thank you. mrs. reinboldt, my name is michael metnick. and i am the attorney for randy steidl. do you understand that? yes, i do. why is it that you re here today? because there were some things that didn t weren t truthful in the testimonies and were you there at the rhoads house the night they were killed? no. that s when i was done with the state s case. she was either there or she wasn t. who s she lying to? either way, she s not credible. why did you mention randy steidl? why did i? yes. at that point? yes. because that s who everybody was saying did it. okay. around the time of reinboldt s recantation, bill clutter obtained a previously unknown box of records from the paris police department.
bolster the credibility of debbie reinboldt. debbie reinboldt s testimony was a little bit of a revelation. she was vivid, convincing, and you ve got to remember, in champaign county, i m used to to having drug addicts testify on behalf of the state. those are the people who are present when homicides occur. after a one-week trial, randy s jury was just out for 6 1/2 hours. i sat down next to my attorney. the judge ordered the jury to come in. i don t see their faces because they re looking at the tops of their shoes, and i know it s not going to be good. your stomach and your heart s in your throat because i m listening for two words, not guilty. and i only hear one word. it doesn t sink in until i hear my mother wailing behind me. i never will forget that.
we re able to go through and view all of the police reports that included polygraph reports that had never been disclosed to us. a polygraph report where darrell herrington had failed the polygraph. but if reinboldt and herrington were lying, why had both of them fingered steidl and whitelock for the crime? randy thought he knew. two weeks before dike and karen were murdered, herb whitlock and myself had went to the fbi about prosecutor mike mcfatridge. they believed the state s attorney mike mcfatridge was unfairly targeting them for drug deals they had nothing to do with. and they provided information about the state s attorney. and the allegation they made to the fbi was that he was protecting drug dealers and gambling in paris, illinois. it was common knowledge to see the prosecutor out in bars every night, loaded. be up the next morning, he s in court prosecuting somebody for the same offense.
doing anything like this. as soon as i got that out of my mouth, she was up and out of that visiting booth, slammed the door. when we left, she said he didn t do that, rory. i said, well how do you know? and she said, by the way he answered my question. i looked him right in the eye. i know when he s lying to me. despite their mother s belief in randy s innocence, only hard evidence could shake rory s faith in the system. that evidence was about to come from an unlikely source. my epiphany came when i got the call from randy s attorney that said, i just received a letter from debbie reinboldt that says your brother wasn t there. and that he had nothing to do with it, and that she s willing to speak to me. do you swear that the testimony you re about to give will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you god? i do. proceed.
firefighters as they entered the room and after they suppressed the fire, not during the murders. that meant debbie reinboldt s testimony about the lamp had been false. even more troubling were facts callahan learned about the purported murder weapon. the knife that deborah reinboldt presented was a folding knife, it s called the racazo, where the knife bends over. that knife had a blade of 5 and some inches long. one of the things the pathologist did was measure the depth of the wounds. on both bodies, the wounds were more than six inches deep. we then took it to michael baden, a forensic pathologist, and he provided us with an affidavit and analysis. what board certifications do you have? three areas of pathology. anatomical pathology, pathological pathology, forensic pathology. i think dr. michael baden was able to refute the knife very easily. it was a five-inch blade, the