but in late august 1988 he told his dad he wanted to start a lawnmowing business. i was going to help him with that. i was going to help him get a truck. well, he never called me that weekend. and i found out on monday that he had been killed on friday. it was the coldest day of my life. as we covered all of this ground, he shared something with me that i had heard no one else mention. he said that tony klann had told him, richard, that he had witnessed a rape in the apartment building where he lived. i understood that there was going to be a trial and tony was going to be a witness for that. after we hung up, i felt like i needed to share that information with neil. martin told me that. and i went down to the justice
hole in your trachea, you could plug it perhaps, you might be able to make noise. it might sound something like this. so there is no way that anthony klann could be running down a creek bed trying to plug two holes in his trachea so he can scream for his life. after visiting the crime scene, father neil had other suspicions about espinoza s testimony. joe supposedly grabs the knife and goes after anthony in the creek bed, stabbing him. and yet there were no tire tracks or anything on the side of the creek. and so i thought, whoa, something s not right here. neil believed espinoza had to be lying. but a witness who was lying did not necessarily mean joe was telling the truth. neil needed to know more about joe s background. joe s father died when he was
but in order to get a new trial they had to find new evidence. so neil took a new approach. i thought, one of the things i need to do to get help is media attention. one of the first media outlets that i got was the cleveland scene magazine. neil kookoothe came into the office a couple weeks after i joined the staff. neil didn t oversell what he believed to be joe s case of actual innocence. he came to me with pieces of the case that he felt were questionable. kuz interviewed dozens of witnesses and discovered pieces of evidence that joe s defense didn t have at trial. i got in touch with the two detectives who first responded to this case and confirmed my instinct that there was more to the story than had previously been told. the human body holds eight to ten pints of blood. when tony s body was found, he had two pints of blood left. yet there was no blood or forensic evidence of any kind
moved into a basement apartment near little italy. he lived in the coventry area which at the time was something a lot of 20-somethings did. they were blue-collar workers and they partied a lot. i was not an angel. i drank. i drank like a fish. right across the street from where i was living was a bar called the saloon. and i was in there throwing darts one day and ed espinoza, the foreman for mike keenan, came in and threw out a general question, who needs a job? and he hired me as a landscaper plus home repair work. i started work the next day, september 1st. september 26th, i m sitting in jail. in contrast to joe s story, neil discovered that the man who put joe on death row, eddie espinoza, had a very checkered past. eddie espinoza was someone who in court admitted that he
longenecker, stoney lewis s alleged rape victim, who had been found living in florida. neil convinced chris that his testimony could save joe s life. i wasn t able to do anything for tony because and so i figured, if i could help someone else, then i ll do that. chris, who is legally blind and was born with a physical disability on the left side of his body, was 22 years old and tony klann s roommate back in 1988. he told the court what happened one evening when he was hanging around with his downstairs neighbor, stoney lewis. we went back to his place to hang out. and decided to make something to eat, i guess. and he started pressing up against me and crap. and i was like, dude, what the hell are you doing? i told him i wasn t into that. and he was a little bit more