Beyond All Repair: The Clancy Trial

After the mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case, one big question remains: Will District Attorney Tim Cruz retry the case — and if so, on what charges? As we wait for a status hearing on Sept. 29, new details have emerged about the holdout juror. Three jurors recently told the media he refused to go along with the other 11 jurors. Reports suggest he may have failed to disclose a criminal history. Meanwhile, a case in Massachusetts with similarities to Clancy's case is being reconsidered. Latarsha Sanders was convicted of murder for killing her two children in 2022. The charges were brought by Cruz, and her trial was presided over by the same judge who handled Clancy's trial. For Sanders's trial, Judge William Sullivan ruled her medical records inadmissible. But this summer, in the middle of Clancy's trial, the state's high court said that was a mistake and vacated the earlier conviction. Now, Sanders is getting a new trial. WBUR’s Deborah Becker explores what a retrial might look like for both women and what Clancy's future holds. She also examines what this case reveals about gaps in America's mental health system and unpacks what this case tells us about how we handle family tragedies.

Amory learns more about Marlyne Johnson, Sophia Johnson’s late mother-in-law, and her murder is explored through footage of Sophia’s 2003 trial. Clark County Detective Rick Buckner and his team narrowed the field of suspects to siblings Sophia and Sean Correia (Shane Correia's older brother and sister). Sean testified during Sophia’s 2003 murder trial that he saw his sister standing over Marlyne’s body, holding fireplace tongs. If you have questions about the case, the real people at the center of this story, or anything else about this series, we want to hear them. Email [email protected] with a voice message or written message. Listener note: This show has descriptions of violence and strong language. *** Consider becoming a "BEYOND" member today: This show is made at WBUR, a public radio station, which means we cannot make shows like this without public support. Join our membership program, "BEYOND" here: wbur.org/beyond

Imagine if, one day, you are accused of something. Something horrible, violent, heinous. Something you swear you did not do, and nothing you say can convince anyone otherwise — even the people closest to you. That’s Sophia Johnson’s story. Sophia was starting fresh: A new life, a new husband, a baby on the way. But it all unraveled on January 10, 2002, when her mother-in-law Marlyne Johnson was found bludgeoned to death in her home. Days later, Sophia was charged with the murder. To this day, Sophia swears she didn’t do it. But someone says they witnessed it — her own brother. When family betrays family, who do you believe? In this story of a sibling rivalry beyond compare, WBUR’s Amory Sivertson turns the clock back. She reexamines an unsolved case, a family torn apart, and a woman who wasn’t believed. From WBUR and ZSP Media, Beyond All Repair is a 10-part true crime investigation into a cold case. The series ends with an answer. The first two episodes of Beyond All Repair will drop on March 7, 2024. Listen and follow Beyond All Repair on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts. Listener note: This show has descriptions of violence and strong language.

Part eight of Violation explores what time means behind bars. And listeners respond to the question: Did Jake get what he deserves?

In August, lawyers representing Jacob Wideman argued before a judge in Arizona that state officials treated him in a “constitutionally impermissible” way when they revoked his parole more than six years ago. Lawyers for the parole board and the state corrections department said Wideman was trying to avoid following directions and therefore could not be trusted to be free. In this update, we fill you in on the hearing and how it could set the stage for further legal action in Wideman’s case.

Six months after Jacob Wideman was released from prison on home arrest, he appeared before the parole board for a routine check-in hearing. His parole officer told the board that Jake was doing well: Jake’s employers and therapists gave him positive reviews, as did the director at his halfway house and the landlord at his apartment complex. But other people were coming to a different conclusion. About a week before the hearing, Jake’s parole officer had told him that he had received complaints that Jake had committed numerous violations of the terms of his parole — violations that, if he had committed them, could cost him his freedom. The officer also told him something that startled him: A private investigator could be watching him. “It brought home to me the people who didn't want me to be out were keeping an exceptionally close eye on me, and that, you know, they were willing to go to some pretty drastic lengths to try to find ways to get me put back in prison,” Jake said later in an interview from prison. Soon after that routine check-in hearing before the parole board, Jake was re-arrested. In Part 6 of "Violation," we hear interviews and testimony from Jake, his attorneys, parole officials and others as we piece together the events leading up to the parole violation that sent Jake behind bars again — possibly for life.

How do you build a meaningful life in prison, knowing you might never be free? What if whether you might one day be free hinges on your ability to build a meaningful life in prison? In Part 4 of “Violation," we follow Jacob Wideman’s decades-long journey through the Arizona prison system and hear how he prepared to tell his life story to the parole board. Two years after he murdered Eric Kane, Jake was transferred from county jail to the Arizona Department of Corrections to begin serving a life sentence. At 18 years old, he was thrust into a world where the only way to feel safe was through physical aggression and bravado. He had many years of practice pretending he wasn’t suffering from mental health struggles in his youth, but now, Jake had to push those struggles even further out of sight as he faced a series of challenges in prison, each more difficult than the last. “Heart test” is prison shorthand for proving yourself when you first arrive in the facility — standing up for yourself and not snitching to guards after you’ve been assaulted, for example. But the physical heart tests of Jake’s early years would give way to heart tests of a different kind: a slow and painful journey to identify and manage his mental health problems, and a search for love, even through prison bars. Eventually he would have to stitch all these experiences together to tell the parole board a compelling life story, in the hopes that they would one day find him worthy of release.

Not long after Jacob Wideman murdered his summer camp roommate, Eric Kane, in 1986 — seemingly with no motive — a question emerged in the breathless news coverage of the tragedy: Was Jake a “bad seed”? It was no accident that some reporters latched onto the phrase. After all, it was plucked straight from perhaps the most famous book written by Jake’s own father, acclaimed author John Edgar Wideman, about his family’s experience with violence, trauma and incarceration. But John Wideman wasn’t writing about his son Jake when he used the phrase “bad seed” in his seminal memoir, “Brothers and Keepers.” The book was published in 1984, two years before Jake murdered Eric. Instead, John was writing about his own younger brother Robby, Jake’s uncle, who years earlier had participated in a robbery that went very wrong. A man died, and although Robby didn’t pull the trigger, he was sentenced to life in prison. “The bad seed. The good seed. Mommy’s been saying for as long as I can remember: ‘That Robby, he wakes up in the morning looking for the party,’” John Edgar Wideman writes in “Brothers and Keepers” — and reads aloud in this latest episode of “Violation,” a podcast series from The Marshall Project and WBUR. This idea from John’s book, of going “bad,” would be applied to Jake, too, although John was disdainful of the concept. “Bad Seed,” Part Two of “Violation,” tells the story of Jake’s Uncle Robby through interviews with John as well as with Jake, who remembers having epiphanies as a boy that he would somehow follow his uncle’s path. The episode also brings listeners through the harrowing weeks and months after the murder of Eric Kane, when Jake Wideman turned himself into authorities and began his long journey through the criminal justice system. Ultimately, this episode asks: What should happen to kids like Jake?