00:00:02
Speaker 1: April twenty ninth, nineteen eighty nine, was prom night in the small town of lake Ville, Indiana, and although high school senior Jeff Pelly had been grounded, two of his sisters and his girlfriend believed that his father's resolved had softened, allowing Jeff to attend unfettered. But on the morning after the prom, his father, stepmother, and two stepsisters were found fatally shot in their own home. Then the state ignored the autopsy findings, as well as his girlfriend, his sisters, and several other witnesses in order for them to argue that Jeff had killed his family in order to gain access to this teenage right of passage. 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 ed free by subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction, where we have the story of a teenager named Jeff Pelly who was accused of killing his father, his stepmother, and two stepsisters in Lakeville, Indiana in nineteen eighty nine. Unfortunately, Jeff was not available to record, but this story needs to be told so. To help us do that, we have one of my absolute favorite investigative journalists, Delia Diambra, who dedicated an entire season of her hit podcast Counterclock to this case. It's going to be linked in the episode description. So Delia, thanks so much for joining.

00:01:45
Speaker 2: Us, Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

00:01:47
Speaker 1: And with her we have Jeff's post conviction attorney, the president of the Indiana Innisis Project, Fran Watson.

00:01:53
Speaker 3: Fran welcome, Well, thank you for Carrie.

00:01:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can't shake this one. So this story acquires quite a bit of background. So let's go back and start where it all started. In Cape Coral, Florida.

00:02:07
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy Bob Pelly met his first wife, Ava Joy Armstrong, and they got married and then their first child, Robert Jeffrey Pelly. He's born in nineteen seventy one, so Carrie is his dad's name, but goes by Jeff and then they have their daughter, Jackie. They have a large community at the Nazarene Church, and Bob was working for a bank called Landmark Bank as a data analyst. They're living happily in Cape Coral, Florida, which at that time was sort of underdeveloped as compared to the city that it is now, But back then it was sort of wild West in terms of real estate development, and I think a lot of people from other states and even other countries saw that as an opportune time to capitalize on Florida's growth.

00:02:53
Speaker 1: It's also rumored that there were organized criminal interests in the area, either coming in from Miami or even far away as Detroit, and Landmark Bank was processing a lot of the land deals being made as Cape Coral developed. Two of the players in the market were a developer from Michigan named Derek Dawson, as well as another Nazarene parishioner named Phil Holly.

00:03:15
Speaker 2: The Holly family attended the Nazarene church in Fort Myers that the Pelly family also attended. The families knew one another and spent time together.

00:03:25
Speaker 3: Mister Holly called mister Pelly his best friend.

00:03:28
Speaker 2: And yes, Phil Holly had several businesses, construction businesses, a debt collection business, some of which were later alleged to be fraudulent businesses, and Phil had banking interests at Landmark Bank. Also, Bob had done it work for Phil Holly.

00:03:45
Speaker 3: There isn't any doubt that mister Pelly knew a lot about mister Holly's business, and I don't think there's any doubt that the Hollys were up to criminal activity.

00:03:55
Speaker 1: Fast forward to nineteen eighty five, Joy Pelly had been diagnosed with cancer and after fighting bravely, she tragically lost her battle. And later on that year, Bob met a widow named Dawn who had three daughters of her own, Jesse, Jannell, and Joe Lene, and they soon married. And to add to this tumultuous situation, Bob abruptly uprooted this newly blended family from a comfortable life in Cape Coral and moved to a very different situation in Lakeville, Indiana. In nineteen eighty six.

00:04:24
Speaker 2: Bob Pelly was incredibly secretive and abrupt about the family's move to Indiana. Jackie her words were, he showed up in the middle of the night and said there was money missing from the bank, and within either the next day or the day after that, the family was gone from Cape Coral and moved to Lakeville.

00:04:44
Speaker 1: Later on, the pastor at Nazarene Church confirmed that Bob was tormented by fraud that he'd uncovered at Landmark and to add another twist, he didn't pick up another banking or it job. He actually became a pastor at the Olive Branch United Brethren Church on Osborne Road in Lakeville, Indiana, and the Pellys live next door in a ranch style home owned by the church called the Parsonage. The kids had to go to new schools, of course, and make all new friends, all while still acclimating to new step parents and siblings. So you know, they were in family therapy, and in April nineteen eighty eight, Jeff threatened to commit suicide.

00:05:25
Speaker 2: In the spring of eighty eight, when Jeff makes this declaration that he was going to take his own life, Bob gets all the guns out of the home. Thomas Kebb, who's an individual who claimed to have received firearms from Bob Pelly. Bob Pelly came to him and it's like, here, take him out of our house.

00:05:42
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, back in Cape Coral, the real estate developer from Michigan, Eric Dawson, had gone deep into debt with the Hollys and soon received cash infusions from their business on other development deals. By late nineteen eighty eight, Dawson's body was discovered in a Florida Wildlife Preserve.

00:05:58
Speaker 2: Eric Dawson was shot execution style and then sunk into a makeshift concrete grave in the middle of a cypress clearing. With the Florida conditions the way they are, that concrete sort of broke open and allows unfortunately, odors of decomposition to escape, and then the wildlife, a lot of wild hogs and boars and snakes came in and began to scavenge, and that ultimately allowed his clothing and things to come out of that and was discovered.

00:06:30
Speaker 1: Eric Dawson had been shot with a twenty two caliber pistol. Curiously, Bob Paley had given Thomas cab a twenty two caliber pistol which came in and out of his possession around the time of Eric Dawson's murder.

00:06:44
Speaker 2: It's back in the home by January of nineteen eighty nine and then subsequently disappears again before the April twenty ninth, nineteen eighty nine massacre in the home. So this twenty two pistol, why was it going in and out of the home? Where was it? And then when you look at the case in late nineteen eighty eight in Florida, with Eric Dawson. He was murdered definitively with a twenty two.

00:07:09
Speaker 1: The Halies were suspected of that murder, and police found Landys that Dawson had signed over to the Hallies the day before his disappearance.

00:07:17
Speaker 3: If you look at what's happening in Florida the month of Pelley family is killed, that's when they serve the search warrants, and that's where they find clear evidence that ultimately convicts the Hallies forging those documents. They're never able to charge the Hallies or anyone with the murder of the business partner, but they were able to charge and convict the Hollies of the fraud tied to taking the asset.

00:07:40
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, Bob was in Lakeville and he was very much aware of the danger. Just according to a person named Tony Beeeler who was hired to take photographs for a church directory, Bob made her swear on a Bible and explained why he didn't want his picture taken and made public.

00:07:56
Speaker 2: He expressed to her there are people from my past in Florida that will find us and harm us, and he was very resistant to their identities being out there. And then they're all massacred like what.

00:08:09
Speaker 1: Curiously, the Pellies were in touch with the Hawlies, who knew that they'd moved to Lakeville, but Bob was certainly afraid of someone. Meanwhile, in Lakeville, the police were investigating a string of petty thefts, and Bob discovered that his son Jeff and his friends the Herzogs, were involved, So he took away Jeff's Mustang and forbade him from attending the prom or any after prime activities, including a day trip the next day to six Flags Rate America.

00:08:35
Speaker 3: That's definitely part of the story is that mister Pelly had told many people that Jeff was grounded from the prom, and the fact we always cite in responses, Well, if Jeff wasn't going to the prom, then how did Jackie know to tell the police he'd be at Great America this pre date cell phone. She'd not been home since Friday nine. So if Jeff wasn't going to the prom, how does Jackie think he's at Great America.

00:08:59
Speaker 1: So according to those closest to the situation, Jeff's sisters Jackie and Jesse, and Jeff's girlfriend Darla, it appears that Bob had softened his result as early as Friday, which was the night before the prompt. Additionally, the Pellies had written checks the week prior to cover Jeff's tuxedo and other prom fees. Yet the state still contended that dis punishment, along with access to his mustang, was the motivation for him to commit a quadruple homicide against his own family. That happened sometime after five pm on April twenty nine, nineteen eighty nine. So let's back up to earlier that day so we can establish the timeline.

00:09:38
Speaker 3: He worked at McDonald's that Saturday of the prom, starting at five am, and then when his father picked him up, the dad stopped at the gun store. Now, the state's theory was the dad stopped at the gun store because he was afraid of his son.

00:09:53
Speaker 1: But if you know the context about Florida, this stop makes more sense. According to the store, Bob inquired about a gun for Dawn, but he didn't purchase anything.

00:10:02
Speaker 3: Mister Pelly's picked his son up at noon brought him home. They all had lunch together and watch baseball. People came over to show their prom dresses.

00:10:10
Speaker 2: There was a girl named Kim and her date David. A boy named Matt Miller. Came over at that same time, so they're all there between four thirty and five o'clock, maybe five after five at the most.

00:10:22
Speaker 3: So the state's theory is that after this dear friend and church people leave, he just goes into a rage and kills everyone and then goes to the prom and acts normal.

00:10:32
Speaker 1: And according to the dear friend and church people, Jeff had been wearing blue jeans and potentially a pink pin striped shirt. And the promgoers left around five pm to pick up Matt Miller's date.

00:10:43
Speaker 2: Matt Miller forgets his corsage for his date, so he goes back home. And as Matt is passing back on Osborne Road headed to go meet Kim and David at his date's house, he passes the parsonage and sees Jeff's Mustang still park there. This is at right around five point fifteen. And then there's I think one of Jeff's friends that was mushroom hunting in the area. Here's Jeff's car, the noticeable engine roar down Osborne Road a little after five point fifteen. And then we have Dennis Nicodmes, who is the clerk at the Mco gas station, who has an interaction with Jeff, who says it's five point seventeen when Jeff is at that gas station.

00:11:23
Speaker 1: From then on, Jeff is accounted for wearing a black Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans, followed by his tuxedo. So, according to the state, Jeff committed this quadruple homicide between five and five sixteen pm. But there's the specter of this black pickup truck, which wasn't mentioned by the promgoers either while they were there as they left, or by Matt Miller as he drove by, but rather by a woman named Lois Stansbury who saw Bob Pelly after the promgoers left and potentially after five sixteen pm.

00:11:54
Speaker 3: She's probably part of the reason Jeff wasn't charged in eighty nine. She was a local, good standing citizen who said she'd been to kmart. She came back up the road to visit her father and saw mister Pelley talking to someone in a black truck.

00:12:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, her purchase at kmart was documented and on her receipt. I want to say like four thirty to four forty. And where that kmart was located Osborne Road. I think we drove it and it was like maybe ten or twelve minutes, so based on her movements and that receipt, and like one other pit stop she made on the way, she's got to be seeing him to be generous a little after five to five twenty.

00:12:35
Speaker 3: And according to the witness, mister Pelly had a shovel in his hand, and he looked a bit circumspect, in other words, he wasn't his normal waving self.

00:12:44
Speaker 2: And when she came forward to law enforcement a week or so after the crime, she provides that receipt to them, saying like, hey, here's how I know when I saw Bob from five to five twenty. So if Bob's alive standing in his driveway talking, is someone in a black pickup truck, He's not getting murdered by his teenage in the home.

00:13:01
Speaker 1: Mysteriously, that receipt later went missing, and the state contends that it must have been earlier and the prom goers just missed it somehow. Now after this sighting, we aren't sure what happened with the Pellies. At five point thirty, Bob was expected at the home of another prom goer, Crystal Easter Day, but when he didn't show up, she and her date came over to the parsonage between five po'ty five and six pm, and they found the Pelly station wagon in the driveway and the curtains drawn, and there was no response when they knocked on the door.

00:13:33
Speaker 3: She made later statements that the doors were locked in her earliest statements. There's nothing that suggests she tried to determine whether they were locked or not. But that was a strong fact the state used because their claim was that the Pelly family had already been slain inside that home.

00:13:50
Speaker 2: Everything that happened after Jeff is accounted for by witnesses. You don't know what's then happening with Bob and Don and the girls. They're either are already deceased or they're potentially still at home for whatever reason, didn't fulfill their plans for the night. Were they taken somewhere and then brought back to the home. That's obviously a possibility, a little bit more involved, because you would think that someone would have seen that were they being held at their home that evening, potentially through the early morning hours.

00:14:20
Speaker 3: I think mister Pelly got in that black truck myself. If mister Pelly's got some inkliness is going on. What if mister Pelly left in the black truck and said to the family, prom goings over, lock the house, don't answer the door.

00:14:34
Speaker 1: No one saw anyone coming or going for the rest of the night, although there's mention of a limousine with Florida plates nearby. Additionally, the next door neighbor, Sheila Saunders, noted that the Pelly's basement light was on at nine to fifteen pm and two am, but when Bob didn't show up for Sunday service and the scene was discovered, it was noted that the basement light was off.

00:14:55
Speaker 2: So Sunday morning, April thirtieth, around nine fifteen nine in the morning, a man named Dave Hathaway, who's sort of like an elder at the church, realized that Bob wasn't in the sanctuary. His stepdaughters weren't running around anywhere. Don was not there, and so Dave eventually walks over the parsonage right he needs a spare keys. Dave walks in through the garage, gets a couple steps in to go let the other elder in, and before he even gets there, he kind of looks over into this hallway that leads into the bedrooms and sees what he recognizes as Bob Pelly's kind of thicker glasses on the carpet, some blood, realizes something is very wrong, and then obviously, law enforcement is called.

00:15:42
Speaker 1: Dave Hathaway initially mentioned that the blood was still wet, but he later recalled it differently and said that the blood was dry. Now clarity on that would have been very helpful when establishing the timeline. But let's go back to the scene.

00:15:55
Speaker 2: I think the thought always was initially by law enforcement, that Bob Pelly died first in the hallway upstairs, and then the killer or killers completed the crime downstairs with Dawn and the girls unfortunately with their bodies sort of positioned on or next to one another, and I think that would indicate that they all died at the same time or in very quick succession.

00:16:18
Speaker 1: There's also a gun shot in the stairwell heading down into the basement that appears to have been a near miss, which may support that theory of succession. Interestingly, the shooter must have collected the shell casing, so all they found were the spent twenty gage shotgun slugs, and watting, which is either a paper or plastic part of the bullet between the gunpowder and the slug.

00:16:37
Speaker 2: This watting usually falls or flutters to the floor, and in this case some of it is in the wounds or on the clothing of the victim, which just goes to show how close in proximity the shooter was to them. There is watting discovered from two different types of shotgun shell casings by different manufacturers, which begins to open the door of was there one shooter? Was there two shooters? It just raises a lot of questions.

00:17:02
Speaker 1: And establishing the time of death would have gone a long way to answering them. Unfortunately, the coroner lost that information when he refrigerated the bodies before determining it. But there were some interesting findings at autopsy.

00:17:16
Speaker 2: We do see popcorn in Bob's stomach. Jackie Pelly always says like her dad's evening snack before he'd had to preach a message the next day was popcorn. So it's like, Okay, why would he have been eating that in the middle of the afternoon or late afternoon. He didn't really have opportunity to do that because we know he was visiting with parishioners all throughout the afternoon on Saturday, right up until about four o'clock, and then all these kids come over to get their pictures taken, So it's like, did they eat those things either right up until they were killed or later that night? But how could they have eaten them if they were already dead? And so it really begins to kind of throw off the timeline.

00:18:00
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00:18:47
Speaker 2: When they first began processing the scene, there was a Indiana State trooper who came to the scene and was familiar with Jeff and Bob Pelly because he was in a community love with Bob and had gotten to know Bob, and Bob had opened up to him a little bit about his sort of parental struggles with Jeff and some thefts and people that Bob didn't like that Jeff was hanging out with, and bad attitude and things like that, the lamenting of a father of a teenage son. And so the state trooper came into the crime scene investigation with that sort of back history.

00:19:22
Speaker 1: Even though the autopsy findings Lois Stansbury and Sheila Saunders all suggests that the murders happened later on that night, it appears that tunnel vision had already set in and the state turned him into some sort of master criminal with prowess that would be something out of a spy thriller or something, and jammed a theory of Jeff's guilt between five and five sixteen pm.

00:19:46
Speaker 2: Law enforcement and even the prosecution over the years has said, it's tight, it's a tight window. It is a hard sell. We get that, but we believe that he did it because we believe that he pre planned to do it.

00:19:59
Speaker 1: And Katie, the surviving Pelly children, Jesse and Jackie were each at their friends' homes and they said that Jeff was at Great America, so that dispels the state's motive. But then Jackie and Jesse disagreed about whether or not the family's twenty gage shotgun was in the home.

00:20:16
Speaker 2: Jesse she says that before she left for her sleepover on Friday, that the gun was there, that the gun was on the rack. That's her memory, and she's obviously young. I don't know how often she went in there and like checked right, So I don't know if that's a memory from a pre existing entry into her parents' room or not.

00:20:36
Speaker 1: But according to both Jackie and Thomas Kebb, that shotgun was not in the parsonage. Next, the local police near Great America picked up Jeff. Lakeville PD went to get Jeff. They searched his car, found a paper grocery bag containing his black Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans, which also had a dollar bill and thirty four coins in the pocket, and there was also a legible receipt in the bag. Jeff was then brought back to Lakeville for an interview with the cops in the company of his grandparents.

00:21:02
Speaker 3: So five am Monday, he waives his rights and he gives a statement it's recorded. When they ask him, can you think of anyone that would do this, he readily says the truth, which is the only thing I can think of is it could be the herse ags And I'm paraphrasing. My dad was investigating a theft ring. These kids are mad at my dad. You need to go talk to detective Center.

00:21:26
Speaker 1: Who confirmed what Jeff said. Now, without a confession, police began to speculate about Jeff's reaction to the news, which is never convincing evidence of guilt or innocence, but people do it anyway. Now, they also inspected his body for any injuries, and they took pictures.

00:21:42
Speaker 3: Those photographs show that Jeff has not a single mark on his chest. So the theory is he took that family twenty gauge and he fired at at least six times within the confines of a small hallway in a small basement area without at all one Bruce. That's Monday morning. So later the grandparents agree to bringing back Monday evening for a polygraph. And at this point they agree they purposely separating from his grandparents for the purpose of getting him to admit this. And you know what, he didn't confess.

00:22:16
Speaker 1: But in between interviews, they discovered something that Jeff hadn't mentioned in his first that he'd stopped at two gas stations on the way to Darla's house. So he explained why, an issue with the car and access to tools that he needed to work with the car, and they said the discrepancy made them doubt his story that he must have done it all while the threat of the death penalty loomed large and importantly, the second interview was not recorded, just some of his answers were jotted down, and the detective alleged that Jeff said something that sounded incriminating.

00:22:49
Speaker 3: They say, he says something like, if I tell you what I know, you see, well I get the death penalty or something. They testify at trial that he said that, Well, maybe that's related to the hers sogs that he came forward with that very morning he told you about them.

00:23:06
Speaker 2: I think that statement on its face is certainly like what who would say that? But you also just have to know where it's coming from, and also how people respond to questions they're asked, and if only their response is written down and the context of the question is not included. I mean, I've done this with now multiple wrongful conviction claim cases where it's like, Wow, Okay, now that I know what was asked, that tanges, how I see the response.

00:23:31
Speaker 1: Without a recording, we don't even know what exactly was said, let alone why. And it also seems that misrepresentations aren't exactly outside the realm of possibilities in this case. And I'm going to get to that later, but for now, we do know that Bob Pelly and the Herzogs were at odds.

00:23:48
Speaker 3: People in the beginning in the community thought it was about this thievery mister Pelly was trying to shut down, and Jeff thought that too. At the funeral home, one of her Sogs showed up, and if people got into a fight, we put on Jackie at the PCR hearing to say the her Sogs came over to our house to threaten.

00:24:08
Speaker 1: Cheff, and we only raised the Herzgs to give potential context around what was allegedly said in this unrecorded interview. Meanwhile, in addition to the clothing from the paperbag in Jeff's car, the police retrieved clothing from the Pelly's washing machine. According to records they sent to the FBI, there was a pink pin striped shirt and tube socks with no biological material found, which became sort of a running theme like this assailant or group of assailants were like ghosts.

00:24:35
Speaker 2: The lack of physical evidence says a lot in this case, because it's not just okay, someone would have had to clean themselves up, like from the biological material, but they would have had to get all those shell casings, be careful not to step in any blood, because there's no tracking of blood or footprints or shoe prints or sock prints. There's no smearing on the floor of any sort of transfer like that. So this is someone who is being extremely careful, extremely methodic picking up shell casings and then able to close curtains and lock doors, get rid of all incriminating evidence, get away from the scene undetected. I think the state they just kept hitting walls with this physical evidence piece, even down to the point of analyzing the washing machine for blood and biological material. They found nothing. All they found was like a small lit up area where the luminol went kind of wild on the floor right in front of the washer or in the retention of the washer, I think. But right away the experts say that's probably from the detergent, which like absolutely picture it.

00:25:44
Speaker 3: Picture it. You go to a washing machine after killing four people, You've got it everywhere you take your clothes off. What happens, It falls where you're just robing. Where was that. You'd have to clean it up, and that would leave a pattern. When they sprayed that lumina, there were no patterns, so nobody wiped anything up.

00:26:04
Speaker 1: Also, importantly, if Jeff had done this, his blue gens should have held on to some biological material. But the FBI confirmed that there was no blood on the jeans and that they had not been washed. The police even found a bloody T shirt in a nearby field that they asked the FBI to try to compare to the clothes found of the paper bag to try to find a connection, but to no avail. And between Thomas keb, Lois Stansbury, Sheila Saunders, the autopsy findings, and the lack of a confession, the state couldn't charge Jeff.

00:26:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean in nineteen eighty nine, all the way through the nineties, the initial prosecutor, the subsequent prosecutors who were elected, none of them would bring charges against Jeff because the case, in their eyes lacked what it would need to have a successful prosecution, and so.

00:26:51
Speaker 1: Life moved on for the surviving Pelly children for now.

00:26:54
Speaker 2: Jackie went to live with her grandparents in Kentucky, came into adulthood, and got married, and she's kind of moved all over with her husband and their family. Jesse goes to live with I believe her mother's parents, Don's family, and then kind of just carried on life.

00:27:13
Speaker 1: And remember, Jeff was fifteen when they left his friends in Florida, and he had no clue about anything that was going on between Phil and his dad. Plus he was close with Phil's youngest son, Martin.

00:27:23
Speaker 2: Jeff graduated high school. He then moved to Florida in the Fort Myers area, he started working for Phil Holly. Jeff then married Phil Hawley's sister's daughter, so kind of married into that family. They then kind of moved a little bit here and there, and it was kind of throughout that mid nineties time frame that he seems to have gravitated a little bit away from the Fort Myers area from the Holly family with his wife and done sort of his own thing. Ninety four is when Phil Hawley and his sons are all on trial for not Eric Dawson's murder, but the fraud that they had committed against Eric Dawson.

00:28:01
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, back in Lakeville, one of the assistant prosecutors from nineteen eighty nine, Christopher Tot, ran for Saint Joseph's County prosecuting Attorney, promising to open a cold case unit. He was elected in November nineteen ninety eight and they began reinvestigating the Pelly case. But the situation didn't really change until two thousand and two when the blue jeans from the paper grocery bag with thirty four coins, a dollar bill, and a legible receipt were viewed again, but this time in a different light.

00:28:27
Speaker 3: When it's picked up again as a cold case, they're looking at old evidence, not timely evidence. And as the court agreed, they clearly confused the blue jeans and make an assumption that the blue jeans were in the washing machine having been washed. When that police officer made that assumption, he sent those blue jeans away again for testing, and in two thousand and two the FBI said they were heavily stained, found no blood on them.

00:28:54
Speaker 2: The blue jeans were analyzed by the FBI, they were determined to be dirty, and so those two things are quite conflicting, right, Like, either the blue jeans are washed because that's what Jeff Ward had kill his family, and they're taken after the fact. But if it's established that the genes weren't in fact washed, had coins in the pocket, and there's a receipt in the bag that they pulled from an evidence storage, then it means that law enforcement can't say he committed the crime and then covered up and washed his clothes.

00:29:23
Speaker 3: They never asked themselves how coins in the pocket of a pair of blue jeans would stay there while being washed with a few other items. The coins are very dirty. I can send you pictures thirty four coins stayed in the pocket of a pair of jeans, washed, all thirty four of them. What are you talking about?

00:29:43
Speaker 1: Not to mention that evidence, especially wet physical evidence, typically would never be placed in a paper grocery bag. Now, it's unclear where exactly Detective Winfield's belief falls on the scale of honest mistake to pure evil, but either way, no one along the way ever questioned the belief, and he obtained an arrest warrant, which was executed at Los Angeles International Airport. Jeff was arriving from a business trip with his wife and Jackie, who then found him a California attorney named Alan Baum to handle the arraignment. After seeing the facts of the case, Allan stayed on board. But even more information came to light after Jeff's arrest.

00:30:24
Speaker 2: That's when Tony Bieler, this photographer from way back in the day who had this weird interaction with Bob Pelly where he made this declaration about his past in Florida and being afraid and whatever he intimated to her.

00:30:37
Speaker 3: She comes forward once there's a trial date, and she goes to the police department, not to mister Pelly's lawyers, to the police department and they record her statement and she describes this encounter with mister Pelly and the church in which he expresses fear for his family safety from his experiences from Florida following him to Indiana.

00:30:58
Speaker 2: Which obviously doesn't really point in Jeff's direction. So that's like not super great for a prosecution.

00:31:04
Speaker 3: And that particular tape of Tony Baylor never made it into the jury trial because mister Pelly's lawyers never knew of her.

00:31:14
Speaker 2: I really don't think based on what the records show that it was a reinvestigation to try and solve the homicides. I believe it shows that the reinvestigation was to ultimately clear or not clear Jeff Pelley as a suspect, and those are two very different things. And ultimately I don't think they pursued really avenues of clearing him. I think they pursued more avenues of arrest.

00:31:37
Speaker 1: From two thousand and three, Jeff was held in pre trial detention with no bond until his attorney finally got one set in two thousand and five, and he wasn't tried until two thousand and six.

00:31:49
Speaker 2: From nineteen eighty nine to two thousand and three is a huge delay.

00:31:54
Speaker 1: That's a very cold case, right.

00:31:56
Speaker 2: I think his attorneys have argued like that, and itself could have been prejudicial or a prejudicial Do you then have all the way until six before you get a trial because of different clocks in the court going at different speeds, And then when that timeframe from the arrest of the trial, the state pauses for like over a year to say they need these family counseling records and that's going to be the thing, And then they get them and they never use them.

00:32:17
Speaker 1: Maybe they were just stalling because the case was so weak. The prosecutor, Frank Shaeffer, even admitted to the jury that they had no physical evidence.

00:32:26
Speaker 2: There's no blood found on Jeff for his belongings. There's nothing of his found on the victims in a way in which that would indicate he was present for the crime. They don't find the firearm, they don't find the shellcasings, they don't find a bundle of clothing and a dumpster somewhere that was somewhere he made a stop. Nothing physical evidence wise connects Jeff to the crime.

00:32:48
Speaker 1: It was a circumstantial case. The investigators described the scene and then they established their timeline with the prom goers, which was countered by Lois Stansbury. But her Kmart receipt had been mysteriously disappeared, just vanished, so the state was able to explain her away, along with other aberrations like the popcorn in Bob's stomach and the light that was on in the basement at nine to fifteen pm and two am, So then the stage was set for between five and five sixteen pm.

00:33:20
Speaker 2: At that point, the prosecution was relying on individuals that knew Jeff and Bob Pelly to talk about their tumultuous relationship and the issue of a prom could he go, could he not go, Could he take his car? Could he not take his car? And so, even though the state doesn't really have to prove motive, they knew that was the only way they were going to be able to convince jurors that Jeff had done it.

00:33:43
Speaker 1: The problem with that is Jackie and Jesse both testified that Jeff was allowed to go, but they disagreed about whether the family's twenty gage shotgun was in the house, which could have been cleared up by Thomas Kebb.

00:33:54
Speaker 2: Thomas Kebb never testifies at the trial. Obviously the defense would have wanted to use him because he's saying, no, there was no guns in the Pelly home. All the guns came to me before the murder, which sort of takes away the states point of there was a shotgun hanging on a rack in the bedroom and that's what Jeff grabbed and killed his family with. Well, if the gun isn't there, then Deff can't do the crime. But Thomas Keb was problematic because I pointed out in the show, if the defense got into why he had the guns, they had to go into the point that Jeff had threatened to take his own life the year before, and I think Jeff's trial attorney saw that as does that paint Jeff as unstable.

00:34:34
Speaker 1: But an unarmed Jeff can't shoot his family. Unstable or not. And to make matters worse, that wasn't his team's only failure.

00:34:43
Speaker 3: The initial claimed in the proble cause Affi David says that the blue jeans were washed. They had thirty four coins and a dollar bill and a readable receipt in the pocket. If you go look, which the lawyers failed to do, you find the readable receipts not in the pocket at all. It's in the bottom the bag, and it's a used and as grocery store bag. And the jury never heard the word annis grocery store bag, never knew the blue jeans were in a grocery store bag. The defense attorneys never looked inside the brown bag to know that the blue jeans themselves were dirty.

00:35:21
Speaker 2: He just accepted the prosecution's established fact that the jeans had been washed.

00:35:26
Speaker 1: So the state's misrepresentation that the jeans had been pulled from the washing machine went unchallenged, and the jury was left with the impression that Jeff covered his tracks by washing those jens.

00:35:36
Speaker 2: What I found absolutely unbelievable is that Craig Whitfield, the investigator who took up the case that reinvestigated and ultimately submitted the arrest affidavit and arrested Jeff Pelly, was never called to testify at his trial. So the absence of Craig Whitfield, I think says a lot as far as how the prosecution potentially saw downfalls of his work.

00:35:57
Speaker 1: But it appears that the defense mad not have prepared cross examination anyway.

00:36:03
Speaker 3: The evidence was so weak that I think the defense they weren't as prepared as they needed to be to attack some of the state's points and totally missed the Florida stuff. Totally missed that at the point that the families killed is right when the Holy Families getting arrested.

00:36:23
Speaker 1: But it's not like the defense didn't try to raise the specter of Bob's past.

00:36:27
Speaker 3: So at trial, the defense is trying to go into the Florida facts without witnesses that have firsthand knowledge. And so the defense attorney says someone saw a limousine with Florida plates. The defense attorney's never found the person who actually saw the limousine. We did the limousine was actually parked closer to the home from what was in the police report. But again, none of this information was dug out or pinned down by the defense prior to trial.

00:37:00
Speaker 1: And without a witness with firsthand knowledge, the Florida facts were denied. Unfortunately, Tony Bieler's video statement appears to have been unavailable as well.

00:37:10
Speaker 3: The defense had many copies of all the video interviews the state did. They provided oftentimes provided two copies this one they never provided any copies, and the defense attorneys both testified at the post conviction hearing had they known about that statement, they were have talked to that witness.

00:37:27
Speaker 1: So the jury never heard about the danger from Florida. But the defense did continue down that alternate suspect road, presenting the shotgun wadding evidence suggesting there may have been multiple shooters.

00:37:39
Speaker 2: And if there's more than one shooter, that kind of takes Jeff off the chess board, right, because it would just be sort of illogical to think that he had a co conspirator that's been quiet like all these years. So the difference in the wadding types means two types of AMMO were used at the same gauge, So either gets two different shotguns or one gun is loaded with different types of amos the same gauge, which like, Okay, that's not impossible, but it would be odd.

00:38:08
Speaker 1: But again, it's not impossible that one shotgun was loaded with the same gauge made by two different manufacturers. So the evidence fell flat without the Florida facts. And then the defense tried to raise doubt about the state's timeline. They put on an expert who had done studies on the rate at which different materials dry and testified that the wash cloths, which were alleged to have been used by Jeff at five PM on the day prior, would have been drier by the time they were collected as evidence.

00:38:35
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, that really fell flat for the defense because their expert that they had hired from out of state was just not very thorough with his sort of recreation of figuring out what rate they would have dried at and that sort of thing.

00:38:48
Speaker 1: Plus, the expert had conducted his experiments in Arizona, a totally different and obviously much drier climate than Indiana, which made the evidence easy to impeach. The state also played the recorded interrogation in which Jeff did not confess, But then the state put on the stand the detective who had conducted the second unrecorded interview, who testified that Jeff had allegedly said, if I tell you what I know, will I get the death penalty? And then the defense didn't raise the context of that response and what it could have meant about the Herzogs that, along with Tony Bieler, the Florida facts, photos of Jeff's unbruised chest, as well as the truth about the blue jeans, well, they simply were not available to the jury.

00:39:35
Speaker 2: And deliberations, and they're saying, hey, we need more on this. We'd like to hear one of this. It's the blue jeans and some curiosity about Florida and Bob Pelly's past, which is super interesting that the jurors at trial are like, well, that seems like there's something there. Can we know more, Can we hear a witness or whatever? And of course, you know, just that never happens. After she was interviewed as an adult, Jesse, she began to look back on her experiences and memories about Jeff and began to have serious doubts about whether or not someone else committed the crime, and he did, and so by the time she is that trial, you know, she was very convinced that Jeff had committed the crime and that he was trying to continue to get away with it, so to speak. She was pleased by the verdict and there was some closure, but you know, it was never one hundred percent closure for her because she genuinely just missed her sisters and her mother, and she felt so much had been taken from her. I know, for Jackie, she never thought that Jeff did it. She had no reason to think that he did. At his arrest and at his eventual trial, she was one hundred percent supportive of her brother. She thought he did not do this and that he should not have been convicted for it. She was obviously upset with the verdict, but she's also a very determined individual. So really, from the moment it was read, it was like, Okay, what's next, what's the next phase, what's the next fight? When are we getting back in court?

00:41:16
Speaker 1: If you recall, it took about three years to take him to trial once he was finally arrested, thirteen long years after the crime. So his direct appeal attorney argued that a number of issues that caused that delay had violated Jeff's right to a speedy trial, which was then ultimately prejudicial.

00:41:35
Speaker 3: The Indiana Court of Appeals reversed the four murder convictions and said that there was a speedy trial violation the state had wasted too much time. The Indiana Supreme Court put those four murder convictions back and said that there was no a speedy trial violation.

00:41:51
Speaker 1: So his sentence of one hundred and sixty years remained.

00:41:54
Speaker 3: Then, after that decision, I agreed to represent him in the post conviction action, where, for example, you allege an effective assistance a council and constitutional speedy tri violations. Let me say this to you that no one, not the defense team and not the Saint Joseph County prosecutor, according to the evidence, had the FBI file. I got the FBI file because there's no way I believed you could wash a pair of blue jeans sufficient to remove every piece of blood but leave thirty four coins in the pocket. There's no way I'm going to believe that. Look at the coins, they're dirty. Look at the jeans, they're dirty. The FBI said they were dirty. So I start from the premise, this is not right. Let me see what's going on.

00:42:43
Speaker 1: Frand made it clear that the defense completely neglected to explore how the blue jeans had not been retrieved from the washing machine or how they were falsely represented as evidence of guilt. Then the defense neglected to show how photographs and a lack of bruising showed that Jeff had not likely fired a twenty gage shotgun. Plus there was the failure on the Florida facts.

00:43:03
Speaker 2: There were ways he could have gotten it in at trial. Even the judge threw him a bone, so to speak at times in sidebar conversations like well, you need to do X, Y and Z. If you want to get this in this way, you gotta do this. You got to give me something to get these facts in that you want to argue about Florida and Bob Pelly in an ultimate suspect that didn't happen. Is also those that knew his attorney and had hired him for Jeff said, he's out in California. He's doing his thing. He's not as engaged with the trial. He's doing other trials like those sorts of allegations. And I think that his attorney has even come bored and said, yeah, could I have done a better job on all fronts? Absolutely? I did what I thought was best at the time. But now that I am being told and shown all these things, I agree an IAC complaint is completely valid and let's go, which is I think kind of rare.

00:43:52
Speaker 1: So they filed the post conviction motion raising ineffective assistance of counsel and speedy trial violations, and they were granted a hearing in twenty twenty two in which they presented evidence of those claims, along with other evidence supporting his innocence, including Tony Bieler.

00:44:07
Speaker 3: So she testified at the post conviction hearing that conversation with mister Pelly was in the weeks before the family was murdered, and she didn't come forward in eighty nine. She was afraid, and she testified about that conversation with mister Pelly, and if you look, the state didn't ask her one cross question. We called a lot of witnesses about the actual Florida facts. We believe that the jury should have heard from the mouths of witnesses, including Detective Kopinski, who believed that the Hawleys had murdered their business partner. So we put in lots of evidence about what was going on in Florida that would have caused mister Hawley to want to foreclose any witnesses from coming forward. And look, if you're a father and you've inclobs your sons in a business enterprise that's criminal, and you've ratcheted up to murder, I imagine you'd do it a lot to protect your.

00:45:01
Speaker 1: Sons, laying the groundwork for the danger from Florida and a potential professional hit. They also hired a cold case investigator to take a fresh look at the crime scene evidence.

00:45:10
Speaker 3: We presented an expert, mister Sopoli. He testified about the lack of proper investigation and how the state's theory wasn't consistent with the forensics. I mean, there's a lot about the crime scene, as our expert witness to POLEI testified, that would cause one to question whether it was the actions of a seventeen year old on his way to the prom.

00:45:34
Speaker 1: Or where mister Sopoli lands that this crime was so clean that it likely was a professional hit.

00:45:42
Speaker 3: So Poli says, they took big trash bags and they just step in him to take their clothes off. That's how professionals do it. But we tried the case and then it took the judge well over a year to rule, and the judge ruled on the anniversary of the murders, which felt harsh. Suffers the deaths of his family, he mourns them. So we lost, and now we take an appeal of the denial of state post conviction relief, which if we lose, will be a prelude to federal habeas and our hope is that the courts will see that the constitutional speedy trial rights and the right to the sixth Amendment effective assistance of counsel were violated.

00:46:25
Speaker 1: In the meantime, we'll link ways to reach Jeff's legal team in the episode description, So if anyone has information about this case, please reach out. You just might be the person that could make a difference here. So with that and with a heavy heart, we're going to go to closing arguments, where I thank you both for helping us tell this harrowing story. And now I'm just going to kick back in my chair and close my eyes and listen to any closing thoughts you may have. We'll start with Delia and then close it out with fran.

00:46:53
Speaker 2: I've really landed based on what I know and what I've learned, if Jeff Pelly committed this crime, which is a huge if based on what we know now, but even if you look at that scenario, he did not do it in any of the ways that the state and investigators came to conclude that he did. It does not hold up against what we know about the physical evidence, and even with some of the circumstantial testimony, and so then you really have to really switch gears and be open to the possibility of Okay, let's take him off the board. Now, what do we look at? And in most criminal cases, you would say, here, here, that's kind of thin, that's hard. But in this case, there are so many credible and legitimate pursuits of investigation that show that other individuals or another individual could have committed this crime.

00:47:46
Speaker 3: I would close by saying thanks for your interest, thanks for the willingness to look at the facts without a bias and with some neutrality. I think this is a case of injustice in which which the state pursued the charges against Jeff without evidence that was truthful in terms of the blue jeans and in terms of the allegations even about the twenty Gage, so I appreciate your audience and their interest. And again, as you said, if there's information out there that would help Jeff, I more than want to know that the Pelly family cares that people believe in his innocence, because that can be sustaining when you have these court battles, and in all of these cases, when we incarcerate the innocent, we let the bad guy go free. Nobody wants that.

00:48:50
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 ed free by subscribing to Lava for Good plus on US. I want to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Kleiber. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal company number one. We've worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in this show are accurate.

00:49:30
Speaker 2: The views and opinions expressed by the individuals featured in this show are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good