OKLAHOMA 1982 Cold Case Solved — details shocks community

OKLAHOMA 1982 Cold Case Solved — details shocks community

On the night of December 7th, 1982, 21-year-old Debra Sue Carter left the Coachlight Club in Ada, Oklahoma after her shift and drove back to her apartment.

Around 2:30 to 3:00 a.

m.

, her friend Gina Vietta’s phone rang.

Carter was on the line saying someone was in her apartment and she didn’t feel comfortable, asking Vietta to come pick her up.

Vietta asked who it was, but Carter didn’t answer, only saying hold on.

Vietta heard rustling noises over the phone and said she was on her way.

Then the phone rang again.

Carter called back saying there was no need to come anymore.

She had decided to stay home.

When Vietta asked again who it was, Carter changed the subject and said to call her back the next morning so she wouldn’t be late for work.

The next morning, another friend of Debra’s came to the apartment and discovered her body on the bedroom floor with the word die written in nail polish on her chest and the name Duke Graham written in ketchup on her back.

Police collected 17 hairs from the scene, took body fluid samples, and recorded a bloody fingerprint on the bedroom wall.

Those items sat untouched in the file for 5 years.

When the investigation finally moved forward in 1987, it did not focus on the last person seen with Debra alive, the one who had argued with her in the parking lot that night, the one from whom no biological samples were taken throughout the 5-year investigation.

It focused on a former baseball player with mental illness who lived with his mother and had nothing to defend himself with except the truth.

And in Ada, Oklahoma in 1988, the truth was not enough.

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In 1982, America was going through the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

Unemployment hit 10.

8% President Reagan had just signed cuts to social welfare programs, and small towns in southern Oklahoma were struggling because of a collapsing economy.

Pontotoc County, an agricultural area with vast wheat fields, a few small factories laying off workers, and local unemployment higher than the national average, was not a place with many options for young people wanting to become independent.

In Ada, the county seat with a population of 16,000, life revolved around a few main streets, several churches, East Central University, and bars that stayed open late.

It was a town where everyone knew each other.

Rumors spread faster than facts, and reputations were built or destroyed not by courts, but by stories on the street.

Debra Sue Carter was a daughter of Ada.

Born in 1961, she grew up in this small community.

In the fall of 1982, at age 21, she had just moved into a small garage apartment, living alone for the first time, a small but meaningful milestone for her.

To cover rent and living expenses, she worked three part-time jobs simultaneously, as a bartender and waitress at the Coachlite Club, babysitting for local families, and doing various odd jobs.

It wasn’t an easy life, but she was standing on her own two feet.

Friends at the Coachlite remembered her by the western-style belt with Debbie engraved on it that she wore almost every day, which became her signature at the bar.

Her mother, Peggy Carter Sanders, described her daughter as mischievous, full of energy and vitality, a good girl with many morals.

Those who knew her at the Coachlite confirmed this.

She was well-liked by customers and known by name.

On the evening of December 7th, 1982, a regular Tuesday night, Debra worked the evening shift at the Coachlite Club.

The night was quieter than usual.

Winter, tough economy, people went out less, and the bar closed early.

Among the customers present that night was 22-year-old Glenn Gore, a familiar face in the Ada community, who came to the bar after being driven by his friend Ron West.

Gore was a regular at the Coachlight and knew Deborah from previous times.

When the Coachlight closed and customers trickled out, Gore stepped into the parking lot and stood next to Deborah’s car talking to her through the window.

Some people leaving the bar saw this and didn’t think anything unusual.

Two acquaintances chatting before heading home.

Others remembered it more clearly.

They saw Deborah push Gore away to close her car door.

Deborah left the parking lot alone.

Gore went back inside and then left with Ron West in West’s car.

That was what witnesses could confirm about the night of December 7.

What happened after that, only one person knew.

Around 2:30 to 3:00 a.

m.

on December 8, Deborah called her friend Gina Vietta and said someone was in her apartment and she didn’t feel comfortable, asking Vietta to come pick her up.

Vietta asked who it was.

Deborah didn’t answer, only saying, “Hold on.

” Vietta heard rustling noises over the phone and said she was on her way.

Then the phone rang again.

Deborah called back a second time saying there was no need to come anymore.

She had decided to stay home.

When Vietta asked once more who it was, Deborah changed the subject and said to call her back the next morning so she wouldn’t be late for work.

That was the last time Vietta heard her friend’s voice.

Around 11:20 a.

m.

on December 8, Deborah’s long-time friend Donna Johnson came to the apartment to visit her.

Entering the bedroom, Johnson found Deborah lying face down on the floor, naked with something written on her back.

Realizing the killer might still be in the apartment, Johnson ran back to her car and immediately contacted the Carter family.

Charlie Carter arrived, went up the stairs to the second floor apartment, and stopped right at the landing.

Broken glass covered the floor.

The screen door and main door were wide open.

He stepped inside and found a blood-soaked towel stuffed in his daughter’s mouth.

Police were called.

The two early morning phone calls, the rustling noises over the line, and the hold on were never explained.

That was all Debra Carter’s family had when Ada police began their investigation on that winter morning in 1982.

Detective Dennis Smith was the first to examine the apartment after Charlie Carter called the police.

When the paramedics entered the bedroom, one of them began vomiting because of what they saw.

And what they saw would haunt everyone present that day for decades.

The bedroom was in complete chaos.

Clothes, bedding, and stuffed animals were scattered all over the floor as if a battle had taken place in that cramped space.

Debra Carter’s body lay face down on the floor between the bed and the wall, naked except for a pair of white socks.

But it wasn’t the position of the body or the chaos of the room that people couldn’t forget.

It was what the killer had written on her body and on the surfaces around her.

On Debra’s back, written in ketchup, Duke Graham.

On her chest, written in nail polish, die.

On the Formica table in the room, also in ketchup, a misspelled message, don’t look for us or eels, don’t look for us or else, written by someone who was not calm enough to spell correctly at the time.

The plural us and we were written intentionally as if to suggest more than one person was involved.

A blood-soaked towel was stuffed into her mouth and pushed deep down her throat.

Under the body, an electrical cord from an electric blanket and a belt.

Next to the body, a crumpled sheet, and inside the sheet was an uncapped ketchup bottle.

The same type of ketchup used to write on her back and on the table.

On the floor near the body, there was also an uncapped bottle of shampoo.

And shampoo appeared on part of the victim’s body in a way that suggested it had been used as as weapon.

The bracelet was still on Debra’s wrist.

Money was scattered on the bedroom floor, not a sign of robbery, but part of a staged scene.

Broken glass on the stair landing, but when police examined it more closely, they found glass both inside and outside the apartment window.

Crime scene reconstruction experts concluded this could not have happened naturally in a typical break-in.

The glass must have been broken from both inside out and outside in, meaning it was staged.

The killer deliberately created the illusion of a break-in from outside and of multiple people being involved.

The entire chaotic scene, from the crumpled sheet to the uncapped shampoo bottle to the wee message, was the work of one person acting alone, but trying to cover his tracks in a way that would make police look in another direction.

On
December 9, Chief Medical Examiner Fred Jordan performed the autopsy and recorded every detail.

Bruises and abrasions all over her face, forehead, above the right eye, along the right cheek, left corner of the mouth, under the chin, back of the neck.

Bruises and bite marks inside the mouth and on the tongue.

A semi-circular ligature mark around the neck.

Defensive wounds on the arms.

Debra had fought back.

She had struggled.

Small puncture marks on the nose and cheeks that Jordan could not fully explain.

Internal examination revealed internal bruising and a small metal bottle cap in the rectum.

Evidence of the level of violence the killer had inflicted.

Cause of death, asphyxiation from the towel stuffed deep into her throat combined with a ligature around her neck.

Police collected from the scene what they believed would identify the killer.

17 head and pubic hairs, body fluid samples, and a bloody fingerprint on the bedroom wall.

And the name Duke Graham written on Debra Carter’s back.

Another name written in ketchup on the back of a dead girl pointing straight in the direction that Ada police would not choose to follow.

Ronald Keith Williamson was born on February 3rd, 1953 in Ada, the youngest of three siblings growing up in the same town where Debra Carter would work at the Coachlight Club 30 years later.

In his late high school years, Williamson was someone everyone in Ada knew, not for trouble, but for baseball.

He pitched and caught so well that in 1971, at age 18, he was selected as the 41st overall pick in the national amateur draft.

Not many boys from Pontotoc County, Oklahoma had gone that far.

He played in the New York Yankees organization in 1976 and 1977, close enough to the dream to taste it before a shoulder injury brought him back down to Earth.

At age 24, his baseball career ended.

He returned to Ada with no money, no plans, nothing except a name that once made people look at him with admiration, and now only reminded him of what he had lost.

In the years that followed, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, severe depression, and schizophrenia, a series of diagnoses for which he was not properly treated and self-medicated with alcohol and drugs.

He lived with his mother, Juanita, had no stable job, and gradually became the town eccentric, drunk and singing loudly on the streets late at night, mowing neighbors’ lawns unasked, showing up in places at the wrong times in ways people used to describe untreated mentally ill individuals.

He frequented the Coachlight Club, the same place where Debra Carter worked.

The same place where Glen Gore drank on the night of December 7th, 1982.

Dennis Fritz was a completely different person.

He was a high school science teacher with a stable job, a normal life, no criminal record, and nothing in his background suggesting he could be involved in violence.

He met Williamson in 1981, and the two became friends, frequenting the Coachlight together on their free evenings.

That was all that connected Fritz to the Debra Carter case.

He was Williamson’s friend, and that turned out to be enough to destroy his life.

In March 1983, 3 months after Debra Carter’s death, Glen Gore went to Ada police and claimed he had seen Williamson at the Coachlight on the night of December 7, and that Williamson wouldn’t leave Carter alone.

Police called Williamson in for questioning.

He denied any involvement and voluntarily provided hair and saliva samples, the action of someone who believed he had nothing to fear.

His mother, Waneta, confirmed to police that he was home before 10:00 p.

m.

on December 7, before the Coachlight closed, before Gore stood next to Carter’s car in the parking lot.

There was no physical evidence linking him to the scene.

Meanwhile, Gore, the one who pointed the finger at Williamson, the last person confirmed to have seen Carter alive, the one described by bar witnesses as standing next to her car and being pushed away by her, left the questioning without having his fingerprints taken, without providing saliva or hair samples.

Not a single biological sample.

Ada police did not choose Williamson because the evidence pointed to him.

They chose him because in a town of 16,000 people, where everyone knew each other, a former baseball hero who drank on the streets and lived off his mother, was someone the community was ready to believe was guilty.

And in criminal investigations at that time, the community’s readiness to believe was sometimes enough to replace evidence.

While Ada police focused on Williamson, the things that could actually lead to the real killer were being buried one by one.

In 1983, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation fingerprint expert Jerry Peters examined the bloody fingerprint on the bedroom wall where Debra Carter’s body was found, and concluded the fingerprint was not Carter’s, not Williamson’s, not Fritz’s.

This result was not disclosed.

That same year, after Williamson took a polygraph test, there was a video tape recording his exculpatory statement, clearly explaining what he knew and didn’t know about the case.

Pontotoc County District Attorney Bill Peterson never disclosed the existence of this tape to the defense.

And around the same time, a man named Ricky Joe Simmons went to the police and confessed to killing Debra Carter.

Peterson never disclosed this confession.

Three pieces of evidence that could have changed the direction of the investigation, a fingerprint result, a video tape, a confession, all disappeared into the drawers of the prosecutor’s office, and no one knew of their existence for many years afterward.

From 1983 to 1987, the case gradually went cold.

No arrests, no progress.

Pressure from the Ada community and from the Carter family grew.

A town of 16,000 people not accustomed to living with an unsolved murder for years.

In October 1984, Williamson was jailed in Pontotoc County Jail for writing bad checks, and remained there until January 1985.

During that time, a fellow inmate named Terry Holland claimed she had heard Williamson talk about a dream related to Carter’s death, a dream in which he played the role of investigator, not the killer.

But Holland described it differently.

Holland’s statement was recorded and kept, waiting for the day it would be needed.

That day came in 1987.

After 5 years with no arrests, Peterson and Ada police decided to act.

In May 1987, Debra Carter’s body was exhumed, with the official reason being the need for a new set of fingerprints for comparison.

Jerry Peters, the same fingerprint expert who had concluded in 1983 that the bloody fingerprint did not belong to Carter, this time reached the completely opposite conclusion.

The fingerprint matched Carter.

This was the first time in Peters’ 24-year career that he changed his conclusion on the same piece of evidence, and the change happened exactly when the prosecution needed something to justify an arrest warrant.

No scientific explanation was given for the difference between the 1983 and 1987 results.

It was the same fingerprint.

The examiner was the same person.

Only the conclusion changed, and the new conclusion changed in exactly the direction Peterson needed.

The arrest warrant was signed.

On May 8th, 1987, 5 years after the night Debra Carter called Gina Veleta, and no one came to pick her up, police arrested Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz.

Fritz had no clear alibi.

No one could remember where they were on a regular Tuesday night 5 years earlier, and that gap in memory would be used to build the story of his guilt.

The two men were arrested based on the altered fingerprint result, jailhouse informant testimony, and a dream.

While three pieces of exculpatory evidence sat untouched in the files, unknown to the defense.

Dennis Fritz’s trial took place in April 1988.

Fritz sat at the defense table as a high school science teacher with no criminal record, no proven motive, and nothing connecting him to the scene except that he was Williamson’s friend and had frequented the Coachlight Club.

The prosecution presented microscopic hair evidence and jailhouse informant testimony.

Someone who claimed to have heard Fritz confess, who appeared exactly 1 day before the prosecution would have been forced to release Fritz for lack of evidence.

The jury convicted Fritz of first-degree murder.

Sentence, life in prison without parole.

Fritz, a normal high school teacher with a normal life, would spend the next 11 years in an Oklahoma prison for a crime he did not commit, while his daughter grew up without a father.

Ron Williamson’s trial began on April 21st, 1988, and what happened in that courtroom is one of the most clearly documented examples of the justice system trying a person who had no ability to defend himself.

Williamson was represented by a blind lawyer who lacked sufficient assistance and resources to prepare an adequate defense.

More importantly, no motion was filed to evaluate Williamson’s mental competency before the trial began.

Despite him being in an active psychotic state suffering from untreated bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and his behavior in the courtroom clearly showing this to anyone with mental health expertise.

Throughout the trial, Williamson screamed at witnesses and the judge, overturned tables, and lost control in ways that a person in a psychotic state cannot control.

The jury saw this and did not read it as symptoms of mental illness.

They read it as evidence of his dangerousness, as confirmation that this was a person capable of committing the crime he was accused of.

No one in the courtroom explained to the jury the difference between the behavior of a psychotic person and the behavior of a guilty person.

The prosecution’s main witness was Glenn Gore, the last person confirmed to have seen Carter alive, the one described by Coachlight witnesses as standing next to Carter’s car in the parking lot and being pushed away by her, the one from whom no biological samples were taken throughout the 5-year investigation.

Gore stood before the court, placed his hand on the Bible, and testified that he had seen Williamson harassing Carter at the Coachlight on the night of December 7.

That was the only testimony placing Williamson at the bar that night.

Because among the other 23 people present at the Coachlight that evening, people who had known Williamson for many years, not a single one confirmed seeing him.

Only Gore.

Williamson testified in his own defense, denying knowing Carter and saying he had never been to her apartment.

Asserting that what he told the detective was a dream, not a confession, never a confession, and in his psychotic state, he could not convey that in a way the jury could hear.

Prosecutor Bill Peterson had four types of evidence to convict Williamson and Fritz, and all four of them, in different ways, were traps.

The first trap was the 17 hairs collected from the scene in 1982, including head and pubic hairs found on and around Debra Carter’s body.

OSBI forensic expert Melvin Hett stood before the jury and declared that 13 of the 17 hairs were microscopically consistent with Fritz and Williamson, and one was a match.

Those phrases sounded scientific and conclusive, but they weren’t.

Microscopically consistent did not mean a match.

It meant that when viewed under a microscope, two hairs looked similar, something that could be true for tens of thousands of people with similar hair color and thickness.

Williamson and Fritz’s defense attorneys did not point this out.

No one told the jury that those hairs could just as easily have exonerated both men with the same level of certainty.

Decades later, in 2012, the FBI officially admitted that microscopic hair analysis was not a validated forensic science, that experts had for decades testified beyond what the method could actually conclude, and thousands of cases across the United States were reviewed.

In 1988, in Ada, Oklahoma, no one knew that was coming.

The second trap was the jailhouse informants.

Kerry Holland, who was incarcerated with Williamson at Pontotoc County Jail in 1984-1985, testified in court that she had heard Williamson talk about a dream related to Carter’s death in a way that she described as a confession.

For Fritz, another inmate claimed to have heard Fritz confess to the murder while awaiting trial at the county jail, and that testimony appeared exactly one day before the prosecution would have been forced to release Fritz for lack of evidence.

One day, in the American legal system, jailhouse snitches, informants who provide information in exchange for benefits, are the least reliable and most notorious source of wrongful convictions.

People say what they need to say to get out of prison sooner, and the system often accepts it.

The third trap was something unlike any other evidence in modern American criminal justice history.

In 1984, while in jail for writing bad checks, Williamson told a detective about a dream he had.

In that dream, he played the role of the detective investigating Carter’s murder, following her home, describing what happened.

He made it clear it was a dream and that he was playing the role of the investigator in that dream.

At the 1988 trial, the prosecution presented this account to the jury as a real confession.

Without the context of the dream, without explaining that Williamson was describing himself as the investigator, not the perpetrator.

The jury heard a person describing the act of murder and was told it was a confession.

No other known wrongful conviction in modern American history involved a defendant being sent to death row based on the content of his own dream.

The fourth trap was what was never said.

The 1983 videotape recording Williamson’s exculpatory statement after his polygraph test was kept by Peterson and never disclosed to the defense.

Ricky Joe Simmons’ confession was kept by Peterson and never disclosed.

Brady v.

Maryland, the US Supreme Court ruling from 1963 requires prosecutors to disclose all evidence favorable to the defendant.

Peterson violated that twice with two separate pieces of evidence in the same case.

Not mistakes, two deliberate decisions to withhold things that could have dismantled his entire theory of the case.

Four traps, junk science, jailhouse informants, an edited dream, and hidden evidence.

That was what the Ada justice system presented to the jury in 1988 and called the truth.

On April 27th, 1988, the jury convicted Ronald Keith Williamson of first-degree murder.

Sentence, death.

The man who had once been the pride of Ada, Oklahoma, the man selected as the 41st overall pick in the 1971 National Baseball Draft, would be sent to death row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary to await lethal injection for a crime that the real killer, the very man who had just
testified against him, had committed.

Two years after his conviction, Williamson was transferred from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary to a new death row facility, an underground building with no windows and no sunlight.

The facility was literally an underground dungeon designed to completely isolate those awaiting execution from the outside world.

Williamson’s cell measured 2 by 4.

5 m.

He went months without showering.

He barely ate.

He paced in that cramped space and screamed about his innocence, behavior that those who didn’t understand mental illness saw as madness, and those who did recognized as symptoms of untreated schizophrenia growing worse under solitary confinement.

His mental health deteriorated day by day in that hole, and the prison system did nothing to intervene.

Each cell in the facility had an intercom system, speakers and microphones connecting the cells to the guard station.

Some guards found their own ways to use that system.

At night, after lights out, whispers would come through the speaker in Williamson’s cell.

Ron, this is God.

Why did you kill Debbie Carter? Williamson was a devout Christian who was in a psychotic state.

He could not distinguish the boundary between reality and hallucination on nights like that.

He would scream and yell for hours after each provocation, loud enough that other death row inmates in nearby cells couldn’t sleep, long enough for the guards to be satisfied with the results of the game they were playing.

No one intervened.

No one was disciplined.

This was what happened to a severely mentally ill man held underground without treatment, and no one in the system saw it as a problem that needed fixing.

While on death row, Williamson learned that Ricky Joe Simmons had confessed to killing Debra Carter, the confession that Peterson had withheld and never disclosed.

From his underground cell, Williamson repeatedly demanded through every channel he could access that Simmons be investigated, that he be arrested, that this was the person who had actually killed Carter.

No one listened.

Those demands were treated as symptoms of mental illness, the ranting of a deranged death row inmate, not information that needed to be taken seriously.

On May 15th, 1991, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld both Williamson and Fritz’s convictions.

Williamson continued filing appeals through federal channels.

All were denied.

Each denial brought the execution date closer.

By 1994, that date was set, September 27th, 1994.

On September 26th, 1994, 5 days before Williamson was to be taken to the execution chamber, his public defender filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court.

A stay of execution was granted.

When that news reached Williamson in his underground cell, he screamed from behind the bars, “I’m innocent.

I’m innocent.

I’m innocent.

” Not the scream of a madman, but the scream of a man who had just avoided death by 5 days after 6 years in the dungeon.

5 days was the distance between Ron Williamson and wrongful death.

And that is a number the Ada, Oklahoma justice system must carry forever.

After the stay of execution was granted in 1994, Williamson’s lawyers began the process of reviewing the entire case file in federal court.

In 1995, the federal judge granted the habeas corpus petition and ordered a new trial for Williamson, and the reasons the judge gave in that ruling were a detailed catalog of what Peterson and the Ada justice system had done throughout the 7 years from 1987 to 1988.

First, the prosecution had failed to disclose the 1983 video tape recording Williamson’s exculpatory statement after his polygraph test, violating the Brady rule.

Second, the prosecution had failed to disclose Ricky Joe Simmons confession, a second Brady rule violation in the same case.

Third, Williamson’s defense attorney was determined to be ineffective for failing to develop evidence of his client’s mental illness, failing to request a competency evaluation before trial, and failing to do what the law required a defense attorney to do to protect his
client’s interests.

While Williamson’s appeals were being considered at the federal level, Dennis Fritz was doing the only thing he could do from prison, contacting the Innocence Project, the non-profit organization founded in 1992 to use DNA testing to exonerate the wrongfully convicted.

Fritz understood that the physical evidence from the 1982 scene, 17 hairs, body fluid samples, still existed, and if DNA was tested, the results could change everything.

But first, he had to make sure that evidence wasn’t destroyed before testing could be done.

Fritz filed a motion with the court to preserve the physical evidence, a critical strategic move without which the entire exoneration process might never have happened.

In 1997, the federal appeals court also ordered a new trial for Fritz for reasons similar to Williamson’s.

In 1999, Williamson’s lawyer Mark Barrett obtained permission to test DNA on all the physical evidence collected from Debra Carter’s apartment in 1982.

The 17 hairs that expert Melvin Hett had stood before the jury and declared microscopically consistent with Fritz and Williamson did not match Williamson, did not match Fritz, completely excluding both men.

The intact sperm samples collected from the vaginal and rectal swabs during the 1982 autopsy did not belong to Williamson, did not belong to Fritz.

All the physical evidence from the scene pointed to only one person, Glen Gore, the man who had stood next to Carter’s car in the Coachlight parking lot on the night of December 7th, the last person confirmed to have seen her alive, the one from whom no biological samples were taken throughout the five-year investigation, and the one who had stood before the court in 1988 as the prosecution’s main witness to convict
innocent men.

On April 15th, 1999, Judge Tom Landrith sat on the bench in the Pontotoc County courtroom and dismissed all charges against both men.

He told the courtroom, “We can never replace the 12 years of incarceration, nor can we forget Debra Carter.

All we can do is move forward.

” Williamson was released from the very courthouse where he had been convicted 11 years earlier.

When the judge read the order, he only said three words, “Thank you, Judge.

” Fritz sat in the arms of his mother and daughter at the press conference afterward and said, “There were times I was very angry, very bitter.

I was in so much pain that I wanted to do everything possible to prevent this from happening to anyone else.

That was the statement of a man who had just lost 11 years and was still trying to find a way to turn that loss into something meaningful.

” Glen Gore was the only person who knew the full truth about the night of December 7th, 1982, from the moment Debra Carter drove out of the Coachlight parking lot until her father pushed open the bedroom door the next morning.

He was the last person confirmed to have seen her alive, standing next to her car in the parking lot, talking to her through the window, described by some witnesses as being pushed away by her before she closed her car door.

He was the one who had argued with her right before she left.

Those details were in the investigative file from 1982.

In 1983, when police questioned Gore, he left without having his fingerprints taken, without providing saliva or hair samples.

While Williamson, whose alibi was confirmed by his mother, had full biological samples taken.

While Williamson and Fritz sat in prison, Gore continued living in Ada and continued committing crimes.

He was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for kidnapping and assault with a firearm in a case completely unrelated to Debra Carter.

Serving time in the Oklahoma prison system while two innocent men served time for his crime.

In 1988, during Williamson’s trial, Gore was brought out of prison to testify.

He stood before the jury, placed his hand on the Bible, and testified that he had seen Williamson harassing Carter at the Coachlight on the night of December 7th.

The only testimony placing Williamson at the bar that night, testimony that none of the other 23 people present that evening confirmed.

He was the prosecution’s star witness and his testimony helped send Williamson to death row.

The man who killed Debra Carter had stood in the courtroom and helped convict the man who didn’t kill her.

When the DNA was released in 1999, excluding Williamson and Fritz, and pointing directly at Gore, he was serving time in an Oklahoma prison.

The DNA news broke on April 14th, 1999, one day before Williamson and Fritz were released.

Gore knew the DNA would point to him.

That day, he escaped from a public work crew at Purcell, fleeing in the hope he could escape what science had just confirmed.

He was recaptured shortly afterward.

He didn’t get far, had no real plan.

It was simply the reflex of a man who knew he was about to face the consequences of 17 years of undeserved freedom.

In 2001, the Pontotoc County Prosecutor’s Office charged Gore with the rape and murder of Debra Sue Carter.

On June 24th, 2003, 21 years after the night Debra Carter called Gina Vierra and no one came to pick her up, the jury convicted Glenn Gore and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

The man who had pointed the finger at Williamson to police in 1983, who had testified against Williamson before the jury in 1988, who had lived free while two innocent men served time in his place, was convicted of the very murder he had used as a tool to keep the system’s attention pointed elsewhere.

Ron Williamson walked out of the Ada courthouse on April 15th, 1999, legally free, but 11 years in an underground dungeon had destroyed what remained of his mind in a way no release order could repair.

He returned to Ada, lived with
family and was convinced police would come back to arrest him again.

He carried a pocket knife around the neighborhood out of fear, not aggression, because he no longer had the ability to distinguish real threats from the ones in his head.

His family tried to keep him on psychiatric medication, but struggled.

He continued drinking and alcohol mixed with medication only made the confusion worse.

He lived on disability benefits from social security and cycled in and out of mental health facilities multiple times in the five years after his release.

In his more lucid periods, he participated in marches advocating for clemency for those still on death row.

The man who had been five days from wrongful execution now stood outside prisons calling for those still inside.

On December 4th, 2004, Ronald Keith Williamson died at a nursing home in Oklahoma, surrounded by his two sisters, Renee Simmons and Annette Hudson, the women who had fought for him throughout his years in prison and cared for him in the years he was out.

He had just been diagnosed with cirrhosis.

He was 51 years old and had lived only five years after his release.

Dennis Fritz had a different path.

He returned to Missouri, rebuilt his life and found ways to turn the 11 years the system had stolen into something more meaningful than just loss.

He described the greatest loss not as the years in prison, but what happened outside prison during that time.

I was cheated out of 12 years, taken away from family members.

I was cheated out of watching my daughter grow up and bloom into a woman.

He became an advocate for the wrongfully convicted, served on the board of the Midwest Innocence Project, and in 2008 wrote the memoir Journey Toward Justice documenting the entire journey from arrest to release.

Fritz and Williamson each received $500,000 in compensation from the city of Ada and the state of Oklahoma settled separately with an undisclosed amount.

On March 10th, 2024, Dennis Fritz passed away at the age of 74 and there was one moment after the exoneration that no one could have predicted.

Debra Carter’s mother, Peggy Carter Sanders, the woman who had lost her daughter and then watched two innocent men convicted in place of her daughter’s killer, built a relationship with Fritz in the years after the exoneration.

At an Innocence
Project fundraiser in New York, Fritz walked over to Mrs.

Sanders, the 65-year-old woman he had once been convicted of murdering her daughter, and invited her on stage to dance together as jazz music played.

The two people who had once been on opposite sides of the same tragedy stood side by side on stage, not because they had forgotten, but because sometimes the only thing you can do after the system has failed everyone is choose to stand together instead of facing each other.

The question this case leaves behind is how all of this could happen in a modern justice system with all the procedures and standards designed to prevent exactly this.

The answer is not a single mistake, but five layers of failure stacked on top of each other.

First, police overlooked Gore from day one, the last person seen with Carter alive, the one who argued with her in the parking lot, who left the investigation without a single biological sample taken.

Second, when 5 years passed without an arrest and pressure mounted, the fingerprint was exhumed and its conclusion reversed.

The same expert, the same fingerprint, a completely opposite conclusion after 24 years of career.

Third, two pieces of exculpatory evidence were tucked away by Peterson and never disclosed.

The exculpatory video tape and Simmons confession, both of which could have dismantled the entire case before it reached trial.

Fourth, junk science was presented as fact to a jury without enough information to question it and defense attorneys lacked the competence to point out what microscopic hair analysis could and could not actually conclude.

Fifth, a man in an active psychotic state was put on trial without anyone checking his competency and his mentally ill behavior in the courtroom was read by the jury as evidence of guilt.

Five layers, each enough on its own to cause serious harm, together producing a death sentence for an innocent man.

After this case, the FBI officially confirmed that microscopic hair analysis was not validated forensic science and reviewed thousands of cases nationwide.

The question that review raised was how many other people were sitting in prison because of the same type of evidence with no one fighting for them.

The Innocence Project became one of the most influential legal organizations in America, having exonerated more than 375 people to date and the Williamson and Fritz case was one of the cases that helped shape the organization into what it is today.

But at the center of all those numbers and reforms and legal legacies is Deborah Sue Carter, the 21-year-old girl working three jobs to support herself with the Western belt engraved Debbie, who called at 2:30 a.

m.

and said there’s someone in the house and I’m not comfortable.

She deserved to have her real killer found in 1982, not 21 years later, not after two innocent men nearly died in her place.

Gore was convicted in 2003.

Williamson died in 2004.

Charlie Carter, the father who pushed open the bedroom door and found his daughter, did not live to see it.

The people most deserving of seeing justice arrive were no longer here when it came.

The Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz case leaves behind practical lessons that any American needs to know.

First, if you or a loved one are arrested for any reason, request a lawyer immediately before answering any questions, even ones that seem harmless like, “Can you tell us about your dream?” Williamson told a dream without a lawyer present, and that story nearly killed him.

Second, know your Brady rights.

Under the 1963 Brady v.

Maryland ruling, prosecutors have a legal obligation to disclose all evidence favorable to the defendant.

If you believe exculpatory evidence is being hidden, have your lawyer file for full discovery, and consider contacting organizations like the Innocence Project at innocenceproject.

org, or calling the hotline 212-364-5340.

Third, if you or a loved one has mental illness and is facing criminal charges, immediately request a mental competency evaluation.

This is a constitutional right, and defense attorneys have an obligation to request it if there are signs of mental illness.

Williamson being tried while in a psychotic state without a competency check was a violation of his constitutional rights, and it was one of the main reasons his conviction was overturned.

Fourth, know that microscopic hair analysis, bite mark analysis, and many other forensic techniques have been determined unreliable by the FBI and scientific organizations.

If the evidence in your or your loved one’s case relies on these techniques, request modern DNA testing through your lawyer.

If the story of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz makes you think differently about the justice system, hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next cases we’ll continue to tell.

Thank you for watching all the way to the end.

See you in the next video.