S3 Ep144: Mischelle Lawless: The Man in the Red Hat (Part 5)

Crime Weekly

Audioboom Studios

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.8 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2023

⏱️ 99 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the early morning hours of November 8th, 1992, 19-year-old nursing student Mischelle Lawless was found dead, just outside Benton, Missouri, on the side of Interstate 70. Investigators claimed the evidence suggested Mischelle had fought for her life, ran from her attacker and was pursued and caught before being returned to her car where she was shot three times in the back of the head. After questioning Mischelle’s boyfriend and friends, the case went cold until April 7th of 1993, when 17 year old Josh Kezer was arrested and charged with the murder of Mischelle Lawless. Kezer’s arrest was based on information provided to police by two jailhouse informants, and supporting testimony of a witness who claimed to see Mischelle and Josh arguing at a party the night of her murder, as well as another witness who placed Kezer at the scene of the crime. Despite the lack of physical evidence and the questionable credibility of the witnesses and informants, Josh Kezer was found guilty of second degree murder and he was sentenced to 60 years in prison. However, sixteen years later Josh Kezer was exonerated when discovered that the eyewitness placing Kezer at the scene had changed his account of that evening multiple times. Kezer sued for wrongful conviction and won.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Crime Weekly. I am Stephanie Harlow. And I'm Derek
0:16.7	Lavasser. So today we are going into our fifth and final part of the Michelle Lawless
0:22.1	series. And today we're actually going to fast forward into the future. We're going to
0:28.5	leave 1994 and we're in a travel to January of 2006. But before we dive in, is there anything
0:33.4	you want to throw out there or do you just want to get going? Nope. We're recording on a Sunday
0:37.6	right now because this is going to be the episode you guys are seeing in the upcoming weekend. We're
0:41.4	going to be recording our regular night tomorrow because we won't be able to record the week of
0:45.4	Crime Con, which we're super excited about. So yeah, it's Sunday. Let's get right into it.
0:50.2	All right. So we're in January 2006. At this time, Bill Farrell had ended his almost 30-year
0:56.4	reign as the sheriff of Scott County and a man named Rick Walter had taken his place. Now,
1:02.2	if that name sounds familiar to you, it's because we've already talked about Rick Walter during
1:06.7	this series, during part one and briefly during part two, but he hasn't really come back into
1:10.9	the story since. Walter was one of the first two responders on the scene of Michelle Lawless's
1:16.6	murder. Remember, it was him and Deputy Moore. And he also interviewed Mark Abbott the afternoon
1:24.9	after Michelle's murder at Mark Abbott's trailer. Now, Walter had never been comfortable with
1:30.5	Josh Keyser's conviction. He said, quote, there were series unanswered questions. How did Josh get
1:36.4	from Kankikey to Benton to be able to use a mandatory car? Why would he have wanted to kill Michelle
1:41.5	in the first place? Being rejected by a girl, the parties seemed an unlikely motive to travel
1:46.0	350 miles to hunt her down and kill her a week later. I thought that at least others had to be
1:51.9	end quote. So when Walter was sheriff, he decided to quietly reopen the case, only telling those in
1:58.5	his department that they were going to be taking another look at it, but later he realized that
2:02.4	someone must have leaked that information because just a few days after announcing this to the
	...

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