The True Story of How a Series of Lies Sent an Innocent Man to Prison
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 …
Getting Started How I gathered evidence for Aggravated is a topic I cover a bit in the book, but I thought if I also said something about it here it might help you see how I tried to find the truth in circumstances where it at first seemed there was little or no evidence. Over …
The last time I visited Steve, back in January 2020, the subject of food came up (as it often does). Visitors can bring up to $25 (in change only) so they can buy their loved ones something to eat from the vending machines in the visiting area. I’m sure the prison system gets part of …
Over the years I have sent Steve books and subscriptions to magazines (all of which are required to be mailed from a bookstore or the publisher), and have printed and mailed him all sorts of articles (some because they describe legal issues pertinent to his case, and others just because I thought he might find …
As I mentioned in the previous post, Steve’s prison is often understaffed, but it’s not the only one. There are a variety of reasons why people don’t want to work in prisons (low pay, potential danger, etc.). Shortages of staff can result in inmates going hungry and being less safe. One of the reasons why …
About the time the coronavirus began reaching into US prisons, in early March, TDCJ put all of the units in the system on permanent lockdown, and stopped all visitations in hopes of keeping the virus outside the prison walls. It was a false hope, of course. Even though family members of inmates weren’t allowed inside, …
By 2010 or so, Steve and I were talking on the phone at least once a week, sometimes twice; long rambling talks about anything and everything (books, music, politics, religion, his circumstances, the law, television, and anything else that happened to surface), although we always discussed some aspect of his case, and that was usually …