Last Chance

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1:17Do you remember the case of Crystal Champagne? Yes. In my business, most of the time you're doing autopsies on bad guys. But doing autopsies on children is something that quite often will stay with you. My name is Fraser McKenzie. I'm a forensic pathologist. And in 1996, I was doing autopsies for the Jefferson Parish Coroner's Office. Crystal Champagne was a 14-year-old loving, caring child that would help anybody. She loved sports. She loved animals. She wouldn't hurt anybody. to somebody I miss very much. I am Dawn Champagne, and I'm Crystal Champagne's mother. Everything seemed like it was just a regular day going on.

2:10Erin Moriarty:I want to say she left my house about 5.15 and went to the store. She went to go get her some noodles. She liked her Chinese noodles. And that was the last time I seen her.

2:26Erin Moriarty:I was asking people if they'd seen her and I couldn't find her I called the police I need to get a cop to my house A 14 year old daughter's been in the school for the last two and a half hours and we can't find her nowhere She's been missing? Yes Okay, what's your daughter's name, ma 'am? Crystal C-R-Y That's the hardest night of my life Champagne? Uh-huh Just staying up waiting for her to come walking through the door

2:54A 14-year-old white female had been reported missing approximately 24 hours prior to her discovery.

3:04Erin Moriarty:Deputies found the Champagne's oldest daughter under the Huey P. Long Bridge last night. She was found unresponsive. A ligature was found around her neck. A matter of death is considered to be homicide. Authorities believe she may have also been sexually assaulted. Damon Thibodeau was a 22-year-old drifter who came to town recently as a cousin of the family. I got a job here as a deckhand. Thibodeau was someone the family trusted. Police were questioning Damon when news came of Crystal being found dead. By the end of the questioning, Damon confessed to the rape and murder of Crystal Champagne.

3:44You wrapped the wire around him twice? Yes. You tell them you did do it. Yeah. You confessed. I was in shock. You don't just say that you murdered her. You say you raped her. It was surprising to hear that he confessed to doing it. My name is Damon Thibodeau. Until someone is in the position that I was put in, they will never understand why someone confesses to a crime they didn't commit.

4:22Like so many places along the banks of the Mississippi, West Wego, Louisiana, attracts strangers in search of work on boats and barges. It is why 22-year-old Damon Thibodeau, who had come to town for a family wedding, stayed. He had been in town for only a month when Crystal Champagne was killed.

4:49In these very high-profile cases, there's a great deal of pressure to get the case solved and ease the worried mind of the public. Attorney Denny LaBeouf remembers the day in July 1996 when Damon was arrested for murder. His picture's in the paper the next day. We got the guy that killed the girl. The Champagne family had befriended Damon when he first arrived at the New Orleans suburb. He was a distant cousin whom they barely knew, says Crystal's mother, Dawn. He just seemed to be an ordinary person. Was he ever inappropriate with your daughter? Not that I ever noticed. Did you consider them as part of your family?

5:32Yeah. Damon was with the Champagnes on the hot Friday afternoon when Crystal said she was going to walk to the store. Had she asked you for a ride? Yes. And you said no? I said no. When she didn't return and her mother panicked and called police... Okay, what's your daughter's name, ma 'am? Crystal. Damon joined family and friends in a search. All through the night. We checked the park where she played softball at. We checked the shopping center. Right around the neighborhood, you know, just looking for her. 24 hours after Crystal went missing, police brought in Damon and others for questioning.

6:16He was still there when the case became a homicide.

6:26Crystal's body was found by a family friend near the levee in Bridge City, about five miles from her home. It's now a murder investigation. It's no longer missing persons. And the conversation, he says, got rough. I was increasingly under the impression that I was not going to be able to leave. Because they thought you had done it. Around 1 a.m., Damon agreed to take a polygraph. And what did they tell you? Did you pass it? No, they said I failed it. That's the point where I realized I was never going to walk out of there. Damon says he felt doomed as the grilling continued for another three hours.

7:08They kept asking the same questions over and over and over and over and over and over again. Finally, he says he was too exhausted to take any more. What did you tell them? Whatever they wanted to hear. Damon told investigators that he had found Crystal at the store and drove her to the levee. When she resisted having sex with him, he said... Who did she do? She started the fight. He killed her. When you left, how was she laying? Face down. But you're confessing to a rape and murder. They were not going to let me go until I did it. Hours later, when Damon met with an attorney, he denied having anything to do with Crystal's death.

7:56But he had already been arrested and charged with rape and murder. Help me out with this a little bit, Damon, because I can't imagine in my wildest dreams admitting to a horrific crime, including giving some grisly details, if I didn't do it. At first, I thought so, too. But after not sleeping, not eating, I'm thinking, well, okay, I'll give them what they want to hear and the evidence will come out and it'll show I didn't do it and people will see that. In fact, almost nothing Damon said matched the evidence, says attorney Denny LaBeouf. They could have known within 24 hours that the confession was really stinky, that it almost couldn't be true.

8:44At first glance, it did appear that Crystal had been raped. Her shorts and her underpants were down about her knees. But when Dr. Fraser McKenzie conducted the autopsy, he found no sign of sexual assault. She didn't have those kind of injuries. No. Nor did he find any seminal fluid. Damon also told investigators that he choked Crystal with his hands. Not likely, says Dr. McKenzie. There's no kind of injury that would be associated with using your hands? Correct. Instead, the neck injury was caused by red industrial wire. Police found its source hanging on a nearby tree.

9:31They asked him, where'd you get the wire? And he said, from the trunk of my car. They say, what color is the wire? And he said, it was clear, like speaker wire.

9:45And when the interrogator finally says, did you have any red wire? Come on.

9:57We did believe that we had the right guy. We did believe that it was a good case, and we believed that he was the perpetrator. Paul Connick became the Jefferson Parish District Attorney six months after the murder. It's hard to believe that anyone would confess to such a terrible crime if they didn't commit it. When Damon Thibodeau went on trial in 1997, he was confident that facts would show that he had falsely confessed. I'm thinking, well, this is all going to come out in the courtroom and this jury is going to see, well, this guy didn't do this. And that'll be the end of it. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime.

10:40They had 84 pieces of physical evidence in this case, and not one went back to Damon Thibodeau. But a detective explained the lack of evidence of rape by suggesting that insects had consumed all the fluids, a theory that he never discussed with the state pathologist. You're actually laughing. Is his explanation laughable? In my opinion, but I'm knowledgeable. For a jury, they're not knowledgeable. But could that have destroyed any evidence of sexual assault? No. No. The jurors also heard from two women who claimed seeing someone who looked like Damon on the levee the day of the murder. Damon did not take the stand, so he did not explain why he admitted to the crime before recanting.

11:30His incriminating words echoed in the courtroom. Put everything you said here as true and to the best to acknowledge. Yes. What went through your mind as you're listening to these? Why couldn't I be a little stronger?

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13:37What was it like seeing Damon in the courtroom? It hurt. I just wanted to ask him why. Dawn Champagne was convinced that Damon Thibodeau killed her daughter. These are people you consider family, and they think you killed Crystal. What was that like? It was weird. I mean, what... What do you tell someone in a situation like that? Jurors took just one hour to reach their verdict. You get the sinking feeling that this isn't going to go right, and then here it comes. What do you remember hearing? Guilty. Guilty. Damon was convicted of the rape and murder of Crystal Champagne. I was glad because it meant that they had who did it.

14:35His sentence? Death by lethal injection. And in October 1997, Damon Thibodeau was sent to Louisiana's notorious Angola prison. He began to despair. You get to a point where you don't want to be in that cell anymore, and that's the only way out. Execution? That's the only way out of that cell. What made you change your mind then? Denny. Denny, as in Denny LaBeouf. She walks in one day, she said, look, I read your case. She's an anti-death penalty attorney who fights to get inmates off of death row, no matter what they did to get there. I mean, you make no bones about it. Most of your clients are guilty.

15:22Absolutely. And the work that I do, I want to do on behalf of people who have tragically committed a homicide. That ain't Damon. LaBeouf was convinced that Damon Thibodeau was innocent. She immediately appealed the verdict. But two years after Damon stood trial, the state Supreme Court reaffirmed his conviction, a major victory for Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick. You still feel it's a good verdict? Absolutely. We had the confession. We had two witnesses who put him on the scene of the murder around the time of the murder. Denny LaBeouf couldn't give up, but she was overwhelmed.

16:05She sought help and found it in a place 1 ,200 miles away in Minneapolis. Here's where the body was found, down in here. Steve Kaplan was a partner at Fredrickson & Byron, a well-heeled civil law firm that takes on a few select criminal cases pro bono. As soon as I met him, it completely changed the stakes for me. It was not clinical. It was deeply personal. It was the look he gave me as he was saying goodbye that I remember, will always remember. His life is in your hands. Correct. How big a difference did it make when you got help from Minneapolis? Everything. Right away, the attorneys took another look at the witnesses, who said they saw a man who looked like Damon on the levee.

16:59But they then said, and you know, the police tape was around and the police were here. Well, that was the night they found her, not the night she was killed. They also reached out to the now-retired state pathologist, Dr. Fraser McKenzie. When he testified at the trial, he didn't know the details of the case. All I know was there was a confession. I have no knowledge whatsoever of what is contained in that confession. None. And when you find out? Then I'm really upset. The confession does not match the physical evidence. When you heard that he was convicted of rape, what did you think? I was just aghast, because at my examination, there was no evidence of a rape.

17:43Mackenzie signed an affidavit for the defense, outlining the serious discrepancies he found in Damon's story. I want the truth to come out and for it to be known. What's more, Mackenzie was able to help establish the time of Crystal's death, sometime before darkness fell, at 7.50 p.m., about two and a half hours after she left her home. That's crucial because Damon Thibodeau was with Crystal's family for most of that time. There was absolutely no time within which Damon could have possibly committed the crime. The defense contends that Damon was only on his own for about a half hour to 45 minutes.

18:30I sat in the parking lot in my car. And how long were you gone? Just long enough to smoke a joint. It's 10 minutes from the apartment to the crime scene. Another 10 to come back, that's 20 minutes. And it would have left no time for him to have done the murder, cleaned up, disposed of all the incriminating evidence, cleaned his car, and gotten back to the Champagnes, presumably fully composed and ready to rejoin the search. Was there anything about Damon that made him more likely to be manipulated? I think so. He was only 22. He had never been through anything like this in his life. And his background made him even more vulnerable, Kaplan says.

19:22I'm not asking any specifics, but you were abused as a child, weren't you? Yeah. Yeah. Dropped out of school? Yes. Damon had a childhood that was very, very tough and that produced a guy who would just rather walk away from a fight. After spending nearly a decade in the most hopeless place there is, by 2005, Damon had dozens of legal professionals, all volunteers, fighting to get his case heard and overturned. I said, well, if these people are going to fight to prove I didn't do this, I'm going to fight with them. Also on his side, attorney Barry Sheck and the Innocence Project based in New York.

20:08Well, this was a no-brainer for us. You could see that this confession was quite problematic from the start. Sheck says that while 25 % of the country's exonerated inmates had confessed to crimes they didn't commit, The hard fact is, no court is likely to release a man who admitted to such a brutal murder. So he came up with a novel and controversial idea. Instead of fighting lengthy court battles that were iffy at best, why not take Damon's case directly to their adversary? We believed that we could persuade the Jefferson County District Attorney's Office that they were dealing with an innocent man.

20:53But that would mean showing the DA everything they had. There's always the danger that all of a sudden you'll come up with some horrible evidence of guilt. That can happen. If you don't get Damon out, he's going to die. I have been in the death house at midnight when they killed my client and watched that, and I know how real it is.

21:25450 miles away from Angola Prison in the rural town of Hantsville, Alabama, a 14-year-old boy got a shocking letter from a death row inmate. I was like, what? Who is this? It was a birthday card from the father he had never known. I hope this card finds you well. You have questions and I want to answer them. I want to know you, so please write. How did you sign your letter? Damon. Not Dad. I didn't think I'd earned the title Dad, you know, because I was never there. Damon Thibodeau was 17 when his son Josh was born. Damon lost contact with him when he broke up with Josh's mom. I wanted to be part of his life, but I was a stranger to it.

22:16I wrote him back and pretty much asked him who he was. I wanted Josh to know that I wasn't a murderer. At that time, I didn't know if he was guilty of it or not. After many letters, over several years, Josh began to believe in his father. I wanted to meet him. I wanted to meet my dad, and he didn't want me to do that. Did I want to see him? Yes. very badly. But I wanted to be able to talk to him without having chains on my feet. Hug him without having chains on my feet. But fighting a case post-conviction takes time. Lots of time. So in May 2007, having already spent nearly 10 long years on death row, Damon agreed to allow Barry Sheck and his other lawyers to show the district attorney all the evidence they had gathered.

23:22There was some skepticism. The man is on death row. He's on death row. It's a horrible murder. And surprisingly, Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick was willing to hear them out. He came in along with his team. I had all of my chiefs in the room. The easy thing to do would be relying on the conviction. You know, this is going to be politically a hot potato here. Why are we going to reopen this case? Let's just leave this lie and let the course decide. I bet there are people in your office who said that. They're thinking, hey, this is good conviction. Why are we going down this road?

23:59But certainly there was enough presented to me. Whereas I sat there, I'm thinking, I got to look at this. Connick was troubled enough by what he saw that he agreed to open an investigation, not just working alongside the defense team, but also splitting costs. They would re-examine the physical evidence. This was a bloody crime scene and a bloody struggle. There would have to be some transfer of trace evidence on the person who committed this crime. I said, let's take another look at what was already tested using today's technology. This is a very scary thing. The risks haunted Denny LaBeouf, who feared Damon's DNA could have innocently ended up on Crystal.

24:43They're going to test his clothing and his car for hairs. And she lived in the house where he slept on the sofa. She'd ridden in his car. It would stop this case cold, I believe, if one little bit of forensic evidence matched Damon. But there was little choice. So every bit of the clothing that Damon and Crystal had worn was scrutinized for any speck of telltale DNA. In all, the testing took another two years. Was any DNA from Damon Thibodeau found on any of the evidence? No, no. Was anything from Crystal found on anything belonging to Damon Thibodeau? No. Was there anything that connected Damon Thibodeau to the crime scene?

25:35No. I was expecting those results. But you had to be thrilled. Oh, yeah, definitely I was thrilled. Because now I have something tangible to stick in front of the DA and say, look, you got the wrong guy. But Connick saw other problems with the case, like the defense claim that Damon didn't have enough time to kill Crystal. Was that true? It all hinged on Crystal's mother, Dawn. She first told police Damon was back at her home when she called 911. Her 14-year-old daughter's been in the school for the last two and a half hours. But later at trial, she said he wasn't. When we questioned her about her trial testimony, she went back and forth and finally said, whatever I told the police is my best recollection.