Hey guys, it's Laura today. I have some pretty great news to share with you. Back in season one of False Confessions, Steve and I brought you the story of the Dix Moore Five, a group of teenage boys who were interrogated for hours without lawyers or parents present. One by one, they were each implicated in the crime and ended up spending about twenty years in prison. Their confessions
were in the Forum of Science Statements. There was no recording of their interrogations, but one of the reasons they confessed was because the police lied to them. This is common in police interrogations and it's something we've seen over and over on the show. Police will falsely promise leniency in order to get a confession, or they'll lie that they have evidence they don't really have. This is a horrible practice and it's one that's clearly not working to
get real criminals off the streets. Using lies and deceptive interrogation tactics is a huge risk factor for false confessions, and as we know, false confessions are one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions. They occur in about thirty percent of cases that have been overturned by DNA evidence. It's just plain wrong and it needs to end. But
here's the good news. In an incredible step towards justice, Illinois became the first state in United States history to adopt a law in twenty twenty one that bans police from lying to children during interrogations. I cannot tell you how huge this is. If this law had been in place back in nineteen ninety one, the Dixmore five would never have gone to prison and had twenty years of
their lives stolen a way. This is a reform that was sorely needed, especially here in Illinois, the false confession capital of the country. In our state alone, there have been over one hundred wrongful convictions based on false confessions. I am so proud to be part of this work and that the cases I helped defend are themselves helping to pass new laws, creating a few with fewer wrongful convictions.
But we can't stop here. This kind of law should exist in every state, and it should apply to everyone, not just kids. We now have the data and the experience to know that when police lie to a suspect during an investigation, that does more harm than good. There are much better ways to solve crimes we need all interrogations to be videotaped, and we need better protections for everybody who winds up inside that room. It's only with reforms like these that we can live up to one
of the founding principles of our justice system. Innocent until proven guilty, Welcome to wrongful conviction, false confessions. I'm Laura and I writer.
And I'm Steve Drusen.
Today we're going to tell you about a case out of Chicago, the story of a violent and tragic crime that took the life of a young girl. But there's a larger reason why we want to talk about this case because of what it also took from not one, but five innocent teenage boys and from their families and communities. This case happened during what we now call the super
Predator era the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. The news media was saturated with stories of urban crime, drugs and gangs, and in particular, sensationalized stories about black and brown youth committing violent crimes in groups. This narrative is often associated with New York City. It drove the wrongful prosecution of the so called Central Park five wolf Pack, but it
didn't stop there. Today, we're going to tell you about a group of teenage boys whose false confessions transformed them into Chicago's own wolf pack. They're known as the Dixmore Five.
Now Chicago may be called the second city comes to false confessions. We don't take a back seat to anybody, not New York or any other jurisdiction for that matter. We're home to more false confessions than any other city in the United States. We're home to more juvenile false confessions. And we're also the home of more cases in which
there are multiple false confessions. And over the years, the Center on Wrongful Convictions has obtained exonerations in many of these cases, all of which were from African American teenagers in the Chicago area.
Marquette Park four, Uptown seven, Englewood four, Dixmore five. These numbers start to add up, and the thing is each one of these cases involves innocent African American teenagers in groups confessing to crimes they didn't commit.
Of course, the most famous case like this was New York's Central Park five case. In April of nineteen eighty nine, five teenage boys were charged with the sexual assault and the tempted murder of a female jogger in New York's Central Park. The boys falsely confessed to beating this woman within an inch of her life and leaving her in the woods to die. The Central Park five confessions were
driven by race Wolfpax. Wilding was a whole new language to describe groups of African American and Latino teenagers, and it created a level of fear in New York City and around the country that I had never seen before. So when we began to look at the Dixmore case, the case of the Central Park five was ringing in my years.
It was November of nineteen ninety one and fourteen year old Kateresa Matthews was in the eighth grade. She lived with her mom and Dix Moore, a suburb on the South side of Chicago, surrounded by a tight knit extended family and community. Every day after school, Kateresa followed the same routine. She'd walk to her great grandmother's house, where she'd do her homework, tuck on the phone, and do
whatever fourteen year old girls do. After school, she was waiting until her mom came home from work to go back to her own house. Kateresa followed this routine religiously until November nineteenth, nineteen ninety one, when she doesn't show up at her great grandmother's house after school. Her family panics. They call the police and a search begins, but for three weeks there's no sign of Kateresa until December eighth,
nineteen ninety one. That's when Kateresa's body is found lying in a wooded field next to the Interstate Highway that runs through Dixmore. She's on her back, partially undressed, with her pants draped across her lower body. On her chest is a spent casing from a twenty five caliber bullet. She's been shot once in the mouth. Even though Kateres had been missing for three weeks, the medical examiner concludes that she's been killed recently, right around the time her
body's found. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, rigor mortis is present when she's found that usually disappears about twenty four to forty eight hours after death. Her body is also still bleeding when she's discovered, which you wouldn't expect if she'd been killed much earlier. And also when a body's been lying outside for a long time, there are usually signs like animal or insect bites. There's nothing like that here. And the medical examiner finds something
else too, semen on Kateresa's body. She's been raped.
This was an awful crime.
It's the worst. I mean, it's every parent's nightmare to have this happen to their child.
You know, when you think of a crime like this, you don't think of it as something that teenagers would do. Typically, teenage crimes are impulsive crimes. There's not a lot of planning or premeditation. They happen in the spur of the moment. But this crime clearly required some forethought.
For eleven long months, the investigation into Kateresa's death goes nowhere until fall nineteen ninety two, when a teenage boy tells police that he saw Kateresa getting into a car with some friends around the time of her disappearance. Police decided to question those friends, starting with Robert Vel on October twenty ninth, nineteen ninety two. Now, Robert's fourteen years old, but he has pretty severe intellectual limitations that make him
think more like a five year old. He's questioned for hours without a parent or a lawyer present, off camera, and in the end he signs a confession prepared by his interrogator, and the story in this confession is brutal. Robert says he and four other African American teenage boys kidnapped a girl they knew from school. They gang raped her as she pleaded with them to stop, and then
they shot her once in the mouth. It was a story of an animalistic group of black teenagers attacking their classmate for sport.
The level of depravity in this story was so out of bounds that it made me question whether it was true, But it also had an eerily familiar ring to it, and for me, the significance was as I was seeing the same explanations in different cases, which made me begin to feel that like maybe there was a script that was getting passed around among Chicago police officers.
Only hours after Robert Veil confesses, police bring in one of his supposed co perpetrators, fifteen year old Robert Taylor. He's a kid from a loving and protective family, but his parents didn't know he was at the police station being interrogated. Hours later, his signature appears on a confession too, and that confession tells a similarly vicious story. The same five African American teenagers lured Katresa into a car, then raped her and shot her in a field.
The super Predator era was a period of of pronounced moral panic in the United States that focused on young people, race, and crime.
That's our colleague and friend, Perry Moriarty. She's a professor of law at the University of Minnesota and an expert on juvenile justice and the era of the super Predator.
The front end marker is more than likely the Central Park five case that was April of nineteen eighty nine, and that began an era when, in the name of public safety, in the name of being tough on crime, law enforcement authorities dropped any pretense of treating children as children and prosecuted them as adults. If they were black and brown children, they were adultified, either by law or
by connotation, and certainly by the media. A jogger murdered in New York Central Park, a little girl gunned down in her family's car.
And Los Angeles, a.
Judge has sentenced two boys for killing another child who refused to steal candy for them. There's a tidal wave of juvenile violent crime right over the horizon, and some who study it say the worst is.
Yet to come, terms like wilding, beast chill, predatory. In New York City newspapers alone, the term wilding appeared one hundred and fifty six times in articles over the eight years following the Central Park five arrests. To put it in perspective, just a few months after the Central Park five case, a large group of Italian and Irish predominantly teenagers in benson Hurst, Brooklyn, chased down and killed a young Black teenager named Yuseph Hawkins. And the headlines did
not say wilding. They did not say beasts chill, They did not even say gang. They said a group of white teenagers.
Now the police have two confessions that implicate the same five teenagers, but they're not done yet. Next up is Cheyenne Sharp, seventeen years old, the third supposed co perpetrator. He's questioned for nearly twenty four hours before he also confesses and implicates the other four. And it's the same brutal story, a group of African American teenage boys terrorizing their classmate for fun.
Now you have to understand how these confessions are taken. These confessions are scripted, usually by a prosecutor from the State attorney's office. Sometimes they're written by police officers, and these scripts contain a narrative, including character development. Kids are described as thugs. There's usually references to gang membership. Women are called bitches and hoes. The scriptwriter in these cases
is doing two things. He's painting the suspect in a way that nobody can ever think of them as teenagers. And he's also painting them in a way that nobody and that means nobody in the public and nobody on the jury can have an ounce of sympathy for them. And in doing so, he's making a script that is about as rock solid as a route to conviction as one can imagine.
So far, the police have confessions from three of the Dixmore five, and within days they bring in the two remaining teenagers for questioning two brothers, seventeen year old James Harden and fifteen year old Jonathan Barr. The boys are interrogated for hours, but their father had always told them
never sign anything prepared by the police. Somehow a miracle they remember these words and they don't confess, but they're still named in the other three teenagers' statements, so all five are on the hook.
In part because because they were arresting and prosecuting kids in mass in groups, law enforcement became very adept in that period at pitting kids against each other during the interrogation process and using kids against each other to extract false confessions.
When you look at these cases of multiple false confessions, you see a similar pattern. First of all, the police usually start with the most vulnerable, most naive, most gullible of the suspects, and they focused in this case on Robert Field. He was the weak link. Then they get a confession from Robert Veel, and what do they do with that confession They use it as a battering ram to plow over all of the other defendants. This is
how it works. The first suspect comes in and the police officers tell them that they know that he was involved in this crime and nothing that suspect can say is going to change their mind. But they don't think he was the one who actually raped anybody or killed anybody. He was just a follower. The suspect is pressured into adopting a story in which he is a passive participant to the crime, and which he fingers his co defendants
as the more active participants. Then once that suspect confesses, they bring that confession to the next in line and they go over the same thing again. We don't think you committed the crime. He's telling us that you committed the crime. We know you were there, but maybe you just held down her arm while they were raping and killing her. Each suspect is vying for the least culpable role, and at the end of the day, this is a very effective way to get confessions from multiple suspects.
In this case, the dominoes are falling and each one of them eventually agrees to a story in which James Harden is the one who actually places the gun inside Kateresa's mouth and pulls the trigger. It's no coincidence that James is one of the last ones questioned here.
That's right. And at the end of the day, please got confessions from Robert Field, Robert Taylor, and Cheyenne's Sharp, but they couldn't get James Harden and Jonathan Barr to confess.
Based on the confessions, all five teenagers are charged with the assault and murder of Kateresa Matthews, and the Dixmore Five are transformed into Chicago's own wolf pack. Pretty soon, though, it becomes apparent that this case has major problems for starters. The teenager's versions of what happened are wildly inconsistent. They can't agree on how they met up with Katsa, what the group did before they ended up in that field by the interstate, or who assaulted Kateresa, and in what order.
In fact, one of the only things they do agree on was that Kateresa had been murdered the day she did disappeared, November nineteenth. But remember this was contradicted by the medical examiner, who determined that she'd been killed three weeks later, around the time her body was found. And then here comes the biggest problem. After all five teenagers were charged but before trial, DNA testing from the seaman
left on Katrese's body excludes all five suspects. Instead, this DNA belongs to a single unidentified male.
This is might drop evidence, the kind of evidence that should have resulted in these cases being dismissed before.
Trial exactly these confessions had been proven false. But instead of dropping its case, the state offers deals to two members of the Dixmore Five, Cheyenne Sharp and Robert Veale. If the boys agree to testify against their co defendants, they'll receive much shorter sentences. Syenna and Robert decide to take the deal, while the state moves forward with trials for the other three, and those trials of are based on the stories told in the confessions. Despite the DNA.
You talk here about tunnel vision. This is what happens. The police officers lock into a story. They become invested in this notion of a gang rape, and they can't get out of.
That box exactly. And you see this when they have to deal with the DNA and the prosecutor addresses it during closing arguments.
And what does the prosecutor say? He explains the presence of DNA as the work of a necrophiliac.
Now, Steve, if this isn't exactly a household term, what is a necrophiliac?
It's someone who has sex with dead bodies.
I knew you know that. This is officially the most batchitt theory I think I've ever.
Heard, By the way, I couldn't agree more.
So, let's get this straight. The theory here at the Dixmore viv trial was that five teenage boys sexually assault this victim. They don't leave a trace of themselves behind. Then here comes this wandering necrophiliac who comes across the body and decides to defile it. I mean, we've heard a lot of excuse us for DNA in our time, but this one may take the prize.
It's unbelievable that they would even present this to a jury. It's that insane. But you have to understand in the context of a climate of fear, the irrational becomes rational. Now, in the opening statement in this case, the prosecutor said that these men, pointing at the five teenagers, these men came from a world where so called friends were turned into a pack of jackals hunting down their prey, and then they were done with it, killing it for sport jackals.
Can you believe that this really is Chicago's own wolf pack?
Again, it's a lot easier to fathom locking up a young, beastial, feral thing than it is a child, which is in fact what we were doing.
And when you talk about children as if they were animals, it becomes so much easier to throw away their lives.
To just not worry about doing that last bit of DNA testing, figure out whose DNA it was actually left on. Katries and Matthew's body.
It becomes easier to try them as adults. It becomes easier to sentence them to life sentences or even the death penalty. It becomes easier to just lock them up and throw away the key.
The dehumanizing story embedded in these boys confessions. While it works, each of the Dixmore five is convicted, and the three who don't cut deals, Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr, and James Harden are sentenced to life in prison. Cheyenne Sharp and Robert Veale serve their time and are eventually released with murder convictions on their records, But the other three languish behind bars forgotten people.
But they were not forgotten by their parents or their loved ones. You know, I'll never forget learning that Jonathan Barr and James Hardin's dad would literally drive around with boxes full of files regarding their cases in his trunk, trying to get lawyers interested in taking his son's cases, and Robert Taylor's family did similar things. They would write letters and letters and letters to lawyers begging them for help. Finally, in twenty ten, we learned about the case of the
Dixmore Five. Our colleague Josh tepfer knew a public defender named Jennifer Blagg who had represented Robert Taylor on appeal. She referred the case to Josh and we agreed to take Robert's case.
By this time, Robert was in his early thirties.
That's right, he had served over fifteen years of his sentence.
Robert Taylor grew up with his parents, sister, and in Harvey, Illinois, right next to Dixmore. From day one, Robert's dad, a Navy vet, was his strongest defender. Robert Senior refused to be broken by the fact that his son had gone to prison because of the words he'd signed his name to. When the Center on Wrongful Convictions agreed to take Robert's case,
his dad became a major presence in our lives. I can still remember the smell of his leather jacket when he hugged us and welcomed us to his family's struggle. Around the same time, organizations like the Innocence Project and Exoneration Project got involved in representing other members of the Dix Moore five. Our collective first priority was identifying whose DNA had been left at the crime scene.
We had a new tool called CODIS the combined DNA index system, and over the time frame since the advent of DNA testing in the late nineteen eighties, that database had grown, and so the chances of finding the identity of the person who raped and killed Katsa. Matthews had grown exactly.
I mean, let's remember for a moment that we're talking here about DNA that was taken from the semen left on a rape victim. You cannot ask for better evidence than that, and it's just sitting there forgotten. How can you not want to know whose DNA that was? Isn't that the most important question in this case had been sitting there unanswered for fifteen years?
But where was it sitting? That was the first challenge. And after a year of searching, we found the DNA in some warehouse or in some trailer, and we then had to get permission from the court to test the DNA. We then sent the DNA off for testing to a lab, and we waited and a lab extracted a profile, and when that profile was extracted, it was run through the code ISS database. A miracle of miracles, in March of twenty eleven, we got a hit and the hit was to a man, not a boy, a man named Randolph.
Now Willy Randolph, was a troubled guy. He was much older than Kateresa or the Dixmore five. When Kateresa disappeared, he was thirty three years old, more than twice her age. Willi had been in and out of prison his entire
adult life for all sorts of different offenses. In fact, he'd been paroled only a few months before Kateresa was killed to a house within a mile of where she lived, and Willie Randolph had previously been accused of rape in that very same field by the interstate where Kateresa's body was found. This is a person with a history of these kinds of attacks, and his DNA and no one else's was present at the crime scene. Finally, it all made sense.
When we learned the identity of Willie Randolph, when we investigated his background, when we learned the history of abusing and sexually assaulting women, including young women, teenagers, we thought this case was over. We thought we are going to get these boys out tomorrow.
Exactly, there's no relationship at all between Willy Randolph and any of the Dixmore five. He's not mentioned in any of their confessions.
And why would there be a relationship. This is a man with a long history of violence in his record, and none of these boys had a history of violence.
Right, He's twice their age. When they were growing up in the neighborhood, he was in prison.
Willy Randolph is the guy who did this to Katersa Matthews. The DNA proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now we had to convince the prosecutors to do the right thing.
But as incredible as it sounds, the state wouldn't let go of their necrophilia theory, and the case dragged on for months.
You know, old habits die hard. The state actually suggested again that maybe Willy Randolph was their mystery necrophiliac.
This is an unbelievable thing. Still they're clinging to this theory that five teenage boys assaulted Katersa Matthews, left no trace of their DNA behind, and here comes Willie Randolph, the older man, the man of the history of assaults and violent crime and rape in that very field, and just happens to defile her body. It beggars belief.
It still took six to seven months to investigate whether there was any link between Willie Randolph and any of the Dicks more five, there wasn't one.
Meanwhile, we were coming back to court every few weeks to get an update on the state's investigation and to ask the judge is today the day of exoneration? And for six long months we were disappointed. I remember coming home after those court dates and crying with frustration that I was able to go home, but Robert Taylor, our clients, had to go back to a prison cell.
Yeah. I remember pulling out my hair and I had hair back then.
That's where it all went.
That's where it all went because we had the best possible evidence of their innocence, and not only were they refusing to our clients, Willie Randolph was on the street. He was out of prison on parole, and he could be doing this to somebody else. It was driving me crazy.
Every time before we walked into that courtroom, I remember watching Robert hold his whole body just taught. His muscles would be tense, and you could see those twenty years of trauma that he had endured and the toll it had taken on him. He couldn't relax into the possibility that it was going to be his day that day, and it wasn't his day.
For months until it finally was.
On November third, twenty eleven, Robert Ville Cheyenne Sharp, James Harden, Jonathan Barr, and Robert Taylor were exonerated. Their convictions were thrown out nearly twenty years to the day after Kateresa matthews disappearance, The Dix Moore five had wrongly served a total of more than fifty years in prison. Eventually, Willie Randolph was charged with the attack on Kateresa Matthews based
on DNA evidence. He's still a waiting trial today. We're proud to have helped free the Dixmore five, but as our colleague Josh Tepfer put it, this is not justice. Justice would have happened a long time ago.
Hello, hey, Robert, Stephen Laura A long time.
I'll see too long.
Too long.
Good to hear your voice. What's going on with you these days, Robert, I'm hanging in now. How's your son doing?
He's all right. I got picked boy. You got to take him up to the school. Yeah, I'll pick him up every day.
Hold your point seven going away?
What's your favorite thing to do with your son?
Robert I'd like to see him smad. I.
So you can't give those twenty years back to Robert or to any of the Dicks, Moore five, or any of the guys we're going to talk about on this podcast. You can't give that time back. But what you can do is make the years decades that they lost means something.
One of the greatest tragedies in my opinion, and I've been teaching about the Central Park five case for years and to this day. When I introduced the case in my criminal law classes, the one thing that people don't know about the case is that the kids were innocent. So few people knew that even after Matthias Rayes confessed, even after these kids were let out of prison, even after they were compensated. It is the footnote in this
story that gets lost in our collective consciousness. Maybe not anymore. Finally, there is attention being brought to who they actually were and what they suffered.
And that's a big part of how Steve and I approach these cases. Right It's about of course getting them out of prisent fighting for them, opening up those doors, but it's also about telling the stories. It's about making it meaningful. It's about saying their name. It's about not forgetting what happened to them and changing it so it doesn't happen again. Like the Central Park five, the story of the Dixmore five is about convictions that were driven
by prejudice rather than proof. But the injustices of the super predator era or not just a New York City thing or a Chicago thing, And although we may want to think so, they're not even really a nineteen nineties thing. In times of great fear or moral panic, prejudices can distort the search for the truth. Mistaken assumptions, faulty investigations, and flawed evidence are all still real, and they still
cause wrongful convictions across the country. Every day. We tell these stories so that we can learn from them, so that one day there won't be any more Dixmore fives. To all the Dixmore five, but especially to our client and friend, Robert Taylor, You've endured years of injustice while remaining a pillar of strength and resilience. To you and your families, we wish you all the best. Thanks for
letting us tell your story. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is the production of Lava for Good podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to our executive producer Jason Flamm and the team at Signal Company Number one. Executive producer Kevin wardis Senior producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura Nyrider and.
You can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
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