Josie Duffy Rice
Josie Duffy Rice is a journalist, writer, and podcast host whose work focuses on prosecutors, prisons, and the criminal justice system. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times,…
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Áine Cain and Kevin Greenlee are the hosts of a podcast called Murder Sheet. They have been releasing episodes on the conviction of Temujin Kensu. But they do not believe he is innocent. Josie Duffy Rice tries to find out why.
If you are interested in further reading, here are books written by people featured in this series:
- The Man No One Believed The Untold Story of the Georgia Church Murders by Joshua Sharpe
- Our Friend, Temujin: The Wrongful Conviction of Temujin Kensu by Joy Marie Mann
- Shadow of the Bridge: The Delphi Murders and the Dark Side of the American Heartland by Áine Cain Kevin Greenlee.
Pushkin. I've spent three years off and on working on the story that has become this podcast. Three years reporting, reading court transcripts and police reports, hour after hour of interviews. Every episode has been fact-checked and scrutinized by lawyers and But this is not the only podcast about the murder of Scott Macklem in Port Huron, Michigan, 40 years ago. Or about the person who was in prison for that murder. Timogen Kinsu. My name is Anya Kane. I'm a journalist.
00:47
Speaker 2
And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney.
00:50
Speaker 3
We're The Murder Sheet. And this is The Murder of Scott Macklem. The Guilt of Timogen Kinsu. Part 1. Tell Him to Leave You Alone.
01:03
Speaker 1
Murder Sheet is a true crime show. They don't only talk about Temujin Kinsu, not by a long shot, but their takes are influential, their episodes numerous, and their conclusions about this case are exactly the opposite of mine.
01:21
Speaker 3
As we look more and more at the case of the murder of Scott Macklem, we became convinced that Temujin Kinsu committed this crime. In our episodes this week, we are going to share the case.
01:33
Speaker 1
For his guilt, Murder Sheet began running episodes like this around the same time I started writing up my own coverage. Their show became the shadow haunting my own work. And it has colored interviews with sources, including Timogen himself. The Murder Sheet episodes kept coming. I worried that somehow they'd uncovered new evidence of guilt that I had missed. But they didn't have new evidence. Instead of relief... I just felt a guttural and eerie sense of discomfort. How could it be that someone would look at the same set of facts and come to the exact opposite conclusion? So I decided I should talk to them. I'm Josie Duffy Rice, and this is The Backfire Effect. The Looking Glass. In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, if you haven't read it, the little girl Alice wonders what life is like in the room she sees through the mirror. The books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way, she says. I believe Timidgin Kinsu is innocent, not because I want to believe that. I've come to that conclusion myself after looking at this case for years. And it's the same conclusion drawn by a whole spectrum of people. longtime police officers, former FBI agents, former prosecutors, federal judges, the Innocence Project, many, many people who have stuck their necks out to state for the record that they don't think Temujin Kinsu murdered Scott Macklem, that authorities convicted the wrong man. But in the world of Murder Sheet, all of us have it wrong.
03:41
Speaker 3
Temujin Kinsu is never going to again breathe a breath of free air. And I believe he's going to die behind bars as he should. And I believe that the people who have worked so hard over the years to keep him incarcerated, I believe they are heroes. He is a terrible human being. He will die in prison.
04:00
Speaker 1
He should. And again, I concur with what you're saying. Over the past year or so, Anya and Kevin emailed me a few times after hearing that I, too, was working on a project about this case. I wasn't enthusiastic about talking with them This seemed to me like a clear innocence case, one that only the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, could address with a pardon. And now Murder Sheet had come along to stomp on Timogen's last opportunities at freedom. But then we talked for hours. Honestly, I'd expected to really, really dislike them. To my surprise, that's not what happened. I still vehemently disagree with their conclusions about Timogen's guilt. but we had a good conversation. So I'm going to play you some of those conversations. And later in this episode, I'm going to respond to some of their arguments point by point. Kevin and Anya are married, and the story of how they met is crazy.
05:02
Speaker 4
We met looking into the same cold case.
05:05
Speaker 3
Oh, wow.
05:06
Speaker 1
Tell me more. Like, where were you? Like, You guys.
05:08
Speaker 4
Red flags abounding.
05:10
Speaker 5
No, no.
05:11
Speaker 1
This is right up my alley.
05:12
Speaker 4
I wouldn't encourage people to do this, but I mean, it worked out for us because I was... So I was a reporter at Insider for years and I'm a weird, morbid person.
05:20
Speaker 1
So I'm always.
05:21
Speaker 4
I'm on the retail beat, but I'm always pitching them like, oh, let's do this cold case. There's a retail angle. So I'm looking into all of these.
05:29
Speaker 1
Cases.
05:30
Speaker 4
I'm looking into one in Indianapolis or right outside of Indianapolis.
05:34
Speaker 6
The 1978 quadruple homicide. I'd gotten interested in it. I became friends with a detective who worked on the case. And he said, Kevin, there's this website called newspapers.com where people clip articles about cases they're interested in. You should look and see who's clipping articles about this.
05:51
Speaker 1
You guys met through newspapers.com? If it's not obvious, I spend a lot of time on Newspapers.com, and I never imagined that two people could meet on there. But perhaps it's a fitting beginning for a couple that would later start their own true crime podcast. How long have you guys been doing the Marushi?
06:11
Speaker 4
We started the podcast in 2020. I think our first episode came out November 17, 2020. And do you guys do it every week?
06:18
Speaker 1
Yeah, we do it.
06:19
Speaker 4
We've done.
06:20
Speaker 6
We.
06:20
Speaker 2
Actually do like four or five episodes a week.
06:23
Speaker 1
It's your full-time jobs then?
06:24
Speaker 5
Yes.
06:25
Speaker 3
Okay.
06:26
Speaker 1
But how many episodes do you have right now?
06:28
Speaker 2
We do a lot of episodes.
06:29
Speaker 4
We do a lot of episodes and we're very prolific. But, you know, sometimes I worry we do too many. We are on 893.
06:40
Speaker 1
How do you guys think about it? Do you think of it as like a journalism project and advocacy, commentary?
06:47
Speaker 4
The way I often conceptualize it and kind of even goes back to the name is sort of like a newspaper where we have perhaps the ability or freedom to do different things. And it's eclectic in sometimes we are doing just straight hard news reporting, breaking news scoops. Sometimes we're doing something that's more like a feature. Sometimes we're doing something that's very opinion based. And, you know, I think there are risks to doing that. And there are, you know, downsides. And sometimes we feel different situations call for different things. But what we try to do is we add value. Try to, or at least that's the goal. I'm not saying we always do.
07:27
Speaker 1
Their episodes on the murder of Scott Macklem are definitely in the opinion bucket. They're not trying to solve a mystery.
07:35
Speaker 6
One thing we did in this case is we put our conclusion about the case in the title of our episode.
07:42
Speaker 5
Mm-hmm.
07:43
Speaker 6
We call it the guilt of Temujin Kenzu. And I do want to stress that's very rare for us. I can't think of any other time we did that. One reason is by the time we did our episodes, we had done so much research, we knew what we thought. And we thought in some way it might be dishonest to hide that from the audience or to hide that from people.
08:07
Speaker 1
Kevin told me how he first got interested in this case. He'd read a news story about it. years before they started covering it.
08:13
Speaker 6
A couple of years earlier, I'd seen an NBC News article, and it was very slanted towards the innocent side. And I remember thinking, if even half of these things in this article are true, it's an outrage. This man is in prison. He's clearly innocent. And I did a little bit of research. And I looked in the other side and I became convinced, no, he's guilty.
08:34
Speaker 4
I'll say this is a case that I feel it's less about any one piece of evidence. And it is a bit more about the totality of everything adding up. I usually use the kind of silly metaphor of it's less of a boulder and more of a bunch of smaller rocks piled on top of each other. But they add up to a weight for me that meets the state's burden of proof in this case.
08:59
Speaker 1
I've used my own Boulder metaphor to explain this case, because trying to prove innocence in the U.S. judicial system would make even Sisyphus despair. But Anya's idea of small rocks, I wanted to understand exactly what she meant. After the break, I'll examine a few of the arguments that Anya and Kevin make, and consider whether they actually have the weight that they say they do. In the many episodes of Murder Sheet devoted to quote-unquote the guilt of Temujin Kinsu, the hosts, Kevin and Anya, try to bolster their case with a few arguments. One argument is around motive. Recall that Temujin had dated the victim's fiancé, Crystal, during the brief time that he lived near Port Huron in 1986.
09:57
Speaker 5
I think....
10:00
Speaker 4
When you look at people who are stalkers of former romantic partners, you will hear stories where somebody is stalked for 20 years because the person does not get over the rejection. I think he had a real power and control coercive dynamic with virtually all of the women. all the girls he's ever been with. But Crystal had the gall to not only leave him, but stay where she was and get with a new guy and then get pregnant. I think he had a real problem with that. I think what you're seeing is somebody losing control and feeling like they have to regain the control no matter what.
10:43
Speaker 1
But what was it that Temujin allegedly couldn't get over? In the little about a month that Crystal and Timogen dated, they saw fairly little of each other. Crystal worked two jobs, one of them full-time. And after a few weeks, Crystal says she broke up with him. Others, including Michelle, and even a former friend who testified against Timogen at trial, say Timogen ended it because he was, quote, tired of her. Either way, according to those around him, nobody hears from Timogen about Crystal again. A few weeks later, he and a now-pregnant Michelle move across the state to the Upper Peninsula. Don't get me wrong. Though he denies her version of events, I don't think Crystal is lying about being scared of him or about him being abusive and controlling. But what Kevin and Anya describe is something more specific. Obsession. I think his arrogance and his general approach to relationships was not I'm obsessed with you. How could you leave me? I think it was sort of the opposite. I don't care about you. You're disposable to me. You're stupid. Who cares? Whatever. Kevin believes that Timogen had threatened Scott after he and Crystal broke up.
12:01
Speaker 6
After Crystal stands up to him and ends the relationship, he becomes very threatening. He stalks the couple. He makes threats to To Crystal, he makes threats to Scott. Scott talks about these threats to other people, including a friend when he's out hunting. He says, Crystal's psycho ex is threatening me. A couple of people come in to where Scott works. One of them is later identified as Mr.
12:30
Speaker 2
Kinzu.
12:31
Speaker 6
So it's pretty apparent that there is some stalking and threatening.
12:36
Speaker 1
Kevin, Anya, and I agree on something here. The threats against Scott were real. People showed up at his job more than once, sometimes one guy, sometimes two, to intimidate him. The thing we don't agree on, though, is whether Timogen was responsible. Scott's manager told police the trouble started in January or February, months before Timogen and Crystal even met. And it turns out that his friend didn't say that Crystal's psycho ex was threatening them, just that someone was threatening them. None of the people that Scott confided in remembered him identifying the culprit. Isn't that kind of strange? If it were Timogen, wouldn't Scott have just said that? But Kevin's argument doesn't just rest on what Scott told his manager or his friends, which wasn't much. It rests on a tipping point.
13:32
Speaker 6
About a week before the murder, Mr. Kinzu learns that Crystal is pregnant. And he believes it is possible that the child is his. So the idea of his child or what he believes is his child being raised by another person really is the final straw. I believe that's when he makes the decision to kill Scott.
13:57
Speaker 1
This argument honestly surprised me. They're the first people I've heard make this claim, despite 40 years of people investigating this case. Not to mention that the party where Timogen allegedly hears about Crystal's pregnancy, he's not even there. He's in Escanaba, working at a school carnival. Multiple people have confirmed that. And honestly, even if he had somehow heard through the grapevine that Crystal was pregnant, I still don't think this argument holds water. Timogen and Crystal both say that after they broke up, they didn't speak again until after Scott was killed. To believe that he is so focused on Crystal and yet there's no record of that. We have his calling card. We have months of his calling card records. No Crystal contact. Anya and Kevin's theory is that Timogen was obsessed with his bloodline. And that's why he killed Scott. Because he thought Crystal's baby might be his. But there's no evidence that he even knew Crystal was pregnant. Plus, at that point, he already had three kids by three women and another woman pregnant with his fourth, and he wasn't parenting any of them. That also, like, allows us to, I think, kind of overlook the parts that don't make sense, including the stuff from Bounds. Because to me, a lot of the stuff from Bounds doesn't make sense. You heard about police detective John Bounds earlier this season. that he put things in his reports that no one can or will corroborate, even years later. And some of what he wrote is flatly contradicted by the evidence, from claims about Temujin's whereabouts to the witnesses who say police never interviewed them. Taken together, I don't think police reports like these add up to evidence of a motive. I think they're evidence of misconduct.
16:00
Speaker 2
Yeah, I hear what you're saying.
16:02
Speaker 6
One of the problems with this case is that, I think Anya mentioned, it's almost like a choose-your-own-adventure because there's almost like two parallel streams of witnesses. And you could say, anybody that Bounds talked to and put in his report, I have trouble with. And by the same token, you could say, well, anybody that Kinzu talked to, he was manipulating people. So you could say anything he says. should be totally disregarded. And I think ultimately what you have to do is just try to go at it by a case-by-case basis. I put more credibility in those witnesses than you do, but I understand why you would have concerns.
16:49
Speaker 1
I hear what Kevin is saying, but there's a logical flaw here that I can't get past. If these witnesses were telling the truth, If Scott had told someone close to him that Timogen was the person stalking him, if Timogen had been seen in Port Huron days before the murder or seen at Scott's job stalking him, why didn't those people testify at trial? It seems like that evidence would be an absolute home run for Prosecutor Robert Cleland. This is a huge high-profile case. Why aren't you calling the people that say that they heard his name, that they saw him? You know, why wouldn't you do that? It doesn't make sense to me.
17:28
Speaker 4
Are you putting a lot of assumptions, though, on the why when we don't know from Cleland? I mean, he won. Obviously, he didn't need it.
17:36
Speaker 1
Well, you're right. He didn't need it. But I don't think he knew that at the beginning. Like, I don't think this case was a home run enough, right? That he would have thought, I don't need someone who can put a name to this face. It is so much of this story, and I think so much of you all's kind of perspective on this relies on This idea that he had stalked Scott, that he had been identified as stalking Scott, and not like he had been at this party and he had heard about this pregnancy. And without that evidence, then what do we have? There's another rock in the pile for Anya. The jailhouse informant, Phil Joplin, who testified that Timogen confessed.
18:20
Speaker 4
I just don't believe, typically, in the facts. benefit of using jailhouse or prison house snitches, but Joplin seemingly was able to recount some details of Scott's murder, I think namely that he screamed before he died, that seem interesting. I mean, they certainly don't conflict with what we know happened, and I question how he would have known that.
18:43
Speaker 1
But the thing is, we know how Joplin learned this detail. He would later say that he heard it from John Bounds himself when he was given a shorter sentence in exchange for testifying in that Timogen had confessed. To their credit, Kevin and Anya do not totally defend the investigation.
19:02
Speaker 4
Your critiques of the investigation are very salient to me and something I would agree with and certainly something if I think we had the case happen in 2026 rather than 1986, I would be looking at it and saying, oh my goodness, you know, like they botched this.
19:18
Speaker 1
We don't agree on motive. and I maintain that there is no evidence linking Timogen to this crime. But I do agree that they botched this. When we return, I take on Murder Sheet's dismissal of Timogen's alibi. Say that you are convinced of the guilt of Temujin Kinsu, as the hosts of Murder Sheet genuinely appear to be. How do you explain how Temujin got from Escanaba in the Upper Peninsula to Port Huron and back in such a small window of time? Here's how I put it in an earlier episode. For Temujin to drive to Port Huron, shoot Scott Macklem a little before 9 a.m. and drive back, he would have needed to be away from Escanaba from at least one in the morning to around five in the afternoon. Yet here are at least some of the people who Timogen says he saw in that same window of time. Beth, who he was on a date with. Paul, who gave his car a jump. Jeff, the manager at the Big Boy. Michelle, his fiancé. His landlord. The cashier at the Burrito Place. Kathy and John at the Taekwondo Studio. Dash, Amy, and Mike. The friends he saw on the street skipping school. The owner of the music store and his wife. The two girls in the car with the dress. And Temujin says there are others. That's a lot of people. And yet, Kevin and Anya believe that he could have pulled it off. First, let's get one thing out of the way. They do not believe the prosecutor's theory that he chartered a plane.
21:13
Speaker 4
We believe he drove. We're not plain people. I want to make that super clear. People are like, how can you be plain people? We're not. I don't believe he flew.
21:23
Speaker 1
What they've argued, on their show and to me, is that only a few of those witnesses matter. Beth, Paul, and the manager at the Big Boy who saw him the night before, they don't matter, because Timogen could have left Escanaba by 2.30 in the morning and still made it to Port Huron. They also say, he could have gotten back by 3.30 the next afternoon. John Bounds testified that he made the drive in six hours and 45 minutes while speeding. Kevin and Anya think Timogen did the same thing.
21:54
Speaker 4
If someone's not going to respect human life, they might not respect the speed limit.
22:01
Speaker 1
I find this implausible. I don't think Timogen could have shaved off three hours of this round-trip drive. In the 1980s, the federal government required states to prove that most drivers on their highways were actually obeying the 55-mile-per-hour limit. Plus, it was peak deer season, the time of year when you have to be extra careful not to hit them, especially on the rural highways that Timogen would have had to drive. And he would have had to stop for gas twice, since cars of that era couldn't go that long without filling up. And don't forget, hours before the murder, his car broke down He had to get it jumped. So he would have had to do all of this in a car that was barely functioning. Cleland saw the problem with this whole round-trip speeding scenario. That's why, at the very end of trial, he brought up the idea of a plane. By car, the timeline only works if the witnesses in Escanaba got the days mixed up, especially the ones at the martial arts school, who testified that they are absolutely sure that they saw Timogen at noon, three hours after the murder. Kevin and Anya are careful about how they talk about these witnesses. They don't think they're lying. They think they're confused and that they were manipulated by Timogen.
23:23
Speaker 6
I believe that the closer you are to the event, the better your memory is. I think you took the different position from that on the podcast. But I think the initial times when she said, I wasn't sure, is more compelling than, oh, I've talked to all these other people. I've given it some thought. Now I think this.
23:42
Speaker 1
I have to say, I totally disagree. I think if you said to me right now, what were you doing 13 days ago? I guess I was working. What day of the week was that? I don't know. Maybe I went. And then if I look at my calendar and I can put things together, even before that, why tonight? If my car breaks down in the parking lot and my plan is to drive it should be gunning it for the next, whatever, 12 hours. Scott will be in that parking lot again next week. Why now?
24:18
Speaker 2
I think that was an attempt to set up an alibi.
24:20
Speaker 4
Yeah, I think a lot of this is an attempt to set up an alibi.
24:22
Speaker 1
So you think that the car didn't actually break down?
24:24
Speaker 2
I don't know.
24:26
Speaker 6
I think he probably arranged for it to break down, thinking, oh, if my car's in that parking lot, that's my alibi. How could I have gotten down there? Look, my car is having a serious issue.
24:38
Speaker 1
But I just don't buy it. Why would Timogen spend an hour trying to jump his car if it wasn't really broken down? He needed to get to Port Huron. He needed that hour. To me, this doesn't look like the work of someone who is carefully or even haphazardly planning an alibi. It looks like an ordinary, messy day that ended with a dead car in a Kmart parking lot. I want an alibi for November 5th. Like the words November 5th are going to like come out of my mouth when I'm talking to people and be like, this is a great November 5th. Isn't it beautiful day outside? This being so intricately planned and then not even really doing a very good job of like shoring up the people you're going to rely on, whether it's the landlord or the music store. Let's just say he leaves immediately. He drives his foster kid. He gets back in six and a half hours. But if he's constructing an alibi, he's going, I would think he would do it a little bit more thoroughly, right? Right now, he sort of has, I ran into these people on the street, whatever. Like, if I'm him, I'm like, you know, I just have a little bit, they're going to be more reliable witnesses. But it doesn't seem like he did a lot of care of ensuring that these people were going to be able to back him up.
25:55
Speaker 4
I think you're a sensible person and would maybe be better at this. You know, like, not that you would ever murder anybody. I think it's, honestly, Kenzu, I think he might be better at the rumination and the plotting, perhaps, than the execution. I mean, like, honestly, I always joke to Kevin, I'm like... I would never want to murder anybody, but I certainly wouldn't get away with it because there'd be like some, I think I was being a Columbo villain and then there'd be some.
26:23
Speaker 1
Really stupid thing I would do. It would be like so stupid. Totally.
26:26
Speaker 4
Right. I'd be like walking right past like a flock camera or something. Right. So like he thinks he's really smart. He thinks he's much smarter than other people. I mean, I could see someone like that perhaps constructing something to a point and thinking, I got it. I mean, but we're right now, we're really getting more into like, would a rational human being do things like this?
26:48
Speaker 1
I guess like, I am skeptical of the reliance on like, he's just not like, he just doesn't make good decisions. Because I think that allows like a lot to be written off. I think it's a little bit of an escape hatch. his alibi does require some level of rationality. This idea that Timogen is just not as rational as us came up a few times, including when I asked Kevin and Anya what, after listening, they thought my blind spots were. They were diplomatic about it.
27:22
Speaker 4
Your tendency, which I think is a really admirable tendency and also good for journalists to have, I think sometimes you're trying to put... a lot of logic and thoughtfulness into how a violent guy might have done something or why he did it this way, not that way. The way I see Temujin tends to be a bit simpler. I see him as a guy who is capable of some level of planning and thought and is not as smart as he thinks he is and is not the Columbo villain he thinks he is. And therefore, certain things with this murder kind of seemed pretty smart or pretty like, yeah. And then it falls apart at a certain point. I just think there's a limit to how helpful that is because we can't really know what's in that person's mind.
28:15
Speaker 6
I think the thing to remember is you frankly are a lot smarter and more rational than Mr.
28:23
Speaker 2
Kenzu.
28:24
Speaker 6
There's a lot of things you would do differently than him. So I think when you look at it and say, oh, I would have done this differently, that's not necessarily an argument for his innocence as much as it is further evidence that you are smarter than him.
28:41
Speaker 1
Maybe I am more rational, but I don't think you have to be a genius to do the basic things that I'm talking about. Like, for example, keep a receipt. What Kevin and Anya are describing is a conclusion that can kind of absorb anything. When something about the crime looks planned, it's because Timogen is calculating. When something makes no sense, it's because he's not as smart as he thinks he is. He gets to be clever enough to pull off a murder from across the state, and still careless enough that every hole in the case is his fault rather than the prosecution's. A theory that explains every fact, including the ones that point in opposite directions, isn't really explaining anything. It's just protecting the conclusion. By that logic, there's no alibi that would clear him. I don't think that Kevin and Anya are acting in bad faith at all. I think they're doing what most people do once they've decided what's true. That is the backfire effect. When people are shown evidence that contradicts what they believe, they don't let the belief go. Sometimes they hold on tighter. Near the end, I asked them if they had changed their minds at all after our back-and-forth.
30:00
Speaker 4
I'm 99% sure this guy did it. I just think he's bad news.
30:03
Speaker 2
Yeah, I'm convinced. I'm 100% convinced he's guilty.
30:06
Speaker 4
Okay, so 99 and 100.
30:08
Speaker 1
Kevin, I feel like I'm going to push back on you a little because I'm 100% convinced I didn't kill Scott Macklem. I'm like 99% sure that you guys didn't kill Scott Macklem because why would you have killed Scott? But like, I wasn't there. Are you really saying there's no way? You think there's no way? Or you're as convinced as you can be?
30:29
Speaker 6
Based on all the evidence I've seen and reviewed, I'm totally convinced it's him. Now, if you say, oh, Kevin, guess what? There was a security camera no one knew about, and it shows someone else doing it, I'll say, yes, I was totally wrong.
30:48
Speaker 2
Boy, did I mess this up. And I'll change my mind.
30:52
Speaker 1
What I've discovered is that the belief that Timogen is guilty, or the belief that some others have, that he's innocent and yet should remain where he is, it isn't built on evidence so much as on fear of what might be true. What if he's a psychopath who fooled everyone and letting him out means letting a killer go? What if he's playing a long game? I heard a version of that fear from Dr. Thomas Mooney, the psychologist who hypnotized witness Rennie Gobain.
31:24
Speaker 5
The question I had, how psychopathic is this guy? I've just watched the show on Ted Bundy. Bundy protested his innocence till he died. Psychopaths can lie through their right teeth. They have no conscience, no guilt. I wondered how psychopathic this guy was.
31:46
Speaker 1
I told him that Timogen would probably think that the people responsible for him being in prison are the psychopaths.
31:53
Speaker 5
Naturally, what does the psychopath do? He blames everybody else.
31:59
Speaker 1
So, if Timogen defends himself, that's proof he's a psychopath. And if he blames the people who convicted him, that's proof too. It's the same logic that Kevin and Anya use, taken one step further. Because once you've decided that someone might be a monster, there's nothing he can say that won't confirm it. It would be easy to hear our conversation as two reasonable sides reading the same evidence differently. But I don't think that's what's happening. When it comes to evidence of murder, John Bounds has to be right, and almost everyone else has to be wrong. Scott's manager has to be off by months about when the threat started. The people at the martial arts school have to have mixed up the day they saw Timogen at noon. These witnesses can't have just been mistaken then. They have to be mistaken now, for decades. His former fiancée Michelle has to still be lying for him. The car that broke down can't have really broken down. He has to have found time to obtain this other second car to commit the murder, a car that has never been found or identified. And he has to have made the round trip about three hours faster than normal. It just doesn't work. You may get the sense that Anya and Kevin and I don't agree on anything. And I admit, when it comes to this case, there's a lot that we don't see eye to eye on. But we do agree on some things.
33:29
Speaker 4
I'm very scared about true crime. Honestly, I came into this space being really optimistic and like, let's all solve a mystery. And now I'm like, I'm concerned that true crime is fostering antisocial tendencies online. The thing I'm scared about is wrongful accusations going out at people. I think true crime really does have a possibility of, you know, advocacy and highlighting issues, highlighting inequity. It can memorialize the victims. It can light a fire around, like, this is an unfair outcome. But it can't if we are just becoming a bunch of lunatic conspiracy theorists about everything about a case that is actively going on, on trial, basically based on vibes.
34:13
Speaker 1
I share their worry. True crime trains us to expect a twist. It teaches us to look for the hidden villain, the secret plot, the explanation that nobody else saw. But honestly, most crime isn't like that. Most of the time, the boring explanation is the right one. In this case, the boring explanation might be that a sloppy investigation grabbed the first possible suspect and never looked anywhere else.
34:41
Speaker 6
We are very much alone in true crime in saying that he's guilty.
34:45
Speaker 1
Yeah, I don't like it.
34:47
Speaker 4
I prefer to be in the group rather than on the outside being screaming in the wilderness.
34:53
Speaker 1
But they're not really alone. If they were alone— Timogen would be out of prison. But instead, the people who agree with Murder Sheet are the ones holding the keys. And when someone in the governor's office needs a reason not to look at this case again, Murder Sheet may give them one. I'm wondering, like, how you would feel if it came out definitively that he was innocent.
35:20
Speaker 4
I'd feel bad. I mean, if we got it wrong and we said someone did it who didn't do it, like, I'd feel bad.
35:26
Speaker 6
I'd probably reassess whether or not I should continue to be in this space. Because if I caused an innocent person that level of extra pain and hardship, why should I take a chance of doing that again? I'd feel awful. I can't imagine a situation where I would be wrong about this and right about everything else.
35:45
Speaker 5
No.
35:46
Speaker 6
If I put this level of research into this and came down completely wrong, I would assume I probably made the same sort of mistakes in other episodes.
36:00
Speaker 1
When I started this investigation, I thought I was telling a story about what this case did to Timogen. That harm alone is enormous. He's lost almost his entire adult life. The longer I've spent with it, the more I've come to wonder what it has done to everyone else. What evil do we do in an attempt to rid the world of evil? I worry that the answer is more than we'd like. How does this corrode us? What does honesty with ourselves demand? The worry that we would be duped into believing the bad guy, it only accounts for one kind of mistake. While people have been guarding against the possibility that a guilty man might go free, an innocent man, has spent nearly four decades in prison. The people with control in this case are so worried about his evil that they've ended up doing something evil themselves. And they can't see it, because in their minds, they're the only ones standing between the rest of us and a monster. And while some have fought hard to keep him in prison, many more have just let this situation stand. And I don't think any of them see themselves as doing something cruel. But they've made their peace with the possibility of locking up an innocent person forever. And this is the part I'm having trouble dealing with. What does this do to them? To me? And of course, to him. Or even to you. Now that you've heard his story, you're part of this too. I hope you won't make that peace so easily. The Backfire Effect is hosted and reported by me, Josie Duffy Rice. Additional reporting by Joshua Sharp. It's produced by Lydia Jean Cott with additional production support from Trina Menino. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producers are Amy Gaines McQuaid and Jacob Smith. Our music was composed by Daniel Walter. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski. Our fact checker is Lauren Vespoli and our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Special thanks to a few more people at Pushkin. who made the backfire effect possible. Greta Cohn, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Jake Flanagan, Owen Miller, Sarah Bruguier, and Karen Shakerji.
The Host
