48 Hours

00:09 Do you remember the case of Crystal Champagne? 00:13 Yes. 00:15 In my business, most of the time, you're doing autopsies on bad guys. 00:20 But doing autopsies on children is something that quite often will stay with you. 00:29 My name is Fraser McKenzie. I'm a forensic pathologist. And in 1996, I was doing autopsies for the Jefferson Parish coroner's office. 00:39 Crystal Champagne was a 14-year-old loving, caring child that would help anybody. She loved sports. She loved animals. 00:49 She wouldn't hurt anybody. 00:51 Somebody I miss very much. 00:55 I am Dawn Champagne, and I'm Crystal Champagne's mother. 01:00 Everything seemed like it was just a regular day going on. I want to say she left my house about 5.15 and went to the store. She wanted to go get her some noodles. 01:09 She liked her Chinese noodles. 01:12 And that was the last time I seen her. 01:19 I was asking people if they'd seen her, and I couldn't find her. 01:23 I called the police. 01:24 I need to get a cop to my house. My 14-year-old daughter's been missing for the last two and a half hours, and we can't find her nowhere. She's been missing? Yes. Okay, what's your daughter's name, ma'am? 01:34 Crystal, C-R-Y-S-T-L. That's the hardest name of my life. 01:39 Champagne? Uh-huh. 01:40 Just staying up waiting for her to come walking through the door. 01:47 14-year-old white female had been reported missing approximately 24 hours prior to her discovery. 01:57 Deputies found the Champagne's oldest daughter under the Huey P. Long Bridge last night. 02:02 She was found unresponsive. A ligature was found around her neck. A matter of death is considered to be homicide. 02:09 Authorities believe she may have also been sexually assaulted. 02:15 Damon Thibodeau was a 22-year-old drifter who came to town recently as a cousin of the family. I got a job here as a deckhand. 02:24 Thibodeau was someone the family trusted. 02:26 Police were questioning Damon when news came of Crystal being found dead. By the end of the questioning, Damon confessed to the rape and murder of Crystal Champagne. 02:40 You tell them you did do it. Yeah. You confess. 02:46 I was in shock. 02:49 You don't just say that you murdered her, you say you raped her. It was surprising to hear that he confessed to doing it. 02:56 My name is Damon Thibodeau. 02:58 Until someone is in the position that I was put in, they will never understand why someone confesses to a crime they didn't commit. 03:15 Like so many places along the banks of the Mississippi, West Wego, Louisiana attracts strangers in search of work on boats and barges. 03:26 It is why 22-year-old Damon Thibodeau, who had come to town for a family wedding, stayed. 03:33 He had been in town for only a month when Crystal Champagne was killed. 03:42 In these very high-profile cases, there's a great deal of pressure to get the case solved and ease the worried mind of the public. 03:51 Attorney Denny LaBeouf remembers the day in July 1996 when Damon was arrested for murder. 03:58 His picture's in the paper the next day. We got the guy that killed the girl. 04:04 The Champagne family had befriended Damon when he first arrived at the New Orleans suburb. He was a distant cousin whom they barely knew, says Crystal's mother, Dawn. He just seemed to be an ordinary person. Was he ever inappropriate with your daughter? Not that I ever noticed. 04:21 Did you consider them as part of your family? Yeah. 04:25 Damon was with the Champagnes on the hot Friday afternoon when Crystal said she was going to walk to the store. 04:33 Had she asked you for a ride? Yes. 04:36 And you said no? I said no. 04:39 When she didn't return and her mother panicked and called police... 04:43 Okay, what's your daughter's name, ma'am? 04:44 Crystal. Damon joined family and friends in a search all through the night. 04:52 We checked the park where she played softball at. We checked the shopping center right around the neighborhood, you know, just looking for her. 05:02 24 hours after Crystal went missing, police brought in Damon and others for questioning. He was still there when the case became a homicide. 05:18 Crystal's body was found by a family friend near the levee in Bridge City, about five miles from her home. 05:26 It's now a murder investigation. It's no longer missing persons. 05:30 And the conversation, he says, got rough. 05:33 I was increasingly under the impression that I was not gonna be able to leave. 05:38 Because they thought you had done it. 05:42 Around 1 a.m., Damon agreed to take a polygraph. And what did they tell you? Did you pass it? 05:48 No, they said I failed it. 05:51 That's the point where I realized I was never gonna walk out of there. 05:55 Damon says he felt doomed as the grilling continued for another three hours. 06:00 They kept asking the same questions over and over and over and over and over and over again. 06:05 Finally, he says, he was too exhausted to take any more. What did you tell them? 06:12 Whatever they wanted to hear. 06:14 Damon told investigators that he had found Crystal at the store and drove her to the levee. When she resisted having sex with him, he said... Who did she do? 06:26 He killed her. 06:28 When you left, how was she lame? 06:34 But you're confessing to a rape and murder. 06:38 They were not going to let me go until I did it. 06:42 Hours later, when Damon met with an attorney, he denied having anything to do with Crystal's death, but he had already been arrested and charged with rape and murder. Help me out with this a little bit, Damon, because I can't imagine in my wildest dreams admitting to a horrific crime, including giving some grisly details, if I didn't do it. 07:06 At first, I thought so too. 07:09 But after not sleeping, not eating, I'm thinking, well, okay, I'll give them what they want to hear, and the evidence will come out, and it'll show I didn't do it, and people will see that. 07:21 In fact, almost nothing Damon said matched the evidence, says attorney Denny LaBeouf. 07:28 They could have known within 24 hours that the confession was really stinky, that it almost couldn't be true. 07:37 At first glance, it did appear that Crystal had been raped. 07:41 Her shorts and her underpants were down about her knees. 07:45 But when Dr. Fraser McKenzie conducted the autopsy, he found no sign of sexual assault. She didn't have those kind of injuries. 07:53 No. 07:53 Nor did he find any seminal fluid. 07:57 Damon also told investigators that he choked Crystal with his hands. Not likely, says Dr. McKenzie. There's no kind of injury that would be associated with using your hands? 08:10 Instead, the neck injury was caused by red industrial wire. Police found its source hanging on a nearby tree. 08:18 I have wire or something. 08:24 They ask him, where'd you get the wire? And he said, from the trunk of my car. They say, what color is the wire? And he said, it was clear, like speaker wire. 08:38 And when the interrogator finally says, did you have any red wire? 08:43 Come on. 08:50 We did believe that we had the right guy. We did believe that it was a good case, and we believed that he was the perpetrator. 08:58 Paul Connick became the Jefferson Parish District Attorney six months after the murder. 09:03 It's hard to believe that anyone would confess to such a terrible crime if they didn't commit it. 09:11 When Damon Thibodeau went on trial in 1997, he was confident that facts would show that he had falsely confessed. 09:19 I'm thinking, well, this is all gonna come out in the courtroom, and this jury's gonna see, well, this guy didn't do this, and that'll be the end of it. 09:29 There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime. 09:32 They had 84 pieces of physical evidence in this case, and not one went back to Damon Thibodeau. 09:41 But a detective explained the lack of evidence of rape by suggesting that insects had consumed all the fluids, a theory that he never discussed with the state pathologist. You're actually laughing. Is his explanation laughable? 09:56 In my opinion, but I'm knowledgeable. For a jury, they're not knowledgeable. 10:02 But could that have destroyed any evidence of sexual assault? 10:05 No. No. 10:08 The jurors also heard from two women who claimed seeing someone who looked like Damon on the levee the day of the murder. 10:15 Damon did not take the stand, so he did not explain why he admitted to the crime before recanting. His incriminating words echoed in the courtroom. 10:27 What went through your mind as you're listening to these? 10:36 And why couldn't I be a little stronger? 10:53 What was it like seeing Damon in the courtroom? 10:59 It hurt. 11:01 I just wanted to ask him why. 11:03 Dawn Champagne was convinced that Damon Thibodeau killed her daughter. These are people you consider family, and they think you killed Crystal. 11:14 What was that like? 11:16 It was weird. I mean, what do you tell someone in a situation like that? 11:24 Jurors took just one hour to reach their verdict. 11:28 You get the sinking feeling that this isn't gonna go right, and then here it comes. 11:33 What do you remember hearing? 11:35 Guilty. 11:37 Guilty. Damon was convicted of the rape and murder of Crystal Champagne. 11:45 I was glad, because it meant that they had who did it. 11:50 His sentence? 11:52 Death by lethal injection. 11:56 And in October 1997, Damon Thibodeau was sent to Louisiana's notorious Angola prison. 12:04 He began to despair. 12:07 You get to a point where you don't want to be in that cell anymore, and that's the only way out. 12:13 Execution? That's the only way out of that cell. 12:17 What made you change your mind then? 12:19 Denny. 12:20 Denny, as in Denny LaBeouf. 12:23 She walks in one day. She said, look, I read your case. 12:27 She's an anti-death penalty attorney who fights to get inmates off of death row no matter what they did to get there. I mean, you make no bones about it. 12:37 Most of your clients are guilty. Absolutely. And the work that I do, I want to do on behalf of people who have tragically committed a homicide. That ain't Damon. 12:47 LaBeouf was convinced that Damon Thibodeau was innocent. She immediately appealed the verdict. But two years after Damon stood trial, the state Supreme Court reaffirmed his conviction, a major victory for Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick. 13:06 You still feel it's a good verdict? Absolutely. We had the confession. We had two witnesses who put him on the scene of the murder around the time of the murder. 13:17 Denny LaBeouf couldn't give up, but she was overwhelmed. She sought help and found it in a place 1,200 miles away, in Minneapolis. 13:30 And here's where the body was found, down in here. 13:34 Steve Kaplan was a partner at Fredrickson & Byron, a well-heeled civil law firm that takes on a few select criminal cases 13:44 As soon as I met him, it completely changed the stakes for me. It was not clinical. It was deeply personal. It was the look he gave me as he was saying goodbye that I remember, will always remember. 13:58 His life is in your hands. 13:59 Correct. 14:01 How big a difference did it make when you got help from Minneapolis? 14:06 Everything. 14:07 Right away, the attorneys took another look at the witnesses, who said they saw a man who looked like Damon on the levee. But they then said, and, you know, the police tape was around and the police were here. Well, that was the night they found her, not the night she was killed. They also reached out to the now-retired state pathologist, Dr. Fraser McKenzie. When he testified at the trial, he didn't know the details of the case. 14:34 All I know was there was a confession. 14:38 I have no knowledge whatsoever of what is contained in that confession. None. And when you find out? Then I'm really upset. The confession does not match the physical evidence. When you heard that he was convicted of rape, what did you think? I was just aghast. Because at my examination, there was no evidence of a rape. 14:59 McKenzie signed an affidavit for the defense, outlining the serious discrepancies he found in Damon's story. 15:07 I want the truth to come out and for it to be known. 15:11 What's more, McKenzie was able to help establish the time of Crystal's death sometime before darkness fell at 7.50 p.m., about two and a half hours after she left her home. 15:26 That's crucial because Damon Thibodeau was with Crystal's family for most of that time. 15:32 There was absolutely no time within which Damon could have possibly committed the crime. 15:39 The defense contends that Damon was only on his own for about a half hour to 45 minutes. 15:46 I sat in the parking lot in my car. And how long were you gone? 15:50 Just long enough to smoke a joint. 15:53 It's 10 minutes from the apartment to the crime scene. 15:57 another 10 to come back, that's 20 minutes, and would have left no time for him to have done the murder, cleaned up, disposed of all the incriminating evidence, cleaned his car, and gotten back to the Champagnes, presumably fully composed and ready to rejoin the search. 16:20 Was there anything about Damon that made him more likely to be manipulated? 16:26 I think so. He was only 22. He had never been through anything like this in his life. 16:33 And his background made him even more vulnerable, Kaplan says. I'm not asking any specifics, but you were abused as a child, weren't you? 16:42 Yeah. 16:43 Yeah. Dropped out of school? Yes. 16:46 Damon had a childhood that was very, very tough and that produced a guy who would just rather walk away from a fight. 16:55 After spending nearly a decade in the most hopeless place there is, by 2005, Damon had dozens of legal professionals, all volunteers, fighting to get his case heard and overturned. 17:10 I said, well, if these people are going to fight to prove I didn't do this, I'm going to fight with them. 17:17 Also on his side, attorney Barry Sheck and the Innocence Project based in New York. 17:23 Well, this was a no-brainer for us. You could see that this confession was quite problematic from the start. 17:31 Sheck says that while 25 percent of the country's exonerated inmates had confessed to crimes they didn't commit, the hard fact is no court is likely to release a man who admitted to such a brutal murder. 17:47 So he came up with a novel and controversial idea. Instead of fighting lengthy court battles that were iffy at best, why not take Damon's case directly to their adversary? 18:00 We believed that we could persuade the Jefferson County District Attorney's Office that they were dealing with an innocent man. 18:08 But that would mean showing the DA everything they had. 18:14 There's always the danger that all of a sudden you'll come up with some horrible evidence of guilt. That can happen. 18:20 If you don't get Damon out, he's gonna die. 18:23 I have been in the death house at midnight when they killed my client and watched that, and I know how real it is. 18:41 450 miles away from Angola Prison in the rural town of Hantsville, Alabama, a 14-year-old boy got a shocking letter from a death row inmate. 18:53 I was like, what? 18:56 Who is this? 18:58 It was a birthday card from the father he had never known. I hope this card finds you well. You have questions, and I want to answer them. 19:06 I want to know you, so please write. 19:08 How did you sign your letter? 19:10 Damon. 19:11 Not Dad. 19:13 I didn't think I earned the title Dad, you know, because I was never there. 19:20 Damon Thibodeau was 17 when his son Josh was born. Damon lost contact with him when he broke up with Josh's mom. 19:29 I wanted to be part of his life, but I was a stranger to it. I wrote him back and, um, and pretty much asked him who he was. I wanted Josh to know that I wasn't a murderer. At that time, I didn't know if he was guilty of it or not. 19:45 After many letters, over several years, Josh began to believe in his father. 19:52 I wanted to meet him. 19:56 I wanted to meet my dad, and he didn't want me to do that. 20:00 Did I want to see him? Yes. 20:02 Very badly. 20:04 But I wanted to be able to talk to him without having chains on my feet. 20:13 Hug him without having chains on my feet. 20:17 But fighting a case post-conviction takes time, lots of time. So in May 2007, having already spent nearly 10 long years on death row, Damon agreed to allow Barry Sheck and his other lawyers to show the district attorney all the evidence they had gathered. 20:38 There was some skepticism. 20:41 The man is on death row. 20:44 He's on death row. 20:46 It's a horrible murder. 20:48 And surprisingly, Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick was willing to hear them out. 20:55 He came in along with his team. 20:58 I had all of my chiefs in the room. 21:01 The easy thing to do would be to rely on the conviction. You know, this is going to be politically a hot potato here. Why are we going to reopen this case? Let's just leave this lie and let the courts decide. 21:09 I bet there are people in your office who said that. 21:11 They're thinking, hey, this is good conviction. Why are we going down this road? But certainly there was enough presented to me. Whereas I sat there, I'm thinking, I got to look at this. 21:22 Connick was troubled enough by what he saw that he agreed to open an investigation, not just working alongside the defense team, but also splitting costs. They would re-examine the physical evidence. 21:35 This was a bloody crime scene and a bloody struggle. There would have to be some transfer of trace evidence on the person who committed this crime. 21:44 I said, let's take another look at what was already tested using today's technology. 21:49 This is a very scary thing. 21:52 The risks haunted Denny LaBeouf, who feared Damon's DNA could have innocently ended up on Crystal. 21:59 They're gonna test his clothing and his car for hairs. And she lived in the house where he slept on the sofa. She'd ridden in his car. It would stop this case cold, I believe, if one little bit of forensic evidence matched Damon. 22:19 But there was little choice. 22:22 So every bit of the clothing that Damon and Crystal had worn was scrutinized for any spec of telltale DNA. In all, the testing took another two years. Was any DNA from Damon Thibodeau found on any of the evidence? 22:38 No. 22:39 No. Was anything from Crystal found on anything belonging to Damon Thibodeau? 22:44 No. 22:45 Was there anything that connected Damon Thibodeau to the crime scene? 22:50 No. 22:52 I was expecting those results. But you had to be thrilled. Oh yeah, definitely I was thrilled. 22:58 Because now I have something tangible to stick in front of the DA and say, look, you got the wrong guy. 23:04 But Connick saw other problems with the case, like the defense claim that Damon didn't have enough time to kill Crystal. Was that true? 23:14 It all hinged on Crystal's mother, Dawn. She first told police Damon was back at her home when she called 911. 23:21 But later at trial, she said he wasn't. 23:29 When we questioned her about her trial testimony, she went back and forth and finally said, whatever I told the police is my best recollection. 23:38 If that's right, and Damon was with the family by then, it was virtually impossible for him to have driven Crystal to Bridge City. Yet, since he confessed so soon after Crystal's body was found, the police never looked into who else might have taken her there. 23:58 There was never a wide-ranging investigation as there should have been after a homicide. 24:05 LaBeouf says there were plenty of people to question, like the friend who said he spoke with Crystal on the phone just hours before she disappeared, or the relative with an arrest record for violent crimes who lived close to where her body was found. And Crystal did have friends in Bridge City, including one now serving life for aggravated rape of a juvenile. 24:31 I can't tell you if any one of those men did the murder or knows anything about the murder. I can't tell you sitting here. What I can tell you is that any decent investigation would have asked them. 24:43 And what about that family friend who found Crystal's body hidden deeply in the brush along the Mississippi River? 24:50 Just how did he manage to do that? What made you go look that one other spot? Because of the dream. 25:04 That's all I can say, because of the dream. 25:16 Do you have a dark curiosity? Heart Starts Pounding Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries is a weekly podcast hosted by me, Kaylin Moore. Each week, I'll take you on a dark journey through terrifying true urban legends, bizarre true crime cases, chilling tales of backwoods horror, and more. So if you're looking to join a passionate community of the darkly curious, check out Heart Starts Pounding on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay curious. 25:53 You have to look at the case and say, let's start with the oddities, the things that really don't add up. 25:58 And what really doesn't add up, says private eye Jen Vitry, is how and where 14-year-old Crystal Champagne was found. 26:08 This is the Huey P. Long Bridge. And at the foot of the bridge here comes into a community called Bridge City. 26:15 Vitry, who was part of Damon Thibodeau's post-conviction defense team, is a CBS News consultant. When we walk down and you see where she was found... Crystal's body was discovered deep in the brush, around five miles from where the teenager had disappeared alone on foot. 26:33 Everybody in the entire police department is looking for her in West Wego, which is 15 minutes away. 26:38 So how did this man, John Tomlinson, happen to find her in the very first place he looked? 26:45 It's something about me. 26:47 See, there's weird things that people don't understand about me. I can have a dream, and it'll actually come true, and it scares me. 26:56 A dream Tomlinson now claims led him to the body, although back in 1996, he told police it was his intuition. 27:07 What did you actually dream? 27:09 All I, in my dream, was remember just staring up and being standing right underneath the Huey P. Long Bridge. 27:18 We tracked down Tomlinson to Ball, Louisiana, where he was working as an auto mechanic. 27:25 Back in 1996, he was a 30-year-old tugboat deckhand, living in the same West Wego apartment complex as Crystal's family. 27:36 It haunts me every day that I found her body. 27:41 It kills me every day. 27:45 What do you mean? Tell me. 27:48 She's a good kid. She didn't deserve it. 27:51 She had a lot of life to go. 27:55 Tomlinson had been dating a close friend of Crystal's mom, Stacy Melanson. 28:00 Crystal often babysat for Stacy and was at her home just hours before she disappeared. Tomlinson insists he was on a tugboat asleep when Stacy called to tell him that Crystal was missing. 28:14 It never really run my mind that she would run away. I mean, she was too good of a kid. She was too happy. 28:23 The next evening, he says, Stacey picked him up at the dock and they handed out flyers in the neighboring bridge city, even though they were far from Crystal's home. 28:33 At a convenience store, he says, a woman told them she had seen a girl who looked like Crystal walking alone on the levee about a mile from the bridge. 28:44 So I said, okay, Stacey, let's go take a little trip. 28:48 But Tomlinson didn't search the area where Crystal was reportedly seen. 28:53 Instead, he drove on for about a mile, stopped the car, and told Stacy to stay behind. 29:00 That dream is what drugged me there. 29:03 Then, without hesitation, he says, he followed a path into the woods. 29:08 Well, there's a little trail here, you know. 29:12 And I walk in, and I love, there she was. 29:21 When I looked up, I was looking at the same thing that I was looking at in my dream when I was standing on a tugboat. 29:29 I mean, how did you know that that's where you would find Crystal's body? 29:34 The hunch. 29:36 Just a hunch. Based on the dream, just a hunch. 29:41 That story obviously didn't go down well with investigators who took Tomlinson in for questioning. 29:48 And I walked in about 10 feet. 29:55 I went through nine and a half hours of intense interrogation because it was the same thing over and over and over. I really felt like they were trying to make me say that I did it. 30:09 That is, until Damon Thibodeau, going through his own interrogation down the hall, told police that he did it. Police then lost interest in Tomlinson, especially since his alibi, claiming that he was on a tugboat that was far downriver on the night Crystal was killed, appeared to be backed up by the boat's logs. 30:32 I proved while I was on that boat that there's no way that I could do it. 30:37 But how airtight was that alibi? Today, Tomlinson concedes that crew members covered for each other all the time. Now, at the time, though, you told him it was impossible to get off the boat. 30:50 Well, sure, you know, I mean, no, it's not. It never is, you know. But I always let my boss know when I was getting off that boat. But you could get off and nobody would have to know. Sure. And you could get right back on. Sure. 31:04 You can get off and get right back on. It's no problem. 31:08 You know? I mean, it's a boat. 31:12 But some night you would sneak off there and go see Stacy. Sure. When you were supposed to be sleeping in the bed. 31:19 And I was sleeping at home. 31:21 You didn't meet up with Stacy on that Friday night. 31:24 No. 31:25 What's more troubling is that Tomlinson was convicted of a sex offense two years before Crystal disappeared. His crime... 31:35 Indecent behavior with a juvenile. 31:37 Here's how he explains it. 31:39 I picked up a 14-year-old girl, thought she was 18 at least at a bar, and got in trouble for it. 31:50 Paid my dues and done my time. 31:52 And you never were inappropriate with Crystal? Never. That's the wrong thing. 31:57 You know, I was raised the right way. You never try to hurt a child. 32:01 Crystal was also 14, but Tomlinson denies having anything to do with her murder. You had nothing to do with her death. 32:09 On my mother's soul, I never touched her. 32:12 He blames the crime on the man who once said he did it, Damon Thibodeau. 32:17 He admitted to what he did wrong. He should be punished. 32:21 That confession is, no doubt, the biggest obstacle to Damon's freedom, especially for the man who agreed to take a new look at the case, District Attorney Paul Connick. After all was said and done, you still had this thing like, why would somebody confess? 32:38 Why? 32:39 I'm not going to take the boilerplate explanation for false confessions. 32:43 Connick was skeptical that the interrogation tactics were to blame, so he turned to this man. 32:50 I don't believe there exists evidence of any false confession in which a person confessed falsely to murder because he didn't get a meal. 32:56 Dr. Michael Wellner, a tough forensic psychiatrist, who often sides with the police. 33:03 I needed to know, can I rely on this confession? Because that's all I have. False confessions are extremely rare. 33:11 I trust him. I trust him. I really do. 33:13 Dr. Wellner insisted on talking to Damon Thibineau by himself. No lawyer present. Yes, yes. That had to drive the defense crazy. And we knew it. With his life riding on this interview, Damon Thibodeau agreed to meet with Dr. Wellner alone. 33:32 I was afraid that he would paint Damon as a different person than he is. 33:37 Was Damon the person you were expecting to meet? 33:40 From the background that was presented to me, I anticipated meeting somebody who would have been crushed, crumpled, and spit out, and that the person that I met was composed, self-possessed. 33:53 I was shocked. 33:55 What was going through my mind is, did we make a big mistake? 34:12 Was Damon Thibodeau coerced by the police into giving a false confession? 34:17 In my professional opinion, he was not. 34:19 Forensic psychiatrist Michael Wellner does not believe that Damon was forced into confessing. But he does believe that if Thibodeau had committed the crime, there would be some physical evidence. 34:34 It was a bloody event. It was a physical event that required restraint, that required contact. 34:40 Still, Wellner says that Damon did blame himself, believing that if he had given Crystal a ride to the store on that fateful afternoon, she might still be alive. 34:52 Had she asked you for a ride? Yes. 34:55 And you said no? I said no. 34:57 On top of that guilt was Damon's failed polygraph. 35:01 To some people, failing a polygraph is powerful evidence. You might be better off confessing. 35:09 What's more, he says, guilty suspects try to minimize their involvement in crimes. 35:15 Damon was admitting to a rape that didn't happen. As you sit here today, do you believe that Damon Thibodeau falsely confessed? 35:24 I do. There are many things about this case that I can't answer, but one thing that I can say is that I believe this to be a false confession. 35:32 And now, so does the man who once put Damon Thibodeau on death row. 35:38 We relied too much on the confession in the beginning. We should have gone further. 35:43 Five years after that first meeting with Damon's team, District Attorney Paul Connick makes an extraordinary decision. 35:52 He will not fight Damon's bid for freedom. 35:55 There's no way I can keep this man in jail. There's no way. 35:59 The defense and Connick file a joint motion in court. 36:03 That same day, a judge orders the conviction vacated, adding in a handwritten note that Damon should be immediately released. 36:14 In September 2012, 16 years after Damon's arrest, his legal team gathers anxiously at the gates of Angola. Denny, have you ever come here then and watched someone walk out of here? Is this the first time? This is the first time ever. That you've ever watched someone walk out alive out of Angola? Yes, it is. First time. 36:40 Hope I never see y'all again. Don't take it the wrong way. Thank you. 36:43 How does it feel to finally be free? 36:52 Good. 36:54 Good. 36:55 Seems like you're overwhelmed. No words. 37:04 Yes, I am in the car driving away from the gate. 37:07 Starting to feel free. 37:17 Five hours later, to say free, Damon is in New Orleans, reunited with his family. His son, Josh, finally gets to meet his father in person. When you first saw him and you realized that was your son, what were you feeling? 37:33 Relief. 37:35 I finally got to meet him. 37:37 It's indescribable. I mean, I love the water. Oh, yeah, it's great. 37:42 They spent three days trying to catch up on all the lost years. And what did the two of you do today? 37:49 We walked. We walked. We talked. We got to know each other a little better. The grounds on Death's Row are kept like a mansion's grounds. 37:58 So what do you think of your son? 38:00 I'm proud. 38:02 I mean, he's a great guy. He's a good man. 38:05 You know, and... 38:08 I'm glad that I'm allowed to see it. 38:11 I think one of the great things of this is the opportunity now for father and son to have a real relationship with each other. That's just unbelievably special. 38:22 You got it all? 38:23 You got it all. Attorney Steve Kaplan's commitment to Damon isn't over yet. I'll put this in the back. Taman is moving in with him until he gets settled. 38:33 We're coming up on Yuppie Long Bridge. 38:35 And so they embark on the 1,200-mile journey to Minneapolis. 38:40 We're headed north. Can I get to sit in the front seat? There you go. No chains. No chains. I'm not in the back seat, and I don't have bars on the windows. I'm shaking the chains off, and I'm starting over. 38:56 This is a man that your office convicted, put on death row, and then 15 years later to turn around and say, I'm going to let him go? Wasn't that a very tough decision? 39:08 The process was tough. 39:10 But in the end, it's what should have been done. In my heart, I knew what I did was the right decision. 39:16 And the fact that so much time now has passed to start taking a new look at this case, isn't it going to make it very difficult to find the real killer? 39:26 It is. 39:27 Again, what's the alternative? We can't stop. That's what we do. It's our job. 39:32 The murder of Crystal Champagne is now an open case, so Connick cannot talk about specifics, but the state is actively reinvestigating. That's sure to mean taking a fresh look at several people, including John Tomlinson. 39:52 Dawn Champagne can only hope that the renewed investigation will pay off. There's a lot of things I don't understand, a lot of things I don't know. 40:02 All she wants is justice for her daughter, who went out to a store and never made it home. 40:10 Because whoever did it, they were walking free, and she didn't have a chance to live. 40:20 After his release, Damon Thibodeau earned his GED and testified before a Senate committee about conditions on death row. Damon died in September 2021 due to complications from COVID-19. 40:34 a new Paramount Plus docu-series. We're about to go kill Osama bin Laden. It did look like a one-way ticket. Experience life on the front lines of infamous US Special Op Forces missions. We are expecting 80% casualties. Told from the soldiers who risked everything. 40:51 There's just way too many of them and way too few of us. 40:55 And featuring exclusive unseen footage. 41:00 Special Ops True, now streaming on Paramount Plus.