#332 Jason Flom with Dean Gillispie

He called himself Roger, a composite sketch finally generated along awaited lead Roger Dean Gillespie was identified as a possible match by his direct supervisor at work, although he typically went by Dean. All three victims identified him out of a photo lineup, and again later at his trial, sending him away for up to fifty six years. So it seems like that's all there is to this story. But

this is wonderful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. If I sound a little more sprightly than usual, it's because of the guy I'm going to be interviewing, who's got this infectious energy and smile and has just transcended this insane ordeal that he went through. So I am really excited today to have my friend Dean Gillespie on the show. Dean, Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, Thank you sir. And with Dean

is the co founder of the Ohio Inness's Project. Dean's case was their very first one, so we're very happy and honor to have Mark Godsy here with us. Thank you, happy to be here. And of course the other co founder was John Cranley, who went on to become the merri Cincinnati, but before all that, he worked to free innocent people like Dean. So let's go back in time with you two. Dean, your story is one that really needs to be told for so many reasons, from police misconduct,

judicial misconduct, to what took place at your trial. We're more than half of the jury was ready to acquit before turning around and convicting you when they obviously had reasonable more than reasonable doubts, and then only for you and Markta then turned this whole thing around and make history in Ohio. But before it any of this happened, you had like a really good life. Well. I grew

up in a middle class family. My dad worked at General Motors, my mother was a beautician, lived in a great neighborhood where the friends that were around me, you know, I knew my whole life. It's a beautiful place to grow up for me. It was like I was like beaver Claver. What town was that in Fairborne, Ohio? Where the airplane was invented. I actually started working when I was fifteen with a friend of my dad's. He was

a contractor, and then I graduated high school. My dad wanted me to go work at General Motors, which at that time was one of the best jobs in America. You know, you get a GM, you were set. You know, my dad in the union, so he knew the right union people to get me the job at the GM plant. I was going to the Community College for fire Science Technology to basically to get the job, which was plant protection at General Motors. And you're basically a fireman, so

put in the applications. You know, bam there was with a job at General Motors at eighteen, I mean that someone could get a job out of high school that would have them, you know, pretty much set up for life. Situations like that were dwindling a number even back then, so this was really a valuable position you had, which sort of inadvertently made you a target for a particularly unscrupulous person. What we figured out during the course of this was the boss at GM, which is a management nonunion.

This guy was the head of security the five different plants and GM and Dayton, and he had a friend who he wanted to get the job. So he don't like me now because I got the job. And this guy would just stirring up crap with me and harassing me and just you know, dalking down to me and everything. But you know, subsequently we come to find out that

he was so mad about it. We've proven four times in federal court that he was taken my information from Jerre Motors to the police department he used to work at, where his buddy was the head of the police department, trying to get me hooked up on something. Wow, because it's a union's shop. You just can't fire somebody because you don't like him. You have to have, you know, some kind of reason. That reason will be me getting

locked up and not showing up to work. And this sinister fox name was Richard Wolf, who then did what he had already done previously when he heard about the crimes were about to talk about it. Now this was August. There were two gruesome sex crimes, one on August five, and then the second one involving two victims, was on August. The second one was reported first though. There were twenty

two year old twin sisters. We're gonna call them c W and b W. This is around seven seven pm as they were getting into their car outside of the Best Product store in Daton, Ohio, and they were kidnapped by a lone gunman and then said that he was a store security guard and his name was Roger. Yeah.

So the perpetrator sort of accused them of shoplifting, had a gun and said you gotta come with me, pretending like you know, I'm going to take you around the little you know, mall cop police station we've got here or whatever. Um. Instead, he takes them off into the woods. When they got there, he exposed himself, bundled their breasts, and forced them to perform oral sex on him. He then blindfolded both women and forced them to lie down in the backseat while he drove back to the Best

Products store. So there were some distinctive things that the perpetrator said and did. Specifically, he would say things like, you know, I'm a contract killer for the c I A. I get a thousand dollars per hit. He had cigarettes, you know, smoking. He mentioned at one point how he does this to women because he was molested by his grandfather when he was twelve. He said he was from Corpus Christi, Texas. At one point he said he's from Columbus, Ohio.

He then fled with money from their purses, as well as a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. Now here's the thing. Like, these women reported this as all to the police, and around the same time, a twenty eight year old woman who were going to call sc totally separate incident reported that a man wearing sunglasses and armed

with a chrome handgun abducted her same emo on August five. Yeah, what happened is uh sc read the newspaper report of what happened to the twins, you know, once she read the similarities, and she decided she was going to come forward. This woman said the attacker got into her car when she came out of a store in a different shopping center. This guy identified himself, according to her, as a security

guard and said his name was Roger. He ordered her to drive behind a vacant building where he funneled her breast and force or of perform oral sex. So it was pretty clear to the police that the same guy was responsible for all three victims in both events. Were rape kits done? Was there any testing done on any of this type of you know, whether zerological or other biological evidence. The b w N C be a case there was rape gets done on We know that for

for sure. You know, they collected semen on the sweater of one of the victims, and there were hairs that were collected, you know. Unfortunately, this was a eight you know, before really DNA testing was known and widely used criminal investigations. So the items in question that the perpetrator touched or might have deposited biological material on were given back to

the victims by the police. So any chance for DNA testing was sort of ruined, right, But no one even knew that until much later when the Ohio Innestance Project kind of involved. But in the immediate aftermath, there were these hairs that they would eventually try to match with suspects by using hair microscopy, which is a well known junk science. But they've actually got to find the suspects first, so they relied on a composite sketch from the detailed

descriptions that they had received from all three victims. And the descriptions were consistent. Yeah, so they were a very consistent all three victims. So he had his shirt unbuttoned and you could see this big like rap medallion, very dark tan. This was August. Had acne along the jaw line, and he had very specific color of hair, is brown with a reddish tent. And they described him as tall and kind of a big guy, and something like between one eight and two fifty. I think there was a

pretty broad range. The pant size that they one of them provided was smaller would be a guy more like, you know, pounds, two hundred pounds something like that. So Dean, did any of those very specific details match. You know? They said the guy who attacked him had a dark sun tan. I'm very irish. I burned and I go back to white. You know. The person who attacked him did not have a hairy chest because of the medallion. I got a bear suit on. I'm covered in hair.

The person who attacked him had severe acne scars on both sides of his jaw line. I did not have any of that stuff. The person who attacked him did not have a cleft chin. I've got a cleft chin. I started having gray hair on my temples in the tenth grade, which is a feature that the victims would have mentioned it have been you. And also I understand that you have always hated cigarettes, absolutely hate cigarettes. My dad smoked most of my life and I could I

can't stand smell them. So why am I even being looked at as a suspect? And you had no idea that your boss, Richard Wolfe had it out for you. This bad I mean, on its face, the only thing about this crime that has any connection to you was the name Roger. Now your full name is Roger Dean Gillespie, but you've always gone by Dean. But by the time you had been considered for this crime, a lot of time had passed by, the case had gone cold. So since it wasn't fresh in the headlines, do we know

what prompted him to try to bring you in. No. He says that he's seen a newspaper article on a bulletin board in the plant, and he went down and said, hey, check this guy out. And the first time that he went down there, he was seeing the detectives who were in charge of that case when it very first started, so they knew the case inside. And now they looked at my d m V or dry was license and

seeing that I didn't fit the description at all. They knew the pant size, and when they looked at the hide and weight on me, they knew I couldn't fit in the pants, which I always say one time in my life, being fat was good for me. Right, you would think, yeah, so you know they've done a little right up on it and disregarded me as a suspect, and that was the end of it, you know with them. Yes, so you know Dean was eliminated as a suspect. Time

went by. The detectives on the case who eliminated Dean retired, moved out of state. After they left. My boss his best friend who was the chief of police. The chief's son was a detective. Now, so my boss he went back with the same information and said, check this guy out.

I think that when he was talking to this young new detective, with him being a ex police officer and understand how the system works, he was able to convince him that he was working on the right track and in the right guy detectives out more twenty six years old, takes over the case, and the filed eliminating Dean disappears

and we don't know what happened to it. And he just decides, I'm gonna go out and show the victims a photo spread with Dena and and you know, you look at the photo spread, it's clear that the other five came from the same source. Deans was glossy and the other ones were matt He's got a different color background.

The victims that described the perpetrators having a wide face to the picture used of Dean is like his face is taking up the entire square, so it makes his head look really big and his face wide, whereas the other five are all like back more like Torso shots. And so if you look at it, you go five of these are fillers, which one doesn't fit clearly it's this one. First off, I have no animosity toward the victims in this case because they were done wrong and

they were lied to, just like I was. And you got to remember, this case is to two and a half years old, and studies show that you know when it's a stranger rape, your ability to identify accurately decreases steadily from the time it happens, and it's essentially down to chance by eleven months. And so you're sticking a photo spread up in front of somebody two years after the fact with an extremely suggestive lineup. That's a very

dangerous situation. Yeah, I mean they were re victimized, right, But now with the victims identifying you, they had what they needed to get into rest warrant. Even though, as we've already mentioned, other than the name Roger, you and the assailant had very little in common. It's why the

initial lead detectives eliminated you as a suspect. And there's more that they discovered that should have eliminated you again, but tunnel vision and no. Perhaps maybe the detective Scott More, feeling some kind of twisted obligation to his father's best friend, may have been why they continued their pursuit of you. Dean. I mean, when did you first find out that you

were being targeted in this way? I got a letter called a demand letter to come into the police department, and because I'm a dumbass, I went in and he questioned me about these incidents. Where were you add on this day? Which was two years before. Who knows where they were at two years ago, But because I didn't know, he felt like I wasn't answering his questions. So weeks later is when they came to the house. They tore my house apart. You know, they're supposed to be a

gun involved and everything else. I didn't have guns. There was no clothing or anything that even even came close to the type of attire this person was wearing. Okay, so that you're arrested and taking out in jail, we go through the arrangement and everything. They reduced the bond down enough for me to get out, and I am in a frantic mode to try to figure out where I was at during this time. And I was very lucky enough to have two friends who kept calendars of events.

You know, I was in Morehead, Kentucky on one of the days of these crimes that took place with my friends. We were skin and fishing and just having fun at the lake, and the other one we were with some friends who came in from college and we were out with them. Unfortunately, alibi witnesses are often easily explained it away by the prosecution as people who are willing to

lie for you, including about your ability to tan. They had photographic evidence of how it would have been impossible for you to tan, but it had no effect, nor did pointing out all the other discrepancies, amongst so many other tactics. During pre child your defense tried to suppress the identifications for the same reasons we had mentioned earlier, which is how outrageously suggested the lineups were. It's harder to get these things suppressed even when they're suggestive. We

see this a lot. The current case law by the Supreme Court is completely out of date, doesn't reflect science, and that needs a change eventually. But yeah, that they allowed it in and they allowed identification, So I want our audience to take notice. Here these are the steps that our guests, usually incompetent attorneys, did not take. That you might be telling yourself that you'd make sure that

you and your lawyer would take. But it still made no difference to judge allowed in the ideas, and the jury was not moved by the alibi witnesses nor any of the discrepancies between Dean and the assailant, so he was found guilty. But war sentencing, a defense investigator learned that Hair is recovered from the victims that were said to have been lost had not only not been lost, but the crime lab had actually tested them against Dean

and excluded him. They found some hairs that had been on the victim's sweaters from the August event with the twins, and they did not belong to Dean Glisbie, and so he got a new trial where they could introduce that the hair is found on the victims did not belong to Dan Glisbean. Right. This seemed compelling at the time, but hair microscopy is shaky science. At best. You might be able to eliminate someone from inclusion, but making a

match with any degree of certainty is total horseship. It could be said that practitioners of this junk science might be willing to say anything, but this is the state's evidence, and given the opportunity, they still didn't try to budge the evidence and fix it on Dean. But the idea that he could simply not have physically been the man they were describing should have been enough on top of his alibi, for which they were over twenty witnesses. So Dean,

what do you number about? The second trial? Things got weird because one of my friends is a pretty proficient smartass. And when the bar esecutor asked him, do you know Roger Gillespie, he said, I sure do, and he said he is in the courtroom and he said he sure is, and he said, will you pointing him out to us, and he said, he's the guy in the back sitting with the gray haired lady, which was my mom and dad. Because my name is Roger Dean Gillespie, my whole entire life.

The only name I've ever used is Dean Gillespie. My dad is Roger. All my friends, some of didn't even know that my first name was Roger. So when he got off the stand, the prosecutor went to a sidebar. We had twenty two other people to testify for me and complain that all these people grew up with me, they knew me my whole life, and they were going to life for me. And they cut all of the rest of the witnesses on my side. That's is that legal.

It worked. Then there was more than just these witnesses that he had an extreme dislike for cigarettes. They had pictures of him before all this happened inside his truck on the dashboard. He had to thank you for not smoking plastic sticker, like a bumper sticker. He's stuck on his dashboard and he's like the most irish whitest guy ever.

I mean, you know, you have these pictures of him before all this happened, where he's out at lakes with all his friends and they're in boats and their skin and then you know they'd be in drinking beers that night and everybody's really tan, and he's like beat red, even though he had sunscreen on and a T shirt, so he he literally cannot tan. On top of that, he's somebody. It's a family trade that had been going

gray since ninth grade. In high school. They called him the silver fox, and the victims were very specific that it was brown with a reddish tan. He didn't have a reddish tent. And they were asked on the stand did he have any gray, and they all said no. There was all this evidence, and sure enough it resonated

with the jury. I think it was two days they deliberated, and they am out eight to four, eight for acquittal, four for conviction, and the judge told him to go to lunch and come back and study on it some more. They came back out again at eight to four. You know, it's it's actually kind of amazing that the jury was eight four for acquittal when you have three victims on the stand crying who were actually raped, and you have all that emotion and they're saying, I'm a positive that's

the guy. That guy is getting convicted, even if there's all these things that don't match. So you know the fact that they were eight to four to acquit at the beginning, it shows you how bad the case was against him. And then the judge gives him what's called a dynamite charger and alan charge and sends them back. And this is what happened after that. He said, I have a fishing trip. I don't want to be here.

If you don't reach a verdict, you're going to be sequestered until you do, which means you are going to leave here to a hotel, no contact, and we will come back in until you reach a verdict. Forty forty five minutes later, they just came back, said all upset, gilly And like I said, I grew up in in just a great, beautiful world, and I go into a close maximum security prison where se of these people are never getting out your life means nothing to them. The

violence is overwhelming. You know, I've been in bar fights or whatever as a kid, but I've never seen anything like this. You know, when you're in prison and you get into a fight, you're fighting for your life. Every time they want to test you. Soon as you get in there, what are you gonna do? You know, you're gonna be a punk and give your stuff every commissary time, and everything you own is gonna be taken by some

body where you're gonna fight. Luckily, and I was a big enough guy, and I was very very well first and fighting, and that helped me a little bit. But still get your ass beat. You know. I started reading a lot, and I started doing artwork and listen to a lot of music and try to stay out of the way the best I could. And somehow or other, you did, and you managed to figure out how to not only survive, but to fight, to continue to fight and what was really not just an uphill battle but

a virtually hopeless battle. I mean, you've seen the worst of what they could do to a person, and yet you managed to continue to advocate for yourself. You know, my mom fought and fought and fought and as she was not giving up on nothing, so I never lost hope. I always knew that I was coming out there because I didn't do this. They would file a brief file emotion and then you know, you wait and you get all excited about it, and then you get denied and

that crushes you. And you start talking to these lawyers and they start explaining to you, Oh, we're gonna do this, and we're gonna do this, so you you get a little bit more hope, and it's like, well, how long is that going to take? Well, you know it's not gonna happen overnight, so you know, the years just start clicking off while you're filing these motions and they keep getting denied, to the point of I said, do not send me these motions no more. I don't want to

read them. I don't want to see them because I get too hyped up. I just want to get my mind into a state where it's the same every day and not keep doing this up and down thing. I tried to clear my mind every day and then start the next day to be as positive and as happy as I could be every day, just to try to keep my sanity until you wanted the senor people. I know, maybe I'm missing something. But and then in two thousand and three, you get a break when the Ohio Innistance

Project began representing you. Right. So in November of two thousand two, I got hired as a law professor teach criminal law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. But I wasn't gonna start until the following year when classes start August of two thousand three. And John Cranley was a city councilman at that time in Cincinnati. He later became the mayor, and he wanted to do something positive with his law degree in addition to be a city councilman. So he was trying to start an innocence

project at you see law school. Couldn't get the dean to bite, couldn't get any professors to bite. So I get hired, and I have been a prosecutor by this point in time. I was very bought into the idea that people are wrongfully convicted and we need to make some reforms in the system. So when he approaches me and says, I've been trying to get this school to start one will you help run it with me? And I'm like, yeah, let's do it. So we have our

first fundraiser shortly after I was hired. It was November of two thousand and two, and there's some newspaper coverage of that fundraiser. And in January, one of Gollispie, Dean's mom, before I even had started at you See Law, before we'd officially launched the Innocence project, she tracks me down. It comes to my office with a big box of files and says, you know you're gonna take this case. It starts like pitching it to me. He's my son's innocent.

He didn't do this. So it was literally the first one we were looking into. Our first angle and we started looking at the case in two thousand three was to see if there was any DNA to test, and there were some hairs that were collected off of the victim's sweaters, but it turns out that most of them belonged to them. We did do DNA testing on those, but they were irrelevant. They didn't match Dean, they didn't match anybody. Most of them were the victim's own hairs.

There was no semen that was actually preserved that we could test, even though there was some of the crime scene. You know, we tried to see if there was anything. Again, our history tells us that they'll say things are destroyed, but when you really dig in, sometimes you'll find the semen even though they said they destroyed it. But in this case, it really was destroyed. There was nothing we could do other than the hairs, which turned out to

be uneventful. So now without the easier of the irrefutable smoking gun evidence seminal DNA in a rape case, you had to buckle in and prove it with a more full investigation. And Dean's case, because it's just so monstrously egregious, there was plenty of it, including a more likely suspect during the initial investigation, which was a guy named Kevin Copp. So at some point after Dean was convicted, a phone

call had come into I believe his attorney's office. Somebody had made an anonymous phone call saying the guy who committed these crimes, his name is Kevin Cobb. It was like a notation to that effect in the file. And this person wouldn't give their name. They said, you know, I worked with him at a correctional institute, but he's the one who committed these crimes. At Dean Gillispie's in So we start investigating Kevin Cobb. First thing we do

is get his rap sheet. He has a history of pretending to be a police officer, flashing a badge and committing crimes. And you start looking into those cases. You know he's arrested in this year of domestic violence. So we go pull that file and we can get the name of the female victim. So we start going and talking to some of these ex girlfriends and stuff, and what do we find out. He would get drunk and tell people he's a contract killer for the CIA, gets

a thousand dollars per hit. He told one girlfriend I was molested by my grandfather when I was twelve. He tells people he's from Columbus, Ohio and Corpus Christie, Texas. In fact, he had been stationed in the Marines at Corpus Christie for a while, exactly what the rapists said. We talked to people who knew him back at the same time of these crimes, to the point of going to his high school getting his senior year book, tracking down people that had lived in that town and knew

him around the same age. We found incidents of him wearing a medallion. Around the same year Flashing of Badge pretending to be a cop. We found incidents of him using the name Roger. We heard the history of how he developed that fake name. There was a mentally challenged young man in their town named Roger who would walk around town and Kevin Cobb would make fun of him, would imitate them and say I'm Roger, you know, mimicking Roger's voice, And when he was acting crazy, he would

take on this Roger persona. So we had incidents where he would commit crimes Flash of Badge and use the name Roger, and then we get a picture of him from and composite sketches are usingly not very accurate, but it looks just like the composite sketch. We found out from the people who knew him that he got very tan in the summer, he was a smoker. Everything just matched up. It was uncanny. In Ohio Corrections, Officer Jesus Christ, I mean almost all of the villains in this story

are part of the system. And I say almost because not only did the initial investigators Fritz and Bailey do the right thing, but now in the lead up to filing the two thousand and seven post conviction filing, the former Ohio Attorney General Jim Pietro actually joined Dean's legal team. The main allegations were the Kevin Cobb, but also the fact that the original investigation had eliminated Dean. We were able to talk to Fritz and Bailey, who told us

all about the original investigation. They gave us affidavits they had created reports eliminating Dean as a suspect. They talked about the pants sized discrepancy everything else, that those had disappeared. The jury had never heard about them. So there were multiple claims that we filed in two thousand seven. So things now appear to be looking up. After all, you had the super compelling alternative suspect evidence about Kevin Cobb.

In addition to Jim Pietro and your team, the original detective Fritz and Bailey were on board in supporting the Brady claim that all of their work from the initial investigation had been disappeared or gone missing and therefore was not shared with the defense. It seems like you finally really had momentum on your side. The judge that Dean had at that time, who had taken over for the trial judge his name was A. J. Wagner, and we

could not have drawn a worse judge. Extremely hostile to the idea that somebody could be wrongfully convicted that eye witness it can be wrong, extremely hostile to basically us. And we presented the evidence and he denied it outright without a hearing, so we had to appeal. The appellate court denied us on the Brady claim, which is the missing file, but said that the judge should have had a hearing on Kevin Cobb. So at that point the

case breaks in half. The Brady claims since we lost in the Court of Appeals, continues up the appellate chain to the House Supreme Court, and that the Kevin Cobb part of it is sent back down the lower step to the trial court for a hearing, which is like a trial. And we'll catch up with the Brady potion of the case in a bit, but first you've got to go back to the trial court with the Kevin

Cobb issue in front of this uper hostile judge. Again, just to show you what type of judge J. J. Wagner was, There was a whole other part of the case where Dean on the August twentie incident, was actually camping in Kentucky with friends, and when his investigator had gone down to try to get the receipts to show he had been camping that weekend, they were missing. So of course they crossed. Examined more on the stand during the trial and he's like, no, I never went down there.

I never took those receipts. When it became public we were working on the case, a cop reached out to us who said, I actually know that he did go down there, because he admitted it to me. And we tried to get an affidavit from him, and the officer said, I can't cross the blue line like that. I just want you to know you're on the right track. And

at that point I started secretly recording this officer. So when we go to file for Dean in two thousand and seven, we attached affidavit's saying what this guy had said to us. What they file a response and they get this cop to say I never said that they're lying, blah blah blah blah blah. On our reply brief we go we got you on tape talking about it. So A. J. Wagner denies us on that claim again, we don't have

a hearing nothing. And after it's over and the case goes to a Court of Appeals, I get a call saying A. J. Wagner wants to have a status conference. So I'm thinking, why does he want a status conference? The cases in the Court of Appeals? Now, this is like not even his jurisdiction. So we get on this teleconference on the phone, the prosecutors on the phone, and Jim Petro's on the phone, and A J. Wagner goes, oh,

thanks everybody for coming together. Um, yeah, I just wanted to get the parties together because Professor Godsey secretly recorded a police officer without his knowledge, which is a federal crime. And I'm letting everybody know that I'm turning the evidence over to federal prosecutors. And then there was this like awkward pause and Jim Petro goes, Judge, it's not a federal crime to secretly record a police officer. It's legal in Ohio. And then Judge Wagner goes, Dan, what's the

name of the prosecutor? Is that your view? Yeah, Judge, I don't think it's illegal, and A J. Wagner goes, well, I'll look into it a little bit, Mark, let me and it just hangs up the phone and I never hear anything about it again. That shows you what kind of judges we sometimes deal with. An A. J Agner's about as bad as the kids. Yeah, So the Brady claim was still being litigated in the background as the Kevin Cobb issue was being sent back down to the

trial court. And now A. J. Wagner was expected to be impartial when he was being forced by the appelic court to hear all of the evidence that you had compiled on Kevin Cobb, especially after he had embarrassed himself in front of his colleagues and the federal prosecutorcy he had spoken to about indicting Mark right, and this guy is your judge. So we had a hearing in front of A. J. Wagner, which is like a trial. That's what we call witnesses. They come and testify about Kevin Cobb.

You know, we call these ex girlfriends, these people that Kevin Cobb had committed crimes against who talked about He used the name Roger, He flashed a badge, you know, he was very tan. He claimed to be a contract killer for the c I A all those things I talked about that make an uncanny match from Kevin Cobb to the this crime, and then Judge Wagner summarily dismissed it. So we then appealed that back up to the Court

of Appeals. Meanwhile, the half that we lost on the Brady claim and the appellate court, we appealed to the highest Supreme Court, where we lost. At that point, since it was a constitutional claim Brady, that gave us jurisdiction to take the case into what's called federal habeas, So we filed a federal habeas petition. So this Brady issue that the initial detective Fritz and Bailey had ruled Dean out as a suspect and the file was hidden from

the defense. They received a hearing and federal court on this issue. In front of Judge Michael Myrs. Fritz and Bailey testified again about all the physical discrepancies that they had written a report about the hair, the skin, the cleft chin, the pants couldn't have fit, so you must

have quit. In addition, they were suspicious of Wolf's tip, calling it quote unquote particularly unreliable because the composite sketch had been posted at the gm plant since shortly after the assaults, but Wolf only went to the police after a nasty fight resulting in Dean being fired. So they wrote this report about Dean not being a viable suspect and it was never seen by the defense, along with the campground receives that the chief's son, Scott More never

turned over either. And the decision came down on December six, two thousand eleven. You know in this day and age, when they issue a decision, the email it an email had come from the federal court, and I see that we won the case. He threwout Dean's conviction based on the Brady claim. So I immediately drive up to Dayton, which is only about forty five minutes from Cincinnati. I don't tell anybody, and I knock on the door of Dean's mom and dad want to and Roger Glispie years

but we won Dean's case. What judge merged throughout the Oh my God, come in here and have a seat. This is the sound, the heart wrenching sound of a mother's grief. But it all means that her boy was finally coming home after so many years lost. And it took about a week for you to get out. You were released on bond with an ankle monitor just in time for the holidays. The US Marshall came and got me. It was December twenty two, so everyone was basically shut

down and closing up for the holidays. So she picks me up and I'm like, where's everybody at what's going on? She goes right down the road. So we drive down the road to a bowling alley right around a corner from the prison. You could actually see the place from the wreck yard on the back side of the prison when you're walking the track, and uh, I go into this bowling alley. All my families there, all my friends, the media was everywhere. One of them asked me, how

does it feel to be free? And I'm like, I'm looking around the room and I knew all these people that were bowling because they were guards from the prison. It was Gardens League bowling night from the prison. And it's like, oh my god, man, am i at am I free? Or am I in purgatory? It was very much of legal purgatory because yeah, you were released, but you were wearing an ankle monitor and the case had not been officially dismissed. Meanwhile, the other issue of the

alternative suspect Kevin Cobb, that was still being litigated. Now, last we checked, A. J. Wagner had just denied you on that issue, and your team appealed to the decision. Four months later, in April of two thousand twelve, we went in the Court of Appeals on Kevin Cobb. So he's like double released. He's the only exonore I know of in the country that was exonerated twice on two totally independent grounds, Like if you take away the Brady,

he still would have been exonerated on Kevin Cobb. If you take away Kevin Cobby still would have been exonerated on Brady, and they're totally independent of one another. So he was like a double exhoneration. So the state would have to fight this on two fronts in order to get you back in and considering the evidence in this,

a normal person would just let this go right. So you guys filed to have the charges dismissed and that was dragged out until two thousand fifteen when Montgomery Court of common Please Judge Stephen Dankoff granted the motion to dismissed the indictment. The state appealed. It dragged it out for another two years to July seventeen, so almost six years later, the decision was finally upheld and the case

was dismissed. That was the federal side, the Brady violation, that was in the federal court, and that's what got dismissed there, and then we had an alternate suspect and the state court. I didn't get officially all the way done until December nine of ten years. I mean not only your time, but their time, which actually belongs to the taxpayers and in the public. I mean, considering all the ship that we all now know about this case, like why continue this charade? And you gotta look at

the money. You gotta look at the money that was wasted. It was just, you know, wasted on frivolous nothingness, Like what are you doing right? And think of all the better things they could have been doing with their time and our money. You know, I can't imagine that a single one of their constituents wants this done in their name.

This was the alternative suspect part of the case. We're not positive that Kevin Cobb was the assailant, but the evidence certainly pointed in his direction and continuing to try to maintain Dean's conviction. They just doubled down on letting whoever the actual sailant was, go free and stay free. Another thing that I can bet that all of their constituents would be firmly opposed to. But now you've finally been fully exonerated, and there's a bitter sweetness to this

part of the story. You pursued Miami Township Police Department as well as the tech have got more civilly right for the civil suit. In November of twenty two, we started a week of preparation for the federal civil suit. We went through a two week trial. The PTSD was off the charts for me. It was just unbelievable to sit through all that. But we get through it and the judge sent him back to deliberate, and they deliberated about three hours. They asked one question and that was

do legal fees come out of damages? And then we knew, like, oh, ship, they're on the right track. They went to lunch and then came back sent us in the court and uh. Then they got to the money amount um of damages and it was it was a shot around the world at forty five million dollars. Yeah, I mean, obviously no amount of money would ever give you that time back. But you know it is the largest verdict in Ohio state history. Correct. Yeah, I wouldn't do it again for

a hundred million dollars. You couldn't say, in n We're gonna send you to prison for twenty years for a hundred million dollars. I wouldn't do it. First, you got to survive the twenty years. You know, there is no way in the world any money, you know, send me back to years old. Do that. You know, keep your money and put me back in that era. But you

know that you can't get it back. And that was one of my things with the PTSD and the court was when they talked about the amount of time and they would always say you, you can never get that back. And when I'm sitting there, it is just like smacking me in the face, like my God, it's gone. It's and it it isn't coming back. This this here is not gonna make that come back. I mean, I've got a lot of things i want to do, got car building on my mind. I'm doing one now, and just

things like that. I'm setting up a trust from my great niece who seven, you know, to hopefully, you know, make this money grow into something that would be a legacy. But uh, definitely going to be supporting our Ohio project. I'd like to encourage our audience to support the Ohio Innocence Project. We're gonna have it linked in the bio because without them, Dean would not be out here with us along with so many others. Yeah, I was. I was the first case the how instance project took person.

We got out and the artists are twenty year anniversary. We've got thirty nine people out well, Mark, you, Jennifer, the whole crew. You're all doing phenomenal work. And here's the next thirty nine. And now we go to the closing of our show. So of course this is called closing arguments. I love this segment and I love it because it's a part where I get to, first of all, thank YouTube for being here and sharing this incredible, incredible

story with me and our our amazing audience. And so how this works is I'm gonna turn my microphone off, kick back in my chair with my headphones on, close my eyes, and just listen to any closing thoughts that you guys want to share Mark, why don't you start? And Dean, you take us off into the sunset. A grave injustice occurred against Dean. Grave injustices and unfairness occurred to people all the time. And you can say, well, you know, how can we take this and how can

he get complete vindication? And you can dream of the steps that you would go through to win your case to get free two then you know, win some huge settlement right in the face of the cop who did this to you. That's like the movie Shawshank Redemption, where he gets his revenge and and everything turns out the way it should. In real life, that doesn't happen. It never happens the way it should. But in Dean's case

it did. And you know, we sat in prison and talked about his wrongful conviction all the way back in two thousand three and two thousand four, and it looked like such a long shot to get this overturned, and everything that should have happened to vindicate him just happened like a Hollywood story. And and I'm so happy for him. I wish this. I wish other people who have had these rawful convictions happened to them. Could have the Hollywood story play out the way it has. People always ask

what is the fix, What is the fix. I don't know that there's a fix. I feel like we need term limits on prosecutors. We need to figure out this system where the judge has put in place, like the federal system, because when you have a judge's gonna be on your television saying I'm gonna be tough on crime, he's already formulating an opinion, so he's biased to start with. I think that's a start in this. But we've got other issues with this problem, and that is the folks

who are in states that don't get compensated. They also don't get credit for Social Security, and that is a huge issue for folks who are gonna have to work the rest of their life. We need to try to figure out a fix for that. I know it's uh that that's a huge undertaking and complicated thing, but we

gotta have compensation across America. Until then, we need to fix the sof security so so folks can not have to work their whole life because they spent time in prison and didn't pay in And thank god for the Innocence Project, thank God for the Berry and Peter you know, the projects all across America. And you know, I can't never say enough about Mark Gazzi saved my life, and the and the kids who work in our program with

the University of Cincinnati Law School. Just you know, support these organizations because this this is still going on, This is still happening. The man just got out of Arizona with fifty three years in so this can't keep going. You can't keep happening. We've got to fix this problem. Thank you for listening to Ronful Conviction. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Cheff Clyvern and Kevin Wardis.

With research by Lila 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 Flom. Wrongful Conviction is the production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one