#470 Jason Flom with Chris Vaughn - podcast episode cover

#470 Jason Flom with Chris Vaughn

Aug 15, 202438 minEp. 470
--:--
--:--
Listen in podcast apps:
Metacast
Spotify
Youtube
RSS
Download Metacast podcast app
Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

On June 14, 2007, 32-year-old Chris Vaughn was found limping on the side of the road near Joliet, IL, bleeding from two gunshot wounds. When police arrived on scene, they found the bodies of his wife and three children shot in the car. Chris is unable to recount the events of that early morning, and there are no other witnesses to the crime. Chris was subsequently convicted of 4 counts of first-degree murder. Although the state intended on imposing the death penalty, it was abolished four years after Chris’s arrest. His trial hadn’t begun, altering the state’s course of action. He is currently incarcerated and serving 4 consecutive life sentences for the killings. 

Chris Vaughn’s case was covered in the hit 2021 podcast series Murder in Illinois. While Chris was interviewed extensively for that podcast, this is the first time we hear Chris Vaughn’s voice as he shares his tragic story with Jason Flom.

Featuring: 

Chris Vaughn

Keith Altman (Attorney)

Lauren Bright Pacheco 

Jason Flom

Click here to listen to Murder in Illinois:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-murder-in-illinois-84071522/

 

Please tell Governor Pritzker about your support for Christopher Vaughn:

https://gov.illinois.gov/contact-us/voice-an-opinion.html

https://www.instagram.com/govpritzker/?hl=en

To write to Christopher, send letters to:

Christopher Vaughn IDOC#MM33173

5835 State Route 154

Pinckneyville, IL 62274

To learn more, visit:

https://lavaforgood.com/podcast/250-jason-flom-with-rodney-lincoln/

Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava For Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Just before sunrise on June fourteenth, two thousand and seven, Kimberly and Christopher Vaughan packed their three kids into the car and headed to a water park in Springfield, Illinois, but the road trips soon turned deadly. Kimberly Vaughan was fatally shot under the chin in the front passenger seat, and gunfire from that direction also killed their three children. Christopher Vaughan was discovered limping alongside the road, suffering from two gunshot wounds. His first words were, I think my

wife shot me. Could a mother possibly have done this to her own family? Police theorized that Christopher Vaughan must have staged the scene to appear like a murder suicide, sending him away for the rest of his natural life. But this is wrongful conviction. Wrongful conviction has always given voice to him missing people in prison, and now we're

expanding that voice to you. Call us at eight three three two O seven four six sixty six and tell us how these stories make you feel and what you've done to help the cause, even if it's something as simple as telling a friend or sharing on social media, and you might just hear yourself in a future episode. Call us eight three, three, two oh seven, four six sixty six. Welcome back to Ronful Conviction and joining us

from a correctional facility in Illinois. We have a man that should have but never was able to grieve the loss of his wife, Kimberly and their three beloved children, but instead was snatched away from their funeral and blamed for their deaths. Christopher Vaughan. I can't none of us can begin to understand your pain or your resilience, but we're very honored to have you here with us today.

Speaker 2

Well, I appreciate you guys taking the time and interest, I really do.

Speaker 1

You're very welcome and joining us today, as well as Chris's attorney, Keith Altman, who's expertise in pharmaceutical side effects will help shed light on this unspeakable tragedy. And Keith, thanks so much for being here.

Speaker 3

You're welcome. You're welcome.

Speaker 1

Later on, we're going to speak with one of our Wrongful Conviction hosts, Lauren Bright Pacheco, whose podcast Murder in Illinois was the first time that almost anyone heard Chris's side of the story. But before he ever needed, or ever thought he would need, any sort of advocacy, he grew up pretty much like anybody else.

Speaker 2

I was born in Indiana, we moved to Missouri. I've got two younger brothers. We spent a lot of time on sports, cub scouts. I did reasonably well in high school, graduated in ninety three. Went to the University of Missouri Raala, focused on an electrical engineering degree, and I had met Kimberly the summer before college. To be frank, I mean, dating was one thing, but we didn't have consistent pictures

of what the future looked like. At the end of that first year of college, we found out she was pregnant, and when I had got married, Abby was born in December. Providing for Kimberly and the baby was my number one focus, so I went ahead and dropped out of college and was focusing on getting a local job. I had started down a technology career path as the Internet was really growing in the mid to late nineties. Information risk management that's where my focus was, so I worked for a

variety of different consulting companies. There was significantly more work out there for consultants in my niche market, so I started my own consulting company.

Speaker 1

Chris's successful private cybersecurity firm eventually got him hired by a large international firm out of Chicago, and this success allowed the family to grow from Abbey to Cassandra just a year later, and then Blake three years later. On. Meanwhile, the stress of parenthood on this young couple, who were seemingly more chosen by fate than by each other, well, that stress began to take a toll.

Speaker 2

Living together was rocky. Were both early on, We're really trying to make it work, and we had pretty much come into the understanding that we were both happy being part of the family and for the kids, we'd stay together and we provide the happiest and most nurturing home possible for them, but as soon as they were out of the house, we would find our own past. And it was fully my intention to continue to help her

out in any way form or fashion I could. I sent her to school and tried to incorporate her into the work I was doing, but it was still fully my intention to pursue other avenues personally, and I believe wasn't something that she was looking forward to.

Speaker 3

So Kim is very unhappy and having mental health details and she's being treated and one of the medications that she's been given as a drug called topiramate. The trade name is topomax, which is really an anti convulsant. It's normally given to people with epilepsy, but people had been using it for mental health treatment as well. But what neither she nor her doctor knew at the time is that topomax had an increased risk of suicidal and self

injurious behavior. Now Johnson and Johnson knew this, and they didn't tell the FDA, but nevertheless, shortly before the incident, her dosage was changed of this drug. And one of the things that these drugs are notorious for is that when you change the dosage, that can lead to increased negative mood and behavioral disturbances, the kind of things that could cause you to take actions that you might not have normally taken.

Speaker 1

Which brings us up to June fourteenth, two thousand and seven, when the couple woke up before sunrise and packed the kids, half asleep into the car for the about three hour drive to a water park in Springfield, Illinois.

Speaker 2

The night before was one of Kimberla and I's many disagreements and turned more into a spiteful argument of well I don't spend enough time at home with the kids, she doesn't spend enough time helping out and partici dating with the family, and then back and forth, and eventually led to well, let's just do something together as a family tomorrow. And in the morning got the kids up and out to the truck, and we sat in the

truck and waited for her to come out. I remember, particularly that morning, I had to go back up to the front door and holler up the stairs. Eventually she did come down through her stuff in the truck. We left the house. It was after the point we got on the highway. She said she wasn't feeling well, so I found a place off the side of the road. After I parked the truck, I asked her, you know, is still feeling bad? She needed a few minutes, and she really just didn't say much of anything, so I

opted to give her a few minutes. When ahead and jumped out. Kids were asleep in the back, and I went around and just did miscellaneous things, checked the luggage rack, looked at the tires, and that's when I'd heard just a horrendous racket, and I was heading for my door to get in and find out what was going on. I pulled the door open, and I was looking at Kim holding the gun. She looked at me and she said,

you won't take my kids away from me. She says, you killed them, and then she starts firing a gun at me. And I was tumbling backward and trying to come forward and not making much progress doing anything, And that's when she turned the gun on herself.

Speaker 3

In the backseat of the vehicle. The three children were all shot twice. The ballistics show that all six shots of the children converge over the passenger seats left shoulder, as if somebody had turned around from the passenger seat and fired the gun and the passenger seat of the vehicle. Kim was shot under the chin straight up. The driver of the vehicle, Chris, was shot in the hand and through the leg. The shots are not fatal, but he is seriously injured.

Speaker 1

So there you are on the side of the road. Had you actually looked in the car and seen what she had done.

Speaker 2

No more than a quick glance, probably I was just too horrified to do anything. The vehicle had an eerie stillness to it, the stillness when you're in a place by yourself and the only thing I could think jop was that I need to get help. Knowing that I wasn't walking distance from anywhere closed, I thought, well, I'll just drive the vehicle. And the way she was slumped, I needed to not unbuckle her, but to buckle her.

But I was just shaking so uncontrollably trying to buckle her and failing on the seatbelt.

Speaker 3

Blood was found. Now one would think that if she had been shot by Chris, as what was alleged, that her blood would have been on the seatbelt, But it turns out that it is not her blood that's on the seatbelt. It's Chris's blood.

Speaker 1

However, before the blood test, police theorized that Chris, who had run a private security firm, never mind that it was cybersecurity, but ignoring that, they came up with this theory that he must have somehow been an expert in staging crime scenes.

Speaker 3

According to prosecutor, Chris is such a criminal mastermind that he was able to make the scene look like she had committed the crime he did. That, down to blood spatter and all of these things. It is just simply prepossible. But what it is is an admission from the prosecution that the physical evidence does not support that Chris committed the crime. It supports that she committed the crime.

Speaker 1

Nevertheless, they alleged that Chris, who's by the way, just under five foot nine, somehow reached into the passenger side of a large SUV, shot Kim from under her chin, then reached over her left shoulder, shooting each child twice, then proceeded to unbuckle the seat belt stained with what they believe was Kim's blood, to make it appear that Kim had been free to make the shots. The theory continued that Chris somehow inflicted two survivable gunshot wounds, one

to his left hand and one to his thigh. But since the blood on the seat belt actually belonged to Chris, it meant two things. One, the belt was not buckled when Kim was shot, and the belt was stained after Chris had been shot. Like he said, when he reached across her, his left hand bloody pulled the belt, leaving a stain, and then it retracted when he was unable to buckle it.

Speaker 2

And then I focused on the driving, but I was just shaking so uncontrollably and just not thinking clearly enough that driving wasn't going to be an option either, So at that point I decided, okay, I just need to find somebody that can make a phone call for me.

Speaker 1

Chris then stumbled down the side of the highway, obviously the state of shock with the two gunshot wounds, both by the way without stippling a burn injury associated with close range gunshots, so the shots had to have been fired from at least eighteen inches away, if not thirty, and the one in his thigh almost castrated him, so we'd have to believe that he risked taking a distant shot to stage a near miss with his testicles. Luckily someone stopped to help him.

Speaker 2

There was a man in a pickup truck and he pulled up aside and asked something to the effect of have you been in an accident? And, without thinking, the first thing that came out of my mouth was I think my wife shot me. It wasn't that much longer that ambulances and police cars showed up, took me to the hospital, released me back to the police station, and

that was the multi day interrogation. The stress of the situation kept me in an imploded state, unable to think and still horrified, confused because I don't think anyone in their right mind could do anything like that. If I had suspected that she was violent at all, I would have taken steps years before that. But that was not the Kim that I knew. And I remember saying that in the interrogation, Kim could not have done this. That

doesn't make any sense. And the missing piece that I didn't have at that point right after the tragedy was the medication.

Speaker 3

Well, it wasn't obvious to him, aha, It must have been the topomax. He just knew he had a wife who was in pain, she was still the mother of his three children, who had done these terrible things. And I think when you combined all of that together, he just decided to say nothing.

Speaker 1

Which is his right. But as we so often see in cases like these, there are judgments about what is the right way to react. Here, they already suspected Chris, and when he was only expressing his bewilderment over what Kim had done. The next question is then who did it, at which point one might expect that he'd vehemently defend himself.

Speaker 2

I can only sum it up in the word implosure. Quite frankly, I was a shame that I had failed my children and not seeing things ahead of time, been better prepared or reacted in a better fashion. The physical and the emotional pain was overwhelming, to the point where I just couldn't string words together to make a sense, let alone draw conclusions or be of any type of productive help to my own defense.

Speaker 1

You're listening to wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 2

After I lost my kids, I lost my identity. I saw myself as a dad, working and paying for a house and taking care of the kids. At that point, I lost meaning and purpose. The part that hurt even more was that I was still here. I thought that there had to have been a reason for that, because I shouldn't be Had she completed what she had started, I wouldn't have left that truck either. But the fact that I did must mean that there's more meaning that

I'm supposed to be here. I've got a purpose. I think that's what provided me with that little bit of strength I needed to kind of start picking myself back up.

Speaker 1

So with no confession, and the crime scene indicating Kim's guilt. Chris was released into a cab wearing nothing but a hospital gown. Meanwhile, there was even more at the scene that supported Chris's innocence. For instance, d Vaughan's usually stored their gun, a Taurus nine milimeter, in a closet in a terrycloth towel.

Speaker 2

There were crime scene pictures that showed a small white towel covered in blood on Kim's leg, and when the crime scene was processed, it was taken and washed and sanitized and essentially destroyed as evidence.

Speaker 1

Also, Kim's hands tested positive for gunshot residue, and while a positive gunshot residence test has limited value, a negative test can be used to exclude a suspect, but Chris's

hands were never tested. At least the crime seat investigator Bob Deal was actively challenging the state's theory, citing the bullet trajectory, the issue of Chris's smaller stature, the fact that there were no signs of a struggle with Kim, as well as the way the blood had hit her hand, all of it serving as clear indications that she and

she alone had shot that gun. But Bob Deal the investigator was ignored, and they continued to seek death penalty even after the DNA testing revealed that the blood on the seat belt indeed belonged to Chris.

Speaker 3

Before the grand jury wasnt panel, they knew the blood on the seat belt was Chris's. We know this because there's a phone lock where the forensic examiner detailed that she told the state's attorney that the blood was not Kims. When the grand jury was to decide whether Chris would be indicted or not, the question over the blood was

presented very craftily. The officer is never asked whose blood was on the seat belt, But when you look at the transcript, it is clear that the way the questions were asked it was meant so that the jury would infer reasonably infer that the blood on the seat belt was Kim's and not Chris's.

Speaker 1

The following is a quote from the exchange between state's attorney Leah Norbit and the lead investigator, Sergeant Gary Lawson. Quote. They looked at the seat belt, right, Yes, as if the seat belt were pulled to be seat belting. Someone in correct, and there was blood on that seat belt? Was there not?

Speaker 2

Yes?

Speaker 1

And when Kimberly Vaughan was found by the paramedics and by the police. She was not wearing a seat belt. Correct. Is significant because she was wearing that seat belt when she was shot. That's correct end quote. If she had been wearing the seat belt when she was shot, it would have had to have been her blood, but it wasn't Kim's blood.

Speaker 3

It completely refutes the prosecution's allegations as to what happened in this case. It's all documented. The other thing that was interesting is that before the grand jury, the forensic report was mark draft, and then the day after the grand jury comes out with its finding, the forensic report it's changed from draft to final, and that examiner was asked why did she do that? And her response was I was told to do it, and she wouldn't answer any further.

Speaker 1

It appears that marking the report final the day after the grand jury indictment offered an appearance of plausible deniability to the assistant state's attorney and Sergeant Gary Lawson. But now they had their indictment and they had chosen to arrest Chris while he was at the funeral of his wife and children. The cruelty of the whole thing be damned and effectively preparing for a capital trial, well, we know that can take quite some time.

Speaker 2

I didn't go to trial until twenty twelve, so I was in the will County jail from two thousand and seven to twenty twelve.

Speaker 3

He was treated very poorly because of what it was alleged that he had done, but he was under the death penalty at the time, and there were funds provided by the state to get the best attorneys, get the best experts. And when I first became exposed to the case, which is actually I had just been sworn in as an attorney, but I had been doing the farmer covigilance safety surveillance of drugs. That's how I got involved in

the case in the first place. And I remember sitting in a room in Clayton, near Saint Louis with what I considered to be the dream team of criminal defense lawyers, and the ballistics expert had shown how it just was

totally inconsistent with Chris having shot the gun. And then when you combine that with the topamax and at the time I had seen a document from Johnson and Johnson where they had concluded that Topermax increased the risk of suicidal itself in Juri's behavior, but they never told the FDA. So it was only after I petitioned the FDA for action that things started to happen. And I remember sitting there and saying, there's just no way this happening.

Speaker 1

Chris's dream team continued to develop their defense, even deposing the crime scene investigator Robert Dial in January twenty eleven about the investigation, and deal said, quote, every time that I offered up something that was contrary to what they said, they had some reason why I didn't know what I was talking about, or they would change their theory of what happened to try to match the evidence, rather than letting the evidence dictate the events that occurred.

Speaker 3

Quote, I know he was taken off the case. And you know, once again, the confirmation bias get rid of anybody that may have an alternate explanation as to what happened.

Speaker 1

It's this horribly flawed human element that makes abolishing the death penalty and absolute moral imperative. And then that's exactly what happened. Illinois abolished the death penalty in March twenty eleven, but this had paradoxically an unintended and ultimately tragic consequence for Chris.

Speaker 3

When the death penalty got taken off the table, the funds for his defense also evaporated.

Speaker 2

It was going to continue to be so expensive to finish out what needed to be done. In my attorney there in Illinois, he showed up and he just apologized. It just wasn't possible.

Speaker 3

And the case was assigned to a public defender, and they're overloaded, overworked, they don't have the resources. I remember the public defender spending about five minutes with me on the phone, and that was the last time I ever heard from the public defender. I think he did ask me if I would appear pro bono that there were no funds, and I wasn't on my own, I was working for somebody and I had just been told to

stop what I was doing. We hadn't done a report yet, and so it is clear that the substantial evidence that was being developed of Chris's innocence was not going to be available to him.

Speaker 1

The Public Defender team had to become fully steeped in everything that had been developed over five years to combat the States team, which had been working together for just as long.

Speaker 2

It's like going to the World Series and removing one of the teams, getting them from a little league park and throwing them in and say, oh, go ahead and do your best.

Speaker 1

You were also facing a situation where I have to believe you were one of the most hated people in the state of Illinois.

Speaker 2

I know. The state's attorney was very vocal, and they used the media to the nth degree to make sure that the stage was set for their advantage.

Speaker 1

So the scales of justice were certainly tipped all the way to one side as the trial was set to begin in August of twenty twelve. But as we so often see, when the physical evidence is weak, the state focus is on circumstantial evidence. So they dug into the Vaughn's marriage and the arrangement that they had, presenting bombshells like Chris had gone to strip clubs.

Speaker 3

A lot of men go to strip clubs, a lot of women go to strip clubs. A lot of men who are happily married go to strip clubs. The fact that somebody goes to a strip club doesn't speak anything as to the state of their marital relationship or lack thereof. It means absolutely nothing the other situation, Chris was into survival type things, hunting, being out in the woods, stuff

he had grown up with his whole life. They took the fact that he had a friend who talked about these things going to go off grid meant that he was planning to do this crime, go off grid and live his days out.

Speaker 1

It's hard to believe that he'd choose to begin that life with two debilitating gunshot wounds, but okay, it's just posterous.

Speaker 3

During the trial, I think the prosecution present at seven hundred exhibits, They had about fifty witnesses. The public defender, put on a limited defense here, did not have the tools to properly defend Chris. First of the prosecution, who had effectively unlimited resources, he had not really presented the

drug issue. I know it was mentioned lightly during the trial, but the experts that had been retained were not consulted, and the jury found him guilty in what an hour or so with all of that information, How could they possibly have reviewed that information?

Speaker 1

Jury foreman Dan Leche expressed that there was no doubt in the juror's minds of Vaughan's guilt and that they never even considered the defense's argument that Kimberly Vaughn had

actually committed the murders. The drug issue was not effectively raised, a forensic expert did not effectively expose the state's nonsensical theory, and the jury bought what they'd already heard in an media, and Chris was found guilty on four accounts of first degree murder, for which he received four consecutive life sentences.

Speaker 2

To have been convicted of this was beyond my comprehension. I've been raised to believe in the courtroom and the judge and the jury, and they're going to find justice. These are open minded people that are there to look at the facts. And it wasn't until that very end that I realized that everything that I had believed in and that trust that I had placed in that system was all or not. It's nothing like you see on TV.

It's not like you see in the movies. There's parts of it that are more grotesque and more violent than they're probably allowed to show on TV. But there's a lot of good people in here. There's a lot of people that have definitely committed crimes, but there's a lot of people that have learned their lessons when I got to prison, I really didn't know what to expect, and

I was frankly scared out of my mind. But early on some of the older guys with life sentences pulled me aside, and the advice that they gave me was that the quicker that I can accept my sentence and the quicker that I can get adjusted to this being home for the rest of my life. They said, it's just going to be that much easier on you. They said, don't trust and hope. All that's going to do is wear you down, make you sick, and eat you up.

They said, make the best of each day and find things that you can do to stay productive, find things you can find meaning in. And for the first four or five years that's what I really did. I was still in contact with my parents and they still come up once a month no matter where I am, no matter where they are, they still come and visit me in person, and I talked to them on home. But essentially I made prison life first four or five years,

assuming that's where I was going to be. It was quite some years before a very open minded person came and decided to do a podcast on.

Speaker 1

Me, and that podcast was called murder in Illinois, hosted by our very own Lauren bred Pacheco.

Speaker 4

I had been covering crime in New York for a national show for a decade, and I had never heard of this case until the ten year anniversary came up, and so I started digging a little bit deeper, and it became very obvious that it's because this case unfolded under the same state's attorney in the same courtroom across the hallway as another very infamous case, which was the police sergeant Drew Peterson who had more than one wife go missing under dubious circumstances. And that just sucked all

the national bandwidth. And that's too bad, because more people would have seen what I saw. There was tremendous reaction to the podcast, both positive and negative. People wish death on my children, that they hoped that I would experience the loss that Kim had experienced. Again, I wasn't anticipating that revisiting this case to see if justice was served

would just produce such incredible personal blowback. But there is a very real pivot that happens when you know that someone is innocent, where you no longer care that you are criticized for being their champion. And that's the way I feel for Chris. I have tremendous sympathy for Kim for her family, But keep an insiscent man in prison is not going to bring the kids back, and it's

not going to bring Kem back. And so the only semblance of justice left in this case is correcting this agree us wrong.

Speaker 1

She told us about the reinvestigation, which started with somebody who our listeners might remember, Bill Clutter from the Rodney Lincoln story, which will be linked in the episode description.

Speaker 2

Now.

Speaker 1

Bill's work as a private investigator led him to found an organization called Investigating Innocence and also the Illinois Innocence Project, and he had been hired as part of Chris's original dream team.

Speaker 4

Bill Clutter had already done a lot of work in terms of forensics and the medication she was on and so when we joined forces and set out to make Murder in Illinois, one of the things that we were working towards was a crime scene reconstruction, which unfortunately is an arduous, expensive undertaking. And so Jason, I reached out to you. Sure enough, you saw what I saw. You so graciously stepped forward and made the crime scene reconstruction

take place. Bill Clutter enlisted a former CSI named Katie Hartman, who was meticulous in her approach, and she went through Bob Diale's initial report with a fine tooth calmb and was so impressed with the work that he had done. She said she could see exactly everything within that suv.

Speaker 1

And let's not forget how deeply Bob Deal disagreed with the lead investigator and prosecutors on this case.

Speaker 4

Bob Deal claims that within an hour that Detective Gary Lawson had come up with this, in my opinion, asenine theory, that Vaughn shot his wife through the passenger Explain then, how there is no blood on the exterior of the car, in the front or the back if he leaned through this window of this gigantic suv. And Vaughn, keep in mind,

is five foot nine, maybe in dress heels. You know, he is not a large, imposing man, and for him to have gotten the trajectory didn't work, and Deal himself said, basically, that's jack assery. Show me how he did it, and Lawson couldn't because it was physically impossible, which is what we then proved when we did the crime scene reconstruction.

Speaker 1

But before the reconstruction, Lauren won Chris's trust. He wrote a letter to his parents, finally explaining what had happened that day, which he in turn shared with Lauren, and it all matched up with what we were to discover through the crime scene reconstruction.

Speaker 4

We enlisted actors who were roughly the same size as Kim and Chris and put it in an identical vehicle and played out the States theory and played out Chris's theory again and again, and only one of them worked. Only one of them was backed by the forensics, by the blood in the car, and that was Christopher Vaughns.

And the moment when the actor recreating Chris's movements reached forward and pulled that belt to try to get it over the actress who was playing Kimberly's body, you see exactly where his blood ended up by her foot, where the blood smeared across the center console, all of it, and it was such an eye opening, astounding moment of undeniable proof. And with all of that, you still have an innocent man who's lost everything, rotting in prison in Illinois.

Speaker 1

Lauren also interviewed Keith for the podcast, which brought him back onto Chris's team.

Speaker 3

It had been haunting me about how he had been convicted, and when she called me in and we talked about it, when she told me about the letter and about him talking about what had happened, and there was an opportunity for me to get involved, I jumped on it. You know, there are things afoot internally that we are not ready to release yet, but I can tell you we're blaming the third person in the car. There was Chris, it

was Kim, and there was Topomax. That is what it's all about, because it does provide an explanation as to what happened here. We intend to talk about the misconduct by the prosecution during the grand jury, combined with the psychological impact of what took place preventing him from really assisting in his defense. And the goal is to get him a new trial. We believe very strongly that's going to lead to a different result.

Speaker 1

Well, we certainly hope so. And if anyone in our audience is moved to act, what can we ask them to do?

Speaker 4

I would say to go to Keith Altman's website because he has links on there. You know, I think we're going to start another outreach of writing Governor Pritzker. Governor Pritzker is a fair, just man. I send him stuff on Instagram constantly, just messages imploring him to take another look at this case.

Speaker 1

And we're going to leave ways to reach both Governor Pritzker and Chris with messages of encouragement in the episode description and with that we're going to go to closing arguments. It's where I thank you again Keith, Lauren, and Chris for being here and sharing this unreal story. But it's all too real. So I'm going to now turn my microphone off and just listen to anything else you want

to share. Keith, why don't you kick it off? Then Lauren, and then Chris, if you would please take us off into the sunset.

Speaker 3

This is a tough case. Three kids killed, mother shot is one that doesn't sit well with anybody. Chris is as much a victim here and prosecutors number one, they need to have an open mind. They need to find out what might have happened, instead of deciding what happened

and then altering the investigation to fit that. It's important that people have open minds, that they wait for the evidence to come through because sometimes things are just not quite as they seem, and upcoms Raiser really does play a role here. The simplest explanation tends to be the right one, and so we are very hopeful that we will be able to get Chris a new trial, and we're highly confident that we will be able to present a very different picture as to what had happened.

Speaker 4

I would just say, please, do not take my word for it, don't take Jason's word for it, don't take Keith Altman's word for it. Just look into it. I guarantee you you will very quickly see the patterns that we all know to be true. It's a heartbreaking misery onion, and the layers just keep building with every single day, week, and year that Christopher Vaughn is incarcerated. He needs to be released and again the process of healing.

Speaker 2

This is not just about me. This is about a lot of people and about a system that's not working like it should be. While I've been in here, I've met a lot of people that have claimed innocence. When I was in the outside world, I assume that anybody locked up it was guilty of the crime. I believe what was in the media. If they got locked up, you know, good riddens. You know they were out of sight and out of mind. That's just not the case.

There's good people in here that deserve second chance. There's good people in here that are innocent of the crimes that they've been accused convicted of, and overall, out night, out of mind doesn't work because there's still human beings in here, and I hope it's nothing else that this starts building awareness for what's going on in these prison systems.

Speaker 1

Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Clibern. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated

composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flamm Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one.

Speaker 4

The land that were

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android
Open in Metacast