On December fifteenth, nineteen eighty one, Linda may Craig, a sales associate at the Tri State Mall in Claymont, Delaware, was abducted in her car at the end of her shift. After not arriving home hours after she was due, her husband called the police. Her body was found the following day, beaten, stabbed, and raped in a church parking lot about a mile and a half away from where her car had been discovered. Nikiaris was a troubled young man with serious substance abuse
issues growing up in southwest Philadelphia. One fateful night, he was pulled over for a traffic violation in a stolen car while high on meth, and he got into an altercation with the arresting officer, whose gun accidentally discharged. While in jail and facing a laundry list of charges, Yarras spotted a newspaper article about Linda may Craig and tried to trade false information for leniency. But what authorities discovered his trickery. They turned the charges and the tables on him.
Manipulating false witness testimonies, hiding or dishing the case history, and using some misleading rology in order to pin the rape and murder on Nick. The biological evidence, as it turned out, that was used to convict him, though, would one day be the same evidence that would set him free. Now. I'm not even going to try to summarize the rest of Nick's story here. It's why we're splitting this episode
into two parts, which are both available now. But to compare Nick's story to a roller coaster ride of twists and turns would feel like a compliment to roller coasters, or it would be actually under selling the story of Nick Yaris. As one journalist put it, nick Yaris is living one of the greatest stories ever told. And this is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm that's me today. I have a guest whose name
you will remember and whose story you won't forget. First of all, thank you for flying all the way across the country from the Great Northwest. Nick Yarris is here.
Nick welcome, Thank you everyone. I really appreciate that.
And as I always say, I'm sorry you're here, but I'm happy you're here. So I often feel that each time I meet someone a member of the exonerated community, and I interview them, I feel like I thought I had heard everything, but now I'll just have to reevaluate. But Nick's story is so far off the rails. He's the only guy to start with this. He's the only guy to have escaped from death row and then turned
himself in and then ultimately been exonerated. He's the first person in America to ever request his DNA to be tested from death Row, and of course that's what led to his wrongful conviction being overturned. He's got so many unique aspects to his story and his character. I just want to let the interview go. So here we go. Nick. First of all, let's go back to the beginning. Where did you grow up?
I was raised in Southwest Philadelphia.
My family lived in a small area of the Eastwick section Southwest Philadelphia, and I was in a working class neighborhood.
You had a difficult childhood from everything I've read.
Yeah, so the problem with everything was in timing. And I'm sure you're old enough to remember this.
I was part of that wave.
Of children that came in the sixties, and in nineteen sixty eight my entire life changed because not was it related to the assassination of Martin Luther King, but I always equate that because all I remember was that summer was the fires and Camden and all of these upheaval and I wasn't allowed to be friends with Roderick Jones, my buddy from first grade, and that was the summer that I had to deal with after a terrible incident that spring where I was in my neighborhood and as
a seven year old boy, I was let out from school to go to a dental appointment and I had my school clothing on when my mother told me as I left the house that day that she really didn't want me to get thirty. But I went running off with my childhood friend, Jocko, who was a medium sized pood on, my best friend in life, and I ended up in a small area behind my neighborhood that was wooded, and as I walked down the path, I didn't notice, but there was a boy there about twenty years old, and I knew.
Who he was.
He was a very aggressive male. I seen him beat up adults and I was very afraid of him, and he knew that he played upon that. And as I found myself alone with this individual, he commanded my attention and he told me to come to him and come over here, because he wanted me to stand before him, and he had a cigarette in his mouth. I remember distinctly how he took the cigarette from his mouth and he wanted me to take a puff at his cigarette. And when I did, I got all lightheaded from the
tobacco entering my lungs. And basically at that moment, that's when he launched the sexual assault upon me. And in frustration and anger, he got all scared and he picked up a fieldstone and he beat my head in with it. I remember only bits and pieces when I came to, and I was terrified. I couldn't find my dog, Jocko. I kept screaming his name over and over, and I
knew that I had to go back home. And I remember the warm blood on the front of my head, and I had this huge, huge hematoma across the front, so that it was like a porpoise head man, and I couldn't hardly see. Everything was like those frosted glasses you see when someone's close to a window and everything's
all fogged up. And I stumbled home and my mother was there, and she was horrified, and she said Nikki would happen, and It was then that I had to recall for her the lie that he kept telling me while he put his trousers on, that I should tell my parents I fell off a wall and a shopping cart fell on my head. I told the story to my mom, and she didn't care about any of it,
and I remember it. I just got rushed to the Willseye Hospital in Philadelphia and they treated me there for the brain swelling, and I was taken home that night. And I remember the only thing that to this day this still sticks out, is that Jocko would leave me alone my dog when I got home, just wouldn't stuck.
So the dog could run home, as if to try to get help for you. Is that right?
It seemingly was that way to me.
That's a horrible, horrible story. It probably I'm going to guess that it had something to do with the fact that you ended up getting caught up with some drugs and alcohol. Anybody probably would having endured such a traumatic situation. And so as a teenager, fast forwarding about a decade, you were involved with some petty crimes. Is that right? I mean, you weren't. You were no angel. Let's just say right.
I grew up in a neighborhood where stealing cars was part of the fun. Man like it was culture. You know, the seventies were different. In nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine, as a long haired kid that hung out with his friends and got high, because I found out that as long as I got high, I wasn't afraid. And it was a terrible thing that I didn't respect anything I
spoke guttural. I was very silly, and I think what did my head in was I was eighteen years old and I was standing by Cobbs Creek Park and I saw my attacker. It's the first time I seen him alone since I got out of the juvenile correctional system where I learned how to box and everything. Now I'm six to two, I weigh close to two hundred and ten pounds. I've been trained to fight. I'm eighteen years old. Man, I'm not no kid anymore. And I seen him. He's
coming from Darby, Pennsylvania, across the creek. He's got a quart of beer in his hands, and he's walking up towards me. Now five foot eight, one hundred and fifty five pounds. Maybe he ain't no big, scary dude.
So as he's.
Walking towards me, I'm getting angrier and angrier. I'm like man, And then he saw it, he saw the anger in my face, and the strangest thing happened. Man, Instead of showing me this snarling, nasty face that beat my head in, he cowered. He capitulated, and in this very milk toasting, cowardly way, he started to plead with me. Nick Man, I'm sorry, man, look, I'm so sorry. I kept looking at him and looking at him, and then I had this horrifying realization. I turned myself into this bitter, nasty
person to be just like him. I hated everyone, disrespected everyone, I talked like shit. I was so screwed up in my head from this incident that I stole a car and I ran off to Florida and I did a bunch of drugs and I ended up in the Florida State Mental Institution over this, and for the very first time, I got diagnosed with having a brain injury called a phasia. And the doctor said, what kind of drugs you've been taking? When I ran through the list of them, mainly being methamphetamine,
he said, I want to explain something to you. If you had a fire and you had napalm, would you throw the nate palm on the fire to put it out? Because methamphetamine inside your brain is napalm, and you're killing yourself. You can't function, you lose folkous. What you do is just full of mental destruction. He said, the worst drug that you can do in your life is methamphetomye. And I said, but I really don't care about myself. He said, it shows you arrived in a medical condition in the
Dade County jail. You weighed one hundred and seventy three pounds, You were malnourished, you were uncommunicated. We had to put you into restraints.
They read it all.
He said, you have a form of a phasia. You have a brain disorder in which you were brain scans show that you have damage. Have you been in a serious automobile accident, because this is likely to be caused by serious trauma. And I told him, I said no, someone hit me in the head when I was a boy with a rock. And then he tried to explain what a PHASEA was. Get out of the medical institution. They send me back to Pennsylvania and in nineteen eighty one.
I was stable for three months. I had a girlfriend named Teresa. I was working at Spencer's Gifts. I wasn't doing meth. Everything was cool. Jay I was like, I understand, I got a brain disorder. I can't do meth. So I tried my best to stay clean. But I'm twenty years old, you know. Then I get to like stressing with my brothers and fighting in the house and causing all kinds of ruckus. And my parents were stressed out because both my brothers were on drugs. So Marty's drinking,
Mikey's drinking, I'm drinking. We're fighting in the house, and it's just chaos. Teresa don't really want to be part of that.
She steps out.
So I go back to stee on cars and doing meth again. On December fourth, nineteen eighty one, two Philadelphia police officers pulled me over and they beat me up and mashed my mouth up with a Beaverdale blackjack. But that didn't stop me. The next week, I went out and stole another car. But this time it's December nineteenth, nineteen eighty one, and I'm driving in the city of Chester. It's twelve o'clock one o'clock in the morning and I went through a stop sign. The cop pulls out, and
my heart's racing. Man, I'm high on meth. I just took a hell of a beaten two weeks three weeks ago from the police for this same shit.
I don't know what to do. I just panicked.
The next thing I know, this police officer comes up and starts beating on the window. I'm boom, boom, get out of the car. But in my head, I swear to God, I can't make no sense to nothing. My heart's racing. I'm so high on meth I I can't move. I'm panicky. You know that's scared panicky. The dude rips the door open, and when he did, I realized the radio was still blasted. I'm so high on it, even though the radio's on it. He rips me out of the car, pushes me back.
Didn't you see me? Why didn't you stop all this? I can't stay.
I'm trying to talk to him, and that's when he foe armed me. And he took his right forearm and put it under my chin and pushed my neck backwards on the roof of the car so that my head's now being pushed against it and I'm choking, you know, And that was it, Like I snapped, and I pushed his arm away with my left hand and flung it off me, and he grabbed his stick in a flash my right.
Hand so fast. I can't explain it.
When you're high on methamphetamine and your adrenal glands kick in, the things that happen are just in flashes. I reached out and like a nanosecond just took a stick off him, and he looked at me incredulously and he went whew. And then he reached down with his right hand and pulled his gun out. And when I seen him going for the gun, I reached out with both hands and put my hands on his hand and pushed downwards so that the barrel went away from us, you know.
And as I did that was it. Boom, big loud explosion.
Man, the gun goes off, and I'm just I can't believe this, Jason. I went from being high in a stolen car driving down the street, thinking about how can I get out of this crazy stuff at my house, and the next thing I know, his cops got his arm on my throat and his gun just went off. So I put my hands up. I said, okay, okay. He put the gun under my chin. He forced me into the car. Then he sat down and he composed himself for a minute, and I watched as like he
thought about this. Then he snatched up the microphone from within the car and he starts yelling shots, fire shots, fire, help, help. He's attacking me as if I'm whipping his ass. I'm like, I can't even believe that this man is now in front of my face making this up. And then he puts the phone down. He goes, oh, and he could sell the car, and he's waiting and a paddy wagon shows up and there's four.
Cops in it.
They ripped me out of the backseat of the car. I ain't even in handcuffs. Boom boom, boom, boom boom to the ground, Beat me down, Stop me down. He already told him he had my gun. He tried to kill me. He beat the shit out on me, put me in jail.
At that time, you were charged with stealing a car.
Right they didn't even know it was stolen. This was a traffic incident. I was originally charged with aggravated assault resisting arrest. Attempted murder on a police officer, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, and for kidnapping of that police officer.
As well as reckless endangerment and robbery. I mean, it's a lot. And so this is where things get really nuts. I mean, in case your story wasn't already crazy enough for three podcasts, because it is now, you come up with what must have seemed like at the time a good idea to get yourself out of what is an impossible situation. With all these charges hanging over your head. You're looking at potentially spending the rest of your life
in prison. We would have to say that it was your fault you were driving high and that you were in a stolen car, But the rest of it sounds like you were basically trying to save your own life and ended up in a situation that spiraled way out of control. Adrenaline, drugs, all kinds of things. And we know in those days that Philadelphia police were notorious. In fact, they were instructed, even ordered to use extreme violence against suspects. It was the era of Frank Rizzo, who was the.
Two weeks before I got arrested by this police officer Rizzo himself. No, it was the police officers that he created, the highway patrol officers, right, the brutal ones you're talking about with the jack boots and the berets.
Yeah, sort of a gestapo that used to patrol the Philadelphia area. And of course Rizzo went on to be the mayor. It's really a dark chapter and not only
Pennsylvania history, but American history. On December fifteenth, nineteen eighty one, Linda May Craig, a sales associate the Tri State Mall in Claymont, Delaware, was abducted in her car at the end of her shift and after not arriving home, you know, hours and hours later, her husband called the police and her car was found abandoned on the side of the
road in Chichester, Pennsylvania. Her body, of course, tragically, was found the following day, beaten, stabbed, and raped, and she was found in a church parking lot about a mile and a half away from where her car had been found. The police report stated that she bled out from multiple stab wounds to stained to the chest. Really an awful crime and an era when crime was high, this one would even stand out as a particularly vicious brutal assault.
So tell us what happened, because you had an idea that would take you into a better spot in terms of your own charges that you were facing. And actually, I think when you came up with, at least on paper, must have seemed like an elegant solution, right.
But that's the thing about being waylaid by a lie. From this point on, I bear responsibility. I know what he did to me was wrong, and a jury, yes, only three months later, I would be found not guilty of all the charges by that police officer.
Not guilty, Wow, that's right.
But before that I was facing life from his lie. So in my desperation, the only thing I had in myself was a newspaper that had the story of Linda May Craig. And I don't know if you've ever been locked in a room with a box of toothpaste, but you'll read the ingredients over and over, man. And that headline kept bugging me, man. And it all started by happenstance. A guard walked by and he saw me. He said, boy,
you don't look right. What's going on. Before that moment, in my head, I concocted a stupid, stupid story where I was going to tell the police that I possibly knew some information about this murder, and that hopes of bartering my way out by saying that this guy that had died of a drug overdose did it so that I could get.
Out and run.
This is the thinking of a twenty year old junkie man, but I still bear responsibility for it my own this. So, this officer standing before my cell says to me, why are you so upset? I said, I need to talk to somebody. What if I knew about this murder? And I held up the newspaper and I said, would they let me out? And then he said, what do you know? And I told him my story. Oh my god. As soon as I finished telling my story, he ran off. He went to the sergeant's office and got the sergeant.
And then I realized I did it. I had already committed to this. I'm stuck now way out there. They came back. They took me to the warden's office. They took me out of solitary confinement. They bought me a soda, They sat me down. They told me what a wonderful citizen I was, what a huge break this was. They can't believe their luck. This is such a great thing you're doing. Nick, Look at you. You're not a bad kid. You were doing some drugs. Let's talk to the police officer.
Get the officer on the phone. Oh yeah, look, the police came, the detectives. They told me all these wonderful things. I told my story that this dude in Philly that I knew named Jimmy did the murder and that they could just go get him and be all said. They took me out of solitary confinement. They put me in general population. They told me I had a our hearing in three days.
I was going to be released. Jason, I thought this shit was real. Man.
Yeah, I'm sitting there for three days. And they came back and they said, Jimmy Chris Boys, the man that you accused of telling you that he committed this murder, is not guilty. He has an alibi. He's at work. When I heard he was at an alibi, I said, what, but he's dead.
They said, what do you mean, he's dead?
And that's when they knew that I was making up the story. And it turns out it was his brother Joey, not Jimmy, that died. The junkie that told me the story got it wrong, and I based my story on a lie, and now the cops are looking at me like you came here with a story. So we went and talked to your girlfriend and she said that you were a weirdo man, you were acting all weird. So we just we put two together and I said, what do you mean? They said, well we figured it out.
You went out and killed Missus Craig because she looks like your girlfriend. You were upset with her and you wanted to punish a woman. Isn't that why you did it? Nick? And I looked at him, like, are you crazy? Why would I go out and kill some lady I don't even know? And they said, well, we have an inmate back in the jail. Who's going to say to that you confessed to the rape and murder of Missus Craig. What do you got to say about that?
I said what they.
Said, Yeah, Charles Michael Catalino said, did you confess to him?
I said, who's this guy?
Charles Michael Cadlino was convicted of robbing William Ryan's house. William Ryan was the first assistant prosecutor of Delaware County who was handling the Linda May.
Craig murder case.
Oh Jesus, when I found out that they recruited this man and instead of giving him twenty years for burglarizing the prosecutor's home in which he abused the prosecutor's pets, I knew I was done. They charged me with the rape and murder of a woman I never even met, just based on an inmate's so called confession to an inmate. I'm sitting there now, I'm not only charged with attempted murder of a police officer. I'm sitting there charged with the rape and murder of a woman I never met.
And this is all within weeks of landing in jail. I went and played my stupid game against a liar, thinking I could make up a lie, and I made it so much worse in retrospect.
Obviously a crazy idea, but no one can walk a mile in your shoes. And I think that you came up with a plan that at least didn't involve implicating a live person. But it is a terrible aspect of the story. And of course you know you went from being zero to hero and then back to sub zero after this because of the fact that now they go, well, you know what, fuck this guy, and you know we're going to now make his life even more of a living hell. So let me just go back to the
crime itself. So, Linda make Craig was murdered before you went to prison for this incident with the office.
Yes, she was murdered on December fifteenth. I was arrested on December nineteenth in the early morning hours in a stone car in the same city, roughly twenty five miles area, just outside of Philadelphia.
Now, going back to the trial, because eventually you go to trial, I'm assuming you had a public defender.
No, I had private counsel come in. Samuel Stretton agreed to represent me for the fifteen hundred dollars inheritance I got from my grandfather, So he represented me on the first trial in April nineteen eighty two, in which the
only two witnesses were me and Officer Benjamin Wright. Officer Benjamin Wright testified about the incident that I described, and he told the court that I jumped out of the car before he had a chance to respond, ran back to his vehicle, punched him, Vishes took his gun off of him, hit him across his face with it, and then proceeded to drag him back to my car when he overpowered me and the gun discharged inches from our faces.
Meanings.
He heroically overpowered me while I had the gun pointed at his eyes, he said, And although there was no powder burns on his face and he had very minimum scarring, the jury took my word over his and found me not guilty of all charges after only twenty minutes of deliberation.
So they found you not guilty after only twenty minutes. That's a remarkable result when you have a guy who's a convicted felon and it's your word against the off the word of an officer of the law, it shows that the case was really a you know, and credit to the jury. By the way, and anyone who's listening. If you don't think it's important that you show up and serve on a jury, you just heard next voice, you may be in a position to save somebody else's life,
So please do show up. You know, if you're listening to this show, you know what's going on, so it's it's extra important that you be there. One vote can save somebody's life. Don't forget that it's a very important thing to remember. They will necessarily tell you. In certain states, they don't tell you that some people go and change their vote because they think unless they can sway everybody to their side. But no, you need one vote, and.
You stop as good as no result.
You can stop a terrible miscarriage of justice from happening to an innocent person, and so please do show up. So now let's get to the trial of your life and for your life in a very real way, right because you end up with the death penalty.
Three day trial, what a joke.
A three day trial, and the prosecution relied on a number of things that don't make any damn sense. The jail house informant, who we know is getting a deal biological materials that couldn't have implicated you because you never metter. And we know now, of course that those biological materials actually ended up exculpating you and leading to your conviction being thrown out, overturned, and you're eventually being declared actually innocent. Can you explain that discrepancy?
In nineteen eighty two, zerology was at the forefront blood grouping and such like this. So when spermatozoa or other biological evidence was left at a crime scene. The furthest that we could go in science was blood grouping. The killer had be positive blood, so do I.
And of course there was also the testimony of a co worker, and I'm confused about this one, Natalie Barr and a salesperson from nearby booth named Franklin Kaminski. These people testified that you had been lingering around Missus Craig's sales booth. The prosecution also introduced evidence that Missus Craig bore a significant resemblance to your former girlfriend. You brought this up before a relationship that had ended, you.
Know, okay to answer to both of these, The composite sketch that was made by Frank Kaminsky in nineteen eighty one described a white male five foot seven to one hundred and forty pounds, that is in the description on his sketch. The band that they described had long black or brown hair. It only changed because Natalie Barr began having personal interactions as they described it later on when I went through the lawsuit stage against Pennsylvania. She was
the main witness. Natalie Marie Barr, I guess had a fixation with police officers and Detective Randy Martin, the lead detective who handled the matter, had very continuous personal interactions with her that led to her coming forward and saying that she saw me at the mall. Now, of course the DNA testing all proves this a lie, but this is what I had to deal with at the time.
So Natalie Barr was actually part of your lawsuit.
Yes, when I filed a lawsuit against Pennsylvania with the help of Jack Beaver Esquire, she was the main witness who came forward through the help of my investigator and explained that she in fact had a personal relationship with Detective Martin and that she basically had too much information given to her by him and she felt obligated to make up a story saying that she saw me at the mall. The horror of it all really is that at the time that I went to prison, everybody was
convinced that I did it. So the jury took only an hour to sentence me to die because I refused to admit my guilt. After they convicted me, I told them that I didn't want my mother to testify, and I watched as my neighbors and people from my neighborhood made sizzling noises because I was sentenced to the electric chair. And when his honor, Robert F. Kelly sentenced me to die, he couldn't look me in the face. The whole time he read off the perfunctory duties of his job. He
had his head down like he was ashamed. So the man sentenced me to death without having the courage to look me in the eyes. And when he raised his head and said if you have anything to add I said, yeah, you can go to hell because you just sentenced me to death without having the courage to look me in the face.
Why can't you look at me?
But all he put in the newspaper was defiant death row prisoner tells judge to go to hell. So they sent me to hell. They sent me to Huntington Prison, the hardest prison in Pennsylvania, the only prison ever condemned by the United Nations for its active practices of torture. And they put me through hell man, and I've spent
the first two years in complete silence. I sang Happy Birthday to myself on my twenty second birthday, and four guards ran into my cell and the nurse stabbed me in the asked with Thorsen, that's some fucked up shit, man, where you can't even sing Happy Birthday to yourself. They'll beat your head in.
Man.
I'm like, how am I going to survive this shit? Then I meet my new lawyer and he tells me I'm guilty. I'm wasting his time. Don't bother trying to convince him of this. So at first I was a bitter pill man. You would have opened my cell out to beat your face and I didn't care who you were. And I'm in the mirror with all these killers, and I gotta be worse than them because I got to keep them off me. This is crazy, man. I'm in
the early stages. Everything was chaos, man. And in nineteen eighty three the drugs in America made the prison swell from one million to two million. So I was in a prison with eight hundred people that went to two thousand prisoners. Man, and the guards just had fun with this man. The first dude that killed himself, I thought it was a mattress that somebody threw off the tier. He couldn't take.
It no more.
They kept torturing them, torturing them, torturing them, throwing pork in his cell, calling him nigger. He just couldn't take it no more. When I heard the body hit, because I lived on the bottom tier and he was forty feet up on the top, I thought they had cleaned the sellout and they threw a mattress away.
So I got up and looked out. His feet were twitching.
I went back over and I said, I don't give a damn what I gotta do. I'm getting out of here, man. And then the torture started. They used to make us have gladiator days on Sundays when the lieutenant wasn't on the block. Man early on, Jason, I had to fight men.
Geeze.
They were beast man like. I had no choice. And these dudes were being tortured, and a lot of it was just because they were Muslims and they rioted in Greater Ford Prison in Pennsylvania.
They were marked.
They had a axe on him, and because I was a good sized kid, they decided that I.
Was going to be her avenging angel and shit like that. It was sick.
Man.
I decided that I wasn't going to give up my humanity. I decided that I wasn't going to do this.
But I didn't know.
How some I'm walking past his cell where the guy killed himself, and the guard says to me, you go in that cell. You get them books. You start reading them books. It will stop you from being mad.
What books were they?
I went into the corner.
Out of them word this urine, the stand of water, standing damage, and shit.
And I picked up.
Nineteen seventy Webster's Dictionary paperback missing cover, a nineteen thirty three Tabler's Medical Encyclopedic, a nineteen eighties ged booklet with all the training courses, The Count of Monte Cristo and the Prophet by Khalil Lebron. And I didn't even know any of these books. It took me three years, but
I took the dictionary part. I was well on my way to working really hard to educating myself when my court appointed lawyer filed my mandatory appeal and the State Supreme Court remanded my case back for all of the destruction of evidence from my case because, like I described, when Frank Kaminski made a composite sketch, all of the related files in a file called eighty one ten seventy
three were missing. Of the first thirty three pages of the initial homicide file, seventeen pages were missing, and of the remaining thirty three pages that many of them were redacted with black markings. The prosecutor deliberately went out of their way to remove all evidence of any suspect prior to my becoming a suspect while in prison, meaning any
investigative notes and everything was taken out of there. The notes related to the killer leaving the gloves in the car because they knew my hands were swollen and large that I wouldn't fit. The killer's gloves were also hidden. So I'm on my way to court in nineteen eighty five, I'm so on pins and needles that I got a reman from the State Supreme Court with a clear mandate to answer the questions related to the destruction of evidence from pre trial files prior to trial, so that I
could show exculpatory evidence. The prosecutor is up Ship's Creek. They're going to have to produce all this evidence that they said didn't even exist. So I get in the car. I'm driving to Philly. I'm going down there to court. Huntington Prison is two hundred and twenty five miles away from the courthouse.
I was to attend.
So we had a five hour journey of driving down from Huntington Prison in the Central Mountains of Pennsylvania all the way down to the Philadelphia area. It was about four and a half hours into the journey when the officers decided that we would have to take a break at either a rest stop or a gas station so that we could all relieve ourselves. And we stop in a hest station. It's February fifteenth, nineteen eighty five. I'm
twenty four years old. I just spent three and a half years in one of the hardest prisons in the world, and I'm telling you I'm ready to go home. I'm tired of this. I didn't kill nobody. I know it's all been a mistake, and I'm ready to go home. I want to see my parents in court. Everything I was talking to the sheriffs, David bo said, I was very congenial and nice. We'd go to use the restroom. The taller of the two officers holds the cubicle door for me. The cubicle was away from the pumps. I
used the restroom. The officers standing there by the door listen to me urinate testified at my escape trial. Later, he heard a man peeing and he had a bladder the size of a pee, and he's almost seventy years old, and he had to go to the toilet. He decided to break protocol. He decided to let me run back to the car on my own so he could run into the toilet and take a WII. That's what unraveled everything. It's now dark, it's five point thirty pm. It's winter.
I'm running back to that car. My eyeglasses are fogged up from being in the toilet. You notice, when you're warm in the car, you go out in the cold, go into a room. Was the first thing happened.
Jay, I wear glasses too.
And that's exactly what happened.
So when I come out of the bathroom, I got that fog and I'm running towards this silhouette. I got handcuffs on. I'm coming to you, man. I'm freezing. I got a prison shirt on, prison trousers.
And that's it. Man, it's the coldest. Look it up.
February fifteenth, nineteen eighty five, the coldest night of the year. No way was I thinking anything but getting that car. Man and he pulls his gun out I'm like, whoa. I throw my like, what are you doing?
Boom?
First shot, no warning, nothing. He testified that he thought he overpowered his partner. Man he tried to blow my brains out. So I did a pirouette. I run, and because I'm handcuffed, I can't get my legs to work right. I become a kimboed with my legs and I go down. Hard man ripped all the skin off my hands, and it just sent this panic through me. When he fired the second shot, boom, That's when I started running to the Ponderosa restaurant windows. I figure, if he's gonna take shots,
he's gonna have to hit one of these people. So I'm like running like I'm gonna jump through the plate glass window. And then I did that thing, you know, that Philly move where you run around the corner. So I ran down to the intersection about one hundred yards.
I ran another hundred yards to my right. I ran another one hundred yards to my right from there, and I was right back behind the cop car, right back where the car was where I just got out of and I'm in the woods and I'm looking at him, and then all of a sudden, I just start throwing up and throwing up. I can't believe, like there's no mental process available to a human being to put perspective on any of this. I stopped to take a piss. The guy blows my head off. Almost I'm paranoid as
it is. I'm looking forward to going home. I don't want to run.
I'm like, what do I do?
And I'm standing there panicking. I'm like, man, I gotta do something. And I look and there's a flag and it's a municipal building and it's a police station. I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna go hide behind the police station. Fuck this, I'm not doing this, man.
So I went and.
Hid behind there for about thirty minutes, forty minutes until I lost my core temperature and I come bolting out of there, and somebody in the building saw me.
Man, that was it. Here comes to a cop. Oh my god, choppers.
ATVs over two hundred police officers in the woods of Chester, Pennsylvania. I'm running, and I mean, I don't care if it's a tree branch or a brick wall.
In this kind of.
State, you just grab your glasses off your face and you run. Oh my god, I got knocked down. I didn't care. I jumped up.
I ran.
Helicopter comes out. He's by this apartment complex and the blades are so close to my head. He's almost whipping me with him. The snow's blowing up in my face. Everything's covered in ice. Man, and this helicopter's on me. I go behind this tractor trailer. I come out underneath it. I roll back under he comes around it. The search light's on me, like you would believe. He's got me lit up. I go down over this fence and I
roll down in embankment and cross the highway. But he still thinks I'm in the parking lot, and he swings back that way and I get away from him. I break across this big parking lot for him, and I end up by this pizza shop. And then I go down another embankment and then someone sees me back there.
And calls the helicopter back on me. Bam, he's on me again. This dude was on me, like you'll believe.
Man. The only reason I got away from that way because I went into a corner of a building and people came out the other side, and he thought that was me, and I buckled back around and went back down these train tracks. I walked for five miles to Fraser, Pennsylvania and broken feet. I found the nineteen sixty five Ford Mustang in the parking lot.
I hot wired it and I drove here to New York City.
What about the handcuffs.
I took them off with my eyeglasses.
See the same circumference of the pinhole of a pair of handcuffs. If you keep putting a human being in handcuffs, he's going to figure them out. Well. I knew from experience that if I take the arm off of my eyeglasses, I can bend it and it's the same circumference as the pin hole. You turn it once left to take off the double lock, and then turn it once right.
You can take your handcuffs off. So while I laid there after I finished throwing up in the woods, I took the handcuffs off and put them in my pocket. I left them in a Bennett.
LaGuardia airport three days later.
Wow, yeah, I.
Left my handcuffs here in New York City, and the transit authority found them. The FBI was on me here in New York City. Man, I bet they were the found my car in Washington Square two days after the escape, February seventeenth, And that's when I was walking past Macy's and I saw all those display windows with the TVs
with my mom's image on it. Man, oh man, they didn't have my image up until a few seconds later, I bet, but as soon as I saw my mom on five hundred televisions because Macy's had all them electronics, remember back in the day, Yes, crazy Eddy man.
So there was a mom on TV like saying, I want my son to come along outside the house.
I will never forget.
WPVA, channeled six in Philadelphia was outside my parents' house and the reporter was out there harassing my mom. I'm thinking, oh my god, I'm on the FBI's most Wonderless because that's what came up next.
Of course you were what did you do about the clothes? Because what happened in the prison clothes?
Oh well, see I stopped in Philadelphia but before I left, and a family member gave me some money and some clothes and some bandages, and I drove to New York. After I dropped the prison clothes in a swamp of New Jersey along the highway. So I had a pair of thirty six trousers on.
I where thirty four is there? A bag of shit.
I had a pair of work boots on because my feet split open in the prison shoes, and I had socks all woven into my feet. So a Puerto Rican girl helped me. I was in the Bowery. I paid seven dollars a night for one of the rooms in the old Bowery, the flophouses third Yeah, that's right right in little Italy, down by Mott Street.
Yeah.
And I was down there and a girl went out and got me a loaf of bread and it's baloney.
And I sat in the room just terrified. What do I do? What do I do?
And I ended up going to Florida from here Orlando by flight, and I thought I was going to do that Miami vice stupid thing, Go rob me a drug dealer and get a bunch of money and go to Surinam and haha, I got away, you know.
But it was too hard, Jay.
I couldn't find a birth certificate to get a driver's license, to get a passport to get out of the country. And I wasn't as smart as I thought I was, even though I had already started educating myself. So I was sitting in Fort Laudadale, across from an Army Navy store, and I decided to buy a rubber raft, a big yellow one. I was going to get a cool full of food, and I was going to go out in the ocean into the shipping lanes and I was going
to have one blowout party. Then I was going to cut my wrists and wait for the sharks to surround the little raft, and I was going to stab the raft and blow my brains out, never again in handcuffs.
Man. That's why I told myself. Thought about my mom on.
A TV, and I realized, I have a brother who's only sixteen months older than me. He's gonna have to pay for this man. He worked for the Philadelphia Police as a hoster for their horses, and when I was on escape, they fired him, say it was too much controversy for a man to work for the Philadelphia Police and take care of their horses.
It broke my brother's heart.
So I manned up. I knew the beating that was waiting on me. I knew the torture that was waiting on me, and I turned myself in and I went back to Pennsylvania, and I faced the music because I told a lie of missus Craig.
Jason that's never stopped bothering me.
Man. I told a lie to get out of a cops line.
But that's only half the story.
I told a lie about a woman's murder man and shamed her family, disrespected mine. I got to live with that man.
So nick Yarris and now survive Gladiator Sundays, torturous guards, shotguns, dogs and helicopter blades whipping at his face on an accidental escape from Death Row all the way from Philly to New York to Florida, only to shrug off suicide to return to death Row. There's so much more in store for part two, so start it now or save it for later. But either way, thank you for listening to part one of nick Yarris un Wrongful Conviction. 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 Ennosis Project, and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to innescenceproject dot org. To learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three time OSCAR nominated
composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to findollow us on Instagram at Brown and Ful Conviction and on Facebook at Brown and Ful Conviction podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one