#175 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - Ray McCann

life into an interrogation room. One of the things we've tried to do this season is to show that you don't need a full confession in order to bring charges against somebody. A false admission that implicates you in the crime, or a false statement effect a lie in this case, could bring the weight of the system down against an innocent person. And all of that stems from what happens

in the interrogation room. Police have so much power over what you say in the interrogation room and the way in which what you say can be used against you in courts. It's that power and the misuse of that power that's what Ray mccannn's case is all about We've seen tunnel vision in other cases, but I've never seen tunnel vision that was this extreme, this long standing, and that included coercion both in and outside of the interrogation room.

You have the police officers lying, right. The police officers don't get charged. It's Ray who gets charged. I mean, this is asymmetric warfare, right. And it becomes even more asymmetrical when they charge him with perjury. Ray McCann a reserve police officer who all he wanted to do was assist police. All he wanted to do was to be a police officer. They ran him over like a truck.

Today's story starts in Constantine, Michigan, a small town of two thousand people in the southern corner of the state. Constantine is an old fashioned dairy farming community, the kind of place that looks like time stopped a half century ago. The town's historic main street is lined with shops that have been kept immaculate for decades. Annual events like the car show and barbecue cook off are marked on everyone's calendar.

But in the autumn of two thousand seven, this Michigan town was hit by a crime that no one could have expected. It was November eight, fourty five in the afternoon, only an hour before sunset. Eleven year old Jodi Perick left her friend's house on her bike and headed for dinner at home a half mile away. But when Joe he didn't arrive on time, her mom called the police, and words spread fast. As the sun went down and temperatures plummeted too, it seemed like the whole town was

out searching for Jody. Joining the search was Ray mccahan, a forty year old family man born and raised in Constantine. Ray was a reserve police officer who hoped one day to join the Michigan State Police. He wasn't a full fledged cop, but he was allowed to carry a badge and do basic police work like making traffic stops and searching for missing people. In this particular missing person case, Ray's son was good friends with Jody, so Ray didn't have to be asked twice to help look for her.

Along with many of his neighbors, Ray threw on a coat and went out to look for Jody. He searched high and low at the baseball field, at the Dollar General, even at a local riverside, walking trail called the Tumble Damn Path. Others searched elsewhere, but no luck for anyone, no Jody. Around ten thirty at night, Ray met up with Jody's mom to talk about where they should look next. That's when Ray McCann asked if anyone had searched the cemetery.

No one had, so Jody's mom headed that way, followed by Ray in another car. The cemetery is where they found Jody. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. Her bike was lying next to her on the ground. Jody's mom bent down tried to embrace her daughter's body, but Ray knew this was a crime scene that shouldn't be disturbed. He gently guided her away from Jody's body

and sat her down in her car. The police arrived quickly at the scene, but as they hunted for leeds, they locked almost immediately onto Ray McCann as a suspect because Ray had been the person who suggested searching the cemetery. Based on that coincidence, police questioned Ray that night. He adamantly denied involvement in this horrible crime. Somehow, though reserve off, Sir Ray McCann became the sole suspect, the only person

police focused on for the next five years. When someone discovers a body, they're gonna be a person of interest in a police investigation because of their proximity to the crime. It's a basis for wanting to question somebody about what they were doing on the evening in question. But they focused on him as the sole and exclusive suspect, and they did so because they grew desperate. This is a crime that is absolutely devastating to this community, and police

did everything in their power to close that vice on Ray. Now, it's not like there was any evidence against Ray. Police compared raised DNA to the DNA left on Jody's body, but it didn't match. No physical evidence implicated him, and no eyewitnesses had identified him. But as Jody's murder sat unsolved for years, pressure escalated on the authorities to come up with a culprit. After a new police chief was elected in new investigators were assigned to the case, and

they immediately doubled down on prime suspect Ray mccan. Over the next few years, police interrogated Ray more than twenty times. Again and again, police asked him to describe what he did on the night of Jody's disappearance, where he searched who he talked to. During these interrogations, police gradually but relentlessly upped the anti The evidence against you is insurmountable.

They told him, we know scientifically you touched her body, oh annointed on your people, whatever, and think that now, that was a lie. But these kinds of lies can be extremely coercive, even on a cop, even on someone like Ray mccan. You guys couldn't do what you're talking to talk to talking, But you know what I did my job that I I wish I knew what happened or because then I guess we would be having this conversation.

The way they questioned Ray was for one purpose, and one purpose only, to get him to give them information that they could use to charge him with this product. And Ray called them out about that too, over and over again. I don't know what you're trying to give me. Confess somebody didn't have no power and now you guys are doing That's the thing. He knew exactly what they were doing. He's a cop. You wanted me to admit to something I didn't do. I'm not gonna do it.

I confessionally I can't give you. I didn't find or didn't put it there, didn't I did. But the more Ray insisted on his innocence, the more police became obsessed with proving him guilty. Here's the really twisted thing. Their obsession began to spread beyond the interrogation room. They blamed Ray for Jody's death in the local media, ruin his reputation, and they viciously attacked his personal life. Police tracked down Rai's friends and relatives and worked to turn them against him.

Police told Ray's family that physical evidence d n A proved he had killed Jody, even though that wasn't true, and they went even further for no clear reason. They told Ray's wife that he had been unfaithful. They falsely told Ray's teenage son, the one who had been friends with Jody when he was younger, that his dad was a drug addict. They also told the boy that his dad was visiting online chat rooms the worst kind I guess that these cops could imagine. Just listen to this.

The computer shows activity in a chat room regularly of gain nature homosexual behavior, talking about how this man on man sexual encounter is going to go, and then how it did go There's been no signs of any of that personally, for anything, I haven't seen anything like that. Is there any part of you at all that questions your dad's sexuality or of what you're saying is absolutely honest to God true? I can tell you that it is your computer. I took it off there and then, yeah,

of course it's going to make me question it. None of this was honest to God true. The cops were lying again, and that's bad enough, but the fact that they equated visiting gay chat rooms with raping and killing an eleven year old girl, I'm sorry, but that's beyond offensive in any event. Until Ray confessed, police were hell bent on taking his life apart peace by peace, and I guess this. Cops thought that telling Ray's teenage son that his dad was gay would be a good way

to accomplish that. Their purpose was to make life for Ray McCann in Constantine, Michigan unendurable, to make his life so miserable and so painful that they could bring him to a place where he could conf s to killing Jodie Park. Despite all this, years go by and Ray doesn't confess. Finally, the cops had to plan. They'll file charges against Ray and see if that gets him to admit guilt. An officer is caught saying as much during

a taped interview with Ray's wife. He's going to have to be charged, The officer says, he'll get so scared he'll talk. It may just come to that. At a certain point in time, they should have realized that Ray had nothing to do with this, and there were all kinds of reasons for them to believe that, beginning with the DNA evidence, but they didn't care one bit about Ray.

This was the first time that I had seen tunnel vision so take over law enforcement officers that they were willing to sacrifice the life of another officer to close a case. Now, the police didn't have any evidence against Ray that would allow them to charge him with murder, so they came up with a different plan and different charges.

In police served Ray McCann with an investigative subpoena requiring him to answer questions yet again about the night Jody disappeared five years earlier because of the subpoena, though this time Ray had to give answers under oath. Ray did bring a lawyer with him. By this point in time, Ray's reputation in the community was so damaged, so tarnished. He couldn't go anywhere without people looking at him as

if he had killed Jody Parrock. So the lawyer advised him to go in and talk to the authorities as a way to maybe put an end to this. The police's subpoena strategy worked. It did put an end to the harassment, but not the end Ray had hoped for. After the interview, on July sevente, two thousand fourteen, prosecutors accused Ray McCann of lying under oath and charged him with five counts of perjury. He was arrested and thrown into the local jail. So did Ray McCann lie under oath?

Four of the five perjury charges were based on incredibly minor inconsistencies between the details Ray remembered about the night Jodie died five years earlier and the details that other people remembered. You know, what stands out to me in this story is how a completely innocent man who is just out trying to help got caught up in this web of lies that was spun by the detectives. It's unbelievable that that could have happened and frightening. That's Ken Colker,

a journalist based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He's been covering Ray McCann's case for years. I'm an investigative reporter, so my job is to just sniff around and look for things that seem wrong. You know, the perjury charges seemed totally unfounded. I mean, if somebody asked me what I had for lunch, I might say Taco bell, but maybe it wasn't. Is that really a lie? Here's one example

of what Ray was charged with under oath. Ray McCann said that at one point while he was searching, he saw Jody's mom with a blonde haired kid, and he thought Jody had been found. He testified that he said to Jody's mom, oh good, you found her. Now. Everyone agreed that a local seventh grader with blonde hair named Katie was with Jody's mom during the search, but Jodie's mom couldn't remember whether five years earlier, Ray had said, oh good, you found her. One of these perjury charges

was based on this so called discrepancy. Here's another example. Police told Ray they found his d n A on Jody's body, even though that was a lie. In a desperate attempt to provide some explanation, Ray made a us. He thought back to the moment he and Jody's mom discovered her little girl's body. He remembered guiding Jody's mom away and helping her sit down in her car. Maybe sometime later the mother had been grieving over her daughter's body.

He said, maybe his DNA had been transferred from Jody's mom to the little girl. But five years after the fact, Jody's mom didn't remember Ray pulling her away, or taking her to the car, or much of anything else from that terrible moment. So the cops charged Ray with another count of perjury. What's interesting is that Ray McCann was a reserve police officer, and for some reason they turned

on him. That's the suspect they're focused on. So they're just hammering and hammering and telling him far more lies than they claim he told them. Raise history as a police officer may have offered him some protection against a false confession, but it couldn't protect him against another weapon in the police officers arsenal, the weapon of perjury. In race case, they turned a series of inconsistencies in his

statements over a five year period into perjurious. Wise, the penalties for perjury in Michigan are extreme, and they charged him with five counts of perjury. So under investigative subpoena, especially in a murder case, telling a lot of police is actually punishable by up to life in prison. The punishment is as bad as if you committed the crime. Four of those five charges were based on ridiculous inconsistencies, like the ones we've talked about. The fifth charge, though,

was different. The fifth charge was based on raised sworn statement that he had searched for Jody near that riverside walking trail, the tumble Damn Path. They claimed, well, that's a lie, because we've got video showing that nobody went to the tumble Damn that time of night. We don't see your car, we don't see your headlights or whatever.

There was a video camera on this nearby creamery that supposedly was aimed right at the tumble dam And the quote unquote lie that they got him on was the fact that he said he was at the tumble Damn, but the surveillance video proved he wasn't there. Police claimed that video proved Ray was lying. In fact, an officer even took the stand at Ray's first court hearing and swore that this video proved Ray had committed perjury. For

his part, Ray couldn't figure it out. He knew he'd gone to the tumble Dam path that night to search for Jody. But his trial approached and five possible life sentences loomed, Ray finally broke. He didn't confess to killing Jody. Instead, on March twenty two, fifteen, he pled no contest to

that fifth perjury charge. No contest plea is an admission that the state has sufficient evidence against you to convict you, so as a matter of law, it's treated within this system just as any other guilty plea would be treated. For that plea of no contest to perjury, Ray received a sentence of twenty months in prison. In exchange, the state dropped the other four charges. They hadn't gotten Ray for murder, but they had gotten him for something, and

I guess that was good enough. Fast forward five months after Ray entered his plea to August two thousand, fifteen, Ray was in prison serving his perjury sentence, and every day was horrific. He was a suspected child rapist and killer. And he talked about you know what other prisoners due to child rapists and killers. He got dragged off of his bunk one night, got smashed over the head with what he thinks was a padlock, and somebody tried to gouge his eyes out. I mean, that's what happened to

the support in prison. While Ray suffered, there was a development. A man named Daniel Furlong, who lived one town over from Constantine, lured a ten year old girl into his garage and attacked her. She escaped, thank god, and was able to lead police to furlong store. They arrested him and took his DNA and what did it match the DNA left eight years earlier on Jodi Parick's body. Police questioned Daniel Furlong on October eighteenth, two thousand fifteen, and

he admitted that he'd raped and killed Jody. Forlong used to live in Constantine, a few blocks away from the Parrot family. When he saw Jody riding by on her bike, he lured her into his garage just like the other girl. That's where he assaulted and killed Jody. And he did it all alone. Furlong told investigators he didn't know Ray McCann. We saw the videotape of police interviewed Daniel for a long and they were a lot nicer to him than

they were to Ray McCann. They asked for long. So what did you think when you saw that in a newspaper that they were focusing on Ray McCann, And he thought, well, I'm in the clear. So, in other words, the fact that the police had pursued this wrongful prosecution of Ray made Furlong feel enough comfort to strike again, and that blew me away. It was crystal clear Ray McCann was never involved in Jody's disappearance. All he did was trying

to help a distraught mom find her missing kid. The police's suspicions about Ray had been wrong from the start. In November two thousand fifteen, Daniel Furlong pled guilty to killing Jody Parrock by himself and received a sentence of thirty to sixty years, But the state wasn't ready to exonerate Ray McCann, not yet. Ray had been convicted of perjury, and the state insisted that even if Ray hadn't committed murder,

he had still lied under oath. I started in this case because we were doing stories about the real killer who confessed and was getting sentenced to prison, and nobody was talking about what happened to Ray McCann. It's like, well, what about this guy who had nothing to do with it. In December two thousand fifteen, Ray was paroled from a Michigan prison after serving his sentence. He was still a convicted felon, a perjurer in the eyes of the law. It was right around that time that his case came

across Steve's desk. Ray had been out of prison for a few months. He was having a hard time reintegrating back in the community. The police officers were still suggesting to the general public that he knew things about this crime and he had spent twenty months locked up for something he didn't do. Thank god for Ken Colker for taking the interest to tell this story about Ray, because if it wasn't for him, I never would have known about the case. I had seemed the work done by

the Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern End. I just reached out to Stephen said, here's an interesting case. I was so angry at what these law enforcement officers had done to Ray, and so I called up to Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, and I said, will you work on this case with me? The legal team's task was to prove Ray innocence of

the only perjury charge he'd been convicted of. That was the charge where the police had sworn under oath that they had a surveillance tape showing the Tumble Damn Path, a video that they said proved Ray had lied about going there to search for Jody Well. Ken Colker got ahold of a copy of that videotape. I remember going

down to Ray McCann's home in meeting Stephen Drisen down there. Yeah, that was like a could have been a scene in a movie, actually standing around this dining room table with my laptop open watching this video that would eventually lead to Ray McCann's case being dismissed. What we saw was that you couldn't see anything from the camera footage. It was simply too dark to make out what kinds of cars were on the street, whether there were any people

on the street. You couldn't see the tumble Dawn Path at all, let alone who was walking on it. So the legal team actually went to the creamery, the business that had taken the surveillance video, and looked at their security camera. The creamery owner assured them that the camera hadn't been moved since the night of Jody's disappearance. The video camera wasn't even aimed at the damn The surveillance camera that they claimed showed he wasn't there was aimed elsewhere.

I wish I'd have been the one that noticed that. Under no circumstances could the creamery camera footage have proven at Ray was not at the tumbled damn path. The whole damn thing was made up. It was a lie. The video was essentially worthless as evidence. This video certainly didn't prove that Ray McCann had lied under oath. Instead, what it proved was that the police were the ones who had lied. In order to convict him. Ray's wish

had come true. He needed to have some kind of evidence to demonstrate that he didn't lie at all, but that the police officers were lying, and that camera footage proved it. Based on that video, Ray's attorneys filed emotion for relief, and on December seventh, two thousand seventeen, the court throughout Ray's perjury conviction. Ray McCann was innocent of the murder and innocent of perjury. He was exonerated. The prosecutor decided not to fight it and to allow the

judge to dismiss the case. And I just felt great for Ray. Mean, you can't take away the twenty months that he spent in prison, but you know, at least he was able to clear his name. That was the end of Ray McCann's legal ordeal. But what happened to the officers who lied to convict him? Okay, Steve, So I'm really hoping you're going to tell us that after Ray was exonerated, these cops were tried for perjury. I wish I could tell you that. But nothing has happened

to these police officers. The prosecutor eventually ended up losing in his next election, but these police officers have never faced any consequences. They were the ones who lied, not Ray. They were the ones who should have gone down for perjury. That's the ultimate irony here. And what about Ray McCann. What's life like for him now? In many ways, it's still really hard. And they took a lot away from this guy. He barely tossed to one of his sons.

This wife divorced him, the he missed the birth of a grandchild. I'm sure there are people in that town who still think Ray McCann had something to do with it. And so, you know, his name is, in some people's eyes, is still mud and constantine. The only thing Ray McCann ever wanted was to find the killer of Jodie Parrock, and that's been accomplished. Now raise free to put his life back together as best he can. Ray. Yeah, Hey, Ray, it's Laura. How are you doing pretty good? So you're

living up north in Michigan. You've got snow on the ground yet, Yeah, actually just got some yesterday. I want to go cut some woods and stuff, and all a sudden just started coming down. Tell me about your your wife, Ray, I am delighted to hear that you're married. Yeah. We got married in um April twelve. I actually on my dad's birthday in two thousand eighteen. Well that's a beautiful way to honor your dad. How did you meet your wife?

We worked together. If she caught my eye right away, you must have caught her I too, Yeah, I must have done something right. We were actually in southwest Michigan there for a while, and we made a decision to start a new life somewhere else because it just, you know, it was hard for me. It's been going a lot better since we made the move up here. It really has I struggle at times, you know, I met that I go through a lot of depression. My wife knows I go through that, and she's there for me. I

am so thankful to my daughter Ashley. She wasn't with me the whole time this was going on and still lives with me. And I just love you know, the grandkids. They keep it busy, that's for sure. You're a good man, right and a survivor, Steve, and I are with you all the way. One of the jobs that we, as innocent lawyers have is to try to tell the story of our clients in a way that can bring them back some measure of their reputation, to tell the story in a way that makes it abundantly clear that Ray

McCann is innocent. We can't undo the trauma that Ray experienced, but at least we can establish that he never committed the crime he was accused of. In fact, a crime was committed against him. One of the arguments against allowing police officers to lie during interrogations is that it creates a culture in which lying is acceptable not only during interrogations, but when police officers come into court and testify about cases, and that may very well have been what happened here.

You're allowed to lie to get a confession, why not lie to get a conviction. It's one of the strongest arguments for banning deception during police interrogations. When you allow police to lie, that sends a message that truthfulness is not essential to the task of enforcing the law, and of course it is. It's vital. And that's the story of Ray McCann. Join us next week when we take you to Aida, Oklahoma to tell you about Tommy Ward.

After detectives learned about a strange dream he had, Tommy was accused of a local woman's murder and found himself on death row. Tommy remains behind bars to this day, but a team of lawyers, including our Center on Wrongful Convictions, is fighting to end Tommy's nightmare. 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 Flam and Kevin Wardis. Our production team is headed by Senior producer and Pope, along with producers Josh Hammer and Jess Shane. Our show is mixed by Jeanie Montalvo. John Colbert is our intrepid intern. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura ni Rider and you can follow me on Twitter at s Driven. For more information on the show,

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