norman hile now felt he had enough evidence to successfully fight for kevin s life. but as he prepared his appeals, yet another witness came forward, fully 20 years after the crime. i hear on the tv set that they re going to put kevin cooper to death, and i went, are you kidding me? on the night of the murders, christine slonaker was eating at the canyon corral, a local country/western bar just two miles from the ryens home. as we were eating, in through the back swinging doors of the kitchen come these three guys. i noticed that one of them was covered in blood. not just little spots. this was like someone had taken
the night of the crimes, a woman named diana roper had seen her boyfriend, man named lee furrow drive up to their house in the wee hours of the morning. lee furrow comes rushing into the house wearing coveralls splattered with what looks to be spots of blood. he changes clothes and turns around and leaves. there were other people in the house, and someone looked out the window and saw a white station wagon, matching the ryens parked in the driveway with other individuals in that car. diana roper called the sheriff s department and she gave them the coveralls. the bloody coveralls that they recovered were booked into evidence. when diana roper later learned that a hatchet was used in the murders, she again called police and said that lee
furrow s hatchet was missing from his tool belt. it would make sense that somebody like lee furrow would have killed the ryens. he was a convicted murderer. he had strangled to death a young woman and thrown her body into a canal. but san bernardino police waited 11 months before questioning lee furrow. and when they did, they never asked him about his missing ax. they also seemed to accept furrow s word that he didn t own any overalls. tom parker thinks he knows why. the coveralls in fact had been destroyed. a deputy had taken them and thrown them in a dumpster behind the sheriff s department to get rid of them because it was unfounded that they had been connected to the case. of course there had never been any blood testing or whatever to come to that conclusion. hile now raised this destruction of evidence with judge huff. in a criminal prosecution, the prosecution is required to turn over to the defense any
for a time, san bernardino police apparently agreed with that conclusion. the sheriff s department was told by two different bystanders that the night of the murders, around the time that the murders had occurred, they had seen a car that matched the description of the ryens station wagon speeding down the road from the ryens house and that in that car were white men. as it turned out, josh ryen, the sole survivor of the attacks, also reported seeing multiple intruders. deputy dale sharp interviewed josh ryen just hours after he was rushed to the hospital. it wasn t good. he had at least one hatchet wound to his head. and he had had his throat slit. josh was unable to speak, so
on the ryens bed sheet, supposedly from a prison-issued sneaker. kottmeier claimed these were only manufactured and sold to prisons. in fact, it was a style of shoe that was readily available, very common tennis shoes with a very common shoe print. the question now was whether these were innocent mistakes by investigators or something more. norm hile was about to learn that before they turned their attention to cooper, police had been given other solid leads, including from the sole survivor. 8-year-old josh ryen was able to communicate to staff at the hospital that the people who had attacked him and his family were three white men. in fact, a picture of kevin cooper was on television. and he looked up, and he said that s not the one who did it.