after staying a while, stoll made his way down to rural oklahoma. very nice people here. there were old friends there who had stuck with him through all the trouble. john and cathy martinez had made a room available. but there was an unsettling truth behind the kindness of friends. if not for them, stoll would very likely be living on the streets. i got out at 61 and had a $742 social security check. what in the world do you do with that? have you been able to get a job anytime in the last couple of years? that s been really hard, because they ask have you ever been arrested for a felony, and i can say no. but it says, have you ever been in prison and i got to say yes. if you weren t convicted of a felony but yes, you re in prison, explain that one. and that s always and accused of molesting children, that s got to be tough for anybody to get past. sure. even if you didn t do it. i understand. i understood perfectly. it just hurts. still, in his drifting limbo,
he was 8 when he testified stoll had assaulted him. sometimes just out of the blue it would come up, for whatever reason i d think about it. this was haunting? yeah, it was. haunting because sampley, one of stoll s alleged victims, says the man never touched him. this man was totally innocent. it s hard to understand how i could fabricate a lie like that. then there was this young man who has asked not to be identified. he also testified against stoll. i knew i was lying, but they told me i had to. do you remember how you felt in court saying those things? scared. scared of what? scared of losing my parents. scared of the police. forced to lie as young children? exactly what stoll had been saying for years. so with this ammunition, his lawyers applied for a writ of habeas corpus, essentially asking for another day in court to present their new testimony.
guilty, guilty, guilty. yes. convicted of crimes so heinous, she received a murderer s sentence. i was given 48 years. 48 years? 48 years. and no contact with my children. ever? ever. i couldn t call them, i couldn t write them. a heavy sentence. but that seemed to be just what bakersfield and the rest of the country wanted. when grafton and stoll were sentenced, child molestation, a crime kept hidden in years past for wont of shaming the victim, had burst forth from a dark closet into the national spotlight. you re charged in indictment a in many ways prosecutors were breaking new ground and started uncovering what they believed to be organized molestation rings from minnesota to massachusetts.
opinion and shared oh, my god, he s innocent. we ve got to get him out. but what would the alleged victims of stoll s sex ring have to say about that? one by one stoll s lawyers tracked them down. remember little donny grafton? margie grafton s son? he testified in 1984 that stoll and his mom forced him into orgies. didn t they? she never did anything wrong. donald grafton, now grown, says it never happened. he tells us authorities pressured him to lie. i was just tricked into lying to put my mom into prison. in other words, if you said what they wanted you to say, you would get your life back? yeah. you d get your mother back? go back to normal. did john stoll ever molest you? no. do you know if john stoll ever molested any of those kids who went to that house? i never saw it. i never heard about it. i never even thought about it. i went swimming there a few times. a handful of times. this is ed sampley.
now, she implied that they that they anticipated gaining money, that they were going to sue and get rich off of this. part of the lawsuit, you bet. first of all, that meant each of them independently came up with this idea. because when we asked them about the case, they recanted. well, maybe you suggested they might want to sue. we suggested it? how would that conversation go? we would sit down and say there s this guy in prison and we know he molested you a bunch of years ago, but why don t you come in and help us get him out of prison. but then maybe you can come in and sue the government and say that you lied because they made you lie. it doesn t pass the laugh test. but now can the one piece of testimony which could be more important than all the rest, stoll was hoping his own son jed would also tell the court that he too had been forced to lie back when he was a little boy 6 years old. now stoll watched a grown man take the stand. that s the first i had seen him,