The Cheat Sheet: Verdicts and Violations

[00:00:00] Content Warning This episode contains discussion of murder. Well, when I was looking through cases that were going on this week to include in this particular episode of Cheat Sheet,

[00:00:15] I noticed a few that had something in common because they were each instances of significant events or developments occurring after the verdict was reached in court.

[00:00:27] Typically, I think we all assume that when there is a verdict in a trial, that that is it, at least in these instances that proved not to be the case. My name is Anya Kane. I'm a journalist. And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney.

[00:00:45] And this is The Murder Sheet. We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases. We're The Murder Sheet. And this is The Cheat Sheet, Verdicts and Violations.

[00:01:00] So I want to start by talking about a case that happened up in Kent County, Michigan. And this is a case involving Gary Artman. Artman was a trucker. He was also a person with a violent history. He actually served a pretty extensive prison term for rape.

[00:02:06] And that is not all this man was accused of doing back in 2022. He was arrested for the murder of a woman named Sharon Kay Hammack. Ms. Hammack had been raped, strangled, stabbed, hog-tied and dumped by the side of a road back in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

[00:02:34] She was actually one of a dozen or so women killed in the 1990s in Grand Rapids. That's horrifying. So this is a horrible story. And one thing that's awful about a story like this is that the family had to wait so long to get justice.

[00:02:56] As I say, she was murdered back in the mid-90s and Artman was not arrested until 2022. And what happened to finally trigger that arrest was there was some DNA found at the crime scene which ultimately could be linked to him.

[00:03:19] When they started to investigate him, they found all sorts of knives, ropes and disturbing videos in his storage unit. They found that he had some journals where he wrote some bizarre things.

[00:03:37] All of these things finally led them to make the decision to pull the trigger and arrest this man. And this happened in 2022. In the middle of last year, he was tried for this heinous murder and he was convicted of it.

[00:03:58] Henry Marx after the conviction, he strongly denied his guilt of this crime. But that's not the end of the story because subsequent to that, he soon developed lung cancer. He got very, very sick and when it became clear that he was going to pass away and die,

[00:04:25] he made statements to the police and law enforcement in which he admitted to his guilt in that crime and he also admitted to his guilt in a total of 11 murders of Grand Rapids women in the 1990s. Wow.

[00:04:45] This is kind of like a serial killer that no one knew about. That's pretty horrifying. Also, can I just say that it underscores my strong lack of caring for when there's a heinous case and somebody keeps protesting their innocence? People do that all the time.

[00:05:02] People act like, oh my gosh, Jeffrey McDonald in the McDonald case accused of killing his family never confessed anything. If you don't confess, then you have a bunch of people telling you what a good fellow you are and you were wrong. You're the real victim in this situation.

[00:05:19] It's an ego thing. It's an ego thing and it's a great point. And I think even in day-to-day normal life, I think a lot of us, if we're confronted with something we did wrong,

[00:05:31] we're not going to immediately confess to it because we're gonna try to get away with it. It just blows my mind in true crime when people be like, well, he never did confess. Yeah, that's... does not surprise me. You know what? Sometimes bad guys lie.

[00:05:44] But I'm glad he at least came clean about it at the last minute so some of these families might have a sense of what horrible thing happened to their loved one. And when we talk about this, as I say, it's like a serial killer we didn't know about.

[00:05:57] It reminds me a while back we did an interview with a man named Michael Erntfeld, who was a criminologist, and he actually made the case to us and in his books and stuff that there's actually many serial killers out there

[00:06:11] who are operating under the radar and their crimes really aren't getting noted or being studied and they're not really even being sought because for this man's case, he was targeting sex workers by and large and for whatever reason those crimes don't always get the attention they deserve.

[00:06:31] Well, if there's somebody who is a vulnerable victim who's also dealing with living on the margins or dealing with addiction issues and is impoverished, then the media frankly does not always pay careful attention to that.

[00:06:44] In some cases, those cases do blow up into something bigger like with the Long Island serial killer case. I think that was largely due to just the gruesomeness and it being such near such a huge media market.

[00:06:57] It's not that the media doesn't care that reporters don't care, but there's just a number of factors that can lead to this happening, especially if there's no one piecing it together that, okay, a serial killer is clearly operating here. It goes unnoticed.

[00:07:11] And also I think a big part of it is reporters who media in general, sometimes you need someone to give you a kick in the pants to do something.

[00:07:22] If there's not people out there saying you need to cover this, you need to cover this, maybe things don't get covered. And when you have families actively involved and we have a big community of people caring about a particular victim

[00:07:35] pushing both the public and law enforcement and the media to do something about it, that's more likely to get a lot of coverage. Also a serial killer case is going to get more coverage typically because it's scary, freaks people out.

[00:07:47] But if you have nobody, even if you have one family saying look into what happened to our daughter, she was doing sex work and something bad happened to her, that might get a day or so of coverage.

[00:08:01] But the thing that's going to attract a lot of attention and bring a lot of pressure to bear on police to devote resources to the case is connecting the dots and kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[00:08:12] It sort of feeds itself because if the police aren't figuring that out, then they're not going to tell the media and then the media can't confirmation. It just kind of spirals. Now there's a couple more points I think we need to make here.

[00:08:24] One is kind of a reiteration of something you just said moments ago. You said bad people can lie and I think it's important to note that just because a person makes a confession doesn't mean it's true.

[00:08:38] I often flash back a police investigator we spoke to once told me that without any evidence, a confession is just a story. And we're both aware of cases where people for whatever reason will confess to things they didn't do. It happens, it happens all the time actually.

[00:09:02] And you'd think why would anyone do that? But there's all sorts of reasons somebody would want to be notorious or scare people in their lives or brag or I mean it's not something that I think normal people would understand.

[00:09:17] But if you have somebody who's dealing with some issues then you kind of get that. One example that comes to mind right away is Henry Lee Lucas. Yeah, he was like confessing to everything in sight with no or minimal evidence and essentially authorities...

[00:09:38] I'm not going to necessarily try to read ill intent here because I'm not as familiar with that case but it seems like authorities were using him to kind of like check off okay like all our cold cases that are being solved now without really being critical and skeptical.

[00:09:52] Well in this instance I think it's important to point out though that these crimes all happen in the same basic geographic area and have a very similar method of operation. And we don't know all the details of these confessions but we do know a few bits and pieces

[00:10:15] and some of them do seem to have some evidence behind them. For instance in one of them, Artman talked that he saw one of the people he ended up murdering leaving a bar with some sort of cast or a sling on her arm.

[00:10:33] I don't believe that information about that particular victim was out there and it turns out the one of the people he murdered did indeed have that on her arm. This was Kathleen Dennis. Okay, that's pretty compelling. So that makes these confessions sound plausible to me.

[00:10:54] I'm sure that the investigators are going to continue to look into all of this and try to find even more evidence. And I'll be very interested in what they find. Absolutely.

[00:11:10] I'm glad that before he passed away he was able to provide some answers to what happened to some of these women's whose lives were ended far too soon.

[00:11:22] Another thing I flash back on is there was a rather notorious case here in the state of Indiana back in the early 80s. There was a man named Stephen Judy. Oh, geez. He did some horrific crimes. He ultimately was executed for them.

[00:11:44] And we've talked with one of the people who knew some of the investigators on that case and he told us that shortly before Judy was to be executed, he told an investigator there are other crimes, other murders I'm responsible for. Investigators had suspected that.

[00:12:05] Judy said, I'm writing down the details of these crimes and I'm putting them in this sealed envelope. Don't open this envelope until after I am dead. And the investigators agreed to that. And Judy is executed. The investigators open up the envelope and find blank pieces of paper.

[00:12:26] That guy was a monster. He was just playing with them. Yeah, that's the, yeah, just an absolute monster. Some people are, are irredeemable in my mind and he's one of them. Yeah, that's a horrifying case. Yeah.

[00:12:42] He killed a mom and I think it was three kids, but he killed the kids. He raped and murdered the mom. I think he strangled her and he threw each of the small children in a creek. They couldn't swim and they drowned.

[00:12:54] And then he said afterwards, well, it's not his fault. They didn't know how to swim. Yeah. Trying to absolve himself of some of the guilt. This was how he wasn't trying to like make a joke or whatever. This was actually the way his mind worked.

[00:13:08] Yeah, he was a really sick person. And he has been suspected in a lot of other crimes, including the Burgershaft crimes, which I don't really see, but I understand why people think that because if you're capable of doing something so awful,

[00:13:20] I can understand describing a lot of awful things to the person. Now let's move on and talk about another case where there's been some interesting developments after the verdict. And in this case, the verdict happened quite a while ago.

[00:13:36] I'm talking about the case of 15 year old Marcia Moxley, who was actually murdered all the way back in 1975. Greenwich, Connecticut. Greenwich, Connecticut. She, her death for many years was unsolved. No one had been prosecuted for it. Ultimately, that finally changed when a man named Michael Skakel,

[00:14:03] who was a cousin to the Kennedy family, was prosecuted and convicted of it. And frankly, the evidence against Skakel was overwhelming. I remember that at one point, Skakel's cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wrote a long article about the case in which he argued strenuously for Skakel's innocence.

[00:14:31] And I wanted to have an open mind and I read the article and the article was frankly so poorly reasoned and put together that absolutely 100% convinced me of this man's guilt. We haven't talked about it. Do you have an opinion?

[00:14:48] Oh, he's guilty. Oh my God. Yeah. Jesus Christ. I mean, this is, this whole thing has been such a miscarriage of justice and it just frankly, it reeks of two different systems for wealthy and connected people and poor people in this country.

[00:15:02] Because I think if this guy was just some Joe Schmoe on the street, he would still be in prison rightfully so. But oh, he's related to the Kennedys. So he's got his little network of support. It's disgusting. This whole thing disgusts me.

[00:15:17] And what's happening now also disgusts me. Before we talk about what's happening now, I want to jump back. He was ultimately convicted for the crime. If you just look at the headlines and such that they're telling you

[00:15:30] that his conviction was tossed out and that the prosecutors in the case declined to put him on trial again because they didn't feel they could prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And so when you look at that, you get a certain impression.

[00:15:49] Wow, it's not a strong case. Yeah, you get the impression it's not a strong case. And I think it's worth pointing out that first of all, this was not an instance where the conviction was thrown out because somebody said, Dolly, this guy is actually innocent.

[00:16:03] It was a procedural matter. The courts felt that his defense attorney made a mistake and should have emphasized some information about an alibi this gagle claimed to have. And so because of that, they threw the conviction out.

[00:16:22] I have an idea of the answer to this, but I'm going to ask you because I'm sure a lot of listeners are wondering this. Why is that the state's problem that his counsel didn't do something? How does that rise to level of throwing a case out?

[00:16:36] The argument would be he didn't get a fair shake. You want to make sure that if you take away a person's liberty and you send this person to prison perhaps for decades, you want to make sure that everything was absolutely done by the book.

[00:16:53] I guess especially if they're related to the Kennedys. You have a pretty strong opinion about this. Oh, I do. I do. Yes. So the case is thrown out. And now you're hearing Ania and I say that we feel it's a strong case. It wasn't it retried.

[00:17:09] And by the time the case is thrown out, it has been decades since the crime. And they were a total of 51 witnesses that the state wanted to use to prosecute their case and 17 of those witnesses had passed away.

[00:17:34] And it's really hard to move forward with a case when about a third of your witnesses are unavailable to you because of death. Think of it like everybody knows the 1908 Cubs were the world champions.

[00:17:50] How good of a team would they be if a third of them were unavailable for a game? What odds would they have to win a game if a third of the team was unavailable to play? So that was why the state did not move forward with the case.

[00:18:12] So that was where things stood. This man had his freedom back, even though many people, the family of the victim, Ania and I, I'm sure many of you out there believe he's guilty. He got to be free. So surely that was enough for him, right?

[00:18:27] Getting away with murder. No. So now he is suing the law enforcement agencies that investigate the case saying they did all these things wrong. They violated his rights. They didn't provide evidence about other suspects this and that.

[00:18:48] And so they need to give him lots of money to make it all right. What's your opinion? Not good. I think this is a guilty man who gamed the system and exploited his connections to a notorious family, and I just, yeah, it just disgusts me.

[00:19:11] This is not justice for Martha Moxley. I know this, I just feel like this would not be happening if he wasn't who he was. I hope he falls flat on his face with this lawsuit.

[00:19:23] There's cases, there's cases of people who are wrongfully convicted and are exonerated by DNA, who like a real exoneration and they get thrown out on the streets and given nothing. Those people deserve monetary compensation for what they went through. This guy deserves nothing.

[00:19:43] One thing about our legal system that upsets and frustrates a lot of people is that even if you don't have a strong case, you can file a suit and there's every chance in the world that if you're suing a big company or perhaps the government

[00:20:01] that some accountant will say, well, it'll cost us $100,000 to defend this suit. Let's offer this person $90,000 to go away. In other words, even if you file a frivolous suit, you can get a pretty good payday. So maybe he's hoping for something like that.

[00:20:19] Because it's more expensive for the larger entity to fight it than to just settle it for a pittance. So I don't know if that's what is his motivation here is, but it will be interesting to keep an eye on this one going forward as well.

[00:20:36] Our last case came to my attention through an article that Audrey Conklin wrote for FoxNews.com. It's a great article. And I should note here that we will include a link to that article in our notes.

[00:20:53] We also include links to other articles covering the other cases we use. These are the articles we used as our sources. WoodTV did some great articles on the Artman case and the Skakel case was covered very well by a number of outlets.

[00:21:09] And as I mentioned, this particular case that we're going to do next was written about by Audrey Conklin. This is the story going back to 1991. A 21-year-old woman named Anita Byington was beaten to death in Austin, Texas.

[00:21:30] A man named Alan Andrecazzi was convicted of that murder, spent 30 years in prison and was released on parole last year. But that is not the end of the story. He last year also began seeking something greater than his release. He wants exoneration.

[00:21:57] He wants people to consider him to be innocent. And the Innocence Project is actually helping him with this. They are claiming that the confessions that cause he made in this case were false confessions, that he was pressured into it. He was intimidated into it.

[00:22:22] And so they should not be taken seriously. And they have some support on this from the current district attorneys in the case who are trying to point the fingers at other potential suspects.

[00:22:38] And one of the reasons I find this very interesting is that the family of the victim was not notified that this, for lack of a better word, re-investigation was going on. The Innocence Project actually fundraised off this.

[00:22:56] They put pictures of a cause he up on social media sites saying donate to help prove this man's innocence or what have you. And that's how the victim's family found out about this, right? That's how they found out. That's very upsetting to me.

[00:23:18] And I think the prosecutor originally tried the case, makes the point that it's easy for people to go into court and do what they want when it's just one side.

[00:23:28] And so you have the Innocence Project, you have the current district attorneys office and stuff working on this case. And they're not bothering to inform the family or others who might present different points of view. And that's troubling.

[00:23:43] Now I'm all about an aggressive defense of people who may have been wrongfully convicted and working towards that exoneration. But I would like to think that there's a way to do that while also treating the victim's family or victims' families with a modicum of respect.

[00:23:59] And that's absolutely not what has gone on here. So I'm not saying, oh, don't do that. It's more of like how you do things.

[00:24:08] I actually do believe that in that situation, both the district attorney's office and the Innocence Project of Texas would have been better for letting them know what they were doing.

[00:24:26] But you know, that would have meant a strategic setback because the family probably wouldn't have been happy about it. And it's all about winning. And it's also not at all clear if this man is actually innocent at all.

[00:24:41] The prosecutor originally tried the case, vehemently maintains that this was actually the guilty man. And he makes some good points for that. And so it's- What are those points? Well, one thing, Kossy actually confessed not just once, but two separate times to two different police investigators.

[00:25:06] And he signed voluntarily a document with his confession. He's signed it in front of civilian employees. Does that suggest that perhaps his confession was actually true if he's doing it multiple times? It's certainly better than him just doing it once and then immediately recanting.

[00:25:24] So the family is upset. They feel that the DA's office has an agenda. They feel the Innocence Project has an agenda in order for the Innocence Project's story about what actually happened to be true.

[00:25:46] They're also having to suggest some sort of a conspiracy where a number of police officers would have had to lie about the circumstances under which the confession was made. Is there evidence of that? That's unclear.

[00:26:03] There is one police officer in Texas who's known for getting people to make false confessions. That was Hector Polanco. He had an association with the 1991 Yogurt Shop Murders in Austin, Texas, which of course involved-

[00:26:20] We have never dug into that case so we're not coming down on one side or another but involved four young men confessing and then eventually being released. That's kind of a high-profile incident that he was involved in.

[00:26:33] That's concerning but I guess to me it's like, I don't know. It's funny. I think the true crime podcast world has over time had a very, very, very favorable view of the Innocence Project as a concept. And I think that's partially deserved.

[00:26:53] I mean coming in and serving people who are innocent, getting them exonerated, getting them their lives back is a worthy and noble mission. One thing I think people don't really realize is that the Innocence Project is a concept. It's not a one unified organization. There's Innocence Projects.

[00:27:13] So right now this is the Innocence Project of Texas. There's all these separate little organizations that have the same maybe methods or have the same mission but they're separate organizations. And I think that they get it wrong a lot. Like a lot of them do.

[00:27:33] There's been so many cases where people are like breathlessly talking about the Innocence Project took it up and they only take people who are innocent. And I think that's very naive. I think that says naive is saying the cops only arrest guilty people.

[00:27:45] I think you have to be very, very critical of any organization with the amount of resources that they have that go around and involve themselves in cases like this. And you have to be willing to be skeptical of them alongside law enforcement and prosecutors office.

[00:27:59] I don't think that should be controversial but it seems to be somewhat in true crime. It's a lot. I feel like their reputation is so needlessly sterling that people see, oh my God, their names on it. They would never do anything.

[00:28:14] They would never try to get a guilty person off and it's like, ugh. That's not... I think people need to be examining some of their actions more critically and with an eye toward it's not all one organization. It's a concept.

[00:28:29] What I'm about to say doesn't really necessarily deal with just the Innocence Project but I think it's also important to look at process. Process matters. It counts for something. Some of the details in this case reminded me a bit of what we saw in the Adnan Syed case.

[00:28:51] Because that was a case where Syed ended up being released because some current office holder decided that she felt he was innocent. And there was court hearings where the family did not receive adequate notice.

[00:29:10] And it seems in this case he was purest paroled so that's not an issue but we're seeing court hearings where the family doesn't receive notice. And process matters.

[00:29:23] I think the family should have been told they deserve a voice in all of this whether Kasi is innocent or guilty of the crime.

[00:29:31] Is there an argument that in this case playing devil's advocate that the Innocence Project didn't owe the family a contact but the DA's office which claims that it tried to contact them claims.

[00:29:43] But obviously it was not successful and I don't really know how that happens like show up at their house.

[00:29:49] Yeah in fairness I don't think the Innocence Project their focus is on their lack of a better word for their clients and their client is the person who they're trying to exonerate. I guess. But the DA. I think it would be nice if they at least tried.

[00:30:08] They're doing something in this case that even if they're correct it's going to upend these people's worlds. So maybe a phone call would be a good idea. Even if you get yelled at at least you're doing the right thing. Doesn't that matter?

[00:30:23] I guess not necessarily in this case. And it's not clear if Kasi is truly innocent or if he was guilty as charged. But I think it seems pretty ambiguous. It seems ambiguous.

[00:30:41] If he was wrongfully convicted obviously he deserves his justice but everybody deserves their justice and the family deserve to be treated better in this in my opinion.

[00:30:52] Oh yeah this is I mean this is a whatever we can we can we can look you know as more information comes out it's possible that it'll it'll indicate that cause he was an innocent man and in that case again as you said he deserves to get exonerated.

[00:31:07] And it's possible that that won't really become clear or it's possible that it'll become clear that he was guilty as charged.

[00:31:13] But at the end of the day there needs to be a process in place for respectfully dealing with victims family members when you're doing this because they deserve better.

[00:31:26] The system of criminal justice seems to fail victims families at every turn sometimes in my view not always not universally but oftentimes and this is just adding insult to injury because they go through the trauma of you know the investigation.

[00:31:42] A trial a conviction and then no you're not done. You got to come back and deal with whatever this is and dealing with them with a little bit more sympathy.

[00:31:54] Even if there's not necessarily a legal reason to be at the very nice and at the very least a nice moral move. Well thank you so much for listening and we will be back next week with more episodes and another episode of the cheat sheet. Thank you.

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