183: Exonerations!

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Kathy Sigman and Maria Ridulph were best friends. The little girls played together constantly, and the evening of December 3, 1957, was no exception. But that evening, a young man approached them. He seemed friendly. He offered them piggyback rides and asked them about dolls. He told them his name was Johnny, and that he wasn’t married. At one point, Kathy excused herself to get a pair of mittens. But when she came back outside, Maria was missing, and Johnny was nowhere to be found.

Then Kristin tells us about a college student in Oklahoma, who woke up to a loud thump. The woman sat in bed for a while, listening for more strange sounds. When she didn’t hear any, she got up to go to the bathroom. That’s when she saw a man standing at the end of her hallway. She flipped on the lights, but the man vanished behind a corner, only to reemerge seconds later. The man sexually assaulted her, then left out the front door. Later, when the woman called police, they showed her two line-ups. Both line ups included an innocent man named Thomas Webb.

And now for a note about our process. For each episode, Kristin reads a bunch of articles, then spits them back out in her very limited vocabulary. Brandi copies and pastes from the best sources on the web. And sometimes Wikipedia. (No shade, Wikipedia. We love you.) We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the real experts who covered these cases.

In this episode, Kristin pulled from:
“The Wrong Man” by Jon Schuppe for NBC News
The book “Rectify: A story of healing and redemption after wrongful conviction,” By Laura Bazelon
“Wrongfully convicted man gets $175,000 for 13 years in prison,” by Jon Schuppe for NBC News
“Rape suspect walks free after innocent man spends 14 years in prison,” by Dallas Franklin for kfor.com
“Thomas Webb, III” entry on The National Registry of Exonerations

In this episode, Brandi pulled from:
"Taken: The Coldest Case Ever Solved” by Ann O’Neill, CNN
“JUSTICE STORY: The coldest case, ‘The Piggyback Kidnap’” by Mara Bovsun, New York Daily News
“Man cleared in 1957 slaying of Sycamore girl wins $300K settlement from Seattle. Cops there arrested him after DeKalb County reopened case.” Associated Press
“Man wrongly convicted in 1957 Sycamore killing of 7-year-old declared innocent by judge” by Clifford Ward, Chicago Tribune
“Murder of Maria Ridulph” wikipedia.org

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