#327 Maggie Freleng with Hope White

In the early morning hours of July nineteenth, two thousand and eight, police discovered the body of twenty four year old Julie Burchett at an abandoned palette mill in Monticello, Kentucky. She had been brutally murdered. Witnesses said they had seen Julie attacked and stabbed by another woman at a house party the night before, and that the party was thrown by Hope White at her mother's house. Did you ever have parties at your mom's house?

Absolutely not. My mother would not allow something like that to go on.

So what did you think about this whole party story?

I thought it was bizarre and guyzy, and I really didn't think that I had anything to worry about because I thought, Okay, this is very easy to prove these these people lion.

But regardless, Hope was arrested and convicted of the murder of Julie Hicks bur chet.

My name is Hope Rena White and I've been in prison for approsingly thirteen years in four months.

From LoVa for good. This is wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling today Hope White.

So I'm from Kentucky in a little small town named Monticello.

Hope White was born in July thirtieth, nineteen eighty two, to Daryl and Tammy White.

We didn't have a lot of money growing up. My mother did work, mostly just at restaurants that didn't pay very much or give her many hours. I did look up to my dad and think that he was the coolest because he did drink and things like that.

As a young girl, Hope thought her dad just liked to have a good time. But the truth was.

Watched my father suffer from mental illness and addiction to drugs from alcohol.

As Hope got older, she says she followed in his footsteps.

By the age eleven, I was consigarette, local marijuana, drinking alcohol. I could even go to the local bootleggers and buy my own pont DeLisi. I was very I'm a very attention seeking person, so I would hang out with whoever gave me an attention. Sometimes I might even change my values or my morals, even my appearance for other's approval.

But not everyone saw that side of Hope.

She was so fun, She was so outgoing, outspoken, passionate.

This is Brittany Hope's sister.

She is eleven years older than me, So she was someone that I looked up to. My early memories of her are almost a mother role rather than a sister. She was very, very passionate about family, about making sure that I had the same experiences as her children did.

Hope had her first daughter, Shonda, in nineteen ninety nine, so she was sixteen when she had her first kid. And if y'all are eleven years apart, you're actually pretty close in age to your nieces and nephews.

Correct. Yeah.

Yeah, she has two daughters, and the first one is five years younger than me, and the second one is nine years younger than me. We kind of grew up as sisters more so than aunt and niece, just because we're so close in age.

When Hope gave birth to Shonda, she knew she wanted a better life for her daughter than she had growing up, but parenthood spun her life in a new direction.

Me and her father worked at various places in town. It was a lot harder than what we thought it would be. It didn't take as long to figure out sailing marijuana and fills and was really fast money for a small town. I began to feel powerful having tons of friends and that money and that I wasn't used to having.

But to her little sister Brittany, she was still the same Hope at heart.

I remember she had and it seems like such a small thing now, but she had went to the gas station and got bug juice, which is these little juices made for kids, and she had already gave them theirs, they had already drank them. And I got home and happened to see like a half empty one, you know, on the counter. And before I could even so much as get a disappointed look on my face, she whipped one out of the fridge and was like, don't worry,

Hope's second daughter, Desiree, was born in two thousand and three, and two years later, Shanda and Desiree's father went to prison for selling drugs. Hope was left to support her family on her own, but soon she met someone new, a man named Bobby Buster.

At first, our relationship was very good. We were good for each other, we got each other sober. He got a good job building houses, for example. I was at home much the kids and force. He paid the bills and everything. So we still didn't have a whole lot of money, and I began listen that fast money. So therefore I started sailing again, and eventually we started to use again together. I started giving a bad one in harder drugs. I began to do things that I wasn't

Hope says that violence eventually showed up in her relationship with Bobby. It started with their arguments, which soon erupted into physical altercations. By the time Shonda was around nine years old, the neighbors were starting to notice. The night of the murder, there was a domestic violence called to your house? Correct, Yes, can you tell me about that? What happened?

Well? Our fight actually started at the lake.

On July nineteenth, two thousand and eight. Hope spent most of the day shopping with her mom. Later When Bobby got off work, Hope met up with him and their friends Janet and Billy Burke. The four of them drove out to f and T Lake, a few miles outside of Monticello, to hang out and ride four wheelers. They left for the lake about four thirty PM, and an hour later, Bobby got a citation.

From Fish and Wild Laugh for Hopper writing his four wheeler illegally because there's signs all over the place down there, saying that those types of things aren't supposed to be on the property.

The evening went downhill from there. Bobby and Hope got into a fight.

I really don't even remember what we were fighting about. I was drinking pretty heavily that day, and I do remember a fight and at the lake, and it escalated. I hit myself in the head with a rock at the lake.

Once they got back to their apartment, the arguing continued. At around nine pm, a neighbor reported hearing Hope and Bobby fighting. Sometime after that, police received a second call reporting a suspected domestic violence incident at their apartment. Finally, at around eleven that night, the police showed up. They first treated the cut on Hope's forehead from the rock injury earlier that day, and then Deputy John Hurd arrested Hope for an active bench warrant for an unpaid fine.

We rode the same school bus together our whole entire life, going to school, and after we started hanging round together when we got older, when she got into doing drugs and had got into seal and drugs, she would actually come and buy them from me.

The investigation into Julie's murder lasted almost a full year. Witnesses said they had seen Julie's car at the mill starting at ten thirty that morning, and they had seen her coming and going. Her car, however, remained there throughout the day with different men passing by, until about seven thirty PM. The minimal forensic evidence police collected at the scene was of little value. Some of it wasn't tested at all, and the items that were tested did not

He met with the lead detective for the state Police and the prosecutor and said he knew something about the murder.

This is Miranda Hellman, an attorney with the Kentucky Innocence Project who now represents Hope. Miranda says how exactly Jason came forward is unknown.

Not a lot of it is recorded we do know from there that they kind of took Jason out into the county and had him try to walk through the narrative.

Jason Miller told police that the knight of Julie's murder, he was at a party at Hope's mother's house and that he had seen Hope kill Julie in a fight there. His story was that Hope confronted Julie about sleeping with her boyfriend and then stabbed her, spewing blood everywhere. Police wanted more details.

So they actually take him on a ride along from the courthouse where he's supposed to point out where the party occurred, where Hope's mom lived, how things occurred, but he couldn't identify the house, He couldn't identify the route.

Jason also couldn't say what date this happened, or what Julie was wearing. Rather he gave the names of three people he said, we're also at the party. The first witness Jason named was Seth Frost, but Frost denied any knowledge of the murder. Meanwhile, Adam Manning, the second witness, was also in jail on a pending felony charge. When he was questioned, Manning said he arrived at the party at ten pm and that there were approximately thirty to

None of it adds up.

No one's story is consistent enough to even really say it happened on this day and time July, So you know when all these people were supposed to be at this party, but only three can tell you a story that even points to Hope is incredibly concerning. And it's not just concerning for me, you know, as a citizen and me as a defense attorney, or.

Me as an advocate for Hope.

It's concerning in that, you know, why did they push so hard to get this story? You know, why did they use these people that had pending charges.

And despite the allegations that dozens of people were at this party, no one called the police after Julie was supposedly brutally murdered, and no one was identified or interviewed from the alleged party other than Jason Miller and the three witnesses he named.

One of them says they're there for an hour.

One of them says they're there for five minutes, and that there was a fight in the back of the house. I'm arguing Hope came out of the bathroom in the back of the house and just picked up an knife. No one really describes what the knife is, if it's a kitchen knife, a pocket knife, two knives, one knife, nobody really knows, and just stabs her.

The stories get even more confused from there.

Nobody says how many times, nobody really says where in the house they all described the house as this open floor plan had a pool table in the middle of the living room and a chair in the corner, and that Hope had walked out into this living room and that's where the stabbing occurred, somewhere between the hallway and the living room. And then everyone says they left. Jason says he left as soon as that stabbing happens. Adam

It's not how her house is laid out.

Despite these shaky testimonies, police executed a search warrant for Tammy White's house. They went in with cadaver dogs and luminol, which is just like.

A spray that reacts to black light, and it will react when it hits certain things. So one of the big ones' is blood or bodily fluids. So the quote at trial was that when they hit the black light in Tammy's house that it lit up like a Christmas tree, and I've seen the photos it did that the walls, the floor, every piece of this house looked like it was having a reaction to luminol. So they pull floor samples, carpet samples, door, drywall, everything.

But when they tested these samples, no blood or DNA showed up on any of them. Police also never interviewed any of Tammy's neighbors to find out if they saw a party happening. These neighbors would have had a direct line of sight to the house and would have seen dozens of people and cars coming and going. The police, however, did speak to Bobby.

The cops really pushed for him to sign safe evidence against me, to say that this party did happen and that he did witness a murder, And they really pushed him to say that this is the truth and this is what's gonna happen, or we're going to charge you for the murder. Also, it also said that they would let him off his charges that he was facing if he would just tell the truth about the whole murders.

But Bobby refused to lie. As the cops were pressuring him to do Despite that, Hope was ultimately indicted on August eighteenth, two thousand and nine.

When they first resided me, I wasn't really I wasn't really worried about it. I just thought, Okay, this is a mix up. It's very easy to prove the these sep a lion, and I have people to back me up where I was at, what I was doing. This will be cleared up in no time. I'll go to the accounting and get booked in and I will be released.

So Hope cooperated with the police. She had nothing to hide.

They asked me for a sample my DNA I gave back to them. They asked me for at a lot of sector test I gave back to him, which I passed.

Yet, investigators continued to focus on Hope as a prime suspect.

Instead of doing any other investigation on any other lease that they may have had at the time or could have done.

Such as Julie's ex boyfriend at the time. Clues about this came from Julie's which was found in the trunk of her car. Inside it were numerous love letters from a man named Billy Shepherd alluding to buying her a wedding ring. And saying if he could not be with her, then he did not want to live. Shepherd also called Julie on the afternoon of her murder, but he was never investigated. Police also had another suspect, Rodney Porter, who drove a car that was seen at the mill the

He was a suspect for some amount of time. We know he's listed as a suspect in many of the police documents, and then about six months of investigation occurs and at some point the suspect.

Changes to Hope.

Really, there's no explanation other than the story from Jason Miller.

When you were at trial, did you think everything was going to work out?

I absolutely did. I had faith in the justice system that yes, the people didn't go to jail. So once this happened to me, I realized now and by looking at back at everything that's happened, of how much corruption is in a small town like the one I lived in.

Hope's trial started on April sixteenth, twenty ten. Prosecutor Matthew Leverage laid out the state's case. He said that Hope thought Bobby was cheating on her Julie, so she killed her. To this allegation, Hope admits that she, Bobby, and Julie sometimes participated in casual three zones, but it was all mutually consensual.

I'm not sure how the police they even knew that we had had these encounters in private, but they asked me about them, and I was honest, and they kind of took their own a little bit of the truth and sun it into their own theory and of events that I supposedly played out in the non in question.

The prosecution called all four alleged witnesses once again. They all gave different accounts, with very few details matching their original statements or those of each other. The only person whose story was consistent with what he told police was Seth Frost.

He said, this didn't happen. He said, they've talked to the police, they've threatened me. I'm terrified, but this never happened and I'm not going to say it did. So the jury, here's testimony from these witnesses talking about this party, with the understanding that we're going to find Julie's blood in this house and its damning evidence against Hope.

But at the end of the day, there.

Was no blood found on any of the items submitted from Tammy's house. Nothing ties anyone to this murder, and most certainly does not tie Hope or her home or her mother's home to Julian anyway.

There was also no blood found outside of Julie's car. The inside of the car, though, was soaked in blood, indicating that the murder happened inside the car, which totally invalidated the story of the stabbing at Tammy White's house. When it came to the physical evidence, the prosecution reiterated that the case lacked forensic evidence. Except there actually was some. It was either just untested or simply did not incriminate Hope. Yet the jury never heard this.

Much of the trial felt like smoke and mirrors. It was alluding to what you're going to hear and then you never hear it, alluding to there's you know, there's evidence against her. But really the evidence were just these eyewitness statements that truly weren't I don't believe believable eyewitness statements.

So Hope's public defenders, Jim Cox and Teresa Whittaker were left to try and discredit these supposed eyewitnesses and their stories. They called a witness who said he saw Hope and Bobby at the lake that day, and that he drove past Tammy's house later that night and didn't see any party. Hope also testified at her trial, as did Bobby. He said Hope was with him all day and night and they were not at a party. Did you ever have parties at your mom's house?

Absolutely not. My mother would not allow something like that to go on. She knew that I did drugs and stuff sometimes that she was basically she would be in mind but all the time about what I should be doing and what I should not be doing, and what my kids should and should not be around, and she would never allow something like that to go on in her home.

They also called Hope's younger sister, Brittany to the stand. Brittany, who lived with their mother Tammy, had been home alone all evening.

She testified that she vividly remembered this phone call that she had with her friend. Her friend actually testified too that yes, I was on the phone with Brittany all night. We talked till two o'clock in the morning, and I don't think there was a party there. Tammy was not home that night, so Brittany was home alone.

I had never been in a courtroom before, had never been in front of a judge. I remember being so scared, especially whenever it was the prosecution turn. I understood enough to know that they were going to try to say things to confuse me or maybe make it look like

The defense stressed to the jury that there was no way this party happened and that Hope could not have killed Julie at the same time she was at the lake or at the same time police were at her apartment responding to the domestic violence call. But that is all they could do.

You know, it's very hard to say those three people are lying and this party never happened, because you know, what proof do you have of the negative? So it was really It was a struggle at trial to be able to disprove, you know, no matter how impossible the timelines were or the stories were, to believe that this truly didn't happen.

It was very emotional. I tried off to show emotion while I was in there, and I try to mask my feelings. Really seeing her pictures and the things that Julie went through was very dramatic and distriving to me. I had dreams about it for a long time. Sometimes I still do.

But a jury convicted Hope of Julie's murder. She was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Hope was in absolute shock, but her first thoughts were for her family.

The only thing I could hear was my mom's screaming, oh my god, my baby, and she ran out of the courtroom crying. And yet I hear that a lot still and the pain in her voice, and that I kept my feeling my attorneys, please go check on my mom, Please go check on my mom, my children. Everything's me.

A year and a half after Hope's trial, her conviction was actually overturned due to a legal error, and she was granted a second trial.

I didn't have no hope during that second trial, I knew I was coming back to prison, but.

Hope was again convicted and sentenced to twenty five years in prison. So what has it been like for you and the family to have Hope in prison.

It was really really hard, honestly, And I feel like I can speak for me and my nieces whenever I say that they were so little whenever it happened, So it was really really hard to have to explain to them, you know, where their mom went and why she wasn't there for Christmases or birthdays and things like that. So yeah, it was pretty traumatizing and really really hard.

And Hope desperately missed her kids.

They never spent a night without me but maybe go see my mom for a weekend or something. Other than that, they was never out of my sight and being without them, Like I said before, I've struggled with oppression my whole life, and I really struggled. I'm hurting myself for years because I didn't have them in my life anymore and because

So as soon as she could, Hope reached out to the Kentucky Innocence Project and in twenty fourteen they took on her case that.

Had every marker that you know of a wrongful conviction case that we know about. From day one of trial, of attend day trial, it was obvious that nothing in the case matched a timeline that could exist. There were testimony that was conflicting, you know, all over the place, and all of the physical evidence that was supposed to be presented against Hope.

From the beginning of the trial never came to fruition.

Not only that, rumors were floating around town about the police officers who were involved in the case and whether they could be trusted. Do you think there was police corruption in your case?

Absolutely, there was a loss of police corruption in my case. It was really weird from Derek Wester signding Julie in the ways that he found Julie and how he was even out of his jurisdiction. Could be in that area to begin.

With, because Hope says Julie had also told her something about Derek Lester.

Eric would I ask for sexual fighters to keep her from getting a driven on no license.

What's more, Miranda says that other aspects of the story the states strung together didn't make sense.

It's physically impossible to drive to the places that they would have driven to in the timeframe that they had. Our theory was always that this happened in her vehicle because of the amount of blood, but that was never really presented at trial. Someone stood over her and stabbed her.

And this person could also have been the one whose hairs were found at the scene.

There's a very good chance that hair belongs to the person who committed this crime, or could have been on her, you know, from during the day and would tell us more about who she was with and where she was.

So that hair seems incredibly important.

And as it turns out, Hope's trial defense team did not even know the hairs existed and they were never tested. So Miranda and the Kentucky Innocence Project have been focused on getting those hairs tested and acquiring other evidence that was either tested years ago with limited technology or never tested at all. After the requests for DNA testing were denied a few times, there was a glimmer of Hope.

So we were recently actually granted an oral argument to talk about the testing statute as it applas to Hope, and hopefully as it applies to many more of our clients that could benefit from this more liberal review of cases that should be eligible for post conviction testing.

In the meantime, Hope focuses on moving forward.

Since I've been incars Rad, I have gotten my GV and I would like to finish college right now. I have a job. I'm doing LANDA. If I'm not at work, I'm either on the file with the family members or my children.

Shonda and Desiree are now adults. Hope watch them grow up from behind bars.

I talked to them all of now. We have a very good relationship since I've been in here. Shonda has three daughters of her own.

Now, and Brittany believes that her sister will be proven innocent. Do you talk about her getting out? Do you talk about the future all the time.

I think that helps her a lot, because that gives her something to look forward to. It's cheesy, but I joke with her all the time that her name is her name for a reason. Of course, my mom didn't know that when she named her, But that's something that we use now a lot to try to encourage her and just tell her, you know, you have to keep having Hope.

I really want to do something to help other people. I really dream is to become an attorney and or someone like the Innocent Project and be able to help people that have wrongfully convicted. That's my dream.

If you want to help Hope and the Kentucky Innocence Project, go to the link in our bio. Next time Unwrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling Brendan Woodruff.

They felt like he was a lot more sinister when really it was just me being myself.

But your clothing doesn't make you a killer.

And you liking guys and girls or just guys or just girls, they doesn't make you a killer either.

Thanks for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support your local innocence organizations and go to the links in our bio to see how you can help. I'd like to thank our executive producers Jason Flamm and Kevin Wurtis, as well as our senior producer Annie Chelsea, producer Lyla Robinson, and story editor Sonia Paul. The show is edited and mixed by Annie Chelsea with additional production by Jeff Cliburn and Connor Hall. The music in this production is by