Barbara Bradley Hagerty

Yeah, you know, and it's a really fascinating story. I've never heard of this happening before. Jim delivered the evidence to Rick Magnus, who had just been elected judge in Dallas County. And Magnus began to read the documents, and he actually shut down his courtroom for a week just to immerse himself in the case. And then in 2007...

A few months later, he called a hearing, and Judge Magnus essentially relitigated the case. He questioned the police. He grilled the witnesses. He also brought Michael Hubbard to court, and Hubbard actually claimed the fifth. Judge Magnus goes back, considers it, and the next year, in 2008, he arrived at a really surprising conclusion, one that he told me about a decade later.

So Judge Magnus felt that Ben was basically caught in a trap.

That's right. This is not a Hollywood ending, at least not at this point. So in Texas, a judge can't just release a prisoner if he believes he's innocent. It requires the approval of the high court in Texas called the Court of Criminal Appeals. So Ben had to wait in prison for three years. for his decision. And then in 2011, the Court of Criminal Appeals made their ruling.

They said, no, you know what? We don't agree. There's no DNA in this case. Sorry, Ben. You're going to have to spend the rest of your life in prison.

You know, the problem is that in Texas, they have a very high standard to reverse a conviction and declare someone innocent. They actually call it a Herculean burden. And essentially what they need is brand new, indisputable evidence, like DNA evidence or maybe videotape that shows up that clearly shows that this person wasn't the perpetrator, but this other person was.

And none of that existed in Ben's case. After the high court's rejection, everyone fighting for Ben's freedom was simply devastated. And when I interviewed Ben, it's not really something he wanted to talk about. It was just too painful for him.

Yeah, I mean, basically, I was trying to tell the story of how broken the system is. I think people didn't realize that even if a judge declared a person innocent, he can't get out of prison. I mean, how crazy is that? But, you know, Aisha, I had this crazy hope of finding new evidence. So I went to Dallas and I teamed up with Daryl Parker.

He's that former police officer we heard earlier who became a private investigator. I teamed up with him.

Yeah, yeah. And the thing is, we had to provide new evidence, not just the evidence. Jim's evidence didn't even count anymore. We needed to find something new. But, you know, Daryl and I spent weeks knocking on doors all over Dallas. And... I got to tell you, I was amazed at what we found 30 years after the crime.

Now, you'll remember I said Ben had an alibi, a friend he was with, but no one believed her. Well, Daryl and I ended up tracking down her younger brother, who said he was with both of them at the time of the assault, but he had never been questioned. So that's new evidence. Mm-hmm. We eventually found one of the original three eyewitnesses. Another wouldn't talk to us, and the third was dead.

And this guy's name is Jimmy Cotton, and he was one of the teenage boys that Gladys Oliver directed the police to, if you'll recall. Daryl and I found him at his mother's apartment.

Hi, I'm Barb. Nice to meet you. Jimmy was tall. He was real thin. He had served time in prison. Now he was in his late 40s. And he told me that he felt a lot of pressure from the authorities, from the police, to identify Ben Spencer in 1987.

And he said something else. Jimmy said that he also felt pressure from Gladys Oliver because she wanted to get the $25,000 reward money.

Yeah, that's how everybody knows there's a reward there. So before we left, Jimmy said he felt really terrible, really awful about helping a man, helping put a man in prison for a crime he didn't do. And later he signed an affidavit and he took a polygraph in which he said he had not seen Ben Spencer's that night and that Gladys Oliver had pressured him.

And he passed the polygraph with flying colors. Now, you know, Aisha, I've been a journalist for more than 40 years by now. I'm showing my age. But I learned two new things when Daryl and I began hunting for evidence. And the first is kind of a basic rule of investigating and journalism and, frankly, life, which is just show up. You'll never know what you'll find.

The second is that time, yeah, it may be the enemy of truth, but it's also its friend. Okay, so, sure, evidence disappears, memories fade, witnesses die. But also, you know, alliances change, marriages collapse. People's consciences begin to eat away at them. You know, a person no longer has a reason to lie. That's what we found with Jimmy Cotton and also with Danny Edwards.

He was a jailhouse informant because, remember, he was one who said that Ben Spencer had confessed to him while he and Spencer shared a jail cell. Edwards got out essentially two months after he testified at trial.

That's right. Exactly. He was morally outraged. Yeah. So we found him. Daryl and I found him, and he was living at a halfway house. Danny had spent about half his life in prison by that point, and time had changed him, and also the circumstances had changed, right? The statute of limitations for perjury in Ben Spencer's case had passed. It was only five years. It had been 30 years at this point.

So Danny could speak to us without worrying about being arrested or without any consequences. And what he told Daryl and me is that Ben never confessed to him.