Host: Dan Kennedy

Dan: [00:00:02] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. And on this week's episode, we have two stories for you. 

Our first story is from Michael VonAllmen. And he told it in San Antonio in 2016 at a workshop that we did in partnership with the Innocence Project. Here's Michael.

[applause] 

Michael: [00:00:27] In January of 1983, I was arrested for raping some woman I had never seen before. I was fortunate enough to make bond when I was arrested, so I avoided incarceration until the conviction. As soon as I was convicted, they took me down to the jail, and right away I got the typical, "Hey, what are you in for?" And my response was, "Man, I'm in here for rape, but I didn't do it." 

A few months later, I'm shipped down to the prison. I'm shipped down to the prison, go into the fish tank and right away the story starts, "What are you in for?" And I say, "I'm in for a rape, but I swear I didn't do it." And that's where I met the me toos. They said, "Yeah, me too. Let me know how that works for you." [audience laughter]

So, a few years pass by and I'm no longer telling that story to the fish, I'm telling to the lifers and the long timers. As I tell my story, I get the feedback, "Your story sounds believable. There's one other story that sounds believable, and that's the story of Ted Maynard. And I said, "Well, who is Ted Maynard?" Because it kept coming back. Ted Maynard sounds like he's innocent as well. So, I found that because I'm innocent, I seek him out. I'm drawn to this guy, Ted Maynard. 

When somebody finally points him out to me on the yard, and he's this old, broken, frail man that has isolated himself from the rest of the population because of the hard bit he had done early on. When I met him, he had been locked up about 15, 16 years and done learned how to do his time. And his time was to cut everybody out, and just eat and sleep. But because of this innocence, I'm drawn to him. And finally, I get up next to him and we develop a relationship and we start jailing together. We don't talk about our innocence, we talk about how to do time. And that's the way it was. We just did our bit together. 

11 years goes by, and all of a sudden, I get paroled. I go to Maynard and I said, "Maynard--" And he had already been abandoned by everybody else. I tell him, "Maynard, I'm going to remember you when I get out, I'll help you." I get out, and true to my word, I write him a few letters, I send him a little money, but I'm dealing with readjustment myself. And in a short time, I had just become another one of those transient people in Maynard's life who crossed through his world. 

But I didn't forget Maynard. 16 years on parole goes by, and one day I opened up my newspaper and there's the Innocence Project right there on my kitchen table. 16 years on parole. I call them up and they go to work on my case and uncover this textbook example of mistaken identity. And all of a sudden, after 27 years as a convicted sex offender, I'm a real-life citizen again. [audience applause] 

[00:05:06] I get to vote [audience chuckles] and I get a voice. All of a sudden, I got a real live voice as well. And the very first thing I say with my voice is, "Get Ted Maynard out of prison. He's got nothing in this world-- [audience applause] 

He's got nothing in this world but a life sentence. He needs some help." So, the Innocence Project took on his case, and they got to looking at it. His case started in 1960. So, uncovering any evidence in that thing was really difficult. In fact, impossible. So, in the end, the Innocence Project didn't have anything to work with. Not that they were abandoning the case, but my voice, I wasn't going to let it go, I said, "Well, what about parole? What about some other way of doing it?" And then, starts preparing a parole package for Ted. 

But in the end, by now, Ted had been diagnosed with dementia. So, for him to be paroled was definitely to a nursing home, some kind of way. We weren't finding any nursing home that would take a convicted murderer. And that's where my voice, that's as far as my voice could carry Ted. But I still have this voice. So, I lift it up in other areas. The death penalty being the first thing I go after. [audience applause] 

As I start lifting my voice with the death penalty, there's where I start meeting an incredible group of people that I never imagined existed. And one of them was Sister Helen Prejean. [audience applause] 

The author of the book Dead Man Walking and the subject of the same movie Dead Man Walking. An incredible person who attacks the death penalty purely on the love of another human being. Way different from while I was attacking it. But to hear her talk about this message of love, you can't help but be moved by her message. I was traveling with Sister Helen to another venue when I got a phone call from my wife. And the hospital had called. They want to know if I would call them. I call them and they tell me, “Ted Maynard has had some medical issues. You are the only person--” 

And because of the parole package being sent, I had gone back to the prison for the first time to visit Ted and to let him know that I hadn't forgotten him, that I was doing all I could from here, that we were working on this parole package. That visit in 2012 or 2013 was the first visit he had since 1973. [audience aww] So, when he had this medical issue, the medical people looked on his record and saw that I was the only person in his life in the outside in the last 30 plus years. They asked if I would mind making decisions about Ted's life or Ted's medical condition. 

Well, of course, I was honored to be able to step up for Ted in this situation. So, they asked if I'd come in and talk to him. When I go in and talk to him, they tell me how dire his situation is, that he's had a stroke, his larynx, throat is paralyzed. He's on a ventilator. In order for him to live, we're going to have to put a trach in and install a feeding tube. We can keep him alive artificially. Is that what Ted wanted for his life? Whoa, not me. Well, well, while I was honored to step up, now it got to be a really heavy burden. And I said, “If you don't mind, let me invite the people that's been investigating this case in and we'll all collectively make a decision here.” 

They agreed. And the next day, myself, the doctor team and the Kentucky Innocence Project met with these folks. We're hearing Ted's situation. They're explaining how they're going to put this trach, and the feeding tube in and then they say, “And he's going to be confined to the bed for the rest of his life.” I just heard the words confined, and that was, “Whoa, wait a minute. I'm not here to confine anybody. I'm here as a liberator.” So, with that word, I was able to decide, “Yes, let's pull the plug on Ted and liberate him.” [clears throat] 

So, we collectively made that decision. The medical team, the Innocence Project and myself, we walk into the room. The doctor, the respiratory therapist, removed the ventilator tube. The armed guard that's been sitting with him for 24/7 gets up and walks out of the room. The doctors walk out. And for the first time in 41 years, Ted is outside of a prison wall with no guard supervision. They pull the tube, and right away the decline starts. It was obvious that Ted was going to be dead in just a few minutes. A really awkward moment, solemn moment. 

And the first thing I do is identify myself. I said, "Ted, it's Mike. You're in the hospital. You're not going back to prison." And there's silence. You just watch the numbers going down, the line starting to decrease. I just had this prison rage all of a sudden, and I just scream out, "Ain't no fucking screws going to tell you what to do anymore. It's over with, brother." [audience applause] 

Again, there's this silence. You just wonder, what do you say? And Linda says, "You're going to a better place, Ted." It's just so awkward. What do you say to someone that you know is about to die? And the numbers keep going down, and it's definite. He is going to be dead within seconds when out of nowhere flashes Sister Helen in front of my eyes. And without control of my own mouth, I just said, "Ted, I love you." 

I was shocked that these words just came out. But even more shocking was how those numbers were in decline, all of a sudden, paused and just hovered, like he was processing what he had just heard, the words that no one has said to him in a meaningful way in over 40 years. And then, the numbers started to rise. [audience chuckles] I said, "What?" It was certain. There was this moment of rise and it was like, “Yes, this is freedom. Being loved was freedom.” They got it. And then, the numbers just plunged and boom, Ted was dead. 

The doctor came in, reached over and felt for a pulse, then he took a stethoscope, listened for a heartbeat. then he looked at his watch and noted the time of death. Ted was exonerated by a medical doctor, and I am his voice. Thank you. [audience applause] 

Dan: [00:15:32] That was Michael VonAllmen. And we met Michael through a workshop we did with exonerated prisoners at a conference that was put on by the Innocence Project. 

Here's Larry Rosen, The Moth's community program manager and also one of Michael's story instructors from the workshop, talking about the process of working with Michael.

Larry: [00:15:52] So, we've been doing these workshops with exonerees at the Innocence Network Conference since 2012. So, this was our fifth this year. Michael has come to every single one. He came to the first one in 2012. He worked with Terence Mickey was one of our instructors at that point. Terence told me that at that point, Michael really wanted to be there, but he was shy, and so he didn't share a story. Instead, he just shared his love of basketball. He broke down the rivalry between the Wildcats and the Cardinals in great detail. 

And then, he came next year, and he worked with our executive producer, Sarah Austin Jenness. They became great buddies, and same thing and he just began, there was a story that he wanted to tell. And then, subsequently, he worked with a bunch of us, including Kate Tellers, Bonnie Levison, Dawn Fraser, just trying to get at what the story was. And so, Bonnie worked with him in 2015, and she said he was getting so close, but she said what she most felt from him was that he wanted to get this story out, and he still wasn't completely focused on it. 

And so, I got to work with him this year, and I'm taking him through all the basic prompting things that we do in any workshop, just basically giving him things to think about. I'm just starting to encourage him toward a story. He stops me and he says, "I want to tell this story about Ted." I said, "Okay." And he told it, and it was beautiful. And so, these guys all told their stories the next day at this luncheon for everybody at the conference was over 500 people. And Michael, after five years, stood up on that stage and shared this with 500 people who just went crazy, and the tears and the love in the room was just amazing.

Dan: [00:17:57] Michael VonAllmen was convicted in 1983 and sentenced to 35 years in prison. He served 11 years before he was paroled in 1994, and later contacted the Innocence Project for their assistance. In 2010, all charges were dropped and his name was cleared. From everyone here at The Moth, we'd like to thank Michael for sharing his story. 

Our next story is from Ted Conover. And Ted has told many stories for us over the years, almost all of which involve his work as an undercover journalist. He just wrote a new book called Immersion: A Writer's Guide to Going Deep. And in celebration of that, here's a story he told live at a Moth Mainstage here in New York way back in 2005. Here's Ted Conover.

[applause] 

Ted: [00:18:52] Prisoners tell lies. Every corrections officer knows this. In fact, there's even a joke about it. How do you know when a prisoner is lying? When he opens his mouth. [audience chuckles] 

I spent almost a year working as a state corrections officer, or CO, up at Sing Sing. I wasn't there for the same reason as my fellow officers who were there for a paycheck. I was there to learn about the life and be able to write a book about it. But the inmates didn't know that, and so they lied to me the same as anybody else. For most of my time, I worked in a place called B Block. It's a massive human warehouse with almost 600 men in it. One of those men was an artist, a Latino guy named Sonny. About 25 years old, slightly built. He had a giant set of felt tip markers.

And for a price of four packs of cigarettes, another inmate could pay him to do a customized greeting card for any occasion. Easter, Mom, I miss you, whatever. But it would say the name of mom and it would have anything else personal you wanted in it. These works of art, and they were, took him two or three days to complete. I'd watch him admiringly. He was a friendly guy, and I got talking to him and one day I said, "Sonny, what are you doing in here?" I had him pegged for some drug offense, you know, some massive sentence for a relatively small crime. He made a gun out of his hand and he said, "Murder. Murder, CO. Triple life." And I thought, whoa, you, murder?

About a month later, the department put an inmate lookup page on their website, so you could enter a person's name and it helps if you have their number too, which I did. When I did that for Sonny, it came back larceny. So, Sonny was a burglar or a thief. He wasn't a murderer. But he was in a place where you want everybody to think you're as tough as you could possibly be. And being a murderer is a good thing in Sing Sing. I understood why Sonny had told me that. 

I had another inmate on the other side of that floor who was one of the very few white guys on the floor. There were 112 inmates I supervised. Four of them were white, he was one. He was a middle-aged guy, glasses, not much hair left and constantly afraid of the other prisoners. You could just see him, he's always looking over his shoulder, he was afraid. Maybe that's one reason he was friendly to me. I liked him okay. And one day I said, "Hey, Van Ness, so what brings you here anyway?" He looked ashamed. He said, "Attempted murder, CO. Attempted murder. I tried to kill my business partner." I said, "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that." [audience laughter] I went home right away, and I looked up Van Ness, and he was in for second degree sodomy, which means sexual intercourse with somebody under 13 years of age. 

You can see why somebody like that would be afraid in prison and you can see why somebody like that would tell a lie. The most common lie, I suppose, was the one you hear almost every day, which is just, "I didn't do it. See, that's not me. I'm doing somebody else's time. This is a bum rap. I was framed." You hear this every single day. At first, I was interested and I thought, wow, a travesty has occurred-- [audience chuckles] I'd want to know more. But it doesn't take long. You just filter that out, you just add it to the rest of the noise you deal with every day. 

Officers have a response. They don't say this to the inmates. You don't want to stir things up. But the response we tell each other is, "Yeah, well, okay, he didn't do that. But you know, he did something else." It's cynical, but most crimes go unsolved. When a person is sent to Sing Sing, when they are convicted of a crime, almost always it's been more than one crime that got them there. So, it may be the officers are right though that that idea always bothered me. 

There was one inmate I talked to, even though I didn't like him. His name was Warith Al Habib. He was an older man. I'd say late 50s, tall, handsome, wore a kufi and other Muslim garb. And he loved to yell at the COs. He loved to get a good rant going. And mine came one day when I asked him for his ID card. He had no reason to dislike me, but bing, "ID card? You mean transit pass, don't you, CO? You mean transit pass? Because this is South Africa. This is the apartheid system here. This is the white man oppressing the black man. This is a Bantustan. You heard, CO? You know what that word means? I bet you don't, do you? Bantustan, CO, look it up."

That's an unpleasant thing to hear, but I was interested because the only other explanation was the CO's explanation of why there was this terrible, terrible racial imbalance in prison. And the CO's explanation doesn't even bear repeating. So, I was interested in what Habib had to say. The problem is, I couldn't tell him so, because any CO who admits to accepting an idea like that that there is the system might be a little rigged, loses all credibility. Not only among COs, but among the prisoners. They don't want to hear that from you, you are there to stand up for the law and stand up for the system. So, I didn't say that to Habib, but I did ask him other things.

He got so much respect from all these prisoners. I learned one reason is he'd been in so long, he had a bad limp. He had a limp, because he had a bullet in his butt against his hip. He had the bullet there, according to him, because the state wouldn't pay to take it out. The bullet had come from a state trooper during the Attica uprising in 1974, I think. Habib was respected for that. If he wanted a shower and it wasn't his day for a shower, the younger guys would say, "Hey, Conover. Give my shower to Habib. Habib can have my shower." And I'd say, "Okay." 

One day, I said to Habib, "What are you here for?" He said, "Oh, man, I'm locked up. I'm locked up for rape, man." I said, "What?" First of all, I thought he was telling me the truth, but I couldn't understand all the respect he was getting if that was his crime, because that's only slightly higher on the scale than Van Ness' crime. So, I was intrigued by Habib. I was worried about him, but I was intrigued. I thought he had a lot to tell. He left Sing Sing before I did. His arthritis got so bad, he couldn't climb the steps. There's a lot of steps there. So, he got sent to the geriatric unit of another prison. Yes, there are many geriatric units for prisoners these days. 

When I quit a few months later, I thought, of all the people, all the interesting people I met in prison, who I'd talk to, Habib's at the top of my list. So, I went back to that inmate lookup page. Habib is now at Green Haven Correctional Facility. I wrote him a letter, he wrote me back and two weeks later, I'm sitting in the visit room of Green Haven. He's the only inmate I ever went to visit, and he is so happy I'm there, because I'm the first person who's visited him in more than five years. I was happy too. I was happy, because I thought, for once, one of the walls is down. I'm not wearing a uniform. He knows I'm interested in him as a person. He's going to be candid with me. 

The first thing I wanted to know was about this rape thing. It's the same rap I heard time after time at Sing Sing. "I didn't do it, Conover, I was a setup. I'd been let out, I'd been paroled, I'd been free like two months and they're looking for a con. They're looking for a con to lay this crime on. And man, I was in my late 50s when I got charged with that. I didn't do it. I got a good lawyer though, Conover. I got a good lawyer. She's been trying to get me out for years. She's going to get me out. I think it's going to happen real soon." I said, "Okay, Habib, you got a good lawyer. I'm glad for that. Tell me what else. Tell me what else you went to prison for." 

He had a long story. It started early on. He ran numbers in Newark. He was called Newark Red. He told me he became a gangster, "I was a stick up man, Conover." His second prison term was for robbery and assault. And then, he went in once for extortion. He converted to Islam during his third term. He said, "It wasn't till then I came down off my high horse, Conover. I learned there's more important things in the world than me." Islam had been good for him. You could see it had filled his life with purpose and discipline. I liked hearing about all that. 

He was glad to tell. He was glad I was there too, because of all the vending machines around us. And in prison, you get tired of the food and then the vending machines, there's pies and sandwiches and I bought a lot of those for us and we spent a pleasant afternoon that way. I couldn't figure out how to work Habib into my book. He was such an interesting guy, but I didn't think he was telling me the whole story. I went on writing. I stopped thinking about him until about four months later. 

It was a hot night in August. I was lying on my bed, almost midnight. I was falling asleep. I had NY1 news on. The announcer said something about another inmate exonerated on DNA evidence. Barry Scheck today got another inmate free on the basis of DNA evidence. I sat up, and I looked and damn if it wasn't Habib coming out of Green Haven Prison with his lawyer, Ms. Peel and Barry Scheck. And I said, “Oh, my God.” 

I woke up my wife and I said, "Margo, you're not going to believe this, but this is the guy. This is the guy who said he was innocent. And he was innocent." It shook me up. [audience chuckles] I'm still shook up. I couldn't sleep well that night. First thing next morning, I called a guy I had worked with who's now an NYPD officer, and I said, "Alcantara, you remember that guy Habib used to yell at us?" He said, "Oh, yeah, I remember." I said, "You remember--" 

He said he was innocent. And he said, "Well, I suppose everybody said that." And I said, "He was innocent. I just saw him on TV. Barry Scheck got him off." And he said, "Huh, that's interesting, Conover. But if he didn't do that crime, I bet he did something else." And I thought, oh, man. [audience chuckles] The problem that stuck with me was both that in this occasion, maybe he did do something else, but he was doing time that wasn't his to do. He did six years. He did six years that were not his crime. And the second thing that got me was I was part of his punishment. I was the guy who locked him in every day. And that bothered me. 

I moved to New York about 15 years ago from Colorado, and I thought, to make it in a city like this, you're going to have to be a little more tough, you're going to have to be a little more suspicious, you're going to have to watch out for yourself and you're going to have to question what people say. Be a little less trusting, don't take things at face value and especially-- Well, Habib taught me this lesson. Especially in a place like prison, you had to be skeptical, because you hear untruths all day long. But the lesson Habib taught me was this, that if you don't question that reflex, if you don't imagine now and then there's cotton in your ears and stop to listen to somebody who is not listened to, you might just lose your ability to hear the truth when it comes at you. So, thanks. Thank you very much.

[cheers and applause] 

Dan: [00:31:32] Ted Conover is a journalist and professor at NYU. And his journeys have seen him as a train hopper, a border crosser and meat inspector. His new book, Immersion: A Writer's Guide to Going Deep, is out now. 

That's all for this week. Thanks to all of you for listening. And from all of us here at The Moth in New York, we hope you have a story-worthy week.

Mooj: [00:31:58] Dan Kennedy is the author of the books, Loser Goes First, Rock On and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and performer with The Moth.

Dan: [00:32:07] Podcast production by Timothy Lou Ly. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.