Episode 1: The Good Cop

Josie Duffy Rice (0:03)

PUSHKIN PUSHKIN PUSHKIN.

Depending on how old you are, maybe you've never heard the sound of a car backfiring. That's what happens when a little bit of gasoline reaches the exhaust system and then suddenly ignites. These days, cars don't backfire that much, but that used to happen all the time. You'd be in a parking lot somewhere, and a loud bang would startle you. That's why on the morning of November 5th, 1986, when a loud crack whipped through the cold air, people nearby didn't think much of it.

SPEAKER_2 (0:48)

You know, we didn't even discuss it. Oh, a car backfired. There was no discussion.

Max (0:54)

I could have swore that I heard a backfire. It sounded like a car backfiring as I was moving to the parking lot.

Sherry (1:00)

You know, I remember the noise.

Max (1:03)

Which, by the way, wasn't unusual.

Josie Duffy Rice (1:05)

Those voices are some of the people who were in the area that day. Max, Kathy, and Sherry. They, and a few others, were in the parking lot of the St. Clair County Community College in Port Huron, Michigan.

Some were students, some were employees. All were unaware that they were about to take on a new identity. Witness.

This is where our story starts. In the easternmost city in Michigan, spitting distance from Ontario, Canada, Port Huron lives near the intersection of Lake Huron and the St. Clair River. And a few blocks from the waterfront sits St. Clair County Community College, or SC4, as the locals call it.

SPEAKER_5 (1:53)

The St. Clair County Community College is spread over an attractive 26-acre campus in central Port Huron. Day and evening classes.

Josie Duffy Rice (2:01)

That was a clip from a very 1980s promotional video.

Downtown Port Huron is pretty with the low slung brick buildings and the Christmas lights at night. But on the morning of November 5th, 1986, it was gray and chilly and dreary. A layer of clouds coating the sky.

The parking lot of SC4 was full. Most students were already in class, but there were a handful of struggling kids. They were adults technically, sure. But really just kids falling in lockstep with their friends. A bunch of 18, 19, 20-year-olds who heard not a car, but a gunshot.

SPEAKER_2 (2:42)

You don't expect to hear a shotgun blast in downtown Port Huron when you're walking through the college parking lot. You just don't expect that.

Josie Duffy Rice (2:52)

The gunshot that no one realized was a gunshot was the first thing people did not, could not recognize. But there were other things too, like the scream.

Sherry (3:04)

I'll tell you what I vividly remember.

I heard the gunshot, and it was so close. And then I heard the death-curdling scream of that young man. And I froze.

Josie Duffy Rice (3:20)

Sharon was on her way to work at SC4 that day.

Sherry (3:24)

In my head, I'm thinking, I don't know what I was thinking. Like it couldn't be real.

I proceeded, I went on into the college. There was another student, do not know who he was. And I just made a comment about, oh my God, I hope someone was just screwing around out there, but that sounded so real. All he said was, yeah, I did.

Josie Duffy Rice (3:55)

This whole series of events probably has taken me longer to describe than it occurred in the moment. A couple of minutes max.

But that one moment would still haunt these witnesses and many others in Port Huron, almost 40 years later.

I'm Josie Duffy Rice, and this is The Backfire Effect, episode one, The Good Cop.

I'm not from Michigan. I'm from Georgia. I'm a journalist and I used to be a lawyer. In both careers, I focused almost exclusively on the criminal legal system. The story I'm going to tell you, the one that has been rattling around in my brain for a couple of years now, that has taken up thousands of hours of my mental real estate, the story that I've honestly wanted to shake, just to loosen its grip on me a little bit, is not the kind of story I usually tell. But it grabbed a hold of me. There's a man in prison right now who maybe shouldn't be there, and he's a complicated man, a brilliant man, a strange man, a man unlike anyone I've ever met before. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

On November 5th, 1986, there was the backfire, there was the scream. But as it turns out, the scream didn't really set off alarm bells either. Cathy later told authorities that it did not sound like a yell that a person would make if they were in trouble.