Sept. 3, 2025
Kevin is Next - Part 2
Nick, Amanda, and three Georgetown undergraduates set out to re-investigate Kevin Herrick’s conviction, combing through trial transcripts, police reports, and overlooked details. What they uncover reshapes everything: a hidden police report that ties the crime to a different man with a violent record—a document Kevin’s defense never saw. For Amanda, it’s a discovery that could finally crack open a case buried for more than thirty years, and it raises a new possibility after decades of silence; maybe Kevin really is next.
Bone Valley is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
00:00:02
Speaker 1: Most of the pis that I know are former cops.
00:00:05
Speaker 2: They're middle aged white dudes for the most part, right, and they got a cop vibe to them. And so depending on where you're going, who you're talking to, you don't necessarily want to talk to something it looks like a cop.
00:00:18
Speaker 3: This is doctor Amanda Lewis. She helps select cases for Georgetown's making an ex hoonery program where people in prison claiming innocence can have their convictions reinvestigated. These investigations aren't led by police or lawyers or private investigators. Instead, they're assigned to groups of undergrad students.
00:00:41
Speaker 2: That is one thing that makes the students so invaluable with reinvestigation.
00:00:46
Speaker 1: First of all, they're curious.
00:00:47
Speaker 2: They actually sometimes don't know a lot about these things, so they'll ask questions that I wouldn't think to ask, or they really don't understand and it so they allow people to explain more and talk more. They're not necessarily intimidating. Typically people want to talk, so that is usually helpful.
00:01:04
Speaker 3: A group of three students is assigned to investigate Kevin Herrick's case, along with a third year law student, Nick White, Amanda's husband.
00:01:13
Speaker 4: When I find something immediately go to like property records, I go to these things.
00:01:17
Speaker 1: She starts.
00:01:18
Speaker 4: She thinks in people more than I do. I think through documents, and she thinks through people.
00:01:25
Speaker 3: Can you describe like the difference in the energy that you bring to this case, and like what that's like working together, and just what strengths one of others have?
00:01:32
Speaker 1: Like how does that work between you? I think we have totally opposite She drives me nuts.
00:01:38
Speaker 4: I don't by throwing chaos into my carefully crafted folders.
00:01:42
Speaker 1: And yeah, no, it's true.
00:01:45
Speaker 3: I mean Amanda has a knack for getting to the bottom of a case through finding people who might know something, gotten.
00:01:51
Speaker 2: Really interested and first of all, just like boots on the ground, door knocking. I don't know what it's being from a small town. I love talking people. People just open up to me about their stuff. Maybe it's because I overshare.
00:01:59
Speaker 1: I don't know, but I've found a way that to make it really useful. I love that part of that.
00:02:04
Speaker 2: I love this.
00:02:05
Speaker 3: They'll work with three undergrads who will spend months digging into Kevin's case.
00:02:10
Speaker 2: It's a group project, right, and it is the most difficult group project anyone will ever work on. And I would say that, like in this particular group, it is an amazing group of students that works really well together and all have their own specific strengths and things that they bring to the table. Got obviously sweet baby Brett.
00:02:33
Speaker 5: My life's purpose is to work with incarcerated people and help them get back with the prison system stole from them.
00:02:38
Speaker 2: Who is a delight and just a really sweet and great young man.
00:02:44
Speaker 3: There's Ava Hi.
00:02:46
Speaker 6: My name is Ava Kaburat.
00:02:48
Speaker 1: She is really really smart. She was quieter at herst and.
00:02:53
Speaker 6: I'm really hoping to be a part of the Spring twenty twenty five cohort for Thing Making Any Sooner.
00:02:58
Speaker 7: Class one my name is Nina.
00:03:02
Speaker 2: Nina who was wonderful, very outspoken, very loud, like I mean, I am as well.
00:03:06
Speaker 7: I will try everything to get these people justice in a system that doesn't.
00:03:11
Speaker 8: Give it out.
00:03:14
Speaker 3: But when the students got their assignments, Nina wasn't eager to work on Kevin's case.
00:03:20
Speaker 7: I got assigned Kevin's case, and I remember the first day I was like, I want to switch off. I was like, I'm not taking this, I'm just not doing it. I just was really vehemently opposed to working on a sexual assault case. I always want to believe the victim, and I just I was like, I'm not taking this. I'm just not doing it.
00:03:41
Speaker 3: She even told Mark Howard, the co director of making an ex Hoonare, that she wanted a different.
00:03:47
Speaker 7: Case, and Mark said, well, this is the case you're working on, so you can drop the class or you can stand the case. So I said, you know what, let me do you one better. I'll read the case and I'll prove to you that he's guilty. It's all there, So let me read the case and prove to you that he's guilty. I got it. I just had no clue what I was getting myself into.
00:04:29
Speaker 3: Do you hear my madness?
00:04:34
Speaker 1: Laughter you.
00:04:40
Speaker 3: Sorrows down, sorrowing.
00:04:46
Speaker 1: Miss Ballly s.
00:05:04
Speaker 3: Yes, bone Valley Kevin is next Part two.
00:05:24
Speaker 7: There's no rule book, there's no right. Nobody says, here's the case. And then once you read the case, then talk to X Y Z person and Buba. No one gives you that shit. You have got to create a playbook.
00:05:39
Speaker 3: When Nina, Ava and Brett get started, one of the first things they do is read the trial transcript.
00:05:46
Speaker 7: We researched everything.
00:05:49
Speaker 3: The trial itself lasted only two days. There's not a whole lot of pages to go through, but the students aren't just reading. They're dissecting line by line, look looking for a clear timeline in the victim's accounts of what happened that night, and whether the pieces actually fit. The first witness called at trial is Cheryl Kevin's neighbor with the baby, who says she was sexually assaulted that night. She testifies that on the night of the attack, she was home alone with the baby while her boyfriend Scott was out. She went to bed, then woke to an intruder on top of her, pressing a sharp object to her neck. She says he threatened to hurt her or her baby if she didn't comply, and says he briefly forced his penis into her mouth. It was pitch black, she says, and she couldn't get a clear look at the attacker. Next on the stand is Scott Barfield. He says that after returning to the triplex that night, he was smoking a cigarette outside when he heard whimpering insiderushed in and fought with the assailant in the dark. During the struggle, Scott was stabbed twice in the chest, shallow wounds that left only minor injuries. The next part of Scott's testimony is hard to follow, but here's the best I can do to boil it down. Scott says the assailant tried to leave through the locked, sliding glass door, then exited out the front. Scott chased him down the block, over a fence, and into the parking lot of another complex. Bleeding and unwilling to confront him again, Scott crouched near a row of boats parked on trailers, trying to get a look at the man who had attacked him and his girlfriend. He thought he saw the man climb into a car. Scott says he memorized the license plate number and then ran back toward the triplex. By then, several neighbors had come outside after hearing Sheryl screams about the attack as she stood holding her baby. At first a skeptic, Nina studies the transcript, trying to follow Scott's testimony. As she reads, she sketched the diagram and labels everyone who is standing in the courtyard of the triplex. There were the victims, Eryl and her baby, missus Pori, Pat's mom, the woman on oxygen who Kevin was living with, Teresa, the young couple living in the other.
00:08:34
Speaker 7: Unit, Barbara and Dave Stewart, and one more person, Kevin's standing right there.
00:08:43
Speaker 3: But if Kevin was standing there when Scott returned, how could he also be the man Scott chased over a fence and saw getting into a car.
00:09:06
Speaker 9: Hey, y'all, it's Maggie. I'm here to tell you about a new show I've been working on for the past two years. It's called Graves County and it's an investigative series about the murder of a young mom in Kentucky and just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. Here is the trailer for Graves County.
00:09:31
Speaker 8: All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half truth is a whole lie.
00:09:36
Speaker 9: For almost a decade, the murder of an eighteen year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
00:09:51
Speaker 10: I'm telling you we know when we know.
00:09:55
Speaker 9: A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.
00:10:03
Speaker 1: Through sheer, persistence and nerve.
00:10:05
Speaker 10: This Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Current.
00:10:10
Speaker 9: My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
00:10:20
Speaker 5: I did not know her, and I did not kill her, or raid or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.
00:10:25
Speaker 11: They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poor guests on her.
00:10:33
Speaker 9: From love of for Good, This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame Marka.
00:10:44
Speaker 1: Y'all got to work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
00:10:53
Speaker 9: Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley Feed starting September seventeenth on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts, and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to LoVa for Good plus on Apple podcasts.
00:11:29
Speaker 3: One of the biggest issues with the theory that Kevin committed this crime is that there was someone with him all night who had no reason to lie about what she saw. Teresa Pori was essentially guarding the only way in and out of the apartment, the front door. In her deposition, she says Kevin came home that night then went into bed, and that she sat in the living room watching TV when she heard Cheryl screaming. She went into Kevin's room to wake him up. She says, there's there's no way he could have left without her knowing, and the layout of the apartment backs her up. The Pory's unit had three sliding glass doors that opened onto the back patio, one in Kevin's room, one in the living room, and one in Missus Pory's bedroom, but none of them offered a realistic escape room. The door to Kevin's room was jammed off its rails, blocked by furniture and construction supplies. If Kevin had used it, he would have had to drag it open and maneuver through obstacles silently and in seconds. The living room door was directly in missus Pory's line of sight as she sat on the couch watching TV, and the sliding door to missus Pory's bedroom was on the other side of the living room, meaning Kevin would have had to sneak right past her to use it. As missus Pory put it in her testimony, he was asleep when I went in there. That boy was asleep. There was no time for that boy to come in there to hop in bed. By the time I got from here to that bedroom, I would have seen him get in the bed. There was no time, because that's how fast I ran back to get him. For Scott's story to be true, Kevin would have had to leave the Pory's apartment without being seen or heard by Teresa. He'd have to walk around the building to Cheryl and Scott's apartment next door, attack Cheryl, fight with Scott, stab him, run out the front door, get chased by Scott a few blocks, sneak back into his bedroom, and pretend to be asleep again without Teresa noticing him. So now the students have to decide which makes more sense Scott's story that Kevin was responsible for the attacks or missus Pori's testimony that Kevin never left the apartment.
00:13:58
Speaker 7: Okay, let's walk the dog with me here.
00:14:03
Speaker 3: Nina started out wanting to prove Kevin guilty, but when she worked through the timeline and testimony, she realized the pieces didn't fit the way Scott said they did. Kevin supposedly ran everywhere, but all the evidence pointed to him never leaving the triplex. Missus Pori said he never went anywhere and there was no way he could have gotten in or out without her seeing him.
00:14:27
Speaker 7: Like, you can't walk the dog with me. The dog is still stationary because there's nothing to walk. Now, screw the timeline, right say, somehow he made it work.
00:14:38
Speaker 3: Even then, if Kevin attacked Cheryl and stab Scott, there should have been something left behind, some trace in the apartment pointing back to him.
00:14:49
Speaker 6: They collected hair, and they collected fingerprints from the crime scene. This is ava They were able to show that the hair didn't match Kevin's through micro analysis that they did.
00:15:01
Speaker 3: They also compared the bloody prints on the door from where the assailant tried to escape to Kevin's prince, and.
00:15:08
Speaker 6: They showed the fingerprints didn't match Kevin either. They a few of them matched the victim, and the rest of them were unidentified. None of the physical evidence matched Kevin.
00:15:17
Speaker 3: Nina may have been skeptical of Kevin at the start, but now based on the timeline and the evidence. She was questioning herself.
00:15:27
Speaker 7: I was like, crap, this guy might actually he may actually.
00:15:34
Speaker 3: As the students dug deeper, they realized there was so much here that seemed to point away from Kevin's guilt. Here's ava I.
00:15:43
Speaker 6: Think also another one of the issues with this case is that there are too many issues. There's a timeline in the physical evidence, and the you know, police interference, and the crappy attorney and all of this stuff and it.
00:15:56
Speaker 3: And then police misrepresented the evidence. Officers told the victims they'd found a bloody knife and clothes in Kevin's room, and that the bloody fingerprints on the sliding glass door were matched to Kevin. None of this was true, but it made a powerful impression at trial.
00:16:16
Speaker 6: We're inclined to believe the victim, especially in sexual assault cases, and the issue is that the identification of Kevin didn't actually originally come from the victim. It came from the police who told them falsely that they found a bloody knife and bloody clothing in Kevin's room, which was not true at the end of the day. But once you tell someone who's just been through a traumatic incident that you have a potential suspect, and all they want to do is resolve the case and figure out who did this and move beyond it. Then it's understandable in a way that they would fixate on that, and at that point you just can't remove that from their minds.
00:17:02
Speaker 3: In her deposition, Cheryl pointed to Kevin as her attacker. On cross examination, Kevin's lawyer asked a simple question.
00:17:12
Speaker 7: Your opinion as to who this was is based on what? And she says, they found a bloody knife in his room and his fingerprints on our door. That is the basis of why she believes Kevin did it, and that's a lie.
00:17:26
Speaker 12: There's so many points where somebody could have stopped this.
00:17:30
Speaker 3: This is Brett.
00:17:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:17:32
Speaker 12: The police could have stopped this, The judge could have stopped this, the prosecutor could have stopped this. So many people, the jury could have stopped this. It feels like it should be so much more difficult for this to happen, but then when you actually look at this, it just happened so easily.
00:17:50
Speaker 3: By the time they were ready to travel to Florida to investigate for themselves, the students had read everything they could get their hands on, and then came more.
00:17:59
Speaker 4: Right before this trip, the Innocence Project gave us over two thousand pages of documents.
00:18:05
Speaker 3: Yes, so we got Since Nick is advising the student group, he and Amanda take on the opposite of their usual roles. Nick heads to Florida to be on the ground with the undergrads, while Amanda stays behind to work through the mountain of documents.
00:18:20
Speaker 1: Documents.
00:18:21
Speaker 2: So, really, the night before your trip and the next day, I'm staying up.
00:18:25
Speaker 1: I'm also an I know, so I'm staying up till like three am, going through just to see what all there is. I'm like skipping.
00:18:30
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, the students are on the ground in Tampa, knocking on doors and visiting key locations in the case, not the kinds of places you'd ever find on the grounds of Georgetown University.
00:18:42
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we just went to Mon's Venus, which is the strip club where Patrick Pory and Felicia Pori both worked at.
00:18:54
Speaker 3: They also try to talk to anyone else who is still alive who might know something about this case.
00:19:00
Speaker 7: I'm really nervous.
00:19:03
Speaker 11: That's gonna be.
00:19:04
Speaker 7: I know that they're not gonna let us a night they will.
00:19:07
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're students looking into cases that have outstanding issues like here we have untested evidence and things like that. We're here to talk to you about your ex husband. See if you had any information for us.
00:19:25
Speaker 13: That's win somewhere to like, yeah, here, let's go.
00:19:28
Speaker 11: Back to that brand in the car.
00:19:31
Speaker 7: And so we just went to.
00:19:35
Speaker 1: Charly and Scott.
00:19:37
Speaker 7: Neither of them were home. We're gonna try again this evening.
00:19:41
Speaker 3: They investigate at the triplex.
00:19:45
Speaker 8: We just pulled up to the triplex. We have looked at photos of this triplex like forever, and we just like saw in person. Holy shit, I can't believe, like this is where Kevin like whole life has taken from him.
00:20:03
Speaker 3: And they try once again to make Scott's testimony line up with Kevin being the assailant.
00:20:09
Speaker 7: Okay, so he runs out through here, this is the fighting.
00:20:13
Speaker 4: Loss story through so he instead comes out this runs that.
00:20:20
Speaker 3: Way, but they can't make it work.
00:20:22
Speaker 1: Doesn't make sense.
00:20:33
Speaker 3: Back in Maryland, Amanda is working her way through this new stack of documents.
00:20:38
Speaker 1: And looking mostly focused on depositions and statements.
00:20:41
Speaker 2: But then I see in there a vehicle property report, but they have been number and a license plate. And we've known from the start of this case, that a license plate was yelled out and that we've never had the plate number.
00:20:53
Speaker 3: This has always been one of the more disturbing parts of Kevin's case. Scott says he told police about the life's plate number, and yet none of the officer's reports from that night mention a car or a plate. It says, if both vanished from police records, so where did that number go and who did it belong to? Then comes the most surprising part at trial. Scott says he made the whole story up. He says he already knew it was Kevin, but lied about the license plate to throw police off because he wanted to take revenge on Kevin himself. He's just been stabbed, his girlfriend has been sexually assaulted, his baby's life has been threatened, and his first instinct is to lie to the police. Also, when Scott runs back to the Triplex, he says he sees Kevin while Cheryl and her baby are also still there. If he really thought Kevin was the attacker all along, why not confront him? And then Scott goes to the hospital to get his minor injuries treated, but leave Cheryl and their baby standing there with Kevin. Still at the Triplex.
00:22:11
Speaker 7: That makes no sense.
00:22:15
Speaker 3: And now, thirty six years later, Amanda uncovers a document buried in the state Attorney's files attached to Kevin's case. It's a police report, an investigation into a license plate.
00:22:32
Speaker 1: I see this report, I'm like, what the hell is this? And I just see that one page and I get so excited, and I so I think.
00:22:41
Speaker 2: I called Nick immediately and I emailed it to all the students.
00:22:45
Speaker 1: I'm like, holy shit, is this the plate.
00:22:47
Speaker 3: Amanda immediately files a record's request with the Florida DMV on plate Easy five one one W and boom, the plate comes back to a nineteen seventy eight Dotson station wagon owned at the time by a man named Paul Fordett, who lived just down the road from the Triplex. She quickly punches for Debt's name into the Panellas County Clerk of Court criminal records database.
00:23:15
Speaker 1: Paul Fordett scroll down.
00:23:17
Speaker 2: One criminal charge shows up on their sexual battery nineteen seventy nine, and I was like, holy shit. I was like, I'm like, I'm fucking so excited. I'm like so and so then I start looking at.
00:23:28
Speaker 1: Those pages again.
00:23:29
Speaker 3: It looks to Amanda like the license plate Scott was screaming out that night. The car he said he initially tracked to the assailant was registered to a man who lived in the neighborhood, a man who had already been charged with sexual battery long before Kevin was ever accused in this case. Amanda eventually pulls the details on those charges.
00:23:51
Speaker 2: Essentially, he had been sexually abusing a family member for four to five years and you know, escalating in that behavior and reported to you know, his wife at the time, and she reported the police. He pretty much confessed like that same day to doing it.
00:24:11
Speaker 3: And that discovery set off a cascade of questions.
00:24:16
Speaker 2: For her limited to that because I started thinking, Okay, would somebody that assaulted a child family member be the same type of person that committed this crime. So I started looking back in the documents and the details of the case, like what did he say, how did he use the weapon?
00:24:32
Speaker 1: All of those things, And to me, I never.
00:24:34
Speaker 2: Thought that this person who attacked Cheryl planned to stab her or the baby, but they clearly were going to use that as a threat.
00:24:44
Speaker 3: And then she starts thinking about the legal issues and what this single document could mean for Kevin's case. Amanda now sees that police did investigate a license plate, but it was never included with the records turned over to Kevin's defense. Instead, it sat buried in the state Attorney's office, so Kevin's lawyers never had a chance to see it. For Kevin's defense, this piece of paper could have pointed to an alternate suspect and an alternate theory of the crime, evidence that could have raised reasonable doubt in front of a jury. Under the law, withholding that kind of material is a Brady violation when prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that could help the defense. And the question now was what were Amanda and Nick going to do about it?
00:25:34
Speaker 4: Which she started doing is diving in, like, Okay, who can I find who might talk to us? And so she started diving in to his relatives.
00:25:43
Speaker 3: And then she wants to know more about this Paul for Debt guy and whether people around him thought he was capable of committing a crime like this. Amanda searches online and finds that for Debt died in twenty twenty three, but his Facebook page still shows two friends. To Amanda, one looks like a bot, the other is a woman living in rural central Florida.
00:26:09
Speaker 1: And this lady just looks like a really nice lady. She is in Teddy.
00:26:13
Speaker 2: She has all these animals, all these dogs, and like we're big animal people.
00:26:16
Speaker 1: So I'm like, this lady, I don't like something about this. I feel like she's gonna help No, it's good. Well, it's what's so crazy too, is I saw.
00:26:33
Speaker 2: You online before I even had all the puzzle pieces, and I'm like, she's gonna have somehow.
00:26:38
Speaker 1: I know she's gonna help us like this.
00:26:40
Speaker 3: Amanda eventually reached the woman for privacy we'll call her Shirley. On their first phone call, Amanda asked what she knew about the man who owned the car at the time of the attack. Shirley said she actually lived on the same property as him.
00:26:56
Speaker 13: For a few years. My husband dealt with him. I didn't want to deal with him, but then when my husband passed away, I started to be the one that I would go to him and say, I'm going grocery shopping, do you need anything. I'm always been the peacemaker mediator. I'll handle this, I'll handle that. So that's how I got to know him. I never got to know him like well, because he had no people skills. None. If I were to label him, I would say he was either brain damaged or just the most selfish person I've ever met in my life. So that's how I got to know him.
00:27:38
Speaker 3: After sharing that, Shirley told Amanda something surprising. After Paul died, she ended up with all of his possessions.
00:27:47
Speaker 1: Who wants to deal with this?
00:27:48
Speaker 13: And it was junk. I mean I went through it a few times. I looked around to see if there was anything of value, but he was junk.
00:27:56
Speaker 3: But Amanda had a feeling there could be something valuable and his belonging, maybe fingerprints they could compare with those collected from SHERYLN. Scott's sliding glass door. So she and Nick went to Shirley's and I went with them. I mean they also brought along Cliff Blum, a former detective turned private investigator, to photograph anything that might serve as evidence.
00:28:20
Speaker 1: So you packed all this stuff up and brought it over here.
00:28:23
Speaker 2: Today, and that's fir yes.
00:28:24
Speaker 13: And so this stuff I couldn't find a bag pig en up for it, So I figured if I use gloves and I put it in the cardboard box, that's fine. And then the rest of it is. You could see I found some big party bags. Amazing, you can take all of this stuff with you. So when I first got contacted by Amanda and I started looking around, and she specifically said, if you see anything like a knife? Well, I was like, oh, yeah, there's a pen knife somewhere.
00:28:57
Speaker 3: Shirley found the knife among Paul's below longings. The knife is small, precise, almost like a scalpel, the same kind of weapon described in the attack.
00:29:09
Speaker 13: Well, this knife has been sitting on the desk, and it has been sitting on that desk all that time, but I picked it up several times.
00:29:15
Speaker 3: Cliff, the former detective, starts taking photos.
00:29:19
Speaker 1: Of the knife.
00:29:20
Speaker 3: I mean, how would you describe that knife? Is that there's a name for that kind of.
00:29:26
Speaker 10: Knife, Cliff, this is I mean, it's it's it's old. I'll tell you that it's it's pretty much just a two bladed pocket knife, about six inches long. There's a stand.
00:29:40
Speaker 3: While we were there, Kevin called Nick, who headed the phone to Shirley. Kevin, like Leo Schofield, is a deeply spiritual man, with a theology degree of his own.
00:29:52
Speaker 13: I'm good.
00:29:53
Speaker 10: I certainly want to tell you thank you very much for everything that you've been doing. Again to tell you how how important it might say.
00:30:02
Speaker 13: I'm hopeful and I'm praying for you.
00:30:07
Speaker 10: I appreciate that. I definitely appreciate that's been a long ride. You know. God, obviously, if you're praying, you're praying to God. I pray Jesus and then yeah, yep, Well that tells me that that he's got plans and he's got to take care of it. He's been taking care of me for a long long time, so and he's got good, good plans for this.
00:30:35
Speaker 13: I have a good friend who always says, that's not odd, that's just God, and that's great. And I had another pastor who said, there are converging lines of destiny that God puts together from the beginning of time. And I really really believe that. But regardless of I never meet you face to face, I know where all I'll meet you.
00:30:55
Speaker 10: Oh yeah, we'll see each other up there, and I'll definitely we'll have me that's God. I'm going to use that. I get to preach pretty regularly a lot of people that made it, so I'm going to use that one for sure.
00:31:12
Speaker 13: Okay, all right, God bless you.
00:31:24
Speaker 3: We don't know if this knife is the one used at the crime scene. We don't know if the man who owned it was the person who assaulted Cheryl, threatened her baby, and attacks Scott. There's still forensic testing an investigation to be done. But here's what we do know. This document that Amanda found, the investigation into a license plate buried in the State Attorney's files, could be the opening that gives Kevin Herrick what he's never had a fair trial. Amanda's worked on so many cases where she know someone is innocent, but there's nothing that can win them another day in court. With Kevin, though, she's found evidence that really could make the difference. For the first time in decades, Are you hopeful for Kevin?
00:32:16
Speaker 1: I'm really hopeful. I'm really hopeful.
00:32:19
Speaker 2: I just want to fucking do something that helps actually get someone out of prison.
00:32:23
Speaker 1: Boar, Sorry, God, but I just want to do that.
00:32:28
Speaker 2: And this is the this is honestly the first time I've actually felt like I might actually do that.
00:32:48
Speaker 3: Hello, this is a pre paid call from.
00:32:51
Speaker 4: An nmate had a four nice Department of Corrections institutions.
00:32:55
Speaker 7: She accepts this call for a zero.
00:32:59
Speaker 3: Leo's been keeping his part of the deal he made with Kevin to never stop fighting for the one left behind. They talk on the phone almost every day, and Chrissy is often there watching her husband on the line with his best friend.
00:33:15
Speaker 11: The two of them when they're on the phone, what I've seen is that Kevin spends a lot of time supporting him and encouraging him.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: Dust Burger, what's going on?
00:33:26
Speaker 11: Brow And we got this and we got this. It's all about hope, hope, hope for each other.
00:33:32
Speaker 10: Well, I'm doing good, I reckon all things considered.
00:33:36
Speaker 11: One thing that's missing, I think is because they have thirty minutes it's recorded, they don't have the opportunity to share their deep, deep stuff that's missing. And I think that's where there's still this credible gratitude for what they have, but this intense longing that they are missing that they they uh, they cover up with the the support and the hope and and the silliness and that here's what's going on.
00:34:12
Speaker 10: They're taking Showers's two feet in front, screaming bigger and your.
00:34:24
Speaker 1: Why you're looking at it?
00:34:28
Speaker 10: That's my response.
00:34:29
Speaker 9: You have one.
00:34:32
Speaker 10: Kind of hate that woman.
00:34:34
Speaker 11: As soon as the phone clicks off his head, goes down every time.
00:34:37
Speaker 10: Every time, you keep your head up and keep doing what you're doing.
00:34:40
Speaker 3: Brother, I love you, Thank you for using global telling.
00:34:48
Speaker 11: So it's a good thing when they talk to each other, but also very very painful. And I would imagine that what happened to Kevin too, that he hangs up and I'm and he hangs up the phone and has to turn around and face here it is again.
00:35:18
Speaker 3: We will be following the new developments Kevin Herrick's case as this investigation continues to unfold. Stay tuned for more to come. Meanwhile, if you'd like to learn more about his case, please visit Kevinisnext dot com
Speaker 1: Most of the pis that I know are former cops.
00:00:05
Speaker 2: They're middle aged white dudes for the most part, right, and they got a cop vibe to them. And so depending on where you're going, who you're talking to, you don't necessarily want to talk to something it looks like a cop.
00:00:18
Speaker 3: This is doctor Amanda Lewis. She helps select cases for Georgetown's making an ex hoonery program where people in prison claiming innocence can have their convictions reinvestigated. These investigations aren't led by police or lawyers or private investigators. Instead, they're assigned to groups of undergrad students.
00:00:41
Speaker 2: That is one thing that makes the students so invaluable with reinvestigation.
00:00:46
Speaker 1: First of all, they're curious.
00:00:47
Speaker 2: They actually sometimes don't know a lot about these things, so they'll ask questions that I wouldn't think to ask, or they really don't understand and it so they allow people to explain more and talk more. They're not necessarily intimidating. Typically people want to talk, so that is usually helpful.
00:01:04
Speaker 3: A group of three students is assigned to investigate Kevin Herrick's case, along with a third year law student, Nick White, Amanda's husband.
00:01:13
Speaker 4: When I find something immediately go to like property records, I go to these things.
00:01:17
Speaker 1: She starts.
00:01:18
Speaker 4: She thinks in people more than I do. I think through documents, and she thinks through people.
00:01:25
Speaker 3: Can you describe like the difference in the energy that you bring to this case, and like what that's like working together, and just what strengths one of others have?
00:01:32
Speaker 1: Like how does that work between you? I think we have totally opposite She drives me nuts.
00:01:38
Speaker 4: I don't by throwing chaos into my carefully crafted folders.
00:01:42
Speaker 1: And yeah, no, it's true.
00:01:45
Speaker 3: I mean Amanda has a knack for getting to the bottom of a case through finding people who might know something, gotten.
00:01:51
Speaker 2: Really interested and first of all, just like boots on the ground, door knocking. I don't know what it's being from a small town. I love talking people. People just open up to me about their stuff. Maybe it's because I overshare.
00:01:59
Speaker 1: I don't know, but I've found a way that to make it really useful. I love that part of that.
00:02:04
Speaker 2: I love this.
00:02:05
Speaker 3: They'll work with three undergrads who will spend months digging into Kevin's case.
00:02:10
Speaker 2: It's a group project, right, and it is the most difficult group project anyone will ever work on. And I would say that, like in this particular group, it is an amazing group of students that works really well together and all have their own specific strengths and things that they bring to the table. Got obviously sweet baby Brett.
00:02:33
Speaker 5: My life's purpose is to work with incarcerated people and help them get back with the prison system stole from them.
00:02:38
Speaker 2: Who is a delight and just a really sweet and great young man.
00:02:44
Speaker 3: There's Ava Hi.
00:02:46
Speaker 6: My name is Ava Kaburat.
00:02:48
Speaker 1: She is really really smart. She was quieter at herst and.
00:02:53
Speaker 6: I'm really hoping to be a part of the Spring twenty twenty five cohort for Thing Making Any Sooner.
00:02:58
Speaker 7: Class one my name is Nina.
00:03:02
Speaker 2: Nina who was wonderful, very outspoken, very loud, like I mean, I am as well.
00:03:06
Speaker 7: I will try everything to get these people justice in a system that doesn't.
00:03:11
Speaker 8: Give it out.
00:03:14
Speaker 3: But when the students got their assignments, Nina wasn't eager to work on Kevin's case.
00:03:20
Speaker 7: I got assigned Kevin's case, and I remember the first day I was like, I want to switch off. I was like, I'm not taking this, I'm just not doing it. I just was really vehemently opposed to working on a sexual assault case. I always want to believe the victim, and I just I was like, I'm not taking this. I'm just not doing it.
00:03:41
Speaker 3: She even told Mark Howard, the co director of making an ex Hoonare, that she wanted a different.
00:03:47
Speaker 7: Case, and Mark said, well, this is the case you're working on, so you can drop the class or you can stand the case. So I said, you know what, let me do you one better. I'll read the case and I'll prove to you that he's guilty. It's all there, So let me read the case and prove to you that he's guilty. I got it. I just had no clue what I was getting myself into.
00:04:29
Speaker 3: Do you hear my madness?
00:04:34
Speaker 1: Laughter you.
00:04:40
Speaker 3: Sorrows down, sorrowing.
00:04:46
Speaker 1: Miss Ballly s.
00:05:04
Speaker 3: Yes, bone Valley Kevin is next Part two.
00:05:24
Speaker 7: There's no rule book, there's no right. Nobody says, here's the case. And then once you read the case, then talk to X Y Z person and Buba. No one gives you that shit. You have got to create a playbook.
00:05:39
Speaker 3: When Nina, Ava and Brett get started, one of the first things they do is read the trial transcript.
00:05:46
Speaker 7: We researched everything.
00:05:49
Speaker 3: The trial itself lasted only two days. There's not a whole lot of pages to go through, but the students aren't just reading. They're dissecting line by line, look looking for a clear timeline in the victim's accounts of what happened that night, and whether the pieces actually fit. The first witness called at trial is Cheryl Kevin's neighbor with the baby, who says she was sexually assaulted that night. She testifies that on the night of the attack, she was home alone with the baby while her boyfriend Scott was out. She went to bed, then woke to an intruder on top of her, pressing a sharp object to her neck. She says he threatened to hurt her or her baby if she didn't comply, and says he briefly forced his penis into her mouth. It was pitch black, she says, and she couldn't get a clear look at the attacker. Next on the stand is Scott Barfield. He says that after returning to the triplex that night, he was smoking a cigarette outside when he heard whimpering insiderushed in and fought with the assailant in the dark. During the struggle, Scott was stabbed twice in the chest, shallow wounds that left only minor injuries. The next part of Scott's testimony is hard to follow, but here's the best I can do to boil it down. Scott says the assailant tried to leave through the locked, sliding glass door, then exited out the front. Scott chased him down the block, over a fence, and into the parking lot of another complex. Bleeding and unwilling to confront him again, Scott crouched near a row of boats parked on trailers, trying to get a look at the man who had attacked him and his girlfriend. He thought he saw the man climb into a car. Scott says he memorized the license plate number and then ran back toward the triplex. By then, several neighbors had come outside after hearing Sheryl screams about the attack as she stood holding her baby. At first a skeptic, Nina studies the transcript, trying to follow Scott's testimony. As she reads, she sketched the diagram and labels everyone who is standing in the courtyard of the triplex. There were the victims, Eryl and her baby, missus Pori, Pat's mom, the woman on oxygen who Kevin was living with, Teresa, the young couple living in the other.
00:08:34
Speaker 7: Unit, Barbara and Dave Stewart, and one more person, Kevin's standing right there.
00:08:43
Speaker 3: But if Kevin was standing there when Scott returned, how could he also be the man Scott chased over a fence and saw getting into a car.
00:09:06
Speaker 9: Hey, y'all, it's Maggie. I'm here to tell you about a new show I've been working on for the past two years. It's called Graves County and it's an investigative series about the murder of a young mom in Kentucky and just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. Here is the trailer for Graves County.
00:09:31
Speaker 8: All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half truth is a whole lie.
00:09:36
Speaker 9: For almost a decade, the murder of an eighteen year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
00:09:51
Speaker 10: I'm telling you we know when we know.
00:09:55
Speaker 9: A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.
00:10:03
Speaker 1: Through sheer, persistence and nerve.
00:10:05
Speaker 10: This Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Current.
00:10:10
Speaker 9: My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
00:10:20
Speaker 5: I did not know her, and I did not kill her, or raid or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.
00:10:25
Speaker 11: They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poor guests on her.
00:10:33
Speaker 9: From love of for Good, This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame Marka.
00:10:44
Speaker 1: Y'all got to work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
00:10:53
Speaker 9: Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley Feed starting September seventeenth on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts, and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to LoVa for Good plus on Apple podcasts.
00:11:29
Speaker 3: One of the biggest issues with the theory that Kevin committed this crime is that there was someone with him all night who had no reason to lie about what she saw. Teresa Pori was essentially guarding the only way in and out of the apartment, the front door. In her deposition, she says Kevin came home that night then went into bed, and that she sat in the living room watching TV when she heard Cheryl screaming. She went into Kevin's room to wake him up. She says, there's there's no way he could have left without her knowing, and the layout of the apartment backs her up. The Pory's unit had three sliding glass doors that opened onto the back patio, one in Kevin's room, one in the living room, and one in Missus Pory's bedroom, but none of them offered a realistic escape room. The door to Kevin's room was jammed off its rails, blocked by furniture and construction supplies. If Kevin had used it, he would have had to drag it open and maneuver through obstacles silently and in seconds. The living room door was directly in missus Pory's line of sight as she sat on the couch watching TV, and the sliding door to missus Pory's bedroom was on the other side of the living room, meaning Kevin would have had to sneak right past her to use it. As missus Pory put it in her testimony, he was asleep when I went in there. That boy was asleep. There was no time for that boy to come in there to hop in bed. By the time I got from here to that bedroom, I would have seen him get in the bed. There was no time, because that's how fast I ran back to get him. For Scott's story to be true, Kevin would have had to leave the Pory's apartment without being seen or heard by Teresa. He'd have to walk around the building to Cheryl and Scott's apartment next door, attack Cheryl, fight with Scott, stab him, run out the front door, get chased by Scott a few blocks, sneak back into his bedroom, and pretend to be asleep again without Teresa noticing him. So now the students have to decide which makes more sense Scott's story that Kevin was responsible for the attacks or missus Pori's testimony that Kevin never left the apartment.
00:13:58
Speaker 7: Okay, let's walk the dog with me here.
00:14:03
Speaker 3: Nina started out wanting to prove Kevin guilty, but when she worked through the timeline and testimony, she realized the pieces didn't fit the way Scott said they did. Kevin supposedly ran everywhere, but all the evidence pointed to him never leaving the triplex. Missus Pori said he never went anywhere and there was no way he could have gotten in or out without her seeing him.
00:14:27
Speaker 7: Like, you can't walk the dog with me. The dog is still stationary because there's nothing to walk. Now, screw the timeline, right say, somehow he made it work.
00:14:38
Speaker 3: Even then, if Kevin attacked Cheryl and stab Scott, there should have been something left behind, some trace in the apartment pointing back to him.
00:14:49
Speaker 6: They collected hair, and they collected fingerprints from the crime scene. This is ava They were able to show that the hair didn't match Kevin's through micro analysis that they did.
00:15:01
Speaker 3: They also compared the bloody prints on the door from where the assailant tried to escape to Kevin's prince, and.
00:15:08
Speaker 6: They showed the fingerprints didn't match Kevin either. They a few of them matched the victim, and the rest of them were unidentified. None of the physical evidence matched Kevin.
00:15:17
Speaker 3: Nina may have been skeptical of Kevin at the start, but now based on the timeline and the evidence. She was questioning herself.
00:15:27
Speaker 7: I was like, crap, this guy might actually he may actually.
00:15:34
Speaker 3: As the students dug deeper, they realized there was so much here that seemed to point away from Kevin's guilt. Here's ava I.
00:15:43
Speaker 6: Think also another one of the issues with this case is that there are too many issues. There's a timeline in the physical evidence, and the you know, police interference, and the crappy attorney and all of this stuff and it.
00:15:56
Speaker 3: And then police misrepresented the evidence. Officers told the victims they'd found a bloody knife and clothes in Kevin's room, and that the bloody fingerprints on the sliding glass door were matched to Kevin. None of this was true, but it made a powerful impression at trial.
00:16:16
Speaker 6: We're inclined to believe the victim, especially in sexual assault cases, and the issue is that the identification of Kevin didn't actually originally come from the victim. It came from the police who told them falsely that they found a bloody knife and bloody clothing in Kevin's room, which was not true at the end of the day. But once you tell someone who's just been through a traumatic incident that you have a potential suspect, and all they want to do is resolve the case and figure out who did this and move beyond it. Then it's understandable in a way that they would fixate on that, and at that point you just can't remove that from their minds.
00:17:02
Speaker 3: In her deposition, Cheryl pointed to Kevin as her attacker. On cross examination, Kevin's lawyer asked a simple question.
00:17:12
Speaker 7: Your opinion as to who this was is based on what? And she says, they found a bloody knife in his room and his fingerprints on our door. That is the basis of why she believes Kevin did it, and that's a lie.
00:17:26
Speaker 12: There's so many points where somebody could have stopped this.
00:17:30
Speaker 3: This is Brett.
00:17:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:17:32
Speaker 12: The police could have stopped this, The judge could have stopped this, the prosecutor could have stopped this. So many people, the jury could have stopped this. It feels like it should be so much more difficult for this to happen, but then when you actually look at this, it just happened so easily.
00:17:50
Speaker 3: By the time they were ready to travel to Florida to investigate for themselves, the students had read everything they could get their hands on, and then came more.
00:17:59
Speaker 4: Right before this trip, the Innocence Project gave us over two thousand pages of documents.
00:18:05
Speaker 3: Yes, so we got Since Nick is advising the student group, he and Amanda take on the opposite of their usual roles. Nick heads to Florida to be on the ground with the undergrads, while Amanda stays behind to work through the mountain of documents.
00:18:20
Speaker 1: Documents.
00:18:21
Speaker 2: So, really, the night before your trip and the next day, I'm staying up.
00:18:25
Speaker 1: I'm also an I know, so I'm staying up till like three am, going through just to see what all there is. I'm like skipping.
00:18:30
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, the students are on the ground in Tampa, knocking on doors and visiting key locations in the case, not the kinds of places you'd ever find on the grounds of Georgetown University.
00:18:42
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we just went to Mon's Venus, which is the strip club where Patrick Pory and Felicia Pori both worked at.
00:18:54
Speaker 3: They also try to talk to anyone else who is still alive who might know something about this case.
00:19:00
Speaker 7: I'm really nervous.
00:19:03
Speaker 11: That's gonna be.
00:19:04
Speaker 7: I know that they're not gonna let us a night they will.
00:19:07
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're students looking into cases that have outstanding issues like here we have untested evidence and things like that. We're here to talk to you about your ex husband. See if you had any information for us.
00:19:25
Speaker 13: That's win somewhere to like, yeah, here, let's go.
00:19:28
Speaker 11: Back to that brand in the car.
00:19:31
Speaker 7: And so we just went to.
00:19:35
Speaker 1: Charly and Scott.
00:19:37
Speaker 7: Neither of them were home. We're gonna try again this evening.
00:19:41
Speaker 3: They investigate at the triplex.
00:19:45
Speaker 8: We just pulled up to the triplex. We have looked at photos of this triplex like forever, and we just like saw in person. Holy shit, I can't believe, like this is where Kevin like whole life has taken from him.
00:20:03
Speaker 3: And they try once again to make Scott's testimony line up with Kevin being the assailant.
00:20:09
Speaker 7: Okay, so he runs out through here, this is the fighting.
00:20:13
Speaker 4: Loss story through so he instead comes out this runs that.
00:20:20
Speaker 3: Way, but they can't make it work.
00:20:22
Speaker 1: Doesn't make sense.
00:20:33
Speaker 3: Back in Maryland, Amanda is working her way through this new stack of documents.
00:20:38
Speaker 1: And looking mostly focused on depositions and statements.
00:20:41
Speaker 2: But then I see in there a vehicle property report, but they have been number and a license plate. And we've known from the start of this case, that a license plate was yelled out and that we've never had the plate number.
00:20:53
Speaker 3: This has always been one of the more disturbing parts of Kevin's case. Scott says he told police about the life's plate number, and yet none of the officer's reports from that night mention a car or a plate. It says, if both vanished from police records, so where did that number go and who did it belong to? Then comes the most surprising part at trial. Scott says he made the whole story up. He says he already knew it was Kevin, but lied about the license plate to throw police off because he wanted to take revenge on Kevin himself. He's just been stabbed, his girlfriend has been sexually assaulted, his baby's life has been threatened, and his first instinct is to lie to the police. Also, when Scott runs back to the Triplex, he says he sees Kevin while Cheryl and her baby are also still there. If he really thought Kevin was the attacker all along, why not confront him? And then Scott goes to the hospital to get his minor injuries treated, but leave Cheryl and their baby standing there with Kevin. Still at the Triplex.
00:22:11
Speaker 7: That makes no sense.
00:22:15
Speaker 3: And now, thirty six years later, Amanda uncovers a document buried in the state Attorney's files attached to Kevin's case. It's a police report, an investigation into a license plate.
00:22:32
Speaker 1: I see this report, I'm like, what the hell is this? And I just see that one page and I get so excited, and I so I think.
00:22:41
Speaker 2: I called Nick immediately and I emailed it to all the students.
00:22:45
Speaker 1: I'm like, holy shit, is this the plate.
00:22:47
Speaker 3: Amanda immediately files a record's request with the Florida DMV on plate Easy five one one W and boom, the plate comes back to a nineteen seventy eight Dotson station wagon owned at the time by a man named Paul Fordett, who lived just down the road from the Triplex. She quickly punches for Debt's name into the Panellas County Clerk of Court criminal records database.
00:23:15
Speaker 1: Paul Fordett scroll down.
00:23:17
Speaker 2: One criminal charge shows up on their sexual battery nineteen seventy nine, and I was like, holy shit. I was like, I'm like, I'm fucking so excited. I'm like so and so then I start looking at.
00:23:28
Speaker 1: Those pages again.
00:23:29
Speaker 3: It looks to Amanda like the license plate Scott was screaming out that night. The car he said he initially tracked to the assailant was registered to a man who lived in the neighborhood, a man who had already been charged with sexual battery long before Kevin was ever accused in this case. Amanda eventually pulls the details on those charges.
00:23:51
Speaker 2: Essentially, he had been sexually abusing a family member for four to five years and you know, escalating in that behavior and reported to you know, his wife at the time, and she reported the police. He pretty much confessed like that same day to doing it.
00:24:11
Speaker 3: And that discovery set off a cascade of questions.
00:24:16
Speaker 2: For her limited to that because I started thinking, Okay, would somebody that assaulted a child family member be the same type of person that committed this crime. So I started looking back in the documents and the details of the case, like what did he say, how did he use the weapon?
00:24:32
Speaker 1: All of those things, And to me, I never.
00:24:34
Speaker 2: Thought that this person who attacked Cheryl planned to stab her or the baby, but they clearly were going to use that as a threat.
00:24:44
Speaker 3: And then she starts thinking about the legal issues and what this single document could mean for Kevin's case. Amanda now sees that police did investigate a license plate, but it was never included with the records turned over to Kevin's defense. Instead, it sat buried in the state Attorney's office, so Kevin's lawyers never had a chance to see it. For Kevin's defense, this piece of paper could have pointed to an alternate suspect and an alternate theory of the crime, evidence that could have raised reasonable doubt in front of a jury. Under the law, withholding that kind of material is a Brady violation when prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that could help the defense. And the question now was what were Amanda and Nick going to do about it?
00:25:34
Speaker 4: Which she started doing is diving in, like, Okay, who can I find who might talk to us? And so she started diving in to his relatives.
00:25:43
Speaker 3: And then she wants to know more about this Paul for Debt guy and whether people around him thought he was capable of committing a crime like this. Amanda searches online and finds that for Debt died in twenty twenty three, but his Facebook page still shows two friends. To Amanda, one looks like a bot, the other is a woman living in rural central Florida.
00:26:09
Speaker 1: And this lady just looks like a really nice lady. She is in Teddy.
00:26:13
Speaker 2: She has all these animals, all these dogs, and like we're big animal people.
00:26:16
Speaker 1: So I'm like, this lady, I don't like something about this. I feel like she's gonna help No, it's good. Well, it's what's so crazy too, is I saw.
00:26:33
Speaker 2: You online before I even had all the puzzle pieces, and I'm like, she's gonna have somehow.
00:26:38
Speaker 1: I know she's gonna help us like this.
00:26:40
Speaker 3: Amanda eventually reached the woman for privacy we'll call her Shirley. On their first phone call, Amanda asked what she knew about the man who owned the car at the time of the attack. Shirley said she actually lived on the same property as him.
00:26:56
Speaker 13: For a few years. My husband dealt with him. I didn't want to deal with him, but then when my husband passed away, I started to be the one that I would go to him and say, I'm going grocery shopping, do you need anything. I'm always been the peacemaker mediator. I'll handle this, I'll handle that. So that's how I got to know him. I never got to know him like well, because he had no people skills. None. If I were to label him, I would say he was either brain damaged or just the most selfish person I've ever met in my life. So that's how I got to know him.
00:27:38
Speaker 3: After sharing that, Shirley told Amanda something surprising. After Paul died, she ended up with all of his possessions.
00:27:47
Speaker 1: Who wants to deal with this?
00:27:48
Speaker 13: And it was junk. I mean I went through it a few times. I looked around to see if there was anything of value, but he was junk.
00:27:56
Speaker 3: But Amanda had a feeling there could be something valuable and his belonging, maybe fingerprints they could compare with those collected from SHERYLN. Scott's sliding glass door. So she and Nick went to Shirley's and I went with them. I mean they also brought along Cliff Blum, a former detective turned private investigator, to photograph anything that might serve as evidence.
00:28:20
Speaker 1: So you packed all this stuff up and brought it over here.
00:28:23
Speaker 2: Today, and that's fir yes.
00:28:24
Speaker 13: And so this stuff I couldn't find a bag pig en up for it, So I figured if I use gloves and I put it in the cardboard box, that's fine. And then the rest of it is. You could see I found some big party bags. Amazing, you can take all of this stuff with you. So when I first got contacted by Amanda and I started looking around, and she specifically said, if you see anything like a knife? Well, I was like, oh, yeah, there's a pen knife somewhere.
00:28:57
Speaker 3: Shirley found the knife among Paul's below longings. The knife is small, precise, almost like a scalpel, the same kind of weapon described in the attack.
00:29:09
Speaker 13: Well, this knife has been sitting on the desk, and it has been sitting on that desk all that time, but I picked it up several times.
00:29:15
Speaker 3: Cliff, the former detective, starts taking photos.
00:29:19
Speaker 1: Of the knife.
00:29:20
Speaker 3: I mean, how would you describe that knife? Is that there's a name for that kind of.
00:29:26
Speaker 10: Knife, Cliff, this is I mean, it's it's it's old. I'll tell you that it's it's pretty much just a two bladed pocket knife, about six inches long. There's a stand.
00:29:40
Speaker 3: While we were there, Kevin called Nick, who headed the phone to Shirley. Kevin, like Leo Schofield, is a deeply spiritual man, with a theology degree of his own.
00:29:52
Speaker 13: I'm good.
00:29:53
Speaker 10: I certainly want to tell you thank you very much for everything that you've been doing. Again to tell you how how important it might say.
00:30:02
Speaker 13: I'm hopeful and I'm praying for you.
00:30:07
Speaker 10: I appreciate that. I definitely appreciate that's been a long ride. You know. God, obviously, if you're praying, you're praying to God. I pray Jesus and then yeah, yep, Well that tells me that that he's got plans and he's got to take care of it. He's been taking care of me for a long long time, so and he's got good, good plans for this.
00:30:35
Speaker 13: I have a good friend who always says, that's not odd, that's just God, and that's great. And I had another pastor who said, there are converging lines of destiny that God puts together from the beginning of time. And I really really believe that. But regardless of I never meet you face to face, I know where all I'll meet you.
00:30:55
Speaker 10: Oh yeah, we'll see each other up there, and I'll definitely we'll have me that's God. I'm going to use that. I get to preach pretty regularly a lot of people that made it, so I'm going to use that one for sure.
00:31:12
Speaker 13: Okay, all right, God bless you.
00:31:24
Speaker 3: We don't know if this knife is the one used at the crime scene. We don't know if the man who owned it was the person who assaulted Cheryl, threatened her baby, and attacks Scott. There's still forensic testing an investigation to be done. But here's what we do know. This document that Amanda found, the investigation into a license plate buried in the State Attorney's files, could be the opening that gives Kevin Herrick what he's never had a fair trial. Amanda's worked on so many cases where she know someone is innocent, but there's nothing that can win them another day in court. With Kevin, though, she's found evidence that really could make the difference. For the first time in decades, Are you hopeful for Kevin?
00:32:16
Speaker 1: I'm really hopeful. I'm really hopeful.
00:32:19
Speaker 2: I just want to fucking do something that helps actually get someone out of prison.
00:32:23
Speaker 1: Boar, Sorry, God, but I just want to do that.
00:32:28
Speaker 2: And this is the this is honestly the first time I've actually felt like I might actually do that.
00:32:48
Speaker 3: Hello, this is a pre paid call from.
00:32:51
Speaker 4: An nmate had a four nice Department of Corrections institutions.
00:32:55
Speaker 7: She accepts this call for a zero.
00:32:59
Speaker 3: Leo's been keeping his part of the deal he made with Kevin to never stop fighting for the one left behind. They talk on the phone almost every day, and Chrissy is often there watching her husband on the line with his best friend.
00:33:15
Speaker 11: The two of them when they're on the phone, what I've seen is that Kevin spends a lot of time supporting him and encouraging him.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: Dust Burger, what's going on?
00:33:26
Speaker 11: Brow And we got this and we got this. It's all about hope, hope, hope for each other.
00:33:32
Speaker 10: Well, I'm doing good, I reckon all things considered.
00:33:36
Speaker 11: One thing that's missing, I think is because they have thirty minutes it's recorded, they don't have the opportunity to share their deep, deep stuff that's missing. And I think that's where there's still this credible gratitude for what they have, but this intense longing that they are missing that they they uh, they cover up with the the support and the hope and and the silliness and that here's what's going on.
00:34:12
Speaker 10: They're taking Showers's two feet in front, screaming bigger and your.
00:34:24
Speaker 1: Why you're looking at it?
00:34:28
Speaker 10: That's my response.
00:34:29
Speaker 9: You have one.
00:34:32
Speaker 10: Kind of hate that woman.
00:34:34
Speaker 11: As soon as the phone clicks off his head, goes down every time.
00:34:37
Speaker 10: Every time, you keep your head up and keep doing what you're doing.
00:34:40
Speaker 3: Brother, I love you, Thank you for using global telling.
00:34:48
Speaker 11: So it's a good thing when they talk to each other, but also very very painful. And I would imagine that what happened to Kevin too, that he hangs up and I'm and he hangs up the phone and has to turn around and face here it is again.
00:35:18
Speaker 3: We will be following the new developments Kevin Herrick's case as this investigation continues to unfold. Stay tuned for more to come. Meanwhile, if you'd like to learn more about his case, please visit Kevinisnext dot com
