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I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime.

And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them. Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.

And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st-century lens. Some are solved, and some are cold.
Very cold. This is Buried Bones.

Hey, Paul. Hey, Kate.
How are you? I'm doing well. We've got Easter coming up.
What kind of Easter traditions do you guys have? I mean, do you celebrate Easter, first of all? You know, we

would do, when the kids were younger, we would do the Easter basket and hide the eggs type of thing.

Even like when I was a kid, you know, I was born and raised Catholic, you know, so of course easter was a big deal and and going to mass and stuff um but now my kids are older i think my wife will get them some basket with chocolates in it and that's about it

they don't look for easter eggs anymore not even like the plastic kind of easter eggs no thank god do you know that my mom would do hard-boiled eggs and i would dye them and then she would hide them but she would hide them i feel like the night before and then they were sitting out until noon or one o'clock the next day.

And then she would use them for deviled eggs. And I think decades later, I said, I don't think this is a good idea.

Should boiled eggs sit out for that long? I mean, you know better than I do. That doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
I don't know because one of the interesting thing, you know, I eat a lot of eggs.

You know, eggs are my staple for breakfast.

But it's like here in the United States, we refrigerate our eggs.

Over in Europe, they don't. Yeah, true.
You know, so if you boil them, you know, maybe there's no reason to have to keep them refrigerated. So maybe they're fine up to a certain point.
I'm guessing.

That's all it is at this point. So my mom is kind of exonerated from having any bad poisoning meat.
After you say that, we could maybe like keep them outside.

Issue number two with leaving the eggs out all night is we have so many raccoons and deer that jump our fans

and bugs and dirt and snakes and everything. I still say it was bad parenting.

I love my mom, but that was not a great idea, I feel like, because she would hide an egg and then she didn't know where the egg went. And I said, that's because a raccoon probably took it.

And now you want me to eat it. Yeah, no, for sure.
But man, you're harsh, bad parenting, huh? Oh, maybe not. Parenting.
Boy, I do parenting fails pretty much constantly. I think every day.

I think I just did one about an hour and a half ago, actually.

I think we all do, actually.

So we hide plastic eggs, and the kids, you know, will hunt around for them and stuff. And they still do it.
And, you know, we'll have sort of a traditional Easter afternoon dinner.

We're not religious at all. So it's mostly about the bunny rabbit.
My grandfather, who was my dad's father, lived in Missouri.

He was a carpenter and he was married to my granny for decades and decades and decades.

And they were the ones, ones, I feel like I told you in another case, those were the grandparents who slept in separate beds, which I found even at eight, weird. I didn't understand it.

And, you know, they had twin beds and they were on the other side of the room, which I don't know what that means. I mean, I would think they would be closer together, but they had twin beds.

My papa had like a massive, it was like four acres garden, all vegetables. They had a root cellar, all this stuff in Missouri.

And he used to tell me that he was going to sit outside with a gun and chase off the Easter bunny. Of course.
I just thought, you're so mean.

I mean, I know he was kind of a farmer type, but I mean, I get it. You know, nobody wants their garden invaded, but the Easter bunny, really, Papa? Yeah.

Well, at least he wasn't out on the porch with a shotgun when Santa Claus was going to come. Now we would have potentially a homicide.
Yeah, and absolutely.

Well, I mean, you know, that strange man creeping along your roof. Yes.
He probably hadn't thought about that. He just wanted to scare me a little bit, I think.

And I just thought, it's a bunny rabbit. Let him have the lettuce.
I mean, you know, I know he chased off animals. So

I had an interesting family, Paul. Sounds like it.

Well, I am taking you to 1963, Arizona. And this is a case that on the surface seems, I think, fairly simple, but it was a landmark case and you'll find out why.

I try to find stories where, you know, we can say, this is the reason why we have X, Y, and Z.

Remember the story about the man who was accused of sexual assault, sneaking into somebody's house, and he left his fingerprints in fresh paint.

And that became the landmark case, the first time that fingerprinting was introduced in court. So this is sort of that.
kind of case.

So as we go along, you know, this case changes quite a bit to reflect why it's important today. Okay, well,

relatively speaking, it's a more recent case. It's like brand new.
It's like yesterday for us. Yeah, no, for sure.
It's just, what, five years before I was born. So you keep dating yourself.

I like a guy who does that, though. I mean, you know, you're proud of your age and all that.
Me too. It's better than the alternative, right? And you know what? My mom says it.

Now I'm going to really give my mom some props. My mom says that every time, you know, she says, well, I have friends who don't want to disclose their age.

And I'm proud of it because, you know, a lot of people don't make it to, you know, my mom's age was about 80. She's going to be 82 this year.
So I would be bragging about about that too. Yeah.

I'll brag about 50. 50, I'm happy to have made it this far.

I've got you beat. You do.
I know. I know.
Yeah. Okay.
Let's go ahead and set the scene for the story.

We are, as I said before, in 1963, Arizona. This is going to be a landmark case.
A warning, there is

a lot involving a sexual assault. You all know that we try to handle this with a lot of sensitivity.
And Paul does a great job talking about this.

So I just want to give you a warning straight off the top. So here is the crime.
We're going to jump right into it. Before midnight, shortly before midnight, March 2nd, 1963,

we are in Phoenix. An 18-year-old woman is heading home from her job at the concession counter at a local movie theater.

She takes a city bus to a stop that's about three blocks away from her home where she lives with her mother and her sister and her sister's husband.

The time when this happened is a little murky because the woman says this happened before midnight on March 2nd, but the police filed the report on March 3rd.

So it gets a little confusing, but we're going to go with March 2nd. Okay.
She will be the victim of a sexual assault. And I am not going to identify her because it's 1963.

And I would hope she's still around. So we're going to leave out her name.
But I don't think it's difficult to find. In the 1960s, Phoenix is in the middle of a huge building boom.

And she lives in a development that's still under construction. So the sidewalks are dark.
They don't seem to have street lights. She's coming home very late by herself.

She can hear a car pulling up behind her. She kind of ignores it and keeps walking.
The driver gets out of the car and he runs up behind her and grabs her by the waist.

She says that he pressed something sharp up against the back of her neck. He says, if you don't scream, I won't hurt you.
And she goes with him. And he puts her in the car's back seat.

And before I kind of get to what happens, I wanted to ask a question because I feel like I don't know what the current guidance is. If you are approached by a stranger.
And he says, get into the car.

And he does have a weapon or doesn't have a weapon. I feel like growing up, I heard comply.
That's how you stay alive because otherwise he'll shoot you right there.

Or he'll force you in and it'll be a really bad situation, even worse situation. But I feel also like I've heard quite a bit about no matter what you do.

And I think this is what they teach in schools to kids. No matter what you do, don't get in a car with somebody.
Fight, scream, whatever it is, even if they have a gun pointed at you, don't do it.

So what's your understanding of what the guidance would be from safety experts with with this?

Well, it's not my understanding. I will tell you from my casework experience, you never, ever let yourself be taken to a secondary location.

I don't care if they've got a gun. I don't care if they've got a knife.

What they're going to do to you at that secondary location is going to be far worse than being shot or stabbed or killed at that contact spot.

You know, with my other podcast, Small Town Dicks with Yardley, Dan, and Dave, Dan, Dave, and I, coming out of law enforcement, we all tell our listeners, don't go to a secondary location.

Don't let yourself get bound. You know, if you are having somebody who is trying to force you into a vehicle, you fight, you kick, you go dead weight, you make it as hard as possible.

And you want to draw as much attention as possible

so somebody else can either come to your aid or at least least get law enforcement rolling. And oftentimes the offender is not expecting that.

He's thinking you're going to comply with the gun or the knife. And now all of a sudden he's got a fight on his hands.
He's got a lot of noise being made.

There's a good chance that that offender will run off. Some won't.
Okay. You know, but that is

straight up. Because I've just seen what happens to victims when they go to a secondary location.

Well, luckily, this woman survives, but her ordeal is awful. He has something sharp up against the back of her neck.
He says, if you don't scream, I won't hurt you.

He puts her in the back seat of his car, binds her ankles together with rope. He also ties her hands behind her back.
He drives about 20 minutes into the desert. Remember, we're in Arizona.

And he rapes her. And then he says something odd.
He says, pray for me. and drops her back off in her neighborhood.
You know, she, of course, goes home, tells her family what happened.

They call the police, doing all the right things. When the investigators come, she can give a description of the car, but not the make and model.

And she says that the car was either gray or a light green sedan with a dark upholstered interior that has stripes, which is great that she sounds so specific there.

But she can't give a description of the offender. I don't know if it's because of trauma or he's masked, but you know, this is what ends up happening.
So what do you think so far based on all of this?

Well, there's plenty of examples where these sexually motivated offenders abduct their victims, sexually assault them, and then take them back either to the abduction location or to some other location and drop them off.

At least within this offender's mind, right now, he doesn't have the homicidal ideations, at least not yet.

If he is unmasked and is letting this victim go, you know,

that's interesting because he's not taking, you know, in 1963, most certainly would be aware that this victim is going to be talking to law enforcement and likely would be able to provide a pretty accurate description of him.

So it kind of tells me a little bit about this offender that he's not being as

careful as he should if he wants to continue to get away, either get away with this particular crime or to continue to offend, you know, because this type of offender, you know, abducting strangers and sexually assaulting them, that generally is considered a predatory type crime.

And they do that over and over and over again. In some ways, he's, he's kind of almost rolling the dice and willingly so, to where maybe, you know, especially with the statement, pray for me,

you know, he knows that he has a fantasy life that society does not agree with, that he's committing a crime. He wants to be caught, but he's not willing to give himself up.

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Okay, what happens next disturbs me. Of course, you know, anything involving a sexual assault disturbs me, but what the police do next, I had not heard, and maybe you have.

The survivor goes to the station to be interviewed. and they make her take a polygraph test.
Have you heard that before?

I hate to say it, but this is an era in which law enforcement did a lot of victim blaming. I saw it over and over again from cases out of the 1960s, 1970s.

And here, right off the bat, they're telling this victim, well, you got to prove yourself that you're telling the truth, right?

It very much was this misogynistic type of mentality that law enforcement had back in the day. And remember, 1963, law enforcement's all male.
Very few females are working. There almost was a

mindset. Well, you shouldn't have dressed that way.
And that is what's happening to this victim here. Yeah.

First of all, let's go back and talk about polygraph tests in general, which we know are unreliable from American Sherlock.

You know, I can't remember what year it was, but it was like 1925, I think, that in that time period, where even the Supreme Court said these should not be admitted in court.

You know, this is not reliable enough because so much can change. Your heart rate, your pulse, everything can change based on medication, how you're feeling that day.

I mean, you know, a host of things that can't be attributed to lying.

I think you and I have talked about that it's an effective interrogation technique, but certainly not something that can point definitively to someone's guilt. It's a tool.
Yeah. That's all it is.

You know, and, you know, polygraphers will, you know, pretty much defend their results, but also they recognize the variables that can skew the results.

Oftentimes, what we get in an investigation from a polygraph, because the person that's being hooked up to the instrument, they now are in a position to where, oh, shit, they're going to know if I'm lying.

And so sometimes certain individuals will now tell the truth. Other individuals will just straight up continue to lie, but it locks them into statements.

And some of the most valuable investigative statements come out of the polygraph interview. You get questioned while you're hooked up to the instrument.
Polygrapher goes off. He comes back.

He's got instrument readouts and he says, okay, Paul, you answered these questions right, but I have concern about this question.

The next thing you know, somebody is just like, well, you know, trying to make something up in order to say why the instrument is thrown off. And then a discussion follows.

And next thing you know, they're making admissions, which now the homicide investigators or sexual assault investigators go, okay, we got the right guy. Now

we need to do some follow-up. It's a tool.
You know, there's no way you can

affect an arrest based off of failing a polygraph.

Well, it is inconclusive. And in 2005, I thought this was interesting.
In 2005, right?

So 20 years ago, the Violence Against Women Act withdrew some federal funding from states that still required rape survivors to take polygraph tests. So, this is what's stunning to me.

As it stands, at least 25 states have since banned this practice. This leaves the other states who still do it.
And that's incredible to me. I just had never heard that before.

So, that it's good to know, you know, that this is something that gives me a lot of context. This is something, you know, that happened in the past.

You know, and I do just want to say, you know, obviously when you have a victim come in, you have to listen to that victim and take what they are saying as being fact, right?

This is what they experienced.

However, we do have victims lie.

They make up things, you know, and so as you investigate, if you do find out this victim is likely lying, then of course you have to figure out, well, what is going on here?

But to treat like in this case, this victim straight off the bat, to hook somebody up to a polygraph before even hearing what happened and starting the investigation. It's just straight up wrong.

Right. And she's not accusing anybody yet.
I mean, it's not like there's some wealthy, you know, young man whose life is on the line because this woman is accusing him of something.

There isn't even an investigation yet. This is her, you know, her contention.
So, okay, let's move on.

So there was a detailed interior description of the car, but not the exterior. But the description of the car matches descriptions that have been given to the police in reports of other assaults.

She said it was a gray or a light green sedan with dark upholstered interior that had stripes.

I mean, that still seems kind of vague, but people who have been survivors of other similar attacks are coming back with the same description of the car. So does that seem reliable to you?

I mean, police are going to really lean into this too.

Well, I think in terms of, you know, is it reliable necessarily to be able to link these crimes together conclusively? No.

You know, what is the prevalence of this style interior at this point in time?

But in terms of this is a detail of if these, if these crimes are similar enough to where these, all these victims are saying, I was inside the offender's vehicle and this is what the interior of the vehicle looked like, then it is a characteristic where you have to consider this may be the same offender.

Now, if you have other behaviors, how these women are abducted, you know, how he is sexually assaulting them, what his appearance is like, and all these seem to be within sort of a, you'd say it's a bracket, you know, in terms of each characteristic falls within a certain bracket where it doesn't deviate too much from each other.

Then you go, okay, there's a good likelihood that we have a serial rapist on the loose here.

Incoming with the old gays. It's Jessé, Bill, Robert, and Mick with a special bonus episode of Silver Linings with the Old Gays.

No matter what time of year it is, we know it's important to uplift the spirit of Pride, which is relatively easy when Palm Springs celebrates in November.

The first pride I went to, it made me feel like I was really part of something.

People being so joyous in the streets and being themselves.

We've really come a long way and I realize I am standing on the shoulders of so many millions of queer people who sacrificed their lives for what we have today.

Silver Linings with the Old Days is brought to you in partnership with iHeart's Ruby Studio and Viv Healthcare. Listen on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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So the police cannot find this car. And about a week later, after this woman's attack, this woman's brother-in-law has been escorting her to and from the bus ever since the rape happened.

At some point, he spots a car that matches his sister-in-law's description. The car leaves before the woman's bus arrives, but comes back once the woman and the brother-in-law are there together.

She confirms that it looks like the right car. And he runs after it, but the car speeds away once he sees somebody is chasing him.

And the brother-in-law, thank goodness, jots down a partial plate number.

This car turns out to be a 1953 Packard, and it's registered to a woman, but she lives with a man who is 23, and his name is Ernesto. I can tell you about Ernesto.

I can talk about what ends up happening when police locate him. And remember, this is a very significant case, and you're going to find out in just a bit.

well i think you know i think the first comment is is that you know the victim being able to say hey that looks like the car it's basically okay this looks like the make and model car that the offender used that she was put into and i'm assuming that they must have been close enough to the vehicle possibly to be able to see oh it's got the the striped upholstery on the inside yes so she's not saying that guy looks like the guy that sexually assaulted me she's saying that looks like the car okay so it's most certainly something where it's, okay, that's good.

Now we have an understanding of the make and model that the offender was using, potentially.

And a 1953 Packard, you know, I know of the Packard vehicles.

I don't think they were exceptionally common, but that would be something that I would be kind of wanting to know as an investigator is, okay, so is this just a you know, we have a ton of these, you know, driving around the city, or is this something that is relatively rare?

That I don't know, but I would be wanting to dig into that before I put a lot of weight on

the person that has access to this vehicle is possibly her attacker. So that's probably the first observation that I have.
And then the registered owner being a woman.

Well, we know a woman isn't the one that is attacking the victim, but we have a 23-year-old male, you know, Arnesto.

So now, based off of what the victim could recount about her offender, does this Arnesto seem to match?

I know you said that she could not remember much about the physical characteristics of this offender.

Yeah, not at all. I mean, she said at the time that she couldn't recall anything specific.

But for law enforcement, there seems to be other cases that are matching this victim's case in terms of the vehicle. Yep.

So what are these other victims saying about the

physical characteristics of their offender? And does Arnesto match that? That's That's kind of what I would be looking at if I'm considering these cases as being related.

I'll tell you, because I do have descriptions of what happens in these other cases too, and we can kind of see that.

On March 13th, 1963, the police come to his house where he lives, Ernesto's house, and ask him to come down for questioning.

According to the police, Ernesto is friendly and helpful, unbothered, and he talks freely with the police. This seems unusual to me.
And I don't know if he is the person.

I don't know if this is someone who thinks he can outsmart the police and, you know, just sort of kind of skate through this.

But, you know, he is someone who does not seem alarmed by the fact that he's being brought in for questioning for it sounds like at least one sexual assault.

And I'm assuming they're going to try to tie him to the others. Sure.
But there are plenty of people that respond that way. Okay.
You really can't draw conclusions.

You're just noting that he seems cooperative. You know, he does not seem nervous.
So, you know, maybe he doesn't have anything to do with this.

But then there are offenders that when they've been pulled in, that's the way they are. Well, before I get to the interrogation, let me just tell you a little bit about him.

He was born in Arizona to a very poverty-stricken family. His mother died when he was young, and he had a lot of brushes with the law when he was a kid.

He was sent to a reform school when he was a teenager. He had some prior arrests in California, though he wasn't convicted.
It doesn't sound like anything violent.

He lived sort of an itinerant lifestyle in his late teens and early 20s, which means he hopped around from place to place and job to job. So he didn't have roots anywhere.

He was convicted in Tennessee for driving a stolen car. When he is being questioned for the sexual assault by the Phoenix police, he's working nights on a loading dock for a produce company.

And that's what we know about Ernesto.

So, you know, the brushes with the law, we've talked about that before, that certain brushes with the law are alarming to you, at least when we talk about psychopathy and the potential for violence of somebody later on.

But these things, you know, he's 23, stolen car, nothing violent. Is this anything that would alarm you as an investigator when you're looking at this case?

Because right now, all it is is he's got a car that people are saying might have been involved in, you know, the offender being a rapist.

No, you know, all of it seems to be minor.

You know, many people have this level of criminality, you know, so it doesn't mean, doesn't point to anything that would indicate that he potentially is a serial rapist or capable of sexual assault.

If he has priors, as I think I've talked about before, if he has prior sexual assault, particularly sexual assaults on

strangers, you know, predatory type crime, then that is more of a red flag in terms of his past criminality indicating, okay, he's capable of this type of crime.

And we know these types of offenders have a tendency to be recidivists. They have a tendency to continue committing these types of crimes.

Okay. Now I'm going to have questions about police conduct just in general when you're interrogating somebody, whether this is sort of commonplace or not.

Here's point number one, and you tell me what you think. They take Ernesto to a very small interrogation room.

You know, they want to try to figure out if he's even the right guy because he does not seem bothered at all that he's there.

So it's described, this interrogation room is described more like a cubicle, 12 feet squared cubicle, and they refer to it as the sweat room.

Are you allowed water? Can you go to the bathroom? Is that one call still, one phone call still a thing?

You know, there's

when somebody's brought in to be interviewed, there is a level of

expected treatment. You know, you're not bringing somebody in to, you know, put them in essentially a jail cell.

Typically, yes, you know, part of a proper interview is where you're ensuring that the subject is reasonably comfortable. Today, law enforcement needs to be mindful of the suspect's perception.

Now, under this circumstance, at this point in time, I don't think you said he was arrested.

He was asked to come down to the station. He is voluntarily there.
In this day and age, under this set of circumstances, you know, at any point, he can decide to get up and leave.

And he has to have that perception of the capability to get up and leave when he is there voluntarily.

So, Smarty, tell me what Ernesto's last name is. Miranda.
Yep.

This is the Miranda Wrights case, 1963. Yes.
I can't believe it took till 1963 to sort all this out, but it's an interesting case. No, for sure.

You know, but this, there, there is a reason because of this case why

people that are in a custodial situation, whether it's they've been told that they are in custody or they perceive that they are in custody, that they need to be told their rights.

And it's because of this case. Well, now we're going to find out why.
So he is questioned for two hours, and he denies the rape.

And several other crimes that police are trying to pin him on, basically just based on the description of his car, which does not seem like a wild description, but I guess it is.

So they're trying to pin him on a bunch of different things. So police put him in a lineup.
Now we need to talk about lineups.

Police put him in a lineup and the young woman, the 18-year-old, who was raped, as well as another woman, identify him out of four men, but they say they're not positive.

I mean, my notes say that the young woman really couldn't give him a description, so I don't know what would have changed. And then talk about how lineups work.
Are they the same as in the 60s?

Well, see, well, and this is where whether you're dealing with a photo lineup or you're doing this in-person type of lineup, is nowadays there are criteria that these lineups have to meet in order for them to be to have any level of veracity in terms of if the victim, like in this case, is able to pick somebody out of the lineup, there isn't anything that would have swayed the victim to point at the person that law enforcement is considering the suspect.

But let's say Ernesto is, you know, I don't know his size, but let's say he's 5'6, 150 pounds, clean shaven, and the other three men in this lineup are all above six foot and they have facial hair.

You know, it's that type of thing.

And those were some of the things that was happening, you know, back in the day in order to get that witness or that victim to point at the person that law enforcement has kind of keyed in on in order for law enforcement to write up a report saying suspect was picked out of a photo lineup.

And now they're putting that in a probable cause affidavit for arrest for that crime. So let's talk about the other case.

There was another woman who identified him in this lineup, but said, you know, I'm not 100% sure.

The circumstances from her case were that she was grabbed at knife point while she was going to her car at night from her job as a bank teller.

He put her in the front bench of her own car, drove a short distance, and she was assaulted but not raped and robbed of $8.

This seems different.

It is tough when you have disparate crimes like this. Now, you have an abduction of females in both instances.
You have these females being kidnapped. They're being moved to a different location.

Okay. There's similarities there.
Just because one case doesn't end in sexual assault and it turns out to be essentially a robbery of $8,

you know, $8 is taken by force or fear by this offender. Serial rapists will also commit this type of crime and not sexually assault somebody.
So you can't eliminate them as not being related.

But I think to your point, yes, you can't necessarily say they are related because there isn't enough circumstances, behaviors, et cetera, that are unique enough to say, yes, this appears to be the same individual, the same offender.

It's just something you have to consider. You know, offenders commit multiple types of crimes.
So that just is what happens. And you take a look at Ernesto's criminal past, this robbery of $8

seems to be more in line with the types of petty crimes that he's committing, even though the kidnap is serious.

That's a massive, major felony that's going on there. But to take the $8

seems in line with maybe some of these petty theft arrests that he possibly had in his criminal past. Yeah.

So remember, it was a lineup of Ernesto and three other men. And they said, it looks like him, but we're not 100% sure.
That's not what the police tell Ernesto.

And they say that he has been positively identified by these two women and he immediately confesses. Now, two hours of interrogation, we don't know what that involved.

And I don't know enough about Phoenix, Arizona in the 60s, if this was the third degree or what happened, but he didn't break until these two women positively identified him.

I know police can lie, right? I mean, how much can they lie when you're interrogating somebody, when you're trying to trap them?

You can lie to the person you're talking to, you know, with the expectation that if the person's innocent, they will stand their ground and in essence, tell the interviewer, you're wrong.

You know, that wasn't me. I did not, you know, attack those women or whatever.
But we do see with select types of suspects. that will cave in to an interrogation when they are told lies.

You know, so it is a balance, you know, that this is where

you have an offender. Hey, we've got your DNA in this case, in this sexual assault.

The innocent person is expected to say, I don't know how that got there. Now, guilty guys say the same thing, right? But you expect that person, the innocent person, to stand their ground.

But then you have to evaluate the individual you're talking to.

And we know individuals that are intellectually challenged, that have certain personalities, that are of a certain age, et cetera, are more susceptible to caving in, either to being under the influence of the interrogator or to caving into the circumstances.

If I just tell them what they want to hear, maybe I'll be let go.

Aaron Powell, I've heard circumstances where people say they were interrogated for so long, almost days, where they start questioning whether they were involved or not.

I don't remember the stat from the Innocence Project, but it's something like 25%, I think, of wrongful convictions come from false confessions.

No, for sure. You know, and it's interesting in California.

So the Reed interview technique, which has been taught forever and it originated out of the Chicago area, has been shown to generate false confessions.

And so in California, I know there's one DA, I think it's El Dorado County DA.

I was listening to him at a conference, talk about how he was championing, banning the use of this Reed interrogation technique in California. And I think he was successful.

I'm not entirely sure I know where that's at, in part because it does cause susceptible individuals to falsely confess to something they didn't do.

You know, it's just the way that these individuals are manipulated. You know, so it's

a balance. You know, you want to get the truth out of the person.

And we know people will lie to protect themselves from the crimes that they've committed.

So you have to somehow figure out a way in order to get those facts out or at least get them to make statements that are incriminating that a prosecutor can use.

But at what point do you draw the line in terms of what you're willing to do in order to get those statements out of that particular suspect?

Well, this prosecutor you were talking about, can you draw briefly a contrast between the Reed interrogation technique and what should be done if you have somebody who's intellectually challenged?

I mean, what's the difference? What's the right and the wrong? What does the read technique do that's so manipulative that gets these wrongful convictions?

Fundamentally, sort of like what you're hearing here in the Miranda case in terms of, you know, very confrontational, making up these lies, you know, really trying to persuade the individual down a certain tract.

You know, back in the day before this case, law enforcement was really heavy-handed in terms of how they would interrogate individuals. You talk about being

kept awake for long hours while you are being questioned over and over again.

And part of the questioning with this tactic is just re-asking the questions over and over again over the course of many hours to where now the person's getting frustrated.

And so now they're going to go, well, my cooperation up to this point isn't working. So now I'm going to give them what they want.

And now they've just confessed to a crime.

And then what I've seen, in fact, I consulted on an Innocence Project case, and I won't go into the details, but fundamentally what law enforcement was doing back in the day, and this was not back in 1963, this is back in the 1990s.

But this particular agency with this particular couple of interviewers, what they do is they, in essence, tell the suspect the details and make the suspect tell those details about the crime back.

And then the the investigator is the one that's typing up this is what the suspect said and there's no recording and then they make the the suspect sign that you you told us this right yes i told you that and they that suspect just now has confessed to a crime and it's just it is so inappropriate well what's hard about this case of ernesto miranda is he is guilty he's about to give a full confession not only that he's going to identify the woman that he attacked.

But, you know, the way that the police handle it and what they have him sign, we have to get a little technical here. That's why this case was so important.
So he signs a form.

He says in the form, he's 23. His highest level of education is eighth grade.
And this is his written statement.

He said, seen a girl walking up the street, stopped a little ahead of her, got out of the car, walked toward her, grabbed her by the arm, and asked her to get in car.

Got in car without force, tied her hands and ankles, drove away for a few miles, stopped, asked to take clothes off, did not.

Asked me to take her home. I started to take clothes off without any force and with cooperation, asked her to lay down, and she did.

Could not get penis into vagina, got about half an inch in, told her to get clothes back on, drove her home. And I couldn't say I was sorry for what I had done, but I asked for her to pray for me.

So that's what he said. And on the form he wrote wrote this statement on, it said, with full knowledge of my rights, even though he was never informed of any rights.
And that's where this case is.

So what do you think about that? First, his confession. What do you think about the confession? Did he write the confession? Well, here's the thing, Paul.
I mean, we have a verbatim.

There's no punctuation, almost no punctuation in here, you know, and I don't know if he actually wrote it, wrote it. In eighth grade, you would think he would be able to, but it's, I don't know.

You're right. It's hard to tell.
Well, well, this is sort of like that innocence project is, you know, what had he been told about the crime?

When I'm assessing statements, and I do this all the time in cold cases, is I'm assessing, okay, what did law enforcement know? How did they know it?

Is this something that during the interviews, law enforcement, during their interrogative phase, they're now confronting him with facts?

And, you know, this fact, you tried to rape her, but you only could get in so far. Well, now he's fed that detail.
At what point during the interview is

the person being interviewed bringing up this level of detail?

And I know when I evaluate a case, I'm often taking a look at the crime scene and the physical evidence and interpreting that.

And many investigators don't know how to interpret. you know, do like a crime scene reconstruction.
So they never bring those types of details up to the suspect that they're talking to.

But when I see a suspect say something during that interview that matches up with what I am seeing in the physical evidence, I'm going, oh, he literally knows something that even the investigators don't know.

Now I'm putting a ton of veracity on that type of detail. So, you know, statement analysis in terms of assessing.

You know, like what Ernesto is saying, you know, that's where, okay, who's writing this? At what stage is he writing this? It's towards the end of the interrogation. Was this recorded?

Was this, were these details that he was fed by the detectives during an interrogation, and now he's just regurgitating them because he just wants to be done? Remember what I said?

You know, there's select individuals in our society that are more susceptible to these types of interrogative tactics and will falsely confess.

One of those is going to be that kind of that limited intellectual aspect. Ernesto has an eighth grade education, and he's 23 years old.

He's satisfying one of those characteristics of, yeah, he might be susceptible.

Now, I'm not saying, you know, that he's innocent of these crimes, but what I am saying is that there's a reason why this became a landmark case. Well, let me tell you how we keep going here.

He identifies the 18-year-old woman that we started the story with, who he sexually assaulted. And then he said, I also did a robbery and an attempted robbery.

He said, in both of those cases, the women had been assaulted, but but escaped before being raped. The robbery was $8, and he took it from a survivor who was a bank teller.

After the statement, he's arrested and booked in the Maricopa County Jail. And the prosecutor ends up filing charges on the rape and the robbery, not like the attempted robbery.

So there were three cases that they were interested in with him.

Again, the detail about the bank teller and a couple of other details, but right, because this is a Miranda case, the Miranda case, we have to think about what investigators did to get this information.

So they're untrustworthy, unfortunately.

Well, you know, and part of what I want to hear from Miranda, you know, as he's giving his statements is I want to hear his perspective on how the crime was committed, not what I'm hearing you telling me is, well, these are the types of statements that the victim would be saying.

I want to hear his perspective. I initially saw this victim at this location.
I followed her until we got to this particular location. I got out.
I went around this corner of the front of my car.

You know, something where he's walking through committing the crime versus regurgitating she was a bank teller.

Well, law enforcement knows she's a bank teller, right?

You know, I need to hear something sort of outside of what I've heard so far. I, you know, of course, I'm familiar with, you know, why Miranda exists.

I'm not real familiar with the crimes that Miranda committed to get to the point where now we have this landmark case. Right.
I'll tell you more about these trials.

There's two trials because remember, there is a robbery and then there's the rape. So he goes on trial for the robbery first in June of 1963.
It takes a day.

He has a court-appointed attorney who files a motion indicating that he intends to plead insanity. And the court has two psychiatrists examine him.

One of the psychiatrists says that he has an emotional illness that the psychiatrist classifies as a, quote, schizophrenic reaction of the chronic, undifferentiated type.

At the same time, he concludes that Miranda was unaware of his actions, but aware that he did something wrong.

Meantime, the other psychiatrist says he's just immature and unstable, and he doesn't see any evidence of psychosis.

So we have the arresting officer and the woman who was robbed testify, and the jury comes back with a unanimous guilty verdict that afternoon.

They're waiting on what happens with the rape trial to deal with sentencing, and the rape trial is the next day.

I want to definitely talk about the diagnosis from one of the psychiatrists about schizophrenia because, you know, you are talking about vulnerable people and being subjected to unethical interrogation techniques.

So, so far, what are you hearing in this?

Because he confessed to the robbery and as well as these other crimes, too. Yeah, you know, it's really tough, you know, to assess kind of the mental health aspect and how that plays into this case.

Most certainly, I'm familiar with schizophrenia,

but in terms of wherever he's at along sort of this spectrum of schizophrenia, he's 23.

We know generally, you know, in the early 20s, oftentimes this is when schizophrenia starts to manifest itself and then

it progresses from that point.

I can only right now speculate from my vantage point that, yeah, schizophrenia may be something that would influence Miranda in terms of how he interacts under an interrogative setting.

I mean, that is way outside my level of expertise. You know, for me, when I'm assessing, let's say,

crime, and we start talking psychosis, you know, a psychotic offender, a true disorganized offender that has a mental health issue that is so extreme, they're unaware that they are committing a crime that is wrong.

This is your true insanity. I can't form any type of opinion.
Does, you know, Miranda fall within that type of offender.

You have one of the psychiatrists saying he's not at the level of a psychosis, right? I think that's what you said.

However, both psychiatrists, though somewhat different in their opinions, are saying he does have some sort of mental health aspect to him.

You know, and so that kind of underscores from my perspective, okay, he is a vulnerable suspect.

And so the interview of somebody like that needs to be handled in a different way than likely it was handled in terms of a hardcore interrogation.

Here's the rape trial. It happens the next day.
The defense tries to shake the survivor's story. She is very consistent and believable.

The lawyer, for lack of a better phrase, completely fucks up his attorney. So states exhibit one is Miranda's signed statement, which admitted to the rape, but his own attorney calls it a confession.

No one else in the court has called it a confession. They say it's a statement.
So the prosecutor at the very end in his closing statement said, even his own attorney says he's confessed.

And this is that.

So, I mean, this will, of course, set up a pretty decent appeal for Miranda, but the defense doesn't dispute the validity of this confession statement thing.

And within minutes, the jury comes back with a guilty verdict. And he's sentenced to 20 to 30 years for each count, the kidnapping and the rape.
And he's also sentenced to 25 years for the robbery.

If this man's last name were not Miranda, this would be the end of our story.

But in the 60s, lawyers and activists had already started being critical of, you know, what the constitutional rights are when you are being interrogated by the police.

And that's why this case turns into a big case. So in 63, the original lawyer who defended Miranda is a guy named Alvin Moore.
He files an appeal.

And there are other cases involving coerced or improperly attained confessions that have drawn a lot of national attention and established the right for an attorney during interrogations under the Sixth Amendment.

So, Moore's basis for this appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court is that his confession was improperly received as evidence. The state Supreme Court disagrees and they uphold the conviction.

But there is a lot more happening here where eventually, I mean, just to kind of shorthand this, you know, this takes a very windy road and the ACLU gets involved.

There's another case in California with the California Supreme Court and that court ruled that before a suspect is interrogated, he has to be expressly informed of his right to an attorney and Miranda wasn't.

So Arizona and California were contradicting each other on the matter of constitutional law. And this is where Robert Corcoran, the retired attorney, decides to step in and he takes over the case.

Now, do you want to do a shorthand of what happens? Or what do you, I mean, this this is such a massive case. We don't know if he's guilty, but it sure sounds like it to me.
But that's not the point.

You know, the point is establishing your rights, you know, and everybody, even guilty people, need rights.

I know of the Miranda case, but in terms of the legal path up to the Supreme Court, not familiar with that at all.

You know, fundamentally, my training when I was with law enforcement, you know, was with Miranda.

Of course, you're informing the person that you're interviewing of their rights, you know, their right to remain silent, the right to have an attorney.

But the primary criteria that impacts law enforcement needing to inform this person of their rights is the custodial status. Is this person in custody, which means they are not free to leave?

Or does the person have perception of custody? And I believe this isn't necessarily addressed under the Miranda case. There's other case law related to perception of custody.

So as an example, the way you set, let's say, a suspect up in an interview room, and now you have two big burly detectives that are between that suspect and the door.

And that suspect has just been told you can leave any time, but he has to push through these two cops. Maybe one of the cops is in uniform.
That person has a perception. I'm not free to leave.

So under that that set of circumstances, this is where now law enforcement is going, okay, generally good,

you know, and there's a balance. You know, you don't want to mirandize somebody if you don't have to, where now you just have told this person, shut up.
You want this person to cooperate.

But if you recognize, okay, this person is talking to me voluntarily and they're free to leave.

but there might be a perception that on their part that they're not free to leave because maybe the way our station house is set up, you know, you err on the side of caution and you mirandize him,

right? And hope that that person is still going to want to be able to cooperate and provide statements so you can further your investigation. There's almost a tactical way of having to approach.

You have to assess your suspect, the situation that you're talking to the suspect, and whether or not it truly does require to mirandize them or not, or is it in the gray area?

And then generally, it's sort of like, oh, you better err on the side of caution because if you don't, pretty much you have just killed the case if they find out that you should have Mirandized them.

This goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and there has to be clarity because there are a lot of cases that are now coming forward where people are saying, you're talking about intimidation with the police.

A lot of the arguments are, I'm not educated enough to know, you know, Paul Holz, the banker, probably knows his rights, but Miranda didn't.

And so what the Supreme Court eventually votes five to four, you know, in favor of, they essentially say that if the Constitution only protects Americans who are educated enough to know their rights, then not all Americans are protected.

So, you know, this is, like I said, a five to four decision.

And in response, police departments across the country give out those cards to their personnel with language to inform suspects of their rights.

You know, the Supreme Court didn't prescribe any specific language, but this is where the little speech that the police will give you if you're under arrest.

Miranda's conviction is overturned, and that drives me crazy. But he goes on trial again in Arizona in 1967.

This is only for the rape and the kidnapping since the robbery didn't go to the Supreme Court.

And his original confession is not admitted as evidence. He is tried under a false name because Miranda is very famous now.

And his estranged girlfriend, the woman who had been living with him, testifies against him and he is found guilty and sentenced to 20 to 30 years in prison.

Eventually, he applies and is denied parole four times. He is granted in 1972 parole.

So he serves about nine years in prison and he violates his parole with a lot of misdemeanors, goes back to prison for another five years. He's released in 75

and

he is stabbed to death at a bar in 1975 after he's released. You know, that sounds vaguely familiar.

I think I may have heard that at some point, but most certainly most of what you just told me about, you know, Miranda's back and forth with prison and parole, I did not know. Yeah.

So, you know, he ends up at this bar and he gets into an argument and he's stabbed in the chest and the neck and he dies within minutes.

You know, I mean, a little side note, they find the guy who did it. They inform him of his rights in Spanish because he doesn't speak English.
So that's how evolved they became.

So they inform him of his rights in Spanish and he waives his rights. He tells police, you know, that he didn't do it.
And they don't arrest him.

So, I mean, the irony here is, is he waives his rights. He denies that he did this.
He had some injuries and the police let him go.

And when they go back to find him again, when employees say we can identify him, he's gone. He's in Mexico.
And this is the suspect in Miranda's homicide. Yes.
So he's gone where his family lives.

He's in the wind. So the murder of Ernesto Miranda, you know, no one was ever arrested for the murder murder of Ernesto Miranda.

And I mean, this story, of course, I'm familiar with Miranda rights, but I did not know the back story of it.

I know this is not our traditional true crime, but like I said, I'm always interested in why cases are, you know, case laws established and, you know, where different things come from in our history.

And this was an interesting case.

Well, yeah, no, for sure. It's a landmark case.

It's, you know, it's one of those things, you know, there's for law enforcement, there are select individuals, you know, just whether they're patrol guys or investigators, they love staying on top of the case law.

And they often, I can think of one guy who was a DA investigator. He would give training to the other investigators.

Hey, this is the current, this was just a Supreme Court decision, or here's a California appellate decision. Because you need to know, you know, what changes.

You go through the police academy and you're told about Miranda, but then there's other case law that have modified Miranda, right? So you have to stay on top of that.

And there are people that fortunately that do that. And that, of course, you know, the prosecutors, your attorneys are the ones that are really the experts, you know.

So if law enforcement, if an investigator ever has a question about the legality of, let's say, a certain type of search, you know, you ring up your local prosecutor and you run the facts by them and say, hey, does this work?

You know, before you do it and you screw something up. Absolutely.

And that's where, you know, one of the reasons I enjoy the cold case side is things are slow. They're slow moving, right? They're decades old.
You don't have that public pressure, right?

You don't have, you know, I don't think people truly appreciate whether it's a patrol officer that's responding to an act of crime or an investigator investigating an act of crime, how many decisions they have to make

on the fly. And they have to make those decisions based on what the current case law is.
It's not something that they necessarily have received a bunch of training on.

So this is part of the evolution as you go through your career of seeing how laws change over time. And it's not necessarily in the penal code.
It's something that is now,

the attorney for the sheriff's office has said, hey, there's new California Supreme Court has just come out with this.

And so even though you've been doing it this way up until today, tomorrow you needed to do it this way, you know, and you have to make that adjustment or you potentially could have a case thrown out.

Yeah.

Well, like I said, not our normal type of story, but important. And I love learning about where things come from.

Next week, I can almost guarantee we're not going to be talking about Miranda rights, probably because from the 1800s. And they didn't have any rights.
So

she'd be lucky to survive interrogation. But, you know, we will have a case that definitely has some deep history.
So I hope you look forward to it, Paul. I always do.

And another great job today, Kate. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Paul. I'll see you next week.
Sounds good.

This has been an Exactly Right Production. For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com slash buried bones sources.
Our senior producer is Alexis Emorosi.

Research by Maren McClashin, Allie Elkin, and Kate Winkler-Dawson. Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Our theme song is by Tom Breifogel. Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer. You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod.

Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, A Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decoat the Criminal Mind, is available now.

And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also also available now.

Listen to Buried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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