Bill Baxley

On June 11th, 1998, a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing.

Listen to Valley of Shadows on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is quite a wall here.

Oh, these are some great photos.

Uh-huh.

How did this come about?

Look at this suit that you have on.

Maybe you've never heard of Bill Baxley, but here in Alabama, he's a big deal.

Baxley is 82, slightly balding, with silver hair and eyebrows.

In the pictures he's showing me on the wall of his office, I see him looking younger, his hair is dark, and he's standing with famous musicians and politicians.

Baxley was elected as Alabama's attorney general when he was just 28 years old.

He later served as lieutenant governor, and he's still practicing law today.

During his career, Baxley prosecuted hundreds of cases and sent three people to Alabama's death row.

He's a lifelong defender of the death penalty, a true believer.

Like when the U.S.

Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty in the 1970s, Baxley worked hard to bring executions back to Alabama.

He's that kind of true believer.

So it's not surprising that Baxley was skeptical when his son, who's also an attorney, asked his dad to look over a case because he believed an innocent man was on death row.

Baxley didn't even glance at the case file until weeks later on an icy winter morning.

It was too slippery to walk down the driveway and grab the newspaper, so he picked up the file that his son sent him and began reading about a black man named Taforest Johnson who was sentenced to death for killing a sheriff's deputy.