From Story Mechanics and VPM.

There's an important group of people who we haven't talked about yet in this series.

A group of people who have been profoundly impacted by Mary Jane Burton's actions,

the women who were assaulted, women who are at the center of the original cases and then further impacted when those

cases broke back open in the 2000s. This episode may be especially disturbing

because in order to talk about the experiences of these women

were including a bit more detail about the sexual assaults themselves, as well as a mention of

self-harm. Early in my reporting, I had a call with one of these women and her story really stuck with me.

Her name is Anne.

At the time that I identified, Earl, I was like in this hyper-vigilance date. You know, I was kind of looking all the time for someone who was going to come and attack me because my

attacker had told me that he would come back and get me if I told the police.

In December of 1981, a man broke into Anne's home

in the middle of the night and raped her.

She identified Julius Earl Ruffin as her attacker. We met Earl in

episode five. He worked in maintenance at the hospital where Anne worked. A few weeks

after the assault, she happened to pass by Earl standing in an elevator at work and became convinced that he was the man who had attacked her.

You know, I think when somebody, you know, makes an eyewitness identification,

number one, I mean, we certainly know now in the science that we're not very reliable witnesses and number two

we're especially poor witnesses when we're dealing with someone of a different

race but at the time, Anne's identification of Earl was enough to take the case to trial.

Actually, it went to trial three times. In the first two, some members of the jury were black, and those trials ended with

hung juries. The third jury had zero black jurors, and they convicted Earl in just seven minutes.

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