5. Injustice Anywhere

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The United States will also be a part of the United States. The United States will also be a part of the United States. The United States will also be a part of the United States. The United States will also be a part of the United States. You heard what the jury heard in Charles Flores as 1999 murder trial.

These 12 people, seven men and five women, took all of that information back into the deliberation room, and they decided that Charles Flores was guilty of murder. Then they determined that based on Texas' special questions and capital cases, he should be sentenced to death. The challenge of this case, you know, it's like separating what was shown to the jury

versus what has been pried out of the depths from, you know, research, where you have people very much not interested in anybody getting at the truth. But there's a lot the jury didn't hear. And these things will be the backbone of the next two decades of appeals in this case. From free-range productions and the Texas Observer, this is season five of the Unforgotten, writing shotgun.

I'm your host, Michelle Pitcher. And I'm West Ferguson. This is episode five in Justice Anywhere. One person was conspicuously absent from the courtroom during Charles Flores's trial, Rick Childs.

The jury never heard from him because he wasn't called to testify.

Juris also never got the chance to hear the tape from the interview he did with the Farmer's Branch Police Department after he was arrested. "You're all the math in the car, are you? We call him, where?" "Decate, we're the one you could see in there, something." "Systems in the ball, balls, the Branch Ball."

Here, Rick is implicating Jackie. He says she drew the map in the car. He says she told them where to look for the money in the walls. Jackie will deny this involvement at trial and jurors won't hear the inconsistencies in Jackie's and Rick's stories, or anything else on the tape. "You're going to work good, aren't you?"

“"I don't have to tell you your deep secret."”

"Okay." "I know there's definitely a little issue." "Okay, just to ban you up at your level and dirt will try to be." "You've been forced right, works." "They're thanks to."

"Okay." "What we like to do is get a statement from." The jury also didn't know about Rick's confession to being Mrs. Black's shooter. He didn't sign the judicial confession in his plea deal until about a year after Charles's trial.

So, of course, jurors couldn't see the future. But according to Documents Uncovered by Charles's appeals lawyer, prosecutors knew that Rick had already confessed to Jackie Roberts that he was the shooter. But they didn't mention this to the jury or the defense. "There's one typed up interview in the police file.

Early on of Jackie Roberts, the blacks, you know, estranged daughter-in-law, meeting with the lead investigator from the Farmer's Branch PD, named Calaway, since deceased, and Jason January.

“And I think his investigator in that office was there, too.”

"You're hearing from Charles as appeals attorney, Gretchen Swenn. In the typed up version, their things she supposedly revealed. A reporter back, I think, in 2016 through a FOIA request, obtained a more complete police file. And there's a handwritten version of that same interview.

And they're missing things. For instance, that there's a note, Rick shot her. At trial, Jason January argued both separately, not only that Charles's lawyer was there, but he was the shooter, though there was no evidence of that.

But he was in on a meeting with Jackie Roberts, where she had told them Rick shot her. The jury didn't hear that Rick's father was formerly a cop, and the Irving Police Department, the very department that sent over Charles's lawyer's mugshot.

I want to note here that I did try to get in contact with Rick Childs for this podcast. The closest I got was a family member who didn't want to speak,

I never heard back, but this family member did tell me

“that in the 10 years he's been out on parole,”

Rick Childs has done his best to live a good life. I also tried really hard to get someone from a Dallas DA's office to talk with me on the record, but they wouldn't bite. They did send over some documents that supported their take, including that 2001 Afadeva from Brad Lawler,

the one he says he didn't write. I've addressed arguments from the state's case throughout the podcast to make sure that even though the state won't speak with me directly, their position on the facts of the case is clear. But back to what the jury didn't hear.

Outside of Rick, the jury only got part of the story with Jill Bargainer's in court ID. They didn't hear about her original description of the two men in the bug, about how she described the driver and passenger with similar hair and builds, which was absolutely not the case for Rick Childs

and Charles Torres for us. Here's Charles. She was looking for a manhead dude, long hair, you know, with a beard in this and that,

and I've never been skinny.

You know what I'm saying? I've never been medium-sized. And at that time, I was about six foot tall, probably about 240, you know, maybe 250, and I always had a fade haircut.

I've never had long hair, and I've always wore glasses. I can't see without glasses. And nothing was ever said about that.

“I just remember feeling like at least in the room”

like that, like she was definitive. That was during number seven, Brian, referring to Jill's testimony. You might remember he was surprised when he read news stories about Charles's case.

He didn't remember anything about hypnosis. Didn't even remember it being part of the trial. Like I said, the jury was informed that Jill had been hypnotized, but all of the arguments around it had happened outside of their presence.

I also mentioned something last time in passing, a piece of gum at the crime scene. It was lying on the bloody carpet in the living room. During trial, Charles's lawyer Brad Lawler points out this piece of gum in a crime scene photo.

He's questioning an officer, wondering if they had bothered to collect that for evidence. Lawler learned that not only was the gum collected,

“but the state had sent it in for DNA testing.”

The DNA audit belonged to a man, but the test showed that that man was neither Rick Childs nor Charles Fores. Why is this coming out in trial? And that seems pretty important. If it's male DNA that doesn't match

either of the men accused and being part of this crime, it shouldn't somebody try to figure out who's DNA is on the gun. But, you know, it's part of the trial by ambush thing they move on. There's an obvious possibility, another man who had reason to be in the black's house that morning.

Bill Black, that he's husband. But according to Gretchen, he denied at the time that the gum belonged to him. Still, it would have been standard for investigators to test the gum against a sample of his DNA just for exclusion purposes.

But for some reason, they didn't. Just a few years ago, after a protractive battle with the courts, Charles's attorneys got the OK to do forensic genetic genealogy testing on the gum. His tool is relatively new in law enforcement, but it's already had some pretty astounding results in cases across the US.

Perhaps the most famous was the 2018 identification of Joseph DiAngelo. He was linked to more than a dozen murders, more than 50 rapes, and at least 120 burglaries committed in the 1970s and 80s across California. Authorities found him after all of those decades by uploading DNA from the crime scenes to a genealogy website.

By building a family tree, they eventually tracked down the long, elusive Golden State Killer. The gum found it Betty Black's murder scene wouldn't lead to quite as definitive and answer. The results showed that while the gum didn't match Rick Child's,

there was an over 98% chance that it belonged to someone with what's called a second degree relationship to him. So a half sibling, a grandparent, an uncle. In appeals, swim points out Max Salmon, Rick Suckel. Mac lived in the house that Rick was hiding out in before his arrest.

He was also Rick's emergency contact when he was booked into the Dallas County jail. And an old photo featured on his obituary. He died in 2016, but he's young in the picture. He looks a lot like Rick Child's.

Founded the hair and everything. The truth about who the other white guy with long hair

was who went on with Child's, we may never know.

But there's several people that were certainly around and in his circle in that 24 hour period that he could have brought along and that part of the deal was, they were just victims of Rick Child's crazy scheme.

But the gum story doesn't end there.

“The DA's office reportedly got a sample of Bill Black's tissue”

from a surgery that he had before he died. They submitted it for testing, and the report showed that the gum was consistent with Mr. Black's profile. This is pretty weird to me that DNA testing showed

the gum was 98% likely to be related to Rick Child's, but then also it was consistent with Mr. Black, the victim's husband. So we're Mr. Black and Rick Child somehow related or were these samples contaminated

or some problem with the testing? What's going on here? That's unfortunately an open question. Gretchen's one has raised this in appeals, but courts haven't really addressed it yet.

It's weird though. I mean, I think of DNA testing, and genetic genealogy being this kind of panacea, like suddenly we're able to know what actually happened. I mean, kind of cutting through the fog

on so many of these old cases, but this also raises a lot of questions. It does. And while DNA is a wildly accurate forensic science, it's only as accurate as the people performing the tests.

As the integrity of the DNA sample, there are a lot of ways that DNA testing can be compromised or called into question. And unfortunately in this case, while it seems like we should have answers from this piece of gum,

it actually raised more questions than it answered. And again, the jury didn't hear these details.

Here's one more thing the jury never heard.

“Any character witnesses who could speak on behalf of Charles?”

I don't think anybody was a character witness for the family, which I thought was its system. Juris didn't know the reason for this. They didn't know that on the advice of a lawyer, Charles's parents were going to have to plead the fifth

if they took the stand, even to be character witnesses. They were under indictment for helping Charles escape justice in the crime he was on trial for. Myra wasn't yet under indictment, but she was subject to a grand jury investigation.

This, we know for a fact, influence the jury's decision to sentence Charles to death. We know this because one of the jurors told us. "It would have been nice to have something from a family member, I would have thought that would have been something."

The prosecution made hay out of Charles not having any character witnesses. In the closing arguments for the sentencing phase, prosecutor Greg Davis said this.

“"Where is one person, just one person, neighbor,”

friend, family member, just one person to tell you that there is just one thing redeeming about this man, where he ought to escape justice? Where is it? Not to be found, is it?

Because he's literally a man without an excuse over here. No mitigation whatsoever as you look at Charles Don Flores." At the time, one of the jurors, a man named John Howard, is quoted in the Dallas Morning News. He said, "We went through and discussed each point.

It was pretty cut and dry. The evidence in the case was just overwhelming. They just kept bringing it on." With summer in Texas right around the corner, I've been thinking a lot about my wardrobe.

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Because you know what's going to happen. In 2016, the killing of Missy Beavers shook the Dallas Metro area. Police are trying to figure out why somebody dressed

Mother and fitness trainer Terry Missy Beavers

“was murdered inside a middle-of-the-in church.”

She was a great woman, a great wife, a great mother, a great friend. Security cameras at the church captured Missy's murder in terrifying detail. But 10 years later, police still don't have a suspect. Rumors are flying, and people are still demanding answers.

I don't give a crap if she had 15 affairs with 15 different men that is not an open invitation to murder someone. Somebody needs to hide for it. This is the unforgotten, who killed Missy Beavers? Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

In the 27 years since Charles Flores was convicted, both a lot and very little has happened. There's a saying that the wheels of justice turn slowly. For each step in this case, there are years of silence, years of waiting for a court to make a decision.

In Texas, every death penalty case is automatically appealed up to the state's highest criminal court, the court of criminal appeals. After he was convicted, it took two years for the CCA to affirm Charles's conviction in sentence, meaning his direct appeal failed.

This is part of the course in Texas death penalty cases.

In 2000, while he was waiting on that decision, he filed a second appeal in Texas.

But in 2006, the CCA denied him again. In 2007, Charles turned the federal appeals process. It would take another seven years for that one to be officially shot down. It's impossible, it takes a miracle. Undeterred by the string of denials in 2015, Charles took the big swing.

He appealed up to the US Supreme Court. The next day, the state motion to set an execution day. The Supreme Court didn't end up looking at the case, but the execution date was a go. June 2, 2016.

“Remember back to our last episode when we read from the trial transcript,”

the part where prosecutors described the reality of the death penalty. If everything went as planned, there's what would happen. On June 2, 2016, at 6 p.m, Charles would be taken to the execution chamber in Huntsville, Texas. He'd be strapped into a gurney with thick leather straps, all witnesses on his side, and Betty Black's side looked on.

Then he'd be given the lethal drugs. He'd be dead within a half hour. Now, Charles was living under a ticking clock. Exactly two weeks before that date with death, his lawyers filed yet another appeal.

They asked the Court of Criminal Appeals to step in and halt the impending execution because of four points, which they said undermined his conviction.

First, they argued that new science regarding hypnosis and memory

discredited Jill Bargainer's in court identification of Charles Flores. Second, they argued that Charles's trial counsel was ineffective because they didn't put up a fight during the sentencing portion of the trial. Third, that Dallas County's use and implementation of the death penalty was racially biased, and fourth, that the law of parties

was unconstitutional because it led to situations like this, where the main perpetrator gets a lighter sentence than the alleged accomplice. Here's Charles's attorney, Gretchen Sven. Often is the person who pulled the trigger is the first one to talk, because they know they're most vulnerable,

and then they agree to a deal where they'll testify against other people, and in exchange for having the death penalty taken off the table. So then you ended up having somebody who often is the least culpable, but was involved, they can't understand how they're being charged with a murder, they didn't have anything to do with,

like they were sitting in the getaway car, and they ended up on death ramp.

“So it creates these proversities that I think are counter to the intent of the law.”

The court decided that the broadest claims, the challenges to Texas's implementation of the death penalty, and the law of parties weren't up to snuff. Neither was the argument that Brad Lawler and Doug Parks had been ineffective at trial,

but that first point, the one about hypnosis, succeeded.

The court of criminal appeals halted Charles's execution, so that a lower court could look into that claim. For the first time in years, a judge would take a look at Charles's case, at least that very specific aspect of it. Charles Flores and his team gathered in a North Texas courtroom,

along with lawyers from the state in 2017. They held an evidentiary hearing on the role hypnosis played in the trial.

and the officers who were in the room during the hypnosis.

“Gretchen Swen, who taken over Charles's case by then,”

tried her hardest to get the court to consider the new found evidence in the case. In the state, argued at every turn to keep things very narrowly focused on hypnosis. And then, another way. In 2020, the court of criminal appeals denied relief on the hypnosis claim, without explaining why.

This wasn't the end of the appeals, though, or the denials. The court shot an appeal down as recently as 2025, and there's one currently pending before the US Supreme Court. You might think that if an appeal is denied, it's because there's nothing to it. But a lot of the time, judges refused to consider claims on the merits at all.

Appeals courts in Texas actually go through a lot of work and see if there's any reason they don't have to look at the arguments.

Maybe a statute of limitations is passed.

Maybe someone missed a filing deadline. The idea is that courts are short on resources, and jury trials are both expensive and difficult for the public. There's an idea known as finality, but it's better for everyone to uphold a verdict wherever possible.

That cases have to be over at some point.

“This is something I think most like people have a lot of trouble understanding.”

It's like, well, if there's new evidence, and it shows maybe somebody didn't do something, shouldn't we all want to hear that? But in fact, the judicial system is premised on the idea, and you're going to get one shot. You know, you're privileged to get a chance to get a trial.

And after that, it becomes exceedingly difficult to unwind it. I want to note an important thing about Texas law.

Back in 2013, the state became the first in the country

to implement what's often referred to as a junk science law. It provided a new legal avenue for people to challenge their convictions if they were based on science or forensics that wouldn't fly in court today. Questionable science, like, might mark analysis, shaken baby syndrome, or, say, investigated hypnosis.

It was a huge step for the state that had gotten a lot of bad PR for executing likely innocent people, like Cameron Todd Willingham. He was put to death after his kids died in a house fire that an arson investigator said was intentionally lit. It turned out it was more than likely a tragic accident.

But in the 13 years since that law passed, no one has successfully used it to get off death row. Lawmakers have even criticized Texas courts for not using the law as it was intended. Another law changed that originally seemed promising

for Charles's case, but ended up going nowhere. In 2023, lawmakers made testimony and statements based on investigative hypnosis in invisible court. Witnesses are often told that memory works like a videotape and that during hypnosis, they'll be able to recall certain events

and suspect descriptions that their normal memory would not be able to assess. That's where public and state representative Jeff Leach. The popular belief is that hypnosis guarantees the accuracy of recall is still without established foundation.

In fact, hypnosis often has no effect on memory at all. Subjects under hypnosis becomes suggestible when asked leading questions and may try to please their hypnotist with created answers that they think will be met with approval. The subject is likely to confabulate or fill in details

from their imagination in order to make their answers more coherent or complete, and the subject often experiences memory hardening, which gives them great confidence in their memories, even when those memories are false. Some lawmakers even cited Charles's case as inspiration for the new law,

but the law wasn't retroactive. Jason January, the lead prosecutor in Charles's case, opposed the effort to exclude hypnosis testimony. In a letter to lawmakers, he called it "throwing out the baby with the bathwater."

“It's merely a device to relax someone to try to remember.”

So I mean, it'd be no different really than sitting onto a spa and hey, go relax a little bit and see if you can focus a little bit. Death penalty appeals aren't meant to go on for at all. Eventually, a judge usually signs off on an execution date, but they do so at the request of the district attorney

in the county where the trial took place. In Charles's case, that was Dallas. But progressive DA, John Cruzo, has led the office since 2018, and he hasn't sought an execution date. So for eight years, it seemed like Charles didn't have to worry.

Then last year, state leaders tried to step in. In 2025, the state attorney general's office run by Ken Paxton,

they sent a letter to the trial court.

“It said, basically, we think it's time to kill Charles Flores.”

This isn't how these things go. It was very unusual for the state agency to metal in a death penalty case this way. Here's Gretchen. What's odd is that the attorney general does not represent the state

of justice in this case hasn't done so in years. So it was, as if someone off the street sent a letter to the judge saying, "Yes, let's just kill this guy and reporting to know the status of the case." Nothing came of the attorney general's request, but it's part of the reason I chose to devote so much time to this case.

It was a very unusual cherry on top of a very unusual case. And just last month, there was another shake-up. In March of 2026, Dallas's D.A. John Cruzo was outstead in an upset primary election by a former judge named Amber Gibbons. It's unclear what stands she'll take on Charles's case

as the county's top prosecutor. And whether she'll seek an execution date for him,

“or any of the other 11 people from Dallas who sit on death row.”

Reporters, myself included, have tried to get her to answer questions, but so far, no one has looked out. [ Music ] Eric Holdin is 81 years old and annoying on the end of a cigar when I sit down with him at his office in Dallas.

He used to smoke, but says he gave it up years ago. It's pretty clear that this scratch is the edge. Holdin has had an interesting life. He started his career working as a psychologist in Texas prisons. Eventually, he counseled people on death row.

There's no isolation on earth like the isolation on death row. And for those population, they're alone for 23 hours a day effectively. And they have very little communication with anybody else. They have very little stimulation with the world, effectively on death row, unlike what they have in general population,

which is nothing to be getting excited about, but at the same time it's certainly more conducive to some societal development than his death row. The death row is an isolation chamber effectively what it is. But now he specializes in one thing, polygraphs.

Like Mark's Howell, the semi-retired investigative hypnotist you heard in episode two, Eric Holdin spends a lot of time defending the science of his trade.

First of all, anything they've seen on television disregard it,

because it's a scam. He gave me a pretty exhaustive history lesson on polygraphs. There were some interesting tidbits in there. Did you know the father of the modern-day polygraph

“also created Wonder Woman, which explains her laugh with truth?”

Polygraphs aren't considered admissible evidence in Texas courts, but they still play a fairly important role in the criminal justice system. Police still use them as investigative tools. Lawyers may use them on potential witnesses ahead of trial. One innocence group by no of only takes up cases

were the person proclaiming their innocence passes a polygraph. So they're not up to the standard of admissibility, but many people think that they offer something in the field of criminal justice. It's an investigative tool,

and it's an extremely important investigative tool. The prosecutors, the agents of general courts, judges, the defense counsel, grand juries. It is a diagnostic tool. It addresses an issue that should be considered.

It's not a tell-all. It's not a fantasy.

It should never be considered that way.

Eric Holdin went down to the Polinsky unit in 2021 to perform a polygraph on Charles Flores. It took about three hours, and at the end, Holdin was satisfied that Charles was being truthful,

when he said he was not at the black's house when Betty Black was shot. Holdin's son, a former federal agent who works with his dad's polygraph company, did quality control on the test.

He told me that Charles's results showed that he was, quote, wildly non-disceptive. To take a page out of Judge Nomsburg, I'll say here that you can obviously make what you will know of these polygraph results.

They're based on controversial science, just like hypnosis is. In terms of Charles's legal battle, the polygraph didn't move the needle. But to some, it adds way to the argument

that Charles's version of events is true. We know about the concept of finality, the belief that in general

The barriers to proving your innocence are massive. It depends on a lot of things, whether new evidence is available,

“whether this evidence came about at the right time,”

whether you have the time and money to pursue the case with a lawyer, but still, exonerations do happen. There have been 520 documented exonerations in Texas in the past century,

meaning that many convictions have been thrown out. The vast majority of these have happened since the 1980s. This is according to the national registry of exonerations. In Texas, you're most likely to be wrongfully convicted for drug crimes,

but the second most common false conviction, murder.

At least 64 people in Texas have been sent to prison for a murder they didn't commit since 1977. Most of the time when people get their sentences overturned, it's because there was something wrong with their trials.

Their constitutional rights were violated, which invalidates the conviction. In Texas, even if your trial was squeaky clean, you can appeal based on actual innocence. This isn't impossibly high bar.

Courts have called it a curculean burden to prove that, quote, "no rational jury would convict in light of this new evidence." You might have heard of the 1988 documentary "The Thin Blue Line" by Aral Morris.

“It was an extremely important and controversial movie at the time,”

and it remains sort of a foundational text

for people interested in wrongful convictions today. When it came out, it shook a lot of people's faith in the criminal justice system. When we started putting the facts together, how much information we actually had,

we found that we didn't have anything. I bring it up now because the documentary chronicles the case of Randall Dale Adams, whose case is almost eerily similar to Charles's. Two men, Randall Adams,

and a guy named David Harris, are writing around Dallas in a blue car one night. Later that night, someone in that blue car shoots and kills a police officer during a graphic stop. Police tracked down David Harris,

who's been bragging about the murder in his home count.

When confronted, Harris blamed the shooting on Randall Adams.

But Adams says he wasn't in the car any more at the time of the shooting. He had said goodbye to Harris and was home, watching TV or sleeping. Erie similarities, right? The day they took me up, they took me upstairs,

but they took me out of the room. He had a confession there, he wanted me to sign. He said that I would sign. He didn't give a damn what I said. I would sign this piece of paper he's got.

And I told him I killed him. Three eyewitnesses came out of the woodwork and testified at trial that Adams was the shooter. He was convicted and sentenced to death. You get mad.

Just like a bad girl. You want to wake up? What you mean? Later, his sentence was committed to life. But it turns out that Adams was telling the truth.

He was not in the car when the shooting took place. Adams ended up being exonerated and David Harris wound up on death row for a different murder. Like I said, the story made a lot of people uneasy when the film came out in 1988.

He was a clear example of many lives being ruined when the justice system gets it wrong. And we've only heard more stories like it since then. I want to talk about another case of actual innocence out of Dallas County. Charles Flores's lawyers have mentioned this one in appeals

because it too bears a lot of similarities to Charles's case. And it's fascinating in its own right. In 2017, it's looking for a story for the Atlantic. And so I called up one of my favorite sources from my NPR days. A guy named Jim Maclusky.

That's Barbara Haggerty. She worked for NPR for two decades and is now a contributing writer at the Atlantic. He was the founder of Centurion Ministries, which way before the innocence project was even born. He was getting people out of prison who had been wrongly convicted.

By that point, he had gotten about 65 people off of either death row or life sentences.

“And so I called him up and I said, "Jim, what's the case at Haunts you?”

What's the case it keeps you up at night?" And he goes, "Well, that's easy. Ben Spencer's case. There is in a day that goes by that I don't think about Ben." Ben was living in Dallas, newly married with a baby on the way.

On the night of March 22nd, 1987, he was unaware that he was about to be swept up in a decades-long fight for his life. That Sunday night, a 33-year-old dad, Jeffrey Young, went to his office to catch up on work. He often went to work on Sunday nights just to get going on the week. His whole family was away on vacation.

So he was here alone. His office was in the warehouse district of Dallas.

They robbed him, then hit him over the head and put him in the trunk of his own DMW.

“They drove over the Trinity River into West Dallas, which was at that point in 1987.”

A pretty scary neighborhood, a lot of drugs. And somehow, Jeffrey Young was able to find a lever or something in the trunk. Hoist himself out on the Puget Street, where he lay shaking and bleeding in a small crowd gathered around him. The perpetrators looked in the rearview mirror, saw that the victim was now lying on the street, drove the BMW into an alleyway and ran away.

A total of $35,000 had been put up as reward money by the victims company and Dallas philanthropist Ross Perro.

Three eyewitnesses came forward to say that they saw the men running from the car,

“and that they recognized one as 22-year-old Ben Spencer.”

These three witnesses were Ben's neighbors, a middle-aged woman, and two young men. There was no physical evidence connecting him to the crime, which became a murder when Jeffrey Young died at 305 that morning. But these eyewitnesses were strong. They were people who knew Ben personally, and they all told the same story. There was also a guy from the jail where Ben had been held, who swore, that Ben had confessed to the crime.

Ben Spencer was convicted. His original conviction was overturned because it turns out that the prosecution star witness, his neighbor who I deed him, lied on the stand of our receiving reward money. The state then gave him the chance to take a plea deal, lead guilty, and you'll be out of here in three years. He said, "You know what? I'm not going to plead guilty to a crime I didn't do. So they tried him again and he got a life sentence."

Like Charles, Ben embarked on a decades-long journey of appealing his conviction. Jim McClusky, the man Barbara called back in 2017, who initially told her about Ben's case, had gone before a judge in Dallas. The judge had ruled that Ben should be released based on his innocence claim, but the state appealed, and it took the court of criminal appeals three years to say that they weren't going to let him out because there was no DNA in the case. So Ben was to serve his entire life sentence, even though he was ruled innocent by a judge.

And so my question was, "If a judge rules that you're innocent, and there's nothing you can do about it, what good is innocence? What good is truth?" When John Crusoe was elected DA in 2018, he agreed to look again at Ben's case. By 2021, Crusoe petitioned the court to let Ben out of prison. The case had fallen apart. Ben was released in 2021, and a judge declared him actually innocent in 2024. Again, we're talking about Ben's Ben's case for a reason, and that's because a lot of what he experienced happened to others in Dallas.

Before and since. For decades, the Dallas DA's office was run by a man named Henry Wade. Even if you think you haven't heard of Henry Wade, you've heard of Henry Wade.

He was the most famous DA in the country. He was the way to grovey Wade, and he basically had like a 96% conviction rate.

From 1951 to 1988, Wade ran the Dallas DA's office with a win at all costs attitude.

“There was a culture there that you have to, you can't lie and get caught. Let's put it that way. You can't hide evidence and get caught.”

But there was basically a culture that a couple of things. One is that you win no matter what. You bring cases you win no matter what, and they did. The other culture was back then in 1987, any black man will do. And this is as much with the police as it was prosecutors. You know, if Ben didn't commit that crime, he committed another crime. And so we might as well get them off the streets. Even though Wade left the office ten years before Betty Black was murdered, he had built the office in his image.

The prosecutors and his successors as DA were trained in his methods. Some resisted them more than others, but his influence on the office was undeniable. Henry Wade cast a shadow for a couple of decades into the 2000s. I mean, people kept doing the same thing. And of course, Henry Wade had trained all of these prosecutors. They were coming up. They were just kind of staying in the DA's office. The thing about the DA's office in Dallas, it was almost the place you had to work for a while to have a good career as an attorney in Dallas.

So everyone tried to work there. And it took quite a while. I mean, Henry Wade's successors were people who had trained under Henry Wade.

Charles is original defense attorney, Brad Lawler, acknowledged that in 1999, when Charles went on trial,

“this attitude still pervaded the DA's office.”

The DA was a former prosecutor, so things carried on the way they had been. One thing helped speed up a change of culture in the office, the discovery of DNA evidence, and how it could prove definitively when someone had been put in prison for a crime they didn't commit. Suddenly, Henry Wade's win record didn't look quite as impressive. These cases kind of piled up. These cases of wrongful conviction by the early to mid 2000s, things were beginning to change. They were beginning to take a harder look at these convictions.

In 2007, Dallas elected the first black district attorney in Texas, Craig Walkins, who established the first conviction integrity unit in the US.

“A little over a decade later, John Pruso, who'd been a young assistant district attorney under Henry Wade, but disagreed with his ethos to go over.”

In 2026, the future of the office and potential wrongful convictions in Dallas County is up in the air under a new leader. Wrongful convictions don't happen only because of a DA office's ethos, or a police department's investigative tactics, or the plain fallibility of human perception. They happen because all of these things can work together to create a perfect storm. Here's writer Barbara Haggerty again.

The system is broken. Texas has done more than almost any other state to try to fix it, especially when it comes to wrongful convictions, but really the problem has to do with people.

Witnesses lie. Prosecutors hide evidence. You can a police get tunnel vision in the course confessions. Apologies don't want to be bothered. District attorneys who run for election don't want to reopen a case because they could be called soft on crime. And that could hurt them in the next election. A lot of it is political. I want to say here that I don't know if Charles Flores was wrongfully convicted. I was about three years old when this crime happened.

“Everything I know has been shown to me through some sort of filter, what the police chose to document, what evidence and witnesses made it into the courtroom, what appeals attorneys and prosecutors tell me is important.”

My goal from the outset has been to give as comprehensive a picture of the crime and the prosecution as possible, but of course there are parts we've had to leave out because of time or relevance to the overall story. You're hearing all of this through the filter of me, and while I might find some arguments more compelling than others, I'm not claiming to have all the answers. One thing I am certain of though, wrongful convictions happen, and we know of some that have happened in very similar circumstances to this case.

It's important to take a close look at these cases, especially ones where the stakes are life or death, to make sure the system is working, the way we'd like to think it does all the time. Often, the people who are forgotten in these wrongful convictions stories are the initial victims, but when the system fails, it fails everyone. Next time, on the end for God. Every time he calls, and the phone goes through, he goes to low-hello, and then starts cactiating and laughing, and he's so positive. I don't know, it's like things get him down, obviously, but he's just overwhelmingly positive and forward-thinking.

I think if him too is like really kind. 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, editing by Aslan Gattis, audio engineering, and sound-designed by Austin Sisler with E-Side Studios. I'm Executive Producer West Ferguson.

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