reached a point where he felt so discouraged and it was just going to happen all over again, and he was going to he didn't want to be at the hearing anymore. He had, you know, requested that

I not make him sit through it. It was hard for him because he was he was he was frail, He had a bad back he had placed in his ankle. In the first day of the hearing, the sheriffs made him go down the set of stairs with his leg shackles on and his arms cuffed, his hands coughed together, and he lost his footing tripped and fell down the stairs. And why they didn't allow him to go down the elevator is beyond me, but they didn't, and he really hurt his back when he fell. So he was very

uncomfortable and it was a shame. But as I was, as we were going through the appeal process, every time I would go visit aary and give him an update, he was increasingly looking more frail and his breathing was becoming more labored, And at one point I just looked at him and I was shocked at how fast he

was declining. I could see that he was on borrowed time, and I felt like it was the race against time to actually provide give him news that he had been exonerated or that it was at least going to be granted a new trial. So yeah, I was becoming more and more concerned that he wasn't going to make it through the whole process. And then when we lost, we had at a Pellet division and we had one judge who dissented but wrote amazing descending opinion. It really kind

of refueled me. Recharged. Okay, here we have a judge who believes and Gary's innocent. He's somebody who followed what the new evidence meant and he believes Gary deserves a new trial. So here we go. We're going to go to the Court of Appeals. And a lot of what I was being told is, hey, it's almost impossible to get your case heard at that level. And I wasn't going to hear of that. We were just going to

put our best foot forward. And we got the news the Court of Appeals has decided to hear the case. We were beyond thrilled because I thought, Okay, this is it, you know, this is a level where we're going to get released for Gary. And then we get the decision back four to three. We lost, but again the descent was an amazing decision and much longer and much more

detailed and much more analysis than the majority opinion. But I had to go to Gary and tell him that we have one more avenue to pursue at the Court of Appeals, and then it's into federal court, which is where we were originally thinking we would have to go anyway. But this process took so long. You know, here we start in twenty fourteen, now we're at twenty seventeen, and now we're twenty eighteen, and and Gary is just you know, just skeletal by then and not even able to breathe

on his own. So it was it was sad and frustrating and disheartening. And you know, I just had wanted Gary to be able to hang on as long as possible, but I just knew that there was absolutely no chance that he could make it through a federal habeas petition.

we had an opening. So together we would frequently go keep Gary updated about his case, and we were with him a day before he passed, and it was really very hard. It was really hard to watch. We were there with his brother Richard he went and then his niece was also there, and you know, it was just

really heartbreaking and sad. And I felt like I let him down because I'd kept promising him that we would win and we were going to keep going, and I just felt like I promised him something I wasn't able to live on, and I just it really tore me up, which is why we wanted to capture all of the events of what took place in the best possible way, in all all in one place for people to understand what happened throughout this process and how the system failed Gary.

of the cabin site. Jennifer Wescott texted to a friend that I don't care what people are saying. I'm not saying nothing about it. I will not be the next one dead in a box in the woods. And that's that's her writing to someone thinking the whole world isn't watching. But there are a lot of moments like that. But unfortunately the people on your side, the prosecutors, the prosecutor Greg Oakes, just did not do the right thing.