In Steven Avery's 2018 affidavit he states that he went to retrieve papers from his vehicle around noon on 10/31 and noticed Scott's green Ford Ranger parked behind Bobby Dassey's Chevy Blazer. Steven states that about 15 minutes later Scott's truck was gone. Did Bobby leave to go hunting around 12:15 PM in Scott's truck? Did Scott tell Bobby to take his truck since it was blocking the Blazer (image above)? Was Scott the person on the computer that afternoon at 1:08 pm and 1:51 pm. Did he make the call to Teresa at 1:52 pm using a spoofed number? Did he call Teresa at 1:52 PM using a burner phone (the audiovox phone found by the turnaround at the East Twin River, near the old dam)? Did Factbender lie in the voicemail report about the message that was left by this caller?
Scott may have led Teresa into a trap set by the Manitowoc cabal. Perhaps he turned her over to them, and then resumed his day by driving Bobby's Blazer home. Then after Bobby is done hunting, he drives to Scott's trailer, which would explain why Blaine, on the school bus heading west on Highway 147 toward Avery Road, saw him driving a green Ford Ranger around 3:40 PM, heading east on highway 147, toward Scott's home at 12764 Highway 147 (1.8 miles from 12932 Avery Road). Then Scott follows Bobby to his home on Avery Road, with his fresh deer kill still in the bed of Scott's truck, and helps him unload the deer and hang it in the garage. Then he goes back home and returns later to Avery Road to pick up Barb to go to the hospital. Or he simply arranges for alibis from Barb, and he never went to the hospital at all that day.
Conrad "Pete" Baetz retired in 1996 from the Madison County (Illinois) Sheriff’s Department. He decided to move back to Wisconsin “right around the time when the Avery case broke,” Baetz said. “When I came back to Wisconsin, the people around here were going nuts as to whether he was guilty or innocent.” Baetz contacted Avery's defense attorneys, Dean Strang and Jerome Buting, and offered his services. “I said, ‘Look, I’m up here and this is going crazy. Do you need any help? I would be more than happy to assist — I’ve done this kind of work before,’” Baetz recalled. The defense attorneys hired Baetz. Because Strang and Buting lived more than 100 miles from the Calumet County Jail, they sometimes would send Baetz to visit Avery.Conrad "Pete" Baetz was Dean Strang and Jerry Buting’s private investigator, who is shown commenting several times in different episodes of Making A Murderer (you can find one of his appearances in Episode 4 at 30:50).
Why would Strang and Buting hire a retired deputy, who contacted them out of the blue to offer his services, as their private investigator?
What share did Baetz receive of the $260,000 that Avery paid Strang and Buting from Avery's $400,000 settlement for his 1985 wrongful conviction?
And what exactly did Pete Baetz investigate?
He didn't try to establish a timeline using call detail records, cell tower dumps, and surveillance footage from the routes Teresa may have driven on October 31st.
He didn't investigate the people closest to Teresa and establish their alibis.
He didn't request a forensic analysis of Teresa Halbach's laptop to determine her online activity, which could help establish an accurate timeline and alternate suspects.
He didn't interview Teresa's friends to see if she had plans for October 31st.
He didn't investigate Teresa's emails, land line records, or cell phone text messages.
He didn't investigate the wedding of a friend that Teresa attended on Saturday, October 29th, or the Halloween party she attended that night.
More than a decade later Pete Baetz is still suggesting that Bobby Dassey and Scott Tadych are Teresa's killers.
Corey Taylor Talks 08-22-17 Guest: Pete Baetz
"Strang and Buting had the information showing that Halbach's cell phone pinged a remote tower when she was supposedly being raped and murdered by Avery and Dassey. Why did Strang and Buting (and their only private investigator, former sheriff's lieutenant Pete Baetz) ignore the single most exculpatory fact?" - Whiznot, Reddit
The congressional committee in 1978 that looked into Martin Luther King's death had an investigator on loan from the Madison County Sheriff's Office -- Conrad "Pete" Baetz -- who had previously worked for a military agency known to have engaged in illegal domestic spying.
Baetz came up with the theory that Russell Byers had been offered a contract by two St. Louis businessmen to kill the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1966-67.
Getting Away with Murder: The FBI's Sam White Files
Media Mayhem
March 6, 2004
Baetz came up with the theory that Russell Byers had been offered a contract by two St. Louis businessmen to kill the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1966-67.
Getting Away with Murder: The FBI's Sam White Files
Media Mayhem
March 6, 2004
I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI in 1997, asking for documents pertaining to Sam White, the St. Louis Art Museum burglary suspect whose body was found in rural Madison County, Ill. in June 1978.
White disappeared shortly after being interviewed at the FBI's field office in downtown St. Louis.
The St. Louis field office said that it had destroyed White's files because they were old and inactive.
But a couple years later, after I had finished writing two or three stories on the HSCA's (House Select Committee on Assassinations) bungled investigation of the King murder, I received three volumes of highly redacted FBI reports on White from the FBI's Washington Headquarters.
White disappeared shortly after being interviewed at the FBI's field office in downtown St. Louis.
The St. Louis field office said that it had destroyed White's files because they were old and inactive.
But a couple years later, after I had finished writing two or three stories on the HSCA's (House Select Committee on Assassinations) bungled investigation of the King murder, I received three volumes of highly redacted FBI reports on White from the FBI's Washington Headquarters.
Remember, HSCA investigator Conrad "Pete" Baetz employed a former FBI informant (Oliver Patterson) to spy for him during the course of the congressional inquiry into King's assassination.
Baetz later told me he knew nothing about Russell Byer's suspected involvement in the art museum burglary case.
Baetz's denial came despite the fact that Baetz had developed Byers as the HSCA's primary witness, a source who claimed to have knowledge of the plot to murder King.
Baetz later told me he knew nothing about Russell Byer's suspected involvement in the art museum burglary case.
Baetz's denial came despite the fact that Baetz had developed Byers as the HSCA's primary witness, a source who claimed to have knowledge of the plot to murder King.
Baetz also said he had never heard of Sam White, another suspect in the art museum burglary.
Baetz denied knowing about the murder of White even though his body was found in Madison County -- which is where Baetz worked as a deputy sheriff.
Baetz denied knowing about the murder of White even though his body was found in Madison County -- which is where Baetz worked as a deputy sheriff.
Below are a few choice documents courtesy of the FBI.
Keep in mind that the FBI also investigated the St. Louis Art Museum burglary for some reason, despite the fact that it was not overtly a federal case.
Keep in mind that the FBI also investigated the St. Louis Art Museum burglary for some reason, despite the fact that it was not overtly a federal case.
DIRECTOR, FBI (183-1276)
6/20/78
SAC, ST. LOUIS (183-117)
[two lines redacted]
RICO
Re SL letter to Bureau dated 2/22/78
[three or four lines redacted]
As a result of contacts with St. Louis Police Department, it was determined that [redacted] had had the statues stolen but a source had revealed this and subsequent pressure had caused [redacted] to return statues in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
Further investigation shows that two Negro males [redacted] and [redacted] had assisted in the thefts along with other persons.
[redacted] and [redacted] have made statements to the FBI as a result of being introduced to the FBI by the St. Louis Police Department. [redacted] and [redacted] were associated with SAM B. WHITE who in turn had been hired by [redacted]
[redacted] and [redacted] stated that WHITE and [redacted] had hired them to beat up [redacted] in May, 1977.
On 6/16/78, it was determined that SAM WHITE had been murdered, his body being found in Madison County, Illinois.
St. Louis will interview associates in an effort to determine the murderers and the reason for the murder.
Other investigation will be done to verify [redacted] and redacted information.
2 Bureau
2 St. Louis
RRK:mt:sfm
(4)
ADMINISTRATIVE: Delay in submission of this communication is due to stenographic delinquency in St. Louis in St. Louis Division of which the Bureau is aware.
###
[The FBI bureaucracy is apparently like any other office, the blame is always shifted down to the secretary.]
###
United States Attorney
Eastern District of Missouri
1114 Market Street
St. Louis, Mo. 63101
July 26, 1978
Special Agent in Charge
Federal Bureau of Investigation
1520 Market Street
St. Louis, Missouri 63101
Attention: [redacted]
Re: United States v. [redacted]
FBI File #SL 183-117
Dear Sir:
The FBI investigation into this matter has been hampered by the subjects' involvement with others in the Art Museum case. Cognizant of the deal made between the Circuit Attorney's Office and the other subjects and of certain investigatory police work, our chances of successful prosecution are dim. Coupling these problems with the stature of the two main witnesses (assuming they testify) and the problems of proving an interstate nexus for a RICO or Hobbs Act charge, it is the opinion of this office that this case is legally and factually insufficient for prosecution.
Very truly yours,
Robert D. Kingsland
United States Attorney
By Ronald E. Jenkins
Assistant United States Attorney
REJ/jb
###
MISSELLANEOUS
SL-183-117
On August 18, 1978, Michael Sullivan, Assistant Circuit Attorney, St. Louis City, was advised of the U.S. Attorney's declination and stated that his office is not going to issue warrants for [redacted] regarding activities at Finer Metals Company. He stated that the witnesses, [redacted] are currently being prosecuted and that their records are such that they would make unsatisfactory witnesses
On July 19, 1978, [redacted] Detective, Madison County Sheriff's Office, Edwardsville, Illinois, made available a report dated June 11, 1978, report number CP-78-142. The report shows the recovery of a body that had been located in Madison County, Illinois. The body was identified as SAM ERNEST WHITE. The body had received gunshot wounds and had subsequently been set on fire presumably by the use of a flammable liquid. The identification of the body was made through several fingerprints that remained on the corpse.
[redacted] has an extensive arrest record and convictions for burglary and car theft. His description is as follows:
Name [redacted]
Race Negro
Sex Male
Date of Birth [redacted]
Place of Birth Missouri
Weight 150 pounds
Height 5' 8''
Eyes Brown
Hair Black
Social Security # [redacted]
Alias [redacted]
FBI# [redacted]
[redacted has been convicted and sentenced to [redacted] for burglary and stealing in relation to the theft [redacted] as well as several other thefts.
43
###
Today's Word Puzzle
courtesy of Danny Casolaro's notes
Phil (Linsalata) -- Ben Menashi
Ted Stevens plane 223- 8222
Hays (Hayes)
associaates
Lavi houe[unreadable] A. Motley
from in Brazl, his father began Brazilian Petroleum Industry
Ambassador to Brazil
Alaskan resident
quite a temper
Miami lawyer
Pete Harick (?) key
According to Charlie (Hayes)
worked for Customs and was found out (arrow)
Bear Cat Post Bill "Pierre" (Dirty)
Call Harry re Mena
Herb Quindes LaRouche
re Carmen Brothers
(father and son)
New Hampshire
Max Huegal business partner
Economist with NSC 83
Norman Bailey spring of 84
In 84-85 -- Project Democracy
EIR western gold
Spitz
Connecticut woman
Oct. 86
Executive order 1233 -- 1981
January
put CIA under aegis
Howard & Tucker
Information Prospector -- 36 CIA agents 73
Wendy Shull (202) 232-4503
Beans, rice and M16s
Rico + Rebecca Sims
Karish
Lindsey Madison -- July 86 by 15 August
Jack Terrell case on Rene Carbot
Dave McMichael
Phillipe Vidal
Diguere picture of him Pennsylvania
Information Center
Gene Wheaton
Saudi Prince stayed or strangled (?) at Key Bridge Marriot
Trump (?)
retired Col.?
in Laos Shackley
Paul Hogan
lady researchers 89 founded the Association of former intelligence
officials McMichael does the newsletter
Alex Coburn
503-636-7511
B spring of 88
Joe Kelso erly 88 (can) cited in Jan.
San Jose Tico Times Williams (aka) tapes on DEA/ embassy knowledge
* Robert Owen plot Kelso claims
Danny Sheehan
Dec. 87 -- individual --"mistrial" went to Memphis to Tulsa where he's from continued through Arkansas
fight between federal prosecutor -- state police
Rich Mountain Aviation -- Mena / Wheaton -- late Jan. 88
244-3807 3425
Rich Mountain Aviation
504-766-6616
Hampton
Barry Seale
Delbert Hahn -- Baton Rouge FBI
Agent -- Customs agent arrested Seale
former CID Doug Strahan (504) 682-5635
Title 3 affidavits -- screenplay
all the 18
Jacobson control officer moved Seale to Mena
Rich Mountain Aviation
served a subpoena -- March 88 -- Gene Wheaton
"collect evidence --memos I don't do"
July 87
Tom Green -- counsel for Secord, Chi-Chi, Hakim, Tom Clines
appt. at 1:30 at Key Bridge Marriott
WSJ investigative firm. pillow talk
Ramada
Carlos -- Chinchilla ? Tom Green(e)
Karl Jenkins
Mena
Joe Kelso (lines to)
Colorado business Rupp
Chandler, Kelso move into Rupp's office o vice versa
Joe Kelso May 88
Bureau of Prisons
Oregon is important
Jeff
Sheila
(line from Kelso's name to) Rupp gets requests from Iraq. Customs was running a sting operation (line from here to Bureau of Prisons)
The Sam White Murder
Sam White was one of the suspects in the 1978 St. Louis Art Museum burglaries. His burnt body was found was found in a farm field in Madison County, Illinois in June 1978.
Press accounts from the time of the art museum burglaries earlier that year named Russell Byers, a convicted thief who specialized in fencing fine art and jewelry, as the alleged mastermind of the first heist.
The police arrested Byers, but he was never charged.
Press accounts from the time of the art museum burglaries earlier that year named Russell Byers, a convicted thief who specialized in fencing fine art and jewelry, as the alleged mastermind of the first heist.
The police arrested Byers, but he was never charged.
Within a matter of a few months, Byers became the House Select Committee on Assassinations star witness.
Congressional investigator Conrad "Pete" Baetz, who was on leave from the Madison County (Ill.) Sheriff's Department at the time, came up with a theory that Byers had been offered a contract by two St. Louis businessmen to kill the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1966-67.
This information was allegedly provided to the FBI by one of Byers' partner's in crime, Richard O'Hara, who was working as a FBI informant.
The FBI allegedly misfiled the information and didn't find it again until the HSCA requested all King-related files from FBI field offices in 1977.
Congressional investigator Conrad "Pete" Baetz, who was on leave from the Madison County (Ill.) Sheriff's Department at the time, came up with a theory that Byers had been offered a contract by two St. Louis businessmen to kill the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1966-67.
This information was allegedly provided to the FBI by one of Byers' partner's in crime, Richard O'Hara, who was working as a FBI informant.
The FBI allegedly misfiled the information and didn't find it again until the HSCA requested all King-related files from FBI field offices in 1977.
I interviewed Baetz for the first time in the early 1990s, when he was still a deputy for the Madison County Sheriff's Department.
At that time, Baetz told me that he didn't recall Byers, his key witness, being a suspect in the art museum burglary case. The arm museum heist were front page news in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for months that year.
At that time, Baetz told me that he didn't recall Byers, his key witness, being a suspect in the art museum burglary case. The arm museum heist were front page news in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for months that year.
Even more questionable was Baetz's response when I asked him about the murder of Sam White, another art museum burglary suspect. Baetz told me he had never heard of White.
Several years later, I was contacted by David Patterson, the son of HSCA informant Oliver Patterson.
Baetz had been Patterson's handler, instructing him on how to spy on James Earl Ray's brother, Jerry Ray, prior to his testimony before the HSCA.
The younger Patterson had tapes of telephone conversations that his late father had recorded with Baetz.
I listened to some of the tapes.
In one conversation, Baetz tells him to call him back at the Madison County Sheriff's Department.
This means even though Baetz was working as a congressional investigator in the spring and summer of 1978, he was still checking in at the Madison County Sheriff Department's headquarters in Edwardsville, Ill.
Baetz had been Patterson's handler, instructing him on how to spy on James Earl Ray's brother, Jerry Ray, prior to his testimony before the HSCA.
The younger Patterson had tapes of telephone conversations that his late father had recorded with Baetz.
I listened to some of the tapes.
In one conversation, Baetz tells him to call him back at the Madison County Sheriff's Department.
This means even though Baetz was working as a congressional investigator in the spring and summer of 1978, he was still checking in at the Madison County Sheriff Department's headquarters in Edwardsville, Ill.
Baetz's claim that he knew nothing about Byers' being a suspect in a high-profile burglary case and that he was unaware of a gruesome murder within his own jurisdiction defies credulity.
In 1998, shortly before the death of James Earl Ray, Gerald Posner, a popular author, published a book on the assassination that concludes that Ray acted alone in the King assassination. Posner was lauded by New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis for his fine investigative work. In truth, the book is riddled with factual inaccuracies.
I debated Posner briefly by telephone on two different radio shows: NPR's Talk of the Nation and the Charles Jaco talk show on KMOX radio in St. Louis. In both cases, the hosts of the shows cut me off and sided with Posner's errant thesis. Posner was on a book tour at the time.
So I went on an emailing campaign, sending an excerpt of my earlier work on MLK to newspaper reporters across the country. The excerpt alludes to Baetz, Byers, Patterson and White.
Thanks to Blogger I no longer need to rely on sending multiple emails, or uploading documents to a web site, which is a slow process.
Here's the excerpt:
I debated Posner briefly by telephone on two different radio shows: NPR's Talk of the Nation and the Charles Jaco talk show on KMOX radio in St. Louis. In both cases, the hosts of the shows cut me off and sided with Posner's errant thesis. Posner was on a book tour at the time.
So I went on an emailing campaign, sending an excerpt of my earlier work on MLK to newspaper reporters across the country. The excerpt alludes to Baetz, Byers, Patterson and White.
Thanks to Blogger I no longer need to rely on sending multiple emails, or uploading documents to a web site, which is a slow process.
Here's the excerpt:
In his book, Killing the Dream, Mr. Gerald Posner accepted the House Select Committee on Assassinations conclusions without question.
Mr. Posner also excluded relevant HSCA testimony that casts doubt on the veracity of the sole witness who claimed he was offered $50,000 to kill the Rev. Martin Luther King. Mr. Anthony Lewis, the august columnist for The New York Times, has errorred in accepting Mr. Posner's opinions.
Mr. Posner also excluded relevant HSCA testimony that casts doubt on the veracity of the sole witness who claimed he was offered $50,000 to kill the Rev. Martin Luther King. Mr. Anthony Lewis, the august columnist for The New York Times, has errorred in accepting Mr. Posner's opinions.
The below excerpt is part of a story that won a third-place award for investigative reporting from the Missouri Press Association last year.
C.D. Stelzer is a member of Investigative Reporters & Editors and the Society for Professional Journalists.
C.D. Stelzer is a member of Investigative Reporters & Editors and the Society for Professional Journalists.
Reasonable Doubt
Published in the Riverfront Times (St. Louis)
April 2, 1997
April 2, 1997
... April 4 marks the 29th anniversary of the crime. In the only official investigation of the case, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) found that a conspiracy existed to kill King. But the congressional panel chose not to exonerate Ray.
Instead, the HSCA concluded that Ray may have carried out the murder to collect a bounty from a pair of S t. Louis racists, who represented a secret Southern society."
There are reasons to doubt the committee's findings, however.
Instead, the HSCA concluded that Ray may have carried out the murder to collect a bounty from a pair of S t. Louis racists, who represented a secret Southern society."
There are reasons to doubt the committee's findings, however.
In 1978, the late St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Murry Lee Randall sent a letter to Rep. Louis Stokes (D-Ohio), the chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). His plea to the congressman was unusual for a jurist -- perhaps desperate. ...
Russell G. Byers, a former legal client of Randall's, claimed to have received a contract offer to kill King in late 1966 or early 1967, according to information furnished by a FBI informant in 1974.
The local FBI office overlooked the allegation until Byers was arrested as a suspect in one of two highly-publicized St. Louis Art Museum burglaries in early 1978.
The bureau then turned the information over to the HSCA. Byers told the committee he declined to accept the $50,000 contract to murder the civil rights leader offered by convicted drug dealer John R. Kauffmann and patent lawyer John H. Sutherland, the head of a local white rights group. By the time HSCA hearings took place, both of the men implicated by Byers were already dead. ...
The local FBI office overlooked the allegation until Byers was arrested as a suspect in one of two highly-publicized St. Louis Art Museum burglaries in early 1978.
The bureau then turned the information over to the HSCA. Byers told the committee he declined to accept the $50,000 contract to murder the civil rights leader offered by convicted drug dealer John R. Kauffmann and patent lawyer John H. Sutherland, the head of a local white rights group. By the time HSCA hearings took place, both of the men implicated by Byers were already dead. ...
Once sworn in as a witness ... Randall candidly answered questions, often against the advice of his own counsel. Although his testimony was used to corroborate that of Byers, many of the judge's statements contradict conclusions later reached by the HSCA.
In short, Randall found Byers' story incredible, and placed no credence in the St. Louis connection formulated by congressional investigators. Yet the HSCA's assumption that a St. Louis based conspiracy existed is predicated entirely on the testimony of Byers, a convicted felon. ...
In short, Randall found Byers' story incredible, and placed no credence in the St. Louis connection formulated by congressional investigators. Yet the HSCA's assumption that a St. Louis based conspiracy existed is predicated entirely on the testimony of Byers, a convicted felon. ...
In a sense, the 1978 congressional inquiry exposed its own machinations more than any racist conspiracy that may have been active here a decade earlier.
Indeed, individuals with ties to organized crime, the FBI and even military intelligence were all involved in shaping the HSCA theory that a racist plot to kill King supposedly originated in St. Louis. ...
Indeed, individuals with ties to organized crime, the FBI and even military intelligence were all involved in shaping the HSCA theory that a racist plot to kill King supposedly originated in St. Louis. ...
This much is a matter of record: police arrested Byers in connection with one of the 1978 burglaries of the St. Louis Art Museum in which several valuable statuettes were stolen. All of the stolen art was ultimately recovered, and police dropped charges against Byers, but not before two other suspects in the case were murdered, and a third refused to testify against him.
Sam E. White, one of the suspects in the Art Museum heists, was last seen alive leaving the FBI office in St. Louis on June 6, 1978. Five days later, a farmer found his body in rural Madison County, Ill. ... Although severely burned, the corpse was identified from fingerprints lifted from three unscorched fingers. ...
A burnt body, shredded evidence, and a plea of ignorance by a congressional investigator. It may all add up to nothing more than coincidence, but Randal l thought otherwise.
In his letter the HSCA chairman, the judge stated:
"I believe that this man's murder (White's) was arranged by the person to whom he and Mr. Byers had sold the statues stolen from the museum, and Mr. Byers is now fearful that this publicity is classing him an informant and the same fate will occur to him. ..."
In his letter the HSCA chairman, the judge stated:
"I believe that this man's murder (White's) was arranged by the person to whom he and Mr. Byers had sold the statues stolen from the museum, and Mr. Byers is now fearful that this publicity is classing him an informant and the same fate will occur to him. ..."
Randall told the HSCA that Byers had concocted the story about the contract on King as a means of fingering a presumed FBI informant by the name of Richard O'Hara.
"I believe those remarks by Mr. Byers were fabricated and purposely planted with Mr. O'Hara for the purpose of trying learn whether Mr. O'Hara was a FBI informant, since the only person the FBI could possibly check with was Mr. Byers himself," wrote Randall. "The FBI apparently recognized (this) and did not interview Mr. Byers, as to do so would have endangered the life of its informant. ..."
Oliver Patterson, who had spied on Jerry Ray in the early 1970s for the FBI, had by this time become a secret operative for the HSCA.
That spring, while Jerry Ray testified before Congress, Patterson rifled through the hotel room they shared in the capital. The search yielded hair samples and a hand-drawn map of the prison, where James Earl Ray was incarcerated.
Patterson then called Conrad “Pete” Baetz, the HSCA investigator who was handling him.
That spring, while Jerry Ray testified before Congress, Patterson rifled through the hotel room they shared in the capital. The search yielded hair samples and a hand-drawn map of the prison, where James Earl Ray was incarcerated.
Patterson then called Conrad “Pete” Baetz, the HSCA investigator who was handling him.
"We knew that it was going to create a mess," says Baetz of Patterson's rummaging. "We had no authority to do it."
Baetz claims that the informant had acted without his prior approval. Once informed of Patterson's extracurricular activity, the committee ordered Baetz to keep him on a closer leash. ...
Baetz claims that the informant had acted without his prior approval. Once informed of Patterson's extracurricular activity, the committee ordered Baetz to keep him on a closer leash. ...
But it appears Patterson exceeded those bounds. His undercover work ended in August 1978, after James Earl Ray's lawyer learned about it. In a press conference held here, Mark Lane, the attorney, convinced Patterson to divulge details of his spy status, which he had been informed of by a female friend of Patterson's.
The woman -- who was engaged in making pornographic videos for Patterson -- told Lane that the HSCA informant planned to plant a story with The New York Times branding the attorney a homosexual. After being confronted by Lane, however, Patterson instead publicly confessed that his HSCA duties included theft, making false statements to Congress and wire-tapping.
The woman -- who was engaged in making pornographic videos for Patterson -- told Lane that the HSCA informant planned to plant a story with The New York Times branding the attorney a homosexual. After being confronted by Lane, however, Patterson instead publicly confessed that his HSCA duties included theft, making false statements to Congress and wire-tapping.
The admission of wire-tapping by Patterson is particularly interesting given Baetz's prior military service record obtained by the RFT.
The ASA is known to have participated in illegal domestic spying in the 1960 and 1970s.
ASA agents were possibly responsible for tapping King's phone in Memphis, according to Orders to Kill, a book by James Earl Ray's current attorney William F. Pepper. More certain yet is the fact that the ASA participated in Operation Garden Plot, a secret eavesdropping campaign carried out against civil rights and anti-war activists. ...
ASA agents were possibly responsible for tapping King's phone in Memphis, according to Orders to Kill, a book by James Earl Ray's current attorney William F. Pepper. More certain yet is the fact that the ASA participated in Operation Garden Plot, a secret eavesdropping campaign carried out against civil rights and anti-war activists. ...
In essence, the congressional committee that looked into King's death had an investigator -- Baetz -- who had previously worked for a military agency known to have engaged in illegal domestic spying, and had employed a man -- Patterson -- who admitted to breaking the law while working for the committee.
The 1997 Jerry Ray Interview
Here’s what he said. And this is just since James Earl went in the hospital. It’s Dec. 27 article. It’s by Pat Gauen. He’s an Eastside reporter for them. He (Baetz) says, “I think James Earl Ray is finally getting what’s coming to him. He should have gotten the death penalty. Baetz said Thursday at his home in Glen Carbon, six weeks after his retirement from the Madison County Sheriff’s Department. ....”
That's a pretty harsh statement." - Jerry Ray, quoting HSCA investigator Pete Baetz from a story that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
So much for objective journalism from the mainstream media.
Jerry Ray, the younger brother of James Earl Ray, was subpoened to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. The committee was then investigating the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King a decade earlier.
HSCA investigator Conrad "Pete" Baetz, on leave from the Madison County (Ill.) Sheriff's Department, employed a former FBI informant, Oliver Patterson, to spy on Jerry Ray.
HSCA investigator Conrad "Pete" Baetz, on leave from the Madison County (Ill.) Sheriff's Department, employed a former FBI informant, Oliver Patterson, to spy on Jerry Ray.
After I wrote a story about the MLK assassination for the Riverfront Times, Patterson's son, David, contacted me. He had tapes on some of his father's telephone conversations. We arranged to meet twice. I listened to some of the tapes in the David Patterson's car, while parked outside Kaldi's coffeehouse on DeMun Avenue in Clayton, Missouri on one occasion. A year later, I contacted David Patterson and dubbed portions of other tapes before he moved to New Orleans.
One of the phone conversations that Oliver Patterson recorded was with a young woman who admitted having sexual intercourse with Baetz, the congressional investigator.
If true, Baetz's alleged actions may have compromised a highly sensitive investigation into the murder of the most important civil rights leader in the history of the United States.
Jerry Ray, who is not known for his credibility, had told me about Baetz's behavior in an earlier interview. The tape that David Patterson shared with me confirmed much of Jerry Ray's account.
Because this information is of historic importance and I am publishing it verbatim without deletions of names. At the very least, the young woman who was involved in the tryst was being taken advantage of by both Oliver and Patterson.
And just as disconcerting is the possible role of Jerry Ray's attorney, Mark Lane in the affair.
If true, Baetz's alleged actions may have compromised a highly sensitive investigation into the murder of the most important civil rights leader in the history of the United States.
Jerry Ray, who is not known for his credibility, had told me about Baetz's behavior in an earlier interview. The tape that David Patterson shared with me confirmed much of Jerry Ray's account.
Because this information is of historic importance and I am publishing it verbatim without deletions of names. At the very least, the young woman who was involved in the tryst was being taken advantage of by both Oliver and Patterson.
And just as disconcerting is the possible role of Jerry Ray's attorney, Mark Lane in the affair.
In the 1990s, James Earl Ray's last attorney, William Pepper, garnered publicity for his client through HBO telecast mock trial. Pepper considered calling the woman interviewed on this tape as a witness but didn't. The fact that she didn't appear may have more to do with the Memphis-based conspiracy theory that Pepper chose to pursue.
During this period of renewed interest in the case preceding James Earl Ray's death, Baetz continued to be highly critical of his veracity and that of his former attorney, Lane. As revealed in the press account in 1978, Baetz had asked Patterson to accuse Lane of being a homosexual.
When I reported that Baetz had served in Army Intelligence during the Vietnam era, which violated the congressional guidelines for investigators, he wrote a scathing letter to one of my editors criticizing the accuracy of my reporting.
When I reported that Baetz had served in Army Intelligence during the Vietnam era, which violated the congressional guidelines for investigators, he wrote a scathing letter to one of my editors criticizing the accuracy of my reporting.
One other person who should be credited with helping to expose Baetz's extra-legal activity is veteran St. Louis broadcast journalist John Auble.
If I wanted to be glib about this, I guess I could conclude that if congressional investigators want to get laid they should do it with someone other than their informant's under-age girlfriend.
It doesn't give me any great pride to reveal this information. Maybe this what happens to a reporter when he's been out of work for three years. I don't know. This much is certain: reporting on sex scandals hasn't exactly been my forte. This is perhaps the first time, however, that the story behind the story has been told.
It doesn't give me any great pride to reveal this information. Maybe this what happens to a reporter when he's been out of work for three years. I don't know. This much is certain: reporting on sex scandals hasn't exactly been my forte. This is perhaps the first time, however, that the story behind the story has been told.
Jerry Ray telephone interview: 01-15-97
615/668-1692
If you got time I’d like to explain the whole story on Pete Baetz.
This is not my word, you can check most of this with (broadcast journalist) John Auble.
I’ll explain Oliver Patterson. He died a few years ago. He wasn’t that old when he died. I’ll explain the whole story to you. Oliver Patterson and Pete Baetz and that.
In 1970, I was down in Savannah, Ga. And at the time I could get no couldn’t get no job in St. Louis. You know, and this guy, he’s a racist attorney J.B. Stoner. He represented my brother (James Earl) for a few months until my brother got another attorney, you know. Because he can’t have controversial attorneys handling his case, you know, cause it makes him look like, you know, they say "birds of a feather flock together."
So he only represented him for a short time until he got another lawyer. So, anyway, Stoner called me up and asked me if I’d come down, because he knew from James that I couldn’t get no job or nothin’, figured I’d get in trouble up here, if I couldn’t work, and on account of the FBI and that, and so I flew down to Savannah. And I worked there for a while and Stoner was running for governor, against Jimmy Carter and them.
And so, anyway, the FBI hired this guy named Oliver Patterson. He lived in Florissant, Mo. 12350, I think, Old Florissant over there or something in Florissant.
So, anyway, he came down. The FBI sent him down in style. He came down and joined up with Stoner’s party and he hung around me a lot. And he used to question me a lot. And I didn’t pay much attention to him. He’d asked me this and that. I just thought he was a rich kid. So he hung there for a while.
So then, I think it was in 1972, I went to St. Louis. He had me to come out his house. He always get in touch with me. So I went out to his house. And later on he was takin’ me to my sister’s house, I wound up in the hospital. And ah, and ah, so ah, he waited there. And so when I got out of the hospital he took me home, he claimed some car run us down in the middle of the street and they worked me over. At the time I didn’t pay it much attention, you know. So I just forgot about it. I got out of the hospital. They beat me with chains or something like that. Anyway, I forgot about it. Went to work in Chicago.
So then, I think it was in 1972, I went to St. Louis. He had me to come out his house. He always get in touch with me. So I went out to his house. And later on he was takin’ me to my sister’s house, I wound up in the hospital. And ah, and ah, so ah, he waited there. And so when I got out of the hospital he took me home, he claimed some car run us down in the middle of the street and they worked me over. At the time I didn’t pay it much attention, you know. So I just forgot about it. I got out of the hospital. They beat me with chains or something like that. Anyway, I forgot about it. Went to work in Chicago.
Then in 1977, when James escaped from Brushy Mounta in prison, I hadn’t seen this guy or heard from him in all this time.
Well, I think it was in 1978, when I got my first subpoena to go to Washington to go the House Assassinations Committee. Oliver Patterson called down there, I was down in Marietta, Ga. then. He called down there. He knew where I was all of those times. See I’m not of sufficient mind. He said, "Jerry, I just got a subpoena to go to Washington and testify." I said, "that’s strange I did too." He said, "Well, I’ll drive by and pick you up."
Like I said, he lived in Florissant then. So he drove down to Marietta and picked me and took me to Washington.
And while I was testifying, he was going through all of my belongings and all of this. When I came back after testifying, he said, "Well, they decided they’re not going to call me."
Well, I think it was in 1978, when I got my first subpoena to go to Washington to go the House Assassinations Committee. Oliver Patterson called down there, I was down in Marietta, Ga. then. He called down there. He knew where I was all of those times. See I’m not of sufficient mind. He said, "Jerry, I just got a subpoena to go to Washington and testify." I said, "that’s strange I did too." He said, "Well, I’ll drive by and pick you up."
Like I said, he lived in Florissant then. So he drove down to Marietta and picked me and took me to Washington.
And while I was testifying, he was going through all of my belongings and all of this. When I came back after testifying, he said, "Well, they decided they’re not going to call me."
So he drove me back to Marietta. So a few months later was going to go up to Chicago and go to work until, until I had to go to a live hearing. See that was a secret (hearing). See, they had two hearings, a live and a secret, and that was a secret one.
He told me, why don’t you stay over at my house, you know. Stay over as long as you want to. A week or two weeks, you know. So I went over to his house and stayed over at his house.
Well, unknowingly to me, see, Conrad “Pete” Baetz would come by every morning. They had the whole house taped. And Conrad “Pete” Baetz would come by every morning picking up tapes.
Well, unknowingly to me, see, Conrad “Pete” Baetz would come by every morning. They had the whole house taped. And Conrad “Pete” Baetz would come by every morning picking up tapes.
How was he representing himself?
He was supposed to be working for the assassinations committee then.
But they had the house bugged?
Yeah, they had the whole house bugged. And so, anyway, Mark Lane had come down and met Patterson before, and he met this girl. See, they had the young girl there about 16-years-old, Sue Wadsworth.
She was staying at Patterson’s house?
Yeah, ugh-huh. She was a young girl. She was staying at the house. So every morning he’d come by (Lane or Baetz?) So every morning, this girl was really impressed by Mark Lane. One day she went out and called Mark Lane on a pay phone. Mark Lane give us his address, you know, after we met him. So she called Mark Lane up and told Mark Lane. She said Oliver Patterson is an FBI informant and he’s taping everything that Jerry says and its turned over to Conrad Baetz, picking up in the morning and returning to the assassination committee.
So a phone ring there and Patterson answered the phone and he handed it to me, and it’s Mark Lane. And Mark Lane told me, "get out of that house today, he said, call me up, go to a pay phone and call me up."
So I went to a pay phone and called Mark Lane up out in California. He told me the whole story. He said, "Sue Wadsworth called me up and said that whole house is bugged, and that Patterson is an informant, been spying on you for years, and turned everything over to the FBI and now he’s turning it over to the assassinations committee."
He said, "Get out of that house today and move some place other. So I made some excuse up with Patterson and I moved in with my sister, you know."
So I went to a pay phone and called Mark Lane up out in California. He told me the whole story. He said, "Sue Wadsworth called me up and said that whole house is bugged, and that Patterson is an informant, been spying on you for years, and turned everything over to the FBI and now he’s turning it over to the assassinations committee."
He said, "Get out of that house today and move some place other. So I made some excuse up with Patterson and I moved in with my sister, you know."
So then I called Mark Lane back up. He said, "Me and Dick Gregory, we’re going to come to St. Louis. And we’re going to confront Patterson." He said, "We got the information and we’re going to confront him."
So in the meantime, I don’t know that all that house is tapped.
So they found out, I guess that that girl who put the finger on Patterson. So the FBI and House assassinations committee, they contacted Patterson. And said, what we’re going to do is we’re going to send a reporter from the New York Times down and this reporter, you tell this reporter that Mark Lane is a homosexual and all that BS, you know.
So in the meantime, I don’t know that all that house is tapped.
So they found out, I guess that that girl who put the finger on Patterson. So the FBI and House assassinations committee, they contacted Patterson. And said, what we’re going to do is we’re going to send a reporter from the New York Times down and this reporter, you tell this reporter that Mark Lane is a homosexual and all that BS, you know.
So when Mark Lane and Dick Gregory came down and confronted Patterson, Patterson told them what was going on. He said the FBI and the assassinations committee knows that you found out that I was an informant and they’re going to send down this reporter from the New York Times and weren’t none of them supposed to tell them.
So Mark Lane contacted John Auble. John Auble at the time was working with KSD and he filled John Auble in on everything that was going on. John Auble went out to the Mariott, the Mariott out by the airport, and John Auble get in a motel room there. And so when this knock comes on the door, instead of Patterson opening up the door, Mark Lane opened up the door. And he said my name is Mark Lane, and this New York Times reporter started running and Auble is filming the whole thing on tape. And Mark Lane grabbed him when he gets by the elevator, and he says, "Why don’t the New York Times ever want to write the truth?"
So that night or the next night, I forgot exactly, but either that day or the next day, Patterson went on Auble’s show on Channel 5 and told whole story, plus what he had. Not only that, when he’d make out an FBI report, he’d Xerox 'em. He had all these Xerox copies of FBI things he made out on me. And if I said one thing, and it didn’t sound right, the FBI would tell him to take this out and put this in, you know.
And what I was goin’ to tell you about Conrad Baetz, too. And I’m positive Auble’s got all this, too.
Conrad “Pete” Baetz, he used to go over to Oliver Patterson’s house all the time and they would watch those porno movies, you know. And that young girl (end of tape). ... [Ray alleges that Baetz had sex with Wadsworth].
Conrad “Pete” Baetz, he used to go over to Oliver Patterson’s house all the time and they would watch those porno movies, you know. And that young girl (end of tape). ... [Ray alleges that Baetz had sex with Wadsworth].
The tape just ran out. You said that Sue Wadsworth, who was 16 at the time, was living at Oliver Patterson’s house in Florrissant. What was the relationship, if any?
She just didn’t get along with her parents, and she moved in with Patterson, see. And, ah, she was a mixed up little girl. She’s the one that tipped Mark Lane off about (Patterson) being an informant.
I got her phone number now. I haven’t talked to her. The last time I talked to her was in 92 or 93. That’s when they was filming that HBO movie, you know, that James was found not guilty on. She was going to testify on it, but she didn’t, you know, because there was nothing that she could testify to, see. But she was going to testify on it. If you hold on a minute, I’ll get her last phone number [leaves phone to retrieve phone number] ...
I got her phone number now. I haven’t talked to her. The last time I talked to her was in 92 or 93. That’s when they was filming that HBO movie, you know, that James was found not guilty on. She was going to testify on it, but she didn’t, you know, because there was nothing that she could testify to, see. But she was going to testify on it. If you hold on a minute, I’ll get her last phone number [leaves phone to retrieve phone number] ...
I forget to turn the tape player back on immediately, when Ray returns to the phone. There is a gap of perhaps five minutes. When the recording resumes Ray is speaking about Jack Gawron, a criminal associate and snitch who James Earl Ray also had a relationship with.
He put 'em together, and it look like he was trying to get us both, see. He didn’t like this guy Goldenstein. I don’t know why he didn’t like him. He’s up there testifying against him. I told him that’s dirty, anyway.
I don’t know if Goldenstein was guilty or not anyway, if he’s guilty he should testify. He testified against John, so that’s why I mention that, you know.
I don’t know if Goldenstein was guilty or not anyway, if he’s guilty he should testify. He testified against John, so that’s why I mention that, you know.
[Jerry Ray mentions Gawron in a letter to FBI agent Pete, who he alleges was harrassing him in 1971 and trying to intimidate witnesses into testifying that Jerry Ray was involved in bank robberies.]
He [Gawron] was like that Charlie Stevens in Memphis. That guy who was passed out on the floor drunk, but he identified James.
Right, right, I recall that. You know, I really appreciate you calling me up. As I was just talking to you now, I flipped the tape over and I just realized that the last part of our conversation I didn’t get down. So I need to go back, if I can recall what we were just speaking about. Make sure, you were talking about the hearing in February.
It comes up February 20 in front of Judge Brown in circuit court [of Shelby County, Tenn.].
It still has to do with the rifle, right?
He’s got a lot more evidence, plus that about Rauol and different things. That’s going to be one of the main things, too, is that that rifle, they refused to let the attorneys test fire it. Cause he’s (William Pepper) going to have three experts. They’re going to tell if that bullet came from the gun that killed King.
Like I mentioned before that same judge ordered that gun bein’ tested about a year-and-a-half-ago and John Periotti (sp?), the U.S. attorney general, prosecutor [I think Periotti is only Shelby County prosecuting attorney, not U.S. attorney]. He run to the higher court and filed a motion to, ah, to ah, to ah reverse that judge’s decision; and they did, so they wouldn’t let that gun be tested and Judge Brown said he didn’t know what they were trying to cover up. He said, if that was the gun that killed King, you’d think they’d want it tested.
Like I mentioned before that same judge ordered that gun bein’ tested about a year-and-a-half-ago and John Periotti (sp?), the U.S. attorney general, prosecutor [I think Periotti is only Shelby County prosecuting attorney, not U.S. attorney]. He run to the higher court and filed a motion to, ah, to ah, to ah reverse that judge’s decision; and they did, so they wouldn’t let that gun be tested and Judge Brown said he didn’t know what they were trying to cover up. He said, if that was the gun that killed King, you’d think they’d want it tested.
So he’s going to have three more experts down there. That’ll testify that it can be told if that bullet came from that gun or not was the one that killed King. That’s the gun that James admitted buying. He admitted buying the gun. And the guy picked it up the night before at the New Rebel Motel.
But if that gun that he bought is proved not to be the one that killed King then they would have to just turn him loose because they know damn well that the only eye witness identified somebody else coming out of the bathroom. Of course, Pepper thinks the bullet was fired from downstairs. But if it was as the FBI claimed, the bullet was fired from the bathroom, Ray Stevens, the common-law wife of Charlie Stevens, Charlie Stevens is passed out in the room, and she sees the person coming out of the bathroom face-to-face. She said it wasn’t him.
Didn’t they put her in a mental institution?
A strange (thing) that Mark Lane finally got out, what happened was, the story, and you can check this out to be true, it no more than happened, the FBI run up, you know, they thought the bullet came from up there. The FBI run up there and she had her door open. And Charlie Stevens was likely passed out in the bed. So they asked her whether she seen anybody come out of there, when they were in the bathroom checking it out. And she said she seen right after the shot a person come out of the bathroom and looked her in the face. She had her door open. And they asked her to describe the guy. And she described the guy, sandy-colored hair, I can’t remember the whole description, completely opposite of James: color hair, height, complexion.
So they didn’t do anything to her until they arrested James in London England. When they arrested James in London, England, they took her and placed her in the Bolivar State Mental Institution (?), changed her name.
Then they offered Charlie Stevens so much money as a witness. So they showed Charlie Stevens, who is passed out in the bed. And he said, 'yeah, that’s the guy (James Earl Ray) who came out of the bath room.
So that’s what they used to get James over on. Of course, it never went to court, cause, if he’d ever got a trial, they couldn’t have used him, you know.
Cause this all came out, this is not me saying it, this public record.
A cab driver by the name of McGraw was called earlier that day to pick him up -- they call him wino Charlie -- to get some liquor. And he [cab driver McGraw] wouldn’t haul him [Charlie Stevens], see, cause he was too drunk, see, he couldn’t get him down the steps or nothing.
And the woman, she don’t drink, one that they took to the mental institution.
Well, Mark Lane found out about it through investigators and that and he went and got her out and she lived with him in Memphis until he moved to New York. I met her several times. There wasn’t nothing wrong with her. She wasn’t mentally ill or nothing.
She told the press that, "The only reason I went into the mental institution was because I wouldn’t lie for the FBI and identify somebody that they wanted me to identify."
She said the person that came out of that bathroom wasn’t James Earl Ray.
Then they offered Charlie Stevens so much money as a witness. So they showed Charlie Stevens, who is passed out in the bed. And he said, 'yeah, that’s the guy (James Earl Ray) who came out of the bath room.
So that’s what they used to get James over on. Of course, it never went to court, cause, if he’d ever got a trial, they couldn’t have used him, you know.
Cause this all came out, this is not me saying it, this public record.
A cab driver by the name of McGraw was called earlier that day to pick him up -- they call him wino Charlie -- to get some liquor. And he [cab driver McGraw] wouldn’t haul him [Charlie Stevens], see, cause he was too drunk, see, he couldn’t get him down the steps or nothing.
And the woman, she don’t drink, one that they took to the mental institution.
Well, Mark Lane found out about it through investigators and that and he went and got her out and she lived with him in Memphis until he moved to New York. I met her several times. There wasn’t nothing wrong with her. She wasn’t mentally ill or nothing.
She told the press that, "The only reason I went into the mental institution was because I wouldn’t lie for the FBI and identify somebody that they wanted me to identify."
She said the person that came out of that bathroom wasn’t James Earl Ray.
Ok, what’s this whole St. Louis theory. What’s your opinion of all these different people that were brought into this: Spica, Byers ...?
I think what they did, they want to prove a family conspiracy.
At the time that King got killed, I didn’t come to St. Louis and buy into the Grapevine until James got caught in London, England. I was working in Chicago. I was working at Sportsman’s Country Club. I had worked there for three years.
When James got caught in London, England, then I quit my job and moved to St. Louis and bought into the Grapevine. And we both run the Grapevine.
They was trying to show a family conspiracy, and put me in it and John in it, and then have these two guys Byers, and Sutherland and Spica maybe, too, I don’t know. [Byers actually implicated John Sutherland and John Kauffman.]
At the time that King got killed, I didn’t come to St. Louis and buy into the Grapevine until James got caught in London, England. I was working in Chicago. I was working at Sportsman’s Country Club. I had worked there for three years.
When James got caught in London, England, then I quit my job and moved to St. Louis and bought into the Grapevine. And we both run the Grapevine.
They was trying to show a family conspiracy, and put me in it and John in it, and then have these two guys Byers, and Sutherland and Spica maybe, too, I don’t know. [Byers actually implicated John Sutherland and John Kauffman.]
I didn’t know none of those guys. I never had seen any of them in my life.
And I’m almost positive. I can’t be positive of anything. I’m almost positive that none of those guys ever came in the Grapevine. If they did at the most it was two times, if they came in at all, because I would have remembered them if they came in more than that. But once in a great while a stranger would come in a stranger, you know, would get one or two drinks and go on. But that maybe would be once every two or three months. The same old people every day.
And I’m almost positive. I can’t be positive of anything. I’m almost positive that none of those guys ever came in the Grapevine. If they did at the most it was two times, if they came in at all, because I would have remembered them if they came in more than that. But once in a great while a stranger would come in a stranger, you know, would get one or two drinks and go on. But that maybe would be once every two or three months. The same old people every day.
They might have. I don’t know.
Like I said, first they start off that James (killed) King because he’s a racist, you know, he didn’t like blacks -- that was his whole thing.
Then they jumped to that Alton bank robbery. That’s to give him enough money to travel around and kill King.
Then when that racist thing, they couldn’t find one thing about him being a racist.
Like I said, first they start off that James (killed) King because he’s a racist, you know, he didn’t like blacks -- that was his whole thing.
Then they jumped to that Alton bank robbery. That’s to give him enough money to travel around and kill King.
Then when that racist thing, they couldn’t find one thing about him being a racist.
A person ain’t going to escape from no prison, work around and do all of those small-time robberies. And ah, and ah, you’d have to be a hell of a smart criminal to do them all of those times. Cause all the travelin’ he done, they figured out how many thousands of dollars it cost him to that, you know. To hunt down one man, for King. For what? King never done nothing to him. He didn’t do anything to me.
When that fell through, then they went to the bank robbery. See, if he had robbed a bank, I forget how much they said he’d take, $25,000, $30,000. That would have been enough money to finance it. Then he’d need a motive.
If the racist thing fell through, there wouldn’t be no motive. Last they came up with these two guys and offered him $40,000 to $50,000 to kill King.
Then they claimed he never did collect it, though. He did the crime and he couldn’t collect it. Then where the hell did all that money come from that he’d already spent, if he couldn’t collect it.
They just jump around.
When that fell through, then they went to the bank robbery. See, if he had robbed a bank, I forget how much they said he’d take, $25,000, $30,000. That would have been enough money to finance it. Then he’d need a motive.
If the racist thing fell through, there wouldn’t be no motive. Last they came up with these two guys and offered him $40,000 to $50,000 to kill King.
Then they claimed he never did collect it, though. He did the crime and he couldn’t collect it. Then where the hell did all that money come from that he’d already spent, if he couldn’t collect it.
They just jump around.
They got on A&E. You ever watch A&E? You get that up there. On A&E they did a thing here a few months ago. They reruns a couple of times.
It’s about like that old Conrad talked about. They claimed that me and James. That the conspiracy came out of the Grapevine tavern. That me and James went down to Birmingham and bought the gun. That I was Rauol. We planned it together. That he shot King, you know.
It’s about like that old Conrad talked about. They claimed that me and James. That the conspiracy came out of the Grapevine tavern. That me and James went down to Birmingham and bought the gun. That I was Rauol. We planned it together. That he shot King, you know.
Pepper going to file a suit against them, you know. He’s called them up and notified them. He said that even if we don’t win, we have to stop that kind of stuff, you know.
They had some kind of a narrator on there. He’s a law, I’m trying to think of his name now, from Arizona. Some guy name of Clark. He’s a law professor. He’s narrating it. He’s telling about me and James buying a gun.
I don’t know who and the hell wrote his script.
But I’m working six nights a week up at the Sportsman’s Country Club in Chicago. They got records of it. And how in the hell do I get off to do all of that traveling and robbing banks and all that kind of stuff with one night off a week. I worked there three years and never missed a night.
They had some kind of a narrator on there. He’s a law, I’m trying to think of his name now, from Arizona. Some guy name of Clark. He’s a law professor. He’s narrating it. He’s telling about me and James buying a gun.
I don’t know who and the hell wrote his script.
But I’m working six nights a week up at the Sportsman’s Country Club in Chicago. They got records of it. And how in the hell do I get off to do all of that traveling and robbing banks and all that kind of stuff with one night off a week. I worked there three years and never missed a night.
You mentioned that you don’t have any criminal record since the 1950s. What were you convicted of?
From the time I was 14 until the time I was 20, hell, I was convicted of every damn thing: burglary and armed robbery and everything. After that, all that money I got out of all that damn stuff, I could have made in a month working, see.
And so after that, I was a kid, and after I got out, I was smart enough. No more of that damn stuff for me.
I got records. I just retired here in 92, and I went to work for HBO. And I worked in the last place for seven years. And I worked for three years up there when King got killed. And three years before at the other place.
So I worked my whole life ever since that happened.
And so after that, I was a kid, and after I got out, I was smart enough. No more of that damn stuff for me.
I got records. I just retired here in 92, and I went to work for HBO. And I worked in the last place for seven years. And I worked for three years up there when King got killed. And three years before at the other place.
So I worked my whole life ever since that happened.
Is your brother out of the hospital?
He’s back in the prison, spacial (or special) needs. That’s where he’ll be at. He was over there before he went in the hospital. He’s got his own cell and his own TV set. They just send people over there who are not in real good health. He was at River Bend. They’re right next door to each other. They’re within walking distance. One is like a prison hospital and one is like a prison, see.
How often do you visit him?
I see him Saturday and Sunday. I won’t go back over. He calls me every day. He just called me a couple of hours ago. I won’t go back over Saturday unless he wants me to come over on a week night and see him. On a week night you can visit him 6:30 to 7:30 every night. On weekends, from 1:30 to 3:30 in the afternoon on Saturday and Sunday. Like I say, this past week I visited two hours Saturday and two hours Sun day. Then I told him unless something changes, I won’t back to see him until next Saturday.
Does your brother John still live in St. Louis?
The last I heard. I haven’t heard from him in a while.
What about your other family members. Your sister Carol is she in the St. Louis area?
Yeah, the last I heard. She’s in the St. Louis area.
I’m trying to think of anything else I might want to ask. If I have any further questions, you know, can I call you back?
Yeah, give me a call. You write a story, though, do a lot of checking with John Auble. Because Auble, it’s different then taking the word from me, because, you know, he could say he’s promoting his brother’s case. But Auble will tell it like it is and so will that Sue Wadsworth, you know. That’s independent people that will tell you the facts. Plus, Auble got a lot that on tape, you know.
Let me go back and try to find the newspaper clips about that incident with Oliver Patterson and then I’ll probably call up Baetz and question him about this.
Hey, you want to shake Baetz up? When you call him and talk to him, tell him you’ve talked to Sue Wadsworth, even if you haven’t. (Say) I just talked to Sue and she gave me a lot of information about those porno movies that Patterson used to (laughs)... He’ll probably hang up on you then.
I just feel like the Post-Dispatch he’s recently has ran a couple stories in which they interviewed him...
Yeah, the guy called me up when James went in the hospital, when he first had that coma. He called up. I didn’t get the message for two days on account of I was at the hospital. I stayed over at the hospital, see. Then I got a hold of him back and said that he wrote a story and that he’d send me a copy. But he didn’t, though. I guess he forgot.
He’d told me about Baetz.
And I told him I wish the hell I would have got a hold of you before you run that story -- I’d have filled you in on old Conrad.
I said, Conrad, it’s a wonder that he runs his mouth the way that he does because he knows that the news people got about those porno movies and that young girl over there and making those movie and him molesting her.
I said they could put him in jail, if he wasn’t working for the FBI.
I said, too bad you didn’t call me.
He’d told me about Baetz.
And I told him I wish the hell I would have got a hold of you before you run that story -- I’d have filled you in on old Conrad.
I said, Conrad, it’s a wonder that he runs his mouth the way that he does because he knows that the news people got about those porno movies and that young girl over there and making those movie and him molesting her.
I said they could put him in jail, if he wasn’t working for the FBI.
I said, too bad you didn’t call me.
Here’s what he said. And this is just since James Earl went in the hospital. It’s Dec. 27 article. It’s by Pat Gauen. He’s an Eastside reporter for them. He (Baetz) says, “I think James Earl Ray is finally getting what’s coming to him. He should have gotten the death penalty. Baetz said Thursday at his home in Glen Carbon, six weeks after his retirement from the Madison County Sheriff’s Department. ....” That’s a pretty harsh statement ....
What got him and the committee too was when Mark Lane and Dick Gregory confronted Patterson, he broke down and told them. And he told all about Baetz and he told all about the committee and he told all about all the stuff that was going on.
When he went up there, he was going through all of my belongings, when I was up there. And he was instructed by the assassinations committee to do all that, you know. And about Baetz.
When he went up there, he was going through all of my belongings, when I was up there. And he was instructed by the assassinations committee to do all that, you know. And about Baetz.
But what made Baetz madder than anything, more so, cause he’s legal to work as an FBI informer or for the committee.
But when Patterson spilled the beans about them having porno movies and him having an affair with that young girl, see, he had sex with that young Sue Wadsworth. That’s why I gave you her number, see if you can get a hold of her. She’ll fill you in a lot about Pete Baetz.
But when Patterson spilled the beans about them having porno movies and him having an affair with that young girl, see, he had sex with that young Sue Wadsworth. That’s why I gave you her number, see if you can get a hold of her. She’ll fill you in a lot about Pete Baetz.
Was Patterson, was he working as an informant for the committee or the FBI?
Well, he started with the FBI. See, what the FBI did, when this committee was formed, Richard Sprague was the head of the committee and they forced him out because he wanted the FBI files, he wanted all the files. He didn’t go with the family conspiracy, he wanted to investigate the whole thing.
And they forced him out because the committee was kind of crooked. And they just wanted to focus on the Ray family.
And G. Robert Blakey, who took over after they forced Sprague out, he said he didn’t want no FBI files, and, see, he just went after the Ray family.
He tried to prove a Ray family conspiracy. He overlooked everything else.
That’s when they set up on me. And so the FBI informants, the ones that was working with the FBI, moved over to the House assassinations committee.
And so they hired FBI informants to keep on working. So that’s how they got Oliver Patterson because he had been informing on me since 1970 off and on. So the FBI turned that over to the House assassinations committee, so they hired him to start back on me.
And Conrad, I’m not positive about that, I couldn’t make a statement about how he got involved.
I read what he told you how he got involved. He knew some stuff over in Madison or something like that, you know.
That may be true, I don’t know. I ain’t going to say one way or the other about something I don’t know.
And they forced him out because the committee was kind of crooked. And they just wanted to focus on the Ray family.
And G. Robert Blakey, who took over after they forced Sprague out, he said he didn’t want no FBI files, and, see, he just went after the Ray family.
He tried to prove a Ray family conspiracy. He overlooked everything else.
That’s when they set up on me. And so the FBI informants, the ones that was working with the FBI, moved over to the House assassinations committee.
And so they hired FBI informants to keep on working. So that’s how they got Oliver Patterson because he had been informing on me since 1970 off and on. So the FBI turned that over to the House assassinations committee, so they hired him to start back on me.
And Conrad, I’m not positive about that, I couldn’t make a statement about how he got involved.
I read what he told you how he got involved. He knew some stuff over in Madison or something like that, you know.
That may be true, I don’t know. I ain’t going to say one way or the other about something I don’t know.
The only thing I do know is what he did do after he got involved. It’s been so long ago, you know, I don’t like to say things that aren’t true, I mean say things that are uncertain. But it seems like after that sex stuff came out with that young girl that Baetz wife either divorced him or they separated or something. Because that came out him having affairs on those porno movies. She found out about all that you know. His wife did. So I don’t know. There was something that came out back then that she divorced him or separated or something. But I can’t remember for sure just exactly what it was.
Were the porno movies being distributed?
No, I think they we’re just watching for their own enjoyment based on Patterson. Now, I’d been around Patterson for a while. I stayed over there, see. Now he would never show me nothing like that because I don’t go in for that kind of stuff, you know, I call that stuff sick stuff. So he never did show me anything like that. The first thing I knew about it was when Sue Wadsworth brought it all out and Patterson admitted all that, see that’s all on record.
If I called up Sue Wadsworth, do you think that she would talk to me about this?
She’s an honest person. She felt sorry for James and me, too, the way the FBI was.
She spilled the beans to Mark Lane about Patterson.
Just tell her you won’t publish her name because embarrassed about that kind of stuff. She’s a grown woman now. See, this happened back in 1978.
She spilled the beans to Mark Lane about Patterson.
Just tell her you won’t publish her name because embarrassed about that kind of stuff. She’s a grown woman now. See, this happened back in 1978.
Right, it wouldn’t be necessary to use her name.
Just tell her I just want the information. Say her name and everything will be protected. Because I think she’s married now, I’m not sure. Anything else, give me a call.
I will. Thanks for calling. Bye.
Bye....
By C. D. Stelzer
November 28, 2007
John Larry Ray marks time in Quincy, still trying to set the record straight
Eyewitnesses pegged the stickup man as about 50 years old, 5 feet 8 inches tall, 180 pounds, gray-haired and potbellied. He was dressed in baggy slacks, a tan jacket, and a floppy fisherman’s hat. Though a nylon-stocking mask concealed the robber’s facial features, the traumatized teller noted his “farmer’s tan.”
Three weeks later, John Larry Ray, the brother of the late James Earl Ray, was arrested for the heist.
In the town of Liberty, Ill., Ray’s name still strikes terror in the former bank teller, though a jury ultimately acquitted Ray of that crime in a federal trial in Springfield more than a quarter-century ago.
These days, the notorious bank robber lives quietly on College Avenue in Quincy in a small brick house with a rickety front porch. Vacant lots dot the neighborhood. Around the corner, on Martin Luther King Memorial Drive, African-American children play on the sidewalk in the autumn dusk.
John Larry Ray moved here from St. Louis three years ago to care for his sister, Melba, who died last November. The 74-year-old brother of the convicted assassin of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has survived a heart attack and a stroke in recent years. He is also hobbled by diabetes. Complications from the disease forced the partial amputation of both of his feet more than a decade ago. In the spring, he hopes to erect tombstones at a local cemetery for himself and his kin.
He is counting on royalties from a book due out in March to help pay the bills. The forthcoming biography chronicles his criminal career and life in prison. It also purportedly reveals his late brother’s alleged ties to the CIA [see “His last score,” page 15]. Because of contractual obligations, he is currently not speaking to the press.
John Larry Ray’s own story, however, has little to do with international intrigue or espionage. His is a cops-and-robbers tale rooted in western Illinois.
He was born in Alton on St. Valentine’s Day 1933, the second son of Lucille and George “Speedy” Ray, a small-time hoodlum. During his youth, the family hightailed it from town to town, his father adopting aliases to stay one step ahead of the law. By 1944, the “Rayns” family had moved north to Knox County, where, Ray says, he applied for his first Social Security number to earn money delivering the Galesburg Register-Mail. James Earl Ray borrowed that number in 1967 to get a job as a dishwasher in Chicago after John Larry Ray helped him escape from the Missouri State Penitentiary. Those acts would bind the two brothers’ fates.
But John Larry Ray had already made more than one wrong turn by then.
His first serious scrape with the law came in 1953, when a joyride through the streets of Quincy in a stolen Hudson earned him five to 10.
After his release in 1960 from the Menard State Penitentiary, in Chester, Ill, he worked as a bartender and Greyhound bus-depot employee. He dreamed of being a seaman but ended up tending greens at a golf course near Chicago.
In 1964 and 1965, he knocked around Florida and the Catskill Mountains, in upstate New York, and collected unemployment benefits in New York City.
By October 1966 he had landed in St. Louis, where, he says, he worked as a painter.
In January 1968 he opened the Grapevine tavern on Arsenal Street in South St. Louis with one of his sisters.
Months later, the FBI showed up at the Grapevine to question John Larry Ray on the whereabouts of his brother, who was by then wanted for the murder of King. He lied, telling the agents that he hadn’t had any contact with his brother for years.
The FBI couldn’t prove his participation in the prison break the previous year, but the bureau had John Larry Ray in its crosshairs, and he would remain a target.
In 1970, federal agents nabbed him for serving as the getaway driver in a bank robbery in St. Peters, Mo. That charge resulted in his only bank-robbery conviction and an 18-year sentence.
In 1978, however, a congressional panel investigating King’s murder — the House Select Committee on Assassinations — accused Ray of four other bank heists, including an October 1969 stickup in rural Illinois.
In an odd twist, Ray would be busted for robbing the same financial institution — the Farmers Bank of Liberty — in 1980, a year-and-a-half after the conclusion of the congressional hearings.
The crime stunned the town of Liberty, population 524. Rumors that the robber was camped in a pasture at the edge of town hiked fears. Police-band chatter crackled with mounting reports of suspicious characters in the vicinity. The robbery garnered banner headlines in the Quincy Herald-Whig, and the Liberty Bee-Times, the town’s weekly newspaper, devoted its entire front page to the story.
Less than a week later, Liberty would be jolted again.
At 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 4, 1980, a farmer reported a suspicious vehicle west of town, according to the Bee-Times. When Liberty Police Chief Albert “Ab” Viar responded to the call, he found a blue 1969 Pontiac Tempest abandoned beside a gravel road, its engine compartment still warm. The car didn’t have license plates, but a registration application in the lower right-hand corner of the windshield bore the signature of James R. LaRue.
Viar drove back to the house of the farmer. As she and her husband talked to the chief, the farmer’s wife saw a light come on inside the Tempest, which was parked about a quarter-mile away. By the time the police chief got back to that location, the car was heading in his direction. Viar flipped on his squad car’s emergency lights to signal the driver to stop. Instead the driver sped away, and Viar pursued him. The chase ended a half-mile later, when the Tempest spun out on a curve and crashed into a ditch. The driver jumped from the car and escaped on foot into a cornfield. As darkness fell, the police chief radioed for backup. After his deputy arrived, they conducted a search. About 300 feet from where the Tempest had first been spotted, Viar found a yellow satchel containing $10,803 from the bank robbery.
At 8 o’clock the next morning, a county deputy and state police officer reported being fired upon near the bank, prompting another manhunt. Heavily armed local and state cops swarmed the fields and woodlands surrounding the town. That afternoon, authorities discovered an abandoned encampment about a mile from the scene of the car chase. At the site, police found a hole under a tree, leading them to believe that the robber had unearthed the loot, only to have his plans thwarted by the vigilant police chief.
Meanwhile, the Adams County Sheriff’s Department issued a warrant for James R. LaRue, and the Illinois State Police arrested a man with that name in Cicero, Ill., on June 9, 1980. They released the suspect within hours, however, after he informed officers that a wallet containing his identification had been stolen a month earlier. The investigation appeared to have reached a dead end.
But a week later the sheriff’s department charged Ray with the bank robbery on the basis of a left thumbprint found on one of the Tempest’s side-view mirrors. Ray, who matched the general description of the suspect, had vanished months earlier after being released on parole.
Within days the FBI entered the case and, weirdly enough, so did an investigator for the defunct congressional committee. At 5:45 p.m. on June 23, 1980, Sgt. Conrad “Pete” Baetz of the Madison County (Ill.) Sheriff’s Department spotted Ray walking along Illinois Route 140 near Alton.
“As I remember it, he was wearing a dark-blue leisure suit,” says Baetz, who now lives in Two Rivers, Wis. “It was also hotter than hell that day.”
Baetz, on a shopping trip with his wife, turned his car around and passed the sweaty pedestrian again to confirm his identity. He then called the sheriff’s department from a nearby roadhouse. An on-duty officer arrived promptly to assist Baetz in the arrest. The two deputies frisked Ray and found nothing. Later, a Madison County jailer discovered a .38-caliber revolver among the personal items that Ray was toting in a shopping bag when he was arrested. The bag reportedly also contained women’s nylon hosiery and coin-roll wrappers from the Farmers Bank of Liberty.
Baetz recognized the suspect so readily because they had crossed paths before. He had interviewed Ray in his capacity as a congressional investigator for the HSCA two years earlier. The Madison County officer had taken a leave of absence from his local law-enforcement duties in 1978 to work for the committee, but the career move turned bad when Baetz came under investigation himself.
Former FBI informant Oliver Patterson alleged that the then-congressional investigator [Baetz] had directed him to spy on Jerry Ray, the youngest of the three Ray brothers. The informant also said that he gave false testimony, provided to him by Baetz, to the committee.
Patterson revealed his illegal activities at a St. Louis press conference organized by attorney Mark Lane, who then represented James Earl Ray.
Though the committee denied any wrongdoing, the press coverage tarnished the reputations of both the HSCA and Baetz.
If Baetz feared that his latest brush with fame would stir up questions about his checkered Capitol Hill tenure, he needn’t have worried. The arrest of John Larry Ray grabbed front-page headlines in newspapers in St. Louis, Alton, and Quincy, but none of the accompanying stories mentioned Baetz’s central role in the HSCA scandal two years earlier.
The Adams County sheriff arrived in Alton the next morning by chartered plane and flew Ray back to Quincy, where FBI agents dispatched from Indianapolis waited to interrogate him about the shooting of National Urban League president Vernon Jordan in Fort Wayne, Ind., on May 29, 1980 — the day before the Farmers Bank of Liberty robbery.
Though the agents publicly discounted Ray as a suspect in the civil-rights leader’s shooting, their boss took a different tack. In a front-page story that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, FBI director William H. Webster emphasized the similarities between the Jordan shooting and the murder of King — including the possibility that money from bank robberies financed the plots.
The FBI chief’s accusations may have been sparked by memories of his early days on the bench.
Like Baetz, the nation’s top cop had encountered John Larry Ray previously. As a fledgling federal district judge in St. Louis, Webster had sentenced John Larry Ray to prison for being the wheelman in the 1970 robbery of the Bank of St. Peters (Mo.).
In 1978, the HSCA used that single federal conviction as the linchpin for its theory that the Ray brothers were an organized gang of bank robbers. The committee further alleged that James Earl Ray and John Larry Ray robbed the Bank of Alton on July 13, 1967, and used proceeds from that heist to finance James Earl Ray’s travels in the year preceding the King assassination.
To buttress its theory, the committee cited other bank robberies that were carried out in a similar fashion, including the 1970 Bank of St. Peters robbery, for which John Larry Ray was convicted, and the 1969 holdup of the Farmers Bank of Liberty, for which he wasn’t even charged.
“They all went down in essentially the same way,” Baetz says. “We put James Earl Ray in the area on the day the Alton robbery occurred.”
By the time HSCA called him to testify, John Larry Ray was slotted for parole for his 1971 bank-robbery conviction. After he refused to admit involvement in any of the bank robberies, the committee charged him with perjury and federal marshals pulled him out of a halfway house in St. Louis. He spent the next two months in solitary confinement at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., while Justice Department officials tried to decide whether to pursue the charge.
In comments to the press, Ray accused the federal prison system, the FBI, and congressional investigators of conspiring to deny his release. Attorney James Lesar, who represented John Larry Ray before the HSCA hearings, objected vehemently to the relevancy of bringing up bank robberies that took place after King was assassinated. The committee repeatedly overruled the objections.
“They pretended they were a judicial proceeding despite the fact that it was a totally one-sided presentation of evidence,” says Lesar, a Washington, D.C., lawyer. “They were the prosecutor, the judge, and the jury, all in one ball.”
Internal Justice Department memos obtained later by Lesar through the Freedom of Information Act confirmed the HSCA had overreached its authority. Justice Department officials ruled that the committee had improperly slapped the perjury charge on John Larry Ray to force James Earl Ray to testify. The department refused to prosecute the case.
Back at the St. Louis halfway house from which he had been yanked, John Larry Ray told the Associated Press on Aug. 24, 1978, that “he would testify about a ‘link’ in the assassination if authorities would permit a nationwide television report about improper judicial action that resulted in his conviction of aiding the robbery of a St. Peters, Mo., bank.”
His only co-defendant in the 1971 St. Peters bank-robbery trial had his conviction overturned on a technicality as Ray remained locked up. Now the judge who sentenced him had risen to FBI director.
Guilt or innocence mattered little under these circumstances.
Nothing would ever shake his belief that he had been set up to take a fall because he was James Earl Ray’s brother.
The pawn had made his move, but it was as if he wasn’t even on the chessboard. Nobody paid attention to his offer. This must have convinced him that the game was rigged. But that doesn’t explain why John Larry Ray chose to lie to the HSCA.
Despite the expiration on the statute of limitation and a congressional grant of immunity, Ray denied involvement in James Earl Ray’s escape from the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1967. He has since admitted picking up his brother after the escape near Jefferson City, Mo.
In its final report, the HSCA concluded “that the resistance of the Ray brothers to admitting a criminal association among themselves in these minor crimes is based on a frank realization that such an admission might well lead to their implication in the higher crime of assassination.”
When asked to make a closing statement before the HSCA on Dec. 1, 1978, John Larry Ray cast the blame for King’s assassination on his accusers, appealing to Congress to unlock evidence the government had decided to seal until 2027.
“The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI and a federal judge locked up thousands of pages of evidence concerning . . . Martin Luther King, and the Rays and maybe a person who conspired to assassinate him. It is my belief that since I have been locked in solitary confinement for 67 days, in three different federal asylums, and [endured] many physical tortures by this government, that they should release this information, and the person who do [sic] not release the information, it seems to me they would be covering up a murder. They would be covering up the murder of Martin Luther King. . . .”
At his arraignment in Adams County on June 25, 1980, Ray displayed no belated signs of contrition.
He argued press coverage of “FBI propaganda” made it impossible for him to receive fair treatment in the United States and requested a trial before the United Nations.
Six months later, after more contentious court appearances, the state of Illinois washed its hands of John Larry Ray and turned the case over to federal prosecutors. The rest of the courtroom drama would play out in federal district court in Springfield.
It would pit an inexperienced public defender against a phalanx of assistant U.S. attorneys.
Ronald Spears, Ray’s court-appointed lawyer, had been in private practice for less than two years when he went to trial in April 1981. He confesses a degree of youthful naïveté then about outside events surrounding the case, but that doesn’t explain his surprise over the unusual developments inside the courtroom. “There were some critical mysteries in the case that I’ve never figured out,” says Spears, who is now a Christian County Circuit Court judge.
The most mysterious element of the case, says Spears, involved a flashlight that the prosecution admitted as evidence. Twenty-six years later it remains a subject of debate.
Baetz, the arresting officer who testified at the trial, says that FBI agents belatedly discovered a roll of bills inside the flashlight, money that the former congressional investigator contends came from the bank robbery.
Spears remembers it differently. With FBI agents present, he and Ray examined the physical evidence, including the flashlight that had been found in the shopping bag at the time of his arrest. Ray opened the flashlight and peered into the battery chamber and then put the cap back on, according to Spears. Later Ray took Spears aside and asked him to call for an investigation.
Ray claimed that before his arrest he had stashed money he had earned working in Chicago in the flashlight and that it had disappeared.
Spears informed the court of his client’s allegation and demanded an explanation.
“So the prosecutor brings the thing into open court and takes it out of the box,” says Spears. “He opens up the end of it, [and] pulls out several thousand dollars in cash. All of this evidence was in the custody of the FBI. They had already examined it. They obviously would have identified if they found the money in there. Either there was some not very good work done by the crime lab, or somebody took it [the money] and was going to keep it and got caught.”
Other evidence may have been flushed down the toilet. Feces collected near the getaway car contained anal hairs, which prompted the state to order Ray to provide samples. He complied.
But when Spears later questioned the forensic specialist at the trial, the witness testified that he had thrown away the evidence.
“Again, it points to either what could have been a sloppy investigation or worse,” Spears says.
The prosecution relied on the testimony of Charles Reeder, a cellmate of John Larry Ray’s while Ray was jailed in Adams County. He told the jury that Ray had confessed to the crime. Under cross-examination, however, Reeder said that he agreed to testify for the government in exchange for a possible reduction in his 10-year sentence for deviate sexual assault.
The defense countered by calling Oliver Patterson, the former HSCA informant, to the stand, prompting the prosecution to object, so Judge J. Waldo Ackerman cleared the jury from the courtroom to ascertain the relevancy of his testimony.
Under oath, Patterson said that when he heard that Baetz had arrested John Larry Ray, he immediately wondered whether the former congressional investigator had tampered with the evidence.
Moreover, Patterson told the court, his false testimony before the HSCA — which Baetz allegedly condoned — led to the delay in Ray’s 1978 parole.
In short, Patterson maintained that Baetz had a vendetta against Ray and his family.
Not surprisingly, Jerry Ray agreed. The youngest of the Ray brothers testified that the FBI had first tried to pin the Liberty bank heist on him.
“When it was shown that I couldn’t have robbed it because I was in Georgia, then they said ‘John Ray robbed it,’ ” says Jerry Ray. “If they can’t get one, then they get the other.”
Ackerman, however, ruled that Patterson’s testimony was irrelevant to the bank-robbery charge.
“I’m sure at that point Patterson liked the publicity he was getting,” Baetz says. “I didn’t even know that he was going to testify, but my guess is he would testify to the fact that there was this vast conspiracy against the Ray family.”
The former congressional investigator [Baetz] blames Mark Lane, James Earl Ray’s attorney, for promulgating that idea.
“His way of handling things was to throw out as many allegations as you can, as loud as you can, and see if they will stick,” Baetz says.
In this case, however, the job of making things stick fell to federal prosecutors, who failed to place John Larry Ray inside the bank that had been robbed. None of the fingerprints at the bank matched Ray’s, plus none of the witnesses, including the teller, could identify Ray.
Instead, prosecutors used circumstantial evidence against Ray, including the thumbprint on the vehicle involved in the car chase — a week after the robbery.
In addition, a ballistic expert testified that a .38-caliber bullet removed from a tree at the site where the getaway car was found on the day of the robbery matched the gun discovered in Ray’s shopping bag after his arrest.
After seven hours of deliberations, the jury found Ray guilty. But the judge threw out the conviction. His decision hinged on a handwritten motion submitted by John Larry Ray when he faced state charges in Adams County. Federal prosecutors introduced his motion as evidence so that the jury could compare it with handwriting on the license-plate-application form for the Pontiac Tempest involved in the car chase. But Ray’s motion included detailed information on his prior bank-robbery conviction, which was inadmissible evidence.
In the second trial, which took place in July 1981, Ray was acquitted by the jury after more than 10 hours of deliberations. John Larry Ray, however, returned to federal penitentiary because he had been convicted in March 1981 for contempt of court for not providing handwriting samples to federal prosecutors.
Ray apparently balked at the demand after having already given samples to the state after his arrest the previous year. For his lack of cooperation, he received a three-year sentence. He received additional time for the .38-caliber pistol found among his possessions after his arrest.
Ray was paroled in 1987 and disappeared for the next five years. U.S. marshals arrested him for parole violation in St. Louis in 1992. The Federal Bureau of Prisons released him for the last time on July 26, 1993. By that time, Ray had spent more than 25 years of his life in prisons in 13 states from coast to coast.
By virtue of his relationship to his late brother, John Larry Ray will always be associated with one of the most heinous crimes of the 20th century. In many ways he has been cast in a role not entirely of his own creation. His legend is really a collaborative work, a crazy quilt of official sources whose pieces don’t always fit. His side of the story has been largely ignored or discredited. Ray is, after all, a felon, an ex-con with a rap sheet that spans five decades. He is known to have lied to the FBI and Congress.
But there is another reason that his version of events has often gone unheeded: Ray has a lifelong speech impediment. Words have failed him. He has literally been misunderstood.
An intent listener can discern his message clearly enough, however, and it hasn’t changed for a very long time. Ray still harbors an unyielding contempt for authority. The world is his prison, and he has made a career of defying those who run the joint.
[–]bennybaku
Well I guess you could say, Pete knows when someone is being framed by experience.
[–]wewannawii
...or he's projecting his own "questionable ethics" onto others
He seems to be implicitly admitting to being a dirty cop in the Talks interview.
[–]bennybaku
Yes, he does, and I would say with his history with the Ray case, he did what he had to do to bring him in. It cost him though.
John Larry Ray’s Journey
Ray’s criminal history includes car theft, bank robbery, aiding a prison escape, and perjury.
Feb. 14, 1933 — Born Alton, Ill.
1944 — Applies for and receives Social Security number 318-24-7098 in Galesburg, Ill. under the name John L. Raynes.
1953 — Convicted of car theft in Quincy, Ill., sentenced to five-to-ten years.
1960 — Released from Menard State Penitentiary in Chester, Ill.
April 23, 1967 — Helps his brother James Earl Ray escape from the Missouri Penitentiary in Jefferson City, Mo.
April 1968 — Interviewed at the Grapevine tavern in St. Louis about his brother’s whereabouts by the FBI.
Oct. 28, 1970 — Charged with driving the getaway car in the robbery of the Bank of St. Peters (Mo.).
April 6, 1970 — Convicted of the St. Peters bank robbery.
April 23, 1970 — Sentenced to 18-years in federal penitentiary by U.S. District Judge William H. Webster.
April-May 1978 — Gives closed-door testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).
June 15, 1978 — Pulled out of a halfway house in St. Louis and charged with perjury by the U.S. Congress; placed in solitary confinement at the federal maximum security prison in Marion, Ill.
Aug. 24, 1978 — Returns to halfway house in St. Louis.
Dec. 1, 1978 — Gives public testimony before the HSCA.
July 26, 1979 — Parole revoked for failing to appear in court for DWI charge in Fredericktown, Mo.
Feb. 4, 1980 — Fails to report to halfway house in St. Louis, after being released from the federal medical facility for prisoners in Springfield, Mo.
June 16, 1980 — Charged with the robbery of the Farmer’s Bank of Liberty (Ill.)
June 23,1980 — Arrested by Madison County, Ill., deputy and former congressional investigator Conrad “Pete” Baetz near Alton, Ill.
June 24, 1980 — Questioned by FBI agents in Quincy about the shooting of National Urban League President Vernon Jordan Jr.
June 25, 1980 — Charged in Adams County, Ill. with the Farmers Bank of Liberty robbery; asks for trial before the United Nations.
Dec. 23, 1980 — Illinois authorities drop charges and remand John Larry Ray into federal custody.
March 17, 1981 — After seven hours of deliberations, the jury convicts John Larry Ray of contempt in U.S. District Court in Springfield for not providing handwriting samples to federal prosecutors.
April 6, 1981 — Convicted of robbing the Farmers Bank of Liberty in U.S. District Court in Springfield.
April 30, 1981 — U.S. District Judge J. Waldo Ackerman throws out guilty verdict because the jury received inadmissible evidence.
July 10, 1981 — After more than 10 hours of deliberations, a jury finds John Larry Ray not guilty in second Farmers Bank of Liberty robbery trial in U.S. District Court in Springfield.
July 28, 1981 — Sentenced to three years for contempt of court for not providing handwriting samples to federal prosecutors.
July 26, 1982 — 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds contempt of court conviction.
1987 — Paroled from federal prison.
Feb. 8, 1992 — Arrested for parole violation by federal marshals in St. Louis.
July 26, 1993 — Federal Bureau of Prisons releases John Larry Ray for the last time.
JFK-King Panel Spying Charged
By George Lardner Jr., The Washington Post, August 9, 1978
Published in Riverfront Times, April 8, 1992
The House Assassinations Committee suddenly began investigating itself yesterday in the face of accusations that an undercover agent it recruited had spied on Jerry Ray, filched his letters and secretly tape-recorded his conversations.
Ray is a brother of James Earl Ray, convicted killer of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
According to a statement by the undercover agent, a former FBI informer named Oliver patterson of Blackjack, Mo., one committee investigator even assigned him to "secure samples of Jerry Ray's hair."
The charges prompted an abrupt withholding of additional funds for the committee's inquiries and sent it into a turmoil less than a week before the start of public hearings into King's murder in 1968.
The turnabout, which included a bit of gamesmanship at the expenses of The New York Times, was engineered by the controversial Mark Lane. Now the lawyer for king's convicted assassin, Lane led the lobbying effort to create the committee two years ago, but has since turned against it.
The committee's chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, acknowledged that the allegations were "very serious" and said they would be thoroughly examined. But he refused further comment and declined even to say whether the committee had any undercover agents.
"I'm not authorized" to say. Blakey protested in a somewhat tense exchange with reporters yesterday morning, moments after a House Administration subcommittee had shelved the committee's report for $790,000 to carry it through the end of the year.
Rep. Samuel L. Devine (Ohio), the ranking Republican on both the Assassinations Committee and the subcommittee that funds it, complained that the inquiry would run out of money by Sept. 15 right in the middle of public hearings on President Kennedy's assassination, without a fresh transfusion, but his colleagues were unimpressed.
Subcommittee Chairman John H. Dent (D-Pa.) said the Assassinations Committee had $822,000 as of July 1, more than enough to keep it going until the current furor is settled and the Kennedy hearings completed.
The charges of comittee-authorized spying on Jerry Ray were first aired Monday in a St. Louis "news conference" that Lane had carefully orchestrated last weekend after enlisting Patterson as a defector willing to tell all. In a typewritten statement, the self-described undercover agent said he had "recruited" by committee investigator Conrad (Pete) Baetz early this year and sent to Georgia to "renew my relationship" with Jerry Ray.
According to Patterson, he had been an informer for the FBI on the activities of Jerry Ray and white supremacist J. B. Stoner from 1971 to 1974. Apparently the FBI supplied Patterson's name to the Assassinations Committee as a potential asset.
In any case, Patterson said in his statement that Baetz, a $24,000-a-year committee investigator based in St. Louis, "regularly instructed me to telephone Jerry Ray and to tape-record those conversations."
"I often did that while Baetz was in my house," continued Patterson, an electronics salesman who used to operate a shop called Blackjack Radio out of his home. "Often Baetz would listen into the conversation by using earphones designed to monitor conversations. This went on for several months. Baetz took the tapes of the recorded conversations with him and gave me back tapes regularly."
Under rules adopted by the committee last year in the midst of another controversy, "no conversation of committee members or staff with any person shall be recorded without the prior knowledge and/or written consent of the person whose conversation is to be recorded."
In addition, the rules state, "there shall be no electronic surveillance or wiretapping of any person."
A Madison County, III, deputy sheriff on leave for a year, Baetz was reportedly closeted here with committee officials yesterday. A representative of the committee quoted him as saying, "I can't make any comment. I don't want to make any comment."
Patterson also said that on one occasion while he was in Washington with Jerry Ray -- apparently in mid-April when both testified before the Assassinations Committee and shared a motel room during the trip -- he searched Ray's belongings. Patterson said he found some letters from James Earl Ray to his brother along with a map "which Jerry had placed in his toilet articles bag."
"I took them, photocopied them, and sent the copies to Baetz," Patterson said.
He said Baetz later told him the documents were considered "so important" that they were discussed at a meeting in Washington attended by Blakey, "the director of the FBI and Attorney General [Griffin] Bell."
Asked about that, Blakey parried by asking whether he was really being asked to comment about such a "ridiculous' claim. Told that he was being asked just that, he declined to comment. He also refused to say whether he thought the committee itself, rather than some other body, ought to be conducting the investigation of Patterson's allegations. Finally Blakey demanded that all his "no comments" not be attributed to him by name.
According to Patterson, Baetz also sent him to Georgia to see Jerry Ray and "to secure samples of Jerry Ray's hair. A woman named Donna, who traveled with me at the time, assisted in securing hair samples."
Ray's brother seeks $$ for story
UPI
September 1, 1998
My brother James' dying words to me were, 'Jerry, I did not shoot (the) Rev. King.''
Conrad 'Pete' Baetz, who was one of the federal agents who investigated the King assassination, told the Alton Telegraph today that John Ray may be able to supply the names of those involved in a conspiracy in St. Louis to kill King.
King was shot to death on April 4, 1968, as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel. Ray died in prison of liver disease on April 23, 1998.
Ray, who grew up a petty criminal in Alton, initially confessed to the murder but later recanted and sought a new trial, claiming his confession was forced.
Baetz investigated the King assassination in 1977-78 for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
The investigation found that Ray used a high-powered rifle to kill King at the Lorraine Motel to collect a $50,000 bounty offered by white supremacists, who met in St. Louis near a tavern operated by John Ray.
Baetz told the Telegraph, 'If John Ray tells the truth, he may know the names of the people involved in the conspiracy to assassinate King.'
However another Ray brother, Jerry, says John Ray is lying. 'My brother, John, is making up the story about what he knows about the assassination to try to get money from the U.S. government.... My brother James' dying words to me were, 'Jerry, I did not shoot (the) Rev. King.''
John Ray reportedly is seeking a six-figure payoff for his information.
Despite Family's Doubts, Detective Still Sure Ray Shot King
By Patrick E. Gauen, St Louis Post-Dispatch
December 27, 1996
Conrad "Pete" Baetz would not have minded clearing James Earl Ray of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, Baetz would have been one famous cop if he had.
But the deeper into the case Baetz got as a federal detective, the more he became convinced that Ray told the truth when he confessed to killing the nation's premier civil rights leader in 1968.
And Baetz remains convinced, despite the efforts of Ray's brother to clear the family name.
"I think James Earl Ray is finally getting what's coming to him; he should have gotten the death penalty," Baetz said Thursday from his home in Glen Carbon, six weeks after retirement from the Madison County Sheriff's Department.
In 1977, the sheriff lent Baetz to Congress as an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. That inquiry was grueling work.
Ray had withdrawn his confession days after giving it and insisted he was framed by a man known only as Raoul.
Baetz criss-crossed the country looking for any trace of him.
A lingering mystery was why Ray, a burglar and holdup man from Alton who once spent time in the old Madison County Jail at Edwardsville, would want to do it.
In its 1978 report, the committee embraced the theory of Baetz and other investigators who believed that a white segregationist lawyer from St. Louis named John H. Sutherland, long deceased, probably paid Ray $50,000 to silence King in a sniping in Memphis.
"I believe Ray did it for the same reason he did anything -- for money," Baetz said.
It was an interest in Ray's history that got Baetz the congressional assignment.
He also
Spielberg, Rockwell and the Martin Luther King Assassination
By C.D. Stelzer
March 4, 2007
More than 30 years after its theft, a Norman Rockwell painting stolen from a St. Louis art gallery was discovered this week in the possession of Hollywood director Steven Spielberg. On its surface, it's an intriguing story. The details make it even more so. But nobody at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, made the effort to even look up the background information that 's available through the newspaper's own archives.
More than 30 years after its theft, a Norman Rockwell painting stolen from a St. Louis art gallery was discovered this week in the possession of Hollywood director Steven Spielberg. On its surface, it's an intriguing story. The details make it even more so. But nobody at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, made the effort to even look up the background information that 's available through the newspaper's own archives.
If anyone on the Post's staff had done so, they would have discovered that the missing Rockwell painting shared an interesting link to a couple of long unsolved local mysteries.
Instead, the newspaper chose to publish a wire service story on the recovered artwork, which was buried at the bottom of page 21A of its Saturday, March 3 edition.
That story reported Spielberg notified the FBI in California, after he recently became aware that the painting, "Russian Schoolroom," had been stolen before he purchased it. The filmmaker said he acquired the painting from a legitimate dealer in 1989. The Rockwell piece had been taken more than a decade earlier in a late-night burglary of a suburban St. Louis art gallery in late June 1973.
At the time, the painting was valued at between $20,000 to $25,000. Today, it is estimated to be worth $700,000. According to a FBI web site, the painting surfaced at an auction in New Orleans in October 1989. At that time, the FBI says that the painting was associated with Circle Galleries of Chicago and the Danenburg Gallery of New York. At the time of its theft in 1973, the painting had been purchased by St. Louisan Bert C. Elam.
The wire service story that ran in today's Post included some of this information. But old newspaper clips dating back to the 1970s, from the archives of the now-defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat, as well as the Post-Dispatch, provide a fuller picture.
The painting was snatched late on a Sunday night or in the early morning hours of Monday June 24-25, 1973 from Arts International Ltd., 8113 Maryland Ave., Clayton, Mo. The out-of-town owner of the gallery, identified in today's wire service story as the aforementioned Circle Fine Art of Chicago, had arranged for the Rockwell painting to be exhibited here as part of a showing of other works by the same artist. The burglar or burglars smashed plate glass doors at the entrance to the gallery, grabbing only the one painting and leaving other Rockwell works of lesser value.
The Globe-Democrat quoted the late Marjorie Pond, the gallery's director, as saying: "That painting is known all over the country. There is no possible way they can unload that painting."
Despite its high-profile, however, the gallery director's prediction didn't prove true.
In 1978, Pond would be cited by the press again in another story having to do with stolen art from the same gallery. On Feb. 28 of that year, police raided the home of Russell Byers in the 9300 block of Frederic Court in Rock Hill, Mo., another St. Louis suburb. Law enforcement authorities seized suspected stolen artwork from Byers' residence -- including nine paintings by Norman Rockwell, according to a Globe-Democrat account. Months later, the Post-Dispatch reported that eight lithographs had been confiscated during the same raid. Those eight lithographs were also reported to have been stolen in 1976 from the same Clayton art gallery, Arts International Ltd.
The police had raided Byers' home because they suspected him of being the mastermind of one of two St. Louis Art Museum burglaries that occurred in early 1978. Investigators believed Byers had ordered the first burglary on Jan. 29 in which a valuable bronze by Frederick Remington and three other statuettes had been taken.
Two of the suspected burglars soon thereafter died violent deaths. A third burglary suspect refused to testify against Byers. Over the course of the next few months, the St. Louis police would recover all of the stolen art museum pieces. One suspect pleaded guilty in the case, but Byers managed to evade prosecution.
Byers, however, had also been charged with possessing the other stolen art from the 1976 Clayton art gallery heist. But those charges were dropped, too, on May 25, 1978, after Pond, the art gallery director, failed to appear in court to testify. Other witnesses who failed to appear on the same date included policemen who had searched Byers' home and found the stolen artwork.
Then Post-Dispatch reporter Sally Bixby Defty paraphrased Pond as saying that "that she did not appear because because she had been told that the case would be thrown out of court."
Just who told the art gallery director that the case would be thrown out of court is not made clear in Defty's story. This much is clear: Byers, a convicted felon and career criminal, walked. Prosecutors in St. Louis and St. Louis County gave him a free get of jail card.
Not long after all charges were dropped against Byers, he became a the star witness in the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations hearings into the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
That summer, Byers would testify that he received a $50,000 offer to kill King from two St. Louis businessmen, alleged racists, in late 1966 or early 1967. By the time of Byers' testimony, however, the two men, John R. Kauffmann and John H. Sutherland, were already dead.
Based on Byers' testimony, the HSCA concluded that James Earl Ray, King's alleged assassin, killed the civil rights leader as part of a St. Louis-based conspiracy.
The conspiracy theory had been put together by congressional investigator Conrad "Pete" Baetz, a deputy on leave from the Madison County, Ill. sheriff's department.
Byers alleged knowledge of the assassination plot came to the attention of the FBI only after he became a suspect in the art museum burglary case in the winter of 1978.
By no small coincidence, on March 19, 1978, less than three weeks after local police raided Byers' house, the FBI in St. Louis claimed that they found a misfiled report.
The report -- dated March 1974 -- was based on information provided to the bureau field office by informant Richard O'Hara, a criminal associate of Byers.
In the report, O'Hara claimed Byers had bragged about receiving the offer to kill King.
In 1992, as a reporter for the Riverfront Times, St. Louis' alternative weekly, I asked Baetz about Byers' involvement in the St. Louis Art Museum burglaries of 1978. Baetz said he never knew that Byers had been a suspect in the case.
The Associated Press
January 7, 2016
Former Madison County sheriff’s lieutenant Conrad “Pete” Baetz says he developed a gut feeling about Steven Avery during their jailhouse meetings.
Baetz recalls meeting “numerous times,” face-to-face, with Avery, the murder defendant whose case has gone viral, thanks to a new Netflix documentary: “Making a Murderer.”
During those eye-to-eye interviews, Baetz — with more than 30 years of experience as a cop and private investigator in Madison County — formed an impression of Avery.
“Just as a personal opinion, I think there’s a very good possibility he’s innocent. Just from the way he talked and the way we talked. You get a feel for these things, and I would have picked up some indication,” Baetz said in a phone interview from his current home in Wisconsin.
He added: “I don’t think he did it. He is just adamant that he’s innocent.”
Baetz joined the Madison County Sheriff’s Department in 1970 and retired in 1996. He then spent eight or so years doing investigative work for criminal defense lawyers in Madison County.
In about 2004, he decided to move from Illinois back to Wisconsin, where he was raised. That’s where his path would cross with Avery’s.
In 2003, Avery, of Manitowoc County, Wis., was exonerated and released after serving 18 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit. DNA proved that another man committed the rape. After his exoneration, Avery filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Manitowoc County and its investigators who handled the rape case.
But then, in 2005, a young woman who worked as a photographer for an auto trader-type publication went missing. The disappearance of 25-year-old Teresa Halbach drew even more media attention when it was revealed that one of her last scheduled appointments was to take a picture of a vehicle at a salvage yard, operated by none other than Steven Avery and his family.
In the ensuing days, searchers found Halbach’s vehicle on the sprawling Avery Salvage property. Charred pieces of her bones were found in a burn pit near Avery’s mobile home.
And police arrested Avery on murder charges.
“When I came back to Wisconsin, right around that time is when the Avery case broke,” Baetz said. “The people around here were going nuts as to whether he was guilty or innocent.”
Baetz contacted the Avery defense attorneys, Dean Strang and Jerome Buting, and offered his services.
“I said, ‘Look, I’m up here and this is going crazy. Do you need any help? I would be more than happy to assist — I’ve done this kind of work before,’” Baetz recalled.
The defense attorneys hired Baetz.
“I interviewed everybody we thought was a potential witness, plus the prosecution witnesses — if I could get to them. I talked to them and reviewed every document that was released to us in discovery,” Baetz said. “And I was kind of a consultant on police procedures and the way things usually and generally operate in police departments during an investigation like that.”
For their trial strategy, the defense attorneys suggested that members of the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department planted evidence against Avery. The evidence included a key to Halbach’s vehicle, found in Avery’s mobile home, stains of Avery’s blood in Halbach’s vehicle, and a bullet found in Avery’s garage.
Baetz said he was on hand during one of the series’ dramatic moments: when a vial of Avery’s blood was inspected. The vial was in the office of the court clerk, inside a box containing evidence from the old rape case. The evidence seal on the box containing the vial appeared to be retaped, and there appeared to be a pin-size hole in the vial’s lid.
“I looked at it, and it’s got a hole in it,” Baetz said. “It convinced me that you couldn’t count on the blood smears in the vehicle being left by Steven Avery himself. There was blood available to other parties. Somebody got to that box.”
Baetz said he found it troubling that the key and keychain contained DNA from Avery, but no one else, not even Halbach.
“Now, that’s got to be bullshit,” Baetz said. “It’s her key, she’s been handling it for years.”
Ken Kratz, the special prosecutor in the case, said the filmmakers never gave him a chance to answer the defense attorneys’ allegations. He said the documentary ignores up to 90 percent of the physical evidence that links Avery to the homicide.
He said Netflix should give him an opportunity to tell his side of the story.
“Anytime you edit 18 months’ worth of information and only include the statements or pieces that support your particular conclusion, that conclusion should be reached,” Kratz said.
The prosecutor, in an interview with the New York Times, said the film “really presents misinformation.”
Steven Avery served 18 years for a crime he didn't commit. Now he's on the line again, and some want to see him put away for good.
Filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos condensed hundreds of hours of footage into 10 one-hour episodes of the “Marking a Murderer” series.
Demos said, “We believe the series is representative of what we witnessed. The key pieces of the state’s evidence are included in the series.”
Baetz said he thinks the documentary is a fair and accurate representation of the case.
“I really do. They go into a lot of detail,” he said. “The other thing that makes it different from a move retelling of a case is that everything on there was taped as it was happening.”
Baetz said the filmmakers were “nice, competent, very professional women. I saw them trying to talk to the prosecution. They tried to talk to Kratz, to the sheriffs’ department, but they were just dismissed.”
Baetz’s impression of the prosecutor, Kratz, isn’t as favorable.
“He was an arrogant, snotty, son of a bitch, and you can use that as a quote if you want,” Baetz said.
Baetz said the filmmakers interviewed him for hours, but his appearances in the final product make up a total of only about 3 minutes.
“They must have filmed 50 hours of interviews of just me over the years,” he said. “They cut down my appearances in the film. I guess that’s not a ringing endorsement for my movie career.”
Baetz said one of the problems with Avery’s trial, in his mind, is that the judge prohibited the defense from pointing to other potential suspects.
“That’s just crazy — it’s used in cases all over,” he said. “We had people who we thought looked pretty good.”
In the film, Baetz criticizes the continued involvement of the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department in the murder investigation, despite being advised by that county’s district attorney that other police agencies should handle the case.
“Well, the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department decided to do it its own way, or at least a couple of people in the department did,” Baetz said.
Baetz argued that the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department had a conflict of interest, due to Avery’s lawsuit, which ended up being settled for $450,000 after Avery’s murder arrest.
Also in the film, Baetz questions why no physical evidence or DNA from Halbach was found in Avery’s trailer or garage, except for the keychain and bullet.
“She was shot a number of times. There would be massive pools of blood. It wasn’t there,” Baetz told the interviewers.
He added: “Steven, I don’t believe, is capable of sanitizing that house. Very few evidence technicians would be capable of fully sanitizing an area like that. And they know what to hide and how to hide it. I don’t think Steven could do that.”
Avery and his learning-impaired nephew, Brendan Dassey, were convicted, in separate trials, of Halbach’s murder. Avery is serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole. Dassey is eligible for parole in 2048.
Since the Netflix series, online petitions calling for Avery and Dassey to be pardoned have collected hundreds of thousands of digital signatures.
Baetz, who resides in Manitowoc, said the community’s attitudes about the case have shifted since the Netflix series.
“Back in 2005, when it started, I’d say the majority of citizens in Manitowoc County were a lynch mob that wanted him convicted right away. Now, I’d say it’s probably totally reversed after they watched this Netflix thing,” he said.
Though Baetz’s on-screen time is limited, “it was just enough that some of my friends recognized me.” He said a number of his old co-workers and others from the metro-east have contacted him about the series.
“I’ve gotten a lot of messages from them. It’s nice to hear from them,” he said. “They’re mostly cops, too, and apparently, a lot of them have kind of decided this was a fixed case, too, from what they’ve seen.”
Though he thinks Avery is innocent, Baetz declined to offer any alternative suspects by name, saying he fears lawsuits.
“I’ve got my own ideas about who killed her,” he said. “The one thing I will say, I’m satisfied from my investigation that she was not killed on that property.”
Brian Brueggemann: 618-239-2475, @B_Brueggemann The Associated Press contributed to this report
January 7, 2016
Former Madison County sheriff’s lieutenant Conrad “Pete” Baetz says he developed a gut feeling about Steven Avery during their jailhouse meetings.
Baetz recalls meeting “numerous times,” face-to-face, with Avery, the murder defendant whose case has gone viral, thanks to a new Netflix documentary: “Making a Murderer.”
During those eye-to-eye interviews, Baetz — with more than 30 years of experience as a cop and private investigator in Madison County — formed an impression of Avery.
“Just as a personal opinion, I think there’s a very good possibility he’s innocent. Just from the way he talked and the way we talked. You get a feel for these things, and I would have picked up some indication,” Baetz said in a phone interview from his current home in Wisconsin.
He added: “I don’t think he did it. He is just adamant that he’s innocent.”
Baetz joined the Madison County Sheriff’s Department in 1970 and retired in 1996. He then spent eight or so years doing investigative work for criminal defense lawyers in Madison County.
In about 2004, he decided to move from Illinois back to Wisconsin, where he was raised. That’s where his path would cross with Avery’s.
In 2003, Avery, of Manitowoc County, Wis., was exonerated and released after serving 18 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit. DNA proved that another man committed the rape. After his exoneration, Avery filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Manitowoc County and its investigators who handled the rape case.
But then, in 2005, a young woman who worked as a photographer for an auto trader-type publication went missing. The disappearance of 25-year-old Teresa Halbach drew even more media attention when it was revealed that one of her last scheduled appointments was to take a picture of a vehicle at a salvage yard, operated by none other than Steven Avery and his family.
In the ensuing days, searchers found Halbach’s vehicle on the sprawling Avery Salvage property. Charred pieces of her bones were found in a burn pit near Avery’s mobile home.
And police arrested Avery on murder charges.
“When I came back to Wisconsin, right around that time is when the Avery case broke,” Baetz said. “The people around here were going nuts as to whether he was guilty or innocent.”
Baetz contacted the Avery defense attorneys, Dean Strang and Jerome Buting, and offered his services.
“I said, ‘Look, I’m up here and this is going crazy. Do you need any help? I would be more than happy to assist — I’ve done this kind of work before,’” Baetz recalled.
The defense attorneys hired Baetz.
“I interviewed everybody we thought was a potential witness, plus the prosecution witnesses — if I could get to them. I talked to them and reviewed every document that was released to us in discovery,” Baetz said. “And I was kind of a consultant on police procedures and the way things usually and generally operate in police departments during an investigation like that.”
For their trial strategy, the defense attorneys suggested that members of the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department planted evidence against Avery. The evidence included a key to Halbach’s vehicle, found in Avery’s mobile home, stains of Avery’s blood in Halbach’s vehicle, and a bullet found in Avery’s garage.
Baetz said he was on hand during one of the series’ dramatic moments: when a vial of Avery’s blood was inspected. The vial was in the office of the court clerk, inside a box containing evidence from the old rape case. The evidence seal on the box containing the vial appeared to be retaped, and there appeared to be a pin-size hole in the vial’s lid.
“I looked at it, and it’s got a hole in it,” Baetz said. “It convinced me that you couldn’t count on the blood smears in the vehicle being left by Steven Avery himself. There was blood available to other parties. Somebody got to that box.”
Baetz said he found it troubling that the key and keychain contained DNA from Avery, but no one else, not even Halbach.
“Now, that’s got to be bullshit,” Baetz said. “It’s her key, she’s been handling it for years.”
Ken Kratz, the special prosecutor in the case, said the filmmakers never gave him a chance to answer the defense attorneys’ allegations. He said the documentary ignores up to 90 percent of the physical evidence that links Avery to the homicide.
He said Netflix should give him an opportunity to tell his side of the story.
“Anytime you edit 18 months’ worth of information and only include the statements or pieces that support your particular conclusion, that conclusion should be reached,” Kratz said.
The prosecutor, in an interview with the New York Times, said the film “really presents misinformation.”
Steven Avery served 18 years for a crime he didn't commit. Now he's on the line again, and some want to see him put away for good.
Filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos condensed hundreds of hours of footage into 10 one-hour episodes of the “Marking a Murderer” series.
Demos said, “We believe the series is representative of what we witnessed. The key pieces of the state’s evidence are included in the series.”
Baetz said he thinks the documentary is a fair and accurate representation of the case.
“I really do. They go into a lot of detail,” he said. “The other thing that makes it different from a move retelling of a case is that everything on there was taped as it was happening.”
Baetz said the filmmakers were “nice, competent, very professional women. I saw them trying to talk to the prosecution. They tried to talk to Kratz, to the sheriffs’ department, but they were just dismissed.”
Baetz’s impression of the prosecutor, Kratz, isn’t as favorable.
“He was an arrogant, snotty, son of a bitch, and you can use that as a quote if you want,” Baetz said.
Baetz said the filmmakers interviewed him for hours, but his appearances in the final product make up a total of only about 3 minutes.
“They must have filmed 50 hours of interviews of just me over the years,” he said. “They cut down my appearances in the film. I guess that’s not a ringing endorsement for my movie career.”
Baetz said one of the problems with Avery’s trial, in his mind, is that the judge prohibited the defense from pointing to other potential suspects.
“That’s just crazy — it’s used in cases all over,” he said. “We had people who we thought looked pretty good.”
In the film, Baetz criticizes the continued involvement of the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department in the murder investigation, despite being advised by that county’s district attorney that other police agencies should handle the case.
“Well, the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department decided to do it its own way, or at least a couple of people in the department did,” Baetz said.
Baetz argued that the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department had a conflict of interest, due to Avery’s lawsuit, which ended up being settled for $450,000 after Avery’s murder arrest.
Also in the film, Baetz questions why no physical evidence or DNA from Halbach was found in Avery’s trailer or garage, except for the keychain and bullet.
“She was shot a number of times. There would be massive pools of blood. It wasn’t there,” Baetz told the interviewers.
He added: “Steven, I don’t believe, is capable of sanitizing that house. Very few evidence technicians would be capable of fully sanitizing an area like that. And they know what to hide and how to hide it. I don’t think Steven could do that.”
Avery and his learning-impaired nephew, Brendan Dassey, were convicted, in separate trials, of Halbach’s murder. Avery is serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole. Dassey is eligible for parole in 2048.
Since the Netflix series, online petitions calling for Avery and Dassey to be pardoned have collected hundreds of thousands of digital signatures.
Baetz, who resides in Manitowoc, said the community’s attitudes about the case have shifted since the Netflix series.
“Back in 2005, when it started, I’d say the majority of citizens in Manitowoc County were a lynch mob that wanted him convicted right away. Now, I’d say it’s probably totally reversed after they watched this Netflix thing,” he said.
Though Baetz’s on-screen time is limited, “it was just enough that some of my friends recognized me.” He said a number of his old co-workers and others from the metro-east have contacted him about the series.
“I’ve gotten a lot of messages from them. It’s nice to hear from them,” he said. “They’re mostly cops, too, and apparently, a lot of them have kind of decided this was a fixed case, too, from what they’ve seen.”
Though he thinks Avery is innocent, Baetz declined to offer any alternative suspects by name, saying he fears lawsuits.
“I’ve got my own ideas about who killed her,” he said. “The one thing I will say, I’m satisfied from my investigation that she was not killed on that property.”
Brian Brueggemann: 618-239-2475, @B_Brueggemann The Associated Press contributed to this report
‘Making a Murderer’: Former cop who worked viral case thinks Steven Avery is innocent
By Brian Brueggemann
January 7, 2016
Updated February 9, 2016
The investigator who worked for Steven Avery’s trial lawyers has revisited a popular theory about who killed Teresa Halbach back in 2005.
Appearing on the teen talk show Corey Taylor Talks on Tuesday, August 22, Pete Baetz said Halbach’s body was burned elsewhere before someone salted her bones in Avery’ burn pit — a theory widely accepted by millions of documentary fans and web sleuths.
But, according to Baetz, the person who planted the cremains is not who is currently being eyed as the killer.
Baetz says it was someone as familiar with the salvage yard as Steven Avery himself.
Baetz theorizes that someone without intimate knowledge of the Avery property would be left to circumvent a potentially dangerous entanglement while trying to plant the bones without being seen.
“Steven Avery had a pet dog,” he said. “His name was Bear. He was a German Shepherd that nobody was going to fool with. Bear was chained next to that burn pit. He was your typical junkyard dog. Because that’s what it was — a junkyard — where he was living. Nobody not known to Bear was going to get in that area.”
Because the 26-year police veteran maintains that Avery and Dassey are not killers, it leaves just about everybody else in the family as a potential suspect.
“Whoever did it was known to [Bear], and was possibly a resident who walked in and planted it,” Baetz said.
Although Baetz did not name Avery family members, he said Halbach’s death could not have unfolded as the state described. The rape, throat slashing, shooting, and possible dismemberment, would surely have left a trail of carnage. But nothing remotely close to a bloodbath was ever discovered in Avery’s trailer or garage.
Only a speck of Teresa’s DNA was allegedly found on a bullet retrieved from the garage floor. For many, that leaves a gaping hole to fill with the explanation of where the horrific acts took place. The state claims the killers had more than enough time to meticulously wipe the crime scene clean. Baetz doesn’t buy that.
“You’re going to leave evidence behind, no matter how good you are,” the investigator said. “Cutting [Teresa Halbach’s] throat, which is what they accused [Avery and Dassey] of, is a very dirty crime. I mean, that there are droplets of evidence left by everybody, everywhere. The human body keeps blood under pressure. When you invade that pressurized container, blood is going to spray.”
Who did the slashing, cutting and burning? That remains an eternal question.
Avery’s lawyer alludes to Teresa’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Ryan Hillegas, and a possible accomplice, although she says Halbach was beaten with a mallet or hammer.
Making a Murderer fans ensnared in multiple conspiracy theories since the documentary premiered in 2015 were somewhat quieted this year when Kathleen Zellner filed the 1,200-page appellate brief that pointed to Hillegas. It put an end to some of the more outlandish theories that law enforcement killed Teresa Halbach, or she was the victim of a random serial killer known to frame people. Then there is the claim that Teresa is still alive, and that her bones were those of a Manitowoc overdose victim. That one didn’t check out either.
Although the Hillegas theory remains near the top of the list for those trying to “crack the case,” Baetz’s interview has prompted social media users to rein back in an earlier conjecture that Brendan Dassey’s brother, Bobby, and now stepfather, Scott Tadych, may know more than they testified to.
Those theories aside, Baetz is on the side of the Steven Avery “truther” movement. He says police were convinced from the start that Steven Avery was their man. And when there was little evidence to support that bias, they turned up the heat on Dassey. By making him a co-conspirator, police solidified their case against his uncle, Baetz said.
Baetz did reveal something not previously privy to the public, information he says confirmed that Avery was not treated fairly. Because Dean Strang and Jerry Buting lived more than 100 miles from the Calumet County Jail, they would sometimes send Baetz to visit Avery. Baetz said during one of those visits, a jailer revealed that his conversations with Steven were being recorded.
“That’s flat a** illegal,” Baetz said. “I was part of the defense team. They should not have access to what I say.
Consequently, when [Strang and Buting] did visit him, they were really impaired in talking to him. A lawyer has to be able to talk to his client without hesitation. That is probably not grounds for a reversal, but it was indicative of what they did.”
While Zellner claims some of his family members had opportunity to commit the crime, her sights are not on anyone related to Avery. The Halbach killing was fueled by jealousy, and the perpetrator had a background in science, she says, the ability to extract human blood from a sink and transfer it to the victim’s car. Some of the Averys are hunters, but not experienced in applied science.
Avery attorney's social media strategy questioned
By John Ferak, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin
June 7, 2016
Since late January, legions of "Making a Murderer" fans have developed a weekly obsession — scouring the internet for the latest tweets from Kathleen Zellner, Steven Avery's high-profile criminal defense attorney from Illinois.
Now five months later, Zellner continues to reward her growing list of 163,000 Twitter followers with 140-character snippets of her theories and ongoing defense work on behalf of Avery, 53, who has remained incarcerated since his arrest in November 2005 for the death of freelance photographer Teresa Halbach of neighboring Calumet County.
But some have questioned the social media tactic, including Matthew J. Haiduk, a veteran criminal defense attorney in Geneva, Illinois. He told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin that Zellner's frequent use of Twitter in the Avery case is highly unusual.
"I have never seen anybody in Illinois use social media during a pending case like she's doing with Steven Avery's case," Haiduk said last week. "She's kind of in a weird gray area because it's not like there was a pending case involving Steven Avery for a while."
Zellner has vowed to make Avery the latest addition to her law firm's list of persons who were proven to be wrongfully convicted. On May 17, Zellner tweeted that evidence was planted in Avery's trailer, burn pit, burn barrel, garage and inside the head of Avery's nephew, Brendan Dassey, who was also convicted in 2007 for participating in the Halbach slaying.
But by Memorial Day, some of Zellner's Twitter followers who expected a quick exoneration for Avery were left feeling deflated. Zellner asked the Wisconsin Court of Appeals to grant her a 90-day extension. The courts have now given Zellner until Aug. 29 to file her legal briefs seeking to overturn Avery's 2007 murder conviction.
Zellner tweeted on May 30 that Rome was not built in a day.
Haiduk is not convinced that using Twitter to alert everyone to Zellner's ongoing legal battle plans is the best approach to winning Avery's exoneration. About half of Zellner's tweets on the Avery case are nothing more than "self-promotion," he said.
One example, he said, was her February tweet that declared: "Fifth trip to Steven Avery. Collected samples for new tests. The inevitable is coming — he was smiling so were we."
"These tweets, other than inciting the mob, they don't (accomplish) anything," said Haiduk, who practices law about 40 miles west of Chicago. "I could never support what she's doing. And I don't think this is the future of our profession. As a professional colleague, I wish she wasn't doing this. Really, cases are decided in the courtrooms and not on Twitter."
Pete Baetz, a retired Illinois police investigator who appeared in "Making a Murderer," said he spoke with Zellner for about 45 minutes on the phone when she first took over Avery's appeal. Baetz served as a defense investigator for Avery's trial lawyers, Jerry Buting and Dean Strang, in 2006 and 2007.
Baetz said he, too, has had difficulty deciphering many of Zellner's tweets. He cited an April tweet in which she mentioned that she spent all day re-tracing Teresa Halbach's steps. Halbach disappeared after visiting Avery Salvage Yard on the afternoon of Oct. 31, 2005. She was there to take photos of a van Steven Avery was trying to sell.
"No doubt she left Avery property alive. All roads lead to one door and it's not Steven Avery's," Zellner tweeted.
Baetz said he has gone over that remark about the roads multiple times and still can't figure out what she meant.
In March, Newsweek reported Zellner was re-examining several people who may have been overlooked as suspects at the time of the original murder. When Halbach vanished, Avery was embroiled in a $36 million lawsuit against Manitowoc County. He had lost 18 years of freedom due to a wrongful rape conviction.
In that interview with Newsweek, Zellner implied that Halbach's killer was a male who she knew. When asked if she had identified alternative suspects, Zellner told the national publication: "We have a couple. I'd say there's one leading the pack by a lot. But I don't want to scare him off. I don't want him to run."
Baetz said that he also failed to grasp another of Zellner's more popular tweets from March that declared how cellular phone tower records provide Avery with an airtight alibi. "She left property. He didn't," Zellner tweeted.
Zellner's tweet will not carry any weight with the courts unless she can prove who Halbach was talking to on the phone, he noted.
"Since I don't know the reason for many of her tweets to begin with, that one really confuses me," Baetz said. "You have to know who's on the other end of the cellphone before you make an impression that somebody else grabbed her, and it's not to say that (the killer) used her phone to dial it up. Cell phone towers identify the location of a cell phone, not the person using it."
Baetz believes the "Stranger Beside Me" Twitter reference was Zellner's way of trying to smoke out a suspect from a large list of people on her radar who had motive to kill Halbach. Other than Zellner, he has never seen a criminal defense attorney use social media in hopes of trying to prove a client was wrongly convicted of murder.
"I was really surprised by it," said Baetz, who has about 40 years of experience in police work and private investigations. "But you can't argue with her success."
Still, Baetz wonders whether Zellner is spending enough time digging into allegations that the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Office planted evidence.
Baetz contends that evidence-planting suspicions may be more widespread than Strang and Buting were able to raise before Manitowoc County Circuit Judge Patrick Willis. During the trial, the attorneys mainly focused on the small droplets of Avery's blood that appeared inside of Halbach's RAV4 and they accused Lenk and Colborn of planting a spare key for Halbach's vehicle inside Avery's bedroom.
The same day that then Sgt. Andrew Colborn and now-retired Lt. James Lenk found the spare key, human bones were found at Avery's burn pit by Manitowoc County Sheriff's Sgt. Jason Jost. However, nobody in Wisconsin law enforcement — including Jost — took photos of the bones at the scene.
At this juncture, it appears Zellner may have to prove who killed Halbach if the murderer was not Avery or Dassey, Baetz said.
"She is saying that she's going to prove that somebody else did it and that's going the hard way, the extremely hard way," Baetz said.
"On that basis, she has got to make a big splash for this appeal to go any place at all. Let me put it this way, everybody is expecting that. They will be very disappointed or they will be elated. There won't be any middle ground at all. She's made all these promises."
Haiduk, the suburban Chicago lawyer, said he can't criticize Zellner's track record as a trial lawyer. She has achieved numerous exonerations for other prisoners. "She has an outstanding record," he said. "Hell, you can't argue with success."
As far as her tweets, "it certainly keeps up interest in the Avery case, that's for sure," Haiduk said. "She's keeping it in front of peoples' minds. At some point, a judge may tell her to stop. If this case was (awaiting a trial) in circuit court, you can't do it. Not a chance."
On the other hand, Haiduk said he stopped paying attention to Zellner's tweets weeks ago. They were becoming "obnoxious," he said.
It's now been six months since Zellner issued a press release announcing that she had made Avery her latest client. He still remains locked away in Wisconsin's prison system.
Zellner has yet to file a legal brief that offers any substance in terms of proving her theory that Avery was the victim of a wrongful murder conviction.
"Clearly, there are a large element of her tweets that are self-promotion," Haiduk told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. "I would take anything she says on Twitter with a grain of salt. It's just that these tweets are more distracting than they are helpful as far as the (legal) process goes."
John Ferak of USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin: 920-993-7115 or jferak@gannett.com; on Twitter @johnferak
By Brian Brueggemann
January 7, 2016
Updated February 9, 2016
The investigator who worked for Steven Avery’s trial lawyers has revisited a popular theory about who killed Teresa Halbach back in 2005.
Appearing on the teen talk show Corey Taylor Talks on Tuesday, August 22, Pete Baetz said Halbach’s body was burned elsewhere before someone salted her bones in Avery’ burn pit — a theory widely accepted by millions of documentary fans and web sleuths.
But, according to Baetz, the person who planted the cremains is not who is currently being eyed as the killer.
Baetz says it was someone as familiar with the salvage yard as Steven Avery himself.
Baetz theorizes that someone without intimate knowledge of the Avery property would be left to circumvent a potentially dangerous entanglement while trying to plant the bones without being seen.
“Steven Avery had a pet dog,” he said. “His name was Bear. He was a German Shepherd that nobody was going to fool with. Bear was chained next to that burn pit. He was your typical junkyard dog. Because that’s what it was — a junkyard — where he was living. Nobody not known to Bear was going to get in that area.”
Because the 26-year police veteran maintains that Avery and Dassey are not killers, it leaves just about everybody else in the family as a potential suspect.
“Whoever did it was known to [Bear], and was possibly a resident who walked in and planted it,” Baetz said.
Although Baetz did not name Avery family members, he said Halbach’s death could not have unfolded as the state described. The rape, throat slashing, shooting, and possible dismemberment, would surely have left a trail of carnage. But nothing remotely close to a bloodbath was ever discovered in Avery’s trailer or garage.
Only a speck of Teresa’s DNA was allegedly found on a bullet retrieved from the garage floor. For many, that leaves a gaping hole to fill with the explanation of where the horrific acts took place. The state claims the killers had more than enough time to meticulously wipe the crime scene clean. Baetz doesn’t buy that.
“You’re going to leave evidence behind, no matter how good you are,” the investigator said. “Cutting [Teresa Halbach’s] throat, which is what they accused [Avery and Dassey] of, is a very dirty crime. I mean, that there are droplets of evidence left by everybody, everywhere. The human body keeps blood under pressure. When you invade that pressurized container, blood is going to spray.”
Who did the slashing, cutting and burning? That remains an eternal question.
Avery’s lawyer alludes to Teresa’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Ryan Hillegas, and a possible accomplice, although she says Halbach was beaten with a mallet or hammer.
Making a Murderer fans ensnared in multiple conspiracy theories since the documentary premiered in 2015 were somewhat quieted this year when Kathleen Zellner filed the 1,200-page appellate brief that pointed to Hillegas. It put an end to some of the more outlandish theories that law enforcement killed Teresa Halbach, or she was the victim of a random serial killer known to frame people. Then there is the claim that Teresa is still alive, and that her bones were those of a Manitowoc overdose victim. That one didn’t check out either.
Although the Hillegas theory remains near the top of the list for those trying to “crack the case,” Baetz’s interview has prompted social media users to rein back in an earlier conjecture that Brendan Dassey’s brother, Bobby, and now stepfather, Scott Tadych, may know more than they testified to.
Those theories aside, Baetz is on the side of the Steven Avery “truther” movement. He says police were convinced from the start that Steven Avery was their man. And when there was little evidence to support that bias, they turned up the heat on Dassey. By making him a co-conspirator, police solidified their case against his uncle, Baetz said.
Baetz did reveal something not previously privy to the public, information he says confirmed that Avery was not treated fairly. Because Dean Strang and Jerry Buting lived more than 100 miles from the Calumet County Jail, they would sometimes send Baetz to visit Avery. Baetz said during one of those visits, a jailer revealed that his conversations with Steven were being recorded.
“That’s flat a** illegal,” Baetz said. “I was part of the defense team. They should not have access to what I say.
Consequently, when [Strang and Buting] did visit him, they were really impaired in talking to him. A lawyer has to be able to talk to his client without hesitation. That is probably not grounds for a reversal, but it was indicative of what they did.”
While Zellner claims some of his family members had opportunity to commit the crime, her sights are not on anyone related to Avery. The Halbach killing was fueled by jealousy, and the perpetrator had a background in science, she says, the ability to extract human blood from a sink and transfer it to the victim’s car. Some of the Averys are hunters, but not experienced in applied science.
Avery attorney's social media strategy questioned
By John Ferak, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin
June 7, 2016
Since late January, legions of "Making a Murderer" fans have developed a weekly obsession — scouring the internet for the latest tweets from Kathleen Zellner, Steven Avery's high-profile criminal defense attorney from Illinois.
Now five months later, Zellner continues to reward her growing list of 163,000 Twitter followers with 140-character snippets of her theories and ongoing defense work on behalf of Avery, 53, who has remained incarcerated since his arrest in November 2005 for the death of freelance photographer Teresa Halbach of neighboring Calumet County.
But some have questioned the social media tactic, including Matthew J. Haiduk, a veteran criminal defense attorney in Geneva, Illinois. He told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin that Zellner's frequent use of Twitter in the Avery case is highly unusual.
"I have never seen anybody in Illinois use social media during a pending case like she's doing with Steven Avery's case," Haiduk said last week. "She's kind of in a weird gray area because it's not like there was a pending case involving Steven Avery for a while."
Zellner has vowed to make Avery the latest addition to her law firm's list of persons who were proven to be wrongfully convicted. On May 17, Zellner tweeted that evidence was planted in Avery's trailer, burn pit, burn barrel, garage and inside the head of Avery's nephew, Brendan Dassey, who was also convicted in 2007 for participating in the Halbach slaying.
But by Memorial Day, some of Zellner's Twitter followers who expected a quick exoneration for Avery were left feeling deflated. Zellner asked the Wisconsin Court of Appeals to grant her a 90-day extension. The courts have now given Zellner until Aug. 29 to file her legal briefs seeking to overturn Avery's 2007 murder conviction.
Zellner tweeted on May 30 that Rome was not built in a day.
Haiduk is not convinced that using Twitter to alert everyone to Zellner's ongoing legal battle plans is the best approach to winning Avery's exoneration. About half of Zellner's tweets on the Avery case are nothing more than "self-promotion," he said.
One example, he said, was her February tweet that declared: "Fifth trip to Steven Avery. Collected samples for new tests. The inevitable is coming — he was smiling so were we."
"These tweets, other than inciting the mob, they don't (accomplish) anything," said Haiduk, who practices law about 40 miles west of Chicago. "I could never support what she's doing. And I don't think this is the future of our profession. As a professional colleague, I wish she wasn't doing this. Really, cases are decided in the courtrooms and not on Twitter."
Pete Baetz, a retired Illinois police investigator who appeared in "Making a Murderer," said he spoke with Zellner for about 45 minutes on the phone when she first took over Avery's appeal. Baetz served as a defense investigator for Avery's trial lawyers, Jerry Buting and Dean Strang, in 2006 and 2007.
Baetz said he, too, has had difficulty deciphering many of Zellner's tweets. He cited an April tweet in which she mentioned that she spent all day re-tracing Teresa Halbach's steps. Halbach disappeared after visiting Avery Salvage Yard on the afternoon of Oct. 31, 2005. She was there to take photos of a van Steven Avery was trying to sell.
"No doubt she left Avery property alive. All roads lead to one door and it's not Steven Avery's," Zellner tweeted.
Baetz said he has gone over that remark about the roads multiple times and still can't figure out what she meant.
In March, Newsweek reported Zellner was re-examining several people who may have been overlooked as suspects at the time of the original murder. When Halbach vanished, Avery was embroiled in a $36 million lawsuit against Manitowoc County. He had lost 18 years of freedom due to a wrongful rape conviction.
In that interview with Newsweek, Zellner implied that Halbach's killer was a male who she knew. When asked if she had identified alternative suspects, Zellner told the national publication: "We have a couple. I'd say there's one leading the pack by a lot. But I don't want to scare him off. I don't want him to run."
Baetz said that he also failed to grasp another of Zellner's more popular tweets from March that declared how cellular phone tower records provide Avery with an airtight alibi. "She left property. He didn't," Zellner tweeted.
Zellner's tweet will not carry any weight with the courts unless she can prove who Halbach was talking to on the phone, he noted.
"Since I don't know the reason for many of her tweets to begin with, that one really confuses me," Baetz said. "You have to know who's on the other end of the cellphone before you make an impression that somebody else grabbed her, and it's not to say that (the killer) used her phone to dial it up. Cell phone towers identify the location of a cell phone, not the person using it."
Baetz believes the "Stranger Beside Me" Twitter reference was Zellner's way of trying to smoke out a suspect from a large list of people on her radar who had motive to kill Halbach. Other than Zellner, he has never seen a criminal defense attorney use social media in hopes of trying to prove a client was wrongly convicted of murder.
"I was really surprised by it," said Baetz, who has about 40 years of experience in police work and private investigations. "But you can't argue with her success."
Still, Baetz wonders whether Zellner is spending enough time digging into allegations that the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Office planted evidence.
Baetz contends that evidence-planting suspicions may be more widespread than Strang and Buting were able to raise before Manitowoc County Circuit Judge Patrick Willis. During the trial, the attorneys mainly focused on the small droplets of Avery's blood that appeared inside of Halbach's RAV4 and they accused Lenk and Colborn of planting a spare key for Halbach's vehicle inside Avery's bedroom.
The same day that then Sgt. Andrew Colborn and now-retired Lt. James Lenk found the spare key, human bones were found at Avery's burn pit by Manitowoc County Sheriff's Sgt. Jason Jost. However, nobody in Wisconsin law enforcement — including Jost — took photos of the bones at the scene.
At this juncture, it appears Zellner may have to prove who killed Halbach if the murderer was not Avery or Dassey, Baetz said.
"She is saying that she's going to prove that somebody else did it and that's going the hard way, the extremely hard way," Baetz said.
"On that basis, she has got to make a big splash for this appeal to go any place at all. Let me put it this way, everybody is expecting that. They will be very disappointed or they will be elated. There won't be any middle ground at all. She's made all these promises."
Haiduk, the suburban Chicago lawyer, said he can't criticize Zellner's track record as a trial lawyer. She has achieved numerous exonerations for other prisoners. "She has an outstanding record," he said. "Hell, you can't argue with success."
As far as her tweets, "it certainly keeps up interest in the Avery case, that's for sure," Haiduk said. "She's keeping it in front of peoples' minds. At some point, a judge may tell her to stop. If this case was (awaiting a trial) in circuit court, you can't do it. Not a chance."
On the other hand, Haiduk said he stopped paying attention to Zellner's tweets weeks ago. They were becoming "obnoxious," he said.
It's now been six months since Zellner issued a press release announcing that she had made Avery her latest client. He still remains locked away in Wisconsin's prison system.
Zellner has yet to file a legal brief that offers any substance in terms of proving her theory that Avery was the victim of a wrongful murder conviction.
"Clearly, there are a large element of her tweets that are self-promotion," Haiduk told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. "I would take anything she says on Twitter with a grain of salt. It's just that these tweets are more distracting than they are helpful as far as the (legal) process goes."
John Ferak of USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin: 920-993-7115 or jferak@gannett.com; on Twitter @johnferak
Pete Baetz has a long, respected career in law enforcement. He would know how to "drain the swamp" of corrupt leadership in Manitowoc. https://t.co/AQ8arO24RQ— Jerome Buting (@JButing) January 13, 2017
Buting was “recommended” by Steven Glynn to Steven Avery. Who was also a member of Peg’s Commission. Remember, these would be 2 of 4 to collect direct pay from SA’s settlement. Proof they were linked to Peg.. pic.twitter.com/uAbwvwTz8I— Beyond Avery Road (@XAveryFiles) January 3, 2018
Buting was working with Law Enforcement Representatives at the Wisconsin State Capitol Level with Peg prior to Teresa Halbach’s Death. This is proof pic.twitter.com/OmPHmytET6— Beyond Avery Road (@XAveryFiles) January 3, 2018
II. The Trial Court Properly Excluded Evidence of Third-Party Liability.
ReplyDeleteA. Background
37 Prior to trial, the State moved to prohibit Avery from presenting evidence of third-party liability. The court issued an order on July 10, 2006, that if Avery intended to suggest that a third party, other than Brendan Dassey,[8] was responsible for the crimes charged, the defense would need to notify the court at least thirty days prior to trial. The defense did so on January 10, 2007. Avery stated: “Several members of Avery’s extended family as well as customers were on the Avery Salvage Yard property during the approximate time that Teresa Halbach likely was there. In that general sense, Avery can establish their opportunity—to about the same extent that the [S]tate can establish Steven Avery’s opportunity.” The State opposed his request, arguing that “the introduction of any third-party liability evidence regarding the possibility or probability that any of the individuals mentioned in their … filing committed the crimes charged” is precluded by State v. Denny, 120 Wis. 2d 614, 357 N.W.2d 12 (Ct. App. 1984).
38 In Denny, this court adopted the “legitimate tendency” test for third-party liability evidence. Id. at 623 (citing Alexander v. United States, 138 U.S. 353 (1891)). Thus a defendant is required to demonstrate a legitimate tendency test that a third person could have committed the crime. The Denny court explained:
[T]o show “legitimate tendency,” a defendant should not be required to establish the guilt of third persons with that degree of certainty requisite to sustain a conviction in order for this type of evidence to be admitted. On the other hand, evidence that simply affords a possible ground of suspicion against another person should not be admissible. Otherwise, a defendant could conceivably produce evidence tending to show that hundreds of other persons had some motive or animus against the deceased—degenerating the proceedings into a trial of collateral issues. The “legitimate tendency” test asks whether the proffered evidence is so remote in time, place or circumstance that a direct connection cannot be made between the third person and the crime.
Thus, as long as motive and opportunity have been shown and as long as there is also some evidence to directly connect a third person to the crime charged which is not remote in time, place or circumstances, the evidence should be admissible.
Denny, 120 Wis. 2d at 623-24 (citation omitted). The legitimate tendency test, characterized as a “bright line standard,” was summarized by the supreme court as follows:
Third-party defense evidence may be admissible under the legitimate tendency test if the defendant can show that the third party had (1) the motive and (2) the opportunity to commit the charged crime, and (3) can provide some evidence to directly connect the third person to the crime charged which is not remote in time, place or circumstance.
State v. Scheidell, 227 Wis. 2d 285, 296, 595 N.W.2d 661 (1999) (citing Denny, 120 Wis. 2d at 623-24).
CONTINUED...
39 Following a hearing on January 19, 2007, the trial court issued a written decision and order in which it applied the legitimate tendency test set forth in Denny. The court determined that none of the third-party liability evidence offered by Avery was admissible “because the defendant does not contend any of the other persons present at the Avery property on October 31, 2005, had a motive to murder Teresa Halbach or commit the other crimes alleged to have been committed against her.” The trial court noted that Avery’s Denny proffer, identifying “each customer or family friend and each member of his extended family present on the Avery salvage yard property,” appeared to be an example of the dangers warned of by the court in Denny.[9] There, the court observed that “a defendant could conceivably produce evidence tending to show that hundreds of other persons had some motive or animus against the deceased—degenerating the proceedings into a trial of collateral issues.” Denny, 120 Wis. 2d at 623-24.
ReplyDeleteB. The Trial Court Properly Applied Denny.
40 Avery argues on appeal that the trial court erred when it applied Denny to the proffered third-party liability evidence. Avery contends that (1) his “constitutional right to present a defense trumps the evidentiary rule articulated in Denny” and (2) Denny applies only when the defendant “seeks to introduce evidence of other possible perpetrators’ motives to commit the crime,” where the defendant has no such motive.[10] Avery further contends that if Denny does apply to the evidence proffered, then the trial court erred in its determination that the evidence failed to meet the requirements of Denny.[11]
https://www.wicourts.gov/ca/opinion/DisplayDocument.html?content=html&seqNo=70129
Making a Murderer: How much did it really cost to defend Steven Avery?
ReplyDeleteYoni Heisler @edibleapple
February 5th, 2016 at 10:04 AM
Nearly seven weeks after its premiere, the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer continues to attract attention from passionate viewers, legal figures, and the news media at large. If you haven’t seen the 10-part documentary yet, you’ve certainly heard people buzzing about it; and I can assure you, it’s as riveting, addictive and thought-provoking as any program that has aired in recent memory.
Now assuming that you’ve already seen the documentary, you’re undoubtedly familiar with Dean Strang and Jerome Buting, the two high-end defense attorneys who defended Steven Avery in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. In one of the earlier episodes, the documentary notes that Avery used a large cash settlement of $400,000 (received after a wrongful conviction) to help pay for Strang and Buting’s expert defense services. While the documentary unassumingly made it seem as if both Strang and Buting made off well financially from their involvement in the case, it turns out that the pair of now semi-famous attorneys actually made very little. In fact, the real cost to defend Steve Avery turned out to be not much less than the money Strang and Buting received.
As part of an interesting interview with Forbes, Strang recently explained the unique economic circumstances that surfaced in their defense of Avery.
For starters, Avery may have received a $400,000 settlement, but $160,000 right off the top was earmarked for Avery’s civil lawyers for the work involved in securing the settlement in the first place. That left Avery with $240,000 to give to Strang and Buting.
“Of that $240,000, Jerry and I split that,” Strang explains. “Some to his firm, some to mine. And all of the out-of-pocket expenses had to come from that. It’s not all legal fees. Private investigators, subpoenas, transcripts, scientific testing, lodging during a seven-week trial.”
And that can all add up extraordinarily quickly. Interestingly, Strang relays that both he and Buting were aware that defending Avery was not going to be an economically prudent decision for either of them.
Strang estimates that both he and Buting put in around 2,000 hours while working the case over a 16 month period, or about 125 hours a month. That’s all well and good until you consider the out-of-pocket expenses involved.
Strang explains:
For the expert we flew in from New Mexico, for the experts we didn’t end up using. For a private investigator, Pete Bates, who appears in the film. We had to move to Appleton,Wisconsin for two months because the trial was too far to commute. So we rented a furnished apartment.
Interestingly enough, once these expenses are added into the equation, Forbes estimates that both Strang and Buting were working for about $9/hour.
Of course, Strang and Buting weren’t in it for the money, but nonetheless an interesting glimpse into some of the legal backstory involved in the handling of Avery’s top-notch defense.
Make sure to hit the source link below to read the entire interview with Strang. Also, if you haven’t yet seen it, we’ve put together an updated “Where are they now?” piece detailing what all of the documentary’s major players are up to today, a good 9 years after his conviction.
http://bgr.com/2016/02/05/making-a-murderer-cost-steven-avery-defense-dean-strang-jerry-buting/
[–]s_wardy_s
ReplyDeleteThere was a huge opportunity to stop both Bobby Dassey and Scott Tadych from testifying in court; both could have been impeached due to their character.
Bryan Dassey had already given a statement saying BoD said TH left the property, plus the Dassey hard drive results were available, and Jerry Buting and Dean Strang should have been diligent in requesting and scrutinising this.
ST should have been impeached through his shady goings-on and his lack of sticking to one story. Yet, they were allowed to testify as two of the states key witnesses.
For me, the fact the jury was split going into deliberations, these two witnesses, BoD and ST, broke the case for the defence.
JB and DS allowed themselves to be railroaded. WHY? Will we ever know?
And all that circumstantial evidence is evidence that relies on an inference to connect it to a conclusion of fact, yet how can a place be searched 6 times and on the 7th provide the RAV4 key, not even the real but a sub key (WTF)? And the bullet, since proven to contain wood and red paint but no DNA. Yet they allowed the prosecutor to get away with saying the bullet had TH blood on it.
SA has always had the greatest chance of a new trial or release if these two fockers (BoD and ST) recant and provide new statements, hence new evidence as in what happened in the Ryan Ferguson case.
Though I believe both of them took payments (Barb Janda Tadych and ST new house worth $200K, a fortune back then) for their jobs in this, and are bound by that. These people (BT, ST, BoD) are still railroading Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, even knowing what Zellner has, and that Brendan has so much support at the moment.
What or whoever has the hold over BoD, that he can't come forward to say he saw her leave, must be very strong.
[–]barbwireless
People underestimate the loyalty factor in the society of that region. It's us and them, you're in or you're out. You have power or are protected by the powerful by virtue of your loyalties. Averys were in the out group and those who wanted to protect their 'in' status would hide their support of them. It's ugly, but it's the social order there. Hard to build an unbiased jury from that pool...
https://www.reddit.com/r/TickTockManitowoc/comments/87ptpn/buting_stang/