Death Row Stories (2014–…): Season 2, Episode 3 - Death, Lies and Videotape - full transcript
On this episode
of Death Row Stories,
a family is found brutally murdered.
The severity of the crime
puts it on another level.
And an escaped convict
is sentenced to death.
They caught him? They
should do away with him.
But just hours before
his execution,
a new defense team
raises doubts about his guilt.
You let the evidence
lead you to a suspect.
What they did in this case
was exactly the opposite.
Evidence disruption, evidence tampering.
My client was framed.
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.
♪ ♪
Chino Hills is very rural.
Very peaceful.
A lot of horse ranches.
We all knew each other.
We didn't lock our doors.
Just a quaint little community.
The sleepy hamlet of Chino Hills
sits nestled below the
San Bernardino mountains,
less than 40 miles from Los Angeles.
There, Peggy Ryen, a horse trainer,
and her husband, Doug,
lived on a ranch with their children,
10-year-old Jessica and 8-year-old Josh.
On the night of June 4th, 1983,
Josh Ryen's friend Chris Hughes was invited
to spend the night.
- We're on a hill
- overlooking Chino,
The scene of a multiple homicide.
We have four fatal victims.
One victim approximately
eight years of age.
The eyes are open, however,
there is no response.
The next morning,
Chris Hughes's father
discovered the lifeless bodies
of his son Chris,
as well as Doug and Peggy Ryen
and their daughter, Jessica.
Among the carnage,
first responders also found
8-year-old Josh Ryen.
He was still breathing, but barely.
He was immediately
air-lifted to a nearby hospital.
I first arrived with
Sheriff Floyd Tidwell.
Each of the victims
had a combination of
hatchet and knife wounds.
This was such a brutal crime.
The severity of the crime
puts it on another level.
I think we'd be lying
if we didn't say that.
We were trying to figure
out a motive for these killings,
and we couldn't come up with anything.
Nothing made sense.
We heard there had been a murder
up on the hill.
As a community,
our hearts grieved for these people.
They're horse people. They were our people.
How could anybody do this?
It just doesn't make sense.
They were the type of
people no one could ever hate.
Never.
On the same day
the bodies were found,
a Chino Hills resident
stumbled onto another discovery:
one of the murder weapons
lying on the side of the road.
The hatchet had
the victims' blood on it,
but it didn't have any fingerprints on it.
Nearby, a tan, blood-stained
T-shirt
was also found.
Slide them out a little bit.
As the search continued,
police received a tip from
the Ryens' next-door neighbor,
Larry Lease.
Mr. Lease said,
"I think you might be interested
in seeing my rental house."
The rental house,
supposedly unoccupied
at the time of the murders,
held a major piece of evidence:
a sheath that fit the
ax used in the murders.
We knew that whoever
had been in the Lease house
committed the murders at the Ryen house.
And in the closet, we found a small box
of prison-issued tobacco
from Chino Institution for Men.
We checked with prison authorities.
Got names of any individuals
that escaped within the past week.
All of a sudden, we had a suspect:
Kevin Cooper.
Just two days before
the murders,
25-year-old Kevin Cooper had escaped
from the California Institution for Men,
a prison just five miles
from the Ryens' home.
Police believed Cooper
hid at the Lease house
before killing the Ryens and Chris Hughes.
With Cooper still at large,
San Bernardino county sheriff Floyd Tidwell
took to the airwaves.
We have evidence in our possession
that places Kevin
Cooper at the crime scene.
And we have other evidence
that gives us cause to believe
that Kevin Cooper was
responsible for the murders.
Police patrolled on both sides
of the California/Mexico border today
seeking the escaped convict, Kevin Cooper.
Tidwell launched
one of the largest
manhunts in state history,
circulating photos of Cooper
and the Ryens' stolen station wagon.
There is growing fear in the
California community of Chino.
I want to know what the
state officials are going to do.
As pressure mounted
to apprehend Cooper,
police caught a break.
We recovered the Ryen station
wagon from a church parking lot
in Long Beach.
Cooper had used that car to escape.
For District Attorney Kottmeier,
the motive behind the
murders was now clear.
Cooper's motive
was to get the hell out of Chino Hills.
If he had to kill people to
cover his escape, then he would.
The killer seemed to be
within reach.
But then the trail went cold.
On July 30th, 1983,
almost two months after the brutal murders,
the US Coast Guard
responded to a distress call
near Santa Barbara.
They arrived at a sailboat
moored in a small marina,
the scene of an alleged rape.
When they got in the sheriff's station,
the victim of the rape was
walking by the wanted posters
and saw Cooper's wanted picture,
and said, "Oh, my God,
I've been raped by Kevin Cooper."
Kevin Cooper escaped
an almost two-month-long murder manhunt,
and police caught him trying to swim away
from the scene of an alleged rape.
The rape allegation
was never pursued,
because Cooper now faced
four counts of first-degree murder,
each carrying the death penalty.
I hope you die!
Put him in the gas chamber!
When Cooper was returned
to San Bernardino,
racial tensions boiled over.
Local authorities say
they received several
calls from outraged residents
who demanded Cooper
be sent to the gas chamber.
They caught him? They
should do away with him.
We're seeking the death penalty,
as we have all along.
Cooper's trial began
on October 23rd, 1984.
I cross-examined Cooper
for a day and a half.
Cooper said, "Yeah,
I was at the Lease house,
"but I never went up to the Ryen house.
"It wasn't me.
Must have been
somebody else that did this."
Kottmeier countered
Cooper's testimony
by showing the jury the hatchet
sheath found in the Lease house,
and a bloody footprint
found in the Ryens' bedroom.
In the folds of that sheet
was a half-bloody footprint.
Now, those soles were unique.
And we were able to
determine that the shoe print
was made by a prison-issued
PRO-Ked tennis shoe.
Blood found at the murder scene
also led back to Cooper.
A-41 was a single drop of blood
in the hallway.
And Cooper matched it.
Finally, Kottmeier played
the emotional videotape
testimony of the lone survivor,
Josh Ryen.
Have you tried to forget
what happened that night?
What have you done to try and forget it?
Cooper's defense would argue
that the police mishandled
evidence and the investigation.
But after seven days of deliberations,
the jury found Kevin
Cooper guilty on all counts.
There is no question.
There is no doubt
about the guilt of Kevin Cooper.
The only justice in this case
is for Kevin Cooper to face his maker,
and then spend the
rest of his days in hell.
"We, the jury, of the above entitled cause,
determine that the penalty shall be death."
Kevin Cooper would spend
the next two decades on death row.
But in 2003, a new defense
team investigated Cooper's case,
and made a string of discoveries
they felt proved Kevin Cooper's innocence.
I began to learn all of the facts
about the evidence destruction,
the evidence tampering,
the false testimony that was given,
and the failure of the defense
team to put on evidence
that showed who the real killers were.
The state of California is about
to execute an innocent man.
By 2003, Kevin Cooper had lost
all of his appeals
for the 1983 murders of the
Ryen family and Chris Hughes.
With his time running out,
and Cooper still professing his innocence,
the case came to the attention
of the high-powered law firm
Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe.
Norm Hile was part of a team
that fought death penalty cases
on a pro-bono basis.
One thing I've learned in now 25 years
of representing people on death row,
you're going to be
fighting an uphill battle.
And to have a client
whose life is in the balance
is a very heavy burden.
What Hile could not dispute
was Cooper's criminal history,
his escape from prison,
and his proximity to the murders.
- I lived on the mean streets
- of Pittsburgh
When I was growing up.
I became a car thief.
I landed in the California
Institution for Men in 1983
because of a burglary
conviction in Los Angeles.
I was there a couple months.
I was out walking around,
and there was a hole in the fence.
And I just ran.
Mr. Cooper started wandering
through farms and pastures.
Areas that were off of the roadways.
And ultimately found his
way to the Lease house.
When I got to the Lease house,
I called a couple ex-girlfriends.
I asked them to send me money.
I watched TV, ate,
tried to figure out what's next.
But I did not murder those people.
Cooper said he'd already
set out hitchhiking to Mexico
by the time the murders took place.
He went into hiding when he became
the most wanted man in California.
Norm Hile hired former FBI agent Tom Parker
to look into Cooper's case.
When you're conducting an investigation,
especially one as complex as this one,
you essentially collect the evidence
and let the evidence lead you to a suspect.
What they did in this case
was exactly the opposite.
As word of the murders got out,
the sheriff's department learned
that Kevin Cooper had escaped.
And that started what we
refer to in law enforcement
as tunnel vision.
Sheriff Tidwell held a
big press conference.
They started with a suspect.
And they then started collecting evidence
to prove their theory.
But if Kevin Cooper
wasn't the killer,
why did the hatchet sheath
and the prison-issued tobacco
found at Larry Lease's empty
home link him to the murders?
A couple of deputies went over
to the Lease house, walked through it,
and really didn't see anything suspicious.
A day or two later,
other deputies were asked
to go search the Lease house again.
By then, they knew a hatchet
had been used in the murders.
And they found a sheath to a hand ax
laying right out in
the middle of the floor,
in a position that the first deputies
walking through the house
could not have missed it.
They would have had to have
been blind to miss that sheath.
Cooper also said that during
his two days in the house,
he smoked multiple cigarettes.
But when the police collected the evidence,
they only collected one cigarette butt.
And the rest of the cigarette
butts somehow disappeared.
Later on,
when they found the Ryen station wagon
in Long Beach,
the first time it was inspected
there were no cigarette butts.
The second time,
they suddenly found two cigarette butts.
Clearly they had been
taken from the hideout house.
And there was the blood evidence
connecting Cooper to the murders.
This small speck, labeled A-41.
A-41 was examined
by sheriff's department
criminalist Daniel Gregonis.
Gregonis was a rookie
at the time.
Now, the proper lab
procedure is to do blind testing.
You test something,
and you don't know what
the other person's blood is
who you're trying to see
whether it's that person or not.
But Gregonis waited until he
had Kevin Cooper's blood type.
Gregonis originally found A-41
did not match Kevin Cooper.
But then he changed
notes to show that it did.
So, in fact, the testing
actually showed that the blood drop
was not from somebody
with Kevin's blood type.
Other evidence
prosecutors claimed
linked Cooper to the murders
was a bloody footprint
on the Ryens' bed sheet,
supposedly from a prison-issued sneaker.
Kottmeier claimed that
these were tennis shoes
that were manufactured
and sold only to prisons.
In fact, it was a style of shoe
that was readily available.
Very common tennis shoes
with a very common shoe print.
The question now was
whether these were innocent
mistakes by investigators,
or something more.
Norm Hile was about to learn
that before they turned
their attention to Cooper,
police had been given other solid leads,
including from the sole survivor.
Eight-year-old Josh Ryen
was able to communicate
to staff at the hospital
that the people who had
attacked him and his family
were three white men.
In fact, a picture of Kevin
Cooper was on television,
and he looked up and he said,
"That's not the one who did it."
Kevin Cooper had been on
death row for nearly 20 years
when attorney Norm Hile
began looking into his case.
Hile felt the evidence against Cooper...
The cigarette butts in the Ryen car,
the bloody shoe print on the Ryens' bed,
even the blood testing... all had flaws.
But Hile's biggest
question involved motive,
and the prosecution's claim
that Cooper had killed the Ryens
in order to steal their station wagon.
The problem with this theory
is that if somebody such as Kevin Cooper
had wanted to make an escape,
they missed the fact that there was cash,
credit cards, and other valuables
left at the scene of the crimes.
None of that was taken.
If Mr. Cooper has walked
away from the prison,
obviously with no money,
all of it was right there for him to take.
And it was not touched.
Hile also disputed
the prosecution's theory
that the killer worked alone.
The sheer number of
wounds suffered by the victims,
140 in all,
and the fact that Doug
Ryen was an ex-Marine
with loaded guns in the bedroom,
suggested to Hile that there
had been more than one killer.
For a time, San Bernardino police
apparently agreed with that conclusion.
The sheriff's department was
told by two different bystanders
that the night of the murders
around the time that the
murders had occurred,
they had seen a car that
matched the description
of the Ryen station wagon
speeding down the road
from the Ryens' house,
and that in that car were white men.
As it turned out,
Josh Ryen,
the sole survivor of the attacks,
also reported seeing multiple intruders.
Deputy Dale Sharp interviewed Josh Ryen
just hours after he was
rushed to the hospital.
It wasn't good. He had at least
one hatched wound to his head,
and he had had his throat slit.
Josh was unable to speak,
so Deputy Sharp devised
another method of communication.
He would squeeze my hand for a yes,
and no squeeze for a no.
I took his hand and let him know
that I was his friend the best I could.
We talked about baseball,
and it got him comfortable with me.
I would ask, "Do you remember anything?"
And I would get a hand squeeze, "Yes."
Can you remember anyone
coming to your house?
"Yes."
We ended up with three Mexican guys,
or maybe three white guys.
I ask, "Were these three men
there when things went crazy?"
And the answer was yes.
Based on this information,
police released this bulletin
two days after the murders.
But by the time of the trial,
Josh Ryen had changed his story.
When Josh was pressed to what he had seen,
he is very specific.
He only saw one person that had very bushy,
fuzzy hair.
Did you see what that shadow
by the bathroom was doing?
How many shadows did you see?
Just the one?
Deputy Sharp
saw nothing suspicious
about Josh Ryen's changing story.
Victim interviews can change,
especially with a 8-year-old boy.
You don't know what he's seen.
You don't know what he remembers.
Based on my 30-plus years
experience in law enforcement,
the initial comments of eyewitnesses
are usually the most accurate.
There's a very strong possibility
that Josh was coached.
Norman Hile now felt
he had enough evidence
to successfully fight for Kevin's life.
But as he prepared his appeals,
yet another witness came forward,
fully 20 years after the crime.
I hear on the TV set
that they're going to put
Kevin Cooper to death.
And I went,
"Are you kidding me?"
♪ ♪
On the night of the murders,
Christine Slonaker was
eating at the Canyon Corral,
a local country/western bar
just two miles from the Ryens' home.
As we were eating,
in through the back
swinging doors of the kitchen
come these three guys.
I noticed that one of
them was covered in blood.
Not just little spots.
This was like someone
had taken a paintbrush
and went whoo!
Like this.
It was splattered everywhere.
Their feet were sticking to the floor.
They were so inundated with blood.
At the time we didn't
know about the murder,
and we just thought, well, I don't know
what they've been doing.
Slaughtering pigs or whatever.
But we're out of here.
Slonaker never reported
the incident,
because she claimed a
uniformed sheriff's deputy
was at the bar that night,
and she assumed he would follow up.
In 2004, Norm Hile fought
for a new trial for Kevin Cooper
in front of US district court
judge Marilyn Huff in San Diego.
In his appeal,
Hile presented Christine
Slonaker's testimony.
And to his surprise, the state responded
by inadvertently revealing
a previously unknown piece of evidence
provided by a woman named Laurel Epler,
who lived near the Canyon Corral bar.
Here was a log that shows
that Laurel Epler called
into the sheriff's department
the day after the murders,
saying she had found a
short-sleeved blue shirt
that she thought had blood on it
on the road near the Canyon Corral bar.
One of the bar employees testified
that one of the men in the bar that night
might have had on a blue shirt.
The criminal bulletin
showed that they were looking
for three white men,
and one of them was wearing a blue shirt.
Hile would argue
that the neighbors' eyewitness testimony,
along with the testimony
of Christine Slonaker,
and Josh Ryen's original account,
all pointed to three suspects.
And in the new documents
released by the prosecution,
Hile was about to discover the name
of one of the three suspects.
And that man also happened
to be a convicted murderer.
While he fought for a new trial
for Kevin Cooper in front
of Judge Marilyn Huff,
attorney Norm Hile discovered evidence
that put a name to an alternate suspect.
The night of the crimes,
a woman named Diana
Roper had seen her boyfriend,
a man named Lee Furrow,
drive up to their house
in the wee hours of the morning.
Lee Furrow comes rushing into the house
wearing coveralls splattered
with what looks to be spots of blood.
He changes clothes and
turns around and leaves.
There were other people in the house,
and someone looked out the window
and saw a white station
wagon matching the Ryens'
parked in the driveway with
other individuals in that car.
Diana Roper called
the sheriff's department,
and she gave them the coveralls.
The bloody coveralls that they recovered
were booked into evidence.
When Diana Roper later learned
that a hatchet was used in the murders,
she again called police and
said that Lee Furrow's hatchet
was missing from his tool belt.
It would make sense that
somebody like Lee Furrow
would have killed the Ryens.
He was a convicted murderer.
He had strangled to death a young woman
and thrown her body into a canal.
But San Bernardino police
waited 11 months before
questioning Lee Furrow.
And when they did, they never asked him
about his missing ax.
They also seemed to accept Furrow's word
that he didn't own any overalls.
Tom Parker thinks he knows why.
The coveralls, in fact,
had been destroyed.
A deputy had taken them
and thrown them in a dumpster
behind the sheriff's
department to get rid of them,
because it was unfounded that
they were connected to the case.
Of course, there had never
been any blood testing or whatever
to come to that conclusion.
Hile now raised
this destruction of
evidence with Judge Huff.
In a criminal prosecution,
the prosecution is required
to turn over to the defense
any evidence that might
be considered exonerating.
It's a rule.
And if the prosecution doesn't do it,
then they have committed
what is called a Brady violation.
And the trial must be reversed,
and a new trial given.
The tennis shoe situation,
the blue shirt, and the bloody coveralls
were all Brady violations.
And we put on evidence as to all of those.
Judge Huff rejected it.
Kevin Cooper was running
out of time.
So his defense team reached
out to a new potential advocate:
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Debra Saunders.
As a supporter of the death penalty,
I wouldn't want to see an
innocent man executed, would I?
If there's a hint that
somebody who's not guilty
might be executed, I want to know about it.
I want to write about it.
My editorial board at the
San Francisco Chronicle
wrote an editorial saying,
"Gee,
maybe Kevin Cooper is an innocent man."
The defense attorneys laid out this case
about how this man had
been unjustly convicted.
Cooper's defense told Saunders
that for years they'd been unsuccessful
in petitioning the courts for
newly available DNA testing,
which could exonerate Cooper.
Kevin Cooper kept saying,
"I'm not guilty.
"Do DNA testing now that you can do it.
"If it shows that I'm guilty,
then you can go ahead and execute me."
I walked out of there thinking,
"Whoa, they've really made
a case I've got to think about."
San Bernardino's current
district attorney Michael Ramos
was handling Cooper's appeals.
We felt that the ongoing request
by defense counsel in this case
was just another delay tactic.
There was no evidence at all
that anybody but Kevin Cooper
committed these horrendous murders.
None.
But in the early 2000s,
new legislation in California
would grant Kevin Cooper
the right to DNA testing.
All these years
that my case was in the appeals courts,
I never got a fair hearing.
I would always get denied
for one reason or the next.
So I felt very bad,
very discouraged,
until DNA testing came along.
And I had a shot.
The state would perform
DNA tests
on blood sample A-41,
taken from the Ryens' hallway,
and blood on the tan shirt
though to have been thrown
from their stolen station wagon.
The results would determine
whether Kevin Cooper lived or died.
Newly available DNA testing
was being conducted on the
evidence from the Ryen murders.
Preliminary results showed that the blood
from the Ryens' hallway
and on the tan T-shirt
both came from the same person.
That DNA profile was then
compared to Kevin Cooper's.
The analysis regarding this was 100%
beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Kevin Cooper was in that house
and bled at that crime scene.
It really verified what you knew all along:
that Kevin Cooper committed
these horrendous murders.
Only one out of
300 billion people
could have matched A-41.
You could go to galaxies
far beyond the stars
and still not find the match for A-41
that Cooper supplies.
Once the DNA test
put Kevin Cooper in the home
he said he never went into,
and on a T-shirt with
Doug Ryen's blood on it,
that was it for him.
Debra Saunders,
once convinced of Cooper's innocence,
now published scathing articles
in the San Francisco Chronicle
about Kevin Cooper's guilt.
The DNA results and
this new press attention
had backfired on Cooper's defense.
To Kevin Cooper's shock
and the defense's shock,
the testing came back saying
that there was Kevin's DNA on A-41.
But for Hile,
the DNA results raised a red flag.
Back in 1983, the lab
technician, Daniel Gregonis,
had testified that he had consumed A-41
during his testing.
Now Gregonis was asked to
make sure that A-41 still existed.
We have a photograph of the envelope
that shows the date that he
took it out and when he resealed it.
So we know that he had A-41 on his person
for 24 hours before he returned it.
He also had, nearby in the lab,
the vial of Kevin Cooper's
blood that was taken from him
when he was arrested.
Contrary to Gregonis's
original testimony,
the state now reported
there was enough of A-41
for additional DNA testing.
Results from the tan T-shirt
also changed drastically.
At the original trial,
the T-shirt was only shown
to have Doug Ryen's blood on it.
When the T-shirt was tested
at this time,
there was additional blood located
on the upper part of the T-shirt,
across the chest,
that had not been noticed,
or photographed, or even reported
previous to this time.
Cooper's defense argued
that the new blood on the T-shirt
and the newly discovered
blood found on A-41
could only have come from one place:
the vial of Cooper's blood that
lab technician Daniel Gregonis
had access to.
The defense would strengthen that assertion
by taking the vial of Cooper's blood
to an independent lab for analysis.
It was discovered that the vial
of Kevin Cooper's blood
contained two different blood types
and two different DNA types,
indicating without any
doubt that additional blood
from another person had
been poured into Cooper's vial.
The likelihood is that
they poured somebody else's blood into it
after they poured blood
onto A-41 and the T-shirt.
Much like when teenagers
drink their parents' alcohol,
in order to conceal that,
they have to fill that bottle
back up with something else.
Cooper and his team
eventually brought their
claims of blood tampering
to Judge Marilyn Huff,
requesting that Daniel
Gregonis be called to testify.
But, as in previous petitions,
Judge Huff denied all of their requests.
After more than 20 years on death row
and numerous failed appeals,
the courts now set Kevin
Cooper's execution date
for February 10th, 2004.
By this time, news of the controversy
surrounding Kevin's case
had become widespread.
People care to start
not only seeing the evidence
and learning about the evidence,
but they decided they were not going
to let these people murder
me without exposing the truth.
Save Kevin Cooper!
Save Kevin Cooper!
No fact will change
Kevin Cooper's groupies.
They're being spoon-fed
this story that doesn't hold up.
And the Kevin Cooper legal
team knew how to play that.
You had those opposed
to the death penalty
saying this execution should be stayed.
He's an innocent man.
Ramos, yeah, he wants
to bring closure
to the victims' families.
He doesn't want to bring them truth.
He wants to bring them closure,
which is two different things.
- But while the court
- of public opinion
May have turned in Kevin's favor,
his defense team was
running out of options.
We were working against the clock.
We had to file up to the
California Supreme Court,
saying that Kevin had
been denied his rights,
and that the prosecution had been improper.
Cooper's arguments hinged
on accusations of planted evidence
and alternate suspects
who were never pursued.
Cooper also appealed
to Governor Schwarzenegger for clemency.
For the clemency petition,
a number of the jurors came forward
and said they were very uncomfortable
now that they had
learned about all the things
that had surfaced since the trial.
Peggy Ryen's sister even
wrote a letter to the governor,
saying that she believed
that Kevin was not the killer,
and that they should not execute him.
Ten days before the execution,
Governor Schwarzenegger made his decision.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has
made his first live-or-die decision
as California governor.
He rejected pleas to spare
the life of a convicted killer.
He said that Kevin was clearly
guilty and should be executed.
A few days before the execution date,
the California Supreme
Court denied our request
for a stay of the execution,
and for the chance to file
further appeals in Kevin's case.
San Quentin guards
now escorted Kevin Cooper to a new cell,
adjacent to the death chamber.
Cooper was about to
become a dead man walking.
Just hours before
his midnight execution
on February 10th, 2004,
Kevin Cooper was strip-searched
and dressed for the death chamber.
But Cooper steadfastly refused
to assist in his own execution.
Defiantly,
he'd begun a hunger strike the week before.
They say death row!
We say hell no!
- Death row! - Hell no!
- Death row! - Hell no!
As midnight approached,
a crowd of several hundred demonstrators
gathered outside the prison walls.
We say hell no!
- Death row! - Hell no!
- Our lawyers were
- going to attend.
Family members were
going to attend the execution.
Finally,
the family was going to have justice.
With just hours to go,
a frenzied back and forth
was erupting in the courts.
A three-judge panel of the
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
issued an opinion denying
a stay of Kevin's execution.
A few hours later,
a judge of the Ninth Circuit
disagreed with the three-judge panel,
and the Ninth Circuit en banc,
which meant with an 11-judge panel,
issued a ruling staying his execution.
Though en banc requests
are granted less than 1% of the time,
the justices reversed the earlier opinion
and gave Kevin Cooper a stay.
But their decision didn't sit well
with California's attorney general.
The attorney general
immediately filed a request
of the Supreme Court of the United States
to reverse that stay.
At 8:15 p.m.,
as Kevin Cooper waited for news
about his impending execution,
a phone rang in the death chamber.
My lawyers told me
that the United States Supreme Court,
in a unanimous decision,
said that I would not
be murdered that night.
I began to feel life
come back into my body,
because I honestly
thought I was a dead man.
Finding out four hours before
your client is going to be executed
that he's not going to be executed
is a tremendous sense of exhilaration.
But it's not over. Kevin
was not off death row.
Two years after Kevin Cooper's
brush with death,
a judge imposed a moratorium
on the use of lethal
injection in California.
No one has been executed
in the state since 2006.
Meanwhile, Kevin Cooper continues
to declare his innocence.
And though his appeals
have all been denied,
in 2009 a judge from
the Ninth Circuit Court
wrote a scathing indictment
of the prosecution's case.
Dissenting from the majority,
Judge William Fletcher wrote:
"Cooper is probably innocent of the crimes
"for which the state of California
"is about to execute him.
"If he is innocent,
the real killers have escaped.
They may kill again. They
may already have done so."
Despite conflicting
opinions about Cooper's guilt,
if and when California resumes executions,
Kevin Cooper will be
returned to the death chamber.
If he were to be executed,
I would still want to prove his innocence,
because our system often
convicts innocent people.
And when you have the ultimate punishment,
you've got to get another system.
We save the death penalty
for the worst of the worst.
These people on death row,
some of them, I'll call them monsters.
Everybody talks about, you know,
the death row inmates and their rights,
but people forget about the victims,
and their families,
and their rights.
This is one of the most heinous
crimes imaginable.
And the defense attorneys like to say,
"What was his motive?
He could have just
taken their car and gone."
That's true.
But he didn't. He killed this family.
He deserves the death penalty.
I hope you die!
Put him in the gas chamber!
In 1985 I was escorted
to death row
here in San Quentin Prison.
And it's like I went to hell.
But I am an innocent man.
Damn it, I did not murder anyone.
I hope people learn from this story
that you have to stand up
and fight this rotten-ass system,
because it is rotten.
It is rotten to the core.
All of the potential inaccuracies,
the potential miscarriages of justice,
I can't correct.
I can only tell you that, personally,
I was involved in this case
from the very beginning,
and personally believe that
Kevin Cooper should die.
of Death Row Stories,
a family is found brutally murdered.
The severity of the crime
puts it on another level.
And an escaped convict
is sentenced to death.
They caught him? They
should do away with him.
But just hours before
his execution,
a new defense team
raises doubts about his guilt.
You let the evidence
lead you to a suspect.
What they did in this case
was exactly the opposite.
Evidence disruption, evidence tampering.
My client was framed.
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.
♪ ♪
Chino Hills is very rural.
Very peaceful.
A lot of horse ranches.
We all knew each other.
We didn't lock our doors.
Just a quaint little community.
The sleepy hamlet of Chino Hills
sits nestled below the
San Bernardino mountains,
less than 40 miles from Los Angeles.
There, Peggy Ryen, a horse trainer,
and her husband, Doug,
lived on a ranch with their children,
10-year-old Jessica and 8-year-old Josh.
On the night of June 4th, 1983,
Josh Ryen's friend Chris Hughes was invited
to spend the night.
- We're on a hill
- overlooking Chino,
The scene of a multiple homicide.
We have four fatal victims.
One victim approximately
eight years of age.
The eyes are open, however,
there is no response.
The next morning,
Chris Hughes's father
discovered the lifeless bodies
of his son Chris,
as well as Doug and Peggy Ryen
and their daughter, Jessica.
Among the carnage,
first responders also found
8-year-old Josh Ryen.
He was still breathing, but barely.
He was immediately
air-lifted to a nearby hospital.
I first arrived with
Sheriff Floyd Tidwell.
Each of the victims
had a combination of
hatchet and knife wounds.
This was such a brutal crime.
The severity of the crime
puts it on another level.
I think we'd be lying
if we didn't say that.
We were trying to figure
out a motive for these killings,
and we couldn't come up with anything.
Nothing made sense.
We heard there had been a murder
up on the hill.
As a community,
our hearts grieved for these people.
They're horse people. They were our people.
How could anybody do this?
It just doesn't make sense.
They were the type of
people no one could ever hate.
Never.
On the same day
the bodies were found,
a Chino Hills resident
stumbled onto another discovery:
one of the murder weapons
lying on the side of the road.
The hatchet had
the victims' blood on it,
but it didn't have any fingerprints on it.
Nearby, a tan, blood-stained
T-shirt
was also found.
Slide them out a little bit.
As the search continued,
police received a tip from
the Ryens' next-door neighbor,
Larry Lease.
Mr. Lease said,
"I think you might be interested
in seeing my rental house."
The rental house,
supposedly unoccupied
at the time of the murders,
held a major piece of evidence:
a sheath that fit the
ax used in the murders.
We knew that whoever
had been in the Lease house
committed the murders at the Ryen house.
And in the closet, we found a small box
of prison-issued tobacco
from Chino Institution for Men.
We checked with prison authorities.
Got names of any individuals
that escaped within the past week.
All of a sudden, we had a suspect:
Kevin Cooper.
Just two days before
the murders,
25-year-old Kevin Cooper had escaped
from the California Institution for Men,
a prison just five miles
from the Ryens' home.
Police believed Cooper
hid at the Lease house
before killing the Ryens and Chris Hughes.
With Cooper still at large,
San Bernardino county sheriff Floyd Tidwell
took to the airwaves.
We have evidence in our possession
that places Kevin
Cooper at the crime scene.
And we have other evidence
that gives us cause to believe
that Kevin Cooper was
responsible for the murders.
Police patrolled on both sides
of the California/Mexico border today
seeking the escaped convict, Kevin Cooper.
Tidwell launched
one of the largest
manhunts in state history,
circulating photos of Cooper
and the Ryens' stolen station wagon.
There is growing fear in the
California community of Chino.
I want to know what the
state officials are going to do.
As pressure mounted
to apprehend Cooper,
police caught a break.
We recovered the Ryen station
wagon from a church parking lot
in Long Beach.
Cooper had used that car to escape.
For District Attorney Kottmeier,
the motive behind the
murders was now clear.
Cooper's motive
was to get the hell out of Chino Hills.
If he had to kill people to
cover his escape, then he would.
The killer seemed to be
within reach.
But then the trail went cold.
On July 30th, 1983,
almost two months after the brutal murders,
the US Coast Guard
responded to a distress call
near Santa Barbara.
They arrived at a sailboat
moored in a small marina,
the scene of an alleged rape.
When they got in the sheriff's station,
the victim of the rape was
walking by the wanted posters
and saw Cooper's wanted picture,
and said, "Oh, my God,
I've been raped by Kevin Cooper."
Kevin Cooper escaped
an almost two-month-long murder manhunt,
and police caught him trying to swim away
from the scene of an alleged rape.
The rape allegation
was never pursued,
because Cooper now faced
four counts of first-degree murder,
each carrying the death penalty.
I hope you die!
Put him in the gas chamber!
When Cooper was returned
to San Bernardino,
racial tensions boiled over.
Local authorities say
they received several
calls from outraged residents
who demanded Cooper
be sent to the gas chamber.
They caught him? They
should do away with him.
We're seeking the death penalty,
as we have all along.
Cooper's trial began
on October 23rd, 1984.
I cross-examined Cooper
for a day and a half.
Cooper said, "Yeah,
I was at the Lease house,
"but I never went up to the Ryen house.
"It wasn't me.
Must have been
somebody else that did this."
Kottmeier countered
Cooper's testimony
by showing the jury the hatchet
sheath found in the Lease house,
and a bloody footprint
found in the Ryens' bedroom.
In the folds of that sheet
was a half-bloody footprint.
Now, those soles were unique.
And we were able to
determine that the shoe print
was made by a prison-issued
PRO-Ked tennis shoe.
Blood found at the murder scene
also led back to Cooper.
A-41 was a single drop of blood
in the hallway.
And Cooper matched it.
Finally, Kottmeier played
the emotional videotape
testimony of the lone survivor,
Josh Ryen.
Have you tried to forget
what happened that night?
What have you done to try and forget it?
Cooper's defense would argue
that the police mishandled
evidence and the investigation.
But after seven days of deliberations,
the jury found Kevin
Cooper guilty on all counts.
There is no question.
There is no doubt
about the guilt of Kevin Cooper.
The only justice in this case
is for Kevin Cooper to face his maker,
and then spend the
rest of his days in hell.
"We, the jury, of the above entitled cause,
determine that the penalty shall be death."
Kevin Cooper would spend
the next two decades on death row.
But in 2003, a new defense
team investigated Cooper's case,
and made a string of discoveries
they felt proved Kevin Cooper's innocence.
I began to learn all of the facts
about the evidence destruction,
the evidence tampering,
the false testimony that was given,
and the failure of the defense
team to put on evidence
that showed who the real killers were.
The state of California is about
to execute an innocent man.
By 2003, Kevin Cooper had lost
all of his appeals
for the 1983 murders of the
Ryen family and Chris Hughes.
With his time running out,
and Cooper still professing his innocence,
the case came to the attention
of the high-powered law firm
Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe.
Norm Hile was part of a team
that fought death penalty cases
on a pro-bono basis.
One thing I've learned in now 25 years
of representing people on death row,
you're going to be
fighting an uphill battle.
And to have a client
whose life is in the balance
is a very heavy burden.
What Hile could not dispute
was Cooper's criminal history,
his escape from prison,
and his proximity to the murders.
- I lived on the mean streets
- of Pittsburgh
When I was growing up.
I became a car thief.
I landed in the California
Institution for Men in 1983
because of a burglary
conviction in Los Angeles.
I was there a couple months.
I was out walking around,
and there was a hole in the fence.
And I just ran.
Mr. Cooper started wandering
through farms and pastures.
Areas that were off of the roadways.
And ultimately found his
way to the Lease house.
When I got to the Lease house,
I called a couple ex-girlfriends.
I asked them to send me money.
I watched TV, ate,
tried to figure out what's next.
But I did not murder those people.
Cooper said he'd already
set out hitchhiking to Mexico
by the time the murders took place.
He went into hiding when he became
the most wanted man in California.
Norm Hile hired former FBI agent Tom Parker
to look into Cooper's case.
When you're conducting an investigation,
especially one as complex as this one,
you essentially collect the evidence
and let the evidence lead you to a suspect.
What they did in this case
was exactly the opposite.
As word of the murders got out,
the sheriff's department learned
that Kevin Cooper had escaped.
And that started what we
refer to in law enforcement
as tunnel vision.
Sheriff Tidwell held a
big press conference.
They started with a suspect.
And they then started collecting evidence
to prove their theory.
But if Kevin Cooper
wasn't the killer,
why did the hatchet sheath
and the prison-issued tobacco
found at Larry Lease's empty
home link him to the murders?
A couple of deputies went over
to the Lease house, walked through it,
and really didn't see anything suspicious.
A day or two later,
other deputies were asked
to go search the Lease house again.
By then, they knew a hatchet
had been used in the murders.
And they found a sheath to a hand ax
laying right out in
the middle of the floor,
in a position that the first deputies
walking through the house
could not have missed it.
They would have had to have
been blind to miss that sheath.
Cooper also said that during
his two days in the house,
he smoked multiple cigarettes.
But when the police collected the evidence,
they only collected one cigarette butt.
And the rest of the cigarette
butts somehow disappeared.
Later on,
when they found the Ryen station wagon
in Long Beach,
the first time it was inspected
there were no cigarette butts.
The second time,
they suddenly found two cigarette butts.
Clearly they had been
taken from the hideout house.
And there was the blood evidence
connecting Cooper to the murders.
This small speck, labeled A-41.
A-41 was examined
by sheriff's department
criminalist Daniel Gregonis.
Gregonis was a rookie
at the time.
Now, the proper lab
procedure is to do blind testing.
You test something,
and you don't know what
the other person's blood is
who you're trying to see
whether it's that person or not.
But Gregonis waited until he
had Kevin Cooper's blood type.
Gregonis originally found A-41
did not match Kevin Cooper.
But then he changed
notes to show that it did.
So, in fact, the testing
actually showed that the blood drop
was not from somebody
with Kevin's blood type.
Other evidence
prosecutors claimed
linked Cooper to the murders
was a bloody footprint
on the Ryens' bed sheet,
supposedly from a prison-issued sneaker.
Kottmeier claimed that
these were tennis shoes
that were manufactured
and sold only to prisons.
In fact, it was a style of shoe
that was readily available.
Very common tennis shoes
with a very common shoe print.
The question now was
whether these were innocent
mistakes by investigators,
or something more.
Norm Hile was about to learn
that before they turned
their attention to Cooper,
police had been given other solid leads,
including from the sole survivor.
Eight-year-old Josh Ryen
was able to communicate
to staff at the hospital
that the people who had
attacked him and his family
were three white men.
In fact, a picture of Kevin
Cooper was on television,
and he looked up and he said,
"That's not the one who did it."
Kevin Cooper had been on
death row for nearly 20 years
when attorney Norm Hile
began looking into his case.
Hile felt the evidence against Cooper...
The cigarette butts in the Ryen car,
the bloody shoe print on the Ryens' bed,
even the blood testing... all had flaws.
But Hile's biggest
question involved motive,
and the prosecution's claim
that Cooper had killed the Ryens
in order to steal their station wagon.
The problem with this theory
is that if somebody such as Kevin Cooper
had wanted to make an escape,
they missed the fact that there was cash,
credit cards, and other valuables
left at the scene of the crimes.
None of that was taken.
If Mr. Cooper has walked
away from the prison,
obviously with no money,
all of it was right there for him to take.
And it was not touched.
Hile also disputed
the prosecution's theory
that the killer worked alone.
The sheer number of
wounds suffered by the victims,
140 in all,
and the fact that Doug
Ryen was an ex-Marine
with loaded guns in the bedroom,
suggested to Hile that there
had been more than one killer.
For a time, San Bernardino police
apparently agreed with that conclusion.
The sheriff's department was
told by two different bystanders
that the night of the murders
around the time that the
murders had occurred,
they had seen a car that
matched the description
of the Ryen station wagon
speeding down the road
from the Ryens' house,
and that in that car were white men.
As it turned out,
Josh Ryen,
the sole survivor of the attacks,
also reported seeing multiple intruders.
Deputy Dale Sharp interviewed Josh Ryen
just hours after he was
rushed to the hospital.
It wasn't good. He had at least
one hatched wound to his head,
and he had had his throat slit.
Josh was unable to speak,
so Deputy Sharp devised
another method of communication.
He would squeeze my hand for a yes,
and no squeeze for a no.
I took his hand and let him know
that I was his friend the best I could.
We talked about baseball,
and it got him comfortable with me.
I would ask, "Do you remember anything?"
And I would get a hand squeeze, "Yes."
Can you remember anyone
coming to your house?
"Yes."
We ended up with three Mexican guys,
or maybe three white guys.
I ask, "Were these three men
there when things went crazy?"
And the answer was yes.
Based on this information,
police released this bulletin
two days after the murders.
But by the time of the trial,
Josh Ryen had changed his story.
When Josh was pressed to what he had seen,
he is very specific.
He only saw one person that had very bushy,
fuzzy hair.
Did you see what that shadow
by the bathroom was doing?
How many shadows did you see?
Just the one?
Deputy Sharp
saw nothing suspicious
about Josh Ryen's changing story.
Victim interviews can change,
especially with a 8-year-old boy.
You don't know what he's seen.
You don't know what he remembers.
Based on my 30-plus years
experience in law enforcement,
the initial comments of eyewitnesses
are usually the most accurate.
There's a very strong possibility
that Josh was coached.
Norman Hile now felt
he had enough evidence
to successfully fight for Kevin's life.
But as he prepared his appeals,
yet another witness came forward,
fully 20 years after the crime.
I hear on the TV set
that they're going to put
Kevin Cooper to death.
And I went,
"Are you kidding me?"
♪ ♪
On the night of the murders,
Christine Slonaker was
eating at the Canyon Corral,
a local country/western bar
just two miles from the Ryens' home.
As we were eating,
in through the back
swinging doors of the kitchen
come these three guys.
I noticed that one of
them was covered in blood.
Not just little spots.
This was like someone
had taken a paintbrush
and went whoo!
Like this.
It was splattered everywhere.
Their feet were sticking to the floor.
They were so inundated with blood.
At the time we didn't
know about the murder,
and we just thought, well, I don't know
what they've been doing.
Slaughtering pigs or whatever.
But we're out of here.
Slonaker never reported
the incident,
because she claimed a
uniformed sheriff's deputy
was at the bar that night,
and she assumed he would follow up.
In 2004, Norm Hile fought
for a new trial for Kevin Cooper
in front of US district court
judge Marilyn Huff in San Diego.
In his appeal,
Hile presented Christine
Slonaker's testimony.
And to his surprise, the state responded
by inadvertently revealing
a previously unknown piece of evidence
provided by a woman named Laurel Epler,
who lived near the Canyon Corral bar.
Here was a log that shows
that Laurel Epler called
into the sheriff's department
the day after the murders,
saying she had found a
short-sleeved blue shirt
that she thought had blood on it
on the road near the Canyon Corral bar.
One of the bar employees testified
that one of the men in the bar that night
might have had on a blue shirt.
The criminal bulletin
showed that they were looking
for three white men,
and one of them was wearing a blue shirt.
Hile would argue
that the neighbors' eyewitness testimony,
along with the testimony
of Christine Slonaker,
and Josh Ryen's original account,
all pointed to three suspects.
And in the new documents
released by the prosecution,
Hile was about to discover the name
of one of the three suspects.
And that man also happened
to be a convicted murderer.
While he fought for a new trial
for Kevin Cooper in front
of Judge Marilyn Huff,
attorney Norm Hile discovered evidence
that put a name to an alternate suspect.
The night of the crimes,
a woman named Diana
Roper had seen her boyfriend,
a man named Lee Furrow,
drive up to their house
in the wee hours of the morning.
Lee Furrow comes rushing into the house
wearing coveralls splattered
with what looks to be spots of blood.
He changes clothes and
turns around and leaves.
There were other people in the house,
and someone looked out the window
and saw a white station
wagon matching the Ryens'
parked in the driveway with
other individuals in that car.
Diana Roper called
the sheriff's department,
and she gave them the coveralls.
The bloody coveralls that they recovered
were booked into evidence.
When Diana Roper later learned
that a hatchet was used in the murders,
she again called police and
said that Lee Furrow's hatchet
was missing from his tool belt.
It would make sense that
somebody like Lee Furrow
would have killed the Ryens.
He was a convicted murderer.
He had strangled to death a young woman
and thrown her body into a canal.
But San Bernardino police
waited 11 months before
questioning Lee Furrow.
And when they did, they never asked him
about his missing ax.
They also seemed to accept Furrow's word
that he didn't own any overalls.
Tom Parker thinks he knows why.
The coveralls, in fact,
had been destroyed.
A deputy had taken them
and thrown them in a dumpster
behind the sheriff's
department to get rid of them,
because it was unfounded that
they were connected to the case.
Of course, there had never
been any blood testing or whatever
to come to that conclusion.
Hile now raised
this destruction of
evidence with Judge Huff.
In a criminal prosecution,
the prosecution is required
to turn over to the defense
any evidence that might
be considered exonerating.
It's a rule.
And if the prosecution doesn't do it,
then they have committed
what is called a Brady violation.
And the trial must be reversed,
and a new trial given.
The tennis shoe situation,
the blue shirt, and the bloody coveralls
were all Brady violations.
And we put on evidence as to all of those.
Judge Huff rejected it.
Kevin Cooper was running
out of time.
So his defense team reached
out to a new potential advocate:
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Debra Saunders.
As a supporter of the death penalty,
I wouldn't want to see an
innocent man executed, would I?
If there's a hint that
somebody who's not guilty
might be executed, I want to know about it.
I want to write about it.
My editorial board at the
San Francisco Chronicle
wrote an editorial saying,
"Gee,
maybe Kevin Cooper is an innocent man."
The defense attorneys laid out this case
about how this man had
been unjustly convicted.
Cooper's defense told Saunders
that for years they'd been unsuccessful
in petitioning the courts for
newly available DNA testing,
which could exonerate Cooper.
Kevin Cooper kept saying,
"I'm not guilty.
"Do DNA testing now that you can do it.
"If it shows that I'm guilty,
then you can go ahead and execute me."
I walked out of there thinking,
"Whoa, they've really made
a case I've got to think about."
San Bernardino's current
district attorney Michael Ramos
was handling Cooper's appeals.
We felt that the ongoing request
by defense counsel in this case
was just another delay tactic.
There was no evidence at all
that anybody but Kevin Cooper
committed these horrendous murders.
None.
But in the early 2000s,
new legislation in California
would grant Kevin Cooper
the right to DNA testing.
All these years
that my case was in the appeals courts,
I never got a fair hearing.
I would always get denied
for one reason or the next.
So I felt very bad,
very discouraged,
until DNA testing came along.
And I had a shot.
The state would perform
DNA tests
on blood sample A-41,
taken from the Ryens' hallway,
and blood on the tan shirt
though to have been thrown
from their stolen station wagon.
The results would determine
whether Kevin Cooper lived or died.
Newly available DNA testing
was being conducted on the
evidence from the Ryen murders.
Preliminary results showed that the blood
from the Ryens' hallway
and on the tan T-shirt
both came from the same person.
That DNA profile was then
compared to Kevin Cooper's.
The analysis regarding this was 100%
beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Kevin Cooper was in that house
and bled at that crime scene.
It really verified what you knew all along:
that Kevin Cooper committed
these horrendous murders.
Only one out of
300 billion people
could have matched A-41.
You could go to galaxies
far beyond the stars
and still not find the match for A-41
that Cooper supplies.
Once the DNA test
put Kevin Cooper in the home
he said he never went into,
and on a T-shirt with
Doug Ryen's blood on it,
that was it for him.
Debra Saunders,
once convinced of Cooper's innocence,
now published scathing articles
in the San Francisco Chronicle
about Kevin Cooper's guilt.
The DNA results and
this new press attention
had backfired on Cooper's defense.
To Kevin Cooper's shock
and the defense's shock,
the testing came back saying
that there was Kevin's DNA on A-41.
But for Hile,
the DNA results raised a red flag.
Back in 1983, the lab
technician, Daniel Gregonis,
had testified that he had consumed A-41
during his testing.
Now Gregonis was asked to
make sure that A-41 still existed.
We have a photograph of the envelope
that shows the date that he
took it out and when he resealed it.
So we know that he had A-41 on his person
for 24 hours before he returned it.
He also had, nearby in the lab,
the vial of Kevin Cooper's
blood that was taken from him
when he was arrested.
Contrary to Gregonis's
original testimony,
the state now reported
there was enough of A-41
for additional DNA testing.
Results from the tan T-shirt
also changed drastically.
At the original trial,
the T-shirt was only shown
to have Doug Ryen's blood on it.
When the T-shirt was tested
at this time,
there was additional blood located
on the upper part of the T-shirt,
across the chest,
that had not been noticed,
or photographed, or even reported
previous to this time.
Cooper's defense argued
that the new blood on the T-shirt
and the newly discovered
blood found on A-41
could only have come from one place:
the vial of Cooper's blood that
lab technician Daniel Gregonis
had access to.
The defense would strengthen that assertion
by taking the vial of Cooper's blood
to an independent lab for analysis.
It was discovered that the vial
of Kevin Cooper's blood
contained two different blood types
and two different DNA types,
indicating without any
doubt that additional blood
from another person had
been poured into Cooper's vial.
The likelihood is that
they poured somebody else's blood into it
after they poured blood
onto A-41 and the T-shirt.
Much like when teenagers
drink their parents' alcohol,
in order to conceal that,
they have to fill that bottle
back up with something else.
Cooper and his team
eventually brought their
claims of blood tampering
to Judge Marilyn Huff,
requesting that Daniel
Gregonis be called to testify.
But, as in previous petitions,
Judge Huff denied all of their requests.
After more than 20 years on death row
and numerous failed appeals,
the courts now set Kevin
Cooper's execution date
for February 10th, 2004.
By this time, news of the controversy
surrounding Kevin's case
had become widespread.
People care to start
not only seeing the evidence
and learning about the evidence,
but they decided they were not going
to let these people murder
me without exposing the truth.
Save Kevin Cooper!
Save Kevin Cooper!
No fact will change
Kevin Cooper's groupies.
They're being spoon-fed
this story that doesn't hold up.
And the Kevin Cooper legal
team knew how to play that.
You had those opposed
to the death penalty
saying this execution should be stayed.
He's an innocent man.
Ramos, yeah, he wants
to bring closure
to the victims' families.
He doesn't want to bring them truth.
He wants to bring them closure,
which is two different things.
- But while the court
- of public opinion
May have turned in Kevin's favor,
his defense team was
running out of options.
We were working against the clock.
We had to file up to the
California Supreme Court,
saying that Kevin had
been denied his rights,
and that the prosecution had been improper.
Cooper's arguments hinged
on accusations of planted evidence
and alternate suspects
who were never pursued.
Cooper also appealed
to Governor Schwarzenegger for clemency.
For the clemency petition,
a number of the jurors came forward
and said they were very uncomfortable
now that they had
learned about all the things
that had surfaced since the trial.
Peggy Ryen's sister even
wrote a letter to the governor,
saying that she believed
that Kevin was not the killer,
and that they should not execute him.
Ten days before the execution,
Governor Schwarzenegger made his decision.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has
made his first live-or-die decision
as California governor.
He rejected pleas to spare
the life of a convicted killer.
He said that Kevin was clearly
guilty and should be executed.
A few days before the execution date,
the California Supreme
Court denied our request
for a stay of the execution,
and for the chance to file
further appeals in Kevin's case.
San Quentin guards
now escorted Kevin Cooper to a new cell,
adjacent to the death chamber.
Cooper was about to
become a dead man walking.
Just hours before
his midnight execution
on February 10th, 2004,
Kevin Cooper was strip-searched
and dressed for the death chamber.
But Cooper steadfastly refused
to assist in his own execution.
Defiantly,
he'd begun a hunger strike the week before.
They say death row!
We say hell no!
- Death row! - Hell no!
- Death row! - Hell no!
As midnight approached,
a crowd of several hundred demonstrators
gathered outside the prison walls.
We say hell no!
- Death row! - Hell no!
- Our lawyers were
- going to attend.
Family members were
going to attend the execution.
Finally,
the family was going to have justice.
With just hours to go,
a frenzied back and forth
was erupting in the courts.
A three-judge panel of the
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
issued an opinion denying
a stay of Kevin's execution.
A few hours later,
a judge of the Ninth Circuit
disagreed with the three-judge panel,
and the Ninth Circuit en banc,
which meant with an 11-judge panel,
issued a ruling staying his execution.
Though en banc requests
are granted less than 1% of the time,
the justices reversed the earlier opinion
and gave Kevin Cooper a stay.
But their decision didn't sit well
with California's attorney general.
The attorney general
immediately filed a request
of the Supreme Court of the United States
to reverse that stay.
At 8:15 p.m.,
as Kevin Cooper waited for news
about his impending execution,
a phone rang in the death chamber.
My lawyers told me
that the United States Supreme Court,
in a unanimous decision,
said that I would not
be murdered that night.
I began to feel life
come back into my body,
because I honestly
thought I was a dead man.
Finding out four hours before
your client is going to be executed
that he's not going to be executed
is a tremendous sense of exhilaration.
But it's not over. Kevin
was not off death row.
Two years after Kevin Cooper's
brush with death,
a judge imposed a moratorium
on the use of lethal
injection in California.
No one has been executed
in the state since 2006.
Meanwhile, Kevin Cooper continues
to declare his innocence.
And though his appeals
have all been denied,
in 2009 a judge from
the Ninth Circuit Court
wrote a scathing indictment
of the prosecution's case.
Dissenting from the majority,
Judge William Fletcher wrote:
"Cooper is probably innocent of the crimes
"for which the state of California
"is about to execute him.
"If he is innocent,
the real killers have escaped.
They may kill again. They
may already have done so."
Despite conflicting
opinions about Cooper's guilt,
if and when California resumes executions,
Kevin Cooper will be
returned to the death chamber.
If he were to be executed,
I would still want to prove his innocence,
because our system often
convicts innocent people.
And when you have the ultimate punishment,
you've got to get another system.
We save the death penalty
for the worst of the worst.
These people on death row,
some of them, I'll call them monsters.
Everybody talks about, you know,
the death row inmates and their rights,
but people forget about the victims,
and their families,
and their rights.
This is one of the most heinous
crimes imaginable.
And the defense attorneys like to say,
"What was his motive?
He could have just
taken their car and gone."
That's true.
But he didn't. He killed this family.
He deserves the death penalty.
I hope you die!
Put him in the gas chamber!
In 1985 I was escorted
to death row
here in San Quentin Prison.
And it's like I went to hell.
But I am an innocent man.
Damn it, I did not murder anyone.
I hope people learn from this story
that you have to stand up
and fight this rotten-ass system,
because it is rotten.
It is rotten to the core.
All of the potential inaccuracies,
the potential miscarriages of justice,
I can't correct.
I can only tell you that, personally,
I was involved in this case
from the very beginning,
and personally believe that
Kevin Cooper should die.