Deborah Roberts

Yeah, well, it was in the 90s.

So you come along later on 2017, you join this case.

And as you said, we can talk more later about what you brought to the case from your expertise.

But talk to me a little bit about when you joined the case and what you learned from the families because they had been through the ringer over, you know, more than two decades at that point, almost three decades.

And no answers, really.

I mean, a lot of twists and turns, which we'll get to.

But what what would the families like for you to meet at that time?

Yeah.

Otherwise, you might have been more nervous than you were probably to begin with.

Yeah, well, you were held up as somebody who was going to take a fresh look at the case.

But it's just really astounding to me.

There were false confessions, which implicated four young men.

And let's talk about them.

Robert Springsteen, Forrest Welburn, Michael Scott, and Maurice Pierce.

And various ones had been arrested and either convicted, but then the cases had been dismissed.

Tell us a little bit about how police had to deal with all of that over the years.

Yeah.

And then, of course, years later— Years later, they would come back and look at them, and we talk about that in the piece, how police would circle back around to this crowd.

They were making no progress, no arrest.

What's a little frightening about this, though, is that two people were convicted, and one of them could have been put to death because of this.