What could go wrong in the Helen Wilson murder case did go wrong, said a Chicago law professor who studies wrongful convictions.
"This is the single biggest train wreck since DNA was first used to exonerate in 1989," said Steven Drizin, director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. The center's mission is to identify and rectify wrongful convictions and other miscarriages of justice.
At the Journal Star's request, Drizin watched the taped interrogations of three Beatrice defendants - Ada JoAnn Taylor, Debra Shelden and Thomas Winslow. The newspaper also shared interview transcripts of James Dean with the professor, who was already following news reports about the case that he considers a landmark in DNA exoneration.
His conclusion: "What happened here is the perfect storm of professional incompetence."
People are also reading…
Problems identified by the Northwestern professor:
* Four false confessions and five guilty pleas. No other wrongful conviction case in the United States has involved so many false admissions of guilt.
While it's difficult to accept innocent people would admit to crimes, false confessions have contributed to about one in four wrongful convictions, according to the Innocence Project, an organization that advocates DNA testing in criminal cases.
* The unusual role of the forensic psychologist.
"To allow a police officer to serve as both a therapist and an interrogator creates an inherent conflict," Drizin said.
In particular, suggesting that suspects may have repressed memories of a crime, or blacked out while committing it, has led to invented memories in other cases, Drizin said.
* Investigators who asked leading questions and fed information during interrogations. In several notable instances, investigators mentioned crime scene information only a perpetrator could have known, such as the torn $5 bill found in the apartment.
So-called police contamination of confessions, intentional or not, has been uncovered in nearly every wrongful conviction on record, Drizin said.
Breaks in the videotapes are a related problem, he added, because they raise questions about what was said to the suspects off-camera. In at least two instances, suspects significantly changed their stories following such breaks.
* Tunnel vision by investigators and the prosecutor. Authorities seemed so focused on convicting the six that they either overlooked or ignored evidence to the contrary, Drizin said. In particular, he questioned why they accepted a scenario offered by suspects that couldn't be supported by crime scene evidence.
"You've got a story that, if you step back, borders on the ridiculous," he said. "If robbery is the motive, why is rape involved? If rape is the motive, why are there so many people involved?
"I'm no profiler but this case had all of the earmarks of the work of a single, sexual predator."
Indeed, the FBI, the attorney general and a multi-agency task force that reopened the investigation reached the same conclusion.
* The defense lawyers. At least some of the court-appointed attorneys shared information about the crime - information obtained from the prosecution - with their clients. They apparently did this so their clients could cooperate and obtain lighter sentences.
For example, records show attorneys gave Taylor and James Dean written statements by other witnesses so the two could "remember" key facts and conform their stories to the prosecution's theory.
Dean, who first insisted he could remember nothing about the crime, also said his attorney went so far as to suggest what might have happened in the victim's apartment.
It's not the first Nebraska case to draw the attention of Drizin. He is involved in a civil claim against four Nebraska police interrogators who obtained a false confession in the 2006 murders of Wayne and Sharmon Stock near Murdock.
