00:00:00
Why is he awake? What time is it? Machine must have malfunctioned. No, there's the forced air from the CPAP, still hissing past his ear.
00:00:16
The breathing machine that keeps his sleep apnea from killing him. He looks at the clock, 3 a.m.
00:00:21
Something's different, off. Is his wife home from work early? No. Is one of the kids up?
00:00:28
He pulls off the CPAP mask, rolls out of bed. Now Billy Wencope is wide awake. He looks around.
00:00:35
This is weird. The hog light was on, and our porch light was on. I came to the conclusion, well, maybe Amanda left these things on.
00:00:43
Maybe she got up. But Amanda's door is shut. He peers into the third bedroom. Amanda's two younger sisters fast asleep.
00:00:51
He turns into the tiny living room, clicks on the computer. There was a couple of unanswered emails that I've not heard of.
00:00:58
I clicked on one and it was a porn site. He stares, transfixed, then shame. He thinks about God, about wife Mary Sue.
00:01:07
But then the whole night had been off. Earlier, everybody awake. Mary Sue off to her overnight office cleaning job.
00:01:14
Billy helped the girls with school assignments. Jessica, my middle daughter, she's always had a problem with her homework.
00:01:22
11-year-old Jessica Cope was the middle of Billy Cope's three girls. 12-year-old Amanda was the eldest, baby Kyla, just seven.
00:01:30
Jessica couldn't understand the math, was way behind, big pressure from the teacher.
00:01:35
Amanda volunteered to help, which meant that the four of them would miss the Wednesday night church service they always attended.
00:01:43
I agreed with Mary Sue, my wife, to let her stay up as long as it took to get it done.
00:01:49
How long did it take? It took till 1 a.m. So they all stayed up that late? No sir, no. Just my middle daughter and my oldest daughter.
00:01:57
The baby, she went to bed like 9 o'clock. Soon after 1 a.m., lights out. They were all asleep.
00:02:04
Humming fans shunted the air around. Billy's sleep machine churned out its steady, thumping hiss.
00:02:11
So it had been weird waking up that way just two hours later, finding the lights on.
00:02:16
It was after 3 now. He climbed back into bed, fell into a troubled sleep. I dreamed about the rapture of the church.
00:02:23
Billy Cope, born-again Christian, had read all the popular left-behind books. He believed Christ would soon come to rapture his church,
00:02:31
meaning his whole family, all of them saved, would be swept up together into eternal paradise.
00:02:38
But this dream was terrifying. I dreamed I got left behind. I dreamed I heard my daughter say,
00:02:45
Bye, Daddy. The dream was still fresh when the wake-up alarm sounded. 6 a.m. Amanda, she didn't hear me. She didn't respond. Then I was starting to worry,
00:02:58
especially about my dream. Maybe the rapture took place. Maybe I did get left behind. Maybe it wasn't
00:03:05
a dream. He passed the room where the two youngest girls slept. If the rapture had come, they'd be
00:03:11
gone to heaven. But there they were in their beds. It was just a nightmare. He called again, Amanda.
00:03:17
So I just turned and I pushed on her door, but it got caught behind the closet door.
00:03:25
And I kicked the door as hard as I could. And there she was before him on the bed, the horror.
00:03:33
He saw the swollen body, saw the bruises. He saw the top she'd slept in pulled up to expose her breast.
00:03:41
He went over, covered her nakedness, felt the dead cold skin, went to the phone.
00:03:47
9-1-1. Yeah, my daughter's dead. She's cold as a cucumber. Okay, you don't want to try to CPR anything on her?
00:03:56
No, ma'am, she's dead. She's ice cold. Billy waited for help at his front door. She's gone on the way with the Lord.
00:04:05
She was a Christian. Please, I really don't. Okay, all right, sir. Thank you, ma'am.
00:04:10
Thank you. The firemen arrived, their life-saving gear useless. The detectives came.
00:04:17
Billy followed them through the cramped rooms of his wildly cluttered house. He offered, he said later, the only explanation he could think of.
00:04:26
I asked what happened and he informed me that she choked on her blanket and that she had a history of rolling in her sleep.
00:04:33
Dozens of investigators packed the tiny house looking for clues, but found it hard to tell what might be amiss.
00:04:40
The family's possessions littered every room. It was hard to determine what was out of place and what was in place.
00:04:46
Clothes filled the corners. Dishes crowded the sink. Roaches scurried out. When the freezer door was opened,
00:04:53
Amanda lay fully dressed on top of her bed, surrounded by her books, new school pictures just back from the photographer,
00:05:00
and her favorite green blanket. Investigators determined she'd been beaten and strangled
00:05:05
and without question sexually assaulted. They checked the windows and doors. No sign of forced entry.
00:05:12
Billy must have been alone in the house with the girls, all night. And wait a minute, wasn't this the same Billy Cope who two years earlier and with his wife
00:05:23
had pleaded guilty to neglecting the proper care of his children? Why, indeed it was. They took him
00:05:29
downtown, grilled him, 17 hours of questions over four days, and then the news was as shocking as
00:05:36
a thing could be. Billy was charged. Billy Wayne Cope has been charged with the murder of his 12-year-old
00:05:44
daughter, Amanda. The whole story, the strange night, the twisted blanket, the accidental
00:05:51
strangulation must have been nothing but a lie He must have assaulted and killed his own daughter Must have The police reported he miserably failed to polygraph then volunteered four graphically detailed confessions
00:06:06
one of them on videotape, admitting he had killed his own child. So it was shocking, yes.
00:06:15
But a relief, too, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, just knowing who did it. except what happened to that sweet girl is precisely what they did not know.
00:06:28
The story of Billy Wayne Cope and his daughter Amanda is very strange and puzzling
00:06:34
and frankly sometimes almost unbelievable. But what hangs above the whole bizarre business is one central question.
00:06:42
If you are poor, insignificant, powerless, What does justice look like? From the house at 407 Ridge Street.
00:06:52
Amanda Cope's death left a raw wound in the places where she'd spent so much of her 12 years on this earth,
00:07:18
especially at church. It seemed if the doors were open, Amanda was inside, singing, playing her violin,
00:07:27
or winning gold medals as a member of the Bible quiz team. More often than not, her chief cheerleader and Bible quiz coach was her dad, Billy.
00:07:35
She had all of Ann's classes. Very smart. Susan Archie wouldn't believe Billy Cope killed anybody, but then,
00:07:44
she's his sister, and the devoted aunt to Amanda and her sisters. She never complained. She was just a happy young lady.
00:07:55
Which, given her family life is no small achievement, theirs had always been a precarious existence,
00:08:01
Billy working part-time days delivering takeout food while attending school. Mom Mary Sue's overnight job meant one of them was always home for the girls.
00:08:11
Still, the couple's small paychecks often failed to cover the bills. If they did not have anything to eat, we all knew.
00:08:19
My mother would buy their supper. They always had something to eat. But, truth be told, the Copes, Mary Sue, and Billy Wayne were truly dreadful housekeepers.
00:08:32
Two years before Amanda's death, the family lived in a filthy mobile home. So bad, in fact, somebody told social services, which put the girls in foster care.
00:08:42
didn't return them until the copes cleaned up and attended some counseling sessions.
00:08:48
But then, having hit some sort of bottom, Billy and Mary Sue started turning it around.
00:08:55
They rented a new house on the ironically named Rich Street, still run down and in an iffy neighborhood, but better.
00:09:01
And things really started looking up when Billy got his degree in computer electronics from the local technical school.
00:09:08
On a fine day in springtime, the whole family attended his graduation ceremony. All good things seemed finally possible.
00:09:19
They were happy. They didn't have a lot of money, but they had love. Billy loved being daddy to his little girls, even dressed up with them at Halloween and Christmas.
00:09:29
The kids loved it. It was just something he loved doing. It was just his way of making them happy.
00:09:36
And quietly, Billy, the college grad, began to work on his ultimate goal, a career with his first love, the church.
00:09:44
He had told me that when he was very young, that he had been called to preach. In the meantime, Billy and Mary Sue scraped by while Sister Susan helped out,
00:09:55
fearful that even the family's new neighborhood wasn't safe for her nieces. In fact, I told the kids to lock the doors.
00:10:03
You know, if it was such a bad neighborhood, why'd they live there? That's all they could afford.
00:10:07
In the end, of course, where they lived had a great deal to do with the catastrophe of Amanda's murder.
00:10:13
And their poverty was the reason that a few weeks after it happened, Phil Beatty got a call.
00:10:20
In Rock Hill, South Carolina, private attorneys take turns defending indigent clients like Billy Wayne Cope,
00:10:26
and now it was Beatty's turn. The case seemed horrifying, but uncomplicated. I looked around and I said, oh, my God.
00:10:36
Quite frankly, I thought he was guilty. When I first met him, he was stone-faced.
00:10:40
He was not responsive. He showed no emotion. So the job ahead seems straightforward.
00:10:45
Get Billy Wayne Cope the best plea deal possible and put the whole sad case to rest.
00:10:51
And then? Well, it wasn't the first time Beatty had heard something like this before.
00:10:58
And he began to say, I didn't do this. This is not me. I don't care what those confessions are.
00:11:05
They broke me down. You've got to help me. But who wouldn't have second thoughts, facing life in prison or possibly even the electric chair?
00:11:14
Billy's two youngest girls were whisked back into foster care. Occasional phone calls were his only connection.
00:11:20
Are you okay, Jessica? Yes, sir. I love you. I love you, too. We're going to get through this, okay?
00:11:28
Yes, sir. Billy remained in jail as the case crawled through the system. And then, nearly a year after the murder,
00:11:37
Beatty got a call from the prosecutor's office. Would Beatty come in and meet with them on the case?
00:11:43
Must be a deal, thought Beatty. It wasn't. They sat down and they were very friendly about it
00:11:48
and they said, we've got some information for you. And, I mean, it was a bombshell.
00:11:55
Well it certainly was They had found DNA on Amanda body said the prosecutor DNA is the holy grail of evidence Saliva on her breast semen on her pant blade And guess what That DNA did not belong to Billy Wayne Cope Bombshell is right
00:12:14
But there was more, and this was truly shocking. Police knew within weeks of the murder, the DNA was not Billy's,
00:12:23
but they didn't bother to tell his own lawyer. It took them months and months to reveal that information.
00:12:30
But the biggest headline of all? Police now knew whose DNA it was, and they didn't even have to look for him.
00:12:37
That man, the one whose bite marks, saliva, and semen were found on Amanda's body,
00:12:41
was sitting in the very same jail as Billy Coke. His name? James Sanders. And get this, Sanders lived just two blocks away from Cope's place.
00:12:54
He had just moved into the neighborhood, and, you know, right before this happened.
00:12:59
And suddenly, said Beatty, after that meeting with the prosecutor, he had a moment of absolute clarity.
00:13:05
Really, for the first time, I became convinced that my client was truly innocent
00:13:10
and had been telling me the truth all this time. Case solved. Done. Nothing to do but release Billy Cope from prison.
00:13:19
But life and the law are never quite as simple as all that. And maybe if Beatty had known about the secrets in Billy Cope's case,
00:13:28
he might have run from his revelation. But he didn't. When this case kept getting more and more complicated,
00:13:35
this old boy got overwhelmed. And I don't mind admitting it. So Beatty called in some help.
00:13:42
a former prosecutor and now private trial attorney named Jim Morton. But you don't see any of that in any of these photographs.
00:13:50
Together, Beatty and Morton embarked on a legal odyssey and agreed to give Dateline behind-the-scenes access to their case,
00:13:58
to their own investigation, too, which would reveal strange events in Little Rock Hill, South Carolina,
00:14:06
allegations and revelations beyond anyone's predictions. There was one thing the good people of Rock Hill, South Carolina,
00:14:28
could quite reasonably assume. As they absorbed the shock of the Amanda Cope murder,
00:14:33
Billy Cope must have killed his own daughter. If he didn't, why in heaven's name did he confess?
00:14:40
And yet Billy's defenders, Phil Beatty and his new partner, former prosecutor Jim Morton,
00:14:45
now knew that another man's DNA was found on Amanda's body, which meant Amanda's killer had to have been someone else, not Billy.
00:14:54
So now they set about trying to understand what led to those confessions. Billy, could you state your full name for us?
00:15:01
Billy Wayne Coat. This, at least, was in the record. Billy volunteered to talk with police.
00:15:08
Detectives recorded some of the interrogation that followed, about three hours of it.
00:15:12
I said, Amanda, Amanda, and I picked it up, and I just held it. Billy told the officers he feared Amanda accidentally strangled herself on a strip of fabric from her frayed blanket.
00:15:27
Impossible, interrogators snapped back. Amanda was sexually assaulted, and no blanket attacked her.
00:15:33
Somebody killed Amanda last night in your house. You were the only one in the house.
00:15:39
Honest to God, I cannot believe it. Why can't you believe it? Because I couldn't, I didn't hear nothing.
00:15:45
I didn't hear anything. Billy told detectives about his sleep disorder and the CPAP machine that kept him breathing at night.
00:15:52
The pump was noisy. He had to wear a mask. He and his girls also kept fans running all night in their bedrooms.
00:15:59
And those noises could have drowned out any intruder. Billy, you can stick to this till hell freezes up.
00:16:06
I'm telling you the truth, sir. I will not change my story because I'm telling you the truth.
00:16:12
As God is my witness, I did not harm my child in any way. God? The officers seemed to know about Billy's faith.
00:16:21
They used it to try to trigger an admission. You're burning hell for this lie quicker than you will for killing your daughter.
00:16:27
Yes, sir. Is that not true? I am not. If all this was going on, how come my other dude off the way and they'll be able to say I didn't hear anything?
00:16:39
The officers assured Cope they had all the evidence they needed. There's no forced entry into your house.
00:16:45
There's no signs of anybody coming in into the windows. I'm telling you the truth, sir.
00:16:50
Investigators did not buy it. Remember, they didn't have DNA results at this point.
00:16:56
They wouldn't be known for a month. But the officers told Billy those results would convict him.
00:17:03
If that semen on her body turns out to be yours, what's going to happen? It won't. It won't match.
00:17:09
I have not ever done anything to my child like that in no way, shape, or form. I loved her with all my heart.
00:17:19
Hour after hour, he repeated his denials over and over. The transcript of that interrogation confirms that Billy denied killing Amanda more than 650 times.
00:17:31
You can clearly hear on that tape that they have made up their mind that Billy Cope sexually assaulted and murdered his own daughter.
00:17:42
And there's nothing that he can say. There's no evidence that can be found. It's going to change your mind.
00:17:47
Then as the fourth hour of questioning began Billy Cope actually begged for a lie detector test He expected he said it would set him free He taken them for job applications he said He trusted the test Instead it became the moment of no return
00:18:05
I'm telling you the truth. Please get the polygraph, and this will prove it. Next morning, they strapped Billy in, turned on the machine,
00:18:14
and before long, the polygrapher had his answer. He slams his hands against the table, pushes his chair back, and says,
00:18:24
we can quip right here. He said, we know the truth. And I said, what do we know? He said,
00:18:30
you failed it. When he said that, what did you think? Maybe I did do this? I wasn't sure I did it, but I knew that nothing else logically seemed possible the way they were
00:18:42
talking. I trusted. I've always trusted the officials. And the next question was,
00:18:48
why don't you tell us what you think you might have done if you did do it? So Billy goes into that and then it goes downhill.
00:18:56
And the next thing you know, he's writing it up and signed right here. It was the first of four confessions.
00:19:03
But by the time police escorted Cope to his house for a videotape reenactment, Billy said,
00:19:08
the certainty that he was innocent had returned. So what did he do? Well, this may seem strange.
00:19:17
Listen to the reason he offers for confessing on video to what he now said he did not do.
00:19:23
Here you are in your daughter's room. I was trying to confuse them. Why would you confuse them?
00:19:28
Because I knew I didn't do it. And I figured with my ignorance of the law, I didn't think a confession carried the weight unless they could prove it.
00:19:43
But he was wrong. Police accepted his confession. even though none of them matched.
00:19:48
Amanda was assaulted with a broom in some confessions, no mention of one another.
00:19:53
Some confessions included a dream, but the dream was excluded or a different dream in others.
00:20:00
Most remarkable, Billy's confessions never once mentioned James Sanders. No mention at all in any of Billy's confessions
00:20:07
that another man was there and leaving his semen and his trace in that room. And something else didn't fit about those days of interrogation.
00:20:16
Billy asked for and was appointed a public defender the day he was arrested. B.J. Bearclaw was assigned.
00:20:23
But when he went to the police station attempting to see his client. They said that I would not be allowed to see him.
00:20:30
Wait a minute. You're his lawyer. Right. Appointed by the court to be his lawyer.
00:20:35
Right. On the television shows, if the lawyer comes along and says, my client's not going to talk to you anymore.
00:20:41
That's it. Right. And sadly, that is not really the case in Rock Hill. Bearclaw persisted, and still they wouldn't let him see Billy.
00:20:51
Instead, investigators produced a note signed by Billy Cope. He doesn't want to see you.
00:20:58
And I said, I'm not satisfied by that. If I'm here to protect you from coercing him into confessing,
00:21:07
then certainly you could coerce him to sign that piece of paper. I said, you let me back there.
00:21:11
And his response was, well, I'm just not going to let you do that. Only after Billy Cope finished the reenactment and final written confession was the public defender allowed to see him.
00:21:24
And I said, why did you sign this? And he said, they told me I would get the death penalty if I didn't sign it.
00:21:32
And truly, that answer didn't surprise me at all. Now, more than a year after the murder,
00:21:38
Bearclaw successors Phil Beatty and Jim Morton were about to discover a series of disturbingly similar crimes
00:21:44
in Billy's neighborhood, and the DNA now named the suspect. Would that help the jury understand what they already knew?
00:21:53
Billy didn't kill his daughter. Someone else did. The confessions of Billy Wayne Cope, at least to the lawyers representing him,
00:22:16
seemed not only untrue, but unfairly obtained, especially in the light of information that changed everything.
00:22:25
Eleven months after Amanda's murder, James Sanders was arrested, and when they tested Sanders' DNA,
00:22:32
Police discovered it matched the semen and saliva found on Amanda's body. Now, surely, thought lawyer Phil Beatty,
00:22:39
police would see Billy Cope had been telling the truth in those 600 and some denials.
00:22:45
He faced the local media with something that sounded like confidence. We are very happy to see that an alternate defendant,
00:22:52
an alternate perpetrator has been identified by the police, and this is certainly consistent with the defense's view of the case.
00:22:58
But there was soon enough another sobering fact to crush any emerging bravado. I went from elation to the depths of despair in almost seconds flat.
00:23:12
Phil Beatty could scarcely believe it. Sanders' DNA, police said, didn't change their mind at all about Cope's guilt.
00:23:21
But it did change their theory. The new one? That it was a conspiracy. That Billy Cope actually invited James Sanders into his own house that night
00:23:31
for the purpose of helping Sanders kill his own child. So police now added murder charges to Sanders' list of arrests
00:23:39
and conspiracy charges for both Sanders and Cope. My question to the prosecutor was, what do you have to prove a conspiracy?
00:23:47
And he said, we've got Sanders' DNA on Amanda's leg, and we have no force entry into the house,
00:23:52
and also your guy must have let him in, and that's what they have. Ridiculous, responded Beatty's partner Jim Morton.
00:23:58
For one thing, No evidence these two men had ever even met. The two serious problems that they have are being able to connect Billy Koch with James Sanders,
00:24:08
who they have charged with conspiring together. Sanders' record, the fact that he's just not some 17-year-old kid who happened by this house.
00:24:18
Well, that's true. Sanders certainly wasn't some kid who just happened by. He was 42.
00:24:24
His criminal career, breaking and entering, burglary and the like, went back more than 20 years.
00:24:29
11 convictions, as much time in prison as out. In fact, he even very briefly got married while in prison.
00:24:37
Then, six weeks before Amanda was murdered, Sanders was paroled, and a now-divorced Sanders moved into a girlfriend's house
00:24:44
less than five minutes' walk from the Cope's house. Back at the office, a little digging told the lawyers
00:24:51
that the 200-pound Sanders was arrested after allegedly targeting women on a crime spree
00:24:56
right around the time Amanda was murdered, and in close range of the Cope House.
00:25:01
Two weeks after Amanda's death, Sanders' saliva placed him a little more than a mile from Cope's house
00:25:07
where a 60-year-old woman was knocked down and slapped around and raped. Four miles away, less than a week later,
00:25:14
a young mother identified Sanders as the man who slipped into her second-floor apartment
00:25:18
and assaulted her while her three children slept and heard nothing. Three days later, less than a mile from the Cope House,
00:25:26
Yet another female identified Sanders as the man who attempted a sexual assault.
00:25:32
And finally, six weeks after Amanda's murder, one mile from the cope house, a woman told police Sanders surprised her in the bathroom, tackled and choked her.
00:25:42
This is a sexual pervert that we can show is a perverted housebreaker who does this.
00:25:48
Within that area? Within that area, within that time. In every case, police reports showed Sanders attacked at night,
00:25:55
indicated no accomplice and left no sign of forced entry. But if Cope conspired with Sanders, as the D.A. insisted,
00:26:05
why didn't Sanders' name come up in any of those four confessions? Cope adamantly insisted it was because he never met James Sanders,
00:26:14
only saw him for the first time when they were both housed in the same jail, and even then didn't know who he was, though Sanders seemed to know him.
00:26:22
He said, yeah, I lived in your neighborhood. I said, do you know who did it? And he said, let's just say, I know you didn't do it.
00:26:30
That's all he would say. First, their client confesses. Then DNA reveals an entirely different attacker.
00:26:37
And then Billy Culp is charged with conspiring in the murder, helping a man kill his own daughter.
00:26:44
But in a case full of surprises, there was another one from the prosecutor, which was, well, how would Beatty put it?
00:26:52
It's illegal, it's horrible, it's unethical, it's terrible, it should have never happened.
00:26:58
For defense attorney Phil Beatty, the discovery of James Sanders' DNA on the murdered body of Amanda Cope
00:27:17
now shed new light on the troubling event back at the very beginning of the case.
00:27:23
It was another belated admission from the prosecutor that finally brought it to Beatty's attention,
00:27:28
something that happened before Sanders' DNA was identified. This was the prosecutor's admission.
00:27:36
It seems that a couple of the officers may have wired your client's wife for sound
00:27:42
and sent her into the cell to talk to your client after you were appointed his counsel without any notice to you.
00:27:50
And that is? That's a violation of two or three constitutional rights. It was a month after Amanda's murder,
00:27:59
and barely an hour after Beatty's first jailhouse conversation with Billy. On Monday, December 31st, 2001.
00:28:06
What did police do? They got Billy's wife to question her husband on their behalf.
00:28:13
The significance of that day, New Year's Eve? At the Rock Hill Police Department, detectives had just received DNA results.
00:28:20
And they proved that someone else's DNA and semen and saliva was found on Amanda's body.
00:28:27
It wasn't Billy Wayne Copes. They had no idea whose it was. But Phil Beatty learned that's not what they told Mary Sue.
00:28:36
In fact, they informed her that the DNA on Amanda's body did match both her husband and someone else who had helped kill their daughter.
00:28:46
And they also found somebody else's and they want to know who it is. Well, I mean, it's yours or somebody else's.
00:28:52
Only her side of the conversation was on the tape, at least the portion given to the lawyers.
00:28:57
But it was clear from her questions that Billy denied killing Amanda. If you're saying you didn't do it, then somebody else did.
00:29:05
We need to find who did it. And now Cope's defense team had grown to include his sister, Susan,
00:29:11
and family friend and fellow church member, Amy Simmons. Both women told the lawyers Mary Sue didn't want to go undercover for police.
00:29:19
but detectives showed her the gruesome autopsy pictures and Billy's confessions and then they
00:29:24
threatened her said these women that if she didn't help them get another confession from her husband
00:29:30
she would be sorry that's when she said you don't understand I can't win they told me if I do not
00:29:35
wear a wire and do not get Billy to confess do me what he did to Amanda they're going to take the
00:29:40
kids forever and they're going to put me in jail the defense team was shocked this was the first
00:29:45
they'd heard that police may have coerced Billy's wife into wearing a wire. Did they tell her anything about what they were going to do in the future with her?
00:29:53
They want to talk to her again Not at that point But when it was over Mary Sue was convinced she had learned to read him well enough she said She knew he was innocent And she said Amy I looked him straight in the eyes
00:30:07
He denied everything to me. She said, I don't believe that he did. Billy never saw his wife again.
00:30:15
Six weeks after that jailhouse visit, Mary Sue died. she had been staying at Amy Simmons' house
00:30:22
where she'd gone to recover from a hysterectomy. Her death, well in Amy Simmons' care,
00:30:27
was as baffling as it was unexpected. And Billy found consolation in Amy's friendship
00:30:34
in her many letters. And as the months passed, their correspondence grew warm, close.
00:30:42
I honestly believe that he's getting real attached to her and he trusted her completely.
00:30:47
The whole episode with detectives wiring up Mary Sue for a fifth confession made defense lawyers wonder.
00:30:54
What was wrong with the four confessions Billy had already made? We began noticing right away that the facts of the case did not match the facts that were in the confessions.
00:31:05
What are some of the factual problems? One of the main factual problems is in the video reenactment,
00:31:10
Billy says that he jumped on his daughter's back from behind and choked her with two hands from behind.
00:31:15
Our pathologist will testify that she was choked from the front with a right hand on her neck.
00:31:23
And something else. In some of his confessions, Cope said he sexually assaulted his daughter with a broom handle.
00:31:30
The state's DNA lab tested the handle of every mop and broom they found in the whole house,
00:31:35
and not one tested positive for anybody's DNA. Billy Cope could not have done what he said he did on all of those confessions.
00:31:45
and not left one trace of himself in that room. He would have had to have been a ghost,
00:31:50
and obviously that's not what happened. Then, pouring over dozens of crime scene photos,
00:31:55
the lawyers noticed evidence that should have been collected, and wasn't. Right on Amanda's bed, they could see a purse.
00:32:03
It belonged to Amanda's mother. James Sanders was known to assault women and steal from them.
00:32:09
Had the purse been rifled? Did Sanders handle it? Don't know. It was never tested or taken into evidence.
00:32:18
But then there was some other interesting material. Billy, if you'll notice in his video reenactment, says,
00:32:25
oh yes, I was pushing Amanda down on the bed, and yeah, that's how her lip must have been busted, was from that video game.
00:32:32
That video game right there was laying right up under. While you were slinging her around, her mouth got busted on the video game.
00:32:40
Now, for them not to have taken that evidence in, to me, is really astonishing. In the police evidence room, the lawyers found bags of evidence marked not examined.
00:32:55
Most surprising, not one fingerprint was collected in the entire house. I mean, the police didn't do their job because they felt they had their man.
00:33:04
And then all of a sudden, a month later, they realize that, oops, the DNA doesn't match.
00:33:12
And oops, maybe somebody else was in the house. Well, it's too late to go back and look at the crime scene at that point.
00:33:18
It's contaminated. And there was one more police claim that now to the lawyers just didn't seem to add up.
00:33:26
The police said James Sanders did not break into Billy's house. No sign of forced entry.
00:33:32
But listen to this. When officers took Cope back for that reenactment, Billy said one of them jimmied the ancient back door quickly and easily without any key.
00:33:42
They said, we don't have a key. And he said, I'll be back in a few minutes. And he just walked around the back.
00:33:46
And the next thing I know, he's opening the door. More than ever, the defense team was convinced
00:33:52
that Billy had been charged with murdering Amanda based on a false confession with no evidence to back it up.
00:33:59
But how could they possibly persuade a jury that a loving father would voluntarily confess four times to killing his own daughter if he didn't do it?
00:34:10
Impossible. Unless there was one place to go to find out. An era of urgency hung in the space between defense attorneys Phil Beatty and Jim Morton.
00:34:32
Dateline cameras were along as they made the long trip from South Carolina to Williamstown, Massachusetts,
00:34:38
on their way to see the one person who might be able to solve this puzzle. Why would a man in his right mind confess four times to killing his own daughter
00:34:47
if he didn't actually do it? Billy Cobb's trial was fast approaching. They needed to answer that question.
00:34:55
It's got to be convincing and it's got to be accurate and it's got to convince a jury that the state's main evidence is not reliable.
00:35:04
The man they'd come to meet is one of the nation's leading experts on false confessions.
00:35:08
His name is Saul Kasson. He agreed to listen to their pitch. But that's all. Dr. Kasson had already made it clear
00:35:16
that while hundreds of lawyers ask for his help, he selects very few, only the most obvious and provable examples
00:35:23
of false confession. So as they met, he sounded a pessimistic warning. If their case wasn't unusually persuasive,
00:35:31
he would not take it. They're going to have to overcome a great deal of common sense and intuition
00:35:36
because most people don't believe that people confessed to crimes that didn't commit.
00:35:41
And yet, Kasson told them, he has documented hundreds of cases in which defendants did just that,
00:35:47
gave detailed confessions, just as Billy Cope had, that were later proven false.
00:35:53
The most famous, perhaps? Remember the Central Park jogger case It made headlines back in 1989 when five men confessed on tape and in detail that they attacked a female jogger And then as the front pages shouted three years later all five were exonerated when
00:36:10
DNA identified the real assailant. Kasson told the lawyers that scores of similar cases are on file all around the country.
00:36:18
But what about Billy Wayne Cope? His confession, his disturbingly detailed video tour of murder.
00:36:26
Would an innocent man have done this? I've read the transcripts. Kasson seemed most interested in the hours of questioning that preceded Billy's confessions,
00:36:36
during which he denied killing his daughter. More than 650 determined denials. He provides all the cues that a trained interrogator looks for as diagnostic of innocence.
00:36:48
Okay. His denials are adamant, they're complete, they're vigorous, they're insistent,
00:36:55
they persist through four hours of interrogation and accusation. A big clue for him, said Kassim, was the interrogator's insistence that they, the police, could tell whether or not Billy was lying.
00:37:07
A dangerous attitude for a policeman to adopt, he said, dangerous and according to the science, wrong.
00:37:13
Confessing to their crime or making something up from scratch. Cops cannot tell the difference.
00:37:19
They're more confident in what they do, but they're not any more accurate. In fact, they're somewhat less accurate than the average college student.
00:37:27
Because they show a bias. And in those hours of Cope's audio tape denial, said Dr. Kasson,
00:37:33
he heard interrogators do something else. They started early on tinkering with the notion that it's possible to do something like this and not realize it.
00:37:42
The seed was being planted for the possibility that we might have scientific evidence that implicates you, despite your lack of memory.
00:37:50
With that seed in his exhausted and confused mind, said Kasson, the four confessions that followed weren't so very surprising.
00:37:58
Then, the lawyers told Kasson the story of Mary Sue's jailhouse visit with Billy.
00:38:03
They wire his wife, send her into the jail. Remember, Billy's wife told a friend that police demanded she get a fifth confession.
00:38:11
Every additional effort to get an additional statement is a concession about what we already don't have.
00:38:18
In other words, said Kassin, wiring up Mary Sue and sending her into jail to question Billy
00:38:24
was an admission that the police didn't believe any of Billy's earlier confessions.
00:38:30
Nor could they, said Kassin, because it was a classic false confession. The clincher? Not just interrogation errors, but these huge red flags.
00:38:41
None of the physical evidence at the scene matched Billy's confessions. It was James Sanders, whose semen, DNA, was found on Amanda, not Billy's.
00:38:51
And in none of Billy's confessions, detailed though they were, does he ever mention the presence of Sanders or anybody else.
00:38:57
What he reenacts, we know didn't happen. So, by definition, this new co-defendant renders the whole confession false.
00:39:07
The confession doesn't match the crime. Saul Kasson was hooked. When Billy's lawyers walked in the door, he had his doubts, but not anymore.
00:39:17
When a case comes along of this nature, I reach this threshold point of outrage over the facts of the case,
00:39:24
and this is one of them. With Kasson on board, perhaps Billy Cope had a chance after all.
00:39:30
Couldn't ask for a better reaction. Had a great meeting, great meeting. Probably a good thing to savor the day,
00:39:37
because back in South Carolina, the surprise was in store. Hey, man. Hey, what's up? How you doing?
00:39:58
No lawyer would ever get rich representing a man as poor and apparently doomed as Billy Wayne Cope.
00:40:04
But he'd certainly encounter a roller coaster of emotions, and, as they would soon see, some very big surprises.
00:40:11
Jim Morton had just returned to South Carolina with the good news that a leading false confession expert
00:40:16
would take Billy Wayne Cope's case. It had been three years since Amanda's murder.
00:40:22
His wife Mary Sue was dead after surgery, and Billy Cope was about to get an impossible choice
00:40:27
involving his two surviving daughters, now 14 and 10. We've got to decide before Monday what we're going to do here.
00:40:37
The decision? The state had moved to end Billy's rights as a parent to his surviving daughters.
00:40:43
Should he fight it in court, he'd almost surely lose. But perhaps worse, he'd have to reveal in that open courtroom whatever strategy he might later use in his murder trial.
00:40:53
We got to show him our hand. You know, we got to go in there and basically try the criminal case in family court.
00:41:00
unless Billy decided to give in and give up forever his claim to be Kyla and Jessica's legal father.
00:41:08
Billy, you're not doing yourself any good by trying this case in family court. You're just hurting yourself.
00:41:13
Billy considered the argument for a moment and rejected it out of hand. I have promised to my girls,
00:41:21
and I feel like if I done that, I'd be breaking that promise. That's the way it's going to look to me,
00:41:28
and it's the way it's going to look to them. In other words, said Billy, to show his daughters that he loved them, he would embrace a very risky legal strategy, jeopardizing his chances of being acquitted of murder, just as his lawyers feared.
00:41:43
Sure enough, as the family court hearing began, one of the criminal prosecutors slid into a back row to watch and listen to Billy's appeal.
00:41:51
Billy got simply this a glimpse of Jessica and Kyla Not in person mind you The girls remained in another room their testimony projected on a concrete wall of the courtroom But he heard the recording made the last time he was able to speak to them on the phone three years earlier
00:42:08
Hey, Daddy. I love you. I love you, too. I love you so much. I love you, too. Are you okay?
00:42:18
Yes, sir. For Billy, it was simply too much. And then, then he learned that his love for them was no longer returned.
00:42:27
Since that last phone call, the girls had been shown the video of Billy's confession,
00:42:31
had been told about the case against him. We had prepared him for the worst. We had prepared him for Kyle and Jessica telling the judge that they did not want to be around him,
00:42:40
that they were afraid of him. And nobody was surprised when Billy's daughters were taken away from him forever.
00:42:48
Billy's lawyers were depressed. The risky legal move had put them at a disadvantage in exchange for, it turned out, nothing good.
00:42:56
And then, well, bad news often comes in batches. But this, with this, the bottom fell out.
00:43:06
It was a simple phone call, but if the caller was telling the truth, then defense lawyers had been played for fools all along.
00:43:14
I had to do the right thing morally and ethically, and so I let both the defense and the detective and the prosecution in the case know that I had received the letter.
00:43:22
The caller was Amy Simmons, that family friend who'd nursed Billy's wife Mary Sue the night she died,
00:43:28
the one who'd kept Billy going with her letters. Amy had also been attending meetings of Billy's legal defense team, was a key supporter, knew the whole case.
00:43:38
And now, as Billy's murder trial was approaching, he'd apparently confessed again to Amy Simmons.
00:43:45
And I was just real shocked because normally I get letters that talk about his week, what he's done, who's been there to visit.
00:43:52
And this time the letter basically said that he had been instructed by God to tell me what he had done to Amanda.
00:44:00
Here's part of the letter addressed to Amy Simmons. Dear Amy, God told me to tell you that I killed Amanda.
00:44:07
Please forgive me. God is going to remove his servant. I just felt you should know.
00:44:13
Please don't stop writing. I have to get on with my life. It's real disturbing. It brings up, makes you have second thoughts about what you've believed in
00:44:21
and things that people have told you. And it's just real concerning. It's very confusing.
00:44:27
Confusing is the least of it. They'd been convinced of his innocence. Now it seemed clear he was guilty.
00:44:32
And so they rushed to see Billy in jail, where he insisted he didn't write any such letter, not ever,
00:44:40
and certainly did not confess to Amy Simmons. It was, to say the least, an awful mess.
00:44:46
Who could believe anything anymore? It is a possibility our client could have a split personality
00:44:51
and he could be flipping out on us. I don't know. Why didn't he not tell us? We just met with him the day before that day.
00:45:00
Then he goes and writes a letter to his friend. I just don't believe it. I'm not a psychologist, but if he's a split personality, he's got a good one.
00:45:09
Boy, he does. He's got us fooled. Well, someone was fooling them. But was it Billy?
00:45:16
Or was it someone else? The letter was bad. More than bad. It was a nightmare. Because this time, Billy's confession appeared to be exactly what he intended.
00:45:42
Billy Cope's defense against the charge that he murdered his daughter Amanda hinged on the claim that his confessions to police were false.
00:45:49
But now, Amy Simmons was saying she'd received a letter from him saying, God told me to tell you I killed Amanda.
00:45:58
This report came back from the state law enforcement division, which indicated that their expert believes that Billy was the author.
00:46:06
So, the letter would almost certainly kill their false confession defense. It just sucks all the wind out of you.
00:46:13
Our case, I think, went from having a real good shot at winning to probably now a real good shot at losing.
00:46:21
They poured over that letter, word for awkward word. In fact, was it too awkward to be real?
00:46:29
Those words, I killed Amanda, for example, were followed by the banal pleasantry,
00:46:34
how is Brian and Jamie, Amy Simmons' sons? The longer the lawyers looked, the more sure they felt the letter was fake.
00:46:43
It was an artful forgery. Had to be. Could it be that you want to believe in his innocence so much that you allowed yourself to be fooled,
00:46:52
and he, a religious man, needed to confess to somebody, and therefore chose his friend Amy?
00:46:58
I thought Billy Cope was guilty, and the evidence and Billy Cope's convinced me otherwise.
00:47:03
And those letters are a blip on the screen to me. I'm sure they're forgeries. Letters? Plural?
00:47:11
Oh, yes. Amy said she got another curious letter from Billy six months earlier. In that one, Billy didn't exactly confess, but, well, here's a quote.
00:47:22
I need to tell you what I really did to Amanda. That time, the lawyer suspected some jailhouse prankster was at work.
00:47:29
The letter seemed an obvious and poorly constructed forgery. But this new one was different.
00:47:35
So important that Billy's defense team rushed to Mickey Dawson, a veteran handwriting analyst, the same man who created the state's own handwriting lab.
00:47:47
They gave him Xerox copies of the letters and asked him, are those real or fake?
00:47:54
No question, Dawson said, the first letter Amy got was an obvious fake. But this...
00:48:00
This new confession? As a document examiner, I've got to verify my evidence before I step out and give you an opinion.
00:48:06
The analyst was blunt. The Xerox copy showed hallmarks of authenticity. Maybe he'd find something else when he studied the original letter,
00:48:14
but he couldn't call it a forgery. Not yet. Time was the enemy now. The trial was weeks away.
00:48:22
If that letter was real, they were done. Remember, Amy Simmons was a family friend.
00:48:28
Billy's wife stayed with her, died in her house. She was a member of Billy's defense team.
00:48:33
She attended legal strategy sessions. But defense investigator Pete Skidmore was beginning to have his doubts about Amy's loyalty.
00:48:41
So he paid her a visit and came back with news that sent the rest of them reeling.
00:48:47
A girl is the leak. Now, why do you say that? She told me. Amy Simmons admitted that at the very same time she'd been attending the regular meetings of the defense team,
00:49:02
she'd also been giving information to the prosecutor. We're talking to her. She's going to be on our side.
00:49:08
When she's talking to them, she's going to be on their side. Was Amy Simmons a spy for the prosecution who befriended Billy only to betray him?
00:49:16
Before we hogtie and throw our client to the wolves, why the hell is she writing him all the time?
00:49:23
Had Amy somehow invented this new confession? No one had access to as much written material from Billy Cope as she did,
00:49:32
and there was no doubt Billy addressed the envelopes she turned in. So how does Billy's envelopes contain these forgeries except that Amy puts them in there?
00:49:41
Besides, the type of paper the letters were written on wasn't even available to inmates at that prison.
00:49:47
We started doing some research about Amy Simmons. We found out that she had been suspended from her job as a nurse for forgeries that she had committed while in her employment at a nursing home.
00:50:00
Plus, court records showed Amy had pleaded guilty in another county to obstruction of justice and obtaining drugs by false pretense.
00:50:08
Police records revealed she'd been under investigation since a nursing home patient under her care died of apparent insulin overdoses.
00:50:16
Amy Simmons was in trouble with the law. And now she was helping the prosecution.
00:50:21
Was there some connection? So went the defense team's speculation. But then, with the trial just days away,
00:50:27
handwriting expert Mickey Dawson told the defense team he could not testify the I killed Amanda letter was a forgery.
00:50:34
He just didn't know. We were panicked. Definitely. Michael Smith and Rixie Dunn were members of the defense team.
00:50:41
You see that letter. Your guy thinks it's real. Did you think it was real? No, I don't think any of us ever thought it was real.
00:50:48
The question was, how did someone else do this? They stared at the offending letter.
00:50:54
If Amy Simmons forged this, as they suspected, how did she do it? We all noticed that the sentences didn't seem to flow together.
00:51:02
We had decided that we probably needed to read the rest of Billy's letters. So we started reading through, and certain phrases we thought sounded familiar.
00:51:13
And then we started comparing them. They were stunned to discover that exact phrases from the confession letter were scattered through the dozens of letters Billy had written Amy, word for word.
00:51:27
And every time they found a match, they highlighted it. By the time we finished, the entire confession letter was highlighted.
00:51:38
She had mixed certain phrases together that shouldn't have been together. So that's why it sounded strange.
00:51:45
It was a monumental discovery. A forgery so good it fooled one of the best handwriting analysts, quite possibly.
00:51:52
This was the breakthrough Billy Cope's defense desperately needed. Well, I called Rixie. It was probably midnight.
00:51:58
I called Jim, Phil. We called everyone. It was unbelievable. Armed with that new analysis, Phil Beatty went again to the handwriting expert, and this time...
00:52:07
He said, I think we may be making history here. It clearly said that both letters were forgeries.
00:52:15
But as the court got ready to try the case of the murder of Amanda Cope, another letter was making its way through the system.
00:52:23
There was a second defendant, remember? The man whose DNA was found on Amanda's body, James Sanders.
00:52:30
And now Mr. Sanders had written a letter, too. It was an omen, a good one, or it certainly seemed like it.
00:52:49
It arrived four weeks before the murder trial of Billy Wayne Cope. Another letter.
00:52:55
This one from Billy's alleged partner and co-conspirator in Amanda's murder, the man who would go on trial with him.
00:53:01
James Sanders had written to the prosecutor. The letter was a complaint. James Sanders to this prosecutor said,
00:53:09
why are you trying me with this man Cope? I don't even know a Cope. This letter was a gift.
00:53:16
Sanders had never met Billy Cope, had never once even seen him. Remember, prosecutors were going to claim that
00:53:22
Billy Cope invited Sanders into his house for the purpose of assaulting Amanda, and the two of them completed that horrible deed together.
00:53:30
But if Sanders had never met Billy Cope, then how could Billy have conspired with Sanders?
00:53:36
The defense lawyers rejoiced. This letter could help a lot. And just in time. Because three years after 12-year-old Amanda Cope was brutally killed in her own bed,
00:53:51
her father and James Sanders went on trial together accused of conspiring to sexually assault and murder her Good afternoon Finally it was time for a prosecution And from day one of the trial it was clear that James Sanders
00:54:07
the DNA-identified attacker, was a bit player in a story that was mostly about his alleged co-conspirator, Billy Cope.
00:54:15
Billy Cope served up his daughter for his and James Sanders' own perverse pleasures.
00:54:25
and took her life. Circumstantial evidence, assured the prosecutor, would indicate Cope opened his home to James Sanders
00:54:34
and allowed his daughter to be assaulted. There's direct evidence as to each of them.
00:54:40
Confession, DNA. Obviously no one broke in. Someone had to be let in. Billy Cope himself, said the prosecution,
00:54:48
provided the clues that pointed to guilt, starting with that weirdly calm 911 call.
00:54:55
Yeah, my daughter's dead. She's cold as a cucumber. And it's from Billy Cope. It is almost completely devoid of emotion.
00:55:03
It was strange, according to the first responders. Cope, they testified, was asking the sort of questions a guilty man would ask.
00:55:11
At one point, Mr. Cope flagged me down, and he asked me if anything bad was going to happen to him with his daughter being dead in the house.
00:55:18
How was he acting? How was he behaving? It wasn't emotionally upsetting or anything like that.
00:55:24
To underscore the police theory that Cope opened his home to Sanders, more than one investigator took the stand to report there was no sign anywhere of forced entry.
00:55:33
There was no signs of anybody entering any of the windows of this residence at all.
00:55:38
Each of the investigators said Cope offered a possible explanation for what might have caused his daughter's death.
00:55:44
He told them he found the satin trim of her favorite blanket twisted around her neck
00:55:48
as if she'd strangled by accident. But one look, said the investigators, made it obvious.
00:55:53
didn't happen. She was not choked by that selvage. She died as a result of strangulation and beating.
00:55:59
The state's pathologist agreed. He said Amanda was likely strangled from the back with someone's
00:56:05
bare hands, just the way Billy showed in his reenactment. And he said the sexual assault
00:56:13
injuries could easily have been caused by the broom mentioned in some of Cope's confessions.
00:56:18
and the doctor saw something else. The clothing was sort of placed on the body more than really dressed by her.
00:56:27
The bra was not hooked, but this laid over the body. Taken together, said the investigators.
00:56:33
The lame story about the blanket, the lack of evidence for a break-in, the pathologist's observations,
00:56:39
looked like Cope did it and then staged the whole thing in an effort to protect himself.
00:56:44
The confessions, four of them, came one after the other as soon as Detective Mike Baker informed Cope he'd failed the very polygraph he'd begged for.
00:56:53
His reaction was he wasn't surprised and showed no emotion. That's correct. No emotion whatsoever and he was not surprised.
00:56:59
Did Mr. Cope ever ask for an attorney during this entire process throughout the day?
00:57:04
No, sir, he did not. Did he ever assert that he wished to remain silent? No, sir, quite the contrary.
00:57:10
The jury listened to details of Cope's four confessions. Prosecutor Brackett read aloud.
00:57:16
I started strangling her with my hands. Amanda was pulling at my hands, and I let go and started hitting her in the head.
00:57:23
Then I went back to strangling her, and she went limp. That one videotaped confession played for a packed courtroom, silenced by the gruesome details.
00:57:35
And then, as if in anticipation of a claim that Billy's confessions were false, the prosecutor produced that amazing letter addressed to Amy Simmons,
00:57:45
the one she said she'd received more than two years after those initial confessions.
00:57:50
Dear Amy, God told me to tell you that I killed Amanda. Amy Simmons, no longer Billy's friend and pen pal, testified for the prosecution.
00:57:59
How did he sign this letter? Keep the faith, always, Billy, Tinker Cope. The state's document examiner testified the letter certainly looked real to him.
00:58:11
It's my opinion that the Billy Wayne Cope authored this handwriting. Six days of testimony.
00:58:19
Twenty-one witnesses to testify that Billy Wayne Cope must surely have killed his daughter Amanda.
00:58:25
And the actual attacker, as identified by DNA, co-defendant James Sanders? He was all but ignored.
00:58:32
They have done nothing to try to convict him. The mention of the DNA is almost in passing, parenthetically.
00:58:40
Oh, yeah, James Sanders' DNA is on there. But if the state's case persuaded the jury, it sure looked like it.
00:58:49
We're bad off. I mean, the jury thinks our client did it. They started crying during Billy's confessions.
00:58:57
That hurt. But hang on. Remember, the defense was going to tear that prosecution case apart.
00:59:06
But trials, of course, play according to strict rules. And the question was, what would the jury hear?
00:59:13
An oppressive September sun thickened the blanket of heat around the courthouse in York County, South Carolina.
00:59:33
Inside in the artificial cool, Billy Wencope's defense team struggled to explain a difficult idea,
00:59:39
that a father who confessed four times to killing his daughter didn't actually do it.
00:59:46
Well, I submit, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to be sitting here for the next two weeks
00:59:49
simply because the Rock Hill Police Department made a mistake. Wouldn be here on trial said lawyer Phil Beatty if Cope house had been clean and tidy If he reacted to his daughter death the way police thought he should have
01:00:05
Billy Cope would be attending the murder trial simply as a grieving dad, not a co-defendant.
01:00:10
And in their rush, said Beatty, they skipped crucial police work. It involved a fingerprint at the house.
01:00:17
On the stand, the defense took on the state investigator. Did you look to see if he had any blood on his clothing?
01:00:23
I didn't. Did you look for any scratches or bruises or any other marks that may have been on them?
01:00:30
Like I said, I didn't examine. And once they got those confessions, said the defense,
01:00:34
the police didn't bother to see whether evidence at the scene matched the stories Billy told.
01:00:39
The video game story, for example. In one of his confessions, Billy said he used a handheld game to beat Amanda.
01:00:47
That video game right there. Which would have made it a murder weapon. And yet? You did not play the video game.
01:00:54
that Mr. Racoat purports to use on Amanda's face. No, sir. Well, I finally seen the video game a couple days ago
01:01:02
in one of these photographs and then again in a video. And that's the first time I've seen it.
01:01:07
Then there was the awkward business of Amanda's injury pattern. In all his confessions,
01:01:13
Billy said he attacked Amanda from the back, strangling her with both hands. But defense pathologist Clay Nichols said
01:01:20
the state's own autopsy clearly showed Amanda was attacked from the front, not the back.
01:01:26
And with one hand, not two, as the state's pathologist had testified. So it appears to me to be a one-handed strangulation.
01:01:35
Doctor, was there any evidence of an attack from the rear on this poor young lady?
01:01:41
No, in fact... Nor was she sexually attacked with any broom handle, Dr. Nichols said.
01:01:46
There's no evidence that a broom was used. And then there was the issue of how James Sanders got into the house to kill Amanda.
01:01:55
Detectives testified there was no sign of forced entry, and yet a lock expert for the defense told jurors that
01:02:02
even when the cope house was locked up tight, it could easily be entered by simply using a credit card in the door.
01:02:10
Still, there was that damning I killed Amanda letter family friend Amy Simmons claimed she received long after the murder.
01:02:17
Now in court, the defense set out to show that the letter was a forgery and that Amy, Billy's former friend, was the forger.
01:02:26
Attorney Beatty got Amy to admit she had falsified patient records in her job as a nurse.
01:02:31
You're also facing criminal charges, isn't that correct? They're there, I have all confidence that I won't have a problem.
01:02:38
She insisted, though, that didn't mean she forged a confession letter. I want to give you an opportunity to tell the jury that you forged that letter.
01:02:46
That is absolutely ludicrous. As lights dimmed, lawyer Beatty gave Amy a highlighter,
01:02:52
and when her testimony was done, virtually every word in the alleged new confession letter were yellowed
01:02:59
as Billy's former friend agreed that those precise phrases existed already in a dozen other letters Billy had written her.
01:03:08
Which is why, said the defense forgery expert, it is most probably a simulation, both documents are simulations.
01:03:14
In other words, forgeries. Still, questions remain. If Billy Cope's confessions were false, if he was innocent,
01:03:23
why did he fail the polygraph? Well, in fact, said the defense, he didn't. The defense polygraph expert who reviewed the raw test data from scratch
01:03:32
said the test grade was not just a little wrong. It was 180 degrees wrong. Did Mr. Cope's performance on this test indicate deception or truthfulness?
01:03:43
They indicate truthfulness to me. He should have been told he passed it. So it wasn't Billy Cope who lied, said the defense, but the police.
01:03:51
And more than once. Proof of that? Here's the detective who secretly wired Billy Cope's wife, Mary Sue,
01:03:58
a month after the crime and sent her into the jail to question him, seeking yet another confession.
01:04:03
Did I tell Mary Sue that their dad's DNA had been found on her daughter, Amanda?
01:04:12
Yes, the detective admitted, though she knew perfectly well it was not Billy's DNA they had found on Amanda's body.
01:04:18
She told Billy's wife it was. And I said yes, so I stand corrected. But the big question, by far the most important, was this.
01:04:29
Why would any loving father admit to killing his child if he didn't really do it?
01:04:35
Remember Saul Kasson, that false confession researcher? now he took the stand determined to convince the jury that Billy Cope's case is a classic example of a false confession.
01:04:45
Just like that in the recent Central Park jogger case. Must stand the objection.
01:04:49
With that, Dr. Casson was cut short. The judge ruled most of his testimony inadmissible,
01:04:56
wouldn't allow him to give specific examples of real false confessions, confessions which once sent innocent people to prison.
01:05:04
Why? Here's the judge's reasoning. It's a quote. I don't want this jury put in fear that they're going to have to live the rest of
01:05:13
their lives if they put an innocent man in jail because the joggers and all this other stuff
01:05:19
happen. So, what was left? Well, the defense still had the letter, the one from Sanders,
01:05:26
in which he said he never once in his life saw Billy Cope and couldn't understand being tried
01:05:31
with him. So, if Cope had never met Sanders, how was it possible for him to have conspired with
01:05:37
Sanders to kill Amanda. Sanders' letter was a direct attack on what police detective Cabinus
01:05:44
agreed was an assumption on his part that Cope had to be involved. But you have no evidence to
01:05:50
link them together physical or knowledge of each other or friendship or anything like that No sir Now would be the time to show the jury Sanders letter saying he never met Billy Cope
01:06:05
But the judge ruled Sanders' letter inadmissible. Nor would the jury hear a word about James Sanders' arrest
01:06:14
in those four other home invasions, none with any sign of forced entry, right around the time when Amanda was murdered.
01:06:20
Now, you know, if the jury knew that, then they wouldn't need to hear any more other than the DNA. His DNA is on the body. They would know exactly why.
01:06:29
But they don't know that. And as far as they know, he's an assistant pastor somewhere.
01:06:35
The rulings forced a risky decision. Billy Cope would take the stand. He could win the case or
01:06:40
lose it. I picked her up and I held her and I said, oh, and... He explained his lack of hysteria
01:06:48
in that 911 call. But I knew from past experience that you had to be real calm when you talked to 911.
01:06:57
I used to work for the Red Cross. He explained how the noise from his breathing machine
01:07:02
and the whirling room fans kept him from hearing any sound from Amanda's room. I didn't know that somebody
01:07:08
had been in my home. He told the jury he begged for a polygraph because he was so confident
01:07:13
it would prove his 600 and some denials were true. But when they told him he'd failed...
01:07:19
He said I was a liar. I couldn't think straight. I cried. I said I can't handle no more.
01:07:24
The details for all his confessions? Cope claimed he got them from the men who were questioning him about the murder.
01:07:31
I wrote the way they told me that it happened. Why did you do that? Because I was scared.
01:07:37
I didn't know what else to do. And then Cope addressed the man whose DNA was found on his daughter's body.
01:07:44
The Bible says love thy neighbor and love your enemies and do good to them. And so help me God, I've tried.
01:07:56
But I hate him. I hate him so bad I can't stand it. Would the jury believe him? The false confession defense was a hard sell.
01:08:07
They'd know soon enough. In a South Carolina courtroom, just a few feet down the defense table from Billy Wayne Cope,
01:08:31
sat a phantom, a man who seemed at times barely visible in the case at all. James Sanders had been charged as Cope's co-conspirator.
01:08:41
But after weeks of testimony, James Sanders was still a mystery, at least to the jury.
01:08:46
Not a single witness testified on his behalf. He uttered not a word in court and did not try to cast the blame for Amanda's death on anyone, let alone Billy Cope.
01:08:57
And when they took the stand, detectives admitted they had no evidence to show that Cope and Sanders even knew each other.
01:09:05
But by the time closing arguments rolled around, the prosecutor said he didn't have to prove that the two had met each other.
01:09:13
All I have to do is satisfy each of you that each one of them is guilty. And if they were both guilty, then they had to do it together.
01:09:22
And how could the jury know Cope was guilty? For a start, his calm demeanor on that 911 call, said Prosecutor Brackett.
01:09:30
You don't hear him going, oh my God, please, please. Hurry, bring somebody to help her.
01:09:38
That's what a father would say. If he could even get that much out. So, what should the jury think of Cope's 600 and some denials, all recorded by police?
01:09:50
Just drivel, said the prosecutor. This was a man who knew she'd been dead for some period of time and had been working on his story,
01:09:58
cleaning up the situation, staging the crime scene, fixing it up so that at six o'clock when the alarm went off,
01:10:04
He could yell out, wake his kids up, and start his show. But the confessions that came later, those, he said, had to be true.
01:10:13
No man could say this stuff, ladies and gentlemen. No man could say this. If you didn't do this, you would never admit to it.
01:10:20
All the jury needed to know, said the prosecutor, could be found in James Sanders' DNA and Billy Cope's confessions.
01:10:27
These men brutalized and hurt that child. They did unspeakable things to her. today's the day they pay thank you it was powerful stuff bracket poured out his
01:10:41
scorn on Billy Cope's claims and on defense lawyer Jim Morton's closing Morton had claimed that the police drew a trusting man into a false confession
01:10:50
by telling him we have evidence we have pictures we have machines that don't lie
01:10:58
and he began to doubt his own core, his own self. The police jumped to conclusions far too soon, said Morton,
01:11:08
and took advantage of a gullible man who just wanted to help. You cooperate with them every step of the way?
01:11:16
You insist on taking a polygraph. Is that somebody who's trying to hide? Is that somebody who's trying to stage the scene?
01:11:25
So why did he confess? He gave up. There was nothing that Billy Cope could do. He was helpless. He was destroyed.
01:11:37
And now the decision belonged to the jury. You may convict one and acquit the other, or you may acquit both, or you may convict both.
01:11:45
Billy Cope's lawyers and supporters didn't have long to wait. It took a grand total of five hours for the jury to find both Cope and Sanders guilty of all charges.
01:11:58
The verdict is guilty, sign by four persons. And it's followed without further ado.
01:12:02
Life without parole for both. For police, of course, the outcome was a vindication of everything they had done.
01:12:09
But when we asked for interviews to get their side of the story, we were, again and again, turned down.
01:12:17
Even the prosecutor, Kevin Brackett. After many requests, he finally agreed to an interview and then canceled.
01:12:26
We organized an interview with the jury to learn how they evaluated the case. And when they were assembled, Prosecutor Brackett turned up with his own video camera
01:12:35
and advised the jury not to speak unless he was present to approve what they said.
01:12:40
We canceled the interview. But months after the trial, our continued efforts netted two jurors
01:12:46
who agreed to speak with Dateline out of the presence of the prosecutor. I even dreamed about this case. It was terrible.
01:12:53
Samantha Thomas was an alternate on the jury, but heard all the testimony. I didn't want to sit on that jury and had no desire to, but I felt like it was my duty.
01:13:03
Bill Leffler, however, took part in the vote and strongly approved of the verdict against Billy Cope.
01:13:08
But he told us he was deeply suspicious of us. So he brought to our interview Prosecutor Brackett's video camera to record what was said.
01:13:18
Maybe I'm paranoid. You know, you guys have the final cut and you can that camera can make me say anything he wants to say.
01:13:26
It was clear the jury had no trouble, though, trusting Billy Cope's confessions.
01:13:31
Not one confession, not even two, even three, four confessions. How important was that to you? Extremely important.
01:13:41
How could a man confess to killing his own daughter if he didn't actually do it?
01:13:47
That was my thought, yes, sir. I mean as a parent had I not done it you couldn have beat that confession out of me I can understand maybe one time in a moment of grief thinking that it might have been his fault because he didn stop it
01:14:03
But confessing four times, each time saying that he did it, there's no way to get away from that.
01:14:10
The prosecution suggested that Billy Wayne Cope let James Sanders in. Did they show you any evidence of that connection between the two?
01:14:19
No. Do you like to have seen evidence of that? No. We told these jurors what they didn't hear at the trial.
01:14:27
James Sanders' criminal past. So if you knew that he had other robbery and sexual assaults in the neighborhood,
01:14:34
which he was charged with right around the same time? No. Bill Leffler says the entire jury was certain they knew enough to hold both Cope and Sanders responsible for Amanda's murder.
01:14:47
their bigger worry, that somehow the two might still go free. Was there any concern about an appeal and what effect it may have for you folks to talk to the media?
01:15:00
Yes. But in a case already riddled with twists and surprises, this one wasn't over.
01:15:17
The months grew to years after the jury sent Billy Wayne Cope off to prison for life.
01:15:27
I don't have any news for you. I haven't talked. Most weeks, Billy would talk to one of his lawyers on the telephone.
01:15:33
Lawyers haunted by the difficult days of that trial. I've never felt in front of a jury like we never had their attention at all.
01:15:43
They would not look at us when we argued They would not look at us when we interviewed or cross witnesses in front of them And Morton is it turns out not alone False confession expert Saul Kassin has written about and now teaches his students about the Koch case
01:16:00
as a clear example of what he believes an innocent person under stress can sometimes be induced to say.
01:16:06
Members of that jury told us, we simply cannot believe. If I'm a father, I'm not going to confess to killing my daughter.
01:16:14
I'm sorry to shake your world, but it happens. And those false confessions that have happened just like that are on the books.
01:16:22
It's not a theory. It's a fact. Dr. Kassin has his own regrets that on the stand he was cut off before he had a chance to explain all that to the jury.
01:16:31
Innocent people are cooperative. They waive their right to silence. They waive their right to counsel.
01:16:36
They agree to take lie detector tests. So innocent people put themselves willingly and voluntarily at risk
01:16:43
because they don't believe they have anything to fear or anything to hide. As for James Sanders, Billy's co-defendant,
01:16:50
after the trial he pleaded guilty to two of the four break-ins and assaults for which he'd been arrested near the Cope home just after Amanda's murder.
01:16:58
In one of those, Cope's lawyers believed, Sanders used just the same M.O. as the assault on Amanda.
01:17:05
How badly did it hurt you that they were able to keep that up? It destroyed us. And Amy Simmons, Billy's friend-turned-prosecution witness,
01:17:13
she pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and drug charges that arose from her work at a nursing home.
01:17:19
She was sentenced to probation, no jail time. And the investigation into the death of a patient in her care
01:17:26
was quietly dropped without charges. Billy Wayne Cope's case attracted some of the nation's
01:17:33
most highly regarded teams of defense attorneys, all determined to prove Cope innocence Noted appellate attorney David Bruck joined the team set to argue Cope appeals The most glaring mistakes in the trial he said That prosecutors never proved Cope conspired with James Sanders to kill a mandant
01:17:53
And that the judge was legally wrong to keep the jury from hearing about Sanders' previous crimes.
01:18:00
Errors are a judge's discretion. Because that's what the other side will say. The judge was perfectly right to make those decisions.
01:18:06
A judge does not have the discretion, does not have the power. to simply decide that the core of a man's defense can be withheld from the jury,
01:18:16
covered up, not heard. And that's what happened in this case. And for a few months, it appeared Billy Cope might have been a step closer to a new trial.
01:18:27
The South Carolina Appeals Court agreed with Bruck that the state failed to prove Cope ever conspired with Sanders to kill his daughter.
01:18:34
But then the court later reversed its own ruling. Cope's defense team appealed to the state Supreme Court, but lost.
01:18:43
There really couldn't be a worse error than to convict a man of killing and raping his own daughter who didn't do it.
01:18:48
And Billy Cope? In prison, he finally realized one lifelong dream. He became a minister and earned a degree in biblical studies.
01:19:00
and then 16 years after his daughter's death, Billy Cope died in prison, still believing his innocence would one day be proven.
01:19:12
He's completely innocent. He is not guilty. And I know what evidence was used to convict him
01:19:19
and I know what evidence was kept out to convict him. It still bothers me because I just, I know he didn't do it.
01:19:30
you