Two Georgia men were released from prison – and one of them was completely exonerated – after spending more than two decades behind bars, when a true crime podcast revealed new evidence that all but destroyed the case authorities had built against them.
Darrell Lee Clark and his co-defendant Cain Joshua Storey were released from custody last week, after spending more than 25 years imprisoned for the 1996 shooting death of 15-year-old Brian Bowling, a friend of the pair, according to a press release from the Georgia Innocence Project.
New evidence from the true-crime podcast Proof disputed the prosecution’s case that Clark and Storey had murdered Bowling with premeditation.
“You never think something like that is going to happen to you,” said Lee Clark, who thanked the Innocence Project and the podcast for helping secure his release.
“It’s been surreal to say the least,” Storey added. “I believe it’s going to be great. One step at a time.”
Bowling had died after being shot in the head on 18 October 1996.
Right before his death, Bowling had been on the phone with his girlfriend, telling her that he was playing Russian roulette with a gun.
The gun had been brought over by Storey, Bowling’s best friend. Storey had also been in the room with Bowling when the gun was fired.
Police had initially charged Storey with manslaughter in connection to Bowling’s death, believing the shooting had been unintentional but still illegal. But at the urging of Bowling’s family, police began investigating his death as a murder, which implies much more serious charges.
To build their case, police interviewed a woman who lived near the Bowlings’ house. The woman had claimed that she heard Storey and Clark talk about having planned to murder Bowling during a party, months after the shooting had happened. The woman also said Storey and Clark wanted to kill Bowling because he knew too much about a theft the pair had committed.
Furthermore, police spoke with a person with hearing and speech impairments who was in a different part of the house during the shooting. The person claimed to see Clark running out of the Bowling’s home and through the back yard.
During the trial, prosecutors relied on the testimony of a coroner who said he had a “gut feeling” that the gunshot could not have been self-inflicted in the way it might happen if they were really playing Russian roulette. But the coroner was not a medical doctor, and an autopsy was never conducted on Bowling.
Storey and Clark were convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder in 1998. They were both sentenced to life in prison at the age of 17.
In 2021, podcasters Susan Simpson and Jacinda Davis of Proof began looking into Storey and Clark’s case. The two interviewed the key witnesses who prosecutors relied on to convict Storey and Clark.
They learned that police had actually coerced the woman to falsely state that she had heard Storey and Clark discussing any plans to murder Bowling after police had threatened to take her children away.
The Proof podcasters also found out the police’s second witness had been misunderstood at the time of the trial and was speaking about an unrelated shooting he had witnessed in 1976. The person had actually never seen any boy outside the Bowling property during the shooting.
“It took us a long time to talk to both of those witnesses,” Davis said to CNN. “The podcast was happening in almost real time as an investigation. When we finally found and were able to talk to those two witnesses, it really solidified that both of these guys had been wrongly convicted.”
In September, Clark’s attorneys filed motions asserting that Clark’s conviction had been based on false evidence and coercion.
Clark was released from Floyd county jail after court officials agreed that his conviction should be completely vacated in light of the new evidence. That finding essentially found him innocent of having committed any crime.
Meanwhile, the murder-related charges on which Storey had been convicted were also dropped against him. But he had previously admitted to bringing Bowling the gun on the night that Bowling told his girlfriend he was playing Russian roulette.
So Storey struck a deal with prosecutors to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter in exchange for a sentence of 10 years he had already served, setting up his immediate release.
