S17 Ep9: The Star Witness

Truth & Justice with Bob Ruff

Bob Ruff

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.6 • 7.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 September 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Larry Brooks was 12 years old and in the 5th grade when his mother, aunt and mother's boyfriend were murdered in the living room of his home. He's an often overlooked victim in this case. He was courageous enough to come out of his room after the attack, and call 911. He told the first responding officers what he had seen and heard, but rather than conducting an actual thorough investigation, the detectives on the case used Larry as a pawn in their attempt to fabricate a case against Chris Bynum. In this episode we hear Larry's own words, as he described in a deposition where his trial testimony actually came from.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From NBII Studios, this is Truth and Justice, a crowdsourced investigation in real time. I'm Bob Ruff. In a case where five people lost their lives and a man was sent to prison for the rest of his,
0:44.1	one would hope that the police would have investigated every angle, left no stone unturned.
0:51.4	You would hope that the detectives in charge would do everything in their power to make
0:55.2	sure that these victims received justice, and that the monster who took their lives was locked
1:00.6	away forever. But one of the first things that really stood out to me when I began reading into this
1:06.6	case was the complete void of conclusive evidence pointing to Chris Bynum. There were lots of
1:13.5	fingerprints and DNA profiles found on the scene, but none of them matched Chris. Last week,
1:20.1	you heard evidence that most of the bullets recovered at both scenes were fired from the same gun,
1:25.4	but there's zero evidence that came from a gun that Chris owned
1:28.6	or even used, nor is there any evidence that he ever even possessed such a gun. Now, to be fair,
1:35.9	there is that confession, but any eighth grader could figure out in ten minutes that the details
1:41.2	of the confession don't fit the crime scene evidence at all.
1:49.9	So how did this happen? How could a man with no connection to the victims who left no biological evidence on either scene with no history of violence and no access to a 38-caliber
1:55.1	pistol get convicted and sent to prison for the rest of his life? The answer lies in the testimony of a 12-year-old
2:04.8	little boy, a fifth grader. Right away, that detail stood out to me as a big problem. Not because
2:14.1	Larry Brooks is unreliable or a bad kid or known to be untrustworthy,
2:19.4	simply because a 12-year-old, any 12-year-old, particularly one who has been horribly traumatized
2:26.5	and lost his entire support system in the process, is going to be vulnerable and highly suggestible.
2:34.5	And Larry Brooks is a perfect example of that.
2:38.3	Throughout the course of today's episode,
2:40.0	I'm going to walk you through the many different versions of Larry's story,
2:44.0	beginning with the reports from the first arriving officers.
	...

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