Death Row Stories (2014–…): Season 2, Episode 1 - Wrong Man - full transcript
On this episode
of Death Row Stories...
A mother's throat is slashed
and her two young sons are murdered.
It was a bloodbath,
and when a crime like that happens,
someone in the house did this.
Yeah, you were.
No motive, no explanation.
By God, somebody is going to pay
for these two boys being murdered.
A buxom blond, materialistic, a temptress.
The state will be seeking
the death penalty in this case.
It just didn't seem real.
I know that I'm innocent.
There's a body in the water.
He was butchered and murdered.
Many people proclaim their innocence.
In this case, there are
a number of things that stink.
This man is remorseless.
He needs to pay for it with his life.
The electric chair
flashed in front of my eyes.
Get a conviction at all costs.
Let the truth fall where it may.
♪ ♪
I'm going to Florida in two days.
I can't wait!
You'll take the camera with you?
Yeah, I'll take the camera with me.
Darlie Lynn and Darin Routier
were high school sweethearts from Lubbock,
Texas.
They married when he was 20 and she was 18.
They were the proud parents of three boys.
What's your name? - Devon.
Do something special.
Do a cartwheel.
Wow! Way to go, Devon!
Oh, that hurt.
- Yeah.
Say hi, Damon.
Hi.
Damon, can you do a flip?
No.
The family moved
to an upscale neighborhood
in Dallas after Darin Routier's
computer business took off.
Oh, no, Damon's driving.
By all accounts, the Routiers
were living a charmed life,
but that would all change on June 6, 1996.
It was an average day.
It was an ordinary day.
You know, I remember going to sleep.
That night, Darlie fell asleep
in front of the TV
with her two older sons, Devon and Damon.
Darin Routier was upstairs
asleep with their infant,
and he said he heard Darlie yell for him,
he heard a glass break,
and that's when he came
downstairs to find a bloodbath.
Oh, my God!
I come in downstairs,
running straight over to Devon,
and there's blood all over.
Six-year-old Devon Routier
had two devastating wounds
to his chest.
They went completely through his body.
He was impaled by a large knife.
Darin tried to perform CPR.
When I blew into his mouth,
the first thing that happened
was air came out of his chest
and blood just sprayed all over me.
Darlie Routier has also
been injured
with stab wounds to her neck and arms.
There's blood everywhere
and Darlie's bleeding,
and she's telling Darin that,
"Some men came in here and did this."
The first two officers
who arrived,
I think essentially were just shocked.
One of the boys was dead,
but the other was alive.
Damon was found near a wall
and he'd been stabbed
multiple times in the back.
He was barely alive,
and he put down a bloody palm print
to help himself up.
When paramedics arrived,
six-year-old Devon was already dead.
As they tried to revive
five-year-old Damon,
he gasped his final breath.
I got a phone call
at 3:00 in the morning...
"Devon and Damon are dead
and Darlie Lynn might be dying,"
and I just start screaming.
Darlie was rushed
to Baylor University Medical
in Dallas and immediately
taken into surgery.
The necklace Darlie had been wearing
at the time of the attack
was so deeply embedded
in her throat,
it had to be surgically removed,
but it also saved her life,
stopping the knife
less than 2 millimeters
from her carotid artery.
The surgeon who treated Darlie,
he took my hand and he said
that she was lucky to have survived this.
When Darlie awoke
from anesthesia,
two detectives from the
Rowlett police department
were waiting to interview her.
The story was, an assailant was in there.
She woke up and a man was over her,
and she started fighting with him,
and she really wouldn't
give any type of description
because she said she couldn't remember.
Couldn't remember his face
and couldn't remember anything about him.
At the crime scene,
detectives tried to gather
pieces to a murky puzzle.
I think the Rowlett police department
was entirely overwhelmed,
and they didn't know what to do...
The way they were handling evidence,
the way they were trying to take pictures.
They have a camera guy going through there
while others were picking up evidence,
and it was just absolute chaos.
- The Rowlett police department
- had only handled
One other multiple homicide in its history,
so they called for help
from retired Dallas County
Lieutenant James Cron.
Within minutes of his arrival,
Cron developed a theory
that ruled out an intruder.
There was numerous
items... watches and rings...
All laid out on the island in the kitchen,
and nothing was taken.
Darlie Routier said that the
assailant dropped the knife
and she picked it up in the utility room,
which lead to the garage.
The knife was covered with blood.
They found evidence where
it was laid on the carpet,
they found it was laid on
the counter in the kitchen,
but they didn't find any evidence
of the knife being
dropped in the utility room.
But that's where she said she picked it up,
which didn't correlate with the evidence.
Darin hears glass break,
and the troubling thing about that was,
there was broken wine glass there,
and it was on top of her bloody footprints,
which proves beyond any
doubt that it was placed there
after she'd been walking around down there.
The red flags were so startling,
he's like, "This ain't making sense,"
and when a crime like
that happens in the home,
an experienced detective goes,
"It's someone in the house that did this."
As word of the murders spread,
news crews descended on the Routier home.
One neighbor said
her son Michael
had just spent the night Tuesday.
I'm just so glad that he
wasn't there last night.
After Darlie was released
from the hospital,
she and Darin were driven
directly to the Rowlett police department,
where they were questioned separately.
According to police,
in this critical moment,
Darlie's story shifted.
Instead of waking to face an intruder,
Darlie now claimed her
son Damon had woken her,
calling, "Mommy, Mommy."
She then saw a man with a knife
and followed him into the utility room.
I do not think that those two
stories are mutually exclusive.
Darlie could have been awoken by a burglar
and momentarily have a memory lapse
or a blackout or whatever, and then also
have some perception that
she was woken by the baby.
All I was thinking about
was trying to save the babies.
I mean, Darin and I tried
to save the babies, but...
it was too late, the babies were gone.
But we tried. We tried,
and we have to live with that forever.
12 days after the murders,
Darin and Darlie return to
the Rowlett police department
for more questioning.
They walked in voluntarily,
but only one of them would walk out.
At approximately 10:20 p.m. this evening,
investigators from the
Rowlett police department
arrested Darlie Routier.
As for the father,
Darin Routier, at this point,
we do not believe that he
was involved in the murders.
We believe that the white male suspect,
described by Darlie Routier
as the man that attacked her
and murdered her children, never existed.
I watched it on the 10:00 news,
my daughter being arrested.
Had no clue. Had no idea.
I looked up,
and there's Darlie in handcuffs, crying.
Darlie was charged
with capital murder
and taken to the Dallas County jail.
It just didn't seem real.
Like, it just couldn't be happening.
I was just in a place of deep hurt,
trying to survive,
still in the shock that
my babies were gone.
Before being arrested for
the murder of two of her sons,
Darlie Routier was a 26-year-old mother
to three boys.
Darlie was known
as a doting mother
who baked cookies for her boys
and their neighborhood friends.
It's terrible to think a mother
would do something like that,
but it's good to know that
they caught the murderer.
Darlie's arrest came
less than two years
after Susan Smith claimed
an assailant had taken her two boys,
before Smith herself
confessed to driving them
into a lake in South Carolina.
As with Susan Smith, there were
two young boys involved.
Pretty quickly,
Darlie was called Dallas' Susan Smith.
She is not a Susan Smith,
and we're gonna prove this.
Concerned that Darlie might be
released on bail,
Child Protective Services
came to take her son Drake
away from Darlie's mother.
I said, "You're not
taking Drake.
We haven't done anything wrong,"
and she said, "Well,
you think Darlie's innocent,
so we can't be sure
that you'll protect him."
And I said, "My daughter is
innocent until proven guilty,
or is it changed now?"
Drake was temporarily placed
in a foster home,
and with Darlie's trial approaching,
the media spotlight only intensified.
Sources say the Routiers may
have been in financial trouble
and had recently taken
out large insurance policies
on the two boys.
The Routiers tried
to fight back.
There were two $5,000
life insurance policies.
That was not enough to even bury the boys.
I'll stand behind Darlie
150%. I know she didn't do it.
I know all the millions of
little pieces of this puzzle
that will come out in the trial.
After their radio interview,
Darlie's mother and Darin
were handed subpoenas
for violating the gag order
against talking about the case.
To represent them,
they hired legendary Dallas attorney,
Douglas Mulder,
who also agreed to take on Darlie's case.
It is an interesting case,
and I'm gonna look forward to trying it.
I'm very happy. For what reason?
He's the best.
Mulder's fee was $250,000,
and the Routiers scrambled to raise
all the money they could.
We started selling
everything in the house.
All our family members started taking
their children's college funds.
We sold everything.
Greg Davis was
the lead prosecutor
assigned to the case.
The only real announcement
that we made today
was that the state will be
seeking the death penalty
in this case.
Davis would only try Darlie
for Damon's death,
since victims under age six
qualify for the death penalty.
The reason the state tries
for only one murder
is that if she's found innocent,
they can try her for the second one,
and that's a way for the state
to load up a double-barreled shotgun.
Given the media circus
in Dallas, the trial is moved
to the small,
conservative town of Kerrville, Texas.
Why that was agreed to is
really unfathomable to me.
Richard Mosty, second chair
on Darlie's defense,
was raised in Kerrville.
Doug Mulder always says to me,
he says, "Mosty,
"if I ever get murdered,
I want you to promise
that my murderer will
get tried in Kerr Country."
On January 6, 1997,
Darlie's trial began.
Her family,
who had all been called as witnesses,
were banned from the court,
but Darin's Aunt Sandy
slipped under the radar.
Darlie Lynn had asked me,
"Please, would you come to the trial?"
I have to tell you,
I'd never been to trial in my entire life.
All I'd ever seen was Perry Mason.
You know, so I didn't... I really
did not know what to expect.
Everyone's behind Darlie 100%.
She had no one in that
courtroom other than me
that she could turn and look to.
True crime novelist
Barbara Davis,
who would later publish
a book about the case,
was also in the courtroom.
Greg Davis is an extremely
dynamic prosecutor.
He had a way of making you believe
what he said was the God's truth.
He began painting Darlie as materialistic,
a buxom blond,
worried about her own
self and how she looked
and a temptress, so to speak.
Greg Davis constantly
portrayed her as a psychopath.
On the stand,
retired Lieutenant James Cron
laid out his case for a staged crime scene.
Jewelry left on the kitchen counter,
the murder weapon suspiciously moved,
and a slashed window screen in the garage.
Burglars,
intruders don't usually cut a screen,
because they know you just
can pry a screen off very easily.
I think it's just a part of staging.
Next, the Dallas County
medical examiner
described Darlie's wounds as superficial
and potentially self-inflicted.
They didn't go deep,
and it was just a straight
slice across this way,
and that's why we call
them superficial wounds.
But if there really was a killer in there
doing those things to those boys,
he would have stabbed Darlie Routier
multiple times right through the chest,
just like he did those boys,
and she'd be dead.
The state also focused on
blood spatter from the two boys
found on the back of Darlie's nightshirt.
Our blood expert was able
to demonstrate how that happens
if you're kneeling over
someone and stabbing them.
He just showed you come up,
and when it comes up
is when the castoff happens,
but obviously,
that's the manner they had to be stabbed.
And stabbed and stabbed
and stabbed and stabbed,
and that remained in that jury's mind.
For Darlie's defense,
Doug Mulder called two doctors,
one who said Darlie was
suffering from traumatic amnesia
and another who felt Darlie's wounds
had not been self-inflicted.
Mulder also focused on the 911 call
from the night of the murders.
The 911 tape, when I heard it,
I was very convinced
that she was an hysterical mother,
but all of a sudden,
Darlie was worried about touching a knife.
What grieving mother
would even think of that?
She went from being a victim in their eyes
to a murderer of two little children.
Finally, prosecutors showed
the jury a news report
shot eight days after the slayings.
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
For some, this may seem
a strange thing to do
in an odd place and time.
♪ Happy birthday, dear Devon ♪
Singing Happy Birthday
in a cemetery
to a son who was brutally stabbed to death
just over a week ago.
- Ah! - I love you, Devon and Damon.
It was one of the strangest
things I'd ever seen,
not how you'd expect a
mother whose boys had been
brutally murdered to act...
To grin, to smack gum,
and to shoot silly string.
My gut reaction was what I think
the majority of the public was.
How could a mother
who just lost her two sons
do something like that?
And the cameras were there to capture it,
and I think that sealed her doom.
During deliberations,
the jury asked
to see the silly string
videotape nine times.
And after only eight hours, they returned
with their unanimous verdict: guilty.
Night had fallen when Darlie arrived
at the Texas Department of Corrections.
Considered a suicide risk,
Darlie was dressed in a white paper gown
for her walk to death row.
It just didn't seem real.
Like, it just couldn't be happening.
It seemed like a nightmare.
- Darlie, do you have
- anything to say?
- Darlie, do you have
- any comments?
Is there anything you would like to say?
After Darlie Routier
was sent to death row,
her family quickly ran out of money
to pay her attorney, Douglas Mulder.
We had to sign a paper
even after she was convicted
that for two years,
if we did any movies or books or whatever,
we owed him the balance.
The courts appointed
J. Stephen Cooper
to lead Darlie's appeals.
As an appellate lawyer,
you get the transcript of the trial
and work from the transcript.
It's strictly from what's on the page.
In this case, what was on the page
was erroneous in large parts
and we had a lot of issues
on reconstructing the trial transcript.
Darlie's trial transcript
had over 30,000 mistakes.
It was very serious. The difference
between yes and no.
The difference between,
you know, up and down,
and I'd never seen that before
in 25 years of practicing law.
When Sandra Halsey... the court
reporter for Darlie's trial...
Was questioned,
she pled the Fifth Amendment.
Cooper felt confident the flawed transcript
could earn a new trial for Darlie,
preferably in a courtroom
away from Kerrville.
This drew concern from prosecutors.
When all of this came to light,
the state offered her a life sentence,
and all she would have
to do is basically admit
that she had killed her children.
And what did she say?
No.
And what does that tell you about Darlie?
Uh, she's strong, she's brave,
and she's innocent.
But just hours
before the scheduled hearing,
the judge denied Darlie's motion.
These demonstrators protested
a state district judge's decision
to cancel a hearing in Routier's case,
originally set for today.
We're the voice for Darlie Lynn Routier.
The issue
with the court reporter
literally changed the
court reporting industry,
and there are many people, to this day,
who are astounded that that trial record
did not result in a new
trial for Darlie Routier.
Darlie's defense now faced
the uphill battle of appeals,
but as Cooper dug through evidence,
he came across a second videotape,
never shown to the jury,
which cast the silly string incident
in a very different light.
The silly string was a major
factor in her conviction,
from the jury's own mouths,
but what was not shown the jury
was this two-hour memorial video
that took place before
the silly string incident.
This second video was
secretly filmed by police,
attempting to capture any guilty comments
made at the boys' memorial.
The preacher was there,
the family was there,
prayers, crying, emotion you would expect,
all appropriate behavior.
Her sister brought the silly string,
it wasn't Darlie's idea.
This was my son's birthday,
Devon's birthday,
and my sister and her
boyfriend went and got silly string.
He loved silly string.
We did for them what...
Devon didn't get to have,
and what we knew that
he would want and enjoy.
They took that and they twisted it,
and they turned something
that was supposed to be beautiful
and tried to make it
into something very ugly.
When Doug Mulder brought up
the tape during the trial,
the detectives who were
asked about it pled the Fifth.
We have a lady on death row in Texas
who, in the course of the litigation,
the only three people who
took the Fifth Amendment
were the two lead detectives
and the court reporter.
The question for Cooper was,
"Why hadn't Mulder shown
this second videotape to the jury?"
I don't know why they didn't show the tape.
Greg Davis said,
"You put it in if you want,"
but they never did put
that portion of the tape in.
I think it was a huge mistake
not to show the jury this memorial service.
I think it would have effectively nullified
any impact the silly string video had.
As he continued to build
Darlie's appeal,
Cooper was confronted
with another question.
Why had Mulder never
raised Darlie's husband Darin
as a possible suspect?
Let's be practical about this.
There are two adults in this house
and there's two dead children,
and Darlie is sliced and
cut and beat severely.
Well, the most logical culprit of that,
if it's not an intruder,
would be the husband, or Darin.
In addition to defending Darlie,
Doug Mulder had represented
Darin in his gag order case.
Well, we've alleged
in several appellate pleadings
that Mr. Mulder was suffering
from a conflict of interest.
At the time that Dougl
Mulder represented Darlie,
he had a continuing duty to protect Darin.
I was in the room when Mulder
and Darin had that conversation.
Darin had said, "You know,
I don't want them going after me
because I didn't do anything,"
and Mulder said, "Well,
you didn't do anything,
I don't see any reason to go after you."
And that was that.
It'd be very difficult to
point a finger at Darin
when the person on trial says,
"My husband's not involved."
At that time,
that was just absurd to me.
It was...
I didn't even want to
hear anything like that.
What you didn't really
hear about at the time
was the life insurance on Darlie,
of which Darin was the beneficiary.
It was $250,000.
This insurance policy
raised questions,
even with one of Darin's
own family members.
This is my nephew, and I love him.
I don't know if Darin was involved.
I know that that is a big question.
Everybody has their answer to that.
In my heart, I say no.
In my head, I have a few questions.
To answer those questions,
Sandy contacted
multi-millionaire Brian Pardo.
Something of an armchair detective,
Pardo supports the death
penalty but funds investigations
for inmates he thinks are innocent.
I felt that it was extremely
important to exclude Darin,
and the only way that he was
gonna be eliminated as a suspect
was to pass a polygraph,
because that's what the police like to do.
The results
of Pardo's investigation
were about to uncover dark secrets
that Darin had kept hidden for years.
Darlie Routier had been
on death row for 15 months
when Brian Pardo began raising questions
about her husband Darin.
Darin adamantly denied any involvement
in the murders of his sons,
and to prove it,
he submitted to a polygraph test.
The polygraph examiner was
with the police department.
He came around the other
side of the table and he sat down,
and he said, "Darin,
you have utterly failed this examination.
It looks to me like you
perpetrated this crime."
Yeah, you were.
In what way?
No, I didn't.
When Brian Pardo came back
and pointed a finger at Darin,
the whole family went ballistic,
and "How dare Aunt Sandy
have brought him into this?"
Even Darlie Lynn wrote
me a letter and said,
"You need to think
about what you're doing."
And I have to admit,
I wrote back to her and said,
"You're the one on death row.
You need to think about what you're doing."
The polygraph wasn't
the only revelation about Darin.
Pardo also hired a private investigator,
who discovered that before the murders,
Darin suggested hiring
someone to rob his house
so he could collect insurance money.
Darin had come up with a screwball scheme.
He had already done one insurance scam.
He admitted that to
Darlie. That was with a car,
and he got the money for the car.
In a signed affidavit,
Darin admitted
to both the car scam and
his plot for a home robbery.
I've known Darin since he was 15 years old.
Possibly, you could get me to believe
that he set it up for a robbery,
because he talked about that.
He would never hurt his
children or hurt Darlie, never.
I will never believe that.
But the results of Pardo's
investigation differed.
Darlie had no motive at all,
and Darin had $250,000 worth of motive.
I met with Darlie and told her
that we were very persuaded
that Darin was a participant in this act.
When Darlie was told
of some of the facts regarding Darin,
she totally lost it,
and for the first time,
in her mind,
she thought maybe Darin was involved in it.
I felt betrayed.
Here's the person that I had
been with since high school,
that I had three children with
and a good marriage... so I thought...
And whether or not that had
anything to do with this or not,
to know that that had been
plotted behind my back...
Hurt. It hurt.
Did it make you think that maybe
he could have been behind this?
It's made me have a lot of questions.
While any case against Darin
would have been purely circumstantial,
that didn't explain why
Doug Mulder hadn't fended off
some of the circumstantial
evidence against Darlie,
who was facing death row.
Really, the biggest failing
was the failure to use any forensic testing
to advance a defense on Darlie's behalf.
The fiber evidence
I think was probably
the strongest forensic
evidence that the state had.
The state contended that
fibers found on a bread knife
in the Routier's kitchen matched
the slashed window screen.
But they didn't do any testing
to exclude other sources
for that particular fiber,
or even to pin it down really to the screen
and only the screen.
The bread knife had been
dusted for fingerprints
with a brush that raised
questions for Cooper.
My experts tested seven
random fingerprint brushes,
and four of them had the
same chemical consistency
in appearance as this one fiber
that was found on the bread knife.
It's typical in a criminal case
that the defense is not
satisfied with the state's case,
so if there was any dispute,
certainly you would have
heard from that evidence.
If the defense had had any experts,
where were they?
Where are they
The DA, at final arguments,
says, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,
"the defense didn't put up
any witnesses to contradict it,
so the only evidence before
you is what our experts said."
Cooper's team also learned
about three fingerprints at the crime scene
that police had marked as "unidentified,"
but to match these to a potential intruder,
they first had to rule out the family,
and police had failed to get prints
from Devon and Damon's bodies.
That left Darlie and her family
with only one very emotional choice.
We had to have them exhumed...
and have a specialist come
in to take their fingerprints,
because they foot-printed them,
but they didn't fingerprint them.
You just couldn't believe
this nightmare had gotten to that point.
Darlie hoped the boys' prints
would soon provide evidence
of what she claimed all along,
concrete proof of an intruder.
Three years after Darlie
was sentenced to death,
her sons' bodies were exhumed
in an attempt to rule them out
as a source of the
unidentified fingerprints
found at the crime scene.
The boys were buried together,
holding hands,
and so where the hands were together,
the vault had flooded,
and that totally
destroyed the fingerprints.
The only other option
to identify the fingerprints was DNA,
but Cooper's request for
testing was denied by the courts.
DNA would help,
but there's other aspects of the case
that I think are very helpful to us,
so we're not just limited to the DNA.
Cooper felt the prosecution's
timeline of events
also had flaws.
Well, the timeline
that's drawn by the state,
it was remarkable that they
were able to sell it to this jury,
because of the long time that she was
on the telephone with 911.
Darlie's call to 911
lasted 5:44.
Damon could only have
lived for eight or nine minutes
after those wounds were inflicted.
This is according to courtroom testimony.
So since she was on the
phone with 911 for 5:44,
she had a lot to do real fast.
The biggest wrench
in the timeline
was the discovery of a bloody sock,
found in an alley 75 yards
away from the Routier home.
That sock is the most
important piece of evidence
in this entire case.
There's no way it fits
into the timeline.
One of the things that had to happen
after the boys were stabbed
was the blood on the sock,
because both boys' blood
was found on the sock.
They hadn't quite figured
out what to do with that sock.
There is not but a couple of minutes
for her to stab and kill the children,
cut the screen,
get this sock and run it
down the alley in the dark
through a gate that
doesn't really work very well,
come back. Then the state claims
that she stood at the kitchen sink
and injured herself,
staged this crime scene.
It really defies common
sense to believe that all that
could have been done
within that time frame.
But during closing arguments,
Greg Davis asked the jury,
"What loving mother
sleeps through the murder
of her two children?"
And then he told the jury,
"The last thing each of
these two children saw
was their killer."
Everything pointed to Darlie,
nothing pointed to anyone else,
and I had a hand in
convincing a lot of people
she did this. Sold over 200,000 books.
Barbara Davis' book had
only been out for about a year
when she received a call
from a Deep Throat source
within the District Attorney's office,
and that source said to her,
"You need to meet with me.
There's some things you need to see."
And within about 20 minutes,
I had tears running down my cheeks.
I had written a book
based on my reputation and my integrity
saying that this woman
had killed her children,
and I was staring at facts
that she indeed had not.
After the publication
of true crime writer
Barbara Davis' scathing book,
a secret source within the DA's office
showed her evidence that she'd never seen.
When I saw the photographs...
This was a small police department,
never handled a murder case like this,
and the pictures were
taken out of sequence.
Major evidence was picked
up and moved around,
because I saw them here in one picture,
you know, they were here in another,
contradicting any...
Any testimony of staging.
I learned an hour before
the silly string happened,
they had a video showing the prayer vigil
before the celebration,
but the jury never saw
this solemn,
appropriate celebration of the boys' lives.
I began to see other photographs.
That throat was cut
where her dominant hand wouldn't do it.
Her left hand would
have had to have done it.
She had bruised up and down her arm,
and the picture began to form in my mind,
the horror of the injuries she had.
If the jurors had seen it,
it would have been a different outcome,
but they didn't even look at the evidence.
The last thing they did
was play the silly string tape,
and turn to Charlie Samford, who was going,
"I don't want to do this,
I don't think she's guilty,"
and said, "Now do you think she's guilty?"
And a freezing, tired,
worn-out Charlie Samford
finally said, "Okay."
Charlie Samford was a juror
at Darlie's trial.
When you do something and it's right,
after a while, it'll... you settle.
This never would settle. It
never would leave me alone.
Like Barbara Davis,
Charlie Samford was shocked
to learn about the surveillance tape
and the photos of
Darlie's extensive wounds.
There's a lot of evidence that
we in the jury never did see.
If I would have seen those pictures before,
they would have made a lot
of difference in what I thought.
He says he wasn't shown all the evidence,
and the evidence he wasn't shown
was actually evidence he was shown.
When the prosecution
gets on their high horse
and said, "The pictures were right there,"
they sure were,
with thousands of other things,
and they made sure they were mixed in,
and the jury was not gonna
sit through those pictures.
Have any of the other jurors
had a change of heart?
Yes, but they don't want to...
They don't want to do this.
They see me coming
down an aisle at Walmart,
they take off, run the other way.
In June of 2008,
Stephen Cooper finally got
the break he was looking for
when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
granted DNA testing.
It's good news, we've been fighting for it
for five or six years.
We're trying to get some proof
of some male DNA in the house
that's connected to the crime scene.
The infamous 85J is a
fingerprint on a couch table,
and that bloody print
would certainly be one.
If DNA ultimately shows
that there was in fact
an intruder that night,
how can Darlie ever be
repaid for all the years of her life
that have been spent in
a 9x6 cell on death row,
and how can she ever be
repaid for the years she's lost
with her sole surviving son?
Darlie's son Drake
is now 19 years old.
He's never before given an interview.
I usually won't talk about it.
A lot of people kind of knew that, "Yeah,
it's Drake Routier. I mean,
his mom's on death row."
I mean, it's just part of my life,
something I've had to
live with for... 19 years.
He's been coming up here
since he was, you know, pretty little.
I mean, he was a little baby,
so this is all he really remembers.
Drake lives with his father
Darin in Lubbock, Texas.
Darlie and Darin were divorced in 2011.
Darin has done a good job
of raising Drake.
He didn't get the hugs that a mom gives.
We don't have contact,
so I've never gotten to hold him or hug him
since I've been in this place.
There's just the glass
right there in between us.
I mean, you can't do anything about it.
In the summer of 2013,
Drake was forced to deliver
devastating news to Darlie.
I was diagnosed with cancer,
I mean, a year ago, June 26th.
Drake was diagnosed
with acute lymphocytic leukemia.
I was handed a cell phone
in the hospital bed.
I mean, I heard her voice,
and I said, "Mom, I have cancer."
I mean,
it was probably one of the hardest things
I've ever done in my life.
You know, not being able
to hold him...
that was extremely hard.
I didn't want to break apart for him,
I wanted to be strong.
Drake's cancer still requires
monthly chemotherapy,
but his prospects for
remission are positive.
His body is healing.
Yeah,
he's... he helps keep me fighting for sure.
Darlie, will you ever admit
to having killed the boys?
I'm innocent.
Even today, I can't believe
that I have a daughter
who's innocent on death row.
I mean,
it's just... it changes your whole life.
That's what you think
about when you wake up,
That's what you think
about when you go to bed.
Darlie's case
is currently on hold,
pending DNA testing.
Cooper believes that the results...
Specifically those of
the bloody fingerprint...
Will finally prove that
there was an intruder
at the home on the night of the murders.
If we get it reversed
by the appellate court,
they have to try or dismiss it.
With all the evidence that's
been established over time,
they're not gonna retry this case,
in my opinion.
Well prepared attorneys
with a good strategy
will eat the prosecution alive.
But time is not
on Darlie's side.
In Texas, if you've been
sentenced to death,
you have three appeals.
Darlie Routier's lost
her direct state appeal
and she's lost the writ
appeal from the state.
If her federal appeals are denied,
then the trial judge from that court
will set a date of execution.
I fully expect her to be
put to death one day,
and I think at that time,
you know, we can finally say
that justice was done
in this case and this case is now closed.
This must be
really hard for you.
What would you say to your mom?
I mean, I love you.
I mean, I always will.
I hope you get out soon.
That's it.
Darlie is unique in the fact
that she's maintained her
innocence from day one,
and she was convicted, in my mind,
partially because of Susan
Smith and what happened there.
It became apparent,
because of the publicity,
that mothers kill their children.
It created a perfect storm,
and that perfect storm
swept up a 26-year-old housewife and mother
with no prior criminal history
and landed her on death row.
I'm at peace.
I'm at peace. I know I didn't do this.
It gives me that peace inside.
I can look people in the eye.
I've done nothing but tell the truth.
My innocent blood will be on their hands,
and they will have to
answer for that one day.
May not be here,
but they'll have to answer for it.
of Death Row Stories...
A mother's throat is slashed
and her two young sons are murdered.
It was a bloodbath,
and when a crime like that happens,
someone in the house did this.
Yeah, you were.
No motive, no explanation.
By God, somebody is going to pay
for these two boys being murdered.
A buxom blond, materialistic, a temptress.
The state will be seeking
the death penalty in this case.
It just didn't seem real.
I know that I'm innocent.
There's a body in the water.
He was butchered and murdered.
Many people proclaim their innocence.
In this case, there are
a number of things that stink.
This man is remorseless.
He needs to pay for it with his life.
The electric chair
flashed in front of my eyes.
Get a conviction at all costs.
Let the truth fall where it may.
♪ ♪
I'm going to Florida in two days.
I can't wait!
You'll take the camera with you?
Yeah, I'll take the camera with me.
Darlie Lynn and Darin Routier
were high school sweethearts from Lubbock,
Texas.
They married when he was 20 and she was 18.
They were the proud parents of three boys.
What's your name? - Devon.
Do something special.
Do a cartwheel.
Wow! Way to go, Devon!
Oh, that hurt.
- Yeah.
Say hi, Damon.
Hi.
Damon, can you do a flip?
No.
The family moved
to an upscale neighborhood
in Dallas after Darin Routier's
computer business took off.
Oh, no, Damon's driving.
By all accounts, the Routiers
were living a charmed life,
but that would all change on June 6, 1996.
It was an average day.
It was an ordinary day.
You know, I remember going to sleep.
That night, Darlie fell asleep
in front of the TV
with her two older sons, Devon and Damon.
Darin Routier was upstairs
asleep with their infant,
and he said he heard Darlie yell for him,
he heard a glass break,
and that's when he came
downstairs to find a bloodbath.
Oh, my God!
I come in downstairs,
running straight over to Devon,
and there's blood all over.
Six-year-old Devon Routier
had two devastating wounds
to his chest.
They went completely through his body.
He was impaled by a large knife.
Darin tried to perform CPR.
When I blew into his mouth,
the first thing that happened
was air came out of his chest
and blood just sprayed all over me.
Darlie Routier has also
been injured
with stab wounds to her neck and arms.
There's blood everywhere
and Darlie's bleeding,
and she's telling Darin that,
"Some men came in here and did this."
The first two officers
who arrived,
I think essentially were just shocked.
One of the boys was dead,
but the other was alive.
Damon was found near a wall
and he'd been stabbed
multiple times in the back.
He was barely alive,
and he put down a bloody palm print
to help himself up.
When paramedics arrived,
six-year-old Devon was already dead.
As they tried to revive
five-year-old Damon,
he gasped his final breath.
I got a phone call
at 3:00 in the morning...
"Devon and Damon are dead
and Darlie Lynn might be dying,"
and I just start screaming.
Darlie was rushed
to Baylor University Medical
in Dallas and immediately
taken into surgery.
The necklace Darlie had been wearing
at the time of the attack
was so deeply embedded
in her throat,
it had to be surgically removed,
but it also saved her life,
stopping the knife
less than 2 millimeters
from her carotid artery.
The surgeon who treated Darlie,
he took my hand and he said
that she was lucky to have survived this.
When Darlie awoke
from anesthesia,
two detectives from the
Rowlett police department
were waiting to interview her.
The story was, an assailant was in there.
She woke up and a man was over her,
and she started fighting with him,
and she really wouldn't
give any type of description
because she said she couldn't remember.
Couldn't remember his face
and couldn't remember anything about him.
At the crime scene,
detectives tried to gather
pieces to a murky puzzle.
I think the Rowlett police department
was entirely overwhelmed,
and they didn't know what to do...
The way they were handling evidence,
the way they were trying to take pictures.
They have a camera guy going through there
while others were picking up evidence,
and it was just absolute chaos.
- The Rowlett police department
- had only handled
One other multiple homicide in its history,
so they called for help
from retired Dallas County
Lieutenant James Cron.
Within minutes of his arrival,
Cron developed a theory
that ruled out an intruder.
There was numerous
items... watches and rings...
All laid out on the island in the kitchen,
and nothing was taken.
Darlie Routier said that the
assailant dropped the knife
and she picked it up in the utility room,
which lead to the garage.
The knife was covered with blood.
They found evidence where
it was laid on the carpet,
they found it was laid on
the counter in the kitchen,
but they didn't find any evidence
of the knife being
dropped in the utility room.
But that's where she said she picked it up,
which didn't correlate with the evidence.
Darin hears glass break,
and the troubling thing about that was,
there was broken wine glass there,
and it was on top of her bloody footprints,
which proves beyond any
doubt that it was placed there
after she'd been walking around down there.
The red flags were so startling,
he's like, "This ain't making sense,"
and when a crime like
that happens in the home,
an experienced detective goes,
"It's someone in the house that did this."
As word of the murders spread,
news crews descended on the Routier home.
One neighbor said
her son Michael
had just spent the night Tuesday.
I'm just so glad that he
wasn't there last night.
After Darlie was released
from the hospital,
she and Darin were driven
directly to the Rowlett police department,
where they were questioned separately.
According to police,
in this critical moment,
Darlie's story shifted.
Instead of waking to face an intruder,
Darlie now claimed her
son Damon had woken her,
calling, "Mommy, Mommy."
She then saw a man with a knife
and followed him into the utility room.
I do not think that those two
stories are mutually exclusive.
Darlie could have been awoken by a burglar
and momentarily have a memory lapse
or a blackout or whatever, and then also
have some perception that
she was woken by the baby.
All I was thinking about
was trying to save the babies.
I mean, Darin and I tried
to save the babies, but...
it was too late, the babies were gone.
But we tried. We tried,
and we have to live with that forever.
12 days after the murders,
Darin and Darlie return to
the Rowlett police department
for more questioning.
They walked in voluntarily,
but only one of them would walk out.
At approximately 10:20 p.m. this evening,
investigators from the
Rowlett police department
arrested Darlie Routier.
As for the father,
Darin Routier, at this point,
we do not believe that he
was involved in the murders.
We believe that the white male suspect,
described by Darlie Routier
as the man that attacked her
and murdered her children, never existed.
I watched it on the 10:00 news,
my daughter being arrested.
Had no clue. Had no idea.
I looked up,
and there's Darlie in handcuffs, crying.
Darlie was charged
with capital murder
and taken to the Dallas County jail.
It just didn't seem real.
Like, it just couldn't be happening.
I was just in a place of deep hurt,
trying to survive,
still in the shock that
my babies were gone.
Before being arrested for
the murder of two of her sons,
Darlie Routier was a 26-year-old mother
to three boys.
Darlie was known
as a doting mother
who baked cookies for her boys
and their neighborhood friends.
It's terrible to think a mother
would do something like that,
but it's good to know that
they caught the murderer.
Darlie's arrest came
less than two years
after Susan Smith claimed
an assailant had taken her two boys,
before Smith herself
confessed to driving them
into a lake in South Carolina.
As with Susan Smith, there were
two young boys involved.
Pretty quickly,
Darlie was called Dallas' Susan Smith.
She is not a Susan Smith,
and we're gonna prove this.
Concerned that Darlie might be
released on bail,
Child Protective Services
came to take her son Drake
away from Darlie's mother.
I said, "You're not
taking Drake.
We haven't done anything wrong,"
and she said, "Well,
you think Darlie's innocent,
so we can't be sure
that you'll protect him."
And I said, "My daughter is
innocent until proven guilty,
or is it changed now?"
Drake was temporarily placed
in a foster home,
and with Darlie's trial approaching,
the media spotlight only intensified.
Sources say the Routiers may
have been in financial trouble
and had recently taken
out large insurance policies
on the two boys.
The Routiers tried
to fight back.
There were two $5,000
life insurance policies.
That was not enough to even bury the boys.
I'll stand behind Darlie
150%. I know she didn't do it.
I know all the millions of
little pieces of this puzzle
that will come out in the trial.
After their radio interview,
Darlie's mother and Darin
were handed subpoenas
for violating the gag order
against talking about the case.
To represent them,
they hired legendary Dallas attorney,
Douglas Mulder,
who also agreed to take on Darlie's case.
It is an interesting case,
and I'm gonna look forward to trying it.
I'm very happy. For what reason?
He's the best.
Mulder's fee was $250,000,
and the Routiers scrambled to raise
all the money they could.
We started selling
everything in the house.
All our family members started taking
their children's college funds.
We sold everything.
Greg Davis was
the lead prosecutor
assigned to the case.
The only real announcement
that we made today
was that the state will be
seeking the death penalty
in this case.
Davis would only try Darlie
for Damon's death,
since victims under age six
qualify for the death penalty.
The reason the state tries
for only one murder
is that if she's found innocent,
they can try her for the second one,
and that's a way for the state
to load up a double-barreled shotgun.
Given the media circus
in Dallas, the trial is moved
to the small,
conservative town of Kerrville, Texas.
Why that was agreed to is
really unfathomable to me.
Richard Mosty, second chair
on Darlie's defense,
was raised in Kerrville.
Doug Mulder always says to me,
he says, "Mosty,
"if I ever get murdered,
I want you to promise
that my murderer will
get tried in Kerr Country."
On January 6, 1997,
Darlie's trial began.
Her family,
who had all been called as witnesses,
were banned from the court,
but Darin's Aunt Sandy
slipped under the radar.
Darlie Lynn had asked me,
"Please, would you come to the trial?"
I have to tell you,
I'd never been to trial in my entire life.
All I'd ever seen was Perry Mason.
You know, so I didn't... I really
did not know what to expect.
Everyone's behind Darlie 100%.
She had no one in that
courtroom other than me
that she could turn and look to.
True crime novelist
Barbara Davis,
who would later publish
a book about the case,
was also in the courtroom.
Greg Davis is an extremely
dynamic prosecutor.
He had a way of making you believe
what he said was the God's truth.
He began painting Darlie as materialistic,
a buxom blond,
worried about her own
self and how she looked
and a temptress, so to speak.
Greg Davis constantly
portrayed her as a psychopath.
On the stand,
retired Lieutenant James Cron
laid out his case for a staged crime scene.
Jewelry left on the kitchen counter,
the murder weapon suspiciously moved,
and a slashed window screen in the garage.
Burglars,
intruders don't usually cut a screen,
because they know you just
can pry a screen off very easily.
I think it's just a part of staging.
Next, the Dallas County
medical examiner
described Darlie's wounds as superficial
and potentially self-inflicted.
They didn't go deep,
and it was just a straight
slice across this way,
and that's why we call
them superficial wounds.
But if there really was a killer in there
doing those things to those boys,
he would have stabbed Darlie Routier
multiple times right through the chest,
just like he did those boys,
and she'd be dead.
The state also focused on
blood spatter from the two boys
found on the back of Darlie's nightshirt.
Our blood expert was able
to demonstrate how that happens
if you're kneeling over
someone and stabbing them.
He just showed you come up,
and when it comes up
is when the castoff happens,
but obviously,
that's the manner they had to be stabbed.
And stabbed and stabbed
and stabbed and stabbed,
and that remained in that jury's mind.
For Darlie's defense,
Doug Mulder called two doctors,
one who said Darlie was
suffering from traumatic amnesia
and another who felt Darlie's wounds
had not been self-inflicted.
Mulder also focused on the 911 call
from the night of the murders.
The 911 tape, when I heard it,
I was very convinced
that she was an hysterical mother,
but all of a sudden,
Darlie was worried about touching a knife.
What grieving mother
would even think of that?
She went from being a victim in their eyes
to a murderer of two little children.
Finally, prosecutors showed
the jury a news report
shot eight days after the slayings.
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
For some, this may seem
a strange thing to do
in an odd place and time.
♪ Happy birthday, dear Devon ♪
Singing Happy Birthday
in a cemetery
to a son who was brutally stabbed to death
just over a week ago.
- Ah! - I love you, Devon and Damon.
It was one of the strangest
things I'd ever seen,
not how you'd expect a
mother whose boys had been
brutally murdered to act...
To grin, to smack gum,
and to shoot silly string.
My gut reaction was what I think
the majority of the public was.
How could a mother
who just lost her two sons
do something like that?
And the cameras were there to capture it,
and I think that sealed her doom.
During deliberations,
the jury asked
to see the silly string
videotape nine times.
And after only eight hours, they returned
with their unanimous verdict: guilty.
Night had fallen when Darlie arrived
at the Texas Department of Corrections.
Considered a suicide risk,
Darlie was dressed in a white paper gown
for her walk to death row.
It just didn't seem real.
Like, it just couldn't be happening.
It seemed like a nightmare.
- Darlie, do you have
- anything to say?
- Darlie, do you have
- any comments?
Is there anything you would like to say?
After Darlie Routier
was sent to death row,
her family quickly ran out of money
to pay her attorney, Douglas Mulder.
We had to sign a paper
even after she was convicted
that for two years,
if we did any movies or books or whatever,
we owed him the balance.
The courts appointed
J. Stephen Cooper
to lead Darlie's appeals.
As an appellate lawyer,
you get the transcript of the trial
and work from the transcript.
It's strictly from what's on the page.
In this case, what was on the page
was erroneous in large parts
and we had a lot of issues
on reconstructing the trial transcript.
Darlie's trial transcript
had over 30,000 mistakes.
It was very serious. The difference
between yes and no.
The difference between,
you know, up and down,
and I'd never seen that before
in 25 years of practicing law.
When Sandra Halsey... the court
reporter for Darlie's trial...
Was questioned,
she pled the Fifth Amendment.
Cooper felt confident the flawed transcript
could earn a new trial for Darlie,
preferably in a courtroom
away from Kerrville.
This drew concern from prosecutors.
When all of this came to light,
the state offered her a life sentence,
and all she would have
to do is basically admit
that she had killed her children.
And what did she say?
No.
And what does that tell you about Darlie?
Uh, she's strong, she's brave,
and she's innocent.
But just hours
before the scheduled hearing,
the judge denied Darlie's motion.
These demonstrators protested
a state district judge's decision
to cancel a hearing in Routier's case,
originally set for today.
We're the voice for Darlie Lynn Routier.
The issue
with the court reporter
literally changed the
court reporting industry,
and there are many people, to this day,
who are astounded that that trial record
did not result in a new
trial for Darlie Routier.
Darlie's defense now faced
the uphill battle of appeals,
but as Cooper dug through evidence,
he came across a second videotape,
never shown to the jury,
which cast the silly string incident
in a very different light.
The silly string was a major
factor in her conviction,
from the jury's own mouths,
but what was not shown the jury
was this two-hour memorial video
that took place before
the silly string incident.
This second video was
secretly filmed by police,
attempting to capture any guilty comments
made at the boys' memorial.
The preacher was there,
the family was there,
prayers, crying, emotion you would expect,
all appropriate behavior.
Her sister brought the silly string,
it wasn't Darlie's idea.
This was my son's birthday,
Devon's birthday,
and my sister and her
boyfriend went and got silly string.
He loved silly string.
We did for them what...
Devon didn't get to have,
and what we knew that
he would want and enjoy.
They took that and they twisted it,
and they turned something
that was supposed to be beautiful
and tried to make it
into something very ugly.
When Doug Mulder brought up
the tape during the trial,
the detectives who were
asked about it pled the Fifth.
We have a lady on death row in Texas
who, in the course of the litigation,
the only three people who
took the Fifth Amendment
were the two lead detectives
and the court reporter.
The question for Cooper was,
"Why hadn't Mulder shown
this second videotape to the jury?"
I don't know why they didn't show the tape.
Greg Davis said,
"You put it in if you want,"
but they never did put
that portion of the tape in.
I think it was a huge mistake
not to show the jury this memorial service.
I think it would have effectively nullified
any impact the silly string video had.
As he continued to build
Darlie's appeal,
Cooper was confronted
with another question.
Why had Mulder never
raised Darlie's husband Darin
as a possible suspect?
Let's be practical about this.
There are two adults in this house
and there's two dead children,
and Darlie is sliced and
cut and beat severely.
Well, the most logical culprit of that,
if it's not an intruder,
would be the husband, or Darin.
In addition to defending Darlie,
Doug Mulder had represented
Darin in his gag order case.
Well, we've alleged
in several appellate pleadings
that Mr. Mulder was suffering
from a conflict of interest.
At the time that Dougl
Mulder represented Darlie,
he had a continuing duty to protect Darin.
I was in the room when Mulder
and Darin had that conversation.
Darin had said, "You know,
I don't want them going after me
because I didn't do anything,"
and Mulder said, "Well,
you didn't do anything,
I don't see any reason to go after you."
And that was that.
It'd be very difficult to
point a finger at Darin
when the person on trial says,
"My husband's not involved."
At that time,
that was just absurd to me.
It was...
I didn't even want to
hear anything like that.
What you didn't really
hear about at the time
was the life insurance on Darlie,
of which Darin was the beneficiary.
It was $250,000.
This insurance policy
raised questions,
even with one of Darin's
own family members.
This is my nephew, and I love him.
I don't know if Darin was involved.
I know that that is a big question.
Everybody has their answer to that.
In my heart, I say no.
In my head, I have a few questions.
To answer those questions,
Sandy contacted
multi-millionaire Brian Pardo.
Something of an armchair detective,
Pardo supports the death
penalty but funds investigations
for inmates he thinks are innocent.
I felt that it was extremely
important to exclude Darin,
and the only way that he was
gonna be eliminated as a suspect
was to pass a polygraph,
because that's what the police like to do.
The results
of Pardo's investigation
were about to uncover dark secrets
that Darin had kept hidden for years.
Darlie Routier had been
on death row for 15 months
when Brian Pardo began raising questions
about her husband Darin.
Darin adamantly denied any involvement
in the murders of his sons,
and to prove it,
he submitted to a polygraph test.
The polygraph examiner was
with the police department.
He came around the other
side of the table and he sat down,
and he said, "Darin,
you have utterly failed this examination.
It looks to me like you
perpetrated this crime."
Yeah, you were.
In what way?
No, I didn't.
When Brian Pardo came back
and pointed a finger at Darin,
the whole family went ballistic,
and "How dare Aunt Sandy
have brought him into this?"
Even Darlie Lynn wrote
me a letter and said,
"You need to think
about what you're doing."
And I have to admit,
I wrote back to her and said,
"You're the one on death row.
You need to think about what you're doing."
The polygraph wasn't
the only revelation about Darin.
Pardo also hired a private investigator,
who discovered that before the murders,
Darin suggested hiring
someone to rob his house
so he could collect insurance money.
Darin had come up with a screwball scheme.
He had already done one insurance scam.
He admitted that to
Darlie. That was with a car,
and he got the money for the car.
In a signed affidavit,
Darin admitted
to both the car scam and
his plot for a home robbery.
I've known Darin since he was 15 years old.
Possibly, you could get me to believe
that he set it up for a robbery,
because he talked about that.
He would never hurt his
children or hurt Darlie, never.
I will never believe that.
But the results of Pardo's
investigation differed.
Darlie had no motive at all,
and Darin had $250,000 worth of motive.
I met with Darlie and told her
that we were very persuaded
that Darin was a participant in this act.
When Darlie was told
of some of the facts regarding Darin,
she totally lost it,
and for the first time,
in her mind,
she thought maybe Darin was involved in it.
I felt betrayed.
Here's the person that I had
been with since high school,
that I had three children with
and a good marriage... so I thought...
And whether or not that had
anything to do with this or not,
to know that that had been
plotted behind my back...
Hurt. It hurt.
Did it make you think that maybe
he could have been behind this?
It's made me have a lot of questions.
While any case against Darin
would have been purely circumstantial,
that didn't explain why
Doug Mulder hadn't fended off
some of the circumstantial
evidence against Darlie,
who was facing death row.
Really, the biggest failing
was the failure to use any forensic testing
to advance a defense on Darlie's behalf.
The fiber evidence
I think was probably
the strongest forensic
evidence that the state had.
The state contended that
fibers found on a bread knife
in the Routier's kitchen matched
the slashed window screen.
But they didn't do any testing
to exclude other sources
for that particular fiber,
or even to pin it down really to the screen
and only the screen.
The bread knife had been
dusted for fingerprints
with a brush that raised
questions for Cooper.
My experts tested seven
random fingerprint brushes,
and four of them had the
same chemical consistency
in appearance as this one fiber
that was found on the bread knife.
It's typical in a criminal case
that the defense is not
satisfied with the state's case,
so if there was any dispute,
certainly you would have
heard from that evidence.
If the defense had had any experts,
where were they?
Where are they
The DA, at final arguments,
says, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,
"the defense didn't put up
any witnesses to contradict it,
so the only evidence before
you is what our experts said."
Cooper's team also learned
about three fingerprints at the crime scene
that police had marked as "unidentified,"
but to match these to a potential intruder,
they first had to rule out the family,
and police had failed to get prints
from Devon and Damon's bodies.
That left Darlie and her family
with only one very emotional choice.
We had to have them exhumed...
and have a specialist come
in to take their fingerprints,
because they foot-printed them,
but they didn't fingerprint them.
You just couldn't believe
this nightmare had gotten to that point.
Darlie hoped the boys' prints
would soon provide evidence
of what she claimed all along,
concrete proof of an intruder.
Three years after Darlie
was sentenced to death,
her sons' bodies were exhumed
in an attempt to rule them out
as a source of the
unidentified fingerprints
found at the crime scene.
The boys were buried together,
holding hands,
and so where the hands were together,
the vault had flooded,
and that totally
destroyed the fingerprints.
The only other option
to identify the fingerprints was DNA,
but Cooper's request for
testing was denied by the courts.
DNA would help,
but there's other aspects of the case
that I think are very helpful to us,
so we're not just limited to the DNA.
Cooper felt the prosecution's
timeline of events
also had flaws.
Well, the timeline
that's drawn by the state,
it was remarkable that they
were able to sell it to this jury,
because of the long time that she was
on the telephone with 911.
Darlie's call to 911
lasted 5:44.
Damon could only have
lived for eight or nine minutes
after those wounds were inflicted.
This is according to courtroom testimony.
So since she was on the
phone with 911 for 5:44,
she had a lot to do real fast.
The biggest wrench
in the timeline
was the discovery of a bloody sock,
found in an alley 75 yards
away from the Routier home.
That sock is the most
important piece of evidence
in this entire case.
There's no way it fits
into the timeline.
One of the things that had to happen
after the boys were stabbed
was the blood on the sock,
because both boys' blood
was found on the sock.
They hadn't quite figured
out what to do with that sock.
There is not but a couple of minutes
for her to stab and kill the children,
cut the screen,
get this sock and run it
down the alley in the dark
through a gate that
doesn't really work very well,
come back. Then the state claims
that she stood at the kitchen sink
and injured herself,
staged this crime scene.
It really defies common
sense to believe that all that
could have been done
within that time frame.
But during closing arguments,
Greg Davis asked the jury,
"What loving mother
sleeps through the murder
of her two children?"
And then he told the jury,
"The last thing each of
these two children saw
was their killer."
Everything pointed to Darlie,
nothing pointed to anyone else,
and I had a hand in
convincing a lot of people
she did this. Sold over 200,000 books.
Barbara Davis' book had
only been out for about a year
when she received a call
from a Deep Throat source
within the District Attorney's office,
and that source said to her,
"You need to meet with me.
There's some things you need to see."
And within about 20 minutes,
I had tears running down my cheeks.
I had written a book
based on my reputation and my integrity
saying that this woman
had killed her children,
and I was staring at facts
that she indeed had not.
After the publication
of true crime writer
Barbara Davis' scathing book,
a secret source within the DA's office
showed her evidence that she'd never seen.
When I saw the photographs...
This was a small police department,
never handled a murder case like this,
and the pictures were
taken out of sequence.
Major evidence was picked
up and moved around,
because I saw them here in one picture,
you know, they were here in another,
contradicting any...
Any testimony of staging.
I learned an hour before
the silly string happened,
they had a video showing the prayer vigil
before the celebration,
but the jury never saw
this solemn,
appropriate celebration of the boys' lives.
I began to see other photographs.
That throat was cut
where her dominant hand wouldn't do it.
Her left hand would
have had to have done it.
She had bruised up and down her arm,
and the picture began to form in my mind,
the horror of the injuries she had.
If the jurors had seen it,
it would have been a different outcome,
but they didn't even look at the evidence.
The last thing they did
was play the silly string tape,
and turn to Charlie Samford, who was going,
"I don't want to do this,
I don't think she's guilty,"
and said, "Now do you think she's guilty?"
And a freezing, tired,
worn-out Charlie Samford
finally said, "Okay."
Charlie Samford was a juror
at Darlie's trial.
When you do something and it's right,
after a while, it'll... you settle.
This never would settle. It
never would leave me alone.
Like Barbara Davis,
Charlie Samford was shocked
to learn about the surveillance tape
and the photos of
Darlie's extensive wounds.
There's a lot of evidence that
we in the jury never did see.
If I would have seen those pictures before,
they would have made a lot
of difference in what I thought.
He says he wasn't shown all the evidence,
and the evidence he wasn't shown
was actually evidence he was shown.
When the prosecution
gets on their high horse
and said, "The pictures were right there,"
they sure were,
with thousands of other things,
and they made sure they were mixed in,
and the jury was not gonna
sit through those pictures.
Have any of the other jurors
had a change of heart?
Yes, but they don't want to...
They don't want to do this.
They see me coming
down an aisle at Walmart,
they take off, run the other way.
In June of 2008,
Stephen Cooper finally got
the break he was looking for
when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
granted DNA testing.
It's good news, we've been fighting for it
for five or six years.
We're trying to get some proof
of some male DNA in the house
that's connected to the crime scene.
The infamous 85J is a
fingerprint on a couch table,
and that bloody print
would certainly be one.
If DNA ultimately shows
that there was in fact
an intruder that night,
how can Darlie ever be
repaid for all the years of her life
that have been spent in
a 9x6 cell on death row,
and how can she ever be
repaid for the years she's lost
with her sole surviving son?
Darlie's son Drake
is now 19 years old.
He's never before given an interview.
I usually won't talk about it.
A lot of people kind of knew that, "Yeah,
it's Drake Routier. I mean,
his mom's on death row."
I mean, it's just part of my life,
something I've had to
live with for... 19 years.
He's been coming up here
since he was, you know, pretty little.
I mean, he was a little baby,
so this is all he really remembers.
Drake lives with his father
Darin in Lubbock, Texas.
Darlie and Darin were divorced in 2011.
Darin has done a good job
of raising Drake.
He didn't get the hugs that a mom gives.
We don't have contact,
so I've never gotten to hold him or hug him
since I've been in this place.
There's just the glass
right there in between us.
I mean, you can't do anything about it.
In the summer of 2013,
Drake was forced to deliver
devastating news to Darlie.
I was diagnosed with cancer,
I mean, a year ago, June 26th.
Drake was diagnosed
with acute lymphocytic leukemia.
I was handed a cell phone
in the hospital bed.
I mean, I heard her voice,
and I said, "Mom, I have cancer."
I mean,
it was probably one of the hardest things
I've ever done in my life.
You know, not being able
to hold him...
that was extremely hard.
I didn't want to break apart for him,
I wanted to be strong.
Drake's cancer still requires
monthly chemotherapy,
but his prospects for
remission are positive.
His body is healing.
Yeah,
he's... he helps keep me fighting for sure.
Darlie, will you ever admit
to having killed the boys?
I'm innocent.
Even today, I can't believe
that I have a daughter
who's innocent on death row.
I mean,
it's just... it changes your whole life.
That's what you think
about when you wake up,
That's what you think
about when you go to bed.
Darlie's case
is currently on hold,
pending DNA testing.
Cooper believes that the results...
Specifically those of
the bloody fingerprint...
Will finally prove that
there was an intruder
at the home on the night of the murders.
If we get it reversed
by the appellate court,
they have to try or dismiss it.
With all the evidence that's
been established over time,
they're not gonna retry this case,
in my opinion.
Well prepared attorneys
with a good strategy
will eat the prosecution alive.
But time is not
on Darlie's side.
In Texas, if you've been
sentenced to death,
you have three appeals.
Darlie Routier's lost
her direct state appeal
and she's lost the writ
appeal from the state.
If her federal appeals are denied,
then the trial judge from that court
will set a date of execution.
I fully expect her to be
put to death one day,
and I think at that time,
you know, we can finally say
that justice was done
in this case and this case is now closed.
This must be
really hard for you.
What would you say to your mom?
I mean, I love you.
I mean, I always will.
I hope you get out soon.
That's it.
Darlie is unique in the fact
that she's maintained her
innocence from day one,
and she was convicted, in my mind,
partially because of Susan
Smith and what happened there.
It became apparent,
because of the publicity,
that mothers kill their children.
It created a perfect storm,
and that perfect storm
swept up a 26-year-old housewife and mother
with no prior criminal history
and landed her on death row.
I'm at peace.
I'm at peace. I know I didn't do this.
It gives me that peace inside.
I can look people in the eye.
I've done nothing but tell the truth.
My innocent blood will be on their hands,
and they will have to
answer for that one day.
May not be here,
but they'll have to answer for it.