#033 Jason Flom with Andrew Krivak

My interview with Andrew Kreevak originally aired on August twenty first of twenty seventeen, and there's been some incredible development since then. In twenty nineteen, a judge throughout Andrew's nineteen ninety seven conviction and granted him a new trial in Putnam County Court. At the time I'm recording this, he's still in prison awaiting his new trial. But by the time you're hearing it, I'm really optimistic that he's going

I think we have the best legal system, it's just the people that implement it.

They get lost along the way and forget what the job really is.

He just kept on trying to remind me that who was in authority, who was in control, and how easy it was for my body to be found in any alley of New York City.

It's a tough prison when you have the guards going against you because they are the biggest gang in the prison.

They do that.

They'll give a guy a life sentence and go home in eat spaghetti like it was nothing.

Anybody that would say, well, why would you confess to something that you didn't do? My question to them will be why wouldn't you confess when somebody's threatening to kill your life? Judge, he said, how you feel?

I said, I'm okay.

He said, well the day is You're lucky day.

You going home. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. We have a very unique case and a very special episode of wrongful Conviction behind bars. Today is going to be the noisiest episode. I just want to warn you up front because we're inside Wendy Maximum Security Prison in Buffalo, New York. So apologies in advance, but I promise you you're going to hear an extraordinary interview today, and so hang in

It was a horrific case, the rape and strangulation in nineteen ninety four evangelically beautiful twelve year old Josette Wright.

Now there was funning development in the sensational case of a convicted child killer rapist in Putnam County.

What's wrong with this case?

This case was created at a hot cloth by the deputy sheriff in charge of this case, who himself has been indicted by this very county for crimes.

Di Pippo still maintains his innocence.

For jury and Putnam County found him not guilty. The main witness against him was a former girlfriend who said she witnessed the attack, but the jury didn't buy. What we learned at this trial is that the eyewitness was incredible. The defense was allowed to suggest Howard Gombert is the real killer, seen with the victims shortly before her disappearance and currently in a Connecticut prison on sex assault charges.

Judge Robert nearly ordered DiPippo released on a million dollars bail.

The Putnam County District Attorney, though, isn't backing down. He insists not guilty. It's not the same as innocent.

Andrew Welcome to the show.

Thanks.

In this case, I could say I'm sorry you're here. Usually I'm happy to have our guests on the show, but I'm sorry to be taping it in this facility. I'm looking forward to seeing you on the outside sometime soon.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

We also have with us another very special guest, someone who I considered to be a sort of royalty. A lot of people to be royalty in the innocents community. The one and only Adele Bernhard is here.

Adele welcome, Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here. I'm really glad you're focusing on Andy's case. I think it's important and I'm.

Glad so Adele has been representing Andy for over ten years.

Now, well close to ten, I guess.

Unfortunately, it's easy to get wrongfully convicted and undoing it we know takes thousands of hours of legal work, and this case is no different. So Andy, going back to the beginning, Where were you from? Where were you born? Originally?

I was rizzily born in Punham County, New York, Punam County Hospital. Raised there till probably like nineteen ninety. Then my family moved to Stormville, New York to take care of my grandmother, Me and my father, My grandmother and my brother and at the.

Time my stepmother.

And your childhood, was it a happy childhood? How was How were things?

It was?

I mean, you know, we had on normal problems like anything else. I can't say that, you know, I was subjected to anything unusual. It was normal for the most part. I had my you know, little issues growing up, primarily because i'd know my real mother, so you know, I was emotional a lot on that end of things.

But it was pretty normal.

And I mean, upstate New York pretty nice place to grow up. It's beautiful around here.

Did you play sports or yeah, I grew up Actually I started fifth grade football. From that point on, I baseball basketball. I did that probably up until junior high with the hopes that I could go into high school playing sports and see how far I can go.

Unfortunately that never panned out.

So you were a teenager growing up up doing teenager type stuff, right, certainly not not getting in trouble right, A's a double negative. But yeah, I mean like you.

Know nothing major. I mean, you know juvenile things.

But you were not a violent guy.

No.

So you're going along trying to find your way like a lot of teenagers, and then one day something absolutely horrifying happens. A young girl, twelve year old girl named Josette Wright, was raped and brutally murdered. But they didn't know that at the time. All they knew was that she had disappeared. Yes, did you know her.

I knew her from being around the area, seeing her, knowing her older sisters. Carmos a small community, so everybody interacted. You know, when a fair comes around and goes to the fair. They got a plaza, so they have all these regular areas that you would run into people. So yeah, for that part of in passing or being around somewhere or being in a fair I knew her to that extent.

Yes, and Adel, this is a very strange aspect of this case because here you have this small community, sounds sort of idyllic in a lot of ways, and this lovely young girl disappears one day. Right now. You know, we all see on TV when these things happen, the search parties are formed, there's you know, the whole town comes out almost pandemonium, but control pandemia, where people are just searching everywhere to find this little girl. But that's

Well from what I could tell from the records they've turned over to us, the police didn't seem to take her disappearance terribly seriously at all. So they put up some wanted posters. But that's about it so as far as I can see from all of the records that I've gathered, unless I'm missing something, they figured she'd come back.

They figured she was a runaway. They didn't really take it very seriously.

They logged a couple of calls people reported seeing her later on in the malls.

But I guess they thought, well, easy companies.

To go, she'll be back. I mean, as a it's just outrageous.

I think it's very shocking, and.

It's particularly outrageous because of her age. I mean, it's not like she was seventeen, where you'd say, well, you know, sometimes seventeen years run away.

She was in school every day, she wasn't getting into trouble with older people from any place else. So the fact that she all of a sudden wasn't there was I think pretty serious.

Yes, she was twelve, I mean, Jesus, it's so young. The horror of that is unimaginable. But so months and months go by, Right, you've obviously heard about the case. Everybody's probably heard about the case, yes, And then I think it was thirteen months later her body was found in the woods. And now everything changes.

Right, all of a sudden, once they found the bones and they were able to identify the dental records as belonging to her, Suddenly the police realized that they should have been paying more attention.

This is my interpretation of the.

Records, Like they realized, hey, we should have been taking this more seriously. All the way along. Now we know this is a homicide. It's not just a runaway. She's not coming back, and we didn't follow up the leads that might have let us discover what happened much much earlier, when the trail wasn't so cold.

So Andrew, now we have a situation where not only is there the very real problem of the fact that there's a brutal childkiller in the midst of this town, right and everything that that would mean to the authorities. Many of them have kids of their own, or relatives or nieces, whatever might be. So on a personal level, all of a sudden, there's a real sense of urgency. But also there's got to be a lot of pressure

To be obvious that they didn't do their job.

Going to be a lot more pressure brought to bear on them. There could be people losing their jobs, who knows what could happen, people getting voted out. They got to find this guy or people who did this, right, So, things start to go downhill quick from this point, and ultimately you end up being arrested and charged with this crime that you must have been like are you were you? I mean, were you? Like? Are you kidding? Like?

I was in shock.

I mean, you know, the actual processes was like fifty paces behind my brain, like trying to catch up, Like, wait a minute, your.

Brain was fifty paces behind.

What's happened my conscious?

You know, it's like trying to am I really sitting here? You know, as a juvenile, I've been in and out of little situations, so but to being told that I raped and murdered somebody at seventeen, Like are you serious?

Right?

You know what I'm saying, Like, I mean, just anybody who knows me like like they don't correlate the two, and you know, me to try to process that I'm being accused of it and sitting in there and having you know, these people yell at me and say this evidence, there's witnesses, there's people, and I'm yelling back, You're lying, You're crazy, You're making it up. I don't really think it still has hit me because I refuse to let it.

How did they land on you and Anthony? I mean, I know the story, but I want to hear from your perspective because it's so bizarre. There was no physical evidence connecting you. What do you understand how that happened?

No, and I think about it every day, you know, I have since this has happened. My only consensus of it is maybe prior run ends being an easy target. I don't know, Like I said, you know, you try to make sense of something that doesn't make sense, and you can drive yourself crazy.

For one thing, what happened is that Denise Rose got herself arrested.

Well eventually, I mean yeah, you know, later on down the line through there talking to people wherever the case

Do you want to jump in here, adult? Sure?

I mean, when Denise Rose got arrested, they had an idea of who the likely suspects were in the town. And I think that Anthony in particular was a likely suspect just because he was a big guy.

They knew him.

He'd got in trouble for various juvenile kinds of things. And so when Denise gets arrested and she's in trouble and they know that she had been his girlfriend at around the time that they now decided that this little girl was murdered, they immediately started putting the pressure on her.

Did you know him? You knew him?

Then?

How did you know him? Weren't you with him? Weren't you with him that night? Didn't you see what happened?

And they talked to her time and time again. They talked to her at least three different times while she was in jail, after she'd gotten arrested, while she was worried about going to jail herself, and so a little bit, by little bit, by little bit, they got her to start thinking that maybe there would be something in it for her to put these pieces together for them, when she could perfectly well see where they wanted her to go, which was to give them something about this murder that

So it's a little bit of a house of cards. And Denise would not seem to have been the most credible witness since, by her own admission, she smoked crack thousands of times.

Yeah, but I don't know that they knew that then.

Okay, that came out in this third trial where there was some really very pointed cross examination and a lot of discovery about who she was and what she had done. I don't know how much the police knew or even thought about it at the time.

I just know that they realized that maybe this is.

A way into this case, right, maybe we can put pressure on this gal and then the whole thing will fall into place.

Why they would have assumed that she would know who the killer was. That's for anybody to speculate, right.

Only because they already had in their mind this idea. I mean, if she had been somebody else's boyfriend during that time, they might have picked on somebody else. But I think it was a way like, Okay, we've got.

Pressure on you.

You know the other kids, you know all the kids in this community. Okay, the gal who disappeared was a kid, maybe you know something about it.

We're going to go.

With this, right And she ultimately came up with a very farcical story which has been disproven in every imaginable way. I mean, it never made sense in the first place. Right now it's actually been disproven. Dell, What was this story that she satisfactured completely?

As far as I'm concerned. Incredible story. And so I think that the police had in.

Their minds because I really think this story came from the investigating officers. I think they came up with this idea of how they thought that the crime must have happened, and they pushed their hypothesis onto everybody, eventually convincing juries

And threw her body into the woods.

So they had this idea in their minds, is my belief, before they talked to her, and then they got her to say exactly what they thought. And remember they had been investigating the case for months before they talked to her, so they knew where the body was found, they knew how far that road was from where the kids all lived, they knew who drove down that road. And they said, isn't this what happened, Denise? And she's like, yeah, that's right. We're all in a.

Van fill high and there were according to her story, her fairy tale, there were five people besides the victim in the van, correct, all of whom knew what was going on, including her, right, But she made a sound

Right now, she claims that she is present and sees a rape and a murder of a twelve year old girl that happens in a car right in front of her eyes, that she sees the whole thing, and she never mentions it to a soul.

Not her mother, not a priest, not her best friends, not her best friend.

Right, teenage girls have best friends and tell them everything.

I've never been a teenage girl. But our teenage girls good at keeping secrets. No, they're not going to keeping secrets, okay, And we don't want to sound sexist here. A teenage boys are no good at it either. In this case, you'd have to look at that and go, no, that's not possible. Somebody's lying because that didn't happen the way she says. Somebody else would have known and it would

Can I just interject for a minute before it even got to that point, you gotta be aware that there were two previous statements, both of which she doesn't know nothing more along the lines of the truth. For whatever reasons,

And it wasn't her best interest because who knows what she would have been facing herself?

Well absolutely, and again too, she was actually older than both me and Anthony, so she was already on probation. She's had arrests for drugs, so it's easy to understand how that type of threat of going to jail would influence her to go along with the cops version of events.

It's a very real threat. And also we know too that she was a teenager. Even though she was older than you, he was still a very young woman, and you know, she may not have been able to process the real consequences of her actions. Your case has many of the causes that we see most frequently in wrongful convictions. Whatever the reverse of a jackpot is, you hit it because you had incentivized witnesses, you had sloppy or incompetent police work, a known liar who was the guy who

Well, it's not my words. I didn't confess to nothing.

It's pre written statement made by them that I wound up breaking down and signing.

I think that's important.

It's not his words, it's their words on a piece of paper.

To understand my segregation. I came in.

I denied everything, obviously, and at the time my mind was working like, oh, I detect the test, they'll see I pass it, They'll understand they made a mistake, and I'll be let go.

So you believe they were after justice, they wanted to do the right thing.

Yes, my naivete at the time believed in the good of the system and not to at that particular moment think that they were devising this big operation to get themselves to solve a case by any means necessary. Now I know, obviously, but yeah, I was still believing that even if they were under the impression I had any involvement by me giving a lot of detective tests would clear that up, and then it would reevaluate and go somewhere else. That's what my belief was. So I answered

Did you have a lawyer or a parent or anybody in there with you?

Well, ironically, from what I found out after the fact, was all right.

Just to bring it back a little bit.

At the time of my arrest, it's crazy because I was reporting to my probation office in Beacon, New York.

It was a morning.

I was at the time with a girl who was my girlfriend. She was in the car, so we left my house. I went and reported to probation. I was going to be my father to go to work because at the time I worked for him, and while I was in my probationer's office. Four detectives come in the room, Castaldoing Quick from Punham County and two Beacon detectives, and they detained me, put me in the car, and bring me to Punham County. Now, my girlfriend is still sitting

Why did they have me?

And apparently while I was being interrogated, news was outside in the parking lot. My family was out there, So I guess there was a whole scrum going on out there while I'm in the back room being worked over.

One of the things I beat myself up with is how I was allowed to just give in.

But again, a sense in my mind that was working was like, you can't make an untruthed truth. So regardless of what's written on paper, it's words on paper, it's not evidence. And I really felt that if it had to come to litigation, meaning court, that the evidence and the truth would come out and solidify my innocence. Again, that's being young and naive to the system, and I pretty much helped them convict me wrongfully for this crime.

But you were young and naive and and I don't think you can really beat yourself up. The thing is, I think for me anyway, having met and befriended and work for and with so many people who not only signed a piece of paper like you did, we see all different types of false confessions.

Well, I think it's perfectly understandable and reasonable to think that the truth is going to come out and that you can't change it, and if you're innocent, that that will eventually be the story that emerges, which is like, I think what he's saying is I figured the truth would prevail.

I am innocent. Everyone will eventually know that.

Yeah, and and correctly if I'm wrong, Andrew. But when you're in that room and I'm just trying to put myself in your shoes and give me the chills. But it became clear, after many hours of interrogation that these guys were not going to listen to you.

No, absolutely not.

I mean there was nothing you could Probably by now you'd said everything you could say, and they keep telling you you're lying, and they keep becoming more aggressive. Right, So at a certain point you go, well, this ain't working right, This is not getting me anywhere. But somebody somewhere is going to be on my side because it's called the justice system and I'm just a kid and

They pretty much, you know, wanted to hear me admit that I committed this crime. And I kept getting more aggressively in my nature of telling him that I didn't commit it and it was it was a volcano getting ready to erupt.

Would you worry that they were going to be physically violent with you?

Daniel Steven has already had upon my completing the polygraph test. You know, when he told me I failed, grabbed me by my throat, punched me in my stomach, told me that I, you know, I was a piece of shit, I'm gonna get it.

I get deserved and all this other stuff.

You know, we know he's made other people for to confess. That's what you didn't know at the time.

No, I didn't know at the time.

He's also been similarly violent in other cases. I was brought up on charges for at least one of those. Right, Okay, So now we're getting really to the crux of it. So you now have a guy who is a very real danger to you. I mean he has now physically assaulted you, and you have no way out of this room, nobody who's listening to you, and you've now been beaten, and you don't know what's coming next. So at a certain point you say, okay, well, here's this piece of paper.

Yeah, I mean, that's always been my belief. I mean even to this day, Like I said, I mean, I just find it completely preposterous that they could try to stand behind that argument when all the physical, scientific inforence evidence disproves what's on that paper.

Oh, by the way, did you fail a polygraph test.

No, we had our own polygraphist at the time, who was a retired polygraph expert for the FEDES, was on the polygraph Board of Administrators who came in and reviewed my tests and determined that the attempts were to make it failed by disconnecting parts of the machine. And he said, despite all of that, I was truthful in every answer.

Will the disconnecting parts of the machine, I mean, on top of everything else, it's just.

Like Daniel Stevens, I mean Russia.

I mean, this is what was exposed with Jeffrey Dskovic into the you know, his procedure and his version of what he does and the correct manner in which to perform a polygraph test. I mean, there's a lot of dynamics in my case that don't make sense, Like how was that introduced as evidence when it's not allowed. It was never a mechanism for them to try to ascertain

Heads you lose, tails you lose. And now we know too, like a top of all those other causes that the three central police figures in this investigation have all been either indicted or convicted of other crimes. I mean, the system really failed you in so many ways. And these are ways that we as a society have to address because if we don't, it's going to happen to somebody else. And then for those of you out there listening, could be someone you love, could be you. And there's so

Yeah, I mean he is very much so.

And you know, just to point out that's why I say this, there's dynamics of the case that is so overwhelmingly obvious it puzzles you to say, how do you ignore it? Here it is as a person at that time that was in his I think late twenties, who goes back to the eighties of rapes, insidomies, who is known through the Legal Aid Society and the police departments in Carmewall.

He's a monster, absolutely so.

With all the initial investigations going on and all the statements that were provided to the police, his name is repeated and brought up time and time again. Two of the witnesses from Anthony's recent trial were victims of how wegum.

Let's go back to that for a second. So Anthony de Pippo, who was convicted of the same crime that you were convicted of in separate trials for reasons looking into but it was convicted the same crime co defendants, and I think people out there are probably saying, well, wait, minut if you're both convicted the same crime and he's out, what are you doing here? Why are you here and Anthony served twenty years and you're in your twenty first year now, and it's like where, where and when is

I mean, yeah, it's the unfortunate efficiencies in a system when you have people in the power that can abuse it legally.

And then defend it. I mean, it's like they're defending something that's been disproven already and leaving out the guy who is so clearly should be under extreme scrutiny for this crime and should be being questioned and should be held accountable. You should be held accountable, I mean, and this little girl deserves justice and she's not getting it either.

And may I just point out too, and we got to go back to nineteen ninety four because this is when she was first reported missing. I was seventeen at the time, Anthony was eighteen at the time. Shortly thereafter, another young woman became missing that had ties to Howard Gombert and who's been investigated for her disappearance, and I believe still is.

Yeah, the police were looking at this fellow Gombert, yes, for another somewhat similar homicide that occurred in that area at around the same time. Yes, so we know for the records that they were looking at him. Why they dropped the ball on this. Hopefully someday we'll find out.

You know, you could speculate and try to figure out so many areas of why they did what it did. Some things become more obvious than others. You have a different police agency other than the sheriffs, which is a common police department, and they believed that Gombert was responsible for both crimes. They wanted to work together to try to tackle the evidence and come to a consensus, and the Sheriff's department basically told him to take And again, is it politics, it's ugly head.

Maybe Gombert had some powerful friends somewhere.

Maybe maybe he did.

I mean it makes you scratch your head because you sit there and say, this is obvious. It's not like you see similar cases where you could get the wrong impression by evidence just by interpretating, and that's understandable. And then you know, they run down the line and said, oh, well, this is how I got a room. It didn't start off like that. This was blatant disregard to certain elements of the case. And this is decisions that were made knowingly by the police involved.

I mean, one thing, if there was some sort of an ironclad alibi, you know, they had records and mister Gombert was in Canada at the time or something like that, but there's nothing to show.

That because all of the.

Evidence points to him and they do nothing. He was connected to the victim, he knew the victim.

He was a suspect, similar suspect the other.

So here it is you have an individual that if you're going to fit a mold of any type of area, I mean, like, what more do you look for?

So now it comes to trial, A bunch of time had passed, right, You've been sitting in jail presumably this whole time waiting for your trial.

Yes, since July first, nineteen ninety six, and ever since I've been incarcerated.

But I'm talking about from July first, nineteenety six, was when you were arrested.

Arrested, Yes, that was a trial I think ninety seven right, ear in jail for.

Over a year better part of a year for a waiting trial, and then you go to trial. At this point, did you still have hope that the system was going to work?

Yeah? Yeah, I did.

A lot of that was under the pretense of my lawyer at the time, and the things that he was telling me making me believe that certain things were going to be addressed, and his disclosure to me about how he was going to present the evidence to disprove that we committed this crime led me to believe that I was going to be successful in establishing that.

But he did none of what he said he was going to do.

You had a lawyer who was definitely not on his a game, let's just say that, which happens, sadly, tragically more frequently than it should ever be allowed to. But you go to trial, your family's there. I want to get to the moment when the jury went out and everything that could be said, had been said, and then you get called back to the courtroom because a verdict is ready. How long was the jury out I.

Think like maybe thirty five to forty minutes. I don't know, it was like during lunch break. But like by the time I literally got brought to them, like two minutes later, they said they got a verdict and I got back in the corner back up to the court building.

So like that's how fast it was.

Can you just paint the picture for us, Like at that moment when they stole your life from you, what went through your mind?

I mean, the same thing that's going through my mind now. Like I mean when they came back and read the verdict that I was guilty on both charges, I was still in shock.

I mean through the whole process.

Like I said, I don't think I really ever adjusted to it really settling in and I stood up and rest of court saying that they got it wrong, that somebody else committed this crime and that one day the truth will come out. I didn't have an emotional outburst, I didn't break down. I just gathered my inner self and just faced it.

It's hard. I mean, it's like.

I I broke inside, but I didn't allow myself to break completely. I don't know if that makes sense. It's like, what do you do? What's the next course of action? How do you do it? Somebody has to listen, somebody

Closure. Yeah, that's the that's a big word of closure. Get it off the desk and onto the next one. Just let you rot. And then meanwhile, let this guy who's at this point still out there.

Yeah, I don't know when he was arrested for the case that he's serving time on now.

I think mid two thousands.

Okay, So let's just reflect on that for a second too. Had this investigation been conducted properly, had been.

Arrested, and that would have been prevented.

All those other victims would have just been able to go on about their lives and never go through this horrific experience. Them and their families and the whole thing. I find that fucking outrageous. It's it's just fucking outrageous. Then you find yourself in a maximum security prison. You're locked up as someone who's convicted, but convicted of the worst crime that you can be convicted of, which is

Just like I said, facing it straight up, it hasn't been easy to this day, it's still not easy because it's something that's always exemplified and used against you. You know, the word that, oh he's convicted of a rape and murder. It's a twelve year old girl automatically, it's a completely different outlep to me. So now there's certain restrictions in place, there's certain attitudes I'm dealt with, there's certain ways I'm looked at, and it's a battle trying to say that, yo,

So it's like the boy you crowd wolf.

So it's a constant that I'm facing on a daily basis, and it's got on extreme in certain cases.

But again it's just what else do I do?

Signing living a shell, just conformed to the to the outlook that they have in a negative manner. No, one of the things that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna scream loud and proud because I didn't do it. It's ugly, it's nasty, and it's understandable how people can look at it one way. But in order to overcome that and realize just how significant my situation is, you need to understand that there's other elements that you don't know about.

For I want to get to the aspect of your mental state, because you seem to be somebody who's very calm, rational, thoughtful, even I want to say, you maintain a very real sense of hope in a situation that to a lot of people, I think it would just collapse and they would just you know, and no one could blame you for that, right. I mean to find yourself in a place like this for over twenty years.

There were It's not easy and it's taken a long time to get this calm.

I'm forcing the situation. It's reality. It is what it is.

So I could allow things to overwhelm me and make them harder, or I could just face it and deal with the best way that I can. And that's what I chose to do. I got a voice, and I try to put it out there as much as I can, and I got to just be a warrior and just face everything that comes my way, all adversity, and it's hard. Each conflict that I go through allows me to deal with something different in a more positive way. So I try to take all of that on a daily basis to gain my strength.

That's amazing. I don't even know what to say after, but I will say that it's important for you to know. And we spoke to Anthony di Pippo on the way in today and he wanted us to communicate to you that he is standing strong with you and that he's going to be there when you have your hearings, and he's going to bring a group of exenrees. I mean, he's another one. He's a fighter. I mean, he's a

Well, Basically, we're doing what you said right in the beginning, which is we're trying to raise the specter of justice. Why if two people have been convicted of the same crime on the same evidence, essentially, why is one free and one in jail? That just seems wrong, It seems injust and it seems like we should be able to do something about that. In this situation, Andrew didn't get the new trial that Anthony got, so he hasn't had an opportunity to let a jury hear about the evidence

Or they can just vacate. Then they could just.

Vacate the conviction, which they could do now frankly.

Absolutely, but that's very unlikely.

It's very unlikely, but that's not something that we have completely given up on.

We're in touch with the DEA.

If new evidence gets developed, will continue to talk to the DEA about this case and about how they could do the right thing and they could save everybody a lot of time, a lot.

Of trouble, right and go after the guy.

So we suspect who the evidence points to. I mean, clearly he's never been charged. Okay, we're talking about him as though he were in.

Fact the guilty party. We don't know that.

What we know is that the evidence certainly points to him, right, He's done things that are very similar.

To what they've been convicted of.

So we have a reason to believe that he is the person. But we don't know that obviously, and it hasn't been proved in a court.

Of law, just in the manner of the way that this case was presented, has a lot of associative ties to Gombert and his culpable acts against other victims. Yeah, the evidence points to that. You have a lot of dots that connect that. I'm not here to do anything other than prove I was not the one who committed this crime. To exemplify that, focus on the evidence, focus on the facts, keep it simple. I'm not an investigator,

Say, oh, well, you admitted it.

No, the forensic and pathological evidence disproves those words, disproves Denise rules. She disproves her own through her testimony, words and her statement. So there's all of these different avenues to come to conclusion that they're refusing to do.

Yeah, the only evidence is her testimony. There really is nothing else.

They say, well, this happened in this van, and there's no forensic evidence linking the victim to the van.

There's just nothing there.

There's supposed to be other witnesses who were in the van with Denise, and all of them say, oh, I didn't see that happen. The police tried to make me say that that's what happened, but I refuse to say that because it didn't happen. So that's what Adam Wilson says. He says, Oh, the police tried to make me go along with that story. They tried to make me corroborate what Denise Rose said, but I wouldn't do it because it didn't happen.

The only evidence is the testimony of this crack addicted young woman who has been refuted by the other people that were there with her at the time. The physical evidence. Not only is there no physical evidence that because there's always going to be skeptics, right, these people out there going, well, there must be something, well, you know, in this case,

The forensic evidence is completely consistent with innocence and not at all consistent with guilt.

So if we are to believe that you actually did this, you would have to be a master criminal.

You have to be I have cleaned up the entire brand that they said it happened in so that no trace of this victim could be found in the van, which I think is really beyond the abilities of two teens, especially when the van that they said it happened in was already in police custody, was already off the roads, it was already at the time they said it happened.

So there's one more thing that we have to talk about, which is that the prosecutions theory revolved around the idea that this horrible crime was committed in the van with five people and the victim. And there's a pretty big problem with that, which is that there's a mechanic who has testified that the van in fact was up on blocks at the time.

Right wheels, And the fact of the matter is he testified to that in this recent trial where Anthony was acquitted, but he also testified to that back at the first trial.

This isn't even new evidence.

The police knew that and there was no reason to disbelieve the mechanic.

I mean, there was no reason to think that he was.

Somehow in codes with the defendants and you know, trying to improperly create a reasonable doubt where there was none.

There was all sorts of stuff with the van. It was on blocks, right, the tires were off it, the engine was screwed up.

Yeah, I could explain some of that, but just before I get into that, just so everybody knows and is aware of just to extent an involvement of these detectives is initially on the statements, it was a Bronco that was crossed out and changed to van.

What happens is is that they later on okay, because remember there's this long period of time between the time that Joset disappears and the time that they realize it's a homicide. So during that period of time when they're not really investigating this case and they're not following up their leads on Howard Gombert, during this time.

They seize this van.

So by the time they arrest Andrew, they've got.

It in their custody.

Well, they legally stole it, right.

They kept it, they seize it, and they never returned it. So at that point it becomes helpful for them to have the crime occur in the van, which is in their possession. So they then change it from saying oh, it was the Bronco to saying, oh, this must have happened in Andy's van, not knowing that there was an actual witness out there who could say, oh, that's impossible because the van was actually up on blocks and inoperable at the time that you're saying that this child was actually.

Murdered, yes, which was in nineteen ninety fourth from there.

So I think Andrew's right to say that when you look at this from the point of view of thinking about the police after the fact having a hypothesis which they tried to make the facts conform to that, this evidence actually does support that theory, and I think that's what happened.

It's simple orchestration.

What they did was they said this is the crime, and we're going to get the people to say this is what happened, and that's what they did. They glued together but again simplifying it, keep it into the evidence, and it tells its own story, and going back to Denise Rose and her claims of her witnessing, and you

Evidence conflicts with her version. So who do you believe?

So they actually did, when you think about it, a very sloppy job of framing you, because in fact, if they had been a little bit more thoughtful, somebody would have said, wait a minute, let's not go with that van theory, because I just found out that the van is over at Mechanic Autoshop, up on a thing with an engine that doesn't work, no tires. But they didn't even bother to do that.

And guess what they didn't need to, did they.

No, And that's why, again there is another side to what the prosecution is saying. I'm not saying they're wrong all the time. There's certainly not.

You're absolutely right.

We want to hold the prosecution, the police and the prosecution to a high standard. There's a burden of proof in a criminal trial which is beyond a reasonable doubt, and we want to be holding people to that standard and make them prove that case.

I mean, you know, just to point out it would be easy for me to just jump on that bashing, you know, aspect or mindset. And even as hard as it is, I understand and believe in the system. There's a lot of good and you know, I believe in what it's supposed to be there for. But again, this isn't something that it wasn't something that you could take and say, it's understandable how these two were willfully convicted because there was a lot of close ties to the

It's not just me.

I want to point out that, regardless of what anybody can say that's to the extent this case is, this isn't one of those just close knit or we understand it. No, this is individuals choosing to go against the lord that were in the powers to get people to believe them because of their positions, and just shatter lives. They say,

I tell there's one more aspect of this case that troubles me, and it highlights the fact that there was so much time elapsed from the time of the crime to the time of the arrests, and they came up with a little girl who said she remembered something about some jewelry or something, which I found so far fetched.

Well, the police said that they had found jewelry belonging to the victim, Josett, in this van, which we know that even if they had committed the crime, they couldn't have committed it in this van. But anyway, they said they had found jewelry in the van. They then called witnesses at the trial to say that they recognized the

Didn't believe it. And they also said, despite.

The lack of any forensic evidence linking the girl to the van, there was jewelry found in the van that witnesses have identified as belonging to the victim. And I just didn't believe that that could possibly be true, because I didn't believe that little girls fourteen, because they were fourteen by the time they testified at trial, would have remembered what their girlfriend was wearing on the day that

I'm thinking now right about that courtroom in that moment, right and I'm sure the jury, but it must have been almost like a gasp, like, oh my god, the jewelry her, the poor girl's jewelry was found in the van. And now I would ask anyone listening to conduct a little test, which is, think of who you were hanging out with yesterday and describe what kind of jewelry they

Because by the time they got to the trial, they're saying, yes, I can remember distinctly what she was wearing. Now, they weren't saying that they were with her at the time that this supposedly happened. They were just saying, yeah, I saw her that day, earlier, that day, the night before, and yes, I can remember this is her jewelry, that's what she was wearing.

I have to point out, pertaining to the jewelry, one of the things again that I mean, it's just it's so funny that it's not funny, but It's funny the homicide de Texas. We took possession in my van at the time in nineteen ninety five.

It's never left their custody.

So some of the jewelry that they mentioned now bear in mind, a state trooper in April of nineteen ninety five did the inventory sarch.

No jewelry was found.

Well.

I get arrested on May eleventh, nineteen ninety five on a warrant for marijuana possession, and from that point on, the van was in the possession in the Punham County serff's department, and the jewelry that they claim to have fine in the map compartment was already searched by two other officers. So it never left your possession. It wasn't found. How does it get found?

Conveniently they had, they searched the van, they didn't see it.

And then suddenly.

After they had decided how this case is going to go, oh, there's jewelry in the van. That wow, people can link to the homicide.

Now it's a piece of physical because all the DNA testing up into point in that time, fiber blood analysis or whatever was going on, did not support their version. There was not a hair of Joseph right inside that vehicle. She's never been in the vile, She's never been in none of my vehicles. So it systematically became obvious that they needed some more to push this version of events.

And I'm sitting here now thinking about maybe they were sitting around having a coffee or lunch, or maybe having a meeting in the Investigator of Prosecutors or whatever it was, and somebody goes, I got an idea, and go, hey, what's that? Well, what if a jewelry story? Yeah, what if we go with the jewelry story? So it goes that's a great idea. I mean, like, how does it? How does everybody go so far wrong? It makes me insane?

I mean, because all of Anthony's team is they've got great lawyers, They've been totally helpful. I think the whole network, the innocence network, will be supportive on the legal issue at the very least because of the question of why one person still in jail and the other one isn't. So I think that appeals just on an emotional gut level to people.

So I think we're gonna get.

A lot of support on behalf of our position in the court. So I feel actually quite positively that we'll we'll get.

A new trial.

And when we do, I think it's impossible to imagine how a jury you can look at this evidence now and say yeah, no, yeah, I mean reasonable doubt, my ass. I mean, this thing is it's a mountain of shot.

In the intervening years, also, people have learned a lot about why folks falsely confess and how that happens. I think that public is much more educated.

And jurors will be as well.

So I think at the time that Andy was convicted, nobody believed that individuals falsely confessed, So if they heard a confession, they figured it must be true, and I don't think they needed much additional evidence, and they had Denise Rose. So with the two of those statements, I think it would have been very hard in that time to have gotten a not guilty verdict. Now it's a

Yeah, I'm going to say this before I turn it over to you for closing remarks. Having heard about you and heard about your case for some time now, I really wanted to come up here and meet you. Now that I have met you and getting a sense of your strength and your spirit, I can say that I'm going to do everything in my power to help Adele. In the team, there's a lot of people who care about you and care about this case and care about justice, and we're just going to keep going until we get

All right, Well, you know, first, I just want to thank you Sabin, with Dell everybody listening for your support. Continued support, future support or it means a lot.

It really does.

You got to find strength in yourself in order to face adversity and going through the situation. It's a constant battle. But I won't give up. You can't give up. Everybody be hearing from me soon. I got a start to tell I stay positive, I stay driven. Otherwise I'm subjected to just the whims and the mercy of what they did to me, and I can't let that happen.

Last question, do you want people to write to you? Is there any social media you want them to go to you?

I mean absolutely, I would love to hear from anybody and everybody you know.

Can you give the information of where people can write?

Wendy Correctional Facility all in New York? I'm not sure the zip cord. I apologize for that.

Wendy wnd WE and.

De Correctional facility. It's an old in New York.

Ald E And my name is Andrew kreevac kr I v AK and my DIN number is ninety seven A four two three six. If you want to know a little bit more about me, you could look up obviously my colt of Anthony, the Pippo Home, A lot of the information is on his Facebook.

Page or just google your name and my name.

You know, there's a lot of news articles recently through the exposure of the evidence and things that came out with Anthony's retrial. Also, Jeffrey Deskovic, who I'm in close contact with, is also in my corner and speaks of my case. And you know, I want to just thank those that have reached out to me so far, some of which I'm corresponding with, and I'm looking to link up with as many people as possible, just pay forward, do something positive.

I'm glad you brought that up too, because Jeffrey Deskovic, who had a terrible thing in common with you, which was this lying polygraph examiner, has become a very powerful advocate for the wrongfully convicted, and he's been on the show, he passed the bar in New York State, and I do want to just mention that he has been a very vocal and passionate advocate of yours and Anthony's and others who've been wrongfully convicted. So shout out to jeff and I know he's here in spirit and he's on

And I appreciate it. I really do.

I know sometimes I can't in the future. People, You just see how much I appreciate things. But like I said, it's up to us to make change and eventually we're over.

Cool.

Thank you for listening to Ronfuel Conviction behind bars, and I want to thank well the star of our show today who I'm very excited to see on the outside soon, Andrew Kreevac. Thank you for being on and at del Bernhard.

Thank you for having me.

This is a wonderful lawyer.

Thank you.

Thank you to our producers, to Bean Jansen for coming and making us sound as good as we can even with all of the deal cool.

Thank you Jason for doing this work and making a difference in so many people's lives.

Yeah, I want to say that too. You know, I definitely applored your longevity. It means a lot. Like I said, you know, it's because of people like you that allow people like me to have the opportunity to.

Correct these rooms. So it definitely touches.

My heart won't stop, not gonna stop, and I'm very stubborn and that's a good thing in this line of work. Because you need it. And like I said, I've seen too many miracles to stop believing in miracles. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps. And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future

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