Crime Junkie - UPDATE: Angela Mischelle Lawless (Interview with Josh Kezer)

Episode Date: February 25, 2019

UPDATE: Josh Kezer, the man who was wrongfully convicted of Angela's murder and then later declared actually innocent, reached out to us to discuss the case. If you are familiar with the case details you can skip to 52:20 just to hear his interview.Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/update-angela-mischelle-lawless/*******In November 1992, Mischelle Lawless was found by passersby deceased in her car with the headlights on and vehicle still running. Police have spent decades trying to piece together what happened to Mischelle that night. Who would she have pulled over for? Where was she headed? And even though a man served 16 years for her murder the current sherriff is convinced they still have not captured Mishelle's killer and it could all be tied back to the man... or men... who initially found her car.   For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. 

Hey crime junkies, Ashley Flowers here, and today we're doing something a little bit different. We have kind of an update on one of our old episodes. That's episode 34 on the murder of Angela Michelle Lawless. Sometime after we released the episode, we were actually contacted by Josh Keiser. He is the man who was wrongfully convicted for her murder. We had the opportunity to have a really long conversation with him, learn about some of the stuff that's misreported in his case and what he's doing now and where Angela's case stands. So what we're going to do is we're going to re-release the episode next. So if you just recently found our show, you've binged it, you're familiar with all the details, you can check our show notes and jump right to

the hour-long interview with Josh. But if it's been a while, if you've been a crime junkie for some time, I bet the details are fuzzy. So listen to the episode again and then you'll get to hear at the end the entire interview with Josh. I'm so excited to be able to talk to him. And I think you guys are going to be really interested in what he has to say. All right, Britt. Today I'm telling the story of a girl named Angela Michelle Lawless. And our story starts in the early morning hours of November 8, 1992, shortly before 1.25 a.m. to be exact, in the small town of Benton, Missouri. A couple is driving down the highway when they see a car pulled over. With its headlights on, the car is running and the dome light is on. When the

couple sees this car, they pull up beside it and the husband offers to get out and check, but his wife insists that he doesn't. And I feel like maybe she had some crime junkie instincts because all of this scene feels really wrong. Yeah, definitely. Right. So when they pull up, they didn't see anything specific. It just felt weird. So they decide the safest thing to do isn't to go exploring Hardy Boy style and do their own investigation, but they go straight to the sheriff's office and report the car to police. When they get to the sheriff's office, there's a reserve officer working at the time named Rick Walter, along with another officer named Roy Moore. And they're just about getting off their shift. So the two decide to go check

out the car themselves. Rick Walter pulls up and parks in front of the six year old burgundy Buick. And the scene is nothing like what he expected to find. He finds that the vehicle hasn't been abandoned at all. Inside the car is a girl slumped over in the driver's seat. His partner that's with him, Roy Moore, popped the door open with two fingers and the two men shouted a couple of times trying to like wake this person up. They thought maybe she was drunk, maybe she's sleeping, but they get no response. Then Rick Walter shines his light in trying again to maybe startle the person or see what's going on. And they think for sure, yeah, this couple's right. This girl's just passed out the driver's drunk until they see the blood, lots and lots

of blood. The girl didn't appear to be breathing. So Rick Walter radios in for an ambulance at 129 in the morning. While he's making this call, another person comes in to report this scene to the Sheriff's Station. A man named Mr. Abbott arrives and tells the officer that he found a white female in a vehicle down by the Benton exit off the highway. Now when I say Mr. Abbott, you might be picturing an older man, maybe someone who could be like a dad. But this was actually kind of a young guy, maybe Michelle's age or slightly older in his early twenties, like tops. Mr. Abbott says there was blood everywhere and she had been shot. At first, Mr. Abbott says that he told the officer he thought that maybe she was drunk like the other

people had thought. And he said that he leaned through the window, which he said was rolled down all of the way. And he grabbed the girl by the waist trying to sit her up when he saw all of the blood. And at the time that he's reporting this, they're obviously getting the same call about the same thing from one of their own officers. So since they didn't see any blood on this man, they don't hold him for questioning and the man leaves the station. Back at the scene, Rick Walter and Roy Moore are taking in more of the scene as they wait for help. And here's what they observe and all of this is going to be super important later. The driver's side window was rolled down five to seven inches. The victim, who they identified to be a woman, doesn't appear to

be wearing any rings. She just had socks on her feet and her shoes were somewhere else in the car. And it looked like there was grass and weeds on the bottom of her socks. So they're thinking that she had gotten out of her car at some point. And to back this up, there appeared to be drops of blood outside of her vehicle. About the time the first responder comes responding to Rick Walter's call, he checks for a pulse, but there is none. However, her body is still warm and clammy, so they know that she had to have died shortly before they arrived. This first responder also takes note of the girl's grassy socks and the blood outside of the car. That's when they follow this trail. And it appears that at some point, their victim had actually been outside of her car

and had gone over a guardrail down a grassy embankment. And at the bottom was a bloody scene where they believe that she was severely beaten and hit over the head. They could tell this not only from the scene, but from her wounds. What wasn't obvious at first, though, but becomes clear after officers take a harder look at the car was that the girl had not only been covered in blood from her two blunt force trauma wounds, but when they took a closer look, Walter notices spent shell casings. And that's when he realized that she had actually been shot three times after being beaten. So what they piece together and what they think happened is that this girl was driving down the highway and they think that someone somehow got her to pull over. There was nothing wrong

with her car. So their best guess is that it was someone that she knew or someone that got her attention and would make her feel comfortable enough to pull to the side of the road near the exit. And there had to have been some kind of altercation that either made her run down the ramp or maybe she followed someone down that grassy embankment. But there is where she was beaten and they think that she was likely hit over the head a couple of times and knocked unconscious and then carried back up over the hill over the guardrail put back in her car where either she was shot while unconscious or some people believe that maybe she regained consciousness. And this is what scared the person they shot her three times point blank range once in the face once in the back of her

head and once in her back while they are processing the scene Roy Moore sees a white car a hatchback or station wagon coming towards him and this person actually comes up and he's driving by really slow which is creepy. So Roy stops the car and the driver speaks Spanish and asks where he might be able to get some gas. So he directs him basically says everything's closed right now dude just like go home. Just minutes after this first encounter Roy sees another vehicle pass by then loop around and a man actually approaches Roy directly and Roy says you know can I help you and this man asked is she dead oh my god and Roy's like what are you talking about like this guy doesn't isn't supposed to know anything about the scene and he said the girl I'm the one that found

the girl and this man goes on to tell Roy Moore that he was Mr. Abbott and he tells him about how he had gone into the Sheriff's station to report finding the body but actually going to the police wasn't his first move he kind of tells Roy a slightly different story he says that he had come upon the scene tells the same story about finding her reaching in the window trying to help her up realizing she was shot so then he says he drives to a nearby pay phone tries to call 911 but for some reason the phone didn't work or he couldn't get through so that's when he drove into the station Roy Moore actually calls in to verify this story and he asked the person in the Sheriff's office if he wanted the guy to come back in and he said no you know we got everything we need from

him you can let him go to as they continue their investigation they find that the victim is 19-year old college student Angela Michelle Lawless but she goes by Michelle the first stop they make is around 3 a.m. to Michelle's parents house where they have to make the notification and start to try and piece together Michelle's last known movements who might have wanted to hurt her who was she acquainted with who was she hanging out with that night and here's what they learned about Michelle and what she did in the evening hours of November 7th and the early morning hours of November 8th at around 7 p.m. Michelle is hanging out and cruising around with friends around midnight she drops her friend off at home and she tells her friend that she plans to go home

too now we know for sure she doesn't go home because she ends up murdered on the side of the road at 1 30 in the morning but we also know for sure that she isn't murdered on her way home because her body was still warm when officers arrived on the scene so we know that she had to have gone somewhere else and according to her on again off again boyfriend of three years named Leon Michelle was at his house during that missing time and he said she came over around midnight they had sex and then she left around 1 a.m. now Michelle and Leon were on again and off again because like a they were teenagers and like woof dating was the worst in high school but not for all of us yeah not for all us who married our high school sweethearts but woof so apparently

though they would also fight a lot and he would get especially angry or jealous if he saw her hanging out with other guys so even if it was just friends I mean it caused a ton of fights so that's why they were so tumultuous on again off again Leon told the police this about their relationship but police also confirmed this story from Michelle's diaries that they were on again off again but she did really love him so again according to Leon around 1 a.m. Michelle leaves and as she's leaving she says again to him that she's going straight home he did say though that there was something in her that was reluctant to leave like she was kind of lingering and I don't know if that's just because she's 19 years old and hanging out with her boyfriend or if she knew

she was heading somewhere else that she didn't want to go to we know that by 1.25 in the morning Michelle's car is on the side of the road and she is either mid attack or has already been attacked Leon is given a polygraph and passes so police continue to look for new suspects all of Michelle's friends say that she didn't have an enemy in the world she wasn't afraid of anyone before her death so they felt like they had absolutely nothing to go off of this brings us to November 9th they circle back and talk to the same guy that found her Mr Abbott and things get a little wonky with Abbott they interview him about that night his actions his movements and what he might have seen and here's what he tells them well here's what he tells them the first time he walks them through

finding Michelle again he said I see the car I pull over thought maybe she was drunk and so I reached into the window to like grab her by her waist and help her up and that's when I realized she's covered in blood and had been shot and he said the scene was so bloody that he only knew she was a woman because she had all these rings on her hand what didn't the responding officers notice that she wasn't wearing any rings right so a little bit of a red flag and this time when he's telling the story he has something new to add he says that as his truck was approaching the exit near Michelle's car he saw a man who looked like a hitchhiker wearing a gray sweatshirt and light colored jeans jump off into that ditch alongside Michelle's car so this is where we get him saying

like he has the first sighting of somebody not a half an hour later he gives a more detailed statement to another deputy and in this version he finds Michelle in the car he had straight for the payphone at the small convenience store and the store is closed but he tells police that he dialed 911 from the payphone anyways and as he's doing so a small white car rolled up and a man with dark complexion who he described as his spanish asked for a ride claiming he was out of fuel so this kind of makes sense this version because you'll remember there was a guy that pulled up kind of matching that description and talked to the officer Roy Moore so police okay maybe they can believe this one well when pressed he said it was too dark to give any more detail about what

this guy looked like and in another totally different statement to police Abbott says that the car's interior was so dark it was difficult to tell how many people were inside but it could have been as many as six so first there's this hitchhiker jumping over the guardrail then there's this Hispanic guy who asked him for a ride near the scene then there's maybe six people in a car that he talks to so there's a couple of things wrong with Abbott's statements or his ever changing statements things that stuck with Rick Walter for decades and the first was his statement to that deputy the first time that he went in saying he found a woman who had been shot now when Rick Walter went to the scene he remembers saying that you know I had no idea what happened to her I

thought she was beat she was so bloody I had no idea she had been shot until we found those shell casings so he thinks it's strange that this person who had little to no interaction with her would have known her cause of death the second thing that he finds really strange about his statements is the fact about the window so when the police officers the deputies pulled up to the scene the window was only rolled down five to seven inches Abbott's telling them the window was rolled down enough that he actually got his body into the car and tried to pick her up by the waist so he's saying that if he actually did put his body in the car he would have broken the glass there wasn't enough room and it wouldn't have made sense that the window was rolled down and then

he rolled it back up so that's not flying either and then the third thing was exactly what you pointed out those rings mr Abbott said that he only knew it was a woman because of her rings but if you remember from the beginning of the story she wasn't wearing any and all of her rings were found in the center console of her car so not only did this not make sense but it would make someone think that maybe this mr Abbott guy had seen Michelle at some point that night with her rings on yeah i'm with rick walter there's a lot that doesn't add up here right so he is got his eye on him he doesn't feel right but again he's just a part-time deputy like on the reserves he's not an official investigator so this is not his case now the fourth thing i need to mention that is

probably the wonkiest of all and i keep using the word wonky but the weirdest of all and police knew about this confusion right away but i wanted to get all the other facts out there first so no one was distracted by it when mr Abbott approached those deputies on the scene he introduces himself as mark Abbott when police called into the deputy to verify his story about coming in to report the scene the jailer there said the man identified himself as Matt Abbott wait why would he give two different names that doesn't make any sense because it was two different guys mark and matt Abbott are identical twins what yes and to this day there is still a ton of confusion about who reported it who was actually on the scene i guess these guys had a history of like taking each other's

places when they were younger they would like do each other's schoolwork or play pranks on people and one person would pretend to be someone that was actually the other so no one is really buying their story the the story that the boys are sticking to is that the whole time everything was mark and matt had nothing to do with it but the deputy at the sheriff's station says no i wrote down matt Abbott why would i write like why would i write that down that's who he said he was so this has just been a red flag the whole time of why are these two boys both at the scene but not being honest about like i could even see one found her and like sent their brother i mean i think you could write this off pretty easily but they're sticking to the story that everything was mark

and it's just a red flag that i can't get rid of and both of these boys did actually know michelle they didn't know her well but she had mentioned the boys to her friends saying she thought they were cute and she had mentioned them in their diary so it's possible it's speculated that at some point she may have dated one of them but it's not known for sure which one or when the deputies continue to look heavily at mark and they do identify other suspects though her boyfriend for one who was last seen with her a man named todd mayberry who michelle's friends saw her actually fighting with at a halloween party just a few weeks earlier but none of these men could be conclusively linked to her murder the officers bring mark back in again and have him take a

polygraph he gives yet another story about when he was making that 911 call this time he talks about meeting that man who ran out of gas and needed a ride but he says now that this is a man that he had met earlier that night at a party he said he gave police that name just 10 days following the crime but this man's name was never released so i have to assume that he was cleared or more likely never existed because mark is bananas the department continued to identify more people of interest but a month into the investigation deputies still had not a single idea on what the motive would be or why she would have pulled over her car i mean they had more questions and answers and even a month into the investigation they didn't have a single prime

suspect and four months past before the sheriff's office gets the big break that they've been waiting for several inmates at a county jail say that there was a 17-year-old boy from illinois who was being held in a missouri county jail very briefly on an assault charge and while he was there apparently he had confessed to killing michelle's these other inmates and this boy's name was joshua keezer this is huge for the investigators and the prosecutors so they put together a photo lineup and they go back to mark abbott who's clearly like the most reliable witness wink wink sarcasm no he's not and this is the beginning of a lot that goes wrong in the case against josh first i mean the fact that they're going to mark at all when he's changed his story so much to me is crazy

but when they put this photo lineup together they basically do one sheet and they tell mark that the person they think did it is in this lineup and mark then picks out josh and says that he looks like it could be the guy that he saw in the car that night okay i have to explain josh to you because i just realized this is audio and you can't see anything josh is this like blonde hair blue eye white boy and he said that the guy he saw in the car was a dark-skinned hispanic man i'm not sure why this like adds up to anyone ever yeah i mean i'm a light-skinned hispanic person so like mistaking me for hispanic sure that's what i am mistaking me for white sure but not if you're blonde hair and blue white like i don't think anyone would mistake me for you

exactly so this statement though this lineup combined with the statements from the jailhouse informants is all police need and they end up charging josh with michelle's murder and everyone is stunned her friends her family never had heard josh's name before josh says he's never met her they weren't friends he isn't mentioned in her diaries and everyone feels just lost was she just at the wrong place at the wrong time and she ran into this stranger but that doesn't even really make sense because what they can't figure out is like something someone made her pull over and she wouldn't have pulled over for a guy she'd never met before even the investigators that were first on the scene thought that she pulled over for someone she knew and she did not know josh

but in the sheriff's mind this was a but a minute detail in the sheriff's mind josh fit the profile of a killer he had an unstable home life he would bounce from place to place sometimes even sleeping on the streets and he had plenty of run-ins with the law by the time he found himself in the county jail at age 17 and by the time he is charged with her murder he is only 18 but then can be charged as an adult now josh says there was no way he was anywhere near missouri when michelle was murdered he said he was 350 miles away in illinois living with his dad at the time but there wasn't any kind of video proof putting him in illinois at the time so the sheriff and the prosecutor charge him with the murder they say you know we can't prove you were here but we can't prove you were away

so that's really not a hang up for us and when they go to trial josh is a little nonchalant about the whole thing because in his mind i mean he's still a kid he still probably believes in the justice system because growing up you think or at least some of us think that police are honest and you think that the whole reason we have this justice system and prove an innocent until guilty is because that's how it actually works and in his mind there's no way he's gonna get convicted of the murder of a girl he had never met who was murdered in a town 350 miles away from where he was yeah that reminds me a lot of damien eckles from the west memphis three case he was kind of nonchalant about this trial too yeah it was i remember it being one of the things that actually the jury

like convicted him on or like it added to everything because they just didn't like him they thought he wasn't taking the trial seriously and when he was interviewed years later he was like of course i didn't take it seriously i thought like i had never met these boys i didn't do anything and i thought the justice system would realize that there was nothing tying me to these boys so there's no way i'm gonna go to prison for it and it was just like all this act basically that we had to get through but the jury read it as no remorse cold-hearted yeah and it flipped on him so not only is josh feeling confident because he knows he didn't do it there is actually evidence pointing away from him two other suspects that are used in the trial

there wasn't any prints of josh in her car there was no motive by the prosecution for why josh would have killed her there was no paper trail putting him in the state at the time of her murder and the biggest thing of all i think there was blood under michelle's fingernails and the blood type did not match josh really it didn't match him and they still took it to trial right does it match anybody did they test it at the time i'm not sure they were able to this was 1994 so dna was really new and if one thing i've learned the more i've done this podcast looked into wrongful convictions a lot of times if you don't have honest prosecutors and you don't have honest detectives they will actually choose not to test evidence if they think there's any chance that it's not going to point to

their suspects they consider it bad evidence so i think that's what they did in this case they tested it for a type to see if it matched josh and when it didn't they didn't push any further because they didn't want to know they had the guy they wanted to convict exactly and they kind of tried to write it off being like well the dna the stuff under her fingernails doesn't have to be a result of defensive wounds like even if she was defending herself like she could have grabbed the guy's shirt i mean the the stuff under her nails doesn't mean anything which to me is kind of crazy i think the dna under your fingernails when you're murdered and she did have marx on her right hand and her wrist that were consistent with defensive wounds so we know she fought this seems like a

key piece of evidence to me definitely so josh is thinking okay not only is there no evidence pointing directly at me there's also evidence that could be pointing at someone else all they have at this point against josh is those jailhouse informants and mark abbott's testimony that he saw him that night near the scene and josh's lawyer was desperately trying to discount mark statement saying that he was quote holy unreliable as a witness which let's be honest he legit was the worst but he was able to testify anyway and the prosecution did present some evidence they say is proof of a crime they said that the jacket josh was wearing that night and the car that he had access to showed signs of blood when they did some luminal testing but to me again it still

doesn't feel like strong enough evidence because it's not like it they tested it and it was michelle's blood they just said that there were some like spots that showed up their case to me was still really lacking but just before the trial ends another witness comes forward and provides prosecution exactly what they need to put josh away this witness provides a motive a friend of michelle's name shantel comes forward with a story that is a very familiar story shantel says that there was a man at a halloween party that michelle was arguing with like todd mayberry well no so when investigators did their investigation they found that she fought with a todd mayberry at the halloween party but shantel says now this man was actually josh that she fought with she said that josh was at

the party and he kept asking michelle out michelle kept saying no and he got really ugly and it got heated and then he gives up on michelle comes up to shantel and asks her out and shantel's like are you kidding me you've been asking my friend out all night and when she turns him down he slaps her on the back of the head and even though this sounds super made up because there was someone before who said that guy wasn't josh the prosecution is like this is what we are looking for finally a motive so they are going to use it they say okay he was angry at michelle for rejecting him he clearly is violent because he smacked shantel on the back of his head when he didn't get what he wanted this is it and really it was the piece that they were missing it was all they were missing

and all the jury needed because with this new witness the jury deliberated and found josh guilty of second degree murder and sentenced him to 60 years in prison literally the day after the trial was over another friend don who actually had hosted that halloween party read about shantel's testimony and came forward and was like nah uh she spoke to josh's attorney and said she knew everyone at her party and josh was not there but it was too late to use her at this point and the case was over so josh goes to prison sentenced to 60 years and he was sent to one of the deadliest prisons in america which has now been closed a few years after he had been in prison josh's mom happens to meet a private investigator named jim sullens he comes into a diner where she's

serving as a waitress and they get to talking about her son and how he's in prison for something he didn't do and this private investigator gives her his card probably just as like a nice gesture and she shows up though weeks later at his office with boxes of materials and when he looks at josh's case and this is 1997 now he spent the first couple of months actually trying to prove that he did it he wanted to see what the prosecution saw what did they know that makes so much sense that made them so sure of his guilt that they could send this kid to prison for 60 years and he's like i want to find this so i can show josh's mom and maybe put her mind to ease that maybe he's where he belongs but he couldn't find it not only could he not find a single

thing connecting josh to the murder he couldn't find any proof that he had even been in missouri at all which is what josh had been saying the whole time multiple family members in illinois remember seeing him the night of november 7th 1992 less than two hours before michelle was murdered from where he was in illinois it would have been physically impossible for him to get to michelle and kill her even if he had known her or had a motive which by the way he still did not this case was slowly eating away at the private investigator he said it bothered him more than almost any other case he had worked because he couldn't make any kind of connection and he couldn't figure out why the sheriff would have focused in on this guy with no motive and no

connection to the crime when there were other suspects eventually he packed up all of his research everything that he had gathered and turned over about 50 pounds of paperwork to the then governor basically pleading and saying listen you have somebody in jail who shouldn't be there and the governor's office doesn't even dignify his efforts with a response and he doesn't hear anything about his efforts until 2004 when he's contacted by a woman named jane who was a volunteer social worker in the prison where josh was housed she had gotten to know josh and taken an interest in his case and although she had no legal background you didn't need one to see that this kid got a raw deal so she actually works on his behalf to get a lawyer to take on josh's case pro bono so jane

and the lawyer and the pi are all trying to work new leads filed for appeals do anything they can to give josh a second shot at a fair shake while they're working all of their angles everyone is surprised when a new sheriff comes to visit josh in prison it's 2006 now and remember rick walter the first guy to be on the scene who went to go check out michelle's car after work yeah well he is sheriff now and he has never formally met josh because again he wasn't an investigator he just arrived on the scene and someone else took over but he has a sit-down with him in prison and he asked josh if he trusts law enforcement and josh basically says listen all i know is i don't trust the scott county sheriffs and that's when sheriff walter drops a bombshell he says listen i'm on

your side i have never believed that you are guilty and now that i'm in charge i promise you i'm gonna find the truth you guys i know i got like really happy full body chills like this is so magical it's so rare i mean we can go into this a little bit later but to overturn a case that's already been closed i mean there's like financial repercussions there's political repercussions what this guy's doing is not popular but for every like bad prosecutor and bad investigator it is so heartwarming to know that there are a couple of good guys out there who know that people make mistakes and won't stand for it just because they're part of a system like i have such a cop crushed on sheriff walter right now seriously also cop crushed we need to like brand that or

something crash hashtag cop crush so 15 months after sheriff walter met josh and 27 months into the new investigation walter and his team began to question every piece of evidence every testimony every alibi and they start from scratch like the pi before them they found nothing that connected josh to michelle's murder sheriff walter hires a full-time investigator to work on the case and naturally the first place this investigator wants to start is with mark abbott what he finds is that mark's changing stories didn't stop when josh was convicted and sent to prison he continued to tell new changing stories in 1997 there was an entirely another version that he told police now mark and matt both were in jail at the time for manufacturing meth and mark offered up a new

story about michelle's homicide hoping that maybe he could get leniency in his drug case the story he tells this time is that a man named kevin williams who was a friend of his committed the murder and mark was there mark said that kevin williams had been having an affair with michelle and that michelle claimed she was pregnant with his child apparently kevin wanted to talk to her that night to try and calm her down so kevin and mark followed her in their car and mark said they were able to flash their lights from behind michelle to get her to pull over which again kind of makes sense we were saying all along it would be somebody that she knew if they flash her like their lights they would get her to pull over i guess the only thing in my mind that i still wonder

is when it's really dark all you see is headlights i don't know how you would know that it was someone you knew trying to pull you over but he says that it worked she pulls over and her and kevin started to argue for a short time and mark says the next thing he hears is gunshots he said then that kevin williams took off on foot toward a mobile home sales lot and after mark then went to report the homicide to the sheriff's office he said he later swung back around to pick up kevin now this story makes some sense but there's even holes in this one michelle was not pregnant at the time of her murder and this story doesn't really account for her going over the guardrail down that embankment but the story does offer up a new suspect this kevin williams guy and by the way

this information was not new the investigator who finds this like back in 2006 finds that this information was given to investigators in 1997 when mark came forward and when the guy who took it like the narcotics officer who was working with mark on his drug case went to the sheriff's office who investigated michelle's murder and says hey i have this new story like you might want to hear this they basically were like nah we don't need that we already got a conviction like you can just keep your stories oh this is so frustrating they're literally just saying we have our conviction and now the guy's saying at someone else we don't really care our statistics look better without this information yeah and it's really hard for me to like wrap my mind around because

one of their key witnesses i mean mark abbott was the guy who puts josh at the scene and now the same guy is saying it's not even like you have like a random person saying like oh i heard somebody killed this guy you're like no we got a conviction it's almost like he's recanting exactly and this isn't the only time kevin william's name is brought up in this reinvestigation a witness gave a statement saying that he and his wife were in the car with kevin william shortly after josh's conviction when the subject of michelle's murder came up and it's right as they were driving past that trailer sales lot that mark said he had run to and kevin tells a slightly different version and he basically says that he had something to do with it and that trailer sales lot is where it all

started if that isn't enough a third witness comes forward not someone saying he heard something but someone saying he saw something a man named dallas butler says around 1 a.m the night of michelle's murder he was riding his honda motorcycle along interstate 55 in benton missouri he got to the exit where michelle's car was and he saw two vehicles pulled to the side of the road a small dark sedan and so we think this is probably michelle's car and a lighter colored four truck parked near the exit so he pulled up to see if maybe they needed help when he got close he saw a woman in the driver's seat she had her head bowed and both of her hands on the steering wheel but he said that she seemed fine she didn't look to be injured or disheveled in any way and a man

was with her and dallas described this man as being about 160 pounds slender and wearing a red hat and he was standing near her car and when dallas pulls up he kind of waves him off and he's like listen everything's fine we don't need help like you should go and at first dallas said he thought the girl might have had car trouble and was upset or maybe had too much to drink and then that this man was trying to help her but he said something about the whole situation was just nagging at him and it didn't feel right dallas trust your instincts i know and i'm sure it nags at him and he said the man seemed super nervous and anxious and he kept thinking about that girl even as he drove away and the next morning he actually saw a television broadcast

reporting that a girl had been killed at the same exit ramp that he was at so just a couple of days later he goes to the scott county sheriff's office to report what he saw and he gave a statement to the girl at the front desk and the girl told him that a deputy would be in contact with him but he never heard anything back so he assumed that the sheriff's office didn't need his story or they kind of looked through it and it didn't fit or it wasn't relevant to what happened but looking back it seems so relevant the description of the guy could have matched kevin or mark or matt and mark actually drove a pickup truck kind of like the one he described and in 2015 dallas ends up picking kevin out of a lineup as the man he saw that night now granted this is 20 years later

but this lineup was actually legit and they showed him a couple of mugshot sheets and they didn't tell him if their suspect was even in any of them and of all of the pictures he points out kevin williams as the man he saw standing next to michelle's car that night stories abound about mark and kevin people saying that mark or kevin confessed to them in one way or another or they would say that the wrong man is in jail or that they took care of her but again in the reinvestigation these two were not the only suspects sheriff walter wanted to have all of the physical evidence retested and the dna under michelle's fingernails her clothing anything in that car and there was blood evidence at the scene apparently there was a bloody paper towel that didn't match michelle

and it didn't match her boyfriend and it didn't match anyone else didn't match josh and this likely could have been the killer's blood and they needed to get it tested the type of dna analysis required was a technique involving a low copy dna where only a few cells are analyzed and it was something that the lab that they normally used didn't do in 2006 when he started this reinvestigation so they would typically refer clients to the marshall university forensic science center in west virginia well all of the evidence is sent there including the nail clippings fingernail scrapings all the blood the paper towel her clothes everything it's properly packaged by the southeast crime lab and then sent to marshall and this also included samples that had never been tested before

and at marshall scientists were able to extract a partial genetic profile based on blood evidence from a bloodstained paper towel now this is compared to josh as well as some of the other suspects and that profile didn't come back as any of them but it did contain enough genetic markers required to be entered into codis so when scott county gets this information back they're like okay like we want to enter this into codis we want to see if maybe there's a suspect that's not even on our radar but they are told that they cannot submit their results to codis and this is kind of confusing to me but basically the reason they're given is that because the results were sent to a lab that's not the normal one that they use under the crime lab's recommendation they were told

basically we won't submit to codis because we didn't do the testing we didn't supervise the testing and apparently there's like some kind of rule they have which kind of makes sense they're basically saying you can't like do a dna here then send it somewhere else and then send that to codis because that looks like you're shopping your dna which wasn't done in this case the first lab never did it to begin with but they weren't going to sign off on someone else's work exactly and they were like you know if if we would have known you wanted to send to codis we would have had to go and supervise their methods which we didn't do now the team that's working with josh and he trying to get him a new trial sends some of the items to be retested but they can't send everything they

need like 37 000 to do all of the retesting and it's funds that they just don't have and again this is early 2000s there isn't a ton of dna methods that are even available at a reasonable price in the us but they were able to send some stuff outside of the us where it was a little bit cheaper to test but more tests were possible with touch dna so around 2009 sheriff walter sent michelle's clothing to a place in the netherlands called the crime farm and basically this crime farm was a place in the netherlands i think it was run by like a husband and wife and they were way ahead of their times i mean they're doing touch dna in 2009 getting stuff off of her clothing and basically they have this farm i mean that's exactly what it is set up where they would

do experiments they would run dna and a lot of people were sending evidence over there to get tested at a slightly cheaper rate but where more things were possible yeah it was more experimental exactly so they're getting her clothing retested for touch dna while this is going on we do find out whose dna is under her fingernails the dna under her fingernails belonged to her boyfriend leon really yes and when they confront leon with this he says basically that that is not because he had anything to do with her murder he says that it was because they had sex that night and he said they were very passionate and sometimes she would scratch him and i don't know what to believe about this because it seems strange to me

that his dna is the only one that's found it seems to me that her boyfriend would be somebody that she would pull over on the side of the road for and we know that he gets jealous very easily if she's talking to another guy or being seen with another guy maybe they had some kind of altercation which came over i mean he admittedly is the last person to have seen michelle before she was murdered so he's back on the radar for police there are even more suspects though information came in during this reinvestigation that the killing may have been connected to a murder for hire plot back in 1994 a handful of people said that the same gun was used in both cases and that gun has never been recovered but they both were believed to have been

a 380 caliber semi-automatic handgun but they don't necessarily need the gun itself to conclusively tie these cases together in the 1994 murder for hire case a man named richard clay was convicted of the murder all that sheriff walter needs is to get one of the bullets from that 1994 case and compare it to his to see if there is a chance that they might be connected but the highway patrol who was in charge of that evidence won't release the bullet for comparison ballistics report shows similarities in all of the grooves but there's no way to know with any kind of certainty just with pictures amidst all this reinvestigation josh is still fighting for a new trial in 2009 he gets a hearing to see if he can have his conviction overturned and after the hearing of all of the

evidence the judge makes an incredibly unusual ruling instead of just overturning his conviction and granting him a new trial he just straight up rules that josh is innocent and the next day josh gets to walk out of prison a free man for the first time in 16 years and again this judge gives me the same like judge crush like he sees everything that's going wrong in the system and instead of going through the appeals and the retrials like if you see a gross injustice has been carried out like let's just try and right the wrongs or we can please and this makes me feel like so hopeful and so bummed out for cases like odd nonce like i know it could happen for him but it won't because of the elected officials involved yeah yeah a lot of politics involved again this

whole case as i was researching it to me is so rare because i feel like for every case like this i can find a hundred cases where everyone is protecting people or they're so deep into politics that at the end of the day the truth doesn't matter to them it doesn't matter that there's an innocent man in prison it doesn't matter there's a guilty man walking the streets it's all about like preserving their own careers and saving face as the investigation continues the rest of the case against josh falls apart all of the jailhouse informants recant shantal recantor statement about seeing him at the party and for many years kevin williams alibi was his wife said that he was at a christmas party but in 2015 even she changes her story to say that

he left the party early that night in 2015 and 2016 sheriff walter tried to get a grand jury together but he was denied both times by the prosecutors the sheriff won't say which man is his prime suspect but whoever it is he thinks he has solved the case and has enough evidence to prosecute and walter said that the denials are all politically motivated which again is so sucky especially for a guy who's just out there wearing the white hat trying to right wrongs and doing what he was elected to do i will say though i think his investigation is leaning towards mark matt and kevin having some kind of involvement because in 2017 the sheriff polygraphed mark and matt again and the same year 2017 a grand jury finally was convened and they were able to

hear 15 hours of testimony over a two month period and the grand jury did not come back with an indictment though meaning that the panels did not believe there was enough evidence that existed to proceed with charges in a trial but they didn't hear a couple of key witnesses that maybe would have changed their mind so there was one guy who would have spoke to the dna that they found that touched dna there was one person who was a crime scene reconstruction expert um who i think would have testified to the fact that the way mark says he would have picked her up out of the car by her waist and later he even says he touched her on the shoulder like they would say that that probably didn't make sense and the jury never got to hear from kevin william's wife who recanted his alibi

for that night i agree that there's a bunch of evidence but i don't see the motive i it was hard for me too to kind of piece it together so i think for people who believe that mark matt and kevin had something to do with it the motive was drug related because we know by 1997 both of the abbot brothers were in jail for meth and kevin's ex-wife says that he was a drug informant so it's possible that michelle found out something either by accident or she actually did know these guys and she found like knew something that she wasn't supposed to know it's possible that they're just really bad guys and she was kind of into one of them she said she thought they were cute and she got mixed up with the wrong crowd that's the best motive i can come up with those two i again i'm so

stuck on the fact that it was her boyfriend's dna under her fingernails but from everything i can pull together i don't think that that's who the sheriff is looking at so i don't think we really need to talk about his motive again what i'm so confused about is how they would have gotten her to pull over did she know that they were following her were they all going somewhere together did something start earlier and then she drove off and they followed her there's just a lot of holes exactly and that kind of fits in with the story that kevin said where they like were at this trailer home sales lot something went down and maybe she got mad and left and they tracked her down and got her to pull over i also heard one theory it's it's not based on anything but someone said maybe

someone was hiding in the back seat of michelle's car and yeah full body shells and they i don't like this i don't like thinking about this at all and they basically like as she was driving down the highway like got her to pull over they had a gun forced her to pull over and then somebody maybe drove up like a partner drove up behind them again not sure what the motive is for that because she wasn't robbed check your back seat right so this case was crazy i hate stories like this about wrongful convictions i mean it happens you can't ignore it it happens so often and to me it's not even like i can kind of understand where a prosecutor if there's like a little bit of evidence something looks bad for somebody like we're all human and we can make mistakes and you can think

somebody did it and actually believe it in your heart but i don't know how anyone believed in their heart of hearts that josh was guilty and it's amazing to me that they were able to sleep at night knowing they're sentencing this kid to 60 years in one of the most deadly prisons and there's a lot of other weird political stuff that happened in the background of this case were actually the old sheriff who was in charge of prosecuting josh actually was like warning kevin williams when a reinvestigation was being done so i don't know if he was doing that like as a being politically motivated he didn't want his conviction to get overturned or what but i mean again it's this case was so hard because there were so many bad guys but it was encouraging to see a couple of good

guys fighting the good fight doing the job that i would hope that sheriffs officers and police officers and prosecutors should be doing so it gives me a little bit of hope and i i hope for cases like ad nuns and other wrongful convictions brandon dassey god i hope that we can get a couple more good guys so that was the episode as we knew it back in july of 2018 but if you're in for some more stay tuned because you're going to get to hear from the wrongfully convicted man himself so i first of all i mean i i want to thank you for reaching out we get we don't get that a ton from people and i know we kind of had like a back and forth of like i feel very uncomfortable reaching out to people you encouraged me that that's something i should be doing as we talk

about these cases and as we kind of gather information of course from the internet which is never 100 reliable something that i really dislike is that things get reported and then re reported and then twisted and re reported and so i never feel like we have the full truth and when we tell these stories so i so appreciate you taking the time to reach out and kind of pointing out the things that that weren't a hundred percent right so you had sent me an email kind of just laying out a little like the inconsistencies or where we had misinformation so i thought it'd be really good if we could walk through that and you can kind of help us understand the story from your perspective what really happened and you know the one of the

first things that you said was that the timeline was just a little bit off would you be able to speak to that and how it really happened for you i could speak to that now i'm sitting in a Starbucks drinking a coffee so and i'm on my phone and don't have a computer sitting in front of me so i don't have my message sitting in front of me so if you can kind of go over a little bit what i said and then that can kind of help me but if you can't do that if it's just the timeline that i can give you a little bit off the top of my head of what i remember sure now i've got the message in front of me so the first thing that you pointed out is that you were not actually locked up when you first became a suspect true i was not um so when i listened to the podcast

one of the things that that stuck out to me and to be sure that i was hearing things um correctly or at least according to what you were saying i also sent a copy of the podcast to a journalist who has covered my story um pretty much the paper has covered my story from the inception of the case and have covered me since my appeal process started and i was ultimately released and they continue to cover the case so i sent it to a journalist very familiar with it and you know it is the same things that caught my attention caught hits um and so one of the things that i noticed was the timeline and i did not become a suspect um because i confessed in jail um i i became a suspect because some jailhouse snitches were locked up and each one of them were facing

various different um charges and they were locked up in the um Cape Trotter County jail in Missouri at that point i was living in kinky key county um Illinois with my father i was not locked up and they were all locked up in the Cape Trotter County jail and they were talking to each other and one of them basically you know i mean what they were talking about they were they were in tough spot because they were all guilty of the things they were charged with and various different types of cases and they were like what are we gonna do and i happened to know these kids because i used to run around in Cape Trotter County um because my mother lived there um so but at this point i didn't live there and one of them spoke up and said hey i saw this murder on television in the news and they

don't know who did it why don't we just tell them just did it and that's that's how i became a suspect it wasn't because i confessed to anybody it was because they claimed while i was living with my father that i had confessed at a halloween party or not at a halloween party at a party not at a halloween party i got that i got that mixed up they had they had they had said that i had confessed to them at a party at a girl's house um in uh in in 1993 where they that the halloween party is a chantel brighter thing where she had said that um i had come on to her and the victim and Michelle Wallace at a halloween party in 1992 and um we know that that was never me not just because i denied that it was me but because the people who held the party

said it was not me um they approached the law enforcement and my attorneys um and said it was not me um and we also have a police report who stated who actually was the guy named Todd Mayberry and Todd Mayberry was spoken to by the police officer and he admitted that it was him and that was not allowed in my trial the judge would not allow that in my trial but back to the timeline um yeah the timeline is that i was i was first accused then i was locked up and at no point did i ever confess to anybody that i did anything i did have um some cell mates in a scott county jail that claimed that i confessed to them but we were able to prove both of those um claims erroneous as well i i would never confess um i was a stubborn young man and

i'm a stubborn old man well and that's something again like i i apologize if you felt we got saying that you did confess uh we always try and tell the story as if it were unfolding so the listener can hear how they might have heard it if if they could they kind of follow the story so i i don't think at any point we really believed that you did um it's what they were saying um but for me for me i think i i tried to convey this in my message to you that the details matter on this so much to me it's your life i absolutely understand well yes ma'am but let me let me even correct you on that they used to matter so much to me because it was my life they no longer matter to me for that reason anymore because my life has been given back to me

my justice has been established i was declared actually innocent and i don't know if your listeners know know what that means but there are different types of exonerations in the united states of america actual innocence is the most thorough exoneration a man or a woman a citizen in this country can receive so i'm no longer concerned about the details regarding myself the details concern me because every detail whether or not they involve the murder of evangelist lawless or they involve the botched investigation that resulted in my conviction or they involve the investigation that resulted in my exoneration or they involve the present investigation all the details now revolve around angela lawless as they always should have

so every little detail matters to me because she deserves justice and the person who killed her or persons as most of us believe they deserve to be brought to justice and attention to details the only way that we're going to be able to accomplish that so that that's my motivation i appreciate that and actually if we if we can diverge just a little bit it kind of you sent me a facebook post that you had made this last november about the anniversary and there being a new da and you had said something to the effect of you know you got brought into this trial not by anything you actually did you were forced into it but now it's it's a part of a part of like what you're motivating factors are in life and that being said how involved are you

still in the case i know you put up a substantial reward for information do you have contact with the investigators in the family like what role do you play now well it wasn't so much a reward for the investigation ma'am um it was that i gave back to the county that decimated my life i gave back to that county ten thousand dollars to put towards dna testing for the lawless investigation and i did there's nothing that um there's there's another i i i you know i'm not required to be involved in this case anymore i choose to be involved in this case because i like to at least consider my man myself to be a man of honor um and i like to at least believe that i'm on the path of becoming the man that my grandfather and my father um raised me to be when i was a young man

now clearly i didn't always follow that you know their lessons because you know when i was younger i was in a gang and things that nature but as i've gotten older i try to follow those principles and i'm a christian man um and i believe as a principal ethical honorable christian man a man should always defend the honor of a woman and ultimately that's what we're talking about here a woman who was brutally murdered on the side of a highway and it just doesn't sit well with me that she hasn't gotten the justice that she deserves is there anything being actively done to reinvestigate her case do you know where it stands now um there are there are some things happening um i um i'm not really in a position to be able to um divulge those um but there are

some things happening um people talk to me uh i have reached out on social media um to people and asked them to contact me if they know anything and just um just recently i spoke to a person who confirmed that she used to party with the suspects of the uh alleged killers i mean the suspect of the i mean the the suspects of uh uh the used to party with the alleged killers and in the um lawless case so you know as she confirmed that i i had so many come and say hey i know this girl who used to party with them um would you uh you know maybe you can talk to her so i reached out to her um told her i would keep her named private until she was ready to divulge that information herself but she they confirmed that um so i got people that come to me all the time

they talk to me they tell me things because they know that you know um i'm not scared i'm not afraid of these men i have told them to their face that you know the boy that they framed is no longer a boy anymore when you say the boy that they framed is is that something you felt like these people actively were involved in framing you absolutely why you were you close with them no okay i don't know they answer all these questions ma'am i really know that's okay and and no and i know like no like no the questions like why me and and things that nature i really don't know they answer that question my response to that would be it doesn't really matter why me it was me so um and that was their mistake and and you know i've had people who believe in the in the providence of god that

have told me well maybe there was a reason why it was you because had it been someone else maybe they're not as intent on giving that girl the justice that she deserves and maybe they're not as selfless at things as nature and don't get me wrong i must stand on any pedestal and saying you know look at me admire me because god knows no one should do that but i do want to do the right thing for this girl and um i just can't walk away from that i really wish sometimes i could but i can't because like i said uh i can no more walk away if i'm walking down and down an aisle in a walmart and i see a man slap a woman or a child i can i can no more walk away from the the angelo allis um murder then i could walk away from that and there's no way i can ever walk away

from that do you think there's any way for the public either locally or nationally to help push this case along or is this something that we just have to leave in the hands of the investigators no you never leave a case in the hands of investigators especially not a case that's been in their hands for 26 years um but i also think that the thing that the society can do is just stay interested stay engaged don't let tomorrow's news distract you from news that happened in 1992 that's the hardest thing the hardest thing is to stay focused if they concentrated because every day some new tragedy you know hits us and rocks us you know something new happens and it takes the wind out of us and for good reason because those things they upset us um there's a

you know there's there's been women unfortunately and men and him and children that have been murdered and kidnapped and sex trafficked um and you know and hurt as we're having this conversation and they matter every bit as much as angelo allis and i understand why people focus on them whenever the news comes out my only request is that people would not forget angelo allis i never knew the girl i never knew my accusers i knew the guys that said that i confessed to them at a party right uh but you know i never knew my accusers i never knew matt i never knew mark avid he's the guy who claimed that he saw me at the scene of the crime and now he's the number one suspect i was just gonna say i'm amazed at how

like strong you are when it comes to this and i i think some people are right i think what happened to you could have broke another person do you attribute the way you're able to handle yourself and continue on with your life and stay so involved is that because of your faith or what what is it do you think that's given you the strength to go on after what happened to you let me be very clear about this it is absolutely because of my faith and not faith in a chair or not faith in um an unknown thing faith in my lord and savior jesus christ meet you very clear about that and um with all due respect to our sensitive society that we live in nowadays i really don't care if that offends someone because that faith has carried me through

years of torture that faith helped mold me into the man that i haven't yet become but i strive to become and it without it i would have lost my sanity i know the monster i would have become without my faith in christ because i was so angry when this happened to me i was furious i was full of rage and it was only through my faith in christ and through watching how reading the bible and reading how he carried himself with his accusers when he was hanging on the cross and said father forgive them for they know not what they do i looked at it at the time when i was reading that and i was like but father they know what they did to me they know they set me up they know they lied about me and the response i got in my heart is believing that the lord told me doesn't matter

doesn't matter if they knew where they didn't know are you better than me i forgave i'm the lord of the universe and i forgave my you know the people that crucified me you're a man you can't forgive the people that are to see you and who am i to argue with god so i forgave them and i and i and sometimes that's a daily process it's not a one-time thing you know so sometimes i do that regularly i forgive and i re-forgive and i re-forgive and i re-forgive but every time i find myself doing that i find myself becoming a better man so it is my faith that carried me through this it is my faith in christ that maintained not only maintaining my sanity but put me in a position to become a good man through the process when everything was available to me to become anything

but a good man i grew up around killers in a maximum security prison in what time magazine once called the bloodiest 47 acres in america in jefferson city missouri i could have come i could have become anything but a good man so it is my faith that carried me absolutely and you're you know it's not even like it carried you through i think you're actively doing wonderful work because you know in our conversations before you said not only are you continually trying to make people remember miss lawless and make people remember what happened to her and get justice for her but you are actually also working on other wrongful convictions correct i am um i am i i am um never forgetting um my primary mission is to find justice for angela lawless

but still um trying to um devote my life to other things um to help people who are suffering um i i i try to help others who have been falsely convicted i also have been actively involved in the anti human trafficking community as well when it comes to helping people who have been wrongfully convicted i just know what it's like to go through that so i've befriended family members um i've befriended people who have gone through it or are going through it one of those people um being a guy named donald doc nash donald doc nash is incarcerated here in missouri um was accused of a gruesome horrific crime was accused of killing his girlfriend and we know he did not do it and let me be let me be perfectly clear i'm a hard man when it comes to

representing um claims of innocence i've had many people many many people um contact me and as i question them and as i look into it i walk away from it and i tell them i'm sorry um i hope someone else is able to help you um but from what i can see i i can't and there's been times where i've been like i just don't believe you're telling me the truth that you're not answering all my questions i'm sorry i can't move forward or sometimes i'm not sorry i'm not going to help you i've been net blunt with people before um but with the donald doc nash case i absolutely am convinced that he's innocent and um so much to the point that his daughter reached out to me years ago and um she saw me on television and she reached out to me and she told me about the case and i

got to ask him some questions looked into it a little bit and i connected her with my attorneys the attorneys that got me out um and now they are donald doc nash attorneys are you able to speak to his case just a little bit and point out maybe the things that went wrong was it a lot of the same things you saw in your case or was it completely different um there is there is a lot of differences um i'll go into a couple of the things um i don't want to go into too much um but a couple of the things now people can actually if they chose to they can uh on youtube i made a video and if you look up um donald doc nash or um the josh keezer page i've only got one thing i posted this video i made on donald doc nash well and josh if if you're able to if you email me the link i

can put it in the show notes and on our website for people to get to well you can do that now the i made the video um before he lost his last appeal um but the way he lost his deal was his absolutely egregious um the judge should be ashamed of themselves in fact the judge just lost his most recent election because the people in that area know that he um basically just did not he did not uh do his duties regularly not only with that case but with other cases um but he um but donald doc nash said and one of the things is that um they said they found his dna um underneath the victim's fingernails well the dna was his girlfriend and the type of dna was contact dna common dna so if you have a husband or a wife you guys are just covered in each other's dna

all over the place and all your follicles and your fingernails your toenails everywhere right so because that's common common touch if you went to work today and you shook someone's hand their dna is underneath your fingernails so that's not evidence of a crime you have to look at more you got to understand the types of dna that are useful in a criminal conviction and it's the type of dna that was used in the donald doc nash case is not useful in a criminal conviction and in these types of cases need to become more familiar to people because they're they're they're bad science and a lot of times when people hear well they found dna they they think that means something and and it should mean something but sometimes it means something other than what

they think it means you know so there is that and also the very fact that um a known a previously convicted sex criminal in the donald doc nash case evidence of his um presence was found um years back and the prosecution did not allow it to talk to trial what and they and they and they should have so there's a lot there's a lot going on here um in doc's case and then daniel holt's clause case and there's that the daniel holt's call case the case is definitely looking to also i don't know if you're familiar with the um michelle malkin um yeah the news news personality from fox news like she's like a little like um she's literally like a little piece of like dynamite she's a little asian woman she's literally got like tons of energy she's like you know people say

it's like you know that's my spirit animal she's like my spirit female she's like a little piece of dynamite she's like just fighting everything that she believes in which is awesome and she's fighting really fighting for the daniel holt's call case and she may she she may be able to clarify what i just said i might have just gotten a little bit wrong and on his but my point is in doc's case is common DNA um and um everything else about the man everything um says that he's innocent all the evidence that jesse's innocent you mentioned that doc lost his last appeal the last one that he filed does he have any more to go or was that it for him no they're they're they're i spoke to his attorney to mom just about an hour and a half ago they're on they're preparing to file his next appeal

very quickly like probably within the next month that's a Missouri case correct where you are it is the Missouri case yes is that getting so obviously i've never heard of it here in indiana is that something that's getting a lot of attention in Missouri or is that one of the cases you're talking me to interrupt you but i was going to say probably as many missourians have never heard of the case it's it's a greek just actually um and one of the things that has angered me about the doc nash case is the um how little it's known us and that was that was what i was afraid of is kind of like you were talking about in angela lawless's case how people just have a short attention span and they forget i was wondering if if that was a case in his where people just moved on and even though

he's going through this process no one's paying attention we're talking about the victim that case was murdered in 1982 that doc nash wasn't wasn't even um arrested until 2008 because of the dna is that what spurred the arrest yeah they looked into the case and some like some kids they or something along those lines found you know found this dna and it's like uh if she was murdered in 1982 on this flimsy evidence you know that is not being properly used you're going to arrest them in a decimated life and now he's 76 years old and i just spoke to him on the phone the other day he called me and it took me all of 30 minutes to encourage him to continue to fight and to live how long did it take you to go from being that angry man to

the man who could forgive and you know try and help other people from one to the other i don't know that i've actually made the transition if we're talking about a clear transition i haven't made that transition yet i still struggle with anger and i still have to bring that to the cross of christ and i still got to bring it to in prayer to god and i still have to forget um but how long did it take me to start seeking that path yeah i don't know i don't know if i have a timeline clear timeline of my own head on that when i do know that at no point in time have i ever been upset with the lawless family ever i mean you can go back as far as this case goes and i've always understood who the actual victim was in this case i had to have people convince me at one

point time even after my conviction that i was a victim it took me a long time to accept that i was a victim really yeah and even like today um i have friends that um um that are in the anti-human trafficking industry you know we use the word survivor and i don't know if you've ever heard um rebecca bender with a rebecca bender initiative um she's not she's not like a close friend but i like her better you know i'm saying we get along chat on facebook that makes it official right um totally but uh we talked about and then i've shared with her how um i'm not really that big of a fan of the word survivor um why is that because i wasn't really interested in surviving prison i was more interested in conquering it um and in the word of god he says we're more than

conquerors in christ and what that really means in my head when i think i'm more than a conqueror i think of a a warrior that conquers a city and then he takes the city and then he makes the city his own and i felt like the only way i was really gonna i was really going to beat this is if i took this false conviction i took this torture i took the suffering i didn't just survive it i didn't just take it over but i literally made it something that it was never intended to be i turned it into something that is mine that is that is precious between me and god that can be used for his purpose and can be used for other people and i can tell you without them ever having to admit it the people that did this to me never intended that to happen and i and i believe that that's what any of us who

are going through something can do you mentioned that uh you know you never blamed her family with even when they thought you were guilty you you never you knew that they were the victims do you have any kind of relationship with them now no not really and it's not necessary i mean i've spoken i've spoken to her brother um you know we have we have an understanding and that's all that's all that's good you know that's that's all that's necessary um they believe i'm innocent um but you know they they they want they want justice as they should you know they're like we're glad that we're glad that josh is free but what about angela and that's the way it should be right now it's really the way it should be the thing that um disappoints me is that the um

um the officers in charge of this have just been so i really believe they haven't done what they should be doing they've treated this case like it's the next jfk assassination like it's going to require a donald trump or the next president presidential decree to release the records and like the grief you know she was a she was a she was a 19-year-old college student who was murdered on the side of a highway brutally murdered on the side of a highway now unless they know something that the rest of us don't know and who know a lot about this case there's no excuse for them not having already finished this case or at least having charged someone and you know what really bothers me it bothers me when they use the excuse well we don't want to do another

josh geezer we don't want to falsely accuse someone else my response every time they use that like no no no no don't use that that's a cop out pun intended that's a cop out because there's more evidence against the um alleged killers now than there ever was ever was against me because there wasn't ever any evidence against me do you think they say all of that you know we don't want another josh geezer because they're kind of watching their own butts like i mean they made a huge mistake when they put you in jail and now even now it's almost made them afraid because even if they have all of this evidence against someone else they're just it's like a but what if we don't have that's where i would correct you though they didn't make a huge mistake they knew very well what

they were doing okay the officers in that day knew very well what they were doing i feel i feel very confident saying that and i feel so confident saying that that they have the gumption actually want to sue me for having said that bring it bring it let's go to court you truly prove me wrong because i believe sincerely they knew what they were doing i believe we have proven that they knew what they were doing so they can't say they want to do another josh geezer right unless they want to actually intentionally frame someone okay so yeah that that was my question so you think that they in their heart of hearts knew it wasn't you but just wanted to close the case not that that they just had it all wrong and ego was involved and they thought you did it and they were going

to prove it no matter what you think they they knew you were innocent and set it up anyways i do and i think ego was involved in that being done so it it's not the same people involved right that that were involved in your case i would assume it's different unfortunately unfortunately it is now because um in my case the officer that you pointed out west hurry when the abbott brother came in and accidentally said it was mad at it you did get that part correct and when you said that that part was correct where he accidentally slipped and said it was mad but it was but he's the many correct himself now it says mark right um the officer that was on duty that night and did not actually go through the process of knowing their identical twins um he knew who they were

and knowing their identical twins did not go through the process of getting a fingerprint from one of them getting a signature from one of them getting a statement from one of them you know getting proof you know proof of who it actually was in in the department at that point though the one who exercised such irresponsibility in that juncture and that crucial juncture of the case the night of the homicide is now the sheriff and the one in charge of the investigation really west hurry and if i'm correct he's facing sexual and misconduct allegations right now do you think it'll take him like leaving the sheriff's office for any real progress to happen in this case i think it's going to take him and everybody that is loyal to him the cronyism and nepotism in that

county it's just out of control it's going to take that um there is now a new prosecutor thankfully that's over the case she was just elected um so that's a good that's a good development but we'll see you know i've um if she does the right thing like i put my message um if she does the right thing then i will uh i was very thankful and grateful and you know i'll be behind her um but and i want to believe that she's going to do the right thing i really do and i've communicated that um with her but um we have to wait she was just elected in november of 2018 correct correct how long is it is there a normal amount of time or has anyone communicated to you like how long it would take for her to make a decision whether or not she's going to try and prosecute

someone else um well i got two answers to that question one um i don't see why they would report to me um i just didn't know if you you mentioned you reach out to i didn't know if there was any conversation no there there is that and two um i i really wouldn't divulge that information um i would respect conversations i had with them and get that private if if that did happen you know what i'm not saying it did but if it did um i'm very respectful of people um they're in charge of this case um and people that talk to me like i will not unless somebody gives me permission i will not release information to someone else um i have an understanding i have respect for what's really going on and the people that i believe actually committed this murder are free so

what we have are convicted well or not well what we have not convicted killers we have are people that should be convicted killers but what we have are killers that are running the street and other people are rightfully terrified the only person that i'm aware of that isn't actually terrified and that has told them that he's not terrified as many i've put my hands in the hand of one of them i had one of them attempt to shake my hand and tell me you know he didn't do it in things and i looked him in his eyes and told him if i find out he did it i want to do everything in my power to make sure he goes to prison for the rest of his life and i'm keeping my work because i believe he did it do you think the the new dna testing that that you helped fund do you

think that's going to play a role in if this case goes to trial again that dna testing has identified a person that's identified mark abit and no one's doing anything what they've known about that dna since 2010 that's why it's good there's a new prosecutor in office do you happen to know and again you don't have to share anything you're not comfortable with do you happen to know what kind of dna well i i i believe it's touch dna but i don't know that that's the only dna and i'm not going to sit here and say that the touch dna is the only evidence or should be the only evidence that we take in consideration for who is charged in this case i'm not going to do that um but the dn but mark abit put himself at the scene but where the touch dna was found i mean you can watch the

48 hours mystery episode about the case um in it they they show in 2010 that his touch dna was found on a part of the victim's clothing that it should not have been found out right if i recall correctly it was basically the way of his story of reaching into the car like didn't none of it added up to where his dna was actually found none of it added up and his description of the scene none of it matched anybody else's description of the scene any of the first responders any the officers their descriptions of the scene all contradicted mark abit's description so you know knowing what you said before that you think okay i think these sheriffs knew all along that i was innocent and framed me anyways it seems like it would have been just as easy to you know put mark abit away

for this even even back then why do you think it was that that they went after you and said just because they had those snitches those jailhouse snitches and they thought that that would just be an easier slam dunk what was like and again if you don't want to speculate to their motives you don't have to i don't really at this juncture i could speculate the motive um and i know a little bit of the motive but it would take too long to get into it so i won't get into that um i do believe that um if you go back and your listeners go back and look at some of the articles that have been written by um bob miller um bridge into cosmo and others with the southeast missouri and in cape jurata missouri then some of that will go into that um if not now hopefully in the near future

um we'll go into that as well um there that paper is dedicated to finding out the truth in this case i really appreciate them i really genuinely do um it's it's it's good to have people that really are dedicated to giving a girl justice you know i think she deserves it i i i keep going back to that i really do because you know if people were asking why are you involved in this or like what what else do you expect me to do man you know really what do you expect me to do i mean can i walk away from knowing that a girl that her brains were blown out on the side of a highway that she was beating she was beaten for an estimated 150 yards that she was practically stopped

hunted back to her car shot three times well let's forget my supposed to just walk away from that um but go but you want to go back to the messages again because you asked me some more questions about that so we can get some more clarification one thing the blonde i did i didn't have blonde hair i know you guys you guys went into that and i know that that might not come across well for me but i didn't i didn't have blonde hair okay okay in fact my my hair was i believe it was dyed with black at that time oh really okay yeah so where it was dark brown one of the two right because they showed pictures um i remember they showed me when i testified in 2008 the prosecutor mike splay showed me a picture of myself he said well what was your you know what

did you look like back then i said what's the picture look like did you have a tan i said you can see i don't have a tan and i said and i've never been to a tan in bed in my life i literally said that i was just fine because i was i i've never had anything to be to be ashamed of i've never think never had anything to hide from um and it just it just was not me period i was 350 miles away from the scene the crime when it happened i'd never known that there was never in the anywhere in that area during that period of time now i had you know i've lived in cape dorota when i was when i was you know at other times in my life but during that period of time i was nowhere near that area nowhere near it one of the other things you brought up in the email

that i actually would like you to clarify because i was just a little bit confused is um we talked about rick's visit being a surprise and you had said in your email that it caught you off guard but it wasn't a surprise could you talk more about that okay because at that time i knew that rick knew my lawyers had went to scott county to look into the case and to inform scott county that they were not representing me in this blessed twist and no no really no holes you can actually um describe it we went down there thinking that the only people that were advocating for my innocence at that point were jane williams and here in columbia missouri um a couple other people you know public journalists and my lawyers right we hadn't yet known that scott county had actually reopened the case

so when they went down there to inform them that they were representing me sheriff rick walter at the time the sheriff at the time informed them well that's interesting because i uh i reopened the case not long ago and we found it at that point it's because he didn't believe that um i should have been convicted now he hadn't yet eliminated me as a suspect as you should not have let me be clear i have no interest in getting anybody's favors in this case i don't need things most of the poor don't need anybody's like just like uh support just because it seems like the social thing to do and so i didn't at that point in time want rick walter eliminating me as a suspect i wanted him to investigate include me as a suspect right and

if you do your job you're going to find out i didn't do it right so that's i knew that he was going through that process and my lawyers had informed me and i was sitting in a visit they'd informed me that he wanted to come and see right um but they had told him not until we talked to him right because we don't want you catching him off guard you don't know how he's going to respond you're scott county sheriff you don't say we think he deserves a heads up right right absolutely so i'm sitting with my uh with some people visiting me um jane williams and another woman who was supporting me at the time um in a visiting room and it was upsetting to me because they interrupted my visit and they told me they they came into the visit and they told me hey you know you're

you need to come with us um you're uh they told they told my visitors and i think i believe they told me you guys can stick around we know the home this is going to be but you know you might want to leave as well and we didn't know really what was going on so they brought me out and they they brought me into a room and the um captain was a captain in the um in the department of corrections led me to the room basically told me they gave me the option told me which was actually against prison policy and the law um that i was going to go into the room and talk to these cops excuse me so i turn around i go in and i see rick waltern i the roid moore was with him and there was another officer i believe it was brandy kate i may be wrong about that one i can't

remember um he would think that i remember all three officers i believe was roi moore sheriff rick walter and brandy kate and rick walter had brought roi moore with him because roi moore i knew roi moore and roi moore had had testified in my favor at my original trial so the um as i walk in i was immediately unpretentious but i wasn't surprised i wasn't surprised it caught me off guard because i was in a visit and my understanding was you know i'm saying that i was supposed to be spoken to and things that nature before then there really wasn't surprised i was like okay so you were expecting it just not not then not not at that point no and people have you know expressed opinions you know like became in and had a

chummy conversation with me and rick have talked about it and if we laugh we talk about it we're like yeah if people could have been flies on the wall in that room they would see there was nothing nice about that conversation really no no it was him knowing that he basically had a wildcat in a corner and trying to inform me of what was going on that he was really looking into it and was not eliminating me as a suspect that i was going to be the number one suspect that he believed something was done wrong that he didn't never step well with him um he informed me that he was the first responding officer um at the at the scene when Wallace was murdered and he went through some of that stuff and he told me he was going to reopen it i'd literally i looked at him i said you see

that badge study arms yeah that's Scott County on it yeah i don't believe the damn word come out your mouth i mean i don't think anyone blames you yeah it was not it was not a chummy conversation say the least but i gave him my word but i told him i said if you do the right thing and if you do the right thing you will get me out of prison i said if you do the right thing i'll shake your hand and i shook his hand twice i shook his hand the day that right after he testified um i was sitting in the in the 2008 hearing and judge heard a call in court room and judge sitting Missouri after rick walter got on testifying he walked he walked by me to go back into the um into the uh you know sitting chamber and things that nature and um and i stood up and shook his hand thank you

when was the second time and then when i walked out of prison and there's a photo of that in the usa today do you guys have any contact now or you just were you know you know he did his job but there's no reason for you guys to be friends no we're friends now you are yeah we're friends now we talk that's no reason why we shouldn't be friends we're we're we're bound together by something um very rare well and that kind of brings me to the next thing in the email so someone who's brought into this and you said in the email that we probably shouldn't have brought her up at all um was kevin's ex-wife and she was the one that originally had testified against you but then she did come out and say no that it that it wasn't you she took it back she she testified

again um do you want to speak to that a little bit i just feel like we need to be conscious as a people i understand there's an interest um in true crime um that's the new thing right it's you guys your podcast is off of and and you talk about true crime and things that nature um we need to be careful um because these are people that we that we believe are killers and people are scared and any little thing can suck them off and i get so like we when you're dealing with the case thankfully in this case there's a lot of information and there's an always necessary to bring up certain information because we want to we want to be mindful that people are scared and that not everybody's walking around you know with no wife no kids nothing to lose like me you know not everybody's

walking around with please please you know leave me alone but if you decide to go there wouldn't bother me at all to get in a fight with you in the middle of time square you know there's not everybody's walking around like that right something more terrified and we i think we i just wonder if we should disrespect that that's all i'm saying i'm not trying to you know um chastise you or chastise anybody a lot of the lines but i'm very protective of people who have been brave and bold specifically women yeah um in this case because i don't want another answer michelle ball this i don't want some girl getting murdered right um where do you think the balance is so again and this kind of feeds into one of the questions you know you ask

why we covered it and i think we touched on it a little bit at the beginning of the conversation is like you especially when these cases are considered unsolved i think the only way movement happens in these cases is is if people don't forget about them it is if people keep talking about it and you know sharing the story of people who aren't even in Missouri but need to know a name of a girl who had something horrible happened to her and who still hasn't had justice whose family hasn't had justice so where do you think the balance is when we're trying to tell these stories but also being mindful of the people like you said who might have something to lose like in your opinion where do you think that that balance lies i think the balance is different for each case um i think

it just it lies with its primary is it just um there are certain human traits that maybe have been lost on society that are not maybe but i believe have been lost on society like empathy honor respect um and um just like everybody just think about it like everybody is if i said some of the words i could throw out words today and you'd be like oh that's taboo we can't include that you know i'm saying we'll get we'll get boycott it it's like a crease man and that's so that's the kind of like the society we live in is just so insensitive really how other people feel we we believe that we're sensitive but we're really not we're only sensitive to our own things so i think that whenever we're looking at these cases just be aware of the fact that when something is unsolved

right it's different for each case like in one case there may be nobody that's scared you know i'm saying there's no one that's scared talk about it freely whatever you know i'm saying but if there are people who are terrified right that's the reason why it's important to reach out to them to say hey you know what what would you think you know i'm saying um and think that nature and i understand what you said in your message that you know the police advise you to not do that from time to time but with all due respect to the police they're wrong like it in in in my case where's the harm and reach not to me i've been i've been reached out to you by a media around the world as that hollywood execs the execs reach out you have walked away from two movie deals

so where's the harm of a podcast reach not right or reaching you know or or something like that or like um i'm not saying specifically you but like if someone wanted to talk about the case maybe they should reach out to the southeast as early in it talk to the newspaper that is fairly familiar with all the sources and their personalities and their character traits you know i'm saying so there's just there's just a little bit of background i believe that could help um understand what should actually be you know tiptoed in and what shouldn't so people today they literally don't have they don't i don't really they believe they have this built engage anymore that lets them know know what should be brooched and what shouldn't i think that the only way we can really proceed

in these cases is just be aware of that gauge that should be there and maybe try to find to make whenever we're looking in the cases those are most of the high points in your email is there anything that that you've thought of or that you feel like we've left uncovered or anything again that that listeners can do you know you know we have this platform and you know we don't want to forget about angela but is there anything else we can do well i'll tell you what angela michelle Wallace was murdered on november 8 1992 um around between 12 30 and 1 a.m i think somewhere around there um i think that you know if your listeners could maybe try to exercise remembering her on that date in their social media posts um with the you know a justice for justice for lawless i know

that the the term seems a little bit contradictory but that was her last name and you know maybe we should um things that nature i know that's the thing nowadays i got out of prison social media is the way that we report things so you know we keep we keep on track so maybe if your listeners did that and then maybe um if they just you know they pray that you know i those your listeners that are pray that like that pray and that have faith in christ you know kind of could pray for her family i would really appreciate that personally um and just pray for the prosecutor pray for the um the journal the journalists that are covering the case pray for the eventual jury that will be over the case um i'm not interested in anyone posting anything talking about

you know damn this person that person should be fired how dare they what about the prosecutor that falsely convicted him she went to prison none of that has any any place in this so save all that i'm not trying to hear any barking i don't want any barking all that stuff is ridiculous you know no paper tiger posts we used to refer to tough guys in prison that would yell at you from the distance piece from part of this paper tigers because if you got up on too close up on them you literally like poke your hole they look like a tiger from distance you get up close on you poke your hole through them like a piece of paper i'm not interested in any of those kind of posts when i am interested in it as people basically just stand stand on it you know i'm saying

stand on it stand on it and if you can you know irritate your followers irritate the people that are on the facebook and instagram and and and i mean and um twitter and and you still got my space for crying out loud and just irritate them and get on social get on google and find the 48 hours mystery story find that on youtube google josh keyser 700 club find that story you can follow the southeast missourians reporting and every time there's something share those things a million times and just make people pay attention but in in the whole process be kind be nice you know i don't know how many of your listeners have watched roadhouse right but like you know be nice what people will solve you be nice when people say mean things to you

and believe in each other be nice until it's time to not be nice but newsflash those times are very rare and they're not as often as people think they are on a computer screen so just be nice thank you again to josh for reaching out to us and for spending so much time talking with me on the phone if you guys want to follow him he more than welcomes you to message him tweet him his twitter is at josh keezer j-o-s-h-k-e-z-e-r and you can find him on facebook facebook.com slash josh keezer so thank you again i hope you guys enjoy the update and we will continue to follow angela michelle wallis's case i hope none of you forget about her we haven't and hopefully we'll be seeing some developments in her case very soon

crime junkie is an audio chuck production so what do you think chuck do you approve