On the night of May 31st, 2002, Diane Fanning was sitting in her living room flipping through channels

on TV when she landed on the news magazine show 2020.

And the show looked interesting.

Of course we had a woman claiming she was innocent and her family saying she was innocent and her family saying she was innocent and her friends and her lawyers.

But you know, honestly, that's the kind of thing that you read about all the time from people who've been convicted.

It just doesn't ring true initially and I was very skeptical listening to her story

The episode Diane was watching concerned a woman named Julie Ray. Julie was from Lawrenceville, Illinois.

Two months earlier, she had been convicted of stabbing her 10-year-old son Joel to death.

She'd been sentenced to 65 years in prison.

Julie was a 28 year old PhD student and single mom at the time of Joel's death.

She said an intruder had broken into the house around 4 a.m. and fatally stabbed her son with a knife

taken from her kitchen. But authorities found her story suspicious. They'd found no evidence of a break-in. At trial, her ex-husband

painted her as unstable and emotionally volatile. The two were engaged in a messy custody

dispute. The lead prosecutor argued that she'd

killed Joel in an act of vengeance. But as Diane Fanning watched the

episode, she spotted some flaws in the prosecutor's argument.

The prosecutor just didn't seem right.

He talked about things never happening,

like no one ever takes a weapon from your home and uses it against you.

He also talked about how someone doesn't just come and run away without killing all the witnesses.

Well, I was working on a book about Tommy Lynn Sales at that time,

and quite honestly, he did that a lot.

...