Ronko Yamada

This one was a deep dive into the case against Chol Soo.

In a Sunday edition of the Sacramento Union in 1978, journalist K.W.

Lee had introduced the people of Sacramento, California to Chol Soo Lee, a young Korean immigrant facing a death sentence.

The next day, K.W.

ran the second part of his two-part story, posing a question to his readers.

This is an excerpt from that article, which he titled, Alice in Chinatown Murder Case.

KW's article lays out a detailed outline for why Chol Soo Lee was unlikely to have committed the Chinatown murder.

And he found that the biggest flaws in the city's case against Chol Soo boiled down to two things, the murder weapon and the witnesses.

To refresh, the police uncovered a .38 caliber gun near the crime scene, and they had matched it with the bullet Chol Soo Lee had accidentally fired into his own wall the day before the murder.

The gun wasn't actually a match, and the police knew it.

But they thought they still had a case against Chol Soo Lee because of the witnesses.

But remember, nobody who lived in Chinatown came forward as a witness.

They were too afraid of the gangs.

So the only eyewitnesses were out-of-towners.

And the IDs made by these witnesses were not as rock-solid as jurors were made to believe.

Ronko says after the shooting, six witnesses had been brought to the police station.

There, officers handed them a photo book full of Asian men's faces, or mugs, and they were told...

Some of the witnesses picked Chol Soo because his hair looked similar to the killer.

Or maybe his eyes.

But they told the police they weren't actually identifying the person in the photo as the suspect.