In August nineteen eighty eight, a serial rapist had already struck twice in Dayton, Ohio, claiming three victims. The victims descriptions of the assailant, as well as the event itself, were almost identical. The assailant pretended to be a security guardner's shopping center and accused the victims of shoplifting before using their cars to drive them off into the woods to be orally sodomized and assaulted. He called himself Roger.
A composite sketch finally generated a long 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 wrongful 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 Hioliness's Project. Dean's case was their very first once, so we're very happy and honored to have Mark Gotzi 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 mayor of Cincinnati, but before all that, he worked to free innocent people like Dean. So let's go back in time with YouTube. 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 Mark to then turned this whole thing around to make history in Ohio. But before 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. I was like beaver Cleaver.
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. 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 FI Science Technology to basically to get the job, which was a plant protection at Geral Motors. And you're basically a fireman, so put in the applications. You know, Bam, there I was with a cholb at Terrro 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 non union. 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 taking my information from General 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 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 would be me getting locked up and not showing up the work.
And this sinister fock's name was Richard Wolfe, 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 nineteen eighty eight. There were two gruesome sex crimes, one on August fifth, and then the second one involving two victims, was on August twentieth. The second one was reported first though. There were twenty two year old twin sisters. We're going to call them CW and BW.
This is around seven pm as they were getting into their car outside of a Best Product store in Dayton, Ohio, and they were kidnapped by a loan gunman. He 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 got to 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. Instead, he takes them off into the woods.
When they got there, he exposed himself fonald 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 Product 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 CIA. I gain one thousand dollars per hit. He had cigarettes, you know, was 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, this is all to the police. And around the same time, a twenty eight year old woman who were going to call SC totally separates that reported that a man wearing sunglasses and armed with a chrome handgun abducted her Samemo on August fifth.
Yeah, what happened is SC read the newspaper report of what happened to the twins. You know, once she read the similarities, 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 finled her breast and force her to 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 BWNC a case, there was rape gets done on, We know that 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 an eighty 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 Innos 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 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 hairs, brown with a reddish tint. And they described him as tall and kind of a big guy, and something like between one eighty 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, one hundred and eighty pounds, two hundred pounds something like that.
So, Dean, did any of those very specific details match you.
No, they said the guy who attacked him had a dark sun tan. I'm very irish. I burn and I go back to white. You know. The person who attacked him did not have a hairy chest because 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 jawline. 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 been you. And also, I understand that you have always hated cigarettes.
I 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 moss Richard Wolf 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 gotten 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 out. They looked at my DMV license and seeing that I didn't fit
the description at all. They knew the pants size, and when they looked at the hide and weight on me, they knew I couldn't fit into pants, which I always say one time in my life being fat was good for me.
Well yeah, 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.
Yeah, so you know, Dean was eliminated as a suspect. Time went by. The detectives on the case who eliminated Dean retired and 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 worked, he was able to convince him that he was working in the right track. And in the right guy.
Detectives more twenty six years old, takes over the case and the filed eliminating Dean disappears and we don't know what happened to it. He just decides I'm going to go out and show the victims a photo spread with Dean. And you know, you look at the photo spread, it's clear that the other five came from the same source. Dean's was a glossy and the other ones were matts.
He's got a different color background. The victims to described the perpetrators having a wide face, So 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 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 revictimized, right, but now with the victims identifying you, they had what they needed to get an arrest 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 you know, 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 at 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, there's supposed to be a gun involved and everything else. I
didn't have guns. There was no clothing or anything that 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 arraiement 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 skinning and fishing and just
having fun at the lake. And the other one we were with some friends who had came in from college and we were out with them.
Unfortunately, alibi witnesses are often easily explained 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 Charlie 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, they allowed it in and they allowed the 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 IDs, and the jury was not moved by the alby witnesses nor any of the discrepancies between Dean and the assailant,
so he was found guilty. But the war sentencing a defense investigator learned that hairs 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 twentieth event with the twins, and they did not belong to Dean Glyspie, and so he got a new trial where they could introduce that the hairs found on the victims did not belong to Dean Gilyspian.
Right.
This seemed compelling at the time, but har 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 horseshit. 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 there were over twenty witnesses. So Dean what do you remember about the second trial?
Things got weird because one of my friends is a pretty proficient smart ass, and when the prosecutor asked him, do you know Roger Gillespie, he said, I sure do, and he said he's 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 them 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 complained 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.
Wow, 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 a 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 they're skiing, 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 literally cannot tan. On top of that, he's somebody. It's a family trait 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 tent. 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 came 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 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 one hundred percent positive that's the guy. That guy's 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 them what's called a dynamite charger, an Allen charge, and sends him 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 up, said Gilly, And like I say, I grew up in just a great, beautiful world, and I go into a close maximum security prison where seventy percent 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 are fighting for your life every time they want to test you. Soon as you get in here, 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 tooken by some where. You're going to fight. Luckily, you know, I was a big enough guy, and I was very very well first in 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 what was really not just an uphill battle, but a virtually hopeless battle. I mean, you'd 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 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 it. And you start talking to these lawyers and they start explaining to you, Oh, we're going to do this, and we're going to do this, so 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.
I tell you, one of the sator people, I know maybe I'm missing something. But and then in two thousand and three, you get a break when you'll highly missis project began representing you.
Right.
So in November of two thousand and two, I got hired as a law professor teach criminal law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. But I wasn't going to start un till the following year when classes start August of two thousand and 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 council so he was trying to start an innocence project
at u 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, Wana Gillispie, Dean's mom, before I even had started at u See Law, before we'd officially launched the Innocence Project, she tracks me down, comes to my office with a big box of files and says, you know you're going to take this case. It starts like pitching it to me. My son's Ennison. He didn't do this, so it was literally the first one we were looking into.
Our first angle we started looking at the case in two thousand and 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 at the crime scene. 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 Cobb.
So at some point after Dean was convicted, a phone call had come in to 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 Correctional Institute. But he's the one who committed these crimes at Dean Gillispies And 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 Christi, Texas. In fact, he had been stationed in the Marines at Corpus Christy for a while. Exactly what the rapist 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 yearbook, 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 a badge, pretending to be a cop. We found incidents of him using the name of 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 him 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 of Roger. And then we get a picture of him from nineteen eighty eight, and composite sketches are usually 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.
An 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 Pietrow 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 that they had created reports eliminating Dean as a suspect. They talked about the pant size discrepancy, everything else, that those had disappeared and the jury had never heard about them. So there were multiple claims that we filed in two thousand and 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 Petrow and your team, the original detective Fritz and Bailey were on board and 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 aj Wagner, and we could not have drawn a worse judge, extremely hostile to the idea that somebody could be wrongfully convicted that eyewitnessed 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 claim, since we lost in the Court of Appeals, continues up the appellate chain to the High Supreme Court, and 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 portion 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 super hostile judge.
Again, just to show you what type of judge aj Wagner was there was a whole other part of the case where Dean on the August twentieth 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 cross 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 attach Affi Davids saying what this guy had said to us. 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 AJ Wagner denies us on that claim. Again, we don't have a hearing. And after it's over and the case goes to a Court of Appeals, I get a call
saying AJ Wagner wants to have a status conference. I'm thinking, why does he want a status conference? The case is in the Court of Appeals. Now, this is like not even his jurisdiction. So we get on this teleconference on the phone. The Prosecutor's on the phone and Jim Petro's on the phone, and AJ Wagner goes, oh, thanks everybody for coming together. Yeah, I just wanted to get the parties together because Professor Godsee 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 Petrow 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, this is the name of the prosecutor.
Is that your view? Yeah, Judge, I.
Don't think it's illegal, and AJ Wagner goes, well, I'll look into it a little bit, Mark, 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 Aja Wagner's about as bad as a kids.
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 AJ Wagner was expected to be impartial when he was being forced by the appellate 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 veteran prosecutors he had spoken to about indicting Mark. Right, and this guy is your judge.
So we had a hearing in front of AJ 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 CEA, all those things I talked about that make an uncanny match from Kevin Cobb to 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 detectives Fritz and Bailey had ruled Dean out as a suspect and the file was hidden from the defense. They received a hearing at federal court on this issue in front of Judge Michael Murrs. 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 Wolfe'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 Wolfe 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 receipts that the chief's son, Scott Moore,
never turned over either. And the decision came down on December sixteenth, twenty eleven.
You know, in this day and age, when they issued a decision, they email it. An email had come from the federal court, and I see that we won the case. He threw out 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, Wan and Roger Gillispie for twenty years.
Well we won Dean's case. What judge murs throughout the.
Counts kidd me, oh my god, come.
In here to 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.
A US Marshall came and got me. It was December twenty second, 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 the corner from the prison. You could actually see the place from the wreckyard on the back side of the prison when you're walking the track. And I go into this bowling alley. All my family's 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 Garden League bowling night from the prison. And it's like, oh my god, man, am I free? Or am I a 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, the alternative suspect Kevin Cobb, that was still being litigated. Now last we checked, AJ Wagner had just denied you on that issue, and your team appealed to the decision.
Four months later, in April of twenty twelve, we went in the Court of Appeals on Kevin Cobb. So he's like double released. He's the only exonery 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, he still would have been exonerated on Brady. And they're totally independent of one another. So he was like double exoneration.
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 twenty fifteen when Montgomery Court of Common Please Judge Stephen Dankoff granted the motion to dismiss the indictment. The state appealed it
dragged it out for another two years. Of July twenty six, twenty 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 alternate suspect in the state court. I didn't get officially all the way done until December ninth of twenty twenty one.
Ten years. I mean not only your time, but their time, which actually belongs to the taxpayers and the public. I mean, considering all the shit 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, waste it on frivolous nothing. Just 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 in continuing to try to maintain Dean's conviction, they just doubled down on letting whoever the actual assailant 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 bittersweetness to this part of the story. You pursued Miami Township Police Department as well as the tech to Scott 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 them 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 shit, they're on the right track. They went to lunch and then came back set us in the court and then they got to the money amount of damages and 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 nineteen ninety one, We're gonna send you to prison for twenty years for one 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 twenty five 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 in the court was when they talked about the amount of time and they would always say, you can never get that back. And while I'm sitting there, it is just like smacking me in the face, like my God, it's gone and it isn't coming back. This here is not going to 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, Just things like that. I'm setting up a trust for my great niece who's seven, you know, to hopefully, you know, make this money grow into something that would be a legacy. But 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 LinkedIn the bio because without them, Dean would not be out here with us along with so many others.
Yeah, I I was the first case the Ohio Instance Project took the fourteenth person we got out. Artist is our 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 to 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 you two for being here and sharing this incredible, incredible story with me
and 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 to 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 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 and three and two thousand and 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 I'm so happy for him.
I wish this.
I wish other people who've had these wrawful 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 is put in place, like the federal system, because when you have a judge who's going to be on your television saying I'm going to be tough on crime, he's already formulated an opinion, so he's biased to start with. I think that's a
start in this. But we 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 going to have to work the rest of their life. We need to try to figure out a fix for that. I know that's a huge undertaking and complicated thing, but
we got to have compensation across America. Until then, we need to fix the social 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 Barry and Peter, you know, the projects all across America. And you know, I can't never say enough about Mark Gazzi who saved my life, and the kids who work at our program with the University of Cincinnati Law School. Just you know,
support these organizations because 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. It can't keep happening. We've got to fix this problem.
Thank you for listening to Rafel 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. Podcasts and association with signal Company Number one