Walking Free

0:07What does freedom feel like? It's amazing. It's hard not to find me with a smile on my face. It's just an overwhelming happiness that I can't and don't want to ever lose.

0:358 weeks worth of testimony, dozens of witnesses. This jury deliberated roughly 10 hours. We can only imagine the emotion that must have been going on. David Cam immediately erupted into tears. When that verdict came down, a verdict they have waited 13 years for. Stay back. Stay back, please. David Camp not guilty on all three counts of murder in this case.

1:27In some aspects, it's like I was never gone. With the exception of the fact that nieces and nephews and cousins are all grown. You're taller than I thought you were. You're really tall. Seeing people I haven't seen in a long time. Giving them hugs and kisses, you know, is just a real joy.

1:55I want my family back. I want my babies back. I want my wife back.

2:06You saw a body on the floor of the garage? Yeah. And I get down in her face and I'm yelling at her, Kim, Kim, Kim. And her eyes, I could tell she was gone. And it just hit me. Where are the kids? Where are the kids? We're not going to get David Cam to ever tell the truth. This guy's a murderer. He killed his wife. He killed his two beautiful children. My name is Charles Bonet, and I'm linked to David Cam because I'm the individual that sold him the weapon that he used to kill his family. Did you know Charles Bonet? Had you ever met him? No. Never laid eyes on him? No. So you think the prosecutor helped Charles Bonet come up with the story?

2:47I know that the investigators helped Charles Bonet to create a story. The government hid evidence, lied to me about the evidence. The time the crime was wrong, elements of the crime scene were incorrectly portrayed, and David Kamm gets arrested. How just was that? Justice is a very hard thing to define, and justice is a very hard thing to do. It took three trials, two convictions overturned by the Court of Appeals before the truth finally came out and established that David is totally innocent of the murder of his family. Charles Bonet is the person that killed my family. He thinks he's won by being free, but really, we have unfinished business.

3:36He's a psychopath. He's a liar.

3:43My assessment of the justice system, specifically in southern Indiana, is that at the trial court level, it's a disaster. These people that represent the state are incapable of doing the right thing. Oh, no. I have earned the right to have that opinion, Richard. I've earned that right. It's good to see you, Richard Schlesinger. Nice to meet you. For 12 years, David Kam has been talking to 48 Hours about the one night when his life was forever changed.

4:19Get everybody out here to my house now! Okay, alright. My wife and my kids are dead. The way David Kam tells it, on September 28, 2000, he returned home from playing basketball and discovered a scene that is still hard to imagine, let alone look at. His wife, Kim, was on the floor of the garage. Her pants had been removed. His five-year-old daughter, Jill, and his seven-year-old son, Bradley, were slumped inside the SUV. They had been shot dead with one bullet each, like an execution. It's Dave Kam. Let me talk to Post Command right now. Months earlier, Cam had quit the Indiana State Police to work at his family's business.

5:05But within three days of the murders, his former colleagues, his buddies, concluded he was the killer and charged him with three counts of homicide. And from our first interview in 2002, as he was in jail awaiting trial, he has insisted he is innocent. What about Cam and Brad and Jim? and what about the son of a bitch that's out there that did this? And what about the fact that I'm sitting in this jail? What about those questions? I want some answers. But Frank and Janice Wren, Kim's parents, Brad and Jill's grandparents, have all the answers they need. They know who killed their family. There's no way he's going to bring the kids back and my daughter back, no matter what they do with David, but he'll have to suffer.

5:56He dies someday, if it's soon, or it's 40 years from now. He's a guy after the God. Except Cam has what could be an airtight alibi. At the time of the murders, he said he was here, a few minutes away in a church gymnasium, playing basketball with 11 other people. How sure are you that David Cam was here for the entire two hours and change that you were here? I'm 100 % sure because I saw him walking on the side. I saw him sitting down. At his trial in 2002, prosecutors laid out their theory. The basketball players were focused on their game. Cam somehow slipped out of the gym, went home, killed his family, and came back unnoticed.

6:46To counter those 11 eyewitnesses, the prosecutors have these eight tiny specks of blood. on Cam's t-shirt. What I'm going to do is to demonstrate... The prosecution's blood expert, Rod Englert, called it high velocity impact spatter. This is blood that has been hit by something going very fast, like a bullet. Right. This is so unique and so separate from other stains that one can say with confidence that this is from high velocity mist, that the person that got this on him would be in close proximity, within four feet of the shots when they were fired. Cam says those tiny bloodstains were transferred to his shirt when he reached inside the car to pull out his son.

7:35His lawyers say 11 eyewitnesses can't be wrong. The DA says eight blood spots can't be wrong. And, say the prosecutors, besides the blood evidence, Cam had a strong motive to kill his family. Prosecutors found more than a dozen women who say they'd had affairs with Cam, or at least had been propositioned. It's sheer stupidity on my part. I allowed myself to get caught in something that never should have happened. And I take full responsibility for that. It shows motive, exactly. Stan Faith was the lead prosecutor. From a legal standpoint, we're showing what was going on in this man's mind prior, considerably prior to the murders, and how long it was developing and growing up into the hateful fruit that we saw on September 28th.

8:32I think that's utterly ridiculous. When the medical examiner, Dr. Tracy Corey, thought she found signs that Jill had been molested within 24 hours of her death, Prosecutors suggested that might have been a motive. The jury may believe that, yeah. I said, what are you talking about? So this is my five-year-old daughter, and I did not molest her, and I did not kill her. David Cam had never been accused of molesting Jill, and he was never charged with it in this case. He's doing fine. Cam's family, led by his uncle Sam Lockhart, who was also one of those basketball players, never once doubted his innocence.

9:16He was arrested three days after the murders. How thorough of an investigation can you do in three days? I think once they got beyond the path of no turning back, now their egos become involved and their political aspirations become involved. And as the Cam jury spends another night in the motel, they will be back in the room. And the jury deliberation will actually be in there because there's so much work out of you. But the jury convicted Cam after deliberating for three days. They're wrong! You all know they're wrong! You know they're wrong! Oh, God! Cam was sentenced to 195 years for the murder of his family.

9:57Eleven witnesses said he was at the basketball game. guilty guilty but while this was the end of the trial it was far from the end of this case this is just a delay we're not quitting i want to find out who killed those kids and kim i want to find that out richard and we're not going to quit until we do or we die

10:22one key to this case was in front of everyone's eyes right there next to bradley's body a sweatshirt Prosecutors knew in 2002 that there was some mystery DNA on it, along with a cryptic name inside the collar, Backbone. But they never investigated. The killer left a calling card there. That's the biggest clue in the case. We need to find out who was wearing that shirt. What if it comes back David Kam was wearing that shirt? It's not David Kam's sweatshirt. It took five years to find out, but David Kam was right. The sweatshirt belonged to this man, Charles Bonet, an ex-con with a nickname, Backbone.

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11:54He is the person that killed my family. He's a psychopath. He's a liar. He is the guy that has hurt waves and waves and waves of people, people that I love and care about. Who is that? Charles Bonet. Okay, so after this... Charles Bonet is the man who turned this case upside down. He is, to be charitable, a man whose honesty can honestly be questioned. Never, ever encountered Mr. David Kam. That's what he said when he was first interviewed about this case. And this is what he said to us a few years later. I lied about not knowing David Kam in the very beginning. I lied about not being at the crime scene.

12:45I gave Pinocchio a run for the Oscar. You told a lot of lies. I had to. Nobody knew anything about Bonet until an appeals court threw out David Cam's convictions, saying the prosecutors should never have introduced all those women Cam had affairs with. It was 2004. There was a newly elected prosecutor, Keith Henderson, who defeated Stan Faith. The Court of Appeals didn't say he was innocent. Henderson decided to try Cam again, and he was forced by a court order to test that DNA on the sweatshirt. I did not know what we were going to find. They quickly found Charles Bonet. The DNA was entered into a database of known criminals, and it was an easy match.

13:34They also matched a palm print found on the family's SUV to Bonet. My initial presumption was, we've got the guy. It's over. It was five years after the murders, and now there was a new suspect and a new question. Why didn't Stan Faith, the first prosecutor, find Bonet? You did know that the unknown male DNA existed. I knew that existed. The laboratory knew it existed. And I asked the state police officer, the lead investigator, to check that out. And he told me he checked it out and there wasn't anything that they had. But Bonet's DNA was in the database all along. Faith now says there must have been some misunderstanding on the part of the state police about what he wanted.

14:30You asked the state police to run it. How is that misunderstood? I don't know. In 2002, Faith told Cam's first defense attorney, Mike McDaniel, that there was no match. After all these years, McDaniel still thinks Faith never even tried to match the DNA. I think I was lied to. I mean, that's me. I did not tell him a lie. I certainly did not do that. I told him the truth as I was told the information by the state police. Period. It turns out there was plenty of evidence implicating Bonet from day one of the investigation. Not just the DNA and the palm print, but that nickname, Backbone, that Bonet used when he was in prison.

15:17You had all of these signposts pointing you towards Bonet kind of staring you in the face. 2020 hindsight says that. That's not 20. That's 2020 hindsight, sir. You know, here, we've known each other a long time. I don't mean any disrespect by this, but we were asking questions about that sweatshirt 10 years ago, 11 years ago. We asked questions about the sweatshirt, too. We looked at that, and I cannot tell you why the name Bonet did not come up. I wish it had come up. What must that have done to you when you learned all of this stuff that you could have had in your trial, in your case? I spoke harshly to Mr.

16:01Faith. Harshly? Yes, sir. What did you say to Mr. Faith? I cursed him like a wet dog. Bonet could have been the answer to the prayers of Cam's first attorney, Mike McDaniel. Bonet grew up around New Albany, and he soon started getting into trouble. His record includes armed robbery and a history of attacking women. He was just waving the gun at us, hollering. He terrorized Donna Ennis and her two roommates in 1992. Do you think that Charles Bonet was going to kill you that time? Yes. You thought you were going to die right there? Well, yeah, that night, yes. That night? Yes. And there is one other intriguing aspect of Bonet's criminal background.

16:51You know, quite honestly, for anyone who doesn't know the story, I have a foot fetish. In fact, at one point, he was known to the police as the shoe bandit. He would make off with the shoes of his victims. There's thousands of men that have foot fetishes or whatever. There's nothing unusual about that. But in this case, Kim Cam was barefoot, and her shoes were placed neatly on top of her SUV in the midst of a messy crime scene. And that has always perplexed investigators. Is it logical to make a connection between someone with, you know, with your interest in feet and shoes to this crime where strange things happen to feet and shoes?

17:36That would be a logical conclusion or situation, yes. But it didn't happen that way. So what did happen? Bonet is now trying to sell the story that all he did was sell David Cam a gun. And Bonet swears that's the truth.

18:07I've learned you don't let the highs get too high. Otherwise, you're going to fall off a cliff if you go too far in allowing yourself to presume that you're going to be victorious. In 2005, things were looking up for David Cam. His convictions had been thrown out. He was out on bond, and Charles Bonet had been tracked down. And then came word all charges against Cam had been dropped. David, how does it feel to be out from behind bars? Cam was technically a free man. It seemed too good to be true, and it was. I'm looking at the file as we speak. Prosecutor Keith Henderson had to drop the old charges to file new charges against Cam and Bonet.

18:55I didn't want David Cam to flee. I got a guy that's convicted and sentenced to 195 years, a natural life sentence. So a little more than an hour after the charges were dropped, the police showed up to re-arrest David Cam. They informed me that I was being recharged with three counts of murder. Just sick in my stomach, sick in my gut, heartbroken. In January 2006, Cam and Bonet went on trial, separately and simultaneously, but on opposite sides of the state for murder and conspiracy. After discovering Charles Bonet, my belief now is that this was planned, well in advance. But one of Cam's lawyers, Kitty Lyle, believed Bonet would make all the difference in trial number two.

19:48We can answer the question to the jury, if Dave Cam didn't do it, who did? Although a defendant never has the burden of proof, never has to prove they're innocent, the fact of the matter is jurors are human beings, they have natural questions, and they want that question answered. Cam says he never heard of Bonet, but Bonet says the two met on a basketball court a few weeks before the murders. He asked me if I had access or knew of a way in order to gain access to specifically a handgun. Bonet says he delivered a gun to Cam's house the night of the murders. I transported it inside of my sweatshirt, the infamous backbone sweatshirt.

20:32And that's how that sweatshirt came to be in that garage? That's correct. Bonet says when Cam came home a few minutes later, things started happening quickly. And then along comes this black SUV. He says Kim drove into the garage and Cam followed her. I heard him talking a little more loudly. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I hear a pop. And then I hear another pop. And then the third pop. They were the gunshot deaths of his family. And then, according to Bonet, Cam came after him. When he came out of the garage, he pointed that weapon at me, and he pulled it, and there was nothing, nothing discharged.

21:11To hear Bonet tell it, he had a close brush with death. But he says right after the gun failed to fire, he chased Cam back into the garage. Who goes running after somebody who's just tried to kill him? Why not run after him? There's no bullets in the weapon. I did go in after him, and if someone doesn't believe that, that's fine. I'm sure it was his hope and belief that he could create a story that would, you know, enable him to continue to get away with killing my family. We have breaking news in the Charles Bonet triple murder trial. The jury just reached a verdict. Guilty on all counts. With Bonet convicted, Cam was feeling better about his second trial, especially because the judge threw out the conspiracy charge.

21:59But he had to worry when he heard prosecutor Keith Henderson tell the jury about those unproven suspicions that Jill was molested. What's it like to hear those allegations? Now, that makes my blood boil. That's the one thing that really infuriates me more than a lot of things. Because? Because it's not true and because it is so inflammatory. And your birthday, dear Jill. It would have been Jill's 11th birthday. And now David Cam's fate is once again in the hands of 12 jurors. Spent a lot of time on my knees, Perry. And believe me. It didn't work. Cam was found guilty again. No, no, no, no. Don't ask!

22:55God damn! This time, David Kam was sentenced to life in prison without parole. So how do you convince people now from this place that you're an innocent man? You've had two trials, two convictions. Well, I mean, at this point, Richard, people have formulated an opinion, and they either believe in me or they don't. There's one group of individuals that I'm concerned with right now, that is the Indiana Supreme Court.

23:31Cam's lawyers filed an appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court, and in 2009, the justices overturned his second conviction. The court ruled, among other things, the jury was unfairly influenced by the unproven theory that Cam abused his daughter, saying, quote, missing from this record is any competent evidence of the premise that the defendant molested the child. And I turned on the TV and there it was. And? Tears, people yelling congratulations, just an overwhelming happiness and the possibility of another shot. And were you ready to go through this again? Absolutely. He would have to wait three years in maximum security for trial number three.

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25:11The third trial was based upon fact and evidence, and that's what trials are supposed to be about. That's what the courtroom is supposed to be about. For David Kam's third trial, he has a third new lawyer, Rick Kamen, who is convinced he's innocent. What kind of pressure does that put on you as a defense lawyer?

25:37Kamen is joining Stacey Ulyanov, who helped defend Kam in his second trial and argued his second appeal. I wanted to make sure I was the person who stayed on the case, who got that opportunity to correct it. We're putting on the evidence as best we can. This time, the defense will be up against a special prosecutor, Stan Levko, who had to familiarize himself with a 13-year-long investigation. How does this rate with the number of boxes, I guess, that you have on a normal case? Oh, this is... I personally never tried a case with this much. It was a familiar scene, but a different courthouse on August 22, 2013, this time just outside Indianapolis.

26:21Frank and Janice Wren, who lost their daughter and their grandchildren, have been in court for almost every day of every trial. Your mind's spinning a lot, and my stomach turns sometimes on certain things, and I guess I just wonder, why is this happening? David Cam's sister, Julie, came with their uncle, Sam Lockhart. They've been at Cam's side since day one. Emotionally, financially, physically, all those things just taken a toll not only on me, but on our family. Once again, the jury would hear about the 11 basketball players and the eight drops of blood. But this time, David Cam's lawyers had a different strategy and different experts.

27:12What the defense hoped would be a major turning point in this case came from here, a most unlikely spot 10 ,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains at this DNA lab. So this is where you tested some of the evidence? Yes. Scientists Richard and Selma Eichlenboom are originally from the Netherlands. In Holland we do truth finding. We work for the courts. As they showed us in this demonstration, their specialty is locating what's called touch DNA, using a very sensitive technique to find skin cells. And this time they found DNA that would change everything. So you found Bonet's DNA on all the victims? Correct.

28:00All over that crime scene? Correct. What does that tell you? That he was active on this crime scene. But Bonet says if his DNA is spread over the crime scene, David Cam put it there. David Cam and I shook hands, for example. Your DNA ended up all over that scene because you shook hands with David Cam. Well, once again, my DNA is not all over the scene. But the Eichlin boom say their tests show Bonet's DNA on Jill's shirt, Bradley's shirt, Kim's shirt, and her underwear. And they say they also found Bonet's DNA under Kim's fingernails. What's more, they insist the state police lab could have found it years ago if the technicians had looked more closely.