Previously on Bear Brook Season 2, A True Crime Story.
Basically said to me, all kinds of promises have been made to him, and I trust Roland Lammy explicitly, and we got into kind of a heated discussion. I never doubted for a minute that she was made promises. Lammy made promises to her that he could never possibly keep. By the year 1991, the state of New Hampshire had their story of who killed Sharon Johnson. They had arrested three people and charged them all with capital murder. Ken Johnson, Tony Puff, and Jason Carroll waited in separate jails for their day in court.
None of them could afford to pay for their own attorney, so the court assigned them each a different team of lawyers. A judge also decided to try each of them separately. They faced different sets of charges in addition to capital murder. For instance, Jason and Tony were charged with kidnapping, since it was they who allegedly abducted Sharon from the mall. And Tony alone was charged with sexual assault for allegedly touching Sharon's breasts during the attack, though that particular charge was later dropped. And so the stage was set for three trials, each with a different defendant, a different set of defense lawyers, and a different jury.
Ken was scheduled to be tried first, then Tony, then Jason. For the defense teams, it was a complicated situation. Their interests were aligned, but only so long as they were all pleading not guilty and not testifying against each other. At any time, one of the three could try to cut a deal with the state and turn on the others. Ken was represented by Buzz Schur and Jim Moyer. What would you do in that circumstance if you were Carol or Puff? You know, I think the odds were that one of them would flip rather than they'd both hang tough. I mean, that was the anxiety on our part. It would be hard to believe when faced with a capital charge that you're not going to flip to save your life. But by the fall of 1991, about two years since they were all arrested, Jason and Tony hadn't flipped.
One possible reason for that, the three defense teams had joined together and successfully argued that New Hampshire's death penalty law, as it was written then, was unconstitutional. Back then, only juries could impose the death penalty in New Hampshire. So if a defendant pled guilty before trial, before a jury was seated, they'd be sentenced by a judge, and therefore escape the death penalty. The defense lawyers argued, and the courts agreed, that undermined defendant's constitutional right to a trial by jury, since, by definition, that was the more dangerous route for them. So the death penalty was now off the table for Ken, Tony, and Jason.
Ken's trial was scheduled to start in just a few weeks, and the prosecutors were in a real bind. Unless Jason or Tony agreed to testify as witnesses, the state could not enter their confessions as evidence against Ken. That's because the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution gives criminal defendants the right to confront witnesses who testify against them. If Jason or Tony's words were going to be used to say that Ken was guilty, Ken's lawyers had a right to cross-examine Jason and Tony. But Jason and Tony didn't have to testify because of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, the right to remain silent and not incriminate themselves. The lead prosecutor told a reporter he and his staff spent countless hours trying to find a way around this. But in the end, they couldn't. And so, in October of 1991, prosecutors did something they really, really did not want to do. They dropped all the charges against Ken Johnson.
No matter how convinced they were that Ken was guilty, without Tony or Jason's testimony, they just didn't have a case. The reason I remember this so well is that we picked him up from the jail. They were releasing him. And my car was in the shop that day. And I had borrowed my mother's car. And my mother's car had a unique license plate. It said, Granny.
And so we jumped in the car. We went to pick him up from the jail. And there's press all outside. I'm in the car waiting like the getaway car. And I think, Buzz, you got out and said, come on, Kenny, let's go. And for some reason, Ken decided, instead of getting in the car and driving away, walking across Willow Street, or Elm Street, whatever it was, to Dunkin' Donuts with the press following him. Just, you know, the cameras, everything following him. And we're saying, come on, come on. He got himself a cup of coffee. Jim says Ken said nothing to the reporters. He just calmly bought a cup of coffee and then walked back to the car. My mother then saw it on Channel 9 News that night and saw her car. She was really pissed.
What are you putting murderers in my car for? Even the mother of Ken's lawyer seemed to think he was guilty. But the state knew they couldn't win at trial, so they let him go. Ken, the state's lead suspect from almost the moment Sharon was murdered, was a free man. Now, it was just Tony and Jason, each facing life in prison. This is Bear Brook Season 2, a true crime story. I'm Jason Moon. What did we walk into? I mean...
This is Mark Sisti, one of the lawyers who defended Tony Puff. I talked with him and his former partner, Paul Toomey. They worked together for decades. By their count, they defended as many as 80 people charged with murder. Talking to them feels like talking to two brothers who grew up together. They have lots of stories. Like the time their office burned down. The fire was a good story, too.
One of our clients is reputed to have said it who was looking for something. No, no, no, no. He wanted to continue. We were his six lawyers and the first five quit because they were afraid of him. And we were the stupid ones. We took it on a Thursday and burned down on like a Monday. For a time, and probably still today, Mark and Paul were among the most famous defense attorneys in New Hampshire. Mark wears a ponytail and silver spectacles. Picture of Ben Franklin, grizzled by dozens and dozens of homicide trials. It feels like Mark is always on his feet in a conversation, always quicker than you are.
And Paul, but Paul somehow managed to operate a small farm on his property while also practicing as an attorney. His tall face looks out at you from beneath the head of thick silver hair. For years, all the high-profile cases seemed to go to Mark and Paul. Just a few months before they were set to defend Tony Puff in trial, they defended Pamela Smart, who you might have heard of. Smart was accused of conspiring with teenage boys to kill her husband. Do you want this jury to understand that Bill Flynn decided to kill your husband because you broke off with him? I want this jury to understand the truth.
Pam Smart's trial attracted national attention. It was the first murder trial in the U.S. to be televised live from start to finish, which meant Mark and Paul were on TV a lot. People knew them. And now, once again, Mark and Paul were appointed to a case where someone was accused of conspiring with teenagers to kill their spouse. Tony's trial would all come down to his confession. That's because there was no other evidence against him. Police found no physical evidence linking Tony to this crime.
No fingerprints in Sharon's car, no shoe impressions at the construction site, nothing that proved he'd been with Sharon or was at the site where her body was found. Police also couldn't find evidence to corroborate key parts of Tony's confession, like the idea that Tony was paid by Ken to commit the murder, or that Tony and Ken had talked on the phone in the days before they killed Sharon. Police couldn't find any bank statements or phone records to back up either. No physical evidence, no paper trail, just Tony's words on a tape, and whether 12 jurors would believe them. The trial began on December 4, 1991.
You already know what the prosecutors say happened. So I'm going to tell you about the case that Mark and Paul put on for the jury. As a story, it had two main themes. One, Tony's confession is just not true. It wasn't your typical confession case. Things with this weren't adding up. And it clearly appeared to be a coerced false confession case right out of the gate. I mean, it was clearly not true. It was clearly a not true confession. Clearly not a true confession.
To convince the jury of that, Mark and Paul directed their attention to parts of Tony's confession where he says things that just didn't line up with reality. One example of that comes near the middle of Tony's taped confession. By this point, Tony has told Detective Roland Lammy that he, Jason, and Ken all murdered Sharon at a construction site. Tony says after that, he and Jason got back into Sharon's green Subaru and drove it right back to the mall.
This statement is a big problem for the investigators. Remember the mystery of the car from the early investigation? Sharon was murdered on a Thursday, but her car wasn't found at the mall until Saturday. And yet, here in Tony's confession, he's saying they left it there on Thursday, the same night as the murder. But it's not just the wrong night. It's also the wrong location.
The part of the parking lot Tony just said he left the car in, between the food court and the Sears, is not the area where Sharon's car was found. This is a mall parking lot, so it's huge. It goes around the whole building. And in reality, Sharon's car was found on a whole different side of the mall, near the Sears Automotive entrance. So Tony's story about the car has a few issues. And during the interrogation, it seems like Lammy knows it. A few minutes later, he circles back to this detail about the car. The car was moved, again, to explain how that happened. You took the keys, you said.
Where did you park it at the Sears parking lot? I told one of the officers where I parked it, and I don't remember what aisle it was, but it was not exactly in front of the food court. It was in between the food court. See you. Again, this is not where Sharon's car was actually found. Lammy tries again. Let me ask you a question, okay? I know you're having a hard time remembering. I don't have any words in your mouth, but is it that you don't remember if you went back and got the car again at this time, or is it that...
You simply do remember that you only left it there once and took the keys. Did you go back after the car the next day, that night, later that night into the morning? I went back to the car. I went back to the car. Okay, could you please explain that, and with whom? It was by myself. All right. Why did you go back to the car? To make sure I didn't leave anything behind. Okay. Did you move it at that time? Did you go for a ride with it? Did you leave it someplace? Did you take it someplace and bring it back another day? No. I didn't go anywhere with it.
Despite being asked about it repeatedly, and despite the hints from Lammy, Tony's story about Sharon's car just doesn't line up with what police know. Tony's confession puts the car back at the mall on the wrong night and in the wrong location. And there were plenty of other examples for Tony's lawyers, Mark and Paul, to choose from. Like how, in describing Sharon's murder, Tony mentions a total of four stabs, two from Jason, two from him. In reality, Sharon was stabbed 14 times. Or how Tony says Sharon was fully clothed when she was stabbed.
In reality, Sharon's bra had been cut open with a knife in the front before she was stabbed. Or how Tony says he left the keys to Sharon's car underneath the seat. When police found her car, the keys were nowhere to be found. And then there's this story Tony tells about meeting with Ken after the murder. It's maybe the biggest difference between Tony's confession and the known facts. Tony says sometime after the murder, doesn't say exactly when, he drove to Ken's house to talk with him. He asked me if I had told anybody, and I said no, I haven't told anybody. He asked me about Jason.
Detective Lammy has been trying to pry specifics from Tony this entire tape recording. And here's a rare instance where Tony delivers. He said he drove his car, a blue 1981 Malibu Classic, to see Ken at his house after the murder. Only, Tony definitively did not do that. We know that because 12 days before the murder, at 3.20 a.m., Tony was pulled over in his blue 81 Malibu Classic for a broken taillight.
Tony was driving with a suspended license. He was arrested. His car was impounded. And Tony never got the Malibu classic back. So Tony's confession includes a scene where he's driving a car that in reality was held by the police at that time. By the Allentown police, in fact. The town that includes much of Bear Brook State Park. The cop handling Tony's case for that arrest was someone you might remember. Ron Montpleasure. You talk about noise complaints to country music was blaring. Not that I don't like country music.
Tony's confession didn't line up with the physical evidence. But that wasn't the only thing Mark and Paul wanted to show the jury. There were also all the inconsistencies between Tony's confession and Jason's. As far as Mark and Paul saw it, Jason's confession was good for Tony's case. If they were both there, why were their stories so different? But they had a problem. Remember how prosecutors couldn't bring in Jason's confessions to a trial for Ken without calling Jason as a witness? Well, Tony's defense couldn't either. In Tony's trial, Jason's confessions were legally considered hearsay, not allowed as evidence.
The basic idea behind the hearsay rule is to keep unreliable gossip from leaking in through someone's testimony. But the hearsay rule has lots of exceptions, and the arguments around them can get notoriously complicated. And during the hand-to-hand legal combat of Tony's trial, Mark and Paul successfully argued one of those exceptions did apply in this case. The judge allowed the jury to hear Jason's confessions, partly because Tony's confession was recorded after Jason's. Tony heard Jason's confession at the construction site, and Lammy referenced what Jason said while interrogating Tony.
Mark and Paul argued that influenced what Tony said and whether it was reliable. And for the jury to fairly weigh that argument, they needed to hear Jason's confessions too. And so, with that bit of clever legal maneuvering, Jason's confessions entered Tony's trial. It was a bold move for Mark and Paul. The judge told the jury Jason's tapes were only to be taken to judge the reliability of Tony's confession, and not for the truth of the matter. But still, the jury was going to hear Jason say Tony stabbed and strangled Sharon. But Mark and Paul felt it was worth it. The inconsistencies were too glaring.
And so they made sure the jury heard lots and lots of them. Like the motive for the murder. Tony says in his confession that Ken wanted Sharon killed because he was deep in debt. Jason says at first he wasn't told why Ken wanted his wife dead. Then later Jason says it was because Sharon had caught Ken raping his daughter and doing, quote, some very other criminal acts. At the construction site, Jason says Ken and Sharon had a big argument before they stabbed her. Tony says Ken emerged from somewhere nearby only after Sharon had been stabbed.
Then there's the murder weapon. Jason says the knife they used to kill Sharon was his, a brown folding pocket knife. Tony says the knife they used was white and silver and belonged to Lisa Johnson, Ken's daughter. The money. Tony says Ken paid them $10,000. Jason at first says he was paid $500, then $2,000, then finally he says they split the $10,000. Tony says Ken paid them at his house on the night of the murder. Jason says they were paid in the morning, two days later. Why didn't Tony's confession, Jason's confession, and the physical evidence all line up?
To Mark and Paul, the answer was obvious. Detective Roland Lamme. His conduct, his character. That was the second theme of their defense. I mean, the facts he wanted to come out were the facts that he would have been comfortable with with regard to the theory of his case, the way he looked at it. But sometimes that won't match up with reality. Mark and Paul knew Lamme well. They faced off with him before in court. They actually kind of like him.
But according to Mark and Paul, Lammy had a tendency to will his theory of a case into existence. I never got the sense that he tried to convict people that he thought were innocent. I mean, I never got that sense at all. But I just don't think, I think he would do what it took to get confessions and do what it took to convict people he thought were guilty. And that's a dangerous thing. I talked to a number of other defense attorneys who had clients Lammy investigated. They all agreed Lammy had this reputation. But none of them could point me to a specific instance where Lammy crossed a line. So whether that reputation was founded, I don't know.
But it's what Mark and Paul saw here, a detective assured of his own theory, who, through intimidation and insinuation, got Tony to confess to that theory. Mark and Paul saw a whole alternate version of the story of Lammy's investigation, one that answered the question, why did Tony say all of this if it weren't true? What would motivate him to do that? That's after the break. Mark Sisti versus Roland Lammy was the main event of Tony Puff's trial, a showdown between two veterans of their trades, cop versus lawyer, interrogator versus cross-examiner.
Mark cross-examines Lammy for hours. One of the things he hones in on is how Tony acted during the investigation. Behaviors that Mark says just don't make any sense if Lammy's theory is true. Remember how when Lammy first makes contact with Tony, Tony agrees to help in the investigation, and they go down to the motel in Rhode Island and try to get Ken to incriminate himself? I don't have the audio of Tony's trial, but it's not hard to read the sparks into the transcript of the courtroom back and forth between Mark and Lammy on this.
Mark is basically saying it's crazy to think that Tony would volunteer to fly up to New Hampshire to help police catch the guy who paid him to commit murder. Why would Tony be trying to entrap his own co-conspirator who could just as easily take Tony down with him? Mark says that's absolutely ridiculous, isn't it? Lammy fires back. It's not ridiculous if Ken knew police were listening. Mark says, OK, now we're going to hear some objective fact that Ken Johnson knew the police were listening. Tell the jury the objective fact. Lammy says it's just a conclusion.
It's a conclusion without any support, right, Sergeant? Pretty much. Could we call that speculation, right? Lammy is forced to answer yes. If Tony really did kill Sharon, why did he agree to fly from North Carolina to New Hampshire to help in the investigation? Twice. Once in March of 89 when he tried to entrap Ken Johnson, and again about eight months later when he walked right into Lammy's trap at the construction site. Lammy said it was because Tony was conning them, trying to throw police off the scent. But Mark and Paul had a different story about a 19-year-old kid under the thumb of state police.
about serious incentives for Tony to make stuff up that were just offstage in the police's telling of the story, and about a detective who was willing to lie to make his theory of the case come true. And that was everything. That was the beginning to the end. You're going to see a lying cop. Can you stick with us on this? Let's rewind the clock and hear the story of Lammy's investigation as told from Mark and Paul's perspective. Sharon Johnson is murdered in July 1988. For six months, police can't solve it. They can't figure out who this Bob is that Sharon was supposed to be meeting the night she was killed, and they can't figure out who moved Sharon's car.
Lammy takes over the case in January of 1989. By March, he has a hunch that Tony might know something. But he has a hard time finding Tony, so he calls some of his relatives. Lammy talks to a couple, Deborah and George Gagnon. They will become key characters in Lammy's alleged manipulation of Tony. To the Gagnons, Tony was technically an ex-step-nephew. But not technically, Deborah and George were like parents to Tony.
Deborah Gagnon testified at Tony's trial that when Lammy called looking for Tony, he asked her, quote, if we thought if Tony was asked to move a car from point A to point B, if he would do it, and I said yes. In his own testimony, Detective Lammy agrees this is what happened. This means that Lammy had the notion in his head that Tony moved Sharon's car before he even talked to Tony. When Lammy finally gets Tony on the phone, lo and behold, Tony tells him can ask him to move Sharon's car. But why would Tony say even that much if it weren't true?
In Mark and Paul's story, the answer is leverage. Lammy had leverage over Tony. Tony had several warrants out for his arrest when Lammy first called him, motor vehicle violations that Tony had failed to appear in court for. He also owed child support payments to Lisa Johnson, Ken's stepdaughter. Mark and Paul argued that all of this provided a powerful incentive for Tony to play along with whatever Lammy had in mind, since Lammy could arrest him at any moment on his outstanding warrants.
The implication from Tony's lawyers was that he was just trying to say or do whatever he thought Lammy wanted so he could avoid consequences. Like maybe say he moved a car when he really didn't. And whether this view of events is accurate. Once Tony starts cooperating, Lammy does pull strings for him. He calls the local PD that held Tony's arrest warrants, and they put the warrants on an inactive status. Tony learns. Play along with the cops. Get favors. Now Mark and Paul weren't arguing here that Lammy was knowingly planting a false story in Tony.
Instead, they implied that Lammy just got fooled. A kind of confirmation bias. He squeezed Tony, Tony talked. And what Tony said matched Lammy's pre-existing theory. And Detective Lammy wasn't shy about squeezing people, as this next moment shows. In the fall of 1989, Lammy is looking for Tony for the second time. By this point, Lammy believes Tony was directly involved in the murder. He thinks Tony was playing him during their trip to Rhode Island. But again, Lammy can't find Tony.
When Lammy calls Tony's parental figures, Deborah and George Gagnon, they tell Lammy they're not sure where he is either. But Lammy doesn't really believe them. And to provide a little extra motivation for the Gagnons to find Tony, he lies to them. Lammy tells the Gagnons he thinks Tony has AIDS. Remember, this is 1989 when Lammy says this, just a few years before the peak of the AIDS crisis in America. Deborah testifies she was so frightened she drove her entire family to the doctor's office and asked to have them tested.
By the way, Lammy lying to people like this? Totally legal. And eventually, it seems to work. He does get Tony on the phone again. And Lammy, who still has the same leverage over Tony, the inactive arrest warrants, the child support payments, convinces Tony to come back to New Hampshire once again. Only this time, Lammy is luring Tony into a trap. At the construction site, Tony is confronted by Jason and his confession. Tony says Jason is crazy. He says none of that ever happened. He tries to tell Lammy he didn't even move the car like he originally said. But now it's too late.
Lammy is convinced. Tony is guilty. Police interrogate Tony for three hours before they turn the tape recorder on. At one point, Tony asks to see Debra and George Gagnon. Lammy calls them, and they drive to the police station. They arrive about an hour and a half into Tony's interrogation. At Tony's trial, Debra testifies when they arrived, Tony's eyes were wide and bloodshot. She says he looked like a wild animal. George says he looked like death warmed over. Debra testifies Lammy kept telling Tony over and over again, it'll be easier if you cooperate.
Deborah testifies Tony kept saying he had nothing to confess to. Deborah testifies that at one point during the interrogation, Tony leaned on to her and whispered, I'm just going to tell them what they want to hear because they're not going to let me out of here unless I do. Finally, and this is according to the police report, Tony threw up his arms and said, I'm ready. And that's when the detectives turned on the tape recorder. Tony, are you aware that this is being recorded? Yes. Would you speak it up, please? Yes. Thank you. So this is the alternate version of the story that Tony's lawyers, Mark and Paul, are putting forward during the trial.
Lammy bullied a 19-year-old Tony into confessing to his pre-existing theories of the case. It was by no means a sure thing. There's still a taped confession where Tony Puff says he stabbed Sharon Johnson. And a lot of what the Gagnons testified to was disputed by police testimony. The inconsistencies in Tony's confession could be explained as simple mistakes in his recollection. And convincing a New Hampshire jury that a state police detective was a liar? Remember, it's 1991. It would be hard to pull off today, even harder then. But then, Lammy does something that will change the course of the trial.
something that plays right into Mark and Paul's strategy. After a long day of being cross-examined by Mark, Lammy goes home and takes a phone call. At the beginning of just about every criminal trial, the judge issues an order which says witnesses are not allowed to talk to each other until the trial is over. Yeah, I mean, it's important so that they don't get together and, you know, meld their stories and make them right. It's a pretty basic rule, common to virtually every criminal trial. But on this night, when Lammy gets home and picks up the phone, he breaks that rule.
He gets a call from another potential witness in the case, his partner, Detective Neil Scott. According to Lammy, he and Neil talked about the fact that they would be questioned about Jason Carroll, which they were not expecting during Tony Puff's trial. Lammy says he told Neil he was going to have to spend the night reading their old reports. Lammy said, I'm afraid I might screw up and not remember the details. Neil allegedly told Lammy he wouldn't remember either if he was called to testify. They say they weren't trying to coordinate their testimony, though at one point Neil acknowledged they weren't supposed to be talking about that. We'll never really know what was said on that phone call.
The only reason we know it happened is because the prosecutor handling the case accidentally interrupted it. He called Lammy that night while Lammy was on the phone with Neil. When Lammy switched lines to answer the call from the prosecutor, he said, hold on, I've got Neil on the phone. Maybe Lammy blurted that out because he didn't think it was a big deal, or maybe he didn't think the prosecutor would actually tell the judge. But he did. That turned into a trial inside of a trial, which was a great opportunity for us, actually. It became the most significant moment in the trial.
Witness testimony was postponed for a week while hearings about this phone call were held. Detectives Lammy and Scott were forced to hire their own lawyers. Mark and Paul tried to have the whole case dismissed. The judge didn't go for that. But still, it was more than Mark and Paul could have hoped for. I think it was huge. I mean, our whole thing was that he was a dirty cop and then he got to prove it in front of the jury. The judge just, he was just furious. And he was absolutely furious. And the jury could tell he was furious. And he gave them an instruction that Roland had disobeyed court orders and they were free to disregard everything he said, which you don't hear that instruction very often from judges.
In his closing argument, Mark had no mercy for Lammy. He called him a liar. He said he'd shamed police work. And Mark did not let the jury forget how Lammy had violated the court order. Mark said, at the beginning of this case, we asserted he couldn't be trusted. And guess what? He proved it himself last Tuesday. Not to somebody on the street, but to you, to the judge, to everybody in this court.
The prosecutor, Michael Ramsdell, fought back by arguing Lammy and Neal's phone call was a moot point, since Neal wasn't even called as a witness. He said the defense had attacked Lammy from the beginning to distract jurors from the real evidence, Tony's confession. And with that, after 15 days, Tony's trial ended. Now it was up to the jurors. In the legal world, jurors are known as finders of fact. They are burdened with a profound, almost magical power and responsibility to decide what actually happened, to transform a story into a verdict.
Robert Hoagland was not impressed by the magic of being a juror. He especially did not like the way the jury foreperson ran the deliberation. According to Robert, when the jury sat down to deliberate, everyone else was ready to acquit. He was the lone holdout. Robert says for his fellow jurors, and even for him, the hang-up was Detective Lammy. Mark and Paul's plan to go after the character and conduct of Lammy, it worked.
Didn't like that sergeant. Do you think that was the number one factor why they voted not guilty? Yes, it really was. There was one who laid there. I was going to discuss to him. He's not guilty and I'm not going to... I finally gave him. So basically you voted not guilty just because it seemed hopeless and you wanted to get out of there. After six hours and 46 minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted Tony Puff of all charges. He was free to go. In the end, the jury didn't buy the state's story about Tony. They didn't believe his confession. And they didn't trust what Lammy had to say. And it went beyond the jury.
After the acquittal, the Union Leader newspaper, the biggest paper in the state known for its conservative editorials, published an essay titled The Lammy Controversy. The editorial referred to Lammy's, quote, perceived credibility gap. It said Lammy's role in the case should be carefully reviewed. But Lammy's superiors sprang to his defense. They said he did a, quote, excellent job and that no action would be taken against him. Jason Carroll's trial was scheduled to start just two months after Tony Puff's acquittal. Tony's lawyers publicly called on the state to drop the case after what happened in Tony's trial.
To them, Jason's confession was even more problematic than Tony's. I think that Paul and I, and I think anybody that knows anything about that case, would say that the big sore thumb sticking out in Carroll's case is that confession. You can't shake it. As a professional, you're looking at it, you can't shake it. I think if you had a police officer today listen to that, they'd be horrified. They would never conduct an interrogation like that. Paul at the beginning of the set said, I felt sorry for Jason Carroll. Now whether or not he is a murderer or not, okay, I felt sorry for him.
And we had a co-defendant. And if we could dump it on Jason Carroll to get our guy off, we would have. But we didn't even go in that direction. I mean, that confession was terrible. The state's case was falling apart. Ken was released. Tony was acquitted. The only defendant left was Jason. Remember, in the state's theory, Jason got involved in the murder plot because of Tony, who a jury just said was not guilty, to carry out a murder for Ken, who the state had just let go because they didn't have enough evidence. So how does another jury find Jason guilty?
That's next time on Bear Brook Season 2, A True Crime Story. A True Crime Story is reported and produced by me, Jason Moon. It's edited by Katie Culinary. Additional reporting and research by Paul Cuno Booth. Editing help from Lauren Shulgin, Daniela Ali, Sarah Plourd, Taylor Quimby, Mara Hoplamazian, and Todd Bookman. Our news director is Dan Barrick. Our director of podcasts is Rebecca Lavoie. Fact-checking by Dania Suleiman. Sarah Plourd created our original artwork as well as our website, barebrookpodcast.com. Photos and videos by Gabby Lozada. Original music for the series was created by me, Jason Moon. Barebrook is a production of The Document Team at New Hampshire Public Radio.
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