S2 E6: Punishment

In The Dark

The New Yorker

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 28.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2018

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Odell Hallmon, the state's key witness in the Curtis Flowers case, is serving three consecutive life sentences. We wondered what he might say now that there are no deals to cut, and he will spend the rest of his days in prison. Would he stick to his story that Flowers had confessed to the Tardy Furniture murders? We wrote him letters and sent him a friend request on Facebook. Weeks went by and we heard nothing. And then, one day, he wrote back. Support investigative journalism with a donation to In the Dark.

Transcript

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0:57.8	Conditions and exclusions apply previously on In the Dark.
1:01.8	He's told, I told him, oh, I told him, he's saying he told you, he did, but he didn't
1:10.8	and then directly, right? Oh, they got away with everything. He got,
1:16.8	he got a lot of privilege. He worked something out with someone, he did the DAO or some other
1:22.3	agency because he didn't stay in jail alone. He's been a frame request and everything.
1:26.8	And I'm like, this is probably like a maybe a month or two after. He was like, yeah,
1:33.8	yeah, yeah, yeah, keep your sentence of money. Like, asking people from my back, a lot of people
1:37.6	money into the area. One morning last fall, our producer Samara got a Facebook alert on
1:51.9	her phone. Odell Cookie, Holman, had gotten in touch. Samara found our producer Natalie.
1:58.7	They turned on a recorder. Okay. So here's what happened. Okay. So I had sent a friend request
2:03.4	to Odell's Facebook page and that was a couple weeks ago. And now he just typed, like,
2:10.4	as we are speaking, he typed, I hope you're not setting me up. What we got to talk about.
2:16.6	Okay. So I'm going to write, hi, Odell. I'm not setting you up. I'm a reporter. We just
	...

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