True Crime Recaps 2022 - Efficient Learning online -
On Saturday June 4th 1983 Bill Hughes’ 11-year-old son Chris spent the night with the neighbours. The Ryens were a loving upper-middle-class family … He [Bill] showed up at the Ryen’ house and knocked on the front door. When nobody answered he peered through the window and saw something his brain refused to accept: the walls and the floors were covered in red … Bill kicked in the front door to find a total bloodbath. He rushed over to his son who was dead on the floor, stabbed 25 times in the head, chest and arms. He then found Doug & Peggy [Ryen] stabbed over 30 times each. Poor Jessica bled out in her parents’ doorway … Miraculously, 8-year-old Josh was still alive. True Crime Recaps: Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder? Youtube 19.29, 2022
Several other witnesses reported seeing three disorderly at the Canyon Coral bar on the night of the murders not too far from the Ryen home. They had blood on their clothes and they left in a car similar to the missing station wagon. ibid.
Instead of testing the pants they [rozzers] threw them out. ibid.
They had a new suspect in their sites, a 25-year-old black man named Kevin Cooper. ibid.
Despite every piece of testimony and evidence they’d been given including Lee’s bloody overalls, the investigation pivoted to focus only on Kevin Cooper. ibid.
The initial report indicated that several assailants used a hatchet, an ice-pick and one or two knives. ibid.
The State’s original test on blood in the house did not match Kevin. ibid.
The tampered evidence should have been enough to declare a mistrial. ibid.
As of 2022 Kevin is a 64-year-old man still sitting on Death Row and still insisting that he is an innocent man. ibid.
Three hours and 42 minutes. That’s how close Kevin Cooper came in 2004 to being murdered by the state, strapped down to a gurney, and poisoned via lethal injection. He had been placed in what he calls a ‘death chamber waiting room’ and stripped of all his clothes before he was granted a stay of execution. Five years later, in an unprecedented dissent, five federal judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion that began: ‘The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man’.
A rash of evidence would appear to substantiate their claim. In the opinion, Judge William A Fletcher details multiple Brady disclosures — key information that had been ignored or actively suppressed that would compromise the case against Cooper. Yet thanks to Govenor Jerry Brown’s inaction, he is no closer to getting state-of-the-art DNA testing, despite the calls of California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris. Due to the passage of Prop 66, which dramatically shortens the death penalty appeals process, Cooper’s execution could be expedited without his ever receiving a fair hearing — this is in one of the bluest states in the country. Efficient Learning online article 5th May 2020