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Episode: Episode 5: Trial in a Trial

Author: NHPR
Duration: 00:49:43

Episode Shownotes

A new true crime story is told and when juries hear it, it leads to different results for all three defendants. During the first trial, the lead detective makes a big mistake.For more on the case and to see a table of confession discrepancies, visit bearbrookpodcast.com. To make a donation

in support of Bear Brook, click here. SUPPORT THE WORK OF THE TEAM BEHIND BEAR BROOK BY MAKING A DONATION HERE!

Summary

In Episode 5 of Bear Brook titled 'Trial in a Trial,' the complexities of the legal proceedings following the murder of Sharon Johnson are explored. The episode illustrates how Ken Johnson, Tony Puff, and Jason Carroll faced capital murder charges, with Ken being freed due to a lack of evidence. It emphasizes the contentious nature of confessions, particularly Tony's coerced confession that lacked supporting physical evidence. Detective Lammy's flawed investigation and his methods of pressure during interrogations raise critical questions about the integrity of evidence and the reliability of confessions, ultimately leading to Tony's acquittal as the jury doubts both the state's narrative and Lammy's credibility.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Episode 5: Trial in a Trial) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_03
previously on Bear Brook Season 2, A True Crime Story. Right from the top again, Jason. When were you first contacted?

00:00:15 Speaker_14
July 27th, 1988. To do what? To kill Sherry Johnson. By whom? Tony Puff.

00:00:24 Speaker_15
I want you to explain to the jury, if you will, and I know it's very difficult to do this, but I must ask you, How does Tony Pupp feel about having participated in the murder of Sharon Johnson?

00:00:40 Speaker_14
I feel bad and I'm sorry it took place and I wish it had never even happened.

00:00:48 Speaker_02
Karen basically said to me, all kinds of promises have been made to him, and I trust Roland Lamy explicitly. And we got into kind of a heated discussion. I never doubted for a minute that she was made promises.

00:01:05 Speaker_02
Lamy made promises to her that he could never possibly keep.

00:01:18 Speaker_06
By the year 1991, the state of New Hampshire had their story of who killed Sharon Johnson. They had arrested three people and charged them all with capital murder.

00:01:31 Speaker_06
Ken Johnson, Tony Puff, and Jason Carroll waited in separate jails for their day in court. None of them could afford to pay for their own attorney, so the court assigned them each a different team of lawyers.

00:01:45 Speaker_06
A judge also decided to try each of them separately. They faced different sets of charges in addition to capital murder. For instance, Jason and Tony were charged with kidnapping, since it was they who allegedly abducted Sharon from the mall.

00:02:01 Speaker_06
And Tony alone was charged with sexual assault for allegedly touching Sharon's breasts during the attack, though that particular charge was later dropped.

00:02:12 Speaker_06
And so the stage was set for three trials, each with a different defendant, a different set of defense lawyers, and a different jury. Ken was scheduled to be tried first, then Tony, then Jason. For the defense teams, it was a complicated situation.

00:02:35 Speaker_06
Their interests were aligned, but only so long as they were all pleading not guilty and not testifying against each other. At any time, one of the three could try to cut a deal with the state and turn on the others.

00:02:49 Speaker_06
Ken was represented by Buzz Schur and Jim Moyer.

00:02:53 Speaker_01
What would you do in that circumstance if you were Carroll or Puff? You know, I think the odds were that one of them would flip. rather than they'd both hang tough. I mean, that was the anxiety on our part.

00:03:07 Speaker_01
It would be hard to believe when faced with a capital charge that you're not gonna flip to save your life.

00:03:16 Speaker_11
But by the fall of 1991, about two years since they were all arrested, Jason and Tony hadn't flipped.

00:03:31 Speaker_06
One possible reason for that, the three defense teams had joined together and successfully argued that New Hampshire's death penalty law, as it was written then, was unconstitutional.

00:03:43 Speaker_06
Back then, only juries could impose the death penalty in New Hampshire. So if a defendant pled guilty before trial, before a jury was seated, they'd be sentenced by a judge and therefore escape the death penalty.

00:03:57 Speaker_06
The defense lawyers argued, and the courts agreed, that undermined defendants' constitutional right to a trial by jury, since, by definition, that was the more dangerous route for them.

00:04:09 Speaker_06
So, the death penalty was now off the table for Ken, Tony, and Jason. Ken's trial was scheduled to start in just a few weeks, and the prosecutors were in a real bind.

00:04:26 Speaker_06
Unless Jason or Tony agreed to testify as witnesses, the state could not enter their confessions as evidence against Kim.

00:04:36 Speaker_06
That's because the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution gives criminal defendants the right to confront witnesses who testify against them.

00:04:45 Speaker_06
If Jason or Tony's words were going to be used to say that Ken was guilty, Ken's lawyers had a right to cross-examine Jason and Tony.

00:04:55 Speaker_06
But Jason and Tony didn't have to testify because of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, the right to remain silent and not incriminate themselves.

00:05:07 Speaker_06
The lead prosecutor told a reporter he and his staff spent countless hours trying to find a way around this. But in the end, they couldn't. And so in October of 1991, prosecutors did something they really, really did not want to do.

00:05:26 Speaker_06
They dropped all the charges against Ken Johnson. No matter how convinced they were that Ken was guilty, without Tony or Jason's testimony, they just didn't have a case.

00:05:39 Speaker_10
The reason I remember this so well is that we picked him up from the jail. They were releasing him. And my car was in the shop that day. And I had borrowed my mother's car. And my mother's car had a unique license plate. It said, Granny.

00:05:58 Speaker_10
And so we jumped in the car, went to pick him up from the jail, and there's press all outside. I'm in the car waiting, like the getaway car, and I think Buzz, you got out and said, come on, Kenny, let's go.

00:06:11 Speaker_10
And for some reason, Ken decided, instead of getting in the car and driving away, walking across Willow Street, or Elm Street, whatever it was, to Dunkin' Donuts. With the press following him. Just, you know, the cameras, everything following him.

00:06:25 Speaker_10
And we're saying, come on, come on. He got himself a cup of coffee.

00:06:31 Speaker_06
Jim says Ken said nothing to the reporters. He just calmly bought a cup of coffee and then walked back to the car.

00:06:38 Speaker_10
My mother then saw it on Channel 9 News that night and saw her car. She was really pissed. What are you putting murderers in my car for?

00:06:51 Speaker_06
Even the mother of Ken's lawyer seemed to think he was guilty. But the state knew they couldn't win at trial. So they let him go. Ken, the state's lead suspect from almost the moment Sharon was murdered, was a free man.

00:07:16 Speaker_06
Now it was just Tony and Jason, each facing life in prison. This is Bear Brook Season 2, A True Crime Story. I'm Jason Moon.

00:08:10 Speaker_13
But what did we walk into? I mean, the fact pattern was horrendous. I mean, a kidnapping, a brutal murder of a pregnant woman.

00:08:18 Speaker_13
And, you know, this is something that, you know, you're starting basically with two and a half strikes against you before you step in the box.

00:08:27 Speaker_06
This is Mark Sisti, one of the lawyers who defended Tony Puff. I talked with him and his former partner, Paul Toomey. They worked together for decades. By their count, they defended as many as 80 people charged with murder.

00:08:42 Speaker_06
Talking to them feels like talking to two brothers who grew up together. They have lots of stories, like the time their office burned down.

00:08:50 Speaker_12
The fire was a good story, too. One of our clients is reputed to have said it, who was looking for something. No, no, no, no. He wanted to continue. We were his six lawyers, and the first five quit because they were afraid of him.

00:09:04 Speaker_12
And we were the stupid ones who took it. Drew will take the case. We took it on a Thursday.

00:09:10 Speaker_13
It burned down on like a Monday. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:09:14 Speaker_06
For a time, and probably still today, Mark and Paul were among the most famous defense attorneys in New Hampshire. Mark wears a ponytail and silver spectacles, picture of Ben Franklin grizzled by dozens and dozens of homicide trials.

00:09:32 Speaker_06
It feels like Mark is always on his feet in a conversation, always quicker than you are. And Paul, but Paul somehow managed to operate a small farm on his property while also practicing as an attorney.

00:09:45 Speaker_06
His tall face looks out at you from beneath a head of thick silver hair. For years, all the high-profile cases seemed to go to Mark and Paul.

00:09:55 Speaker_06
Just a few months before they were set to defend Tony Puff in trial, they defended Pamela Smart, who you might have heard of. Smart was accused of conspiring with teenage boys to kill her husband.

00:10:08 Speaker_07
Do you want this jury to understand that Bill Flynn decided to kill your husband because you broke up with him?

00:10:14 Speaker_00
I want this jury to understand the truth.

00:10:18 Speaker_06
Pam Smart's trial attracted national attention. It was the first murder trial in the U.S. to be televised live from start to finish, which meant Mark and Paul were on TV a lot. People knew them.

00:10:32 Speaker_06
And now, once again, Mark and Paul were appointed to a case where someone was accused of conspiring with teenagers to kill their spouse. Tony's trial would all come down to his confession. That's because there was no other evidence against him.

00:10:51 Speaker_06
Police found no physical evidence linking Tony to this crime. No fingerprints in Sharon's car. No shoe impressions at the construction site. Nothing that proved he'd been with Sharon or was at the site where her body was found.

00:11:06 Speaker_06
Police also couldn't find evidence to corroborate key parts of Tony's confession, like the idea that Tony was paid by Ken to commit the murder, or that Tony and Ken had talked on the phone in the days before they killed Sharon.

00:11:20 Speaker_06
Police couldn't find any bank statements or phone records to back up either. No physical evidence, no paper trail, just Tony's words on a tape, and whether 12 jurors would believe them. The trial began on December 4, 1991.

00:11:46 Speaker_06
You already know what the prosecutors say happened, so I'm going to tell you about the case that Mark and Paul put on for the jury. As a story, it had two main themes. One, Tony's confession is just not true.

00:12:02 Speaker_13
It wasn't your typical confession case. Things were just weren't adding up. And it was clearly appeared to be a coerced false confession case right out of the gate.

00:12:13 Speaker_12
I mean, it was it was clearly not true. It was clearly a not true confession.

00:12:18 Speaker_06
clearly not a true confession. To convince the jury of that, Mark and Paul directed their attention to parts of Tony's confession where he says things that just didn't line up with reality.

00:12:36 Speaker_06
One example of that comes near the middle of Tony's taped confession.

00:12:43 Speaker_15
What happens now?

00:12:45 Speaker_06
We get in that vehicle and run.

00:12:46 Speaker_15
Okay, what vehicles are we talking about now?

00:12:49 Speaker_06
By this point, Tony has told Detective Roland Lammy that he, Jason, and Ken all murdered Sharon at a construction site. Tony says after that, he and Jason got back into Sharon's green Subaru and drove it right back to the mall.

00:13:05 Speaker_15
What happened? Did you get in the car?

00:13:08 Speaker_14
I shut the car, get in the car, we go there, back to the mall, put the car back behind the mall by the food court and Sears.

00:13:22 Speaker_06
This statement is a big problem for the investigators. Remember the mystery of the car from the early investigation? Sharon was murdered on a Thursday, but her car wasn't found at the mall until Saturday.

00:13:36 Speaker_06
And yet, here in Tony's confession, he's saying they left it there on Thursday, the same night as the murder. But it's not just the wrong night. It's also the wrong location.

00:13:48 Speaker_06
The part of the parking lot Tony just said he left the car in, between the food court and the Sears, is not the area where Sharon's car was found. This is a mall parking lot, so it's huge. It goes around the whole building.

00:14:03 Speaker_06
And in reality, Sharon's car was found on a whole different side of the mall, near the Sears automotive entrance. So Tony's story about the car has a few issues. And during the interrogation, it seems like Lammy knows it.

00:14:20 Speaker_06
A few minutes later, he circles back to this detail about the car.

00:14:25 Speaker_15
The car was moved again. Can you explain how that happened?

00:14:32 Speaker_11
No.

00:14:38 Speaker_15
You took the keys, you said. Where did you park it at the Sears parking lot?

00:14:46 Speaker_14
I told one of the officers where I parked it. I don't remember what aisle it was, but it was not exactly in front of the food court. It was in between the food court and Sears.

00:14:59 Speaker_06
Again, this is not where Sharon's car was actually found. Lammy tries again.

00:15:04 Speaker_15
Let me ask you a question, OK? I know you're having a hard time remembering. I don't want to put any words in your mouth.

00:15:11 Speaker_15
But is it that you don't remember if you went back and got the car again at this time, or is it that you simply do remember that you only left it there once and took the keys?

00:15:23 Speaker_15
Did you go back after the car the next day, that night, later that night into the morning?

00:15:29 Speaker_14
I went back to the car. I went back to the car.

00:15:42 Speaker_15
Okay, could you please explain that and with whom?

00:15:48 Speaker_14
It was by myself.

00:15:48 Speaker_15
Alright. Why did you go back to the car?

00:15:55 Speaker_14
To make sure I didn't leave anything behind.

00:15:57 Speaker_15
Okay. Did you move it at that time? Did you go for a ride with it? Did you leave it someplace? Did you take it someplace? And bring it back another day? No.

00:16:13 Speaker_06
I didn't go anywhere with it. Despite being asked about it repeatedly and despite the hints from Lammy, Tony's story about Sharon's car just doesn't line up with what police know.

00:16:28 Speaker_06
Tony's confession puts the car back at the mall on the wrong night and in the wrong location. And there were plenty of other examples for Tony's lawyers, Mark and Paul, to choose from.

00:16:40 Speaker_06
Like how, in describing Sharon's murder, Tony mentions a total of four stabs—two from Jason, two from him. In reality, Sharon was stabbed 14 times. Or how Tony says Sharon was fully clothed when she was stabbed.

00:16:57 Speaker_06
In reality, Sharon's bra had been cut open with a knife in the front before she was stabbed. Or how Tony says he left the keys to Sharon's car underneath the seat. When police found her car, the keys were nowhere to be found.

00:17:14 Speaker_06
And then there's this story Tony tells about meeting with Ken after the murder. It's maybe the biggest difference between Tony's confession and the known facts.

00:17:25 Speaker_06
Tony says sometime after the murder, doesn't say exactly when, he drove to Ken's house to talk with him.

00:17:33 Speaker_14
He asked me if I had told anybody, and I said, no, I haven't told anybody. And he asked me about Jason.

00:17:43 Speaker_15
Were you with anyone when you went to his house this time?

00:17:45 Speaker_14
No, it was by myself. I was driving an 81 Malibu Classic.

00:17:51 Speaker_15
What color?

00:17:52 Speaker_14
Blue. OK.

00:17:55 Speaker_06
Detective Lammy has been trying to pry specifics from Tony this entire tape recording. And here's a rare instance where Tony delivers. He said he drove his car, a blue 1981 Malibu Classic, to see Ken at his house after the murder.

00:18:13 Speaker_06
Only, Tony definitively did not do that. We know that because 12 days before the murder at 3.20 a.m., Tony was pulled over in his blue 81 Malibu Classic for a broken taillight. Tony was driving with a suspended license. He was arrested.

00:18:34 Speaker_06
His car was impounded and Tony never got the Malibu Classic back. So Tony's confession includes a scene where he's driving a car that, in reality, was held by the police at that time. By the Allentown police, in fact.

00:18:53 Speaker_06
The town that includes much of Bear Brook State Park. The cop handling Tony's case for that arrest was someone you might remember. Ron Montplaisir. Tony's confession didn't line up with the physical evidence.

00:19:25 Speaker_06
But that wasn't the only thing Mark and Paul wanted to show the jury. There were also all the inconsistencies between Tony's confession and Jason's. As far as Mark and Paul saw it, Jason's confession was good for Tony's case.

00:19:41 Speaker_06
If they were both there, why were their stories so different? But they had a problem. Remember how prosecutors couldn't bring in Jason's confessions to a trial for Ken without calling Jason as a witness? Well, Tony's defense couldn't either.

00:19:59 Speaker_06
In Tony's trial, Jason's confessions were legally considered hearsay, not allowed as evidence. The basic idea behind the hearsay rule is to keep unreliable gossip from leaking in through someone's testimony.

00:20:13 Speaker_06
But the hearsay rule has lots of exceptions, and the arguments around them can get notoriously complicated. And during the hand-to-hand legal combat of Tony's trial, Mark and Paul successfully argued one of those exceptions did apply in this case.

00:20:34 Speaker_06
The judge allowed the jury to hear Jason's confessions, partly because Tony's confession was recorded after Jason's. Tony heard Jason's confession at the construction site, and Lammy referenced what Jason said while interrogating Tony.

00:20:51 Speaker_06
Mark and Paul argued that influenced what Tony said and whether it was reliable. And for the jury to fairly weigh that argument, they needed to hear Jason's confessions, too.

00:21:09 Speaker_06
And so with that bit of clever legal maneuvering, Jason's confessions entered Tony's trial. It was a bold move for Mark and Paul.

00:21:20 Speaker_06
The judge told the jury Jason's tapes were only to be taken to judge the reliability of Tony's confession and not for the truth of the matter. But still, the jury was going to hear Jason say Tony stabbed and strangled Sharon.

00:21:35 Speaker_06
But Mark and Paul felt it was worth it. The inconsistencies were too glaring. And so they made sure the jury heard lots and lots of them. like the motive for the murder.

00:21:51 Speaker_06
Tony says in his confession that Ken wanted Sharon killed because he was deep in debt. Jason says at first he wasn't told why Ken wanted his wife dead.

00:22:01 Speaker_06
Then later, Jason says it was because Sharon had caught Ken raping his daughter and doing, quote, some very other criminal acts. At the construction site, Jason says Ken and Sharon had a big argument before they stabbed her.

00:22:19 Speaker_06
Tony says Ken emerged from somewhere nearby only after Sharon had been stabbed. Then there's the murder weapon. Jason says the knife they used to kill Sharon was his, a brown folding pocket knife.

00:22:36 Speaker_06
Tony says the knife they used was white and silver and belonged to Lisa Johnson, Ken's daughter. The money. Tony says Ken paid them $10,000. Jason, at first, says he was paid $500, then $2,000. Then finally, he says they split the 10 grand.

00:22:58 Speaker_06
Tony says Ken paid them at his house on the night of the murder. Jason says they were paid in the morning, two days later. Why didn't Tony's confession, Jason's confession, and the physical evidence all line up?

00:23:24 Speaker_06
To Mark and Paul, the answer was obvious. Detective Roland Lammy. His conduct. His character. That was the second theme of their defense.

00:23:36 Speaker_13
I mean, the facts he wanted to come out were the facts that he would have been comfortable with, with regard to the theory of his case, the way he looked at it. But sometimes that won't match up with reality.

00:23:50 Speaker_06
Mark and Paul knew Lammy well. They'd faced off with him before in court. They actually kind of like him. But according to Mark and Paul, Lammy had a tendency to will his theory of a case into existence.

00:24:05 Speaker_12
I never got the sense that he tried to convict people that he thought were innocent. I never got that sense at all.

00:24:12 Speaker_12
But I just don't think, I think he would do what it took to get confessions and do what it took to convict people he thought were guilty. And that's a dangerous thing.

00:24:24 Speaker_06
I talked to a number of other defense attorneys who had clients Lammy investigated. They all agreed Lammy had this reputation, but none of them could point me to a specific instance where Lammy crossed a line.

00:24:37 Speaker_06
So whether that reputation was founded, I don't know. But it's what Mark and Paul saw here—a detective assured of his own theory, who, through intimidation and insinuation, got Tony to confess to that theory.

00:24:56 Speaker_06
Mark and Paul saw a whole alternate version of the story of Lammy's investigation. One that answered the question, why did Tony say all of this if it weren't true? What would motivate him to do that? That's after the break.

00:25:35 Speaker_04
About a year ago, I was hiking in Zion National Park. I was climbing this really steep trail, hundreds of feet up. And then a little voice inside my head said, Of course, I didn't. I'm terrified of heights. But the moment stuck with me.

00:26:01 Speaker_04
And when I got home, I started Googling around, and I learned that that little voice is a psychological phenomenon known as the call of the void.

00:26:09 Speaker_04
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00:26:25 Speaker_04
We lean over the edge and jump into the stuff that makes us feel uncomfortable or curious or overjoyed by the weirdness of the natural world. Like, what's it like to decompose?

00:26:38 Speaker_08
All of the germs and bacteria is saying, okay baby, we gotta get rid of this person.

00:26:47 Speaker_04
Or what's better, eating vegan or eating local? I mean, the buffalo is definitely more expensive. It's like $15.61.

00:26:54 Speaker_07
From a climate perspective, it's not better and it might be worse. Or why the hell do we have lawns?

00:27:01 Speaker_04
Who the hell needs five acres of ornamental grass? This is the king of waste. I'm Nate Hedgie, host of Outside In. Outside In is where curiosity and the natural world collide. Sometimes it's serious, sometimes it's ridiculous.

00:27:19 Speaker_04
Like a honeycomb, it's just like clusters of holes.

00:27:22 Speaker_05
Yes, a cluster, the word cluster.

00:27:25 Speaker_04
But it's always a wild journey. Listen to Outside In wherever you get your podcasts. That's Outside slash In from New Hampshire Public Radio.

00:27:47 Speaker_06
Mark Sisti versus Roland Lammy was the main event of Tony Puff's trial, a showdown between two veterans of their trades, cop versus lawyer, interrogator versus cross-examiner. Mark cross-examines Lammy for hours.

00:28:09 Speaker_06
One of the things he hones in on is how Tony acted during the investigation, behaviors that Mark says just don't make any sense if Lammy's theory is true.

00:28:21 Speaker_06
Remember how, when Lammy first makes contact with Tony, Tony agrees to help in the investigation, and they go down to the motel in Rhode Island and try to get Ken to incriminate himself?

00:28:34 Speaker_06
I don't have the audio of Tony's trial, but it's not hard to read the sparks into the transcript of the courtroom back and forth between Mark and Lammy on this.

00:28:43 Speaker_06
Mark is basically saying, it's crazy to think that Tony would volunteer to fly up to New Hampshire to help police catch the guy who paid him to commit murder.

00:28:55 Speaker_06
Why would Tony be trying to entrap his own co-conspirator, who could just as easily take Tony down with him? Mark says, that's absolutely ridiculous, isn't it? Lammy fires back, it's not ridiculous if Ken knew police were listening.

00:29:11 Speaker_06
Mark says, okay, now we're going to hear some objective fact that Ken Johnson knew the police were listening. Tell the jury the objective fact. Lammy says, it's just a conclusion. It's a conclusion without any support, right, Sergeant? Pretty much.

00:29:27 Speaker_06
Could we, we call that speculation, right? Lammy is forced to answer yes. If Tony really did kill Sharon, why did he agree to fly from North Carolina to New Hampshire to help in the investigation? Twice.

00:30:01 Speaker_06
Once in March of 89 when he tried to entrap Ken Johnson, and again about eight months later when he walked right into Lammy's trap at the construction site. Lammy said it was because Tony was conning them, trying to throw police off the scent.

00:30:17 Speaker_06
But Mark and Paul had a different story about a 19-year-old kid under the thumb of state police, about serious incentives for Tony to make stuff up that were just offstage in the police's telling of the story, and about a detective who was willing to lie to make his theory of the case come true.

00:30:38 Speaker_13
And that was everything. That was the beginning to the end. You're going to see a lying cop. Can you stick with us on this?

00:30:49 Speaker_06
Let's rewind the clock and hear the story of Lammy's investigation as told from Mark and Paul's perspective. Sharon Johnson is murdered in July 1988. For six months, police can't solve it.

00:31:03 Speaker_06
They can't figure out who this Bob is that Sharon was supposed to be meeting the night she was killed, and they can't figure out who moved Sharon's car. Lammy takes over the case in January of 1989.

00:31:15 Speaker_06
By March, he has a hunch that Tony might know something. But he has a hard time finding Tony, so he calls some of his relatives. Lammy talks to a couple, Deborah and George Gagnon. They will become key characters in Lammy's alleged manipulation of Tony.

00:31:37 Speaker_06
To the Gagnons, Tony was technically an ex-step-nephew, but not technically. Debra and George were like parents to Tony.

00:31:47 Speaker_06
Debra Gagnon testified at Tony's trial that when Lammy called looking for Tony, he asked her, quote, In his own testimony, Detective Lammy agrees this is what happened.

00:32:07 Speaker_06
This means that Lammy had the notion in his head that Tony moved Sharon's car before he even talked to Tony. When Lammy finally gets Tony on the phone, lo and behold, Tony tells him Ken asked him to move Sharon's car.

00:32:33 Speaker_06
But why would Tony say even that much if it weren't true? In Mark and Paul's story, the answer is leverage. Lammy had leverage over Tony.

00:32:46 Speaker_06
Tony had several warrants out for his arrest when Lammy first called him, motor vehicle violations that Tony had failed to appear in court for. He also owed child support payments to Lisa Johnson, Ken's stepdaughter.

00:33:01 Speaker_06
Mark and Paul argued that all of this provided a powerful incentive for Tony to play along with whatever Lammy had in mind, since Lammy could arrest him at any moment on his outstanding warrants.

00:33:13 Speaker_06
The implication from Tony's lawyers was that he was just trying to say or do whatever he thought Lammy wanted so he could avoid consequences, like maybe say he moved a car when he really didn't. and whether this view of events is accurate.

00:33:29 Speaker_06
Once Tony starts cooperating, Lammy does pull strings for him. He calls the local PD that held Tony's arrest warrants, and they put the warrants on an inactive status. Tony learns. Play along with the cops. Get favors.

00:33:47 Speaker_06
Now, Mark and Paul weren't arguing here that Lammy was knowingly planting a false story in Tony. Instead, they implied that Lammy just got fooled, a kind of confirmation bias.

00:33:59 Speaker_06
He squeezed Tony, Tony talked, and what Tony said matched Lammy's pre-existing theory. And Detective Lammy wasn't shy about squeezing people, as this next moment shows. In the fall of 1989, Lammy is looking for Tony for the second time.

00:34:24 Speaker_06
By this point, Lammy believes Tony was directly involved in the murder. He thinks Tony was playing him during their trip to Rhode Island. But again, Lammy can't find Tony.

00:34:36 Speaker_06
When Lammy calls Tony's parental figures, Deborah and George Gagnon, they tell Lammy they're not sure where he is either. But Lammy doesn't really believe them. And to provide a little extra motivation for the Gagnons to find Tony, he lies to them.

00:34:53 Speaker_06
Lammy tells the Gagnons he thinks Tony has AIDS. Remember, this is 1989 when Lammy says this, just a few years before the peak of the AIDS crisis in America.

00:35:12 Speaker_06
Deborah testifies she was so frightened she drove her entire family to the doctor's office and asked to have them tested. By the way, Lammy lying to people like this, totally legal. And eventually it seems to work. He does get Tony on the phone again.

00:35:31 Speaker_06
And Lamme, who still has the same leverage over Tony — the inactive arrest warrants, the child support payments — convinces Tony to come back to New Hampshire once again. Only this time, Lamme is luring Tony into a trap.

00:35:46 Speaker_06
At the construction site, Tony is confronted by Jason and his confession. Tony says Jason is crazy. He says none of that ever happened. He tries to tell Lammy he didn't even move the car like he originally said. But now it's too late. Lammy is convinced.

00:36:08 Speaker_06
Tony is guilty. Police interrogate Tony for three hours before they turn the tape recorder on. At one point, Tony asks to see Debra and George Gagnon. Lammy calls them and they drive to the police station.

00:36:32 Speaker_06
They arrive about an hour and a half into Tony's interrogation. At Tony's trial, Debra testifies when they arrived, Tony's eyes were wide and bloodshot. She says he looked like a wild animal. George says he looked like death warmed over.

00:36:51 Speaker_06
Deborah testifies, Lammy kept telling Tony over and over again, it'll be easier if you cooperate. Deborah testifies, Tony kept saying he had nothing to confess to.

00:37:02 Speaker_06
Deborah testifies that at one point during the interrogation, Tony leaned onto her and whispered, I'm just going to tell them what they want to hear because they're not going to let me out of here unless I do.

00:37:15 Speaker_06
Finally, and this is according to the police report, Tony threw up his arms and said, I'm ready. And that's when the detectives turned on the tape recorder.

00:37:26 Speaker_03
Tony, are you aware that this is being recorded?

00:37:29 Speaker_14
Yes.

00:37:30 Speaker_03
Would you speak it up, please?

00:37:31 Speaker_06
Yes.

00:37:32 Speaker_03
Thank you.

00:37:36 Speaker_06
So this is the alternate version of the story that Tony's lawyers, Mark and Paul, are putting forward during the trial. Lammy bullied a 19-year-old Tony into confessing to his pre-existing theories of the case. It was by no means a sure thing.

00:37:53 Speaker_06
There's still a taped confession where Tony Puff says he stabbed Sharon Johnson. And a lot of what the Gagnons testified to was disputed by police testimony.

00:38:03 Speaker_06
The inconsistencies in Tony's confession could be explained as simple mistakes in his recollection. And convincing a New Hampshire jury that a state police detective was a liar? Remember, it's 1991. It would be hard to pull off today, even harder then.

00:38:22 Speaker_06
But then Lammy does something that will change the course of the trial, something that plays right into Mark and Paul's strategy. After a long day of being cross-examined by Mark, Lammy goes home and takes a phone call.

00:38:45 Speaker_06
At the beginning of just about every criminal trial, the judge issues an order which says witnesses are not allowed to talk to each other until the trial is over.

00:38:54 Speaker_13
Yeah, I mean, it's important so that they don't get together and, you know, meld their stories and make them right.

00:39:01 Speaker_06
It's a pretty basic rule, common to virtually every criminal trial. But on this night, when Lammy gets home and picks up the phone, he breaks that rule. He gets a call from another potential witness in the case, his partner, Detective Neil Scott.

00:39:22 Speaker_06
According to Lammy, he and Neal talked about the fact that they would be questioned about Jason Carroll, which they were not expecting during Tony Puff's trial.

00:39:32 Speaker_06
Lammy says he told Neal he was going to have to spend the night reading their old reports. Lammy said, I'm afraid I might screw up and not remember the details. Neal allegedly told Lammy he wouldn't remember either if he was called to testify.

00:39:47 Speaker_06
They say they weren't trying to coordinate their testimony, though at one point Neal acknowledged they weren't supposed to be talking about that. We'll never really know what was said on that phone call.

00:39:58 Speaker_06
The only reason we know it happened is because the prosecutor handling the case accidentally interrupted it. He called Lammy that night while Lammy was on the phone with Neal.

00:40:09 Speaker_06
When Lammy switched lines to answer the call from the prosecutor, he said, hold on, I've got Neal on the phone.

00:40:18 Speaker_06
Maybe Lammy blurted that out because he didn't think it was a big deal, or maybe he didn't think the prosecutor would actually tell the judge. But he did.

00:40:27 Speaker_13
That turned into a trial inside of a trial, which was a great opportunity for us, actually.

00:40:40 Speaker_06
It became the most significant moment in the trial. Witness testimony was postponed for a week while hearings about this phone call were held. Detectives Lamme and Scott were forced to hire their own lawyers.

00:40:54 Speaker_06
Mark and Paul tried to have the whole case dismissed. The judge didn't go for that. But still, it was more than Mark and Paul could have hoped for.

00:41:02 Speaker_13
I think it was huge. I mean, our whole thing was that he was a dirty cop. And then he got to prove it in front of the jury.

00:41:07 Speaker_12
The judge just, he was just furious. I mean, he was absolutely furious. And the jury could tell he was furious.

00:41:13 Speaker_12
And he gave them an instruction that Rowland had disobeyed court orders and they were free to disregard everything he said, which you don't hear that instruction very often from judges.

00:41:27 Speaker_06
In his closing argument, Mark had no mercy for Lammy. He called him a liar. He said he'd shamed police work. And Mark did not let the jury forget how Lammy had violated the court order.

00:41:42 Speaker_06
Mark said, at the beginning of this case, we asserted he couldn't be trusted. And guess what? He proved it himself last Tuesday. Not to somebody on the street, but to you, to the judge, to everybody in this court.

00:41:56 Speaker_06
The prosecutor, Michael Ramsdell, fought back by arguing Lammy and Neal's phone call was a moot point, since Neal wasn't even called as a witness.

00:42:05 Speaker_06
He said the defense had attacked Lammy from the beginning to distract jurors from the real evidence, Tony's confession. And with that, after 15 days, Tony's trial ended. Now it was up to the jurors.

00:42:29 Speaker_06
In the legal world, jurors are known as finders of fact. They are burdened with a profound, almost magical power and responsibility to decide what actually happened, to transform a story into a verdict.

00:42:47 Speaker_09
And I said, I'm not — at one time, by the way, I told them that they could take the Roberts rules and shove them where the sun don't shine.

00:42:56 Speaker_06
Robert Hoagland was not impressed by the magic of being a juror. He especially did not like the way the jury foreperson ran the deliberation.

00:43:05 Speaker_09
She said, you're out of order to me one too many times. And I said, I'm not out of order.

00:43:14 Speaker_06
According to Robert, when the jury sat down to deliberate, everyone else was ready to acquit. He was the lone holdout.

00:43:23 Speaker_09
I thought he was guilty. I thought there was no question about whether he was guilty or not. The jury would have come back with a not guilty within 15 minutes if it wasn't for me.

00:43:39 Speaker_06
Robert says for his fellow jurors, and even for him, the hang-up was Detective Lammy. Mark and Paul's plan to go after the character and conduct of Lammy, it worked.

00:43:53 Speaker_09
This guy was — these people didn't like that sergeant. And I didn't like him either. I thought he was an idiot.

00:44:07 Speaker_06
Do you think that was the number one factor why they voted not guilty?

00:44:10 Speaker_09
Yes, it really was. There was one person on the jury. Once the jury was handed the case, he walked into the room. He threw his coat down in a corner, got down on that coat and laid there and said, you guys can discuss to whatever you want.

00:44:32 Speaker_09
Let me know when you're done. He's not guilty and I'm not going to change my mind. I finally gave in and I shouldn't have. I knew he was guilty. And I ended up voting not guilty. That was the final vote.

00:44:52 Speaker_09
And then the judge came in and congratulated us and said we did the right thing and all this crap. And I was sitting there shaking my head.

00:45:03 Speaker_05
So, so basically you voted not guilty just because it seemed hopeless and you wanted to get out of there.

00:45:09 Speaker_09
Basically.

00:45:13 Speaker_06
After six hours and 46 minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted Tony Puff of all charges. He was free to go. In the end, the jury didn't buy the state's story about Tony. They didn't believe his confession and they didn't trust what Lammy had to say.

00:45:32 Speaker_06
And it went beyond the jury. After the acquittal, the union leader newspaper, the biggest paper in the state, known for its conservative editorials, published an essay titled The Lammy Controversy.

00:45:45 Speaker_06
The editorial referred to Lammy's, quote, perceived credibility gap. It said Lammy's role in the case should be carefully reviewed. But Lammy's superiors sprang to his defense.

00:45:57 Speaker_06
They said he did a, quote, excellent job and that no action would be taken against him. Jason Carroll's trial was scheduled to start just two months after Tony Puff's acquittal.

00:46:14 Speaker_06
Tony's lawyers publicly called on the state to drop the case after what happened in Tony's trial. To them, Jason's confession was even more problematic than Tony's.

00:46:26 Speaker_13
I mean, I think that Paul and I, and I think anybody that knows anything about that case, would say that the big sore thumb sticking out in Carol's case is that confession. You can't shake it.

00:46:37 Speaker_13
As a professional, you're looking at it, you can't shake it. I think if you had a police officer today listen to that, They'd go, they'd be horrified. They would never conduct an interrogation like that.

00:46:49 Speaker_13
Paul, at the beginning of this, said, I felt sorry for Jason Carroll. Now, whether or not he is a murderer or not, OK, I felt sorry for him. And we had a co-defendant. And if we could dump it on Jason Carroll to get our guy off, we would have.

00:47:07 Speaker_13
But we didn't even go in that direction. I mean, that confession was terrible.

00:47:20 Speaker_06
The state's case was falling apart. Ken was released. Tony was acquitted. The only defendant left was Jason.

00:47:30 Speaker_06
Remember, in the state's theory, Jason got involved in the murder plot because of Tony, who a jury just said was not guilty, to carry out a murder for Ken, who the state had just let go because they didn't have enough evidence.

00:47:46 Speaker_06
So how does another jury find Jason guilty? That's next time on Bear Brook Season 2, A True Crime Story. A True Crime Story is reported and produced by me, Jason Moon. It's edited by Katie Culinary. Additional reporting and research by Paul Kuno Booth.

00:48:28 Speaker_06
Editing help from Lauren Chooljian, Daniella Ali, Sarah Plord, Taylor Quimby, Mara Hoplamazian, and Todd Bookman. Our news director is Dan Baric. Our director of podcasts is Rebecca Lavoie. Fact-checking by Danya Suleiman.

00:48:43 Speaker_06
Sarah Plord created our original artwork as well as our website, barebrookpodcast.com. Photos and videos by Gabby Lozada. Original music for the series was created by me, Jason Moon.

00:48:57 Speaker_06
Barebrook is a production of the Document Team at New Hampshire Public Radio.