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 …
Parts of this post were used in Aggravated. This is the fourth of four posts about a search for some evidence. If you haven’t read the first three yet, you should probably do that before reading this one, starting with Part 1, Why I Searched for Karla. The Aftermath Early in September 2014, I drove …
Parts of this post were used in Aggravated. This is the third of four posts about a search for some evidence. If you haven’t read the first two yet, you should probably do that before reading this one, starting with Part 1, Why I Searched for Karla. A Revelation The previous two posts were about …
Parts of this post were used in Aggravated. This is the second of four posts about a search for some evidence. If you haven’t read the first post yet, you should probably do that before reading this one. Here’s a link, Part 1, Why I Searched for Karla. A Trip to Deep Springs In late-August …
This post and the three that follow it comprise an expanded early version of a chapter in Aggravated. This is the first of four posts about the search for some information. A considerably abbreviated version of that trip was used in the book, so if you’ve read the book you don’t need to read these …
In January 2017, Jerry Stubblefield, a friend of mine, invited me to present something to a gathering of artists and writers at something he had started called The Salon at the Microscopic Theater. The Salon is located in his home in Asheville, North Carolina (and I live in Texas), but he was thinking I might …