On Thanksgiving two thousand and five, ninety four year old Helen Sailor returned to her home, a high rise apartment building for the elderly and disabled in Elkhardidiana. When phone calls went unanswered through the following morning, family members found Helen strangled to death, allegedly with the lanyard that had gone missing. A partial print of dubious importance was sent to the Indiana State Police lab. Initially, Elk Cahrd PD
had two viable suspects, but the investigation went cold. The case became a priority again when a new homicide unit was formed. Detective Mark Daggy had an unfounded theory involving a string of burglaries and a younger resident the high rise, Lana Canaan. Investigators pressured a vulnerable friend of Lana's to claim that she had confessed to murdering Helen Sailor with another high rise resident, a disabled man named Andy Royer, who was dragged in for a course of interrogation resulting
in a false confession. Corroborate these false statements. They pulled the prints from the Indiana State Police ladder and gave them to an untrained analyst just to get him to say the print match Faana. Andy and Lana went to trial together and were not able to cross examine each other to point out the glaring inconsistencies in Andy's recanted statement between the fabricated fingerprint match, false statements, and outright perjury by law enforcement. Both Lana and Andy were sentenced
to fifty five years in prison. This is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. Today. I have a case out of Elkhart, Indiana, a town that I have a bad feeling. We're going to start to know really well, because if just one case can involve so many of the hallmarks of wrongful convictions in the town of so
few people, what else must be out there? And the case today involves a false confession, a coerced eye witness, false expert testimony, prosecutorial misconduct, official misconduct, and a general reckless and almost total disregard for the truth, justice, and public safety. And this case is not only about what happened to an elderly woman, Helen Sailor, but also the two people who were wrongfully convicted, Vlana Kane and the
man who is with us today, Andy Royer. Andy, Welcome to wrongful conviction.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for joining us. And with him is his attorney from the Notre Dame Exoneration Justice Clinic. I've never seen someone who is more effective at breaking down the blue wall of silence. Elliott Slosar, Welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having us.
So tell us a little about where this story takes place.
Yeah, Elkhart, you know, small town, Indiana, approximately forty fifty thousand people. I think it still considers itself the RV capital of the world. RVs are less used now than then we're in the nineties, but it's a town that you know, at its height, people were moving from all over the Midwest to go work there and work in the factories and you know, build better lives. You know when the RV stuff sort of slowed down is when
Elkhart became more written with crime. That uptick ultimately produced a lot of wrongful convictions.
Right, And as we saw all over the country in the eighties and nineties, you had an uptick in crime, and politicians then ran quote unquote tough on crime campaigns, which I have to say is just nonsense. It's really
just tough on people. Those things never result in a reduction in crime, but anyway, that led to an era when the authorities were just playing fast and loose with the rules and the civil rights of our fellow Americans, arresting just about anyone in order to close cases, which, of course, as we often recognize here on the show, it leaves the trooper out on the street, ready and willing to commit more crimes in most cases.
Yeah, I think systemically Elkhart have had police miss conduct problems dating back to the sixties and seventies. There was a real lack of training in place and a real acceptance and even encouragement of police mist conduct, and that stuff did not end in the nineties.
And you know, they've had a lot of wrongful convictions.
Five exonerations so far, five exonerations out of a population of fifty thousand, five exonerations. You know, we've got like another dozen wrongfully convicted clients from Melkart who are still trying.
To come home.
And that's only like the tip of what we're uncovering there.
Right, So we're talking about seventeen out of a population of fifty thousand, and those are just the ones we know about. I mean, just to give you a comparison. By the way, there have been three hundred and thirty exonerations in New York City. Now there are plenty more people fighting for justice as we speak, innocent as could be, but still three hundred and thirty in a city of about eight and a half million people. That nets out to about four per one hundred thousand.
I think that per capita Elkhart, Indiana, the city will be the wrongful conviction capital in the US.
Yeah, you know. I read another case out of Elkhart, a guy named Edgar Garrett in the nineties when interrogations were all video recorded. It's a false confession case which preceded Andy's. But Edgar Garrett was acquitted because the jury saw the interrogation. And I bring it up to illustrate the systemic problem in Elkhart. Can you tell us about that case?
What happened in the case with Edgar Garrett? He was a father accused of murdering his child. The child wasn't found yet the police interrogate him for twelve hours. This is like back in like ninety three, ninety four. It's all video recorded, same interrogations rooms. As you know, Andy, a decade later, when that interrogation was going on. It produced a false confession where edgar Garrett falsely confessed to killing his daughter by hitting her.
Over the head with like a pipe.
They hadn't found the body yet. They then took Garrett to the crime scene, did a reenactment with him. A couple weeks later, they find the body. The daughter is stabbed to death like dozens and dozens of times. She wasn't killed by being hit in the head, and they're like, oh, shoot, so like in hell, caart what they did? They went forward with the death penalty trial. The jury was shown
the interrogation video. They found Eggre Garrett not guilty, and the jurors were interviewed and what they'd said was we saw that it was the cops confession that Egregarrett was just repeating it, that they browbeat him into a false confession.
And I mean, this is why we obviously and desperately need videotaping of all interactions with police. I'm talking about identification proceedings, witness interviews, interrogations, because when a jury witnesses how these things go down, they can better assess the validity of each of these pieces of evidence.
One hundred percent so they do this dayline episode, the Electric prosecutors on there, Michael Consteina, and they're like, boy, you know, mister Constantino, this seems like you've got a problem. Like the guy canfest in a different way than the daughter was killed.
That's a real problem. You know.
Weren't you concerned about that? He's like, well, you know, wasn't good for the case.
Which of course begs the question why did they go forward with the prosecution, let alone go for the death penalty.
Yeah, so he went forward with it anyways. And so at the end of the episode, there's this fascinating thing where they're like, and we've spoken to the city of Elkhart and they have now changed their policies and they were no longer video recording interrogations.
Okay, So, faced with the reality that this man had not killed his daughter and was coerced at to saying that he had, the remedy was not to reprimand the officer or figured out some safeguards against getting false confessions. No, their solution was to remove the transparency, and that of course set the stage for what happened in Andy's case. But before we get into that aspect of it, go back to before any of this happened, Andy, what was
your life like growing up in Elkhart. Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood.
I had a stepdad and he was around for us all the time and it turned out good. So.
And what were some of your favorite things to do?
Swimming and playing baseball? Junior minor leagues?
Wow, junior minor leagues. You must have been a pretty decent athlete there, you know.
It was It kept me busy during the summer.
So you kept busy and never were in trouble with the police. What about school?
Yeah, a's and b's and great.
So you excelled in sports and in school. But then you later went on to qualify to live in a high rise building specifically for elderly people and people with disabilities because of a tragic accident. Do you feel comfortable telling us about that?
No, I don't want to.
I totally understand. Is it okay if Elliott tells us about it?
Yeah?
Andy was working and suffered you know, a really really tragic accident while working, you know, one of those telephone poles. He pushed somebody out of the way it was going to fall in. Another colleague and it caused for Andy to suffer significant traumatic injury to his hand, and so he's lost part of his middle finger.
He only has half of it.
He saved somebody's life in the process. But the fascinating thing was that the trauma that Andy endured from that experience like rewired his brain, and so Andy now suffers, you know, significant cognitive functioning disabilities that like he didn't have as a teenager.
Well, Andy, I know you don't want to talk about it, but what you did was just straight heroic and it's something you should be very proud of.
I'm proud of it.
Yeah, I would be too. And so you were living in this high rise, struggling to acclimate and adjust to life having gone through this tragic accent, and that's when you offended Lana Canaan, who ends up the second wrongful conviction survivor in this story. Now, from what I understand, the detective in this case had previously had a theory that Lana may have been responsible for or a few
burglaries in the high rise. Now he had nothing to actually back that up other than that she had dated a maintenance guy there and could have plausibly theoretically had access to his keys, so pretty much just pure speculation. But she was on the mind of at least one detective before all of this happened. Can you tell us about your relationship to her.
Yeah, I used to hang around her. She didn't seem like trouble somebody talk to and just as a friend.
Dude, either of you remember what brought her to the high rise.
My understanding is that Lana had some sort of mental health struggle that qualified as a disability which allowed for her to live there. I'm not sure the exact type. She was functioning at a much higher rate than Andy was.
At the time, and the prosecution then used that as a way to say that Andy was the muscle under Lana's control in an incident that neither of you had anything to do with the murder of another resident at the high rise, a ninety four year old blind woman
named Helen Sailor. And this blind woman she lived alone, but she had a home healthcare worker to a sister in her daily task including filling up her medications, and it's believed that she was killed sometime in the evening on November twenty eighth, Thanksgiving, two thousand and two.
So they had a family dinner. You know, Helen was dropped off at the high rise. I think sometime in the early evening. Her home healthcare worker called, as she usually would to, you know, say hey, I'm going to be there the next morning to help you out, please, you know, have the door unlocked or whatever. And there
were some phone calls that were missed that night. The next morning she also didn't answer, and so ultimately the home health care nurse arrived, the family came, They unlocked the door, and inside they found a deceased Helen Saylor.
And one of her relatives was Elkhard PD Lieutenant Paul Converts, who initially led this investigation. Now, Helen had been strangled to death, and they believed that it may have been done with a missing lanyard.
Right, so she had like a lanyard around her neck, would have like her key on it. They couldn't find that, and so the thought was that if she was strangled, that it likely would have been that the perpetrator used that lanyard. There were no signs of like forced entry, and so the police sort of suspected that she either opened her door voluntarily or this is somebody who had a key there was some like pretty significant physical evidence that was there.
You know.
One of the things that they found on her was like a cranberry like substance, like a sticky substance around her. And they also found a pill bottle out on the counter. They ended up recovering a latent print from that pill bottle that became an issue later on in the investigation.
Yeah, so there's this partial fingerprint on the pill bottle in an apartment that is frequented by home healthcare workers. But if that print belonged to someone who didn't belong in the apartment, like Lanna Canaan, then that would appear to be damning evidence. Unfortunately, the subjectivity a fingerprint analysis plays heavily in this case, as it does in so many cases. Fingerprints do have appropriate value, but the analysis comes down to a subjective comparison made by a highly
fallible human being. This type of analysis is hardly as exact as we've all been led to believe. Now, I encourage our audience to listen to our episode of Junk Science ronfl Coviction Junk Science, where our host Josh Duben does a deep dive on this subject. We're going to have it linked in the bio please check it out. And in this case, the analysis was later proven to be wholly unreliable, but let's put a pin in that
for now. So we've got no werner weapon, a partial print which may or may not have had anything to do with the crime, no signs of a break in, which means the perp probably either new missailor or had a key or forced their way in while the door was still a lot. They did DNA testing of her fingernails, detecting only missailors DNA. And then you've got what might
be cranberry sauce residue, potentially from somebody thanksgiving leftovers. It was Thanksgiving it for all, but hardly anything to go on. And this investigation happened in almost like phases, the first of which was before ELK CARDPD had a homicide unit. And in this first phase, the detectives from the Criminal Investigation Division did a surprisingly good job at developing leads with this little to go on.
These initial leads, there were two really good alternative suspects developed. The first one and you know this isn't a shocker. It's like, well, you want to see who the victim has contact with how about the guy who delivers her medicine. And so they looked at this guy, Larry Wood. They went to his apartment. I believe it was the day that the body was found. He was very, very anxious.
According to the officers, they found his shoes and on the shoes was blood and they did luminol testing inside the apartment which confirmed it was blood, and then they took the shoes and so they had this guy. They asked Larry at first, they were like, hey, Larry, when's the last time you saw Helen Sailor? And He's like, oh, saw her on Thanksgiving evening, after she got dropped off by her family. You know, I helped her the elevator.
And that becomes important because later when Larry's confronted in an interrogation like setting at the Olkcar Police department, he changes his story and said, oh, I think I actually went on the elevator with her, and I may have walked her into the apartment. And so Larry would, by all respects, was like the last person to see Helen
Sailor alive. He would later fail a polygraph exam. You know, I know polygraph is an admissible evidence in court, but like this is a guy that like should have like raised every single red flag. So that was like suspect number one. Suspect number two is this guy named Tony Thomas who was like visiting his grandmother at the high rise over that weekend. He had previously been convicted of murder in like Kansas or somewhere, and was acting very
very suspicious that day. And the early investigation they spoke to people who saw Tony Thomas on the elevator clicking the buttons for every floor. And this would have been after the time that Helen Saylor got home, and so there was some real question as to whether he may have gotten off on the floor that Helen lived on and tried to take money that way, because he was asking other people for money in the high rise. What's
fascinating about Tony Thomas. You would think, hey, convicted murder, you bring him to the police station, you'd interrogate him. There's nothing indicating that they ever did that. And the initial investigators they didn't charge anybody, and eventually they consider the case to be cold. And so I think by like the summer of two thousand and three, so this is, you know, roughly six seven months later, that's when the Elkhar Police Department formed their homicide unit. Lieutenant Converse was
in charge of it. This case became the first case that the homicide unit ever investigated. In Lieutenant Converse, we believe you know, was determined to close the case for a relative of his who got killed.
But instead of racking those promising leads from phase one of the investigations, the newly formed homicide unit assigned the case to lead Detective Carl Conway and Detective Mark dag who took the case in the wrong direction. So what happens in this next phase of the investigation.
Phase two of the investigation was how they framed Andy and Lana. By like August the two thousand and three, this was a cold case and Daggie was like obsessed with Lana Keenan, Like he thought that Lana had committed burglaries in the high rise because she was dating this maintenance worker, so she would have access to a key,
he thought. And he can never develop proble cause to charge with any of those burglaries, like he kept coming after and coming after, can never charge on Alna was like, I didn't do any of this stuff, you know, leave me alone. You're like really annoying me. And so Daggy couldn't get her on this. So when him and Conway came up, they're like, Oh, we're gonna go get Lana Kanaan. So on September one, two thousand and three, Lana Cayden Anita Porter are drive in in a car and they
get pulled over for like super minor traffic infractions. And at the time, Nina Porter was on prol so she had a lot at risk. But in that interaction, Nina Porter was never like I have information about a murder, nothing like that. The only thing of value was that Lana was taken into costody as a result of that traffic stop. Detective Conway found out and he talked to patrol officer, and patrol officer was like, oh, yeah, Lana
was with this woman named Nina Porter. And so Conway took it on his own volition to show up at Nina Porter's house the next day.
And from what I understand is that Carl Conway was known for being a case closer, so to speak, who would use intimidation tactics to get what he wanted.
Yeah, well, I think now Detective Conway is known for all of his feelings in this particular case. It's what led to the end of his career. But you know, he had a reputation in the department for getting confessions and closing cases. I mean, the guy is massive. He's likely sixty five sixty six, two fifty to three hundred pounds.
Sounds like a really scary guy in the interrogation room, Andy who was. He's not somebody you won't show up on your front doorstep either, like he did with Nina Porter. And the details of that interaction didn't come out until Nina testified about fifteen or sixteen years later in post conviction. Can you tell us what she said about that?
What Nina Porter says is that Conway shows up at her house, threatening her from the jump to tell her something about implicating Lana Keenan and the murder of Helen Sailor, and Nina's like, I don't know any think I don't know anything. He then threatens to like violate her parle, have her kids removed, then takes her down to the police station and interrogates the heck out of this woman
who is super vulnerable. At some point he promises her reward too, because you know reward money have been offering up by the home healthcare company that you know assisted Helen Taylor, and so like just coerces the heck out of this woman for hours to fabricate a fallse statement implicating Laana and Andy and the murder of Helen Sailor.
It is so freaking disturbing how normalized that tactic of threatening to take someone's children away is for the police. It's like as common as donuts, but much more sinister. And Nina later in post conviction had so much more to say about the absurd way in which Conway took this false statement.
So during a recorded setment, imagine this con is showing her pictures and on the back of it there were phrases that she was supposed to repeat once he turned the recorder on. The story was that Lana keenan over the Fourth of July holiday like stall Nina Porter at a high rise picnic or something, and was just like talking about killing Helen Sailor in like very vague ways.
And one of the things she remembered that she was supposed to say was that Lana told her Thanksgiving thanks for giving death, that that's what thanksgiving mentor which is an absurd thing. And then you know, made some other comment implicating her and Andy in the murder by saying that I had like complete control over Andy and so she was basically the brains and Andy was the bron and that was something that the police had feed to her as well.
Okay, so now they have the probable cause they needed to drag you and Lana in for question. Lana denied any Vomban and was initially that go. But that's not how it went with you. Andy, tell us about when they picked you up.
I was in my apartment and I heard a knock on the door and they said, do you want to come down? And we want to question you know, I thought nothing of it. I wasn't even sure what it was for because I had never heard about the murders.
So and when they interrogated you over the course of September third and fourth, how did they come at you? What did they say to you?
We know you have ties with Atlanta and what do means to you? And what do you know about the murder? And what I was trying to say is I didn't have nothing to do with it. I told him that too. He just kept twisting and twisting away, repeating himself asking me what'd you choke her with? And how'd you get in the door? And how was Lana involved with this?
And it's not like they were oblivious to your cognitive impairment health. It was part of their theory of how Lana could control you. So at some point, after hours of this intense pressure, you finally gave in, thinking that you'd be able to leave if you said what they wanted. Is that accurate?
Yes, I just I gave up. They fed me lines, and.
As we have seen in so many false confessions, the lines that they fed you ended up being the only things that could be verified, while the information that solely came from you, Andy was riddled with falsehoods, nonsense, and inconsistencies for the simple and obvious reason that you knew nothing about the crime and Elliott, you were able to get Conway to admit to this, right, which is insane? Can you take us through that?
But Conway eventually admitted to this. Is like at Andy's evidentiary hearing, was that the only two pieces of information that they were able to corroberate they were actually true was the fact that he lived in the high rise at the time of the murder, and that he knew Lana Kanan. Everything else that was like in his statement was proven to either be false or Detective Conway admitted to feeding Andy.
First.
You know, a couple of the examples of the stuff that was false is they got Andy to say that he sold Helen Sailors, like some r jewelry or something at like a pawnshop. They went to the pawnshop. The records objectively proved that Andy Royer never sold anything there. Another thing is they got Andy to say that like he cleaned up the apartment with some like towels and
threw them down the chute, the trash chute. During the underlying investigation, they actually learned that the trash chute was broken from like the twelfth floor down or something like that. There was also another thing where you know, they're like, you know, what liquid did you pour on her? And Andy said milk. That was wrong because they knew it
was like a Cranberry saw substance and wasn't milk. So like, unless Conway actually was telling him stuff that was consistent with the investigation, everything else was objectively wrong.
And they knew that.
And you know, the biggest piece of evidence that we had that showed the unreliability of the statement was after the statement, According to Detective Conway's report, Andy asked can I go home now?
And Conway had to tell.
Andy that he just gave a confession to murder and didn't even know right.
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So what they did, though, was because the statement was so botched, as a captain Andy in custody at the police department overnight after charging him with murder so that they can interrogate him the next day, which lake never happens. If you get a confession that's legitimate, why you need to keep this guy the next day? And the interrogate
him again. He had already been charged with murder. They kept him overnight, they didn't give him an attorney, he didn't get to go to court, and then they did the whole thing the next day, hoping that they could get a more reliable statement that wasn't so obviously fabricated by coercion.
Yeah, imagine if they still had to worry about their misconduct being videotape for a jury to see. And yet somehow this still has room to get even worse.
While this two day interrogations going on, with this very aggressive, psychologically coercive interrogator and Andy, who's got the mind of a child, there are people watching the interrogation and we only found this out after Andy was EXONDERI it was one of the people watching. It was the person who ultimately prosecuted him, that she was actually sitting there watching this psychologically coercive interrogation take place and doing nothing about it.
What's her name again, Vicky Becker?
Vicky Becker, and she's now the elected prosecutor you know Aboutkark County. Our hope is that we can end that she was at the interrogaate. She was the person who put on Detective Conway to testify a trial about the interrogation actually elicited from him. Now, did you feed mister roy or any information? Conway's like, Oh, No, wouldn't do that because I knew he had a mental disability. Wouldn't
feed him a single fact. If she was there during the interrogation, which she says she is, she would have known what Conway now admits, which is that he fed Andy all the information that actually aligned with the facts of the case. Whatever those facts were, it came from
Conway's mouth. And in Detective Conway's own report, he admitted that before he took Andy's confession that Andy was confused, he was fatigued, and he's later admitted that he believed that Andy was mentally broken before he ever took the statement.
And had this been videotaped, like Edgar Garrett's interrogation, had the jury seen this, it would have impeached everything, all the lies that Detective Conway had to say a trial. And if the evidence in this case wasn't fraudulent enough, that brings us to the only physical evidence, the fingerprint. So in Phase one they sent the medicine bottle and other physical evidence off to the Indiana State Police lab and eventually they sent fingerprints of suspects aka standards for comparison.
But in Phase two, when Conway and Daggy got involved, something telling happened with the Prince. Conway and Daggy's story was that Andy and Lana first came on their radar through Nina Porter's coerce statement in September two thousand and three.
In August of two thousand and three, though before Nina and Lana were pulled over, the Alkhar Police Department removed the physical evidence from the Indiana c Police Laboratory and sent it to a deputy sheriff at the Elkhart County Sheriff's Department named Denis Chapman for him to compare the Leyden print to Andy Warrior's standard. Not only Andy, but but Lana can as well. They were literally targeting Lana and Andy before they manufactured that false evidence during the
first week of September. Chapman, come to find out, never trained to do leaking different comparisons at all. And Dennis Chapman writes like a two page report that says that he matches the print from the medicine bottle to the left peaky finger of Lana Canna. Come to find out, it ended up not being a peaky figer at all. It was like the index finger to somebody. He excluded
a home healthcare worker. So like he got the finger wrong, the person wrong, and then he somehow excluded the right person, which all of that shows it was just like a total fabrication. Like this guy was not doing a legitimate comparison. He was just doing whatever the conway An EPD wanted him to do.
You might as well have my dog look at it.
I mean, it would be just the same, right, because like Chapman is a total fraud anyways.
Right, And that's even unfair to my dog because Freddy would never do something.
Yeah, So like we see him as like Elkhart's hired gun. You know, this untrained, unqualified deputy sheriff that when the elk Car Prosecutor's Office or the el Car Police Department was concerned that the Indy NFC Police Laboratory wouldn't give them the findings that they want, they would remove it and send it to this illegitimate proxy who would then fabricated opinion for them for whoever their suspect was.
I shuddered to think. But how many other cases has Chapman been involved in?
So we are digging into Chapman now. He had been used by the elkar Police Department to do Leyton print comparisons dating back to the nineteen nineties. So we actually have another wrongful conviction case from Elkhart. That's a murder from like two thousand that Vicky Becker was the prosecutor on and Lo and Behold.
The week before trial.
In that case, Dennis Chapman was brought in to exclude all the alternati suspects from the print left on what they alleged was a murder weapon.
Wow, this is a Fandora's box of evil.
And he only stopped giving them opinions in twenty eleven ish when Lana Kingan's post conviction petition unraveled the fact that his opinion was false all along.
So almost twenty years worth of cases, this guy Chapman, who has no formal training to do fingerprint analysis, would just come in and testify as an expert. You've got a real problem in Elkhart and Andy was just another one of their countless victims. So they had this in and I'm putting this in quotation marks fingerprint match Nina Porter saying that Lana confessed to her and implicated you Andy,
And then they had Andy's false confession. Andy, you had been in jail for two years now, and they came to see you with your defense attorney to see if they could get you to testify and repeat your false confession. But this time he wouldn't do it. How did that all play out?
They just kept asking me questions again and making sure everything was okay, And I was like, no, I didn't have nothing to do with the murder.
Of course they knew that already. So now it's August two thousand and five and you walk into court. What was that like? Uh?
I felt like a stiff board walking down the aisle and going into sit down in the courtroom. And Vicky Becker was, well, we got this and we got that. And they never asked me or my attorney never did anything at the time.
Yeah, you had a defense attorney who had just heard you vehemently recant your false confession. Yet he made no effort to suppress that statement. And from what I understand, when he was given a list of false confession experts like doctor Richard Leo doctor offshe that he called exactly zero of the names on that list up to testify.
And Elliott. We've seen plenty of cases with multiple Code defendants, but this one really is problematic and it's hard to believe this was allowed to go forward as one trial. Can you explain what I'm talking.
About, Because like ol In el Card Indiana, when you have a situation where you have two code defendants, one of them falsely confesses and implicates his other Code defendant, and then Nina Porter attributes a confession to Alanna Keenan that the state then tries to use against Andy. So it's constitutionally problematic because Lana can't force Andy on the
stand like he has a right to not testify. Andy can't put Lana on a stand to say that she never made these statements to Nina Porter, and the states like using all of this evidence to convict both of them at the same time, Like the trial should have been severed. You know, the trial was about two days excluding jury selection, and you know the state just like completely ran over the defense. So you had the lead
in print fabrication introduce a trial. Conway goes up there, introduces Andy's two recorded statements, which total and length are roughly just over an hour combined. So like, you know, you basically have like eight to nine hours of unrecorded interrogation where and Andy, who had the mind of a child, is psychologically coerced into giving a false confession, fed all
the facts. Conway testified the trial in response to questioning by miss Becker, never fed him any information, you know, never coerced him anyway, won't do that, you know, knew that he had a disability. All of that a lie. And then Nina Porter went up there on the stand and testified that Lana gave this confession to her to doing the murder, you know, thanksgiving, thanks for giving death, and that she had complete control over Andy to the extent that if Lana said Andy, go stand in the rain,
that he would go do it. And the state and closing arguments were like, the print corroborates the confession, the confession corroborates, need a porter, need a porter corroborates both of it. Look at everything together, You've got your puzzle conduct these people and the jury did what the prosecutors wanted, And.
Did they present anything in your defense at all?
No, I felt it was all one silence.
No witnesses, no defense witnesses, no, and not even like no defense witnesses. But like the police officers went up there and testify to the jury that they never had any alternate suspects, and we know that's a lie, Like Larry would Tony Thomas, people were straight up committing perjury left and right.
So, Andy, when you saw this circus unfolding in front of you, did you still hold out any hope that the jury would come back in and get it right.
Yes?
I was hoping, yes, but as we know, with all the lying and fabricated evidence, it was probably well hard to somewhere near impossible for them to see the truth. So can you tell us about that awful moment when they did get it so wrong?
I felt nothingness. I was just numb. It took me back to the jail cell and I just walked in like I not seeing a ghost, but I was a ghost. I got to know people right off the hand, and I found me a job, so I kept busy most of the time, working in a wood factory making skids, and that people would from the outside had come and pick up the skids, and we got paid for it.
We got like fifty cents an hour, and if we got so many skids done, we got five or it was either five cents or a penny for each kid that got done.
So a lot of people don't know a very important and insidious thing about the thirteenth Amendment, which is that it did end slavery, but they left a loophole in there. And the loophole is that it doesn't apply to people who aren't free. So that meant that if they put people behind bars like they did to you, Andy, they can enslave you. It can pay. In some states they pay four cents an hour and charge attacks on top
of that. Other states it's nineteen cents an hour. And tons of products everyday, products that many of us use license plates, instance, are made in these prisons. Big corporations use this slave labor. It's a huge problem, and it creates a perverse and reverse insteadive for people to lock
up other people because there's money in it. So here you have a system in Elkhart where it appears they deliberately wrongfully convicted Andy and countless others at a rate that's at least get this eight times higher per capita than a place like New York, which has a long and ordered history of lawful convictions, and the same prosecutor that is still in office today made Andy and so many others essentially into slaves.
Yes, I worked in the kitchen too, and they pay fifty cents an hour.
So were you able to make any friends while you were in there? Oh?
Yeah, lots of friends, played board games. I was in the Ounder doorm. People that didn't get in trouble. If you got one lettle ride up here get kicked out. And I was there for two years and never got a ride up. And you could go outside and walk around to play basketball. And I caught a ride up once before I got in an honor dorm. I fell asleep and went to the chow hall. Then I went back and went to chowhaw again, and they had a scanner and I got a I accidentally got two meals.
So this is probably like the worst thing you've ever done. Yes, needless to say, you didn't belong there and desperately needed help, And your first appellate lawyer did bring a compelling ineffective assistance claim based on the fact that your trial lawyer never tried to suppress the false confession of his disabled client and never bothered to call a false confession expert
like doctor Leo or doctor Afshi. And the one thing that sticks out in my mind here is that the trial lawyer said in his own defense that this was actual strategy. Okay, he said that in Elkhart, the jury wasn't going to believe.
An expert from outside the community.
From outside the community, yeah, But what's ironic about this logic here is that because Dennis Chapman's from within the community, they'll believe him, right.
I mean, it was an outrageous explanation by the attorney, But the judge overseeing that claim was this guy, Terry Schumaker. He was the prosecutor on Egar Gerrit's case who we found out exclude did Richard off She from testifying as a false confession expert at that midnighteties trial, saying false confession expert testimony should never be before a jury because it invades the province of the jury. So when this guy now who's on the on the bench, he's never like, hey,
mister Royer just wants you to know. As a prosecutor, I took the position that these types of people should never be allowed in a court room never disclosed. It denied Andy's post conviction petition. He sat in prison for like another decade. The judge should have recused himself. And that's when I think, you know, we start talking about
systemic misconduct. I mean, frankly, when I said the words that there were systemic police and prosecutor and mist conduct that caused wrong quel convictions in Alcarda, Indiana, including Andy Royers, the state filed emotion for an injunction against me. The stakehourt judge found that like when I said systemic misconduct, that that was defamatory. You know what's amusing now is that that judge Formal Cark Kenny prosecutor, she withheld from us that she was also married to a former corrupt
Olkar cop in the nineties. Right, Like this is like when you talk about systemic, it's like you're going before judges who are former prosecutors married to Alcar police officers. Like that is the system in Elkhart that is like allowed for people like Andy to get wrongfully convicted in like open view. The whole system is stacked.
You don't have a.
Chance, and that's how you end up with five going on seventeen exonerations and counting in a town of fifty thousand. So, Andy, how did you end up getting in touch with Elliott?
Oh, to one of my lawyers, Michael Sutherland, you put a newspaper article out saying how wrongfully I was done, and Elliott happened to see it and took up the case from there.
Yeah.
So it's funny, you know, this goes back to the systemic Elkhart misconduct. By the time that I found out about Andy's keys, we had another client who was exonerated by then, by the name of Keith Cooper.
Who we'd like to cover in the very near future if you'll both join us.
Yeah.
And so Keith had been wrongfully convicted. You know, he was framed for a crime he did commit too, and the Indie Star started like a wrongful Conviction series. I want to say, in like twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, Keith them was still trying to get a part in an actual innocence pardon from the governor, and as part of that series they did a story ultimately on Andy. I want to say, this was like twenty seventeen.
So, okay, you saw the article you and Sutherland got in touch what happened next.
You know, I was like desperate to get my hands on the material.
My wife and I were going on.
A vacation to Mexico and I had just gotten like the trial transcripts, and I just remember that whole vacation, like being on the beach under an umbrella, read through the whole trial, was like reading through the police reports and was just like, oh my god, this guy got so framed.
You know. So by this.
Time, we had a project going at Notre Dame Law School in Andy's case was the first one that we ever worked on, and so we had a number of like great students on the case and incredible investigator named Patty, and we went out and like knocked on a ton of doors.
So I'm going to imagine that Nina Porter got a visit.
Yeah, Nina Port was actually the first witness that we talked to. You know, by then, you know, to put this in context, By the time we talked to Nina Porter, Lana Keenan, his co defend it was exonerated and sought civil compensation. Andy's like still sitting there, you know, even though the attorney who had this before us, he filed e motion for leave to even file a post conviction petition in the appellate court denied like they weren't letting Andy Royer even get back to court. I mean, it
was like fundamentally outrageous. So Lana, she got an incredible post conviction lawyer, Karen Winnicky who dug into the Layte Prince stuff, you know, like Dennis Chapman total fraud. Kara Winnikey is the one who unraveled that fraud. They ended up getting a lane print expert excluded Lana Keenan found all these differences that couldn't be explained away. That science is very subjective. What's fascinating is they filed post conviction petition.
State challenges it. At some point, the state sends the print materials off to the DNST Police Lab. Any usctate police cops.
Like this excludes her.
They still go to an evidentiary hearing. Even though the state lab says not a lot of Caenans, the private person says not a lone of Keenans. Right around the time of the evidentiary hearing, Chapman gets a chance to look at it and sees the print and immediately starts admitting that he got it wrong. That was after he already saw you know what the private expert was saying, so he knew that other people were saying that he
was wrong. By then they go to the adventure hearing, the state does an aggressive cross examination of Chapman, like it was self preservation mode. You know, Vicky Becker still prosecutor in the office. You put him on the stand trial. It was a different deputy prosecutor doing the cross but it was like saving his boss, right, Like make this guy look like he's a fraud, that he duped all all of us and that none of us knew about it all along.
To save face for the system as a whole, exactly.
So then eventually before ruling is made, the state agrees to a new trial for Lana and the case gets dismissed.
Now one would think this should have an effect on her co defend and Andy.
It's so crazy they use that evidence at Andy's trial and still they were like, you know what, We've got this disabled guy. We're just going to leave him in prison. He hasn't had the rights representation, he hasn't had the funds for private representation. We're going to leave him there. We're going to see if they're able to unravel everything else that happened.
All right, So back to Nina Porter.
One of our law students, me and our investigator, we knocked on Nina Porter's door. She was like, I've been waiting fifteen years for somebody to ask me how this whole thing came about. And she told us, in painful detail, how she was coerced into lying against Andy and Lana for crimeate in commitment.
So Nina Order recanted. The print is toast, which brings us to the false confession. So did you reach out to any of the false confession experts at Andy's trial attorney should have called in the first place.
Well, we called doctor Leo. He began digging through the material. But what really changed things? In addition to our investigation, you know, so like patting the students knocked on doors, got a ton of affidavits, people implicating Larry Wood, people implicating Tony Thomas. We also had a former outcar police officer, Larry Towns. He actually called Mark Daggie and was recording the entire conversation and Larry was chatting him up about
this case. And Daggy admitted there that the interrogation. He witnessed it. He said he believed that it was actually video recorded, and that the interrogation was super leading and among the worst he had ever seen. He had no idea that a recorder was on. You know, this was like two police officers talking to each other, and so
he made these admissions. Towns also called another person who was involved in the investigation watched the interrogations, person Peggy's, and she admitted that she always believed Andy was innocent. She was the one who signed the charging documents, who sought the warrant for Andy's arrest for the murder, and was admitting in this call, I always thought that guy
was innocent. So they didn't think that Larry would ever tell They surely didn't think that this other police officer would ever record them, but he did because he was so fundamentally outraged.
Okay, so we not only have an expert poking huge holes in the false confession, but also two people who were in the room who didn't think that anyone would be breaking down their sacred blue wall of silence. But then, on top of that, your involvement in Keith Cooper's case had a direct effect on Andy as it turns.
Out, in Keith Cooper's wrong quol conviction lawsuit, we were able to do depositions of Conway and Daggy, and that's where things finally unraveled, because those depositions uncovered the truth
about what happened the interrogation room. Conway finally admitted defeating Andy information, admitted that he believed that he was psychologically broken down, admitted that he was informed prior to the interrogation that Andy was mentally disabled and had the mind of a child, and then testified under oath that he disregarded all of that, gave no accommodations to his disability.
Like this is all like in a deposition. You know, this guy was making all these admissions that were like completely contrary to what he testified to a trial.
Elliott I got a hand it to you, man, what you were able to do here. This is not normal. I mean, this is nothing short of and I'm not like a magical thinker, but this shit is just miraculous. The things you've been able to uncover are shocking.
And what was also shocking that we found out through the depositions was that Conway was removed from the homicide unit of the Ulkhar Police Department before Andy's two thousand and five trial, from his conduct in another interrogation in
a different homicide case was removed. So we got to the bottom of it and ultimately had his supervisor testify for us at the entry hearing that he removed Conway because he believed that he lied in order to interrogate another person without their council present, and that his lie in that case, the supervisor belief could jeopardize the integrity of any further criminal investigations that he worked on and would cause credibility issues a trial, so they removed him
from the homicide unit. This all happened before Andy's trial. Conway was like the most important witness at Andy trial because only Conway could either admit or deny what happened the interrogation room before a recorder was turned on. And yet the state withheld the fact that this guy was removed from homicide due to issues with his credibility and integrity.
Conway also further admitted defeating Andy all the information and then Vicki Becker watched it all happen and put Conway on the stand to lie anyway, and Chapman had already been exposed as a frauded a lot of post conviction.
By the way, Dennis Chapman, we ultimately got his personnel file. What Dennis Chapman admitted. After Keenan got exonerated, Chapman had to sit down with the sheriff and explain how he botched that print so badly. And in that interview he said that he was pressured by el Car police officers to form an opinion. That they told him the theory of the case, that Lana Kanaan was the brains, that
Andy Warrior was the brawn. That Andy couldn't do this on his own, so they fed him who they wanted him to id, and then pressured him into making that fabricated ID.
You also had those recordings of Daggie and that supervised Daggie repeated what he had said on the recording on the stand as well.
I mean, like the state's case imploded. And Nina Porter testified for us too. She told the court how she
was coerced into repeating a fabricad statement. And by the way, while Andy was like wrongfully convicted, you know, within like forty eight hours of that, Daggy and another officer went and gave her the two thousand dollars reward that was never disclosed, you know, like nobody ever knew that she was pressured into lying and that like, oh as soon as she got the stand, she was going to be given thousands of dollars.
So there they are using the carrot and the stick. So how did it all end up with Andy being here with us today? When was this this long overdue.
Hearing September into October twenty nineteen? And the fascinating part about it is that we agree to only litigate like really like a fourth of what it was in our petition. Yeah, we were like Judge, you know, like let's just do five or six issues, like because if we went on those issues, we don't need to get to the other twenty Wow.
So you really were ready to embarrass the state further than you even needed to in order to convince the court that a new trial was in order, and the court agreed with you. So Andy, what was it like watching this shit show from your perspective?
Like there was a superman on my side, and uh, I just couldn't believe the lawyers before Elliott didn't do anything, you know what I mean? It just they just here, you go give it to the prosecutor.
Yeah, so safe to say that Elliott is a good guy. Book.
Yes, he's a cool guy. He's got the records straight now, so he's all right around. Great guy.
Thanks Andy, thank you.
So you've just watched Superman come in and kick some serious ass, right right, But this being outid, they're not going to just start doing the right thing now.
We got this case kicked out at Khark County. That's why I need to get justice, right. So, like we got that judge to recuse herself. She actually found that it was defamatory when I said that Andy was wrongfully convicted. Like it wasn't just like systemic misconduct. It was like this judge is like the most unfair judge that we could ever be before.
And how this judge is oblivious to the system she's been overseeing is ridiculous.
But okay, Yeah, so Andy's case outside of Alkhark Counyon, we litigated in Coskiosco County before this super kind, really smart, fair judge. The whole proceeding was like very very fair to both sides, and we felt like we had a real chance given the case that we put on and we submitted proposed find After the hearing, the state did as well, and we waited and when that phone call happened, They're like, hey, Elliott, how far away are you? Because
Andy's ready to get picked up. The judge granted a new trial in March thirty first, and I was like in a meeting with other students on a different Elkhart wrongful conviction case, like we were in a zoom meeting because everything was through zoom then, and I was like, oh my god, guys, Oh my god, Andy just got a new trial. He's getting released. I gotta go, And
I ran upstairs put on a suit. I was like calling Andy's parents, Janie and Mike, and you know, obviously one of the most incredible phone calls that I'll ever have, and like Andy's coming home, Like we've all got to figure this out. Somebody go by mask, you know, Like my wife was like like seven months pregnant at the time.
Like I wasn't leaving the house at all.
Right, So this was the beginning of the pandemic. No one knew how bad this was going to be yet, but you forged ahead.
No hesitation, drove so fast. I called the students you know, we all sort of like, I agreed to meet at the jail to welcome Andy home.
So finally when I got to teskiaskau Joe, I said, you're being released. I was like, wow. I started shaking, color started coming back to my face, and I started feeling like a person again. It was just unbelievable. It was there's no words to put it out there.
So wow, yeah, I can only imagine. And this judge didn't have to do what he did, which was to release you on a ricognos response, It seems because he was so convinced of Andy's innocence that he didn't want to see Andy back in prison even for another day waiting for a new trial while the state and COVID
dragged this thing out. So Andy was released. The state appealed the ruling for a new trial, and the appellate court affirmed the ruling, stating, and this is a quote, Detective Conway withheld the truth when he attempted to bolster the reliability of Royer's confessions by saying Royer knew details about the murder which were not known to the public. Again, just like Chapman. Now it was Conway's turn to be under the.
Bus, and the appellate court ruled Detective Conway that his continued employment at the Elkre Police Department was galling and found that he committed perjury back at Andy I. Llana's two thousand and five trial. And after that happened, we put pressure on the city of Elcar and the Elkhar Chief of Police. You know, we were calling for Conway's termination and the chief, who has a ton of integrity.
Finally they have a chief of police there who wants to change things and is trying to change things wrote up a ten page notice of termination of Detective Conway about the egregious misconduct that he committed in this case.
Well we'll see if he's actually ever criminally pursued like one of us mere mortals would be, but at least he can't do any more damage. So the new trial ruling was upheld on appeal.
Than what happened after the appellate court decision, we filed the motion suppress. That was like the first time that anybody had ever filed the motion in express for Andy saying that is confession, what's false, involuntary and unconstitutional and it should be not admitted at the trial, and the state's response was to not respond and dismiss the case.
Right because they knew. They always knew. So Andy's name was finally cleared on July nineteen, twenty twenty one. Conway and Chapman are disgraced. Vicky Becker still needs her come up and and it appears that she's currently running unopposed in November twenty twenty two. Now I'm not sure if it's too late to change that, but we hope for so much worse for her and Andy. Is there anything that you'd like to call on our audience to do or to support, anything that you'd like to see happen.
I just hope that they've done wrong so they should pay for it.
Yeah, I absolutely agree, and I hope that comes to pass. So now we go to closing arguments, where first of all, I thank you both from the bottom of my heart for being here and sharing your incredible story. I know it must be difficult to drudge up all of these emotions, so thank you for being brave and doing just that.
And now I'm going to shut my microphone off, leave my headphones on, kick back in my chair, and just listen to any final thoughts you guys have Elliott please kick it off for us and Andy, you take us home.
You know, I think Andy's case shows the need for why interrogation should be video recorded. You know, from beginning to end, Andy was like among the most vulnerable in our community and was manipulated and coerced into confessing to something that wasn't true. And it's heartbreaking, and it was completely preventable the state. You know, the prosecutor was watching the interrogation, other officers were watching the interrogation. They could
have stopped it at any point. You know, they didn't have to charge him, they knew it wasn't reliable, and instead, you know, it's pretty clear what happened. They just wanted to close a case, and they sadly did that through framing an innocent really really innocent, not only like in this case, but like Andy's just like an innocent human being.
And the students and Notre Dame and our team worked so so hard to show the injustice and to bring Andy home, and in Andy's name, we hope to do that for so many other innocent people from Elkhart.
I just want to thank everybody that worked on my case and law students and.
The people that.
Believed in me, my mom and my stepdad and family, and they brought me through a lot. I didn't know how to get through it, but I did.
Thank you. Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Cliburn, and Kevin Wardis, with research by Lyla Robinson. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction, as well as at Lava
for Good. On all three platforms, you can also follow me on both TikTok and Instagram at It's Jason Flam. Wrongful Conviction is the production of Lava for Good podcast and association with Signal Company Number one