Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowEarwitness: The Toforest Johnson Case, with Beth Shelburne
One July night in 1995, Deputy Sheriff William G. Hardy was shot behind the Crown Sterling Suites hotel in Birmingham, Alabama. While law enforcement had almost nothing to go on, prosecutors used shaky earwitness testimony to convict Toforest Johnson of the crime. Despite repeated appeals from multiple legal experts, he remains on death row to this day. In tonight's interview, award-winning journalist Beth Shelburne discusses how her new podcast Earwitness explores the ins and outs of this profoundly disturbing case -- and what it tells us about the US justice system.
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Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nolan.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Michigan. Troll decands most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Tonight, folks, we are so glad you are joining us for an incredibly important and disturbing story. Long story short, pretty much everyone in the United States can agree there are serious problems with the US justice system. Problems not limited to overworked officials draconian mandates for punishment. There are also clear cases of and indeed conspiracy. Weirdly enough, there are surreal cases wherein pretty much everyone, including former prosecutors, will agree a person convicted of a crime is probably or actually innocent, Yet the system still insists upon moving forward, even toward executions, and tonight we're exploring a particularly disturbing example of this, the case of a Birmingham native named to Forest Johnson, who is convicted of homicide with scant or no evidence in nineteen ninety five and remains on death row as we record today. We are immensely fortunate to be joined with the creator of the ear Witness podcast, award winning journalist anchor writer, Beth Shelburn. Thanks so much for joining us, Beth.
Thank you so much for having me. I so appreciate it.
Well, Hey, I know we're jumping right into the story, guys, but do you mind really quickly. I just want to know a little bit more about Beth, because Beth, if you don't mind either, we just learned about how how much time you spent at WBRCTV Fox six. I guess it is there in Birmingham, and I'd just love to know what it was like to be in that position as an anchor and reporter, like digging into those stories but also being the face the person that's telling those stories.
Yeah. I worked for WBrC Fox six for the last nine years of my TV news career, but I was working for local TV stations around the country for twenty years, so that was the last stop, and Birmingham happens to be my hometown. I didn't I was sort of a traditional news reporter. I wasn't particularly bent on justice issues. I was covering all the normal general assignment TV news stories that are typical and local markets, like building is on fire, Go there, somebody just shot and killed someone, Go there. You know, it's really run and gun journalism. And that's what I was doing for probably the first ten years of my career. Then I started getting into investigative or more long form stories where you can really take your time, and TV news a long story is like three to four minutes as opposed to one minute and fifteen seconds, which is what the general TV news story is. When I moved back to Birmingham. I came back here in twenty ten and started covering the crisis that's been unfolding in Alabama prisons in twenty twelve. And I think the prison system in Georgia has many of the same kind of problems of overcrowding, violence, corruption, drugs inside the system. It's really, you know, like the seventh layer of hell in our prison system, and we're sending all these people there who have problems with addiction or mental health and they're getting exponentially worse. So I started writing about what was going on in the prisons and why the prisons were so bad, and that kind of dovetailed into my interest in sentencing policy and why we're sending people to prison for decades and decades for crimes sometimes that didn't even result in a physical injury to a victim. And just in my course of kind of developing that as a beat, I came to know to Forrest Johnson's case, and that's how I started covering it. But you know, when you're the face of TV news, I was always an anchor and a reporter, you're sort of kind of like a homecoming queen type persona for the community that you're working in. And so it started to become kind of a hard balance for me to strike when I was asking some really difficult questions about accountability and who's responsible for these human rights disasters and our jails and prisons, and then you know, getting on the news and talking about the weather and sports. It was starting to feel like it wasn't a good fit for me anymore, because my heart was really with asking some of these serious questions and spending more than a minute and fifteen seconds on a story, and certainly getting into crime reporting in a more complete and nuanced way other than just showing somebody's mugshot and telling folks what they're alleged to have done.
And the hard truth is that often, given the format of news reporting, we don't have the space for the nuance, right for the substantive examination. And just so everyone knows, in case you're unfamiliar, Beth, when you returned to Birmingham, you were not returning empty handed. You had also won an Emmy Award for breaking news coverage during the fires in California, and two thousand and three your the recipient of Edward R. Muaw Award for a series in Manhattan shortly after the terrorist attacks of September eleventh, and there was another Edward R. Mureau Award You've won for the twenty twelve series Chasing the Dragon on Heroin Addiction.
And so please stop, come on, we got to let other people have awards too, for us news on the running.
In the TV news world, that's like not that highly decorated. So I covet my little three awards that I got very much.
I appreciate it, and is as far as we're concerned, in the podcast world that would be considered very highly tech career.
Yeah, especially because the three of us as well as super Producer, we all work on these long form you know, shows like this where we try and tell these stories. So it just means a lot to us that that people have recognized the work that you've already done in the past, right, and now you've got this show that we're about to really dig into that feels extremely meaningful and important.
And to dovetail on that this is a story that may not have gone very far beyond Birmingham were it not for the work that you and your team and Lava for Good have done. I think, you know, I think something that might chock a lot of people is to learn that even in Atlanta, just a few hours away, as you said, many people are not familiar with the story of the forest.
Johnson, Well, I mean, you know, we're in the Lava for Good folks, and we do this stuff as sort of a beat of our own in terms of just being aware of these kinds of stories.
And I think all of us we're hearing about this stuff for the first.
Time, and I think that speaks volumes to the fact that it's a lot more common than you might think, and that these stories aren't always instantly remarkable, and it takes somebody with your experience to really kind of figure out that this is the kind of thing that needs to be given a closer look, because a lot of times these stories fall through the cracks. And so that's why I think we're grateful to folks like LoVa for Good and yourself for digging into these cases of wrongful conviction.
Yeah, and I think that that was one thing we were cognizant of when we were putting this podcast together, as it is the story of what happened to to Forrest Johnson, which continues to be an injustice because he's still on death row and he's still at risk of being executed for a crime that he did not commit. But I think the system that allowed this to happen is what we really wanted to amplify and show people that this isn't really a one off. This is reflective of a system that is full of problems, issues that don't just affect to Forest Johnson or other people who might be wrongfully convicted, but tens of thousands of people who are churned through our criminal justice system every day.
One hundred percent agreed, and let's scope in on this case.
Yeah, let's get started by giving everybody a picture of what occurred, right, just like you do in the show, and kind of tell him a bit of the story as we go here. So, what happened to Jefferson County Sheriff's Deputy William Jerome Hardy on the night of Tuesday, July eighteenth, nineteen ninety five.
So Bill Hardy had been a deputy with Jefferson County for twenty three years, and he was working at a hotel right off the Red Mountain Expressway. If people know Birmingham, it's now an embassyc Suites. At the time it was called the Crown Sterling Suites. He was moonlighting as a security guard at the hotel, and it was a pretty easy gig. It's a kind of a business class hotel in a quiet area on the outskirts of Homewood, the suburb that I grew up in, So this is not a shoot him up kind of neighborhood. But Hardy would walk the floor, you know, check the exterior of the building in his patrol car, and mostly sit in the atrium of the hotel's lobby, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee on the overnight shift to make extra money. So he was there the night of July eighteenth, nineteen ninety five, the last time he was seen alive. He was sitting in the atrium smoking more brand Mental cigarettes and drinking coffee, and there were only a couple of people that worked at the hotel around. There was a night desk clerk, there was a houseman who you know, would buff the floors, and there was Deputy Hardy. And so, for some reason that has never been clear to this day, he got up from where he was sitting, walked down a back hallway, out a pair of glass double doors into the back parking lot, and was shot twice in the head, right behind the hotel. It was about twelve forty five twelve fifty, ten minutes before one am, so almost everyone in the hotel was asleep. No one actually saw the crime happen. A few people heard the gunshots, but that's what happened. It was a real who done it, because this was a man who had no known enemies. He was a very easy going guy, very chill, very friendly, and no one really knew why he went behind the hotel or who would kill him in.
This way, right, no discernible motive, no obvious. It appears link to link to suspects in the beginning, And could you tell us a little bit maybe just to continue painting the picture here, a little bit of the socioeconomic status of this Crown Sterling Suites, like the neighborhood at the time.
Yeah, so it's Homewood is the first suburb south of Birmingham, and the Red Mountain Expressway is the freeway that cuts from the downtown city center into the suburbs that have been built out south of the city. The Crown Sterling Suites now Embassy Suites is right on the line between Homewood and Birmingham, and it's in this kind of weird area right off the interstate where there's like a couple of office park type buildings and there's a bank, and there's like, you know, these sort of nondescript mirrored buildings and you're always like, what's going on in that you know, building with no sign on it? Is there like an Al Qaeda cellating out of that building?
You know that's going there.
Yeah, that kind of area, but kind of plopped in the middle is the Crown Sterling Suites are now Embassy Suites, which you know is sort of your standard mid range business hotels that's right off the interstate. Homewood is known now to be kind of an upper income area. At the time, it was sort of middle class, but it's gotten very fancy and gentrified. But it's never been a real high crime area. It's high density, there's a lot of people in Homewood, but it's generally considered a safe place to live where the main crimes are property crimes. There's not a lot of violent crime there.
I actually spent a couple of years living in Birmingham in my high school days, and I remember in the two thousands, Like I graduated in two thousand and two, so this would have been like in ninety nine, two thousand and I remember Homewood as being kind of a hippish area, Like there were some cool record stores there and like it had interesting kind of pop culture type stuff, and I just I remember going there sometimes.
There were a couple of neat shops that I would go to with friends there.
Yeah, it's still got a downtown commerce area. It's become really fancy, but there's this very strange locally owned pet store called Ed's Pet World that has stuck it out and it's down there. The weirdness of Ed's Pet World is surrounded by like high end cupcake places and embroidery shops. Hanging on. Ed is hanging on. But man, you walk into this place and you're like, for sure going to get a spider on you somewhere. It's like a really narrow store with a box turtle walking around like free range turtles. You got to stop in Ed's Pet World if you're in Birmingham.
I haven't been back in ages, but I would love to back in this in this night in July nineteen ninety five. You know, we all know that law enforcement takes it incredibly seriously when there's an officer attacked, injured, or down, so the other authorities show up pretty quickly. Is that correct? Could you tell us how many people are on the scene after this is first reported.
Yeah, there were a few people that heard the shots and called down to the front desk clerk who quickly called nine to one one. And he actually his name's Barry Rushikov. He lives in Las Vegas now and we actually tracked him down and talked to him, so it was cool. We hear him on the original nine one one tapes, and then we talked to him present day where this has still impacted him because he still works in the hospitality industry and to have something like this happen is really harrowing.
But he sounds so scared on the tapes.
He said, the officers on the phone are asking him to kind of observe the body for vital signs, and he's like, I'm not going back out there. I don't know if these folks are still around.
Yeah.
To hear the shakiness in his voice, I.
Think it was terrifying because it came out of nowhere and he wasn't sure what happened, but he knew hotel guests heard gunshots and then he saw Hardy lying on the pavement dying. So the law enforcement response was almost immediate, and there were four different agencies that descended on the hotel and it became a very active scene really quickly. I don't know how many police were there, but I would say dozens. I know that the district attorney at the time, the elected district attorney, like the head guy, showed up at the scene. The sheriff was called out to the scene. You know, four different agencies and all of their captains were trying to figure out who's going to have jurisdiction on this one. So yeah, it was it was big.
Well, let's talk about the physical evidence that was recovered at the scene.
What was there?
Very very little. There were two shellcasings that the crime scene texts collected from the scene, and other than that, there were people that heard the shots and saw some kind of car drive away. But other than the shellcasings, was literally no physical evidence. There was the stuff that was on Hardy's body, which was belongings of his his cigarettes. And you know, he had even left his two way radio on the table inside the hotel, which has always been a strange detail for me because there was a theory that police had, well, he must have heard something and went out the back door to investigate a strange noise or something that alarmed him. But it seems very out of character for him to leave his two way radio on the table and his cigarette was still burning in an ash tray.
And just to ask the question that I think maybe is on people's minds, were those shellcasings dusted for prints?
Like again, know, maybe I've.
Watched too many cop shows that seems like that's the first thing, you do, you.
Know, I know that they dusted for prints on the outside of the glass double doors and they were not able to get any usable prints. I'm assuming they dusted the shellcasings for prints, but that I don't know for sure. A lot of the information I gleaned about those shellcasings came from the trial transcripts because the crime scene tech testified at the trials. But there were no usable prints from the scene.
That's that's the takeaway for so And at this point, Beth, we've got, if we assume the perspective of Birmingham law enforcement, we have one of the absolute most terrific situations possible. One of our own has been murdered, shot twice in the head, and we have bupkis to go on. So could you walk us through the process us that law enforcement takes to start gathering what they can at least say is evidence with a straight face, and maybe walk us up to how they eventually zoom in on four suspects.
Yeah, they were really spinning in circles from the very beginning because they realized, oh, no one actually saw this. We don't have anything here at the scene. There were just a couple of guests inside the hotel that heard something. They parked a bunch of detectives at the hotel to talk to the witnesses there, and then officers fanned out all around the hotel in the hours following the shooting, really pulling over everyone. They had be on the lookouts for six different possible vehicles that were seen leaving the scene, so not a lot of specifics, and it seems like looking at the investigative file, they were just pulling everybody over within the vicinity of the crime scene, particularly young black men, some of whom they pulled in for questioning who clearly had absolutely nothing to do with what happened, but were questioned for hours and hours until they were eventually released. What ended up happening that allowed them to zero in on the four suspects that were ultimately charged with capital murder was a reward was offered for information in the case that actually was announced in the hours following the murder and the very first media reports that came out that police were offering a cash reward for information. That reward eventually grew to twenty thousand dollars, which is a lot of money in a.
Reward, especially in the mid nineties, right.
Isn't that tainted things just a little bit.
I know it's important, they're scrambling to get people to come forward, but we seem to have some sketchy sources and other you know, of course people calling in with absolutely unverifiable sketchy stories. I'm sure, but that's just aggressively large again, worthy of the right information, but it seems to when you're in hustle mode, to really kind of give you this massive, like shotgun blast of potential bad information.
And I think it did. We have seen the investigative file, and they ended up setting up a tip line because the phones were ringing so much after they announced this reward, and a lot of it is, you know, people just clearly fishing for information or after the reward money or kind of giving very vague I heard my cousin say that you know, so and so heard that this guy might have had something to do with it, those kinds of tips. During that whole milieu of all these people calling into this tip line after the reward has been announced, a woman contacted police and said, my fifteen year old daughter has information about the murder. That's right, Yolanda Chambers Yolanda Chambers became one of the most important witnesses in this case, and we really unpack her ordeal, her life, what happened to her in this series. She was brought in for questioning reluctantly. She did not want to talk to police at first. She was brought in without her mother and without an attorney present. Anne was questioned for hours, sometimes on tape, sometimes not on tape. But Yolanda eventually is who police relied on. And the four people that were arrested and charged with capital murder they were charged based on the tip from Yolanda Chambers that they had something to do with the crime, and she, during the course of at least twenty five interviews with police, she implicated six different people in the murder. So she changed her story over and over and over again.
She just sounds like she's talking until she gets an idea on those tapes.
I'm sorry, it's just that's just how it feels like a cold psychle I don't.
The name started with a smirch.
This person's reputation.
And there's confusion about the names even right.
It's weird.
Yeah, I just have to be when you put your mind there a fifteen year old girl who was in that position, right, being we have no idea what happened between her and those officers when that tape recording stopped, right, which is I think one of the biggest pieces for me in listening to the first couple of episodes of your witness like in my mind reels imagining what's being said. Right, what do you think was Do you have any ideas of what was happening or it's all speculation?
Well, yeah, that's one of the main questions that we had because we got access to the investigative file, and that included more than fifty hours of taped police interviews, many of them with Yolanda Chambers. I think there were eight recorded interviews with Yolanda Chambers. In some individual interviews, they would stop and then restart the tape multiple times. Sometimes the transcript of the interview will list how long the tape was off. It was off sometimes thirty minutes at a time, and we have no way of knowing what was happening. Then we interviewed the lead homicide investigator, Tony Richardson, who was in charge of these interrogations, and we asked him about stopping and starting the tape and on the record interviews, and he admitted that it's against best practices to do that, but he wasn't able to tell us why he did that while he was interviewing Yolanda, what happened when the tape was off, But he was insistent that nothing sinister occurred.
That's the word, yeah, sinister, And he.
Said that over and over again. The thing that I think is really interesting for listeners of the podcast to hear is how Yolanda Chambers story evolves and changes. Every time police turn off the tape and then come back, some key detail has changed dramatically with no explanation as to why it changed. And so when you look at the totality of what they got from Yolanda, which the first time they talked to her was I don't know anything about this murder and I don't know what happened to Okay, I might know who did it to. Well, I was with these two guys and they talked about doing it to Oh. I was actually there and I witnessed it happening. It just changed over and over and over again. You really have to ask yourself, how did they even get these guys indicted on the word of this fifteen year old witness. But we obtained the transcript from the grand jury proceedings, which are supposed to be secret, and those transcripts are not ever supposed to get out, but I had a source share it with me. And you know, Detective Tony Richardson told the grand jury under oath that he had no doubt in his mind that Yolanda Chambers was telling the truth. Of course, the grand jury didn't know that she changed that truth over and over and over again, and that it had, you know, changed over time, and she had even changed who she said the shooters were. They didn't know that. They just knew who he was claiming was responsible there at that hearing.
And we'll pause here for a word from our sponsor before returning with more from Beth Shelter.
Okay, we're back.
So we've got the six initial named, four of which do get the indictments right. And there's something very strange about that part, Beth, when they begin proceedings for these four suspects, and they do almost like a Marvel movie multiverse approach to the explanations or to the allegations. And it seems that as we run through the four initial people. I think it's important to have you confirm was the state giving contradictory or indeed mutually exclusive theories or charges and if so, how why is that even legal? I was confused.
Yes it is legal, and yes, the state did give contradictory mutually exclusive theories about how the crime was committed and who committed the crime at different proceedings. We've gone through everything and we counted five different theories of the crime that were presented by the state. It's important for listeners to know that as Yolanda Chambers changed her story over and over and over again, and four people were arrested and charged with this murder, to Forrest Johnson being one of them, at some point she told investigators that two of the men, whose names are Omar Berry and Quintez Wilson, she told them, you know what, they didn't have anything to do with it, and I completely made up that they were involved, and so their charges were dropped and they were released eighteen months into the investigation. Shortly after that, there was a competency hearing called by one of the defense attorneys for the remaining two suspects, where he wanted the judge to determine whether or not Yolanda Chambers was a competent enough witness for these other two capital murder cases to move forward, because she was changing her story, including, you know, recanting on two of the suspects. So during this competency hearing, which we got a transcript from and we actually re enacted with an actress playing Yolanda Chambers and the attorneys and the judge, she ended up recanting everything on the stand, not just that the two suspects that had already been released had nothing to do with it, but also that to Forrest Johnson and his co defendant had nothing to do with it. And she told the judge, I made all of this up because I was scared because police threatened to put me in jail if I did not give them information that was helpful, and the judge allowed the case to go forward.
I want to apologize earlier.
I think I maybe was mistaking in my head two different, very important players in this part of the story. There's Yolanda Chambers and then there's also Violet Ellison. And I said something to the effect of they sound like they're talking till they get an idea, and that's just there's something that did not ring true to me to my initial again, cold listen, can you tell us a bit about how things kind of pivoted to Violet Ellison and why I might felt that way or I don't know what you thought.
Well, I think that that's part of the reason, Noah, why I wanted to do a narrative series podcast on this case, Because there's so many twists and turns, it's really hard to keep it all straight. So we really wanted to unpack it step by step by painful, horrific step and sort of lay it all out, lay bare this thing that happened to this man. You are correct in that the state completely pivoted away from Yolanda Chambers after this recantation, even though the judge allowed the case to go forward. They realized, we've got to figure something else out because we can't rely on Yolanda Chambers as the sole evidence in this case. And so they went back through their file and they remembered that they had spoken to a woman three weeks after the murder. That woman's name is Violet Ellison, and she also contacted detectives once the reward was offered, claimed that she had information relative to the investigation came in and talked to detectives and said that she overheard to Forest Johnson talking about the murder on a jailhouse phone call that she evesdropped on, and so she gave a very convoluted statement to detectives that we got the recording of. It's about seven minutes long, and they sat on it for two years. She was never mentioned again at any of the preliminary hearings to the grand jury, nothing until to Forst Johnson was put on trial, and then she was called to the stand as their star witness, and ultimately was how the state convicted someone of this murder was putting this ear witness on the stand who claimed that she overheard to Forst Johnson talk about the murder, and that is the key evidence, some would argue, the only evidence that the state used to convict him.
Oh and Beth, let's that's we said. The we said one of the primary words here. So for anyone who is unfamiliar, I think has been colleagues mentioned. A lot of people learn about law enforcement and prosecution through you know, copaganda, through true crime shows like Law and Order, whatever. So we know about eyewitnesses. What is an ear witness and why is that so pivotal to stories like this?
An ear witness is like an eyewitness, except an ear witness heard something, and so a lot of studies have been done on how unreliable eyewitnesses are and ear witnesses are even more so. Unfortunately, there's been less study on the reliability of ear witnesses because they're used less. But one of the most common questions we got while reporting on this story from people into forest community and his family even is how was the state allowed to present hearsay as evidence? Like why is Violet ellison statement not considered hearsay?
That's literally what that is, right, And it's a.
Great question, But here's why. And this is like at the crux of what we're trying to get at is these double standards. It's in our criminal justice system, normally a person testifying about hearing somebody else say something is considered hearsay. But there's an exception to the hearsay rule, and it's if the witness claims to have heard a confession to a crime, well then it's not hearsay. That's the exception. So it's like it's hearsay unless it's extremely valuable to the state and an exception.
That's right, hearsay, unless it helps.
Us, that's right.
I'm really quickly. I'm not gonna lie.
I thought air Witness was just a very clever name for your podcast. I was not a familiar with this concept at all, because to me, it just sounds bonkers to hear you describe it. And that's probably why people don't know about it, because you said it's not used much, but it seems like it's the perfect thing to use when you need a piece, you know, to it is story over the finish line.
You're so right. It is totally bonkers, and it's That's probably the best way that I can explain why I wanted to do a project like this, because when I first learned about to Forrest's case and his attorneys, his family, the people that were telling me about it were telling me, yeah, he's on death row. Because one woman claimed that she overheard him talking about the crime on a phone call that she evesdropped on. I thought, No, there's no way that's it.
That can't be it, that can't.
Be it, that cannot be it, and that's it. That is it.
Let me throw a let me throw a kind of a softball underheaded toss of a question here, Beth, Well, surely it wouldn't necessarily be here saved because jails are supposed to record phone calls, So surely someone could go back into the records and maybe see if that conversation existed, right, I think yes.
But unfortunately, the supervisor of the Jefferson County Jail where this phone call originated took the stand and said that the jail was not equipped to record phone calls in nineteen ninety five, So there's no recording I'm going.
To ask too in nineteen ninety five, even if they did have the tape, digital technology and analysis wasn't where it is today in twenty twenty three.
I mean, there might have.
Maybe there was a way you could prove beyond a shadow of it, now this is this person's voice on this tape, but probably not with the same degree of certainty that you could today.
Well, mate, with the tape.
Yeah, we we actually found a voice exemplar tape in the investigative file. We did not find any evidence that they ever played it for Violet Ellison, and we asked the detectives, the prosecutor, and Violet Ellison, and nobody could really remember, but they prepared. It's called a voice exemplar tape. You know, where you hear several Yeah, you hear several different people's voices, including to Forest Johnson's. You know, but I guess I don't know. Yeah, it's like a voice lineup. Yeah. I don't know that they ever played it for her. I know that when I have spoken to her directly and I asked her, how do you know that this was him? She had never heard him speak before, she did not know him personally, and she told me, I don't know that it was him. I just know that it was the same voice that I overheard. She listened in on several different phone calls. The first one is the only one that contained allegedly these incriminating statements that she testified to. But you know, most of the people into Forest community that I talked to, this is it's really a terrifying idea that anybody can go to police and just claim that they overheard you say something, and that can send you all the way to death row, where he's been for twenty five years. That is really frightening.
I want to talk about one of the at least it's one of the first times I think the listener gets to hear to Forrest Johnson's voice, But I want to know about the first time you heard a particular tape, which is when you hear him being interrogated by law enforcement around the same time when I think it's when Yolanda's allegations are coming forward and then they're trying to get information from to Forest. Just that back and forth hearing somebody saying over and over again, I can't prove a negative. I don't have information for you, and then it never stopping, this deluge of you're guilty and you're not telling me things. What was that like for you at like as you're diving into this.
It is some of the worst tape I've ever listened to, And of course everything is edited and condensed in the podcast series, so we actually had to curate to Forest interrogation from close to two hours of tape that police recorded in conducting interviews with him. Yeah, it is like the most extreme form of gaslighting you can ever imagine. When you're stuck in a chair and cops insist for hours and hours and hours that you did something that you didn't do, and not only did you not do it, you don't know anything about it because you were somewhere else when it happened, and it just it's really sickening to listen to it in its entirety. I think for me, it also really made me aware of my own privilege, that this is not the kind of interaction that my self, is a middle aged white woman, has ever had with police or likely would. I think that, especially in this time period in the mid nineties, cops were really running the show, and it was tough on crime, and they wanted convictions, and you know, frankly, a lot of civil rights and human rights were thrown out the window. So in those recordings, we hear to Forrest repeatedly ask for an attorney, and they just keep on going, you know, like he didn't even say it. They make him cry at one point, and you can hear the exhaustion in his voice at the end and him kind of understanding what's happening that he says over and over again. I can tell I'm getting fire. I am getting because they're not believing him, and there's nothing else that he can say and they're still not believing him. So it's it's an awful listen.
They decided they wanted someone and they needed someone, right, So there's I think it makes me go back to the the excellent points you made at the very top of our conversation, Beth, which is the system, right, the enormity of this thing that at some point becomes a feedback loop, it's self propelled. And we so we we talked about the two two of the four who are indicted are the charges are dismissed more than a year later, and uh, there is the third person who I believe makes it a trial but is acquitted, leaving only to Forrest Johnson. And you know, as Matt said, as you said that that tape especially is is harrowing. How does the how does the prosecution proceed now that Chambers has Chambers has had her credibility, you know, cast out. They've pivoted to Violet Ellison remembered this conversation way later. Uh what do they what do they do? What? What does the prosecutor do in this situation?
Well, that's one of the things that makes this whole story so astonishing, is we mentioned that they presented multiple theories for the same crime. Our dregas Ford was to Forrest Johnson's co defendant, and they were tried separately. They were actually each tried twice for the crime. So there's four trials total, and this is laid out in episode five, so this is a little bit of a spoiler alert if folks haven't gotten that far in the series. So the order of trials was our dregas Ford was tried first. The jury couldn't reach a verdict, so it was a hung jery. To Forest Johnson was tried second, jury couldn't reach a verdict hung jury. To Forest Johnson is tried a second time for Trial three, using Violet Ellison. They get a verdict and a death sentence. He's sent to death row. And then, incredibly, eight months after they sent to Forest Johnson to death row, the state tries ar dregis Ford a second time, not using Violet Ellison and her theory about what happened, but calling Y'll landa Chambers to the stand and rehashing you'll landa double jeopardy.
It's not like, how isn't it being tried twice for the same thing, or is it is? The allegations were specific to each one, so therefore it stood on its own merits, as it says, as another case sometimes that's.
A fantastic question. And I've had several people ask me that that have been listening, like how are they at allowed to keep trying people? I think when there's a hung jury, it's declared a mistrial, so that's not the same thing as being.
But still, if it was a hung jury, it means there wasn't enough information to do the thing.
Yeah, thank you.
And I think that's one takeaway, kind of a meta takeaway that a lot of people are walking away with, is like, you know, the state should not be allowed to just keep trying people over and over again until they get a guilty verdict.
You know, try try again, right exactly help.
Succeed, but you know they I interviewed the lead prosecutor in this case, who's a really interesting he takes some really interesting positions in this case. His name is Jeff Wallace, and I was actually really surprised that he agreed to talk to me, and that Detective Tony Richardson agreed to talk to me, because usually these kinds of podcasts, the folks that were responsible for the wrongful conviction are running away. But I've talked to both of them for hours. Jeff Wallace explained to me that the state, and it's true other prosecutors have told me the state is allowed to present conflicting theories for the same crime. The rules of the court allow that. What you have to do is, you know, use the evidence that you're presenting to that particular jury. You don't have to lay out everything. The burden is beyond a reasonable doubt. You don't have to hand them a one hundred percent scientific proof of everything that happened from start to finish. And so that's the way they kind of, I think, justify in their minds that, well, the law allows this, and so we just look at the evidence that we have the cognitive dissonance though in trying two separate people for a crime that we know only had one gunman involved, because those two shellcasings from the two bullets that went into Deputy Harty's head came from one gun, which indicates one gunman only. So at each of these trials they argued the defendant on trial was the shooter and described a different scenario. And these scenarios cannot all be true together. And so I really wanted somebody to answer for how did you work that out in your own mind? Like ethically, morally, how can you get up there in the courtroom and do this? And the answer was always, well, court rules allow us to do this or to employ this strategy. I could never really get an answer. It was always veered into very highly technical legal jargon. But I myself personally have a real problem with it, and I think a lot of listeners.
Do too, agree agreed unanimously. There was also there was this one line that stuck out to me speaking with the former prosecutor, where he says, you know, he had a reputation as a hard prosecutor, which I think most prosecutors will say that about themselves, and then he said, maybe I had a reputation of being a bit too hard of a prosecutor. If I had a case, I would take it to the fullest extent possible, or something like that, which does seem to be in my mind, it does seem to be a confirmation of exactly what you're saying, this idea that actual justice the way civilians might think of it can be put in the back seat in favor of legalistic mechanisms, right to up your score in the courtroom.
Well, but they're also trying to find someone who murdered one of their own. Right, well, so that pressure is on top of everything you're talking about then, right.
Yeah, absolutely, I think they all felt a personal responsibility and incredible pressure to get some kind of resolution. I think that you know, what our job is is to ask, like, what does a resolution look like? And is it just getting a conviction? Because what if it's not the right person? You know, And that's kind of like where we are right now, and also looking at the very narrow ways that you can attack a case post conviction.
Hey, let's pause here really quickly on the conversation for a word from our sponsors, and then we'll be right back with more from Beth.
Okay, and we've returned with more with Beth Chilburn.
There are other things. There are multiple things I don't want to spoil them all that really stick out about the justice system in general in the United States, the justice system in particular in Alabama and indeed in the South, theast overall. One of the things that we keep going back to to your your point about the narrow scope of what we would we would call appeals or saying that you know our weight, but what about this kind of moments It seems that for a time there was a bit of light possible here because I believe it was twenty seventeen, Johnson's case reached the higher courts, reach the Supreme Court. Could you tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, So he has a really great post conviction legal team. The reason that he's on death row is not because he doesn't have good representation now, it's just that you know, they have these very narrow pathways that they can attack his case. You literally cannot argue that someone is innocent post conviction if they're on death row. Innocence is not a legal argument, which is just kind of mind blowing if you really think about it. The Supreme happen, Supreme Court has actually said innocence is not enough to overturn a death row conviction. But anyway, one of the most egregious things about to Forest's conviction is something that happened after he was sent to death row, and it's the key witness in the case, Violet Ellison, the ear witness, was paid a reward behind closed doors, off the record, and the jury did not know that she was going to be paid for her testimony, and so that has been one of the main issues that has been litigated now for almost twenty years, and the courts have repeatedly said, this is not prosecutorial misconduct. Nobody did anything wrong here, and to Forrest's conviction can stand. Even though the state paid the star witness five thousand dollars off the record, it was not entered into the official court record. To Forrest Johnson and his attorneys were not told about the payment, and the jury did not know that this reward was even on the table.
And this was an addition to the original reward for the information or for actionable information.
It was part of the original reward. And since she from what I understand looking at the reward documents that the state finally turned over after denying that they existed for seventeen years, from what I can tell, she was paid five thousand dollars because she wasn't part of Forrest's arrest. Her testimony just led to his conviction. But they even like lowballed her. You know, it's like she only got five thousand dollars. Her story about the reward and the state's story don't match up. And the state's story has changed since I've been covering this issue, since I started covering it in twenty nineteen, and they've completely changed their story about what happened with this reward.
Chambers, they sure did.
Yeah, except there you know, this is the long arm of the law that has the power to kill to Forrest Johnson, which is what is so scary. It's not just sloppy, it's incredibly suspicious. When this issue is being litigated and the state keeps changing what they're actually filing in court documents. It's not like just they might misrepresent a word or two in an interview with me. I'm talking like the whole narrative about how the reward was triggered, who called who, how it came, about why people didn't know about it, All of that has changed.
You start the podcast off with forgive me if you've already said this person's name. But there's a lot of characters in the story, with some from a clearly very experienced lawyer or prosecutor perhaps who's a big fan of the death penalty, and you know, speaks to that effect that there are certain crimes that there's.
No other way. He believes in it.
He's always hearing these social justice warriors whining about, you know, somebody being wrongfully accused or whatever. And then he turns where his son I think he was a lawyer as well, turns him onto this story and he's like, and none of that made any sense, That all was absurd, And I'm the one who kind of would be more in that corner, probably from hearing a story like that, but immediately he was skeptical.
Can you tell us who that was? And a little bit about.
That kind of frame story of the podcast, I think is a really cool way to start it off.
Yeah. His name is Bill Baxley, and in Alabama he's kind of legendary. He was I think the youngest elected attorney general the state has ever had. He was elected at age twenty eight, and he was in Alabama politics for decades. He was lieutenant governor for a time, he ran for governor. He's just been around forever and he is staunchly pro death penalty. He was actually the attorney general when the Supreme Court outlawed capital punishment. There was a time in the early seventies, I think, for four or five years where there were no death sentences and they declared it to be unconstitutional. Bill Baxley was instrumental in bringing executions back to Alabama during that time period. So he's a true believer. In his career, which is now more than sixty years in running, he's still practicing law. He's looked at so many cases post conviction, hundreds and hundreds of cases, maybe thousands, and he has only agreed that somebody was likely innocent in two cases. One of them was the Scottsboro Boys, and that is an infamous case at the turn of the century where a group of young black boys were convicted of raping to white women and they were all sentenced to death. All of their cases fell apart over a long period of time and they've all been pardoned posthumously by the state. It was a wrongful conviction, so probably one of the most infamous injustices in the history of Alabama. Bill Baxley says, yes, they were innocent, and to Forrest Johnson, and that's the only other case that he's looked at in detail and said, there's no way this guy did this, and it's really out of character, and he's stepping way out of something that he would normally do to advocate for someone who's on death row.
And Baxley is I think that that speaks to the enormity of the miscarriage of justice. Baxley is joined also by a cavalcade of other supporters who are experts. I was looking at the the Chief Justice, former Chief Justice, neighbors Drayton, neighbors of other former US attorneys, other former judges, three former jurors, and it seems that this leads me to one of the biggest questions I want to ask, And I know that a lot of us listening long tonight are thinking the same thing with this, With this high amount, this high density of heavy hitters who are saying, no, something wrong happens here, why won't the state re examine this? Is there some concern on their side about perhaps setting a precedent and triggering like a new era of reinvestigation or reopening of cases or what gives? Because it seems it seems as though, you know, it's not not to sound cold, but it is not as though it is simply the family of before Johnson saying he didn't do it. It's not just his friends or aquaintances in Birmingham. It's top legal minds, right.
I wish I could speak to why the state is continuing to seek his execution and why they're continuing to fight his appeals despite the calls for a new trial. The current elected district attorney in Jefferson County has a conviction integrity unit. He spent nine months reviewing this case and concluded that there were multiple problems with the process and that to Forest Johnson at the very least should get a new trial. He filed a petition in court asking for a new trial to be granted. He was joined by Jeff Wallace, the original prosecutor, who argued that to Forest Johnson deserved to die. That literally never happens. I mean I called innocence projects. I talked to people all over the country. I could not find another case in any state where the original trial prosecutor supports a new trial for a defendant on death row. The Alabama Attorney General's office handles all death row cases post conviction and their full steam ahead. And I wish I could tell you why. All I can do is look at what they're filing in court. I've asked them to talk with me for the podcast. I sent them lists of questions which they would not answer. What they have argued. This is their filing that I've got in front of me that they put in front of the US Supreme Court this year to Forest Johnson asked the court to again review this secret reward payment and the fact that the elected district attorney has now called for a new trial after reviewing the case, and the Attorney General's office in Alabama says that to Forrest Johnson does not raise an issue of extraordinary public importance or any compelling circumstance.
What does that have to do with anything? What does public importance even mean? I'm just that's a that's a new.
One on me.
Is that from that that's a good question.
Yeah.
On December seventh of this year, he will have spent twenty five years in prison, and that is just that It's just there's such an injustice there. And your work on the you know, looking at prisons, specific prisons, right, like the I'm imagining your work on the Julia Tutweiler prison, right and just looking at the environment that human beings have to survive in when they're in you know, each one is it's a different ecosystem, but each one has kind of the same set of problems. I just wonder, what do you think, like just imagining this person who's been in jail for twenty five years as of this December.
To Forrest is really an amazing person, and we didn't get to interview him for the podcast because the Alabama Department of Corrections has this bullsh rule where people on death row aren't allowed to talk to journalists and we didn't want to get him in trouble. But to Forrest has amazing fortitude. He's a very positive person. I think that part of the reason why is because he has five children and fifteen grandchildren that he maintains very close relationships with. He's also very tight with his mother. Yeah, we sit down for a long, expanded conversation with his family in the last episode, So I hope people stick around for that because it's really beautiful and it's just it really shows us that, yes, this is a horrible injustice that this one human being has had to suffer, but it's really a community trauma and a family trauma because it just fans out cross so many different lives and the beautiful way he's been able to father his children from death row. I have found it just to be awe inspiring and there's such a genuine love and commitment in this family despite this just horrific thing that's always there right in front of them. But they just keep going, and they keep loving on each other, and they stay hopeful. And it has been something.
To behold in that case too, that point about intergenerational trauma, the ripples and the consequences they continue long after an action has been committed. It got me thinking, what about the survivors of Deputy Shareff Bill Hardy? Right, clearly they would one would assume they would want some closure as well. And as we're recording, for anybody who wants to catch the news to what you're referring to be I believe was early October this month the US Supreme Court declined to review the case, and so this has repeatedly come into question legally and along the way. Thinks in great part to your incredibly thorough reporting here. I think more and more people are questioning more and more other cases that often slip by the wayside or or don't make it past you know, the local Post sentinel or what have you. And with this, you know, one of the one of the questions that we always end with when we have these conversations is what what do you hope people can take from this? Case. What what do you hope people will walk away with after they have experienced this investigation.
Well, I think that first and four or most, our goal was to present the truth that to Forrest Johnson has experienced, because that was not presented in the traditional media coverage of this murder and these trials and conviction. So there is a record of what happened to this man, with the hope that it will turn the ship and that there will be enough momentum where enough people will lean into this and say, no, this cannot be Unfortunately, there have been other cases where innocent people have ended up on death row and have been executed, and he is at risk, and so we know that his attorneys know that, and they're continuing to fight the good fight in the legal system. But I think what we were hoping for, in addition to illuminating this injustice, which, as you mentioned, and is hard to imagine being cooped up in a cell for twenty five years away from your family and community when you're innocent. It's just I don't know how he's maintained his sanity. But the other thing we were hoping to do is really unpack and unwind this case in a way to show some of the systemic problems that people run into every day. Even people that are charged with misdemeanors run into inadequate defense, you know, a bias from jurors or from cops themselves. There's all sorts of problems that this case highlights that I think for people that are lucky enough to not be justice impacted, wouldn't have a way to get proximate to the dynamics that play out every day in jails and a courtrooms across the United States. And so we really wanted to kind of hold their hand and guide them through a truly unbelievable and horrific Bonker's story about the links the system will go to to get a conviction and what that has meant to Forrest Johnson and what it means today for the people that were involved that feel like the evidence has now changed. So how do we fix that?
You mentioned what a you know, thoughtful person to Forrest is, and I've seen it in other stories involving wrongfully convicted death row inmates or at least people that are maybe not death or inmates, but just people that have been held for that long of their lives, and the case of Frank Gable. He was recently released, and that was a story that we have reported on and that we had a podcast called Murder and Organ that was out on our podcast network.
But he was always very similarly.
Zen and kind of like thoughtful and you know, drew beautiful, you know, drawing and sent them to the brothers who are kind of defending his case, who were actually the brothers of the man he supposedly killed.
But it just does go to show.
This is another thing that the Lava folks are definitely cued in on, is that people do get out.
This does it.
You know, things are overturned and they are given new trials sometimes, but it is an uphill battle every step of the way.
Yeah, and you know, I think that he maintains that hope because it truly is reflective of his heart and he, like his cousin Antonio Green, who we interview in the podcast, told me, he has that kind of zen piece about him because he's good with God. He knows he didn't do anything, and so he's told his family, you know, I'm good. I want to get out for y'all, but the things that are most important within me, I'm good. I just want the truth out there, and you know, he wants justice. I think his family does want some account of But yeah, as long as he is alive and he wakes up every day, he has hope. And I try to maintain that too, that it's not over, that the state can still do the right thing. People can still do the right thing, and people are doing the right thing. You know, having prosecutors get on board advocating for someone who's on death row is highly unusual, so they've stepped out of their comfort zone. Some of these folks like Jeff Wallace and the current district Attorney Danny Carr and have you know, had to really dig deep and be honest about what happened here and what can we do. So we have seen some people do the right thing. We just want to keep building on that momentum to try and as long as we can to get this right, to make us right.
And if you want to learn more about this, you can right now visit to Forrest Johnson dot com. That's T O F O R E. S. T. Johnson with an h dot com to get more updates to learn much much more about the case. And Beth, we want to thank you so much for your time with this work that continues today. Ear Witness is out now, not all of it, and as true story. Off air, we were trying to, you know, sweet talk you into giving us some preview episodes, but we are listening along with you, folks, And thank you not only for your time in this interview this evening, but thank you so much for the work you're putting in which has brought new visibility, new examination to this case. Where can people learn more about not just your work on the Forest Johnson case and Earwitness, but more of your additional work, like Matt mentioned, the deep dives you've done into specific prison systems and criminal justice issues.
Yeah, thank you so much for asking. I'm still on Twitter, which I guess is called X now. Yeah, I still call it Twitter.
Yeah, everybody, everybody but Ella Musk still calls it Twitter.
I know.
It's like, stop trying to make X happen, Elon Musk, It's not gonna happen.
I have a substack called Moth to Flame where I publish a lot of first person writing about justice, reporting and other things. And yeah, I'm on Twitter, and I publish independently so people can google me and find some of the work that I've done, but it's it's mainly on my substack and I have a landing page which is just Bethshelburne dot com.
Amazing And when you are ready to listen to ear Witness, make sure you head to Lava for Good. That's l A V A F O R G O O D dot com slash ear Witness because you can find pictures of speci places, There's all kinds of amazing resources that are on that site. As you're going through and listening to the episodes. It's a cool experience and I would highly recommend it.
Thank you. Yeah, we wanted to put source material as much of it online as possible, so Lava and the folks there have done a great job of laying it all out for listeners to look at as they're listening to this just absolutely bananas bonkers story.
And that stuff is great supplementary material.
But I mean, just to the original point you made, like this is the kind of story that, like the podcast medium was made for because of the very you know, questionable nature of to do our ears deceive us and things like that. So it really well done and I think we all are very much enjoyed. I mean enjoy is a strong word. It's a difficult thing to hear, but you really tell the story so compellingly and it moves and I think I joked before you even sort of that you get just.
Mad enough where you want to keep going.
You don't want to throw your phone out the way because it's a tough one.
It's a tough one.
It is a tough one. But I really appreciate, I really appreciate all of you listening and supporting.
So tune in to your witness, folks, don't delay. It's available on your favorite podcast platform of choice to day. And with that, folks, we cannot wait to hear your thoughts on your witness. Also, we want to hear your stories or experiences with similar situations because, as Beth pointed out, there are a lot of unfortunate commonalities in a broken justice system that sometimes does not seem incentivized to be fixed. So we want to be easy to find online. Here's how you can get in touch with us.
That's right.
You can find out the handle Conspiracy Stuff Show on Twitter. It's called Twitter damn it Okay. You might also know it as X if you're new to the Internet. We are also concer spirasey Stuff on Facebook, and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
If you want to leave us a voicemail, call one eight three three STDWYTK. You've got three minutes. Say whatever you'd like, give yourself a cool nickname, and let us know if we can use your name and message on the air. If you don't want to do any of that, but you've still got something to say, why not instead send us a good old fashioned email.
We are We are the people who read every email we get, and let me point this out because we haven't been saying it lately. What we love about the emails. You can attach photos, you can send us links. We can't wait. Just take us to the edge of the rabbit hole. We'll do the rest. Conspiracydiheartradio dot com.
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