The small town of Ada Oklahoma was rocked in the early 80s by two unrelated murders of young women in the town. But by the mid 90s, that would change. The town would come under scrutiny for miscarriages of justice, where two and possibly more men were convicted of crimes they did not commit. Last month, Netflix released The Innocent Man, a 6 part series looking at these crimes and their aftermaths.
This week on the podcast, we take an in-depth look into just one of those cases, that of the murder of Debbie Sue Carter and the wrongful convictions of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz. Ron and Dennis had very different journeys through their appeals processes, but both of their fates lay in the testing of DNA evidence. Would new science finally exonerate them?
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Theme Music:
Quinn’s Song: The Dance Begins by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Sources:
John Grisham, The Innocent Man (New York: Doubleday, 2006) Purchase here
Ross M. Dinerstein and Clay Tweel, "The Innocent Man" (Netflix, 2018)
Jim Dwyer, "Ron Williamson, Freed from death row, dies at 51" in The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/09/us/ronald-williamson-freed-from-death-row-dies-at-51.html (9 December 2004)
Frontline, from PBS.org https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/burden/profiles/williamson.html (1 May 2003)
Eric Shorey, "Karl Fontenot today?" from Oxygen.com https://www.oxygen.com/martinis-murder/where-are-tommy-ward-and-karl-fontenot-today-innocent-man (18 December 2018)
Emily Mae Czachor, "Newflix's New true Crime Series" from Bustle.com https://www.bustle.com/p/netflixs-new-true-crime-series-the-innocent-man-finally-has-a-trailer-to-spook-intrigue-you-video-13234092 (December 2018)
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