#119 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - Matt Livers

a run for his money. Horrible crimes can happen anywhere, even where you least expect it. And if you've learned one thing by listening to this podcast, I hope it's that false confessions can also happen anywhere and any time. I want them to learn a second thing, it's that a confession is only as good as the evidence the corroborates it. And in this case, it looked like there was perfect corroboration. There was evidence that seemed to prove

the confession true. But what happens when new evidence surfaces that causes the confession to unravel? That makes the narrative seem to be false. What do you do in a case like this starts falling apart? Do you double down? Or do you fix it up? Today's story begins in Murdoch, Nebraska. It's a tiny town about halfway between Lincoln and Omaha. Murdoch is barely more than a few dozen homes, surrounded

by fields of corn and the occasional outlying farmhouse. The population just two hundred and sixty nine people, only sixty six families, and one of Murdoch's most respected families was the Stokes, headed by Wayne and Sharman Stoke, both in their mid fifties. When our story starts on Easter Sunday two thousand six. Wayne and Sharman were good people, god fearing, well known Murdock residents who lived in an immaculate farmhouse

near town. Wayne was a successful businessman for years, he'd run the Stoke Hay Company, growing bundling selling hay to all the local farmers, and Sharman was a teacher's aide. She ran a popular cake business out of their home. So it's that Easter Sunday, April sixteen, two thousand sex it unfolded like many holidays for the Stokes. It was a family occasion. That morning, Wayne and Sharman went to church, followed by Easter traditions. Right they had brunch with their family.

They had an Easter egg hunt with their grandkids. It was a lovely but unremarkable day, and Wayne and Sharman went to sleep that night in their farmhouse as usual. The next day, April seventeenth, rolls around. Wayne and Sharman are early risers, but when their adult son, Andy arrives at the farmhouse about nine am, he doesn't see any sign of his parents. He goes inside. He moves through the tidy but sile first floor. He goes upstairs and he finds the worst, his dad's body in a blood

spattered second floor hallway. Wayne's head had nearly been blown away by a gunshot last Now, Amy calls the police and the Cass County Police arrived. Murdoch's Way too small to have its own police force, and soon enough investigators find a double tragedy. Not only is Wayne dead, but Sharman's body is found in the bedroom, wedged between the bedside and the wall. She's been shot in the head too, and a phone cort is wrapped around her body like

maybe she'd been trying to call for help. This was a double murder of the worst kind, something that Murdoch, Nebraska had never seen before. Seasoned crime scene veterans and officers in the area looked at this crime scene and it made them physically ill. They had never seen so

much carnage before, certainly not in Murdoch, Nebraska exactly. So as local police are assessing this scene, processing this trauma that they're seeing in front of them, they realize they're in a bit over their heads, so they call in the big guns. They call in the Crime Scene Investigation Division of the Douglas County Sheriff's Office. It's basically the state's leading crime scene forensic experts. Now, the investigators find

several items of interest at the scene. They find shells from a twelve gage shotgun that are littered around the whole area. They find a silver flashlight with blood on it, and sitting in the Silks driveway. There's a red and silver marijuana pipe. Now, both the flashlight and the marijuana pipe are potentially DNA testable. There's also a damaged window

in the Stokes laundry room. It suggests that maybe somebody had broken into the house, and inside police observe in the blood spray that had been left on the wall, there's a human silhouette. It implies that there had been two people present, one to shoot and one to get sprayed by all that blood. What a visual blood spray to human silhouette exactly. It's It's like a movie scene.

And on the otherwise spotless kitchen floor, police find a golden ring with an unusual inscription, an inscription that didn't seem to relate to anyone in the Stoke family. It said love Always, Corey and Ryan. There's no signs that anything's been stolen from the house. Wayne and Charman's children

can't pinpoint anything that seems to be missing. That leads the police officers to believe that this crime was not some random break in, but that it was personal, that it was an act of vengeance, and that whoever slaughtered

the Stokes had an exe to grind with them. Police start asking Stoke family relatives who might have wanted to harm Wayne and Sharman, and some of Sharman's family members start wondering out loud about the person they thought of as the black sheep of the family Sharman's nephew Matt Livers. Matt was twenty eight years old and had no criminal record whatsoever, but he'd had his share of challenges because

of his severe mental limitations. Matt had struggled with getting through school as a boy and trying to hold down a job as an adult. The Stokes were a family that prided themselves on their success and by their standards, Matt Liver's stuck out like a sore thumb. He'd also argued recently with Wayne and Sharman about whether he was getting a sufficient share of a family inheritance, and it was this feud that made police focus on Matt as

a suspect in the Stokes murder. At about ten forty five pm on the day that the Stokes bodies are discovered, the police decided to interview Matt Liver's The interrogation lasts four hours until almost three o'clock in the morning, but Matt tells the cops he's there to cooperate and he has only good things to say about the Stokes. He downplays this idea of a family feud, and that makes officers bitious, and he does what many people who are innocent do he says, I want to cooperate. Take my DNA,

take my hair, take my saliva, take my fingerprints. I'll even come back for a polygraph. I had nothing to do with this. I'm an open book and based on all that, for the time being, Matt Liver's is released. Meanwhile, the police are interviewing others too, and they do get a lead. Right there's a local newspaper carrier who tells the police that he had seen a car parked near the Stokes property on the morning of the murders. It's

a tan four door midsize sedan. Now, this guy doesn't know whether the vehicle was related to the crime or not, but he did recall seeing an OH in the license plate. Now, Matt Liver's drives a red convertible, but his cousin, Will Sampson drove a tan four door Ford Contour, which made

investigators become suspicious. Now, Will's Contour didn't have an O in its license plate, but oddly enough, it had been professionally cleaned and detailed right after the murders, and that gave the police reason enough to want to search Will's car. They even go to the auto detail shop itself. They go through the vacuum bags that were used when Will's card was cleaned, but they find zero incriminating evidence. Now

this is strange. The crime scene was incredibly bloody. It would have been almost impossible even for the most professional detailers to erase every molecule of evidence, but the investigators found nothing. Despite all this, police are still suspicious. Now they discover that Will Samson, the guy who owns the contour, did have an alibi on Eastern night, which is when the crime presumably occurred. But Nick Sampson, another one of Matt Liver's cousins, did not have an alibi, and soon enough,

Matt Liver's and Nick Sampson become the prime suspects. Fast forward to eight days after the Stokes bodies are discovered. It's April. Police ask Matt to come in for questioning a second time, but this time they take him an hour away to the Cass County Law Enforcement Center. He is held there for questioning a total of eleven hours, most of it video recording. Now Matt doesn't know it at the time, but he wasn't going to return home

for months because here comes the interrogation. The line of questioning designed to break, Matt Liver's we're gonna watching after your years, you were involved in it. We need to know what happened. As typical in these interrogations, the investigators start by accusing that of killing his aunt and uncle. It's not whether or not you committed this crime, they say, we already know that. You have to tell us why you committed this crime, and Matt denies it right He says,

I'm not that kind of person. All I remember is sleeping in my bed that night. He goes on to deny and deny and deny eighty six times, and then, just as in so many other cases, he offers to try to prove his own innocence. He agrees to take a polygraph, which the police build up to him as fool proof that you're lost about. Matt takes the exam. He's excited. He thinks he's going to pass the exam and this will all be over, But the polygrapher comes into the room and tells him that he had failed

this test miserably. This way, when he continues denying his involvement, the police can point to his test results as evidence of his guilt. They tell him that these polygraph charts leave absolutely no doubt and holding the results in his hand, the Nebraska State Patrol officer says to mattution, we ask you a question that specifically has to do with the death of Wayne, you fly off the chart. Now, this is a lie. Like in so many of these other cases,

Matt did not actually fail this polygraph exam. It was confirmed after the fact by a polygraph expert. But we know as always that police are allowed to lie during interrogations, and that's what they're doing here, lying to him about lying again. It's like seeing the same script play out over and over and over again. In these stories. The whole point is to bring Matt Liver's down to this place of hopelessness. Nebraska is a death penalty state, so

what do the interrogators do. They introduce the idea to Matt that he's going to get the death penalty unless he confesses to this crime. If he doesn't, then they promise him they're going to go the hard route, and they get graphic, they get specific. When I first saw this tape, my jaw dropped. Matt Liver's is told by one of the Cast County investigators that he's going to personally make sure that Matt is executed for this crime. If he doesn't confess, I do, and you're meant to

me exactly what you've done. I'm gonna do my best to hang your ass. I'm going to do my level best to hang your ass from the highest tree. You are done, I will go after the death penalty. They're reciting all the different ways the death penalty can be administered, electric chair, gas, lethal injection. They tell him his asses on the line, and you're in the frying pan right now. Push and push until I get everything I mean to

make this. Make no mistake about it. Matt is beginning to break down, and make no mistake about this as well. These investigators know that Matt has intellectual disabilities exactly. He's giving them these really clear signals during the interrogation that he's limited. At one point, one of the police says to him, you know many people have tried and failed to outsmartest. Matt turns to him and assures him that he's not trying to do that. I'm dumb as a brick,

he says. And when one of the interrogators urges Matt to confess, to stand up and to be a man, Matt takes him literally. He is a concrete thinker, and he interprets that to actually mean that he's going to stand up and get up out of his chair. These are terribly frightening, terribly coercive interrogation tactics, and it's not the way someone with these kinds of disabilities should be questioned.

I am so tired of law enforcement officers pretending that they didn't know the person they were interrogating had some disabilities. This wilful ignorance on their part has got to stop. There were strong signs that they were dealing with somebody who was disabled, and they just treated him like he was any other normal adult, and they plowed ahead and used the same tactics and got false confessions away. This

is a high profile case. This pressure builds actually goes on for about six and a half hours until we start to see signs that Matt is finally beginning to crack under the pressure. He looks up at his interrogators and he says, all I want to do is go

home now. The interrogators take that as their cue and they start telling Matt that he must have been tired of being put down, shut out, kept out, of the family inheritance by his aunt and uncle, and slowly Matt begins to respond affirmatively agree with a series of leading questions from officers who literally start walking him through the story. The truth is, you got a gun, right or wrong? Right, and you took that gun back to your uncle Wayne

and aunt Sharman's house, right right. Eventually they come around to the murder itself, and you fired a shot at your uncle Wayne. Matt gives a series of one word wrote answers, agreeing to the suggestions of these interrogators about how this crime took place. All the answers to these questions, they've scripted it, and Matt is just agreeing to it.

You know, you listen to this and you get the impression that if the next question was and this crime happened on the moon, right, Matt, he would say right too. He was that much under their controls in our house after hours. Originally, he takes soul responsibility for the murders, but remember, these investigators have good reason to think that at least two people were involved in the crime, right

because of the silhouette and the blood sprayed wall. So after another lengthy series of questioning, Matt finally imp Kate's his cousin, Nick Sampson too, saying that it was Nick that gave him the murder weapon and the keys to the Ford Contour. Based on this statement, both Matt Liver's and Nick Sampson are arrested and charged with murder. Now, the very next day, Matt is facing yet another polygraph exam. Right questioning is continuing for him even after he's arrested

and charged. But the very next day he can'ts on videotape the whole thing. He says, you know, I've just been making things up to satisfy you guys and basically fitting in answers to what you guys have been asking. He later explained to a court appointed psychologist that he confessed because he wanted to go home. Case closed. This is front page news in both Lincoln and in We

got our men exactly. They're facing charges both in the courtroom and the court of public opinion, but the case against them is problematic because there's no physical evidence implicating them. Police try to match those twelve gage casings that they found at the crime scene to a shotgun that they found in Nick Sampson's bedroom, but there is no match. What about the marijuana pipe that they found in the Stokes driveway, Well, there was DNA on it and it

excluded both Matt and Nick. And the same thing goes for that strange golden ring that was found in the Stokes kitchen. It did contain DNA from two unknown people, but that DNA did not belong to Nick or Matt. The police were in desperate need of some corroboration for Matt Liver's confession. So what do they do? They call in David co Fode. Now, David Kofode was the commander of the Douglas County Sheriff c s I Unit. He's widely viewed as a statewide law enforcement hero. He was

also a shameless self promoter. He was not only a legend in law enforcement circles, but he was also a legend in his own mind right. David was a guy who had the magic touch. He had a reputation for closing cases by finding forensic evidence that all the other officers had overlooked. And David co Fote was brought in and asked to take a second look at will Samson's forward contour. Now, co Fote examines the contour personally and true to his reputation, he claims to have found blood

under the dash. He swabs the blood and it tests positive. The blood belongs to Wayne Stoke. The case against matt Iver's and Nick Sampson just became devastating, or so it seemed. Meanwhile, other officers were continuing their investigation and they focused on that strange golden ring from the Stokes kitchen. Now, there were two marks on that ring. The first one was the inscription that we already talked about, Love Always, Corey

and Ryan. But there was also a jeweler's mark on the inside of that ring, a mark made by the manufacturer, and police were able to trace that mark to a jeweler in New York. This jewelry business is going out of business, and the Nebraska investigator calls up and gets a woman on the phone who was closing down the office, and she says, can you help me track this ring? Where did this ring go after it was manufactured? And

do you have any idea about this inscription? And on the day before this jeweler is literally closing its doors in New York, it's employees tell investigators that that ring was shipped off to a Walmart in beaver Dam, Wisconsin, where it was hurchased by a woman named Corey for her boyfriend Ryan. Had this phone call come a day later, they may never have been able to trace that rank, and we might never know who actually killed Wayne and

Sharmon Stoke. It was a miracle, was a break, and it was a break that was generated by really good police work, unbelievable that traces ring them from Nebraska to New York to Wisconsin, where they discovered the story about Gregory Fester and Jessica Reid stealing the truck in which the ring had been left. Now, who are these two? Jessica Reid grew up in Wisconsin in a small town

called Horicon. Jessica was an honors student when she fell in love with greg who was an older, really troubled teenager. And the more detectives dug into Greg and Jessica, the more there was to learn. It turns out they'd stolen a twelve gage shotgun and the pickup truck where Corey

and Ryan had left that golden ring. Greg and Jessica had gone on a drug fueled interstate crime spree, breaking into houses in rural Iowa and Nebraska, They eventually ran out of money and abandoned the truck in Louisiana on April eighteenth. Somehow they made it back to Wisconsin, where they were arrested a week later for car theft. Police

questioned Greg and Jessica and began connecting the dots. According to Jessica, she and Greg started their bender in Wisconsin and we're passing through Nebraska when the truck began running out of gas. They were tired, cranky, coming down from a cough syrup high and looking for a house to rob. That's when Greg and Jessica came across the Stoke Holme in Murdoch. Greg goes in through a downstairs window, Jessica said,

and he lets her in at the front door. They go upstairs and are confronted by Wayne and Sharman Stoke. Greg lift up his shotgun and he fires once at Wayne, hitting him in the knee. He and Jessica back out of the room. They get into the hallway and Jessica looks at Greg and says, do something. So one of them goes back into the room, we don't know which one, and finish his Wayne off with a shotgun blastic close

range to the back of his head. Meanwhile, Sharmon is calling the police, and one of these two natural born killers opens fire and charman and shoots her in the face and her body falls down next to the bed and it's wedged between the bed and the wall. Greg and Jessica don't steal a thing. They just get out of that farmhouse, get back into their vehicle, and drive off into the night. Now, Jessica's story smacked of truth,

and it was soon corroborated. Wisconsin detectives in Jessica and Greg's DNA to Nebraska and lo and behold, their DNA was consistent with the DNA on the marijuana pipe and on the Golden Ring. Investigators also found Wayne Stokes blood in the truck and on clothes and shoes that had belonged to both Greg and Jessica. They even found a chilling entry in Jessica Read's diary, I killed someone, She wrote, I loved it. I wish I could do it all

the time. And they find a cigarette box in Jessica's home containing a letter to Greg and has spent twelve gage shell casing from the murders. In the letters, she wrote, this was something I did for you for you to love me as much as I love you. This is a crazy story. It's something straight out of Natural Born Killers. This was a thrill kill by two drug craze teens who actually thought they were in Iowa, not Nebraska. Needless to say, the discovery of Jessica and Greg up ends

the case against Matt Livers and Nick Sampson. After Jessica and Greg are arrested and implicated in the Stoke murders, Nebraska investigators travel out to Wisconsin to question them, and they do so because Jessica and Greg are telling a story that doesn't involve Matt Livers and Nick Sampson, so they played the same card they played with Livers. Wisconsin is not a death penalty stage, they say, but Nebraska is.

And if you don't come clean to having committed this crime with Matt and Nick, we're gonna seek the death penalty against you as well. And for a brief moment, Jessica comes up with a wild story about how she had met Nick Sampson at a bar and had gone with them into the Stoke house. But she immediately were cants once those Nebraska investigators leave the room. As soon as she's alone with this Wisconsin investigator. She says to him, these guys keep wanting me to pin this murder on

two people I have never met. During one of my many searches of cases with the words false confession, I came upon this case and I knew the psychologist who had been hired by Matt Liver's attorney, Julie Bear. So I reached out to Julie and played a sort of behind the scenes consulting role. She didn't need me. This case was beginning to crash on its own. That psychologist Steve knew. His name is Scott Bressler. Scott's report for the defense team gave a fuller picture of the motivations

behind Matt's confession. I have results that clearly showed that Matt was very vulnerable and low functioning and had personality characteristics in which he wants to please other people, wants to be complying with other people, and has a very

low tolerance for stress. And when he didn't do well on particular kinds of tests, it's because he didn't understand it, so he would make up stuff, which is interesting because he confabulated the whole scenario that the police took Cookline and Sinker, which they thought indicated that he was guilty. Scott also presented his analysis of Matt's personality to an expert from the prosecution side, and that expert was shocked by what he saw and he said, Oh my god,

I think that this is a real false confession. It becomes clear Jessica and Gregg committed this crime on their own. So I'm off this meeting with the prosecuting attorney and he's visibly emotionally shaken by everything that's happened. Right after that meeting ended, he announced his decision to release math. So I was right there when Matt walked out of jail, who and all the press were there and saw match reaction to seeing his family, and of course he gave me a big hug and thanked me. It was a

very emotional same. You know, this case shows the difference between bad police work and good police work. On the one hand, we have cops trying to solve this case by breaking an obviously vulnerable man through an insanely coercive interrogation. Compare that to the gumshoe investigator who focused on the

physical evidence. That investigator traced the golden ring to the New York Jewelers, which led to the Wisconsin Walmart, which led to Corey and Ryan and their pickup truck getting stolen, the ring in the glove compartment, and that twisted path finally ends with Greg and Jessica. That's great police work, and we know it's great because in fact, Greg and Jessica's DNA and forensic evidence was found all over the scene. We know they're guilty because the science tells us that

they are. Without that dogged investigative work, these two young men very well might have been on death row. Both Jessica and Greg went on to be prosecuted for the murders of Wayne and Sharman Stoke. They were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But hang on a second, because there's one other question here, right, what about that blood stain in the forward contour? How did that bloodstain get there if the car had nothing to do with

this crime. Well, it turns out the blood had been planted by none other than the States Star crime scene investigator himself, David co Fode. Turns out the guy with the magic touch was in this case a little more than a odd. Nebraska prosecutors ended up charging co Fode with planting that blood in the contour. He was convicted and sentenced to spend between twenty months and four years

behind bars. Prosecutors called it poetic justice. Let's talk a little bit about David cofone because he's one of the interesting figures in this case. You know, why would someone do something like this. He literally framed two innocent men by claiming that he had found Wayne Stokes blood in the contour. This is what happens when someone believes the end that they're pursuing is just, and that therefore they can cut corners and do unethical things in service of

the just goal. I don't buy that he did this because he never imagined that that confession would be false. So we figured, I'll just strengthen the case and I'll get away with it and I'll be a hero and nobody will think twice about it. But he got caught, Thank god for that. I helped Matt Livers get an attorney to bring a civil suit against the Cass County officers and the others involved in his arrest. When that case settled, something was said by Nebraska Attorney General John

Brunning that bothers me to this day. He said, the only reason we're settling the civil suit is because of David Coopodes criminal activity. My investigators did nothing wrong here. They acted honorably. Nothing could be further from the truth. They threatened Matt Liver's with the death penalty to get him to confess. They threatened Jessica Reed with the death penalty to get her to implicate Livers and Sampson. There's nothing honorable here about what these detectives did. Jessica Reid

was more honorable than they were. She told the truth I believe it or not. In the Annual False Confessions there are other cases of people who have been wrongfully convicted, only later to be exonerated when it turns out the

people on a multi state crimes where you're responsible. I mean, that's the interesting thing about so many cases that we're talking about on this podcast, because you have innocent people going down for these horrific crimes based on false confessions, while people who really need to be stopped right, whether they're serial rapists, serial killers, rights are out there doing terrible things while the innocent person does their time. Justice was eventually done here, but for Matt and for Nick

scars remain. Matt moved to Texas, but the legacy of these murders still haunts him. His relationship with Nick and other family members has been forever fraid. Nick Sampson drifted apart from his cousin. He could never accept that Matt had falsely implicated him during that interrogation. Both of them sued the state of Nebraska and ended up recovering some compensation for their ordeal, although of course nothing can properly repay them for the harm that they underwent. Matt, Nick,

you both endured ordeals that would test anyone. Your stories stand both as a warning for those police officers who want to breach trust and cut corners, but also as a testament to the justice that can be brought by good police work, the work done by those who trace that golden ring. To Greg and Jessica, we wish you peace and happy futures. Thanks for listening as we've told the story of Matt Livers and Nick Samson. Next week, we're going to tackle the story of Tana Porra, a

story that hails all the way from New Zealand. Because falesse confessions aren't just a problem here in the US, It's a global problem until them. Thanks for listening to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal

Company Number One. Special thanks to our executive producer Jason Flom and the team at Signal Company Number one Executive producer Kevin Wardace, Senior Producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura night Rider and you can follow me on

Twitter at s Driven. For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com and be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction