72: The Assassination Attempt on Ronald Reagan & Bite Mark Analysis

Let's Go To Court!

True Crime, History, Comedy

4.8 • 4.8K Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2019

⏱️ 115 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ione Cychosz’s life ended in the worst possible way. Her body was discovered in a vacant lot. She’d been beaten, stabbed, and bitten. There were no witnesses. And since it was the 80’s, investigators didn’t test for DNA. So they turned to a relatively new form of science — bite mark analysis. A forensic dentist examined the bite marks and told detectives that the killer was missing an upper front tooth. It didn’t take long for investigators to find 20-year-old Robert Lee Stinson. Robert lived near the crime scene and was missing a right front tooth. The detectives knew they had the right guy. There was just one problem: They didn’t.

Then, Brandi tells us about the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. Interestingly, when John Hinckley Jr. set out to murder Ronald Reagan, he didn’t have a political agenda. In fact, John later admitted that he opened fire on the president in an attempt to impress actress Jodie Foster. He’d become obsessed with Jodie ever since he saw her in the movie Taxi Driver. His trial drew worldwide attention and forever changed the way we look at insanity pleas.

And now for a note about our process. For each episode, Kristin reads a bunch of articles, then spits them back out in her very limited vocabulary. Brandi copies and pastes from the best sources on the web. And sometimes Wikipedia. (No shade, Wikipedia. We love you.) We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the real experts who covered these cases.

In this episode, Kristin pulled from:
“False Positive: When Forensic Science Fails,” Vox video
“Robert Lee Stinson,” National Registry of Exonerations
“Robert Lee Stinson case,” Wikipedia
“Robert Lee Stinson,” Innocence Project
“Innocent man piecing life together after conviction,” by Dinesh Ramde for the Associated Press
“A long ride for me,” by Dinesh Ramde and Todd Richmond for the Associated Press
“Man sentenced to life for murder,” Associated Press

In this episode, Brandi pulled from:
“The John Hinckley Case” by Denise Noe, Crime Library
“The Trial of John W. Hinckley Jr.” Famous-Trials.com
“John Hinckley Jr.” wikipedia.org

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Albert Einstein here, Chico and I, are out for walkies in the park.
0:04.3	My watch tells me we've walked exactly 3,04 steps, our personal best.
0:09.5	Our steps aren't the only thing we track.
0:11.5	Our smart meter display at home tells us how much energy we use daily,
0:15.4	weekly and monthly, which can help me make changes to save energy. And now my watch tells me,
0:20.8	it's time to head back for a gappa, right, Chico?
0:24.0	For extra help managing your household budgets, such get a smart meter today.
0:28.0	Consumer Action Required Eligibility may vary.
0:30.0	One semester of law school.
0:32.0	One semester of law school one semester of criminal justice two experts I'm Kristen Caruso. I'm Brandy Egan
0:38.9	Let's go to court on this episode. I'll talk about bite mark analysis and I'll be talking about an
0:45.4	assassination attempt is it Reagan it is I'm so excited I don't know anything about this.
0:54.0	You don't? No. I didn't know anything about it either.
0:56.0	Okay, this is Chris. Oh, whoa.
0:59.0	But I'm going first. You go first.
1:01.0	I say you're looking at me like I was supposed to start. You go first.
1:04.0	I think I'm just excited for yours and I kind of wanted you to start.
1:08.0	But fine, we'll go in order.
1:12.0	Okay, first of of all poor Ian. Ian had no idea that when he
1:16.7	emailed with two cases I would just like do them both of them.
1:21.3	Do you think he's to be upset about that?
1:24.0	No, you're right.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Let's Go To Court!, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Let's Go To Court! and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.