the make or break witness. if you have reason not to believe him, then you have some lack of confidence in the jury verdict. the testimony of a thoroughly discredited perjuror, that s what they said. we would say he is a [ bleep ] liar. cleveland also should have disclosed his deal with masse. gary masse should have been confronted with the fact that he really did have a deal with the prosecution. in a fair proceeding, a jury should hear it all. together, hawkins wrote, these errors were devastating to confidence in the process. still, prosecutor cleland fought the ruling all the way to the supreme court without success. six months later, gloria was freed. in a rare step, the state bar eventually admonished cleland for hiding evidence. the state of california finally stood up and said, this is not right.
there was no deal. he said it a dozen times. the prosecution said masse had not been promised that he would receive any benefit. but he hoped that he would get a benefit. mr. masse was hoping if i tell the truth, that judge has to give me something. but we never made any kind of deal with him. two days later, the jury returned its verdict. guilty of murder in the first degree. gloria was sentenced to 32 to life. i just wanted to scream at this jury. are you crazy? how could you do this? how can you possibly believe this? and then they took me away. i lost every single thing that i ever had. but i convinced myself that as long as i could do something to
people generally believe if a person is in prison, she deserves to be there. that s not necessarily the case. joyce sent private investigator darryl carlson to visit gloria. she said i don t want you doing this. she said, i ve had enough of this for the last few years. i don t want it anymore. i can t handle it. i think she didn t want to get her hopes up needlessly. and she didn t want to see me waste my money. i did have some inheritance money from my father which i went through rather quickly. i just thought it was worth the expense. over gloria s objections, joyce hired carlson who soon found a note in the case files revealing cleland s unorthodox relationship with his star witness, gary masse. you don t take a suspect in a murder case home for conjugal visits and chicken and dumpling dinners without handcuffs.
murder could no longer face execution. the death penalty is off the table. and that was that. and since she doesn t get the death penalty, she is allowed to be out on bail. gloria was eligible for bail, but there were objections from the new prosecutor on her case. an assistant d.a. named kit cleland. kit cleland was far more emotional than the first prosecutor. he was just angry and very sarcastic. you know, she s a murderer, she s a killer. she s going to run, and cleland seemed to feel he was the avenging angel of god. the judge didn t buy it. look. did you pull her off an international flight? did you catch her running down the road? and cleland went no, not exactly. and the judge said, you know what? she s out on $25,000 bail and you can leave her alone. gloria was free on bail for almost two years.
but waiting for her day in court proved to be an emotional roller coaster. i would go from thinking they will never convict me of something i didn t do to thinking they re going to send me away for a million years. i did everything i could to avoid it. there was no way that i could even cope with the idea. shutting herself off, gloria missed some critical developments. the fbi discovered stephen desantis holed up in texas. he went on trial in 1985. i acted as if it had nothing to do with me at all. i should have been studying the daily transcript of it. i would have known that stephen desantis said he never heard of me, never saw me in my life. the star witness against stephen desantis was gary masse. the jury found desantis guilty of murder and sentenced him to death. gary would next testify at