#1171 - Nick Yarris

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Three, two, one, stir it up, Nick, we're live.

Nick Yarris (0:08)

Hello, everyone.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

Hello, everyone. Put the ear cups on, and cheers, sir.

Nick Yarris (0:13)

Oh man, thank you, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Thanks for being here, man.

Nick Yarris (0:15)

Yeah, thank you for bringing me out here, man. I know we meant to do this before, but I hope now with all this good energy between us, we can do this properly for your audience.

Joe Rogan (0:26)

Listen, man, to say that you've had a crazy experience in this life is one of the most understated things a person could ever say.

I mean, where do we begin, right? Let's tell everybody your story. So you were wrongfully committed of murder. You spent 22 years on death row before you were exonerated by DNA evidence.

Nick Yarris (0:53)

Hello, everyone. My name is Nick Yarris, and I was, as Joe said, convicted and sentenced to die for a rape and murder I didn't commit at the age of 21 In 1981, a woman named Mrs. Craig was murdered in Delaware.

I had never met the woman. I was in prison on unrelated charges, and I stupidly made up a story to try and get out of those charges.

The police soon realized that I was a liar, and they fabricated the charges around me then.

So it's ironic that in a few days you're going to Upper Derby, Pennsylvania, and that's where the murder happened, really, basically.

And Linda May Craig was leaving her job at 4 or 5 p.m. on December 15, 1981 She's going home. She gets abducted. I don't know any of this, but I tried in desperation to get out of a lie that this officer put on me. I got pulled over in a stolen car. The cop beats me up. He puts charges on me. I'm facing life imprisonment, and I'm a junkie because all of my life I was destroyed by what happened to me at the age of 7 I had my head beaten by a man with a rock in his hand after he sexually assaulted me, and I did all the stupid things that people can do. In the aftermath, I kept it a secret, and I let it foster all the anger in me. I became very aggressive as a child, and I ended up in trouble all the time. And when I was in prison on these unrelated charges, to the murder, I stupidly fell into that mindset of desperation of trying to get out of it. So, the police put a prisoner in the cell next to me. He said I confessed to him. I was given a three-day trial. I was sentenced to death and put on death row. And then, stupidly, I escaped from prison in 1985 and ended up on the FBI's most wanted list.

Joe Rogan (2:45)

How'd you get out?

Nick Yarris (2:47)

I was being transported to court, and the sheriffs were being cool with me at first. They were talking about what was going on in Philly. They were two nice guys, like, 68, 67

And we drove five hours from one of the hardest prisons in America called Huntington. And I left there after spending two years of my first two years in silence, so if you opened your mouth, they would come in and beat your head in. So I was so glad to get in the car because my mom was waiting in my lawyer's office because they were going to give me a review of my trial because they had withheld so much evidence. So I was eager to go to court, and it was the coldest day of 1985, February 15th.

We stop at a gas station in Exton, Pennsylvania, and as I got out of the car, the officer driving pulled past the cubicles. Now we all got out of the car and ran over to the cubicle together, and I went in and started peeing, and the officer's holding the door for me, and my eyeglasses start fogging up. You know what I mean? Because you go from the freezing cold to the warm to the cold, your eyeglasses. So all I know is I turn around, and I come out, and he has the door like that, and I put my head down, go under his arm, and I turn left and go back to the car, and the dude smoking a cigarette doesn't know that his partner went in the cubicle to piss.

And as I'm running back to the dude, he pulls his pistol out, and point blank shoots at me, Joe, like pow. And as it went past my face, I was like, oh shit, I hit the ground. I ran, and he followed me with the gun. I could feel it like I was waiting from the blast me.