00:00:02
Speaker 1: On November one, nineteen seventy five, Leslie and Georgine Mark and their two young children were discovered fatally shot in their Iowa farmhouse. The extended family was notified immediately, except for Leslie's older brother, Jerry, who was on a motorcycle ride that took him from California to at least as far as Nebraska, but a few inconsistencies about the first two days of his journey led authorities to doubt his alibi. They theorized that he'd set out for the family farmhouse in Cedar Falls, Iowa, to exact revenge for losing his state in the family farm to his younger brother, and despite evidence to the contrary, the state produced enough circumstantial evidence and junk science to convince a Jerry this is wrongful conviction. You're listening to wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to wromful Conviction, where we have a case that pitted brother against brother and a canaan able type of clash. When it turns out that there were at least two other motivated parties, none of whom were our guests today. And our guest today is calling in from an Iowa correctional facility. Jerry Mark. Welcome to Romful Conviction. I'm sorry you're here, but we're very honored to have you. Thank you now to help explain what happened way back in nineteen seventy five and ever since. Erica and Nichols Cook, who heads up the Wrongful Conviction Unit for the Iowa Public Defender's Office, Thanks for doing this with us today.

00:01:56
Speaker 2: Of course, thank you for having me now.

00:01:58
Speaker 1: Jerry's backstory is kind of epically. It's like a movie. He's going to be eighty two in January twenty twenty five, so when this happened back in nineteen seventy five, he was thirty two, and by that age he'd already lived the hell of a life.

00:02:13
Speaker 3: I was the second born of four brothers. My older brother was Richard. My name is Jerry Allen Mark. Next younger is Thomas, and then the youngest of all is Leslie Wayne Mark. Mom and dad on day two hundred acre farm in northeast Iowa. We lived in a huge seventeen eighteen room farmhouse. It had been built for very large families and previous generations of the Mark family. So I grew up on a farm. And the person that I was accused of murdering and his family was my youngest brother, Less, who was seven years younger than me, and I was his mentor, and I kind of taught him out to do all the farm chores. That was away a lot because Dad switched over from being a farmer to being a real estate broker.

00:02:58
Speaker 2: Today farming more corporate right, and Wayne was a pioneer in that he was buying smaller farms and amassing thousands of acres, and he wasn't always well liked. In fact, he and an attorney in town, a friend. They had a corporation called vy Vim, and they would use it to make purchases of farmland for people who didn't want to sell to Wayne.

00:03:23
Speaker 3: These would be widows whose husbands had died and left them a farm, and the farms were worth a lot more than the old ladies realized, and the attorneys could persuade the class to sell the farm a straw buyer with an either farm. One farm we found out they sold for two hundred and fifty thousand bucks, and then a few months later turned around a straw purchaser resold the farm for seven hundred and fifty thousand, so they made half a million dollars on just one farm transaction.

00:03:52
Speaker 1: It appears that the rest of the Mark family was unaware of these crooked dealings. In fact, Jerry had planned to join his dad's partners after law school, but first he joined the Peace Corps.

00:04:04
Speaker 3: Which was a response to President John Kennedy. He brought out these fielings of pat triotism and service in people like me, and so I went to Brazil for two years in nineteen sixty two and sixty three.

00:04:16
Speaker 2: He's the first class in the Peace Corps and so with his farming background, he's placed in rural Brazil, where he meets the Blestra family and he becomes friends with Renato Blestra. Renato's dad is like the mayor. Jerry ends up staying with Renato. They become very close. When Jerry's time is up in the Peace Corps, he returns home and then gets a visa for Renato to live in Cedar Falls with the Mark family. Jerry actually goes back to school to finish college and then gone to law school and Renato stays with Wayne and Dorothy on the farm. He gets his pilot license and goes to Vietnam.

00:04:55
Speaker 1: So while Renato served in the US military, gaining a path in the US citizenship, Jerry was able to go a different path. Before the draft was reinstated. He joined the Navy, but he refused an officer commission for another role at home.

00:05:09
Speaker 3: I strongly opposed that war. Two of my very dearest friends volunteered to go to Vietnam, so we were patriotic. It was just kind of accidental that I learned enough about the Vietnamese independence movement to understand that we were on the wrong side of that, and I found myself drawn into the civil rights movement here in the United States. In the summer of sixty four, I volunteered to be the fundraiser for James Jackson, and first African American elector to the Arwood Legislature in modern times.

00:05:39
Speaker 1: So through college and law school, Jerry was engaged in politics and the anti war movement, and in nineteen sixty eight he and his wife Rebecca were Iowa delegates for Bobby Kennedy before his assassination, which in turn ushered in Richard Nixon and the war escalated, while Jerry joined the Legal Aid Society to protect the indigenous as well as those who were pro sedvil rights and opposed to the war.

00:06:02
Speaker 3: By this time, I have already had a reputation as a radical attorney, and I was playing right into their images. I guess I had long red hair and a red beard living in Berkeley. I had become such an anti war fanatic that my wife had basically given me an ultimatum. I had to settle down and have a normal family life somewhere, or she wanted a separation. We had two little girls, and I just didn't take it seriously enough.

00:06:29
Speaker 1: Jerry and Rebecca divorced and shared custody of their girls, and soon Jerry met somebody knew, a neighbor of his at a Berkeley, California trailer park named Mimi, who was also divorcing her husband, Alga Forrest, and in the spring of seventy five, the new couple returned to Cedar Falls with the girls to visit Jerry's ailing father and to discuss the future of the farmhouse.

00:06:51
Speaker 3: I was very assertive toward that, and I finally got Dad to promise me that in the early part of summer that he would make the move. That Mom already had picked out a home nearby for them to move into, so a Lesson Georgian could move into the farmhouse.

00:07:05
Speaker 1: So, despite advocating for his brother, the state later used Alga Forrest to argue that Jerry killed Less and his family over Less inheriting the farm, all while ignoring both the victims of Wayne Mark's crooked real estate dealings as well as the powerful enemies that were not Obolestra had made.

00:07:23
Speaker 2: In the early seventies, Renato had some problems with his pilot license here and that's when he took a job flying drugs from Paraguay to Miami. He is one of the pilots with Caesar Bianki and he turned state evidence and he testifies in New York and federal court against August Record and Caesar Bianki. Wayne posted Renato's bond. Renato stayed with Wayne and Dorothy while he was on bond before he had to go back and testify. And there was also several August Record and Caesar Bianki co defendants who escaped from the Federal Detention Center in New York and are never accounted for. They were part of the enforcers of that cartel.

00:08:07
Speaker 1: So by Halloween nineteen seventy five, Wayne, Dorothy, and Renato were all out of the farmhouse, inadvertently leaving Less and his family in harm's way. Meanwhile, Jerry was struggling with the idea of jumping into a new marriage with Mimi.

00:08:21
Speaker 3: So I had basically said to her I need to take off for a week or so and spend some time by myself. I wanted to do some introspection. I had recently bought a motorcycle, and my attention was to go south in southern California rather than come east and then being on the road, I had encountered people, and I had actually picked up a girl Atogray along the way.

00:08:43
Speaker 1: Her name was Ginger, and she was heading east. So they hopped on I eighty on Wednesday, October twenty ninth, nineteen seventy five. Despite some mutual attraction, Jerry claims that he remained faithful to Mimi, and Ginger took off in Cheyenne, Wyoming on Thursday evening, at which point Jerry intended to head back to Berkeley and try to.

00:09:03
Speaker 3: Get back over the Continental divide a Thursday night, it was so cold and it snowed a little bit that I couldn't make it. I actually spent a lot of early morning hours during Thursday night Friday morning at restaurants and cafes. Anyway, I decided I would come down to a lower altitude in western Nebraska, camp out, rest up, then get a hold of my body renowned till the next day. He had a general aviation business in eastern Nebraska, so he could have my motorcycle ship back to California and fly me back to California. So Friday night, that's when I camped at the first rest area at a lower altitude down in Nebraska.

00:09:47
Speaker 1: The rest area was in Chapel, Nebraska, about a nine hour ride from Cedar Falls, Iowa, where Less and his family were murdered at some time during that night.

00:09:56
Speaker 2: So October thirty first, nineteen seventy five, it is Halloween and it is also harvest, so at the Mark family farm there's a lot of people in and out. So this night Less is seen pretty late at night. Victor is there, the uncle who's helping with harvest, and he goes home. Everything is fine. A trooper drives by who knows Less from the Army National Guard. He sees lights on, he goes to a call, he comes back, gets like one am. The lights are off.

00:10:24
Speaker 1: According to the clocks in the house, someone had cut the power around three am, and it's unclear if there was any relevance to a blue sedan that was seen in the area. Then in the morning, a neighboring farmer named Clark Renner, who had been working in tandem with Less on the corn harvest, got no response from Less at the farmhouse, and he saw that a front door window pane and a potted plant inside had been broken, so he went and got Dorothy and Wayne.

00:10:51
Speaker 2: When Dorothy gets there, Wayne is sick. Dorothy pulls a key down off a nail, lets yourself into the house or calling for Less and Georgine. They go through a couple of rooms to the bedroom that they know Less than Georgine use. The door's closed, but they see blood seeping out from under the door. Clark Renner pushes on the door and it's there's something against it and he can't get it open very far. He gets it open enough to look in and he sees Georgane's body on the floor and then he can see less against the door. At that time, he and Dorothy believe that it must have been a murder suicide. So then Dorothy and Clark go upstairs to check on the children, and they find Julie in her bed with gunshot wounds. They find Jeffrey in his crib, also with gunshot wounds. So Clark first goes to the basement to try to flip the power back on, and they find a couple of cigarette butts down there under the fuse box.

00:11:48
Speaker 1: And in nineteen seventy five, all they had was sorology, not the DNA testing that would later clear Jerry from these cigarettes. It tested positive for tybo blood, same as forty percent of the population, by the way, and Jerry and there were two more stamped out upstairs.

00:12:03
Speaker 2: The only DNA and fingerprints we've been able to identify to anyone have all came back to law enforcement. They were not treating it like a crime scene at first. The first responders worked off for theory that it was a murder suicide. I don't fully understand that sense of the broken window, you know, but they apparently thought it was, and that's why they made coffee and everybody's sitting around smoking cigarettes. Then you know, hours later they get permission from the corner to move Less's body to look for the gun, and there is no gun, so all of a sudden, now it's murder.

00:12:34
Speaker 1: There's also evidence that Less and Georgine had been awake.

00:12:37
Speaker 2: There's a theory that they were awake and are having sex because there's some condoms, one on Georgine, one on the floor. You know they'd either had sex before they went to bed or were awake. There's a total of fourteen shots one Gray's wound, so clearly they woke up or were awake, and there's some bullets found on the floor by the bed where they either went through or missed. But at autopsy both Les and Georgane they are multiple gunshots to the heart, a gunshot back of the head. From what we've understand, to leave a crime scene so clean, without identifiable fingerprints, without being seen, a car being seen, the gunshots on the victims execution style shots, so this could have been a professional cartel, organized crime type hit.

00:13:29
Speaker 3: I think Lets tried to put up a fight, and I know him well to know that he would have put up a fight even if he was caught unawares. But the way the kids were killed that was so cold blooded.

00:13:41
Speaker 2: The children were clearly asleep. Julie just has two wounds, one in her temple and one in her heart. Jeffrey is the same, and the bullet that went through his heart went through the crib mattress and lodged itself in a children's book under his bed.

00:14:08
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00:14:57
Speaker 3: See at Police Investigators. Please. People knew me even though I had been a bit of a rebel, rouser or a troublemaker. They knew that I was not an evil, violent person. They knew that I was an idealistic kid. They knew there's no evidence connecting meet at the crime.

00:15:15
Speaker 2: I can never quite get past the fact that he is a Peace Corps volunteer. He refused a commission in the Navy and cleaned toilets instead of going to Vietnam. He didn't hunt, and he's supposed to be able to kill an eighteen month old in her crib with two clean kill shots. It doesn't even seem possible.

00:15:34
Speaker 3: Saturday morning, I got up and went to the restroom where I had camped off in western Nebraska, and that's where I met Leslie Warren, a maintenance man who took care of an interstate restroom. The murders had happened in Cedar Falls earlier that morning. This is six hundred miles away from the sea of the murders.

00:15:55
Speaker 1: The rest area was in Chapel, Nebraska, a nine hour drive from Cedar Fall, where the murders happened only five hours earlier, and Jerry was spotted twice more that morning driving from Chapel toward Renato's aviation business in eastern Nebraska, once by a waitress and then by another woman named Jean Doyle.

00:16:13
Speaker 3: A lady cashier at a gas station where I guessed up my motorcycle had idead me. She saw me about ten am on Saturday morning, about an hour's drive eastward toward my buddy Renato's location, but also toward Iowa.

00:16:30
Speaker 1: Jean Doyle noted that he was traveling west to east, importantly, not fleeing Iowa east to west, but both of these witnesses were hidden from the defense. Now it appears that Jerry had learned that Renato was unavailable, so he turned back west and eventually hitched a ride with a trucker who was heading to Seattle with an empty horse trailer for the bike.

00:16:51
Speaker 3: So I rode with him to Provo, Utah, and somewhere after Salt Lake City. Sometime on November second, I was calling him. I didn't get hold of my girlfriend, and when I couldn't get an answer from her at home, I called her mom and dad. They lived in South Lake, Tahoe, and her mom told me on the phone that I should call home, and I said I'd been trying to call home. Maybe he doesn't answer and then she said, no, Jerry, something terrible has happened. Your brother's been killed.

00:17:20
Speaker 1: Jerry went to Mimi's parents' house in Lake Tahoe, where he accurately represented to the police where he had been on Friday and to Saturday. But he was also trying to shield Bemi and her parents from knowing about Wednesday and Thursday with Ginger.

00:17:34
Speaker 3: I think that was the biggest issue for them that made them suspicious of me.

00:17:38
Speaker 2: And he's always questioned in front of them. Law enforcement never took him a side by himself so that he had an opportunity to provide information without that pressure, so he doesn't give an accurate history of where he drove, where he stopped, and where he called from.

00:17:56
Speaker 3: I think I told the cops that I made a loop through southern California, came up, got back on Interstate eighty, and went eastward on eighty, and ended up as far as western Nebraska. If I told the cops go find the maintenance man, you'll verify that I was there.

00:18:11
Speaker 1: At this point, the police sought out the maintenance band, Leslie Warren, as well as Mimi's phone records.

00:18:17
Speaker 3: Mimi had insisted that I check in every night, and so I did that, and Mimi said, I won't be home Friday night. I'm going over to one of my girlfriends. And Friday night was the night I needed to have called, because I would have established my alibi.

00:18:31
Speaker 1: The phone records clearly showed that Jerry had called from payphones a long I eighty on Wednesday and Thursday, and not from southern California as he had initially said, which raised suspicions. And on November three, they found the maintenance band Leslie Warren and asked about Jerry's story for the more important dates of October thirty first and November first.

00:18:52
Speaker 3: When they founded a maintenance man. He initially did verify it, and then later on they persuaded him to say and he'd see meet the day earlier. Then they could create a false route of travel for me traveling into Iowa and committing the murders the following day, which is when they needed to have me there.

00:19:11
Speaker 2: Eventually, Leslie Warren, he testifies he saw Jerry on Friday. He's like, oh, well, I had a doctor's appointment, you know, it couldn't have been Saturday. So what we learn eventually, though, is that as medical records showed that he had a doctors appointment Friday and he was working Saturday, and so it corroborated Jerry's story, and.

00:19:30
Speaker 1: It appears that the state hid those records from the defense, knowing full well that they corroborated Jerry's innocence while also contradicting their witness. Meanwhile, Jerry and Mimi were in Cedar Falls for the funeral when they were confronted about Jerry's whereabouts on the far less important dates of October twenty ninetheen thirtieth.

00:19:49
Speaker 3: We went in together saying we'd be interviewed together. So they told me to come back in a couple hours and that they were going to interview her first and then verify what she had said.

00:19:59
Speaker 2: By they put her in front of a judge to be questioned about Jerry, lying about whether Jerry bought the motorcycle specifically for this purpose, whether she knew he was going to go kill less when he left California that day.

00:20:13
Speaker 3: When I came back from my interview after an hour or so of it, started accusing me.

00:20:17
Speaker 2: Now, he explains, well, you know, I met a girl. I was smoking some weed. I didn't want Mimi and her parents to.

00:20:23
Speaker 3: Know, after being accused for a while, I just said, am I under arrested and they said no. I said, okay, well I don't want to talk to you anymore. I left and that's when I found out this Mimi is under arrest. As soon as they arrested me, they let her brother take her back to California, and I didn't get arrested until the tenth when the cops were discovered I had bought a box of ammunition in California.

00:20:47
Speaker 2: Even in seventy five, when you bought a box of bullets you had to sign for them, and Jerry had bought a box to try to get someone to talk to him about political stuff. Back then, they were very sure that the bullets from the car I'm seeing where these very rare special thirty eight long colt bullets. In seventy five and seventy six, the FBI was still doing comparative lead analysis, and so they took the bullets from the bodies and they went back to that same gun shop in California and bought more bullets. They compared them and they said that they had the same lead composition.

00:21:24
Speaker 1: The FBI has since officially ceased peddling CBLA or comparative bullet lead analysis, as they'd like to maintain their own credibility. It's not even clear if the bullets from the scene were the same kind that Jerry had purchased, and the States machinations didn't stop at just junk science.

00:21:42
Speaker 3: The police have actually found those bullets matching the ones that I had bought for sale at local sports stores six miles from the murders, paid the owner for them and got them off the shelf, And then the prosecution presented evidence to my jury that that make model of bullets weren't even available for sale in northeast Iowa, in that whole region, so that it could not have been some local person who bought the bullets.

00:22:10
Speaker 1: It appears that this deliberate misrepresentation was only discovered years after his conviction, and then this date went on and employed still more junk science.

00:22:19
Speaker 2: You remember, this is harvest, and this is a family farm, and there's lots of people around. On November first, this special sergeant he sees a trail that he believes supports an intruder coming around the farmyard to the house. They preserve them. I print something over them and then taking some photographs, and they sent officers out with a photograph of the shoe print to find shoes that would match it.

00:22:45
Speaker 1: It's anyone's guess if these particular shoeprints were any more relevant than the others. And I encourage our audience to listen to our coverage of shoeprint analysis on Rawful Conviction Junk Science. It's going to be linked in the episode description. Now back to the investigation.

00:22:59
Speaker 2: So they go and buy tennis shoes and they're like Converse, which is very popular in seventy five, and they make a shoe print next to the others. Decided this type of shoes, what made these prints? We need to find people who have these shoes. Uncle Victor has shoes that are similar, and he'd been there working harvest. But this special Sergeant Anton decides that the tread is too small, it doesn't match. He rules them out. And this Sergeant Anton, he is eliminating law enforcement and anybody else on the farm just by taking a look at their shoes, I mean, not having them take their shoes off, not taking actual prints of them for comparisons, obviously not following any best practices for how you evaluate a print. When Jerry's arrested. They search Jerry's apartment in California. He doesn't have any shoes with this tread, so they bought shoes. They have Jerry prit them on. They're too small, Jerry can't really walk in them.

00:23:54
Speaker 1: And for whatever reason, that doesn't rule Jerry out. So then they bought a size up to fit Jerry right, which of course then doesn't match the crime scene shoeprint. And then this junk science was compounded with even more junkier junk science.

00:24:11
Speaker 2: They filmed Jerry walking in it, and then they have him walk for a pediatriss and the podiatrist decides that Jerry's gate matches the three prints they saved, so that those are Jerry's prints.

00:24:22
Speaker 1: So to recap Jerry's walk could produce the shoeprints that his feet were too big to make. Got it okay, guy, I have to laugh to keep from screaming. Then the investigators turned to some dubious eyewitness practices to try to place Jerry in Iowa on October thirty first into November.

00:24:41
Speaker 2: First, they had Jerry's picture and that was the only picture they were showing people when they started canvassing the route they thought Jerry took, and so they convinced a couple of people from truck stops in Iowa that they saw Jerry. Mark van Hewan testified he saw Jerry and Aclee close to Cedar Falls at eight Pmctober thirty first, and then Jaythan Hurd and Williams Iowa between three thirty and five am on November first, and then Rosalie McGuinness at seven thirty in the morning in Stuart, Iowa. But I think that the current understanding of how I wouldn't identifications are made and the reliability of those memories, I think even the people who think they saw Jerry, they're not reliable because of the way the identification was obtained. They're only shown Jerry's photo that then brought in for a lineup after us all hit the news.

00:25:30
Speaker 1: In addition, each of these folks described Jerry dressed in wildly different outfits. A judge later commented that Jerry's bike couldn't have carried the amount of clothing necessary to support the allegedi witness accounts, which were then presented as fact by County Prosecutor Dave Dutton, who, in preparation for the May nineteen seventy six trial had resigned his position to focus solely on this case. Meanwhile, those closest to Jerry believed in his innocence.

00:25:55
Speaker 3: I had total fun family support. Everybody knew I was Everson. They knew how much of loved less and how close we were. And Dad and Mom also not only put up the bond, but the lonely fifty thousand bucks to hire a team of lawyers to defend me.

00:26:11
Speaker 2: He hired a really well known attorney in Iowa who had been the Attorney General at one point, Larry Scalise, and then Scalise put an associate, John Sondre, on it, and John Sondre and Jerry. They went looking for alibi witnesses.

00:26:26
Speaker 1: But they didn't find the waitress or the gas station attendant. To combat Leslie Warren, who testified, contrary to his own medical records, that he'd seen Jerry on the morning of October thirty first, thereby making it possible for Jerry to have traveled to Iowa in time to commit the murders, as well as to be seen by the three others who testified to see Jerry arriving in Iowa on October thirty first and leaving Iowa on November first. Then the state continued to impute Jerry's alibi with his deceit about October twenty ninth and thirtieth.

00:26:56
Speaker 3: Tim McDonald, the lead interrogator, got on the stand and discussed, I have the full story about my motorcycle trip, itinerary and activities, and they could prove that I was lying by the phone calls that I'd made home to Mimi.

00:27:09
Speaker 1: Of course, covering for potential infidelity does not make somebody a murder, especially when Jerry was truthful about the night that mattered. But even with the witness statements that placed Jerry in Iowa, the state still needed to actually place Jerry at the farmhouse.

00:27:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's the two cigarettes in the basement under the fusebox, there is a cigarette in Julie's bedroom that has been smushed out with a foot, and then there's another cigarette found upstairs in a room that was unoccupied. They argued at trial and present evidence that it was Jerry's blood type.

00:27:44
Speaker 1: Now, Jerry has type old blood, the same as forty percent of the general population. And then one of the officers who took the stand ended up impeaching the sorology expert by mistake.

00:27:56
Speaker 2: Yes, a deputy testified at trial that he did smoke that cigarette upstairs, but he's type A. They're even wrong just about the erroology, right, But the state still presented that they were all, oh, and that's false testimony that the judge let them put on.

00:28:13
Speaker 1: But the judge was a little more discerning with the shoe print evidence, refusing all of the evidence about the different pairs of shoes, which probably would have damaged the state's case if it had been admitted.

00:28:23
Speaker 3: The shoe that fit me of that type of shoe was a half inch longer than the shoe prints on the crime scene.

00:28:29
Speaker 2: And the judges like, that's a little too far, But he lets everything else come in. So the jury got to hear that Jerry's gate, the way he walked, and only he walks that way made those prints.

00:28:39
Speaker 1: But if the shoe didn't fit, then you must have quit, right. And then came the bullet evidence. They believed that the assailant had used thirty eight caliber long colts, which first they falsely represented could not have been purchased locally in Iowa. Then the FBI CBLA expert testified that the chemical composition of the crime scene slugs were match to those that the state, not Jerry, had purchased in California. So to help solidify this tenuous and janky connection, they brought in Mimi's ex husband, Alga Forrest.

00:29:11
Speaker 2: Alga Forrest says that an old gun of his is missing and he believes Jerry stole it, and they have Alga do this whole gun lineup thing in California where Alga could pick the one that looked the closest to the gun he'd lost, so that was a long colt apparently, and also would have been able to fire those bullets. And then they tried to argue that Jerry must have picked up all the casings. The weapon that they think he used didn't e check casings.

00:29:40
Speaker 1: So both of these tidbits aren't proof of anything besides the state's propensity for trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. So other than cross examination, what did the defense do.

00:29:50
Speaker 2: They put on a private investigator who was a motorcycle rider to talk about how long it took him to make this trip. They put on a man who said he saw a car at the Mark farmhouse that was blue, so they tried to put some doubt in there that somebody else was there, but they never found anybody with a blue car. They never connected to anything. They called the trailer park owner from California to talk a little bit about Jerry and Alga and all of that, and then Alga also testifies that Jerry was mad at his dad and mad at his brother about not inheriting the farm, and that is the basis of the state's whole theory of why Jerry would do this.

00:30:32
Speaker 3: They laid the groundwork for the can Enable analogy throughout the trial. Now, Mom contradicted that in her testimony, But we could have presented Dad's will, which showed that I wasn't being screwed in any way, and we could have presented evidence from other people who knew that I had been urging Dad for years to move off the farm so less could take it over.

00:30:55
Speaker 2: And Dorothy testified about what a good relationship Lesson Jerry had. I mean, they were each other's best man in their wedding.

00:31:03
Speaker 3: There was a young woman on the jury. She started crying when Mom was testifying, and I suspected that she thought that Mom was a victim, a loving mother who was trying to protect her son Jerry, and so not believable, and that made me really worry. And matter of fact, that we had a weekend break. The last weekend before I was convicted, we went home from Sious City back to Cedar Falls, and I took my brother Dick aside. I said to him, Dick, I believe the jury is believing this frame up, and I think I'm going to get convicted. And I asked him to promise to take care of my daughters. There was only one telephone in this one thousand men prison that Christmas could use. That weekly phone call. I owe my son to my ex wife and daughters, because the rest of the week I could be in dithering about this or fighting this battle or that battle, or feeling angry. But during that Saturday morning phone call every week with my daughters, I had to be focused on them. That intentional process of being aware of my responsibility to my daughters was a key to starting to get over the traumas of the murders of lesson his family and treatment by the courts and being incarcerated. It took me years to get over the anger at these people what they did to me. I had good spiritual advisors, Sister Irene Munnos, and helped me learn how to forgive because I was angry and bitter and steing, and I was destroying my own health and I had to do my grieving. But Sister Irene Munnos, she said, I think you need to pick out the one individual that you feel did you the greatest wrong and pray for that person. Probably took me a month to agree to the propositions, but anyway, I picked out the prosecutor himself, Dave Duttan, who had framed me, and pray for him. She said, pay only positive stuff about him, and do this ritualistically every night. It seems so absurd to me, but I was so desperate that I actually started doing it. And from there on I focused instead on trying to understand why they had done what they had done and to be accepting of it.

00:33:29
Speaker 1: While Jerry tried to find peace, his direct appeal began focusing on the eyewitnesses and sufficiency of evidence.

00:33:36
Speaker 2: In Iowa. Once your convictions final, you have the right to an appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court. Sometimes Iowa Supreme Court will send it down to the Iowa Court of Appeals and then if you don't like their ruling, you can ask the Supreme Court for further review. That didn't happen with Jerry's. The Supreme Court affirmed the convictions pretty quickly.

00:33:59
Speaker 3: During my direct appeal, Mom put up a reward for information that would help to clear me, and we had a surprise lead. We thought the blue car that had been observed in the lesson's neighborhood a suspicious car. We thought we had located that car in the owner of that car, and so in nineteen seventy eight, my appeal attorney took that information to the ab Supreme Court and the court ordered copies of all of the police and the prosecutors for investigative files, and all that material was put into a filing cabinet in that Blackhawk County.

00:34:35
Speaker 1: Courthouse, which is Attorney Jim Cleary soon accessed while filing his first post confection motion.

00:34:41
Speaker 3: That's how we found out about the prosecution knowing that the maintenance man in Nebraska had not been at work when he testified that I'd been there a day before. They concealed the doctor's records from my defense, and they still had him testify, and they knew he was miss taken or lying about the date that he had seen me. They knowingly presented false evidence, and they concealed other alibi witnesses.

00:35:08
Speaker 2: The jury never got to hear that Jeane Doyle identified Jerry as being in North Platte, Nebraska on the.

00:35:14
Speaker 3: First The other thing that we found out was that the police had actually found those bullets matching the one that I had bought in the very town six miles from the murders Nelson's boat shop, and they proceeded to present evidence that there weren't available at my trial. And then Jim systematically interviewed every single cop that had been involved, and a policeman named John Lang who was in charge of the paperwork and the evidence. He ended up with this box of bullets from the local sports store. He still had those sixteen years later as a souvenir, and he actually given a bullet or several bullets from the box to other police investigators as souvenirs to keep for their work in framing me.

00:35:59
Speaker 2: So Jeane Doyle, the schuperrint evidence, the zerology stuff, you know, the cigarette butts, and Leslie Warren, all of that is heard in that first post conviction in the eighties and the Iowa District Court they deny relief. They concluded just wouldn't have had an impact on the outcome of the trial.

00:36:17
Speaker 3: They just ruled it didn't matter that there was so much certain potential evidence and scientific evidence that proved my guild that conviction should stand regardless of the fact that the prosecution had misbehaved. And then I went into habeas corpus, and that's when the federal judge helped to persuade the Attorney General of Iowa to do some of DNA testing, and that's when I was excluded from two of the four cigarette butts.

00:36:44
Speaker 1: If you recall, the other two were claimed by a deputy at trial. So now Jerry had been excluded from the remaining two type old blood cigarette butts that were found by the fuse box. Additionally, at this time, an FBI whistleblower exposed their crime lab for prosecution bias and misconduct, and an internal investigation led to reassignments, reforms, and early retirements, and the FBI issued a letter alerting prosecutors about the issues, but only prosecutors who were then supposed to tell those they'd convicted using the FBI crime lab. Right, Okay, and in this case that meant the comparative bullet led analysis which Jerry had heard about while watching TV in his cell in two thousand and five.

00:37:24
Speaker 3: What sixty minutes, and they found out that some retired FBI agents who worked in that lab had become suspicious of what they'd been doing. And the National Academy of Science has appointed a scientific board to review all this and came back saying that this is junk science. The FBI and in providing junk testimony for years, and it was exactly what had happened in my case. And attorney Jim Clary and then an attorney in Des Moines named Paul Rosenberg filed into the case in two thousand and six, presented all the evidence to a federal judge and in Sioux City named Donald O'Brien, and he issued a two hundred plus pig age ruling detailing all of the violations of law and granted my writ for habeas corpus and ordered that I'd be given a new fair trial.

00:38:08
Speaker 2: And should have gotten a new trial. Then, unfortunately, the Eighth Circuit did not agree that habeas relief was warranted, and so they reversed JUJ. O'Brien and reinstated the conviction.

00:38:23
Speaker 3: That was in two thousand and seven that killed moms of A year and a half later, she was dead, broke her heart and that was the last of my parents I lost, And then I'd already lost everybody other than my older brother Dick.

00:38:35
Speaker 1: Between two thousand and seven and twenty thirteen, Jerry saw DNA testing for more crime scene evidence like fingernail scrapings.

00:38:42
Speaker 3: They basically said, despite the fact that you found DNA evidence of the crime scene that exonerated you, were not going to let you do any more DNA testing of crime scene evidence. That ruling came down in twenty thirteen, and that totally wiped me out.

00:38:57
Speaker 2: You know, I started Jerry's case in part because I read the twenty thirteen opinion about the DNA on the cigarette butts and the courts like refusing to consider them in the PCR and then CBLA and they don't even want to consider the FBI letter, And so we started just systemically investigating and looking at all of the scientific evidence they used and what is left.

00:39:24
Speaker 1: By then CBLA was recognized as jump. Not to mention the misrepresentation that those bullets had not been available in Iowa. The shoe print and gate analysis not only were they junk, but then his foot was too big for a shoe print that were not even sure was relevant in the first place. The rology was later completely refuted by DNA testing. So all the remains are the witnesses Alga Forrest, who had an obvious motivation as Mimi's ex husband, then four allegedi witnesses who are gathered through questionable practices, three of whom described Jerry in three different outfits on the same day, and the last one, Leslie Warren, was discredited by his own medical records, which were then hidden from the defense, along with at least two more witnesses that corroborated Jerry's alibi. This is why j. J. O'Brien ordered a new trial and Erica has worked on it even more.

00:40:13
Speaker 2: Since there's unidentified prints in the house that can't be connected to anybody, we've been running them through aphis. The other thing that we worked on is trying to figure out, well, Okay, this Honda four fifty, it's not made for long distance travel. It's not like a big Harley bike, it's not a road bike, and how could he possibly have driven that many miles in the middle of the night, you know, when he has to stop for gas. And so we talked to an expert in California who agreed that this gas tank is very small, that it vibrates continuously, it can get really hot, and you have to take breaks. It's not made to ride for five or six hours straight, that kind of thing, and so that again just reinforced for us that it's not physically possible he was there.

00:41:00
Speaker 1: So even if you're of the mind to choose Leslie Warren's statement over his medical records, Jerry would have had all day Friday to take the nine hour ride to Caesar Falls, but then only seven hours to complete an eight hour journey to North Platte, Nebraska, in time to see Gene Doyle on a bike that needed to cool off and refuel every five hours. Don't forget so Erica follow the success a PCRA in twenty twenty four, containing everything we've spoken about, including the alternate theories like the real estate fraud victims or even a professional hit meant for Ronado Blestra.

00:41:31
Speaker 2: Years later, Ornazzo dies in a small plane crash, and Caesar Baianki also dies in a plane crash. I'm not a DA expert, but you know there's some similarities there that you just have a hard time understanding.

00:41:49
Speaker 1: And with that, we're going to ask for you to scroll down to the episode description for action steps as we go to closing arguments, where first I thank both of you for joining us, and so now I'm just going to kick back in my chair and listen to anything else you feel is left to be said. So start with Erica and then Jerry, you take us off into the sunset.

00:42:09
Speaker 2: Jerry Mark is this example of a wrongful conviction and everything that could possibly have gone wrong. A tragedy happened to their family, and he got caught up in it. Our system is so imperfect and there have been so many chances to right this wrong, and yet we haven't been able to do it. He's going to be eighty two in January. He has grandchildren now, and he's persevered through a lot, and yeah, as much support as he can get. We don't have a big social media presence, but we will definitely let you know if there are updates and you can share that for us. Because we are public defenders working out of a law school, we are doing everything we can to correct this in justice for him and his family, So we appreciate just sharing the story.

00:42:58
Speaker 3: I'm deeply grateful to my friends and loved ones who've been so supportive of me and so encouraging, and to just a network of people, good hearted people in the free world who had then kind and encouraging to me. There's no way I can repay the goodness that's been done for me, except to try to bring some attention to other cases guys in prison who have been wrongly convicted. So if I'm fortunate enough to be exonerated and freed, I intend to do everything I can to be a constructive citizen and to help in whatever way I can. And I hope very much that the public will encourage our judicial system to look at cases like mine with a critical analysis. It's okay to assume that the prosecutors and police have good intentions, but sometimes they get carried away by the horrors or the heinous nature of the crime, and they target the wrong individual and make mistakes. When it's up to the judiciary, to the judges to take a good objective life look at these cases and don't let the due process rights of prisoners like me be violated by overzeales or emotionally involved or biased prosecutors saying police.

00:44:17
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler, Kevin Warnis, and Jeff Cliber. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Plomm. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One. We've worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed by the individuals featured in the the show are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good.