it s really hard. i told her grandma, i just lost my last appeal. i don t know what i m going to do. i always say, eric, let s keep the faith and let s go and pray and i said, we have many, many sisters praying with you. sister joanna offered more than just her prayers. that s when she brought in peter cross, who was now fighting for eric on the outside. so you have detective donnelly as the officer assigned. yes. with eric as his guide, cross got up to speed. and he found some troubling information about how detectives donnelly and aiello connected the two murders. it was through this witness. her name is kathy gomez. kathy, we re on the record. cross tracked her down and videotaped his interview with her. you know i m here today because eric glisson gomez, who was 16 at the time of the murder, says she first came in contact with the detectives for only one reason.
justice. we wanted to speak to someone from the nypd or the bronx district attorney s office, but both declined comment citing the multiple civil suits they faced as the bronx six sought millions in damages against the city. and those two detectives, donnelly and aiello, portrayed as super sleuths back in 1995, are now both retired and they didn t have anything to say to us. but in court filings attorneys for the city of new york denied that either detective threatened witnesses or falsified statements. and yet o both new york city and state would ultimately agree to pay each of the bronx six millions of dollars in damages. but for eric, the immediate challenge was starting a new life. one full of amazing discoveries. hello? no, no. upside down. huh?
so you have detective donnelly as the officer assigned. yes. with eric as his guide, cross got up to speed. and he found some troubling information about how detectives donnelly and aiello connected the two murders. it was through this witness. her name is kathy gomez. kathy, we re on the record. cross tracked her down and videotaped his interview with her. you know i m here today because eric glisson gomez, who was 16 at the time of the murder, says she first came in contact with the detectives for only one reason. she was friends with miriam tavares, who spoke only spanish. so you served kind of as a translator? yes. but by the time she had walked out of the police station, kathy gomez had become the key witness in the investigation of the fed-ex murder. gomez had signed a sworn statement claiming she overheard the same suspects talking about details of both crimes that only the killers or the cops would know. tell me if you recognize
worked through the night knocking on doors and collecting evidence. then as the sun rose the next morning some of the cops turned their attention to another murder, another bloody crime scene. this is the video police recorded of that second murder scene. it was seemingly unrelated but just a half mile away in the same precinct. this was a busy night for the murder business in the bronx. time now is approximately 7:15 a. m. on january 19th, 1995. this time, a livery cab driver named baithe diop had been found slumped over his steering wheel shot multiple times, the victim of an apparent robbery. the driver s money and cell phone were missing. the investigation of the cab driver s murder would be headed by 31-year-old detective mike donnelly, who worked alongside detective aiello. the two detectives donnelly and aiello ended up putting their heads and cases together, concluding the same group of several people committed both murders.
aiello went with what they had and closed both murder cases. within three weeks, they arrested their suspects and the bronx district attorney tried them. in all, six people were convicted. we ll call them the bronx six. five men and a woman. all sent away facing 25 to life. one of them was eric glisson. what s it like to hear that verdict read? it s like a shot in the chest. it s like your heart just melts. just dissolves. you actually think that, you know, they read the wrong verdict. that this can t be true. the nypd was quite proud of detectives donnelly and aiello s work, so proud that five months after the arrests the department allowed the detectives to be featured in new york magazine about how they amazingly cracked the cases. how the detectives could have believed that and decided to run with this and send them to jail for the rest of their