Beth Shelburne

I was the receptionist there.

When Rosa gets to work that day, she reads in the newspaper that their family friend, Deputy Bill Hardy, has been shot and killed.

A little while later, she gets a call from Yolanda.

Rosa says Yolanda didn't give her names, but after the call, Rosa tells a police officer that her daughter has information about the murder.

Sometime after talking with police, Rosa hires an attorney to pursue the $20,000 in reward money.

Was she ever compensated for giving?

Law enforcement rewards are set up to entice people in tough financial situations, people like Rosa and Yolanda.

Police say rewards are necessary to penetrate the culture of silence in communities impacted by crime.

But they can also be a means to manipulate, because it's up to police to decide whether the information is valuable enough to merit the reward.

That means detectives can dangle the money while they work with witnesses, but then choose to never pay it.

To state the obvious, Yolanda is extremely vulnerable when detectives first bring her in for questioning.

In a clinical analysis she underwent that year, a psychologist wrote that Yolanda was friendly and outgoing but could also be verbally aggressive and manipulative.

She also observed that Yolanda was attention-seeking, especially with men.

For over a year, detectives questioned Yolanda at different foster homes and shelters, sometimes pulling her out of class, a pattern that frustrated Yolanda because she was trying to get her GED.

It seems like police were really relentless with her, too.

They were.

They were.

Do you think that they pressured her?

Yolanda's statements about the night Deputy Hardy was murdered lead to four people charged with capital murder, including to Forrest Johnson and Ardragus Ford.

But because Yolanda keeps changing her story, in the fall of 1996, Ardragus Ford's attorney, Richard Jaffe, asks for a hearing.