USA: Innocently convicted free again after 25 years thanks to True Crime Podcast

United States
True crime podcast frees innocent man after 25 years

Two men who were innocently imprisoned for murder in the United States at the age of 17 have been freed after 25 years. The makers of a true crime podcast went in search of clues in their case – and found new evidence.

It will be the first Christmas that Darrell Lee Clark will be free in 25 years. The American was arrested – when he was just 17 – for a murder he did not commit. This was announced by the non-profit Georgia Innocence Project (GIP) last Thursday. “You never believe something like this is going to happen to you,” Clark said after exiting Floyd County Jail in the US state of Georgia. “I never thought I would spend more than half my life in prison, especially for something I didn’t do. I’m just glad the truth finally came out after 25 years. I’m so thankful for the Georgia Innocence Project and the Proof podcast for what they did. Without them I would still be in prison.”

Clark was sentenced to life imprisonment along with Cain Joshua Storey, who was also 17 at the time, for the murder of Brian Bowling, who was 15 at the time. The teenager suffered a fatal gunshot wound in his own bedroom at a party on October 18, 1996. Immediately before his death, Bowling had called his girlfriend and told her he was playing Russian roulette with a gun. Storey, Bowling’s best friend, had brought this for him. Storey had also been in the room when the fatal shot was fired. The police initially believed his statement and wanted to charge him with manslaughter. Months after the shooting, however, at the urging of Bowling’s family, officers began investigating the case as a homicide.

USA: True crime podcast investigates murder case and provides new evidence

In doing so, however, they made serious mistakes and misbehaved, as two true crime podcasters found out last year. So they relied on the statements of a woman who had thrown a party months after the incident and to which the two suspects were also invited. There they allegedly shared how they planned to murder Bowling because he knew too much about a previous theft they had committed. They also interviewed a witness with hearing and speech impairments who was in another part of the house during the shooting and who claimed that he saw Clark running out of the Bowling’s house and through the backyard. However, he was the only person present in the house at the time who had seen anyone outside.

At Clark and Storey’s January 1998 trial, the prosecution’s theory relied largely on the testimony of the woman and that of a coroner. He explained that his gut feeling told him that the gunshot wound couldn’t have been self-inflicted because it wasn’t a close-contact wound. However, the coroner was not a medical doctor by training, nor was an autopsy ever performed on Bowling.

After a week-long trial, the jury sentenced Clark and Storey to life in prison for murder and conspiracy to commit a crime — despite Clark having a confirmed alibi.

In their true crime podcast series Proof, Susan Simpson and Jacinda Davis explored the case. In late 2021, they began interviewing witnesses and learned that at the time, police had actually forced the woman to give false testimony by threatening to take her children away. The witness, who had hearing and speech impairments, was also apparently misunderstood because he was talking about a shooting he had witnessed in 1976. He had therefore never seen Clark run away from the crime scene.

While Clark was eventually officially exonerated of his friend’s shooting death due to newly discovered evidence of police misconduct during the initial investigation, Storey settled with prosecutors to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter. In return, he received a ten-year sentence that had already been served, which also enabled his immediate release.

See the video: After an attack with a crossbow at a school in Bremerhaven, a 21-year-old has to answer to the Bremen district court. According to the indictment, he is charged with attempted murder.

Sources: Georgia Innocence Project, Proof: A True Crim Podcast, “The Guardians”