S2 E1: July 16, 1996

In The Dark

The New Yorker

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 28.4K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2018

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On the morning of July 16, 1996, someone walked into a furniture store in downtown Winona, Mississippi, and murdered four employees. Each was shot in the head. It was perhaps the most shocking crime the small town had ever seen. Investigators charged a man named Curtis Flowers with the murders. What followed was a two-decade legal odyssey in which Flowers was tried six times for the same crime. He remains on death row, though some people believe he's innocent. For the second season of In the Dark, we spent a year digging into the Flowers case. We found a town divided by race and a murder conviction supported by questionable evidence. And it all began that summer morning in 1996 with a horrifying crime scene that left investigators puzzled. Support investigative journalism with a donation to In the Dark.

Transcript

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1:21.8	It's been that way since I was a kid. Wow. Go straight through.
1:35.8	Long before I ever went into that tunnel, before I'd ever even heard of the town where
1:40.6	the tunnel was, I heard about a man named Curtis Flowers. Curtis was from a small town
1:47.4	in Mississippi called Winona, but he now lives in a one-man cell in parchment prison.
1:54.3	Back in 1997, he was convicted and sentenced to death for an awful crime. Maybe the worst
2:00.7	in the town's history. The murder of four people in a local furniture store. But what got
2:07.0	my attention about Curtis Flowers was something else. It was the fact that Curtis had been
2:13.1	tried not once, not twice, but six times for the same crime. Six trials over 21 years.
2:23.8	All along, Curtis Flowers has maintained his innocence. Curtis kept appealing his convictions.
2:29.9	He kept winning and he kept getting tried again, all by the same prosecutor. Trying someone's
2:36.1	six times is incredibly unusual. It almost never happens. But it happened here.
2:47.5	This is season two of In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports. I'm Madeline Baron.
2:56.0	This season is about the case of Curtis Flowers, a black man from a small town in Mississippi
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