1

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Rat’s in the Trap

The day before Michael Beckcom was arrested for murder, a Texas Ranger spotted his red Ford Explorer parked in a small town not far from the Gulf Coast. On its tailpipe was a silver substance that looked like the remnants of melted duct tape. It was evidence that would link Beckcom to the grisly killing of a federal witness.

On June 4, 1996, Beckcom was jailed on a $10 million bond for his role in the slaying of George “Nick” Brueggen. Brueggen had been cooperating with federal authorities to build a fraud and tax evasion case against Beckcom and his associates, who fancied themselves a sort of South Texas Mafia. Beckcom and several others, including Mark Crawford, the former mayor of sleepy Ingleside, Texas, locked Brueggen in a large metal storage box. Using duct tape, they attached one end of a garden hose to the box and the other end to the tailpipe of Beckcom’s SUV. According to the Texas Rangers’ report, Beckcom then revved the engine, asphyxiating Brueggen.

Facing a capital murder charge, Beckcom cut a deal with prosecutors, becoming the government’s key witness against Crawford, the mastermind behind the murder.

Beckcom’s testimony was vivid. “Nick was kicking the box and making noise; he was panicking,” he testified in federal court, recalling one of his associates offering a pithy aside: “The rat’s in the trap.” When it was all over, his friends were eager to open the box, Beckcom said, while he “looked from the distance” as fumes wafted from its lid. Brueggen’s “eyes were open, and he had a blank stare. He was frozen there.”

Beckcom was critical to convicting Crawford, and while a federal district judge ultimately signed off on his plea deal, he also made clear that Beckcom had lied under oath. “The court believed you in part,” the judge said at Beckcom’s sentencing hearing. “But there were certainly areas where you gave false statements either to the investigating officers or your testimony on the witness stand was false.”

Despite the apparent perjury, Beckcom went on to play an equally crucial role in convicting Jeffrey Prible, who was sent to death row for the murder of his friends Steve Herrera and Nilda Tirado, along with their three kids. The family was found dead in their Houston home on April 24, 1999. Two years later, Prible was indicted for the killings while serving a five-year sentence at the federal correctional institution in Beaumont for a string of bank robberies.

There was no direct evidence tying Prible to the murders. Instead, Harris County prosecutor Kelly Siegler’s case was based on the thinnest of circumstantial evidence, which made Beckcom’s testimony indispensable even if his credibility was questionable: He was the only witness who could connect Prible to the crime.

Beckcom said that he and his cellmate, Nathan Foreman, had befriended Prible while imprisoned at Beaumont. One evening, according to Beckcom, the three men were sitting in a field on the rec yard when Prible confessed to the killings.

Once again, Beckcom’s testimony was cinematic. He described Prible as a modern-day ninja who boasted about his ability to carry out the murders undetected. “Anybody that can go in a house and take out a whole family and get out without being seen is a bad motherfucker,” Beckcom recalled Prible saying. “And I’m that motherfucker.”

The information Beckcom provided also sewed up the gaping holes in Siegler’s case. Prible lacked a motive — until Beckcom said he was angry with Herrera for hoarding cash from the bank robberies. Beckcom explained away the missing murder weapon by implying that Prible had buried it under some newly poured concrete. “Asphalt’s good sometimes for hiding things,” he said Prible told him. And he countered Prible’s alibi witness — a neighbor who saw Prible dropped off at home hours before the murders — by suggesting that Prible had snuck back into his friend’s house to kill the family.

In early 2017, Prible’s defense lawyers, James Rytting and Gretchen Scardino, sought Beckcom out to learn more about the deal he’d cut with Siegler. The first time he was scheduled to be deposed, Beckcom didn’t show up. Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise; when a defense investigator went to serve him with a subpoena, Beckcom was outwardly hostile to the notion of having to answer any questions.

The investigator persuaded Beckcom to meet him at a Starbucks outside a gated community in Florida. Beckcom rolled up on a Harley Davidson. Still fit, with his dark hair now graying around the temples, he was furious to learn about the subpoena. “If I have to,” the investigator recalled Beckcom saying, “I’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch lawyer and go back to prison, but I’m not going to get involved in this case anymore.”

The threat unnerved Scardino. She hired a retired federal marshal to sit outside the room when they finally got Beckcom in for his deposition. Scardino steadied her nerves as the questioning began, but it was Beckcom who broke the ice. Was he on anything that might impair his memory? Scardino asked. “Just age,” Beckcom joked.

For his role in the Crawford prosecution, Beckcom had been handsomely rewarded: just 11 years for a slaying that could have netted him the death penalty. Still, as he served his time at Beaumont, he hoped that his cooperation in the Prible case would swing the prison doors wide open. He expected as much from Siegler, he told Scardino. Instead, he got a year shaved off his sentence. Nearly two decades later, he was still vexed.

“You thought you’d be walking out the door?” Scardino asked.

“For a house full of bodies? Yeah,” he replied, crossing his arms. “Children? Sure.”

Still, Scardino could see why Beckcom made an effective witness; he remained unflappable and calm over more than five hours of questioning. He said he’d gotten Siegler’s name from Foreman but couldn’t recall how he knew that Prible was coming to the unit before he arrived. “Someone would have had to tell you that he was coming, right?” Scardino asked. “Yeah, I would assume so,” Beckcom replied. Nor could he recall whether Siegler had shared details about Prible’s case, like the problem of the alibi witness.

At some point, Beckcom said, he realized there were multiple men vying to inform on Prible, “like fricking 10 guys,” but “somehow I ended up with the information.”

“The details Jeff Prible gave me he gave completely and explicitly to me and Nathan Foreman one night,” he said. “He just rolled it out.”

At trial, Siegler had introduced a photo of Beckcom, Foreman, and Prible alongside their parents in the Beaumont visitation room. During his deposition, Beckcom acknowledged that the photo was staged to corroborate his story that the men were so close that Prible would confess. But while the photo was dated the same day as the alleged confession, it was taken hours earlier, before Prible had said anything. “You had nothing to corroborate yet,” Rytting said. “No,” Beckcom agreed.

Rytting asked Beckcom about the affidavit Foreman had provided in 2016, which characterized Beckcom as one of the men looking to sink Prible in exchange for a time cut. Foreman said that Prible never confessed in his presence, contrary to Beckcom’s trial testimony. “In fact, I never heard Prible say anything bad about the victims,” Foreman said. “When he talked about Herrera, he talked about him like he was a friend he had lost.”

“Wow,” Beckcom remarked. “I mean, it makes no sense. Why would he be trying to gather information and then say, ‘I didn’t get the information, no, that’s not true’? He either heard these things or he didn’t hear them, so he can’t have it both ways.”

“That’s correct,” Rytting replied. “And he states he didn’t hear them.”

2

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Underground Market

Kelly Siegler sat in a leather office chair, a bottle of Diet Coke in hand, staring down a videographer’s camera. Throughout more than nine hours of questioning, her expressions traversed a spectrum of impassive to dismissive to haughty as she repeatedly denied doing anything wrong.

In her decades at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, Siegler had been the one asking questions. Now, during a sworn deposition in October 2017, Prible’s lawyers had the chance to confront her about the measures she took to convict their client.

It was a significant turn of events for the hot shot prosecutor-turned-reality TV star, but not unprecedented. A few years earlier, she’d spent five bruising days on the witness stand answering questions about her prosecution of David Temple, the high school football coach sentenced to life in prison for murdering his pregnant wife, Belinda. Temple’s conviction, based on circumstantial evidence, was Siegler’s final cold case victory at the DA’s office. Months later, in the wake of her failed campaign to become the next DA, she resigned.

More than just a personal defeat, Siegler’s election loss signaled the start of Harris County’s ongoing shift away from the lock-them-all-up politics of her mentors. And while it ultimately fed the narrative of Siegler’s phoenix-like ascent to a larger stage, the loss also seemed to animate her with the notion that subsequent allegations of prosecutorial misconduct were some sort of political payback.

In challenging his conviction, Temple argued that Siegler had withheld a raft of records from the defense, including those related to an alternate suspect. Confronted with the alleged improprieties in court, Siegler was pugnacious. She was only required to turn over evidence related to “truly, truly” alternate suspects, she said, not “ridiculous” information that came from sources she deemed “kooky.”

She intimated that the questions swirling around Temple’s conviction were all thanks to her opponent in the DA’s race years earlier, whom Siegler claimed had made a deal with Temple’s trial attorney to reopen the case, presumably as part of a plot to besmirch her reputation.

Siegler’s testimony did not sit well with the district court, which concluded that her actions had deprived Temple of a fair trial. The notoriously conservative Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed, vacating the conviction. While Temple would eventually be retried and convicted, the public rebuke was still fresh when Siegler sat down to answer questions about the Prible case.

Siegler insisted that the lawyers’ petition challenging Prible’s conviction was full of lies.

Can you name one of the allegations that “stands out as being false?” Rytting asked.

“Well, the overarching lie is that I orchestrated a ring of informants from the Beaumont federal prison,” she said. “That is a lie … that you made up.”

Siegler also denied hiding anything from Prible’s lawyers at trial. All the evidence the state had developed was in a file that was open to the defense, she said, including any notes.

It was an odd position given that federal District Judge Keith Ellison had only recently unearthed notes from Siegler’s files documenting her meetings with Nathan Foreman, who positioned himself early on as an informant against Prible and was later described as the ringleader of the Beaumont snitches. The notes also showed that she had consulted a forensic expert who undermined her assertion at trial that the sperm found in Nilda Tirado’s mouth could only have been deposited moments before she was shot.

Siegler’s colleagues, meanwhile, had different takes on her willingness to turn over evidence. “Kelly didn’t give up anything she didn’t have to,” Johnny Bonds, the DA investigator who went on to become Siegler’s “Cold Justice” co-star, said in a deposition. Vic Wisner, her co-counsel on the Prible case, said the DA’s office “always had an open file policy unless there was some extraordinary need not to,” but that it didn’t include notes.

There were other contradictions. Siegler denied that Beckcom played a “vital role” at Prible’s trial, even though that was the precise language she used to describe his participation. In a Rule 35 letter, Siegler had implored the federal prosecutor who handled the Brueggen murder case to advocate for a time cut for Beckcom. The prosecutor was reluctant; Beckcom’s plea deal was generous, he told Siegler. But her case “involved the vicious murder of FIVE people,” she wrote in a second letter. And Beckcom had “played a vital role in obtaining a conviction.”

Siegler conceded at her deposition that she and Bonds first met with Foreman to discuss Prible’s case in August 2001, long before the casual rec yard encounter presented at trial. Foreman offered dubious details of Prible’s alleged crime, which Siegler and Bonds memorialized on several sheets of lined paper. Still, Siegler insisted that Foreman played no role in the case, becoming increasingly hostile each time his name was brought up. “Mr. Foreman was not involved in Jeffrey Prible’s case,” she told the lawyers. “I know you want him to be, but he was not.”

Siegler claimed, for the first time, that she and Bonds left the meeting convinced that Foreman was not credible. “We walked out of there saying we didn’t believe a word he had to say.” This echoed what Bonds said in his deposition; as he recalled, Foreman could not even describe what Prible looked like. Siegler did not explain why she continued to meet with Foreman, who introduced her to his cellmate, Beckcom, the man she decided was credible enough to put on the witness stand.

As it turns out, Siegler had been talking about Prible with a Beaumont informant even earlier than her notes reflected. At the deposition, she revealed that in July 2001 she had discussed Prible’s case with Jesse Moreno, the informant who gave her Foreman’s name and later served as her star witness against Hermilo Herrero. The admission suggested it was Siegler who set in motion the high-stakes competition to inform on Prible. And all of it started before Prible had even been charged with murder or transferred to the unit where the snitch ring operated.

There was also the matter of the letters Siegler had received from three other men at Beaumont volunteering accounts of Prible’s jailhouse confession. Like Siegler’s notes, the letters were only disclosed via judicial intervention years after Prible’s trial. They would never have come to light without Carl Walker, one of the would-be informants who withdrew from the scheme after a crisis of conscience and prompted the lawyers to seek a review of Siegler’s records. Nevertheless, Siegler said that the letters would also have been in her “open” file.

She dismissed their significance, seemingly unfazed by the idea that so many people angling to inform on Prible might cast doubt on any confession narrative coming out of Beaumont. “Federal inmates audition for any role … on any case they can think of with any information they might hear to try to get a time cut,” she said. “That’s what federal inmates do all day long 24 hours a day.”

“So you knew that they were doing this before Mr. Prible’s trial?” Scardino asked.

“I’m not stupid,” Siegler replied.

Rytting questioned whether Siegler had engaged with the Beaumont informants in an effort to gin up evidence. Siegler was having none of it. “Your witnesses’ affidavits were lies,” she stated. “You have not one shred or iota or piece of credible evidence from a credible witness that supports any of these allegations.”

“And these are the type of witnesses that you used to put people on death row?” Rytting asked.

“I’m calling you a liar, sir,” she replied.

“And I’m calling you one.”

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A Mark

In 2018, Scardino and Rytting filed an amended petition in federal court challenging Prible’s conviction. “For over 15 years, the state has denied any conspiracy to frame Prible for the murders of the Herrera/Tirado family through the use of false jailhouse informant testimony,” it began. “Now, lead prosecutor Kelly Siegler’s own handwritten notes … confirm that this was in fact the case.”

“Prible’s trial was a master class in obfuscation by omission,” the lawyers wrote. Had jurors been privy to the extent of Siegler’s interactions with the Beaumont informants, they would have seen the state’s case for what it was. “The jury would have figured out that the whole thing was a set-up.”

A year later, Ellison granted their request for a hearing to consider the evidence. For so long, Prible’s suspicions about the Beaumont informants had been dismissed as paranoid speculation. Now a federal judge was giving them a chance to prove their case. “We knew we had a story to tell,” Scardino said.

A few days before the evidentiary hearing was scheduled to begin in downtown Houston, Ellison convened a conference call with the lawyers for each side. The topic: Kelly Siegler.

“I am concerned with the fact that Ms. Siegler seems to be unavailable,” he said.

For months, Scardino and Rytting had been trying to serve Siegler with a subpoena to appear at the hearing. They tried her at her office and at home. She never responded.

Tina Miranda, the Texas assistant attorney general tasked with defending Prible’s conviction, spoke up: Siegler had contacted her to say that she “travels a lot for her taping of her show” and would be unavailable. The judge was irritated. “That’s the kind of thing that a witness avoiding appearing would say,” Ellison said. “I really would have expected much more from an officer of the court.”

On the morning of the hearing, Prible sat in a high-backed chair in Ellison’s courtroom. He turned to smile at his family, which was out in force. His three grown children were there, along with his mother, sister, and other relatives. Scardino had two witnesses waiting to testify: Nathan Foreman and Carl Walker. The judge assumed the bench at 10 a.m. There was just one problem. “Has anybody heard from Ms. Siegler?” Ellison asked.

Miranda had: Siegler was still out of town. “I wish she would cover this case on her TV show and explain to the nation why she couldn’t be present,” Ellison quipped. The hearing would start without her.

Scardino launched into Prible’s case. Prosecutors had declined to indict anyone for the Herrera and Tirado murders based on the limited evidence collected by the summer of 1999, she said. Yet, without uncovering anything new, Siegler asked a grand jury to indict Prible two years later. By the time she took the case to trial, there was only one additional element: Michael Beckcom.

To believe Beckcom’s story about Prible’s confession, Scardino told the judge, you’d have to place faith in Foreman, whom Beckcom said was by his side when Prible owned up to the crime. Siegler had met with Foreman at least twice in connection with Prible’s case, although she failed to inform the defense. Despite this, Siegler claimed Foreman was irrelevant and untrustworthy.

Siegler’s files showed that she’d heard from at least five men at Beaumont jockeying for informant status in the hopes of securing time cuts, which should have raised red flags. Yet Siegler simply buried the communications.

The “sordid backstory” of the prosecutor and the informants would never have come to light, Scardino said, if “one of the informants that Siegler decided not to use,” Carl Walker, hadn’t come forward and “spilled the beans on the ring of snitches.”

“There’s only one reason she would avoid being here in person today to clear her name,” Scardino said. “That is because her name can’t be cleared.”

Miranda conceded that “at face value,” it was “disturbing” that so many people were trying to snitch on Prible, but she said there was no proof that Siegler put them up to it or even understood what was going on.

The judge seemed skeptical of Miranda’s take. “What was the alternative thesis?” he asked. “Why would these inmates become so enthusiastic about trying to pin a capital crime on Mr. Prible?”

That’s just what they do, Miranda responded. If that were the case, Ellison said, “Wouldn’t that cause a seasoned prosecutor to be especially wary about this kind of evidence?”

Miranda insisted that Siegler was attuned to the problem. After all, she only put Beckcom on the stand as a witness against Prible — not the four others who also supposedly heard him confess.

After being released from Beaumont, Foreman had landed in legal trouble again with a conviction for aggravated kidnapping and robbery. When he took the stand at the evidentiary hearing, he was out on bond as his case made its way through the appeals process. Although he’d played an outsize role behind bars in the scheme to snitch on Prible, in court Foreman was almost timid; he spoke so quietly that the court reporter asked him to pull the microphone closer.

At Beaumont, Foreman had every incentive to offer up incriminating information about his neighbors, true or not. Now he was facing 50 years in state prison — the rest of his life — and no amount of self-dealing would change the sentence.

Foreman testified that he’d first heard the names Kelly Siegler and Jeffrey Prible from Jesse Moreno, the informant who met with Siegler about Prible’s case and became her star witness against Hermilo Herrero. It was Herrero who first alerted Prible that the same band of informants was behind their convictions. Two months before Prible’s trial started, Siegler traveled to Louisiana to testify in favor of a drastic time cut for Moreno, whose sentence was reduced from 78 months in prison to just one.

While incarcerated in Beaumont, Foreman and Moreno both wound up in the Special Housing Unit, where Foreman was working as a janitor and orderly, delivering meals. It was there that Moreno told him about Prible — before Prible had even arrived. Moreno suggested that he reach out to Siegler about becoming an informant. Foreman testified that what he knew about Prible’s case came not only from Moreno, but also from Siegler, who told him that Prible’s DNA had been found in Tirado’s mouth.

Foreman said he never heard Prible confess to the murders of Herrera, Tirado, and their kids. And since he was eager for a time cut, he’d remember a confession. Beckcom’s statement at trial sounded scripted, he added. “All I could say is that he should have been a book writer or something.” When Rytting read aloud Beckcom’s line about Prible being trained in the Marines for “high-intensity, low-drag” maneuvers, Foreman laughed. “I’ve never heard that one,” he said. “It really sounds like he got it off television.”

The judge wanted to know if men at Beaumont regularly discussed the crimes they had committed. Wouldn’t that be risky business? “That is correct,” Foreman replied. People might talk about past crimes — if they were of little consequence — but never about pending charges and certainly not about murdering children. That could get you killed.

As Prible recalled, Foreman winked at him on his way out of the courtroom. Prible took it as a conciliatory gesture, as if to admit he’d done wrong but tried to make it right. “So he’s OK with me.”

In contrast to Foreman, Carl Walker had created a prosperous new life for himself after leaving federal prison, becoming a tech entrepreneur in Houston. He was, Scardino thought, the moral center of their case, sharing what he knew about the ring of informants even when doing so might have put him in jeopardy. “He struck me as someone who has a very clear understanding of right and wrong,” she said.

“He was going to be a scapegoat for several individuals to have an opportunity to get out of prison sooner than later.”

The courtroom was silent as Walker testified. He’d been recruited as one of a handful of snitches who would inform on Prible, he said, and was told details of the alleged offense before Prible was transferred to the prison unit.

“It was already mapped out” by the time Prible arrived, Walker said. Beckcom and Foreman were the ones corralling things on the inside, but there was clearly someone pulling the strings on the outside: “The details they knew … was so vivid or so in depth that, like I say, I knew before he got there, and they knew even more than I knew.”

“Was Mr. Prible a mark?” Rytting asked.

“In every sense of the word,” Walker replied. “He was going to be a scapegoat for several individuals to have an opportunity to get out of prison sooner than later.”

Did Walker know anyone else at Beaumont who was the target of a similar plot? Yes, Walker said: Hermilo Herrero. A bunch of guys who tried to get a piece of the Prible case had eyed Herrero as well. “Some of them were working on the twofer aspect.”

By the time Terry Gaiser appeared at the hearing, he had nearly 50 years of criminal defense experience in Harris County under his belt. Gaiser represented Prible at his 2002 trial. Back then, he told the court, what was shared with the defense was “what they put in the file.” The whole discovery process relied on a foundation of trust, and jailhouse informants were “fundamentally unreliable,” Gaiser said. Had he known Siegler was communicating with a network of men competing to inform on Prible, as the undisclosed letters and meeting notes revealed, he could have used these items to dismantle the basis of the state’s case.

By the time the hearing convened again, arrangements had been made for Siegler to appear via video. It was a less-than-ideal setup. There were transmission delays, and Siegler was positioned so that part of her face was out of the frame, making it hard to read her expressions. At one point, the connection was lost altogether. “She do it intentionally?” Ellison asked. “Can we tell?”

Cheryl Peterson, Prible’s aunt, recalled this as the one moment Ellison seemed close to losing his cool. “He was so restrained,” she said. She had watched with growing disbelief as Siegler tested his patience in the run-up to the hearing. “Like, how the hell does she thumb her nose at a federal judge?”

Siegler was unapologetic about her failure to appear in court. Miranda hadn’t told her where to be or when, she said. And she claimed to have no idea that Prible’s team had repeatedly attempted to serve her with a subpoena.

Pressed about her failure to disclose her dealings with Foreman to Prible’s defense, Siegler again insisted that Foreman was not connected to the case. But he was her original snitch, Scardino said, and according to Beckcom, he was there when Prible confessed, which made him a corroborating witness even if he didn’t take the stand. “Because he’s standing there, it doesn’t mean he’s credible,” Siegler snapped. “It doesn’t mean he has information.”

Siegler seemed invested in painting Foreman as a liar, not just in their previous interactions, when he was angling for a time cut, but also at the hearing, when he was undermining the basis of her case against Prible. When Ellison suggested that Foreman’s testimony struck him as sincere, Siegler assured him she knew better. “Of all the inmates I’ve ever dealt with, he’s at the top of the list for not being credible.”

On cross-examination, Miranda pitched a series of softball questions: When Siegler got the case in 2001, there was already enough evidence to take it to trial, right? Was she even looking for an informant? “No, ma’am,” Siegler replied.

If her case was already solid, the judge asked, why did she use Beckcom at all? “There are five victims here,” Siegler said. While she believed her case was “strong enough for a jury to convict,” she worried that some of the jurors might not see it that way. “I wanted to be sure.”

Scardino pounced on Siegler’s statement as an admission that the case was too weak to prosecute without Beckcom. “Siegler didn’t just use Beckcom to testify that he heard a confession,” Scardino told the judge. She used his “highly scripted and choreographed” testimony to “explain away all of the problematic aspects of the state’s case.” Beckcom, she said, was Siegler’s case.

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Ethical Duties

A year after the evidentiary hearing, Ellison vacated Prible’s conviction. The prosecution had engaged in a “pattern of deceptive behavior and active concealment” that could have changed the outcome of Prible’s trial, he wrote. The evidence Siegler withheld revealed an “orchestrated effort by a ring of informants to fabricate a confession from Prible in return for sentence reductions.”

Ellison concluded that Beckcom had acted as an agent of the state in working with Siegler to elicit a confession from Prible, implicating the prosecution in a violation of Prible’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

And while the evidence did not prove that Siegler knew Beckcom was lying nor “completely” verify Prible’s argument that she was running a snitch scheme, Ellison nonetheless found that Siegler had hidden the full extent of her dealings with the informants and “was far from credible in her federal court testimony.”

“This court does not endorse the cavalier attitude Siegler has displayed regarding her constitutional duty to preserve the fundamental fairness of the trial proceedings,” Ellison wrote.

Scardino was elated. She felt confident that the judge would rule in their favor, but she didn’t anticipate how powerful the ruling would be. “It really vindicated Jeff,” she said.

News of the order came in the early months of the pandemic. “We were all just stumbling into one of our first of many covid lockdowns when I heard the news about Jeff’s reversal,” Thomas Whitaker, the incarcerated writer who investigated Prible’s case, wrote. “I remember standing at my door, paper in hand, arms raised in triumph.”

Prible’s sense of vindication was bittersweet. His father, who suffered bouts of depression over his son’s wrongful conviction, had died without seeing the legal victory. Prible’s own son, 27-year-old Ronald Jeffrey Prible III, whom he called “Little Jeff,” was struck by a train and killed six months after attending the evidentiary hearing. For Prible, who had seen hundreds of neighbors taken to the execution chamber, there was no court order that could restore what he had lost.

Still, he began to imagine a life outside prison walls. Peterson, his aunt, used to send him photos of the sunsets from her waterfront property on Lake Conroe, north of Houston. Prible dreamed of working the grounds and watching the sun go down over the water. From his colorless death row cell, the images of future sunsets sustained him. But just when it started to feel like freedom might be within reach, a whole new nightmare began.

Ellison ordered the state to retry or release Prible within six months. Instead, Texas balked at the ruling and asked the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn it.

According to Texas Assistant Solicitor General Ari Cuenin, the allegations of the snitch ring were “incoherent and unproven,” and federal law barred the judge from even allowing Prible’s lawyers to present them in court. In the state’s reading, any argument Prible wanted to pursue about the Beaumont informants should have been made by his state post-conviction attorney, Roland Moore, back in 2004. At the time, Prible was only aware that a Black man named Walker might have some information about how he was framed for a crime he didn’t commit.

To Rytting and Scardino, this was absurd. Prible had no proof precisely because Siegler failed to disclose evidence of her communication with the Beaumont informants. After all, the state knew where the elusive Carl Walker was all along: His full name and inmate number were included on the letter he’d signed, which was sequestered in Siegler’s file.

It was the state’s actions that prevented Prible from raising the claims earlier, the lawyers maintained. If Prible’s trial attorneys had known there was a band of informants scheming to set him up — and that Siegler deemed Foreman unreliable, even as Beckcom testified that Foreman could corroborate his account of Prible’s confession — then they could have gutted Beckcom’s testimony, leaving Siegler’s otherwise circumstantial case in tatters.

In late 2021, the lawyers for each side traveled from Texas to New Orleans, where the 5th Circuit is based, for oral arguments. Presiding over the panel was Judge James Dennis. Now 87 and on senior status, he is one of a handful of judges appointed by a Democratic president left on the ultra-conservative court. Dennis, participating remotely amid the pandemic, asked no questions of either side; all queries would come from a pair of Republican-appointed judges who appeared to see the case in radically different terms.

A former Texas assistant solicitor general and Trump appointee known for his far-right views, Judge Kyle Duncan leaned into Cuenin’s position that Prible should have raised the informant issues years earlier. Duncan asked whether the defense had sent anyone to Beaumont to look for a man named Walker, prompting a long pause from Rytting: “That is not how the Bureau of Prisons works,” he said. “What, the investigator goes in and says, ‘You got a guy named Walker here?’”

Prible did what he could with the scant information available behind bars, Rytting said. But it all amounted to rumor and hunch, which was not enough to raise a concrete legal claim back in 2004.

Jennifer Elrod, who was a civil court judge in Houston before being appointed to the bench by George W. Bush, appeared to understand Prible’s dilemma.

She took issue with the state’s dismissal of Siegler’s note about the DNA, which Cuenin said had no bearing on the case given Prible had admitted to having sex with Tirado early on the morning of her murder. The note would have to say more than it did — “Pamela McInnis — semen lives up to 72 hours” — to be relevant to Prible’s defense, Cuenin argued.

“It is very relevant whether it happened on the edge of the killing or whether it happened several hours before,” Elrod said. At trial, Siegler asserted that the amount of semen on the swab proved that Prible had forced Tirado to perform oral sex moments before shooting her. The note showed that the director of a local crime lab she consulted would not have been willing to back up her argument. “That matters tremendously in inflaming the jury and … whether you get the death penalty because you’re such a monster that you have sex and then have just an overwhelming desire to kill,” Elrod said. “And that was ginned up to be very relevant.”

“Do we have any ethical duties if we believe that there’s unethical conduct?” Elrod asked Cuenin as the arguments came to a close.

“As lawyers we all have ethical duties,” he replied.

“I’m just wondering, has that been handled?” she pressed. “We don’t have any duty to report anything we learn in this case to the bar?”

“That’s not a part of this case,” Cuenin said.

Peterson remembers feeling encouraged by Elrod’s line of questioning. She was optimistic that the court might rule in Prible’s favor. Instead, nine months later, a unanimous panel ruled in favor of Texas, reinstating Prible’s death sentence. “That was devastating,” she said. “After that, we didn’t have much hope.”

Scardino and Rytting were dismayed. Elrod had expressed concern about unethical conduct on the part of the state. For her to join Duncan’s majority opinion, which fully embraced the state’s position, was confounding. The judges did not address whether Siegler had withheld evidence critical to Prible’s defense, ruling only that the lawyers had raised the claim too late.

“Jeff was gaslighted for years,” by Siegler, by the courts, by the attorney general’s office, Scardino said, “all of whom were saying, ‘This guy is delusional, this conspiracy is all a figment of his imagination.’” And once he was finally able to prove it, “the 5th Circuit says, ‘Too bad, it’s too late, he should’ve figured it out years earlier.’”

The lawyers asked the full court to reconsider the panel’s ruling, and when it declined, they asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. In June, it too declined to get involved.

5

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Truth Will Come Out

If Siegler was paying attention to Prible’s case as it made its way through the courts, there was no sign of it on her Twitter feed. As Prible’s fate hung in the balance at the Supreme Court, Siegler posted a landscape photo taken from an airplane. “Hello America! First case, Season 7 we start working tomorrow,” she wrote. ““Wish us luck!”

The new season of “Cold Justice” is set to air next year. In the meantime, Siegler is promoting the inaugural season of “Prosecuting Evil.” At CrimeCon in Orlando, she was welcomed with uproarious cheers and a standing ovation. “When you’re not here you’re so missed,” said the Oxygen correspondent who introduced Siegler. “When you’re back here it feels like a reunion.”

Siegler took the stage with the showrunner from “Cold Justice” and the executive producer of “Prosecuting Evil.” They teased the new show’s premiere with a clip revisiting Siegler’s most notorious moment: straddling her colleague on a bloody mattress to reenact a defendant stabbing her husband to death.

“I can truly say that probably is what led to all this,” Siegler said of the bed stunt. It was the point where her real life as a hard-driving prosecutor produced the parallel life she would later inhabit, turning her into a reality TV star. There were members of the legal community who thought she went too far, she told the audience, but that didn’t bother her. “I care more about what people like you think.”

Asked about the advice she would give someone “passionate about a career in the legal system,” Siegler said it was all about ethics. “Every decision you make comes back to your own integrity.” From filing charges to “every time you talk to a witness,” she said, you’re “always really, really” trying to do the right thing. “And you don’t let your damn ego get in the way. And you don’t worry about winning or losing the trial, you just do what’s right. It’ll keep your reputation always intact.”

Five episodes in, “Prosecuting Evil” appears to be about fortifying Siegler’s reputation and ensuring her legacy as a prosecutor who pulled no punches in the pursuit of justice. The show prominently features the families of homicide victims, who show deep gratitude for the work done on behalf of their loved ones. In the episodes focused on her old cases, Siegler is more defiant than reflective, reveling in court victories and evincing scorn for defendants, defense attorneys, and attempts to overturn her convictions. “That’s inflammatory and that’s over the top and that’s grandstanding,” she said in the premiere, mocking her critics. “Gimme a break.”

To Prible’s supporters, Siegler’s continued celebrity is less disturbing than the lack of accountability she’s faced. Ward Larkin, the anti-death-penalty activist, has made it a point never to watch “Cold Justice.” “It’s obvious she’s extremely intelligent,” he said. “But she’s also a horrible person. … She has no compunction about the horrors she inflicts on people.”

Hermilo Herrero is now in his 50s. Despite Rytting’s efforts on his behalf, his appeals have been denied. He continues to insist on his innocence for the murder of Albert Guajardo in 1995. “Albert was a friend and never my enemy and I have been living with that lie they made up,” he wrote in a letter to The Intercept. He blames Siegler for her drive to win at all costs, even if it meant sending innocent people to die in prison and “stealing the justice from the victims or the victim’s families that they so much need and deserve.”

“It is not just Herrero and myself where the only evidence presented against us is a jailhouse snitch who says that we confessed to them,” Prible wrote in an open letter after his conviction was vacated. “There are others. … The truth will come out. It has already started.”

If the state wanted to reinvestigate Prible’s case, there are some obvious places to start. A man named Philip Brody shared recollections with The Intercept that could have been critical to law enforcement had there been a thorough investigation two decades ago. Brody was friends with both Prible and Steve Herrera in the years leading up to Herrera’s death. Some six months before the killings, Brody said, Herrera told him about a man in the “drug game” who owed him money. The man had been arrested before paying Herrera back. So “we took my truck and emptied out everything in his whole house,” Brody recalled. Then Herrera sold the man’s belongings.

The man was just one person who had a motive to kill Herrera. But there were others, Brody said. Shortly after that incident, Herrera asked Brody to do something that “kind of put the nail in the coffin for our friendship.” According to Brody, Herrera asked if he would be willing to arm himself with tactical gear and an assault weapon and break into a drug dealer’s house to steal money, drugs, and whatever else they could find. “And I was like, ‘Hell no.’”

To Brody, it seemed obvious that Herrera was making dangerous enemies. He believes this is what got him killed in the end. Murdering an entire family was something members of a drug cartel would do. Prible had children of his own. “I couldn’t see Jeff doing that to the innocent kids, you know?”

It should also have been obvious to police that Herrera’s drug dealing likely played a part in the murders. Among the documents the state failed to turn over to Prible’s defense before trial was an anonymous letter that Herrera’s parents received days after their son’s murder. “OK Fuckheads this is not a cordial greeting,” it began, before demanding that the couple get rid of the “thieves and drug dealers” living in a rental property they owned. The letter threatened to burn down 11 properties the Herreras maintained as rentals if the alleged drug dealing continued. “This is your only warning!!!!” the letter concluded.

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The letter did not include the house where Herrera and Tirado lived. Still, the threats dovetailed with the circumstances surrounding the murders and appeared to offer a viable lead. But contemporaneous reports suggest police did nothing with the letter aside from putting it in a manila envelope and marking it as evidence.

It isn’t clear when Prible’s attorneys received a copy of the letter. When Gaiser, Prible’s trial attorney, was shown a copy during the 2019 evidentiary hearing, he testified that he’d never seen it. He said he would have used it as a jumping off point for his own investigation. “That was extremely relevant to whether there was another motive,” he testified.

Bill Watson, the state’s DNA analyst at trial, told The Intercept that he would testify differently if called to the stand today. He has more experience now, he said, and some of his answers sounded more “definitive” than they should have. As the state’s expert witness, he didn’t intend to endorse the theory that the DNA could only have been deposited at the time of Tirado’s death, but that’s how the state used his testimony. During his closing argument, Vic Wisner, Siegler’s co-counsel, told the jury that there was “no way in the world that semen wasn’t deposited either moments before or seconds after Nilda died.” Watson called that an “overstatement.” “‘No way in the world’ is not something I would’ve said.”

In a phone call with The Intercept, Johnny Bonds, the DA investigator turned “Cold Justice” star, defended Siegler, saying his longtime friend and colleague is one of the most “upstanding” people he’s met. Bonds said he was reassured when he learned that Prible’s death sentence had been reinstated. “I can’t imagine her doing anything like [what] she’s accused of.” Upon reflection, he believes Nathan Foreman was behind the allegations that fueled Prible’s litigation. Foreman was indignant that Bonds and Siegler wouldn’t let him on the “bandwagon” of informants against Prible, Bonds said. “He wanted something out of it, and when he didn’t get anything out of it, he said, ‘Well, I’ll show you.’”

Scardino, meanwhile, is hard at work on a new state court appeal. While the 5th Circuit ruled against Prible, it didn’t disturb the district judge’s findings that Prible had been denied a fair trial. Scardino plans to take those findings and the wealth of evidence backing them up to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. “I really do believe that in the end, the system will correct the colossal miscarriage of justice that has taken place,” she said.

Michael Beckcom has been out of prison for nearly two decades and lives a quiet life. He rides a motorcycle, plays in a band, and loves dogs. He still carries himself with confidence, though years of bodybuilding have left significant aches and pains.

He doesn’t like to talk about his time in prison or his turn as a snitch for Kelly Siegler. Working with her put him in danger behind bars, he said, netting him several years of solitary confinement, which was meant to keep him safe. Beckcom is still angry with Siegler. He expected that his testimony against Prible would spring him from prison. He was counting on that. And he needed to get home to take care of his daughter and aging mother.

It was Siegler who screwed him over, he said over a cup of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, but it was Foreman who “roped me” into the whole mess to begin with. Foreman was working with Siegler on the Herrero case, he recalled, when he pulled Beckcom in on the Prible case. Foreman then told Siegler that Beckcom was the one who “knew the whole story,” he said. “And it all came to fruition.” Foreman did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for an interview.

Beckcom acknowledged that his testimony against Prible might have sounded fishy. He understands that it was the only new piece of evidence Siegler turned up after taking over the cold case. But he insists that Prible confessed to him. At least that’s how he remembers it. “It is what it is from my perspective, and that’s the way it happened to me,” he said. “Anybody can take that, do with it what they want.”

“Your ass is in a jam because she’s going to get 12 people to say you did it.”

At the same time, he believed Siegler provided him with a road map to the information she needed to convict Prible. “She may give you, I’m not going to say evidence, but she can give you certain things that he wouldn’t have given you,” Beckcom said. “It’s all in the framing.” She would say something like, “‘Did he mention anything about such and such’ and then maybe give you an idea. If you had more than one brain cell kicking, you could figure it out what she was talking about.”

“This was her forte,” he added. Which is “not good if you’re on the fucking receiving end. Your ass is in a jam because she’s going to get 12 people to say you did it.”

When asked if it was possible that his story of Prible’s confession wasn’t all above board — that it was embellished with information Siegler provided — Beckcom said no. But he also demurred, saying maybe Prible was just telling stories to make himself look tough behind bars. “If everything he said was a fabrication to make him look like a gangster because he was in prison, then that’s on him,” Beckcom said. “He shouldn’t have said anything.”

Prible has never stopped talking about his case. In correspondence, he often writes at a frenzied pace, joking frequently, alluding to literature and music, and peppering his emails with exclamation points.

Prible makes no excuses for his past. “I did drugs and was involved in criminal activity! I was a womanizer! I am not like that anymore!” He maintains his innocence and adamantly denies ever confessing to Beckcom, “an obvious fake” who carried himself like an Italian mobster, saying “stupid shit” like he knew who killed Jimmy Hoffa. Prible said he only tolerated Beckcom because he was friendly with Foreman. “I did not want to say ‘your friend’s full of shit.’”

Prible rejects the notion that the state never considered any other suspects in the murders, as Siegler emphasized to his jury. “They just got rid of anything that was useful to my defense!” While he’s eager to discuss aspects of his case that he feels have not been sufficiently investigated, he’s just as anxious to convey the urgency of his circumstances. Living on death row for 21 years has been a “rollercoaster ride through hell.”

Prible’s mental health has ebbed and flowed over his decades at Polunsky. During one period, Larkin said, “he was having episodes, mental health episodes, where it would just paralyze him.” Prible asked Larkin to research the impact of long-term solitary confinement — “he was convinced that there was something to that.” He was right. Solitary confinement has been shown to be psychologically devastating. Many experts consider it torture. The research became a survival tool for Prible, a way to recognize what was happening to his mind.

Prible’s earliest emails to The Intercept were strikingly upbeat. He was hopeful that the Supreme Court would take his case, even though it was a long shot, and seemed undeterred when it was rejected. “Jeff, in spite of all of this, is an eternal optimist,” Scardino said. “He’s able to recover from the repeated blows to his legal case — to his life.”

But more recently, Prible has struggled to ward off the torment of his surroundings. In early November, a series of panic attacks sent him spiraling. “You know I was fine until they locked me in a tiny cage for so fucking long and killed everyone around me I come to care for!” he wrote in one email. In another, he remembered a friend executed years ago, whom he believed was waiting for him “at the end of the Green Mile. … He comes to me in my dreams and always makes me smile like only he can!” In the wake of the panic attacks, Prible sent a letter asking the judge in his case for an execution date.

Legally, it would take more than such a letter to put Prible in imminent danger of execution. And he’s not actually ready to give up. “In the Marine Corps, they teach you contingency plans for everything,” he said in a recent phone call, discussing a possible hearing in state court. As Christmas approached, he shared recipes from a holiday-themed issue of Southern Living.

Despite bouts of rage and despair, Prible expresses constant gratitude for those who have helped him, whom he describes as heaven-sent. Though he does not consider himself religious, he takes comfort in passages from the Bible. One, from the book of Jeremiah, promises freedom from captivity: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to give you hope and a future. … I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you … and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”

The post What Happened When a Star Prosecutor Was Accused of Running a Jailhouse Snitch Scheme appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

1

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Invisible Man

Hermilo Herrero, 35, had been stuck inside the Harris County jail for months. He was bewildered and angry. He’d been serving a drug sentence at the federal correctional institution in Beaumont, Texas, when he was indicted for a cold case murder he swore he did not commit, then dragged to Houston to face trial. There was no evidence linking him to the crime save for a pair of informants enlisted by prosecutor Kelly Siegler. On the stand, they claimed that Herrero had confessed to the 1995 murder of his friend Albert Guajardo. In April 2002, Herrero was sentenced to life.

Herrero was awaiting transfer back to FCI Beaumont when he saw that a man named Jeffrey Prible was about to stand trial down the road for murdering a family in Houston. The case was familiar — Herrero had read about it in the Houston Chronicle. Prible was charged at almost the exact same time as Herrero, and both cases involved murders gone cold. But the more Herrero learned about Prible’s case, the more disturbed he was by the parallels. As in Herrero’s case, an informant claimed Prible had confessed to him at Beaumont. And as in Herrero’s case, the informant made a deal with Siegler that could get him out of prison early.

Herrero had seen his share of legal trouble. But Siegler turned him into a cartoon villain at trial, comparing him to the notorious mobster John Gotti. Siegler told jurors that after running into Guajardo at a bar, Herrero had attacked him from the backseat of a moving van, slitting his throat and beating his head with a hammer. He rolled Guajardo’s body in a rug, Siegler said, and threw it on the side of the road. Although the lead investigator, Harris County homicide detective Curtis Brown, bluntly conceded on the stand that he’d found no evidence implicating Herrero, Siegler and her snitches convinced the jury that he had committed the brutal murder.

The informants who testified against Herrero were also at Beaumont on drug crimes. Their convictions came out of a tough-on-crime era that saw the federal prison population explode. Spurred by the war on drugs, sentences grew longer, and for those convicted after 1987, the sweeping Sentencing Reform Act eliminated federal parole altogether.

For people serving long sentences with no end in sight, providing information to the government became one of the only ways to win early release. Although Rule 35 had been part of federal criminal procedure for decades, the drug war transformed it from a provision that merely gave judges a chance to show mercy to one that required incarcerated people to provide “substantial assistance” to prosecutors for any chance at leniency. Informing on their peers was a deal many were willing to make — even if it meant lying on the stand.

Within such a population, men like Herrero and Prible were sitting ducks. Not only were they facing new charges while in federal prison, but both had been charged with murder — the kind of high-stakes prosecution that could yield significant benefits for anyone who offered intel.

Herrero knew the men who testified against him: Jesse Moreno and Rafael Dominguez. Moreno was the star witness, “pretty much the crux of this case,” Siegler said in her opening statement. Although she told jurors that she would only vouch for Moreno’s Rule 35 motion if he told the truth, to Herrero, this was a cruel joke. Like Prible, he swore the case against him had been blatantly fabricated.

It was only when Herrero was finally being transferred out of Houston, waiting in the holding tank to go back to Beaumont, that he happened to meet someone who had insight into just how connected the two cases were. The man was Black, in his late 20s, stocky and bald. He went by Brother Walker.

“He told me he knew everything about what happened to me and a guy named Prible,” Herrero recalled. According to Walker, Beaumont was home to a ring of informants who gave Siegler information to use against defendants in state cases in exchange for her help in their federal cases. Moreno and Dominguez were part of this ring, as was Michael Beckcom, the star witness against Prible. The head of the operation was a man who lurked in the background of both Prible’s and Herrero’s cases, someone who supposedly heard both men confess yet was conspicuously absent from both trials: Nathan Foreman.

A relative of the legendary boxer George Foreman, Nathan Foreman arrived at FCI Beaumont in early 2000 for federal drug crimes. He was placed in the Special Housing Unit, nicknamed the SHU, where he worked as an orderly. The job gave him some freedom of movement, allowing him to visit different cells. Some knew him as “Green Eyes.” Others called him “Bones.” To Herrero, Foreman was the “invisible man.” He was convinced he’d never seen him. Yet at trial, Siegler repeatedly characterized Foreman as one of Herrero’s associates in prison.

Walker told Herrero that he had firsthand knowledge of the Beaumont snitch ring: Foreman had recruited him too.

Herrero asked if he would be willing to put what he knew in a statement. But Walker was hesitant to get involved. Not long after their return to Beaumont, Herrero was transferred to a different prison. Although he lost touch with Walker, Herrero was determined to share what he’d uncovered with Prible.

Texas death row is located at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, some 70 miles north of Houston. The state has long been notorious as the execution capital of the country. By the time Prible arrived in November 2002, 29 men had been executed that year alone. Four more would be killed before Christmas.

As Prible tells it, he arrived on death row convinced that it was only a matter of time before somebody realized a mistake had been made. “As bad as this place was, I thought this would all get straightened out,” he said. Growing up on the border of Houston’s north side, Prible had not been raised to mistrust the criminal justice system. His parents were “just middle class, working people,” Prible’s aunt, Cheryl Peterson, said. “We used to believe the police were all righteous and good.”

Nevertheless, Prible would be the first to say that he wasn’t a model citizen. As a teenager, he partied and ran from the cops. “We were stupid as fuck when we were young but goddamn we had fun,” he said. Things got more serious as he got older. At the punishment phase of his trial, his ex-wife said he used cocaine and steroids, which compounded his mood swings. “He could be happy, completely happy one minute, and completely hysterical, crazy mad the next.” At his worst, she said, he was physically and emotionally abusive, threatening to hurt himself or her.

“Jeff was a handful from the time he was little,” Peterson recalled. She said there was a history of bipolar disorder in their family, which she suspected Prible shared, although he was never diagnosed or treated. This was the kind of mitigating factor that might have persuaded a jury to spare his life. But Prible’s lawyers focused instead on portraying him as a loving son, father, and uncle who would never hurt a child. That much was true, according to Peterson, who never believed Prible committed the murders.

Peterson carried guilt over her own unwitting role in the case. While awaiting trial, Prible asked her to send him a copy of the probable cause affidavit laying out the state’s evidence against him. He then recklessly showed it to his neighbors at Beaumont. “That helped set him up,” Peterson said. One man who was incarcerated alongside Prible testified at trial that he’d warned Prible to stop discussing it. “I told him to shut up.”

Not long after Prible arrived at Polunsky, a neighbor on death row named Jaime Elizalde asked him if he’d ever done time in federal prison. Prible said yes, he’d been at Beaumont. Elizalde responded that his good friend, Hermilo Herrero, was locked up at Beaumont. Herrero was innocent, Elizalde told Prible, and he knew this for a fact — because he was the one who had murdered Guajardo.

Herrero’s wife had recently visited Elizalde at Polunsky, and she recognized Prible in the visitation room. Prible said he almost fainted when Elizalde showed him paperwork from Herrero’s case and he saw the people involved: Kelly Siegler, Curtis Brown, and a pair of informants from Beaumont. Elizalde also shared a letter from Herrero, who described meeting a man who knew the whole story of how he and Prible had been set up. Herrero did not know much about the man, only that he was Black and went by Walker.

Correspondence between people incarcerated at different facilities is strictly forbidden. Most communication happens illicitly or by word of mouth, so there is no record of the information Herrero shared. Nor was there a way for Prible to write Herrero directly — any letters would be swiftly confiscated. Nevertheless, from his death row cell, Prible set out to find Walker.

It would not be easy. For one, he didn’t know Walker’s first name. And he got nowhere when he tried to tell his lawyers what he’d learned. After his direct appeal was rejected in 2004, Prible was assigned a new attorney to represent him in state post-conviction proceedings: longtime Houston criminal defense lawyer Roland Moore III. It might have been a reason for optimism; Moore had just won a new trial for a man who was misidentified by a woman coming out of a coma.

Prible was certain that Walker was the key to exposing the conspiracy against him. But to his dismay, Moore seemed unmotivated to find him. Instead, the attorney set about proving that Prible’s trial attorneys had been ineffective, often the most promising path to relief for people on death row.

Among Moore’s claims was that the lawyers had failed to challenge the state’s forensic evidence. A well-respected DNA scientist named Elizabeth Johnson provided a declaration disputing the testimony of Bill Watson, the analyst who claimed that sperm found in Nilda Tirado’s mouth must have been deposited right before she died. Watson did not conduct the microscopic examination necessary to support his conclusions, Johnson wrote. Nor was he apparently aware of studies showing that sperm could be found in oral samples of live individuals many hours after being deposited, including those who rinsed their mouths. Had Prible’s attorneys challenged Watson’s unscientific testimony, it could have been kept out of the trial.

Moore included Johnson’s declaration in a state writ challenging Prible’s conviction. But Prible was furious upon learning that Moore had filed the writ without finding Walker.

“What I don’t understand is what anybody could say that would help,” Moore wrote in a letter to his client. “If the ideal witness came forward like you would dream up in a movie and said, ‘Yes, Kelly Siegler told me to say all those things about Prible’s confessing,’ … then we could have a hearing where this dream witness would say all that. But nobody would believe it. I mean nobody.”

Prible decided to take matters into his own hands. It was one of his neighbors, after all, who provided the tip that could break the case open. Now he just needed someone on the outside to run it down.

2

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Stroke of Luck

Ward Larkin doesn’t remember exactly when he received the first letter from Prible. As an activist involved in leftist causes, Larkin had been visiting Texas death row for almost a decade by the time they met. Some of the men just wanted someone to talk to. But from the beginning, Prible insisted he was innocent.

Larkin knew better than to roll his eyes. By that point, he’d grown close to a number of condemned men he believed were innocent. At least one had already been executed. Others would eventually be released.

Prible told Larkin that he needed help with something specific. There was a man in federal prison with the last name Walker. He was Black. And he had been incarcerated at Beaumont around 2001. That was all he knew.

Larkin, a computer programmer, scoured the Bureau of Prisons’ public database. He put together a list of men with the last name Walker. One of them, Larry Walker, seemed like a promising match. Larkin sent the man several letters but did not hear back.

He had found the wrong Walker. But by a stroke of luck, his letters made their way to the right man anyway. In 2005, Hurricane Rita pummeled the Texas coast, forcing the Bureau of Prisons to relocate hundreds of people previously housed at Beaumont. Carl Walker ended up at the federal lockup in Yazoo City, Mississippi. It was there, on the rec yard, that he spotted a friendly acquaintance he knew as Smiley. Smiley said that his cellmate, Larry Walker, had been receiving letters from someone trying to help a man on Texas death row. Smiley suspected the letters might actually be meant for him. Carl Walker said he immediately guessed what this was about. “I knew the whole thing.”

As 2007 came to a close, so did Siegler’s final cold case murder prosecution for Harris County, with the conviction of David Temple, a high school football coach accused of killing his pregnant wife, Belinda.

The investigation into Belinda’s murder had been dormant for years before Siegler dusted it off and, without any new evidence, got a grand jury to indict Temple, who was sentenced to life in prison. It was business as usual for Siegler, but that was about to change.

Siegler’s longtime mentor, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal, who had announced his intention to run for reelection in 2008, became embroiled in a scandal after the release of emails from his work account, which included intimate messages he’d sent to a co-worker. Rosenthal withdrew his candidacy at the request of the local GOP. That same day, Siegler tossed her hat in the race, casting herself as a reform candidate. A campaign ad billed her as a “bulldog in a chihuahua’s body.” During a candidate forum at the Old Spaghetti Warehouse, Siegler acknowledged there were problems in the DA’s office but insisted that she was the one to fix them. “I am the only one who has worked there for the last 21 years,” she said. “I know how it operates.”

Reminders that she was part of the office’s entrenched culture peppered her campaign. Days after she announced her run, a new cache of Rosenthal’s emails, some involving racist jokes and explicit images, made headlines. A video of men forcibly stripping off women’s shirts in public had been sent by Siegler’s husband, who was Rosenthal’s doctor. Siegler brushed it off. “His sense of humor is crude, to put it mildly,” she said of her husband, but he could do what he wanted on his own computer because “he’s the boss.” She dismissed the incident as a distraction: “I would hope the voters are more concerned about qualifications of their DA than some inappropriate emails.”

Siegler’s qualifications were impressive, but the emails weren’t the only problem. Early in her career, she’d apologized for using the word “Jew” as a synonym for “cheat” in front of prospective jurors. She said she didn’t know it was a slur because she hadn’t grown up around many Jewish people. There was also an allegation that she’d struck a juror in a death penalty case because he was Black. Not true, she said; she’d struck the man because he was a member of the megachurch led by televangelist Joel Osteen. Its congregants were “screwballs and nuts,” she explained. She later apologized and said that by striking the juror, she was just trying to weed out those who would shy away from imposing a death sentence. “You don’t think an aggressive prosecutor hasn’t offended just a few people?” she asked.

Siegler’s campaign amassed a number of law enforcement endorsements, which pushed her through a crowded four-way Republican primary and into a runoff. But it wasn’t enough: She lost to the former chief judge of the county’s criminal courts. On the heels of defeat, Siegler resigned from the DA’s office. “All that this office stands for will always be a part of my heart,” she wrote in her resignation letter. She left her job feeling beaten up, she later told Texas Monthly. She’d imagined spending her career at the DA’s office, and now she was wondering if there would be a second act.

For a while, Siegler maintained an uncharacteristically low profile before blasting back into the headlines in 2010, when she was appointed special prosecutor in the case of Anthony Graves, who’d spent 12 years on death row for a crime he swore he did not commit. After years of legal wrangling, Graves’s conviction was overturned; Siegler was hired to determine whether the state should retry him. That October, she declared that Graves had been the victim of prosecutorial misconduct, “the worst I’ve ever seen.” It was an unexpected conclusion from a woman who for so long had been a poster child for the state’s aggressive and unreflective criminal justice system. And it came just as things were beginning to heat up in the case of Jeffrey Prible.

3

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Birthday Cake

As an attorney in Houston, James Rytting was familiar with Siegler’s courtroom theatrics. Her most famous stunt, tying her colleague to the headboard of a victim’s bloody bed, expanded her brand beyond Texas’s borders. A TV crew shadowed her during the trial, and the bed scene was reenacted in “The Blue-Eyed Butcher,” a Lifetime movie about the case. “I was actually surprised that the scene caused as much uproar as it did,” Siegler said. “It was just something that seemed to be the right thing to do at the time.”

Rytting taught university-level classes in philosophy and logic before turning to law. Gracile in appearance and earnest in demeanor, he quickly developed a reputation for taking on some of Texas’s most difficult death penalty appeals. In 2008, Rytting was appointed to represent Prible as the case moved into federal court.

Prible had long stopped trusting his appointed attorneys. He’d filed a series of unsuccessful motions on his own behalf arguing that Siegler had colluded with a ring of informants to send him to death row. He sought material in the state’s file related to Beckcom, Foreman, and Walker, along with one of the informants in Herrero’s case. “Siegler went to great lengths to hide her ties to jailhouse informants in Beaumont,” Prible wrote.

On their own, Prible’s motions sounded desperate and conspiratorial. But Rytting took his new client’s claims seriously. “James Rytting was the first one that ever gave us hope,” Peterson, Prible’s aunt, recalled.

Prible’s trial featured some of Siegler’s dramatic charms, which Rytting equated to the talents of a B-rate actor. She’d played up what little evidence she had in a prosecutorial style equivalent to a radio shock jock, all while apologizing for being crude. To believe Prible’s claim that he and Tirado had engaged in consensual sex, Siegler said, “you’ve also got to believe that his semen is so tasty that she walked around savoring the flavor of it in her mouth for a couple hours.”

But as Rytting prepared to challenge Prible’s conviction, he saw beyond the cinematic reenactments and blustery rhetoric to something far more insidious.

Although several years had passed since Carl Walker learned Prible was looking for him, he remained reluctant to get involved. In early 2009, however, Rytting’s investigator managed to get Walker on the phone, documenting their conversation in an affidavit. Prible had been set up, Walker confirmed, and he believed Siegler was in on it. According to Walker, Siegler fed information about the crime to Foreman, who passed it to Beckcom, Walker, and others. As Walker understood it, Siegler was concerned about getting around Prible’s alibi: the next-door neighbor who saw Steve Herrera drop Prible off at home several hours before the murders.

Interviews Rytting conducted with other defendants Siegler had prosecuted in the early 2000s revealed additional allegations that supported Prible’s theory and suggested that Siegler’s reliance on jailhouse informants extended beyond Beaumont.

William Irvan was housed next to Prible at the Harris County jail while they were both awaiting trial. In an affidavit, he said that Siegler had offered him a deal via his lawyer: If he informed on Prible, she would agree to a 35-year sentence. Irvan refused. Siegler went on to deploy an informant at Irvan’s trial to help convict him of a cold-case rape and murder, sending him to Texas death row, where he remains.

In a separate affidavit, Tarus Sales told Rytting that while in jail, he was repeatedly placed in proximity to a man he didn’t know. At Sales’s trial, the man testified for Siegler that he and Sales were great friends and Sales had confessed to murder, all of which Sales denied. Sales was also sent to death row, where he remains.

A third man, Danny Bible, recalled seeing Beckcom at the Harris County jail in advance of Prible’s trial. Beckcom approached various men to ask about their cases, gathering notes in a folder, Bible said in an affidavit. He watched as Beckcom talked to Siegler outside court one day, handing her some papers from his folder. Bible, a serial killer who confessed to a 1979 slaying in Houston, was executed in 2016.

And then, of course, there was Herrero, who was serving a life sentence based on the dubious testimony of two informants from Beaumont. Were it not for Herrero’s efforts years earlier to alert Prible to what he’d learned about the snitch scheme, Rytting might never have gone looking for information about Siegler’s use of informants.

With the new intel in hand, Rytting filed a petition in federal court challenging Prible’s conviction. He argued that a band of snitches inside FCI Beaumont, seeking to reduce their prison terms, had conspired to frame Prible using information that Siegler provided to Foreman. But because a state court had never addressed Prible’s informant claims, U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison paused the federal action to allow the Texas courts to weigh in. The case landed back in front of the judge who had presided over Prible’s 2002 trial.

In the meantime, Rytting finally arranged to meet Walker in person. On an August morning in 2010, he waited in a room at a low-level federal prison in Oakdale, Louisiana, tape recorder in hand. Walker, wearing his prison-issued khakis, strode in, sat down, and laid it all out.

Walker was just 26 when he got popped on federal crack charges. Thanks to the racist sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. When Walker arrived at Beaumont in the summer of 2000, he was scared and depressed, he told Rytting, according to a transcript of their meeting. “That’s more time in prison than I’ve actually been alive.”

Seeking solace, Walker gravitated to the prison church, where he sang in the choir. His devotion earned him the nickname “Brother Walker.” Being pious, a Houston native, and in prison for the first time put Walker on Foreman and Beckcom’s radar. It was a choice mix of factors that would signal credibility to a prosecutor vetting an informant. Foreman and Beckcom approached Walker with an opportunity, a “blessing,” he said. A guy named Jeff Prible would be coming to their unit. If Walker informed on Prible, he’d likely be able to get his sentence reduced. “That’s the pitch,” Walker explained.

Rytting intervened: Foreman and Beckcom knew Prible was coming to the unit before he arrived? “How could they possibly have known that?” he asked.

Walker replied that he didn’t know for sure, but “from what I understand, they were all in cahoots with the prosecutor.” Foreman handed out Siegler’s number to guys at Beaumont like mints after a meal. Walker wrote the number in his address book. Siegler was worried about the case, Foreman and Beckcom told him; where evidence was concerned, she had “little to none,” and she needed a confession to link Prible to the murders.

Foreman and Beckcom gave him details of the crime, Walker said, including where the bodies were located and the fact that DNA was found in Tirado’s mouth. They also told him that while Prible had an alibi, he had supposedly returned to Herrera’s house to slaughter the family.

“All of this was discussed before you even laid eyes on Prible?” Rytting asked.

“Before I even seen the man,” Walker said.

Walker was conflicted. Having been ratted on himself, he had little respect for informants, and being tagged a snitch in prison could be dangerous. At the same time, the crime Prible was accused of was heinous. If he was behind the deaths of three kids, then he deserved what was coming to him.

Walker decided to go along with the scheme. He joined Foreman, Beckcom, and several others in befriending Prible. They staged photos with him during visiting hours. Seven of them surrounded Prible in one shot, standing in front of a backdrop illustrated with palm trees and fluffy white clouds. In another, Foreman and Beckcom smiled broadly alongside Prible, all three accompanied by family members. The idea was to show how chummy they were — evidence that could go a long way toward corroborating their account of Prible’s confession.

Beckcom also scored some wine, expensive contraband made from commissary grape juice, and they got Prible drunk on the rec yard, trying to loosen his lips. It didn’t work; Prible got so inebriated they had to help him back to his cell. As far as Walker knew, Prible never did confess to the crime. But it didn’t really matter. They had enough details to sink him without Prible ever saying a word. “That’s the thing,” Walker told Rytting. “If I know your favorite color is blue, and I go through all this trouble to make you tell me blue, whether you tell me blue or not it still don’t change the fact that I know what your color is.”

“Whether you tell me blue or not it still don’t change the fact that I know what your color is.”

Foreman and Beckcom instructed Walker to send Siegler a letter expressing his willingness to testify against Prible. Walker didn’t write the letter, which someone else typed up for him in the law library, but he did sign it. He didn’t know if it was ever sent because in the end, he decided to withdraw from the plot. “Can I live with knowing that I am going to openly lie about information I have no idea about and send this man to death?” Walker asked. “I concluded that I could not do that.”

Rytting told him that in Beckcom’s version of events, Prible had confessed to Beckcom and Foreman on the rec yard. “That’s bullshit,” Walker replied. There are only three things to do in prison, he said: Watch, listen, and do your time. Private conversations are generally confined to cells, not public spaces. For Foreman and Beckcom, that posed a problem, Walker said. They lived in a different housing block than Prible, so there was no way to allege they’d ever had an intimate conversation with the man. Instead, they’d have to say Prible confessed in the open, among a throng of others, which, Walker said, was nuts to anyone with any clue how prison works. “Who talks about murdering somebody when any ears in the surrounding area could hear? It’s just not logical.”

Walker said he’d been apprehensive about coming forward, but the situation still weighed on him. He knew there could be serious repercussions for helping someone who might be guilty — and he didn’t have any idea if Prible was guilty. “Nobody’s going to give you a pat on the back for releasing somebody who was suspected of such a horrendous crime,” he said. “And it’s not that I am looking for a pat on the back. I just don’t want something else in the back.” But the bottom line was that he believed Prible had been set up, and that was wrong. “I just know these guys is guilty of conspiring against him,” he told Rytting. “I know that for a fact. I do know for a fact that Kelly Siegler was involved.”

“Prible was dead the day he hit the yard,” Walker said. “They had already baked a cake for the man. He just didn’t know it was his birthday.”

Back in Houston, Rytting asked Mark Kent Ellis, the state judge who presided over Prible’s trial, to inspect Siegler’s files for any materials that should have been disclosed to defense lawyers. Among the items Harris County prosecutors handed over was a sealed envelope marked “attorney work product.” Inside were three letters from would-be Beaumont informants, including Walker.

The sequestered letters were strikingly similar. Each referenced previous communications with Siegler and reinforced the idea that Prible had killed Herrera in a dispute over money. The formatting was identical, and all three contained the same misspelling of Prible’s name as “Pribble,” suggesting a common author.

As Siegler might remember from “previous conversations with Nathan Foreman,” Walker’s letter began, he and several other guys from Houston had grown close to Prible; sharing a hometown put Prible at ease. “At first Jeff would only talk about the bank jobs he had pulled, but later he began to open up about the murders and how he did what he thought he had to do. It was business, not personal,” the letter read. “I’m more than willing to testify to these things in court. … I will help you in any way I can and would appreciate any help you could give me.”

“Steve had screwed him out of some money so he did what he had to do,” read a letter signed by Jesse Gonzalez, who enclosed a photo of himself with Prible.

“Pribble confided in me of Steve owing him some money from the banks they were robbing together, and how he had gone back that night to get what belonged to him,” the third letter, from a man named Mark Martinez, read. “I am more than willing to testify to these things in court.”

Martinez later told his prison counselor that “some dudes” at Beaumont had “been pressured” to write letters to Siegler. He neither wrote nor signed the letter, he said, but would not elaborate. The counselor confirmed that Martinez’s signature did not match the one on the letter he purportedly signed, according to a defense investigator’s affidavit.

Rytting tried to persuade the judge that the state had gone to great lengths to conceal the plot to frame Prible. Only now, with the information Walker provided and the documents discovered in Siegler’s files, were facts emerging that could prove the conspiracy. But Ellis was unmoved. While he concluded that Walker was “present during the planning of the alleged conspiracy” to inform on Prible, he quickly dismissed the revelation. Prible’s allegations were “unpersuasive” and full of “speculation,” he ruled, noting there was no evidence that Beckcom had recanted his account of Prible’s confession.

After an unsuccessful appeal, Rytting prepared to revive his case in federal court.

4

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Show on the Road

TNT aired the inaugural episode of its first reality show, “Cold Justice,” in 2013, starring Siegler and former crime scene investigator Yolanda McClary. Produced by “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, the pilot investigated the case of a woman in Cuero, Texas, who died of what appeared to be a self-inflicted bullet to the head. In the span of a week, Siegler and her co-stars concluded that the woman had actually been killed by her husband; he was charged and pleaded guilty to murder.

“Cold Justice” was a hit. Fans were drawn to Siegler and McClary for their gumption, expertise, and empathy toward victims’ families. Critics liked that the series focused on small towns rather than big cities. “Siegler and McClary are attractive and photogenic, yet never ham it up on camera or glamorize their jobs,” one reviewer wrote. “They’re eminently professional.”

The show was Siegler’s idea. In her years as a Harris County prosecutor, she had served on a committee that reviewed cold cases across the state. “I realized that a lot of these agencies have cases that are really close to being solved,” she told Texas Monthly. “That’s where the idea started, and after I left the DA’s office, I tried to sell it to a couple of people out in the LA world, and one day I got hooked up with Dick Wolf. … He immediately loved the idea.”

The real-world impact was mixed from the start. After the pilot aired, an article titled “Lukewarm Justice” was printed in the professional journal of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. Authored by the DA who handled the Cuero case, he described how the publicity created a nightmare when it came to selecting a jury, leading to a mistrial. While he praised Siegler and her co-stars, he was disgusted with the producers, who refused to push the air date until after the trial. “‘Justice’ was out the window and ‘cold’ was all that remained,” he wrote.

Coverage of the show steered clear of such controversies. In interviews, Siegler pushed the lesson she wanted audiences to take from her work. If “Cold Justice” had a mantra, she said, it was: “There is nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence cases, oh my God! People, would you quit thinking that!”

By the time “Cold Justice” finished its third season, however, Siegler and TNT were facing the first of several defamation lawsuits. A man Siegler accused of murdering his wife, who was later acquitted, alleged that the show used coercive tactics by telling the local DA’s office that the episode would not be televised if the DA declined to seek an indictment. The producers denied the allegation, and the lawsuit was eventually dismissed. (To date, the other defamation suits have also been unsuccessful.)

In another episode, a Georgia prosecutor decided to move forward with the case Siegler assembled only for a judge to issue a scathing ruling years later, dropping all charges against the defendants and barring the state from pursuing them in the future.

“It is doubtful defendants would have ever been charged based on the record of this case in the absence of interest from a California entertainment studio 10 years after the crime was committed,” the judge wrote. The studio profited from the “scandalous allegations” but had “no burden of proof in a court of law,” he continued. “This order is the outcome that results naturally when forensic inquiry and the pursuit of truth are confused with entertainment.”

TNT canceled “Cold Justice” after the third season. After a brief hiatus, the show found a new home on Oxygen as part of the network’s pivot to true-crime programming.

“This order is the outcome that results naturally when forensic inquiry and the pursuit of truth are confused with entertainment.”

In the meantime, Siegler’s record in Texas started to come under scrutiny for the first time. In July 2015, a district court overturned the conviction of David Temple, the high school football coach Siegler had put on trial for killing his pregnant wife. The judge found that Siegler had withheld evidence dozens of times in violation of Brady v. Maryland, a landmark Supreme Court decision requiring prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense.

Siegler’s justification of her conduct was almost as stunning as the violations themselves. “Of enormous significance,” the judge wrote, was her testimony insisting that she was only obligated to turn over exculpatory evidence that she believed to be true.

“If Kelly’s bizarre interpretation … were ever to be the law, then all a prosecutor would ever have to do to keep any witness statement away from the defense is say, ‘Well, I didn’t believe it,’” Paul Looney, an attorney who worked on the Temple case, told the Houston Press. “If Kelly Siegler’s a lawyer in five years, I’ll be shocked.”

Before long, Siegler’s conduct in other cases was being questioned. The Houston Chronicle published a story citing similar allegations in the death penalty case of Howard Guidry. “Here it is — the same patterns and practices,” Guidry’s lawyer told the paper. She argued in court that Siegler had withheld critical evidence from Guidry’s trial attorneys, including fingerprints found at the crime scene that belonged to someone other than their client. Guidry’s appeals have since been denied.

For Prible and his neighbors on death row, the questions suddenly swirling about Siegler’s conduct were woefully overdue. While Siegler was promoting “Cold Justice” to a friendly press, an incarcerated writer at Polunsky named Thomas Whitaker published a sprawling series about Prible’s case on his blog, Minutes Before Six, with the help of supporters on the outside. Drawing on case records as well as conversations with Prible, Whitaker wrote in exhaustive and vivid detail about Prible’s legal saga.

While Siegler was basking in TV stardom, Prible was languishing, talking about his case to anyone who would listen. “I’ve watched his mental state deteriorate over the years,” Whitaker wrote. He recalled hearing thumping from outside his cell, only to discover that Prible had been slamming his head against the wall. “That is how I see him in my mind’s eye these days, alone, on his hand and knees, the wall splotched crimson, a dull knocking sound echoing down the run. And no one, no one, is listening.”

5

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Ticket Out of Jail

As Rytting peeled back the layers in Prible’s case, he became convinced that it was inextricably linked to that of Hermilo Herrero. Herrero’s innocence claim had gotten a temporary boost in 2005, when Jaime Elizalde, Herrero’s friend on Texas death row, gave a sworn statement confessing to being the real killer in the case. Elizalde later pleaded the Fifth, refusing to answer questions on the matter in court. He was executed in 2006. But the records Rytting obtained supported what Herrero had long suspected: that he and Prible were set up by the same ring of Beaumont informants. Rytting took on Herrero’s case pro bono.

Some of the most important records were related to Jesse Moreno, the star witness at Herrero’s trial. As it turned out, it was Moreno who gave Siegler Foreman’s name in the first place. Moreno had a history of cutting deals with the state. In 1997, while he was serving a federal sentence for drug crimes, Siegler put him on the stand to testify against another man on trial for murder. Siegler wrote a Rule 35 letter on Moreno’s behalf, but it did not result in a sentence reduction.

In 2001, Moreno got back in touch with Siegler while at Beaumont, reminding her of his previous assistance, which he felt had gone unrewarded, and offering “some info that can be helpful for you on an unsolved case.” In a tape-recorded, in-person conversation that July, he told Siegler that Herrero had confessed to him more than a year and a half earlier, in 1999. Foreman and Rafael Dominguez were both present for the confession, he said. There was one problem: Foreman wasn’t at Beaumont in 1999.

By the time Moreno took the stand at Herrero’s trial, Foreman had disappeared from his account of Herrero’s confession. Meanwhile, Dominguez, the second informant Siegler called as a witness, testified that Foreman was present for two subsequent confessions by Herrero.

Although Siegler told jurors that Moreno had put his life on the line to share what he knew, Moreno testified that he didn’t have much of a choice: Herrero had put a hit on him after discovering that he had assisted authorities in other cases. The threat was so dire that Moreno was put in protective custody and eventually transferred away from Beaumont. Cooperating with Siegler in the hopes of receiving a time cut was the only way to get out of federal prison alive, Moreno said. “Either that or I’m dead.”

But memos Rytting obtained from the Bureau of Prisons dismantled this story. Records documenting Moreno’s transfers made no mention of Herrero, suggesting instead that Moreno feared for his life because he’d crossed a prison gang for which he’d been smuggling drugs. He was shipped out of Beaumont after cooperating with officials investigating the illicit activity. As Rytting later argued, Siegler allowed “false and misleading testimony from Moreno about when and why he decided to turn state’s witness against Herrero.”

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As he worked to untangle the web of informants, Rytting realized he needed help and enlisted a civil lawyer named Gretchen Scardino. Born and raised in Texas, Scardino had worked on death penalty litigation as a summer law clerk at the California State Public Defender’s Office. “My eyes were opened enough to know that I didn’t know what I was doing and that I might be getting in over my head,” she recalled. After graduating law school, she turned to civil practice.

But the desire to return to capital litigation didn’t go away. She had never understood the logic behind the death penalty, that punishing someone for murder should mean committing murder in response. She’d also learned from a young age that deadly violence was rooted in complex problems, and those who killed were often vulnerable themselves. A family friend had murdered his parents after becoming schizophrenic. “Knowing him before he became mentally ill and before he did this crime probably had a pretty big effect on me as a young person,” she said.

Prible’s case was Scardino’s reintroduction to death penalty work. She started out by reading the case record and trial transcripts. “I really thought that there must be a volume of the transcript missing,” she recalled. “I couldn’t believe that someone could be convicted of such a horrible crime and sentenced to death based on what I had seen.”

Although the Prible case presented a steep learning curve, her lack of experience also served her well: Unlike civil litigation, which involves obtaining large amounts of discovery as a matter of course, in federal death penalty appeals, “you don’t automatically get discovery,” she said. A judge has to grant permission every step of the way. But Scardino didn’t know this at the time. “I just approached it as, ‘Let’s ask for everything that we would ask for if it was a regular civil case,’” she said. “And that’s kind of what broke it open.”

In early 2016, a critical piece fell into place. After leaving Beaumont, Foreman had been sentenced to decades in state prison. Thirteen years after his role in the snitch ring first came to light in a chance encounter between Walker and Herrero, Foreman decided to talk. The result was a pair of affidavits, one in Prible’s case and one in Herrero’s.

The affidavits did not address whether Foreman had been the leader of the snitch ring, as Walker described. But contrary to the claims made by the informants in both cases, Foreman said he never heard either man confess. “Prible did not brag in my presence about killing an entire family,” Foreman said. “Prible did not tell me that he was the kind of man who can go in a house and take out a whole family and come out clean or say that he was a bad motherfucker.” When Prible talked about Steve Herrera, “he talked about him like he was a friend he had lost.”

Foreman confirmed something Walker said: that men incarcerated at Beaumont joked about how Prible would be their “ticket out of jail.” Although Prible discussed his case with Foreman, “I learned information about his case from Kelly Siegler too,” he said in his affidavit. She “knew that FCI inmates wanted to testify against Prible in return for help getting their federal sentence reduced.” According to Foreman, his first meeting with Siegler took place in August 2001. “I think it was before I even met Prible,” he said.

Soon afterward, Prible’s attorneys asked U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison to order the Harris County DA’s office to hand over any trial material that was “withheld from the defense on the basis that it is work product, privileged, or otherwise confidential.” The DA’s office eventually agreed to submit hundreds of pages to Ellison for a determination on whether they should have been disclosed.

Almost five months later, Ellison issued his order. He had identified a number of records that “possibly contain exculpatory information,” including 19 pages of handwritten notes. The notes were written by Siegler and her investigator Johnny Bonds. Some were hard to decipher, but a few things jumped out immediately. The notes confirmed that Siegler and Bonds had met with Foreman to discuss the Prible case on August 8, 2001. At the meeting, Foreman had positioned himself as an informant, offering intel about an apparent confession by Prible. One note said Prible showed “Ø remorse.”

The notes suggested that Foreman might not have had his facts straight. He seemed to be under the impression that Prible’s own family had been murdered. But if Siegler was skeptical at the time, there was no hint of it in the records, which showed that she met with Foreman again in December.

The notes dramatically undercut the scenario Siegler presented at Prible’s trial, in which Beckcom and Foreman met Prible through a casual encounter on the rec yard. In reality, Siegler had discussed the case with Foreman before Prible was even indicted. “Oh my god. I cannot believe that this has been hidden,” Scardino remembers thinking. “This puts the lie to the whole story about Beckcom and Foreman just coincidentally coming into contact with Jeff.”

Just as damning were notes that appeared to undermine key forensic evidence Siegler presented at Prible’s trial. Prosecutors had elicited testimony from a DNA analyst who claimed that the sperm found in Tirado’s mouth had to have been deposited shortly before she was murdered. But the notes showed that Siegler had consulted a different forensic expert, the director of the police crime lab in Pasadena, Texas, whose analysis did not support the inflammatory theory she presented at trial. “Pamela McInnis — semen lives up to 72 hours,” Siegler had written.

“So much of the trial was just this really horrific narrative spun by the prosecution,” Scardino said. In her closing argument, Siegler asserted that Prible had shot Tirado moments after forcing her to perform oral sex. But Siegler’s own notes made clear that the evidence didn’t support this.

To Scardino, the revelations were a bombshell. “I thought, ‘Oh wow. We’re gonna win this case.’”

The post How Two Men Convicted by Kelly Siegler Uncovered the Dark Secret to Her Success appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

1

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Secrets of Stardom

Only a few bones remained and there was no clear cause of death.

In the realm of murder cases gone cold, this was a challenging one — even for Kelly Siegler, a veteran prosecutor from Houston, Texas, with a nearly perfect conviction record and an evangelical fervor for solving cold cases using circumstantial evidence.

There were a few facts to start with. Twenty-nine-year-old Margie Pointer had disappeared in 1987. What was left of her was found in a ravine near Alamogordo, New Mexico, 17 years later. Despite the best efforts of a local cop haunted by the case, it remained unsolved. The Alamogordo Police Department needed help, and Siegler, star of the true-crime reality show “Cold Justice,” was there to answer the call.

Siegler arrived in town with her co-stars, Yolanda McClary, a former Las Vegas crime scene investigator, and Johnny Bonds, a retired Houston homicide detective. They had their work cut out for them, but there was an additional hurdle: “The statute of limitations for second-degree murder has run out,” Siegler explained at the start of the episode. “So our job this week is to see if the evidence warrants a first-degree murder.”

“A first-degree murder in New Mexico has to be committed in a willful and deliberate way,” she went on. “Since we don’t have a crime scene or any DNA, we’re gonna need to find witnesses who can show that it was committed in a willful or deliberate way.”

In other words, determining what happened to Pointer wasn’t the aim so much as ensuring they landed on a scenario that would make her alleged killer eligible for punishment.

In the world of “Cold Justice,” identifying new suspects isn’t what Siegler and her team are there to do. Instead, they arrive in town with the objective of wrapping up a cold case within a week. They always have a couple of suspects in mind, individuals the local cops have previously investigated. In Alamogordo, they quickly latched onto Pointer’s former co-worker, a man with whom, rumor had it, she was having an affair. The day Pointer went missing, he showed up at a friend’s cabin 4 miles from where her bones were later found with a hurt thumb and a scratch on his cheek. In the absence of a body, cause of death, or any other physical evidence, these injuries convinced Siegler that she knew how Pointer had met her demise.

At the Alamogordo Police Department, Siegler reenacted her theory of the murder. She and Bonds demonstrated how Pointer could have been strangled to death and her attempts to fight back could have produced the injuries found on their suspect. With his hands around Siegler’s neck, Bonds explained that Pointer would have tried to pull the killer’s thumb off her throat. Siegler, pulling his thumb with one hand, reached toward his cheek with the other. “Scratch, scratch,” she said. Bonds said it would take 15 to 20 seconds for Pointer to black out and at least another minute to kill her.

“A minute and a half of consistent pressure without letting go, never changing your mind,” Siegler said. “How is that not deliberate?”

“All right, sounds good,” the police investigator said. They decided to take it to the district attorney.

The DA was less convinced and declined to seek an indictment. Siegler and the investigator returned looking crestfallen. Bonds sunk his head into his hands.

“Here’s the good news: Your case is strong, your case is great,” Siegler told the investigator. “It might be circumstantial, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s ready to go right now. But she doesn’t want to do it yet.”

The episode, titled “Sunspot Highway,” aired in July 2014 as part of the show’s second season. Although “Cold Justice” had been running for less than a year, Siegler had already attracted a devoted following, and the Alamogordo DA’s decision did not go over well. Fans were convinced that Pointer’s co-worker had killed her and Siegler had figured it all out. “This is a slam dunk case for everyone except the DA,” one viewer wrote on the show’s Facebook page. “WTF is with that idiot DA,” another wrote. “You guys handed her the killer on a silver platter and she refused to charge him!”

That a case so lacking in direct evidence could convince Siegler’s fans of the man’s guilt was a testament to her skill in crafting a narrative, whether for a TV audience or a real-world jury.

As an assistant district attorney in Harris County, Texas, Siegler was known for her courtroom theatrics. She once famously straddled her colleague atop a bloody mattress at trial to reenact for jurors how the defendant had stabbed her husband 193 times. Siegler’s flair for the dramatic was perfect for TV, while her reliance on circumstantial evidence allowed her to spin bare facts into a compelling theory that might or might not be supported.

While “Cold Justice” often boasts about its track record — it has helped bring about 49 arrests and 21 convictions over six seasons, the Oxygen network reported in May — the show has also weathered a series of defamation lawsuits. Many of the cases Siegler assembled eventually fell apart precisely because there was too little direct evidence to convict whomever she identified as the killer.

Siegler’s TV career has not suffered for the controversies. In September, she took the stage before a cheering crowd in Orlando, Florida, as one of the headliners at CrimeCon, an annual conference for true-crime fans and creators. She was there to promote two shows. Not only had “Cold Justice” begun taping its seventh season, but she would also be starring in a new series, “Prosecuting Evil With Kelly Siegler.” The program, which premiered on November 18, takes her back to her home state to examine “the most harrowing homicides and toughest trials in Texas history — all told with Kelly Siegler’s unique insight and unparalleled access.”

“Prosecuting Evil” will revisit some of Siegler’s old Harris County cases, offering fans a behind-the-scenes look at the celebrity prosecutor’s “superhero origin story,” as one of her fellow speakers put it. “Both of our shows are about reality. There’s no faking,” Siegler told the crowd. “We’re the real deal.” She waxed nostalgic for her years in the district attorney’s office. “All those big cases,” she said, “no one’s ever told those stories.”

On paper, Siegler’s record as a Harris County prosecutor is far more impressive than the stats boasted by the Oxygen network. Over her two decades in Houston, Siegler handled more than 200 trials, securing more than 60 murder convictions and 19 death sentences. But the stories behind some of those convictions raise serious questions about their integrity. While Siegler’s formula for closing cold cases might make for great television, it has left a trail of wreckage in its wake.

As Siegler’s TV star has been rising over the last decade, a parallel reality has been playing out in Texas courts, where allegations of prosecutorial misconduct have tarnished Siegler’s reputation. Appellate litigation in murder cases handled by Siegler has exposed a history of withholding exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys, including in death penalty cases. One prominent criminal defense attorney has called on the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to review all of Siegler’s convictions.

Some of the most disturbing evidence of Siegler’s conduct is documented in the files of a case that has largely gone unnoticed: the 2002 conviction of Ronald Jeffrey Prible. Prible was sent to death row for the murder of a Houston family. The evidence tying him to the crime was entirely circumstantial. He has maintained his innocence for more than 20 years.

In 2020, a federal district judge overturned Prible’s conviction on the basis of Siegler’s suppression of evidence, ordering the state to retry or release him within six months. Instead, Texas fought the order, persuading the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate Prible’s death sentence on procedural grounds. The court did not address Siegler’s actions. Prible appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in June, the justices declined to intervene.

Today, Prible faces execution despite the fact that the case against him has unraveled. A monthslong investigation by The Intercept — including a review of thousands of pages of court records — shows that Prible’s case contains numerous hallmarks of wrongful convictions, from a shockingly inept police investigation to unsupportable junk science peddled by prosecutors at trial.

But particularly alarming is the way Siegler weaponized a network of confidential informants to construct her case against Prible, as the federal district judge found.

The star witness was a man named Michael Beckcom, who testified that Prible confessed to the killings while they were imprisoned together in southeast Texas. Beckcom, who was doing time for the audacious murder of a federal witness, was part of a ring of informants at the same lockup in Beaumont, each trying to game the system in an effort to shave time off their sentences. Several informants offered information to Siegler before they had even met Prible, according to a petition challenging his conviction filed in federal court. The petition details how Siegler encouraged Beckcom to extract details from Prible that would help her convict him and hid the extent of the informants’ involvement at trial.

“American criminal law has essentially created an underground market in which we permit the state to trade leniency for information.”

To Harvard law professor Alexandra Natapoff, author of “Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice,” the role of informants in Prible’s case is emblematic of a deeper problem that corrupts the criminal legal system. “American criminal law has essentially created an underground market in which we permit the state to trade leniency for information,” she said. Prosecutors have wide discretion to avail themselves of informants who have an obvious incentive to lie about what they know — a leading cause of wrongful convictions.

“Because so much of these negotiations and transactions take place under the table, the likelihood that anyone will ever find out is extremely low,” Natapoff said. “And because we reward police and prosecutors for arrests and convictions, we have a baked-in, dysfunctional incentive for them to use bad witnesses, bad evidence, over and over again.”

Court records reveal that Siegler repeatedly used informants in murder cases despite reasons to doubt their credibility. Details of the Beaumont snitch ring only came to light after Prible and another man Siegler sent to prison realized that she had relied on the same network of informants in both their cases. Despite strict limits on communication between incarcerated people, the two men, whose cases were otherwise unrelated, managed to connect the dots.

Siegler not only gained a reputation as a prosecutor who was willing to help informants seek sentence reductions, but she also advocated for them even when she didn’t consider their information reliable, court records show. Taken together, the records paint a damning picture of a prosecutor who cut corners and betrayed her professional obligations in order to secure convictions in weak or shaky cases. At best, Siegler was reckless in her use of informants and careless about scrutinizing the information they provided. At worst, as Prible’s lawyers argue, she actively conspired to use dubious testimony from a ring of snitches to win a conviction despite knowing the case wouldn’t otherwise hold up — framing an innocent man for murder.

Siegler has denied any wrongdoing. She declined to be interviewed for this investigation. “A second grader could see that you are biased and in no way inclined to listen to the truth or appreciate what really happened with these prosecutions,” Siegler wrote in response to questions from The Intercept. “I took an oath to seek justice and justice is what these defendants got.”

2

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House Full of Bodies

Gregory Francisco lifted his garage door before sunrise on Saturday, April 24, 1999, and immediately smelled smoke. As he rushed across the street toward the home of his neighbor Steve Herrera, Francisco could see it too, billowing from the turbines on the roof and curling out from the garage doors.

The night before, Herrera had invited Francisco to one of his regular get-togethers to drink beer, play pool, and listen to music inside the two-car garage. Francisco didn’t make it, but as far as he could tell, things looked like they usually did: The music was on, and the garage doors were raised to shoulder height. By the time Francisco headed to bed around midnight, the gathering appeared to be winding down.

Now, however, as Francisco rang Herrera’s doorbell, he could hear music blaring — “maxed out,” he later testified. No one answered, so he rushed to a side door, which was hot to the touch. Francisco kicked it open. Inside the garage, he found Herrera face down on the floor between the pool table and a washer and dryer. Francisco yelled for Herrera to wake up, but then he saw blood. His neighbor was dead.

Firefighters were the first to arrive on the scene. In a den just beyond the garage, they made a grisly discovery: Herrera’s girlfriend, Nilda Tirado, was slumped on a smoldering loveseat. Next to her charred body was a can of Kutzit, a volatile solvent; on the floor was a red gas can. The walls were covered in soot, and the couple’s big screen TV had melted.

First responders found the children in the bedrooms. In one, Herrera’s 7-year-old daughter, Valerie, was face down on a bed; Tirado’s 7-year-old daughter, Rachel, was nearby on the floor. In the master bedroom, firefighters found the couple’s 22-month-old daughter, Jade. The medical examiner determined that Herrera and Tirado had been killed before the fire was set, each shot once through the back of the neck in what she called an “assassin’s wound.” The children, whose airways were full of soot, had died from smoke inhalation.

Word of the murders spread quickly. Relatives of Herrera and Tirado gathered outside the brick home as investigators processed the scene. The house was tidy, and there were no signs of forced entry or a robbery gone wrong. Herrera’s wallet, with approximately $900 inside, was found in the back pocket of his shorts. No weapon was found, nor any shell casings, which led investigators to believe a revolver had been used to shoot the couple. They gathered bottles and cans from the garage to process for fingerprints but failed to preserve what appeared to be blood stains on the wall and washing machine — evidence that could have been left by the perpetrator.

Curtis Brown, a detective with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, led the investigation. Court records reflect it was a less than robust inquiry. At trial, Brown confirmed that he spoke to just four people the day of the murders, including Herrera’s brother Edward and his brother-in-law Victor Martinez. Those interviews led him to Jeffrey Prible, who had been a friend of Herrera’s since grade school. From there, Brown looked nowhere else.

According to Edward, Herrera and Prible were at the house playing pool Friday night and had paged him looking to score an eight ball of cocaine. Edward and Herrera were both dealers, Edward told investigators, and Herrera was a regular user. Edward said he tried to find some but never did.

Martinez had been at Herrera’s that night. He told Brown that he picked up cigarettes and a 12-pack of Bud Light on his way to the house, arriving around 10 p.m. Later, with the beer almost gone, Herrera and Prible loaded into Martinez’s white Ford Escort, and the three men made their way to Rick’s Cabaret, a nearby strip club. Prible was friendly, Martinez said, and nothing seemed off. After several drinks, the men headed back to Herrera’s around 2 a.m. They smoked a joint outside before Martinez headed home. Prible and Herrera went back into the garage to continue playing pool.

On Saturday afternoon, Brown and Deputy Ramon Hernandez made their way several blocks west to Prible’s home. Prible, then 27, had been honorably discharged from the Marines in 1995 and was living at his parents’ place along with his 7-year-old son. The deputy said Prible was shocked to learn about the murders. He agreed to go down to the sheriff’s station to provide a statement.

Prible’s statement largely mirrored Martinez’s. After Martinez left, Prible said, he and Herrera played pool until Tirado came into the garage, fixing Herrera with a “look” that Prible took as a sign it was time to wrap things up. He said Herrera drove him home around 4 a.m. Prible went straight to bed and slept until early afternoon. He was hanging around the house, playing with his son, until the cops came knocking.

The deputy later testified that he believed Prible’s statement to be “truthful.” Nonetheless the cops asked Prible to take a polygraph, the results of which indicated deception. They read Prible his rights, and he sat down to provide a second statement. There was something he’d left out, he told them: He and Tirado were involved in an affair and had sex in the bathroom after the men got home from the club. He failed to mention this, he said, because he worried it would “ruin” Tirado’s reputation.

Prible provided a DNA sample and let the cops photograph him naked. They did not find any soot, burns, or other wounds on his body. Investigators searched Prible’s parents’ house, collecting the clothes he’d worn Friday night, which had no traces of blood, smoke, or any accelerant. They collected firearms, magazines, and ammunition. They found paperwork related to a .38 revolver but didn’t find the gun. DNA collected from Tirado was soon matched to Prible, but given his story about their sexual tryst, there was an explanation for that.

On Monday, police took a statement from Cynthia Garcia Flores, a childhood friend of Tirado’s. It was the first in a string of statements that raised new questions, not only about Prible, but also about Herrera — and what the two were up to in the weeks before the murders.

Flores said Herrera had told her husband that he and Prible were involved in a bank robbery and Herrera’s take was $12,000. Herrera had paid her husband, Vincent, for a “job” with some of the cash from the heist. Vincent said Herrera used the money to pay him for cocaine. Another woman, who said she’d been having an affair with Herrera, told police that a month before the murders, Prible handed Herrera a bag full of money. And Edward, Herrera’s brother, said that he’d seen both Prible and Herrera with large amounts of cash.

As it turned out, Prible had robbed six banks since March. The robberies went down the same way: Prible donned a ball cap and drove his mother’s car to a bank carrying a stack of manila envelopes and a note for the teller. One read, “This is a robbery,” while later iterations included a warning that he had a gun or a bomb, though he never brandished a weapon. Prible would instruct the teller to put the cash in an envelope and wait 15 minutes before “doing anything,” he later told a detective with the Houston Area Bank Robbery Task Force, which had dubbed the serial robber the “15-Minute Bandit.”

The robberies were part of an absurd scheme Herrera and Prible had devised to come up with enough money to buy their own nightclub. Prible would rob the banks, then Herrera would launder and grow the cash by buying drugs that he would sell for a profit. “After we bought one club, we would then open some more,” Prible told a task force investigator. “I trusted Steve. … I thought he could use his drug connections to make us a lot of money. Steve was a smart guy when it came to things like that.”

In all, the robberies netted the friends about $45,000. In the wake of the murders, the cash disappeared and has never been found.

On May 21, 1999, Prible confessed to the robberies. Three months later, he was sentenced to five years and shipped east to the federal correctional institution in Beaumont.

The investigation into the murders of Herrera, Tirado, and the three children went cold.

3

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A Real Trial Tiger

The day after Christmas in 1999, the Houston Chronicle published a glowing profile of a star prosecutor at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office: 37-year-old Assistant District Attorney Kelly Siegler. Titled “One shrewd cracker-barrel lawyer,” the article traced her evolution from a small-town girl from Matagorda County to a gifted prosecutor who’d shot through the ranks to “symbolize the aggressive and colorful spirit of a powerful office in a county that sends more people to death row than anywhere else.”

Born Kelly Renee Jalufka, Siegler grew up in tiny Blessing, Texas, “a wart of a town on State Highway 35 … surrounded by rice farms,” as Texas Monthly described it in a 1977 feature highlighting her mother’s homestyle cooking. Siegler’s father, known as Big Billy, ran a barbershop and worked as the local justice of the peace; he “went shoeless and held court between haircuts,” the Chronicle reported. Siegler played high school basketball and was valedictorian of her graduating class. At the University of Texas at Austin, where she graduated early after studying international business, she was known in her dorm as “the hick.”

Siegler joined the DA’s office straight out of law school in 1987. As an intern in the office’s family criminal law division, she had come face to face with domestic violence cases, which fueled a desire to seek justice for victims. The issue was personal for Siegler, who was just a child when she urged her mother to leave her abusive stepfather and watched helplessly as the system protected him. “I grew up in a world where ladies walked around all the time with black eyes,” she later said in a clip from “Cold Justice.”

Siegler arrived at the DA’s office as legendary District Attorney Johnny Holmes was becoming famous for seeking the harshest possible punishments. Before long, she was making her mark as an overachiever. Evaluations contained in her personnel file show that Siegler quickly gained a reputation as “a real trial tiger,” in the words of then-supervisor Chuck Rosenthal, who would eventually replace Holmes as DA. “I have seen her try a murder case based solely on circumstantial evidence and get a life sentence from the jury,” another supervisor wrote.

Siegler won her first death sentence in 1992. Her mother sat in the courtroom as Siegler urged jurors to send an alleged skinhead with a low IQ named Brian Edward Davis to death row for a crime he committed when he was 22. Despite her victory, Siegler cried and was sick to her stomach after the trial. “He was like every boy I grew up with,” she told the Chronicle.

But if she had any reservations about seeking the ultimate punishment, there was no hint of it in her record. Siegler was repeatedly lauded for securing convictions when the evidence was thin, or as Rosenthal put it, for her ability to make “a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Investigators and police detectives sent letters to Holmes praising her talent. “No average ADA would have gone to trial under the heading ‘Murder,’” one letter read. “‘Luckily, you don’t have an average ADA in Kelly Siegler.’”

Jurors were won over by Siegler’s folksy appeal and knack for weaving compelling stories from circumstantial evidence. She spent a ton of time preparing her witnesses — and it showed. Siegler credited her humble roots for helping her relate to jurors. “I practice every argument and time it out like I’m in that barbershop,” Siegler told the Chronicle. “I figure if I can talk to a jury like I’m explaining it to Daddy and his buddies, then I’m doing OK.”

At the start of the new millennium, Siegler was at the top of her game. Holmes, who retired in 2001, had transformed the DA’s office, putting Houston on the map as the most aggressive death penalty jurisdiction in the country. Siegler was both a product of the office and a trailblazer: a woman who thrived in a good ol’ boys club while pushing the boundaries of prosecutorial performance. She estimated that she’d won “at least 80 percent of the 150 felony jury trials” she’d handled, according to the Chronicle, although co-workers said the number was “much higher.” If there was anyone who could resurrect the cold case murders of Herrera and Tirado and win a conviction, it was Siegler.

It’s not entirely clear when Siegler first decided Prible was guilty of murder.

Brown, the lead detective, testified that he first brought his file on the murders to her office in late 2000. But it was another detective who helped Siegler revive the cold case: Harris County DA’s investigator Johnny Bonds, who would later become Siegler’s co-star on “Cold Justice.”

Like Siegler, Bonds started his career as an overachiever. Once the youngest Houston Police Department officer ever assigned to the homicide unit, he was immortalized in “The Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit,” a 1983 book chronicling his quest to solve a triple murder. After leaving the police force, Bonds did short stints working private security and home remodeling but quickly returned to detective work. In 1989 he joined the Harris County DA’s Office.

On March 1, 2001, Bonds received a fax from a Dallas-based DNA analyst named Bill Watson, who had examined forensic evidence submitted by the sheriff’s department, including the blood, hair, and saliva samples taken from Prible. The fax was a copy of Watson’s original two-page report from 1999. His findings were not revelatory. Scrapings taken from beneath Tirado’s fingernails had yielded only her DNA. A pair of white tennis shoes belonging to Prible was tested for blood, but Watson found none.

Still, one part of the report interested Siegler. Two male DNA profiles had been obtained from semen collected from Tirado’s body. Vaginal and anal swabs showed sperm that came from Herrera. Sperm from an oral swab was linked to Prible.

In his statement divulging the affair, Prible told detectives that Tirado had performed oral sex on him in the bathroom, which would explain the presence of sperm in her mouth. But Siegler was skeptical. Although Prible said the two had been “messing around” for some time, friends of Tirado’s rejected the notion that she was cheating on Herrera with Prible. Flores, the friend who told police about Herrera’s involvement in the bank robberies, said she’d known Prible since middle school and he gave her the creeps. Another friend said Tirado shared this opinion. “Nilda told me that she always thought Jeff was creepy,” the woman told detectives.

When these statements were first collected in 1999, the DA’s office did not consider the evidence strong enough to form the basis of a murder case. But with Siegler in charge, things changed. By the summer of 2001, Siegler had concluded that the DNA evidence from the oral swab could only be the result of sexual assault. In the absence of any other physical evidence against Prible, this would be a linchpin to her case.

In a probable cause affidavit, the DA’s office laid out the evidence against Prible, describing the bank robbery scheme and noting that Prible was the last person known to have seen Herrera and Tirado alive. The affidavit mentioned the weapons and paperwork recovered from the home of Prible’s parents; records from a local firearm retailer showed that Prible had purchased a .38 Taurus revolver in 1998, yet this weapon “has yet to be found among the defendant’s possessions.” A firearms examiner said that a projectile recovered next to Tirado’s body was “consistent with a .38 caliber.” The affidavit suggested that Prible shot Herrera and Tirado with the .38 Taurus, then successfully got rid of it.

Finally, the state cited the DNA evidence taken from sperm on the oral swab and the woman who said Tirado found Prible “creepy.” She “does not believe the complainant was having any sort of affair with the defendant based on what she thought about him.”

On August 29, 2001, a grand jury indicted Prible for capital murder.

4

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Texas v. Prible

Opening statements in the State of Texas v. Ronald Jeffrey Prible Jr. took place on October 14, 2002, at a courthouse in downtown Houston. Presiding over the trial was District Judge Mark Kent Ellis, a former Harris County prosecutor-turned-defense attorney who was elected to the bench on a Republican ticket. Siegler was accompanied by Vic Wisner, an ex-cop and veteran of the DA’s office with whom she’d teamed up in previous death penalty cases.

Siegler kicked off the state’s case with a provocation: “‘What kind of a man can go in a house and take out a whole family and come out clean?’” she began, over an objection from Prible’s lawyers. “‘That kind of person is a bad motherfucker — and I’m that kind of motherfucker.’ Those are the words of this defendant. … That’s what this man said about what he did on April 24, 1999.”

Prible’s words, Siegler told jurors, had been revealed by a man named Michael Beckcom, who was incarcerated at the federal prison known as FCI Beaumont. “And I’m going to stand here today and tell you he’s a vile, disgusting man himself,” she said. “He’s going to make you sick to your stomach.” But his testimony was crucial. This man would describe how he befriended Prible at Beaumont — and how Prible ultimately confessed to the crime.

Siegler previewed the state’s other key piece of evidence: the DNA taken from sperm found in Tirado’s mouth. A forensic expert would prove that Prible assaulted Tirado just moments before he shot her, set her on fire, and left her children to die, Siegler said. That’s the kind of man Prible is, she declared. “And he’s guilty of capital murder.”

The trial lasted two weeks, with the first several days focused on the fire and the deaths of the three little girls. Amid repeated warnings from the judge, who urged people in the courtroom to control their emotions, prosecutors introduced autopsy photos showing soot and mucus on the children’s faces, emphasizing their struggle to breathe before they died. Yet basic elements of the fire remained unclear, including precisely how or when it was set. Also puzzling was the missing murder weapon. Despite the affidavit arguing that Prible had used a .38 revolver, the same ballistics expert now testified that the weapon had likely been a 9 mm pistol.

But perhaps the most confounding testimony came from Brown, who said that he’d never considered any other suspect apart from Prible, a fact Siegler saw fit to reiterate. Yet the detective could not explain why his investigation justified such a singular focus. He didn’t pay attention to Prible’s interrogation, he said. Nor did he remember the names of anyone he interviewed in the aftermath of the murders.

Among the people Brown apparently did not recall was the most critical witness for the defense: a 12-year-old girl named Christina Gurrusquieta, who lived next door to Prible’s parents. She told police that she had seen Prible and Herrera arriving before dawn on April 24, 1999. Although there was no record of her eyewitness account in the police reports — Brown said he did not document their conversation — Gurrusquieta’s testimony lent credence to Prible’s claim that Herrera had driven him home around 4 a.m.

Gurrusquieta had turned 15 by the time she took the stand. She said she knew both Herrera and Prible; Herrera used to curse at her and her siblings when they played kickball and accidentally hit his car. In the early morning hours of April 24, she said, she got out of bed to use the bathroom and spotted the two men from her window, which faced the front of the house. It had to be after 1 a.m., since that was when her parents came home after working at the Mexican restaurant they owned. Gurrusquieta and her sister waited up for them on Friday nights. That night, Prible and Herrera “were just standing outside beside Jeff’s dad’s truck talking. And then I saw Jeff walk into his house and I seen Steve leave.”

Siegler did her best to pick apart Gurrusquieta’s account. “Is it possible, Christina, that the night you’re remembering was Thursday night instead of Friday night?” No, Gurrusquieta said. Did she “look at the clock to write down or memorialize forever what time it was when this all happened?” No, Gurrusquieta said. “Because a 12-year-old little girl would never do that, right?” Siegler said.

Siegler asked Gurrusquieta to read part of Prible’s statement aloud. “I then asked Steve to take me home. It was about 4 a.m.,” she read. So if Herrera did drop Prible off, Siegler said, “you wouldn’t have been awake to see if Jeff snuck back out of the house to get back over to Steve’s house anyway, would you?”

If it seemed like a stretch for Prible to have left Herrera’s place after a night of heavy drinking only to return to murder the whole household, Siegler and Wisner didn’t push this scenario very hard. Instead, they left the timeline vague. Jurors sought clarity during deliberations, asking the court to read back testimony about what happened when. The jury also seemed intrigued by Gurrusquieta, requesting more detail on when she was first interviewed by Brown.

But in the end, the alibi provided by Gurrusquieta was no match for the two witnesses at the crux of the state’s case: Beckcom, the jailhouse informant, and Watson, the DNA analyst.

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A 41-year-old former bodybuilder who once managed a Gold’s Gym, Beckcom was a smooth talker, fit and confident in his prison uniform. Siegler was upfront about Beckcom’s incentive to testify, asking him to describe his deal with the state. “We have an understanding that if I testify truthfully to this court that you will reciprocate by calling my federal prosecutor,” he said. The prosecutor would file what’s known as a Rule 35 motion to Beckcom’s judge. Under the federal rules of criminal procedure, the judge could reduce Beckcom’s sentence if he was satisfied that Beckcom had provided “substantial assistance” in the Prible case. But he had to be truthful, Siegler emphasized, or else no deal. Right, Beckcom said.

Beckcom testified that he’d gotten Siegler’s name from his cellmate at Beaumont, Nathan Foreman. After getting in touch with Siegler in the fall of 2001, Beckcom met with her and Bonds. She seemed skeptical of “another inmate maybe spinning a yarn,” Beckcom said. But after he laid out everything he knew in a letter, Siegler was convinced.

Beckcom said he’d met Prible through his exercise partner at Beaumont. Prible used to stop by while they worked out. One day he struck up a conversation with Beckcom directly. “I was sitting on the bleachers in the rec yard just catching some sun, listening to my radio, and Prible approached myself and Nathan Foreman,” Beckcom said. According to Beckcom, Prible was seeking advice on his case. Before long, they were discussing it every day, while also making plans to go into the asphalt business together.

Beckcom said that Prible’s account evolved over time. At first he said, “I didn’t do it.” He conceded that his DNA had been found on the female victim but said everyone knew they were having an affair. Did he say anything about a weapon? Siegler asked. Yes, Beckcom said. Prible said the cops were looking for a .38 caliber revolver he owned but that he’d sold it. That wasn’t even the murder weapon, Prible told him. Instead, he intimated that he’d successfully gotten rid of the weapon, telling Beckcom, “Asphalt’s good sometimes for hiding things.”

Eventually, Beckcom decided to get as much information as he could from Prible, thinking he could use it to his advantage. After becoming aggravated by Prible insisting on his innocence, Beckcom said, he told him, “I know what you did. … I don’t care.” After that, Prible spilled everything. The details Beckcom shared on the stand could only have come from Prible, Siegler told the jury. “How would Mike Beckcom know all the things that he does know unless the killer told him?” When Beckcom asked Prible how he got in and out of the house without being seen, he said Prible pointed to his time deployed as a Marine. “It’s a typical high-intensity, low-drag maneuver,” he said, in what was presumably special ops speak.

“It was over money,” Beckcom said Prible confessed. Herrera “fucked me out of my money and then he was going to kill me, so I handled my business.”

To illustrate the level of trust that had developed between the informants and Prible, Siegler displayed a photograph taken at the Beaumont visiting room in November 2001. It showed Prible with his mother, Beckcom with his mother, and Foreman with his parents. “He called us his brothers and said he loved us,” Beckcom said. Still, Prible was aware they might betray him. At one point he told them, “You’re the only ones that could convict me,” Beckcom said. “If you do that you’ll have to live with it. I’m prepared to die.”

He used those words? Siegler asked. “He used those words,” Beckcom said.

Prible’s lead attorney, Terry Gaiser, asked Beckcom if he had ever lied under oath. “Yes, I have,” Beckcom answered. In fact, Gaiser continued, hadn’t a federal judge in California explicitly found that Beckcom lied in a different case? “That’s correct,” Beckcom said. Yet Gaiser did not elicit further details about Beckcom’s apparent history of perjury.

If Beckcom’s testimony filled the gaps in the state’s case against Prible, Watson, the DNA analyst, gave prosecutors the tools they needed to conjure a final harrowing image of Tirado’s death. “Have you thought about what Nilda went through in the last moments of her life?” Siegler asked the jury. According to Siegler, DNA had unlocked this story.

Watson, 36, had spent two years as a forensic analyst for the Fort Worth Police Department and one year at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office before moving to a lab called Gene Screen. In his years testing swabs for the presence of semen, Watson testified, he’d found that anal and vaginal swabs could retain usable quantities of sperm for roughly two to three days. But he couldn’t recall ever getting even a partial male profile from an oral swab, even in cases where the evidence was submitted quickly.

Watson drew a damning — and highly speculative — conclusion from this: Given the large amount of sperm on the swab, Tirado had not had a chance to eliminate Prible’s semen by spitting or swallowing before she was shot. Would the evidence “be consistent with the male depositing the semen in Nilda’s mouth moments, if not seconds, before she was killed?” Wisner asked. “It certainly would be consistent with that,” Watson said.

In his closing, Wisner exaggerated Watson’s testimony for maximum effect. “There is no way in the world that that semen wasn’t deposited either moments before or seconds after Nilda died,” he said. Prible shot Herrera, then “forced Nilda to orally copulate him at gunpoint and executed her as soon as he finished. As horrific as that sounds, that is the only logical conclusion that you can draw from that evidence.”

Siegler was even more dramatic: “She left this world with his penis in her mouth, knowing her husband was dead, hoping to God that her babies would survive the nightmare that is Jeff Prible.”

On October 23, Prible was convicted of murder. Two days later, jurors sentenced him to death.

It was another signature Siegler victory. “Her ability to do what few others can is a continual amazement to some, but not to those who watch her work,” her supervisor wrote in her next performance review. But while her colleagues in the DA’s office celebrated, others watched with a growing sense of alarm. For one man sitting in a Beaumont prison cell staring at a life sentence, the secret to Siegler’s success was starting to come into focus — and the picture looked eerily familiar.

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I first encountered officer Raymond Piwnicki in the summer of 2001. At the time, the citywide demolition of high-rise public housing was gathering momentum in Chicago. Having recently regained control of the Chicago Housing Authority after a period of federal receivership, the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley was making a concerted effort to replace its high-rise public housing developments with “mixed income communities.” Among its first actions was to disband the CHA police force, established a decade earlier by the housing authority in an effort to offset the Chicago Police Department’s neglect of its tenants. That, in turn, required beefing up the CPD’s Public Housing Section. While the public housing unit was ramping up, members of the Special Operations Section — an elite unit charged with rooting out, as Daley often put it, “gangs, drugs, and guns” — were deployed to public housing developments. Piwnicki was among them.

The heat in Chicago on July 9, 2001, was blistering. At the Stateway Gardens public housing development, it was the sort of midsummer day that draws tenants and their children outside in hopes of catching a breeze. As adviser to the resident leadership at Stateway, I worked out of an office on the ground floor of a high-rise on South State Street with a small team of residents known as the Neighborhood Conservation Corps. One of our projects — a collaboration with professor Craig Futterman and law students from the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School — was to monitor police performance in an effort to improve police-community relations. That afternoon, we were meeting with Futterman and two of his students to discuss an incident that had occurred a few months earlier.

Kenya Richmond, one of my colleagues, had witnessed white officers in a police vehicle strike a young Black man they were pursuing outside our State Street office. Richmond attempted to document the incident. The officers responded by arresting him on false charges, destroying his notes, and subjecting him to racist invective. En route to the police station, they told him to stay out of their way — “Who the fuck do you think you are?” — and called him “a fucking monkey” and “a fucking nigger.” The officers involved in the incident were members of the Special Operations Section, or SOS. When they failed to appear in court, the judge dismissed the criminal charges against Richmond. We were meeting on July 9 to prepare a civil lawsuit.

Our meeting was interrupted by a commotion outside. When we emerged on State Street, we found a middle-aged Black man — his name proved to be Nevles Traylor — pinned under a police car. He was moaning in pain and distress. Within a few minutes, the two white SOS officers were surrounded by a curious and then increasingly angry crowd of roughly a hundred residents. The officers’ names, we later learned, were Raymond Piwnicki and Robert Smith.

We fanned out through the crowd and set to work documenting the incident. According to multiple witnesses, Traylor had been riding a bicycle across the grounds of the development. Piwnicki, who was driving the squad car, had deliberately struck his bike from behind, pinning him against a fence. Piwnicki had then jumped out of the vehicle and repeatedly struck Traylor in the head.

Among the witnesses were several Black officers from the public housing unit. I spoke with one who was as outraged by what she had witnessed as any of the residents. Another exchanged sharp words with Piwnicki, then used wire cutters to cut through the fence and extricate Traylor from under the police car.

An ambulance arrived and Traylor, having been handcuffed by the SOS officers, was taken to the hospital. As the ambulance drove off, a television news crew drove by, assessed the situation, then, apparently realizing they had missed the “when it bleeds, it leads” moment, drove on.

Traylor was charged with two counts of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, felonies that would require, if he was convicted, a mandatory minimum sentence of four years and would allow a maximum sentence of 15 years. Unable to make bond while awaiting trial, he remained in jail for four months.

The Mandel Legal Aid Clinic represented Traylor in his criminal case and later brought a federal civil rights suit against Piwnicki and Smith. In the criminal case, the officers testified that they had observed Traylor engage in a hand-to-hand drug transaction and had undertaken pursuit in the course of which he had fallen off his bicycle. They also claimed that they had found no money from the drug transaction on his person because he had flung it away during his flight. The defense demonstrated that it was physically impossible to see what the officers claimed to have seen from the location a block away where they placed themselves. (As a witness for Traylor, I testified on that point.) They argued that the officers struck Traylor with their vehicle to amuse themselves, then fabricated evidence and falsely arrested him to cover their abuse.

The judge found that Piwnicki and Smith arrested Traylor without probable cause, in violation of his constitutional rights, and dismissed all charges. The subsequent civil suit was settled in 2003.

On the day of the incident, a complaint was filed on Traylor’s behalf with the Office of Professional Standards, which at that time was the agency within the police department that investigated police shootings and citizen complaints of excessive force. As chance would have it, the OPS office was less than a block away from the site of the incident. Yet the investigator made no effort to interview any of the scores of witnesses to the incident. Nor did he interview the accused officers. On the basis of an interview with Traylor, his medical records, and written statements from Piwnicki and Smith denying the allegations, he made a finding of “not sustained” “due to lack of evidence to either prove or disprove” the alleged misconduct. After the judge ruled in the criminal case that Piwnicki and Smith had violated Traylor’s constitutional rights, OPS saw no need to reopen its investigation.

Racism as Sport

In 2006, the SOS unit imploded in scandal. Not surprisingly, in view of the quality of the Traylor investigation, OPS played no role in exposing the criminal activity within the unit. Rather, investigations were initiated by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and later pursued by the U.S. attorney, after it became apparent that SOS officers were consistently failing to appear to testify in drug cases.

The investigations exposed a robbery and home invasion ring within SOS: A group of officers had begun by shaking down drug dealers, then graduated to robbery, extortion, and kidnapping of anyone likely to have cash on hand.

Ultimately, 11 officers were convicted. Jerome Finnigan, the reputed ringleader (and one of the officers who abused Richmond), was given a 12-year sentence for crimes that included soliciting the murder of another SOS officer whom he believed would testify against him. And the city has paid out millions of dollars in settlements and awards in civil suits brought by victims of the rogue SOS officers.

The political fallout from the scandal was intense. Together with other high-profile police misconduct cases at the time, it generated a serious crisis for Daley, who responded by forcing the resignation of his police superintendent, disbanding the SOS unit, and replacing OPS with a new investigative agency: the Independent Police Review Authority.

The true mission of OPS — to protect officers from discipline while maintaining the illusion that there was a system in place to investigate misconduct complaints — was made clear when it was revealed that an extraordinary number of citizen complaints accused Finnigan and his co-conspirators of precisely the forms of criminal activity for which they were ultimately convicted, yet they had virtually never been disciplined.

Finnigan is near the top of the list of CPD officers with the most citizen complaints. Also high on that list is Piwnicki. The difference is that Finnigan went to prison for his transgressions, while Piwnicki remains on the force. His career was not affected by the SOS scandal, for most of the citizen complaints against him allege not corruption, but racist abuse — something which the accountability system, then and now, largely ignores.

That is not to say that Finnigan and his cohort of rogue SOS officers were not deeply racist. Their racism was apparent in their selection of victims: Black and brown residents of low-income neighborhoods rendered vulnerable and presumptively not credible due to the criminalization of their communities by the war on drugs — a war in which the SOS unit served as shock troops. And it was apparent in their fluency with racial invective such as they as inflicted on Richmond and many others. (I once heard an SOS officer, making a routine announcement about a traffic matter over the loudspeaker of his vehicle, address the residents of Stateway Gardens this way: “Listen, you hood rats.”)

Yet it was not their overt racism that brought down the SOS officers. Nor is that how their crimes are categorized. Their racism only made news as a coda to the scandal, when some nine years into Finnigan’s incarceration, a photograph became public in court documents that had been taken in a police station in 2003 or thereabouts. It shows Finnigan and Timothy McDermott, another member of SOS, holding rifles while kneeling over a Black man with antlers on his head and his tongue hanging out — their hunting trophy.

The photo provides a glimpse of something at once fundamental and elusive: the practice within the CPD of racism as sport. Officers so disposed have enjoyed license to toy with Black and brown Chicagoans. The performance of racial contempt is not incidental to some other purpose. It’s the point of the exercise, an end in itself, a perverse source of pleasure.

The U.S. Department of Justice report on its investigation of the CPD, undertaken in the wake of the police murder of Laquan McDonald, speaks to the failure of the department to identify and discipline patterns of racist behavior: “We have serious concerns about the prevalence of racially discriminatory conduct by some CPD officers and the degree to which that conduct is tolerated and, in some respects, caused by deficiencies in CPD’s systems of training, supervision and accountability.”

The report notes elsewhere that the sort of racist mindset reflected in the Finnigan hunting trophy photograph “has desensitized many officers from the humanity of the people of color they serve, setting the stage for the use of excessive force.”

In the years since the January 6 insurrection, the Chicago Police Department, like other law enforcement jurisdictions across the country, has been forced to acknowledge the problem of white supremacists in its ranks. It has, however, been slow to address the problem. Now the issue is receiving renewed public attention due to a Chicago Sun-Times series on the failure of CPD to terminate officers whose names appeared on Oath Keepers membership rolls made public by NPR in 2021.

In response to the Sun-Times series, Police Superintendent Larry Snelling, who assumed office in September, has said that the department will undertake “stringent” and “thorough” investigations of suspected “members of hate groups” and “will do everything we can to remove those members from our ranks.” A recently established citizens oversight panel — the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability — has adopted a policy banning officers from being active members of certain hate groups. And Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx has placed active CPD members affiliated with the Oath Keepers on the “no call list” of officers barred from testifying in Cook County criminal cases. 

Predictably, a dissenting voice has been that of John Catanzara, president of the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police. While he agrees that “there’s things officers should be disqualified over,” he has characterized the proposed remedies as “a broad brush” and argued that officers should be judged by their actions rather than solely on the basis of their affiliations. 

He has a point. Whatever the merits of monitoring officers’ political affiliations and social media activity — both of which raise possible First Amendment issues — the department has failed to make use of the most powerful tool at its disposal for the purpose of identifying white supremacists on the force: pattern analysis of citizen complaints. Such analysis can reveal racist behavior that is in plain sight, and it can illuminate the systemic conditions that allow racists to operate with impunity as police officers. For both purposes, the 25-year career of Chicago police sergeant Piwnicki, who has no known affiliation with extremist organizations, is instructive.

“Unfounded” Allegations

The 2001 incident at Stateway Gardens occurred early in Piwnicki’s career. A complaint filed against him with the Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA, more than a decade later illustrates a pattern repeated again and again throughout his career. The occasion was a backyard family barbecue in the Englewood neighborhood on May 5, 2012. The alleged victim was 37-year-old Kendall McClennon. As McClennon tells the story, he stepped out into the alley to relieve his bladder at about 7:15 p.m. Moments later, Piwnicki and two other officers — Brian McDevitt and Thomas Carey — burst into the yard with their guns drawn. Piwnicki did a takedown of McClennon, forced him down on a wooden deck, handcuffed his hands behind his back, and struck him repeatedly.

McClennon’s 39-year-old sister Cicely took out a camera to document what was happening. One of the officers seized the camera and cuffed her hands behind her back. McClennon, face down on the ground in handcuffs, asked the officers to leave his sister alone. Piwnicki responded by discharging his taser into McClennon’s body. When the taser malfunctioned, he reset it to “dry stun” — a mode in which it functions as a “pain compliance” tool without incapacitating the subject — and applied it to McClennon’s ear. Throughout the incident, McClennon alleges, Piwnicki directed racial invective at him and his family, at one point calling them “animals.”

Piwnicki tells a different story: While patrolling the neighborhood, he and his partners observed McClennon urinating in an alley. When McClennon saw the police car approach, he fled. The officers gave pursuit and entered McClennon’s cousin’s backyard. McClennon resisted arrest. When Piwnicki attempted to handcuff him, a struggle ensued, in the course of which McClennon’s nails cut Piwnicki’s wrist.

After Piwnicki tased him, McClennon no longer resisted. When they searched him, the officers found a dime bag of marijuana. They arrested him and charged him with aggravated battery of a police officer, resisting an officer, possession of cannabis, and urinating in the public way. The aggravated battery charge is a Class 2 felony carrying a three- to seven-year sentence.

That evening, Cicely filed her formal complaint. Two years later, on May 29, 2014, IPRA issued the results of its investigation. The investigator, Alice Chico, determined that the allegations of excessive force against Piwnicki were “unfounded.” That is, she found that the alleged misconduct did not occur. Chico’s analysis focused on the accounts given by McClennon’s sister and his cousin who was the host of the barbecue. (Contacted on the night of May 5, 2012, at a hospital where he was being assessed for injuries, McClennon declined to be interviewed by IPRA.) In her interview, Cicely stated that when her brother was handcuffed on the ground, Piwnicki punched him five times in the face, kicked him once in the abdomen, and tased him. She also stated that Piwnicki smelled of alcohol and that officers took her digital camera but did not inventory it or return it.

The cousin was inside the house when the police entered the backyard. When she went to her back door, she found that three of her guests, including McClennon, were handcuffed. She says she saw Piwnicki strike McClennon once on the left side of his face. They struggled, and Piwnicki tased him. She also stated that as Piwnicki escorted McClennon out of the yard, he slammed him against the back gate.

Chico wrote that the two witnesses “gave conflicting accounts of the incident,” that there was no evidence McClennon had suffered any injuries, and that Piwnicki was within department policies when he tased McClennon, “who was an assailant.” She also noted that Piwnicki passed a Breathalyzer test and that Cicely’s camera was, in fact, inventoried.

“Based on the totality of the circumstances surrounding this incident,” she concluded, “there is no evidence to establish that the incident occurred as alleged.” In light of her finding of “unfounded,” she did not find it necessary to obtain reports from Piwnicki and the other officers on the scene.

The 2001-02 investigation of the Traylor complaint by OPS and the 2012-14 investigation of the McClennon complaint by IPRA share two characteristics that make findings of “not sustained” and “unfounded” all but inevitable.

First, the investigator’s assessment of credibility is heavily weighted toward the police: The credibility of officers is assumed, while that of complainants and witnesses is sharply questioned. In neither instance does the investigator find it necessary to interview the accused officers; a written statement suffices. In the case of community members, by contrast, any inaccuracies or inconsistencies, no matter how marginal to the alleged misconduct, are seized upon to impeach credibility.

Second, the investigators do not consider the officer’s disciplinary history in assessing the allegations in the particular case. This is not an oversight. The collective bargaining agreement between the police union and the city in force at the time effectively barred the agency from employing even the most rudimentary pattern analysis — e.g., reviewing a past history of complaints alleging similar misconduct — as an investigatory tool. In negotiations with the union, Chicago, like a number of other cities, had over the years made concessions with respect to discipline in lieu of increasing compensation and benefits. As a consequence, an accused officer’s disciplinary history could only be considered at the point at which the investigator, having sustained the complaint, was determining what discipline to recommend, and only past “sustained” complaints could be considered for this purpose.

At the time of the 2012 incident, McClennon, a man in his late 30s, had no criminal record. Piwnicki, by contrast, had accumulated a total of 87 complaints over his 14-year career, putting him close to the top of the list of active officers with the most complaints. In McClennon’s criminal trial, the defense demonstrated that in 42 instances, the complaints allege the same pattern of misconduct by Piwnicki: Approaching people of color, they argued, he subjected them to physical and verbal violence. When they challenged his behavior, he imposed false charges. Each of these elements of abuse — excessive force, racial verbal abuse, and false arrest — figured in the McClennon complaint. Yet those patterns were not considered by the investigator. She assessed the complaint in isolation and concluded that there was no way to determine whether the alleged abuse had occurred.

In 2014, in Kalven v. City of Chicago, a case in which I was plaintiff, the Illinois Appellate Court ruled that completed police misconduct investigations are public information under the Freedom of Information Act. Prior to that, the disciplinary histories of officers and underlying investigative files known as complaint registers, or CRs, were hidden from the public behind a heavily defended wall of official secrecy. Occasionally, CRs were produced in discovery in civil rights lawsuits, but under protective orders that barred the parties from sharing them with the public.

The victims of abusive policing practices had no doubt about the realities, and, despite the long odds, some brought formal complaints, but because the investigations of those complaints were kept from the public, it was impossible to document the nature and extent of the phenomenon.

According to CPD records, Piwnicki currently has 99 complaints, putting him in the 99.9th percentile of officers with the most complaints.

In the wake of the Kalven decision, that changed. The Invisible Institute created the Citizens Police Data Project, a public database that currently contains information about 250,000 investigations of allegations of misconduct and the disciplinary histories of 34,000 officers.

According to CPD records, Piwnicki currently has 99 complaints, putting him in the 99.9th percentile of officers with the most complaints.

Contacted through the Chicago Police Department, Piwnicki declined to be interviewed or provide comment.

It also should be noted that there is a large ghost phenomenon of individuals who believe they have been abused by the police but do not file a formal complaint. Studies by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics based on national survey data indicate a ratio of roughly one complaint for every eight people who believe they were subjected to excessive force by the police. There is reason to believe that ratio is conservative, at least with respect to populations most affected by unconstitutional policing.

Nothing to See Here

Although these aggregate numbers are stunning, they do not fully reveal the realities. To grasp the racist nature of the abuse and the institutional failure to identify and discipline it, it is necessary to examine the CR investigations themselves. This is not only a matter of capturing concrete narrative detail; it is also necessary because of the manner in which CRs are categorized. When, as is often the case, a complainant makes multiple allegations of abuse, the CR is coded according to the investigator’s judgment as to the most serious of the allegations. As a result, allegations of racist behavior tend to disappear from an officer’s disciplinary profile, for excessive force will generally trump and thereby bury allegations of racist verbal abuse. But the difference between beating someone up and beating someone up while spewing racist invective is essential. Indeed, in another context, these would be elements used in identifying a hate crime.

Here is a sampling of complaints against Piwnicki and the outcomes of investigations of those complaints. Although none of these complaints were sustained by investigators, the pattern they form is powerful evidence.

August 13, 2000
A Black pregnant woman alleged she was stopped at gunpoint by an unidentified partner of Piwnicki, who forced her to get on the ground. She was handcuffed and placed in the back of a squad car, where she got into a verbal argument with Piwnicki, who slapped her face. Piwnicki’s partner said, “We don’t like black pregnant women,” and made other derogatory statements of a racist and sexist nature.
Not sustained. (CR 266694)

August 13, 2000
A Black man alleged Piwnicki and officer Louis Gade approached him in an unmarked police car in an alley and told him to come to the car. When he ignored the officer’s request, Piwnicki sprayed him in the face with pepper spray. Gade then hit him in the face with a flashlight. He fell to the ground. Piwnicki and Gade repeatedly kicked him. He was handcuffed and taken to the station. The officers refused his request for medical treatment.
Not sustained. (CR 265117)

October 26, 2000
A Black man alleged that he was walking to a restaurant when he was stopped by Piwnicki and other officers. Piwnicki searched under his car and claimed to find narcotics. He was arrested, handcuffed, and put in a squad car. While cuffed in the car, Piwnicki punched and slapped him in the face and punched him in the stomach.
Not sustained. (CR 267343)

November 27, 2000
A Latino man alleged that he was walking down the street when Piwnicki and two other officers stopped him and searched him for drugs. Piwnicki slapped him in the face, one of Piwnicki’s partners elbowed him and also slapped him in the face, and the third partner called him a “fucking Puerto Rican.” A bystander witnessed the incident and reported it to the OPS.
Not sustained. (CR 267496)

March 8, 2002
A Black man alleged that he was walking with his cousin, sister, and girlfriend when they were approached by a police car. Piwnicki and Robert Smith exited the car with their guns drawn. Smith pushed him against a wall, handcuffed him, and put him in the squad car, where Piwnicki punched him in the face. The officers accused the man of being involved in a car accident that caused damage to a police vehicle. When he denied the allegations, one of the officers said, “This one is going on you.” When he asked why he was being falsely charged, one of the officers said to him, “Shut up you black bitch. You are a waste of sperm, nigger.”
Not sustained. (CR 279202)

March 23, 2002
A 13-year-old Black girl alleged that she was playing with her brother and cousins when she threw a stick in the street as Piwnicki and Smith were driving by. The officers exited their car. Piwnicki approached her, pushed her face with his hand, grabbed her arm, and pulled it behind her back. He threatened to “smack the shit out of her” and called her and the other children “cocksuckers.”
Not sustained. (CR 279250)

June 2, 2002
A Latino man alleged that he was driving with his wife, father, and brother when he was stopped by Piwnicki and Smith. Piwnicki told him to “put his fucking hands up,” grabbed him, yanked him out of his car, and handcuffed him. When he asked what was going on, Piwnicki told him “to shut the fuck up” and smacked him on the back of his head. When he attempted to read Piwnicki’s badge, Piwnicki told him not to look at him. Piwnicki also told the man’s wife to “shut the fuck up” and ordered her away from the car. The complainant, who was not arrested, identified the license plate of the car driven by Piwnicki.
Not sustained. (CR 281125)

August 13, 2002
A Black woman alleged that she was standing inside the gate of her apartment building when Piwnicki approached and asked her where she lived. She replied, “I live here where I am standing.” “You better tell me, bitch,” he said and threatened to throw her to the ground and arrest her for trespassing. She countered that he could not do that because she was not trespassing. He grabbed her by the arm, called her a “cunt,” threatened to put marijuana on her, and handcuffed her. “You had to get fucking smart on me,” he said. “Now you are going to jail.” When she asked why he put the handcuffs on so tight, Piwnicki said, “Shut up you cunt nigger bitch,” and slapped her face. Piwnicki then put her in his squad car. “Why did you put your hands on me?” she asked. Piwnicki stopped the car, grabbed her hair, and struck her repeatedly in the face. Later, at the police station, when she asked to speak to a sergeant, Piwnicki grabbed her by the neck, threw her down on a bench, and said, “Shut up you fucking cunt.” Piwnicki falsely charged the woman with drinking on the public way. Witnesses unrelated to the woman corroborated her allegations of physical and verbal abuse. The victim received medical treatment for her injuries. The investigator sustained the allegations against Piwnicki. During the command channel review — the process by which supervisors review a complete complaint investigation into allegations against an officer under their command — Piwnicki’s supervisors objected to the findings, and the findings were overturned.
Sustained finding overturned. (CR 283229)

May 10, 2003
The complaint alleged that three Latino men and two Latina women were parking their car when the drivers in two vehicles behind them honked their horns. After parking the car, one of the men was approached by Piwnicki, who was in plainclothes. “What the fuck,” he said. “Why are you rolling your eyes?” The man replied he didn’t know Piwnicki. “Shut the fuck up, wetback,” said Piwnicki. The man told Piwnicki to leave them alone. Officer Jennifer Chapin Mayoski, who was also in plainclothes, approached and said, “You don’t know who you are fucking with,” and drew her gun. When the complainant started to write down the license plates of the police cars, Mayoski told Piwnicki they should go. As Piwnicki was leaving the scene, he punched the man in the face, breaking his glasses. A second Latino male in the car corroborated the allegations of the first. He also reported that as Piwnicki was leaving, he punched him in the jaw and said, “You ain’t going to do nothing! Fuck you, you spics, you wetbacks.” The two female passengers corroborated the versions given by the two men and further noted that both Piwnicki and Mayoski called them “fucking Mexicans” and “stupid Mexicans.”
Not sustained. (CR 289333)

October 5, 2003
According to the complaint, two Black men were approached by Piwnicki and officer Keith Rigan after one of them was in an altercation with a third party. They alleged that Piwnicki and Rigan asked the third party if they were having a problem with these “niggers and animals.” The officers then punched one of the men in the neck, knocked him to the ground, picked him up, and kneed him in the groin several times. The other man alleged that he was punched, knocked to the ground, and kicked. Both men received medical treatment for their physical injuries.
unfounded. (CR 292855)

June 17, 2007
A Black woman alleged that Piwnicki and officers Russell Willingham and Anthony Martin ordered her and two companions to get out of their parked car and pick up litter around the vehicle. In the course of the interaction, the officers called them “morons,” “ignorant,” and “nigger.”
No affidavit. (CR 1006665)(No action was taken because the complainant did not execute the required affidavit.)

June 17, 2007
A half hour after the incident above — a Black woman alleged that Piwnicki said to her, “Pick up this fucking trash from the ground, this is what niggas do, you fucking moron.”
No affidavit. (CR 1006666)

February 20, 2011
A Black man alleged that he was standing on the street giving his mother a hug when Piwnicki and officer Daniel Sullivan drove up in an unmarked squad car. Piwnicki ordered the man over to the car, saying, “Get over here, you fat greasy nigger.” When the victim responded “wow” and failed to head toward their car, Piwnicki and Sullivan exited their car, chased the man, and knocked a bottle of juice out of his hands. He was criminally charged.
Not sustained. (CR 1043517)

May 18, 2011
According to the complaint, a Puerto Rican woman was driving through an alley en route to a medical appointment when she was stopped by Piwnicki. When she acknowledged that she was cutting through the alley, Piwnicki told her that she was breaking the law. “You people should go back to Mexico,” he said. “Because of people like you, this City is messed up.” The complainant then exited the alley, parked her car, and returned to the area to request Piwnicki’s name and badge number. Piwnicki responded by handcuffing her tightly. He put her in the back of his squad car and berated her: “You people only understand beatings.” When she informed him the handcuffs were too tight, he responded, “I don’t care what the fuck they are.” He also threatened her with the loss of her job as a special education teacher, saying he was going to contact Chicago Public Schools and inform them of her arrest. She was eventually released from Piwnicki’s custody and received medical treatment for the slight fracture she sustained to her wrist from the handcuffs Piwnicki placed on her too tightly.
Not sustained; unfounded. (CR 1045507)

Notwithstanding the long odds of achieving redress, the complainants, all of them Black or brown — and presumably unacquainted with each other — independently filed strikingly similar complaints against Piwnicki alleging excessive force coupled with racist and sexist verbal abuse. The pattern that emerges has probative value, despite the fact that it cannot be determined, in the absence of further investigation, whether the allegations in any given case are true. In a high-functioning accountability system, that pattern would have been discerned early in Piwnicki’s career and prompted appropriate interventions. In a system committed to removing white supremacists from the force, analysis of that pattern would be a priority. In the system we currently have, it has been willfully ignored.

Beyond Impunity

The systemic conditions that have allowed Piwnicki to operate with virtual impunity throughout his career despite these multiple accusations are further illuminated by the rare instances in which complaints against him have been sustained. There are seven such cases:

July 15, 2000
A Black female CPD sergeant filed a complaint alleging that Piwnicki and two other officers were insubordinate, inattentive to duty, and disobeyed a direct order. Piwnicki received a reprimand.
(CR 2000-0263967)

May 6, 2005
A CPD lieutenant initiated a complaint against a CPD police officer for engaging in a bar fight while off duty, in the course of which he was accused of injuring a Black man and calling him a “fucking nigger.” The altercation resulted in the officer’s arrest by the Lake Geneva Police Department. Piwnicki, who was not present at the scene of the incident, subsequently bailed the officer out. Found to have violated a rule requiring that CPD officers file a report when a member of the department is under investigation by a law enforcement agency other than the CPD, Piwnicki received a reprimand.
(CR 297735)

September 29, 2005
A Black husband and wife were at the county courthouse to attend a court date for a relative. The wife alleged that while she was attempting to step into the elevator, Piwnicki (who was wearing a shirt that covered his uniform) slammed his hand across her chest and moved her away to create space for his partner to step onto the elevator. When the woman’s husband verbally confronted Piwnicki, he responded, “Shut the fuck up you coon … You fucking cluck.” Piwnicki then pushed the woman and started swinging at her husband. Piwnicki and the husband attempted to strike each other. During the encounter, Piwnicki grabbed the husband by the neck and called him a “nigger.” Cook County deputy sheriffs separated the husband from Piwnicki and held him against the wall. Even after the husband was physically restrained by deputy sheriffs, Piwnicki continued to attack him saying, “I’ll see you in court you fuckin coon, and I’m going to see to it that you will pay.” In addition to the wife and husband reporting these events, several deputy sheriffs corroborated the portions of the incident they witnessed. Piwnicki followed through with his threat and falsely charged the husband with making threats to an officer. The criminal charges were ultimately dismissed. The allegations made by the couple were sustained, and Piwnicki was suspended for 20 days.
(CR 308792)

October 12, 2005
Piwnicki had a verbal and physical altercation with a Black male CPD officer. He was in the process of arresting two Black women, when the officer, who was in plainclothes, approached him and asked to see his identification. Piwnicki refused. “I don’t know who the fuck you are,” he is alleged to have said to the officer, who proved to be Sgt. Ronald Watts. (It would later be established that Watts was the leader of a criminal enterprise that preyed on residents of the public housing development where the confrontation between the two officers occurred.) Piwnicki and Watts grabbed at each other. “I know how you motherfuckers roll,” Watts is alleged to have said. “You’re not on the plantation anymore.” The Internal Affairs Division found that the two officers engaged in an unjustified altercation. Each was suspended for 10 days.
(CR 309085)

July 10, 2006
A Black female CPD officer filed a complaint on behalf of her son. She alleged that her son was sitting in his yard when Piwnicki approached him. He told him, “Come here, you fucking Negro,” then slapped him in the face repeatedly and placed an empty alcohol bottle that was laying on the street in his back pocket. When the man removed the bottle from his pocket and threw it on the ground, Piwnicki kicked him in his groin area and repeatedly called him “nigger.” Piwnicki falsely arrested the complainant for drinking on the public way. The man’s mother observed the incident and heard Piwnicki call her son a “nigger.” The investigator sustained the allegation that Piwnicki verbally abused the man, finding there was “sufficient evidence to support the allegation that PO Piwnicki used profane and derogatory language toward the victim.” Piwnicki received a reprimand.
(CR 306868)

June 10, 2010
A Black woman was sitting on the porch of her home with several neighbors. From his squad car on the street, Piwnicki is alleged to have addressed them as “motherfuckers” and ordered them off the porch. “Well, sir, I live here,” she responded. Piwnicki is then alleged to have threatened “to lock her black ass up.” A male neighbor approached the porch and encountered Piwnicki, who is alleged to have said, “You gonna run, nigger?” “No,” he replied, “why would I run if I haven’t done anything?” Piwnicki got out of his vehicle, grabbed the man, and handcuffed and arrested him. As he left, Piwnicki told the woman on the porch, “When I come back, I’m locking your black ass up, too.” The woman called her landlord, a CPD officer, who advised her to call a sergeant to file a complaint. When the sergeant arrived, he refused to take her complaint. Piwnicki received a 10-day suspension, and a complaint against the sergeant was also sustained.
(CR 1037059)

March 15, 2019
Piwnicki failed to serve notice on the person named in an order of protection. The individual who had secured the order filed a complaint against Piwnicki for failure to provide service. The complaint was sustained, and he was given a reprimand.
(CR 2019-0003252)

Putting aside the last of these complaints, the other six sustained complaints against Piwnicki share a common feature: All involve other law enforcement personnel as antagonist, complainant, or witness. Under those circumstances, the disciplinary system responded. What it has proved unwilling to address are the scores of complaints alleging racist abuse by Piwnicki filed by Black and brown Chicagoans without any connection to law enforcement.

Despite the massive public record describing Piwnicki’s racism, the only change in his status within the CPD over the course of his career is that he was promoted to detective in 2013 and then to sergeant in late 2017. The latter promotion came more than two years after the political upheaval precipitated by release of the video of the police murder of McDonald and a year after the release of the Department of Justice’s report on its investigation of the CPD in which it expressed “serious concerns” about patterns of racially discriminatory conduct by CPD officers and found that “the impact of CPD’s pattern or practice of unreasonable force falls heaviest on predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods.”

Since his promotions, Piwnicki has had relatively few CRs. An obvious reason for this is that the nature of the job is different. There is less direct contact with community members. At the same time, as a sergeant, he remains in a position to do harm. It is a widely shared belief among those working to advance police reform that sergeants as first-line supervisors are the key to changing institutional culture. By the same token, Piwnicki’s promotion to sergeant puts him in the position to perpetuate the ugly racist subculture within the department that he has embodied throughout his career.

Piwnicki’s promotion to sergeant puts him in the position to perpetuate the ugly racist subculture within the department that he has embodied throughout his career.

Just as the Office of Professional Standards was replaced by the Independent Police Review Authority in the wake of a police scandal, the IPRA was replaced in 2017 by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability in the wake of the police murder of McDonald. Over time, the quality of COPA’s investigations of misconduct complaints has significantly improved, but it remains constrained by the police union contract from doing the sort of pattern analysis necessary to effectively curb the immense damage to public trust caused by officers such as Piwnicki.

Although those constraints have been relaxed somewhat, they continue to hobble effective pattern analysis. Under the most recent version of the union contract, negotiated last year, COPA and the Bureau of Internal Affairs may consider complaints up to seven years old alleging excessive force, racial verbal abuse, and criminal conduct for the purpose of assessing credibility. They may only consider other categories of complaints if they are sustained. And under no circumstances can they consider complaints that have been determined to be “not founded.”

Fraternal Order of Police president Catanzara’s argument that officers should be judged by their actions is impeached by his union’s long history of using collective bargaining to block such accountability. Applied to Piwnicki, the seven-year look back would not even begin to reveal his career-long pattern of behavior that results in complaints of racial abuse by Black and brown Chicagoans.

If the administration of Mayor Brandon Johnson is serious about addressing racism within CPD ranks, it will go beyond investigating officers affiliated with extremist groups and will prioritize vigorous pattern analysis of citizen complaints, while taking steps to remove the constraints imposed on such analysis by the police union contract. Unless and until it does, the career of Piwnicki will stand as the cautionary tale: An officer who, for over a quarter century, has been allowed to openly act out his racial hostilities by an oversight system that has only seen fit to discipline him when his abusive behavior spills over onto others in law enforcement.

Toward the end of his tenure, I asked Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson what he had learned since assuming leadership of the department. A Black officer who had not sought the position, he had been appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the aftermath of the McDonald revelations.

Johnson replied that he had been surprised above all by the intensity of the racism within the department — an unexpected observation from a Black officer who had risen through the ranks — and he expressed the hope that the problem would be resolved over time by the retirement of certain older officers.

Piwnicki refutes that hope. As he approaches the end of his career, his complaint history is a teaching. To the extent that the department has allowed him to abuse people of color with impunity while promoting him first to detective and then to sergeant, his career stands as a model for others disposed to engage in racial abuse within their job descriptions as Chicago police officers.

In response to inquiries from The Intercept, the Chicago Police Department provided the following statement:

The Chicago Police Department’s members are held to the highest standard and expected to conduct themselves with the utmost professionalism both on and off duty. Per CPD policy, all members are prohibited from engaging in any illegal discrimination against an individual or group on the basis of any protected class under federal, state and local law.

We have also been working to implement a strengthened policy prohibiting members from participating, supporting and associating with criminal and bias-based organizations. We are updating this policy in close collaboration with the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), which recently voted to approve the revised policy. 

Allegations of Department members violating CPD policy are thoroughly investigated. During the course of these investigations, members are afforded due process. Members found in violation will be held accountable based on the findings of these investigations.

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This post was originally published on The Intercept.