In recording our coverage of Barry Beach, we realize that there are so many details and twists and turns that the story simply warrants two episodes, so we've split the episode and released both for your listening pleasure at the same time. Enjoy.
On Montana's Fort Peck Reservation, just after seven am June sixteenth, nineteen seventy nine, the body of seventeen year old Chimneys was found on the bank of the Poplar River. Her car was parked about one hundred yards away, and it appeared to be the scene of a vicious beating, potentially involving multiple assailants. Bootprints could be seen in the path from the car to the river, and fingerprints made in blood were found on the interior and exterior of the car.
The police interrogated many local young men, including Barry Beach, who was initially cleared as a suspect, and for three and a half years the case remained cold. Barry Beach moved to Louisiana to build a relationship with his strange father. When his stepsister ran away and ended up in his apartment, Barry's stepmother notified police, also making sure to mention that Barry had been interviewed three times about a murder in Montana.
The police in Monroe, Louisiana interrogated Barry about three open serial murders involving young women, but having been out of state for each, they began pressing him about the murder back in Montana. Eventually, Barry gave a confession that was presented at his trial. With a confession as well as the specter of a potential hair match, a punishment of life plus one hundred years must have seemed like justice was being served by the state of Montana. But this
is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. I don't even know what to say. I'm actually at a loss for words. What I'm going to do is just start by apologizing, Okay, to our guest today, Barry Beach, for what is one of the most egregious injustices that I have ever seen in almost thirty years of doing this work. So this story is going to blow people's minds anyway, without further ado, Barry Beach, Welcome to ronfel conviction.
Thank you, Jason, and good morning to you.
And as I always say, I'm happy you're here because I'm honored to talk to you, but I'm sorry you're here because of everything, the hell that you went through that is going to form the basis of the story
we're about to tell. And we'll also be talking to one of the heroes in this story in a bit, an investigator named Richard Hepburn, who helped unravel the open secret the prevailing wisdom of a small town in Montana, which is what actually happened on a terrible night on a hillside next to the Popular River all those years ago. But let's go all the way back to your childhood. Did you grow up there in Poplar, Montana?
I actually grew up in several different locations, but mainly in Poplar, Montana, on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in the northeast corner of the state of Montana. In a lot of ways, I had a very normal and happy childhood because my grandparents owned a large farm and ranch, and that was the best memories of my childhood was the horses and the cattle and the chores and the work and the labor, you know. But along with that, my mother was divorced when I was two years old
from my father, who was an Air forceman. And was stationed in several different locations during my early years of life.
You did get to know a bit the year that this incident happened, I guess when he was stationed down in Louisiana.
Right, for over a year and a half, maybe two years, I had been trying to leave Poplar, Montana and discover my my biological father, who I did not know until I was seventeen. That being said, I had actually gone to work for a local farmer, saved up some money, purchased a car, was going to drive down there and spend the summer with my biological father for the first time in my entire life. So I don't know my dad from my childhood, but I had a stepfather who
was a full blood Lakota Sioux. And just like any racial tension area in the United States of America, reservations were racially tense areas to live. That doesn't make it a bad place to live, It's just that there was always that conflict growing up in a mixed race home, and it created problems at school and.
Right, you were from a mixed race household going to school in Poplar, Montana, a small farming and oil community where over seventy percent of the population were Native American,
maybe twenty eight percent white. Also notable about the population is that there were only about a little over that some people living there, and the typic of graduating class was around twenty kids, so you all knew each other pretty well even between grades, you know, which put you in close proximity with the victim in this case, Kim Niese, a young white woman who was a great ahead of you.
We actually grew up on the same block, just four houses apart from each other, and one of the things that I've been talking about is the aspect of mixed racial tensions on the reservation as we grew up as kids. Kim Nice was also the granddaughter of a state senator. Her uncle, Stanley was the local banker. Her dad, Ted was a farmer as well as involved with some of the local oil explorations. So Kim was on that upper
level of school of classmates of society. Growing up in in the United States of America are the most poverty stricken areas of our entire nation, which is a Native American reservation.
So she kind of stood out a bit in the area, as did her sister, who was two years behind.
You, and I actually dated Kim's younger sister, Pam, off and on for over two years, and we were still kind of dating off and on when this happened.
And you had seen her on the day of the murder, right earlier in the day.
I had seen Pam and we talked for twenty minutes or so that day before I left town for the river. I did not see Kim because Kim and I did not associate with each other, being that Kim was very athletic, she was the upper social class of society. I was a known drug user and alcoholic and fighter, and drove fast cars and liked rock and music. I was the guy that you do not take home. DeMont got it.
So I guess her sister was really just kind of rebelling by dating you. I mean, from what I understand, in addition to being a wild kind of guy, you and your family were not as well off, not even close as the News family.
We were a lower to middle class family economically, even though we were a hard working family. It just sometimes you can work really hard not go anywhere. But by the time I did get into high school, I was fairly regular user. And I do think that along with being from a biracial family, contributed to making myself a susceptible target for law enforcement.
But up until this point, your run ins with the law consisted of a few traffic tickets, so no prior violence or criminal record to speak of. And there's something about the jurisdiction of law enforcement on a reservation that's a bit complicated.
Right correct. In nineteen sixty two, the federal government passed what is called Public Law six point eighty. Native American Indian reservations are federal land established by the federal government during the eighteen hundreds. Therefore, the FBI have jurisdiction over that land. However, Native American tribes are independent governments nations, so they control the land even though it belongs to
the federal government. Where that applies to jurisdiction is when there is a major crime such as a robbery, homicide, kidnapping, that takes place on a reservation. It is immediately the jurisdiction of the FBI until it is established that the perpetrator of that crime is not an enrolled tribal member. So on the reservations you have four, possibly five different
law enforcement agencies with split jurisdiction and control. So you will have at the bottom of it what they call the BIA Police, which is a federally funded tribal police. Then you're going to have your city police, which controls the city limits, mainly involving non Native Americans. Then you have your county Sheriff's department, who will control the county,
but they only have jurisdiction over non tribal members. And then you have the FBI, who have jurisdiction over tribal members and tribal lands and over all of those agencies.
Sounds like a recipe for at a minimum, confusion and potentially disaster, since when anything happens on the reservation, there's
not just one single agency that's responsible and accountable. You have all these competing agencies mucking up the crime scene together trying to figure out who should ultimately be working the case or have jurisdiction, and by the time that's determined, so many different hands, different people have tainted the investigation, which unfortunately happened here with the death of Kimneys and the investigation that included all of these agencies, not to
mention also the police in Monroe, Louisiana that ultimately led. All of this just led to your prosecution, leaving the true perpetrators free. So let's get into that. So this crime, this horrible crime, took place on the early morning hours of June sixteenth of nineteen seventy nine. Kimberly Neese was murdered at the Poplar River on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation near Fort Peck, Montana. Now, she was a by all accounts, a lovely seventeen year old girl who had
just graduated from high school. And she graduated as valedictorian. Which you know, it doesn't matter because this shouldn't have happened to anyone, but it kind of makes it even feel worse. It's giving me the chills. That night, that faithful night, she went to a drive in movie with her boyfriend, a guy named Greg Norgard, and he dropped Knees off at her home right after the movie. Well, she was home for about fifteen minutes before she left
in her dad's truck around twelve eighteen am, r after midnight. Now, witnesses reported seeing her parked at the Exxon gas station on Highway To around twelve thirty, and she was later seen following several cars towards the Poplar River at one am. Now to set the stage, the Poplar River was an area where kids would go to drink and smoke pod and party until late at night, like countless other places like it all around the country.
Yeah, the Poplar River had had several areas. There are four or five areas because it encircled the town on three different sides. But the train bridge was definitely one of the areas where people not only partied, but they would go down there to swim and hang out. The boat docks were down in that area. It was a local park as well, so there was a baseball field down there.
So it's an area that you might find in any town, USA where kids just go to hang out. And sometimes I find it helpful to look a place up on Google Maps, and here you have, like Barry said, the Poplar River that encircles the town on three sides, along with the Missouri River. US Route two runs through the town and as it heads west out of town it meets the Poplar River, you can see a train track that also crosses the river just to the south. So
this is where it happened. And from what I understand, there's a hill that runs down to the river from where some younger kids heard what happened that night. In fact, there may have been a whole bunch of eyewitnesses who were close to this murder that simply never came forward
for fear of reprisal. But what witnesses did feel safe reporting was that Kimney's's car was seen around one am, following several other cars to this area, and then at four AM, two of the tribal police officers observed the truck parked in the deserted field near the Poplar River, but they didn't feel the need to check it out of the time, it was just a truck parked in
a field. Around seven am that morning, as the officers were driving back into town, they noticed that the same truck was still there and they decided to investigate further. They found blood in the interior of the truck, a large pull of blood at a clump of hair near the passenger side, and a trail of blood leading down to the river. When they followed the trail, sure enough, they found this poor girl's lifeless body a semi submerged in the Poplar River.
Correct, But there actually were calls that we'd later found out years later that took place from several different citizens to law enforcement at about two o'clock reporting loud female voices and screams in the area of the park. And there is actually one report that a city police officer by the name of Stevie Greyhawks supposedly went down there and checked on those reports and reported that there was nothing down there interesting.
Stevie Greyhawk. Let's let's tuck that name away because it's going to come back around later. So it seems like this crime should have been discovered sometime after two am by this city police officer, but it wasn't reported to be discovered until seven am by the tribal police.
Tribal police officers noticed the vehicle and went down there and found the body. They called the city police department and the Sheriff's department, and the Sheriff's department then called the FBI.
Wow. So this complex web of law enforcement has already given us a lazy and unaccountable investigation into what was going on down by the river at two am. And then four agencies entered a bloody and scattered crime scene in and around seven am, beginning with the truck. Now blood evidence indicated that the attack began in the cab
of the truck on the driver's side. His knees was then yanked out the passenger side, where the bludgeoning and hair pulling continued and concluded about ten feet from the truck. Her one hundred and twenty pound body was then dragged almost the length of a football field down to the river, down an embankment, and then that's where it was found semi submerged in the water. The autopsy report noted skull fractures and brain injuries from the more than thirty blows
to the head. There was no evidence of a rape, sexual assault, or anything remotely sexual about this attack, but there was a ton of blood and other physical evidence.
The crime scene itself was absolutely loaded with physical evidence. There were numerous clumps of bloody hair and footprints found around the pickup and in the drag trail. There were three different sets of footprints and i'man identifiable footprints in the trail that they used to carry Kim to the river,
which was two hundred and fifty six feet long. There were over twenty eight fingerprints inside of the pickup, on the outside of the pickup and also on twenty three beer cans around the vehicle and specifically fingerprint sets number five, ten and number eleven. Those three sets of fingerprints were found on beer cans around the vehicle, on the outside of the vehicle, and they were also found on the
inside dash of the vehicle. Some of those fingerprints were in blood, but the most significant evidence when the assailant drug Kim out of her pickup, they placed their palm on the side of the cab, leaving a full palm print in Kim's blood on the side of the pickup.
The owner of that palm print has still never been identified to my understanding.
Correct.
We'll be right back after this.
This episode is underwritten by AIG, a leading global insurance company. AIG is committed to corporate social responsibility and is making a positive difference in the lives of its employees and in the communities where we work and live. In light of the compelling need for pro bono legal assistance, and in recognition of AIG's commitment to criminal and social justice reform, the AIG pro Bono Program provides free legal services and other support to underrepresented communities and individuals.
All of the evidence that was collected ended up going to different jurisdictional locations. Some of it was sent to the FBI crime Lab in Butte, Montana. Some of it was actually taken to the local Poplar City Police department and put into an evidence room.
It really is not that there was, perhaps still is, no standard practice or protocol for evidence collection in these instances. It seems so obvious that it should be collected by one bureau or one agency every time in one place. How can you mount an effective investigation in this manner? Well, the short answer is obviously that you can't. But even with this nonsensical evidence collection procedure, what about good old
fashioned just talking to people. This was a very small community with only about twenty kids in a graduating class, and one of their recent fellow graduates just got murdered. There had to have been at the very least rumors going around town.
For the first week or so, we all heard and knew around school and around town that it was supposedly this group of girls allegedly. Because I don't want to point the finger at somebody that has not been forensically and scientifically connected to this, that's something that we have to keep in mind as we talk about this case is that the State of Montana, the FBI, the city police, and the tribal police to this day, three forty four years later, have never matched any of those fingerprints, the
palm print, the footprints, the blood samples to anybody. They have never made a legitimate, honest arrest with anybody but law enforcement. We're bringing numerous of US high school kids in for questioning and taking statements, and myself personally, six months or seven months after the crime, I was brought in. I was questioned, I gave fingerprints, I gave blood samples, I gave footprints, I gave hair samples, and was told that none of the physical evidence matched me and that
they knew I did not commit the crime. That process right there actually took place with a lot of people in town.
But somehow or other they managed to bring you, and as you said, a lot of other people in town in there, and they managed to I don't know if it was willful, but somehow or other they managed to not bring in the people who actually matched to this evidence.
So, when you're dealing with a small community like that, how could they not bring in the people that everybody in town was talking about.
It's hard not to draw a sort of a sinister conclusion, which is that at some level they were sort of protecting these people for reasons that may become clear as we go along in this episode, and thereby putting up almost like a sinister smokescreen where they were just sort of acting like they were doing some investigation by bringing people in to distract everybody from the fact that they were weren't actually interested in arresting the people that committed this heinous crime.
Certainly there had to be somebody somewhere wondering why these people weren't being looked at closer. And to take it one step further, Kimneys's family put a ten thousand dollars reward up for information, and that reward went completely ignored.
So even though there were rumors about the group of young women who had bludgeoned Kimneys to death, the police were dragging in young men for scrutiny, and then no one even responded to this ten thousand dollars reward. We're talking about four decades ago in a little town that's big money, and in all likelihood, there were eyewitnesses at this party by the river, so either no one was talking the police weren't actually trying to catch the assailants
or both. Nonetheless, they had already ruled you out by virtue of the physical evidence, conclusively proved you could not have committed this crime, and that should have been it, but it wasn't correct.
Yes, they did ask me to come in and take a polograph test just to finalize their investigation. So I went in and I took a polygraph test with the FBI. The polygraph at that time showed that I did not commit the crime, but that I had general knowledge of the crime, which everybody in town had general knowledge. I mean, how could you not be in high school in a small town and understand what's going on around you.
Now, at this point you had been ruled out, no more suspicion allegedly, so you moved on with your plan to reconnect with your biological father in Monroe, Louisiana.
Jumping forward to nineteen eighty, when I returned to Montana again from down in Louisiana, they brought me in one more time because of traffic at tickets. I had to do thirty days in jail for excessive traffic tickets. When they released me that day, again, I was going back to Leuisiana and again they questioned me, but again they said that they knew I did not commit the crime, they just would like to know if there was any
information that I had. They released me again. I returned to my father's house in Louisiana and went on with my life.
Okay, so three times you come in, three times you're clear. Here you are back in Louisiana working construction, building holiday inns, as I understand it, And then you signed up for the Navy and completed boot camp right, and we're preparing to be deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. This was the time of the conflict in Lebanon.
Correct, Very few people probably remember, but in nineteen eighty one eighty two, the Lebanesian Army had just shot down two of our American planes over the Mediterranean Sea. So we were about to be deployed with the USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean Sea to defend our international spaces. In that process, being that I was new to the s and this was my first overseas deployment, they ran
a background check on me. During that process. The Roosevelt County Sheriff had sent a letter to the FBI, stating that I was their suspect in a homicide and that they had quote unquote two eye witnesses who could put me at the scene of the crime. I was confronted with that letter by the United States Navy Police Force.
They put me in the brig and after two days of being in the brig, I was given an option to take an honorable discharge, return to Montana and undergo an investigation, at which point, if the investigation did not lead to an arrest, I could re enlist in the military, or they could contact the Roosevelt County Sheriff's Department, and if the Roosevelt County Sheriff's departments backed up the letter, I would be charged with federal charges of fraudulent enlistment
into the military to avoid jurisdiction, and I would immediately be incarcerated for ten years in federal prison. So I took the honorable discharge. I went back to Wolf Point, Montana, and once again turned myself into the Roosevelt County Sheriff's Department, only to be told that they didn't know of the letter, they had no witnesses that could put me at the scene of the crime, and that they knew I did not commit the crime based on the forensic evidence, and
they released me to go back to Louisiana. There's absolutely no question that it came from that sheriff. It was on his letter head, it was his signature. It was mailed to the FBI office in Butte, Montana. To this day, that letter exists in the FBI files in Butte Montana. So him telling me that he did not know about the letter was just a blatant line. But yet it destroyed my military career.
Right, But this is hardly the worst that's about to come. So you're cleared by Roosevelt County, back of Louisiana.
Go back to work building holiday inns.
Right and putting this hopefully behind you. But then there was some craziness with your stepmom, and that may have led indirectly or even directly to this downward spiral that got deeper and deeper and faster and faster.
Correct, it actually is the direct link that led to a wrongful conviction, or allowed the state of Montana to continue its pursuit of a wrongful conviction. When I returned to Louisiana, I was living with my father and his new wife who had five children. They all lived there at the house. There became a pretty open dispute between me and my stepmother as to whether or not I
was even my father's child. When on New Year's Eve nineteen eighty three, we went out as a family drinking, got back home all drunk, and there was a large family argument over that issue. My stepmother kicks me out of the house and I go get a place to stay real quick. But when she kicked me out, one of my younger step sisters decided that she was going to run away from home because she couldn't stand her
step mom. I was at work. My stepsister called me up and said her and three of her friends were out at the freeway hitchhiking to Houston. I says, no, stay right where you're at. I'm going to come get you and call dad. That led to my step mother calling law enforcement and saying that I was a prime suspect and a murder in Montana, and that she was fearful that I was going to kill her daughter. What
I didn't know, Jason. At that point in time, Mondro, Louisiana had a serial killer on the loose and they had formed a seven member Homicide Task Force to investigate these serial killings. Two of those homicides took place while I was in the military. The other one took place while I was on a holiday in job in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So when those three homicides took place, I had absolutely
no knowledge. I wasn't even in the state of Louisiana, etc. But my stepmother used those along with the fact that she knew I was a suspect in Montana at one time, and turned me into local law enforcement and I was arrested.
So they started questioning you about the Monroe murders. But of course you had no knowledge of those crimes, because how would you have known. You weren't even in the state.
I didn't even know those crimes existed at that time. I wasn't charged with homicide. I was only charged with misdemeanor charges concerning my stepsister contributing to delinquency of a minor. So they took me into this interrogation room. The initial interrogation was done by three members of the Homicide Task Force, Richard Maderis, Javi and Joe Cummings. They had accused me
on numerous numerous occasions of showing deception, etc. Etc. On what they called voice stress test, which was this tape recorder that set there on the interrogation table the whole entire day.
So they were trying to extract a false statement. Your alibi was air tight. For the Monroe murders. You were in a different state. Every single one of those murders. You weren't in state. But they are experienced in convincing suspects that their super scientific voice stress test says that you're lying. Then maybe they can coerce you into a statement. For example, we'll tell the jury that you registered deception, so you better plead guilty and get a good deal.
Another route is potentially convincing the suspect of their own guilt. None of it had worked on you yet. And then later on that even they brought in their closer, a guy named Alfred Calhoun. Now he was the bad cop to Joe Vie's good cop, and they continued to rail on you about these Monroe, Louisiana murders while describing to you in great detail what happens what would happen to your body chair And this was something that they said you'd be able to avoid if you just told them what they wanted.
To hear correct. And it was only when Alfred Calhoun came in and started threatening me with the death penalty in Louisiana for the Louisiana crimes that the Kimnice murder in Montana actually came into the picture. Alfred Calhoun promised me that he would assure that I was convicted on the three homicides in Louisiana and would ensure with everything that he had within him that I received the electric chair, and that he wanted to be there to push the
button and watch me fry for the Louisiana homicides. But if I would just simply tell them the truth about the Montana homicide, that they would go back to Montana and help me to establish the facts of that case, and we'd get out of Louisiana.
Right, which actually sounded like a logical thing to do, because you already knew that everybody knew that you had nothing to do with the these murder and there was overwhelming evidence to prove it. So why not get the hell out of Louisiana and away from these monsters and go deal with the monsters, you know, because you know you can prove eighteen ways till Sunday that you didn't have anything to do with the murder of Kimnese. So ultimately you falsely confessed to the murder of Kim Nice.
This confession was a tape recorded confession. There is actually a phone conversation between the sheriff in Montana and the detectives in Louisiana where they have me in the interrogation room. The sheriff in Montana is feeding information to the detective in Louisiana. He's going in and making sure it's a part of the confession, and then going back and getting
more information. The sheriff falsely and inaccurately told Detective VI that Kim Nice was wearing a plaid shirt with a brown jacket, and that actually ended up in the confession with me saying that she was wearing a plaid shirt and brown jacket, when in fact, Kim was wearing a white pullover sweater.
The inconsistencies and contradictions between this confession and the crime scene border on the ridiculous. There were multiple sets of bootprints for starters, it wasn't a single assailant. Clearly, Barry exhibited a complete misunderstanding about where the car was in
relation to the river. It confessed to multiple double football field length round trips, which was not corroborated by the bootprints either, and then on these round trips, Barry allegedly threw one item in the river at a time, which is not only ridiculous considering the distance, but also after searching the river, these items were never found, including a jacket, the keys to the truck, which obviously would have just sank, and the alleged murder weapon, a tire iron that obviously
didn't float downstream. They did, however, find a clawhammer in the river, with which wounds, as well as gouge marks and the ceiling of the truck were more consistent. He also said that she had jumped out of the driver's side and he had to run after her. Not only that we know that she left through the passenger side direct contradiction again, but also with the amount of blood found on the front seat, the likelihood of her running
was borderline impossible. And then Barry also confessed to choking her, which we know never happened.
I not only claimed to have choked Kim, but allegedly I choked her to the point that she passes out and the amount of force that it takes to do that would have left very clear and indictative physical evidence on the body that was never found. It wasn't there, it didn't exist. More importantly, the so called motive for this taking place was supposed to be a rape, and there was no indication of rape or sexual intercourse.
Barry also said he had wiped the scene of his fingerprints. However, there were no ways marks at the scene. And to top it off, Barry said that he put her body feet first into a garbage bag that only came up to her armpits and dragged the body to the river and pushed her in again, not understanding the distance because he didn't know anything about it, but also that there was a twenty foot embankment that he'd have to have figured out how to maneuver, but he completely left that
detail out. And on top of all that, there was no garbage bag or remnants of one being used that wherever found. But this wild confession was seemingly good enough for everyone on both sides of that infamous phone call.
So one more interesting fact about what you just said that probably should be brought up at this point when you're talking about Javi and Alfred Calhoun in Louisiana. Alfred Calhoun JF and that homicide detected group actually got two other individuals to confess to those three Louisiana murders, and those two individuals were later proven to be innocent and
their confessions were proven to be false as well. And later one of those crimes in Louisiana were actually solved by DNA, proving that all the people that JAYVII and Alfred Calhoun got to confess to those three homicides were false. I was actually facing the death penalty all the way up until a month prior to my trial. We actually had a hearing to do away with the death penalty, and that's when we learned that the tape of the
confession had been erased. It was like three weeks prior to my trial.
So you're being cleared as a suspect by all the physical evidence matter at all, but this false confession, the gathering of which was corrupt at best, the recording of which had then been mysteriously erased. Yeah, this false confession overcame all fingerprints, the bloody pomp print, the lack of any white marks around the other fingerprints on or in the interior or exterior of the truck, the bootprints, the blood samples, how inconsistent your false confession was with the
crime scene. None of this mattered at all, and you were charged with deliberate homicide in the fifteenth Judicial District of Montana. And in the lead up to your April nineteen eighty four trial, your attorney tried to expose that false confession for what it was and suppress it as involuntary, but the judge allowed a recitation of the false confession
by Detective J. V. Now to corroborate that evidence. The state was trying to admit a pubic here that had allegedly been discovered on Kimney's sweater, and the former head of the Montana State Crime Lab, Arnold Melnikoff, was willing to testify that the hare had characteristics that were somewhat similar to Barry's hair, Which what does that testimony even mean? Similar? How that it was hair? It was also hair? I mean, yeah,
it was hair, and there's hair. That's about it. There was no other similarities.
Let's start there with Arnold Melnikoff. They were not allowed to have him testify for two reasons the fact that the sweater he claimed to have found a pubic air on had already been searched in nineteen seventy nine and there was nothing found on it. But not only that federal report saying that nothing was found on that sweater. That sweater was kept in the Poplar City Police Department's
evidence room. On the night of June sixteenth, nineteen seventy nine, about twelve thirty one o'clock at night, a police officer on duty for the Poplar City Police Department by the name of Stevie Greyhawk had actually broken into that evidence room, kicking in the locked door, supposedly to use the restroom.
But that break in contaminated all the evidence that was stored in that evidence room involving the Kimney's murder, including the sweater that in nineteen eighty three, Arnold Melnikoff claims to have found a pubicare on that had quote unquote similar characteristics to Barry Beach.
So the same guy, if you remember, I told you to tuck his name away for later, This guy, Stevie Greyhawk, the Poplar City police officer who answered that two am call early on the morning of June sixteenth, nineteen seventy nine, down to the river for the sounds of female voices screaming, and back with nothing to report, even though there definitely was.
That freaking guy is the same cop who had to go to the bathroom so badly that he busted down the door to an evidence room holding the evidence from this crime. Again, nothing to see, there, nothing to report. Now, I'm going to ask you to tuck that's Stevie Greyhawk name back in again for later as we continue on through the trial. So no bogus planted pubic hair was admitted.
But this recitation of an alleged transcript of your false confession was really all that was presented, because, I mean, they couldn't present the physical evidence because all of it they knew had already exonerated you. At this point, were you worried.
Going into this? My attorney kept telling me, don't worry, don't worry. They can never find you guilty. There's no physical evidence. It's impossible for to find you guilty. But on the second day of my trial, the prosecutor, even though the judge had thrown out the pubycare and stated that it was not admissible at my trial, the prosecutor still managed to mention it to the jury, saying that he had a pubycare that he would later introduce that matched me.
And that wasn't the only time he pulled this type of trick in his summation. He did it twice, referring to the confession in ways that were either misleading or outright lies. In reading the transcripts, the prosecutor Roscoe talked about wondering how there was so little blood on the drag trail from the truck to the river, and that Barry had said in his confession that he had put the body into the garbage bag head first, so that explained it. But Barry didn't even say head first. He
said beat first, that her head was not covered. So here he is misleading, lying to the jury to bolster the state's narrative. Then, at some point in the trial, Kim's fire Tedneese, took the stand and confirmed that he owned a tool like the alleged murder weapon from Barry's false confession, a tire iron. Now, in the confession, Barry had said that he threw it in the river, but when Tedaneese was asked if it was missing when the
truck was returned. He said that he hadn't noticed. In the prosecutor's summation, he lied about Tedanese's testimony, telling the jury that mister Neese had confirmed that the alleged murder weapon was missing. None of this information actually holds value, as all of it comes from a false confession, but using it and lying about it to bolster the state's narrative was apparently effective, but not nearly as much as the false confession itself.
They put Jvi on the stand, who took the confession, supposedly did a handwritten transcript that he himself wrote out of that tape confession, and the prosecutor and jav line by line for two and a half days role play this confession and in front of the jury, including Jayvi from Louisiana getting on the floor of the courtroom as if he was Kim Nice and the prosecutor choking him, mimicking in front of the jury the confession, and when the judge allowed that to happen, I knew without question
that I was going to be found guilty.
On part one of our coverage of Barry Beach, you've heard about how he was wrongfully convicted. Now Here about his epic fight for freedom in Part two, available now.
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