Episode 7: Revival

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. New episode every Wednesday. Use #TheAlleyPod to share your thoughts on the the latest episode as we uncover the truth behind DC's 8th and H Case.

Two decades later, the Catherine Fuller murder case is cracked open again—with the support of a dogged reporter, the Innocence Project, and a team of expert lawyers. And in a moment of hope, it goes all the way to the Supreme Court, where only 2 percent of cases are accepted.

Voices & Sounds Heard in this Episode

• Patrice Gaines, former Washington Post reporter
• Shawn Armbrust, Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project executive director
• Don Salzman, attorney involved in post-conviction proceedings
• Barry Pollack, attorney involved in post-conviction proceedings
• Tom Dybdahl, former DC public defender and author of When Innocence Is Not Enough
• Keith Alexander, Washington Post reporter who was present for post-conviction proceedings
• Audio from the Supreme Court including Justice Roberts and Justice Ginsberg
• John Williams, the attorney who argued the case at the Supreme Court
• Samantha Culp, producer of Netflix’s The Confession Tapes
• Kelly Loudenberg, director of Netflix’s The Confession Tapes
  

Transcript:

Episode 7: Revival

Gabrielle Sweet: The following story contains descriptions of violence, coercion, and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.

Narrator (Shannon Lynch): This is The Alley: DC’s 8th and H Case. My name is Shannon Lynch.

Episode 7: Revival

The important role Patrice Gaines plays in the 8th and H story cannot be overstated. But before she got involved in this case, she had an incredible life journey.

Patrice Gaines: When I was 21, I was busted with drugs and charged with possession of heroin, with intent to distribute and possession of a needle and syringe, which are both felonies. I had a drug habit. I was fortunate I didn't have to go to prison, but I spent part of a summer in jail. I was a convicted felon, which made life more difficult.

Narrator: Gaines was able to beat addiction and flourished professionally. She was accepted into a journalism program at Berkeley, and went on to land a dream job as a reporter at the Washington Post in 1985:

Patrice Gaines: My time at the Washington Post was quite wonderful in many ways. It was a dream come true. You know, it was like the Washington Post and the New York Times were the best. So to land at the Washington Post and to accomplish this was, you know, great and significant in my life. And at the same time, it was a lot different than it is today. The lowest-paid reporters were Black reporters and Black women reporters. And I would later find out that I was the lowest of them all because I didn't have a college degree and it allowed them to pay me less.

Narrator: Despite the hardships she faced, Patrice dove in head first into her new job. One of her first assignments was acting as a researcher, assisting journalists at the Post that were writing about the 8th and H trial.

Patrice Gaines: When I got to the post in January of 1985, the police were beginning to arrest the people who were charged in the murder of Catherine Fuller. So I was eventually assigned to go out into the community to find out who are these young defendants and to find out what the community was like and what the people in the community thought.

Narrator: Once she started talking to the people that lived around 8th and H, she started to have her doubts about the government’s gang attack story.

Patrice Gaines: And this murder supposedly occurred during broad daylight between four and six. And where it happened, it was not a secluded spot. And so one of the things that struck me when I talked to one of the store owners on a street, he said he had dogs in the back yard and his yard faced the alley. And if there were people out there, the dogs would bark, and there was no barking. Also, there were houses that their backs faced the alley and people would have heard people would have seen that many people. Before I knew anything about these young people. I thought, well, if they were going to beat somebody for money, they would go to a neighborhood where people were more likely to have money. It was as if the police said, well, there's just something wrong with them and they just did it for sport. It became like animals, you know. So none of that made sense to me.

Narrator: She also took note of how the people investigating the case were affecting the gang narrative being fed to the public.

Patrice Gaines: Now, these detectives were not familiar with that neighborhood, and they were dependent on this Officer Gossage then to school them, you could say, on who would be suspicious in the neighborhood. And so he already had his own prejudices. When I went out there, one of the things that struck me was that all the young people were petrified because they thought they might be next to be arrested and charged because they had been threatened. It was either you become a witness or you become a defendant.

Narrator: Although she felt like there was reason to push back on the government’s theory, Patrice wasn’t in a position of power to write about it. At the time, she was working as a researcher for more senior journalists. She’d likely risk her new job if she tried to challenge the Post’s official telling of the crime. When the trial came to a close and the verdicts were read, she was left deeply disturbed.

Patrice Gaines: For months, I could not think about anything at night as I'd fall asleep at except these verdicts, like how could this happen? Over the years, I tried to put it out of my mind because I really felt like it would drive me crazy if I stayed in that place of where I felt like I couldn't do anything about it. You know, it was done now, and so I needed to accept that and move on.

Narrator: Ms. Gaines worked at the Post for 15 more years after the conclusion of the trial. The 8th and H case continued to gnaw at her throughout her tenure. She couldn’t shake the feeling that part of the story was missing. In the mid 90s, she received a sign it was time to examine the case again.

Patrice Gaines: I got a letter from Chris Turner, one of the young guys in this case, that I was invited to look at it again. When I heard from Chris, it was almost like a dam broke and the flood came because all of my doubt just came like it was fresh again. And I realized enough years have passed for me to be a smarter reporter and that maybe there was something I could do. And I thought, well, why don't I also revisit some of the witnesses and the police? At one point when I talked to some police officers, they mentioned the name of a guy, James McMillan, and I heard his name a couple of times. They said, oh, you know, James McMillan, the guy that killed the young lady on Capitol Hill.

Narrator: James McMillan is the man that William Freeman and Jackie Tylie identified running from the scene of Mrs. Fuller’s murder. At this point, Gaines didn’t know that McMillan had been spotted at the crime scene, because the police records she’d been given were heavily redacted. Nonetheless, the information she was able to piece together portrayed him as a strong alternative perpetrator.

As we discussed in episode 2, shortly after Mrs. Fuller was murdered, McMillan was charged with the brutal robberies and beatings of two other middle-aged women in the same neighborhood. The detectives on the Fuller case didn’t pull McMillan into their investigation because he didn’t fit neatly into the gang attack theory they’d already started building a case around. McMillan was sent to prison for 8 years for the assaults he committed in 1984.

Just months after McMillan was released in 1993, he committed a murder eerily similar to Mrs. Fuller’s. At about 8 pm on September 15th in 1993, a young woman was walking home from work when she was shoved and dragged into an alley less than three blocks from 8th and H. Minutes later, 2 men walked into the alley to get their parked car and witnessed McMillan get up off the ground and run away. The young woman was in a coma for three days before she tragically passed away from her injuries. Her body showed blunt force trauma to the head and on one side of her torso. The injuries were also consistent with being dragged over several yards on concrete. Furthermore, the victim’s body had significant injuries in the anal region. Just like Mrs. Fuller, she’d been forcefully sodomized. Sodomy was definitely part of McMillan’s MO. Back in 1993, one of his girlfriends divulged to a reporter that all he was interested in was oral and anal sex.

McMillan was later convicted for this 1993 murder that mirrored Catherine Fuller’s murder. He’s still serving out a life sentence in Virginia. I wrote to him and got a response, but after I told him I was doing a podcast on the 8th and H case and wanted to give him the opportunity to share his side of the story, the letters stopped coming.

This information about James McMillian wasn’t the only thing Patrice Gaines found during her investigation in the late 90s.

Patrice Gaines: I had discovered not only James McMillan but this other guy, James Blue.

Narrator: Gaines uncovered the statement Ammie Davis made to police about seeing James Blue in the alley on the day of the murder. For some reason – maybe by mistake – this part of the police record hadn’t been redacted. Now, Gaines had identified two strong alternative suspects: James McMillian and James Blue.

In all, Gaines spent six years tracking down and interviewing people connected to the case, including the detectives, former prosecutor Jerry Goren, and those who testified on behalf of the government at trial.

She hoped to publish all of the information she’d collected, but the Washington Post didn’t allow her to come out with her story in its entirety. This was part of the reason why she left the Post in 2001. But she refused to let the story die. After a chance meeting with a celebrity, Gaines was able to get the attention of The Innocence Project, which works to exonerate innocent people:

Patrice Gaines: So I sent the article and I sent it along with a letter signed by Danny Glover, the actor. I had been at a dinner with him, with some other friends who were social justice activists and talking about the case and asked if he would, you know, write a letter of support. And he said yes.

Narrator: After receiving the letter from Patrice Gaines, The Innocence Project decided to take on the case in 2005. They built a team of lawyers from various top law firms in the DC area. Now, all the imprisoned men could do was pray for a miracle.

Part 2: Post-Conviction Proceedings

Shawn Armbrust: The Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project is a nonprofit organization that works to prevent and correct the conviction of innocent people in D.C., Maryland and Virginia.

Narrator: Shawn Armbrust has served as the executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project since the early 2000s.

Shawn Armbrust: I learned about the Fuller case very shortly after I started work at the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project back in July of 2005. At the time, I was the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project's only employee, but prior to my starting, people involved with the Project had decided that this case was really compelling and that we should help find lawyers for some of the people who did not still have lawyers.

Narrator: During the course of their investigation, they dug even further into the research Patrice Gaines had started by looking at James Blue and James McMillan as alternative suspects. But unlike Patrice, the lawyers were given access to unredacted police records. They also got their hands on prosecutor notes from the trial. What they found was shocking.

It turns out Ammie Davis’ statement about James Blue hadn’t gotten lost in the shuffle. The prosecutor’s team actually did a follow up interview with Davis. They independently decided that her statement was not important enough to share with the defense lawyers. Just weeks later, Blue murdered her.

Additionally, the Innocence Project found the record of William Freeman and Jackie Tylie positively identifying McMillian as the young man running from the crime scene.

Armed with this information, The Innocence Project team initiated what is called post-conviction proceedings. Don Salzman, one of the attorneys who was on the defendants’ team during this era, explains:

Don Salzman: So it's something that comes after the trial and the direct appeal that people in the general public sort of understand. You know, if someone gets convicted at a trial, then they have a right to appeal. But there's a whole process that comes after that, and it's called the post-conviction process. And it has different names in different places. So in DC, we brought a post-conviction proceeding. We brought claims that our client's constitutional rights were violated during their trial and that they didn't have a fair trial. And we believed we knew at that point who did commit the crime.

Narrator: The team of lawyers representing the men from the 8th and H case were going to present all of the evidence they’d collected to a judge. The goal was to convince said judge that the men deserved a new trial. They argued that the government broke the Brady Rule by hiding evidence highly favorable to the defense, and therefore, the defendants didn’t have a fair trial back in 1985. They had a new trial hearing in 2012 in front of Judge Fredrick Weisberg in DC Superior Court.

Don Salzman: The Brady claims that the lawyers brought to court were based on investigative reporting work that Patrice Gaines, a Washington Post reporter, had done on this case.

Narrator: This time around, the Innocence Project lawyers were able to present James McMillan as a strong alternative perpetrator.

Don Salzman: James McMillan was a young man with a very troubled background who lived in the neighborhood near eighth and H street. In fact, he had moved into a home that was less than a block from the garage where Catherine Fuller was murdered. He was a violent young man. James McMillan was seen on the day of Catherine Fuller's murder several times on that day, acting suspiciously. The first time he was seen, he was seen walking back and forth on H Street as if he was casing a crime that he was thinking about committing. And then later in the day after a street vendor found her body, he and I believe two other witnesses saw James McMillan standing just outside the garage acting suspiciously. And as the first police officer drove up to the scene, James McMillan ran off and it appeared that James McMillan was trying to hide something under his coat. And that was a critical fact because the weapon that was used to sodomized Catherine Fuller, which was described as something like a pipe, was never found, wasn't at the scene. So someone brutalized Catherine Fuller and then took with them the object that they sodomized her with. For all those reasons, James McMillan was, and is, a powerful alternate suspect. And in fact, in my opinion, he's the person who very likely committed this crime.

Narrator: During the hearing, the team of lawyers were able to question many of the key players from the 1985 trial, including the detectives and lead prosecutor Jerry Goren.

Barry Pollack, one of the defendant's lawyers, directly asked prosecutor Jerry Goren about the evidence he hid in 1985.

Barry Pollack: In the cross-examination of Mr. Goren, he conceded that he had not turned over to the defense information that would have suggested that it was a single participant. And he justified that by saying he didn't think that information was credible because it was inconsistent with their belief that it was this large gang attack. But of course, that's precisely the reason they should have turned it over. It was inconsistent with the government's theory.

Narrator: Under oath, in court, former prosecutor Jerry Goren confessed to hiding evidence from the defense expressly because it contradicted his case. Goren wasn’t reprimanded in any way.

A couple of the expert witnesses the defense lawyers put on the stand had very interesting information to share about the injuries Mrs. Fuller sustained. Thomas Dybdahl told me about the information violent crime scene analyst Larry McCann shared with the court.

Thomas Dybdahl: The expert witness hired by the appellate lawyers testified that the injuries were consistent with one or two attackers because they were fairly localized, that they were inflicted by one or two people, not 15 people all around her who would be kicking and hitting her in all different spots because the injuries were localized in a couple of areas. I mean, they were bad, but they weren't all over her body.

Narrator: Another expert witness, Dr. Richard Callery, the Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Delaware, explained the extreme rarity of sodomy in sexual assault crimes. Here’s Dybdahl again recounting the data Dr. Callery presented.

Thomas Dybdahl: What he testified was that even in rape murders, anal sodomy is extremely rare, happening in less than 1% of rape murders, which makes it highly unusual. And the fact is that we know after he was released from prison, James Mcmillan, while he was still in the halfway house, committed a horrible rape sodomy murder of a 22-year-old woman in an alley just blocks from eighth and age. And the fact that that happens in less than 1% of those cases certainly is just one more powerful piece of evidence that James McMillan was the one who killed and violated Mrs. Fuller.

Narrator: Furthermore, Calvin Alston and Derrick Bennett made appearances in the hearing. Under oath, the government’s two star witnesses from the original trial admitted that they’d lied in their testimonies in 1985. They recanted their original statements entirely.

The fact that he was partially responsible for sending away several of his friends for life haunted Derrick. He recounted, “when I was in prison serving my sentence, I used to cry in my cell about what I did when I testified. I was ashamed that I had stooped so low as to get people who were probably innocent locked away for the rest of their lives.”

Here’s my colleague Morell Mackey reading what Derrick Bennet expressed in a signed affidavit:

Morell Mackey: I lied when I testified. I did not see anyone attack Ms. Fuller, or see anything related to her assault and murder; my testimony about the assault on her was untrue. I did not get a ring from Ms. Fuller that day. As far as I know, none of the defendants had anything to do with killing Ms. Fuller.

Narrator: Derrick added that the police:

Morell Mackey: Told me what I should say about what happened, and what I should say about who did what. They told me that I needed to say that I played some small role in what happened to Mrs. Fuller to make my story more believable, so that’s what I did.

Narrator: Calvin Alston also signed an affidavit recanting his statements made in 1985. Here’s my colleague Joe Wilkes reading that document:

Joe Wilkes: I lied when I testified that I witnessed any part of the attack and murder of Mrs. Fuller, as I was not in the park or the alley by H Street that afternoon, and I never saw anything with respect to the attack and murder of Mrs. Fuller. I provided false testimony in exchange for being able to enter a guilty plea to a second-degree murder charge. I was afraid that if I did not testify to the facts they provided me, I would be convicted, receive a much harsher sentence, and be sent to jail for a very long time.

Narrator: Keith Alexander, a court reporter for the Washington Post, sat in on these proceedings. He told me what he remembers from his vantage point.

Keith Alexander: I wrote stories over several days that looked at testimony from a variety of people who were involved in the arrests and the conviction of these men, such as the lead prosecutor at the time, because the defense attorneys were arguing that the prosecutor withheld evidence, withheld key evidence that another person was actually seen at the crime by witnesses and he withheld that information. Now, that's big because they can't do that. Prosecutors are not allowed to do that. Judge Frederick Weisberg eventually ruled that there was not enough evidence for a new trial, to grant a new trial.

Part 3: SCOTUS

After losing in the hearing for a new trial, the team appealed the decision to the DC Court of Appeals. They also lost there. The final stop was to take the case to the Supreme Court. The lawyers working on the case didn’t think this was very likely to happen, though. The Supreme Court agrees to take on only about 2% of the cases that are sent to them each year. Here’s attorney Barry Pollack again.

Barry Pollack: This was a case where we had lost in the trial court. We had lost in the Court of Appeals. And seeking review from the Supreme Court really was the ultimate Hail Mary. We were out of options at that point, but I don't think any of us seriously believed that the Supreme Court would take the case. The Supreme Court tends to take cases that are purely legal issues, not factual issues. Cases where the different circuits around the country have reached inconsistent conclusions. None of that was present here, and so none of us thought the Supreme Court would take the case. And when the Supreme Court did, I think all of us did a 180 from feeling very pessimistic, to very optimistic.

Narrator: It turned out that the 8th and H case was part of that 2%. The Supreme Court agreed to review the case. The defendants' team of lawyers were headed to the highest court in the land. In a brief, they laid out all of the evidence to support their claim that had the Brady material been disclosed, the outcome of the trial could’ve been different.

It’s important to note here that the only question in this case that the Supreme Court was considering was whether there was reasonable probability that the hidden evidence could have been enough to change the outcome of the trial. Nothing about the police interrogation tactics played into this whatsoever.

Chief Justice (Supreme Court audio): We'll hear argument first this morning in case 15 1503 Turner versus United States.

Narrator: On March 29th, 2017, attorney John Williams presented the argument on behalf of the defendants.

John Williams (Supreme Court audio): Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court. In Brady versus Maryland, this court established the now familiar principle that the prosecution must disclose to the defense all favorable and material information. This case involves a clear violation of that principle.

Narrator: In January of 2023, John told me about this experience. He remembers it as being nerve-wracking, but exciting.

John Williams: The Supreme Court is unique in that when you're actually there at the podium, you are remarkably close to the Justices. It is really kind of shocking. And even though I sat at the counsel table several times at that point, that was my first time at the podium. And it was really kind of amazing to be that close to the Justices and arguing to them.

Narrator: Almost immediately, Williams was hit with questions from several of the Justices. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was concerned that the defense attorneys in 1985 might not have taken on the alternate perpetrator option even if they had known about James McMillan and James Blue.

Justice Ginsberg (Supreme Court audio): Would they all have to agree to go this route if they had the information? If it was turned over as Brady material, some might still say I'd rather go with “not me, maybe them” instead of the alternate perpetrator.

John Williams (Supreme Court audio): Yes, Justice Ginsburg. First, let me say, I don't think they would have all had to do it. It would be enough if a substantial number did it. But let me further add, I think they all would have done it. And the best evidence for that is that Michele Roberts, who is a leading criminal defense lawyer in the city at the time and was until very recently, she also had one of the weakest cases against her client, a case so weak that the government now says it is perfectly logical that he was acquitted. And she testified in our post-conviction hearing that if she had been aware of the McMillan information, she would have pursued an alternative perpetrator defense.

Narrator: I asked John how he felt leaving the Supreme Court that day.

John Williams: You know, the questions were more hostile than I was hoping for, and I realized that it was going to be tough. And so then my my lasting memory coming out of that, though, was as we were leaving the courthouse, how happy so many of my colleagues in the defense group were, how happy in particular Chris Turner was, even though I was very worried that we'd lost. And I think everybody, at least within our Williams and Connolly team was worried that we had lost or were going to lose. But seeing how happy the rest of the teams were was really comforting on one level and also amazing on another, because it underscored to me how important it was just to have been heard.

Part 4: Netflix

Also in 2017 the Netflix show, The Confession Tapes, was in production. The show investigates cases where people convicted of murder claim their confessions were coerced. The Confession Tapes were able to document the Supreme Court chapter of this story.

I spoke with one of the show’s producers, Samantha Culp. Here’s what she told me about why they found the 8th and H case so intriguing.

Samantha Culp: I mean, I think one thing that stood out very clearly from the start was this absurd, but all too common leap that the police made right away at the very beginning about, oh, these kids who hang around here were a gang. And so this theory, the theory before any evidence and then ignoring all kinds of leads that were outside of that theory, the outrageousness of that was something that grabbed us right away. It was so horrifying, but also made the story feel like extra important to tell.

Narrator: I also spoke with Kelly Loudenberg, the director of The Confession Tapes series. After examining a bunch of false confession cases, she said there were some common patterns she’s noticed.

Kelly Loundenberg: One of the telltale signs how you can know is like if they're getting the answers right, only when you're fact feeding and when they're getting those parts of it right, but everything else wrong. And I mean, I was you know, Sam and I were talking yesterday, there’s the lack of forensic evidence. There's a just a lack of other evidence or that evidence is really shaky and doesn't add up or make sense at all.

Narrator: This is exactly what we saw in the 8th and H case with the so-called “witnesses”. They were all able to get the broad facts right – like confirming the attack was made by a large group – but they all got major objective facts wrong. Their statements also varied in key ways from one another, like who led the attack, who was in the alley, and who committed the sodomy. Furthermore, there was not a single piece of forensic evidence that tied any of the accused to the crime scene.

Kelly told me about another common element in the many false confession cases she’s looked at.

Kelly Loudenberg: Other reasons somebody might want to confess is they just want to get out of the room. They're promised that things will get better if they just confess. There's a sense of desperation after somebody in shock from losing a loved one, sleep deprived, hungry, cold. They'll blast the A.C., you know, they just want to get out of there. They think if they confess, they can just go home. And we saw that a lot, too, that the conditions were just so awful that they wanted to make it stop.

Narrator: This is eerily similar to what we heard over and over again from Calvin Alston, Cliff Yarborough, and Derrick Bennett. Under the threat of life in prison, going after their family members, or physical violence, they were desperate to make the interrogation process stop. As young men very unfamiliar with the law, they thought if they lied and placed themselves at the scene like the police encouraged them to do, then the police would help them. But of course, that was far from the truth.

Part 5: Decision

On June 22, 2017, the Supreme Court published their decision for Turner v. United States. John Williams remembers it as a tense day filled with mixed emotions:

John Williams: I remember we were listening live, I believe, to the audio of the releasing of opinions. As soon as I heard that it was Justice Breyer reading the opinion. I had two emotions happen simultaneously. Half of me thought, oh, we may have won. Then the other half, for some reason thought, No, it's bad that it's Justice Breyer. And of course, it would have been so much better to have won. And it bothers me to this day that we didn't win.

Narrator: The vote was 6-2. At the time, one spot was open on the Court, which is why there were only 8 votes as opposed to the regular 9. Justice Breyer wrote the opinion for the majority. He was joined by Justices Thomas, Alito, Kennedy, Sotomayor, and Roberts. Here’s my colleague Lee Drutman reading a passage from the majority opinion:

Lee Drutman: The Government does not contest petitioners’ claim that the withheld evidence was favorable to the accused. Petitioners and the Government, however, do contest the materiality of the undisclosed Brady information. Evidence is ‘material’ within the meaning of Brady when there is a reasonable probability that had the evidence been disclosed, the result of the proceeding would have been different.

Narrator: Justices Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsberg were the only dissenters. Here’s my colleague Jodi Narde reading an excerpt from the dissenting opinion Justice Kagan wrote.

Jodi Narde: Consider two criminal cases. In the first, the government accuses ten defendants of acting together to commit a vicious murder and robbery. At trial, each defendant accepts that the attack occurred almost exactly as the government describes—contending only that he wasn’t part of the rampaging group. The defendants thus undermine each other’s arguments at every turn. In the second case, the government makes the same arguments as before. But this time, all of the accused adopt a common defense, built around an alternative account of the crime. Armed with new evidence that someone else perpetrated the murder, the defendants vigorously dispute the government’s gang attack narrative and challenge the credibility of its investigation. The question this case presents is whether such a unified defense, relying on evidence unavailable in the first scenario, had a “reasonable probability” – less than a preponderance – of shifting even one juror’s vote.

The Government avoided the case it most feared—the one in which the defendants acted jointly to show that a man known to assault women like Fuller committed her murder. The difference between the two cases lay in the government’s files—evidence of obvious relevance that prosecutors nonetheless chose to suppress. I think it could have mattered to the trial’s outcome. For that reason, I respectfully dissent.

Narrator: The group was beyond heart-broken. Yet again, the justice system let them down. They’d exhausted every option to clear their names...or, almost every option.

Shawn Armbrust: In a state, you would go to your governor for a pardon. But in the District of Columbia, you have to go to the president.

Narrator: That’s next time on The Alley: DC’s 8th and H Case.

Maika Moulite: This podcast is dedicated in memory of Catherine Fuller. Our host is Shannon Lynch. Our executive producers are Jason Stewart and Shannon Lynch. This podcast was recorded at New America Studios and Creative Underground. The cover art is by Samantha Webster. Editorial and media support from Jodi Narde, Molly Martin and Joe Wilkes. Audio editing and mixing by Shannon Lynch. Social Media directed by me, Maika Moulite. Script editing and fact-checking by Thomas Dybdahl and Charla Freeland. A very special thank you to Patrice Gaines for keeping this story alive for decades and for supporting this project throughout production. Please subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen and be sure to follow New America on all platforms.