#125 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - Billy Wayne Cope

I think about Billy Cope all the time. I think about how the justice system failed him, and I think about how we failed him. This is the most disappointing loss in my career, one of them. At least I can rest a little bit knowing that we had an incredible team of lawyers that fought his case with every ounce of strength that we had. Well, look, I've watched you throw yourself, hard and soul into the fight for Billy Wayne Cope, and what I have seen is not

failure at all. What I see as a real heroism. And I look at what you've done in this case, and his trial lawyers were heroes too. You know, they fought and fought. This was a group effort, but it didn't succeed in the end. There's something to being a lawyer where you're literally asked to hold someone else's life and future and reputation and story in your own hands and to fight for that story. And it can be devastating when you're not able to deliver the justice that

so clearly is deserved in a case. And Billy Wayne Copes is one of the stories that doesn't have a happy ending. Billy Wayne Cope story starts in rock Hill, South Carolina, a thriving city with lots of jobs and colleges and respectable people. But there are some parts of rock Hill, on the outskirts that are different, run down. The people who live there maybe didn't finish school, maybe don't have great jobs. There are people who are too

easy to forget. Our story starts in a shabby house on Rich Street, where thirty eight year old Billy lived with his wife and three daughters in late two thousand one. Billy had a job delivering fast food chicken and his wife, Mary Sue, was a cleaning lady who worked nights. They were deeply religious. Billy was a born again Christian, the kind of guy who thinks the rapture is around every corner. Now, the Copes had their challenges. For one thing, they didn't

keep a clean house. Dirty dishes would pile up and attract roaches. Years earlier, someone had called social services because the family's mobile home was so dirty, and their kids were put in foster care for a little while. But that was a long time ago. In two thousand one, things were looking up for the Copes. They moved out of the mobile home and onto rich Street. Billy had

even gotten a degree in computer electronics. Neighbors remember the family as loving and clothes even if they didn't have money or a social cachet, and Amanda in particular, she was the shining star of the family. Amanda was the oldest daughter, twelve years old. She was a straight A student who belonged to their church's Bible quiz team, which Billy coached. The family thought of her as their hope for the future. She was a kind of big sister

who would help her little sisters. She would help them with their homework. Billy called her his special child, but Amanda's bright future would never materialize. It was Thursday November nine, Billy's alarm goes off at six am. His wife is still at work, so it's his job to get the kids ready for school. The night before, Billy and a man had stayed up late helping one of the younger girls with her homework. Now, Billy had sleep apnea because he was overweight, so he used a c PAP machine

every night to help him breathe. But the machine made noise. It hissed, it thumped, it drowned out pretty much anything quieter than the alarm clock. When Billy goes to wake his daughters, he doesn't hear from Amanda. Billy walks into her room to find Amanda on the bed, partially clothed, with a strip of her favorite green blanket wrapped tightly around her neck. Billy unwraps the blanket for a minute he holds her. Amanda's body is cold to the touch.

Billy calls. The police rushed to the scene, and right away they suspect Billy. He's willing himself to stay calm for the sake of his two other daughters, but the police misread this as coldness. They asked him what he thinks happened. Billy's in a day is all he can come up with is that Amanda might have tossed and turned in the night and strangled herself with the green blanket.

This guess is light years off the mark. Amanda had been sexually assaulted, beaten, and strangled, not with the blanket but with someone's hands. Police gather forensic evidence semen on her pants and saliva from a bite mark on her chest, and later that evening, at about ten o'clock, police bring Billy Waynecope to the station for questioning. Police start this interrogation by accusing Billy of Amanda's murder, but he vehemently denies it. Six hundred and fifty times. Billy insists he

never harmed his daughter never. Police ask what he'll say if the seamen and turns out to be his, but Billy is ready for it. It won't matchcase. I have not ever done anything much. You can check every part of my body, can do forensic studio, everything, anything. You won't find any evidence, only because I didn't want to. Now, Billy had faith in polygraph exams. He'd taken them in the past for jobs like working behind the counter at a guest station, so he asks the police for a

polygraph to prove his innocence. I'm just telling you, you get a polygraph and you're only willing to take a prah anything you want to do to me, and you will see I didn't want any one singles. Thing can never come, did I never. For the time being, police avoid his request. They keep questioning Billy for four hours until he finally gets a break at two or thirty in the morning. He's brought to a jail cell where he struggles to get a few hours of sleep. Now

let's stop for a moment. Police are focused on Billy like a laser, but by letting tunnel vision take over, they're ignoring other leads. Billy's wife's pocketbook was found next to Amanda's body on her bed. What was it doing there? This was powerful evidence that a burglar was involved in this cry. And you know what else they found. They found a flashlight in the home. And of course this is a flashlight that didn't belong to the Coke family. Not a single member of the family could identify ever

having seen Dad flashlight. But they're ignoring the pocketbook, They ignore the flashlight. They're focused on Billy. At nine fifteen the next morning, after almost no sleep, Billy's brought to a polligrapher. He takes the polygraph and he's told that he ailed. You know, this is reminiscent of so many other cases. It's one of the most powerful steps in

the pathway to a false confession. And of course we know the polygraph, the lie detector test is notoriously unreliable, but it's being presented to Billy as this infallible arbiter of truth. Billy, you failed it. That means you're lying. And when they tell him this, it shakes Billy to his core. Billy begins to doubt himself and he starts asking himself, could I have somehow done this and not

remembered it. Billy described the rest of the interrogation as an exercise in which the polygraph examiner was pulling images out of his head, images that Billy couldn't come up with until the polygrapher suggested them, one after another after another. I've seen a lot of false confessions and wrongful convictions in my life, and the Billy Wayne Cope case has haunted me for years. That's all, hasn't One of the

leading experts on the psychology of false confessions. At every step of the way, it was clear that Billy Wayne Cope's innocence didn't matter, and in fact, it mattered less and less as the process moved forward. Police formed a very strong impression of Billy Wayne Cope's guilt immediately without evidence and for no good reason. And even when evidence came in that contradicted that presumption of guilt, they didn't stop in their tracks and reassess. And that is true

the whole way through. According to that confession story that Billy eventually signed, he had gotten up at three am to go to the bathroom. He started to masturbate, and when he heard Amanda laugh at him, he attacked her, choking her with his hands and eventually violating her. He even agreed that he'd abused his other kids on other

occasions too. Sometimes when police used certain highly suggestive and misleading tactics, they and lead somebody not only to confess to a crime they didn't commit, they can cause that person to create a belief in their own guilt, to get confused about their innocence, and then to actually confabulate false memories of the thing they didn't do. These are

called internalized false confessions. He used words like I had a feeling like I assume, well you told me so, I guess this is the way it must have been. Those are not the words of a confession. Those are words of somebody trying to put pieces together of an event they have no direct memory of. Billy would go on to give something like four or five different variations of this confession, and by the end he was so broken down that he was agreeing to anything that was

suggested to him. He said, first he woke up and he assaulted and killed his daughter, and then he went back to sleep and didn't remember it, and then he woke up again and remembered it, but then forgot it again. Well, that's just psychologically impossible. This fabricated story was so horrifying to Billy that when the police threatened him with the death penalty, he welcomed it. People with authority were telling him that he had done terrible things, even if he

didn't remember doing them. He still thought he deserved to die. So Billy is charged with the murder of his daughter. And of course this is a big news story. It's everywhere, and the narrative that's being painted in the media and in the prosecution is that Billy is garbage. He's just not worth as much as others. He's one of those throwaway people. There's a problem though, with a case against

Billy Wayne Cope. After he's arrested, DNA testing proves that the saliva and seaman left on Amanda did not come from him. Instead, they were left by some other man. The police collect DNA samples from everyone who knew the Cope family, even their preacher, but they can't find a match. It takes them seven months to figure out that the DNA left on Amanda Cope's body belonged to a man named James Sanders. James Sanders is a career burglar, a

serial rapist, and a drug addict from North Carolina. He'd recently been released from prison and moved to South Carolina, to Rock Hill in particular. In fact, as of the date of Amanda's death, James Sanders lived two blocks away from the Cope family, and while Billy Wayne Cope sat in prison for Amanda's death, James Sanders was out on

the streets and he was horribly busy. Between December twelfth, two thousand one and January twelve, two thousand two, in that one month period, James Sanders was implicated in four burg leries and multiple sexual assault in rock Hill, three of them within a mile of the Cope home. On December twelve, he robbed and raped an elderly disabled woman. On December sixteenth and December nineteen, there were two more attempted rapes, and on both occasions the victims identified James Sanders.

This guy is on a literal crime spree, breaking into homes and assaulting females in Amanda Coopes neighborhood within weeks of Amanda Coope stath. He was brazen. He would go into these homes to try to find money, but if there was a woman in the home, he would attack her. He even assaulted some of these women while other people were sleeping in the home. Now, James Sanders also had a signature m O. He would target homes after dark. He would break in without leaving any signs of forest entry.

That was his specialty, and in each case James Sanders acted alone. Sanders was arrested for one of these other rapes. It was only at that point the prosecutors discovered that his DNA matched the Cope crime scene too. Now that Renders Billy Wayne Cope's confessions false because he doesn't indicate the presence of a James Sanders in his scenarios, so his confessions were simply factually wrong. Somebody else raped his daughter.

That same DNA that excluded Billy Wayne Cope identified the assailant. At this point, the whole case against Billy Wayne Cope should have been reevaluated from top to bottom. Instead, prosecutors theorized that Billy and Sanders attacked Amanda together, even though Billy's confession doesn't mention an accomplice, and even though only sanders DNA is left at the scene. Their first act was to go to his wife and to tell her that that DNA in the seamen was Billy Wayne Copes.

They lied to his wife and then wired her up to try and get him to give a better, more accurate confession because his prior confessions were factually incorrect. Why would you sent his wife and to get a fifth confession unless you realized that the other four were worthless. She died shortly thereafter as a result of complications and surgery, and they never corrected the record for her. She died believing that Billy Wayne Cope's DNA had been found inside

of their daughter. The prosecution searched for any connection between Billy and Sanders, and they found nothing. There was zero evidence he and Cope had ever met that alone joined forces. The DNA contradicted the prosecution of Billy Wynko, and instead of moving in that direction, they concocted a theory that essentially had he and the rapist involved together, and they

just made it up. Four weeks before the start of this trial, Sanders wrote a letter to the prosecute just in this case, and in that letter he complained about his own defense attorney, and one of the complaints he had was, He's not even talking to me about this other man. I'm going to trial with someone I'm not even acquainted with. But even Sanders letter didn't deter prosecutors.

They told the jury that Billy Wayne Cope had pimped out his daughter to James, that Billy must have led James into the home in order to attack Amanda, and so the two of them went on trial together. I couldn't believe that Billy Wayne Cope had to sit in court with his daughter's rapist and murderer. The individual who

semen was found inside his daughter. Now, Billy Wayne Cope's case was gaining the attention of national experts in false confessions as well as some of the leading lawyers in South Carolina, and Billy's lawyers were committed to fighting back at trial. Billy's legal team tried to tell the jury about James Sanders crime spree, but the judge refused to let them, saying that sanders other crimes weren't relevant because

they hadn't involved a twelve year old girl. Billy's lawyers also tried to introduce that letter Sanders had written saying he didn't know Billy, but the judge rejected that too. Billy's defense is hamstrong. The jury saw James Sanders there, but they were not permitted to know that James Sanders was about to stand trial for another crime he committed in almost exactly the same way and in the same neighborhood.

In their minds, James Sanders and Billy Wayne Cope came together for this one time only novel crime, when in fact, James Sanders was a serial offender. And meanwhile, the trial that Billy has to endure it's hellish. Every time the prosecutors mentioned Billy's name James Sanders starts laughing. Finally Billy could bear no more. He takes the witness stand in his own defense and he explode at James Sanders, hate you for what you did, Bobo says, love your enemies

and do good to so help me. God, I've tried, but I hate him. I hate him so bad a case. In the end, it wasn't enough. The jury deliberated only five or five and a half hours. Billy Wayne Cope was convicted. Both he and Sanders went down for this crime, and they were both sentenced to life in prison. That's when I got involved. I had been following the case and I was stunned that Billy Wayne Cope had been convicted. I decided to see if Billy Wayne Cope's defense team

could use some help. Steve joined Billy's appeal team, which also included legendary lawyers David Brooke and Alison flam And at first, Billy's appeal seemed like it'd be successful. The appellate court ruled that there wasn't enough evidence that Billy and James Sanders had worked together, but the prosecution appealed that ruling, and I was optimistic. I thought we have checks and balances in our system, and the Supreme Court of South Carolina is not going to let this conviction stand.

But I was wrong. The South Carolina Supreme Court declined to throw out Billy's conviction by a single vote, and the U. S. Supreme Court refused to intervene. I can't tell you how many cases I've seen just like this.

An innocent person gives a confession. Subsequent to the confession, DNA has found the DNA identifies the perpetrator, who has nothing to do with the individual who confessed, and rather than redirect the investigation, admit the mistake and move on, the prosecutor's office chooses instead to create some new theory that brings together the rapist and the innocent confessor. And I just find that shameful. It's a disgrace. Well, the

legal team was prepared to keep on fighting, right. We don't let losses in any court, whether it's the trial court or the U. S. Supreme Court, stop us from fighting for justice. But in this case, we weren't able to continue the fight. On February nine, Billy Wayne Cope died in prison of what the prison said were natural causes. When I heard years later that Billy Wayne Cope had

died in prison. My heart just sunk. While this case haunted me, I harbored the hope that at some point in time, at some level and in some way, an appeal would be successful. He was only fifty three years old, and from a legal perspective, that means that Billy Wayne Cope's case is over. It's done. There are no options left to clear his name. Now we want to tell you uplifting stories of exoneration, of justice that's delayed but

not denied. We all like those stories. They keep us fighting, but not every case turns out that way, and this podcast episode it's our attempt to change Billy's legacy. We're not here to tell you that Billy Wayne Cope was an angel, but that's one of the dangers of telling stories about wrongful conviction. There's always a temptation to paint the defendant as a perfect human and Billy Wayne wasn't perfect,

not by a long shot. But our justice system is supposed to make judgments based on evidence and logic, not on character assassinations or whispers that someone might have been white trash. Billy deserves the truth as much as anyone else does. Billy Wayne Cope did not sexually assault his daughter. He did not rape his daughter. He did not murder his daughter. His greatest indiscretion, if you will, was that he called nine one one one found her dead in the morning. We want to tell you now a little

bit about the man Billy Wayne Coperman. You knew, right, Steve, I did know him. You know, throughout this ordeal he remained upbeat, even hopeful. He had dedicated himself to doing God's work in prison. He taught Hebrew, he preached, He served as a hospice minister to inmates that were dying or ill. When he died, his legal team got together and we wrote a statement about his death, and this is what the statement said. In the years we represented Billy,

he was unfailingly polite. He was optimistic and full of faith, and he maintained these qualities in the long years that followed his conviction. Billy confessed to a dreadful crime he

did not commit. When DNA later proved the actrual killer was a career burglar and serial rapist named James Sanders, law enforcement should have faced up to the truth and admitted they attained a false confession from the grieving and psychologically vulnerable father of a murdered child, Billy, I want you to know that even though we lost your case, these cases of unrequited innocence, these are the ones that give me the strength and energy to continue the fight

for other innocent people. Billy, with your evangelical fervor, we sure hope you're somewhere where you gonna hear us. Justice belongs to every man, not just the rich, powerful, or respectable. This podcast episodes for you and for everyone like you, in the name of justice. Join us next week when we bring you to the Bronx in to meet Hugh Burton, a good kid who happened to live in the apartment above a truly bad guy. Until then, 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 Slam and the team at Signal Company Number one Executive producer Kevin Wardace, Senior producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Special thanks to jog Hammer for additional script editing, and for wrangling and writing

like a mad woman. 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 Drisen. For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com and be sure to follow this show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction m