00:00:00
Speaker 1: This episode of Wrongful Conviction contains discussion of sexual assault. Please listen with caution and care.

00:00:09
Speaker 2: At five a m. On August third, nineteen eighty seven, at the Good Times Tavern in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the opening bartender discovered that the lights were still on, the safe was open and empty, and the previous night's bartender, Sandra Lyson, her car was still in the parking lot. The following day, her body was discovered in a forest about thirty miles north of Green Bay. She had been fatally strangled, and seamen was collected in a rape kit. Investigators interviewed people who had gone to the tavern that night, including thirty one year old Bobby Bentz along with his brother David. The case went cold for nearly twelve years until David Bentz was in prison for an unrelated crime and allegedly confessed to a cellmate that he'd killed Sandra Lyson with his brother Bobby. This is wrongful Conviction. The Fox Foundation is proud to support this episode of wrongful Conviction and the work of After Innocence, a nonprofit that helps hundreds of people nationwide rebuild their lives after wrongful incarceration each year. Innocent people are released after spending years behind bars for crimes they didn't commit. Nearly all of them leave prison with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, with no help or compensation from the state as they face the steep challenges of rebuilding their lives after wrongful imprisonment. After Innocence is changing that After Innocence helps exoneries get and make good use of essential services like health care, dental care, mental health support, legal aid, financial counseling, and more. Since twenty sixteen, they've brought that help to more than eight hundred exoneries across forty six states, working tirelessly to ensure that no one released after wrongful incarceration is left behind. Learn more at after dash innocence dot org and join after Innocence to support exoneries as they rebuild their lives. Welcome back to wrongful Conviction. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and this story takes us to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where a bartending mother of two was tragically taken from her children, while another mother lost two of her boys to the system. And today Bobby Bent joins us, thank you for being here.

00:02:41
Speaker 1: You're welcome.

00:02:42
Speaker 2: We also have this attorney from the Great North Innocence Project, Jim Mayer. Welcome, thank you very much, and later we will speak to his brother David as well. Now, Bobby, you guys grew up in Green Bay, which is a big sports town. Were you and your brother into sports.

00:02:59
Speaker 3: When we were We all got together and played to the ball around, football, baseball when we were kids.

00:03:06
Speaker 2: Were you too competitive with one another?

00:03:08
Speaker 1: Well, we're pretty close together a.

00:03:10
Speaker 2: Year apart, right, yeah. And who's the big brother.

00:03:13
Speaker 3: I got old brother Eddie too, David the oldest brother of me, Lauren.

00:03:19
Speaker 4: I was going to mention one thing if you wanted some more filled in detail about their childhood. They did live together on a farm, a foster home kind of during their high school years, where they did a lot of work on a farm. Is kind of interesting.

00:03:31
Speaker 3: We would clean all the pens out and the gutter and it was a rough childhood.

00:03:37
Speaker 2: From what we understand. There were substance abuse issues at home that resulted in the boys moving to foster care. But by the time of this crime, Bobby was thirty one years old and despite suffering from intellectual disabilities, both Bobby and David were doing well.

00:03:54
Speaker 3: I was an East Side of Green Bay, and I worked at a grocery store. I'm a driver, legad my own car. I always went to work. I was a meat wrapper clerk. I cleaned the meat room up really good, and my boss really enjoyed my work. I had to adopt for ten years.

00:04:11
Speaker 2: And what was David doing at the time.

00:04:14
Speaker 3: Dave had a house on State Tree in Green Bay, and he had a garage who worked on cars self employee. He had an auto salvage business. I helped him to pull motors out and put other motors in, clean them out and junk them. And you sell cars to it. I helped them all once a while.

00:04:32
Speaker 2: So you guys both like cars.

00:04:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh cars.

00:04:35
Speaker 2: Now, the night that this happened, you guys had been to the bar, which was called the Good Times Tavern to buy beer.

00:04:46
Speaker 3: I went and had a soda, and then I bought a case of beer. I went back to David's Houston. Then after that he went home.

00:04:52
Speaker 2: And you were upset because you realized you may have been overcharged for the beer.

00:04:57
Speaker 1: Davi was upset.

00:04:59
Speaker 2: David believed that the bar's price for a case of beer should have aligned more closely with that of a typical retailer, so we called the Good Times Tavern to voice his outrage, but nothing further. According to the other bargoers, the closing bartender, Sandra Lison, kicked everyone out by about two am. They also mentioned a stranger in a flannel's shirt which seemed off due to the balmy August weather, and then around five AM, a Good Times Tavern employee named Robert Miller came in to get the day started.

00:05:30
Speaker 4: The man who came in to clean the Good Times Tavern in the morning noticed that something was wrong. The Sunday night bartender Sandra Lyson. Her pack of cigarettes was sitting on the bar, her car was still in the parking lot. The tavern had not been locked and the safe was opened, so clearly something had gone wrong, and Sandra Lyson was nowhere to be seen, so he called the.

00:05:50
Speaker 2: Police and then her body was found.

00:05:54
Speaker 4: The body was found about forty eight hours later in a wooded area in a state forest about thirty miles or so north of Green Bay.

00:06:03
Speaker 2: Curiously, the first responders reported not seeing any drag marks, so perhaps the attack occurred somewhere else. Additionally, she was clothed, but there were leaves and other debris inside her undergarments.

00:06:18
Speaker 4: The medical examiner actually came out to investigate and examine the body formed the conclusion that the victim had likely been beaten and sexually assaulted and the cause of death was strangulation. So a rape kit was performed. They took samples and they did detect the presence of seamen, which was recovered from the victim's leg and underclothing and dress, and also from a vaginal swab.

00:06:42
Speaker 2: Now I know that Bobby, you mentioned that David had been upset about the cost of the beer from the night before. So when did the police question you?

00:06:53
Speaker 3: A couple of days later? This is where you at the bar of the night you a mission. I remember seeing her and the bar I've seen man, but I remember seeing her.

00:07:01
Speaker 2: Did you think anything else of it? No, we're not sure what happened to any other leads that the police were following, but the case went cold for about four years, at which time sandra license purse was discovered in the woods about ten miles south of Green Bay, so in the opposite direction of where the body was discovered, and who even knows when the purse was deposited there. And then another seven years passed during which time David Bentce was convicted of an unrelated crime and his cellmate Gary Swinby alleged that David Bentce was saying disturbing things in his sleep like quote, killed the bitch Bob unquote.

00:07:43
Speaker 4: As you mentioned, this cellmate of David's came forward and claimed that he'd been saying things in his sleep. The staff at the prison encouraged the cellmate to engage David in conversation when he woke up. This all leads to the cellmate making a statement to and authorities indicating that he says David had confessed to the crime and implicated his brother Bobby as well. I think people who have prior convictions are always an easier target for a wrongful conviction, as are people who may have particular psychological or intellectual vulnerabilities. You know, those people sometimes get preyed upon. They're not able to defend themselves adequately, and they're at much greater risk of a false confession, of a wrongful conviction, of all kinds of bad outcomes in the criminal legal system.

00:08:27
Speaker 2: David agreed to speak with us about his unrecorded interrogation in which investigators confronted him with what his cellmate had alleged this guy.

00:08:37
Speaker 5: I think he thought he could get something out of it.

00:08:38
Speaker 1: What staff.

00:08:39
Speaker 5: I never talked to my sleep, never have. When a tectives came and questioned me, as you said I could get up any time of water, they said, I can get up any time of wan. And I know I was alive because they were going to be going till they got a confession. I was in it room for seven hours.

00:08:58
Speaker 2: You know, we know that best practic this is no more than four hours should somebody be interrogated. And after six hours the incidences of false confessions skyrocket.

00:09:11
Speaker 5: They won't let me go.

00:09:13
Speaker 1: So we know you did it. We know you did it.

00:09:16
Speaker 5: So I said anything to get out of her.

00:09:18
Speaker 4: We don't know one hundred percent because this was an unrecorded interrogation. This was, from all accounts, an aggressive interrogation, one that was designed to secure a confession to try to solve this cold case. David says several times that he was at home on the night Desander license disappears that he didn't know what happened to her, But at the same time, when they would confront him with the statement from the cellmate, he would say things like you've got it right there. It's in black and white. And so it was sort of a conversation that started going in circles.

00:09:48
Speaker 2: So it wasn't a clearer confession that would.

00:09:51
Speaker 4: Be putting it generously, but they made the decision that that was close enough to a confession to focus once again on the Vince brothers.

00:10:13
Speaker 2: Do you remember, Bobby, when you heard that your brother had been accused of talking in his sleep and it named you.

00:10:21
Speaker 3: I remember people talking about it, but he never talks in his sleep.

00:10:25
Speaker 2: But now they have a false confession from David, and then they go to you, Bobby, and say you're under arrest.

00:10:33
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:10:33
Speaker 3: They rested me at my apartment. They said you're under arrest for the murder of Sandral License. And I had my girlfriend in my house too with me, and she's, honey, no go, I said I have to, So you put the couch on me.

00:10:48
Speaker 2: What went through your head? Did you think that this was some big mistake?

00:10:52
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:10:53
Speaker 5: I was.

00:10:54
Speaker 1: I was scared and upset.

00:10:58
Speaker 2: And sometime between as a rest and trial, the state found someone who was willing to claim they'd heard Bobby confess as well.

00:11:06
Speaker 1: That was Joan Andrews.

00:11:08
Speaker 4: So this witness told the court in Bobby's trial that she had been giving him a ride to go and visit his mother up north in the direction of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and that during that ride he had somehow confessed to being involved in Sandra License murder. Of course, what also came out at the trial, though it didn't end up making any difference, was the fact that his mother had never lived up in that area, in fact, lived south of Green Bay.

00:11:35
Speaker 2: If I'm not mistaken, yep, okay, So can you tell me, Jim about the DNA evidence that they were aware of before the brothers even were put on trial.

00:11:48
Speaker 4: Well, as you can recall, in nineteen eighty seven, at the time that the murder happened and the body was recovered, DNA testing was not quite as advanced and widespread. And then if we fast forward the twelve years to and they are thinking about charging the Vince brothers, they realize we've got this rich source of DNA from the crime scene. They get a search warrant to take samples from Bobby and David to compare against the profile from the semen left at the crime scene. And when they did that comparison, both brothers were excluded as the source of the semen.

00:12:20
Speaker 2: So of course they called off the trial and let the brothers.

00:12:23
Speaker 4: Go right, No, that we wouldn't be here if that had happened. But of course they were at a crossroads. Do we go with the physical evidence, which we know is strongly indicative of a sexual assault and strongly suggesting that the person whose bodily fluids are at the crime scene is the person responsible. Or do they abandon that and go after these two guys who have no connection to the crime based on the physical evidence, and they chose the latter. They chose to go after Bobby and David. The state very strongly argued at both trials, this is obviously not a sexual assault. This is simply a robbery and a murder. Any previous thoughts that this may be a sexual assault were pure speculation and not true.

00:13:03
Speaker 2: Remember, the body was discovered clothed, but with leaves and other debris in the undergarments, suggesting that the body was likely unclothed outdoors. Then there was semen collected from her leg, clothing and inside her body. So the theory was that the sperm came from consensual sex that occurred prior to her fourteen hour bartending shift, and that she simply let the seamen just live on her leg and clothing. And then they called experts to the stand to corroborate that theory.

00:13:37
Speaker 4: They present a testimony from a couple of different experts about when the semen would have been deposited based on the condition they found it in, and what the medical examiner said on the witness stand was this most likely was deposited either after the death up to twenty four hours after the death, most likely recent and what the specific words were, seventy five percent likelihood that the sperm was left there within twenty four hours of the death, which makes it very implausible that this was a consensual sexual encounter because she was working a twelve to fourteen hour bartending shift right before this event. You know, she got up in the morning, she went to a bartending shift, and it was implausible enough that she would have had this sexual encounter and not cleaned up or anything. But still, even so, in the closing argument, the prosecutor twisted those words around and said it was most likely between twenty four and forty eight hours when it was deposited. At least that's what he said at Bobby's trial, and so I read that transcript and I just get angry. I don't know that that made the difference, but it makes you think that sometimes this is a game of inches and prosecutors and everyone involved in the system needs to be scrupulously honest when they're talking about the evidence.

00:14:50
Speaker 2: Bobby, tell me about the trial from your perspective.

00:14:55
Speaker 3: Well, when I went to court, I was really upset. And the guy that said David talking and sleep, his name was Gary Swenbee.

00:15:04
Speaker 1: He got out.

00:15:05
Speaker 3: I couldn't cross examine him because he got killed in a car accident a month before my trial. I couldn't cross examine a piece of paper, you know. So I didn't get a fair trial in Green Bay at all.

00:15:17
Speaker 2: All right, So take me to the moment of the verdict guilty.

00:15:22
Speaker 3: The judge said, I send you to the prison the rest of your natural life. I just broke down in tears. I just broke down, and the daughter stood up in court. I said, I'm sorry for what happened, but I said, I did not kill your mom. Well, it's really nasty in there, and it's filthy, and the medical hsu A health department is terrible. I went to the hospital almost every week by resis squad from the prison.

00:16:03
Speaker 1: I got asthma real bad.

00:16:06
Speaker 2: Were you guys held anywhere near one another?

00:16:09
Speaker 3: We're at Green Bay together for a few years. I was in a dorm with Dave. You're so glad to see me when I came in.

00:16:18
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, a lot of people form relationships like brothers when they're serving time together. But was it somewhat of a comfort that you guys were in the same place even though you were both living the same nightmare?

00:16:32
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:16:36
Speaker 2: Did you guys think that it was just a matter of time before they realized they had made a mistake?

00:16:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, it took a few.

00:16:45
Speaker 2: Years, fortunately for both of them. David's case was picked up by the Wisconsin Innocence Project. After all, despite his previous conviction, he too had been wrongfully convicted of this crime, and there was biological evidence that could exonerate him and his brother. They secured additional DNA testing in two thousand and six.

00:17:07
Speaker 4: Additional testing had shown that there was male blood on the victim's dress, and the person who deposited the blood on the victim's dress was the same person who deposited the semen. So that really strongly supported the initial conclusion that this was a sexual assault and that the person. It sounds crazy that I even have to say it, that most likely the man whose blood and semen was on the crime scene was responsible for the crime. So the Wisconsin Innocence Projects sought post conviction relief for David. They tried to get his conviction tossed out, get him a new trial. The state opposed relief for David. This is just speculation to say that this man's blood and semen on the victim are indicative of sexual assault. And the court unfortunately agreed with the state, denied the motion that was affirmed on appeal and the bench Brothers would spend another fifteen years in prison after that decision was made.

00:18:02
Speaker 2: That decision seems completely divorced from reality, and this was obviously a major setback. How do you come up with more convincing evidence than that, Well, that's what the Great North Innocence Projects set out to do in twenty eighteen, and.

00:18:17
Speaker 4: So we set out to test every piece of physical evidence remaining at that crime scene, every bloodstain, every hair, everything we could get a profile from, and nothing from that crime scene of this supposedly very intimate physical crime. Nothing from that scene connected either Bobby or David Bince to the murder, but what we did see was the same unknown male profile that kept coming up.

00:18:41
Speaker 2: Since the unknown male profile cannot be identified in CODIS, they tried another path. The lab was able to develop a special kind of DNA profile, which can be used to trace ancestry through public genealogical databases. They worked with a genealogist going through birth, death and other public records to close in on the origin of this profile. It took almost five years.

00:19:08
Speaker 4: After a long, long stretch of doing that work and almost giving up, we finally were able to narrow the search to one family that had three male children who were all of suitable age and living in the Green Bay area at the time of the crime. One of those three was William Hendrix, and he immediately stood out because of his past. He had prior convictions for sexual assault. Their victim in that case said that he had threatened to strangle her at some point, which, of course was sandra License cause of death. He had just been released from prison less than a year before Sandra Lyson was abducted. We also know that he previously lived about thirty to forty miles north of Green Bay, so that he would have driven by that state forest where the body was found many many times as he went back and forth between that old place where he lived and Green Bay. And at the time of the abduction, he lived in the neighborhood of the Good Times Tavern.

00:20:03
Speaker 2: But once they'd made this potential match, they needed to compare the DNA profile with a sample from William Hendrix himself. However, Hendrix had died in April of two thousand.

00:20:15
Speaker 4: After securing a court order to exhume the body, it was transported to the Brown County Medical Examiner's office and samples were taken and then sent off to the lab for DNA analysis.

00:20:26
Speaker 2: And when they came back.

00:20:27
Speaker 4: I'll never forget the day that they came back with the results testing the femur that was taken from the body and comparing it to the crime scene evidence, and the number that was given to us by the Wisconsin State Crime Lab was that this was a match with a likelihood of one in three hundred and twenty nine trillion.

00:20:46
Speaker 2: Beyond a doubt. How did you share the news with Bobby?

00:20:52
Speaker 4: We called Bobby that day, and I'm looking at him because I'm sure he remembers that phone call. He's smiling, so blessed and we finally got the truth. And I was really emotion on the phone. I chears in my eyes and just emotional. I could hardly talk. We said, we knew this was gonna be happen, but now it finally has. You're gonna be able to go home soon.

00:21:14
Speaker 3: It would just say happy, said feeling, But it's a good feeling. I told the guys just keep your head up and keep the faith. And one guy, she let me give you a hug. And I know you're not a gilt I told you from the get go. I wouldn't hurt him fly, I would never kill anybody. Backed myself and left everything behind and just grow up my paperwork and all that stuff. And boy was I blessed to have good attorneys out of Teat like you and Chris Well.

00:21:38
Speaker 4: There's no better days than the day that someone like Bobby walks out of prison and you can be there to enjoy it with him. And so it was, you know, I think he said it best. It was happy, sad. You're so pleased to see him free. You're so happy to see him on the outside, but you're also struck by the enormity of the loss and the suffering and the years that he can never get back. So it's it's bittersweet. But it was a really, really a wonderful day and it was great to drive Bobby away from that prison. While he was eating his barbecue chips, drinking his son what was it coke?

00:22:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, and having served out his sentence for his prior conviction, David was now also free from his wrongful conviction.

00:22:19
Speaker 5: When I was walking on I didn't know that the Innocent Project was coming to pick me up.

00:22:24
Speaker 6: And I walk outside there was an Innocent Project, Rachel and Zoe and mister Keuneham. There was like three carfuls of people out there.

00:22:34
Speaker 1: Take your time.

00:22:37
Speaker 6: I was emotional. My mom just pushed it over the edge when she had two sons locked up for a GRAM and they commit and she was here to see this. You never got a takeod by her.

00:22:50
Speaker 3: Not my mom said before she passed away. My sister brought her up to visit me and she says that I hope you out some day, asked Mom, today I get out of Printon, You'll be Dan for joy in heaven and I lost my niece to my sister's daughter horrible drunk driver car act. Horrible car accident, and I was in there for my niece and every birthday's and visit them like I used to.

00:23:19
Speaker 2: Now, I want to talk to you guys about that, and I'll ask you Jim first. You know, we've been asking people a lot about the concept of accountability. I know that you know there's a monetary aspect, but that doesn't buy back time. I think of twenty five years for each of you for something that you were innocent of the entire time. But it also seems in this case that that was known even before they set foot and trial. When you look at a case like this, Jim, where do you point blame?

00:23:57
Speaker 4: That's a really difficult question. I guess I would have to start by saying where I don't point blame and where I want to give credit. There's the current Brown County District Attorney. They weren't involved in the original prosecution. This guy was not involved in David's previous petition for post conviction relief. So when we came forward and we said we wanted to do more testing in this case, the current Brown County District Attorney said, go ahead, test whatever you want. I won't oppose it. I'll stipulate to it. And he could have opposed us, he could have stood.

00:24:24
Speaker 1: In our way.

00:24:24
Speaker 4: We would have had to bring a motion in court, and we very well may have lost that motion. The testing never would have happened, and Bobby and David would still be in prison. But he didn't. He said go ahead and test. I won't stand in your way. And then finally when we came to them with the results of the testing and the genealogy and the lead of William Hendrix, they agreed with us that this was significant, that the case needed to be reopened and reinvestigated. And then once we confirmed it didn't happen as quickly as I had hoped that. Once we confirmed that William Hendrix was the one, they agreed with us and stipulated to vacating the conviction and freeing. These men want to give credit where credit is due. I appreciate their approach to the case.

00:25:04
Speaker 2: It is inspiring to know that there are people in positions of power who are ready and willing to acknowledge that mistakes happen, even though they didn't necessarily happen on their watch.

00:25:18
Speaker 4: We need more of that. We need more of that among prosecutors. We need them to take their role as a minister of justice seriously and not simply as being someone whose job is to convict convict. We need prosecutors who are willing to look at the evidence and do the right thing in every case. And we need an informed public who makes electoral decisions for these offices based on that, not simply based on who can say their toughest on crime.

00:25:44
Speaker 2: Amen to that. And so now I'd like to ask for what you want people to take away from this story.

00:25:51
Speaker 4: When I think about what happened to them when they were initially convicted and then again when they sought post conviction relief over fifteen years ago, I just think about the fact that the state is asking everyone to believe something that's really unbelievable. That you've got a crime scene with the victim whose clothing is partially removed, where you've got blood and semen from a man on that crime scene, and you've got debris underneath the victim's underclothing.

00:26:20
Speaker 1: You know what happened.

00:26:23
Speaker 4: If we had known who that person was at the time, that person would have been prosecuted, but we didn't know who that person was, and somebody had to pay. And that is the kind of thinking that we need to get away from the idea that it's more important that someone pay than that we get the right person. We talk a lot in this country about the expression it's better to let ten guilty people go free than to put one innocent person in prison. But if you actually do a poll in the United States, many people really don't believe that to be true. In fact, most people think it's just as bad to allow a guilty person go free as it is to allow an innocent person to be imprisoned, and a substantial number of people even think that it's worse to let a guilty person go free than it is to imprison an innocent person. Forgetting, of course, that every time an innocent person is imprisoned, that means, by definition, the guilty person has gone free. It's important for everyone in the system, including the jurors, to take their oaths and their duties very seriously. We have these burdens for a reason is to protect people's rights.

00:27:30
Speaker 3: I want people to believe that I'm not guilty, that I'm really innocent of this I want people who believe that they see the truth. Because wrongful convictions are terrible Wisconsin and the justice system is terrible. I want people who believe that I'm a good person.

00:27:53
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all Lava for Good podcasts one week early and add free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as executive producers Jason Vlahm, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Clyburn. 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 Lauren Bright Pacheco. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One.

00:28:31
Speaker 1: We have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in this show are accurate. 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,