4. May the Record Reflect

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I had thought about this case.

“Honestly, I had thought about this case since that probably.”

I had thought he had already put it down. I just assumed. Today we're talking about the state of Texas versus Charles on Flores. The trial to determine whether he was guilty of murdering Betty Black. We know what happened from thousands of pages of trial transcripts, but we also talked with the attorneys with Charles Flores

and with one of the jurors who sat in the room. You just heard from him. His name is Brian, juror number seven. It's so loud. I was like, "What's going on?"

We'll get to Brian's soon, but first, let's go back to January 1999

when the prosecution and the defense are preparing for the trial. Jackie Roberts, her boyfriend Rick Childs, and Charles have all been implicated to some extent in the murder of Jackie's ex-mother-in-law, Betty Black. Jackie had a motive. Her monthly allowance had been slashed.

And she knew there was a huge amount of cash hidden somewhere in the Black's house. She thought it was in the bathroom walls. She tells police that she drew a map to Betty Black's house and gave it to Rick the morning of the murder. She later denied this saying she had drawn the map some time before

to give to the babysitter in case of emergency. But some people think that she was more involved than she let on.

“After all, why did the robbers mistakenly think the money was in the bathroom walls?”

If she hadn't given them that idea herself. Here's Jeff Asherbanner, the former farmer is branched in our college officer. You heard from him in episode 1. "Walk in the Jackie, Gary Black's ex. She actually drew them a map.

It was all over the drug, you know, 24 rays thought he got ripped off of. She was saying she was afraid that he was going to kill her. That she had to make her right. She told him she knew where the money was. She drew them a map to the house.

She told them how to take it, give in, but they didn't find the money. But it was there. She drew them a map and everything. And we'd try to fall a case on her. And I was counting wouldn't take it.

The A's office wouldn't take it.

“Jackie will be a key witness in the trial against Charles Flores.”

But the jury will notably not hear from Rick Childs. As of 1999, Rick Childs is still in jail waiting for trial. He's writing letters to girlfriends talking about a plea deal. And for some reason, he's not being asked to testify against his co-dependent.

So Charles is the first person to face a judge in jury for Betty Black's murder.

And the state is asking for that. At the risk of spoiling the story, I want to mention something important. Rick Childs will later admit in writing to shooting and killing Betty Black. This is part of a plea deal he makes for a lighter sentence. But legally, that confession doesn't really matter for Charles's case.

Prosecutors didn't even need to prove that Charles was the shooter. Just that he was at the house on Bergen Lane that morning to commit a burglary. And he knew someone might be killed in the process. In Texas, this is referred to as the law of parties. It means if a group of people commits a crime and one of them kills someone in the process,

they can all be guilty of murder. When we talk at Board Eier to prospective jurors and talk about the law of parties, we say, you know, we give an example of the bank robbery. You know, the person driving the getaway car is just as guilty as the person going inside. And they can both be convicted for killing the clerk.

That's just the way it is. Not only can they be convicted, but they can be sentenced to death. And in Texas, that has real teeth. Texas's death chamber is active. In 2025, the state executed five people.

But since 1982, the state has put nearly 600 people to death. 168 men and women sit on death row as of the beginning of March, 2026. But in the time between when we're recording this episode and when it airs, another man will be put to death.

Capital punishment should be handled with the utmost seriousness.

“And should only be utilized when there is absolute confidence in the crime and the perpetrator.”

And under the existing law of parties, as it is today, we simply cannot do that, and there needs to be changes. That's where public and state representative Jeff Leach, talking to the Texas House of Representatives in 2021. The death penalty, as I said, should be reserved for the worst of the worst offenders for the most heinous crimes.

But our current law of parties undermines the integrity of the Texas Capital punishment system. Charles was invited for killing Betty Black, and the jury could find guilty if he was just a party to it. If he was there, intended to rob her, and knew someone might have been killed in the process. Again, it didn't matter if Charles wasn't the one who actually pulled the trigger. The potential jury members heard about this legal concept during jury selection.

They also heard about the realities of Texas's death penalty. The prosecutors, on this case, actually gave a pretty detailed spiel to each one about what it meant for them to vote for death. Wes is going to read a bit from the transcript. A part where assistant district attorney Mary Miller is talking to a potential juror.

Yeah, here's what she said, and she's talking about Charles.

If you can look over at him, you see that he's a living, breathing, human being, absolutely nothing abstract about him. If we prevail, the defendant will one day lie dead on a gurney in the death chamber in Huntsville. Miller describes the process. If he's found guilty, he'll be held in a cell about the size of a jury box. Once his execution date comes around, he'll be taken to the death chamber in Huntsville.

In the death chamber, he'll be put on a gurney. Like, when you might find in a hospital, except with these big leather straps. He'll be strapped in, and they'll put a needle in his arm. Then a technician will push the drugs into his body. Miller says that after this, he'll be dead within 15 to 20 minutes.

But during those minutes, quote, "Some things may happen. His eyes may roll back. He may gasp for breath. He may go into convulsions. But one thing is for certain, he will lie dead there within 15 to 20 minutes. Then his body would be allowed to be claimed for burial."

“OK, so Michelle, that's what's at stake for Charles, but not for the other two people, Jackie and Rick?”

Right. At this point, the state has only said that they're seeking the death penalty for Charles. And we know now that all of Jackie charges will actually get dropped. And Rick gets a pretty sweet plea deal that lets him walk free in 2016. I asked the lead prosecutor in the case, Jason January,

"How you decide who gets what punishment in a case where you don't know for sure who pulled the trigger?" Most of the time, it's who's cooperating, who is trying to work, you know, plea bargain. I've seen stories where they're trying to make this a racial deal. Well, the wide guy got a better sentence than the Hispanic, I will. Let's look at their records.

You know, let's look at who cooperate. Let's look at who didn't flee and hurt people and bite people and shoot people. And their false means to police and hit female police officers and grab guns and mace.

And basically, everything you can think of that any, you know, animal would do.

That was for us. He was a dangerous criminal before and during and after. In fairness, Charles wasn't the only one who tried to flee. He was just the only one who actually got away.

“You might remember that two days after the murder, police pulled Rick over”

while he was trying to leave his grandma's house in a disguise. He had a pack bag with him and the truck had a full tank of gas. And investigator noted in a search warrant application that Rick was about to leave town. So he tried to run, he just wasn't successful. But as you can see, the state was willing to negotiate in order to get some semblance of justice for this crime.

By this point, it was clear that justice would be uneven. I asked someone else about this imbalance. Brad Lawler, Charles' original defense attorney. It happened because the prosecutor allows it to happen. And that's the only way I can put it.

Jason, Jane, where he allowed the codependence to get away with what they got away with. From free-range productions and the Texas Observer, this is season 5 of the Unforgotten, writing shotgun. I'm your host, Michelle Pitcher. And I'm West Ferguson. This is episode 4, May the record reflect.

The criminal trial of Charles Flores started in January 1999. This is when lawyers called hundreds of people to the courthouse to start picking out a jury.

There was a lot of coverage in the newspaper, the Dallas Morning News.

“But when I tried to find video of the news reports, I came up empty.”

The judge hints that at the time, this case wasn't actually all that high profile. He says in the bench quote, "The media has not exactly been beating our door down. Judge John Nalms would hear the case. He'd been working in the legal system for 36 years by this point. For the state, the Dallas County DA's office sent over a team of prosecutors. Jason January is the lead, along with Greg Davis and Mary Miller.

Charles had a court-appointed team, Brad Lawler and Doug Parks. In capital cases, jury selection is a little different, a little more intense. Each side is allowed to question potential jurors individually. The trying to figure out if anyone has opinions that would sway them, opinions about the case, about crime and punishment, or about the death penalty.

In Charles's case, it takes over two months to sit a jury of 12 and an alternate. When the trial starts, Charles pleads knock guilty, then state makes its case. And the absence of direct evidence, like fingerprints or an eyewitness to the actual murder, the prosecution had the peace together a picture of that morning. Here's prosecutor Jason January again.

Direct evidence, meaning a witness saw Richard Childs and/or Charles Flores pull the trigger. They were on the inside, you know, even popcorn watching the thing go down. Or if you had a video, that might be direct evidence. Everything else is circumstantial. January says relying on circumstantial evidence is a big part of prosecuting a murder case.

Rarely did you have anything but circumstantial?

“And that's what makes murder cases the most difficult is that your eyewitness is dead.”

About two dozen witnesses will take the stand, but a few will be key.

Jackie Roberts testifies that very first day, and she almost immediately gets caught in a lie on the stand.

She says that she's been sober for two years, but then multiple people testify to do drugs with her in that time. It's moments like this that Charles's lawyers jump on to discredit the state witnesses. If she's lying about something like that for seemingly no reason, what else might she be embellishing? Jackie tells the jury her version of the story, but distances herself from the crime. Despite what she told police, she now says she hadn't actually drawn the map for Rick and Charles,

but rather for a babysitter some time before. She promises on the stand that she hadn't been offered any deal in exchange for her testimony. So like Jackie says that she didn't draw this map for Rick and Charles, she drew it for a babysitter, but does the map show where they're supposed to be money in the walls? No, so it's this very crudely drawn map that shows generally how to get from Jackie's house to the house on Bergen Lane.

So they weren't actually that far apart.

It certainly wasn't detailed, but it showed basically the route that the men would have taken that morning.

Okay, so you have Jackie on the stand and she's distancing herself from everything. The next witness up is Doug Roberts.

“And Michelle, can you remind us who Doug Roberts is?”

Doug Roberts was Jackie's ex. He's also the one who initially tipped off police to Rick child identity. Doug testifies that he was at Jackie's place when Rick dropped her off the morning of the murder around 7.15 a.m. He couldn't see who else, if anyone, was in the car because of its tinted windows. Doug also tells the jury that Jackie did know about the money and she'd sometimes tell people about it.

But the next day, when Doug takes the stand, he changes the time that Jackie got home. Now he says it was closer to 6.30 a.m. This comes right before another person, Rick's ex girlfriend Vanessa, testifies that she saw Rick and Charlie together without Jackie around 6.30 that morning. Vanessa was having landlord problems.

And she remembers Charles saying that she could stay with him and is then girlfriend Myra until she got back on her feet.

She says she and Charles smoke meth together and that he was as calm as he'd always been.

This testimony stuck with me because if it's true, it means Charles's story can't be true. It means he couldn't have stayed back at the trailer after Rick and Jackie left that morning. That timeline just wouldn't work. I reached out to Vanessa, but she told me she didn't want to talk. She said her story about that morning has never changed.

When I asked Charles, he said that that conversation did happen just on another day. But the jury didn't hear Charles's argument. What they do hear are the very descriptions from the neighbors on Bergen Lane.

Robert's wife and hypnotized witness comes into play.

The judge agrees to hold a hearing without the jury in the room to talk about whether Jill should be able to testify. That will happen the next morning, but in the meantime, she drops a bombshell. After months of not being able to ID the passenger, she saw get out of the BW bug. She tells the attorneys she's ready to make an in court identification. She's ready to tell the jury that Charles Flores is the man she saw that morning, 13 months before.

Once it became obvious that the next door neighbor was going to testify. I knew with that point that it wasn't a fair trial. So for over a year, she has not been able to identify Charles. She said it was the white guy with long hair, not the Hispanic guy with the bald hair.

And then suddenly at trial, she says, yes, I saw Charles Flores.

Yes, and if you'll remember, she actually was shown a lineup shortly after her hypnosis, where Charles Flores' picture was included, and she didn't pick him out. She didn't pick anyone out of that lineup.

“She says that she doesn't remember that, but on the stand, she says she's over 100% certain.”

Wow. So, Lollar and the defense argued vehemently against letting Jill's testimony in. They said that any ID she provided was tainted, either by hypnosis or by over a year of seeing Charles's face on the news. But the judge allowed her to testify in front of the jury. She told them Charles was the passenger in the BW bug, and that she was positive.

I just remember feeling like at least in the room, they felt like she was definitive.

That's during number seven again, Brian. That's why the hypnosis thing kind of surprised me, like, I don't remember hearing about that. Did I miss that? Like, I felt bad. In one sense, something like, I hate, I would hate to know that I, then we was a part of somebody being put to death. If it was game by faulty, a faulty witness, that would be, that would have caused me pause for sure.

“I think, I hope, I mean, yeah, I can't go back to where I was and what's the divine that was in all that.”

I think the most y'all would have heard was the judge saying, I feel free to consider or not consider this witness's testimony investigative hypnosis was used. So it wouldn't have been a big issue that y'all were aware of at the trial. But you think that if you had noticed it, or if they had made a bigger deal about it, you might have had more reservations about that testimony.

I hope I would bow. Because I know that a lot changed on that witness. And from just eating them back to three readings, so I felt like that was the main reason. One of the main reasons why Charles was just a bit of a way. Michelle, did the jury actually hear that Jill was hypnotized?

Or was that something they didn't hear about? So I went back through all of the trial transcripts after I talked with Brian. And most of the conversation about hypnosis happened when the jury wasn't around. Jill did mention that she was hypnotized when she was on the stand. So during questioning.

And then the judge, when he was giving his super long spiel about legal definitions and jury instructions and logistics, did give the jury a note saying that if they had any reason to disbelieve her testimony because she had been hypnotized, they could just throw it out. They could not consider it. Like I said, it was part of a very long-winded speech, part of a very long trial.

And like Brian said, it kind of flew over a lot of people's heads. Yeah, it would make sense. I mean, you're getting all this information thrown at you. And then this kind of offhand reference to like, oh, yeah, this witness was hypnotized. So easy to see how that might slip through the cracks.

At this point, we know how big of a deal that became. But the jury wasn't in the room when the lawyers were arguing back and forth about whether this sort of, you know, game-changing testimony would even be allowed. So to them, it was just another witness speaking about what she saw that morning to everyone else in the room. They knew the significance of what was going on.

Interesting. Okay, hypnosis aside, there are a couple other big compelling angles to the state's case. The jury also hears from two people who say Charles had confessed to them. His friend, Homerocarcia told FBI agents that Charles told him he'd shot the dog.

“Also, remember Charles's girlfriend, Myra?”

Her dad, Jonathan Wait, also testified that Charles told him he was involved.

You're absolutely right. And it's certainly more than some prosecutions are built on. But both Homero and Jonathan were complicated witnesses. Homero had traded guns with Charlie shortly after the murder. And he was afraid that he now had the murder weapon.

Tests would later show that that wasn't the case. But Homero also had gun possession and other charges hanging over his head. He was forced to testify against Charles. And on the stand, he says he barely remembers that conversation with FBI agents. He'd been awake for about four days on a meth binge.

The bottom line is that dude was a little beaty dude.

“He was, I think, five, two or five, three, maybe 120 pounds.”

And he was scared to prison. And, January's giving out, get out of jail free cards. I reached out to Homero but never heard back. Myra's dad, Jonathan Wait, senior, died in 2012. But back in 1998, he was a drug user himself.

And he had only met Charles a few times. His story of the alleged confession that Charles showed up at his house one night, unprompted and asked for a ride to an autopart store. That he spilled some incriminating details to this man he met less than a month earlier. Didn't make much sense in this context.

His girlfriend's dad, someone he barely knew, would have been an odd choice of comfort on.

Jonathan Wait also had a history of snitching.

He'd been in witness protection before, after testifying and drug and murder trials. He had several known aliases. On top of these alleged confessions, the jury also hears about Charles's time on the run, which you heard about in episode three.

“The flight to Mexico, the drunk driving arrest, the parkland hospital fight.”

All actions the state will say, "Wheet to Charles's guilt in the murder." Their narrative is, "We had no other evidence." And it was just the one hypnotized with this. And this was all some big conspiracy, whatever it gets him, because he's a spatic. No, the guy was a known and convicted.

You know, been to the penitentiary for robberies and drug dealing before. After four days of testimony, the state rests its case. Up next, the defense.

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Miss Michelle. Hello. Hello. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Yes. Last Nancy just took off the city walks. That's perfect.

Safe time. Thanks for letting me and geals home. Cool. I met Brad Lawler at his house in Dallas, in October.

Lawler had defended clients in capital cases before, and he previously worked as a prosecutor in the DA's office. So he was no stranger to the process.

“I set the death penalty case for a defense lawyer, what sets it apart from other types of cases.”

Oh. Gosh. It consumes you. Brad has a ring of white hair around his head, and these steely gray blue eyes. But he's not exactly intense.

He sits back in his chair and has a slow, easy way of speaking. A couple years back, he retired after nearly five decades as a lawyer.

He also did something he's never done before.

He stuck his nose back into one of his old cases. He hadn't been necessarily dwelling on Charles's case in the decades since the trial. But in appeals attorney, Gretchen Swen, reached out to him, and he decided to make his concerns with the trial part of the record. He wrote and signed an affidavit last year in 2025.

“In it, he says the state wasn't playing fair during the 1999 trial.”

They weren't turning over evidence. They were threatening potential witnesses with legal consequences if they didn't help the state's case. And they didn't disclose that there was a plea deal in the works with Rick Childs. They didn't disclose any conversations about exchanging leniency for testimony. He writes that January dropped charges against two witnesses after they testified, including Homerogarcia, Charles's friend to claim to be confessed.

But January didn't tell the defense about these deals.

There's also an issue I want to get into. There was a freshly chewed piece of gum lying on the bloody carpet by the dog Santana. The state ran a DNA test and determined there was DNA from one man on the gum. But it wasn't Rick Childs or Charles Flores. They didn't test to see if it belonged to Bill Black, which, if they could rule him out,

would prove that there was another man in the house the morning of the murder. But Lawler couldn't push for this.

“He didn't even know the gum had been tested until he was cross-examining a witness in the middle of the trial.”

Very frustrating dealing with both Jason and the case itself. Because I didn't think he got a fair trial from the beginning. He was kind of an anomaly. You know, the rest of the cases were so obvious that the defender was guilty. Who they put in charge of the prosecution didn't really matter.

But this case did. And Jason was appointed to represent the state by the DNA. You know, that's why it will. January also required Jackie Roberts to meet with him on a weekly basis during trial preparations. All while threatening to revoke her probation.

I have to note here. I heard criticisms of lead prosecutor Jason January from a few different people during my reporting. I looked into him to see if I could learn anything about his ethics or reputation on the job. I found out that in October of 2000, a little over a year after the Florida's trial, January abruptly resigned from the DA's office.

No two weeks notice, no reason showed with the public. He'd been a bit of a celebrity prosecutor in Dallas, one of the assistant DA's who mostly handled death penalty. I profiled cases. So his abrupt departure made headlines. Articles were actually speculating about why he left.

It likely had nothing to do with Charles's trial. But the actual theory was too good, not to mention. Many thought that he left because the job got in the way of his barbershop quartet dreams. There's a little shamrock that the Irish say you will bring your love. You'll be fine someday.

His group was actually very good. They were nationally known, and the performance states had conflicted with court dates in the past. During one capital murder trial, January took a midweek vacation day to perform in New York. Perhaps more likely, people thought he may have left because his prosecutorial ethos didn't gel with the new DA. It's still unclear, but in 1999, January was in the home stretch of his career as a prosecutor in Dallas.

While the state had over a year to build a case against Charles Flores, the defense didn't have long to prepare. There was both a lot to do and very little to work with. Lawler said they didn't get any discovery from the prosecution before the trial started. They didn't have files from police investigations, witness statements, or transcripts of interviews with the codependence.

Basically, they had no idea what the state was working with.

The judge was pushing us to go to trial, and Jason was pushing us to go to trial.

The case wasn't going to be easy to defend either.

He was so guilty of the burning up the silk wagon that that kind of overshadowed things. Well, law was made up the facts that Charles had burned the car and had fled to Mexico. And as I understand, the state was saying that that was all evidence of his guilt because guilty people run.

“What do you think about ava argument and feeling, can you see that idea in other cases, too?”

Yeah, I have. It was pronounced in this case because that's all the Jason had. And it worked. So, you know, what can I say? But according to Lawler, Charles was insistent that he wasn't guilty. It's common for people facing this sort of charge to negotiate instead of facing a jury. In Charles's case, it was especially risky because of all the crimes he had committed before and after the murder.

Lawler knew a jury wouldn't find him sympathetic, but Charles still refused to seek a plea deal. But in this case, he was absolutely not guilty. You know, there was no fingerprints or no DNA, no fibers.

“Nothing that connects him to the offense at all, except these codependents.”

And then all of this came out after the trial. Jason had talked to one of the codependents on a weekly basis forever. And then he pulled this neighbor out of the air at a thin blue air. You know, she was a total surprise during the trial. Lawler's involvement in Charles's case after all these years is interesting for a few reasons.

There was a moment in the original trial during the defense's closing argument. When Lawler seemed to concede the point that Charles was at the house on Bergen Lane that morning, despite what Charles said. Lawler has talked about his closing arguments in recent years, saying his words were misunderstood. But he was so thrown off by the in court ID by Jill Bargenier that he wasn't clear. He was laying out an extended hypothetical. If the jury believed that Charles was there, it's a load bearing if they still shouldn't find him guilty of capital murder.

Here's a quote from the transcript where Lawler poses an alternate theory for why Charles fled to Mexico. But it not also be true that he was doing those things because he was there at the scene at the time of the murder committed by Rick Childs. That he knew that the Volkswagen was the vehicle that they had gone over there in. That sooner or later the police were going to figure out who did it, who was there, who was involved. So reading that quote, it does sound like Lawler is conceding that maybe Charles was there at the house that day.

So what does he now say he means by that?

So Lawler was basically trying to take down the state's case piece by piece.

So he had this argument. He was saying there's the argument that Charles was not there. That morning. He wasn't at burgundy in that morning. In that case, a quit knock guilty. There's the argument that maybe he was there, but he didn't intend for anyone to be killed. Again, in that case, he's not guilty of capital murder. And the defense was mostly going with argument one, but in this closing argument, Lawler does open the door to argument two.

And it's kind of this like Hail Mary. He knows that things aren't going well. He knows that the jury likely believes that Charles was there after hearing the ID, the in court identification from the hypnotized witness.

“And so he's basically just asking them to remember that the state hasn't proven that Charles necessarily would have known that someone would be killed.”

If he were there that morning. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's like, you know, if he can sense that the jury isn't buying the claim that Charles wasn't there at all. Well, okay, yeah, time for plan B. Like even if you believe that, which I'm not saying he was, but if you believe it, then these other things can also be true. Exactly. And one of the state's main points was that if Charles was there, he went in carrying a gun. And Lawler said if Charles was there and had a gun that didn't necessarily mean that he intended to use it.

He was really always known for carrying a gun.

What's this going to quote again from Lawler's closing statement?

Again, this is kind of the Hail Mary moment. He sees the writing on the wall. He knows that a very believable witness has placed Charles for us at the scene. And he's a vigil barganer, the witness who was hypnotized, and he's just reminding the jury that all of these elements have to be met in order for them to find him guilty of capital murder. He's basically trying to mitigate disaster here.

And in 2025, Brad Lawler was unequivocal. Charles has always maintained his innocence, but that was a confusing point to a lot of people back in 1999.

He was able to understand legal jargon and what they're saying, what the arguments are. This is Charles, thinking back to those moments in the closing argument.

“Man, at the beginning, I didn't, it was like they were talking in Greek, you know what I mean?”

And so, like, for instance, when Lawler got up there and how the hell did he say, you know, let's suppose that Charlie was there or something like that. And it just blew over my head. I didn't even realize what he had said. Here's another big point. There's an affidavit signed by Lawler from 2001.

The DA's office has used this document again and again as a trump card to strike down any appeals attempts.

That statement says that Lawler didn't call my way to the stand as an alibi witness because he knew her testimony would be perjury. It says he knew this because Charles had told him he was there at that morning. Now, Lawler has disavowed this affidavit. He says he didn't even write it. In 2025 he wrote, quote, "I was shown an affidavit that the state obtained in opposing the rate in 2001. I had no memory of that affidavit and do not believe that I drafted it."

He says that he was common practice for the state to draft these affidavits and then to just get signed off from defense counsel. He says he may or may not have signed the document, but he sure didn't write it. He says that the statements in the affidavit from 2001 are untrue, but it still sits in the record.

He's adamant that a confession never happened. That Charles never told him he was there that morning.

He always swore that he wouldn't guilty of the murderers. One knew there. So that's pretty crazy if I'm understanding what you're saying. So the prosecution wrote this affidavit on Lawler's behalf and then Lawler apparently signed it because it's his actual signature on the affidavit.

“But now he says, "I don't remember that and I definitely didn't write it."”

Exactly. So without getting too far into the weeds, this affidavit came from one of Charles's appeals. And in appeals it's very common to claim that your defense counsel was ineffective. In that case, the attorney-client privilege kind of evaporates and your defense counsel is able to defend themselves. So that would have been the context in which this affidavit would have come into play.

And so Lawler is saying that the state, which is the one that fights against the appeals, would have drafted this affidavit, defending against broad Lawler, asked him to sign it. And if he did sign it, he says, he likely didn't read it because everything in it is untrue. And he would have known that it was untrue back in 2001. So unfortunate he would sign something without reading it apparently. Yeah, it's a really, really tricky point. There is, again, this document that exists in the record that appears to show Charles's own attorney saying that Charles confessed to being there that morning.

And if so, you know, kind of case closed. But the fact that Lawler is now vehemently disavowing it just adds more merceness to the water. It's just very unclear what was going on in the day's office at the time that this affidavit would have come about. And we know for sure that it really is Lawler signature on the affidavit. He, at least, doesn't explicitly say he didn't sign it. He says he may or may not have signed it, but he absolutely did not write it.

Wow.

“So is like, do we believe Lawler back then or do we believe him now?”

What do we believe? Who do we believe? Who's raised? Do we believe? And so recurring theme. Yeah. So back to the trial. In the end, the defences case was much shorter than the states.

First, if Jill Bargainier had looked out of her window from a lit house on the pre- Dawn Street, would she have seen anything other than her reflection?

Then there was the question of Doug Roberts, Jackie's ex. He'd liked the police multiple times. He seemed to want to protect Jackie, and he also wanted to protect another friend named Alan, who was notably wearing a jumpsuit,

“similar to what some witnesses remember the passenger in the VW bug wearing the morning of Betty Blacks murder.”

He was also at Jackie's house that morning, but for some reason, he wasn't a suspect. Next timeline was also off. He swore that Jackie had gone to register a business name the day of the murder. It was part of his whole timeline of the day, but official documents show that that happened a full week before. So another situation in which a witness is saying something happened the day of the murder that might have happened a different day. Remember, Jackie, for her part, had made a significant change to her story between speaking to police and taking a stand.

She told police that she drew a map to the blacks house that morning, but on the stand, she denies it all together, distancing herself more and more from culpability.

“So this friend Alan, I think this is the first time that we've heard about him, and he's wearing that jumpsuit, does he have long hair?”

So it's actually really hard to get a good description of Alan Weaver from the documents that we have.

So police did speak to him. He was one of the first people police spoke to.

They tested his fingerprints. It's very unclear why he was ruled out as a suspect, as the passenger, but he was definitely someone who generally fit the description was in the orbit. And we just kind of have no idea why he was ruled out. There was also a witness who cast out on the idea that the robbery was this spur of the moment decision, a reaction to being shorted in drug deal. And she testified this. Three weeks before Betty Black was murdered, Rick asked her what she would do if she knew where some money was that was owed to her. What would she do say if she knew that there was a hundred thousand dollars worth of drug money, stashed at someone's parents house.

In criminal trials, it's the state's job to prove the unreasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime. The burden of proof isn't on the defense, so it's not all that unusual for the defense's case to be shorter.

“Lawler believed that the state hadn't proven their case, so after bringing up these key points and calling a handful of witnesses, the defense rested it.”

The judge explained to jurors what they had to do. First, they had to decide whether Charles for us was guilty.

It took them less than two hours to come back and announce their verdict. Here's juror number seven again. There was a concomission. Mainly because if you felt like such an open and shut face, again, I think the only thing that would have caused us to pause a little bit more is if, if the hypnosis thing would have been chewed on a little bit more or brought to light, but I think because there was such little evidence of the fact that the defense admitted that he was there. There was not anything that caused any other people on the jury to pause. There wasn't anybody that was sounding a alarm of going, you know, this guy should be not to pick them. It felt like an open and shut face. That sort of felt like from what I remembered.

Now, the jury had another task. They'd come back to the courtroom for the second part of the trial to hear arguments for why Charles for us should or shouldn't get the maximum penalty. That. Juron number seven, Brian was 27 years old and in seminary school when he sat on the jury for Charles for us as murder trial. We're only using his first name because he's worried his involvement in the case could jeopardize his job. He didn't have many reservations about the death penalty at the time. He accepted it as the law of the land.

Juron's and capital cases sit through two separate phases of the trial, one to determine guilt or innocence, and one to determine the punishment. A lot of the second phase involves humanizing the defendant, introducing family and friends and character witnesses. The idea is to bring mitigating circumstances into the picture, make jurors think about rough up bringing mental or physical illness, other hardships that might have led the defendant down a bad path. But the defense and Charles' case didn't do that.

"We were thinking that the jur would find him not guilty."

“Going into the trial before he knew that Jill was about to change her witness statement,”

Lawler didn't think the state had enough evidence to convict.

So, they didn't prepare for the second half of the trial, which wouldn't have taken place if Charles had been acquitted.

Here's Brian again. "I don't think anybody was a character witness with him family, which I thought was such stuff." The prosecution brought forward witnesses from Charles' past crimes, and they painted an intimidating picture. It was true that Charles Flora's had a temper. He had a criminal record, and he had been violent before. A former employee at an auto-part store, so Charles had shoved him after he confronted him for shoplifting in 1990.

That same year, a manager caught Charles and his friends trying to steal ladders off of his mechanical company's workfans. He testified that the men threw beer cans at him in a co-worker and smashed the glass out of his car window. In 1993, a man tried to intervene when Charles and a group of his friends were driving drunk. Charles and his friends responded by beating him up at a gas station. In from 1997, the most serious allegation, one with some open questions, a man testified that Charles had forced himself into his house looking for money that he said had been taken from him.

He and the man fought for the gun, and Charles kicked his girlfriend, who was three months pregnant in the stomach. The gun went off, but no one was hit. Both the man and the woman refused medical treatment that night, and they didn't make any written statements.

The woman was never called to testify even though she was at the courthouse, so with the man set on the stand was all the jury had to go on.

It was strongly implied that Charles had caused the woman to have a miscarriage. The defense knew about the incident, but didn't know about this allegation, but they didn't have the chance to challenge the story. The couple said that they had medical records to back it up, but when the lawyers asked the couple to produce these records, they said, "Sure, we'll go get them." And then they just never showed back up to the courthouse. The DA's investigator got hold of the medical records on his own, and they seemed to disprove at least part of the story.

The only time the woman went to the hospital that year was when she heard her tooth trying to open a beer bottle at work. She had had an incident the previous year when she was four months pregnant and a friend threw her down a flight of stairs. Lawler knew how bad this implication looked, and he asked the court what he could tell the jury to undo the damage, now that they knew the testimony might be false. The judge didn't seem to think it would be a problem, and he refused to compel the couple back to the court for more testimony.

He said that Lawler could mention to the jury that the couple never returned with the records, and that the claim about the miscarriage was "unsubstantiated" by the record,

“and I think that would cure any ill effect it might have.”

But as it turns out, you can't unring that bill. That is awful. And like you said, even if the jury is told to ignore that, I don't think I would be able to just put that aside. And it's really gone a factor into how I view Charles when determining his sentence. 100% and you can clearly see that that was the case given the outcome of the trial.

He had a violent criminal history. He was on drugs, he was committing crimes, he was getting into fights. It's not like he was an alter boy who was plucked off the street. And that image, that idea that he's capable of something like this, so he must be capable of something else, is just such a human reaction, it's such a human assumption to make.

And it's hard to imagine that anyone who was in the room hearing that account was able to push that aside. It'd be perfectly honest, I think there will be a lot of listeners who are going to hear this, and then it'd be like, "Oh, we'll screw him." But then our job is to look beyond that, because we're looking at actual guilt or innocence here.

“Yeah, and I think that it's important to remember that you can be guilty of some heinous, heinous stuff.”

That doesn't mean that you should be wrongfully convicted of something you didn't do. And I think that it's a very reasonable feeling to just want justice in a situation like this, to want someone who could do something like this, to get off the street.

which include that if someone else was there that morning at Bergen Lane, they have walked free for 26 years, while someone else has been sitting in prison for their crime.

After all of that vivid testimony of Charles' criminal history, it was painfully glaring to everyone in the room, that the defense just wasn't offering up a rebuttal. Anything to make the jurors look past the criminal, the violent acts. Here's Brian again. Did not feel like the defense had much of anything looked or sad. You know, it was sad, see, I mean just the fact that the defense did not put out, it didn't seem like a reason why I can't remember any shred or hope. Yeah, this is somebody who could be living with someone besides the standpoint.

It would have been nice to have something from a family member for me. I would have thought that they would have been something.

It was out of the room, the reason for this was addressed. Lawler alluded to it earlier. The tactic of threatening criminal charges against potential witnesses.

Charles' parents, Catalina and Lily were both under indictment for hindering apprehension after they allegedly helped which Charles escaped. There were two were subject to a grand jury investigation. They trusted my parents at their house. I mean like like on TV, you know what I'm saying? Like how you're seeing up there in Minneapolis. When you have them showing and beating on the door, we're going to kick the door down. You don't open the damn door in there. There's 60-year-old church people. You know what I'm saying? They start interrogating them. Right? Yeah, you better tell us what. Charlie told you, we know that he told you everything and this and that and if you don't, we're going to see you to prison for 20 years.

And then they tell him that and then they put him in the holding tail. Nobody's going to go to prison for me and I'm telling you better not come up here. In court, an attorney advised Charles' parents that if they got up on the stand, even as a character witness, they should plead the fifth. So, Charles was left without people to speak for him. After all of the testimony and the punishment phases over, text histories and capital cases are asked to answer three questions.

“The first is the person continuing threat to society. Second, did they cause a death or anticipate that a human life could be taken?”

Lastly, are there any mitigating circumstances to warrant a life sentence over death? The jury left the courtroom just before noon to deliberate on these questions. By 2pm, they had sentenced him to death. 7. Brian hadn't thought much about the case since the trial.

After a first reached out to see if he wanted to talk about his experience on the jury, he did some research.

He found the articles talking about the concerns with the case. Mostly about the hypnosis and the fact that Rick Childs later admitted to pulling the trigger. I'm obviously more curious. I would hate to have been a part of something that missed or definitely would have, you know, took the blame on the wrong person. So, in that sense, I would not want to see anyone go to death or find that as long as it leads. And it sounds like that one guy that came out and admitted this. He killed the woman.

“Was that the case? Like there was a guy that admitted to her for a plea deal?”

Yes. And so why hasn't the state gone back and said, okay, we at least need to really look at this? Again, Texas is the land of the law of parties where you don't have to pull the trigger to get the harshest sentence. And justice comes down to who turns on their codependence the quickest. And there's a bigger picture. Courts really hate to overturn convictions in Texas. Innocence claims are nearly impossible to prove.

I wish the defense had been able to bring just even one person to back them. And that doesn't mean that, you know, I can't look and see, change and decide to alter the law or change.

“Or I think that we should be open to those kind of things.”

Especially in this sense where you've got somebody on record that's admitted to seeing the shooter. I think that's that's the child for something. Next time on the unforgotten. Everyone thinks that imprison everyone says they're innocent, but after a while, people don't. They accept it. Often it can be badge of, you know, of honor or courage or something to admit that you murdered someone that keeps you safe.

Thank you for listening to The Unforgotten, a free-range production. Season 5 writing shotgun was created in association with the Texas Observer, and the season is written, reported, and hosted by Michelle Pitcher, a staff writer for the Observer.

I'm Executive Producer West Ferguson. Stay up to date with us when you sign up for our newsletter at unforgottenpod.com. Thank you for listening to The Unforgotten, a free-range production.