#496 Maggie Freleng with William Beeman

Hello, you have a call at no expense to you from an inmate at anamosata. What did he call himself?

You may begin speaking now, Hello, Hello, how you doing?

I'm good? Is this William?

Yes?

Okay?

What do you like to be called? Do you like to be called will or William?

Most people call me drifty Drifty.

Bill got the nickname drifty because his mind tends to wander and he's.

Aloof Bill was kind of a loner.

This is his mom, Donna.

He's off from the corner by myself, reading or watching television.

I just don't like crowds. Crowds even people I like it, don't.

Like crowd especially in prison.

I come in when I was twenty three, I was sixty seven. Now, well, do you realize what happened day to day and a place like this? And I just you wouldn't believe some of the stuff I've seen.

So he sticks to himself, and the name drifty stuck to him. Like this. One time in the prison yard, two guys started getting into it.

They get dark in then down the old fort. I used to watch the two red tail hawks sore while they were arguing, and he says, all there he goes drifted off again.

Drifty Beaman, but he also says I can call him Bill.

I'm William Beaman. I've been incarcerated for forty four years or something I didn't do, and I hope some good comes of this, not only for me, but for others.

From lava for good. This is wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling today William Beeman. William Beeman was born April twenty second, nineteen fifty seven, in Muscatine, Iowa. What was life like growing up in Iowa? Hey?

It was great. Mustin eat that that rule. I mean, it ain't no big city, but we had a lot of industry and stuff around. Heine's fargest metal factory was in Muscatine. Band eggs hedgecorners. We had three factors of them.

And many many other factories. Once known as the pearl button capital of the world in the early nineteen hundreds, before most buttons were made of plastic, Muscatines button factories employed half of the city's workforce. The city was the world's largest producer of pearl buttons. Muscatine was a blue collar town, and so was Bill's family. Here's Bill's mom, Donna again.

I was a checkout at highge and I also managed the music department at War Worse.

She was also a mom to two other.

Kids, two girls and a boy.

Bill is in the middle.

There's four years older than I am. She's mom's first marriage. And my little sister you're younger. And we were together all the time, and Teresa.

Teresa and Belle were like two pieces of pod where you've seen one, you've seen the other.

Bill and his little sister, Teresa did everything together.

Every now and then at dolls was or so she'd play army with me. I thought both of them how to fight is one against two, and I got a little nose start fighting back. They had to learn how to fight, so it kind of hard. Hits some sentence too.

The girls kicked on him that I think it was because he was a boy.

What would they do?

Oh just till tale stuff.

Uh Bill's doing this, Bill's doing that, which wasn't He wasn't doing anything really.

So I was two against fun. One time I got accused of shooting out a woman's neighbor woman's window with my beaf. Again, as the only guy on the blocks that had to beat against him, I had to pay for the window. I had to help fix mode and filled the snow lawn for a year. Yeah, I've been down here four or five years and found out Terry's the woman had done it. Because I had that woman made her mad.

Donna now remembers those times fondly.

He was a happy, go lucky kid.

He had a milk adney on a mini bike, and he made Gramps some things out here in the backyard and jumped them and rode over him.

She remembers hunting and family camping trips and making him his favorite food.

He likes whoppers, and then he likes pizza. When he was a kid, I fixed stuff on the grill at that time, and it was hamburgers and hotbugs.

You know, he just lived on stuff like that.

Donna remembers being close with her only son.

It just seemed like every time he had a little problem, he would come to me. And his dad usually slep a lot in the daytime because he worked at night.

And I just I don't know what to say. Bill and I were just close.

Donna says. The girls were troublemakers, but not Bill smoked.

He never drank, he never took street drugs.

He just well, I don't know.

He stayed home most of the time.

At night, they would watch TV or cook, or Bill would go off and do his favorite thing.

That was what he was more interested in was his mini bike and mo dead and his motorcycle.

As Bill got older, he struggled in school. Donna says he would have to stay home often because he'd get so worked up about going to school he'd make himself sick.

He'd actually run a fever and throw up. Really yeah, and Bill's very smart.

Despite being smart, school just wasn't for Bill, so Donna took him out instead. Bill got his ged and joined a job core program in South Dakota.

I went to South Dakota. I got certified as a welder Union carpentry building supply.

After getting certified, Bill bounced around working different gigs, trying to figure out what he wanted to do in life.

Or did gas station as maintenance man at a nursery or nursing home. I was a maintenance man in a dress shop or gas stations, working a couple of different button factories, one feet mill bandagg rubber, retire pre.

Treading, lots of working and writing. What did you write?

What I was doing? The street racing and stuff on the street with the dirt bike was three fifty six fifty straight bike and a GS thousand Uzuki.

Street In his early twenties, Bill was good looking, tall, slim, with floey brown hair. He's been described as a charmer, and that's evident by the amount of girlfriends Bill says he had.

That's kind of a buttole because how was Cardra to settle down?

After a while searching for the right job, Bill finally found one he liked as a part time DJ at a local night spot called Baker's Front Street Disco. What kind of music were you playing?

Disco?

Disco? So you know, what would that have been like in nineteen seventy eight? What were the heads?

What all depends on the real disco was always you had to beg Michael Jasson had more than people thought. Then you had point your sisters and oh it's been a long time.

You might be wondering what a guy who hates crowds was doing as a DJ.

Well.

Bill says that the DJ booth was on the floor. There was only room for him and a few chairs, so there wasn't.

A bunch of people coming up there and standing room right, so I wasn't in any.

Crowds and stuff, and Bill loved it. He was part of the fun, but far away enough to feel safe.

I could look out over the dance floor and everything, see everybody having a good time, and I knew they were doing it because of me. And that's what being a djvent to me.

Bill had the life as.

DJ and night I built remodeled houses during the day. I really liked that.

One night in April nineteen eighty, twenty three year old Bill Beeman was in his DJ booths.

People would use all kinds of different reasons to come talk to me up in the booth, and I think gets first place I heard about it.

About the body of a young woman found in the campground of wildcat Den State Park. She was naked and had been beaten and stabbed seventeen times. Whispers of the crime were making their way around town.

Yeah, everybody was talking about it. Mom and dad was talking about it.

The body turned out to be twenty two year old Michelle Winkle. Police said she had last been seen on Monday, April twenty first, nineteen eighty at the Canterbury Inn and Spa, a hotel she would go and swim at after work. Michelle Winkle allegedly spent a lot of time alone.

She didn't seem to have a lot of close friends are relatives.

Erica Nichols Cook is the director of the Wrongful Conviction Unit at the Iowa Public Defender's Office. She says Michelle also spent a lot of time at the mall.

She was also known as the crier by a group of girls who worked at the mall. That's so mean because she'd walk around the mall crying.

Erica says Michelle had a troubled life.

She had experienced a lot of mental instability. She had been treated for psychiatric issues in seventy eight seventy nine at the University of Iowa.

She had recently moved back home with her parents, who were devout Catholics, and Erica says Michelle's father could be abusive.

Comments about her being overweight. There was comments that she wouldn't wear red because her dad said only sluts wore read that he called her piggy, those types of things.

So kind of a sad life.

That sounds like, yes, I think, much more so than the state portrayed at the trial. She'd had some struggles. We also learned that she liked a hitchhike.

Michelle had recently been in a car accident and her dad wouldn't let her drive the family car anymore. Despite living on a state highway, she had to walk everywhere.

So she would walk along this state highway and catch a ride into town or catch a ride back out.

She was last seen that Monday around ten forty five pm, leaving the spa and getting into a brown car with a white man. Five days later, her body was found.

One of the sticking points in this investigation was that they didn't have any immediate leads of who Michelle was with or who she could have been hanging out with or gotten a ride from.

Police evaluated her body for sexual assaults and collected semen and blood samples, but in nineteen eighty forensic testing was in its infancy. The most law enforcement could determine from a sample was blood type, and their tests found specimens from an unknown male and.

Someone told investigators that she used to go to Baker's Front Street disco and that they had seen her there.

Police thought maybe she got a ride to the disco after swimming.

That was the only reason they even interviewed me. They thought maybe her with somebody.

More than a week after the body was found, police brought him Bill for questioning. Bill says he was laid up and on painkillers because he'd broken his foot on his birthday about two weeks earlier. He also had a migraine.

I've had migraine headaches since I was a little kid, and my dumbass didn't know I couldn't mix the pain painkiller from migraines with the painkiller for more broken foot.

And on top of that, he was now in a police station being asked about Michelle.

Yeah, I didn't know her at all, but police let him go home.

His girlfriend is then questioned.

His girlfriend, Joyce, and she says.

Well, he was with me that week of his birthday and you know, after he broke his foot.

But her memory was blurry, and she says.

I don't know for sure about Monday night if he, you know, stayed at my house or went to his apartment.

Bill had accompanied Joyce to the police station that day on May eighth, and police brought him back in to question him again about what had happened Monday night.

And during that interrogation they tell Bill that we know that you know something. We think you picked her up and killed her Monday night.

They must have realized I was on drig or whatever and decided to had done it.

They also knew Bill had a reputation.

I've never been addicted to anything other than motorcycles and maybe girls.

Bill had a reputation with girls and a club.

I had three motorcycles. I had a fifty seven two door hard top. I had a blue van and the sixty eight BIS came and a fan cloth and they made a joke about it. Day after I got arrested, nine girls come down stam. We were engaged and needed to talk to me. I told you I was about all the time.

He might have been a butthole, but Bill says he wasn't a killer, and he had an alibi for Monday night.

I stopped the Clark gas station. It was not far from where I lived, talked to a girl about my birthday party. The next day I got home.

Joyce was there, but detectives weren't buying it. They were pointing the finger at Bill in the interrogation room, and Bill says his mind was cloudy from the meds and from fear.

They both had their guns out, wiping them off of handkerchiefs, and I was thinking, this don't look good, and I was starting to feel kind of happy, I guess, and they kept saying, well, what if we had somebody that seen it. I said, they're lying because I didn't do it. I was confused because I knew I didn't do it, So how can they have this evidence? How can they have these witnesses.

The interrogation wasn't recorded, and Bill didn't have a lawyer present, and the next thing he knows, he's in a holding cell.

I just thought they golt me for like a drunken disorderly or something like that. And cop Star laughing, SnO, boys, So they got you in there for murder.

Police called Donna to the station.

He didn't even know where he was at or what he was doing in there when I walked in and I said Bill, I said what is going on? And he said, Mom, I don't know. He said, they took my picture and took my wallet and my shoe strings.

According to police, Bill signed a confession. Do you remember signing anything like? Do you remember having anything in front of you?

I don't remember.

I not.

I remember going in there and Nick harping on this, bad witnesses, bad evidence, parah cleaning their guns. They were doing this. I mean, my mind was on Cody.

But there was the statement signed by Bill saying he picked up Michelle that night, took her to the park where they made out, and after she refused to have sex with him, he kicked her in the head with a steel toe boot. By the time the sexual assault kit came back, it didn't matter that the samples didn't match Bill. Law enforcement had what they needed a confession. Bill was arrested that day on May eighth, for the

They said that we could have got him out of bond by putting my house up for you know, collateral, and.

Dick wouldn't do it.

Bill's dad, He said no.

And I tried to sell my coin collection and different things, but it wasn't enough money.

Wow, how much money did you get for the coins?

Well, I only got five hundred dollars and I should have got about two thousand.

That I had to pay.

The lawyers had to pay somebody. They got court appointed, but there was somebody they had to pay, so I had to sell it and give them the money. And I was on disability and I didn't get much money at that time.

I think I was only getting.

Ninety two dollars a month, and I tried to save my money and I hired a private detective, but that didn't go any place, and I couldn't keep him because I couldn't afford it.

Bill was actually offered a plea before.

Trial, second great plea bard Well second Gree then was only twenty five years and me, mom, dad and lawyer's got talked about it and I didn't do it. So I believed in system and boy.

Bill went to trial in October, just short of five months after his arrest.

The state's theory was that Bill picks her up close to the SPA, but not from the SPA, at a gas station and offers to give her a ride home, and they just said I had to drive around, and they end up at the park, they start making out, and then you know the failed sexual encounter, but that he killed her. On Monday the twenty.

First, a pathologist testified that Michelle's body was infested with maggots placing the time of death around three to fourteen days before her body was found on Saturday, but she was last seen five days prior, on Monday the twenty first. Remember, Bill had broken his foot on Tuesday the twenty second, and the lead investigator conceded that Bill had an alibi for all the days between Tuesday and Saturday when Michelle's

The only thing they had against me was the statement, no way out stands see you know, said, well, we know he'd done it because we've seen it, or no, we know he'd done it because this evidence backs it up. All their evidence counterdicted the.

Statement Michelle was seen getting into a brown car. Bill's defense said he used a motorcycle to get around because his car didn't run well. The defense also presented three alibi witnesses for the evening of April twenty first, who testified to seeing Bill between ten thirty and midnight, when the crime had supposedly occurred. But most surprising of all was that a witness testified at trial that she'd seen

It was terrible.

I I really can't explain it. I have believed Bill right from the start. Bill just couldn't do that, did anybody. I done a lot of crying.

God took me through the value of death.

You know.

I stuck my tone, and I'm still in the value of death as far as I'm concerned.

Used to being alone, safe up in his DJ booth, far away from everyone, Bill was surrounded in prison.

When I got down with Fort Madison, it was like they were throwing a goky did in the shark can.

Bill says he had to fight to survive.

I turned out to be a wolf, and he.

Was angry, resentful about what happened. To him and his family, and he took it out on anyone who crossed him.

I had that rage. Somebody could say something stupid, go off on him.

After decades, the rage turned into loneliness, and people on the outside fell.

Off, girlfriend's friends, family, everybody did.

Even Teresa.

After a while, she just kind of fell off.

Too, everyone except Donna.

People don't have that much to do with somebody in prison, you know, they kind of forget him.

But Donna never forgot about her only son.

I feel terrible. I told Bill just this morning, I wish I could do more. I wish there was something I could do, and he said, Mom, you'd done it when you were younger. I've gave him money as when I could, and done everything I could for him.

For more than four decades, They've stayed in co instant contact through phone and visitation. What is that like? Going to visit your son in prison.

After forty four years? You get used to it, but I don't like it.

I want him home.

Do you worry that maybe you're getting older and you might not see him come home?

Yes? I do.

I'm ninety two and I have several things that matter. My voice, as you can tell, I have COPD, which kind of gets worse all the time, and I have an ampathy in my legs, and of course the usual arthritis and everything, and I just want him home. I'd like to know I have a son for a while. I just sometimes feel like I've never had a son. And then there's times I feel like, you know, I've had him and he's just gone for a while.

That I don't sleep.

I uh, if you just had a key where you could shut off your mind, but you can't do that.

However, when Erica came across Bill's case, Donna was able to sleep a bit easier. When Erica's office was first started, she was given a specific assignment from.

Higher ups get a DNA exoneration.

Iowa had never had one, so she was on the hunt, and Bill's case appeared to have evidence from which her team could potentially recover DNA.

We had a chance to, you know, submit that all for testing if it could be found, and that kind of started our quest, I guess.

A quest that gave Donna nude hope.

Oh, Erica is a doll. I there you if she's a miracle. She has a found out stuff that we didn't even.

Know Erica started with the basics. What would have been Bill's motive to kill Michelle.

The most fascinating part was that there was no connection between him and the victim. They weren't They hadn't dated, they didn't go to school together, they hadn't been seen together.

But Michelle had been seen with an unidentified man in a brown car from the beginning. Were there any better suspects that should have been looked into?

Yes, we found a handwritten suspect matrix from the in the DCI file.

That is something you could only hope to find.

And we'd read a little bit about the fact that she had gone out with a guy or told someone that she had a date with the Larry Dance.

Erica found that Larry Dance had gone out with Michelle about a month before she disappeared.

He told investigators that he'd picked her up from the spa. They'd gone back to his house. They were messing around, They got naked and got into his bed, and then she changed her mind and didn't want to have sex, and so they went to sleep, and he took her to her friend to a mutual friend's house the next morning and dropped her off there and to me, the similarities between his story and the confession quote unquote were so eerily similar.

And Dans didn't have an alibi for the night of the twenty first, but he was cleared after a polygraph and.

The lead DCI investigator, Rick saiwasinc His brother Jeff vouched for Larry Dance and said he's a good guy. I play softball with him. But the most alarming was that law enforcement had her dad, Frances Winkle, as a suspect on their list.

Remember, Michelle had a troubled home life, which was evident to Erica by the fact that no one had reported her missing.

I can't imagine if my family saw me on Monday and didn't hear from me when my body was found on Saturday, that they still hadn't raised an alarm.

Wow.

Michelle never came home, and the brothers also had a really callous attitude towards her, things like she'd being a problem child, used to run away. And then none of the family members testify at trial. They actually call the brother Mark's girlfriend now wife, Diana, to say the last time that she saw her at the house was that Monday afternoon. She wanted a ride into town so she could go to the bank before going to work, and her brother refused to take her, so she left on foot.

What did all this information tell you?

That the investigation that it had all of the features of a wrongful conviction, That investigators focused on the player right, the DJ, the guy that had multiple girlfriends. They ignored all these other legit credible alibis or motives for murdering her. We knew there was just there had to be more to the story.

Erica and her team discovered a list of people who said they saw Michelle alive after the twenty first, the only day the state concedes Bill could have killed Michelle. It wasn't just the schoolmate who testified at trial that she'd seen Michelle at the mall Tuesday.

People saw her alive up through Thursday.

This list was never disclosed to the defense. Erica filed this as a Brady violation withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense. Then she turned to the crime scene.

The pathologist testified she was heavily infested with maggots, and she's not when you look at the crime scene photos. An entomologist that we hired said that the best in her opinion, the best estimate was that Michelle died Wednesday night, the twenty third, and that she did not die on Monday, that the bugs that were there, the maggots, and the temperatures, that there's no way she died on Monday and looked like that on Saturday.

And again everyone agrees Bill could not have killed Michelle after Monday the twenty first. So Erica also filed an actual innocence claim, but she had to explain if Bill was actually innocent, why did he confess? She says, to start calling the statement a confession is a stretch.

It's a one page statement, and he never admits or remembers killing her. It's I must have done it, but I don't remember it. And so it raises all of these red flags about whether it's reliable, and what coercion was happening in that room, and how vulnerable was he.

In terms of the evidence that brought Erica to Bill's case in the first place.

We were denied DNA testing because the state kept saying the evidence was gone. They don't have it, they can't find it.

The sexual assault kit the one thing that could help prove Bill's innocence.

We could find everything, but the physical evidence.

So Erica also filed a young blood claim.

Young Blood versus Arizona, which is a due process violation for destruction evidence. And so we just had a trial on that in June, and the court ruled and denied that claim and said that while the sexual assault kit has been destroyed, it wasn't done in bad faith. A couple of big things the court missed was that the victim's clothing is still unaccounted for. It was never released, it was never on an order to be released it. It was there, they collected it, they had it.

So you just don't know where it is. Like, do you think it was destroyed?

I think it was destroyed. I think it should have been with the sexual assault kit. Wow, it should have been in the sheriff's office.

And remember agent Saiwazink, whose brother vouched for Larry Dan's.

He's the last one to have known to have had the sexual assault kit or any physical evidence. He picked it all up from the lab in Des Moines and was supposed to drive it back to Muscatine a couple hours away. But he doesn't file a report, he doesn't sign a chain of custody document, he doesn't do anything.

All of the claims Erica filed have been denied. She's amending them and refiling.

If we lose these claims in Iowa, I think next stop is federal court.

Erica says that Iowa is a hard place to litigate post conviction cases.

There's no skepticism, and everybody knows everybody, and it's oh, I know him, he's a great guy. He's done lots of murder cases. To me, it's a hard place to be because I'm the outsider. I'm a threat. The work is a threat because they're so nice. They don't get anything wrong.

Do you get any community backlash?

Yeah?

I think there is a unwillingness to work with us.

And through all this bill sits in prison year after year.

Every time we turn around, we prove I didn't do it, and nobody seems to give a shit. There's no justice in Iowa. There's no way you can convince me. I don't care what they do convince me. Yl ever be justice in Iowa or the courts. I mean, if you're going to put somebody in prison, you've got to be damn sure. Especially with a death sentence, which is a life sentence in Iowa, you should be sure you should be on the shadow of a doubt. Well, I got a cave darkness.

One minute remaining. I had dream last night that Bill was home.

Were there any specifics in your dream?

I just dreamed that he came walking in and we just kind of, you know, I was explaining to him what things.

Were, because Bill no computers, no phones, no, you know, a lot of things. And this town has changed so much since.

In fact, it's changed so much that I see these things whenever this lady takes me to the doctor or out of town that I don't know if there. And that was the main thing, and I was so tickled. I just would let him out of my sight, and I took him to McDonald's because that's the first place.

He's gonna go. And then it's going to be a piece of.

Every now and then Donna lets herself believe that dream of having Bill home will become a reality.

Oh I'm gonna love it.

I don't know as I'm gonna be here that long that I'm gonna love every minute of it.

Bill was recently moved to another prison and he's been having a hard time adjusting. He says this new prison is rough, it's also hard holding onto hope. He has yet another petition pending in.

Court, but it's gonna take probably a year.

I asked Bill if he thinks his mom has a year left.

No, no, I'm afraid you don't.

What does it mean to you to have had her all these years?

Yes, Mama, that's where mom is.

Bill says, if his mom is on there's only one other thing he'd want.

We left the hell.

And get a motorcycle.

I want to have a woman on a back. I want to be going down the road. Reached down and lay my hand on her sigh the slag next to me for her being on the back of the bike, and I'll know I'm home.

If you want to help Bill, you can contact the Muscatine, Iowa County Attorney Jim Barry. 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 Ibara. Our producer is Kathleen Fink. Our mixer is Josh Allen, with research by Donald Salzman