08x36 - Dueling Confessions

[bunniefuu]

[music playing]

NARRATOR: A teenage girl in Australia

was found dead on the side of a road.

Her boyfriend became the prime suspect.

Eventually, he confessed to her m*rder.

But so did another man.

Who was telling the truth?

It took years, a writer, and a pedestrian crash

reconstructionist to finally uncover the truth.

[theme music]

The city of Perth sits on the Western Coast

of the vast continent of Australia.

It's a modern example of the industrious,

but laid back Aussie lifestyle, where beaches, barbecuing,

and sport are critically important.

-Sorry.

NARRATOR: In , the city was smaller,

but not that different.

ESTELLE BLACKBURN: Perth had been a sleepy little hollow.

Just a beautiful little town, where you had never

thought of any sort of crime or m*rder,

very innocent, very secure.

NARRATOR: At that time, John Button

was a teenager in love with -year-old Rosemary Anderson.

JOHN BUTTON: Very quiet, a bit head strong at times.

But very enjoyable, company-wise.

NARRATOR: On John's th birthday,

Rosemary stopped over at John's house to celebrate.

John's little brother was also there.

[music on tv]

The three teens spent the night watching television.

ESTELLE BLACKBURN: While they were eating the fish and chips,

John, watching TV, saw her hand come

across for his piece of fish. -Get your bloody hands off it!

ESTELLE BLACKBURN: Yelled at the person,

thinking it was his little brother, but it was Rosemary.

-You know, you're a real jerk sometimes.

ESTELLE BLACKBURN: She got upset.

She stormed off and said, that was over.

She was walking home.

[music on tv]

NARRATOR: Button said he got into his car

and drove alongside her, apologizing, and trying

to convince her to get into the car so he could drive her home.

ESTELLE BLACKBURN: She had done that once before.

-I'm sorry. ESTELLE BLACKBURN: And after--

-I'll take you home.

ESTELLE BLACKBURN: -- he stopped for a while.

And after a five minute walk on her own, she cooled down.

He thought she would do that again.

NARRATOR: So he watched as Rosemary walked under a railway

overpass and around the corner.

[sigh]

JOHN BUTTON: I sat there.

I smoked a cigarette.

And just in those two or three minutes, she was out of sight.

NARRATOR: John claimed he drove after Rosemary

and found her face down on the side of the road,

unconscious, bruised, and bleeding.

JOHN BUTTON: So without thinking,

I just put her straight in the car

and rushed her straight off to her family doctor.

NARRATOR: Dr. Alister Turner treated Rosemary that night.

DR. TURNER: She had severe injuries, where she was scraped

on the road, to her face and to her limbs.

And her blood pressure was very unstable,

going up and down as she was losing blood

into her abdominal organs and so on.

So really, I don't think she ever

had any chance of survival.

NARRATOR: When the police arrived,

they noticed a dent on the front of John's car.

And they also noticed fresh blood.

John was interrogated for several hours.

JOHN BUTTON: There was the accusations.

Why did you knock her down?

We know it was you that knocked her down.

Of course it was you. Look at the front of the car.

It's damaged. You had an argument.

It must have been you.

NARRATOR: Eventually, Button confessed

to hitting his girlfriend with his car.

In his written confession, he admitted the couple's argument

was over something more than a piece of fish.

JOHN BUTTON: They wrote down that I

tried to get fresh with Rosemary.

That I tried to-- tried to come on to her,

and she had refused my advances.

And that that's what caused the argument.

NARRATOR: When Rosemary refused to get in the car,

Button said, he got angry and tried to scare her.

So he sped towards her intending to stop,

but lost control of the car, and inadvertently hit her.

Prosecutors had all they needed for a conviction.

Just a few hours after he confessed

to k*lling his girlfriend with this car, John Button recanted.

He now said his confession was coerced,

and that police hit him during the interrogation.

JOHN BUTTON: And I think it was after that four

hours of questioning that I received a quick punch

to the stomach, which put me underneath the table.

They pulled me out and set me back in the chair again.

And I realized, at that point, that they weren't going

to let me out of here until they got a confession.

And the way they were going, it was just

going to get more and more physical.

NARRATOR: Button said the body damage on his car

happened a few weeks earlier, and that Rosemary's blood

dripped onto the front bumper when he picked her

up to take her to the hospital.

Trevor Condren examined the car at the request

of the local police.

TREVOR CONDREN: If this car had struck a pedestrian,

I would have expected to find damage to the bonnet,

like such as dented bonnet, drag marks, scrape marks.

NARRATOR: But John Button went on trial for m*rder.

And his earlier confession made it an open and shut case.

The jury deliberated for six hours

before returning to the courtroom with their verdict.

[gavel sounding]

JUDGE [VOICEOVER]: Members of the jury,

how do you find the accused?

Guilty or not guilty?

JUROR [VOICEOVER]: Not guilty, Your Honor.

[crowd gasping and cheering]

JOHN BUTTON: I'm thinking, I'm going home.

Could I go now?

Go could I run for the door?

And I decided, well, I better not.

I've got to wait until the judge tells me I can go.

So I turned back to the judge.

[gavel sounding]

JUDGE [VOICEOVER]: Order!

Order!

JUROR [VOICEOVER]: Oh!

Terribly sorry, Your Honor.

I made a mistake.

[gasps]

JUROR [VOICEOVER]: We find him guilty.

[gasps and commotion]

[gavel sounding]

JUDGE [VOICEOVER]: Order!

Order!

-The judge had to say, guilty of what?

Guilty of manslaughter.

NARRATOR: A manslaughter verdict meant

John Button's life had been spared.

But he was sentenced to years of hard labor

in Fremantle Prison.

ESTELLE BLACKBURN: The police succeeded in the jury

thinking he was a terrible young man trying

to have sex with that beautiful young girl.

I've heard that that's what the foreman of jury said.

"Hang the bastard!

Trying to have sex with that beautiful young girl."

-Why do I sign that confession?

Why did they force me into it?

Why?

Why did we have that argument with my girlfriend?

NARRATOR: Fremantle Prison was a relic from Victorian times,

with no plumbing, heating, or air conditioning.

JOHN BUTTON: You're locked up in a cell with nothing

but a mattress on the floor, a rubber bucket in the corner,

a plastic plate, and a wooden spoon.

A very simple little argument over just a small bit of fish.

That's all-- all that it-- it started with.

NARRATOR: Seven months later, another man

arrived at Fremantle Prison to await his execution.

Eric Edgar Cooke had been convicted

of k*lling a young man in cold blood.

He had also confessed to other acts of random v*olence.

BRET CHRISTIAN: Well, Cooke confessed to murders,

and about home invasion, in which

women were att*cked in their beds.

NARRATOR: But that wasn't all.

Incredibly, Cooke also said that he

was the one who k*lled Rosemary Anderson.

Cooke said, he intentionally ran her down

when she was walking on the side of road.

[brakes squealing]

For John Button, it was an answer to his prayers.

JOHN BUTTON: I said, as my lawyer came in and told me

of this confession, I believed then, well, this is it.

I'm free.

It's only a matter of time.

NARRATOR: And for the first time,

Button recalled seeing Cooke's car pass him

when he was looking for Rosemary that night.

JOHN BUTTON: What I didn't realize, at that they moment,

as it's turned out, driving passed, on the other side

of the railway embutment, that man was Eric Cooke.

But there were problems with Cooke's confession.

Police took Cooke to the scene of Rosemary Anderson's m*rder,

and asked him to identify where the incident took place.

Cooke pointed to the wrong spot.

Police didn't believe Cooke's story.

So the court denied John Button's appeal.

-What should have happened is that the Court of Criminal

Appeals should have awarded a retrial of John Button,

at which, Eric Cooke would be the start witness.

NARRATOR: Button clung to hope.

Until the day it disappeared, along with the birds gathered

on the roof of the prison gallows.

[clang]

JOHN BUTTON: They, all of a sudden,

just fly off into the air as the trap door is released.

And you know, just by that, that a person's been hanged.

NARRATOR: Eric Edgar Cooke was ex*cuted.

-I knew that once Eric was hanged,

that was the end of any other chance I had of being released.

NARRATOR: The minister attending Cooke's execution

said Cooke took the Bible from his hands

and, again, confessed to Rosemary's m*rder.

But it was of no help to John Button.

It would take years before he would

get another chance to prove his innocence.

After serving years of a year sentence,

John Button was released from prison for good behavior.

The first thing he did was visit Rosemary Anderson's grave.

ESTELLE BLACKBURN: He was out of prison, physically,

but not out of prison emotionally.

He led his life with a big sign over his head,

convicted k*ller.

And a big rock in is hard, injustice.

NARRATOR: Button eventually got married, had two children,

found a job, and battled a serious depression.

JOHN BUTTON: I desperately wanted to live.

But the heartache and the pain of living with the injustice

was so intense that I knew that I just wasn't going to make it.

That I would finish up doing something foolish.

It was seven years, um, after I was released,

I did do something foolish.

NARRATOR: In desperation, Button took an overdose of sleeping

pills, got into his car, and drove off

a steep embankment at miles an hour.

Miraculously, he survived.

-And from that point on, my life changed completely.

And a couple things that I asked of this God that had watched

over me, was, would he-- would he--

would he give me back the life?

And would he give me justice in my lifetime?

NARRATOR: He wrote to government officials looking for a way

to clear his name, with no luck.

Even tried writing a book, but no publisher would touch it.

JOHN BUTTON: And I remember standing there

with the rejection slip in my hand.

And I raised my hands up and I said,

God, if you want this book written,

you better do something-- and the phone rang.

It was my brother ringing me up, to-- just to mention

that he had been out dancing with a young lady last night.

And he told her about the injustice.

And she wanted to meet me.

NARRATOR: The call was about Estelle Blackburn, a journalist

and a former government press secretary.

She was intrigued by the case.

And agreed to help investigate Button's story.

ESTELLE BLACKBURN: I had the skills.

And the doors that were slammed shut in his face opened for me.

I had the networks and the contacts.

I could get the files and everything that he needed.

I knew how to research. I was playing a detective.

I was investigating a -year-old m*rder,

trying to find fresh evidence.

NARRATOR: Blackburn wasn't entirely

convinced that Button was innocent.

She had serious doubts about Eric Cooke's credibility.

ESTELLE BLACKBURN: Now, I lived through the Cooke era.

I knew Cooke didn't run down girls.

Cooke sh*t people.

And later, we learned that he stabbed and strangled, as well.

But he certainly didn't run down girls.

NARRATOR: But in the files of Button's appeal,

Estelle found something surprising.

Something that h had not been widely

reported years earlier.

Six women had survived hit and run car crashes.

And Eric Cooke had confessed to being

the driver in each of them.

Each woman's story was eerily similar to Rosemary's.

Young women on the dark isolated roads run down by a stolen car.

Estelle eventually wrote her own book about John Button's case.

And she, too, had problems finding a publisher.

That is, until she asked her friend,

a local newspaper publisher for help.

When Bret Christian read the manuscript,

he agreed to personally finance the publication

of Blackburn's book.

-Having met John, I realized it was just not

possible for him to have done it.

And it didn't seem-- the physics didn't seem right to me,

either.

NARRATOR: Christian also questioned the lack of damage

to the front of Button's car.

BRET CHRISTIAN: The police were trying

to say that John's little lightweight French Simca had

hit a girl hard enough to k*ll her,

and yet, there was only-- there was

really no discernible damage on it.

It didn't add up, simply didn't add up.

NARRATOR: But could science back up his suspicions?

The answer to that question would

come from the world's smartest crash test dummy.

Estelle Blackburn's book convinced many

that John Button was innocent, and that serial k*ller Eric

Cooke was the one who k*lled Rosemary Anderson.

-Without a legal verdict, I still

was classed as a k*ller, a convicted k*ller.

NARRATOR: His only hope of overturning the verdict was

to find new or fresh evidence in this -year-old case.

TOM PERCY: Fresh evidence at law in this jurisdiction,

is evidence which was not available at the time

of the trial, which, obviously, didn't

feature at the time of the trial.

And which could not, with reasonable diligence,

have been available at the trial.

NARRATOR: Publisher Bret Christian believed so strongly

in Button's innocence that he searched

all over the world for an expert in the new field of forensics

called Pedestrian Crash Reconstruction.

In Texas, he found Rusty Haight, a former policeman

and one of the most respected crash reconstructionists

in the field.

RUSTY HAIGHT: Accident reconstruction is an effort

to explain how a crash, a car crash, happened.

We use a lot of common sense, some elementary applied

physics, and more common sense, and try to piece together

the objective information we have for a given car crash

to make some sense of it, to sort out how things happened.

NARRATOR: When Haight first looked at photographs taken

of John Button's car after the accident,

he didn't believe there was damage

consistent with the fatal collision.

RUSTY HAIGHT: Rosemary Anderson, the girl that was hit by a car,

was hit me in the range of to miles an hour.

And that leaves, you know, that kind of contact with the body

leaves distinctive marks on a car.

There were none of those marks on the car

that I saw photos of.

Nothing even close.

NARRATOR: The mark would be on the hood, because of the way

a body moves when hit at that speed.

RUSTY HAIGHT: And I think you can envision a person,

as they're struck by a car, basically,

wrapping or bending onto the front of the car.

The technical term we use when we were describing

the trajectory is a wrapped trajectory,

where the force applied on the body

is below the body's center of mass.

And so the body's going to bend, usually about the waist,

and that's going to leave some sort of mark on the hood.

NARRATOR: But in an appeals court,

Haight would need more than just an opinion.

He would need hard, forensic proof.

For that, he needed to perform pedestrian crash tests

on a Simca brand car, a model, that by this time,

was years old.

Despite the age, Bret Christian found three usable cars.

He also found a Holden, the model Eric Cooke said

he was driving when he k*lled Rosemary Anderson.

-Cooke's version is that he drives up behind her

and hits her from behind.

NARRATOR: A biomedical dummy was used

to mimic the reactions of Rosemary's body.

Haight suspended it by a fishing line that breaks on impact.

The police didn't accept Eric Cooke version of the crash,

because the exterior sun visor on his car wasn't damaged,

as one would expect.

When Haight's test car struck the dummy from behind,

it rolled onto the hood and over the roof,

just as Eric Cooke had claimed.

RUSTY HAIGHT: But I was focused on the visor.

I was focused on the alignment.

And then I looked at the visor, and I remember

seeing the visor bend when the dummy hit it.

And it sent a cold chill up my back.

I thought, ah, no. This is not good.

It can't be good.

NARRATOR: But the visor had snapped

back into shape with no damage.

This explained why Eric Cooke's visor showed

no damage when police inspected it.

-They actually flex.

That's what this visor had done when the body hit it.

So now, all of a sudden, what was kind of a tense moment

became, hey!

We've done it.

-So the dummy did exactly what Cooke said.

It was just a moment of, wow! This is it!

We've done it.

NARRATOR: And the dummy landed face down,

consistent with how John Button found Rosemary's body.

But the tests on John Button's car, the Simca

were even more persuasive.

RUSTY HAIGHT: We found marking at the leading

edge of the hood.

And more important, we found a big dent, a big depression

in the hood, where the dummy had come down

and basically smacked it's head on the hood.

Whether we hit in the right, more in the center,

or on the left, it just didn't matter.

NARRATOR: There was no similar damage to Button's car.

And each time, the dummy landed on its back,

inconsistent with the injuries on the front

of Rosemary's body.

Rusty Haight concluded that John Button

did not k*ll Rosemary Anderson.

TOM PERCY: So with Estelle's research,

and with Haight's evidence, we were

able to show both of those things.

A, it must have been Cooke.

And B, it could not have been Button.

You can't get a much stronger case than that.

NARRATOR: This was enough to convince three judges

on the Supreme Court of West Australia.

-That the verdict must be regarded

as unsafe and unsatisfactory on the ground

that there has been a miscarriage of justice.

[applause and cheering]

-We went back and corrected a wrong.

And we did it with an appropriate use

of the forensic evidence.

But also, a liberal use of good investigative techniques

that didn't come from the police.

That came from, basically, lay people.

-I think it makes us all a little bit more aware

of the fallibility of the system,

and have a little bit more faith that it can be rectified.

And that it is possible.

-It's the advance of science that's

only just been made possible.

And the recognition of that branch of science,

that is motor vehicle crash reconstruction,

that I would say, beyond any doubt, put the seal of success

on John Button's case.

[theme music]