True Crime Vault: One Night in Central Park

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Speaker 7 Welcome to the 2020 True Crime Vault, where heart-stopping headlines come to life.

Speaker 8 For these past few months now, we've seen protests calling out the glaring racism in America, the disparity between black and white arrests.

Speaker 3 But we saw saw the very same thing decades ago.

Speaker 13 A terrorist free through Central Park.

Speaker 15 You may see the Central Park V very differently now in the age of George Floyd.

Speaker 16 30 years ago, this was a crime that took New York City apart.

Speaker 18 A case that really shocked this country.

Speaker 19 There's half of the drivers on the reservoir. There's a rolling band.

Speaker 22 I was raped, beaten, and left for dead.

Speaker 8 Young black men accused of a crime involving a white person.

Speaker 28 You knew from the moment you heard this story it was going to explode in New York City.

Speaker 29 If it wasn't black moon, y'all wouldn't be here.

Speaker 12 The Central Park Five are almost mythical figures in the annals of New York crime.

Speaker 29 The police said they were guilty. The mayor said they were guilty.

Speaker 31 It's an outrage.

Speaker 32 Donald Trump said they were guilty.

Speaker 31 If they're found guilty, I think they should be executed.

Speaker 34 He's saying, kill them.

Speaker 9 They must have done it, right?

Speaker 35 They confessed, the police said.

Speaker 37 I started hating that star.

Speaker 32 The press didn't ask. Were they coerced into a confession?

Speaker 14 It could be almost tantamount to

Speaker 14 someone having a gun to your head. It's

Speaker 39 okay.

Speaker 23 There's no coercion.

Speaker 40 These kids attacked this woman.

Speaker 41 There was proof that they were innocent of this crime.

Speaker 8 The police know that there's a missing man, that there is a rapist out there.

Speaker 11 Politics, race.

Speaker 23 What do we want?

Speaker 19 Justice!

Speaker 43 The justice system, all

Speaker 24 are going to come together like a fire.

Speaker 22 I absolutely loved Central Park.

Speaker 22 It was a release to be out there in nature, to see the beauty of the park.

Speaker 22 as well as the skyscrapers and lights of New York City and the sense that, wow, this is my city. I'm here in my park.

Speaker 9 Central Park is like center of the universe, kind of.

Speaker 12 It makes you feel on a beautiful day

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 9 the center of things

Speaker 44 is kind of great.

Speaker 27 It just stretches forever, it seems, through the heart of that city.

Speaker 36 600 football football fields. Imagine that.

Speaker 46 Supposed to be a refuge, a haven, an idyllic place.

Speaker 28 But by the 1980s, this place that was meant to be a central recreation hub for the entire city

Speaker 28 really becomes more of a barrier.

Speaker 12 Night would fall

Speaker 50 and it would change.

Speaker 9 It would become a place where you'd be nervous about going.

Speaker 28 Central Park became a metaphor for the broader dysfunction in New York City. I think you could maybe best understand that as the New York between Scorsese's taxi driver.

Speaker 52 All the animals come out at night. Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.

Speaker 28 And Spike Lee's do the right thing.

Speaker 45 In the late 80s, New York City was very tense.

Speaker 41 It was a place where people were fearful. Fearful of crime, fearful of being mugged, of being attacked.

Speaker 54 was a very violent time in this city.

Speaker 28 This new drug emerged in the 1980s, which is crack.

Speaker 28 You know, what had this immediate devastating impact?

Speaker 8 This has reached epidemic proportions.

Speaker 17 Crack was like the Ebola of drugs.

Speaker 43 It just ravaged the place and it just took the homicide rate through the ceiling.

Speaker 53 88, 89, you had about 1,900 to 2,000 murders a year, citywide.

Speaker 12 And the victims are,

Speaker 15 the huge majority of them were people of color.

Speaker 40 At the same time that all of these things are happening, you have the emergence and really dominance of Wall Street culture.

Speaker 16 We're going to turn the bull loose.

Speaker 59 Now it was about making money and making as much money as possible. And during that time period, the movie Wall Street came out.

Speaker 15 Greed,

Speaker 15 for lack of a better word, is good.

Speaker 45 Greed is right.

Speaker 60 Anything else you want to buy? Any good properties? What about Central Park?

Speaker 61 No, I think that should be preserved and left. And Donald Trump should not be allowed to touch Central Park.

Speaker 60 A lot of people are very relieved.

Speaker 28 The rich are doing really, really well in New York City.

Speaker 16 Wall Street's exploding with obscene riches and there's this gulf that's always been in New York City between rich and poor but now it's even more pronounced.

Speaker 59 And in the more affluent read that white communities, there wasn't crime. So if crime was seeping into those communities,

Speaker 59 there was cause for hysteria.

Speaker 65 How many houses around here have been broken into by blacks?

Speaker 40 Well in 1989,

Speaker 58 you must remember that the city was in a real divisive polarized condition.

Speaker 67 Three white teens arrested in the shooting death last night of a 16-year-old black youth.

Speaker 18 He was killed because he was black.

Speaker 68 This was a time in New York City where if you were black and you went into the wrong neighborhood, it would not be considered unusual for a mob to try and physically attack you.

Speaker 68 That's how bad race relations were at the time.

Speaker 20 A white girl!

Speaker 40 A white girl!

Speaker 28 Then there's turmoil, and there's greed, and there's poverty, and there's fear, and violence, and it is all wrapped up in one big, tumultuous, single city

Speaker 28 between the East and Hudson Rivers.

Speaker 59 This is the sort of cauldron in which the Central Park Jogger narrative emerged.

Speaker 22 On April 19th, 1989, I went to work like I usually did.

Speaker 22 I worked in New York City for Solomon Brothers. I always wanted to work in New York.
It was a sense of accomplishment, and I was devoted to it.

Speaker 22 I stayed until after 8 o'clock, and then I went, I went home

Speaker 22 I ran in the park probably four to five days a week

Speaker 22 I love the freedom of the park it just gave me a sense of vitality

Speaker 16 at the same time as a young Solomon Brothers banker is stepping out of her east side home and starts running towards Central Park.

Speaker 16 There's a group of at least 30 young people about a mile and a half away, and they're about to come into the park.

Speaker 19 We just got a call of a petrol-like group, about 30 to 40 miles inside Central Park, tackling the 12 and harassing people.

Speaker 22 I'm Tricia Miley, and I'm known as the Central Park jogger.

Speaker 22 It was 30 years ago that I went out for a run after work in Central Park,

Speaker 22 and I was attacked. What was this thing last drive from attacking joggers on the reservoir.

Speaker 72 I lived across the street from the park, actually, on 110th up of Manhattan.

Speaker 73 We who lived in Schaumburg looked at Central Park as our backyard.

Speaker 45 That Wednesday night, it was Easter vacation.

Speaker 72 Kids, we could hang out a little later because there was no school till Monday.

Speaker 72 I seen a group of kids entering the park.

Speaker 75 At the time, I followed them.

Speaker 76 Coming out of

Speaker 76 candy fried chicken, used to came my way and asked me about hanging out with them, and that was it.

Speaker 73 You go from hanging out with friends, thinking that you're going to go skateboarding in the park or walk around the lake, to

Speaker 77 Mayhem.

Speaker 78 On the night of April 19th, 1989, approximately 30 to 40 teenagers assembled at the northeast corner of Central Park.

Speaker 78 We just got a call of a Tetrovi group, about 30 to 40 male constructed Central Park, acting detroitly and harassing people.

Speaker 64 I was working a 4 to 12 with my partner.

Speaker 57 And we started to get a lot of radio runs of a group of black and Hispanic teenagers assaulting and harassing people.

Speaker 57 Two of them assault at 102 on East Drive in Central Park. It's a roving band.

Speaker 74 Basically we took over that whole park.

Speaker 56 We just walked down the street and just beat people up.

Speaker 74 We walking on the road towards downtown and somebody recognized an older man walking across the road and he had a bag in his hand.

Speaker 74 Then a bunch of other kids went punching him, kicking him, and all that.

Speaker 80 So I remember balancing. It was real hectic.
It was crazy.

Speaker 81 Standing there and watching somebody get beat.

Speaker 77 It was unreal.

Speaker 73 It's almost like moths being drawn to fire. A child can be a witness to something without being a participant in something.

Speaker 78 Meanwhile, there was a high-speed tandem bicycle driven by Patty Dean and Jerry Malone. They're making their way north on the East Drive.

Speaker 82 We're riding the tandem through Central Park. We saw this whole line of kids.
I remember thinking, I wonder why they're here so late.

Speaker 74 It was a man and a female riding the bike. I don't know who it was, but one person said, get them.

Speaker 83 All of a sudden, they jumped across the road.

Speaker 82 It was actually terrifying. They were ripping at my arms and legs and clothing.
As a woman, you immediately wonder what's going to happen.

Speaker 73 We all started started chasing the bike and they see they got away.

Speaker 22 I would run

Speaker 22 to the park, usually entering at the 84th Street entrance just by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Speaker 22 I would go to the 102nd Street cross-drive that would go from the east drive of the park over to the west drive of the park.

Speaker 79 The whole thing was very chaotic. We were getting a lot of 911 calls.
People were coming into the precinct. We had other people stopping cops who were on patrol.

Speaker 10 We're dragging at this law of attacking dragons on the reservoir in the vicinity of 96th Street and the East Drive, Place.

Speaker 61 96th Street in the East Drive is where the Robin Bayonets camp? Apparently, Circle.

Speaker 78 They head south toward the reservoir. Circle, we have these ETs have a serious head injury on this complaint.
Can you have a bus respond forthwith to

Speaker 78 95 and East Drive?

Speaker 78 The last of the joggers to be attacked was beat with a pipe in the head.

Speaker 85 The victim looked like his head got dunked in a bucket of blood.

Speaker 44 He was beaten so badly. Park B2 Section, are you an ET on that bus? This guy has a serious head injury.
He's losing a lot of blood, yes.

Speaker 36 People were punched in the face and pulled off their bicycles and robbed of their watches.

Speaker 32 I mean, it was a kind of a crazy series of incident took place in the park.

Speaker 44 The calls kept coming in. So we canvassed the area.

Speaker 85 We pulled out of the park at, I think it's 100th Street and Central Park West.

Speaker 57 And boom, there they are.

Speaker 85 There's a group of about 20 or 30 of them.

Speaker 79 Once we came out of the park here, We saw them across the street.

Speaker 79 So what we did was we pulled over right over here at the curb.

Speaker 73 Everybody's just started running.

Speaker 21 They're chasing a large group over there, about 30 to 40 people.

Speaker 44 There's a big foot chase.

Speaker 79 There's a couple cars come, scooters.

Speaker 43 When it was all said and done, we had five kids.

Speaker 41 And at first it seems like a relatively minor thing. They're going to send these kids to family court.
They're going to send them home and have them, you know, come back again later.

Speaker 41 And then this woman is found in the park, covered in blood, near death.

Speaker 24 On that night, a little bit before midnight, a woman's body was found about 50 feet down from this area where I'm standing right here.

Speaker 45 This is the 102nd Street crosspath.

Speaker 24 There were two guys making their way from the west side to the east side.

Speaker 45 They thought it was a man's body, and then they heard moaning.

Speaker 54 Trish Miley, not conscious, barely, barely alive. She actually had been dragged down to the stream in the ravine that most New Yorkers don't know about, have never seen it.

Speaker 54 An ambulance was called, took a while to get into the wooded area.

Speaker 16 The discovery of Trish Mealy lying in a ravine changes everything.

Speaker 80 And the word we got back from the hospital was that she was in an extremely critical condition. and good possibility that she would die.

Speaker 80 So I called for a crime scene and my homicide squads and began our investigation.

Speaker 80 You're gonna play games.

Speaker 80 We're gonna play games.

Speaker 80 Oh my god, are you kidding me? This is gonna be a war.

Speaker 45 Stream Survivor Series War Games, November 29th at 7 Eastern on the ESPN app.

Speaker 87 It started with a phone call in the early hours of the morning.

Speaker 61 911, what is the address to your emergency?

Speaker 87 A terrified woman tells the operator she's been kidnapped, assaulted, and that she's trapped in a room with her attacker.

Speaker 87 He's fallen asleep, so she quietly and ever so carefully finds his phone and calls for help.

Speaker 61 Is there any way you can get out of the building? I don't know without waking him and I'm scared.

Speaker 87 This 911 call began an investigation that would turn the town of Ashland into a crime scene.

Speaker 46 We've got something big going on here.

Speaker 89 The first thing that hit my mind is a monster.

Speaker 87 A new series from ABC Audio and 2020: The Hand in the Window. Out now, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 90 This morning, a woman jogger was found unconscious and bleeding by two men passing by at about 2 o'clock this morning.

Speaker 90 We're told she was taken to Metropolitan Hospital where she's being treated for a fractured skull and a serious loss of blood.

Speaker 48 A young woman had been brought in who was pretty close to death.

Speaker 48 She had blunt trauma. They didn't know if she would survive.
She looked like a little waif in the bed. No one knew who she was yet.

Speaker 61 I will never forget that day.

Speaker 70 I have seen traumatized patients many, many times, but I have never seen somebody like

Speaker 22 destroyed.

Speaker 67 This is the cheekbone, and this was crushed severely.

Speaker 70 Her body was just so swollen, unrecognizable, really.

Speaker 22 My left eye socket had been crushed in, and the force of that blow was so strong that my eyeball exploded into the thin plates of my orbital floor.

Speaker 67 And when that happens, the entire cheekbone falls inward.

Speaker 22 And then I had several skull fractures and there were deep lacerations.

Speaker 70 We all know what rape is. I mean, everybody knows what that is and describe it.
But there's nothing like seeing something like this, the atrocity of such an act.

Speaker 90 This morning detectives walked through the woods picking up evidence from a jogger's night of terror.

Speaker 85 We ended up with five arrests.

Speaker 79 Two of the five were Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana. The detectives who were handling it asked me to hang on to them so that they can interview them.

Speaker 92 I heard the phone ring

Speaker 92 and that's when the detective told me to come to the present

Speaker 92 to get my sign. I went to the desk and I asked him, I say, where's my son?

Speaker 92 And he said, well, we're doing some paperwork and you can see him shortly.

Speaker 16 They came to my house around three o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 87 And when we got there,

Speaker 16 I see my son inside a room with other kids locked in the room.

Speaker 79 We had to go back out and start getting more of the kids that were involved in the attack. That included Yusuf Salam, Corey Weiss, and Antron McCrae.

Speaker 12 But by the evening of the 20th, we had all five in custody.

Speaker 54 I'm looking for my son.

Speaker 93 He's been in the priestess.

Speaker 23 They took him from me up to the store.

Speaker 16 I was out here with a whole bunch of other reporters and cameras, and we were waiting and waiting and waiting for information.

Speaker 16 Because in those early hours, there was an investigation going on behind closed doors. There was intense pressure to solve the case.
This was the crime that had to be solved.

Speaker 41 Over the course of the next couple of days, there are these interrogations at length.

Speaker 90 Here we are at the 20th Precinct on the upper west side of Manhattan where police are still questioning some of the young suspects they believe were involved in last night's attack.

Speaker 41 Those who are 14 and 15 are supposed to have a parent or guardian present and largely they do but then even the parents I think are pretty naive about

Speaker 41 what's going on.

Speaker 94 They were telling us that Kevin is going to to come home with us, that he's a good boy. They know he didn't do anything.
And they used us.

Speaker 94 They used our lack of knowledge of the justice system against us and

Speaker 94 our trusting in them. They used it against us.

Speaker 85 We had all these kids now in custody.

Speaker 23 And they were all starting to talk and give stories about what happened.

Speaker 16 The cops are doing what cops do, which is in these investigations, they can lie. They can say they know more than they do.

Speaker 16 They can say they've got evidence that implicates a suspect trying to get him to confess.

Speaker 40 They did all of those things.

Speaker 41 So these interrogations, they're not recorded in any way, right? They're not even written down.

Speaker 40 These are not my rules.

Speaker 48 These are the rules I was handed.

Speaker 24 And that's what we play by.

Speaker 76 I really didn't know what. My mind just felt like scrambled legs.
I really didn't know what was going on. I just wanted to get the hell home.

Speaker 81 When I was in the room, I didn't know what was going on. I just know I didn't have there doing anything.

Speaker 95 The lead investigated my case. He became fed up and slammed his fist on the table, and give me what I wanted.
He lunged at me.

Speaker 14 If you take an individual that's 15 years old and you put that individual in a room by themselves

Speaker 80 with

Speaker 14 two to four to six officers, some of them

Speaker 14 wanting to attack you,

Speaker 14 that individual will be terrified.

Speaker 14 It could be almost tantamount to

Speaker 14 someone having a gun to your head.

Speaker 16 The cops were proud that they did what cops do, which is they told team one that number two and number three were implicating one, so you better get out ahead of this.

Speaker 16 They told teen four that there was evidence that had been found, and if you don't get out in front, you're going to be implicated.

Speaker 81 I didn't know who did it.

Speaker 81 I just know I didn't do it. So I was trying to get everybody back.

Speaker 58 I was just blaming whoever.

Speaker 81 You know,

Speaker 14 that's how it went.

Speaker 76 That's how it went for me.

Speaker 95 And he's like, well, do you know Kevin Richardson? I said, no, I don't. Never seen him before.
You know, and he says, well, you know, we know he did it.

Speaker 95 And so when Detective Harding produced the picture of Kevin, it was just about me getting out of it.

Speaker 41 All of these kids, and in many cases, their parents, believed that they would get to go home if they

Speaker 41 implicated other people, if they were helpful in the right way, and they were desperate to get out of that room.

Speaker 46 No detective of mine would ever say anything like that.

Speaker 53 You're going to go home with a crime like this?

Speaker 4 Never.

Speaker 94 They played the parents against each other. They said, okay, well, we know he didn't do anything, but Yusuf Salam said he did this.

Speaker 94 So then you feel like, well, okay, he has to defend himself. So they played us against each other.
They played the boys against each other.

Speaker 94 And they made up all of these stories to get their arrest and their convictions.

Speaker 38 How do you coerce somebody when he's sitting there with his parents?

Speaker 85 It's

Speaker 38 okay?

Speaker 38 There's no coercion.

Speaker 40 None of those detectives of their caliber would have to resort to walking anyone into a confession.

Speaker 74 The words are their words.

Speaker 55 We don't put words in people's mouths.

Speaker 11 This interrogation went on

Speaker 21 and on and on.

Speaker 16 Whether or not you believe that there were coercive tactics, the amount of time itself that these teens had to spend in that interrogation room could in and of itself have caused them to say anything to get out of there.

Speaker 98 It is now 3.30 in the morning on the morning of April 21st of 1989.

Speaker 16 In the early hours of the morning on the second day, under questioning, the teenagers make a fateful decision. They decide to start talking on videotape.

Speaker 99 This is my first ring.

Speaker 99 I never did this before. This is going to be my last time doing it.

Speaker 85 That decision would haunt them all the way to the courthouse.

Speaker 45 I was home in bed with my wife.

Speaker 78 We just turned the lights out, and my deputy bureau chief called and asked if I could go up to the 24th Precinct and assist Elizabeth Lederer, who was up there working alongside the police.

Speaker 9 Elizabeth Lederer was the prosecutor in the Central Park Jogger case.

Speaker 16 By all accounts, she was incredibly diligent.

Speaker 9 She was not one of these prosecutors who were just in it to win.

Speaker 98 You have the right to remain silent and to refuse to answer any questions.

Speaker 8 So at this point, after a night in police custody moved from precinct to precinct, Kevin Richardson implicated himself in this night of mayhem with numerous assaults and possibly the rape of Trisha Miley.

Speaker 75 Hey, but I was a ground home.

Speaker 75 And

Speaker 75 I came over there.

Speaker 44 Kevin Richardson had a scratch under his eye. So the detectives asked him, how did you get the scratch under your eye?

Speaker 75 I got in the way.

Speaker 64 She kind of scratched me a little bit.

Speaker 98 She was in the face. Let me just ask you, you saying that she scratched you and you're indicating a place on your face?

Speaker 23 Yeah, I think it did.

Speaker 20 Come over here right here.

Speaker 16 And it's not just Richardson. Other teenagers are implicating themselves on video too.

Speaker 37 I start start hitting that stuff.

Speaker 37 Hey, brother, stop hitting everything.

Speaker 99 This is my first raid.

Speaker 99 I never did this before. This was my last time doing it.

Speaker 98 Anton was going for our clothes.

Speaker 98 And while he was doing that, you were feeling her breasts with both hands?

Speaker 98 And is this your father who sitting next to you? Yes.

Speaker 24 They're all making statements, you know, and open confessions in front of their parents.

Speaker 77 All of them except Yussef Salam.

Speaker 16 He never goes on video and never makes a written statement. And the reason is because his mother comes in and says no.

Speaker 102 I kept telling them I wanted a lawyer. I told them several times I had witnesses who heard me tell them.
And they continued to do what they planned to do because they had an agenda.

Speaker 98 What you said there? You said yes.

Speaker 103 When I first saw those tapes, I didn't disbelieve them. Like anybody else, when I watch a confession tape, my first impulse is, whoa.

Speaker 104 An innocent person really wouldn't do that.

Speaker 98 But you told that to the police before it was the truth.

Speaker 103 My second impulse is to listen to the details and to be influenced by them.

Speaker 37 I see this lady juggling.

Speaker 55 She had on blue shoes.

Speaker 16 But those just aren't the facts. Tricia Mealy that night was wearing tights on her legs.

Speaker 37 She's just jogging hunting.

Speaker 16 She wasn't jogging at the reservoir, which is more than half a mile away from where she was found.

Speaker 24 It was Kevin Richardson who said, volunteered, this is where I tackled the woman, the jogger.

Speaker 53 Right about here.

Speaker 38 I said, well, how did her body get from here down the ravine?

Speaker 24 Who took her down the ravine?

Speaker 45 He said, I don't know.

Speaker 38 I said, what do you mean you don't know?

Speaker 24 I said, the body was found down that hill.

Speaker 45 He said, I don't know how she got there.

Speaker 41 To look back at these statements, there are huge problems. They're inconsistent within themselves.
They're inconsistent relative to the other statements.

Speaker 41 And they're inconsistent relative to the facts.

Speaker 98 How did those marks get on her hand?

Speaker 98 I shouldn't say that those aren't the marks of a knife. She has a fractured skull.
She was hit with a very, very heavy object there. Corey, you saw that picture.
You don't get these lines.

Speaker 98 You don't get a fractured skull from it. No, no, that more.

Speaker 105 That more looks like

Speaker 106 it's from like...

Speaker 105 It's like a rock.

Speaker 99 I did

Speaker 76 see Kelly

Speaker 106 pick up a sm a hair rock, a small hair rock,

Speaker 106 and hit across the face with it.

Speaker 98 Are you just saying that because I you asked?

Speaker 98 Why didn't you say it before?

Speaker 98 Why didn't you say it before?

Speaker 106 I've never,

Speaker 105 me taking a quick glance in the dark, I've never heard picture of a rock from after doing it.

Speaker 78 The inconsistencies in Corey Wise's statement

Speaker 78 and his statements about using a knife in the commission of the crime, I think are just complete exaggerations. He was a very difficult person to interview because he kept changing his story.

Speaker 17 When you watch Corey, it's almost like he's desperate to get it right.

Speaker 103 He tells one story at this moment, he tells this story at another moment.

Speaker 103 Well, yeah, when you look at false confession cases, it's because when they told the truth, you didn't believe them and you made them change it.

Speaker 16 Another problem for the cops and the prosecutors was that every time they went to talk to another one of the Central Park Five,

Speaker 17 they heard that different people were actually the ones that did it.

Speaker 52 Wayne had an arm, Steve had a leg, he spread it out,

Speaker 52 You know, I mean, Angela found himself.

Speaker 98 What was Kevin doing while Steve Lopez was holding her hands and hitting her with the bread? He was having sex with her. You said that someone had sex with her?

Speaker 106 Yeah, Kevin. It was Kevin.

Speaker 106 Revere.

Speaker 106 Kevin. It was Steve and Ray.

Speaker 78 Of course there are going to be some inconsistencies between the statements. And in my experience, when you take statements, there's kind of a range, right?

Speaker 54 They minimized their own involvement in it by saying, but he did more than I did.

Speaker 107 I was playing with the legs. What were you doing to the legs? Huh? I was going up and down the legs.
I wasn't doing as much as they was doing.

Speaker 37 Grabbing arms and stuff.

Speaker 8 Okay, were you grabbing arms?

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 16 The teenagers believed that if they said something, they could get out of the interrogation room.

Speaker 99 All I had to do is tell the truth out, I probably would have been home.

Speaker 16 What they didn't realize was the detectives handed them a shovel.

Speaker 54 According to the law of New York, by saying I didn't do the rape, I just held her down. That is as guilty under the law as if saying I climbed on top of a woman and raped her.

Speaker 62 I think we're at the point where we're thinking there may well be a brain dysfunction as recovery proceeds.

Speaker 90 At least a half a dozen reporters gathered around Dr. Robert Kurtz asking for more details.

Speaker 59 Reporters descended on the hospital. We had to sort of hang out in the lobby and wait for the reports to come in from the doctor.

Speaker 16 When it becomes known that a group of teenagers of color are accused of doing this to that white investment banker, that poor woman,

Speaker 43 it's going to explode New York City.

Speaker 25 For people to go to their defense is unbelievable.

Speaker 63 Politics, race.

Speaker 66 If it wasn't black women, y'all wouldn't even be here.

Speaker 16 Emotions,

Speaker 101 the justice system,

Speaker 16 all are going to come together like a fireball.

Speaker 54 There is a Donald Trump connection to this case.

Speaker 71 You better believe that I hate the people that took this girl and raped her brutally.

Speaker 8 And all while this investigation is going on, Tricia Miles is clinging to life at Metropolitan Hospital.

Speaker 40 She was in a coma for a week, and then she started opening her eyes and looking around.

Speaker 9 Can she talk?

Speaker 16 Will she say she remembered something?

Speaker 101 There was applause and tears from doctors and nurses when this brave young woman came out of a coma.

Speaker 48 Trisha's recovery neurologically, as with anyone like this, is fairly slow and by graduated graduated steps.

Speaker 108 You had

Speaker 56 children, school children, showing up and holding vigils outside.

Speaker 59 Cardinal O'Connor made a visit there.

Speaker 59 Frank Sinatra sent her flowers.

Speaker 77 She woke up and looked around and saw the flowers and said, you know, holy smokes, what's going on?

Speaker 48 Why is Frank Sinatra sending me flowers?

Speaker 50 She had no sense of the magnitude of the news of the story a terrorist free through central park they found her and they gang raped her the shockwaves of the tragedy felt both north and south of the park the headlines were just extraordinary the media was all over this thing according to police they bragged and laughed about the rape and beating

Speaker 63 This was one of the most compelling stories that New York could see, that a reporter could cover.

Speaker 77 It took politics, politics, power, rape, racial politics, controversy.

Speaker 84 People were so angry about what happened.

Speaker 50 I just wanted to come up here, find somebody, and do bodily harm.

Speaker 51 So there were a total of 10 people over several months who were charged and either convicted or pled guilty to various crimes in Central Park.

Speaker 16 The DA decides to charge a group of teenagers in the attack on Trish Mali. One of those, Steve Lopez, decides to plead to a lesser charge when he's offered a deal.

Speaker 16 Some witnesses against him had evaporated, and that left five.

Speaker 25 Five teenagers.

Speaker 36 Kevin Richardson, Antron McRae, Yusuf Salam, Raymond Santana, Corey Wise.

Speaker 4 Kids, really.

Speaker 59 The hysteria that was being drummed up in the press fed into the fear that already existed because of the high rates of crime in the city.

Speaker 32 And the phrase that was used, that was a new phrase, was the wilding.

Speaker 4 They go around and they do crazy things. Sometimes they do it for fun, sometimes they do it for money.

Speaker 101 You know what I'm saying? They just do it, just do it.

Speaker 59 We started hearing this term wilding, this phenomenon where kids of color go berserk and try to harm people.

Speaker 46 The wilding phenomenon, it's all over the newspapers every day. Every news broadcast.

Speaker 86 Wilding. Wilding.
Wilding.

Speaker 110 By any name, it means terror.

Speaker 80 They were the wolf pack.

Speaker 36 They were described in these beastly terms, which are signature racial, racist terms.

Speaker 25 They were monsters in the minds of the media and the public that feared them.

Speaker 40 That fear

Speaker 40 of the sexual violation of white women at the hands of black men is a fear that goes all the way back to the days of slavery in this country.

Speaker 39 And it is inextricably connected to the history of lynching, mob violence, all the kind of worst depredations that black people suffered.

Speaker 63 These kids were as everyday kids as you can be.

Speaker 59 They were just starting their high school careers.

Speaker 17 Antron played Little League.

Speaker 59 Kevin danced in school.

Speaker 59 Youssef was an artist. They came from strong supportive families.
What they were not involved in were criminal activities. None of them had a record at that time.

Speaker 14 I think race played a big role.

Speaker 42 Had we been white youths,

Speaker 14 they probably would have, you know, contacted the legal aid people. and probably had some lawyers down there to speak to us.

Speaker 14 But because we were from black and Latin communities, because we were from some of us impoverished homes,

Speaker 83 it's like, hey,

Speaker 14 who's gonna mind that another black youth or another Latin youth is off the street?

Speaker 14 They're criminals anyway.

Speaker 65 If it wasn't black women, y'all wouldn't be here. Channel 7,

Speaker 66 anybody else news would not be here.

Speaker 66 Okay?

Speaker 32 And it all contributed to this heightened sense of fear in New York and this thirst for vengeance.

Speaker 35 There was this rising tide

Speaker 58 of these boys becoming the symbols of all that was wrong in New York. This is why we need to come down on these young teenagers, these thugs.

Speaker 111 We do not want to see racial hysteria used to predetermine the rights of some teenagers.

Speaker 58 Even in the black and Latino community, we that wanted to stand for them were in the minority. It was by no means a popular stand.

Speaker 4 It could have been me.

Speaker 23 It could have been her.

Speaker 86 Could have been any of us. I ain't got no patience with none of them.

Speaker 43 I hope you get him.

Speaker 55 I think those guys should be sent away for life.

Speaker 32 And the press, who rely on the police for their information about crimes, or largely rely on the police, felt that the case was solved.

Speaker 9 I think that it was kind of assumption, well, they must have done it, right?

Speaker 12 They confessed.

Speaker 34 People were in a frenzy.

Speaker 68 The people weren't all that concerned about fairness and about justice.

Speaker 68 You know, that plus a very live and active newspaper war between the tabloids, it led people to places they really shouldn't have gone.

Speaker 71 You better believe that I hate the people that took this girl and raped her brutally.

Speaker 109 In a full-page ad scheduled to appear in tomorrow's New York City newspapers, millionaire businessman Donald Trump calls for the reinstatement of the state's death penalty.

Speaker 25 Donald Trump at the time was kind of a swaggering real estate developer man about town.

Speaker 101 How does it feel taking pictures of these Playboy Ministers?

Speaker 8 Well somebody has to do it.

Speaker 28 What Donald Trump did was whip up the climate of frenzy around this case a notch higher.

Speaker 100 Were you prejudging those arrested?

Speaker 56 No, I'm not prejudging at all.

Speaker 31 I'm not in this particular case. I'm saying if they're found guilty, if the woman died, which she hopefully will not be dying, but if the woman died, I think they should be executed.

Speaker 34 He's saying kill them. And I never ever could describe

Speaker 58 how enraged I got to call for these kids to be,

Speaker 35 in effect, lynched.

Speaker 101 It should be played out in a court of law, not in the newspapers, not on the TV.

Speaker 102 Those people who

Speaker 102 made this a media frenzy and set us up so that we could be convicted in the press before we even went to trial.

Speaker 89 How do you find a jury that's going to be impartial with five men that they've read deserve to be lynched?

Speaker 32 Excuse the jury.

Speaker 40 It has to.

Speaker 50 You would like to execute them now. Is that your position?

Speaker 65 Castrate them. They can't erase a death.

Speaker 17 This is before, you know, this is before the arraignment.

Speaker 68 This is before anything resembling a trial. They were not going to get the benefit of the doubt in that atmosphere.

Speaker 114 The key victim people are waiting to see if they hear hear from is the Central Park Investment Banking jogger herself.

Speaker 16 It was one of the most anticipated, riveting courtroom moments that I have ever experienced.

Speaker 22 When I walked to the witness stand the first time, I remember I was very nervous.

Speaker 16 There's a big problem for the prosecutors. They don't have a shred of DNA and not a whole lot of evidence, period, that links the Central Park V to the crime, the victim, or the scene.

Speaker 21 No physical oppressing evidence links those boys.

Speaker 26 And yet, the police know that there's a missing man,

Speaker 36 that there is a rapist out there.

Speaker 40 Something that haunted me for years

Speaker 49 was we always felt that we never got everybody.

Speaker 49 There had to be another guy.

Speaker 10 Give it up for Chicago.

Speaker 115 Sebastian Maniscalco's new stand-up special, It Ain't Right, is now streaming on Hulu.

Speaker 107 30 years ago, Jeff Bezos, complete nerd, Bezos now, ripped to shreds on his super yacht, and the boxes keep

Speaker 20 coming.

Speaker 115 Watch Sebastian Maniscalco, It Ain't Right, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundled subscribers.

Speaker 32 Terms apply.

Speaker 116 Coming to Disney Plus and Hulu.

Speaker 115 Cassidy, get us home. Jonas, brother, you got it.
It'll be the best Jonas Christmas ever.

Speaker 115 Can't wait to see you guys. We love you.

Speaker 36 If they can only make it home.

Speaker 109 What's going on? Our tour plane burned? No.

Speaker 86 We cannot miss Christmas.

Speaker 44 Nothing can stop us from getting home now.

Speaker 10 Only

Speaker 20 you won't be alone this trip.

Speaker 41 You lost all three of your passports?

Speaker 29 It's Christmas. Anything can happen, right?

Speaker 116 A very Jonas Christmas movie now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu with the TVPGDL.

Speaker 8 We're not just hearing Black Lives Matter these days, we're seeing it too, literally. Streets being painted with it.

Speaker 16 We've been reminded in this age of George Floyd that we haven't learned.

Speaker 8 We're still flawed. The Central Park V raises questions that we're still answering today.

Speaker 33 It's the crime of the century is what the mayor called it.

Speaker 50 The case that began in Central Park could lead to the most sensational trial ever.

Speaker 110 The emotional trial underscored ugly racial tensions in the city.

Speaker 19 The justice of me!

Speaker 102 These were the scapegoats. Lambs led to the slaughter.

Speaker 89 How do you find a jury that's going to be impartial? Hey, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Speaker 58 It was a foregone conclusion the jury would go the way it was.

Speaker 117 And I wish to God I had just hung the jury.

Speaker 118 That's been my biggest regret for 30 years.

Speaker 85 There was a huge problem in this case.

Speaker 53 Something that haunted me for years. But we never got everybody.

Speaker 78 The seamen that was recovered did not match any of the defendants.

Speaker 64 He's a bona fide psychopath.

Speaker 35 He's a serial rapist.

Speaker 7 We have news this morning on a case that stunned the nation.

Speaker 70 Did you attack the Central Park jogger?

Speaker 83 Yeah, I did.

Speaker 22 I always knew that there was at least one more person involved.

Speaker 8 And this story would change everything.

Speaker 26 It was a cauldron of emotion around this trial, and it was going to be very hard to give them a fair shot.

Speaker 112 They were tried and convicted in the kangaroo court of public opinion probably before the first weekend after the incident.

Speaker 101 The defendants are about to have their two months in court.

Speaker 61 That's how long it's expected to take.

Speaker 114 Raymond Santana, Youssef Salam, Antron McRae, they are finally through with the pretrial publicity and legal wrangling.

Speaker 36 The New York City District Attorney's Office, it's a Cracker Jack outfit, and they put their best people on this case.

Speaker 16 This was like the New York Yankees

Speaker 16 playing against your high school baseball team.

Speaker 24 You had Elizabeth Letteram and of course Robert Morgenthau.

Speaker 16 On the other side, the defense attorneys in this case were outclassed, out-strategized, and outlived in terms of their ability to survive survive a case like this.

Speaker 90 14 months after the crime is committed, the first of two trials in the Central Park Jogger case.

Speaker 78 Outside of the courtroom, the atmosphere was pretty intense.

Speaker 69 There were always protesters.

Speaker 54 Al Sharpton had rallied a lot of people on behalf of the five.

Speaker 78 And there was always a line of people trying to get into the courtroom.

Speaker 73 There were people that wanted us dead.

Speaker 73 I mean, it became so dangerous that my mother camouflaged me, you know, just so that it could be all right for me to walk around.

Speaker 4 How do you think it's going?

Speaker 78 I know that Elizabeth received death threats, so

Speaker 42 it was pretty serious.

Speaker 54 Those young men admitted to some part, what we call acting in concert in the law, of either striking Trisha to bring her down to enable the sexual assault, holding an arm or a leg.

Speaker 78 The first trial involved three defendants, Raymond Santana, Antron McRae, and Youssef Salam.

Speaker 78 Clearly, the statements were the most important evidence.

Speaker 98 What happened to her when she was on the ground?

Speaker 98 Lopez came and he was holding her by her arms. He panted the arms with his knees and then he covered her mouth with his hand and then she was still screaming so he started smacking them.

Speaker 16 The looks on the jurors' faces when they watched those videotapes told a devastating story for the defense.

Speaker 16 You could see it.

Speaker 85 The jurors were engaged, they were riveted, they nodded their heads. In some cases, they were disgusted.

Speaker 101 It's clear, as it has been for a year, that prosecutors will depend on videotaped statements by the suspects themselves.

Speaker 101 But when the defense went on offense this afternoon, its strategy also became clear. The teen's lawyers say confessions were cleverly staged.

Speaker 30 The initial statement that the jury has to decide is whether these statements are voluntary or involuntary.

Speaker 30 And I think that that's a decision that the jury will not take a tremendously long period of time to make that initial decision.

Speaker 98 Did Did somebody take her phone off?

Speaker 72 Yeah.

Speaker 22 I have watched some of the videotapes that were released.

Speaker 98 What was he doing with his hands? He was covering her mouth. Every time she was told, he was smacking.
He's saying, sit up, bitch. I kept smacking her.

Speaker 22 It is very, very hard watching someone describe how people beat me, how people were trying to stop my screaming by beating my face.

Speaker 101 The key victim people are waiting to see if they hear from is the Central Park Investment Banking Jogger herself.

Speaker 22 With the trial, Elizabeth Leder gave me the choice if I wanted to testify.

Speaker 84 And

Speaker 22 I did.

Speaker 50 She came in a tinted van, which sped by reporters.

Speaker 109 The Central Park jogger speaks in public for the very first time.

Speaker 50 She was unsteady walking to the witness stand, but deliberate. Scars were visible around her left eye.

Speaker 22 When I walked to the witness stand the first time, I remember I was very nervous.

Speaker 16 It was one of the most anticipated, riveting courtroom moments that I have ever experienced. Will she say she remembered something? The courtroom was as silent as a library.

Speaker 78 Tricia Miley did not have any memory of the attack, but she was called to the stand. She talked about what her normal running practices had been, what she had been wearing.

Speaker 78 She identified her clothing.

Speaker 22 I thought, I know I have no memory, but I wanted people to know the condition that I had been left in.

Speaker 59 She was put on the stand even when she couldn't remember anything.

Speaker 119 And that was helping to remind the jurors of this is who this horrible thing happened to.

Speaker 108 She was sure of herself and intelligent.

Speaker 29 courageous to be sitting there facing the boys accused of doing this horrible crime and somehow she made it through.

Speaker 108 The whole thing was very emotional and moving.

Speaker 121 They played on your emotions. Big time.
They wanted you to see her with the slurred speech,

Speaker 121 the wound to her head.

Speaker 14 It was powerful.

Speaker 38 It was.

Speaker 88 I told myself and my fellow jurors

Speaker 88 That is not what this case is about. It's about finding the right people.

Speaker 88 And we must not let our feelings of

Speaker 31 outrage about what happened to her

Speaker 88 cause us to leap to any kind of premature conclusions.

Speaker 85 There was a huge problem in this case.

Speaker 25 The semen did not match any of the defendants. And they didn't have DNA evidence against these defendants.
They didn't have physical evidence against these defendants.

Speaker 75 The fact that they didn't find any DNA matches among the boys should have been of great concern.

Speaker 75 If you don't find their semen, it's really hard to make the argument that they committed the rape.

Speaker 78 So we as prosecutors were completely upfront with the jury about the fact that semen had been recovered from Tricia Miley, the female jogger, which did not match any of the people that were on trial.

Speaker 78 And certainly Elizabeth Lederer talked about it in the summation.

Speaker 102 They didn't care about the DNA, they didn't care about who did this to this woman. They wanted to get this case off the books, and these were the scapegoats, lambs led to the slaughter.

Speaker 100 The trial of the three young men accused of attacking the Central Park jogger is coming close to the moment of truth: the verdict.

Speaker 108 When the verdict came in,

Speaker 86 there was screaming and mayhem in the courtroom. We've got flying for!

Speaker 122 After 10 days of deliberations, the verdict, Yusuf Salam, Raymond Santana, and Antro McRae, all 16, were convicted of the rape and assault of the Central Park Jogger.

Speaker 110 Law and order in the nation's largest cities seemed to get a boost tonight as the first three youths to be tried in the Central Park Jogger case were found guilty of gang rape and brutal assault and robbery.

Speaker 110 The emotional trial underscored ugly racial tensions in the city, some demonstrators claiming the defendants were arrested just because they were black.

Speaker 40 In the climate of New York City, at that point in time, there was no surprise about the verdict.

Speaker 4 You're lying hard!

Speaker 21 Do you expect it?

Speaker 58 I thought after the first trial with Yusuf Salam and the other two, that maybe in the second trial, they would say, say well we got three this will be different

Speaker 58 but you always try to hope it gives hope

Speaker 78 the two defendants in the second trial were Kevin Richardson and Corey Wise.

Speaker 8 What's the y'all saying? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Speaker 8 They used these confessions with effectiveness in the first trial and the strategy was if it worked once it'll work again. Play the tapes and let the jurors judge for themselves.

Speaker 90 Tape was brutal. In fact, it was so graphic, some of the jurors, at least a couple of them, looked like they were having a hard time watching it.

Speaker 117 It was the confessions that were on tape that were the heart of everything. The prosecutor kept going back to that, emphasizing that, constantly hammered into us.

Speaker 103 Legal scholars have referred to confession evidence as the gold standard, the king of evidence. The sight and sound of an individual incriminating himself is as powerful as it gets.

Speaker 117 In 1990, it was hard to believe that the police would actually coerce children into making false confessions. I don't think any of us could completely grasp that idea at that point in time.

Speaker 69 The pre-podcast documentary mode, pre-Netflix, people didn't know about false confessions.

Speaker 23 But the system knew about false confessions.

Speaker 84 In the second trial, the jury struggled with Corey Weiss's confessions.

Speaker 16 There were two statements. They were all over the place.
The facts were contradictory, self-contradicted.

Speaker 98 Who was the first person to have sex with her?

Speaker 106 How many good.

Speaker 99 It was Raymond.

Speaker 98 Who was the first one who had sex with him?

Speaker 9 It was Dave.

Speaker 16 In a sense, and ironically, Corey Weiss's lack of consistency ended up working in his favor at the trial because the jury wondered was it just all wrong.

Speaker 98 Why do you want to change the statement you make in the middle?

Speaker 99 Well the detective carried my faith arguably because Nami hit it all.

Speaker 99 I thought about it.

Speaker 99 I said to myself

Speaker 99 you know you said a lie

Speaker 91 they took advantage

Speaker 113 of my whole little innocent being.

Speaker 91 Took advantage of all that.

Speaker 90 Now the jury saw confession tape of Corey Wise in its entirety tonight and they're upstairs working, deliberating right now. And it looks like they're going to make this night a late one.

Speaker 117 I didn't believe that he had anything to do with the rape. Corey Wise's confession didn't make any sense compared to anything else.
It just didn't line up. Several of the jurors kept at me and at me.

Speaker 117 They pushed me to go to the other direction. And I wish to God I just hung the jury on that.
And

Speaker 117 that's been my biggest regret for 30 years.

Speaker 100 Tonight, two young men charged in that infamous attack face the prospect of spending several years of their young lives behind bars.

Speaker 90 The courtroom was hushed. The judge warned the spectators to be quiet.
Then the jury foreman read the verdicts. Carrie Wise, found guilty of sexual abuse, first-degree assault, and riot.

Speaker 90 Then, with respect to Kevin Richardson, guilty on every charge.

Speaker 35 The trial was very intense. Elizabeth Lederer, to her credit, did a phenomenal job of putting the case together.

Speaker 96 When they read the verdict,

Speaker 94 it was like the worst day of our lives.

Speaker 94 It was like somebody just stabbing you in the heart.

Speaker 94 And the haunting image that I will never forget is of my brother looking at us,

Speaker 4 crying.

Speaker 102 We were in shock.

Speaker 90 Then outside the family of Kevin Richardson aimed their grief at the press one man with the family picked up a piece of concrete and looked like he was going to throw it

Speaker 55 we like to believe that New York City is a gorgeous mosaic trials like this reflect the fact that there's a deep crack in that mosaic especially as it relates to young black men

Speaker 16 McRae, Richardson, Santana, Salam, they all get five to ten and they go away as juveniles. One of them, Corey Weiss, is sentenced to five to 15 as an adult.

Speaker 41 Even when admitting their guilt and expressing remorse might have actually given them a shot at being paroled sooner, none of them would.

Speaker 85 I was imprisoned for a crime that I didn't commit.

Speaker 62 It was just really the

Speaker 55 like despair.

Speaker 14 You know, you don't have your family around you.

Speaker 62 You want your family. You want to see your family and your loved ones.
You want to see your friends.

Speaker 102 I saw life standing still and the reason I say that is when you put someone in prison, the world outside moves forward.

Speaker 102 People have gotten older, people have moved on, some have died, you know, things have changed, but they don't hardly go anywhere.

Speaker 16 Then five years after the trials are over, the teenagers are in prison, there's a milestone involving Tricia Mealy.

Speaker 22 In the fall of 1995, I ran the New York City Marathon.

Speaker 22 I felt so proud of the hard work that had gotten me there because it was hard. I mean, I worked hard.

Speaker 22 And in that moment, I realized or I felt that I I had reclaimed my part.

Speaker 22 And it was so exhilarating.

Speaker 16 A couple years after Tricia Mealy runs the marathon again, the teenagers who had been convicted start to come out of prison. They're in their 20s.

Speaker 41 And so ultimately the four men who had been 14 and 15 at the time were conditionally released based on time off for good behavior after about seven or eight years.

Speaker 81 I'm so bitter. I got so much anger in me, you know.

Speaker 81 I'm not the type person to turn a cheek. I mean, we lost our lives.
We grew up in a system.

Speaker 94 You know, I used to tell my brother, because you know what you did. God knows what you did.
So it doesn't matter what any man has to say. You keep your head up high.

Speaker 101 People were outraged with the verdict. We found many people blamed the media.
Can I ask you, bro? I don't want to be asked thing why should you ask anything you've done enough damage as you

Speaker 59 the media fell down on its job i put together a sample of 251 articles representative of the coverage

Speaker 84 12 articles not 12 percent 12 articles in that sample use the term alleged

Speaker 16 if there's a fault of some who covered the Central Park jogger story it may be i wasn't skeptical enough we're live at supreme Supreme Court in Lower Manhattan.

Speaker 16 Maybe we were too willing to accept a result that provided peace when a better job in journalism is digging and digging and digging until you get to the bottom of the trough.

Speaker 16 It turned out that's where Matthias Reyes was.

Speaker 8 So it's 2002. New York City is a completely different place.
There was still rubble in lower Manhattan from 9-11. There's a new mayor who's just been inaugurated.

Speaker 78 I, Michael R. Bloomberg, do solemnly swear.

Speaker 8 The Central Park Five in the back of everyone's consciousness. 13 years later, four of the five had already served their time in prison.

Speaker 8 But Corey Wise was still in prison. He had gotten a longer sentence.
He was in the Auburn Correctional Facility.

Speaker 8 And then suddenly, one of Corey Wise's prison mates comes forward with a story that would change everything. And this story, the Central Park V, they are back in the headlines.

Speaker 7 A prime time investigation.

Speaker 7 The Central Park jogger.

Speaker 30 Out of the blue, a serial predator steps forward and turns the case upside down.

Speaker 78 Mattheus Reyes is a convicted homicidal serial rapist doing 33 years to life in New York prison.

Speaker 91 I was a monster, man. I did some real bad things to so many people and harmed them in so many ways.

Speaker 64 He's a bona fide psychopath.

Speaker 35 He's a serial rapist.

Speaker 79 He raped his own mother and he raped and murdered a pregnant woman in front of her own two children.

Speaker 73 The baby saying mommy screaming

Speaker 52 and she was like tossing me and screaming.

Speaker 47 Mattheus Reyes came forward 13 years after the Central Park attack. He at that time was doing life for a murder, rape, conviction.

Speaker 26 And he had had an encounter with Corey Wise years earlier in the jail in Rikers Island in New York. Flash forward, he sees him in that prison in upstate New York.

Speaker 36 It seems Matthias Reyes had a flash of conscience and he decides he's going to take responsibility for the crime that he committed.

Speaker 47 He came forward to say that he had been the one who had committed the attack upon the jogger.

Speaker 97 Did you attack the Central Park jogger? Yeah, I did.

Speaker 91 Did you rape her?

Speaker 85 Yes.

Speaker 97 Did you beat her?

Speaker 97 Did you leave her for dead?

Speaker 91 I thought I left her there for dead.

Speaker 16 Matthias Reyes manages to get the attention of law enforcement and they do a DNA test and they take his DNA and compare it and voila,

Speaker 16 they have what they never had in the trials in 1990,

Speaker 11 which is a match.

Speaker 4 A perfect match.

Speaker 22 I always knew that there was at least one more person involved because there was unidentified DNA. So when I heard the news, that wasn't a tremendous surprise.

Speaker 22 But when he said that he and he alone had done it,

Speaker 22 that's when some of the turmoil started and wondering, well, how can that be?

Speaker 44 When I first heard that they got the matching DNA with Reyes,

Speaker 85 I was like, oh, that's great.

Speaker 44 We got the final guy, the guy who'd gotten away originally in 1989.

Speaker 44 But then he turned around and said that he did it by himself.

Speaker 91 I was alone that night.

Speaker 91 Anytime I went out to do any of my crimes or anything like that, I was always alone.

Speaker 91 I saw the lady, she was jogging.

Speaker 91 I went behind her and I was zigzagging back and forth from one side of the road to the horse rider pads, sometimes walking, sometimes jogging, just giving her enough distance, you know.

Speaker 91 At the right-hand side, I saw a piece of branch there. I struck over her head with the branch and she fell forward.
I grabbed her to drag her inside through the bushes.

Speaker 91 As I dragged her in there, I remember that I took off her clothes.

Speaker 85 Reyes knew some things about the victim and the crime that had never been revealed and that only a person who was there would know.

Speaker 91 I asked her, can she give me the address to her house? Because I found some keys in a little black bag, one of those little bags that Joggers sometimes wear. She didn't say anything to me.

Speaker 91 So I guess I think that escalated the angle whenever. I know the beating proceeded from there.

Speaker 91 I thought I left her for dead.

Speaker 7 We have news this morning on a case that stunned the nation.

Speaker 21 A man in a New York prison said that he was the guilty one, not them.

Speaker 7 And the case may be reopened.

Speaker 36 This after 13 years is chaos.

Speaker 26 For the New York City District Attorney's Office, for the police department, for the political system in New York, what?

Speaker 26 We have the real rapist?

Speaker 40 They didn't do this?

Speaker 36 I mean, it throws the whole thing upside down.

Speaker 14 When this individual came forward, it was like all the prayers that people had made in the past,

Speaker 14 all the times that my loved ones and people told me, listen, it's going to be all right. The truth is going to come out.
It was like that has been answered. My prayers have been answered.

Speaker 78 The investigation into Matthias Reyes and his story was conducted by the district attorney's office.

Speaker 91 Here I am, being honest 100%.

Speaker 91 With the district attorney telling them about everything and things I got away with, things I didn't do, because I didn't want to hold anything back. I went down there with an open book.

Speaker 45 The spring into the summer of 1989, there was a rash of violent rapes all along Madison Avenue, culminating in the murder of a woman on 97th Street. I think an Eastside rapist, they were calling him.

Speaker 59 Matthias Reyes

Speaker 59 was the Eastside rapist. The police officer investigating that had his DNA marker in that file.

Speaker 59 One of the rapes associated with that case took place in Central Park,

Speaker 113 not far from where the Central Park jogger had been attacked.

Speaker 25 He had committed the rape two nights earlier in Central Park, and he was right there all along.

Speaker 53 The rape on April 17th, we knew nothing about.

Speaker 23 None of us in homicide evidently knew anything about April 17th.

Speaker 24 Sex crimes dealt with rapes.

Speaker 53 There's no sharing of information.

Speaker 45 Maybe there is today,

Speaker 24 but back then, you know, they had a full caseload.

Speaker 45 Ours was ridiculous.

Speaker 19 DNA! Don't lie! DNA!

Speaker 18 Don't lie! A case that really shocked this country is about to take another stunning turn.

Speaker 18 This morning, the Manhattan District Attorney is going to ask to overturn the convictions of five people who were convicted in the 1989 crime of violently assaulting a young female investment banker.

Speaker 23 Robin Morgenthau!

Speaker 32 The DA, Morgenthau, believed that an injustice had been committed to the Central Park 5 and basically moved to withdraw the charges that they had raped this woman.

Speaker 44 The verdicts have been set aside in their entirety.

Speaker 23 13 years I prayed for this day.

Speaker 123 I always told my son and I told everybody.

Speaker 123 One day, 10 months, a year, or

Speaker 123 10 years 20 years but something gonna come out and we're gonna get the victory.

Speaker 123 God gave us the victory

Speaker 123 when this came out.

Speaker 66 And most of all we want our son's name removed from the sex crime predator database.

Speaker 93 I could imagine what he went through. Sometimes I don't want to remember, I don't want to think about it.
You know, it's hard when you can't prove something, but you got to keep going.

Speaker 68 That doesn't undo the years that they spent in prison.

Speaker 8 So excited.

Speaker 20 I couldn't sleep.

Speaker 68 That doesn't undo the psychological damage. That doesn't undo the shattered lives of these kids.

Speaker 32 That stain is very hard to remove once you've been accused of being rapists.

Speaker 53 And even though that charge was removed from the police file, how do you go back to a normal life?

Speaker 4 What I waited so long.

Speaker 77 Audiences and top critics are celebrating.

Speaker 15 Rental Family is the perfect feel-good movie of the year.

Speaker 40 What do you need me for?

Speaker 15 We need a talking white guy. Academy Award winner Brendan Fraser delivers a masterful performance.

Speaker 73 This girl needs a father.

Speaker 21 I hate you.

Speaker 46 She hates me. It's worth being a parent.
Yes.

Speaker 15 In this tender and funny film about the importance of connection.

Speaker 77 This is amazing.

Speaker 21 It's cool, but it's fake. Sometimes it's okay to pretend.

Speaker 15 Rental family, now playing only in theaters. Ready to PG-13.

Speaker 36 May be inappropriate for children under 13.

Speaker 116 An all-new season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is now streaming on Hulu.

Speaker 120 Mom Talk started as a sisterhood, and that's gone to flames.

Speaker 22 New secrets and lies are coming out. This is going to be catastrophic.

Speaker 67 We're fighting for our marriages, and the girls are just putting us through hell.

Speaker 112 They make everything about themselves.

Speaker 40 I can't.

Speaker 41 Hopefully, this doesn't end in a bloodbath.

Speaker 116 Watch the Hulu original, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bonus subscribers.

Speaker 38 Terms apply.

Speaker 93 I could imagine what he went through. Sometimes I don't want to remember, I don't want to think about it.
But you got to keep going.

Speaker 93 And I needed to be going, poor him.

Speaker 8 Reus has changed everything. There's now a new narrative.

Speaker 32 The district attorney has vacated the convictions.

Speaker 8 But now what happens happens to Corey Wise?

Speaker 103 He's still in prison.

Speaker 103 Come on.

Speaker 123 Come on, right here.

Speaker 34 Being away

Speaker 91 for a good number of years.

Speaker 91 Being deprived.

Speaker 91 Being deprived of life.

Speaker 93 It crippled me.

Speaker 91 My body has been locked down for so long. Going from yard to cell block, going from cell block to yard.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 My son is coming home.

Speaker 4 He's here.

Speaker 4 He's home.

Speaker 103 He is home.

Speaker 93 Sometimes people say crumbs is better than nothing.

Speaker 38 Well,

Speaker 93 I don't know about that.

Speaker 91 I'm a conquering woman.

Speaker 93 I want my whole cake back.

Speaker 111 Even if it is after 13 years.

Speaker 102 When you have a son who has been accused of these types of crimes and has gone to prison, it's like something you never forget. It's something you never get over.

Speaker 102 You live with it every day.

Speaker 58 When they got out, I talked a lot to them.

Speaker 34 And they were just broken.

Speaker 22 This is home.

Speaker 111 Everything changed, didn't it?

Speaker 58 And they were like, how do I pick up my life from here? What am I supposed to do?

Speaker 58 And then even after it is proven scientifically with DNA you didn't do the crime, you have people that say, yeah, you did it.

Speaker 78 It doesn't prove that they're innocent. It just means that in the eyes of the law, their convictions no longer exist.

Speaker 16 When Matthias Reyes says he did it alone, it's not just the prosecutors and the cops who don't believe it. Trish Malay herself doesn't think he could have done it by himself.

Speaker 22 There is medical evidence to support

Speaker 22 that more than one person was responsible for the attack on me. My injuries

Speaker 22 are different

Speaker 22 from

Speaker 22 what Matthias Reyes

Speaker 22 claimed, that he was the sole attacker.

Speaker 55 We have not discussed the attack with her.

Speaker 47 They were handprints pressed into her skin that looked red in outline.

Speaker 70 They were also different sizes, so it looks like, to me,

Speaker 70 more than one person doing that.

Speaker 16 The New York City Police Department ends up feeling it needs to do something to tell its side of the story.

Speaker 16 And so the police commissioner decides to appoint Michael Armstrong, who would deliver the Armstrong report.

Speaker 47 I was not considered someone who was a big

Speaker 12 pro-cop person. person.

Speaker 47 Trying to piece together what happened 14 years after it happened was theoretical at best by anybody.

Speaker 98 Did any detective tell you to change your statement? No. Are you doing this of your own free will?

Speaker 47 I don't think there is any credible evidence at all that anything was done in an improper way to make them talk.

Speaker 59 So the police-led investigation concluded that the police didn't do anything wrong.

Speaker 47 We felt that the most likely scenario involved an attack by a large number of people and then she was dragged into the woods and there Rays, either by himself or perhaps with others, practically killed her and committed the horrendous rape.

Speaker 16 He jumps full throat into the realm of speculation and once again there's mud on the Central Park V

Speaker 58 The difficulty I have with the Armstrong report is that to say they had something to do with it, they wasn't convicted of something.

Speaker 58 They were convicted of the rape and the attack.

Speaker 58 So it seems to me like you just want to make something

Speaker 58 stick to justify the hysteria.

Speaker 68 It's not a very satisfying document if you're looking for hard proof.

Speaker 68 But it does become the basis of the city saying, we're not sure enough about Morgenthau's conclusions that we want to issue an apology and pay a settlement to these kids.

Speaker 21 And what do you want?

Speaker 124 I think some kind of legal action should happen against what they did to innocent boys.

Speaker 26 The next chapter in the story is they sue.

Speaker 104 They feel that they were railroaded into prison.

Speaker 27 They lost years of their lives.

Speaker 36 They want justice for that. They want money.

Speaker 16 Michael Bloomberg is the mayor when this lawsuit is filed. Bloomberg was not going to settle this case.

Speaker 8 There was nothing to be gained by any politician anywhere in the United States advocating on behalf of these five young men. And then things changed again when a documentary is introduced.

Speaker 8 And we see how it can be a game changer in the case.

Speaker 113 No money could bring the life that was missing with the time that was taken away bring back.

Speaker 59 We are at a point where the lawsuit filed by the members of the Central Park V against the city has been dragging for a decade.

Speaker 47 The Bloomberg administration steadfastly took the position, the proper one, that in order for the plaintiffs to prevail, they had to show that there was some police misbehavior.

Speaker 16 Then along comes Sarah Burns and she decides she's going to take a look at the case.

Speaker 41 And I was really interested in that historical backdrop for this story. And so I wrote a book about that case that came out in 2011.

Speaker 41 But it became clear that making a film was maybe the best way to tell this story.

Speaker 59 So in 2013, this documentary comes out.

Speaker 41 Interviewing the five and putting them on camera in a way that they hadn't really been before, I think, was a new thing.

Speaker 85 We won't forget what you done lost. No money could bring the life that was missing.

Speaker 39 Why me?

Speaker 56 Cursed God out a couple of times you know my faith was gone I lost seven years of my life

Speaker 83 I lost that sense of

Speaker 83 of

Speaker 83 being you fool

Speaker 46 it changed our life

Speaker 72 in 89

Speaker 72 it was such a media frenzy

Speaker 52 That we were scared to speak

Speaker 72 But now we take the Century Park V and we wear it as a badge.

Speaker 72 And people see us for who we are.

Speaker 16 When this documentary comes out, it succeeds not just in raising what reasonable people would consider doubt as to the guilt of the Central Park V, it raises the possibility that they're actually innocent.

Speaker 54 That film was made while we had the equivalent of a gag order from a federal judge. We could not speak publicly.

Speaker 54 The daughter of the filmmaker had worked for the legal team of the five, so I didn't exactly think we'd get a fair hearing.

Speaker 79 Ken and Sarah Burns did this city and it did our country a huge disservice. They perpetrated a lie.
They created this myth, you know, of these kids who were railroaded when that never happened.

Speaker 59 When that documentary came out, it was a huge deal. I think the documentary really laid the groundwork for some of the steps that occurred afterward.

Speaker 125 I think that the moral issue is quite clear.

Speaker 45 Bill de Blasio is running for mayor in a different New York City.

Speaker 125 An injustice was done, and we have a moral obligation to respond to that injustice.

Speaker 27 Here's this scar

Speaker 16 from the dark days that hasn't healed.

Speaker 83 The Central Park case.

Speaker 33 I'm Bill de Blasio, and he says as a campaign promise, I'll settle it.

Speaker 125 They spent a lot of their lives in jail, in prison wrongly.

Speaker 106 13 years.

Speaker 125 And we have an obligation to turn the page. We have an obligation to do something fair for them, but for the whole city to turn the page and move forward.

Speaker 126 A federal judge has approved a $41 million settlement with the five men wrongly convicted in the Central Park Jogger attack.

Speaker 23 Reparations for injustice done.

Speaker 78 The settlement in this case was $41 million.

Speaker 24 Most of the defendants each received $7 million.

Speaker 78 Corey Wise received $13 million.

Speaker 101 This is amazing.

Speaker 8 Certainly they were given a substantial amount of money, but they were not given back their good name.

Speaker 25 It's a classic settlement. On the one hand, the defendants get $41 million.

Speaker 33 And on the other hand, the city sticks by its cops and prosecutors.

Speaker 25 It says, we are not going to hang them out to dry it.

Speaker 26 They did not engage in police misconduct.

Speaker 25 They did not engage in prosecutorial misconduct.

Speaker 45 I just don't understand a settlement for that kind of behavior.

Speaker 22 Sorry.

Speaker 22 I so wish that the case hadn't been settled. I support the work of law enforcement and prosecutors at the time.
They treated me with such dignity and respect.

Speaker 61 Youssef Salam.

Speaker 14 You know, this green has given us our lives back.

Speaker 16 Now, and they're arguably taking a victory lap.

Speaker 8 The Central Park Five believe that the system worked against them. Now they're the ones telling their story, consulting on the Netflix dramatization of their case.

Speaker 27 Please, stop breaking!

Speaker 68 A mini-series titled When They See Us.

Speaker 8 In the Netflix series When They See Us, I think America saw what Black America has always seen.

Speaker 21 I didn't see any lady.

Speaker 77 Kevin. I didn't see any lady.

Speaker 112 Who are you talking about? The lady in the park.

Speaker 15 I didn't see a lady or hit anyone.

Speaker 44 Raymond saw you hit her.

Speaker 77 Who was Raymond?

Speaker 8 Oftentimes, the justice system in America treats men of color differently.

Speaker 8 After When They See Us air, there was significant public outcry, and there's been a lot of fallout.

Speaker 8 Linda Fairstein has filed suit against Netflix and the film's director, Ava DuVarnay, claiming that When They See Us cast her as a villain and that the portrayal is false and defamatory.

Speaker 8 Netflix and DuVarnay reject those claims and ask the court to dismiss Ferristein's complaint.

Speaker 79 Those kids are the winners.

Speaker 79 The five of them went to Central Park to beat up people and they ended up with millions of dollars. They're heroes, they're civil rights icons.

Speaker 17 It's just appalling.

Speaker 8 Depending on who you talk to, you'll get a different take on the Central Park Five.

Speaker 8 But all people are in agreement about Tricia Milan and and what she endured and what she's doing with her life now. She's advocating for the improvement of rape kids.

Speaker 22 And I speak to groups all around the country, all different kinds of groups. My work now is standing with survivors of brain injury, of sexual assault, of other kinds of trauma.

Speaker 40 Could something like the Central Park V

Speaker 40 case happen again?

Speaker 4 Absolutely. The only safeguard that we have to prevent that from happening is history and our recognition of what happened in that moment.

Speaker 103 There are takeaways. The interrogation must be fully recorded.

Speaker 103 Simple as that. That's transparency.
And you know what my question is?

Speaker 36 When you don't do that, what don't you want me to see?

Speaker 40 Fast forward, what we see now.

Speaker 68 We have Black Lives Matter, where they're picking up some of the threads.

Speaker 21 This poem isn't just for the streets.

Speaker 44 It's for everyone that's ready to address the police.

Speaker 8 It is the same cry

Speaker 8 that people of color have been making in this nation since the day we arrived. That we are human, that our lives matter.
We all black lives matter.

Speaker 35 The feeling has been the system doesn't work for us.

Speaker 59 We have to make sure

Speaker 59 that we don't choose to highlight justice for one and ignore justice for others.

Speaker 8 More than 30 years later, there still are no winners in this case.

Speaker 12 A woman was raped, her life devastated.

Speaker 8 Five young men lost their freedom. The Central Park V raises questions that we're still answering today.

Speaker 16 We've been reminded in this age of George Floyd that we haven't learned.

Speaker 8 We're still flawed.

Speaker 6 Thanks for listening to the 2020 True Crime Vault. We hope you'll join us Friday night at 9 on ABC for all new broadcast episodes.
See you then.

Speaker 5 It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at Whitehouse Farm. But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.

Speaker 68 I know there's going to be a twist, won't they?

Speaker 73 A massive twist.

Speaker 46 At every level of the criminal justice system, there's been a cover-up in this case.

Speaker 5 I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from In the Dark and the New Yorker.
Find it now in the In the Dark podcast feed.