Wrongfully Convicted Death Row Inmate-Nick Yarris

I have the distinction of having begun life twice in my first version of life I was born in southwest Philadelphia in a family that had eventually six children my mother and father had menial work jobs in the area and my grandmother who lived in the house with us ran the household and took care of the chores in the house while my parents worked I was born in 1961 so I experienced a lot of the developmental changes in the city of Philadelphia throughout my childhood at first we had the pleasure of being part of a city that took pride in its neighborhoods having blocked captains and Gardens and everyone made an effort to make their part of Philadelphia beautiful and then it all seemed to change during the aftermath of the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King I was seven years old in a connective way this was the most tumultuous year of my life as well because I remember [Music] everything was still golden and beautiful in my childhood until the spring of 1968 when I was left off from school one day because I had a dental appointment my mother cautioning me to leave the house and not ruin my school clothes yelled her usual warnings to me but I was off on an adventure with my little dog Jocko a black poodle who never left my side and I went down to the local wooded area behind my neighborhood back behind 74th Street and I encountered a young man who is off from school himself older than me by about 10 15 years and he was just I guess in the moment of whatever he was doing I remember being very terrified of him having seen him in the neighborhood beating up adult men this is a very violent chaotic person and I timidly didn't know what to do I was just a little boy he was smoking a cigarette and he took the cigarette out of his mouth and he made me take a puff of the cigarette I became intoxicated and lightheaded from the inhale as I choked and sputtered I felt him put his hands on my neck and pushed me backwards and knocked me to the ground and then he hit me in the head with a field stone that was in his hand I only heard the wet smack of the stone on flesh I didn't realize it was my head the four state of low had done so much damage the next remembrance I have of that occasion was I was coming too and he was putting his clothes right after having sexually assaulted me and he was formulating some kind of plan he either wanted me to not be a witness or he was thinking of what to do you could see it in his face and in a moment he started shouting at me you tell your parents you were pushing a shopping cart on that wall over there you tell your parents that your shopping cart fell over and hit you and that's how you got that lump on your head and when he said it I put my hand up and I had a massive contusion on my head I didn't say anything that I can remember I waited for him to leave and I looked around for my dog and I couldn't find Jocko and I started screaming for him I remember running up the street and the lady on the on Wheeler Street saw me and she oh my God look at you get home boy get home I made it up to my land Street where my family lived at the time and my mother looked at me and she said oh my God I can't believe what happened so I was taken to The Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia and I was diagnosed um with my optic nerve damage to my eyes from the swelling and they had hoped that in time the swelling would go down without damaging it to the point that I would go blind I don't know seven years old I had to wear corrective glasses after that I went from being a left hand a right-handed child to a left-handed child everything in my brain was scattered I had night terrors and I remember I would go down to my parents basement and punch my legs so that I wouldn't be afraid of pain so that if I went outside and he attacked me I wouldn't be afraid I started acting out I remember when I was early on trying to deal with this I would make a Fantastical stories for my father at dinner about owning a farm and I would tell them about these tragedies on the farm opening in some confused way I could tell him what happened to me I never did once I told the LIE and lived with the lie and I was bound by the LIE and I hated myself when you let someone off the hook for doing that to you you hate yourself inside for knowing that you're you're letting them get away with it you're letting them hurt you I couldn't deal with it I was at a family function when I was 10 years old and I had my first bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and by the time I got done with that beer I wasn't afraid anymore I was like oh there's another side to dealing with this by the time I was 14 I was an alcoholic with my friends on the weekends and every night smoking pot drinking then pills came along and they're very popular with Quaaludes and second all and two and all and Valium and I took every kind of pill because when I was high I had courage to not be afraid not courage to fight others I always oh God I gravitated towards violence but I I wasn't afraid inside I didn't have this omnipresent fear that there was something about me that would make men want to do that to me so I emulated all of the bad behaviors that you can becoming really aggressive really nasty and I got hooked on methamphetamine at the age of 18 I stole a car I went to Florida I threw furniture out of a hotel room because I lost my mind and I was put into the south Florida State Mental Institution for my own protection it was there that I was diagnosed with aphasia I had no clue what this meant but the doctors actually did brain scans on me and showed me that I had a physiological distortment to my cognitive process of language and associative abilities to connect with others because of this blockage they explained to me that the one drug that you didn't want to do with speed because it evaporated any of what they called the proteins that were protecting my brain from going into Aphasia shutdown a lot of people have recently heard about Aphasia because of Bruce Willis but I'll explain what it is have you ever woken were just about woken from a nap all around you are recognizable sounds but you're lost to the dream state you can't help it you you want to break free of it but you're stuck there and you don't want to let go imagine your whole day is stuck there and you can't get out of it that's what aphasia is you have an awareness of what's going around you but you're so deeply delved into this other realm of consciousness of either memory or reptitudes of songs or all these things you can't break free of it I had to work so hard because my Aphasia was so bad I would become monocited in times of stress and I couldn't see out of my left eye and I would invariably sit with my thumb pressed against my head like this for as long as I could cut off the pressure from the pain of my eye just pounding and pounding I was sober everything was good I came back to Philadelphia I had some minor charges I was let go I got a job at Spencer's Gifts in downtown Philly it's 20 years 19 years old 20 years old for the first time since I was 14 years old I was actually sober a little bit of weed nothing else because I was afraid of what they explained to me in that hospital it really scared me this is Cuban Doctor Who took a real good time to explain to me exactly how my brain was damaged and I still didn't tell him why I go back to Philly I get a job I'm dating this girl named Terry and she's working downtown in the center city area Philly and I was doing okay for a couple months but then I'm hanging out with everybody I'm living in my parents house I'm fighting with my brothers everything's chaos again it's all the dysfunction in my family pressurizing me and I start doing meth I bought a gram of meth and I started getting high and then sure enough I want it more so I stole a car I stole a car I drove down to see Terry at her work had something of hers I was going to return and I got stopped by the Philadelphia Highway Patrol a notorious unit in Philadelphia and they chased me about nine blocks and I got caught by other police officers who held me so they walked up and this one officer hit me in the mouth with a beaver tail Blackjack and he split my mouth for 86 stitches that was December 4th 1981. I went home and I hid in my bedroom I kept sipping beer because the beer was helping the cauterize the sutures that were falling apart and my blood my mouth kept bleeding for about two weeks I was so despondent that I had lost control again but I couldn't stop wanting to get high so on December 19th I went out and another stolen car and got high with my friend and dropped him off and I was driving in the city of Chester Pennsylvania when I got stopped by officer Dan uh Benjamin Wright it's two o'clock in the morning I'm high as [ __ ] but I can't respond I am so terrified of getting another beating I didn't get out and run this time I sat Frozen in the car gripping the wheel while my brain is shutting down from Aphasia and I can't see out of my left eye he's walking up to the car the music in this 1973 orange Camaro is blasting it was um bad companies um song silver blue and gold had just finished and now Wildfire woman is blaring I don't know I'm so out of it I can't hear anything I can't see anything I'm shut down next thing I know he rips the door open and grabs me by the shirt front and rips me out of the car and starts yelling at me but it's all gibberish then he put his forearm against my for my throat and pushed my head back against the roof of the car and I'm choking and in one Fell Swoop smash knocked his arm away from me he reaches into his belt and takes the night stick out but I'm on it and I take the stick out of his hand and went like that I was like what the [ __ ] are you doing like I'm I remember just yelling them why and then he went for me and then he stopped and he went down like this with a gun and I was like whoa and I reached out and I put both hands on his wrist and I swear to God all I wanted was to just stop everything but the gun went off now we're stuck in that moment as soon as the gun went off and I felt it percussed all around my body I let go and I just started yelling okay okay okay he put the pistol under my mouth put me into the back seat of the car a while yelling you stupid son of a [ __ ] you could have got us both killed slams the door he gets in the front seat he closes the door we're sitting on top of the I-95 overpass there's cars going underneath and he's in the car and he looks at me in the mirror and he's Furious man like he was when he ripped the door open he grabs the microphone and I'm waiting for him to tell what happened and he goes into actor mode shots fired shots fired officer assists I'm under attack help help and then he drops the mic I'm like what the [ __ ] what's this guy doing got out of the car and he paced back and forth a Paddy Wagon came with officers in another car I hear him outside the car this [ __ ] tried to kill me I got my gun back off him I should have shot him in his head and all this I'm like oh no like this ain't what happened like I'm 20 years old man I'm a junkie from Philly I just got caught in another stolen car nobody's going to believe [ __ ] I got to say they open the back seat of the door Up drag them out of the cop car beat the [ __ ] out of me put in the wagon took me down and they put in the county jail in Chester there was a African-American Sergeant on duty name red a big mountain of a man he told them they were not going to hang me like right in front of them oh no you ain't hanging this boy I don't care what you said he'd done y'all don't got him good they beat my ass real good he said but you wait you let him go before the court you get his photographs you don't do nothing you don't touch this boy Benny right was the son of the former mayor so he was well connected I stood next to skip to Mario public defender at 3 45 A.M according to my paperwork and was read the following charges of attempted murder kidnapping of a police officer aggravated assault possession of a firearm by a convicted felon um and uh reckless endangerment I was told that I was going to be held with one hundred thousand dollars bail and placed into the Broad Meadows prison and the high security unit and that I would be facing life imprisonment if I was convicted of these charges it was three days before Christmas man I lost it I went to Broad Meadows prison and the euphemism that they had back then was drug treatment was three days of intensive cell therapy they put you in a cell and they lock the door and they let you detox and I crashed and I crashed hard in my cell the only thing I had was that December 15th Delaware County newspaper with the front page missing and on page three the headline that kept bugging the hell out of me for some reason because I couldn't avoid reading it over and over like we do when we're stuck in a toilet we'll read the sign over and over missing woman police have mystery I'm looking at this case for some reason I don't know why I'm sitting there facing life imprisonment from a lie and in my head I stupidly concoct this idea well if the game is all based on Who Lies the best I'ma make up a lion get out of this I'm gonna concoct a story and say somebody did this crime like in this newspaper and then when I get out I'm out of here I'm running this is the stupid mentality of a 20 year old drug addict so a year before all of this happens I was abducted by a couple of guys in Philadelphia beaten with my own pistol rolled up in a rug and driven around in a pickup truck until they decided to dump me behind the old Westinghouse Warehouse down by the Delaware River oh I had heard that the man who orchestrated the attack Jimmy had died of a drug overdose but it wasn't it was his brother Joseph the guy telling me the story was telling me as a Grace to have me not obsessively keep hunting for this guy Thinking by telling me Jimmy's dead I'd give up because that's all I talked about I went to the police and I told them that Jimmy had committed the murder and confessed it to me after he was out stealing cars the police initially believed me they took me out of solitary confinement and they told me that they'd spoken to officer Wright who was willing to drop my charges down to resisting arrest and I would be prosecuted for the stolen car in Philadelphia if all of this was true that I was telling them to help solve this enormous case I went from sitting in solitary confinement on D Block in broadmeadows prison to be taken to the warden's office and told I had a deal on the table I could be released in three days all they had to do was verify what I said I was like so close to believing this myself three days later the police came back to me and there was no Smiles no free soft drinks no accolades about me doing good community service they wanted to know why and when I told him I lied because of what our officer Wright lied about they said no no no no no no no we don't want to hear that [ __ ] officer writes pressing charges to the fullest amount you're going to be put away for life and we're going to strap you into the electric chair for killing that woman because we know you did it and you came to us to tell us it but you just didn't have the courage we know you have a troubled childhood and you've been in and out of the juvenile system for years we know it was you I couldn't believe this [Music] I couldn't believe in an instant the detectives had formulated this idea that it had to have been me I had made this one detective Randy Martin so angry that when they took me out and interrogated me for 13 hours and I refused to tell them anything other than I was sorry I lied I was messed up they brought me back to the Delaware County Prison and he gave me a hug in front of the Pagan motorcycle prisoners who were in the process unit and told me thanks for that information Nick we're going to go kick some doors in boy and I was stunned I was like what what do you they set me up I go back to b d block in Broad Motors prison and the next morning I get bleach and urine thrown in my face a guy tries to put my eye out with a sharpened broom and there's four Dudes outside my cell trying to kill me call me a rat saying that they saw me with the CID and that they know it's me I can't believe that they did this Sinister thing where the police set me up to be pressurized inside the prison knowing I have a mental disorder knowing that I'm weak and vulnerable and for a week I got abused every time I came out myself I fought just one thing I was getting in the shower see dudes was going buying gas in me man throwing milk cartons of urine and feces at my cell I had to put my mattress up against the door and block it for as long as I could stand up and then when they kicked my door whoever was outside I was [ __ ] them up I don't care if you did anything to me or not I was getting somebody because I had to send a message to these guys and I go in the shower and wash off and go back to my stinking cell and lock the door I did that for a week and then I hung myself the guard caught me hanging from the radiator cut me down and said no no no no no you're not cheating the state of Pennsylvania we don't allow that they took me to the hospital and strapped me down on all fours and let my mom visit me and while I was getting a visit from my mom guys were going by getting her medication and they were touching themselves and saying all kind of lewd things about me and my mother my mother at that time said to me Nikki I don't know what you're doing but I do know this I need you to never hurt yourself you you're my gift to life everything that you are is a gift so I swore her I wouldn't kill myself after that they went back to the block and they put a guy in a Cell next to me from one night named Charles catalino Charles was convicted of burglarizing the prosecutor's home of Delaware County where we were at he was convicted of a jury and he was facing 20 years in prison for this conviction one night he was in a Cell next to me then they moved me out of the jail and put me in Chester County Prison and I was charged with the rape and murder of Mrs Craig a woman I never met I only read about a newspaper Charles said that I confess to him of the rape and murder so that I was worried about my blood being found on the on the scene and um that I I did it all because I was despondent over me and my girlfriend Terry breaking up the police used this as the onus to charge me no weapon no murder weapon no Witnesses a jailhouse confession another lie I was given a trial for the Benny Wright charges for the attempted murder and I was acquitted by the jury after only 20 minutes of deliberation why it was simple Benny Wright just made up a story and he had this notion that by getting at me in court by expounding upon and lying further he could get at me in the courtroom he saw me get upset when he first started telling the lion he got so much schadenfreude enjoyment from it he kept lying he told the jury that when he pulled me over I jumped out of the car before he had a chance to look up from his log book and rip him out of the car punched him in his face broke his eyeglasses then I took the gun out of his holster and beat him with it and I was holding the gun up ready to blow his brains out when he heroically reached up and took the gun off me and subdued me that's the story Benny Wright told the jury my lawyer only asked him a few questions and one of them was you took a photograph of your hand showing where you were cut where Mr Yaris took the gun off of you then he hit you in the face with it after punching you and breaking your eyeglasses you were so astute to take that photograph of your hand why didn't you photograph your face where you did all the damage with a pistol and he froze officer Wright knew right then and there at that moment The Jig was up because how do you answer that and he had no answers so he said look I'm a good looking man I don't have to answer that I didn't want to see I didn't want people to see me with bruises on my face okay but Jerry's like nah you went out of your way to make a photograph of that man taking a gun off you by a scratch but you didn't want nobody to see where he hit you you would have wanted us to see that so that's why they acquitted me of all the charges of attempted murder and everything the case was being prosecuted by a man by the name of Barry gross assistant prosecutor he went berserk in the courtroom he took the case File and threw it against the wall he turned right as I was leaving and he said [ __ ] you'll never leave this County alive Barry gross had nothing to do with the homicide prosecution it was being handled by someone else at that time but after the acquittal by the jury he took over the murder prosecution that I was charged with of Linda May Craig and then for the first time ever began seeking the death penalty the judge took over the trial as well Robert F Kelly wasn't even supposed to be my trial judge but he took that over too so he privately told my lawyer he blamed himself for my acquittal because they didn't mention I was in a stolen car as if that had anything to do with this man lying on the stand they were going to put me up against the death penalty because they knew when you select a death-prone jury you're 90 percent more likely to get any kind of conviction instead of missing out again at the age of 21 I was given a three-day murder trial in Delaware County I knew it was a three-day murder trial because his honor opened and remarks to the jury and told them listen I know you all have a Monumental worry before you that this weekend is the Fourth of July holiday weekend but I got good news for you all I'm gonna have this trial over and you will be home to celebrate with your family this week and I'm not going to sequester you it was Tuesday when he told him that they were trying to get out of there by Friday the trial really hinged only on he said she said words but one factor there was photographs taken Where Mrs Craig was found in the snow after she was abducted in the state of Delaware where she had been kidnapped driven into Pennsylvania where she was sexually assaulted and then stabbed and dumped in the snow where she was discovered by two young boys the next day the photograph was black and white [Music] and the horror of it was you could see the children's footprints right next to where the body was were deep red eventually fading out and in Terror they ran in different ways so for all the world it looked like an angel laying in the snow from above where they photographed it they showed that photograph after showing Mrs Craig on the autopsy table and they got away with it all by saying that since the photographs were black and white that would not excite the passions of the jury to show them the disfigurement of a woman laying there with six visible stab wounds all I knew was that the jury couldn't look at me after they looked at those photographs prior to that they did in fact everyone stopped being able to look me in the eye I kept challenging people I was so indignant I'm like what are you doing I didn't kill anyone but when you're 21 years old no one has any time for you the jury took the time to go to the Wagon Wheel restaurant after convicting me of murder and rape to have dinner they were making sure they was getting us over the Eerie thing was there was a huge storm that came through the Delaware Valley and a boat of lightning hit the courthouse and knocked the power out it was like my Marley moment I couldn't believe that I was being escorted through these clig lights up to a holding cell and I was watching people out in the courtyards of the building that had been emptied after the court been struck by the lightning they looked up and they saw me some of them waved some jeered I knew some I waited I knew that the jury had gone off to eat they asked me if I wanted something myself and I said no they said Well when the jury comes back they'll have gotten things done and the sheriff said I can't believe it and he kept saying this to me I can't believe and I said to him what do you mean sir that they found me good he goes no when they were over there deliberating for you to be convicted they were having dinner and some of them had the nerve to ask the waiters to hold on to their desserts so that after they came back and read my verdict they could go back and deliberate whether or not to put me to death while they had to deserve I don't know I went back in the courtroom and I waited for someone to look in my eye and the judge when he sentenced me to death couldn't look me in the eye he said to me are you finished when I told him look you know it's obvious I didn't kill anyone I was home with my mother my father and my sister having dinner 28 miles away from the murder scene there's no possible way with a bank receipt at 3 pm that day that this murder happens at 405 that I I'm anywhere near Delaware killing this woman but he couldn't look me in the face and he said do you have anything else to say I said yeah you can go to hell look at me you can't even look me in your eye and you're about to sentence me to die and you can't look me in the eye you can go to hell that's all the newspaper group defiant murderer tells judge go to hell oh man when they got me into State Penitentiary oh I was the second youngest person ever sentenced to die in Pennsylvania there was only 27 of us and I made the mistake of getting into an altercation with a correctional officer who was teaching me about Christianity by strip searching me with his fellow officer sticking his fingers in my anus and then rubbing them on my face and telling me about Jesus so I punched them hard as I [ __ ] could to and it was worth the beating and getting locked up but they blamed that as one of the reasons they locked down Pennsylvania's death row so I had no friends on death row they sent me to Huntington prison Huntington State Prison in the early 80s was the only prison ever condemned by the United Nations for its active practices of torture if you spoke in your cell and you broke the silence rule four Burly guards in riot gear rush into your cell with a nurse who's wearing a helmet and a black vest she's got a needle in her hand full of Thorazine 1 000 milligrams she rushes in when they got you down and Jabs you in the ass and says it's done and you're left like a drooling monster you just oh my God so for a week of your life you can't even talk because you're so high off of Thorazine it takes forever for that drug to get out of your system now if that didn't work they upped the next level so they had a a cell built out of glass bricks the object was keep the light on 24 hours a day put you in that cell because they got tired of hitting you with the Thorazine and make you do a head count every 15 minutes for a week that means you have to get up stand at attention and be counted every 15 minutes after about a week of that you go into white out white out is when you no longer have consciousness of your surroundings and this is what they were doing to prisoners at Huntington when I got there they took everybody else off the bus they lined me up against the wall and the lieutenant explained the rules to me that I wasn't allowed to speak of myself and when I stupidly broke the rules by saying yes sir he backhanded me he went on to tell me that I was dead and that everybody I knew or loved was dead and dead men didn't speak in his unit snapped his fingers and said 30 seconds and that's when they pounced they beat me for 30 seconds with clubs hold your breath for 30 seconds that's a challenge hold on to your sanity while men are ripping it into your legs with Riot sticks professionally whacking you all right throw me in a cell and the nurse comes up and by wrote starts reading off the process unit intake paperwork that I need to use to see a doctor a dc-138 -8 medical form would be provided to me if I needed to see a doctor I'm standing there willing this lady to look at me just look at my face lady look at the blood look at what they just did to me she had her head down she would not look up so I refused to answer her hoping to get her to look at me and she knew the routine the guard would wait and say inmate makes no response and she'd read off the next thing and make makes no response then I was finally at the end of that handed a form of where to put my where to send my body or put my body when I was done after they executed me I'm 21 years old I'm thinking how the hell can I live where I can't talk and it's all a joke so I used to sit in my cell and beat my head against the wall I thought at first if I stayed on it if I stayed Street angry ain't no [ __ ] gonna break me like that stupid mentality I remember they'd have to patch my head up take me to the triage for all the times I beat my head open and I was taken there by a guard an OG guard been there for a long time and he kind of took pity on me we were coming back past a cell that was empty from a man that killed himself by jumping off the top tier and he said boy go in that cell get some of them books that'll stop you from being angry so I walked in hurriedly grabbed five books that weren't urine stained or ruined and I ended up with an amazing treasure and I went back to my soul and I began working as best as I could on my own because of one thing I was tired of being humiliated by not being able to process language and having people speak over to my intelligence level words flew past my ears at my own trial and it was devastating to have your life decided when you were guttural you spoke an ugly form it took me a long time to start off and I had so many headaches having aphasia I also discovered that I have a a weird form of Dyslexia where I can't visualize numbers how the hell am I going to deal with this like if I know it's described to me you know six with the three or you know six times three people can do the calculation in their head they can see it you know it's 18 right when I had to take middle blue and second red put them together and times them because I had to contrive an ability in my brain to do math by coming up with number systems at one three five seven and nine are all various types of red and two four six and eight are various types of blue with the zero being black I can come up with math in my brain so I knew I wasn't stupid I I knew I was kind of bright I also had the devastating thing of being assigned public defenders to defend me on appeal who didn't believe in me my first attorney told me he was an ex-military officer and he supported the death penalty but he was filing my appeal perfunctory he didn't care about me and he didn't want me to waste his time trying to tell him I was guilty I mean not guilty because he had gone through the records and he thought it was a solid conviction the best he had hoped for is just to get me a life sentence so I could live out my remaining years in prison and not rape and kill anybody else he said [Music] I couldn't believe that I had waited through two years of Silence to meet my first lawyer and he tells me all this crap I knew I had to become clever I had to educate myself because Not only was the system willing to squash me like a bug and play with me but anybody they gave me for help was going to be a joke I started I tried and then the appeal was filed and I'm being taken to court in 1985 I can't believe that this guy filed the appeal the state supreme court said he was right that I should have never been convicted of rape I mean kidnapping rape and robbery altogether as the underlying aggravating crimes that led to me being sentenced to death because those crimes happened in the state of Delaware she was abducted in the state of Delaware I could not be convicted of kidnapping in Pennsylvania I was going to get off of that floor at least at a minimum I'm going to be given an evidentiary hearing on all 33 pages of the homicide file that disappeared when I became the prime suspect and all of the material related to the actual suspect is gone I'm so eager to get the court I can't believe it in February of 1985 I'm being transported from Death Row to court and we stopped to go to the toilet and in a series of Hazard crazy unpredictable circumstances I escaped from death row and I end up on the FBI's most wanted list for the next 25 days this is crazy I'm going to take a piss at a gas station in Sub-Zero temperatures the coldest night of the year I'm wearing prison shoes prison trousers a prison shirt I ain't thinking about anything but going into the cubicle and urinating and getting my ass back in the car while I was taking a piss the officer who went over with me stood and held the top of the door open so he could watch me but standing there his bladder gave away and he had to go so bad he made a decision to let me just go back to the car by myself he was too far away to say anything to his partner I came out I went under his arm I ducked down I went back to the car and I'm doing that weird thing because my hands are cuffed and he's not behind me but I don't know it the officer in front of me who was smoking a cigarette looked up and saw me trotting at him in the dark doesn't see his partner and freaks and he pulls the gun like that and when he went with the gun pulling out I said what are you doing and bam like no warning no halt none of that television bam the first shot went off and I turned and I ran oh my God I ran but my arms are cuffed I can't get the normal Locomotion that we do when we run and I'm going downhill and I fell when he fired the second shot I went down and I lost all the skin off my hands and it was so painful it jolted me awake like wait a minute man this is it go I ran just like a street kid a hundred yards to the right there was a gas station no cars available I ran another 100 yards to the right I ran another 100 yards to the right and I ended up right behind the cop car that I just got out of and escaped and I watched them shouting at each other and going back and forth while I was laying in the grass no more than 40 yards from them I took off my prison eyeglasses I was hyperventilating I started vomiting I couldn't stop vomiting from the shock and then I got myself together I took the end off of my eyeglasses and I took the handcuffs off having worn a handcuffs for years I learned how to get out of them I took my cuffs off I put them in my pocket and I looked up and there was a flag on a building and I I knew it was a municipal building and it was a police station so I actually went and navigated around the gas station in the woods and the weeds and I crawled behind the police station I hid there but it was so cold that where I was hiding was water that was frozen and I was hiding down in this recessed area by the building and I just kept getting the body shakes and freezing and freezing I couldn't take it anymore when I was convulsing from the cold so badly that it was breaking my ribs almost I jumped up and I took off to the parking lot and someone in the building saw me and they called in the helicopter and for the next five hours I was chased by this very dedicated pilot at one point I was running and it was the end of a parking lot there was so much snow that when the plows had been pushing the snow they made a gap in the fence I didn't know this I was running full on as fast as I could with the helicopter blades down on me down on me like that as soon as I hit the back end I slid for like 20 yards and I saw the fence come on at me and I put my arms up and I dropped because it had been so much of a gap I didn't even hit the fence and I slid down and I ended up jumping up and running to the right and hiding under this tractor trailer and he kept circling and circling and he couldn't find me and I made it out of there and I went across this parking lot and I found some railroad tracks and I walked on broken feet with both hamstrings strings pulled and I couldn't believe it I made it five miles to Fraser Pennsylvania where in the parking lot there was a 1965 green Fastback Mustang I hot-wired the car I drove to Darby Pennsylvania and I got a coin out of the car seat and I called a family member and I asked them for help I got some money off of them some bandages and a hat from the Philadelphia Eagles football team and I drove to New York City in that car right away leaving the area I went up to New York and at the time you could get a flop House hotel room for fourteen dollars in the Bowery I got a room I got a loaf of bread some lunch meat and a box of Epsom salt and I sat in that room for days picking institutional clothing out of my ripped up flesh my face and everything was just torn up so bad from just running blind Terror through the woods [Music] a couple days later I came out of my hotel and I was walking on Madison and I saw all the Macy's display windows with televisions and I saw the news reports of me on some of the channels and I started freaking out and I was wondering if everybody was like able to just look at me and say hey that's you but nobody even was looking you know so I I went down to the West Village and I was walking around and I saw this two men in the window of a uh hair salon and they were talking amicably and nicely and in an instant it just came to me I burst into the door and I was like please please can you help me can you help me he keeps beating me look what he's done to me and they were like oh oh my God who's doing it I said my boyfriend look what he's done to me they sat me in the chair they they permed my hair dyed it black taught me how to put makeup on in two and a half hours after I did that stunt I walked out of there without paying him a penny and I looked completely different I was gone I had black curly hair different eyeglasses for fifty dollars from a shop they recommended me to I couldn't believe it I went to Laguardia Airport after I stole a guy's coat that had his wallet in it and I got on an airplane with no photographic identification anything needed back then and I flew to Orlando Florida and I went looking for a pawn shop so I could sell this fur coat that I stole in New York City out of a a restaurant and I'm thinking get out of America man just go I don't know it was too hard like I I was I was complexly blown away at one point I met this girl and I hung out with her at her mom's a little like business and we had amazing time together and she invites me to her house the next day and I I say yeah but when I get there it's dinner like I thought go get you know pick her up I ended up while on Escape being a dinner guest for a family who later on when they found out who I was her mom said I was still the most polite boy she had ever brought home man it was that kind of crazy I can't explain it but like I was trying not to get caught up in being normalized I was trying to also not think about any minute they're going to catch me they're going to blow my brains out and all this you know oh I'm sitting on the one in Florida and there's a Navy Army Navy Store and it's got the big rubber yellow raft in the window and I had a plan I was going to go in that store and I was going to buy that raft and then I was going to get all my favorite treats and I was going to paddle out into the shipping lanes I was going to have one amazing meal watching the sunset in Florida then I was going to cut my wrist wait for the Sharks to show up I was going to blow my brains out because I didn't want my family to see me in handcuffs ever again then part of me said man then you're always going to beat it in history that murderer that's all you'll ever be man from coward that ran so I turned myself back in they couldn't believe it the Volusia County Jail had me under the charges of a stolen car and I had to bail money I was ready to leave I got tired of I couldn't do this no more I called my dad I said poppy do me a favor I need you to call the FBI and tell them I'm in the Volusia County Jail I'm under the name Daniel Joseph Corbett I'm being held for 500 I've got fifteen hundred dollars on me I can get out of here right now I want to come home I want to fight this thing he said you sure I said yeah he said all right hang up next thing I knew all the guards in the prison ran to get me man strip me naked chained me up and walked me through the female wing of the prison to get to the high security unit I was holding my junk rattling and rolling man it was crazy so I get put on Florida's death row and end up next to coward asked Ted Bundy for eight months in the heat there's no matches in Stark Florida prison they were blowing each other's heads off with handmade shotguns by taking sulfur and Flint from the striker of books of matches until you had enough to make powder and then getting Pebbles and glass and taking a metal pipe and crimping off one end melting a spoon around the hole that you've managed to dig into the pipe so sticking an electrical cord into that hole and wrapping the other one around the exterior of that pipe and then when someone walks past your cell you plug the cord into the wall and the electricity ignites the charge and you blow someone's head off I was on top of Q wing three stories above Yellow Mama the electric chair and I had to The Misfortune of sitting there listening through the vents to [ __ ] Bundy cry about anything he could [ __ ] about while no one had any time for him because he had made it known that he had sex on a visit they took all the dudes visits off of death row so everybody on the wing wanted to kill his little [ __ ] ass I went back to Pennsylvania I ruined my appeals everything was screwed up bad there was no such thing as death row Florida added 35 years to my sentences so in 1987 I was sitting in Pennsylvania's death row with 105 years of sentences plus the death penalty and I had no hope that was it I was done so the strangest thing happens is this whole case began with a newspaper left in a cell that I was initially arrested in and a convicted serial rapist by the name of Dennis Sheffield is throwing away a newspaper and he asked me if I wanted it and I had the guard pass it to me and it was the Philadelphia Inquirer and on the front section of the Science and Technology was a photograph of Sir Alec Jeffries and his invention of DNA science and how courts in Florida had just convicted a man by proving it was his DNA based on the work of Sir Alec Jeffries back in England solving the Colin Pitchfork murder case in leicestershire by gathering all the blood samples of men between a certain age in the village and showing it was Colin that did the murder I was like oh my God are you kidding me they gotta now this is the craziest thing I was partially convicted because whoever killed and then raped Mrs Craig had B positive blood I have B positive blood and I'm a secreter of that antigen but in the 19 early 80s that didn't really do you know Define it DNA changed everything I was shaken with joy I was so sure I could prove my innocence I was the very first prisoner in America to seek DNA testing from Death Row in 1988. no other prisoner on death row at that time had ever sought DNA testing no other convicted prisoner at that time had filed anything in February 88 I had the honor and horrible distinction of being the first man to try and prove his innocence with DNA I didn't know right at that moment it was going to take me 15 agonizing years from that moment for DNA to be relevant in my life I only knew that they were going to orchestrate an effort to Murder Me by destroying evidence my first lawyer Joe Bullard told me to that the the coroner was so eager to see that this would be done his office would be part of the first case in America and that I should call him back on a Monday morning so that they could they could discuss which laboratory the evidence would be shipped to because he just got off the phone remember with the coroner who said they had all of the autopsy material from the Linda May Craig homicide available for DNA testing I got on the phone Monday and it was a different Joe he said I spoke to the corner just 15 minutes ago ignoring what I'm saying about this or that and the coroners found out that all of the evidence has been destroyed sorry Mr Harris they don't know what happened to it they've gone through all their files I said how can I be on death row if there's no evidence to prove me guilty then because it doesn't work that way they had the evidence to convict you they don't need to keep it I said this doesn't make a decision so I was starting to yell I wanted to get upset but I'm in a unit where if I raised my voice the guard standing behind me are just going to lash into my thighs with those like those sticks I let it go man I hung the phone up I went back to my cell you know I was so angry that all the evidence was gone and I kept saying be positive who got me here right be positive well I picked up my trial notes and I started reading them and in what's called sidebar where the defendants never present conversations were had prior to Witnesses and this one little footnote Dr Muhammad Tahir National Medical Services Willow Grove Pennsylvania before he testified about the B positive blood groups because they were asked to do the serological work he said he had numerous well-preserved slides at his lab and I went oh I wonder if he still has them so I wrote him a personal letter and I said dear doctor to hear I'm convicted of the Linda May Craig a homicide I hope you remember me but I was wondering did you keep the evidence from that case he wrote me back and said yeah I have it I was like wow he wrote me back on death row and said I do indeed have well preserved slides that have numerous well-preserved spermatozoa visible to the eye on them two detectives from the prosecutor's office went there without a court order and took that evidence and put that in her desk for the next three years when I finally got it back I couldn't believe in 1992 I got the federal court to finally listen to me and when the evidence came from Delaware County District Attorney's Office of the CID there was nothing left on those slides a detective named David Pfeiffer tried to murder me I knew right then it was going to be hard I knew I had no chance but I had to become seriously strong at that time I had just met a woman named Jackie I was so humiliated by being on death row by my own stupid making up of a story I was more embarrassed by that and I would rather have her think I was guilty that I didn't tell her I was innocent for six months imagine having feelings for someone and caring about them and they come and visit you and yet you don't have the courage to tell them you're innocent a because it would have been a huge emotional burden on them to know I was suffering all this for no reason and B you put yourself there by making up a stupid story huh I only told her because of the DNA and I thought this would work you know we contacted the Sally Jesse Raphael Show we tried to do the show together I kept contacting journalists and all of these organizations all these innocence projects and everyone turned me down it went on for years and Jackie came to visit me after nine years when I finally got the federal court to investigate and find the victim's clothes my mother recalled at the end of the trial they tried to give her the victim's clothes so we had a hearing and my mom was the hero of the day and found the evidence the evidence was being shipped to California so Dr Blake could test the evidence and it burst open in shipping and he refused to do the testing so all the evidence was officially deemed distorted or destroyed and Jackie God bless her came to see me I was up in Pittsburgh Penitentiary I was actually in the cell right next to the original Buffalo Bill Gary heidnick A Man Who Loved to abduct women and put them in the basement of his house and torture them I was surrounded by all these Mad Men like Gary and Jackie walks in and tells me you can't take it no more her mom was dying of emphysema she's got a house full of legal book boxes of my work and this ain't going nowhere and all the evidence is gone and she met someone named Bob and she thought she wanted to be happy and she had to go I was 39 years old I had just spent 18 years on death row nine of which I was deeply in love with this woman so I went on a mad journey of finishing my education and meanwhile I circumnavigated the planet by sending Snippets of my hair to pen pals all over the world thinking I would never see the ocean again and when I found out about DNA I thought [ __ ] it if I Gotta Die in here I'm gonna get some friends of mine to send my DNA all over the world but but I wasn't done with this journey and I started getting sick at one point in prison six two 240 pounds I was working out on this amazing kundaliga yoga program taking care of myself I was doing good man I had a hustle I got two guys off a death row by doing their legal work for him I was well respected people who actually knew who I was and trusted who I was but I was I was diagnosed with Hepatitis C after a couple others on the unit died of it foreign when I came back from Escape in 1987 in Pennsylvania they beat me for four minutes and they broke my teeth and the dentist didn't change the suction return sleeves and he infected 12 or 15 of us with this very viral strain of Hepatitis C so the euphemism name that we had for him was Doctor death because so many guys died in the dentist chair but here was a new level he gave us all hepatitis C now I listened in Greene County prison in 2002 as Dale Carter convicted of rape and murder like me died in his cell [Music] the nurses would come to his soul and facetiously mock him Mr Carter would you like an aspirin would you like something for your pain and he would scream out [ __ ] you know I'm dying I need some morphine help me please don't let me suffer like this well you should have thought about that when you killed that woman Mr Miss Carter I bet you she suffered too and he'd walk on and I'm thinking no man don't let them do this to you Nikki you fought too hard to be somebody that you can respect and love don't [ __ ] let them do that to you watching Carter die gave me an idea you see the very first man in Pennsylvania's history in the modern era to be put to death was Keith zettelmeyer an absolute passive soul of a man they broke his hip up in Huntington prison where he did time with me up there by throwing him down a flight of metal steps Keith killed his Beth's friend they were doing burglaries together they got caught his friend told on a turn States evident Keith took his friend down to the river and shot him in the head other than that Keith wasn't no criminal he was a nice guy he was so sorry for what he did I never seen a man pray and worship God and seek forgiveness but he couldn't take it no more so he asked to be executed and I watched him be walked to his death just like I watched the real Buffalo Bill Gary heidnick seeking Glory do the same thing I was going to use that example to take control of this I was not going to go out with the nurses and others standing at my door mocking me so I wrote a letter to the federal court and I asked to be executed after sitting in my cell blind for three solid days because this is how the medications are distributed in Pennsylvania prisons at the time they have inmate workers who sometimes are in charge of the scripts so I was being given three horse pills of interferon and being jabbed would interfere on these cancer-fighting jobs uh injections three times a week so nine pills a day I was supposed to be taken turned into 12 pills a day because I was given the medication too much it toxified my system shut my kidneys down and blinded I was so distraught that it happened out in the exercise yard and they beat me I'm like this is insane so if I get sick and I'm in the yard it's a move on you oh my God leave me alone with this because it's getting too much so I sat down in December of 2002 and I asked to be executed the federal court knowing that I had been a DNA effort prisoner for 15 years decided to have Dr Edward Blake do the remaining tests in February of 2003 the Killer's gloves that were left in the automobile that were never tested that were hidden from my defense council at my trial yielded DNA from an unknown male number one they also revealed DNA from a second possible female victim now at that time I heard he dismissed my appeals and asked to be executed I was brought to a hearing and my fidgeting hands lawyers were telling me look we have one shot left these are consumptive tests if you want these tests done on the victim's underwear and other items that Dr Blake has in his possession you have to agree that if they are not proof positive of your innocence that that's it I said go I don't have time to argue go like I didn't fight this fight this long and then there's a question and I'm like oh well I better stop go July of 2003 um I was sitting in Graterford prison having been brought to the Philadelphia area for court when the phone was brought to my cell it was like Garris got a phone call so I was hoping it was my mom or something you know so pick up the phone get on it wait through the mechanical process to click through and it's Michael Wiseman of the federal defender's office and he's like Nick just got the paperwork faxed to us from Dr Blake I was sitting there reading it I want you to go through it with his um so the DNA that was found in the Killer's glove of unknown male number one matches DNA from spermatozoa of which was found in Mrs Craig's underwear and he starts slowing down I'm screaming oh my God oh my God don't you see it proves me innocent his sperm and the DNA from his gloves that was left at the crime scene and he's like oh my God it actually yeah this proves you're innocent he goes oh Nick I gotta tell you man you don't know how many times we were sitting around saying what if he's actually and I'm like no I don't have time for your [ __ ] reminiscent about how you as counsel thought I was insane and you held on and did this for me gratis um so I hung the phone up for him and I clicked it back and I got some time left I called my mom I was like Mom listen they got the DNA back from Dr Blake and I'm innocent she goes oh thank God I knew it was going to come out but Nikki I can't take this call right now Mikey's laying at my feet he's having a grand mal seizure he's off his medication he's been drinking again I gotta go talk about the worst possible scenario it broke me it did the guard came back to get the phone and he found me laying on my bed huddled crying incredibly because I'm innocent all the guards on the unit were in on why I was there the inmates next to me are shouting get the [ __ ] out Nick get out and do something with your life he took me down the hall and he put me in the shower and he put a plastic chair in there because I was so shaky he said just go in there it's too hot it's July get under there and he smacked the button and left me under the shower and I started I cried because my little brother Marty died the year before the drug overdose in my parents basement my father got fired from over so many jobs or mistreated my parents would tell me how people would bring them up in the middle of night tell them what scumbags they were for being my parents right and I knew this wasn't somehow it wasn't over man you don't beat me like this and beat me like this and then you stop it's over the administration came to me they said Dear Mr Yaris like we're so happy for you what's happening in the news is wonderful but if till it becomes official and they walk you out of the prison we're keeping you in level five Maximum Security Prison cell because you're one of the most dangerous prisoners we've ever held and we're not going to trust you I said wait a minute whoa whoa whoa you broke my hands you beat me you you beat me I I haven't heard anyone you made me fight other men but I didn't choose to do that like what's wrong with you they said look with your history and what we've done to you we don't believe that anybody could go through what you've gone through and not be angry and as such we think that you you would get revenge on one of us if given the opportunity so until they open the door and let you out you're going to sit in a level five maximum security so and we're taking everything off you so you can't make no weapons so over the last eight months they put me in an empty cell with two towels a sheet pillowcases like that's it nothing a plastic cart and milk carton a drink on them they thought by taking all of my paintings or my books and everything I don't know maybe they would force me to just break mentally I don't know what they were thinking but it became this beautiful opportunity for me to sit in my cell and start drainage daydreaming about the type of person I wanted to try and find Within Myself at the very beginning I told you I had the utter distinction of having started my life twice the second time I began my life was January 16th 2004 [Music] I was 42 years old and I was standing in front of a prison and I had just gone through the horror of having my release botched earlier that morning and I had to stay calm and speak for the men who were innocent in the prison behind me I had to get in a car with my parents and drive across Pennsylvania in the front seat I watched them hold their hands together I knew this was going to be the onset of the hardest challenge of my life somehow I knew this was going to be bigger than death row at the age of 42 I stood in front of my parents house on the evening of my release and I spoke to the Press then I went inside with everyone and I was I hate to say this I was allergic to hugging human beings you see if I held someone all of their energy would impact me so much it would make me shiver and I was vibrating with so much life that if I hugged or touched others they were getting shocks and that I couldn't explain it I sat there and we waited around and the 10 o'clock news came on and then the 11 o'clock news purposefully pushed myself back as far as I could away from everyone in the room because unlike them I didn't know what I looked like I didn't have a mirror in myself I had a scratched up piece of metal on my wall for so long and I never saw photographs to myself or anything I wondered what I look like so I sat back in the corner and I waited and I looked on screen I didn't make the connection who was this man prison eyeglasses a baseball cap standing there with these people that's not me I'm over here to Nikki like that's not that's a that's a fully grown man it was so deep I've been shot stabbed strangled run over by an automobile two drug overdoses I hung myself in a prison cell I lived through 23 years of solitary confinement that included two prison riots and I'm saying the only thing I can derive from all of that is that what a wonderful chance to be somebody what a wonderful chance to have meaning to people and show them that you don't have to capitulate to your ego you don't have to go seeking validity by blaming others shit's gonna happen you're going to get the shitty end of the stick you're going to get beat down things are going to go bad but you define who you are in the aftermath of that you define what you deserved of it what you didn't deserve of it and your actions and more importantly never let anyone steal your kindness It Is What Makes You uniquely Who You Are I've gone through this enormous thing of having two distinct starting points in life the first one I had no control over this one I do as such I'm going to continue on trying to do something to make meaningfulness out of all of this My Hope is that I continue on using my efforts as an author to write things and actions in life as well so that my daughter who haven't seen who's now 16 years old soon to be 17 in April will have a lasting lingering memory of the good that I was I don't have anything else left I have been tested but not broken otherwise I am so grateful to be here I feel like this would be the last time I ever speak in America that's a great sense of accomplishment that I have made here and now I'm free to go on and seek happiness again I'm still in love I'm still alive I'm still a good person so I should have those dreams just as all of you should have I want to thank Mark bringing me here to share all this with all of you I'm eternally grateful to know before you heard my voice today you felt alone but you now know we share that same commonality and I love you I love you for being the decent person that helps others I love you for being the thankless person who doesn't do things to be thanked but it's nice to have them I want to take time at the conclusion here to say I believe so much in good that I was willing to walk out of death row and believe in all of you and yes the truth is the 19 years that I have been free have been harder than all the death row days that I've done that's incredible it's more immediate and profound and Lasting the things that I've encountered out here people have been exceedingly cruel without any punishment notion behind it but I've also found there's so much Beauty and good out here I have to continue believing it all has meaning because I realized the people I've given courage to see me falter I steal from them the grace that I've given them I dare not do that though I shared tears today they're really just expressions of letting out so much that I've waited three years to talk about I'm really honestly at this point feeling like I can let all of this go and if this is my last interview here in the United States I share a beautiful smile knowing that it won't be sad and that things are going to be better in the future thank you for your time I really am grateful goodbye and take care incredible story thank you

Channel: Soft White Underbelly

Views: 1,016,442

Keywords: soft white underbelly, swu

Id: lvx-ufCDaS0

Length: 89min 32sec (5372 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 26 2023