The Mystery of the Lost Weekend

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Speaker 10 They say people reinvent themselves when they move to California.

Speaker 14 Something transformative about the road west, the cities on the hills and in the valleys by the sea.

Speaker 16 They're not exactly the same anymore once they're there.

Speaker 19 But if that's so,

Speaker 14 can you ever really know a person?

Speaker 16 A person like Vincent Brothers, for example.

Speaker 14 By all accounts, popular, successful, and kind.

Speaker 21 I thought he was a very loving individual. I thought he had a heart of gold.

Speaker 14 Ah, yes, a heart of gold.

Speaker 7 Your ability to know a man, know what he is or is not really capable of, is about to be challenged.

Speaker 24 Benson Brothers was an elementary school vice principal.

Speaker 25 A very good one, apparently.

Speaker 8 Later big guy.

Speaker 24 His wife, Joan, a school supervisor in Bakersfield, California.

Speaker 28 Joni was the sweetest, most gentlest person you'd ever meet.

Speaker 29 They had three kids.

Speaker 23 Vincent was the love of her life, said her brother Eddie.

Speaker 28 Vincent was very nice, very giving toward Joni.

Speaker 28 She thought he was an incredible person.

Speaker 28 We knew that Joni was in love with this man,

Speaker 6 deeply in love with him.

Speaker 30 So here he was, the respected educator, father, happily married man.

Speaker 22 And who'd have thought it, given his beginnings back in Bellport, Long Island?

Speaker 21 Where we grew up, it was easy to get in trouble. And that was the biggest thing, was to stay out of trouble.

Speaker 7 But Vincent, remembered childhood val Donald Collier, had a kind of Pied Piper popularity.

Speaker 16 Kids gravitated to this guy like you wouldn't believe.

Speaker 21 They'd run out like he was the ice cream man.

Speaker 6 They loved him.

Speaker 22 One of 10 kids, his mother Margaret, struggled and worried, but not about Vincent.

Speaker 34 Vincent was just blessed with the gift of knowledge because he never had to study, but he took things serious. But I never saw him down or depressed or going through anything.

Speaker 25 He went to college, served in the Marine Reserves, and headed west in the mid-80s to complete his master's degree at Cal State Bakersfield.

Speaker 32 He wasn't perfect.

Speaker 22 There were two brief marriages, which ended even as he rose quickly as a school administrator.

Speaker 11 And then he met sweet, quiet Joni Harper from a modest but respected Bakersfield family.

Speaker 36 Joan's mother, Ernestine, was an outspoken community activist who, most recently, had been working with the defendant in a high-profile murder case.

Speaker 28 My mother's main work

Speaker 28 was helping those defendants who were unjustly accused.

Speaker 28 She was fearless.

Speaker 19 Joni had been a gifted athlete, a star basketball player.

Speaker 27 But her real passion, like Vincent's, was helping children.

Speaker 28 She loved working with children. She was also a Division I women's basketball official.
And yes, she was multi-talented, multi-talented.

Speaker 22 And so Vincent and Joan became a team themselves, going above and beyond for the local kids.

Speaker 19 Keep my hug.

Speaker 22 Which did not go unnoticed around Bakersfield.

Speaker 8 We had done previous stories on how he walked kids home from school.

Speaker 22 Kiyoshi Timono was a Bakersfield news anchor at the time.

Speaker 8 He was known as the caring vice principal, the guy that really wanted to make sure his kids succeeded.

Speaker 38 And were safe.

Speaker 8 And we're safe. Bakersfield's got a lot of heart.
They said this guy should have bikes so they can help escort these kids home.

Speaker 39 Vice Principal Vincent Brothers and Joni Harper, who is the campus supervisor, are escorting students home home on wheels.

Speaker 40 See the best cool we ever had.

Speaker 8 And he was there with his wife in our stories, riding brand new bikes and thanking the community for doing that for him.

Speaker 41 I'm excited and I really appreciate it.

Speaker 41 I didn't expect this, and

Speaker 41 thank you.

Speaker 43 How about you? It's a bit overwhelming, but we appreciate their support that they've given us the years that we've been here.

Speaker 43 And so it's just an opportunity for us to show that we care and make sure their children get home safely.

Speaker 46 He's kind of like a neighborhood hero.

Speaker 8 Absolutely. Was a pillar in this community.

Speaker 7 Their son, Marcus, was born in 1998, and to the relief of Jones' family, the two married in January 2000.

Speaker 15 And this is where we would like to have used the words happily ever after.

Speaker 23 But of course, that's not why we're here.

Speaker 20 Things happened.

Speaker 12 The first thing was Vincent's odd disappearances.

Speaker 28 He would leave for three days, wouldn't say where he's going. He'd come back and Joni could not question his whereabouts or who he was with or what he was doing.

Speaker 28 And so that behavior was extremely strange.

Speaker 36 They fell out of love.

Speaker 20 They divorced.

Speaker 7 They fell in love again.

Speaker 31 They had a daughter, Lindsay.

Speaker 26 Joni, said her brother, worked very hard at this.

Speaker 28 Joni wanted her her children to have a father. She wanted it to be husband and wife.
That was her main concern, that he was really involved in the children's life.

Speaker 27 And it seemed that Vincent wanted that too.

Speaker 22 He began a study program with a local minister.

Speaker 19 And in January 2003, he and Joan secretly remarried.

Speaker 29 And four months later, their third child, Marshall, was born.

Speaker 28 Seeing him change, watching him how he was with the children, and he was, in all intent and purpose, very good.

Speaker 26 July 4th weekend, he took a break, flew east to Ohio to visit his brother Melvin.

Speaker 22 Joan stayed home to enjoy fireworks and barbecues with her mother and the children.

Speaker 19 It was Tuesday, the 8th. Vincent still back east.

Speaker 22 A friend dropped by to see Joni and the children.

Speaker 24 What she found was horrifying.

Speaker 24 Where are you?

Speaker 6 901 Birth Street.

Speaker 6 Hold on, hold on. Take a deep breath.
My best friend, my best friend. He's dead.
He lay on the bed.

Speaker 6 Okay. I'll kill my mother and three children.

Speaker 28 I thought I was dreaming.

Speaker 28 I thought that this day was not really happening.

Speaker 22 The news about what happened over the July 4th weekend at the Bakersfield home of Vincent Brothers and Joni Harper was delivered in pieces like shrapnel to Joan's brother Eddie.

Speaker 28 My cousin's husband called me and told me that Joni and

Speaker 28 Lindsay

Speaker 28 had been shot and killed.

Speaker 28 Well about two hours after, he called me back and informed me that not only was Joni and Lindsay killed, but my mother

Speaker 28 and Marcus

Speaker 28 were also shot and killed.

Speaker 28 He called me back the third time

Speaker 28 and told me that they had found Marshall and he too had been shot and killed.

Speaker 20 A massacre.

Speaker 14 A whole family murdered in cold blood.

Speaker 11 Save for Vincent, who was on the road, thousands of miles away in North Carolina on the way to see his mother, Margaret.

Speaker 10 It was she who broke the news to Vincent when he arrived.

Speaker 34 I healed him real tight and he broke away from me. He started running and screaming and hollering.

Speaker 32 Who would have done it?

Speaker 36 The police in North Carolina talked to Vincent, hoping for leads.

Speaker 8 According to the detectives that interviewed him initially, he was crying unconsolable and at one point asked for a trash can.

Speaker 51 Asked for a trash can.

Speaker 8 Because he was so sick to his stomach that he needed a trash can.

Speaker 22 Still, as the husband, Vincent was, of course, an automatic suspect.

Speaker 15 At the request of Bakersfield police, he was even arrested briefly.

Speaker 52 Five counts of murder, and

Speaker 54 that's what the arrest warrant will also state.

Speaker 22 Within hours, Bakersfield police announced that North Carolina was releasing him, and he was free to return home.

Speaker 54 He has ties to this community, has property in this community, and he voluntarily came in. So the flight risk issues are fairly minimal.

Speaker 40 Where is he now?

Speaker 2 He's free.

Speaker 37 What's the phrase?

Speaker 19 Person of interest?

Speaker 36 Anyway, when he got back to Bakersfield, Vincent Brothers entered a kind of limbo.

Speaker 24 His family was dead.

Speaker 32 He was now famous for the worst of reasons. And the town was nervous.

Speaker 54 You know, we have heightened our police patrols in that particular neighborhood because we know there's a heightened sense of concern in that neighborhood.

Speaker 25 A terrible criminal might still be in their midst.

Speaker 20 But who?

Speaker 25 And why of all people them? Why the whole family? Why little children?

Speaker 31 Why a baby?

Speaker 8 People just came out in droves. For several days, it was a shrine outside the home.

Speaker 5 We've never had a tragedy such as this. So it has a great impact on all of us.

Speaker 9 Well, I'm singing hallelujah.

Speaker 55 Hallelujah, hallelujah.

Speaker 22 And then it was over.

Speaker 36 The dead were buried. Anxiety about the possibility of a serial killer in town began to fade.

Speaker 16 The police couldn't find the murder weapon.

Speaker 11 And for all the chaos and carnage of the scene, forensics provided no real clues.

Speaker 55 My sword and ship.

Speaker 20 But there was Vincent.

Speaker 8 This is kind of classic.

Speaker 8 You know, they look towards the people that know these people first and then move outward.

Speaker 28 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

Speaker 7 Still, Vincent was certainly an unlikely suspect.

Speaker 27 After all, wasn't he thousands of miles away in Ohio when his family was murdered?

Speaker 11 And anyway, he was a respected and by all accounts gentleman who loved his family.

Speaker 46 A murderer of his own kids?

Speaker 26 Impossible.

Speaker 21 My mom, my dad, they was like, Vincent, Vincent wouldn't do nothing like that.

Speaker 6 No,

Speaker 21 there's no way Vincent would do something like that.

Speaker 28 Joni nor my mother ever talked about him having a bad temper.

Speaker 28 I talked with him after the funeral and he told me, Eddie, I was not there. I did not do this.

Speaker 22 Maybe Vincent's wife and children weren't even the intended victims.

Speaker 20 Maybe the target was actually Vincent's mother-in-law, Ernestine Harper.

Speaker 25 After all, as a community activist, she'd been working closely with some very rough characters, including murder suspects.

Speaker 28 If my mother helped anyone, her car was not off limits. Her house was not off limits, nothing.

Speaker 34 The work that she was doing in a community would automatic bring enemies, you know. I know my son had told me years ago that Ms.
Harper was very nervous

Speaker 34 and always had fear somebody was going to break in her house.

Speaker 32 Had Ernestine Harper opened her life to the wrong person?

Speaker 3 Vincent's mother-in-law was a woman who worked with gangs and dangerous people hung around.

Speaker 38 Were any of those leads considered to be, you know, possible early on?

Speaker 8 I don't know if they were thoroughly investigated. I don't think they ever presented evidence that they were.

Speaker 8 I think the police did look into that angle.

Speaker 22 No, police seemed to feel that Ernestine's contacts were at a dead end.

Speaker 26 A year went by.

Speaker 15 The investigation cooled.

Speaker 12 And then, quite suddenly.

Speaker 35 You charge a first-count felony, murder, in further ways, but it was a multiple murder.

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Speaker 49 Some stories stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 49 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 49 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

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Speaker 16 Once they were so full of promise, a fine family, Vincent brothers, Joan Harper, three small children, known, liked, respected.

Speaker 20 And now this family, in one horrible moment, was over.

Speaker 36 It was nearly a year later when they finally brought a suspect into court.

Speaker 18 And who was the accused mass killer?

Speaker 59 Your true name is Vincent Edward Brothers. Yes, sir.
Mr.

Speaker 42 Brothers, you're charged in a criminal complaint, first account of felony, murder.

Speaker 34 I say it's no way possible. There's no way he could do this.

Speaker 26 Surely not Vincent, anybody but him.

Speaker 25 Unless, as the state contended, nobody really knew him.

Speaker 28 We've never heard of him being violent with Joni. We did learn that he had been with the mother of his first child.

Speaker 36 For a year, investigators have been quietly poking around in Vincent's past.

Speaker 25 They found a former girlfriend, Shan Kern.

Speaker 36 Once upon a time, years before he met Joan, the two had lived together when both were studying at Cal State Bakersfield.

Speaker 40 I was in love with Vincent. I loved her.
I admired him.

Speaker 3 Shan was the mother of his first daughter, Margaret, born in 1988.

Speaker 36 That year, Shan said she filed charges against Vincent for assaulting her after she confronted him about one of his unexplained disappearances.

Speaker 40 I had little slippers on and I had a little fuzzy slipper and I picked that thing up and I said, Vincent, you can't treat me like this. Man, when that slipper hit him, he just boom,

Speaker 40 woman, woman, jumped on me and just started beating me like I would, like he didn't even know me.

Speaker 40 Like he didn't know me, just kept, wah, wah. Every time I would get up, he would hit me.

Speaker 38 And he could turn on a dime.

Speaker 47 Just like that.

Speaker 38 And when he did that, he was capable of what?

Speaker 6 Anything?

Speaker 40 A complete different person than what you were really dealing with. And just had this most evil face, scared the living life out of me.

Speaker 22 Vincent spent several days in jail after that incident.

Speaker 19 Two sides to every story, of course. Vincent continued to deny he attacked Shen.

Speaker 22 In fact, he claimed there was a time when she went after him with a gun and a knife.

Speaker 18 But she was cleared of those charges.

Speaker 12 But one certain threat police were discovering was Vincent's penchant for other women.

Speaker 38 Did he cheat on you?

Speaker 40 Oh, yeah, by far, yes.

Speaker 24 Vincent's disappearances turned out to be covers for serial infidelity.

Speaker 28 During their marriage relationship, there were

Speaker 28 a number of women whom he

Speaker 28 had relationships with.

Speaker 22 All but one of his affairs, it turned out, had occurred while he and Joni were separated.

Speaker 12 Still, hard to dispute. He was a womanizer.

Speaker 21 Sometimes you're not ready for the relationship you get into. Guess what happened with Vincent? You know,

Speaker 21 sometimes we don't mature.

Speaker 32 But of course, just because he cheated on his wife, it certainly doesn't mean he killed her and his mother-in-law and his three children.

Speaker 52 Besides, wasn't he thousands of miles away in Ohio the weekend of the murder?

Speaker 44 Didn't make any sense.

Speaker 47 Unless.

Speaker 33 unless he was in both places that long holiday weekend in the year since the murder, Bakersfield investigators had worked hard to piece together that very case.

Speaker 25 On Wednesday, July 2nd, Vincent Ruthers flew from Bakersfield to Columbus, Ohio, rented a car at Dodge Neon, and went to stay with his brother Melvin and his family.

Speaker 11 Then, the state claimed, Thursday or Friday, Vincent drove that rental car all the way back to Bakersfield, 2,300 miles, and there slaughtered slaughtered his family sometime on Sunday, July 6th.

Speaker 14 Then he drove all the way back to Columbus, 2,300 miles, arriving late Monday.

Speaker 11 Early the next morning, Tuesday, he and Melvin got in the same Dodge neon and drove more than 600 miles to see their mother in North Carolina.

Speaker 6 Really?

Speaker 44 Or was there another explanation for the five murder charges?

Speaker 35 They assume it's somebody that people know, and they jump to the conclusion it would be Vincent Brothers who was the husband.

Speaker 13 Obviously, Vincent needed a lawyer, and we spoke to that lawyer, Michael Gardena, in 2009.

Speaker 35 What was compelling about the case is there was a total lack of physical evidence to tie Vincent Brothers to the crime scene.

Speaker 27 And, said his lawyer, Vincent could offer solid evidence he had been in Ohio with his brother Melvin and his family the entire holiday weekend.

Speaker 35 The family first saw Vincent Wednesday night when he arrived. He was with them on Thursday.

Speaker 35 They went out to a restaurant called the China Buffet, and they had a receipt from there that Vincent had signed. He used his credit card to purchase lunch.

Speaker 15 But although Vincent's credit card showed up on more Ohio purchases that weekend, it wasn't Vincent who used the card.

Speaker 22 He'd given it to his brother, Melvin, to use over the weekend.

Speaker 8 Wasn't that just an alibi?

Speaker 28 No.

Speaker 35 The fact that one brother would help out another brother and other family members is not unusual.

Speaker 25 Melvin and his family said Vincent was with them all weekend.

Speaker 31 However, after Friday, the family didn't actually see him again until Monday.

Speaker 44 Then he disappeared after Friday.

Speaker 35 Well, he didn't disappear. He was with Troy on Saturday.
Came back, left early in the morning, came back late.

Speaker 22 Troy was yet another of Vincent's siblings.

Speaker 11 Troy had come from New York to see Vincent. The two of them, according to Vincent, spent Saturday driving around to investigate universities for Vincent's graduate work.

Speaker 26 Unfortunately, he had no receipts to prove it, but he did have something, and that was the memory of an incident that occurred while he was in Columbus that Sunday.

Speaker 35 On Sunday, two witnesses that were from this neighborhood had seen Vincent and seen his car.

Speaker 47 This is the car accident. This is the car accident.

Speaker 24 A young boy on a bike had accidentally hit a car stopped at an intersection in Columbus.

Speaker 10 Nobody was hurt. No police report was filed.

Speaker 61 Vincent Brothers said that he was the driver of that car.

Speaker 24 Martin Yant, an Ohio investigator, went to work for the defense. He scoured Columbus looking for anybody who had seen the incident.

Speaker 11 And he found them.

Speaker 61 Witnesses

Speaker 61 said that the man who was driving the car resembled Vincent Brothers, and

Speaker 61 the description of the car they gave matched the car that Vincent Brothers had rented when he arrived in Columbus. That kind of bolstered the feeling that Vincent Brothers was telling the truth

Speaker 61 or how he would know about this otherwise since it wasn't even reported.

Speaker 7 But Vincent had even more proof he was in the Midwest and not in California when the murders happened.

Speaker 44 In the cellular age, no one goes untracked.

Speaker 7 And a little of Mr.

Speaker 11 Yant's checking revealed that Vincent's phone records had already told their tale.

Speaker 61 Nick confirmed that there were some cell phone calls made from Columbus when he would have had to have been in Bakersfield or on his way to Bakersfield.

Speaker 22 Certainly, Bakersfield wanted answers, but how could that answer lie with a man who seemed to have solid proof that he had been thousands of miles away from the scene of the crime?

Speaker 24 A man the community had admired and trusted for over a decade.

Speaker 35 That was the shocking part. This community is really divided over whether or not Vincent actually did.

Speaker 35 There's many people, especially in the school system, that believe he was not capable of such a crime.

Speaker 18 Of course, the state had to have other proof.

Speaker 12 It had to be something else.

Speaker 6 Had to be.

Speaker 10 We can only guess now at the terror in that house.

Speaker 13 Two women slaughtered, three little children, an infant exterminated.

Speaker 13 Now, four years later, the state was finally ready to claim in court that Vincent Brothers, a popular educator, a school vice principal, had driven across the country and back to obliterate his own family.

Speaker 3 Was any motive mentioned?

Speaker 8 The motive, even all the way down the road after all the investigation, even to the prosecutor, still wasn't entirely clear.

Speaker 25 The scorned former girlfriend felt Vincent Brothers needed no motive at all.

Speaker 40 There's something wrong with his personality where he just flips.

Speaker 40 He will flip and he will not, he's still Vincent, but he's just this evil Vincent. It was like this evil one, and it's a good one, it's an evil one.
It was just two.

Speaker 24 Prosecutor Lisa Green contended Vincent was lying when he said he spent the entire fateful July weekend in the Midwest.

Speaker 20 Oh, the state agreed Vincent did arrive at Columbus Airport on Wednesday, July 2nd, but Vincent's rental car during that very weekend racked up enormous mileage.

Speaker 16 Enough, in fact, for a trip to Bakersfield and back.

Speaker 48 The total mileage driven

Speaker 48 between July 2nd and July 11th date of 5,424 miles, is that right?

Speaker 6 Correct.

Speaker 44 The prosecution then offered a truly creative piece of investigation direct from the land of CSI.

Speaker 56 Just little fragments of insects.

Speaker 7 Bug experts examined the grill of Vincent's rental car and found there scores of dead insects.

Speaker 51 Mute evidence that told a remarkable and damning story.

Speaker 56 We were asked to look at a radiator and an air filter to see what kind of insects we could find and see if we could tell where they were from.

Speaker 56 The question was whether it had been in the western part of the country.

Speaker 18 So,

Speaker 38 where did those shredded bits of bug encounter Vincent's rented Dodge knee on?

Speaker 48 Are the areas of distribution of these four insects consistent with a person traveling west on Interstate 70?

Speaker 56 Yes.

Speaker 52 In other words, the bugs the neon collected lived out west on the road to Bakersfield.

Speaker 60 And Vincent might have had time to make the round trip from Columbus and back again, but only if the state could impeach his alibi witnesses, his brother Melvin and family.

Speaker 44 In fact, said the prosecutor, Melvin had given several versions of his dealings with Vincent that weekend.

Speaker 26 First, he'd waffled on the day Vincent gave him his credit card.

Speaker 31 Was he trying to cover for his brother?

Speaker 48 Were you lying when you told the detectives that your brother, Vincent Brothers, had given you the credit card on Monday, July 3rd?

Speaker 17 I was lying.

Speaker 48 Were you lying when you told the detectives that your brother, Vincent, brothers, had given you the credit card on Sunday, July 3rd?

Speaker 17 Yes.

Speaker 8 She painted him as a liar, as somebody who couldn't be trusted, that his testimony couldn't be trusted.

Speaker 59 And he was flying out that weekend.

Speaker 16 The state even implied it was Melvin, not Vincent, who signed the credit card receipt for that Thursday night family dinner in Columbus.

Speaker 51 Which would give him an extra day, assuming that Melvin is lying about his presence there.

Speaker 8 It would give him an extra day and more time to get across the country.

Speaker 44 And if Vincent had given Melvin his credit card for an alibi, Did he do the same thing with his cell phone?

Speaker 46 The one that seemed to prove Vincent's presence in the Midwest, far from the crime scene all weekend?

Speaker 44 So, if he'd given away his credit card, he could well have given away his cell phone also.

Speaker 8 That's what she was implying.

Speaker 44 It was clear the prosecution wanted to destroy any credibility Melvin had as an alibi witness.

Speaker 44 In fact, in different interviews over the years since the crime, Melvin said, he saw Vincent at his home sometime Saturday.

Speaker 22 Then he said he saw him on Sunday.

Speaker 45 His story kept changing.

Speaker 46 And now, in court, Melvin told the jury he didn't see Vincent from Friday night until late Monday.

Speaker 48 Would the truth be that you have no idea what time your brother got home?

Speaker 59 Like I said, it was Monday. I don't know the exact time.
I mean, how do you want me to answer it? You want me to say it was 12?

Speaker 23 I said, I don't know.

Speaker 59 I don't know exactly what time it was.

Speaker 37 If Melvin had hoped to help his brother's case, that hope crashed to earth under the prosecutor's withering questions.

Speaker 25 But where was the prosecution's proof that Vincent was actually in Bakersfield at any time during the weekend his family was murdered?

Speaker 35 There was nothing to show that an individual had driven 2,200 miles from Columbus, Ohio to Bakersfield, had been in the crime scene, had posited physical evidence.

Speaker 35 There was simply nothing.

Speaker 12 And the defense had something pretty interesting up its sleeve.

Speaker 11 The one man who could claim he was with Vincent thousands of miles from the crime scene when it mattered most.

Speaker 47 What about their brother, Troy?

Speaker 35 Troy was with Vincent on Saturday.

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Speaker 64 What's your sister's name?

Speaker 6 Julie Harper. Joey Harper.

Speaker 50 Sam, I'm going to get an ambulance over there, okay?

Speaker 6 Okay, okay.

Speaker 18 Vincent Brothers was on trial trial for the savage slaughter of his wife, his mother-in-law, and his three youngest children.

Speaker 6 You know who might have done this? They know what don't.

Speaker 27 And prosecutor Lisa Green was holding nothing back.

Speaker 48 Vincent Brothers killed his six-week-old son, Marshall.

Speaker 16 She's a take-no-prisoner sort of prosecutor.

Speaker 46 Pretty much.

Speaker 50 So the Harper family would have gotten home around 2 o'clock.

Speaker 11 But the prosecutor offered little in the way of motive.

Speaker 25 No life insurance, no threatening lover, no why.

Speaker 32 But now, here was the defense, that carrying out that terrible plan would have been simply impossible.

Speaker 65 The evidence will show that it was and it remains physically impossible for Vincent's brothers to have committed these crimes. Let me repeat that.

Speaker 65 It was physically impossible for him to have committed these crimes.

Speaker 22 Remember, the prosecution alleged that Vincent drove almost 2,300 miles, Columbus, Ohio to Bakersfield, California, committed those gruesome murders, and then drove all the way back again.

Speaker 20 How could he do it?

Speaker 33 By averaging 70 miles an hour without stopping or sleeping the entire way.

Speaker 47 A defense expert on fast driving.

Speaker 42 I wouldn't expect 70 to be something you can average. cross-country.
It would be very difficult at best.

Speaker 35 You can't change the physical impossibility of the drives as testified to by the engineers. You can't change the mechanical composition of the car that was rented.

Speaker 35 This is not a car that can go at speeds of 100 miles an hour for 2,200 miles without stopping for gas.

Speaker 38 It's the stuff that makes you go, wait a minute, is this even possible?

Speaker 8 That was the fundamental linchpin, if you will, of the defense in this case, that it was physically impossible for him to make such a trip.

Speaker 33 But hadn't the man from the rental car company testified the car had indeed driven over 5,000 miles on the weekend?

Speaker 47 Well, yes.

Speaker 19 But that very prosecution witness had to admit that his company's mileage records were not always very reliable.

Speaker 57 So there can be many scenarios where bad mileage would be intentionally entered in the computer.

Speaker 17 That is correct.

Speaker 51 They make mistakes on mileage all the time.

Speaker 8 All the time. And

Speaker 8 the defense elicited the fact that the rental car attendants, when they get the car back, don't actually physically look at the odometer.

Speaker 8 They just put down a number, basically, to check it back in and get the person on their way.

Speaker 11 And as for those specifically western insects the prosecution found splattered on the neon's grill, those bugs, it turns out, have been found in the Midwest too.

Speaker 65 Under what circumstances would they be found outside their areas of distribution?

Speaker 56 If they are dispersed in some unusual fashion.

Speaker 65 If they hit your ride on a truck, for example?

Speaker 61 Possible.

Speaker 52 Then there was the whole question of timing. For the prosecution's theory of the drive time to Bakersfield and back to work, then Vincent would have killed his family on Sunday, July the 6th.

Speaker 52 But the defense pathologist testified those murders happened much later, perhaps as late as Monday morning.

Speaker 46 And if that were the case, then Vincent certainly could not have done it.

Speaker 7 Remember, Vincent's brother Melvin and his family had offered various accounts of Vincent's sightings over that weekend, making it impossible for him to have committed the crime in California.

Speaker 38 But the prosecution had worked hard to prove that Melvin, in particular, was lying.

Speaker 18 But was he?

Speaker 66 Do I put a case on Melvin or do I use him as a witness? That's basically how this is going to work. This is how you treat witnesses?

Speaker 45 Oh, no. Right now, right now.

Speaker 66 Right now, you know what you are.

Speaker 66 You know what you are. You know what you are right now? You're a suspect.
I'm a suspect, then. Okay.
You want to play hardball? I'm not playing hardball.

Speaker 6 No, no.

Speaker 12 Or had police used overly harsh methods to get Melvin to change his story?

Speaker 57 Here, did they want you to change your testimony from Friday to Thursday?

Speaker 59 That is correct.

Speaker 57 Did they threaten your family?

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 28 How did they threaten your family?

Speaker 59 That they was going to lock my wife up, me up, put my kids in a home. They said the nice house you're living in, you won't be living in that no more.
That nice vehicle that you drive, it will be gone.

Speaker 59 Did you break down Friday? Yes, I did.

Speaker 35 The police scared the hell out of him, so he changed the story and backed off.

Speaker 52 The defense presented the interrogation tape.

Speaker 45 You don't want to go down with your brother, pal, because there ain't nothing more serious than this.

Speaker 66 Nothing.

Speaker 66 Except maybe maybe what Hitler did.

Speaker 35 We had an expert analyze the video, and he concluded that the techniques that were used on this individual were so psychologically coercive that it was the equivalent of using a rubber hose on an individual.

Speaker 46 But now it was going to get tricky.

Speaker 22 Remember that minor accident in which Vincent said he was involved that Sunday of the murder weekend, a cyclist hitting Vincent's car on a Columbus Street corner?

Speaker 18 The defense called people who witnessed the mishap, and they were helpful, sort of.

Speaker 8 There were several people who say they saw a dark-skinned man in a car that appeared to be teal, and it appeared to be Vincent Brothers, but they weren't able to say specifically.

Speaker 8 I mean, they certainly leaned that way.

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 19 Which meant it was quite a surprise when the prosecution suddenly put up a witness who told a completely different story about that little accident.

Speaker 44 In fact, car dealer Tam Bolebby,

Speaker 23 it wasn't Vincent who had the accident.

Speaker 12 It was him.

Speaker 67 As soon as I started moving, this little boy came with his bicycle and hit me on my side of the car.

Speaker 19 Quite a shock to the defense, given that Leby, before the trial began, actually talked to the defense investigator.

Speaker 35 He told our investigator that he had nothing to do with it. He had never been there.
He doesn't drive that car. In fact, he said he didn't even own that car.
He had sold it to somebody else. Mr.

Speaker 35 Levy did not fit fit this physical description of the defendant or the description given by the witnesses at the scene. We have no idea why Mr.
Levy did what he did or said what he did.

Speaker 13 Who to believe?

Speaker 38 Waiting just outside the courtroom was Vincent's ultimate alibi witness, his brother Troy, who had already sworn the two of them spent the bulk of that murder weekend together, thousands of miles away from the crime.

Speaker 45 Well, now was Troy's chance to come into the courtroom and tell his story.

Speaker 6 And then?

Speaker 8 Because he did not testify. He did not show up.
Did not show up. He was actually in the courtroom at one point.
We all saw him.

Speaker 8 But then there was a lunch break, and he was supposed to be called, and he never came back.

Speaker 32 The courtroom was buzzing.

Speaker 2 Why had Troy disappeared?

Speaker 24 The defense maintained it was a conscious decision, finally, not to have Troy testify.

Speaker 35 Troy was the only member of the family that did have a felony record. And that influenced our decision because we hadn't put no one on the stand who had a felony record.

Speaker 44 So you put Troy on the stand, he gets impeached by the prosecution.

Speaker 60 Your whole case looks a little shaky. And yeah.

Speaker 22 Instead, the defense made a risky move.

Speaker 18 Risky, but maybe crucial.

Speaker 16 Why did you decide to put

Speaker 38 Vinson Brothers on the stand?

Speaker 35 He was very adamant about the fact that he was not involved, that he loved his children. He would never do this to his children.

Speaker 35 And I think that's something the jury needed to hear.

Speaker 37 If there is anything on this earth we can call true evil, then surely it would apply to Vincent Brothers, a man who slaughtered his whole family.

Speaker 20 If...

Speaker 20 If he did it.

Speaker 57 Please stationary the record, sir.

Speaker 12 Didn't say

Speaker 17 Edward Brothers.

Speaker 22 Now he could tell the jury how he really felt about his family.

Speaker 17 Joni.

Speaker 17 Marcus.

Speaker 17 Lindsay Marshall. And Miss Harper.

Speaker 16 How, for example, he had cared for his wife through a difficult pregnancy.

Speaker 17 I just asked her what was wrong, and she said she was having cramps, and

Speaker 17 her back was hurting.

Speaker 17 And I kissed her and she told me to

Speaker 17 go get the kids and that's what I did. I told her I love her and I'll be right there.

Speaker 38 But where was he that dreadful weekend? He told the jury he was with his brother Troy in Ohio on Saturday.

Speaker 38 But the two of them went for a drive out of state to look at colleges and take in a basketball game.

Speaker 17 On the way back, we stopped in St. Louis, Missouri.

Speaker 57 Where'd you wear in St. Louis?

Speaker 17 We stopped and listened to jazz, got something to eat, stretched our legs before getting back on the road.

Speaker 25 And then there was that little mishap back in Columbus on the Sunday.

Speaker 17 A little boy, he came running.

Speaker 17 He was running with his bicycle and he was running on the side of it. And when he came down the curb, he tripped off the curb and the bike kept going and it hit the car.
This was Sunday.

Speaker 19 Give him a hug.

Speaker 19 Over the years, thousands of people have put their trust in him as a school administrator, a champion of children.

Speaker 48 Innocent men do not lie.

Speaker 22 But here he was on trial for his life, and the prosecutor's assessment was blunt.

Speaker 48 And he looked you in the eye, and he lied.

Speaker 48 And that's because

Speaker 48 he is an evil man. What he did was evil.

Speaker 48 And I'm asking you to return verdicts of guilty because that's what justice calls for, and that is all that is left. Thank you.

Speaker 53 So we gave you witnesses. We gave you engineers,

Speaker 53 medical experts to show that Vincent Brothers could not be the perpetrator of this crime.

Speaker 53 There's also a total absence of evidence to put Vincent Brothers in the house when those homicides occurred on Monday, July the 7th.

Speaker 14 So it went back and forth.

Speaker 20 There'd been over a hundred witnesses and now it was up to the jury.

Speaker 28 Emotionally, it was difficult. It was difficult.

Speaker 11 For two and a half days, they waited until.

Speaker 18 until.

Speaker 50 We, the jury, and panel to try the above entitled cause find the defendant, Vincent Edward Brothers, guilty of felony to wit, murder of Ernestine Harper, murder of Joni Harper, murder of Marcus Harper.

Speaker 37 Truly, decided the jury, this man was evil.

Speaker 50 Murder of Lindsey Harper, murder of Marshall Harper.

Speaker 28 We were happy. that he had been justly tried and found guilty.
We know we can close the chapter. Who did it? We can close that chapter and move on.

Speaker 45 In 2009, Prosecutor Lisa Green declined Dateline's request for an interview, nor would she comment on the case.

Speaker 13 And without cooperation from the DA's office, Bakersfield police also declined to talk to us.

Speaker 3 A motion for a new trial was denied.

Speaker 4 An appeal is pending.

Speaker 13 After the trial, Vincent's family and his remaining friends continued to insist he was convicted by implication, not by facts.

Speaker 21 No, they didn't get the right guy and a lot of people on the blog said they never even went after anyone else. So they never proved anything or they proved what he was a womanizer.

Speaker 21 They never proved that he was a murderer because he wasn't a murderer.

Speaker 18 Or was he?

Speaker 28 He thought he was so smart.

Speaker 28 that he could not only fool Joni, my mother, but he could beat the system. Unfortunately, he met Lisa Green,

Speaker 28 and she made sure that he was not going to get away with murder.

Speaker 25 For the murder of his family, Vincent Brothers was given the harshest sentence the law allows, death.

Speaker 17 How did Vincent take it?

Speaker 3 Very hard.

Speaker 35 He deteriorated rapidly after that. He took it very hard.

Speaker 45 For just about everybody involved, it has been and will be a long, bad dream. A dream whose tangled roots might never be uncovered.

Speaker 28 I don't think that he will ever tell why

Speaker 28 because I'm sure he will continue to maintain that he is innocent. But we know different.
We know different.

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