Here in the United States, we praise the justice system we have built. Our rights are protected, and we put our faith that the powers that be will get the right guy. I mean, that's what they're supposed to do. Get the right person, correct?
What happens when the justice system gets it wrong? You see, it takes such little time to convict the accused of a crime, but to overturn a wrong conviction takes years and years, and sometimes for those on death row, time runs out. We talk all the time about having justice for the families of victims and murders, but what about the men and women who spend decades of their life behind bars for something they never did? They too, as well as their families now become victims in the system where justice is wrongly served.
So, we talk about this very problem and how it seems our system really does not work like we think. You are the best of the best when it comes to DNA evidence. This is pretty much not throughout the country, and I desperately need your help. My name is Jonathan Barr, and I was wrongfully convicted of a murder in the rape of my friend Katrina Matthews, and I spent almost 20 years in prison for that crime.
I spent 15 years in prison. I spent 11 years in prison, in prison. 20 years, nine months, five days in prison, four crime, I didn't commit. The system failed us, you know, tremendously.
It failed us. It was a great relief to be able to walk out of there, a free man, after 14 years. I'm able to spend time with my grandkids. I can hold them, my arms.
I can take them to church, take them out to eat. I can remember my first day coming home from prison. I sat up and watched the sun come up that morning. You see the sun like every morning rise in prison, but you actually feel it.
You know, as a free man outside of defenses, it was a totally different experience. The whole time I'm watching it coming up, I'm saying I'm free. You know, I'm truly free. Guys, welcome back to this week's Serial Snippet.
I am Annie Weaves, and joining me tonight is my co-host, The Beautiful, The Lovely. Hey, Annie, how's it going? It's Shae Bay. It's Brandon Shae.
How's it going Shae? I'm perfect. We are in week 984 of quarantine, obviously, and we hope that you guys are hanging in there like a hair and a biscuit like my grandpa would have said. It's tough times, but we have had the opportunity this week to sit down and really dig into some of these true crime documentaries that we wanted to catch up on.
Yeah, we've been fortunate that we've got to sit down and watch a ton of true crime documentaries and one particular one caught our attention. We want to talk about it today. The Innocence Files talks about the injustice system in our justice system, and man, it's staggering. It's on Netflix, and they go through all of these cases of people who have been wrongfully accused.
And it's insane. We dug into some of these stories. Tonight, what we're going to talk about really briefly is not one of those stories, but another story that was here local where we are from, Shae, that just really grabbed my attention. My mom actually told us about it.
I had completely forgotten that this even happened until she said this. I mean, it's crazy. The staggering amount of times that you see this in many cases. But let's let me just go with a couple statistics here that I found on the LATimes.org.
In the United States, there have been 2095 exonerations of innocent inmates since 1989. In that time, an average of 8.7 years was spent by each person for a crime that did not commit. A total of 18,000, 18,250 years were served. That's a percentage of 2% to 10%, which really, if you look at it, seems low.
But when you put it against the staggering population of prisons today, which is around 2.3 million, that's a bunch. 18,000 years is a hell of a lot of time for these people to be incarcerated for crimes that they were later found to be innocent. Investigators are just trying to close these cases or they falsify evidence. There are so many ways that these cases can go wrong.
And once these people are in prison, it takes so many years of appeals to get them out of the system. We do all these cases. We talk about people who actually murder somebody and how the justice system finally gets it right and whatever. And they do.
And it's not to say that they don't, but there is a lot of times that they don't. And nobody ever looks at that. We just kind of skims past that. And we were fortunate enough to watch this documentary and see it firsthand that there's a lot of this crap going around.
So the case that we're going to talk about tonight actually came from the county that we live in, Cabell County, West Virginia. Shae, you know, I love doing some of these local stories. This happened back in around the early 2000s is when we really heard about it. But we're going to talk about a guy named Fred Zane.
Fred Zane was a renowned lab technician for the West Virginia state crime lab in the 1970s and 1980s, infamous for his ability to close cases, usually in favor of the prosecution. Zane claimed to be a chemist and was hired on as such, eventually rising to the position of the director of the state police serology department. Zane claimed to have graduated from West Virginia state college with a degree in biology and a minor in chemistry. Zane became so well known for closing cases and his self-proclaimed expertise in the field of forensics that he was even asked to testify in cases outside of the state of West Virginia on forensic findings.
Zane continued his work in the West Virginia state serology lab through the 1980s, testifying in high profile cases like the serial abductions and rapes at the Huntington mall in early 1987. In those cases, two women came forward stating they had been abducted at knife point from the shopping center, robbed and repeatedly raped by an uncircumcised man wearing a seam mask. Seaman samples were collected from the two victims and sent to Zane's lab to be tested. Shortly after the rapes occurred, a local grave digger and handyman named Glenn Woodall was arrested after one of the victims stated he could have been the man who raped her.
Woodall provided a DNA sample to be tested against the seamans sent to Zane's lab. These samples were among the first ever admitted as evidence at the state level in the United State. At trial, Zane testified that after running the two samples against each other, the DNA evidence from the scene of the crimes was deemed inconclusive. Glenn Woodall was sent to 335 years in prison at the West Virginia State Pen in Mount Zill.
But around the same time that Woodall's trial was taking place, statements about Fred Zane's work in the state crime lab and his history as a biologist and chemist were being made that would turn Woodall's case in hundreds of other cases on their heads. Beginning in the mid-1980s, phone calls were made to the West Virginia state crime lab by multiple organizations, stating that Zane was not who he claimed to be. Zane claimed to have a degree in biology and a minor in chemistry, but investigations into his educational history showed that while he did have a degree in biology from West Virginia State College, he did not possess a minor in chemistry. In fact, he had barely passed or failed the few chemistry courses he had taken and he had passed his biology courses with a C average.
It was also discovered that he had taken an FBI forensics course, which he also failed. In 1985, FBI lab director James Greer contacted the West Virginia State Police and advised them that Zane had failed basic courses in serology and bloodstaying testing that same year. Two of Zane's coworkers came forward, claiming that he had falsified test results from Blink test plates. However, all of the warnings were ignored.
Zane discredited the two coworkers by claiming that they simply did not get along and wanted Zane to be fired. Zane continued his work for the West Virginia State Serology Department until 1989, when he left West Virginia to become the Chief of Fiscal Evidence Department for Bexar County, Texas. So how exactly did Fred Zane's nearly two decades of lies begin to unravel? It all goes back to the rape and abduction trial of Glenn Woodall in 1987.
Zane testified that DNA taken from those two victims had been inconclusive. However, in 1988, Woodall's defense team began conducting their own test. And it was determined that Zane had used flawed testing methods regarding blood typing that he had claimed tied the semen to Woodall. Also, Zane testified a trial that a hair found on one of the victims was from Woodall's beard, when his original report stated that the hair was a pubic hair and could not be identified as Woodalls.
An official investigation into Fred Zane's work was ordered by the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, and a group of a judge, lawyers, and scientists were appointed to investigate the entire State Serology Department. In November 1993, West Virginia Senior Court Circuit Judge James Holiday stated that, as a result of their investigation into Fred Zane, it was discovered that as many as 134 people may have been wrongfully convicted as a result of Zane's faulty DNA reporting. Zane had reported on test that had never been done, reported false positive findings, and described inconclusive results as conclusive. The Supreme Court called Zane's actions, quote, egregious violations of the right of the defendant to a fair trial and a corruption of our legal system.
Already living and working in Texas, Zane was fired from his position there, and further investigation into his work there showed that another 180 wrongful convictions were a result of Zane's fraudulent test results. Zane was charged with fraud, but just as the charges were filed, Fred Zane was diagnosed with liver cancer, and the trial was placed on hold indefinitely. In 2001, Zane died at the age of 51 without ever going to trial. So what happened to Fred Zane's most infamous wrongful conviction that of Glen Woodall?
After his defense attorneys presented the falsified DNA evidence, Woodall's conviction was overturned in 1992. After five years in prison, he was a free man. He filed suit against the State of West Virginia, winning a $1 million settlement. The day over $6.5 million have been paid out to victims of Fred Zane's fraudulent reports.
In 2010, the abduction and rape of the two women Woodall had been convicted of assaulting was solved after the DNA evidence from the cases was placed into CODIS and matched to a man from Kanawai County, West Virginia named Donald Goode, who was already in prison for murder. The positive DNA information was linked to Goode in October of 2010, just weeks before he was scheduled for a November 1st parole hearing, a Cabell County judge sentenced Goode to two life terms without parole, plus an additional 203 to 335 years in prison, ensuring that he would never leave prison alive. It's without a doubt crazy that they can get away with so much stuff like this. And you know, people want to look at it sometimes as bad police work, but DNA saved a lot of these cases.
They collected this stuff in the 70s, 80s. They collected it knowing that the future was going to be a huge thing with DNA. The first ever DNA evidence that convicted a criminal was in 1987. This all happened in 1988, 1989.
DNA evidence was just coming into light. And so it is, you see all of these cases now that 30 and 40 years ago they collected these samples hoping and praying that science would make the advances that would be able to identify some of these criminals. And in fact, it has saved some of these people from death row, from a life in prison. There's a whole list of things that you can place in here, you know, trying to get the right guy, trying to, it's a high profile case.
They want, they want to find him right now. Election years, trying to make himself look good. There's thousands of cases like this where they've had shoddy lab work and the lab lied about this. There's actually one on the innocence files where a guy talks about bite marks and how that's they convicted this guy because he bit somebody and they have all these other experts testifying that, no, that's not true.
This is a case that could be anywhere. And that's what happens when, you know, people just put their faith in all these different people not doing the work that they're supposed to actually do. You know, these cases are just a tiny sampling of the ones that are being appealed in the US court system today. And so I would urge you guys to watch the innocence files to do your own research, to go back and understand how these cases are now being solved.
And these people are being exonerated. You can go to the innocenceproject.org and you can find more facts and you can look at a lot of these different things and techniques that they use to exonerate some of these people. And it's interesting to see it's a small little thing that was overlooked or something that was not submitted in evidence that the prosecution withheld that saves some of these people from sending the rest of their life. Or somebody like Fred Zane, who literally lied and they just, they took him for his word that he was who he said he was that he had these degrees and he didn't.
Yeah, it was almost like a catch me if you can. The movie with a neurodicaprio where he just said, yeah, I got that. Yeah, I got that. I came out years later, you know, he was a fake.
He was a fraud and he put people in prison for the rest of their lives. And you think about it, they get out of prison. Some of these people like they sue automatically. They're going to sue because, you know, there was one guy who spent 33 years of his life in prison for a crime he did not commit.
But how does that money, you know, how is that ever going to recoup the years of your life that you lost? And the thing about it is this guy took all that money and he's traveling the country now. You know, he's an older man and he's like, I don't have much time left. So I might as well just go splurge what I can.
And that's cool. But at the same time, there's there's not enough money in the world that can get those years your life back. And it's sad. It's sad that this stuff is overlooked.
So guys, thank you for tuning in to this week's snippet. We've told you the past few episodes of this show that we do have a Patreon set up now through your Paranormal Warehouse. Go to Paranormal Warehouse.com. You can check out all the great shows.
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We love Darrell. He was the host of the American Ghost Hunter show. You guys know him from that. He's an incredible Paranormal Investigator and we're so glad to be working with him again on Warehouse.
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