Episode 9: The Reversal AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Bear Brook

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Episode 9: The Reversal) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (Bear Brook) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

Bear Brook episodes list: view full AI transcripts and summaries of this podcast on the blog

Episode: Episode 9: The Reversal

Author: NHPR
Duration: 00:28:24

Episode Shownotes

The state of New Hampshire has made a sudden about-face: Prosecutors have now agreed to DNA test old evidence in Jason Carroll’s case. It’s the biggest development in the case in 35 years – and one step closer to possibly learning who killed Sharon Johnson.For more on the case, 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 9: The Reversal of the Bear Brook podcast by NHPR, significant developments arise in Jason Carroll's case regarding the murder of Sharon Johnson. After 35 years of imprisonment, Carroll's legal team has discovered new evidence, leading to a court petition for DNA testing under New Hampshire's Post-Conviction DNA Testing Law. The state has reversed its initial objections to the testing, which includes misidentified clothing and a knife. With expert witnesses prepared to testify, the episode discusses the implications of potential DNA findings and the ongoing pursuit of truth in a case with grave questions about justice and wrongful conviction.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Episode 9: The Reversal) 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.

00:00:07 Speaker_04
My main goal is to raise the concerns around this conviction to the extent that it would encourage the state to revisit the evidence.

00:00:16 Speaker_03
The clerk, who I know, came over to chat with me, and she said that she had been listening to Undisclosed. She's like, you know what? There's a big box in our basement with Jason Carroll's name on it.

00:00:32 Speaker_05
Hey, the fucking nail clippings are here. The nail clippings are here.

00:00:39 Speaker_00
The answer to who killed Sharon Johnson is very likely in that envelope right there.

00:00:43 Speaker_05
It is possible that the answer to who killed Sharon Johnson is in this envelope in front of us.

00:00:55 Speaker_00
It's been about 17 months since that day with the box, the box of evidence from the investigation into Sharon Johnson's murder.

00:01:03 Speaker_00
The box had the clothes Sharon was wearing when she died, the knife police say she was stabbed with, the fingernail clippings from Sharon's hands with blood on them, blood that might belong to her attacker.

00:01:17 Speaker_00
For 17 months, Jason Carroll and his attorney with the New England Innocence Project have been trying to get that evidence DNA tested. They think there's a real shot that evidence could exonerate Jason. But the state of New Hampshire didn't.

00:01:32 Speaker_00
You might remember they said there was, quote, no scenario where DNA testing could exonerate Jason. So they objected to Jason's request for DNA testing. That is, until just a few days ago. So did you celebrate?

00:01:54 Speaker_03
Um, yes. I mean, I think, I think, I think I celebrate, I guess I would say yes, I celebrated. Um, it's weird to say that you would celebrate separately from Jason, right? So like the weird thing was that I wasn't able to see Jason that night.

00:02:09 Speaker_03
Um, so I, I talked to him on the phone and so to be able to say like celebrating something for someone, it's like celebrating somebody's birthday when they're not there. So when I was finally able to talk with him about what happened, he was shocked.

00:02:25 Speaker_03
Shocked, I would say. And he essentially said to me, half of me feels like crying like a baby, and half of me feels like throwing up. And he said, it's the best news I've had in 35 years.

00:02:38 Speaker_00
He said that? The best news in 35 years? He did.

00:02:39 Speaker_03
He did.

00:02:48 Speaker_00
This is Bear Brook Season 2, a true crime story. I'm Jason Moon. So here's what happened. After Jason's lawyer, Cynthia Musso, found that box of evidence, she filed a petition with the court under a state law specifically meant for just such a moment.

00:03:27 Speaker_00
It's called the Post-Conviction DNA Testing Law in New Hampshire. The evidence in question belongs to the court. Remember, the box was hanging out for three decades in their basement. So Cynthia needs a court order to get this stuff tested.

00:03:43 Speaker_00
But the prosecutor on the other side of this case, Charles Buca, objected. By the way, we requested an interview with Buca, but a spokesperson for the AG's office declined on his behalf.

00:03:54 Speaker_00
So with the state and Cynthia taking different positions, that set up a hearing. The two sides were going to duke it out in front of a judge, and he would decide if testing was going to happen. That's where we left off in this series.

00:04:07 Speaker_03
So we were scheduled to have a hearing on this motion in December.

00:04:13 Speaker_00
That's December of 2023.

00:04:16 Speaker_03
And about three days before the hearing was supposed to start, we got a call from the prosecutor And I didn't, I didn't actually, I missed the call or, or he had just emailed me maybe and said, give me a call. And I thought that he was going to agree.

00:04:33 Speaker_03
I, and I told my co-counsel at the time, Oh, I like, I wonder if this is it, like they're going to agree to testing now. And we called and it was clear from like the first moment, like his, the tone of voice that it was not a call about agreeing.

00:04:53 Speaker_03
that it was a call about something else. And I remember that when he said, we found another box.

00:05:05 Speaker_00
We found another box. Another box with more evidence from the investigation into Sharon Johnson's murder.

00:05:13 Speaker_03
I remember just sitting there being like, I don't even know what to say. I think the proverbial, you know, your jaw hits the floor is really how I was feeling in that moment. And I think that was a huge shock to me.

00:05:33 Speaker_00
This box, let's call it box number two, was found in the basement of the former headquarters of the New Hampshire Department of Justice. It just so happens the New Hampshire DOJ is moving offices and the building is being torn down right now.

00:05:49 Speaker_00
So in the process of the big move, someone's down in the basement and they find this box that says, do not destroy Sharon Johnson case.

00:06:03 Speaker_00
It's kind of amazing that the very first box at the courthouse, you stumbled on that because this clerk had happened to have listened to the Undisclosed podcast.

00:06:14 Speaker_00
And then the next box is discovered through another sort of happenstance, that the building in which it's housed is being demolished. And if not for that, you know, maybe they wouldn't have found it. Exactly.

00:06:34 Speaker_00
Remember, Cynthia has been asking the state for all the documents and evidence from the investigation for years. By this point, the state had told her they'd already turned over everything they could find. In light of Box No.

00:06:47 Speaker_00
2, the big hearing that was supposed to happen in December gets postponed. Instead, the two sides meet in front of the judge for what's called a status conference, basically a check-in to see what the heck needs to happen now.

00:07:01 Speaker_00
And at this status conference, Cynthia, she's a little annoyed. It's already been more than a year since she found Box No. 1 and filed the petition for DNA testing. And now things are getting delayed because of some sloppy housekeeping by the state.

00:07:16 Speaker_00
Cynthia wants assurances from the prosecutor, Charles Buca, that this isn't going to happen again.

00:07:23 Speaker_04
I'm not asking for a lot, I'm just asking for a reach out to those sort of three places to ensure that we have everything that exists.

00:07:30 Speaker_02
And the three places are Bedford PD, State Police, we know because they're the ones that catalog this and are involved.

00:07:38 Speaker_04
They did, but I would double check and ask because I've asked you for discovery a lot of times and we didn't know until we knew, right?

00:07:45 Speaker_02
Charles is like, trust me, we've gotten everything from state police. And what would you like me to do?

00:08:10 Speaker_04
I'd like you to reach out and confirm that all the boxes that were in storage have been cataloged and that there's no longer any remaining boxes that had anything to do with the Sharon Johnson homicide investigation.

00:08:21 Speaker_00
Maybe you heard that quiet, yep, as Cynthia was talking. That was the judge, William Delker. He basically agrees with Cynthia and tells the state, check everywhere again and file a memo with the details of how you did that.

00:08:34 Speaker_03
And so we were really grateful that the court did that, because what ended up happening was that they found significantly more information.

00:08:44 Speaker_00
At the Bedford Police Department, three more boxes. And from the state police, yep, 400 new pages of lab documents about the forensic evidence from the case. And just to be clear, do you believe there was any sort of willful hiding of this evidence?

00:09:02 Speaker_00
No. No. Yeah. OK. This is bad record keeping and poor communication. Not a cover up. So the state turns over all this new stuff to Cynthia in January and February.

00:09:14 Speaker_00
She's furiously sorting through those boxes and reading through everything to see what it all means. Meanwhile, the big hearing to argue whether the evidence should be DNA tested is rescheduled to the end of April, as in this April 2024.

00:09:31 Speaker_00
Let's talk about what was in those new boxes. Some of it was stuff Cynthia already had, duplicates of police reports from the discovery file, things like that. But it wasn't just paper. Inside one of the boxes was a shirt. I've seen a photo.

00:09:49 Speaker_00
It's long-sleeved, ribbed, three buttons at the top. Looks like a man's undershirt. It's white, or it was. It's covered in stains, some black, some brown, some yellow. It was found in August of 1988, just after the murder.

00:10:06 Speaker_00
A woman saw it lying on the side of the road in Bedford, about two and a half miles from where Sharon's body was found, and called the cops. But interestingly, when it was tagged in evidence, they— That's labeled victim's shirt.

00:10:22 Speaker_00
Yeah, they labeled it victim's shirt. Do you have any idea why that happened? Any guess?

00:10:28 Speaker_03
I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I have no idea.

00:10:36 Speaker_00
I'm not quite sure what to make of this either. You might remember the location of Sharon's missing shirt was a big focus of the investigation. When state police interrogated Jason, they asked him about it again and again. They never found it.

00:10:52 Speaker_00
But we know what shirt Sharon was wearing when she left work that day. And this isn't it. Remember, Sharon was seven months pregnant when she was killed.

00:11:01 Speaker_00
She was last seen wearing what was likely a maternity t-shirt with teddy bears and baby rattles on it. Again, this one looks like a man's shirt.

00:11:09 Speaker_00
According to the police report, the woman who found the shirt and called police thought it might belong to whoever had murdered Sharon. So I'm not sure how or why it ended up labeled as victim's shirt, but it did.

00:11:22 Speaker_00
At any rate, it got added to the list of items Cynthia wants DNA tested. Maybe those stains are bloodstains. Or maybe it's just a painter or a mechanic's dirty work shirt. Another item that turned up in the new boxes, a knife.

00:11:41 Speaker_00
This knife was also found along the side of a road in Bedford shortly after the murder. It was another civilian who came across it, thought it might be involved in the murder. They called police.

00:11:52 Speaker_00
Just to be clear, the shirt and the knife were found along two different roads in Bedford by two different people. The two areas are in opposite directions from the crime scene.

00:12:02 Speaker_00
But the knife was found less than a mile from where Sharon's body was found. It's described as a long blade, wood handle, similar to what you'd find in a kitchen.

00:12:11 Speaker_03
So those were two big pieces of physical evidence, obviously, that we were really interested in. And then, obviously, the lab file has been really interesting for us.

00:12:23 Speaker_03
And one of the things that we found in there was that there had been a profile generated from Ken Johnson's blood.

00:12:31 Speaker_00
Two things I need to point out on this. One, it's helpful that there's already a profile of Sharon's husband Ken's blood. It'll make it that much easier to know if any DNA found on the evidence is his.

00:12:44 Speaker_00
The second, and I think a lot more interesting thing, is when this DNA profile of Ken was generated.

00:12:51 Speaker_03
It's a very strange scenario. So we had noticed, and by we, I include you in that, we had talked about this a while ago, that we had seen custody logs of Ken's blood tube.

00:13:03 Speaker_03
Ken had his blood drawn at the Department of Corrections when he was arrested for the crime. And that blood tube had ended up going to the state lab. And you and I had both noted that in 2004, it was sent to the lab and it said DNA analysis.

00:13:19 Speaker_00
2004. 16 years after the murder and 13 years after prosecutors dropped the charges against Ken Johnson, New Hampshire State Police were generating a profile of Ken's DNA. But why would they be doing that in 2004?

00:13:37 Speaker_03
The only reason I can guess that they were doing it in 2004 is because they were going to try DNA testings. related to this case. I don't know what other reason there would be.

00:13:50 Speaker_03
The only other thing I can think of is that the national database for DNA was sort of getting online at that time, and perhaps they were trying to put Ken's DNA profile into CODIS, but I don't think, I don't know if they would even be able to do that.

00:14:07 Speaker_03
Ken hadn't been, you know, at that point, he hadn't been convicted of anything.

00:14:12 Speaker_00
There's no record of what, if anything, Ken's DNA was compared to in 2004. The lab report only shows that a DNA profile was generated.

00:14:23 Speaker_00
And as far as CODIS goes, that's the National Law Enforcement DNA Database, only people who are convicted of certain crimes get their DNA put into it. That's why Cynthia is mentioning that Ken hadn't been convicted of anything in 2004.

00:14:38 Speaker_00
Complicating this further is one thing that has always bothered me. I don't know exactly when Ken Johnson died. According to records from the state, by 2006, they were told he was dead.

00:14:52 Speaker_00
So maybe in 2004, Ken was still alive and state police were taking one last crack at connecting him to the murder with DNA evidence. But then, how could it? Ken was Sharon's husband.

00:15:06 Speaker_00
It wouldn't exactly be damning evidence if Ken's DNA was found on Sharon's body. One last thing about this minor mystery of Ken's DNA.

00:15:17 Speaker_00
It set up a pretty ironic situation where the state was about to argue in 2024 against post-conviction DNA testing in this case when they had apparently done it themselves or maybe were about to in 2004.

00:15:38 Speaker_00
Cynthia added the white shirt and the knife to the list of items she wants DNA tested. The full list was now up to about a dozen, depending on how you count them.

00:15:47 Speaker_00
It includes the fingernail cuttings, some of Sharon's clothing, cigarette butts from her car, various samples taken from her body, Jason's pocket knife, the alleged murder weapon, and bloody soil samples from the crime scene.

00:16:01 Speaker_00
And then Cynthia prepared for the hearing, again. Cynthia assembled a cast of heavy-hitter expert witnesses to explain what might seem like an obvious point, that DNA testing could reveal who killed Sharon.

00:16:17 Speaker_00
There was Tim Pombach, 22 years in law enforcement, Connecticut State Trooper, detective. Before he retired, he ran the entire forensic lab for the state of Connecticut.

00:16:27 Speaker_00
He's been called as an expert witness in lots of high-profile cases, like the murder trial of Michael Peterson. That's the staircase trial, for those who've seen the documentary.

00:16:36 Speaker_00
More recently, Tim testified in the murder trial of former South Carolina attorney Alex Murdoch. There was Carl Reich, 22 years experience in biochemistry, Cornell, UCLA, Harvard, Stanford.

00:16:49 Speaker_00
Lawyers for Stephen Avery, the subject of the Making a Murderer documentary, hired him as a consultant. There was Haley Cleary, a psychologist, professor, and expert in juvenile false confessions. She knows this case well.

00:17:02 Speaker_00
She was on Rabia Chaudhry's podcast, Undisclosed, to analyze Jason's confession. Cynthia even consulted with an expert in genetic genealogy, a woman named Barbara Rae Venter.

00:17:16 Speaker_00
Yes, that Barbara Rae Venter, the one who identified Terry Rasmussen and three of the victims from season one of this podcast.

00:17:25 Speaker_01
The challenge is going to be getting usable DNA because those bodies were out there exposed to the New Hampshire winters for between five and 20 years.

00:17:45 Speaker_00
You were ready.

00:17:45 Speaker_03
I was ready. Yeah, I'm still ready. Yeah, I was ready.

00:17:52 Speaker_00
And then, just last Thursday, on the eve of the hearing, the state reversed course. It is dropping its objection to DNA testing. But it is still reserving the right to argue about whether any results exonerate Jason.

00:18:10 Speaker_00
Officially, the deal still needs to be okayed by the judge, but there's not much doubt he will. By the way, the fact this just happened is the reason you're not hearing from Jason in this episode.

00:18:21 Speaker_00
The logistics of getting on the phone with him can be complicated, and there just wasn't enough time. I asked Cynthia what she made of the timing of all of this.

00:18:30 Speaker_03
This is the thing about the court system is that, like, it's not, it doesn't work the way people think it does. So all of the things that you, you know, think about court just aren't, they aren't real, right?

00:18:39 Speaker_03
So, like, the reality is, is that, like, deals get made on the night before trials all the time. And it comes down to lots of things. I have no idea what the actual reason in this particular case was.

00:18:52 Speaker_03
I'd like to think that it's the fact that we were prepared. We had given our reports over. The state looked at those, and they realized that, as they said in their motion, that we're going to be prepared to be able to prove those things.

00:19:05 Speaker_03
And they thought that we were going to be successful in that. And they decided to agree to testing and save us all the trouble of the hearing. Do I wish that this happened a long time ago? Yeah. You know?

00:19:20 Speaker_03
It could be 34 years, not 35 years for Jason if we had rewound the clock to when we, you know, originally had filed this petition.

00:19:33 Speaker_00
After the break, after 35 years, what happens next? Hey, a quick reminder, Bear Brook season two took a lot of resources and time. I've been reporting this story for more than two years now. And as you can hear, I'm still on it.

00:20:00 Speaker_00
If you're in a position to do so, please consider making a donation to New Hampshire Public Radio. To give now, click the link in the show notes. And thank you for supporting local long form investigative reporting.

00:20:22 Speaker_00
The agreement between Cynthia and the state is that the state forensic lab will handle the first stage of the DNA testing. It's called quantitative testing. Basically, how much DNA is there on any particular piece of evidence to begin with.

00:20:37 Speaker_00
But even getting there will be complicated.

00:20:40 Speaker_03
So, for example, the shirt, right? You don't just take the shirt and go, DNA test the shirt. There's not like a machine where you can put the shirt in and then just type in DNA, please. And then it gives you the profile. Right. Doesn't work like that.

00:20:54 Speaker_03
So we have to figure out the places on the shirt that we think there's most likely to be DNA that we can even collect in the first place.

00:21:02 Speaker_00
Forensic experts from both sides will have to go through each piece of evidence one by one and decide what's the best place to try and find DNA on this object.

00:21:12 Speaker_03
you know, what parts of this stuff are we swabbing or cutting or whatever. And then after we do the quant, we figure out what the right method of testing will be.

00:21:24 Speaker_00
And about what kind of a time frame are we talking about here?

00:21:29 Speaker_03
It's hard to tell. We asked for a six month check in to see, you know, sort of what was going on.

00:21:36 Speaker_00
That's a check-in with the judge in six months. Doesn't necessarily mean anything will have happened by then.

00:21:42 Speaker_00
This kind of work can take a long time, especially if there's degraded DNA, which is a real possibility given how long this stuff has been sitting around in boxes.

00:21:52 Speaker_00
There's also a 10-month backlog at the state lab, the only DNA testing and analysis provider in New Hampshire. So it could be a while. All right, the last thing I want to do is briefly talk about some scenarios. Give me the best case scenario for you.

00:22:14 Speaker_03
I think the best case scenario is we get a profile on some of those items that doesn't match Jason, Ken, or Tony. We're able to take that profile and enter it into CODIS, which is the National DNA Database.

00:22:27 Speaker_03
There is a match in CODIS to sort of a known other perpetrator from somewhere else. That obviously has nothing to do with Ken, Jason, and Tony, and we think that that would be pretty clear at that point that Jason wasn't involved.

00:22:41 Speaker_00
And what about a scenario where, let's say, Tony's DNA is found on some of the items?

00:22:47 Speaker_03
Yeah. So there would be a lot of reasons why that could happen that don't have anything to do with Tony being involved, because Tony was involved with the family, right? So Tony had connections with Sharon's stepdaughter, Lisa.

00:23:00 Speaker_03
So there's like lots of reasons why we wouldn't be surprised if Tony's DNA was on some things. It's the same with Ken, right?

00:23:07 Speaker_03
So like, it wouldn't be a total shock if we found Ken's DNA, obviously anything in Sharon's car, because Ken and Sharon were married. So your DNA can get shed from all kinds of things. It's not just, you know, saliva and, you know, bodily fluids.

00:23:21 Speaker_03
It's all kinds of stuff. But, you know, those would be trickier scenarios. So in the event that it's something that, you know,

00:23:28 Speaker_03
we're going to have to make an argument about with the state, what would happen is, you know, we would find out some of these things. Possibly some of that stuff would lead us to further investigation or have further investigative leads for us.

00:23:40 Speaker_03
And maybe not. Or maybe we would get these DNA results and say, you know, none of this matches Jason, but there's some things in here that match Ken. And so then it's a question of like, well, what does that mean for the case at large?

00:23:52 Speaker_03
So that's going to be a matter for the court to decide. you know, when we get the results back.

00:23:59 Speaker_00
Do you think in that scenario you just mentioned where, you know, Jason's DNA isn't found on anything, is that a strong enough case for you to request a retrial?

00:24:12 Speaker_03
If Jason's DNA is not on anything at all, this is a very close contact, very intimate, very violent encounter.

00:24:25 Speaker_03
So the fact that Jason's DNA wouldn't appear on anything of Sharon's or anywhere near her would be, from my perspective, very strange if you were arguing that Jason was involved in this.

00:24:42 Speaker_03
So from my perspective, I think it's certainly arguable that the jury should have known at the time. If this would make a difference to the jury, then the jury should know it, and I think he's entitled to a retrial.

00:24:55 Speaker_00
So what if the DNA comes back and it is Jason's? Do you think about that? Do you let yourself think about that possibility?

00:25:06 Speaker_03
I don't expect it's gonna be Jason. It's such a remote, that's such a remote possibility for me, from my perspective. Having viewed all the evidence in this case, I just, I don't believe that that's gonna be the case. But if that was to happen,

00:25:22 Speaker_03
To me, that's not even sort of the worst case scenario. I mean, that would be an end to the case, obviously. That would be the end of that.

00:25:28 Speaker_03
But the practical reality is it's going to be a lot more anxiety-producing for me if there's a scenario where, like, you know, Jason's excluded from everything, because then it's going to be an argument over what does this mean.

00:25:43 Speaker_03
It's not going to be automatically that Jason gets a retrial. It's going to be like, what does this mean? And then we're going to have to have an argument over what it means.

00:25:50 Speaker_03
You know, I believe, I believe Jason, and I believe in Jason, and I believe this case, and I, and I would be shocked to find that it was Jason's DNA.

00:26:01 Speaker_00
But now we get a chance to find out.

00:26:03 Speaker_03
That's right. Now we get a chance to find out. Yep. 35 years in the making. We didn't go to court and, you know, win in court. We didn't have this dramatic, you know, sort of like, big, like,

00:26:20 Speaker_03
hearing and like a big opinion or any of these things, it's like we have this agreement. This agreement is done, right? And that's great. But it feels really like less dramatic than sort of those like TV shows or whatever that you get.

00:26:34 Speaker_03
But this is so massive. Like this is such a massive, massive win for Jason. There was no guarantees here. And now we're going to be able to move forward. This is a gate. You know, the gate's open. The gate was locked.

00:26:54 Speaker_00
The gate was locked. When we ended this series last year, I said the only question left was whether our system of justice was willing to keep looking for the truth, if it was willing to revisit its own true crime story.

00:27:10 Speaker_00
It's taken 17 months, but now the system, stumbling, a little reluctant, has given us an answer. Yes. the gate was locked. Now, let's find out what's on the other side. Barebrook season 2 a true crime story is reported and produced by me Jason moon.

00:27:58 Speaker_00
It's edited by Katie culinary Sarah plored created our original artwork as well as our website barebrook podcast.com additional photography and videos by Gabby lazada Barebrook is a production of the document team at New Hampshire Public Radio