Mind Over Murder (2022) s01e03 Episode Script

I used to read
true crime novels.
I don't anymore.
Years ago in prison
when I realized
I was actually
living through one, really.
I lived above Mrs. Wilson
in the apartment
directly above hers.
You're here
because you want to talk to me
about what happened.
It's disgusting.
It is and always will be
a part of my life.
I was the last one
to be arrested.
There's a misconception
that we were
some sort of gang.
I didn't know any of them,
except for Joseph.
Joseph had been
a brief roommate.
He worked
some sort of construction.
I remember I said,
"Everything is included
in the rent."
I said, "So if you want
to take a shower,
- you can."
- "Oh, I'm good."
Okay.
Didn't say nothing.
Couple of days later,
I'm about to do laundry.
I said, "You know,
I can throw your clothes in.
You can still take a shower
if you want."
"No."
But I waited a couple more days
'cause he was very polite.
He picked up after himself.
He was a nice guy.
And finally I said, "Lobo,
but you gotta take a bath."
And he kind of looked at me,
and I said, "I'm sorry."
I said, "I can smell you
outside in the hallway."
I said, "I don't want
to be rude here, dude,
but you smell bad."
I said, "And I'm not gonna
come home to that smell."
He said, "Okay, no problem."
He packed his things.
He left.
I didn't talk to him again.
I left Beatrice
at the end of February of '85.
I had thrown away
a bunch of old clothes.
One of 'em was a bra
that had blood on it.
In 1989,
I was in Denver, Colorado.
One day,
the sheriff came down,
and he looked vaguely familiar,
and he introduced himself.
He says,
"Do you know who I am?"
And I said, "Well,
obviously you're a cop."
He says,
"I'm here to arrest you
for the murder
of Helen Wilson."
And he goes, "In 1985,
"your neighbor
was raped and killed,
and we have reason to believe
you were there."
When I met my lawyer, he said,
"Unless you have an alibi
as good as sleeping
with the pope that night,"
he said,
"you're going to prison,
"and your only choice
you're gonna have
is for how long."
Well, he didn't lie there.
Well, this
is a Smith & Wesson
stainless steel
.45-caliber
semiautomatic pistol.
It has been engraved,
"Gratefully,
Helen Wilson family."
What does this gun mean to you?
Lot of work that was done
on what I considered
a major case.
And I'm proud of it.
7:05 on KWBE.
Our temperature at 25.
Looking
at partly cloudy skies today
and a high up around 52.
Preliminary hearings were set
for the six individuals
charged with the slaying
of a Beatrice woman
more than four years ago.
They are being held
without bond
in the county jail.
The Helen Wilson homicide
really dominated the news
for a while.
Beatrice in the 1980s
was a lot different
than it is in today's world.
A lot of what
you relied on was
listening to an account
given verbally on the radio
or watching the newspaper
to see
who these people are,
getting a photo of them
to at least put a face
with the name.
I think everybody
was just saying,
"Hmm, I don't really know
these people."
These people, commonly known
as the Beatrice Six,
are not what you'd call
high society in Beatrice.
They're the bottom floaters,
often out of work,
often on welfare,
often in trouble.
They're the kind of people
that the average juror
in Gage County
would not be real happy with.
This is when Dick Smith
started kind of floating
some plea bargains notions
to us.
Dick Smith,
as the county attorney,
was sometimes referred to
as King Richard.
I guess I'd describe him
as being somewhat haughty.
Richard Smith
obviously was not afraid
to exercise his power,
and he was putting pressure
on all of the attorneys
to accept the guilty plea
and get somebody to crack
and have
kind of the domino effect.
We didn't know
who was gonna jump first.
There's a saying
among trial attorneys:
"You gotta know
when to fold 'em,
and you gotta know
when to hold 'em,"
and I believe that.
It was natural
that Richard Smith
would give his best deals
to the people that pled first
and became witnesses.
It's simply the way
the system works.
With Tom Winslow's case,
based on all the facts,
I assumed
that there was enough there
for his conviction.
Richard Smith had told me,
"Either you make a deal,
or I'm going after
the death penalty."
And I said something rude
to him
which I will not repeat
on the air,
but I think you know
what I said.
It wasn't, "Merry Christmas."
JoAnn Taylor
was facing the death penalty.
It occurred to me
that JoAnn is culpable,
and so when the prosecution
took the death penalty
off the table
and offered us
second-degree murder,
which does not carry the
death penalty in this state,
I saw a way of saving her life.
That's what you have to do
if you're gonna practice
criminal defense law
in rural Nebraska.
Joe White didn't care
what the others were doing.
He wasn't taking
any deal whatsoever.
You're always optimistic.
I mean, you got a client
that said he didn't do it,
hey, I'm going with that.
You want to go to trial,
we'll go to trial.
We had a defense.
That's what you do.
Joseph White's trial
generated a lot of interest.
the attorneys,
the judge, the jurors,
everybody was just
intimately engaged
spectacle.
We knew it was
an uphill battle
because it's such
a horrendous crime.
The best you can do sometimes
is just try to pick holes
in the prosecution's case.
So it was obvious the defense
was going to be
that these people
weren't credible.
This afternoon,
31-year-old Debra Shelden
of Lincoln testified
for more than an hour
on what occurred
February 5, 1985.
I know I was walked over
to the courthouse.
'cause they had someone
on trial.
I think it was Joseph White.
I don't remember a lot of that.
I just know
that he was on trial,
and I told them Joseph White
was the one who done it
and everything.
One of the state's
key witnesses
in the trial
of Joseph Edgar White
was called to the stand
Friday morning.
I go on the stand
putting the whole thing
on Joseph White, basically.
That's the first time
I'd seen him
since this whole thing
went down.
I was scared
of what he would think of me
and what the jury
would think of me
and what, you know,
lawyers would think, all that.
I just told 'em what they
wanted to hear, I guess.
Ada JoAnn Taylor,
who has pleaded guilty
to second-degree murder,
testified Tuesday
that Joseph Edgar White
raped Helen Wilson
and, while doing so,
said she deserved it.
They asked her, "Why did you hold
the pillow over her face?"
And her answer was, "I didn't want her
to see who was raping her."
And as a family,
when you hear that,
it's such a crazy,
twisted nightmare,
you know,
coming to the forefront
that's the tragedy
of this whole thing.
When JoAnn Taylor
started describing
Blocked that out completely.
You're sitting in a courtroom,
trying to force yourself
to keep from going up there
and doing something
really wrong.
Whose testimony
was the most difficult
to listen to
and hard to forget?
The coroner's.
When they showed the jury
pictures of Grandma.
The pictures
of what they did to her,
because then, you know,
they had to explain
what the pictures were.
This case
was absolutely brutal.
The facts of this case
were so absolutely terrible,
and these ordinary people
in Beatrice
are sitting there
listening to these facts.
I thought
he was probably guilty.
Every time
that a trial lawyer
tries a case
and a jury comes back,
the system worked,
and in this case,
the state won the case.
31-year-old Deb Shelden
of Lincoln,
25-year-old James Dean
of Lincoln,
and 29-year-old Kathy Gonzalez
of Denver
each sentenced
to ten years in prison
Friday afternoon,
despite requests for probation
by their attorneys.
Ada JoAnn Taylor
has been sentenced
to 40 years in prison
and Thomas Winslow sentenced
to 50 years in prison
after he pleaded no contest
in the crime.
Joseph Edgar White,
the last defendant
to be sentenced in connection
with the 1985 murder
of Helen Wilson, was sentenced
to life in prison
on Friday.
There was some relief
when he was found guilty.
There was a little bit of peace
in the fact
that we now know
what happened to Grandma.
That helped.
It helped a lot.
After he solved the case,
Burt and I got married,
and we've been married
for 26 years.
When I was reading the papers
about the murder,
I was very happy
that this case was solved,
and later on when I met Burt,
I realized I met somebody
even larger than life.
We would go out
to restaurants,
and he just knows everybody,
and everybody
would call him by his name
and patting him on the back
and saying, you know,
"Just awesome.
You're a great guy,"
things like that.
That just made me smile more,
and my eyes
got bigger and brighter.
"Congratulations, Burt.
Beatrice is proud of you."
Oh, this one.
Picture of him
with his mustache.
Shaved off the mustache for me.
"Congratulations,
Lieutenant Searcey.
This is fantastic news."
This is from
Springfield, Missouri.
That's a long ways away
from Beatrice.
It was just really exciting
time for all of us,
but after the case was solved,
that's when he was
looking for a change.
Yes, it's that time
of year again
to cheer on the Huskers
to another national title.
At the House of Bottles,
Burt Searcey and staff
would like to invite you
to stop in
for all your party needs.
When shopping
I left
the sheriff's department
in '96, I think.
Since then,
I've owned a liquor store.
I've been a real estate agent.
I'm a flower child now.
Single red rose.
Okay.
We bought the flower shop
five years ago.
Cindy is a damn good florist.
I take care of deliveries.
- Hi, you Lonnie?
- I'm her daughter.
Well, would you
give that to Lonnie?
- I sure will.
- Thank you.
- Thank you very much.
- Mm-hmm.
When he goes to deliver,
that makes him feel so good
as compared
to his job as a sheriff
because people
didn't like to see him
when he was knocking
on the door,
and now they do.
But after he retired
from law enforcement,
I think that sometimes
Burt gets bored.
He remembers
the accomplishment
of getting it done.
I mean, that's just how he is.
When I was
a rookie police officer,
you know,
I patrolled these streets.
I know every crack,
crook, cranny
in this town and county.
I worked hundreds of cases
and helped people with
a lot of different situations,
from penny-ante theft
up to homicides,
and I tried to do it
the best I could.
That's what I want
to be remembered as.
But that'll probably
never happen,
and I'll just be another guy,
you know?
But I don't want people
to remember me
And being a bad cop
because I'm not, and I wasn't.
Scene 26,
blood on the coat.
And when you're ready.
Bullshit, Tom.
I got people telling me
exactly what you did
to that woman.
You butt-fucked her.
Don't sit here and lie to me.
I'm not gonna listen
to this shit.
Thank you. That's great.
Do we have to use
the word "butt-fucked"?
- It's what was said.
- It's from the tape.
- It is?
- Yeah.
I have to say,
it's a really, really
important question,
but I'm wondering, even in
the JoAnn Taylor arrest thing
where she's using the F word,
if you could just
not even use the F word.
Just say "effing,"
you know, that kind of thing.
I mean, I don't know
you're gonna use "butt-fucked."
- You might as well use "fuck."
- Yeah.
Can I ask why
you don't like it?
I'm just thinking,
"How quickly could that turn
everyone off in the audience?"
I understand that,
but Burt Searcey used that
in reference
to an elderly woman.
That's, like,
really what happened.
And I totally am with you,
Paige,
'cause it makes me
really uncomfortable, too,
to, like, hear it,
and that's really hard,
but I also think
not good, but, like,
it will be powerful
for the audience
to hear that truth.
There needs to be a little
bit of uncomfortableness.
But I don't want 'em
to be so uncomfortable
that they're like, "Oh, well,
this is too much for me.
- I need to leave."
- Okay.
I mean,
we also state on page one
that the words spoken
by the actors
are from interviews,
trial transcripts,
and public record.
Like, we're stating
that this is stuff
that was actually said.
We'll continue
to think about changes
and cutting.
We'll get there. We'll get there.
We're getting closer.
Double-decker.
There's the salmon.
I heard
one of my coworkers.
"Oh, did you hear?
They're doing a play
about the Beatrice Six."
And I'm like, "Yeah.
Why?"
He said, "The wounds
are still fairly open in town,
"but I think this is clearly
a story that needs
to be told."
So are we taking off, like,
quite a bit of length today,
- or what are you thinking?
- Yeah.
Have you heard,
like, any talk in town
about the play at all?
People have asked about,
like, seeing it and stuff.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't want to, like,
hurt anybody, you know?
I know, yeah.
It's just, like,
a really unfortunate situation
- Yeah.
For a lot of people
and a lot of families.
It's just interesting.
Once, like, you kind of
Mm-hmm.
There's a lot of confusion
about the actual details.
Yeah, totally.
So that's why I'm excited
that this is happening,
because hopefully
people can take the time
to learn
some of the actual facts,
you know?
Mm-hmm, yup, exactly.
Initially I didn't really
think I wanted
to be a part of this,
but I realized
it's not enough
to view the story
from the outside,
especially
as a community member.
You have to actively help
the truth come to light.
All right,
let's give it a shot.
I got attached to the idea
of giving Joseph White
a voice in this.
Most things
that were in the news
only shows a tiny portion
of who he was
in those darkest times.
I didn't know her.
And so I've become defensive,
I guess,
of trying to portray him
as a whole person.
Are you scared right now,
Mr. White?
Yes, sir.
Why are you scared?
'Cause my life
is in the hands
of 12 people I don't know.
Joe White, he's very convinced
of himself,
and I think, for Joe,
having your family
on the outside telling you
that they believe you
and they never doubt you
is the most crucial touchstone
you could ever have when you're
in this alternate world
where everyone
believes you're a monster
except the people
you love the most.
wasn't the mother hen type.
I raised my kids
to go out on their own
when they were old enough,
and I didn't try
to micromanage their lives.
That smile's always there.
That's Joseph, Jason, Jeffrey,
Nancy, Margaret, and Evelyn.
There are six of us.
Joseph's second to the oldest,
and I'm number four.
We played together.
We fought together.
Joseph was always a clown,
always laughing
and pulling pranks.
Sometimes
he was my best friend,
and sometimes
he was my worst enemy.
He's my brother.
I know how we were raised
and what kind of person he is.
Was he perfect?
No.
Was he a butthead?
Yes.
But he wasn't a murderer.
Joseph stayed in Holly Pond
until he finished high school
and went immediately
into the army.
He wanted to see
some of the world.
And he stayed in Korea
about three years.
When he left the army,
he went to California.
When he'd move
from place to place,
he'd call me,
talk about doing things
that he enjoyed.
He called me later and told me
he was in Nebraska.
After his trial, he told me,
"I'll be back,
and I'll prove my innocence."
I had some resentment
for people
that testified against him,
even the ones
that didn't testify,
and I mentioned that to him,
and he said,
"But, Mama, you don't know
what they went through."
"Nebraska Department
of Correctional Services.
"I, the chief
executive officer
"of the Nebraska Center
for Women,
"do hereby issue
this certificate of discharge
"to Gonzalez, Kathy A.
"This document shall be
evidence to all persons
"that the above captioned
individual
"is finally discharged
"and restored
all of his or her civil rights
"as provided by law,
effective this 19th day
of October, 1994."
When I got out,
it was euphoric.
Me and Deb and James each did
a little over five years.
When they finally let me
go out that gate,
I couldn't move.
I couldn't go out the gate.
I was just like, "Whoa."
I stood there, and they went
over the intercom,
and they go, "Debra,
you can go out the gate.
It's open."
When I come out of prison,
I was a totally different guy,
you know what I'm saying?
I wasn't the same person.
My demeanor
had changed completely.
I guess I got to the point
where I just didn't give a shit
anymore, you know?
I was scared
to go to Beatrice.
I figured someone
would bump into me
and say,
"Oh, you're that murderer,"
you know,
and da-da-da.
I thought they were
gonna come at me
and throw stuff at me
or curse at me
or call me a bunch of names.
It was hard to get a job,
you know,
'cause now I've got
a Class A, Class B felony
on my record, and people
don't want to hire felons.
Finally I become
a truck driver,
and I've been driving
ever since.
I still have to go
to job interviews
where people are saying,
"Well, what did the body
look like?"
or, "What was it like
going into that apartment?"
I mean, James Dean
and Deb Shelden
said I was there with them
at the crime,
and it was like,
"I don't know
any of these people."
That's all I can tell you.
In one of the statements
you were the one who brought
up Kathy Gonzalez, right?
Do you remember that?
Not really.
I don't really remember that.
I believe that to be true,
There's so much shit
in this case
that I can't remember it all.
How much did you know Kathy before
you all got involved in this case?
I didn't.
I didn't see Kathy much.
So I don't remember
a lot of things,
and there's a lot of things
I do not remember,
but yeah.
So do you remember that you told
them James Dean was there?
Yeah, I told them
that he was there,
but I don't remember
what I said or nothing, no,
but I did tell 'em
that he was there, yeah.
I told all of 'em
that they were there.
Yeah.
After I got out of prison,
I really didn't give
my codefendants
any thoughts whatsoever.
And for a short time,
I forgot how serious it was,
and I put it
to the back of my head.
And then one day,
I'm working at Valentino's
here in town
as the delivery person,
and as usual, I got there early
so I could read the paper.
I remember reading it,
and I thought,
"Why is that familiar?
Why does he look familiar?"
And so I read the article,
and I went, "Oh, my God."
Joseph is on the front page.
And I was like, "Oh, this
is gonna disrupt my life."
I sent this card to Joseph
while he was in prison.
"Look to tomorrow.
That is when you can
come home to us."
We went once a year
to visit him in prison.
He always came
out the door smiling.
We never knew if there
was gonna be hair or bald.
I liked the hair better.
In the time
Joseph was in prison,
he never gave up believing
that the truth would come out.
He got a job in one
of the prison workshops.
He told me to take his money
and try to get a lawyer.
He had a couple of people
take his money
and then decide
they couldn't take his case.
I just told him we was
Whatever we could do,
we'd do.
Finally he got
a business card
from one of his friends
that had Doug Stratton's
phone number on it,
and he asked me to call him.
I think I was the second
or third attorney
that he had hired
after his appeal.
To be honest with you,
I wasn't optimistic
going in to talk to a guy
that is talking about a murder
that happened in 1985
and he's talking to me in 2005.
The odds weren't gonna be good
that there was any fruit
at the end of this tunnel.
You do criminal work enough,
you start to have
a believability meter
that when you talk to people,
your meter goes one direction
or the other.
He starts off by saying,
"I didn't do this."
I wasn't there."
I said, "Can you tell me why
no one has filed a motion
for DNA testing?"
He couldn't.
He wasn't nervous.
He wasn't going crazy.
You got a very real sense
of calm about this guy.
And I said,
"Listen, this is a case
"that should have a lot of DNA.
If you weren't there,
we're gonna know that."
And he said, "Absolutely.
What do you need?"
And I came out, and I said,
"Boy, this is wild."
You know, there's six people
that were involved in this,
three eyewitness testimonies,
and he says he wasn't there,
and there's something
about Joe White
that you believe.
So I went down
and talked to Tom Winslow.
I remember
when I first got into prison,
I'm walking
through this corridor.
Everyone's talking about you,
and you can feel them
talking about you
as you're walking through.
They're screaming
obscenity things
through the gate and stuff.
I was scared,
but you just sort of
just decide you have
to survive no matter what.
You're locked in a cell
all by yourself.
All you do is think.
We went into
the apartment building,
and we went
into Helen Wilson's
apartment.
When you're a 23-year-old kid,
Let yourself
get into that situation.
When I realized
how wrong I was
and I wanted
to pull myself out of it,
they wouldn't let me.
You end up giving up.
I chose not to go to trial,
plead no contest,
but refused to testify,
so it ended up
in the longer sentence,
but I don't regret that part.
I'd been in quite a while.
I don't know how many years
left in my sentence,
14, maybe.
after a while,
you become numb.
And then one day,
I got a lawyer visit.
I said, "I haven't seen
my lawyer in many years.
"I don't have a lawyer visit.
It must be a mistake.
"Will you call up front
and tell him
it must be a mistake?"
And they said, "No,
this guy is here to see him,
and he is an attorney."
Tom probably
had not seen an attorney
associated with his case
for over a decade.
He walks in, and he
kind of looks me up and down.
He says, "I'd like to talk
to you for a few minutes."
He said, "You don't
have to talk to me."
And I said,
"Tom, Joe White's hired me
he claims he wasn't even there
when the woman was murdered."
Tom looked at me
standing there,
starts crying, and he says,
"I wasn't there either,
but nobody would believe me."
Then he got really serious
and looked across the table,
and he says, "I don't believe
you were there either."
That's all he really said.
We went down to court,
filed a motion
for DNA testing.
The same attorney
that had tried the murder case
was still the county attorney.
Dick Smith handled
the argument against us
to not allow for DNA testing.
When I analyze his reaction,
I thought,
"If this really happened
the way you claim it happened,
you would sit back
and say, 'Test.'"
But he said, "No,
we don't want to do that."
The unfortunate part was,
the trial judge
accepted the argument
that the DNA testing
would not lead
to exculpable evidence.
We had to appeal it
to the Nebraska Supreme Court.
Took us years to get this done
because of Dick Smith,
but a couple of things change
when Randy comes in.
When I came to Gage County,
Dick Smith had been
the county attorney
for about 24 years.
He had never had anybody
run against him,
so I started looking into it
and decided that I would run,
and so he was
pretty upset about that.
He was a very domineering
kind of personality.
I certainly
found that to be the case
when I had to deal with him.
I defeated him in the primary,
got elected,
and came into office in 2007.
First day I walked
into the office,
every single computer
in that office had been wiped.
Clearly there was not
going to be any assistance
or any transition at all,
but we hit the deck running.
In fact, I didn't know
anything about Beatrice Six.
I had never heard
of the convictions.
When I was actually contacted
about the case,
it was because
the Nebraska Supreme Court
ruled that the DNA evidence
was relevant.
Randy had an appropriate
prosecutor's heart.
Let's figure this out.
We made arrangements
for us to go together
along with the Beatrice police
down to their evidence room
to see what was there.
Thank the Lord,
the Beatrice Police Department
had done a wonderful job
of preserving the evidence.
They had her underwear.
They had her robe.
They had everything preserved.
We chose 13 items
for testing.
I was very confident
that the result would be
that the DNA matched
both Winslow and White.
James Dean
was in the same boat.
He was out of prison
by that time,
so let's get him tested too.
In 2008,
I come home off the road,
and there was
a guy waiting for me,
a private investigator.
He said to me,
"I need your DNA."
I didn't believe him at first,
you know?
Which it would be
hard to swallow, you know,
in 2008,
somebody just comes up to you
and says, "Oh, I need your DNA
for this reason."
I told him
I really thought
Joseph White had done this,
him and Thomas Winslow.
All of this takes not days,
not weeks.
It takes months.
I believe Joe.
I believe Tom.
But you never knew
how it was gonna turn out.
You never knew.
From the time Doug Stratton
became his lawyer,
it took
approximately three years
for Joseph's DNA to be tested.
I was praying.
it'll come through.
This story has been
absolute hell for our family.
For a long time,
every time I looked
at that apartment,
I remembered what happened.
But over the course
of many years,
you start to move on.
We all went back somewhat
to our normal lives,
and you're starting to maybe
think of Grandma once a week
instead of once a day
or twice a day.
And then, of course,
down the road,
that all got ripped out
from under us.
We finally got the DNA.
I took the phone call.
It wasn't their DNA.
Wasn't Tom's, wasn't James',
and it wasn't Joe's.
They were eliminated.
That's a big deal.
That's a huge moment.
We were just dumbfounded
that Winslow and White
didn't do the sexual assault.
Everybody's well aware
of the jokes
that everybody in prison
is innocent.
Well, some of them are.
New DNA tests revealed
that neither Winslow or White
were responsible
for the rape and murder
of 68-year-old Helen Wilson.
I was surprised.
I mean, you never know whether
a person's guilty or innocent,
but is there a way Joe
could have won his trial?
As far as the defense goes,
I don't think
there's anything that I know of
that we could have done
any differently.
I was astonished
because at the trial
of Joseph White,
the evidence seemed conclusive
and persuasive,
so I thought that was
the right outcome
at that time.
you certainly
don't win 'em all,
and if you had
a lot of regrets,
why, you wouldn't be able
to do this work.
Obviously I had to look back
and reflect upon
upon whether somehow
I screwed up,
and my conclusion was,
I think I did the right thing
at the right time
given the circumstances
as I knew them.
If you want to stay
in the practice of law,
you cannot bleed
for every client you have.
At the time he was convicted,
I assumed that he had made
the right choice for himself,
but if you're asking me
if I went to bed every night
thinking, "Oh, my God,
an innocent man's in the pen,"
no, I did not.
Do you remember when you first
heard their DNA didn't match?
I thought,
I don't believe it."
I mean, I did believe it
because I believe in DNA,
and I don't have
a problem with it.
That result.
I didn't.
You have to understand
where the DNA testing
was done, okay?
And it wasn't done on
everything in that apartment.
In the crime scene,
there was a coffee maker
with a small amount of coffee
in the pot.
There were six cups
in the sink
that had been used.
Those cups weren't secured
as evidence
for some reason.
You got to take all evidence
that you see
and take it,
and it all needs to be tested.
before you could determine
had been in that apartment,
and it wasn't done.
Like not all the things were tested?
Not everything was tested.
Not everything was secured.
Not everything
was taken as evidence.
A lot of things weren't.
The police chief said,
"We can't let these people
stay in prison."
I looked at him.
I said, "Hold on, partner."
"I mean, we've got a lot to do
before we can decide
"that we're gonna release
these people
who've been accused of
and had admitted to murder."
So I contacted
the attorney general's office,
and then we all agreed
that we were gonna set up
a joint task force
to address this.
I remember meeting at
the Beatrice Police Department
with the attorney general's
office,
and they told us
what they were doing.
They assured us that we have
nothing to worry about.
They did tell us, "Just
because there's no DNA evidence
doesn't mean
they weren't there."
"You guys don't have
anything to worry about.
"We know we have
the right guys.
This is a formality,"
but it just opened
the wounds again.
It's just one more step
in this nightmare
that we're living.
Gage County prosecutor
Randy Ritnour
says the case
is being reinvestigated.
"Just because
the DNA results came in,
"it doesn't necessarily
exonerate the defendants
of all criminal wrongdoing."
Exculpation
doesn't mean exoneration.
White and Winslow
are not free yet,
and White might have
to stand trial again
for the murder
of Helen Wilson.
The investigation
is now focusing
on finding the real killer
in this case.
We were all
sitting there wondering,
"How in the world
can this happen?"
Because we've got five people
who admit and do plea bargains
for a murder.
It just doesn't make sense.
What is this exactly?
Is it a seventh person?