The Six

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2:07Please use discretion. In 1985, a 68-year-old woman named Helen Wilson was found dead in her apartment in Beatrice, Nebraska. Six people were eventually arrested for her murder. Only one of the six had refused to give any sort of cooperation to law enforcement, and that was Joseph Light. Joe Dugan worked as a reporter in Nebraska for almost 30 years. He had maintained he was innocent. He had nothing to do with it. Joseph White pleaded not guilty, and his trial began in the fall of 1989. Two of the other people who'd been arrested, Kathy Gonzalez and Tom Winslow, pleaded no contest. They said they weren't there.

2:56Three of the others who'd been arrested pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Joseph White. Joanne Taylor, James Dean, and Deborah Sheldon. If they cooperated and would give testimony against White, they would get reduced sentences. All three people who testified had told police they were there on the night of the murder. What did they, Deborah Sheldon, James Dean, and Joanne Taylor, what did they say when they got on the stand? Their testimony essentially said that they broke into Helen Wilson's apartment with the intention of robbing an old woman. They were looking for money. These were people who had, at best, worked marginal dead-end jobs, so that was supposed to be the motive.

3:47Essentially, they attacked Mrs. Wilson. Joseph White and Thomas Winslow raped her. And they testified that Joanne Taylor put a pillow over Mrs. Wilson's face, which caused her to suffocate to death. But all three had changed their stories multiple times. Did the defense question their stories at all, their credibility? They did. In his opening statements, Joseph White's attorney talked about how two of the three people testifying, Deborah Sheldon and James Dean, only remembered details of the murder through their dreams. He also talked about how Joanne Taylor had changed her story and about how there is no physical evidence that proved that Joseph White was at the scene.

4:41He said, quote, There is nothing they can show that puts Joe White on the premises except for three incredible witnesses. He did a good job of trying to raise reasonable doubt in the mind of jurors about the testimony of the three. Deputy Bert Searcy also testified at the trial. He said that when he arrested Joseph White in 1989, he admitted he'd been in Beatrice at the time of the murder. But he also said that he had denied knowing anything about what happened. On the last day of the trial, Joseph White was called to testify. He denied that he'd been involved in the murder. The county attorney then handed him a photo of Helen Wilson and asked him if he knew what it was.

5:30He responded, a picture of an old woman. and by the account of the defense attorney who represented White, he said the air just went out of the room when Joseph answered in that way. You had a couple dozen members of Helen Wilson's family were in the courtroom during the trial, had been there throughout the entire trial. It was a very full courtroom. And people were just, he said it was just dead silent after White answered the question in that way. There had been all of this testimony about the horrible crime and injuries that Helen Wilson had suffered during her attack leading to her death. and for White to just not even acknowledge who she was was regarded as a severe mistake on his part.

6:35A day later, he was convicted of first-degree murder. In Nebraska at that time and still today, if you're convicted of first-degree murder, there are only two sentences. One is life in prison. The other is the death penalty. And in Nebraska, life means life. There isn't the possibility of parole on a first-degree murder conviction. Joseph White got life in prison. At his sentencing, Joseph White told the judge, even if it takes 30 years, I am going to prove my innocence.

7:21His mother had read a book about how DNA testing in its nascent period had been used not only to convict criminals, but also to exonerate those who were wrongly accused. And his mother had shared that book with him, and he had brought it to the attention of his defense attorney. And at the sentencing hearing, Joseph did ask for DNA testing through his attorney, but it was not granted. The county prosecutor argued that DNA testing was still too new of a technology to be admissible in court. He also said that he thought the samples might have been too old to be tested. He also felt that the$350 cost of a DNA test was more than the county could afford.

8:13Joseph White appealed his conviction, but it was upheld by the Nebraska Supreme Court. He was sent to the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln. Joseph, while he's serving in prison, he works prison jobs, which pay, I think when he started, they paid like 30 cents an hour. He worked in wood shops and did other jobs he could do. And so he started saving his prison earnings and started contacting lawyers to look into his case. The first lawyer he hired didn't work out. Then he found a recent law school graduate who did a lot of research but didn't make much headway. And then in 2001, 11 years into his prison sentence, Nebraska passed a new law.

9:02It allowed people convicted of a crime to petition to have DNA testing done on old crime scene evidence. And then after the DNA Testing Act is passed by the legislature in 2001, Joseph really starts kind of focusing and hoping that that will provide an avenue. He reached out to a new lawyer named Doug Stratton. And he agrees to go down to the state pen and meet with Joseph White. Doug Stratton later said that he didn't intend to take Joseph's case, but he was going to the state penitentiary that day anyway. He sits down to meet with Joe, and Joseph convinces him of his innocence in a fairly short conversation.

9:49Doug Stratton would testify and tell people after that meeting he walked out of there thinking there was something about this guy that I believe him, I believe he's innocent. It seemed like he was telling the truth. Doug was just convinced he was telling the truth when he said I wasn't there. Lawyer Jeffrey Patterson. And so Doug realized that based on what Joseph told him, that DNA testing would be what would either exonerate Joseph or prove that he was there. Tom Winslow, another person arrested for Helen Wilson's murder, who had pleaded no contest, was also still in prison. He'd been given a 50-year sentence.

10:29Doug Stratton went to talk with him, too. And when Tom came into the interview room, Doug stood up and introduced himself, and he told Tom, I've been talking with Joseph White, and he tells me he wasn't there, and I believe him. And the way Doug describes it, Tom just broke down crying and said, I wasn't there either, but nobody would believe me. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

11:00In 2005, Joseph White and Tom Winslow filed motions to have pieces of evidence from Helen Wilson's apartment tested for DNA. The evidence had been sitting in the Beatrice Police Department basement for 20 years. They had done the original investigation in 1985. The sheriff's office took it over in 1989. And yet it was the police department that had saved that physical evidence. And so, does a DNA get tested? Um, not at first. The same county attorney who had prosecuted Joseph White was still in office. He had argued against testing the evidence in 1989, and now he argued against it again. A district court judge agreed, saying that even if the DNA evidence didn't match Joseph White or Tom Winslow, it wouldn't be enough to prove that they hadn't murdered her.

11:58It eventually goes to the Nebraska Supreme Court, and the Nebraska Supreme Court overturns the lower court's order and says, run the tests. Several pieces of evidence were tested, and in the summer of 2008, the results came back. There was DNA found on the items, but it didn't match Joseph White or Tom Winslow. I, like almost everyone else, thought, oh, okay, these two guys did not rape Helen Wilson, which means there must have been another person. I don't think anybody thought that they weren't there. Katherine Huddle was working in Beatrice, the local newspaper, that summer when the DNA results became public.

12:43You know, five out of the six had pleaded either guilty or no contest. So you thought, okay, this is interesting, but it doesn't change all that much. Right. But Joseph White and Tom Winslow's lawyers argued that they should be released from prison as soon as possible. I mean, it didn't, it could not have happened the way the three eyewitnesses testified. The county decided to do more DNA testing on the rest of the evidence from the crime scene. A second round of tests was conducted involving about 40 different items. and then those results came back and they showed not only did the DNA testing exclude White and Winslow, it also excluded the third male, James Dean, who was in the apartment, supposedly in the apartment, and it also excluded the three women who were in the apartment, Joanne Taylor, Kathy Gonzalez, and Debbie Sheldon.

13:49So all of the six who had been convicted of this crime, none of them could be included as contributors of the DNA. But the tests did find one match. All of the DNA had come from a single person, a man named Bruce Allen Smith.

14:13We'll be right back.

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16:13On the night of Helen Wilson's murder in 1985, Bruce Allen Smith was at a party outside of Beatrice. He was in his early 20s. Smith was really drunk, was kicked out of the party. And he kept saying, I don't care what happens, I'm going to get laid tonight. A friend of his drove him back to Beatrice and dropped him off on a street corner a few blocks south of Helen Wilson's apartment. Shortly after the murder, the police heard that Bruce Allen Smith had been near Helen Wilson's apartment that night. and that he'd been seen with scratches on his face and hands the next day. They tracked him down.

16:52He was in Oklahoma City by then. He gave blood and hair samples to local police. And what they're looking for is type B blood. And they are looking for not only just type B blood, but also B blood with a non-secretor status. The Oklahoma City lab runs tests on Smith's blood, and it comes back type B, but at that it is secretor. And so because of the secretor designation, he is eliminated as a suspect. But the blood test was wrong. Later, the forensic chemist who ran that test, a woman named Joyce Gilchrist, was fired from the Oklahoma City Police Department. The FBI had found that she'd misidentified evidence and made serious mistakes in some of her cases.

17:45She denied it and was never charged with a crime. One of the lingering questions when you look at the case is why didn't Nebraska have those samples retested here? I mean, why didn't anybody think, I wonder, I mean, he's type B. We have him blocks away from Wilson's apartment, that, you know, the night of the murder, in fact, they had determined that Bruce Allen Smith's grandmother had lived in the same apartment building. And there was, you know, so Smith had been in that apartment building, you know, prior to this. He knew the apartment building, at least to some degree. And so they had all of the supporting evidence and why no one thought to say, let's run, let's test his blood one more time.

18:38By the time police matched Bruce Allen Smith's DNA to Helen Wilson's murder in 2008, he'd been dead for 16 years. He'd been arrested over the years for theft, drug possession, and rape, and died in 1992. In 2008, a task force was put together to look again at the 1989 investigation. the evidence from the apartment and the new DNA results. You've got to remember it's a small apartment, right? And there's furniture tipped over, and there's conflict in there. And if you add Bruce Allen Smith to the mix, you've now got eight people in this very small apartment having quite a tussle. And yet, not a single speck of DNA from any of the six is found in the apartment.

19:27Joseph White, Tom Winslow, and Joanne Taylor were still in prison for Helen Wilson's murder. The other three had already served their sentences and had been released. The task force included members of the Beatrice Police Department, the sheriff's office, the Nebraska State Patrol, and representatives from the county. The Gage County prosecutor in 2008 was a member of the task force. and he told me that he remembers clear as a bell that all these prosecutors and all these cops are in this room and they'd gone over all this stuff and they suddenly looked at each other and said, oh my God, these people didn't do this, we've got to get them out of jail.

20:14In the fall of 2008, Joseph White, Tom Winslow, and Joanne Taylor were released. Altogether, the six people convicted of Helen Wilson's murder had spent more than 70 years in prison. As Joseph Light walked down the courthouse steps on the day of his release, reporter Joe Dugan walked with him. I was struck by he was not overly emotional. He didn't hug his attorney or have a big, huge smile on his face. He said, it's been a long, hard road, and I'm glad it's over. On his first day out of prison, Joseph White ate a cheeseburger at McDonald's and bought a cell phone at Walmart. He got on a Greyhound bus to go visit a Buddhist monk who he'd met while in prison, and then got on a plane back to his hometown in Alabama.

21:07What did he say about listening to what the others had said happened that night? You know, was he shocked that they had made up this story? He just said, I, you know, essentially I'm paraphrasing, but he said, they were afraid. I understand fear. And, you know, he was disappointed, obviously, but he didn't blame them. He didn't hold anger or resentment toward those who had testified against him. And I was just shocked by that response. When people feel trapped, when they're threatened, they will confess to something they didn't do. And another note is all of their, the defense attorneys, I mean, it sounded like these clients were guilty.

22:11So I think in good faith that the defense attorneys said, hey, they've got you on this. You better, you either plead and you get, you know, a moderate sentence or you run the risk of going on death row. Joanne Taylor told Joe Dugan in an interview, quote, I was dumb and I did what I had to do to save my life. She told him she was never in Helen Wilson's apartment. She hadn't seen Joseph White and Tom Winslow attacking Helen Wilson. And that she had said she was there because investigators had told her they had evidence that proved her guilty. In early 2009, the task force went before the Nebraska Board of Pardons.

22:58After looking at all of the evidence in the case and re-examining the 1989 investigation, they found that the so-called Beatrice Six could not have been in the apartment on the night of the murder. Quote, not beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond all doubt. It was the first time that anyone in Nebraska had been exonerated because of DNA evidence. At that time, Nebraska never had a DNA exoneration case and had no mechanism for people who were wrongly accused and convicted of crimes to seek compensation as a result of that. The Nebraska state legislature quickly passed a law that would provide compensation to people who had been wrongly convicted.

23:48The maximum payout was$500 ,000. They awarded$500 ,000 to Joseph White on the grounds that he had never admitted guilt and he had not testified or given incriminating statements against the others. They later paid settlements to the other five, too. I think in the end, Nebraska paid out a combined total of$2 million to all of the six. Joseph White got a job working at a factory. He got engaged to his high school sweetheart and reconnected with his son, who was a baby when he went to prison. And then in 2011, a few months after he was awarded the settlement from the state, he was killed in a workplace accident.

24:36He was 48. His mother told reporter Joe Dugan, I was so glad that he had this time of happiness and freedom.

24:50We'll be right back.

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25:41Raise the rudders. Raise the sails. Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sails solution? Reach sails professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started today at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Before his death, Joseph White and several of the others had filed a federal lawsuit arguing that their civil rights had been violated by the investigation.

26:24They sued Gage County and several of the people who had led the investigation in 1989, like Sheriff's Deputy Bert Searcy and part-time Deputy Wayne Price, who had also worked as a psychologist. In law school, you're told, sue everybody. And so we ended up suing a lot of people and then getting evidence back to see what their involvement in it was. Lawyer Jeffrey Patterson. And what we had to show was that the investigators were deliberately indifferent to our clients' known constitutional rights. Lawyers for the Six argued that Bert Searcy knew that he had unreliable witnesses and that the physical evidence found at the scene did not perfectly match the suspects.

27:12They also argued that he had coached or coerced several of the six to supply false evidence against each other. They argued that Wayne Price had taken advantage of his relationship as a therapist with two of the six, and that he had encouraged several of them to essentially invent evidence in their dreams. And the lawsuit argued that the county should be held liable, too, because the sheriff of Gage County had instituted policies which had let it all happen. The case took years to work through the courts. It finally went to trial in 2014. I believed all along that there was no possibility of settling, And the reason why is that the people in Gage County were just adamant that Joseph White and Tom Winslow raped and murdered Mrs.

28:03Wilson, and they were not going to back away from it. Even after the Beatrice Six were officially pardoned by the state of Nebraska, there were people who still believed that they had been there on the night of the murder. In 2014, Helen Wilson's daughter, Jan Hausman, spoke with reporter Joe Dugan. She said, quote,

28:34Obviously, this crime was just devastating for their family. Helen was deeply loved and cared for. And so for having thought for almost 20 years that the killers were behind bars and now being told that the case didn't happen the way it had been testified to in a court of law, I think they were in shock. They were like, oh, we got closure. You know, after all those years, they finally found out who killed our grandmother, our aunt, our mom. And now they're taking that away from us. So I think there was a lot of anger. Because it would have been just too wild that you would have had someone confess to something that they didn't have anything to do with.