Original subtitles

♫♫

Bob: Searching for the game that you´re looking for

is actually very similar to

the work I do as an investigator.

The most important skill involved in any of those things

is patience.

A woman in her late 40s,

naked, face down, whose throat had been slit.

This is a very, very violent crime scene.

Innocent people don´t lie.

Bob: I just know in my gut there´s more to this case.

I think that they may have gotten the wrong person.

Probably one of the worst days of my life.

There´s a truth out there that we know exists.

♫♫

♫♫

♫♫

I live in a very small rural town, Buchanan, Michigan.

It´s the quaint little town where everyone knows everyone.

In early 2000, I became a volunteer fireman.

Immediately was hooked. I loved it.

I loved the fact

that I got to go out and help people every day.

It was nothing for me to kick the door in,

go put the fire out, and then when the fire was over,

go in and start investigating the fire.

I ended up getting a promotion to fire chief

and all of a sudden, you know,

I´m fighting over budgets instead of fighting fires.

I definitely wasn´t feeling fulfilled.

One day, we were hanging around the station

and Bob came in with his earbuds in,

and I asked him what he was listening to and he said,

"It´s a podcast called ´Serial.´"

And then I hear this story of a crime and a tragic murder

and a potential wrongful conviction.

And I kind of became obsessed with it.

There was this investigator inside of me somewhere

that was like, "Wait a minute, that´s not the whole story."

And I wanted to go find more answers.

So I made a podcast where people who were interested in it

could e-mail me and we could talk about it.

Bussing: Bob liked to right wrongs.

He did it every day in the fire service,

and it was something that translated perfectly

to podcasting.

It´s hard to think back to 2015

when there weren´t a million true crime podcasts out there.

This was a new thing.

No one was more shocked than me when within a few weeks

of starting to put these episodes out

that I was recording on $100 worth of equipment,

I had like 10,000 subscribers.

I started to realize

that there´s a legitimate potential for us outsiders

to actually move the ball forward in long old cold cases.

I´m getting all these e-mails from listeners.

People are asking me to investigate cases

for family members,

people that they thought were wrongfully convicted.

So I needed a name.

On my forearms, I have these two tattoos,

the Latin words for truth and justice.

So I decided on "Truth and Justice"

as the new name of the podcast.

Testing, one, two.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to "Truth and Justice."

I´m your host, Bob Ruff, and I want to thank you all

for downloading this episode.

So I don´t know a better way to put it other than

to call all of you the "Truth and Justice" Army.

Because together, we are a force to be reckoned with.

And together our voices will be heard.

Bob: You know, you´re right.

He started...

back in his basement.

It just kind of grew and grew and grew.

And not that I knew what was going on, but he says,

"Yeah, I got like 30 e-mails."

And you know, next week he did it,

and he says, "Man, I got like 100 e-mails."

And a few weeks later, he had too many e-mails to read.

Then he came to me and he says, you know, he says,

"I think I want to do this full-time

and give up my fire career."

I´ve never told him, "No, don´t do that."

I´m thinking that.

I said, "Boy, this could be a tricky move."

Bob: I had a meeting with my fire board.

I just decided I don´t want to be a part of this anymore.

And I came home and talked to my wife,

and I told her, "I think I want to leave my job

and investigate these wrongful convictions full-time."

And my wife is incredibly supportive,

maybe too supportive,

because that´s really not a reasonable request.

I actually -- I wasn´t worried at all.

I just told him to do it.

I don´t even want to say this because I´m going to regret it,

but he is so smart.

And whatever he does, he does it with everything.

And even when he fails at something, he doesn´t quit.

He just like -- He keeps going till he finds a way.

So I was never worried and it worked out.

Bob: You´re crazy.

♫♫

As of January 1st, 2016, I was no longer a fireman.

I was a full-time podcaster,

and suddenly there was like this new life breathed into me.

It was like I was reignited.

I set up the "Truth and Justice" website for me

to post the documents and photos that I was talking about

so that the listeners could also view them and review them.

I´m sifting through all of these e-mails that I´m getting,

and then suddenly I come across this e-mail

about a guy named Kenny Snow

that he was wrongfully convicted in Smith County, Texas.

Immediately, my interest is piqued.

[ Line rings ]

Kenny called me, and he´s telling me

everything about his case.

Almost in passing, Kenny alleged that

he had been manipulated by a prosecutor

to give false testimony.

Back in 1998, he had helped convict another fellow inmate

from the county jail for the D.A. in exchange for a deal.

Tells me that he provided false testimony

to send another man to prison for life, for murder.

As soon as I started reading about the case, I was hooked.

Dispatcher: Smith County 911. What is your emergency?

Pryor: I need somebody to come out.

Ma´am, what´s your problem?

My cousin lives next door... Yes?

...and I think somebody broke in the house

and killed her last night.

I just went in the house and I seen her on the floor.

Okay. What is your name? My name is Johnnie Pryor.

You saw her laying down?

Yeah, I opened the door. I didn´t try to touch her.

I just see her laying down.

Okay, she´s a Black female? Right.

What is her name? Her name is Elnora.

Elnora Griffin.

So, Elnora Griffin was a woman in her late 40s.

She had just moved to Tyler from Dallas.

She was living in the trailer house

right next door to Johnnie.

She lived on her own,

and she worked at one of the local hospitals.

Elnora didn´t show up for work on Friday, July 23rd,

and Johnnie worked with her.

So Johnnie calls her a couple times.

No answer.

She goes and she knocks on the door.

No answer.

Johnnie is the landlord, so she has a key to the trailer,

and they open it up and it´s total chaos.

The mattress is off the bed frame.

A lamp has been knocked over.

There are clumps of feces on the floor.

There in the middle of it all

is their friend Elnora,

face down, naked, with her throat slit.

Elnora was a very petite woman.

She was like 4´4" and weighed barely 100 pounds.

So the investigators from the sheriff´s office arrived,

and there´d obviously been a struggle.

One of the investigators said it was

the worst crime scene he´d ever seen.

The other said that she had almost been beheaded.

Bob: They start canvassing.

They´re talking to the neighbors.

They´re talking to Johnnie.

And it´s a small country town,

so word gets around quick.

Kelvin: Elnora live right next door in the trailer home.

She was really good friends with my grandmother.

Me and my brother, we noticed our grandmother

that was crying and we was like, "What´s going on?"

And my grandma said, "Elnora´s been murdered.

Killed."

And we was like, "Huh? No."

My heart dropped.

It went out for her and her family because I knew her.

She was a nice...I´d say timid,

shy, quiet, small -- small frame.

Well, she was always full of joy.

Investigators theorized that she had been killed

the previous night between 9:30 and 10:30.

And so with that as their basic theory,

they started going out and asking questions of the people

who were there, and nobody knew anything.

They didn´t get very far at all.

So police interviewed Leonard Mosley,

one of Elnora´s very serious boyfriends at the time.

Any time we´re dealing with a murder of a woman,

the first place that investigators look

is to their romantic partners, because we know

that that´s a very established pattern of female violence.

Leonard told them "I had called her and told Elnora

that I was going to be going over to her house that night

after I got off of work.

But," he continued, "I didn´t. I was tired. I didn´t want to."

Leonard offered the statement of Angela,

who was his live-in girlfriend at the time,

and the mother of his child.

And Angela had said that Leonard was home with her that night,

and the police accepted his story.

They kind of dropped Leonard as a suspect, and they moved on.

And they finally got a lucky break

when they talked to somebody

who actually had spoken with Elnora the night before.

Her name was Cubia Jackson, and she came forward

and gave them a name for the first time.

Ed Ates.

♫♫

Hall: Ed Ates was a local kid.

He´d grown up in the area

and then got a basketball scholarship up in Oklahoma.

And gotten into a little trouble up there,

wound up spending some time behind bars.

And after a few years, came home to his grandmother,

who had raised him,

both he and his brother, Kelvin,

who was two years younger.

Me and my brother, my brother, Ed,

we just -- we did everything together.

I mean, it was just like two peas in a pod.

We´d be in the woods fishing, hunting.

I mean, we were just typical boys.

Hall: He was big. He was 6´7".

He made his living basically as a handyman.

He would mow yards.

He would knock down wasp´s nests.

He would do whatever it took for people who needed

a big, tall, local guy to do their yard work for them.

So the investigators had already talked with Ed

and his brother, Kelvin.

But when they heard what Cubia Jackson said,

they went back to Ed.

All of a sudden he´d become a person of interest.

And so they asked him to come down to the police station.

Meanwhile, his mother showed up.

And so Ed agreed to go.

But his mother had to come with him.

Now, Ed´s case is kind of front and center in my mind.

I just know in my gut there´s more to this case

than we´re seeing here.

And there´s potentially the wrong person in prison.

And the investigator in me just couldn´t let that be.

I reached out to Smith County Sheriff´s Department.

I never got a response from any of the law enforcement officers.

I filed some open records requests of Smith County

and spoke with some ladies at the clerk´s office.

They told me just come on in.

They´d have the box ready for me.

Booked a flight to go down to Smith County, Texas.

I end up spending three days in the clerk´s office

just completely immersing myself.

I tried to get into the case and look at it from a blank slate.

That´s the reason I was looking at the police files.

What did the police officer write

on the night that he was there?

What did the defendant say on the night that he was there?

♫♫

He was explaining to them that he was not in Elnora´s trailer

at all on the evening of her murder,

that he would have no reason to be over at her place

in the middle of the night.

He had no idea in general

about why this woman was so violently, brutally murdered.

Hall: All of a sudden, Ed Ates became suspect number one

to the Smith County Sheriff´s Department.

Investigator Hukill, looking at the bottom

of one of the shoes, noticed that there was something

in the grooves of the sole of the shoe.

He thought it looked,

and after he held it up to his nose,

smelled like feces.

Back at the crime scene,

they had seen clumps of something they thought

was human feces on the floor.

And they theorized that this has come from Elnora,

who had been strangled.

They thought that during the course of the attack,

that Elnora´s attacker

had stepped in some of Elnora´s feces

and that person had potentially tracked some of that feces

into Elnora´s kitchen.

And so now Detective Hukill thought,

"Well, maybe this is proof of that."

So Hukill took the shoe

and scraped off from the very bottom

a little piece of this substance

and put it in a plastic baggie.

So as part of the questioning,

they ask Ed if he had an alibi for the night.

And so one of the investigators goes and calls her.

So all of a sudden, to the investigators,

they got a liar in front of them.

Innocent people don´t lie.

They tell you what actually happened.

If he´s lying about this, what else is he lying about?

Number one, he´s an ex-con.

Number two, he was mentioned earlier that night

by somebody who knew Elnora Griffin.

Number three, he lived right next door to Elnora Griffin.

Number four, he´s lying to us.

After they were finished with Ed,

they went back to the crime scene

and spent several hours going over it,

trying to find something where they could figure out

who had committed this terrible murder.

They find Elnora´s car, but somebody tells them the car

is parked in a different place than it´s normally parked.

So that was kind of unusual.

Elnora, we know from her cousin Johnnie,

Elnora normally parked kind of in front of her house.

The car, however, was found and kind of hidden

behind the back of the house.

So the police are saying that the car had been moved

by Elnora´s attacker so as to not make it apparent

that Elnora was home right after she had been murdered.

They go and they look at the car,

and actually the seat is all the way pushed back.

And Elnora, of course, was very short.

And so who would push a car seat all the way back?

A very tall man.

So all of these things

started percolating in the investigators´ minds.

The day after, the Smith County Assistant District Attorney

David Dobbs got on the case.

David Dobbs was a young,

charismatic, very bright assistant prosecutor.

He had a reputation as being brilliant.

He knew how to gather evidence.

He knew how to win in front of a jury.

He wanted the case to be as tight as possible.

Almost one month to the day after Elnora Griffin

was murdered, Ed Ates was finally arrested.

Ed is formally indicted for Elnora´s murder,

but he is able to make bond.

And so he is not in jail,

but he´s out on bond awaiting his trial.

I was a college student.

I was in Tyler, Texas.

The night I met Edward was at a Halloween party,

and I was playing cards at the table with some friends.

This man walked in who was very tall in stature,

very well put together.

I was like, "Oh, he looks like Michael Jordan."

So we talked for a bit and we exchanged numbers.

And the next day, he called me seven times.

Of course, he was very charming and likable,

and we really hit it off.

After that point, we were pretty much inseparable.

We were at my apartment and he said

that he had something that he wanted to tell me.

It was serious.

He told me about his pending murder trial.

I just couldn´t believe it. I couldn´t believe it.

Edward did have two appointed attorneys.

They were like, "We´re going to win this.

The evidence is circumstantial."

We still continued with the relationship

as if our dreams of being married

and having a family would come to fruition.

We had our first baby, Kyra, in October ´95.

We were happy. We were a couple. We were in love.

And we just knew we would have, you know, forever together.

So in 1996, Ed Ates was put on trial for Elnora´s murder.

There were two African-Americans on the jury.

And if this is a Black man,

he needs to be tried by his peers.

After two days of deliberations,

the jury was hopelessly deadlocked

8-4 for guilt,

and the two African-Americans

were the ones that were for not guilty.

So on the third day, the judge declared a mistrial.

♫♫

We just knew all of this was behind us

and we could now look to our future.

We were at home one night, and he asked me to marry him.

I was like, "Of course." I was ecstatic.

I´m on this high from marrying the love of my life.

And then the following year, it comes tumbling down.

Smith County is a very law-and-order place,

and Smith County prosecutors are not ones to give up on something

that they think needs to be done right.

And they were not about to give up on the prosecution

of a man they thought was a murderer.

So they prosecuted Ed again.

During the second trial, his attorneys assured us that,

you know, it´s going to be the same outcome.

It wasn´t until I found out that the jury was all whites.

At that time, I was worried.

And I could also hear the fear in Edward´s voice.

I thought we could actually start to live a normal life

without the fear of him going to prison.

Hall: The first trial, the state didn´t have

a whole lot of evidence against Ed Ates.

But all of a sudden, they had a new witness.

A secret weapon.

The new witness was a guy he had met

when he was in jail in Smith County.

His name was Kenny Snow.

So Kenny testified that Ed had asked him to lie

and say that another inmate

had said that he had killed Elnora Griffin.

So it looked pretty bad for Ed.

What Ed´s lawyers did was

say that Kenny Snow lied about this to send Ed Ates to prison

and that he got a reduction in his sentence

for saying this lie.

Kenny Snow denied there was a deal.

The prosecution denied there was a deal.

They said that this was Kenny Snow just trying to

set the record straight about what Ed Ates truly did.

When they read that guilty verdict...

I felt like the air in my body just -- just left.

I´ll never forget Kim, Granny, and Mom, they just --

just -- just cried out in the courtroom.

I´ll never forget the look on my brother´s face.

It just -- He was just so disgusted, you know?

Probably one of the worst days of my life.

I was terrified.

Because Kyra

and how could I explain to a 2-year-old

that her dad was not coming home?

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to "Truth and Justice."

It´s currently just going on 1:00 in the morning

on Thursday night.

I´ve been burning the candle at both ends all week.

The trip has gone really, really well.

I´ve gotten a lot of new information,

and I have over 500 pages of documents

in my suitcase right now.

The strongest parts of the state´s case

against Edward Ates.

We have testimony from Cubia Jackson who says

that she had called Elnora Griffin

at home the night she was murdered,

and she told her she was sitting there talking to Edward.

You had the fact that

Edward Ates lied about his alibi.

There was testimony that the seat in Elnora´s car

was pushed all the way back.

They had found fecal material

on the bottom of Edward Ates´ shoes.

You have the testimony of Kenny Snow.

As the prosecution stated in closing,

when you add all of that up,

it clearly points to the fact

that Ed Ates murdered Elnora Griffin,

and that was enough for a conviction.

But there is a lot more to this story.

♫♫

As soon as I start talking about it, immediately,

the feedback I´m getting from my listeners

is "We´re having a hard time understanding

the basic layout of all this."

The first thing I did is create

a diagram of the crime scene --

where the crime scene started,

where certain aspects of evidence were

within the crime scene,

and upload them all onto the website

so that the listeners can also review them.

The attack obviously started in the bedroom.

She is strangled.

She manages to break away,

gets into the living room.

So imagine someone going through all of that.

Elnora was very small.

She was under 5-foot tall.

Ed was a 25-year-old strapping, muscular 6´7" man.

You´ll never be able to explain to me

how a 100-pound woman broke loose

of 6´7" muscle-bound Ed´s grip.

There are a few drops of blood just on the floor,

just into the kitchen.

Elnora never made it into the kitchen.

Blood drops are probably 6 to 8 feet in front of her.

Now, the state´s theory on that is that it´s blood spatter.

You know, it was an arterial bleed.

And that is possible.

But I know from tracking deer throughout the years,

you can tell by droplets of blood

which direction someone is moving that´s bleeding.

And you can see that whoever was bleeding there was not moving.

There were several drops where those blood droplets

dropped straight down onto the floor,

which means they could have come from the killer.

Now that we´ve had a listener who works in blood spatter

take a look at it,

it is very unlikely that the blood drops

that are on that wall came from the same source

as the blood drops that are on the floor.

The two different things don´t look like they came

from the same direction.

Unfortunately, we may never know whose blood that is,

but they were never even swabbed or collected.

[ Telephone rings ]

Hello. You´re on the air with "Truth and Justice."

Chris: This is Chris in Texas. Keep it up, man.

I can´t say thank you enough

for the things you´re doing for those people.

It´s just amazing to me

about how close this community has gotten.

Bob: One of the key pieces of evidence against Ed

was there was a footprint in the kitchen

that was determined by the detectives to have been feces

as though, you know,

the killer had stepped in feces in the bedroom

and then took a step in the kitchen.

Detective Waller, in his report, says that he did the sniff tests

of this footprint, but he never sent it out

to determine if that´s, in fact, what it actually was.

Someone would have had to have stepped in the feces

and then walked 20 to 30 feet through the crime scene

without leaving any footprints.

And then for some reason, leave one footprint

in the kitchen without any more.

That didn´t make sense.

Some listeners were able to apply filters

to the photo of the prints.

We were trying to see if the pattern matched Ed´s shoes.

I´m not even so sure it is a footprint.

So it certainly wasn´t a smoking gun,

and it definitely wasn´t the smoking gun

that they made it out to be.

As I start to put that microscope on to the case,

immediately, the case is just getting weaker.

That´s not to say that Ed´s innocent at this point.

I don´t know. I´m keeping an open mind.

But I´m definitely putting a pin in these little things

that I´m finding in the investigation.

So this is my pack for when I do western hunts.

In Michigan, you spend a lot of time sitting in tree stands,

waiting on deer.

So everything in here has its own purpose.

So you could say, like our "Truth and Justice" army,

everybody has their own skill set

to help us solve these cases.

Another huge piece of the police case against Ed

was the positioning of the seat in Elnora´s car.

Ed´s tall, she´s very short,

and they say the seat was pushed all the way back.

And I don´t see a single photo

that shows the position of the seat.

Which is bananas.

There´s no proof that the car seat

was actually pushed back like they said it was.

As I shared that information on the podcast,

listeners start reaching out.

Laura Lester from Canada wrote me to tell me

that she´s just over 5-foot tall

and that she does not find it odd at all

that Elnora´s seat was pushed all the way back.

She said that she´s so short that she does pull her seat

all the way forward when she drives,

but she always pushes the seat all the way back

when she gets in and out of the car.

She said it´s very awkward to get in and out

of that cramped space with the seat pushed all the way up.

Whether or not the seat was forward or back

isn´t evidence of anything

because we don´t know what Elnora´s habits were.

One of the important breakthroughs

that came from a listener was a listener named Bob Carlson.

Bob asked me to look closer at the phone jack in the kitchen.

The phone from the kitchen had been ripped off the wall

and was sitting on the floor in the bedroom.

But what Bob noticed in the close-up photo of the phone jack

is that the top post had been broken off.

We see that the cord had been ripped.

The plug end of the phone cord is still in the jack.

The phone was ripped straight off the wall.

Elnora´s nude, so --

so clearly someone was likely in the bedroom with her.

But then all the way at the other end of the crime scene,

right by the back door,

there´s a phone ripped off the wall,

and then that phone is carried through the crime scene

and is set down right outside the bedroom door

where the attack started.

Now, it´s really difficult to come up with a scenario

in your mind where a single attacker did that.

I think that there were three people

on that crime scene that night.

Someone else came in the back door,

ripped the phone off the wall,

and then went and confronted Elnora

and the other perpetrator that were in the front bedroom.

But there was no forensic evidence

that linked Ed to Elnora.

Hall: Not fingerprints, not hair, not blood, nothing.

Maybe most important, Ed Ates had no motive

to kill Elnora Griffin.

There was a bunch of

circumstantial evidence about Ed Ates.

Tall, lived next door, lied to them.

But they could never come up with a motive.

Kim: Being in prison 14, 15 years, you know,

you think nothing has changed.

Every time we visited was a contact visit.

But this is a room with maybe 20 tables,

so there was no privacy.

Edward was feeling hopeless.

And the visits, you know, you know, became less and less.

I was losing hope.

And the drive to go see him was just --

it got harder and harder and harder.

Harder to see him.

You know, he told me to, you know, go live your life.

You know, don´t worry about me.

That was a hard conversation.

In early 2016, like January, I wrote Ed a letter

and told him I´d like to talk to him about his case.

I never heard back from him.

Then several weeks go by and I wrote a second letter

and I just told him, "I think that I can help you."

Told him I just want to talk.

And about a week later,

I got my first letter back from Ed.

♫♫

♫♫

I got a letter one day,

and it was from a guy named Bob Ruff,

and he´s saying he´d been reading up on my case

and he thought that he might be able to help me.

I was like, "Help me out?"

I just got it in my mind

ain´t nothing going to change

that I just balled it up and threw it away.

About two and a half years, maybe three,

Kim didn´t come, I didn´t see the kids.

My son was getting older and my daughter was getting older.

My grandmother died.

And, you know, that was my heart.

My mom died, too.

And, you know, I didn´t get to say goodbye.

It was kind of like that,

becoming a ghost, you know what I mean?

Bob: After the second letter,

he said he was interested in talking to me,

so we exchanged -- through a couple of more letters,

we arranged a time for him to call me.

And that first call with Ed, I recorded it.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to "Truth and Justice."

What you´re about to hear

is a nearly one-hour-long interview with Ed Ates.

Woman: Hello. This is a collect call from...

Ed: Edward Ates.

Woman: ...an offender at Coffield Unit.

This call is being recorded and is subject to monitoring.

Bob: Yeah, Ed. How are you doing?

All right.

Ed sounded skeptical about this strange guy

from Michigan who reached out to him.

The first thing I asked him was,

"You lied to the police about how you got to Monica´s."

I couldn´t see any reason why he would do that.

When I was at the police station,

Detective Hukill, he said,

"Well, what were you doing that night?"

I said, "Actually, I was getting ready

to go to Monaco Bush, my girlfriend´s house.

I went to her house last night."

And he said, "How did you get there?"

Snuck my grandmother´s car out the driveway and drove up there.

And, you know, I didn´t ask to take the car,

and my mom is sitting here beside me.

And now I´m going to have a problem with my mom, too.

I think I was more scared of my mom than I was them.

So I just said, "Monica came and got me."

I can understand why he lied because of the simple fact

that he knew my mom didn´t play.

We were very afraid of our mom.

My dad beat my mom.

She got tired. She got fed up.

My mom shot my father,

shot his big toe off.

And he´ll tell you it´s the stupidest mistake

he ever made in his life.

Panicked.

He lied,

then he stuck with the lie.

One stupid lie.

The thing that´s directed the police towards Ed

to begin with was the statement of Cubia Jackson.

I don´t know what to do with that.

There´s nothing in the police file

that even suggests a theory as to why he´s there.

And Cubia is the one that I think

was kind of a devastating case

as far as what happened at trial,

because Elnora told her

"I´m just sitting here talking to Edward."

Like clockwork, every Monday morning,

I would have a stack of transcripts to his show.

It seemed like every show, they were talking about me,

every show, and I was like, "Man, this dude is for real."

And as I´m reading the transcripts,

these people are asking questions.

It´s like they investigators too, you know?

♫♫

Bob: As I got to know Ed and talked to Ed more

and he began to trust me and would open up with me

and talk about his family and stuff,

it was -- God, it was devastating.

When I asked Ed if he was still married, he told me that --

He said, "I don´t even know if I´m still married or divorced."

He had no idea.

And that was one of the --

that was one of the things really I´m most proud of

about the work that we did on this case

was I ended up reaching out to Kyra and to Kim.

Kim: In 2012, I filed for divorce in December.

I never got anything to say that I needed to be in court.

So at that point, I didn´t pursue it anymore.

They told me yes, we are still married.

Officiant: Then when the storms of life are raging

and it looks like the world is upside-down...

I went to visit Edward.

I was very, very nervous.

But he seemed to be excited

and happy to see me.

He was like, "I´ll always be married to you."

Hall: Smith County is a very law-and-order place.

It´s got a very Old South feel to it.

And there are a lot of Baptist churches.

It is one of the buckles of the Bible Belt.

It feels like Mississippi in 1962.

And just like the Old South, it´s very conservative.

It´s almost impossible to prove that somebody is innocent

and then get them out of prison.

It is a long and arduous process.

It just becomes more and more apparent

that Ed very likely was not the man

that killed Elnora Griffin.

I would dig deep into every facet of the case.

Go back and look at this one more time.

Look for that detail one more time.

Dig a little deeper.

And it didn´t take much research

before I came across a document

that showed Kenny Snow recanting his testimony.

Soon as I mentioned Kenny Snow´s name to Ed,

it brought up a lot of really bad feelings.

2010, Ed´s family gets together the money

to hire a new legal team

to start challenging Ed´s conviction again.

It takes something big in order to undo a conviction.

Sometimes it can take the form of new evidence.

In Texas, at least, if you can prove you´re actually innocent,

the vehicle that you use to get the conviction overturned

is what´s called a writ of habeas corpus.

And one of the first things that that team does is

they go to Kenny Snow.

If you undermine Kenny´s testimony,

then you undermine the entire conviction.

Kenny tells them, "Yeah, I lied. I lied about Ed.

I lied because they told me that in order for me

to get a good deal on the charges

that I had pending against me,

that I needed to say something

that was going to get Ed Ates convicted.

So that´s what I did."

Hall: Kenney had written an affidavit saying that

what he had said at the trial was all a lie.

And so Ed Ates had some real ammunition on his side.

David Dobbs is the district attorney

that prosecuted Ed not once, but twice.

Kenny Snow alleges that

David Dobbs created this deal for him,

where in exchange for him giving this testimony against Ed,

that he would get a lighter sentence

from David Dobbs in his own case.

But that´s -- that´s obviously unproven.

But that was Kenny´s allegations.

The trial court ended up having a hearing on these affidavits

to see whether this had really happened.

Kenny Snow was brought in from his prison into Smith County.

David Dobbs was adamant through the entire hearing

there was no deal.

There was no gentleman´s agreement.

He said, "That´s just not the way

we do things in Smith County."

They had gone in with a really strong case

undermining Kenneth Snow´s trial testimony.

But by the time they had the hearing,

it had just all fallen apart.

He ultimately did not testify at the hearing.

He got cold feet.

His trial attorney ended up completely

changing his statements from his affidavit.

And the trial court says, "You can´t believe Kenny Snow

because Kenny Snow´s a liar.

And the trial attorney has changed his story,

so you can´t believe the trial attorney either.

So we´re not going to overturn Ed´s conviction."

When I started Ed´s case, you know,

I really thought that if you could show clear evidence

that a person who was convicted is actually innocent,

that they would just let them out of jail.

The American criminal justice system,

it is designed to keep people in prison.

Once you have been convicted,

the burden to overturn that conviction,

it´s called a Herculean burden by many in the legal profession.

And that´s no exaggeration.

Olivine: Hi, Bob. This is Sonny Olivine.

I just got done listening to your episode today.

And...

damn, I´ve never heard you sound so defeated.

Just figured I´d give you a call

and tell you to keep going.

We´re making progress,

and eventually things will work out.

Bob: While I appreciate Sonny´s message,

he´s misread my emotions.

I´m not feeling down or hopeless.

I am saddened by the devastation that has occurred.

Edward Ates´ situation just absolutely breaks my heart.

That sadness has been turned into fury.

As far as I´m concerned, a line has been drawn

in the sand in Smith County.

Bob: I was becoming more and more convinced

that Ed was innocent.

If you take any single element of the state´s case against him

and you just poke it just a little bit,

it just crumbles away.

There wasn´t much more I could do.

Kind of hit a brick wall on his case,

and he needed someone to represent him.

And the only place that I knew at that point

that could help him would be the Innocence Project.

The Innocence Project of Texas is a nonprofit organization

whose mission is to find individuals

who have been wrongly convicted of serious felonies in Texas

and to obtain their exoneration.

We really are the last hope for pretty much everyone

who´s come to us for help.

And so we take our jobs very, very seriously.

And I mentioned on a podcast episode that, you know,

"I wish we could connect Ed with the Innocence Project."

And sure enough, I get an e-mail from a listener that says,

"Hey, I´m personal friends with Michael Ware.

He´s the executive director

of the Innocence Project of Texas.

And I talked to him,

and he´s willing to have a phone call with you."

I thought, "Great."

I remember very well the day

that I found out about the Ed Ates case.

Mike Ware called me one day and he said,

"Listen, I´ve got this podcaster who´s brought this case to me,

and I think there may be something to it,

and I want you to look at it."

And I remember I kind of,

in all honesty, rolled my eyes and said,

"Really, a podcaster?"

It was very, very new at the time.

So I called up Bob Ruff and he explained, you know,

everything about Ed´s case.

And I could see he had done his homework.

There´s a law that we have here in Texas

that says you only get one shot.

If you have the audacity to challenge your conviction,

you´re only going to do it once.

It´s an automatic appeal,

and it´s almost automatically always turned down.

And it was in Ed´s case.

Clayton: So he had already had his one bite at the apple.

But we think we can overcome those procedural issues.

I get on the phone with Michael Ware.

He said, "We don´t have a lot of resources here

to do a lot of legwork."

He said "One of the things that we´ll need

is the entire trial record, the full set of transcripts,"

which in his case was 27 volumes.

Made another trip back to the clerk´s office.

I´d kind of gotten friendly with the ladies that worked in there.

This time I took my producer, Mike.

We had this scanner, which was this really impressive,

sophisticated piece of equipment,

and he was able to use that to scan all of his documents.

He said a listener gave it to him.

And that right there is kind of showing the power

of the crowd-sourced investigation.

Bob comes back, you know, a couple of weeks later.

"Here´s your trial transcripts."

That really got my respect because I knew the kind of work

that it takes just to get to that point.

That´s when I knew that he was serious.

And that´s when I knew that he really could help us.

A lot of times, we´ll have outside advocates

who will come in and they´ll say,

"Hey, my person is innocent."

It´s just very, very surface level.

But Bob was much more advanced than that.

You know, he really had a solid, solid grasp on the case.

You could tell that he had really, really dug in.

So I thought, "Okay, I guess we´re doing this."

We wanted to have DNA testing on a variety of evidence

from the scene of the crime.

We went back to the "Truth and Justice" army

and we said, you know, "We are a nonprofit.

We have limited funding, and we need your help."

DNA testing can be a very, very expensive process.

We´re talking several thousand dollars.

And of course,

as the "Truth and Justice" people always do,

they showed up and they helped pay

for the DNA testing in this case.

Bob: Hello, everybody, and welcome back

to "Truth and Justice."

I´m your host, Bob Ruff.

And this is the season finale for season two

of "Truth and Justice."

Ed´s attorney Allison has refused to give up the fight

and has continued to work towards Ed´s full, actual,

innocence exoneration.

Hey, Allison, how are you?

Clayton: Hey, good, thanks. How are you doing?

Really well. Really well. Thank you for calling in today.

We´ve all been anxiously

awaiting any updates on Ed´s case.

And all of that testing came back,

and we´re talking about blood drops,

scrapings from under Elnora´s fingernails,

items from on her body, around it.

Of all those items of evidence,

how many of those items matched Ed Ates?

None. Not a single one.

Ed is nowhere on that crime scene.

He is not anywhere on Elnora,

and Ed is nowhere in that house or on that scene.

And we still have that scraping off the shoe.

And the results of that DNA testing

are that Elnora Griffin is excluded.

That is not her on the bottom of Ed´s shoe.

♫♫

The case is active. It´s hot.

Allison is working with all the stuff

that we had helped develop over the previous year.

We thought that if we could provide the parole board

with letters from people who knew about Ed´s case,

that that would help indicate

not only that you very likely have an innocent man in prison,

but also there are a lot of eyes on this man.

And so this is likely not going to be someone

who´s going to go out and get in a whole lot of trouble

because there are so many people invested in this man´s case.

Man: It´s just amazing to me

about how close this community has gotten.

It´s not right what´s happening to these guys,

and we need to get this fixed now.

We got hundreds of letters from my listeners submitted

to the parole board, just showing their support for Ed.

Clayton: And it was not just in America.

We´re talking about people from Scotland,

people from Australia, people from the U.K.,

people literally around the world wrote in

to the parole board to say, "Let Ed go, let Ed go."

Bob: So we were pretty excited and hopeful,

but not real hopeful.

[ Line rings ]

I´m sitting in my office, and the phone rings.

And the first thing I hear is Alison,

like, through tears as she --

she can barely get the words out.

And she tells me Ed´s coming home.

It was -- It´s another tearful trip into the house

to tell my wife and kids that Ed´s actually coming home.

♫♫

Ed: My family was the first person I saw.

And then I was coming across the street

and my son came over and ran and hugged me.

And then we were just --

we were just stuck for a minute.

And we just stood.

I just felt the love from him.

And then my wife and then my daughter came

and we were all just, you know, embracing there for a while.

And then I seen -- turn around and Bob was there,

and he´s sitting over there, he got tears in his eyes.

I´m like, "Man, I´m not trying to do no crying,

all these people out here."

He come over there, hug me.

He got tears in his eyes.

I get tears in my eyes, and I´m hugging him.

And then there´s Allison and, you know.

♫♫

I knew at that point I was going home.

Clayton: I have pictures in my office

that I see every day when I come in to work

of the day of Ed´s release, September 5th of 2018,

I will never forget it.

In fact, one of my all-time favorite pictures

is this gorgeous picture that I have

of Ed and Kim embracing and of his now grown children

watching their parents hold each other.

Like, it´s beautiful.

That´s the kind of high that you chase forever.

Of course I busted out in tears when I first saw him walk out.

I was -- "This is really happening."

My husband, who has been in prison for 20 years, is home.

My soul mate is back.

I have my husband.

Unbelievable.

If it wasn´t for Bob Ruff,

I´m positive I would still be sitting in Tennessee Colony.

♫♫

I was very proud of that.

And I told everybody I knew.

I said, "Man, this is going to be a big deal."

And I still have that picture on my phone.

Ed Ates with his hands up.

That picture that´s up there.

That guy really didn´t deserve what he got,

and I´m glad somebody bailed him out of it.

He´s very good at this.

But if he walked away, he´d be good at the next thing.

Producer: Oh, you´re a very proud dad.

Yeah.

♫♫

Is that nice to hear, Bob?

Yeah, of course.

♫♫

Ed: I´m out now and I can, you know,

kind of live my life and see my family every day.

I wake up in the morning, you know,

I look at the positive every day.

You know, I´m not where I was.

I´m gonna make a great day out of this.

He´s here. He´s home.

We´re building a beautiful home.

It´s a great feeling

just, you know, being able to reach out and touch him

and to look at him and to hold him.

A feeling that I didn´t think for a long time

that I was going to be able to do.

So it´s a great joy just -- just to have him here.

It is.

We are still praying and looking

for Edward to be fully exonerated.

We want it to happen, yes. Sooner than later, yes.

Hall: Ed still has a murder on his record.

He hasn´t been exonerated.

That is still another really hard thing to do

in the Texas criminal justice system.

The Innocence Project of Texas

needs to come up with new evidence.

Clayton: We know that on the phone,

there is a very clean set of fingerprints

right where you would have grabbed it

and ripped it from the wall.

They belong to the real killer.

And I think that if we ever get

to a point where we can get those standards,

which are with the FBI,

then I think that we may know

one day what really happened to Elnora.

So we are steadfast.

We are determined. We´re not going to stop.

We´re going to keep moving forward,

and we´re not going to be happy until Ed is fully exonerated.

Bob: Elnora Griffin was so much more

than a victim of a heartless murder.

I hope that all of you listening know and understand

why we do this work.

And I hope that if anyone who loved Elnora is listening

that you will see that this is not about

getting the person out of prison

who was convicted of the senseless murder.

It´s about finding the truth.

There´s a truth out there that we know exists.

This case isn´t over until we find out

who actually killed Elnora Griffin.

And that´s, you know --

the podcast is "Truth and Justice."

We´re still looking for justice for Elnora Griffin.

There was a time when the word "sleuth"

was thrown around like an insult.

But now I wear it like a badge of honor.

And look what we´ve done.

Look at all these cases that have been solved,

people that have been freed,

killers that have been caught

because of us silly online sleuths.

So I´ll take it.

♫♫

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