cooperating. we heard nothing from the most important agency in all of this. ability one. the presidential commission supposed to be checking on disability hires. accord to our sources is alug talug -- allowing contracts to go to contractors noted ming the guidelines. more to come on almost every part of the country on this, john. >> drew griffin. thank you for joining us. that does it for us. thank you for watching. and "death row stories" starts now. on this episode of death row stories. a family is found brutally murdered. >> severity of the crime puts it on another level. >> an escaped convict is sentenced to death. just hours before his execution, a new defense team raises doubts about his guilt.

you let the evidence lead you to the suspect. >> what they did in this case was the opposite. >> evidence destruction, evidence tampering. my client was framed. >> there's a bed in the water. >> he was butchered and murder. >> many people proclaim their innocence. >> in this case there are a number of things that stink. >> this man is remorseless. >> the electric chair flashed in front of my eyes. >> get a conviction at all costs. let the truth fall where it may. >> chino hills is very rural. very peaceful. a lot of horse ranches.

we all knew each other. we didn't look our doors. just a quaint little community. >> the sleepy hamlet of chino hills, nestled beneath the san bernardino mountains less than 40 miles from los angeles. there, peggy ryan, a horse trainer and her husband doug lived on a ranch with their children, 10-year-old jessica, and 8-year-old josh. on the night of june 4, 1983, josh ryan's friend chris hughes was invite to spend the night. >> a hill overlooking chino, a multiple homicide. four victims. one victim, 8 years of age. the eyes are open. however there is no response. >> the next morning, chris hughes' father discovered the

lifeless bodies of his son, chris, as well as doug and peggy ryan and their daughter jessica. among the carnage, first responders also found 8-year-old josh ryan. he was still breathing, but barely. he was immediately air lifted to a nearby hospital. i first arrived with the sheriff. each of the victim had a combination of hatchet and knife wounds. this was such a brutal crime -- >> the severity of the crime puts it on another level. i think we would be lying if we didn't say that. >> we were trying to figure out a motive for the killings. we couldn't come up with anything. nothing made sense. >> we heard there had been a murder up on the hill.

as a community, our hearts grieved for these people. they are horse people. they were our people. >> why would anybody do this? it just doesn't make sense. they were the type of people no one could ever hate. ever. >> on the same day the bodies were found, a chino hills resident stumbled on another discovery. one of the murder weapons lying on the side of the road. >> the hatchet had the victims' blood on it. but it didn't have any fingerprints on it. >> nearby, a tan bloodstained t-shirt was also found. as the search continued. police received a tip from the ryan's next door neighbor. larry lease. >> mr. lease said i think you might be interested in seeing my rental house.

>> the rental house supposedly unoccupied at the time of the murders held a major piece of evidence. a sheathe that fit the ax used in the murders. >> we knew who ever had been in the lease house committed the murders at the ryan house. and, in the closet we found the small box of prison issue tobacco from chino institution for men. we checked with prison authorities, got names of any individuals that had escaped within the past week, all of a sudden we had a suspect. kevin cooper. just two days before the murders, 25 year owed kevin cooper had escaped from the california institution for men. a prison just five miles from the ryan's home.

police believed cooper hid at the lease house before killing the ryens and chris hughes. with cooper still at large, san bernardino county sheriff floyd tidwell took to the airwaves. >> we have evidence in our possession that places, kevin cooper at the crime scene. and we have other evidence that gives us cause to believe that kevin cooper was responsible for the murders. >> police patrolled on both sides of the california/mexico border today seeking the escaped convict, kevin cooper. >> tidwell launched one of the largest manhunts in state history. circulating photos of cooper and the ryen's stolen station wagon. >> there is growing fear in the california community of chino. >> i want to know what the state officials are going to do. >> as pressure mounted to apprehend cooper, police caught a break.

>> we recovered the ryen station wagon from a church parking lot in long beach. cooper used the car to escape. >> the motive was clear. >> cooper's motive was to get the hell out of chino hills. if he had to kill people to cover his escape, then he would. >> the killer seemed to be within reach. but then the trail went cold. on july 30th, 1983, almost two months after the brutal murders, the u.s. coast guard responded

to a distress call near santa barbara. they arrived at a sailboat moored in a small marina, the scene of an alleged rape. >> when they got in the sheriff's station, the victim of the rape was walking by the wanted posters and saw cooper's wanted picture and said, oh, my god, i've been raped by kevin cooper. >> kevin cooper escaped an almost two-month-long murder manhunt and police caught him trying to swim away from the scene of an alleged rape. >> the rape allegation was never pursued because cooper now faced four counts of first-degree murder. each carrying the death penalty. when cooper was returned to san bernardino, racial tensions boiled over. >> local authorities say they received outrage calls demanding cooper be sent to the gas

chamber. >> shouldn't get away with it. >> seek the death penalty as we have all along. >> cooper's trial began on october 23rd, 1984. >> i cross-examined cooper for a day and a half. cooper said, yeah, i was at the lease house but i never went up to the ryen house. it wasn't me. must have been somebody else that did this. >> kottmeier showed the hatchet in the lease house and the bloody footprint found in the ryan's bedroom. >> in the folds of the sheet was a half-bloody footprint. now, those soles were unique and we were able to determine that the shoe print was made by a prison-issued pro ked tennis shoe.

>> blood found at the murder scene led back to cooper. >> a single drop of blood in the hallway and cooper matched it. >> finally, kottmeier played the owe ooe -- emotional videotape testimony of the sole survivor josh ryen. >> have you tried to forget what happened that night? >> yeah. >> what have you done to try to forget it? >> think happy thoughts. >> cooper's defense would argue that the police mishandled evidence and the investigation but after seven days of deliberations, the jury found kevin cooper guilty on all counts. >> there is no question. there is no doubt about the guilt of kevin cooper. the only justice in this case is kevin cooper to face his maker. and then spend the rest of his days in hell.

>> we the jury of the above-entitled cause determined that the penalty shall be death. >> kevin cooper would spend the next two decades on death row. but in 2003, a new defense team investigated cooper's case and made a string of discoveries they felt proved kevin cooper's innocence. >> i began to learn all of the facts about the evidence destruction, the evidence tampering, the false testimony that was given and the failure of the defense team to put on evidence that showed who the real killers were. the state of california is about to execute an innocent man. by 2003, kevin cooper lost pwhat've we got? 5.

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by 2003, kevin cooper lost all his appeals for the 1983 murders of the ryen family and chris hughes. with his time running out and cooper still professing his innocence, the case came to the

attention of the high-powered law firm orrick, herrington & sutclifse. they fought death penalty cases on a pro bono basis. >> one thing i've learned in now 25 years of representing people on death row, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle and you have a client whose life is in the balance is a very heavy burden. >> what hile could not dispute was cooper's criminal history, his escape from prison and his proximity to the murders. >> i lived on the main streets of pittsburgh when i was growing up. i became a car thief. i landed in the california institution for men in 1983 because of a burglary conviction in los angeles. i was there a couple months. i was out of walking around, there was a hole in a fence and i just ran. >> mr. cooper walked through farms, pastures, off the roadways and ultimately found his way to the lease house. >> when i got to the lease

house, i asked a couple girlfriends to send me money. tried to figure out what's next. but i did not murder those people. >> cooper said he'd already set out hitchhiking to mexico by the time the murders took place. he went into hiding when he became the most wanted man in california. norm hile hired former fbi agent tom parker to look into cooper's case. >> when you're conducting an investigation, especially one as complex as this one, you essentially collect the evidence and let the evidence lead you to a suspect.

what they did in this case was exactly the opposite. as word of the murders got out, the sheriff's department learned that kevin cooper had escaped and that started what we refer to in law enforcement as tunnel vision. sheriff tidwell held a big press conference. they started with a suspect and they then started collecting evidence to prove their theory. >> but if kevin cooper wasn't the killer, why did the hatchet sheathe and prison-issued tobacco found at larry lease's home link him to the murders? >> a couple of deputies went over to the lease house, walked through it and really didn't see anything suspicious. a day or two later, other

deputies were asked to go search the lease house again. by then, they knew the hatchet had been used in the murders. and they found a sheath to a hand ax laying right out in the middle of the floor in a position that the first deputies walking through the house could not have missed it. they would have had to have been blind to miss that sheath. >> cooper also said that during his two days in the house he smoked multiple cigarettes. >> but when police collected the evidence, they only collected one cigarette butt. the rest of the cigarette butts somehow disappeared. later on, when they found the ryen station wagon in long beach, the first time it was suspected there were no cigarette butts. the second time they suddenly found two cigarette butts. clearly, they had been taken from the hideout house. >> and then there was the blood evidence connecting cooper to the murders. this small speck labeled a-41. a-41 was examined by sheriff department criminalist daniel gregonas.

>> you test something and you don't know what the other person's blood is who you're trying to see whether it's that person or not but gregonis waited until he had his blood type. >> he originally found a-41 did not match kevin cooper but then he changed notes to show that it did. >> so, in fact, the testing actually showed that the blood drop was not from somebody with kevin's blood type. >> other evidence, prosecutors claimed linked cooper to the murders was a bloody shoe print on the ryen's bed. >> kottmeier claimed that these were tennis shoes bought and sold only to prisons. in fact, it was a stylish shoe, very common tennis shoes with a very common shoe print. >> the question now is whether these were innocent mistakes by

investigators or something more. norm hile was about to learn that before they turned their attention to cooper, police had been given other solid leads, including from the sole survivor. >> 8-year-old josh ryen was able to communicate to staff at the hospital that the people who had attacked him and his family were three white men. in fact, a picture of kevin cooper was on television and he looked up and he said, that's not the one who did it. ♪ a good host, is a good host ♪ no matter where he's hosting. ♪ stella artois host beautifully

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kevin cooper had been on death row for nearly 20 years when norm hile began looking into his case. the cigarette butts in the ryen car, the bloody shoe print and the blood testing all had flaws. but hile's biggest question involved motive and the prosecution's game that cooper killed the ryens in order to steal their station wagon. >> the problem with this theory is that if somebody such as kevin cooper had wanted to make an escape, they missed the fact that there was cash, credit cards, and other valuables left at the scene of the crimes. none of that was taken. if mr. cooper walked away from the prison with no money, all of it was right there for him to take and it was not touched. >> hile also disputed the prosecution's theory that the killer worked alone.

the sheer number of wounds suffered by the victims, 140 in all, and the fact that doug ryen was an ex-marine with loaded guns in the bedroom suggested to hile that there had been more than one killer. for a time, san bernardino police apparently agreed with that conclusion. >> the sheriff's department was told by two different bystanders that the night of the murders, around the time that the murders had occurred, they had seen a car that matched the description of the ryen station wagon speeding down the road from the ryen's house and that in the car were white men. >> as it turned out, josh ryen,

the sole survivor of the attacks, reported seeing multiple intruders. he was interviewed just hours after he was rushed to the hospital. >> he wasn't good. he had at least one hatchet wound to his head and he had had his throat slit. >> josh was unable to speak to deputy sharp devised another method of communication. >> he would squeeze my hand for a yes and squeeze for a no. i took his hand and let him know that i was his friend the best that i could. we talked about baseball and got him comfortable with me. i would ask, do you remember anything? and i'd get a hand squeeze "yes." can you remember anyone coming to your house? "yes." we ended up with three mexican guys or maybe three white guys. i asked, were these three men there when things went crazy? and the answer was "yes."

>> based on this information, police released this bulletin two days after the murders. but by the time of the trial, josh ryen had changed his story. >> we knew josh was pressed to what he had seen. he was very specific. he only saw one person that had very bushy, fuzzy hair. >> did you see what that shadow by the bathroom was doing? >> no. >> how many shadows did you see? just one? >> victim interviews can change, especially with an 8-year-old boy, you don't know what he's seen, you don't know what he remembers. >> have you seen those before? >> based on my 30-plus years experience in law enforcement,

the initial comments of eyewitnesss are usually the most accurate. there's a very strong possibility that josh was coached. >> norman hile now felt he had enough evidence to successfully fight for kevin's life. as he prepared his appeals, yet another witness came forward, fully 20 years after the crime. >> i hear on the tv set that they are going to put kevin cooper to death. and i went, are you kidding me? >> on the night of the murders, christine slonaker was eating at the canyon corral, a local country and western bar two miles from the ryen's home.

>> as we were eating in through the backswinging doors of the kitchen come these three guys. i noticed that one of them was covered in blood. not just little spots. this was like someone had taken a paint brush and went like this. it was splattered everywhere. their feet were sticking to the floor. they were so inundated with blood. at the time, we didn't know about the murder and we just thought, well, i don't know what they've been doing, slaughtering pigs or whatever. but we're out of here. >> she never reported the incident because she claimed a

uniform sheriff's deputy was at the bar that night and she assumed he would follow up. in 2004, norm hile fought for a new trial in front of u.s. district judge marilyn huff in san diego. in his appeal, hile presented christine's testimony and, to his surprise, the state responded by inadvertently revealing a previously unknown piece of evidence provided by a woman named laurel eppler who lived near the canyon corral bar. >> here was a leg that showed, that laurel eppler had called into the sheriff's department the day after the murders saying she had found a short-sleeve blue shirt that she thought had blood on it near the road of the bar. one of the employees at the bar testified that one of the men in the bar that night might have had on a blue shirt. the criminal bulletin showed that they were looking for three white men and one of them was wearing a blue shirt. >> hile would argue that the

neighbor's eyewitness testimony along with the testimony of christine slonaker and josh's original account all pointed to three suspects. and in the new documents released by the prosecution, hile was about to discover the name of one of the three suspects and that man also happened to be a convicted murderer. if you qualify for a sittingham's card today i can offer you no interest for 24 months. thanks to the tools and help at experian.com, i know i have an 812 fico score, so i definitely qualify. so what else can you give me? same day delivery.

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while fought for a new trial in front of judge huff, attorney norm hile found evidence that put a name to an alternate suspect. >> the night of the crimes, a woman named diana roper had seen her boyfriend drive up to their house in the wee hours of the morning. lee fur row comes rushing into the house wearing coveralls with what looked to be spots of blood. he changes clothes and turns around and leaves. there were other people in the house and someone looked out the window and saw a white station wagon matching the ryen's parked in the driveway with other individuals in that car. >> diana roper called the sheriff's department and gave them the coveralls, the bloody

coveralls that they recovered were booked into evidence. >> when diana roper later learned that a hatchet was used in the murders, she again called police and see that lee fur row's hatchet was missing from his tools. >> he was a convicted murderer. he had strangled to death a young woman and threw her body into a canal. >> but san bernardino police waited 11 months before questioning lee. and when they did, they never asked him about his missing ax. they also seemed to accept fur row's word that he didn't own any coveralls. tom parker thinks he knows why. >> the coveralls, in fact, had

been destroyed. a deputy got rid of them because it was unfounded that they were connected to the case. of course, there had never been any blood test or whatever to come to that conclusion. >> hile now raised this destruction of evidence with judge huff. >> in a criminal prosecution, the prosecution is required to turn over to the defense any evidence that might be considered exonerating. it's a rule. if the prosecution doesn't do it, then they have committed what is called a brady violation and the trial must be dismissed and a new trial given. the tennis shoe situation, the blue shirt and bloody coveralls were all brady violations and we put on evidence as to all of those. >> judge huff rejected it. >> kevin cooper was running out of time so his defense team reached out to a new potential

advocate, san francisco columnist debra saunders. >> as a supporter of the death penalty, i wouldn't want to see an innocent man executed, would i? so if there's a hint that somebody who is not guilty might be executed, i want to know about it, i want to write about it. my editorial board wrote an editorial saying, gee, maybe kevin cooper is an innocent man. the defense attorneys laid out this case about how this man had

been unjustly convicted. >> cooper's defense told saunders that for years they had been unsuccessful in petitioning the courts for newly available dna testing which could exonerate cooper. >> kevin cooper kept saying, i'm not guilty. do dna testing now that you can do it. if it shows that i am guilty, you can go ahead and execute me. i walked out of there think, whoa, they've really made a case. >> san bernardino's current district attorney michael ramos was handling cooper's appeals. >> we felt that the ongoing requests by defense counsel in this case was just another delay tactic. there was no evidence at all that anybody but kevin cooper committed these horrendous murders. none. >> but in the early 2000s, new legislation in california would grant kevin cooper the right to dna testing. >> all these years that my case was in the appeals court, i never got a fair hand. would always get denied for one reason or the next. i felt very bad, very discouraged until dna testing came along and i had a shot. >> the state would perform dna tests on blood sample a-41 and blood on the tan shirt thought to be thrown from the stolen station wagon. the results would determine whether kevin cooper lived or died.

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newly available evidence was tested and both came from the same person. this was beyond a doubt kevin

cooper was in that house and bled at the crime scene. it verified what you knew all along, that kevin cooper committed all of these horrendous murders. >> only one out of 300 billion people could have matched a-41. you could go to galaxies far beyond the stars and still not find the match for a-41 that cooper supplies. >> once the dna test put kevin cooper in the home he said he never went into and on a t-shirt

with doug ryan's blood on it, that was it for him. >> debra saunders, once convinced of cooper's innocence now published scathing articles about cooper's guilt. the new pretension backfired on cooper's defense. >> kevin cooper's shock and the shock, testing came back saying there was kevin's dna on a-41. >> but for hile, the dna results raised a red flag. >> back in 1983, the lab technician daniel had testified that he had consumed a-41 during his testing. now he was asked to make sure that a-41 still existed. >> we have a photograph of the envelope that shows the date he took it out and when he resealed it. so we know he had a-41 on his

person for 24 hours before he returned it. >> he also had in the lab nearby a vial of kevin cooper's blood taken from him when he was arrested. >> contrary to original testimony, the state now reported there was enough of a-41 for additional dna testing. results from the tan t-shirt also changed drastically. at the original trial, the t-shirt was only shone to have doug ryan's blood on it. >> when the t-shirt was tested, at this time, there was additional blood located on the upper part of the t-shirt across the chest. it was previous to this time. >> cooper's defense argued that the new blood on the t-shirt and the newly discovered blood found on a-41 only could have come from one place. the vial of cooper's blood that

lab technician daniel gregonas had access to. they would strengthen that assertion by taking the vial to an independent lab for analysis. >> it was discovered that the vial of kevin cooper's blood contained two different blood types and two different dna types indicating without any doubt that additional blood from another person had been poured into cooper's vial. the likelihood is that they poured somebody else's blood into it after they poured blood on to a-41 and the t-shirt. >> much like when teenagers drink their parents' alcohol in order to conceal that, they have to fill the bottle back up with something else. >> cooper and his team eventually brought their claims of blood tampering to judge marilyn hough requesting that daniel gregonas be called to testify but as in previous petitions, judge hough denied all of their requests.

after more than 20 years on death row and numerous failed appeals, the court now set kevin cooper's execution date for february 10th, 2004. by this time, news of the controversy surrounding kevin's case had become widespread. >> people started not only seeing the evidence and learning about the evidence but they decided they wanted to expose the truth. >> save kevin cooper! save kevin cooper! >> no fact will change kevin cooper's group years, they're being spoon fed this story that doesn't hold up. and the kevin cooper legal team knew how to play that. >> you had those opposed to the death penalty saying this execution should be stayed, he's an innocent man. >> he wants to bring closure to the victims' families. he doesn't want to bring them

truth he wants to bring them closure which is two different things. >> while the court of the public opinion may have turned in kevin's favor, his defense team was running out of options. >> we were working against the clock. we had to file up to the california supreme court saying that kevin had been denied his rights and the prosecution had been improper. >> saying that kevin was not the killer and they should not execute him. >> ten days before the

execution, governor made his decision. >> arnold schwartznegger has made his first live or die decision as governor. >> he said that kevin was clearly guilty and should be executed. a few days before the execution date, the california supreme court dpe nighed our request for a stay of execution. >> san quinton guards escorted him to a new cell. cooper was about to become a dead man walking. push you shall

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. just hours before his mid night execution on february 10, 2004, kevin cooper was strip searched. defia defiantly, he had begun a hunger strike the week before. [ chanting ] >> as midnight approached, a crowd of several hundred demonstrators gathered outside the prison walls. >> lawyer were going to attend, family members were going to attend the execution. finally, the family was going to have swrus tis. >> with just hours to go, a frenzied back and forth was erupting in the courts. >> a three-judge panel of the ninth circuit court of appeals issued an opinion denying a stay

of kevin's execution. a few hours later, a judge disagreed with the ninth circuit and issued a ruling staying his execution. >> though en banc requests are granted less than one percent of the time, they granted cooper a stay. >> the attorney general immediately filed a request of the supreme court of the united states to reverse that stay. >> at 8:15 p.m., as kevin cooper waited for news, a phone rang in the death chamber. >> my lawyers told me that the united states supreme court entered a unanimous decision saying i would not be murdered that night.

i began to feel life coming back in my body. i actually thought i was a dead man. >> signing out four hours before that your client is not going to be executed is a miracle. but it's not over. kevin cooper is got off death row. >> two years later, a judge imposed a moratorium on lethal injection in california. no one has been excuted in the state since 2006. meanwhile, kevin cooper begins to declare his innocence. in 2009, a judge from the ninth circuit court wrote a scathing decision. judge william fletcher wrote cooper is probably innocent for the crimes in which the state of california is about to execute him.

if he's innocent, the real killers have escaped. they may kill again. they may have already done so. >> december pielt conflicting opinions, kevin cooper will be returned to the death chamber. >> if he were going to be excuted, i would still want to prove his innocence because our system often convicts innocent people. and when you have the ultimate punishmented, y isishment punishment, you have to get another system. >> we save the penalty for the worst of the worst. these people on death row, some of them are called monsters. everybody talks about the death row inmates and their rights. but people forget about the victims and their families and their rights.

this is one of the most heinous crimes available. he deserves the death penalty. >> 9:25, i was escorted to death row. it's like i went to hell. but i am an innocent man. i did not murder anyone. i hope people watching this story stand up because it is right. >> all of the potential inaccuracies, the potential miscarriages of justice, i can't correct.

i can only tell you that personally, i was involved in this case from the very beginning. and personally believe that kevin cooper should die. >> on this episode of death row stories, a triple murter execution style. >> and the crime is caught on stap. >> most significant piece of evidence i've ever seen in a case. >> but clooerism aear images of only deepen the mystery. >> you're going to kill somebody. it's not everyone a sure conviction. >> what they didn't have, it's not even physical evidence. >> there's no doubt in my mind that he's innocent. >> there's a body on the water. >> he was butchered and murdered. many people proclaim their innocence.