Off Duty: Digital Forensics

Since the day he was arrested, Tyrone Clay had been asking police to look at his playstation. If they did, they'd see he was gaming on the night, Clifton Lewis was murdered, playing NBA 2K.

You know, I was on it that night, I remember I was playing, I was, because I always played basketball. It was 2K-11, back 2K-2011.

He taught police his attorneys, practically anyone who would listen, just check the playstation, you'll see. I told him I said to grab my game, my game gonna prove to y'all. It's just like a computer. It's a hard drive in there. It's gonna save everything, so I was telling them that. I said, man, if you look on that game, it's gonna tell you everything. But by 2022, he'd already spent a decade in the hell hole of Cook County jail, without ever being tried.

The playstation had remained on a shelf in an evidence room, gathering dust, until Jennifer's associate, Eric Bisby, heard about the playstation, and knew exactly what to do next. From the Guardian, I'm Melissa Segura, and this is Off Duty, episode 4, digital forensics. Eric grew up in Tennessee. His dad was an electrical engineer working with NASA. His mom stayed home and looked after Eric and his brother. One of his earliest memories is his mom buying the Christmas present of his dreams. Super Nintendo.

“Honestly, the only memory I have in the first house I ever lived in was meeting like 3 or 4, and mom coming home with that.”

Except it wasn't for Eric. It was for his dad, or at least it was supposed to be. Immediately it was not my dad's toy anymore, it was my brother and I's toy. It didn't take long for young Eric to discover his favorite game. Super Mario Bros. Because there's all kinds of secrets, and this was before the internet so you can look them up. So Nintendo had a hotline, and my dad would call the hotline, and they would keep like, I got a new tip, and we would be so excited.

And then we'd work all day to try to get the secret, and then when we did, we thought we'd done something very special.

That early spark, that itch to grind out a mystery. It never left him.

Gaming, coding, word games, the whole universe of puzzles. Which is to say, Eric's a pretty serious nerd.

“About a year into his internship with Jennifer, will he was supposed to be studying for the bar exam?”

Eric became obsessed with the zodiac killer. The zodiac had sent a lot of coded messages, one of which had not, at that time had been solved. And so, of course, the nerd in me said, "Well, I can solve, you know, the unsolved ones." And then I eventually wrote a whole suite of programs, trying to determine how one of the codes was written. I never solved it. Some other codebreakers did. But I was on the right track, I think.

By spring 2022, Eric had long since passed the bar, and graduated from Jennifer's intern to her associate. They worked elbow to elbow, as they dug through Alex's trial transcripts, and tried to make sense of the pages, and pages of cell phone data that they'd subpoenaed. Reading the documents this time,

“something suddenly clicked for Eric. He realized the playstation could be the key to the case.”

Here's the stage theory. Alex and Ravilla and Tyrone Clay, Melvin D. Young, at Gardicle Lone are all in this car they go to commit this robbery. Alex and Tyrone Clay get out of the car, they go run it in there, the villa supposedly shoots this guy. Their cases are intertwined. If Clay didn't do it, everything that Melvin D. Young said in his statement that came into the trial isn't true. So, in our opinion, proof that Clay didn't do it,

it was a hundred percent proof that Bill had it. Remember, for the first 19 hours Tyrone was in

custody, he denied any involvement in Lewis's murder. So when Clay's first interviewed by the police, he tells the police, I'm innocent. I didn't do this, but he said I was playing playstation. That was his alibi. I didn't do it. About two weeks later, the police went to Tyrone's home to seize the playstation. They knew that there could be important evidence on the console, players can send each other voice messages. Maybe there'd be audio of Tyrone talking about the crime.

Time stamps could show when he was online, and when he wasn't, any of which could blow up his alibi.

to effectuate the search warrant. He was with them when they did the search warrant, even.

“The next thing they do is send the police station to a place called the RCFL.”

It stands for Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory. There are 17 of these labs around the country. There are collaborations between the FBI and local law enforcement agencies where experts examine cell phones, computers, even gaming devices for digital evidence. At a time when nearly every American walks around with a cell phone or logs onto a computer or boots up a gaming device like Tyrone, the findings of the RCFL often carry significant

weight in criminal trials. Shortly after they collected the playstation from Tyrone's apartment, an analyst at the RCFL booted up Tyrone's device. He videotaped his inspection and documented his findings, and then nothing. Whatever evidence might have been on that console, it just evaporates. No one looks deeper into Tyrone's alibi. There seems to be little interest in it for nearly 10 years, until Jennifer and Eric file a subpoena with the FBI. The videotapes

one of the things that comes back to them. So one day, Eric pulls the tape out of a box and presses play.

What Eric sees basically is a screen recording of a technician scrolling through the menus

of Tyrone's playstation, presumably looking for proof that Tyrone either was or was not playing the night of the crime. There's a couple of different things that you can see. One is trophies, and so like if I'm playing, let's say a soccer game, they might have a trophy that says score a hat trick. So three goals in one game. And if you score the hat trick, you get the trophy that says hat trick, and then it'll give you a timestamp of when that happened. The other thing

that the playstation does is tell you when you were playing. So Eric played this game at this time, Eric played this game at that time, messages. If I send a message to somebody else, it'll record the time that the message was said, or if there's a voice message. Eric knows all of this because he has a playstation. He looks again at the video that RCFL had taken of its inspection, and he notices something. So what we recognized in watching the video was that the gameplay section

of the playstation, they don't go through all the games in the times they were playing in the games. It's like if you were trying to see if your spouse was treating on you and you open their cell phone and went to the text message folder, but didn't read any of the text messages. I didn't know anything, right? I'd been like, okay, they looked at it, but Eric immediately saw that they didn't. So at that point we started thinking, well, why is that the only place they

“didn't go through? I knew that something was up. I think Jennifer and I both with enough”

that was going on in the case, you know, this is a dead cop. Somebody's telling you they're playing the playstation. Normally our thought process is, if it hasn't been turned over to us, there's a reason for it. Eric passes this info to Tyrone's attorneys. They get a court order to have the playstation re-examined over the objections of prosecutors. Then a twist in the legal drama. I'm going to spare you the legal ins and outs here, but a quick overview.

Back when he was first interrogated and ultimately confessed, Tyrone asked for a lawyer and so did his alleged accomplice at Garthokalone and the police, they say, ignored them. Eventually, the courts found that police had violated Tyrone and at Garthos' rights. Their confessions were tossed. Tyrone's trial was held up. At Garthos' conviction was thrown out. Now, again, 10 years after their arrests, the state is still working to bring them both to trial.

In the meantime, it Garthok had been sent home with an ankle monitor. But Tyrone,

he'd never left Coo County jail for that entire time. I had to count on them. So every year

passed, I mark off a whole year. At the five years, I lost count. Tyrone had been awaiting trial for so long that some other guys he knew and jail had gone to trial in their own cases. Done their time. Then, been re-arrested and sent back to Coo County on entirely new charges. They'd like me to steal here? At Garthokone Tyrone's pending trials made the data on the

“police station even more important. If voice messages or other data show Tyrone playing video games,”

it would likely be game over for the case against him and maybe even for Alex and a Gartho.

attorney's office. Before we got there, we realized that this was kind of like our one shot to

“look at the police station, at least we thought. So I had brought controller, controller wire,”

power cable, HDMI cable, hook up so we could hook it up to the computer and record everything. Plastation was in an evidence bag that had been opened. It was a special addition spiderman playstation. It's a long table. We're all sitting there. We turned on the playstation and it won't turn on. And it's just screaming. It's smelling like burnt rubber and we're like, okay, well, we got to turn this thing off. We're about to do something real bad.

The playstation was sent back to the RCFL to see if they could fix it. A few months went by.

Then Jennifer and Eric heard back from the RCFL. The analyst there said the machine was broken beyond repair. I've been a video game player for long enough to know that that was likely

“untrue. I see YouTube videos of people fixing, you know, playstations, Xboxes, what have you,”

quite frequently on the internet. So I typed into Google, video game repair store. One of the results? A shop called game over on the city's northwest side. It didn't look like a chain. And it looked like whoever worked there was a gamer or had been in the video game industry for a while because they had Mario painted on the front. So I called him. On the other end of the line, the store's owner, Raul Palma Pettis answered. My name is Raul Palma Pettis. I do want to be

a video game console repair. Unlike Eric, Raul is not a gamer. He's a tinker. I was born and raised in a local town called Mansani Yong in Cuba. I saw about two hours away from the one-tonamo bay. There's not like you have like a micro center or a best by that you can go grab

“a par. I say either. You work with what you have, try to fix and try to make a work.”

Raul moved to the US in 2005 at age 15. A year later, he went into business with his cousin, buying broken video game consoles on eBay, fixing them and then reselling them for a profit. Eventually, he opened his own shop, which is where Eric found him. Over the phone, Eric explained the situation to Raul. You know, the FBI says we can't fix it and you know, looking at your store, you think you could fix it. Raul was pretty sure he could, but whether he should was another question.

First, Raul shop is in a tough part of town. He says he calls the police about once a month,

after someone breaks in. It could be bad for business if he gets on the wrong side of the CPD. The other reason was more personal. I do have a brother that is a police officer. And he actually does work as a volunteer, a police officer security guard. So, I kind of touch my heart when I found out what was going on. I actually did talk to him about the home situation. So he goes like, there is a family that is out there.

Sicken for justice. And there is a family out there looking for proof. So said, listen, I have no choice. Eric brings the playstation to Raul's little shop. He walks past the glass counter full of vintage games, and into a backroom lined with work benches, covered in pieces of old machines, and he leaves the playstation in Raul's hands. Raul rummages around a pile of spare parts. He gets to work on the USB port.

And to that, an hour later, the machine is back up and running. Raul calls Eric. The evidence Jennifer and Eric so desperately hoped to find might actually be back in play. Raul's repairs raised even more questions for Jennifer and Eric. And not just about what was on the playstation, but also about the RCFL itself. A local game shop owner fixes it in less than an hour for $35. So either the FBI and the RCFL

are massively incompetent, or they didn't want to see what was on there. I did some digging and found that the analyst who said the playstation couldn't be fixed is actually a CPD officer on assignment to the RCFL. Years earlier, when Clifton Lewis was killed, he'd been working out of the police station running the so-called operations snake doctor. I reached out to ask the RCFL if they have guidelines about analyst connections to the materials

Whatever the reason the RCFL didn't get the machine to work, Raul had it up in running. He could

see Tyrone's playstation profile. Tyrone had a very, I don't know how to describe it. Just very gentlemanly, username of the real Goonass, and it had a picture of a troll as his icon. There were some stuff, but it wasn't really the smoking gun that we were looking for. Time stamp showed that a person, username, the real Goonass, was playing an MBA 2K video game at the time that officer Lewis was gunned down. That username had even won a trophy that evening.

“But the data didn't answer a key question. Who was playing that evening? Tyrone said it was him,”

but there wasn't proof. It was a weakness the prosecutors would be almost certain to exploit. Jennifer and Eric needed something that could prove that it was Tyrone playing at the time of the murder. And Raul said, "Well, if you log in, if you get online, you can see a whole lot more." Raul was into the machine, but not into Tyrone's online playstation account. Sony gave Raul a temporary password to access Tyrone's account.

Alone in his shop, Raul logged in, and what he found was astonishing. He could hear voice messages from the player calling himself the real Goonass. He called Jennifer and Eric and described the sound of Tyrone's voice and the content of the messages. They knew immediately from his description. It was Tyrone on the playstation. He played for several hours and only stopped for logged out for 15 minutes and before he logged out,

he said, "I have to go to the bathroom and then logged back in." It had voice messages of him talking to his friends, how clay is trying to get money from other people, and how he's cheating on his girlfriend, and oh, yes, selling drugs. And so it seemed very clear to me and Jennifer based on our conversation with him that he had actually seen the real content. This was huge. Raul had unlocked evidence that Tyrone had been telling the truth all along.

At the time of the murder, he was sitting in his house, talking shit, and playing video games, and it was all on tape. So that's it, Eric figured. Boom, game over. You know, here we go. He said it day one. We've got the information right there that police should have had the information and it skipped over it. And oh my god,

“if you want to talk about a smoking gun, we've got it. Jennifer wasn't so sure.”

Eric's a Polyanna and I'm always very anxious about things and I was like, I don't believe it until we see it.

We have to see it. We need proof. We need to record it. Prosecutors always like, if you've got proof of innocence, Jennifer, we're always interested in seeing it. And like, this was our one shot at really having objective proof. Tyrone has a distinctive voice and I think it's very recognizable and I would guess that you would be able to recognize it and to have his alibi corroborated in the police didn't look at it. You know, it was, it was a huge. Jennifer and Eric made plans to stop by Raul's

shop and check out his findings for themselves. Eric called Raul, but the game repairman didn't answer. Eric kept calling Raul. His anxiety increasing with every unanswered call. It's like a week, a week goes by and we're like, what the hell Raul? You know, this is like the biggest thing that could ever happen. Well, that's happened so far in this case. And we're not hearing from you. Day after day, Eric keeps checking his phone. Nothing. No calls, no text. Just silence.

Raul is ghosting them. Around day 10, Eric's phone finally rings. Raul hadn't been ignoring

them and he hadn't been scared off. He'd been in the hospital. He'd had an emergency appendectomy,

“but everything's okay now. He'll be back at the store the next day. Great, we're back on track, right?”

Except, they're not. Raul told Eric, there was a problem. Sony gave me a temporary password, but the temporary password has expired and I can't get another one because Sony will only give me one. Raul can't get into the machine. The recordings of Tyrone's voice? He can't access them, can't play them, and no one else has heard them. Still, they know the files exist. They just need to convince someone at Sony to help them out. While they were trying to find a solution to that problem,

Every time they do update, it's a problem. The update wouldn't just be a problem. It was a disaster.

“A dead end. The software update could delete all the messages and play your data,”

Jennifer and Eric needed to prove Tyrone's alibi. In order to proceed, we have to update the console. If we do update the console,

everything what's going to get lost. Once it was updated, a recording would retrieve nothing.

Without the update, they couldn't access the files. If they did the update,

“the files would likely be deleted, lost in the digital ether. Jennifer and Eric had come so”

so close to proving Tyrone's innocence. In by extension, unraveling the state's story about Alex.

And yet, it felt like every time they were about to make a major breakthrough, disaster struck.

Like the gods were taunting them. They had been keystrokes away from a piece of evidence that most lawyers can only dream of, an audio recorded alibi. digitally, timestamp proof that the suspect was somewhere else at the time of the crime. And now, because of something as boring and innocuous as a software update that they could do nothing about, it could vanish. Forever.

“The only thing they could do was have Rau will take the stand and testify to what he had seen”

on the PlayStation. I told them, I can go in front of any judge. I can take full commitment to my grave, whatever and what I saw there. I know the messages I heard, the boys' message, I know the whole thing. It wouldn't have the same weight as hearing Tyrone's voice, with timestamps, but it might be enough. So now, everything is hanging on Raule. But he goes quiet again. Eric called Raule. No answer. And again, still no answer.

Jennifer and Eric began to worry that Raule had been spooked by the stakes of the case. Had someone gotten to him. Raule was gone. The Guardian made repeated attempts to speak with the Chicago Police Department. The Department did not have anyone available to answer our questions. A spokesperson wrote in an email. "According to documents, officers deny any misconduct. No officers have been accused of wrong

doing by officials or charged in connection with the case. The RCFL declined to comment on the case. A spokesperson for the Cook County jail said in a statement that the jail takes the safety of staff and those entrusted into its custody very seriously. And aggressively investigates all incidents and allegations of violence or criminal behavior within the jail."