A shocking series of murders stunned the rural California mountain town of Placerville in the 1980s. Authorities were under intense pressure to solve the cases, and for a while it seemed they did.
But Times reporters Anita Chabria and Jessica Garrison spent more than a year reexamining the crimes and found troubling questions about both justice and the justice system. Nearly two decades after a woman falsely confessed to a shocking murder, her sons finally see her exonerated from a wrongful conviction that derailed their lives.
Forty years ago, Michael Anthony Cox was convicted of the murders of three girls in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Years later, the two main witnesses at his trial, also teenagers, recanted, saying police had pressured them into false stories. So why is Cox still on death row? California law enforcement is in the midst of a culture war, as experts inside and outside the system question a commonly used police interrogation method that they say can lead to false confessions and wrongful convictions.
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