Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer.
And I'm Steve Drisen.
Today we'll bring you to Philadelphia for the story of Walter Ogrod. Walter was sent to death row for a murder who didn't commit by an old school Philly justice system that was better known for injustice. Walter spent decades in prison until a new wave of reform minded prosecutors went looking for the truth behind his conviction. Walter's story gives Steph and me hope that real reform is really possible.
So I was born and raised in Philadelphia, and a few years ago Laura and I took a trip there for work. I'm very proud of Philadelphia and I like to show off the city. And there was this place that I had to take Laura too. It's not Constitution.
Hall, okay, not the Liberty Bell.
It's the Eastern State Penitentiary.
So you drive me to downtown Philly and there's this rundown relic of a prison that's crumbling. It's covered in cobwebs. It's almost like a haunted house in the middle of downtown Philadelphia. It's not used any longer.
It was built in eighteen twenty nine, but it's.
Been preserved there as this incredible monument against mass incarceration.
It's my favorite place to go because it fits the city's personality and history so well. This is the city with an unbelievable history of injustice, mass incarceration, and corruption within the criminal justice system. And this history of injustice it peaked when I was a child in the sixties and nineteen seventies. This was the time when Frank Rizzo was the police chief and then he was the mayor.
He controlled the city and he sent out a message that when police officers coerced confessions, he had their best.
You know, just like Eastern State Penitentiary. Frank Rizzo has become this symbol for the heaviest of hands in the criminal justice system, for the way it can just come down on the backs of people, especially people without power. And that's exactly what we see in today's story, the story of Walter Ogrod. Today's story starts in Northeast Philadelphia. It's a working class part of Philly. The side streets are lined with bungalows and the main drags are lined
with discount big box stores. The Northeast is an outlying area pretty far from downtown where the courthouses and police department are found. It even tried to secede once from the rest of the city. But when it comes to criminal justice, the Northeast is Philadelphia through and through. It's a full participant in the city's policing machine. When our story starts in nineteen eighty eight, that machine was notoriously
harsh and way too often couldn't deliver real justice. It's July nineteen eighty eight, and on one of Northeast Phillies' side streets lived the family of a little girl, four year old Barbara Jeane Horn. On the twelfth of July, Barbara Jane went missing sometime around two o'clock that afternoon. By five point thirty, a neighbor peeked inside a discarded television box that was sitting outside on a curb next to some trash cans. Inside the box was Barbara Jean
and she was dead. She was unclothed, her hair was wet, and she'd been struck five times on the head. It was a horrendous crime. Police swarmed the block and found four eyewitnesses who'd seen a man earlier that afternoon dragging a cardboard box down the sidewalk. The eyewitnesses all gave roughly the same description. They'd seen a man with brown hair, around thirty years old, somewhere between five six and five nine, with a medium build. It was a pretty good description,
but police weren't able to generate any real leads. After several months, Barbara Jean's murder was featured on the TV show Unsolved Mysteries and a police tip line was set up. Close to a thousand tips were phoned in, but police still couldn't solve the case after almost four years. In early nineteen ninety two, the case was reassigned to a new group of Philly detectives, and these new cops seemed to have no difficulty picking a suspect, a twenty three
year old man named Walter Ogrod. Walter was a round shoulders, thick glasses kind of guy who lived across the street from Barbara Jean's family. He was black haired, six foot one, two hundred and twenty pounds, not exactly the short, slim man who'd been seen dragging that box. Walter had no criminal record at all, but he did have a record of profound learning disabilities over the years, professionals who evaluated him used words like extreme dependency and social inadequacy. His
teachers said that Walter was no troublemaker. He'd only ever get in trouble because he was in the wrong place at the time. For Walter Ogrod, the wrong place at the wrong time was a Philadelphia interrogation room on April fifth, nineteen ninety two. That morning, police called Walter's house and left a message asking him to come in for questioning about Barbara Jeane. He wasn't a suspect, they said, he was an informational witness.
This happens all the time. But this is a ruse. There's already a plan afoot. Police officers don't view that person as a witness. They view that person as a suspect. It's a ruse because it creates a context in which the confession is going to be viewed as voluntary. He drove down to the police station on his own accord. We told him that the door is open and he
can leave at any time that he wants. All of these tactics we see over and over again, and oftentimes it's the first step down the road to a false confession.
Walter was to help first chance he got At about one thirty that afternoon, Walter drove himself to the Philadelphia Police Administration Building. It's an imposing, severe nineteen sixties era complex that Philadelphians call the Roundhouse.
The confession was one of police officer's main tools to solve cases that were still open.
There were experts in breaking people, and the Roundhouse is where the breaking happened.
It's the seat of police power in the city.
Walter showed up to the Roundhouse ready to cooperate, but wiped out. He had just finished an eighteen hour shift driving a bakery truck around a three hundred mile delivery route, and he'd been awake for twelve hours.
Before that, he had been up for like thirty hours. He was exhausted. He came into the interrogation room expecting to be providing information that was helpful to the police, and he got hit with an avalanche.
At the Roundhouse, police put Walter into a back room where the table and chairs were bolted to the floor. That's where he'd face fourteen hours of interrogation.
If you go without sleep for some period of time, it clouds your ability to make rational decisions and leads people to agree to things that they otherwise would never agree to. And Walter had cognitive disabilities too, so these twin issues made him an easy mark.
Now, the interrogation wasn't recorded, so we have no objective record of what happened in the room. But Walter has given a very detailed account of the interrogation. So here we go. According to Walter, police started by asking where he'd been four years ago on the day Barbara Jean disappeared. He went to work, he said. After he got home, he remembered seeing Barbara Jean's stepfather going door to door looking for her. But these answers didn't seem to satisfy
the police. Walter started to feel strange. Why were the cops so interested in him? He stood up tried to leave the room, but he says, his interrogators blocked the door. The police handcuffed Walter to the chair and started showing him photos of Barbara Jean's dead body in the cardboard box.
We think you did this, they said, Walter says. Police told him witnesses had identified him as the perpetrator, even though no one actually had, and when Walter insisted he was innocent, the police told him he must be blocking memories of the murder. They wrote down a description of how they thought Walter had committed the crime. If you don't sign this confession, they said, we're going to take you downstairs and we're going to put you in a
cell with a bunch of black people. We're going to tell them you killed a bunch of black children, and then we're going to see what happens, except, of course, they didn't use the word black.
This is the old school police department, the department built by Frank Rizzo, who was an unabashed racist. I mean, when he ran for mayor, he would hand out buttons to his supporters that said vote white. It's no surprise in this context that Walter Ogrod's interrogation was saturated with racism.
By three point thirty in the morning, Walter had had enough. He signed each page of a sixteen page confession, all of which had been written out by the police. According to the confession, Walter lured Barbara Jean into his basement, where he tried to molest her. When she resisted, he flew into a rage and hit her on the head with a two foot long metal bar from his weight set he rinsed off her body, hit her clothes in a crawl space, and put her in the cardboard box.
It was a brutal statement enough to get Walter booked into jail and charged with murder, but by seven am Walter was recanting. He called an atturn from jail totally distraught and said that police were telling him that he'd killed a little girl and had a mental block about it.
Walter said he didn't do it. When the lawyer asked why he hadn't called earlier, Walter explained that he had requested a lawyer during the interrogation, but the police had said they'd have to put him in jail until the lawyer came, and in the meantime the inmates would kill him. That was more than enough to dissuade Walter.
You might be asking yourself, how can they do that? Aren't they supposed to stop when a suspect asked for the right to counsel? And the answer to that question is yes, that's the one bright line rule of interrogation. Suspect asked for a lawyer, police officers shut up until a lawyer comes into the room. But they could get away with it because there's no recording of this transaction.
Police officers are going to say he never asked for a lawyer, and in Philadelphia in a court of law during this time, nobody's going to believe Walter Ogrid.
Walter's trial for first degree murder began in October nineteen ninety three. The only evidence against him was his confession, and there was plenty of reason to disbelieve it. The confession claimed that Walter had hidden Barbara Jean's clothes in his crawl space, but Walter's defense pointed out that no
clothes had been found there. A psychiatrist testified about Walter's limitations and said the confession wasn't written in Walter's style of speaking, and when Walter took the stand to proclaim his own innocence, it was pretty clear the confession was written in words he'd never use. On November fourth, nineteen ninety three, the jury announced its verdict not guilty.
The jury acquitted Walter Ogrid.
Let's say that one more time. The jury found Walter not guilty. I mean, we almost never see this in confession cases.
He is a rare event. It's like a total eclipse of the sun.
For a moment. It looked like Walter was going home, but as soon as the acquittal was announced, one juror changed everything. He stood up and announced, I do not agree with the verdict. The courtroom erupted and the judge declared a mistrial. In the end, the jury had hung eleven in favor of acquittal, one in favor of conviction. After the trial, one of the eleven jurors who believed in Walter's innocence told the media that he saw gaping
holes in the prosecution's case. I didn't put much stock in the confession, he said, I wanted to see evidence. Walter was retried in nineteen ninety six, and this time the prosecutors filled the holes in their case. They had recruited a notorious jailhouse snitch, a man named John Hall, who was locked up in the same jail as Walter. Hall had a miles long track record of claiming to overhear other inmates confess to their crimes and at least
twelve different homicide cases. He told the authorities about these supposed confessions in exchange for benefits like reductions in his sentence for his apparently priest like ability to hear confessions. Hall was nicknamed the Monseignor.
He would read newspaper articles about these stories and then claim that this suspect confessed to him, and he did it because he was getting something in return, he would get a cut. In his sentence, he was a con man, he was a liar, and the fact that prosecutors were willing to use this man over and over again speaks volumes about this unholy alliance between police officers and prosecutors in Philadelphia.
This partnership with such a prolific snitch had helped the Philly DA's office win a steady stream of convictions, but by the time of Walter Ogrod's second trial, the monster had accumulated such a reputation that even prosecutors realized he had no credibility left.
The baggage around John Hall was so heavy that the prosecutors couldn't use him in this case. So what did Hall do? Hall trained another inmate in the details of Walter's story and used that inmate to be the snitch.
He wasn't the only priest there to take confessions.
That's right. He turned the jail and prison system in Pennsylvania into a seminary.
For Walter's second trial. Prosecutors got around their usual star witnesses credibility problem by calling a different inmate to testify. Ja Wolchansky was an acolyte of John Hall, and Jay was all too happy to take the monseignor's place on the witness stand. At trial, Jay testified that Walter had confessed to him in jail. For good measure, Jay added a story about Walter, describing what happened when his own
mom asked if he'd killed Barbara Jean. According to Jay, Walter told his mom, damn right, I did, and if you know what's best for you, you'll keep quiet.
Believe it or not.
This is enough. Based on Jay's snitch testimony and on the confession, Walter Ogrod was convicted of the murder of Barbara Jane Horn on October eighth, nineteen ninety six. The next day, it took this jury less than ninety minutes to sentence Walter Ogrod to death and off Walter went to death row. Walter's case went through years of appeals to no avail. Eventually, a team of lawyers from the Federal Community Defender Office in Philadelphia, along with attorneys from
a local law firm, began to reinvestigate Walter's case. In twenty eleven, they filed a post conviction petition with some blockbuster pieces of evidence attached. First, the petition took down the snitches. It included an affid david from the Monseigneur himself, John Hall, who said that his buddy Jay wol Chansky never really talked to Walter in any detail at all. Instead, the Monseigneur had told Jay what to say about Walter.
The Monseigneur finally had his come to Jesus moment, he admitted that he had lied about Walter Ogrod.
After the Monseigneur died, his widow also submitted an affidavit spilling details about the snitch scheme. Turns out she was an accomplice in fabricating the Monseigneur's confessions. It was her newspaper research that served as the basis for his stories. But when it came to Walter's case, she couldn't find much information in the papers, so she wrote Walter a letter, pretending to be a stripper, asking for information about his case. Walter,
of course, never confessed anything to her. The story of his guilt was all made up. As for Walter's confession. The lawyers pointed out that Barbara Jean didn't have the kind of skull fracture as you'd expect if she had actually been hit over the head with a weight bar. The confession just didn't match the facts of the case, and it seemed there was a reason for that. The same officer who interrogated Walter had been implicated in at
least two other false confession cases. One involved a man who'd confessed to raping a seventy seven year old woman, and another involved a man who confessed to killing a local businessman. For closing those cases, the Philly police gave this officer the nickname Detective Perfect. Thankfully, both of these wrongfully convicted men were later exonerated, and Detective Perfects record was deservedly tarnished.
The detective who took Walter Ograd's confession was a golden boy in the Philadelphia Police Department, and he claimed to have a ninety five percent success rate in getting confessions to close cases.
There's a great quote from a journalist who followed this case very closely, man named Tom Lowenstein, who said, you know, having a ninety five percent clearance rate for a homicide detective is kind of like Mark maguire hitting seventy five home runs. You got to ask, did he do it honestly exactly?
When you see detectives claiming to have that high of a confession rate, you know there's a lot of false confessions in that mix.
The post conviction lawyers had presented a pretty compelling case for Walter's innocence. Nonetheless, seven years later, in twenty seventeen, the court still had not issued a ruling. But while Walter's case was stalled, Philadelphia began to change. In twenty seventeen, the people of Philadelphia elected a new unlikely district attorney, Larry Krasner. Larry was a civil rights lawyer who made
his name suing the Philadelphia police for misconduct. He was elected on a wave of neighborhood activism led by Philadelphians of color who were angry at the authorities for years of abuse and neglect. Larry Krasner quickly came to define a new vision of what it meant to be a prosecutor. He did not believe in the death penalty, he did not believe in knee jerk mass incarceration, and he did not believe in keeping innocent men and women in prison.
Here's our friend Carrie Wood, who works in the part of Larry Krasner's office dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions. Before she joined his office, she was a wrongful conviction lawyer like us who worked at the Ohio Innocence Project.
Larry Krasner was really thinking about the system differently and wanting to return to her role of truth seeker and representing the whole community, not just a particular swath of it. That was really something that made me change my mind about wanting to work in a DA's office.
Carrie has crossed over to the prosecution side with the goal of changing it, and we're pretty proud of her.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest roadblocks to getting justice were often secutor's offices. I thought that coming to a DA's office, I might actually be able to make a difference to right past wrongs and to use those past wrongs to point to practices that needed to change.
After Carrie began working in the Philadelphia Conviction Integrity Unit, one of the first cases assigned to her was Walter Ogrod.
Walter's attorneys had pointed out that Barbara jen Horn didn't have any skull fractures, and Walter's initial confession was that he had a hit her over the head with a large weight bar. That was certainly something that sounded worth investigating.
Carrie and her colleagues dove into Walter's case and what they found was revealing.
We began to identify documents that looked like they had not been turned over to defense counsel at the time of the original trial. One of the things that really jumped out at me was notes from the prosecutor about what the actual tries cause.
Of death was.
In those notes, it says Barbara Jane Horn had not died from a blow to the head. The most likely scenario was that she had been suffocated. So that particular note in the file, once we came across it, was a pretty big deal.
The state had known all along that Walter's confession, which didn't mention smothering once, was not true, even as it sought to execute him. In fact, a new review of the autopsy revealed that whatever did strike Barberaging in the head was light weight and thin in profile. It definitely wasn't the heavy weight bar that Walter's confession described. That was enough for Carrie and the Conviction Integrity Unit to do DNA testing on the liquid that the morgueuld use to wash Barbara Jean's body.
What else can Barbara gen tell me about what happened to her that maybe was missed at the time.
The result they found a full male DNA profile. That profile didn't match anyone in the state or national DNA atabases, but one thing was clear. The DNA definitely did not belong to Walter Ogrod. And unlike in so many of the stories we tell on this podcast, these prosecutors understood what a DNA exclusion like this meant. It was undeniable proof that Walter had been wrongfully convicted. On February twenty eighth, twenty twenty, Carrie and her team filed a motion to
throw out Walter's conviction. The evidence used to convict him, she wrote, was false, unreliable, and incomplete. Instead, she stated Walter Ogrod was very likely innocent. For Walter to win exoneration and leave death row, though it wasn't enough for the DA's office to declare him innocent, the judge had to agree to exonerate him or Walter wasn't going anywhere. This judge was a former prosecutor herself. She'd tried homicide cases alongside another prosecutor who later became the judge who
presided over Walter's conviction. These two judges epitomized Philadelphia's old Guard, both its harshness and its cronyism. So when the office of Larry Krasner, that new reformer DA declared Walter Ogrod innocent, well, the case encountered some major resistance.
Once we had concluded our investigation, we were originally scheduled to have a hearing in front of the judge, but unfortunately COVID happened.
COVID nineteen hit Pennsylvania only a few weeks after prosecutors asked the court to throw out Walter's conviction. Court operations slowed way down. The judge had scheduled a March twenty seventh hearing on Walter's case, but halfway through March she canceled it. She was too busy. Her clerk informed Walter's lawyers, and Walter's case was no more important than any other.
It is more important and then any other. This is a case where the district attorney is saying, we believe this man is innocent that almost never happens. She put Walter's life at risk. Prisons are a peatri dish for this virus. COVID should have been a reason for fast tracking this, not an excuse for delaying it.
But while the judge was delaying the hearing, Walter Ogrod, then fifty five years old, was falling ill. According to his lawyers, Walter spiked one hundred and three degree temperature and developed breathing problems that made him feel like he was inhaling through a wet sponge. In mid March, Walter was isolated in his cell and left to battle his symptoms alone.
The prison where Walter was was a huge hotspot for COVID. You become concerned that, well, you know, is this COVID? Will he die in prison before he is able to be exonerated.
Walter's lawyer were terrified that he wouldn't live to see freedom. On March nineteenth, they filed an emergency request to get him tested for COVID and treat it at an outside hospital. The DA agreed, but the judge again delayed ruling for days.
This is not the time for a power struggle. Give the guy the fucking test, Oh, yeah, there are other people who want to be tested too, but nobody else has been locked up for two decades or more for a crime they didn't commit.
Walter ended up fighting whatever virus he had in his cell alone. After many days of sickness, he recovered. Walter's health crisis had passed, But what about his freedom? Walter's lawyers kept pressing. They begged the judge for ten minutes of her time, got to wait until June was the reply. Finally, June fifth rolled around. In true twenty twenty fashion, the court hearing on Walter's release unfolded virtually on Zoom. Appeared
in orange prison clothing and a disposable face mask. At the hearing, Prosecutor Carrie would tearfully apologized both to Barbara Jean's mother, Sharon Fahe and to Walter.
I spent a lot of time with Sharon and saw the huge impact that this case had on her life for decades, and worked really hard to see if I could answer the questions for her and then came up short. One of the hardest things for me to do is to tell her that I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to find the person that did to her little girl, and that it was the mistakes
of this office that resulted in that. You know, you can't begin to fix anything until you identify or admit that you have a problem, you apologize for it, and you begin to work to make things better.
And Carrie also had something to say to Walter, something so beautiful that I'm going to read it to you now. I am sorry it twenty eight years for us to listen to what Barbara Jean was trying to tell us, that you are innocent and that the words on your statement of confession came from Philadelphia Police detectives and not you. Not only did this misconduct result in twenty eight years of your life being stolen, but you were also threatened with execution based on falsehoods.
Having worked on a number of cases that have resulted in exonerations even before I came to the office, one of the things that the innocent person had often commented on was did they ever apologize? And most often the answer was no, someone who's innocent, it's the thing they most often wanted to hear. I did a lot of work to try to rectify what I could, but for the things that I couldn't fix that had caused harm. Of course, you apologize.
It was finally enough, after months of delay, the judge granted the DA's motion to throw out Walter's conviction and death sentence. Walter Ogrod walked out of prison that same day after spending almost three decades behind bars.
You know, wrongful convictions don't make people safer. You just slowly try to push forward and improve things so that more wrongful convictions like mister Ogrod's don't happen. It's really hard for people to admit mistakes. The hope is that more folks will be willing to step up and say I got it wrong. What I tend to focus on is can identify a problem and how can I fix it? What can I do to fix this for mister Ogrod? And then what can we do to make it better
for the citizens of Philadelphia. That's why I do the work that I do. That's why I work in a CiU.
The truth is the single most important thing a prosecutor needs to be concerned with, because without truth, there can be no justice.
It takes a lot of courage to face the truth, especially when that means someone with power has to admit they made a mistake.
These are the prosecutors that bring nobility to the profession. These are the prosecutors that place seeking justice ahead of preserving convictions. You know, the ghost of Frank Rizzo still haunts the city of Philadelphia.
There was a statue of Frank Rizzo erected as a monument to the city's law enforcement.
That statute was a symbol of injustice. It became a rallying point for all of the activists seeking change to policinc in Philadelphia. And finally the Mayor of Philadelphia, using a crane, lifted it from its moorings and removed Rizzo's ste.
That monument to the old, unjust ways of doing things came down just a few days before Walter Ogrod walked out of prison.
To me, it's this sort of final fitting end to a kind of policing and a kind of law enforcement that plagued Philadelphia for years. It's the sign that change is here now and hopefully that it will endure.
Out with the old, in with the new. And that's the story of Walter Ogrod. Next week, we'll tell you about a California man named Ricky Davis who came home from a party to find his housemate had been murdered. The case went cold until fourteen years later when detectives coerced Ricky's ex girlfriend into implicating him. Police thought they'd found the killer, but it took nineteen more years for
this cold case to finally be solved. Right Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one Special thanks to our executive producers Jason Flamm and Kevin Wardis. Our production team is headed by Senior producer and Pope, along with producers Joshi Hammer and Jess Shane. Our show is mixed by Genie Montalvo. John Colbert is our intrepid intern. Our
music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura and I Wrider, and you can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen. For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction