True Crime Vault: One Night in Central Park

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There was just one problem.

Was it all a lie, or was it all true?

It turns out the truth might be even harder to believe.

From the creator of Scamanda, this is Unicorn Girl, an Apple original podcast produced by 7 Hills.

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

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

But we saw the very same thing decades ago.

A terrorist free through Central Park.

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

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

A case that really shocked this country.

Attacking drivers on the reservoir.

There's a rolling bang.

I was raped, beaten, and left for dead.

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

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

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

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

The police said they were guilty.

The mayor said they were guilty.

It's an outrage.

Donald Trump said they were guilty.

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

He's saying kill them.

They must have done it, right?

They confessed, the police said.

I start hating that stuff.

You see him on the ground?

The press didn't ask, were they coerced into a confession?

It could be almost tantamount to

someone having a gun to your head.

It's

okay.

There's no coercion.

These kids attacked this woman.

There was proof that they were innocent of this crime.

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

Politics, race, what do we want?

Justice!

The justice system, all

are going to come together like a fire.

I absolutely loved Central Park.

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

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.

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

It makes you feel on a beautiful day

that

the center of things

is kind of great.

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

600 football fields.

Imagine that.

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

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

really becomes more of a barrier.

Night would fall

and it would change.

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

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.

All the animals come out at night.

Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.

And Spike Lee's do the right thing.

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

It was a place where people were fearful.

Fearful of crime, fearful of being mugged, of being attacked.

It was a very violent time in this city.

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

You know, it had this immediate devastating impact.

This has reached epidemic proportions.

Crack was like the Ebola of drugs.

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

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

And the victims are,

the huge majority of them were people of color.

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

We're going to turn the bull loose.

Now it was about making money and making as much money as possible.

And during that time period, the movie Wall Street came out.

Greed,

for lack of a better word, is good.

Greed is right.

Anything else you want to buy?

Any good properties?

What about Central Park?

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

A lot of people are very believe.

The rich are doing really really well in New York City.

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.

And in the more affluent redat white communities, there wasn't crime.

So if crime was seeping into those communities, there was cause for hysteria.

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

Well in 1989

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

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

He was killed because he was black.

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.

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

And you're making the biggest goddamn standard ever!

A white girl!

A white girl gets race!

A white girl!

A white girl!

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 between the East and Hudson Rivers.

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

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

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.

I stayed until after 8 o'clock and then

I went home.

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

I love the freedom of the park.

It just gave me a sense of vitality.

At the same time as a young Solomon Brothers banker, is stepping out of her Eastside home and starts running towards Central Park.

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

We just got a call of our control.

We group about 30 to 40 miles inside Central Park jackling supportedly and harassing people.

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

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

and I was attacked.

100th Street on the East Drive from attacking drivers on the reservoir.

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

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

That Wednesday night, there was Easter vacation.

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

And I seen a group of kids entering the park.

At the time, I followed them.

Coming out of

Kennedy Fried Chicken, you sort of came my way and asked me about hanging out with them.

And that was it.

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

mayhem.

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

We just got a call of a Tefali group, about 30 to 40 miles inside Central Park tackling the drawery and harassing people.

I was working a four to twelve with my partner.

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

There was an assault at 102 and East Drive in Central Park.

There's a rolling band.

Basically, we took over that whole park.

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

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.

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

So I remember balance.

It was real hectic.

It was crazy.

Standing there and watching somebody get beat.

It was unreal.

It's almost like moths being drawn to fire.

A child can be a witness to something without being a participant in something.

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.

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.

It was a man and a female riding the bike.

I don't know who it was, but one person said, get them.

All of a sudden, they jumped across the road.

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.

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

I would run

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

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.

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.

We're driving at the Zooms attacking drivers on the reservoir in the vicinity of 95th Street and the East Drive, Peter.

95th and the East Drive is where the Roving Band is there.

Apparently, Circle.

They head south toward the reservoir.

Central, we have the APs have a serious head injury on this complaint.

Can you have a bus respond forthwith to

95 in the East Drive?

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

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

He was beaten so badly.

Park D2, Central, you got an ECA on that bus.

This guy has a serious head injury.

He's losing a lot of blood, yeah.

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

I mean, it was a kind of a crazy, serious event that took place in the park.

The calls kept coming in.

So we canvassed the area.

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

And boom, there they are.

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

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

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

Everybody's just started running.

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

There's a big foot chase.

There's a couple cars come, scooters.

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

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.

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

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.

This is the 102nd Street crosspath.

There were two guys making their way.

from the west side to the east side.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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This show is supported by Unicorn Girl, an Apple original podcast.

Meet Candace, mother of two, nurse, CEO, and founder of multi-million dollar companies.

Candice went from being a stay-at-home mom to making millions traveling the world and saving lives.

There was just one problem: was it all a lie or was it all true?

It turns out the truth might be even harder to believe.

From the creator of Scamanda, this is Unicorn Girl, an Apple original podcast produced by Seven Hills.

Apple TV Plus subscribers get special early access to the entire season.

Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

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

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

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

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.

I will never forget that day.

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

destroyed.

This is the cheekbone and this was crushed severely.

Her body was just so swollen, unrecognizable, really.

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.

And when that happens, the entire cheekbone falls inward.

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

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.

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

We ended up with five arrests.

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.

I heard the phone ring

and that's when the detective told me to come to the pre-cent

to get my assign.

I went to the desk and I asked him, I said, where's my son?

And he said, well, we're doing some paperwork.

And you can see him shortly.

They came to my house around three o'clock in the morning and when we got there

I see my son inside a room with other kids locking the room.

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.

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

I'm looking for my son.

He's been in the the precinct since they took him from me up to the store.

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

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

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.

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

what's going on.

They were telling us that Kevin is going to come home with us, that he's a good boy.

They know he didn't do anything.

And they used us, they used our lack of knowledge of the justice system against us and our trusting in them.

They used it against us.

We had all these kids now in custody and they were all starting to talk and give stories about what happened.

The cops are doing what cops do, which is in these investigations, they can lie, they can say they know more than they do, they can say they've got evidence that implicates a suspect trying to get him to confess.

They did all of those things.

So these interrogations, they're not recorded in any way, right?

They're not even written down.

These are not my rules.

These are the rules I was handed.

And that's what we play by.

I really didn't know what.

My mind just touched like scrambled legs.

I really didn't know what was going on.

I just wanted to get the hell home.

When I was in a room, I didn't know what was going on.

I just know I didn't have nothing to do with anything.

The lead investigated in my case, he became fed up and slammed his fist on the table.

He didn't give me what I wanted, and he lunged at me.

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

with

two to four to six officers, some of them

wanting to attack you,

that individual will be terrified.

It could be almost tantamount to

someone having a gun to your head.

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.

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

I didn't know who did it.

I just know I didn't do it, so I was just trying to get everybody back.

I was just blaming whoever.

You know,

that's how it went.

That's how it went for me.

And he's like, well, do you know Kevin 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.

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

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

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

No detective of mine would ever say anything like that.

You're going to go home.

And with a crime like this?

Never.

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.

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.

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

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

It's

okay?

There's no coercion.

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

The words are their words.

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

This interrogation went on

and on and on.

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.

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

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.

This is my first grade.

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

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

I was home in bed with my wife.

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.

Elizabeth Lederer was the prosecutor in the Central Park jogger case.

By all accounts, she was incredibly diligent.

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

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

So at this point, after Knight 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 Tricia Miley.

Hey, but it was around her.

And I came over there.

Kevin Richardson had a scratch under his eye.

So the detectives asked him, how did you get the scratch under your eye?

I got in the way.

She got my batch me move.

Let me just ask you, you saying that she scratched you and you're indicating a place on your face?

Yeah, I think

right here.

And it's not just Richardson.

Other teenagers are implicating themselves on video, too.

I'm going to start hitting that stuff.

You see it on the ground?

Hey, brother, stopping everything.

This is my first raid.

I never did this before in this school.

It was my last time doing it.

Anton was going for our clothes.

No places for my mom's.

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

And is this your father who stayed next to you?

Yes.

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

All of them except Yusuf Salam.

He never goes on video and never makes a written statement.

And the reason is because his mother comes in and says no.

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.

What's your sentence?

You said yes.

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.

An innocent person really wouldn't do that.

But you told that to the police before, was it true?

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

I see this lady jogging.

She had on blue shoes.

But those just aren't the facts.

Tricia Mealy that night was wearing tights on her legs.

She's just jogging on the

thing around the reservoir.

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

It was Kevin Richardson who said, volunteered, this is where I tackled the woman, the jogger, right about here.

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

Who took her down the ravine?

He said, I don't know.

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

I said, the body was found down that hill.

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

To look back at these statements, there are huge problems.

They're inconsistent within themselves.

They're inconsistent relative to the other statements.

And they're inconsistent relative to the facts.

How did those marks get on her hand?

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.

You don't get a fractured skull from her.

No, no, no, it looks

like it's

a rock.

I did

see Kevin

pick up

a hand rock, a small hand rock,

and hit across the fence with it.

Are you just saying that because I don't ask?

Why didn't you say it before?

Why didn't you say it before?

I remember...

Me taking a quick glance in the dark, I remember her picking up a rock from out the dirt.

The inconsistencies in Corey Wise's statement

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Wayne had an arm.

Steve had a leg.

He spread it out.

And

downtown.

What was Kevin doing while

Steve Lopez was holding her hands and hitting her with the bridge?

He was having sex with her.

You said that someone had sex with him?

Yeah, Kevin.

It was Kevin

Ray.

Kevin.

It was Steven Ray.

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?

They minimize their own involvement.

in it by saying, but he did more than I did.

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 were doing.

Rattling on your stuff.

Okay, were you ratting arms?

Yeah.

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

All I had to do is tell her to go out, I probably would have been home.

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

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.

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

At least a half a dozen reporters gathered around Dr.

Robert Kurtz asking for more details.

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.

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

it's going to explode New York City.

For people to go to their defense is unbelievable.

Politics, race.

If it wasn't black woman, y'all wouldn't even be here.

Emotions.

The justice system,

all are going to come together like a fireball.

There is a Donald Trump connection to this case.

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

And all while this investigation is going on, Trisha Mil is clinging to life at Metropolitan Hospital.

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

Can she talk?

Will she say she remembered something?

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

Trisha's recovery neurologically,

as with anyone like this, is fairly slow and by graduated steps.

You had

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

Cardinal O'Connor made a visit there.

Frank Sinatra sent her flowers.

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

Why is Frank Sinatra sending me flowers?

She had no sense of...

the magnitude of the news, of the story.

A terrorist free through Central Park.

They found her and their 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.

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

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

People were so angry about what happened.

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

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.

The DA decides to charge a group of teenagers in the attack on Trish Maling.

One of those, Steve Lopez, decides to plead to a lesser charge when he's offered a deal.

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

Five teenagers.

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

Kids, really.

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.

And the phrase that was used, that was a new phrase, was the wild thing.

They go around and they do crazy things.

Sometimes they do it for fun, sometimes they do it for money.

You know what I'm saying?

Just do it, just do it.

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

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

Wilding.

Wilding.

Wilding.

By any name, it means terror.

They were the wolf pack.

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

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

That fear

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.

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

These kids were as everyday kids as you can be.

They were just starting their high school careers.

Antron played Little League.

Kevin danced in school.

Youssef was an artist.

They came from strong supportive families.

What they were not involved in were criminal activities.

None of them had a a record at that time.

I think race played a big role.

Had we been white youths,

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

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

it's like, hey.

Who's gonna mind that another black youth or another Latin youth is off the street?

They're criminals anyway.

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

Channel 7, anybody else, the post, anybody else news would not be here.

Okay?

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

There was this rising tide 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.

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

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.

It could have been me.

It could have been her.

It could have been any of us.

I ain't got no patience with none of them.

I hope you get them.

I think those guys should be sent away for life.

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.

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

They confessed.

People were in a frenzy.

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

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.

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

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.

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

How does it feel taking pictures of these Playboy Man?

Well, somebody has to do it.

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

Were you prejudging those arrested?

No, I'm not prejudging at all.

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.

He's saying kill them.

And I never ever

could describe

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

in effect, lynched.

He's going to lynch it.

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

Those people

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

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

It skews the jury.

It has to.

You would like to execute them now.

Is that your position?

Castrate them.

They can't erase again.

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

This is before anything resembling a trial.

They were not going to get the benefit of the doubt in that atmosphere.

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

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

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

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.

No physical or horrific evidence to link to those boys.

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

That there is a rapist out there.

Something that haunted me for years

was we always felt that we never got everybody.

There had to be another guy.

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You've seen the headline.

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We're not just hearing Black Lives Matter these days, we're seeing it too.

Literally.

Streets being painted with it.

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

We're still flawed.

The Central Park V raises questions that we're still answering today.

You're dying, Bob!

They're not!

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

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

The emotional trial underscored ugly racial tensions in the city.

These were the scapegoats, lambs led to the slaughter.

How do you find a jury that's going to be impartial?

Hey, hey, whoa, whoa, all right, so

it was a foregone conclusion the jury would go the way it was.

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

That's been my biggest regret for 30 years.

There was a huge problem in this case.

Something that haunted me for years.

But we never got everybody.

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

He's a bona fide psychopath.

He's a serial rapist.

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

Did you attack the Central Park chakra?

Yeah, I did.

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

And this story would change everything.

We have no one friend.

We have no one friend.

We have no one friend.

It was a cauldron of emotion around this trial.

And it was going to be very hard to give them a fair shot.

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

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

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

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

The New York City District Attorney's Office is a cracker jack outfit and they put their best people on this case.

This was like the New York Yankees

playing against your high school baseball team.

You had Elizabeth Lederer and, of course, Robert Morgenthau.

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

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

Outside of the courtroom, the atmosphere was pretty intense.

There were always protesters.

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

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

There were people that wanted us dead.

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.

I know that Elizabeth received death threats, so

it was pretty serious.

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.

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

Clearly, the statements were the most important evidence.

What happened to her when she was on the ground?

Lopez came and he was holding her by her arms.

He pinced her arms with his knees and then he covered her mouth with his hand.

And then she to scream so he starts smacking him.

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

You could see it.

The jurors were engaged, they were riveted, they nodded their heads.

In some cases, they were disgusted.

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

But when the defense went on offense this afternoon, its strategy also became clear.

The teens lawyers say confessions were cleverly staged.

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

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.

Did somebody take her phone up?

Yeah.

I have watched some of the videotapes that were released.

What was he doing with his hands?

He was covering her mouth.

Every time she was told, he was smacking.

He's saying, Shut up, bitch.

Kept smacking.

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

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

With the trial, Elizabeth Ledere gave me the choice if I wanted to testify.

And

I did.

She came in a tinted van which sped by reporters.

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

She was unsteady walking to the witness stand, but deliberate.

Scars were visible around her left eye.

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

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.

Patricia 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.

She identified her clothing.

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

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

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

She was sure of herself and intelligent and

courageous to be sitting there facing the boys accused of doing this horrible crime.

And somehow she made it through.

The whole thing was very emotional and moving.

They played on your emotions.

Big time.

They wanted you to see her with the slurred speech,

the wound to her head.

It was powerful.

It was.

I told myself and my fellow jurors,

that is not what this case is about.

It's about finding the right people.

And we must not let our feelings of

outrage about what happened to her

cause us to leap to any kind of premature conclusions.

There was a huge problem in this case.

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.

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

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

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.

And certainly Elizabeth Lederer talked about it in the summation.

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.

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

When the verdict came in,

there was screaming in mayhem in the courtroom.

You're blind for

all the streets now.

Free to all the streets now.

Free to hollow streets down.

Free to

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.

Law and order in the nation's largest city 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.

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

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

You're blind, Paul!

You're not!

You expected it.

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

But you always try to hope against hope.

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

What's the old saying?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

But the system knew about false confessions.

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

There were two statements.

They were all over the place.

The facts were contradictory, self-contradicted.

Who was the first person to have sex with her?

Holly dad.

It was Randy.

Who was the first one who had sex with him?

It was Steve.

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?

Why do you want to change the statement you made with the woman?

Well, the detective came with my favorite argument with me, cursing at me, hit it on me.

I thought about it.

I said to myself,

you know you said a lie.

They took advantage

of my whole little innocent being.

Took advantage of all that.

Now the jury saw confession tape of Corey Weisk in its entirety tonight and they're upstairs working, deliberating right now.

It looks like they're going to make this night a late one.

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.

They pushed me to go to the other direction.

And I wish to God I had just hung the jury on that.

And

that's been my biggest regret for 30 years.

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

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.

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

The trial was very intense.

Elizabeth Lederer, to her credit, did a phenomenal job of putting the case together.

When they read the verdict,

it was like the worst day of our lives.

It was like somebody just stabbing you in the heart.

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

crying.

We were in shock.

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

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.

McRae, Richardson, Santana, Salaam, 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.

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

I was in prison for a crime that I didn't commit.

It was just really the

like despair.

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

You want your family.

You want to see your family and your loved ones.

You want to see your friends.

I saw life standing still.

And the reason I say that is when you put someone in prison, the world outside moves forward.

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

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

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

I felt so proud of the hard work that had gotten me there because it was hard.

I mean, I worked hard.

And in that moment, I realized or I felt that I had reclaimed my park.

And it was so exhilarating.

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.

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.

I'm so bitter.

I got so much anger in me, you know.

I'm not the type of person to turn a cheek.

I mean, we lost our lives.

We grew up in a system.

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.

People were outraged with the verdict.

We found many people blame the media.

Can I ask you?

No, I don't want to be asked anything.

Why should you ask me anything?

You've done enough damage as a media.

The media fell down on its job.

I had put together a sample of 251 articles representative of the coverage.

12 articles, not 12%,

12 articles in that sample use the term alleged.

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 Court in Lower Manhattan.

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.

It turned out that's where Matthias Reyes was.

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.

I, Michael R.

Bloomberg, do solemnly swear.

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.

But Corey Wise was still in prison.

He had gotten a longer sentence.

He was in the Auburn Correctional Facility.

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.

A prime time investigation.

The Central Park jogger.

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

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

I was a monster, man.

I did so many bad things to so many people and harmed them in so many ways.

He's a bona fide psychopath.

He's a serial rapist.

He raped his own mother.

And he raped and murdered a pregnant woman in front of her own two children.

The baby say, mommy, screaming,

and she was like tossing me and screaming.

Mattheus Reyes came forward 13 years after the Central Park attack.

He at that time was doing life for a murder, rape, conviction.

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.

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

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

Did you attack the Central Park jogger?

Yeah, I did.

Did you rape her?

Yes.

Did you beat her?

Did you leave her for dead?

I thought I left her there for dead.

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,

they have what they never had in the trials in 1990, which is a match.

A perfect match.

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.

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

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

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

I was like, oh, that's great.

We got the final guy, the guy who had gotten away originally in 1989.

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

I was alone that night.

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

If I saw the lady, she was jogging.

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.

At the right-hand side, I saw a piece of branch dead.

I struck over her head with the branch and she fell forward.

I grabbed her to drag her inside to the bushes.

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

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.

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.

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

I thought I left her for dead.

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

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

And the case may be reopened.

This after 13 years is chaos.

For the New York City District Attorney's Office, for the police department, for the political system in New York.

What?

We have the real rapist?

They didn't do this?

I mean, it throws the whole thing upside down.

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

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.

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

Here I am, being honest, 100% 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.

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.

Matthias Reyes

was the Eastside rapist.

The police officer investigating that had his DNA marker in that file.

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

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

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

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

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

Sex crimes dealt with rapes.

There's no sharing of information.

Maybe there is today,

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

Ours was ridiculous.

DNA, don't lie.

DNA, don't lie.

A case that really shocked this country is about to take another stunning turn.

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.

Robin Morgenthau!

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

The verdicts have been set aside in their entirety.

13 years I prayed for this day.

I always told my son and I told everybody, one day, 10 months, a year,

10 years, 20 years, but something going to come out and we're going to get the victory.

God gave us the victory

when this came out.

And most of all, we want our son's name removed from the sex crime predatory

database.

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.

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

So excited, I couldn't sleep.

That doesn't undo the psychological damage.

That doesn't undo the shattered lives of these kids.

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

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

What I waited for, Lord.

To you, my darling.

No, to you.

The roses were living the dream.

More champagne for me, people.

Until it all came crashing down.

He got fired by it.

From the director of Meet the Parents.

You're a failure.

Women don't like that.

If you need a shoulder or an inner thigh to lean on.

On August 29th.

I just want the house.

We want everything.

Wow.

Stop.

Yes.

And see the roses.

These people.

The roses.

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Under 17, not a minute without parents.

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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.

And I needed to be going for him.

Reus has changed everything.

There's now a new narrative.

The district attorney has vacated the convictions.

But now, what happens to Corey Wise?

He's still in prison.

Come on.

You don't.

Come on.

Right here.

Being away

for a good number of years.

Being deprived.

Being deprived of life.

It crippled me.

My body's been locked down for so long.

Going from yard

to cell block.

Going from cell block to yard.

Yeah.

My son is coming home.

He's here.

He's home.

her.

He is home.

Sometimes people say crumbs is better than nothing.

Well,

I don't know about that.

I'm a conquering woman.

I want my whole cake back.

Even if it is after 13 years.

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.

You live with it every day.

When they got out, I talked a lot to them and they were just broken.

This is home.

Everything changed, didn't it?

And they were like, how do I pick up my life from here?

What am I supposed to do?

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.

It doesn't prove that they're innocent.

It just means that, in the eyes of the law, their convictions no longer exist.

When Matthias Reyes says he did it alone, it's not just the prosecutors and the cops who don't believe it.

Trish Maley herself doesn't think he could have done it by himself.

There is

medical evidence to support

that more than one person was responsible for the attack on me.

My injuries

are different

from

what Matthias Reyes

claimed, that he was the sole attacker.

We have not discussed the attack with her.

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

They were also different sizes.

So it looks like, to me,

more than one person doing that.

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

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

I was not considered someone who was a big

pro-cop person.

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

Did any detective tell you to change your statement?

No.

Are you doing this of your own free will?

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

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

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 Reyes, either by himself or perhaps with others practically killed her and committed the horrendous rape.

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

The difficulty I have with the Armstrong report is that to say they had something to do with it.

They weren't convicted of something.

They were convicted of the rape and the attack.

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

stick to justify the hysteria.

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

And what do you want?

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

The next chapter in the story is they sue.

They feel that they were railroaded into prison.

They lost years of their lives.

They want justice for that.

They want money.

Michael Bloomberg is the mayor when this lawsuit is filed.

Bloomberg was not going to settle this case.

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 was introduced and we see how it can be a game changer in the case.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It became clear that making a film was maybe the best way to tell this story.

So in 2013, this documentary comes out.

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

We won't forget what you done lost.

No money could bring the life that was missing.

Why me?

Cursed God out a couple of times.

You know, my faith was gone.

I lost seven years of my life.

I love that sense of

being youthful.

It changed our life.

In 1989,

there was such a media frenzy

that we were scared to speak.

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

And people see us for who we are.

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 Five.

It raises the possibility that they're actually innocent.

That film was made while we had the equivalent of a gag order from a federal judge.

We could not speak.

publicly.

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.

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.

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.

I think that the moral issue is quite clear.

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

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

Here's this scar from the dark days that hasn't healed the Central Park case.

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

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

13 years.

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.

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

With reparations for the injustice done.

The settlement in this case was $41 million.

Most of the defendants each received $7 million.

Corey Wise received $13 million.

This is amazing.

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

It's a classic settlement.

On the one hand the defendants get 41 million dollars and on the other hand the city sticks by its cops and prosecutors says we're not going to hang them out to dry they did not engage in police misconduct they did not engage in prosecutorial misconduct i just don't understand a settlement for that kind of behavior

sorry

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.

Yousep Salam.

You know, this film has given us our lives back.

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

The Central Park V believe that the system worked against them.

Now they're the ones telling their story.

Consulting on the Netflix dramatization of their case.

Please, stop right there.

A mini-series titled When They See It's.

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

I didn't see any lady.

Kevin.

I didn't see any lady.

Who are you talking about?

The lady in the park.

I didn't see a lady or hit anyone.

Raymond saw you hit her.

Who was Raymond?

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

No justice, not me.

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

Linda Ferstein 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.

Netflix and DuVarnay reject those claims and have asked the court to dismiss Ferristein's complaint.

Those kids are the winners.

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.

It's just appalling.

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

But all people are in agreement about Tricia Milan and what she endured and what she's doing with her life now.

She's advocating for the improvement of rape kids.

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.

Could something like the Central Park V

case happen again?

Absolutely.

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

There are takeaways.

The interrogation must be fully recorded.

Simple as that.

That's transparency.

And you know what my question is?

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

Fast forward, what we see now.

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

This poem isn't just for the streets.

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

It is the same cry

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.

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

We have to make sure

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

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

A woman was raped, her life devastated.

Five young men men lost their freedom.

The Central Park V raises questions that we're still answering today.

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

We're still flawed.

Thanks for listening to the 2020 True Crime Vault.

We hope you'll join us Friday nights at 9 on ABC for all new broadcast episodes.

See you then.

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