Examined: The Backfire Effect | New Podcast

Guaranteed Human.

“In 1986, a man named Scott Maclin was killed in broad daylight.”

Police quickly found their suspect, prosecutors convicted him.

But now, almost 40 years later, I'm re-examining this case. "I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job." Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time?

Listen to "examined," the backfire effect, wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin. Hey listeners, Josie Duffy Rice here. I'm dropping into your feed today to bring you a preview of my new podcast, "examined," the backfire effect.

Nearly 40 years ago, in the parking lot of a community college in Port Caron, Michigan, a student named Scott Maclin was shot dead in broad daylight. The police quickly found their suspect. And that guy has now been imprisoned for 40 years. The guy who says he's innocent, and who has 11 alibi witnesses that put him across

the state at the time of the murder. This is a story of police corruption, prosecutorial misconduct, and a very, very complicated man. My promise, you'll find the story as gripping as I did. Find "examined," the backfire effect, wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Pushkin plus subscribers can hear each episode at free. Sign up on the "examined" show page on Apple, or at pushkin.fm/+.

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 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 the loud bang would startle you. That's why, on the morning of November 5th, 1986, when a loud crack whipped through a cold air, people nearby didn't think much of it. You know, we didn't even discuss it.

Oh, a car back there. There was no discussion. I could have scored the either of back, but it sounded like a car backfiring. I didn't move into parking lot. You know, I remember the noise.

Which, by the way, wasn't unusual. 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, the St. Claire County Community College”

in Port here on Michigan. Some of our students, some of our 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 here on lives near the intersection of Lake here on in the St. Claire River, and a few blocks from the waterfront sits St. Claire County Community College, or SC4 as the locals call it. The St. Claire County Community College is spread over an attractive 26 acre campus in central Port here on day and evening classes.

That was a clip from a very 1980s promotional video. Downtown Port here on is pretty with a 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 and locked up with their friends, a bunch of 18, 19, 20-year-olds, who heard not a car, but a gunshot. "You don't expect to hear a shotgun blast in downtown Port here on when you're walking through the college parking lot.

You just don't expect that."

The gunshot that no one realized was a gunshot, was the first thing people did not

recognize, but there were other things, too, like the scream. "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." Sharon was on her way to work at SC4 that day.

In my head, I think it's, I don't know what I was thinking, like it couldn't be real.

There was another student who he was, and I just made a comment about, "Oh, my God,

“I hope someone was just screw around out there, but sounds it's so real."”

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 here on, almost 40 years later. I'm Jesse Duffy Race, and this is the backfire effect, episode 1, "The Good Cop." I'm not from Michigan, I'm from Georgia, I'm a journalist, and I used to be a lawyer,

and 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 it to 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, and brilliant man, a strange man, a man unlike anyone I've ever met before, but I'm getting ahead of myself. A 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.

Kathy later told authorities that it did not sound like a yell that a person would make if they were in trouble. Wanda and Jean both saw something weird after they heard it. Wanda, quote, "saw a man bend over and grab himself, then he ran between two cars." She thought he was joking, so she headed to horticulture class.

Jean heard someone cry, "Help me," heard him say, "Oh God, I'm hurt." She apparently said that she saw a man quote walking by his vehicle and it crouched over position, but felt in her mind that this was just one of the college students putting on some sort of act. So she too, just went inside. A number of witnesses would later tell investigators about another strange thing.

A person wearing a red nylon ski jacket lying next to a car. Most of them just assumed it was someone working on their vehicle, but not an 18-year-old student named Max. His story would be different.

I was always never late, and I was late that day, so I was in a rush.

I was surprised that there was a parking spot that close to the main buildings here to me, like that being late usually, that never happens. The parking spot that Max found was right next to a plymothed turismo. I pulled in, grabbed my books, as I walked past kind of fast walk toward class.

“I remember seeing legs hanging out from under the car, and I thought that was kind of strange,”

so I stopped, just kind of backed up and said, "You know, yeah, you need me in the help of me." You didn't respond, and so I kind of edged up along the side of the car and said, "Hey, you okay?" and then I heard kind of the effort of moan. And so then I kind of came up to the front of the car there, and he was lying on the ground there. Max would later learn the man on the ground.

Was a student named Scott McLean, and as Max tried to help him, he realized that Scott had been shot. Another student, sees Max trying to turn Scott's body over. Max tried to do what he could to keep the victim alive, using his clothes to pack the wound. But it was a losing battle. I remember taking off my jacket and stuffing it in the side, trying to keep the blood from,

Within minutes, the fire department and the paramedics arrived, by the time police officers got there,

the EMTs had already loaded Scott's body under the structure. They pronounced him dead about half an hour later, but Max suspects he was the last person to see anything like life in Scott McLean. I was giving him CPR, and I remember he kind of just kind of... I'm not thinking to move these, you know, when somebody passes away, he kind of like,

“it just kind of like the body just kind of went limp. You know what I mean?”

And he just had kind of tilted back. It's just like I think he was already dead by the time the police got there.

In 1986, a man named Scott McLean was killed in broad daylight.

Police quickly found their suspect, prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm re-examining this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real, and I was like, "Well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job." Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time?

Listen to examined the backfire effect wherever you get your podcasts.

In my field of work, if you're lucky, or maybe unlucky, depending, you feel drawn to a story.

And I was drawn to this one, the series of events that started with Scott McLean's tragic death 40 years ago. Like I said, it's not the kind of story I normally tell. I've reported on juvenile asylum in Alabama, cropped cops in Kansas, battered women, serving time in Louisiana. I tend to focus most of my work in the south where I live, and as a black journalist, my stories are often about black people.

In other words, usually when I do a story, I identify more with the subjects. It's not that I see myself reflected in them exactly, but that they're familiar to me in a way. At times it's been kind of strange to be so focused on this story about these white people in a small town in Michigan. One reason that this story of the craziest ones I've heard in my career

“has captivated me is because I think it says a lot about the system, but maybe even more about us.”

About you, about me. I've come to an uncomfortable conclusion over the past few years that I, and I would guess you, are capable of more than I would like to believe. Scott McLean was 20 years old in 1986, and a couple of pictures I've seen of him, old snap shots, from basketball games and high school yearbooks. He's tall with a nice smile and angular features, an athlete, one of two boys, the prize son of Gary and Patricia McLean.

At Croswell Lexington High School, we're Scott graduated in 1984. He was captain of the golf and basketball teams and was voted best dressed and most popular. Here's a former classmate of Scott's. He was like maybe the homecoming king or in the parade and he was very good looking, very attractive. Scott was from a small town about half an hour outside of Port Huron called Croswell

“Michigan where his father was mayor. The teacher liked him. I think it was that he was from a well-known”

family, maybe in Croswell, and you could kind of tell the kids who came from Croswell, good families, and the kids who didn't, and I remember him being treated as though he were, you know, like a Croswell, good family. After he graduated high school, Scott had started at SC4, where he was planning on getting his associates degree in business. He worked part-time at a men's clothing store, where he made close to minimum wage. He liked bird hunting. People said he had

great manners and a kind heart. One old friend called him a good-eating shoes. After he died, there was quote after quote from his high school teachers and a local barber. All American boy, they said fantastic young man, a great kid, happy go lucky. The kind you want your daughter to bring home. Speaking of which, Scott had just gotten engaged the month before he was killed. His fiance's name was Crystal Merrill. Crystal and Scott had grown up in the same area. They've been friends

She'd been her childhood on a farm, three or four hundred acres where they raised dairy cattle

“in beef cattle. People described Crystal as quiet, hardworking, family oriented, kind of like the”

girl next door. They'd started dating near the end of high school and continued on and off through the beginning of college. They broken up in early 1986, but they'd reconciled a few months later.

At the time of the murder, Crystal was pregnant, still in her first trimester. They were planning

to get married, got coming January. I suspect you won't hear much in this podcast from Scott's family or crystals. I've reached out and will keep trying because I'm interested in hearing more about who Scott was, but his family has been reticent to talk, which, again, have your child killed like that as you're preparing for him to become a father himself to go from planning a wedding,

“to lowering him into a grave, and then to be asked to rehash it all these years later.”

I get why they don't want to relive all this. Let's return to the parking lot and the witnesses at SC4 in court here on. After Scott is shot and Max tries to save him and the EMTs try CPR before they realize the heart-sinking clarity that such a job requires that it was a loss cause. At the boy, he was really just a boy was dead. After they put Scott's body on a structure and reased

to the hospital, the witnesses are left shell-shocked, overwhelmed, confused. And it turns out, the witnesses had witnessed very little. No one had seen Scott drive up, but he just

pulled in. He'd missed his first class that morning. No one knew where he'd just been,

no one knew where he was headed. As he tried to get in his car, had he just gotten out. But there was this one thing. Even before they realized that someone had been shot, a few witnesses said they noticed a car drive out of the parking lot quite fast.

“And then I do remember hearing a car racing away. And a car going, because in parking lots,”

cars usually don't go very fast. And then I heard a car going kind of going fast. I remember seeing a car racing out of the parking lot. I remember seeing

a guy leaves in the parking lot, leave the car, drive fast, too quickly for parking lots,

too, and exit the parking lot. At morning, at least three witnesses described this car in generally the same way. They described the color as pinkish tan, or reddish brown, or light brown, in precise yes, but at least in the same color family. And they described the car in the same way, a small compact, a hatchback. Imagine a Prius, but smaller and more boxy. So, a small pinkish brownish reddish hatchback, and maybe a man driving it. No one got a great

look at the guy, but they say he was a white male. Estimates anywhere from 18 to 25 with dark hair. Some say he's wearing a ski mask and a green army fatigue jacket. Some mentioned facial scruff, others don't. Two people say he's wearing a knit cap, another person says he's not. He's in the car so they can't tell how tall he is. The man is described as trying to conceal his face, or glancing in his rearview mirror to see what was going on with the victim, or, alternatively,

laughing and grinning. It's worth noting too, there isn't totally agreement here, even on the basic descriptions. One witness later recalled a blue car, another one said he thought he saw a woman driving, not a man. And more than one person mentions a woman, possibly blonde, possibly wearing a red knit sweater, standing near Scott Macklum after he was shot. So now, you have the beginnings of a strange story. There's so much more that's weird about this murder and everything

that comes after. So many lives that will be upended, and not just those of Scott's family and friends. In 1986, a man named Scott Macklum was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect. Prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later,

"Well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job." Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Listen to examined. The backfire effect, wherever you get your podcasts. St. Claire, Michigan is a tiny town, about four square miles, five, six thousand people,

over 90 percent white. And on this November afternoon, the drive there is something close to

beautiful. It's not as cold as I a resident of Atlanta expected it to be. You would not believe the one or close I bought for the strip. Police line leggings, thick wool socks. Just a few blocks after we pull off the long stretch of highway, where fallen leaves have piled up along the edges.

“We find ourselves in farm country. I think it's been the next one. I think it might be the one”

at the red truck. Yeah, here's his barn. I'm with Joshua Sharp, another journalist from Georgia, who has spent plenty of his own time wrestling with this story. I'm an investigative journalist.

I am based in Detroit, Michigan, where I have lived for going on two years now.

On this Tuesday afternoon, you're on our way to visit a retired police detective named Herb Wellzer. Herb's around 70 years old, and he has lived here in this buttery yellow house, essentially his whole life. It was kind of a strange thing for me and Josh to meet Herb in person after all this time. After talking to him on the phone and reading over his research so much these past few years. I don't think I'd even seen a picture of Herb before we got there, but I knew him very well.

I've been reading his years of his work. But, you know, Herb on the phone,

I always just he felt like this sort of gentle grandfatherly figure and then show up,

and that is exactly who we found. Hello, Jack, I'm James.

“I give them a treat every afternoon, so that's what they're waiting for.”

I see you here. Now over here, I'll show you inside the barn. They actually built the barn before they built the house. My great grandparents. Oh, no, priorities. In the episodes to come, you'll be hearing a fair amount about the port here on police department. It is not a large operation, not now, and not back in 1986. Back then, it had around 50 officers, mostly men, and a town of around 35,000, and shrinking. One of those officers was Herb

Wellzer. I went here to St. Claire High School and graduated in 1973, and at that time, I still love sports. I'm really into sports, and I wanted to be a gym teacher, but I could see there

“really wasn't any openings, you know, in gym teaching, so I had three cousins that were police officers,”

and I thought, "Well, maybe I should try law enforcement." Herb, like a lot of people in the story, graduated from SE4, and was hired as a cadet in 1974 at the Port Your Police Department, and then was hired as an officer in 1976. I was the youngest officer, the Port Your Police Department had ever hired. Just after I was 21, I was hired. Port Your On was not exactly crime written back then, except, of course, for the Canadians. We had a lot of persons from Canada

that came over, because at that time, the drinking age was 18 here in Michigan, and so a lot of Canadians would come over and get into fights in the bars and programs, and a lot of those calls. Herb worked nearly 30 years as a Port Your On Police Officer. On the wall in his office, it's a plaque with all his badges, the sign of the years of his life he gave to the department. So as a patrol officer, I was there for about seven years, and then I was a detective for about

five years, uniformed surgeon for a few years, uniformed lieutenant for a few years, and then the last three years, detective lieutenant. I've spent my career scrutinizing law enforcement. Herb spent his

but his role was to keep the community safe, to behave ethically at all times.

And every so often, he'd hear whispers about the Scott McLean case. He was never assigned to it,

“but he remembers when the call came into the station. I remember the radio call that it came out”

as an injured person there in the parking lot, and then later on in the day I heard the murder had occurred, so I was working that day. And it wasn't long before the murder was all over the news. The story kept growing bigger and bigger, and the rumors started. After her retired from the police force in 2005, he decided to get a private investigator's license. He started looking into the Scott McLean case, hoping to find something that would

vindicate law enforcement. The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags

that just kept coming up over and over. Herb began to realize that something had gone terribly wrong, and even though he didn't cause the problem, he felt it was his responsibility to help fix it.

“So, that's really why that I became involved in this, as churches to do the right thing.”

And I knew it would come at a cost. Herb was going to be investigating the work of his former colleagues, his friends. Some of the audio you'll hear during this series comes from interviews he's done. He showed us the boxes and boxes of documents that he's collected over the years, sitting in his basement. All of those files there on that rack, and then all of them to the whale machine. And this is my to-do list right there. Oh my gosh. Wow. In Herb's prediction, that this investigation

would come at a cost was correct. And not just because he's been doing it on his own dime, all by himself for years. He's done insane amount of work. And once I realized that all of that's

there, I'm thinking, okay, maybe actually, wait a second, maybe my God, maybe Herb's already figured

it out, and nobody, including Herb has put it all together because I couldn't tell you how many interviews is done. In psychology, there's a term called the backfire effect. A concept coined 15 or so years ago, though the ideas that undergird it have existed for much longer. It says that correcting a false belief can sometimes strengthen it. It's kind of controversial

in social psychology, actually. But the idea survives because of points at something real and much older than the term. Rational human behaviors, not the same thing as predictable human behavior. If we were purely rational, our beliefs would shift slightly in accordance with new data. Calculators are rational. Humans are not. That's one of the most beautiful things about being human, are irrationality. Our hopes, our perceptions, our convictions, are the prism through which we

often function. We do not hold our deepest beliefs the way a calculator process is numbers. We hold them the way we hold the people we love in the picture we have of ourselves as things that would cost us something to give up. Another variation of the backfire effect. One that sounds prettier, more romantic, is called belief perseverance. Belief perseverance is woven throughout this case you'll find out. This is a show about everyone for whom the cost of being wrong had simply

grown too high to pay, predictable incentives leading to monstrous outcomes. [Music]

“After Scott's death, everyone in port here on is left wondering who kills a kid like this?”

The people who knew him couldn't make sense of it. As a teacher at his high school put it, things like this don't happen to such nice people. And who kills someone this way? Who does it in the parking lot at 9 a.m. I've been to this parking lot it's big. It sits at a busy intersection surrounded by buildings and houses. To commit a crime here is so risky, so impulsive, it's frankly stupid.

But it's possible that the one person who might have been feeling worried that day in the parking lot was Scott. Later people would say that Scott had been acting nervous, preoccupied,

him. He allegedly told his manager at work that two men had come into the store a couple of times

“looking for him. One time he said he confronted them and they left. Another time he hid.”

Scott told other people too, a couple of his friends, one of his professors, Crystal, his fiance, said two men had followed them home the night after Halloween. Plus, stuff had been stolen out of his car, someone let the air out of his tires.

But for some reason, as far as I can figure, Scott never pointed the finger at anyone.

He knew them, he told people, but he didn't seem to tell anyone the name of who he thought was harassing him. There were other things going on with Scott. School wasn't going great. His cumulative GPA was about a 1.5. Already he was in his third year of a two-year business program and nowhere near to graduating. Part of the problem it seemed was that he rarely showed up. If he wasn't at school, he was at work, Crystal would later say.

But he wasn't really at school. He'd missed 21 days of his accounting class in 18 of algebra.

“Something was up. The question is, was it connected to the way that he died?”

Scott's father, Gary Maclim, was not only mayor of their town. He also ran the insurance agency

where Crystal worked. That's where she was when the police called around 10 a.m. on the morning of November 5th. Crystal said that she didn't think anything of it. At her job, sometimes cops would call and tell you about an accident or something. But then she heard Gary Maclim say, "Is he hurt very bad?" And knew it was about Scott. He ran out, didn't tell her what happened. But soon after she got a call from a friend who told her that Scott had been killed in the

parking lot the best C4. Scott's parents and Crystal went to the hospital to wait.

Soon others came. Crystal's little sister. Scott's boss at the menswear store.

There they learned that the worst had happened. That Scott was dead. In the waiting room, in the midst of their collective shock, they were joined by two officers from the port here on police department. They were starting their homicide investigation and they began to ask questions. That's when the trajectory of another life was changed forever when they heard about a man who might be responsible, a drifter, an outsider, a suspect.

Coming up on the backfire effect.

“The treason came out to me and said, "Why do you have to let all over you?"”

As I'm walking down the driveway, I see there's like five cars lined up and then I'm really freaking out. The whole house was surrounded with days and black and rifle. I'm like, "Who is this? What are you doing in my home?" I'm who this is right now I'm calling police. He goes, "Why am I in the police?" The backfire effect is hosted and reported by me, Jocie Duffy Rice,

additional reporting by Joshua Sharp. It's produced by Lydia Jean-Cott with additional production support from Trina Manino. Our editor is Julia Barton, our executive producer, our Amy Gaines McQuade and Jacob Smith. Our music was composed by Daniel Walter, sound design and additional music by Jake Gorsky. Our fact checker is Lauren Vespoli and our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Special thanks to a few more people at Pushkin who made the

backfire effect possible. Greta Cone, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Jake Flanagan, Owen Miller, Sarah Brugher, and Kiran Chakurgi. In 1986, a man named Scott Maclin was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect, prosecutors convicted him, but now almost 40 years later, I'm re-examining this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real and I was like, "Well, they're going to figure out

this is not me. They're going to do their police job." Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Listen to examined, the backfire effect wherever you get your podcasts.