The True Story of How a Series of Lies Sent an Innocent Man to Prison
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” Søren Kierkegaard One of Hanna’s comments in Aggravated continues to resurface for me periodically. In her May 2006 interview with Tom Swearingen, less than two months before the first trial began, …
My Investigation Begins While I was researching Steve’s trial, I was, of course, doing regular “real life” things (helping my wife care for her elderly parents, working at Rice University until late-2009 and then retiring, writing novels, etc.), but Steve’s situation, was always in the back of my mind. I felt like there should be …
Getting More Data For the next couple of years, on and off, I worked on breaking the transcripts down and analyzing them. I found a great deal of useful information that helped me understand the trial, and why it worked the way it did (or didn’t work the way it should have), but it would …
More Piles of Paper Once I had the full transcript of Steve’s second trial, I read through it at least a dozen times, made notes, and tried to make sense of some of it; but, after a while, all the statements blended together. I had read them so many times that I often wasn’t sure …
Piles of Paper During our early discussions (circa 2007-2008) Steve had given me a basic idea of what his accuser, Hanna Penderfield, claimed, but I found it impossible to believe. She said there had been 80 to 90 incidents of sexual assault, sometimes occurring in front of Steve’s wife and children, and sometimes in public …
Parts of this post were used in Aggravated. The prosecution called two expert witnesses. We’ve already covered Ada Dixon. This post is about the other one, Blake Goudy, the man who gave the speech that day at Hanna’s school. Goudy said he only spoke to Hanna for fifteen minutes, so all he could say was …
Parts of this post were used in Aggravated. During Trial #2, Hanna tried to slip some extra information into one of her answers, but it didn’t work. Here’s how that happened. Elmer Ross had just finished questioning her about some incidents that she claimed happened after Beau’s 21st birthday party. She described several things, two …
Parts of this post were used in Aggravated. In the chapter, The Night of the Rodeo, I included a Top Ten list of the most important facts in that chapter. That list began as roughly twenty-five facts before I whittled them down for the book. If some of these don’t make much sense, read the …
A condensed version of this post was used in Aggravated. If you haven’t read Part 1 of this yet, you probably should do that first. It’s at this link. Line by Line Buried in the text of the note are several clues which might indicate when the note was written, along with some other information. …
A condensed version of this post was used in Aggravated, where I covered the most important points in a note that Rhonda Bresnick produced for Hanna at the request of Hanna’s mother, Darla. I have always had suspicions about the note, and how it was created. Rhonda claimed she wrote it soon after a 2003 …