Hey there, Laura and I writ are here. This week we're bringing you an update from the Commonwealth of Virginia. In Season two of False Confessions, we explored the story of the Norfolk four. This is a classic case of false confessions in all the most horrible ways. It involves tunnel vision and confirmation bias in the investigation police, lying to suspect in the interrogation room, preying on suspects of vulnerabilities, and ignoring forensic evidence. The list goes on and on.
It took twenty years for the truth to be acknowledged by the Virginia legal system, and the story of this miscarriage of justice became a rallying point for the entire legal community, and in twenty twenty one, Virginia took action. The state abolished the death penalty, making it the first state in the South to do so. It was clear cut cases of wrongful conviction like this one that finally
tip the balance away from injustice and toward righteousness. Welcome to wrongful conviction, false confessions.
I'm Laura and I writer and I'm Steve Drisen.
Today's case feels like a recurring nightmare. We'll tell you about not one but four US Navy sailors who falsely confess to murdering another sailor's wife. They volunteered to fight for their country, but they ended up fighting for their own freedom.
The Norfolk four is an iconic case because it is one of the most colossal screw ups in the history of American justice. I've never thought this case would go to trial, but it did, and they were convicted, and I was stunned.
When you think about these guys from all across the United States who signed up to serve their country in the military, and this is what they were handed. It's outrageous. I mean, Steve, you've had family members in the military.
Yeah, My father served, and he enlisted less than six months after his own brother was killed at Iwo Jima. I grew up every Memorial Day we would gather by my uncle's graveside and these men in uniform would fire rifles into the air and I can still hear how loud they were to like a seven year old kid. The military was something that was respected in my household. You know, the military is built on honor.
The truth is, every one of the Norfolk four was there to serve his country and instead, their reputations and their lives were dragged through the mud.
It's like a war zone at the end of this case, with bodies strewn all over the place.
But nobody won.
That's right. Everybody was a casualty. It took twenty years to right this wrong completely, and it never should have happened in the first place.
Today's story starts at the US Naval Station in Norfolk, Virginia. It's the world's largest naval base, the headquarters of the Fleet Forces Command, and it all sits on a narrow peninsula separating the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean. That's where the USS Simpson docks at Peer five on July eighth, nineteen ninety seven, after six days at sea. Among the hundreds of sailors on board is Billy Bosco, a nineteen year old signalman. As his ship maneuvers into place, Billy
is scanning the pier. He's hoping to find his eighteen year old bride, Michelle, waiting for him. Billy and Michelle were high school sweethearts from Pittsburgh who'd been married for just three months. They'd met a few years earlier on the school bus when Billy's eye was caught by Michelle's red hair. He tried to impress her by saying, hey, Toots, nice jacket, but it was her a quick response, my name's Michelle, that impressed him. Pretty soon they became inseparable.
After graduating, Billy enlisted in the navy. Michelle followed him to Norfolk, where they got married. But when Billy's ship docks that day, there's no Michelle waiting for him. He goes straight home to their tiny apartment off base. Michelle usually kept the place spotlessly clean, but today is horribly different. On the bedroom floor, Billy finds his wife dead, wearing nothing but a black T shirt and surrounded by blood. She's been raped, stabbed, and strangled. Billy searches for the phone,
but in his panic, he can't find it. Instead, he runs next door to the apartment of another naval couple, Daniel and Nicole Williams. Billy tells them his wife is dead, and Daniel calls nine one one. The two men go back to the scene, where they a blanket over Michelle's legs. Police arrive just minutes later. There are no signs of forced entry, so police theorized that Michelle knew her attacker and had let him in. They asked Michelle's friends who
might have done this. No one has any ideas. The police keep pressing, though, and one friend finally mentions the neighbor, Daniel Williams. Daniel was a twenty five year old sailor from Michigan who'd also just gotten married. But Daniel and his wife, Nicole, had recently gotten some terrible news. They had thought Nicole was expecting, but she wasn't pregnant after all. Instead, she was dying of ovarian cancer. Daniel was grief stricken, but the police had ideas of their own about how
he was handling it. They developed a theory that Daniel had become interested in Michelle. It's only been an hour and a half since Michelle's body was found, but police are somehow already convinced they've got their man. With no other leads, ask Daniel Williams to come down to the station. They tell him it's normal to question anyone who'd been involved in discovering a body, and Daniel finds himself alone in an interrogation room, totally unprepared for what's about to happen.
This is the worst type of crime you can imagine not only a murder, but a murder rape of a young woman. And these are the kinds of cases that really get the adrenaline of police departments up.
That's our friend Richard Leo, one of the globes leading experts on false confessions. He's also co authored a book about the Norfolk Four.
It's entrenched in the police culture that when you interrogate, it's because your goal is to get a confession. We all think an innocent person wouldn't falsely confess. So it's a puzzle why would people do something that none of us think we would do.
Some of you may remember our explanation of how false confessions happen from last season. If you're new to this podcast, you can check out our first episode or Steve and I take a deep dive into the interrogation room. Here's how it goes. For Daniel Williams, police accuse him of raping and killing Michelle Bosco, and Daniel says he had nothing to do with it. They ask him to take a polygraph and he agrees. He wants to prove his innocence, but police lie to Daniel. They tell him he failed
the polygraph when he really passed it. They say the polygraph proves he's guilty.
Polygraphs, in any event, are highly unreliable. They're not scientific what police pretend they are. You give a suspect polygraph, you tell them the results indicate that they're lying, and that the machine is scientific and error free. So it's an effective interrogation technique in breaking down somebody's resistance and denials because science has just proven beyond any doubt that they are guilty.
Daniel's scared as hell. It's dawning on him that the police will never believe he's innocent. They insist that Daniel needs to admit he attacked Michelle. The interrogation goes on overnight for eight hours, but Daniel won't say he did it. Now, none of the interrogation was taped, so we don't have a perfect record of what happened, but we do know
that by early morning Daniel still hadn't confessed. So police bring in a closer, an interrogator who knows how to get confessions, and according to Daniel, that's when things get really rough.
So the detective who was the primary instigator in this case was a man named Detective Ford, and Daniel Williams was not equipped to deal with his high stress interrogation tactics.
According to Daniel, the detective suggests that he'd been attracted to Michelle. Maybe he couldn't have sex with his dying wife as much as he wanted to. Ford says, maybe Daniel wanted an affair with Michelle and he went to her apartment to get it.
Daniel went from the joy of finding someone to spend the rest of his life with to knowing that his wife was going to die painful, miserable death in all likelihood. In the middle of that, he's accused of sexually assaulting and murdering his neighbor. Unbelievable.
The interrogation only gets worse from there. Daniels told the evidence against him is rock solid. The death penalty is on the table, Ford tells him unless he cooperates with police and confesses.
Daniel is essentially assaulted with threats of the death penalty, lies about the evidence against him, screaming, shouting, breaking him down, accusing him of being a liar, and after a long period of time, Daniel agrees to a preconceived story that was fed to him by Detective Ford.
That's when police finally turned on the tape recorder.
I got her in the back round and I forced her to the floor. I forced her to have intercourse with me. She resisted, and I hit her a couple of times in my hand. I grabbed a flat, hard shoe and I struck her with it once, and I got up and I left.
Soon enough, though, police realized they've got a problem. While they're recording Daniel's confession. The autopsy report comes back and they learned Michelle hadn't been beaten with a shoe, she'd actually been stabbed. So now police have to feed Daniel a news story.
So you stabbed her box me three times?
That Greg, that is correct.
People look at these confessions and say, well, geez, you know, they described the crime scene, they described the weapon. People don't know that when an innocent person is broken down and falsely confesses, the police fed them the crime facts, and the person, after many hours, repeated that back.
By seven o'clock the next morning, Daniel Williams has become a confessed killer. He's arrested and calls his mom right away from jail to recant his confession, but it's too late. Daniel is charged with capital murder, meaning the death penalty is on the table and the Norfolk Police close the case. The case stayed closed for all of four months. That's when results came back from a DNA test on the seamen found on Michelle's body. It was a single mail profile that didn't belong to Daniel Williams.
Game over. This is the kind of evidence that exonerates defendants. All of the.
Time, Dan should have been on his way home.
He and his wife should have been able to spend her remaining days together.
His confession was false, the DNA proved, but the police refuse to let go of their belief in Daniel's guilt. Instead, they developed a new theory. Another man must have been there too, and before long they picked out a second suspect.
This episode is sponsored by AIG, a leading global insurance company, and Paul Weiss Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison, a leading international law firm. The AIG pro Bono program provides free legal services and other support to many nonprofit organizations and individuals most in need, and recently they announced that working to reform the criminal justice system will become a key pillar
of the program's mission. Paul Weiss has long had an unwavering commitment to providing impactful, pro bono legal assistance to the most vulnerable members of our society and in support of the public interest, including extensive work in the criminal justice area.
Joe Dick was twenty one, a Navy sailor who rented a room from Daniel and Nicole Williams. Joe had grown up in Baltimore with major intellectual disabilities that made him think more like a child. Joe was eager to please and very easy to intimidate. As a high schooler, he worked at his church mowing the lawn until one day when the mower clawed, Joe reached inside and the blade cut off a couple of his fingers. After that, whenever his high school shop teachers told him to use machinery
that he didn't understand, Joe would hide until class was over. Unfortunately, Joe couldn't hide from Detective Ford. Six months after Michelle's death, naval security turns Joe over for interrogation. Detective Ford accuses Joe of helping Daniel kill Michelle Bosco. Now Joe is really confused because he remembers being on in his ship the night Michelle was killed. But again Ford administers a
polygraph and says Joe failed. Ford shows Joe a picture of Michelle lying dead on the floor and says he'll get the death penalty unless he admits helping Daniel killer. It's pretty clear there's only one story Ford will accept.
Innocent suspects come to see their situation as hopeless, that there's no way out other than to give the interrogator what they want, and the interrogator is offering them a way out by suggesting they can go home, or they'll mitigate their damage, or or they can just put an end to the interrogation. Most people don't know police are trained in these manipulative techniques. And of course, if the police have the right person, that's a good thing as
long as they follow the law. But sometimes they get the wrong person.
Soon enough, Detective Ford turns on the recorder and Joe Dick confesses to helping Daniel rape and murder Michelle Bosco. At least he does the best he can.
Why did you two take it upon yourselves to rape and murder this woman?
Don't know?
Didn't you describe the knife? All I can say about the knife is it looked like a normal kitchen knife that you would use for Nader song, Charlotte.
Yes, Joe Dick is slow and low functioning and highly suggestible, and these are personality traits that make somebody more vulnerable to making false confessions. And so it took less time to break Joe Dick than it took to break the others.
Joe Dick was even less equipped to deal with the interrogation tactics of Detective Ford. He was a follower in the truest sense of the word, and Detective Ford took advantage of that.
On this confession. Joe is charged with capital murder as Daniel's co defendant. The police were sure that this time they'd closed the case. Then within weeks, Joe's DNA is compared to the semen from the crime scene. Turns out the DNA doesn't belong to him either. Neither Joe Dick nor Daniel Williams could have been the attacker. But instead of looking outside their circle of suspects, police decide to
expand it. They insist that Daniel and Joe must still be guilty, but now they decide a third man must have been involved too.
You know, when faced with compelling evidence of innocence, compelling evidence that your theory is wrong. You should be examining the theory, not trying to reinterpret facts to create a new theory which accommodates the DNA evidence. We see this over and over again. When prosecutions start changing their theories in midstream, you have to be very concerned and an injustice is about to happen.
By this point, two injustices had already happened, and more were still to come. Joe's lawyer told him that his best hope of escaping the electric chair would be if he identified one more perpetrator. Pretty soon, Joe came up with a third name, Eric Wilson, and on April eighth, nineteen ninety eight, Eric became the next domino waiting to fall. Eric Wilson was a twenty one year old naval recruit
from Texas. He was an eagle scout, the kind of guy who'd walk girls home from parties when their dates got too drunk. On April eighth, Detective Ford starts interrogating Eric Wilson once again. Ford administers a polygraph and tells Eric he flunked it, just like with Joe. Ford slaps a picture of Michelle's dead body on the table. And says he can prove Eric helped Daniel and Joe commit the crime. It was all bullshit. Eric barely even knew Daniel or Joe. But after hours in the interrogation room,
Eric starts to doubt his own memory. Maybe he really was lying and didn't realize it.
People come to doubt themselves and their memories or beliefs in interrogations. It's a high pressure game of deception, manipulation, persuasion to get people who deny committing a crime to confess to committing it.
Eventually, Eric agrees to the cop story. Detective Ford turns on the recorder and Eric repeats what he's been told that he, Joe and Daniel raped Michelle, but he says he left before the stabbing started.
I grabbed Michelle by either the shoulders or the upper arm.
I can't remember exactly. I didn't know what to do. I was real confused.
Well, Dan ended up raping her, and.
LEVI went in next and I start.
And soon enough Eric Wilson is charged as capital defendant number three.
He said that the interrogation was so coercive that he would have said anything if they had told him that he needed to confess to the killing of John F. Kennedy. He would have said he handed Oswald the gun. He would have said anything just to get out of there at the end of many, many hours that broke him down.
But again, weeks pass, the DNA is tested, and yet again it's not a match. By mid June, police are looking for a fourth man.
Oh for three. This is bad enough for Joe Dick and Dan Williams and Eric Wilson. Imagine what it's like for Billy Bosco. The worst possible nightmare you can imagine. But it only gets worse because please keep telling him, it's not just one person that raped and killed your wife, it's two and then three. She's being violated over and over again. He has to relive the trial every time. The police bring in somebody else to this story, and it's all a lie.
To find their fourth man, police go back to Joe Dick. After a lot more questioning, Joe offers another name, George Clark. Now police have no idea who George Clark might be, or if this person even exists, so they bring Joe an old Navy yearbook. Joe flips through it and points to a picture of a former sailor named Derek Tice. Yeah, Joe says, that looks like him. Derek Tye was born in North Carolina, a Southerner who called his elders sir and ma'am. Derek was really smart, but he had a
learning disability and never did well in school. He scraped through graduation and enlisted in the Navy to get trained as a paramedic. But now it's Derek Tye's turn to be questioned by Detective Ford. When Derek says he knows nothing about Michelle Bosco's murder, Ford falsely tells Derek that physical evidence had already proven him guilty.
Police routinely pretend to have evidence they don't have, state that there is evidence that doesn't exist. That's an acceptable technique in American policing. In the American legal system, unlike in other legal systems.
Ford follows the same playbook that he used on the other three. He administers a polygraph and tells Derek he failed it again. Ford threatens Derek with the death penalty unless he confesses. After nearly twelve hours of this, Derek agrees to confess. Just like the others on tape, He repeats the story that Ford tells him that he committed the rape and murder along with Daniel, Joe and Eric. This story is enough for Derek to become the fourth man charged with the attack on Michelle Bosco.
Why did you all agree to go with him? I agree because of pil pleasure.
I can't say why the others did.
I believe it is for the same ways.
Probably guess what I'm about to tell you next. The DNA is tested yet again and it doesn't belong to Derek either.
This is false confession number four. Laura. I know you don't know much about baseball.
Yeah, but I do know that no one gets a fourth strike.
You don't get a fourth strike in baseball, and you don't get a fourth strike in law enforcement. It's time to call this game. It's time to end this charade.
All four sailors have been proven innocent by DNA, but prosecutors ignore the evidence and move forward with cases against all of them. Daniel Williams, Joe Dick, Eric Wilson, and Derek Tice become known as the Norfolk Four. As prosecutors got ready to try the Norfolk Four, the case took a serious twist. On February twenty second, nineteen ninety nine, a prison inmate named Omar Ballard sent a letter to his friend. In it, Ballard mentioned Michelle Bosco's murder and wrote,
guess who did that me? Omar Ballard was in prison for raping a fourteen year old girl and for beating up one of Michelle Bosco's female neighbors a few weeks before Michelle died. In fact, right after he'd committed the assault, Ballard had been chased through the apartment complex by an angry crowd eager to exact revenge. To protect him from the mob, Michelle let Ballard hide in her and Billy's apartment until things calmed down. Two weeks later, Michelle was
killed in that same apartment by someone she knew. Police brought Ballard in from prison for questioning. This time, it didn't take a polygraph to get a confession. Ballard admitted to raping and stabbing Michelle Bosco, and he insisted that he acted alone. Most importantly, police finally had their DNA match the semen at the crime scene belonged to Omar Ballard.
No, no, I guess something, just taking my head and I went to the kitchen and got a knife, went back to the room, she was getting ab off the bid, or she was already above the big when I stabbed in the chairs one time, and when she got on the floor, I think I said about two or three more times. I'm not quite sure was anybody with you during this defense?
No police officers were handed the true perpetrator on a silver platter. The wake up call was hand delivered to them literally. Omar Ballard confessed to this crime and then DNA matched him before trial.
Walk away, but prosecutors wouldn't walk away. Instead, they offered Joe Dick a plea deal if he testified that everyone else had been there along with Ballard. For Joe, the death penalty would be off the table. It worked. Joe Dick pled guilty and agreed to testify against the others as he'd been told. In short order, Derek Tice was convicted of murder and Eric Wilson was convicted of rape. As for Daniel Williams, he'd pled guilty to both rape
and murder only a few weeks before Ballard's letter turned up. Daniel, Joe, and Derek all received life in prison. Eric Wilson was sentenced to eight and a half years for rape.
There was just something almost Twilight Zone like about this case. You had four people in prison for a rape and murder. The DNA evidence did not link to any of them, and it linked to somebody else who had a history of violent crime and rape, and he admitted that he did it.
At his own trial in two thousand, Omar Ballard pled guilty to killing Michelle Bosco, but the prosecution also made a deal with him in exchange for a sentence of life rather than death. Ballard told the court that the Norfolk four had participated in the attack. It was the only time he implicated any of them. Back in prison, Ballard returned to his original story over and over. He
insisted that he was the sole perpetrator. That was enough for several large law firms to start reinvestigating the Norfolk Forest convictions. In September two thousand and five, Eric Wilson was paroled after serving his full sentence, and in two thousand and nine, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine granted a conditional pardon to Derek, Daniel and Joe based on the weakness
of the case against them. So all of the Norfolk four were out of prison, but they were still living as convicted murderers and sex offenders, they still had to win exoneration. Derek Tice was the first to be granted a new trial in two thousand and nine. His lawyers found evidence that he had tried to ask for a lawyer during questioning, but he wasn't given one in violation of his Miranda rights. Before Derek could be retried, two
more bombshells dropped. First, a PBS Frontline episode about the Norfolk Four aired in twenty ten, featuring none other than Omar Ballard. During an interview from behind barr as, Ballard insisted he had acted alone. The second bombshell had to do with Detective Ford. In twenty ten, a federal jury convicted Ford of extortion. He'd gotten criminal defendants to pay him to say they deserved shorter sentences because they'd given valuable information. Ford was sentenced to more than twelve years
in prison. That was enough to convince prosecutors not to retry Derek Tice, and he became the first of the Norfolk Four to win exoneration. In twenty sixteen, a federal court held a hearing to determine whether Daniel Williams and Joe Dick were innocent too. At that hearing, Joe's commanding officer testified that Joe had been on duty the night of Michelle Bosco's death and couldn't have killed her. It was testimony that it never came out before because Joe
had been persuaded to plead guilty. In light of this evidence and everything else that didn't make sense, the judge granted Daniel and Joe new trials too. By any measure, the judge wrote, the evidence shows their innocence. No sane human being could find them guilty. The prosecution took the hint. On December fifteenth, twenty sixteen, they decided not to retry Daniel or Joe either. The only one left was Eric Wilson.
Eric's turn came just a few months later. On March twenty first, twenty seventeen, Governor Terry mccaliffe granted absolute pardons to each of the four men, removing all doubt. Finally, after twenty years of hell, the Norfolk Four were exonerated.
Counterintuitively, the Norfolk four are lucky. They spent many years in prison based on false confessions to crimes they didn't commit, but there was DNA in their case and they got out These are all earnest, honest, down to earth individuals who serve their country well, whose wrongful convictions took the best years of their lives for almost two decades before they were exonerated.
The Norfolk Force survived a battle they should never have had to fight, and now they're rebuilding their lives.
Hello.
Dan, this is Laura and Steve. How are you.
It's so nice to finally get a chance to talk to you dad, and thank you.
Are you living in Michigan? Are you living in Virginia?
I'm currently living in Michigan now.
And what keeps you busy these days?
After my incarceration? After I got home, I went to Baker College of Luasso and got my associate's degree and applied science for welding.
Wonderful? Have you been able to stay working?
I have not stopped working yet.
That is phenomenal.
Let's see, you're a Michigan guy. Are you born and raised in Michigan?
Yes?
Okay?
What kind of fishing you like to do? What do you go fishing for?
Usually panfish and bass?
Yep, lakes or streams?
Usually lakes.
Did you ever cook the fish you catch?
Dan?
All the time? Cooking is something that I do enjoy. Also, since getting out, I have been cooking at our local BFW in Alasso Sunday.
Breakfast, pancake breakfast, that kind of thing.
Everything.
Yeah, pancakes, French toast, eggs, to order, omelets, breakfast burrito.
You're grill mad.
Yes, And you're at the VFW, so you're there with other guys who are in the service. Yes, it's nice to be with guys with that same experience.
I usually just live life one day at a time right now and staying positive.
One day at a time is pretty good these days.
It sounds like to me, the idea that it took so long to right these wrongs is just hard to fathom.
You know, we claim we care about those in the military, we care about our vets, and what was done to these men is just beyond the pale.
Too often it's a fight to exonerate, even people who are obviously innocent. But it's a fight that's got to be one. That's our life's work, freeing false confessors and sharing their stories with you. For Dan, Joe, Eric and Derek, that's the least we can do. Thank you for serving our country and for letting your stories serve in the
fight against wrongful convictions. Wrongful Conviction False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one Special thanks to our executive producers Jason Flamm and Kevin Wardis. Production team is headed by Senior producer and Pope, along with producers Joshi Hammer and Jess Shane. Our show is mixed by Genie Montalvo. John Colbert is our intrepid intern. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph.
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura and I Wrider, and you.
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