#488 Maggie Freleng with Belynda Goff

For a woman who spent over two decades in prison, Belinda Goff is full of life and humor.

I do laugh. I have to say I never stopped laughing. It just became less frequent, but it was still there.

But one day the laughter was totally gone, and she considered ending her life. But then Belinda thought about her kids.

So you feel, looking back, you're glad you made the decision.

To live and fight.

Yes, yes, I bet your kids are too.

They see them might be all right.

Belinda knows her situation is no laughing matter, particularly what her conviction did to her three.

Kidsful incarceration impacts the children of those wrongfully convicted. It is I mean, it's monstrous that their entire world was shattered, and nobody in authority took consideration for that whatsoever. I mean, the truly innocent babies are being scarred.

Belinda's son Mark says growing up with his mother in prison indeed scarred him.

I had to grow up really fast, and so I was cooking and cleaning and taking care of things by ten.

But he wouldn't let those circumstances define him.

The system didn't decide what I was going to do with my future. The system had no bearing on what I decided I wanted to be, how hard I could work, what I could put in.

So Mark joined the Marines and says boot camp was the first time he felt like he understood what his mom was going through in prison.

Opened my eyes a little bit to what maybe she was experiencing a little bit, and so there was connection there.

Mark remembers talking on the phone with his mom all the time.

I prayed with her on the phone so many times. Our letters meant a lot.

But Belinda says, there's nothing that can take the place of being impresent with them. Nobody give me my children, Maggie, I don't mean my girl and children. Nobody can bring my six year old boy back to me. But the goal is this stops happening to people. I am Belinda Goff, and I was wrong to be incarcerated for twenty three almost to the day calendar years for Rome.

I did not commit from LoVa for good. This is wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling today. Belinda Goff. Belinda Goff was born in August twenty seventh, nineteen sixty one, in Streeter, Illinois, about two hours away from Chicago.

And mom and I had dad use and Lyle and I had three siblings. So there were a total of four of us, one boy and three girls, and we lived in the Midwest.

Belinda was the middle child, and she says, out of all of her sisters, she's proud to be the tallest.

I'm the tall one of the girls, so and I'm like maybe five four. I just thinking of myself as the average kind of girl, you know. I mean as far as my looks and how I am, I I'm like medium average everything.

Belinda says, like her size, her life was also modest.

We didn't have a lot of money. Originally my mother was in nursing, but I think after four children she had to stay home and be mom. My dad was in a military. He was in the army, and when he got out of the army, he took the career. Where as a meat cutter.

To be clear, she says, a meat cutter is not a butcher.

There is a very big difference.

A butcher deals with the whole animal, while a meat cutter works with the pieces for customers.

I did not know that difference.

It is, it is, it is a difference.

Belinda's parents were also spiritual people, and they brought the family to church.

It was a little small Baptist church there or close just to whatever, a few blocks from where a house was, and you know, we did the regular Sunday service, and you know, I was very involved with the church.

And then in the summers, Belinda got to leave northern Illinois.

I was also raised in the cotton fields of Mississippi. When school was released for the summer break, we went to see grandma in Mississippi.

Belinda's mom was born and raised in Mississippi and her family still lived there.

Some of my fondest memories are during the time that we stayed there. We had water from a water pump. You wanted water, you went outside and you pumped. Well. My great grandfather, my grandmother's father, uh was, was still alive.

Life was good for kid Belinda golf. But as she got older.

You know, like most teenage young girls, there's there's a lot of confusion. I think there's rebellion, there's there's a part of you that is just growing because you're you're you're stepping into young adulthood. And so teenage Belinda young teenage Belinda was very home oriented, but at the same time and trying to explore her young womanhood.

So Blinda was going out and meeting other teens.

I met a lot of friends that are still my friends to this day.

And at sixteen, she met a boy.

I met my daughter's father, the first love if you would, you know, And that's how that began.

They weren't dating for long and then I think.

My mom knew instantaneancy almost and I still don't know how she did, because she kept asking me if I was pregnant and I kept saying no, But she wound up taking me, forcing me to go to a doctor and you know, doing examining her pregnancy test, and that's how she factually found out, you know, that I was pregnant.

Was she was your family supportive of you.

You have to under understand the history with this is my mother and that's a scenario she was born into, so she had to She was born out of wedlock with my grandmother. So for her, it was much more than just her daughter. Getting pregnant was like gay day, the repeat of a nightmare that she remembered as a nightmare. What the instant knee jerk response by both families was to just keep us away from each other.

So Belinda and the boy were split up and he was to have nothing to do with the baby. Belinda was on her own. But over time, she says, her family came around to her being pregnant.

You know, reality is what it is, and we're going to have this baby, meaning we as a family, the family unit, my dad, my siblings. You know, my siblings were very supportive. Had I not had their support and during that time, I'm not sure how that would have gone.

In August of nineteen seventy eight, Belinda gave birth to a baby girl she named Bridget.

I was sixteen, a week from a week away from being seventeen years old when she was born. Literally, it's our birthdays are one week apart seven days. To me, she is just truly a gift from God. But I feel that way about all my children, just in different ways. I have three children, and every one of those three children, oh one hundred percent in my heart. And I know the math doesn't hand what it's effect.

But before she had her other kids to share her heart with, nearly a decade later, it was just Belinda and Bridget.

Well, you know, the reality is is a kid having a kid, a child having a child. Sixteen is not grown, seventeen is not grown. And I don't know if you can relect, most of us can reflect back at that age where we think we're grown, but we're not.

Blinda struggled for a bit. She had to drop out of school, and she took multiple jobs in factories and retail to support herself and Bridget. Then a few years later, Belinda was working at a convenience store when a man came in and caught her attention.

Just one day he came in to get a cup of coffee, and I felt he was a very and some good looking man. He was a very German Man. He could just talk to anybody, I think, and we just had a way of being able to wait to people and connect with people individually.

His name was Steven goff.

Head, one of the best viewers of anybody, yet still to meet in my life, and those cups of coffee just kind of extended.

Belinda says she was happy around Steven.

He'd like to laugh, and we did that. We could laugh at ourselves. He was he had a really good humor. But he was also a man of God and he loved the Lord and a big part of what he did and focused on, what was the passion in his life was Christian music. He could sing, he could play, and he could write, and he was just very gifted musically.

Belinda was smitten. Do I have correct that y'all were only together for three months before you got married, as.

You can't remember them the time frame, but it was very short. It was very short. I think both of our families were free shocked.

Belinda and Steven got married on June twenty second, nineteen eighty six.

We got married. Then we had two sons. So in Togalo I had three children.

Mark was born in nineteen eighty seven and Stephen Lee came in nineteen ninety one.

We had fun in the home.

This is Mark again.

My dad was a goofball. He loved to laugh and make games out of nothing.

Mark remembers a really bad thunderstorm one day.

It was one that was shake in the apartment, the windows rattling. Both me and my brother were you know, we were scared.

So Steven started a farting contest, and he.

Had a unique skill of basically being able to do that on command. So we went from being scared of a thunderstorm to busting out in laughter.

Stephen and Belinda have been described as Yin and yang.

I think her humor's a different kind of goofy, but she's I think like your typical mom. She wants everything in order and making sure everything is going how it should. You know, both of them worked really hard, so the time we got was little, so I think we just made the most of that time.

Mark remembers that time fondly.

We would go, you know, rent movies back when they had VHS tapes, you know, and we'd go and get like four or five movies for the weekend, and it wasn't uncommon for us to just get a pizza and hang out, watch a movie and just enjoy the time at home. It was a simple life, but a good life.

Mark says his parents were also people of faith and tried to live those values.

It was a love and acceptance of just grace and understanding that we're broken human beings and we're all in the same you know, we're all in the same broken world together.

Do you think your parents enjoyed each other's company and enjoyed being together?

Oh, they absolutely did. I mean, you know, no marriage is perfect, but I never I never witnessed any real fighting or arguing. I can't look at my childhood and say that anything was a red flag or alarming.

But Mark is right, despite his and Belinda's happy memories, no marriage is perfect, and those imperfections would end up playing a devastating role in Belinda's fate. In nineteen ninety four, the Goths were living in Green Forest, Arkansas, a town of about three thousand people. The family had moved there a few years earlier because of Stephen.

We came to Arkansas because that's what he wanted to do, because he had he felt he had some connections down here well in the Brandson area, and at the time he had a band, a Christian band.

His dream was, you know, being a musician, and he chased that as hard as he could.

Legal was to hopefully break into maybe the brandsoon area or whatever. The music area never.

Really came to fruition, but you know, of course I viewed him as the musical hero. Anyway.

Stephen's band was made up of a bunch of friends and it was called Friends. And although the name wasn't unique.

They had a unique show. They had a guy who kind of had was like almost like a clown. Basically they put on these little skits in between things. But vocally and how he performed honestly remind me of Elvis a lot, I think, and Elvis was his like that was his hero.

Do you remember listening to a lot of.

Elvish I do. Elvis was around for sure, and.

I'm sure I.

Got I mean, I loved Elvis too, but I'm sure that absolutely was by Osmosis.

Yeah.

Blinda worked at a Tyson Chicken plant at this time, so she had to take leave for a bit to recover from a hysterectomy having her uterus removed. Belinda says it was a painful recovery. The incision went from hip to hip like a big smiley face on her abdomen. I've never had a C section. I've never had my abdomen ripped open. I mean, were you able to could you physically lift your arms over your head?

Oh?

There was no when how you progress is just being able to stand up on your legs, but you cannot stand up straight because you know, so the the process, in the initial process of probably at least a couple of weeks, is just trying to stand up straight. That's not kind of walking, or that's putting it bet on the floor your week, I guess is you know how

On the evening of Saturday, June eleventh, Belinda was having dinner with her husband and youngest son. It was supposed to be an anniversary dinner at first, until Belinda and Stephen realized she'd been off by almost ten days.

I had the wrong day for our anniversary. And then he was very amused by the fact that I was not, that he was not the one that messed up the anniversary. That I did. So. We were just having a nice dinner at home and nothing per se out of the ordinary, and he got a phone call and and that's where everything begins that nobody knows.

What is or was After the phone call, Stephen left.

I do not know what he was going to do. I know what he told me. He told me he was going to go on to get some smoke, some cigarettes, which I felt was a ruse.

Did he normally not really tell you the truth of where he was going? Like, why did you think cigarettes was?

I thought it was off because I knew he had some, But yeah, I don't know what to have. There was nothing else I can elaborate on that. I don't know who was on the phone. I don't know what their conversation was, so I can't. It's a hard one for me. I have pondered it for a very long time. Decades. I've pondered that, and there's something to come to the point. You have to stop, you have to let go because you will drive yourself insane.

After Stephen left, Belinda got her youngest son ready for bed. Bridgette was away, and Mark was staying at a friend's house for the second night in a row.

I wanted to stay another night and asked could I do that? And they had You know, my mom told me that we're going to have steak dinner. You know, are you sure you're going to be missing out? We were always into steak. The steak was a very popular meal, and so I elected to miss out on steak dinner and stay with my friend that night. And yeah, of course the story played out as it did. I of course had no idea that was the last time I was going to see.

I'm Belinda says. She put her youngest son in bed and then fell asleep on the couch.

The next thing I remember was I woke up and went to bed.

On her way to the bedroom, she noticed Steven still wasn't home. Then she got into bed and fell asleep again until her alarm went off.

I hait snoos my first thing with the Hits news.

Sometime around four point thirty am, her alarm went off again, and Belinda realized Stephen still wasn't in bed, so she got up, thinking maybe he'd passed out in the living room.

I was just thinking I was going to go out and find him on the couch to tell him to get up. And I found him in our doorway, not on the couch.

She found Stephen by the front door, bludgeoned and bloody.

My first reaction with a lot of hysteria, screaming and running for the phone.

She called first responders.

I was, I was. I was so freaked, so out of control. This is not something that I would normally be, but I mean leaning out of control of my emotions. I was crying and scared and screaming, and my son's in here and I'm trying to you know. And there was no rhyme or reason. There was just panic. It was just panic, and that's all I could say. I was shocked. I was total.

I was a shock, and that state of shock would almost immediately be used against her. Here's Jane Puture, senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project.

The response from investigators coming to the scene and seeing her and seeing her state of shock, and the fact that she was in a really stunned position, as you know, one I think understandably would be. They're just sort of were assumptions and arrest to judgment that it had to be her, that she somehow had to be.

Involved, Jane says. The police described her behavior as suspicious.

And you know, that initial taint, that sort of initial focus kind of clouded everything out from there on out.

When did you realize you were a suspect?

By that afternoon was pretty clear that I was a suspect, because they were, you know, I mean it went on for hours and hours hours, you know, I went down to the police station, questioning and all those things, and it just, you know, it became really clear, you know, because they were just relentless, relentless, and I just confess, you confess, And they weren't looking were facts and then

Police were also quick to focus on another sign they thought pointed to Belinda.

Because her husband's body was leaned up against the front door. It would have been quote unquote impossible for a person to have killed him, left his body inside and gotten out because of how his body was positioned.

They didn't think someone could have gotten out of the apartment because Stephen's body was allegedly blocking the door from opening, so the killer had to still be inside and the only people inside were Belinda and her three year old son. Belinda was released after questioning a police station that day, and Mark remembers when she picked him up from his sleepover.

She came to pick me up early, and it was with a friend who was driving. It wasn't our car, and I got in the back seat and my mom was bawling in the front seat, and I knew something was wrong.

They rode in the car in total silence.

I think she had to collect herself, as I can't even imagine as a parent, trying to explain something like that to your kids.

Mark says. When they got to Belinda's friend's house, Belinda let him know.

She said Dad's in heaven, and I, yeah, processing that was impossible. She let me know that he had been hurt by other people. He was killed by other people. I had remembered that. You know, my dad was in a martial arts and in a karate I remember thinking like, well, that can't be because he would he would totally be able to whoop whoever came at him. You know, like there was the thoughts as a kid I was having. I remember them, and uh it, I can't even I

Over the next year, police built their case against Belinda.

So what was that year like?

It was a very difficult bit or sweet year, because I believe that justice would be prevail if you would so I really was so formor and lost with what I was dealing with because I was so nice.

The feeling with the friends and family at the time was that, Okay, well this makes no sense, but there was this trust in evidence and truth and the system. And I think that most people in general have this bias that says that the system is going to do the job that it's supposed to do.

But in May nineteen ninety five, nearly a year after her husband was found dead in their home, Blinda Goff was arrested and charged with first degree murder. She went to trial the following year, and right before it was to begin, she was offered a plea.

A ten year sentence that would have gotten her out, you know, in fewer than ten years, and she turned it down because she is innocent and she's always known that she did not do this and could not admit that she did anything she didn't do.

In his opening, deputy prosecutor Kenneth Elser told jurors, quote, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Remember Mark said no marriage is perfect, and Belinda's was no exception. That's because Stephen had been unfaithful. She'd even kicked him out at one point, and Elser told the jury the cheating drove Belinda to murder. The prosecution found out that Stephen had affairs with at least two women in the past.

You know, women scorned and what a woman might do if she suspected something of her husband when there was it's just no record, no evidence to support that. Often in women's trials, particularly for violent crimes, stereotypes and tropes about what women are supposed to do and how they're supposed to act play an outsize role in the state's evidence presents it against them. I mean, sometimes it's the whole case, and frankly, in this case, it was most of the state's case against.

Them, Jane says. The police also relied heavily on how Belinda acted when they arrived at her home.

According to investigators who were first at the scene, Belinda was sitting stunt, she was in shock, and that fact that instead of just throwing herself over his body and sobbing hysterically, that that wasn't the immediate response became a huge part of the state's argument, you know, to show culpability, that you know that she had to have done something wrong because she wasn't in hysterics, and that is an extremely stereotypical, biasing view of how women are supposed to act.

It's really troubling to.

See that that would become so much of the case, a lot of grasping its straws and an attempt to sort of pull a case together where there wasn't one.

There was no physical evidence linking Belinda to the crime, no murder weapon, no bloody clothes.

The majority of the state's case came from the lead investigator.

He sort of developed this.

Version of events that, as we talked about before, you know, the person who killed mister Golf had to have been inside the home.

But Belinda's defense attorneys Charles Davis and Stephen Vell said that just wasn't true.

Ems you know, responders, particularly one of the responders who who testified at the trial, you know, about coming to the house, opening the front door, gaining act says he was able to get in and out with no problem and he was no disrespect him. But he was a very large man, and there was actually testimony about that a trial about how he was very tall and heavy set and had no issue getting in and out of

The defense team also presented the jury with the fact that Belinda was recovering from a hysterectomy.

She was still very limited in her mobility. She wasn't supposed to lift any kind of heavy weights. She was moving slowly at the time, very much in recovery.

In fact, the defense said she slept through the bludgeoning.

She was still on painkillers and sleep aids to help her deal with the pain after that surgery.

Belinda testified to this. At trial. She was able to tell the jury about the hysterectomy and Stephen's strange phone call and him abruptly leaving their dinner, but it wasn't enough to convince the jury that Belinda hadn't killed Stephen, and so on August fifth, nineteen ninety six, Belinda was convicted of first degree murder and later sentenced to life without parole. When you heard that, what was your reaction?

I was broken differently, It just did. It broke me. Everything I believed in about our country was shattered and laying my food in pieces. Everything I believed spiritually was shattered and laying my foot And I was just a very broken person at that point. You know, I hear my children wailing crying behind me, not just crying. They were repeat There's a difference. There are certain big, certain songs she will never forget and it will never forget those.

By the time she was convicted, Belinda's oldest child, Bridget, was off to college.

I only daughters growing up the university.

Yelow and Mark and his brother were raised by their grandma Belinda's mom.

There was such a loss of identity. You know, I had all of your identity as a kid is kind of wrapped up into your mom and your dad and your family, and that's where you developed that sense of it. And I just felt like all of that was stripped and I was just lost.

But Belinda says she did the best she could.

The phone company made a ton of money off of my family during those years because I was on the phone just about every day raising my children. On the phone, they knew if I called, like it might be six thirty in the morning or something, and they's supposed to be a good ready for school, and they knew it was me saying good morning.

She always wanted to know what was going on. She wanted to be involved. She had questions, didn't matter whether it was me dating or sports or school. And she also wasn't afraid to reach through the phone and say, you know, get your crap together, you know your grades aren't what they should be, or you know. So she was a mom, She was absolutely a mom.

But it wasn't the same as being together, and that distance took a toll on Belinda.

There was a point early on in my wrong phonecarceration, that I had to make a conscious choice as far as going to live and die, and that was because of the pain of the laws from their children. And I really did have to make a conscious choice of over I at that time, I remember very well. And then I just decided that outside of being.

Your mom, when they grew up someday, well, kind of human beings were they going to see.

Are they going to see one that gives up textailed accepts it. Are they going to see somebody who fought with everything with them or they get back to them and to stand up in their face of adversity against justice. So that's what I chose to do. I chose to live and show them with their global was beata.

She wrote every organization she could find that might be able to help her.

I just wrote letter after letter after letter to them, trying to get them to help me.

She would include pictures of her children and would say, this.

Is why I need to go home, this is what was taken from me.

And then in twenty thirteen, the Innocence Project took her case.

When we started to work on the case, you know, we kept peeling back the onion layers, thinking are we going to discover more. Was there anything else connecting her? And there just wasn't.

Off the bat, Jane says they were surprised at how little evidence there was connecting Belinda to Stephen's death.

But the way this investigation was handled set things off in a complete misdirection from the very beginning meant that there wasn't real investigation into who actually committed this crime?

So who did? When they started investigating, the team learned that Anita Belfoy's statement had been fabricated. Then the Innocence Project discovered people who were never called to testify, like neighbors who had heard knocking on the door and commotion at the Goth's apartment around two am. Another neighbor said she'd seen two strange men with a baseball bat in front of the Goths the day before Stephen was killed.

Who actually would have had a motive to hurt this person? Who would have had the means and the physical ability to hurt this person.

Jane says that there actually were people who had motive. Stephen was allegedly involved in some criminal activity.

It appeared that mister Gough owed someone a lot of money an arson for higher scheme that had gone awry.

There were some things that really should have been looked into.

There were.

At a post conviction hearing, Belinda's brother testified that he'd gotten calls from Stephen.

Saying that he was in trouble and that he owed people money, and that he had been receiving death threats, and that of course lines up with the neighbors seeing people casing their home and threatening him from outside.

Belinda's brother also testified that he'd received an anonymous phone call threatening him, saying that if he said anything, he would find himself quote laying right next to Steve. Jane thinks this is the direction the police should have gone in their investigation.

Instead of doing real investigation and following leads into who committed this crime, the state focused on this poor woman based on stereotypes and tropes. I mean, the fact that that is the version that the state went with is frankly offensive. It's very disturbing to read the record and to look at what was used, because it really begs the question over and over again, why didn't anyone stop and say, does this really make sense. Is this really

A jury thinks that they are sitting down in a trial and they're going to hear one of the facts of the case, and that is so not true. Juries are forced to hear a case in a vacuum and they don't even realize it.

Belinda and Jane believe that if these neighbors had testified at her trial, the outcome may have been different.

Like there was clear evidence of the motive and third party culpability that wasn't presented.

Jane and her team also did several rounds of DNA testing.

Unfortunately, a lot of the evidence that was, you know, that we had most hoped to test, had been lost or destroyed by the state before we ever got involved.

Including fingernail clippings and a hair.

But everything that we did do testing on from the home, we did not find her DNA on anything that potentially could have been touched by the assailant that existed.

In twenty nineteen, Jane and the Innocence Project were finally able to bring all this evidence or lack thereof, to court.

The fact that Belinda had no blood on her had no injuries, had no evidence on her body that she had struggled with anybody, that she had been in any kind of altercation, you know. Putting aside the fact that she also again was recovering from this massive surgery and not able to cause anybody harm, was all strong evidence that she wasn't involved in this, and.

A judge agreed. According to court records, Carol County Circuit Judge Scott Jackson said that if Belinda were tried today, she would be acquitted.

By the time we had this hearing in twenty nineteen, she had served twenty two years and seven months of her life sentence. You know, in some instances, in some states and even in Arkansas, the remedy could have been to vacate her conviction, to overturn her conviction, and then let the state decide if they're going to retry her or not. I mean, the standard of what should have been put forward to have her conviction be overturned was met here, but the remedy was resentencing.

Judge Scott Jackson re sentenced Belinda to time served, and Belinda Goff walked out of prison in June twenty nineteen.

I absolutely remember the first embrace as a free woman.

Man, what did that feel like?

You know?

I just I really just felt I just felt joy for her. I felt like the kid that wanted her free as mom wasn't there anymore, but as a man, I wanted it for her, and I just it was a sense of relief, a sense of excitement, a sense of hope the war is over type of thing.

Today, Belinda is still catching up on over two decades in prison, like figuring out the first gift she received when she got out.

So I opened the box and I had no idea of what I was holding except I recognized the word phone, which was iPhone. It was an iPhone, and I, wow, what do I do with this? Wow? What less than my first ding iPhone?

And just as much as she and Mark talked on the payphone in prison, she talks on her iPhone today. But their calls are no longer timmit.

And we're so used to that automatic clickoff. There's no saying goodbyes, there's no it's just you wait until the phone call's done. And I remember talking to her for probably two hours on the phone, going is this not cool? Is this not awesome? That here we are and the only way this phone call ends as if we agree, it ends something that simple.

Belinda also relishes in the joy of her grandkids.

I FaceTime my grandchildren.

You know.

I have a little two year old Granda. She's figured out how to call Grandma and I just willdre it.

Mark got married while Belinda was in prison and saved her a seat. He had a son, now ten years old, and he reflects on all the momentous occasions he's missed with his parents.

And I think that's one of the tough things is that with the wrongful incarceration, it's almost as if there really isn't a time where you get to just mourn the family member that was killed. The victim in it was my dad, But with the judicial system and the messed up process and the messed up people in it, you kind of lose that ability to just mourn the actual the loss of my dad. And that hasn't escaped me. You know, I've my entire life. I've had all these

Although Belinda is out, she's not exonerated. She accepted time served, so she still lives with a felony conviction looming over her head.

Do you feel like you never fully got justice since you're still a convicted felon I.

Do feel it way.

This is a woman who should have been exonerated. You know, we have like the evidence clearly was sufficient to overturn her conviction.

And it is.

It is really unfair that she continues to walk around with these convictions when she never should have been even questioned as a suspect in the first place, let alone convicted and meant to live with this hanging over her head.

But Belinda keeps moving forward.

Sometimes, you know, when you get to be my age, can learn to look back at different phases of who you are or who you were and need at previous times in your life. Sometimes you might remember a little five year ago you were, or you might remember the teenager, and I remember myself at that time, and I feel sadness for that movement. But at the same time, I'm proud of her.

Belinda is proud she made that choice to live and fight to get out. Now you can finally enjoy the simple life like she always wanted.

It's nice to just go to work and work and come home and just and make a little money, So I'd just like to appreciate. I like to reappreciate the being, the creation. You know, for so long I couldn't see a star, so, you know, or hear the birds sing, or feel a breeze on my face or my hair. So it gives me an extra gratitude to be able to participate in that now.

Two of those grandkids, Belinda Facetimes, by the way, are Bridget's daughters. One is named Belle after Belinda, and the other is named Liberty in honor of her grandmother's struggle. Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support your local innocence organizations and go to the links in the episode description to see how you can help. This episode was written by me Maggie Freeling, with story editing and sound designed by senior producer Rebecca Ibarra. Our