Maurice Shema

She eventually put all of this in a sworn statement to the court.

Ramona is not the first person to accuse these guys of abusing their power.

There's George Hall, the guy who called Greg with the whole story of the jailhouse informants and the red carpet treatment, and later laid out his claims in a sworn declaration.

According to trial transcripts, at least one other witness claimed the police tried to add falsehoods to her statement.

In a different case from around this time, a suspect told a reporter that Detective Guerrero bullied him into a false confession.

We asked Detective Guerrero about that interrogation, and he said he didn't remember it.

He also denied ever taking Ramona out to the desert.

Actually, what he said was, quote,

Moreover, he told us in his 15 years in homicide, quote, Detective Marquez, for his part, died a couple of years ago.

But it is worth noting that he had a reputation for lying and using force.

In a different case, he allegedly bullied a 16-year-old kid to make him confess to two murders.

The kid was later exonerated after serving nearly 20 years in prison.

Watching the lawyers interview Ramona, watching them jot down notes at every twist and turn, I was struck by how absurd it was that this was where we found ourselves 50 days out from the execution.

All of us huddled around a table in this Whataburger, the lawyers trying to piece together something useful from this zany story.

Ramona is entertaining, but since I'm not steeped in the case, it also seems like she mixes theories and stories and gossip and evidence so effortlessly, and it's such a rapid clip that it's a little hard to keep up, much less to accept it all at face value.

I look over at Greg and Naomi to see how they're reacting, to get some clue about how seriously I should take all of this.

But they're more or less statues.

Very stoic, these two lawyers on a Whataburger.

All of which to say, I'm not sure how to assess some of the other claims Ramona makes.

The most explosive ones concern a very important person in the case against David Wood, Judith Kelling.