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Thanks very much for your support. In 1976, an 18 year old named Nathan Myers graduated from high school and moved into an apartment on Morgan Street in Jacksonville, Florida.

His roommate was a 26 year old woman named Jeanette Williams. Everyone called her boldy. She worked at a carwash. And Nathan says they were great friends. She cooked big dinners for him every Sunday. And then one night in May. Nathan was invited to a birthday party on a street. And Marco, he'd want to talk about a party. I was I've put off a trip called I will go to Philadelphia at night. But he said, well, you we need to go to the theater.

And if there's a problem, if you Delcambre you with me, I said, OK. And I went to the party.

Nathan Myers spent a lot of time with his uncle, Clifford Williams, even though Clifford Williams was much older than Nathan. And they went to the party together along with Cliffords pregnant wife Barbara Williams. There were a lot of people at the party and at approximately one 30 in the morning, they heard gunshots. About 20 minutes later, someone said police were down the block. Everyone went outside and Nathan says he could see police cars right in front of his apartment.

So I just know that to the conflict and I go up there, I see the full extent of the door. So I was asking what was going on and it was you. I thought, my name is Nathan Myers and I live here. So you live here? I said, yes. He said, well, we got white female. Oh, look busy at another one at the hospital. So, yeah, I think they can you identify which one it is?

I sure can. So he said, well, come on here, don't step in the blood. We shot the flashlight or I go to the room. I went to see Boler with the day that we knew there was trouble. I checked back around. I came out and I told the crowd ahead of gather up, they asked me that bowling ball is actually at the time of the shooting, Nathan Meyers roommate, Jeanette Williams, or Baldie was asleep in bed with her partner, Nina Marshall.

Nina Marshall had been shot three times, once in the arm and twice in the neck. She managed to escape the apartment and flagged down a passing car to take her to the hospital. She said she and Jeanette Williams had been sleeping. The TV was on. She said she thought she heard the front door on.

She fell back asleep. She said two men came into the bedroom and stood at the foot of the bed. They covered their guns with pillows or blankets and fired until both guns were empty. Then they turned close the bedroom door and left through the front door, locking it behind them. Nina Marshall told police she knew exactly who the men were. She could see their faces in the light of the television. Nathan Myers and his uncle, Clifford Williams. The police came to me.

See, you need. I said, Yes, sir, they said around the wrist, as if. For what? The other.

If I tried to cover up, they put me in a separate car. It took us about time, you know, like I was I was kind of free a little bit. I know what was going on. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

Nathan Myers and Clifford Williams were charged with the first degree murder of Jeanette Williams and the attempted murder of Nina Marshall. Clifford Williams had a criminal record, he'd been arrested more than 20 times, mostly on drug charges. He was well known by the Jacksonville police and people in the neighborhood as a heroin dealer. Still, his nephew Nathan remembers not worrying. There were so many people who'd seen him at the party that night at the exact moment the gunshots were heard, he thought surely when people heard the whole story, everything would clear itself up.

Was my lawyer told me, said, listen, we don't need to use your witness because they have to prove your guilt. And I said, well, they don't want to keep you guilty. So I would take his advice. I have 30, 40 some witnesses. The state that I was there, what time I got there, where will I seen, what was I eating? You know, sir, I had all these people to testify to their.

But some got away, you know, he told me that our little hero, little Nathan, in Clifford's defense attorneys declined to call any of the more than 40 people who'd seen them at the party as witnesses.

In Florida in the 70s, if a defense attorney waived their right to call witnesses, they could make their closing argument first and then also respond to whatever closing argument the prosecution made. This was the gamble, Nathan, in Cliffords defense attorneys took. They thought a strong closing argument would be more persuasive than hearing from witnesses who are with the men at the party that night.

Your lawyer, you had all of these alibi witnesses and this plan and he basically said, don't worry about it, we don't need an opening statement, we don't need this alibi witnesses, they have to prove you're guilty. We're fine. That's right. Is that where we said. Nina Marshall testified for the prosecution, she told the court what she told the police, she said she'd been able to clearly identify Nathan Myers and Clifford Williams, even though it was dark in the bedroom from the light of the television.

The state's entire case rested on what she said. The prosecutor told the jury, When you have an eyewitness, you don't need all the forensics. You don't need all that stuff. Nathan, in Clifford's defense attorneys argued that Nina Marshall's story, quote, did not make sense. They emphasized her history of drug use. Neighbors described her as a heroin addict and said she had a reputation for failing to pay drug dealers. She'd been arrested before and sometimes used a different name.

Nina Marshall herself said she had stopped using heroin two or three days before the shooting and was using methadone. She acknowledged using methadone and smoking marijuana before going to sleep on the night of the shooting. The prosecution had offered Nathan Myers a plea deal in exchange for testifying against his uncle. If he cooperated, he'd only serve five years in prison. He'd be out by the time he was 23, but he refused. He said he knew his uncle didn't do it.

They'd been together and they were innocent. The trial lasted two days and the jury deliberated for just under three hours before reaching their verdict. Oh, well, when the verdict was read. Wow. You know, I thought my brain got explode cause I couldn't believe it or lysaght life in prison. And after 30 years, life sentence for a murder, 30 years for attempted murder. Eighteen year old Nathan Myers was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Jeanette Williams, plus 30 years in prison for the attempted murder of Nina Marshall.

His uncle, 34 year old Clifford Williams, was sentenced to death. Clifford Williams spent four years on death row before the Florida Supreme Court changed his sentence to life in prison. Nathan says he did all he could to not become completely hopeless. I had a very, very strong family from my grandmother, grandfather, you know, and there's still a lot of know sort of raised us because that's what we are.

We live there. And I could show that kind of weakness could be a sign of weakness. So I couldn't do that. You know, it would it would be unacceptable in my family for me to do it. Clifford and Nathan filed post conviction motions for decades. They always said they were innocent. They filed public records requests asking to see information relating to their own case. Nathan says he asked the court to please interview people from the party, but it was all denied they hit dead ends at every turn.

Decades past like this, Nathan celebrated his 30th birthday in prison than his fortieth and his fiftieth. So I just deal with it and try to fight it. I kept getting locked out, kept getting knocked down. I kept getting up. He knows that I had to take a break. The area called one of my best friends. We raced up in a safe neighborhood with a school together. It got the same table this day with Tony Brown.

Tony Brown was moved to the same prison as Nathan Myers. Shortly after reconnecting, Tony Brown told Nathan about a man named Nathaniel Lawson. He said that back in 1993, he'd just gotten out of a different prison and was hanging out at a place called Deuce's on Pearl Street in downtown Jacksonville when he was approached by Nathaniel Lawson. They started talking. They each told stories about crimes they committed. Nathaniel Lawson said that Clifford Williams and Nathan Myers were serving time for a shooting that he had committed.

He said that he was paid by a heroin dealer to shoot Nina Marshall because she owed money.

Nathan Myers asked Tony Brown to write down the information, sign it and submit it to the court.

Tony Brown agreed. Then Tony Brown told Nathan Myers that he was going to help him as much as possible with his case, and this man here was so good at a law. He kept me in a low LaBarbera case, that case on over cases that get overturned, that look like cases and stuff like that, you know, and we were we were. We were. And he was sit there. He would read a Jacksonville Journal type. You and I wanted to be a reader, USA Today.

He called me his name.

I say, Yeah, yeah. But you you might want to read as hell. They are good. He said, no, you need to go right now. Go to hell. Right. He showed me the people where the state attorney will try to get an interpreter unit together. He said you need to write them. So I wrote.

In January of 2017, Nathan Myers sent a letter about the newly forming Conviction Integrity Unit. He wrote, Dear State Attorney, I pray you please excuse my intrusion.

I am writing this letter after reading an article in the Florida Times Union in which you were starting a group to seek out and reverse wrongful convictions. For the past 42 years, I've been in prison faced with the prospect of dying in a prison cell for a crime I had nothing to do with. I was 18 years of age at the time of these crimes. Today I am 59 years old, having spent 42 years in prison for a crime I did not and could not have committed conviction.

Integrity units are relatively new. Sometimes they're called post conviction units or conviction review units, and they're often described as a sort of in-house Innocence Project, a way for state attorney's offices to look back and try to correct cases where the office may have made a mistake.

There are about 60 of them. Today, a former defense attorney named Shelley Hibito was hired to be the director of the Conviction Integrity Unit for Florida's Fourth Judicial Circuit, the first in the state.

By the time I arrived in the office in January, there were 80 letters sitting on my desk waiting for me. And Nathan Myers had read that article, you know, in prison. And so he started writing the office. You know, hey, when you have the unit up and running, will you please reach out to me? I have a case that I would like for you to investigate. And his letter sat on our on the desk for a year before I arrived.

And then when I arrived, I started going through the 80 letters that were waiting for me. And there was something about the tone or the tenor of his letter that just struck me as being, you know, believable, plausible image.

It intrigued me. And so, you know, following the protocol that we had set up, I sent Nathan Myers back a letter asking him to fill out the petition. And when he returned the petition to me, he attached, you know, he kind of set forth in the petition, you know, his arguments and the story.

And then he attached a bunch of documents along with the documents, Nathan Myerson, a diagram that he had drawn of his old apartment and the bedroom where the shooting had occurred.

You know, I'm thinking to myself, if I'm in prison and I've been wrongfully convicted, you know, this is the sort of thing that I would be doing to try to convince somebody of my innocence.

I would be attaching documents. And after reading the petition, my my initial thought was, you know, if in fact what he is saying is true, you know, there could be something here. And so that then started the whole investigation process.

Charlie Hebdo began her investigation by reading the transcripts of the trial that had taken place more than four decades earlier. So I think right away, I think right after I read the trial transcripts and I realized that there was no physical evidence that links either one of them to these crimes, the only evidence that the state attorney's office put forth at trial was the word of the surviving victim.

And so when it came, became pretty clear to me that, you know, in fact, what Nathan was saying appeared to be borne out by what I was reading. I you know, it I became obsessed at that point time with doing a deep dive into what happened.

Nina Marshall had testified that Clifford and Nathan had stood at the foot of the bed and fired their guns directly at the women in bed, but looking back through the case files, Shelly Toubro realized that nothing about the physical evidence found at the crime scene supported that account. There was a hole in the bedroom window.

And so the detective that came out to the scene initially made a notation that, you know, in the 70s, right. You have a screen on the window. But in the 70s, the screens were made out of aluminum, you know, some sort of metal.

And so the detective had actually made a notation in the report that the metal prongs around the hole pointed inward towards the bedroom, indicating that the bullets came from outside the apartment through the window and the glass window was shattered and had a hole in it.

There was a notation that there was glass found on the victim's bed that was located underneath the window.

No forced entry anywhere.

And as a matter of fact, the door was locked, which I also thought was very strange. You know, I've just committed this horrible crime. I've shot up to people who I know. I mean, I know these women have gone into their bedroom. I've shot them in cold blood, and then I'm going to lock the apartment door as I'm leaving.

I mean, I thought that was a very bizarre fact and it just never sat well with me. Why would you do that? And so and then in addition to the physical findings at the scene, we also have the bullets shell it.

Hibito found that six bullets were recovered from the scene and crime lab analysis from 1976 showed that they were all fired from the same gun. Nina Marshall had said there were two guns.

And I was like, well, that's really interesting because she's adamant that there were two people in her bedroom and both people were firing shots. And so where did the other, you know, where did the other shots go? But in a in a revolver, there would have been six shots. So it accounts for one gun being fired. The shooter fired all of the the projectiles out of that firearm. And there was no evidence that there were actually two firearms involved in this crime.

In addition to that, Phoebe, these men were arrested very shortly after this crime took place and both of them had gunshot residue test done on their hands. And those gunshot residue tests were sent off to be analyzed. And neither one of them had, you know, gunshot residue located on their hands. And I was like, well, that's really interesting.

Shelley Thibodaux, next step was to bring photographs from 1976 to the current medical examiner to get another opinion of the wounds on the victims bodies.

I'm not telling her about the case. You know, I'm trying to be very cognizant of not providing information to anybody that I used as an expert because I don't want to taint their thought process. So we start going through the photographs and right away there is an entrance wound on the decedent's arm, you know, on her left arm and on the back side of her left arm.

And so the medical examiner looks at me and she says, oh, well, this is an irregularly shaped entrance wound, which means that the bullet that struck her arm had to have hit something else and then it tumbles and that it hits the arm tumbling.

So it's not a it's not circular, as you might expect, you know, if you were shot and it just makes its way directly into your skin. And, you know, and I had missed that. And I was like it was like a light went off for me. I mean, I already had my theory and I was already fairly well convinced. But when she said that, I was like, of course, you know, that bullet is the first bullet that was fired and it struck the screen and the glass.

So that was the intervening object that it hit. And it starts to tumble. And, you know, it it hits the back of of Jeanette Williams arm.

And if, in fact, the shooters had fired from inside the bedroom, as described by Nina, you know, there was no intervening object for the bullets have hit. She tracked down as many of the people from the birthday party in 1976 as she could and interviewed them. She spoke with Jeanette Williams family members. She tried to locate Nina Marshall, but she died in 2001. She also learned that Nathaniel Lawson, the man who had previously told Toni Brown that he was the person who committed the shooting had died.

Also, when you found yourself getting deeper and deeper and reading more and more, I mean, did you find yourself, as you say, you kind of became obsessed with this? I became obsessed because, you know, it's becoming more. More and more clear to me that these men have been wrongfully convicted and, you know, at the time, Phoebe, I'm forty eight, you know, I'm now 50. But at the time I'm I'm investigating this.

I'm forty eight. And I'm thinking to myself, these men went to prison when I was six, and they've spent almost my entire lifetime in prison for something that they didn't do. And I'm just thinking to myself my entire lifetime, you know, these men have been in prison for something they didn't do. And so it became very urgent for me to continue my investigation as quickly as I could while being diligent so that we could get to a place where I'm presenting this to the courts and the courts, making a decision about what they're going to do.

But I did towards the end of twenty eighteen, became fairly frantic at that point time. I had met Clifford Williams and you know, he was in his mid 70s. I want to say he was 76 at the time and he's, you know, from my perspective, frail. And I'm thinking, you know, this man may not have a lot of time on this planet and I needed to get something done.

I mean, once you hear something like that, you you want to make it right, you know, you can't get that time back for those guys, obviously, but, you know, they shouldn't we didn't want them to be in there one day longer than they had been. Jim McMillan is the forensic artist for the Fourth District State Attorney's Office in Jacksonville.

It was a consuming kind of thing because once we knew this was wrong, then we had to figure out, OK, well, how can we make it right? And that was not the simple thing. It wasn't a simple thing legally. It wasn't a simple thing to prove, you know.

I had kind of a. Naive view of how the system worked, even after having been in it for a long time. I found it difficult to believe that someone could be convicted of murder and put in prison for 43 years for something. They didn't do it. It was disturbing to me to know that not only can that happen, it it has happened more often than way, more often than it should have.

Jim McMillan used computer programs to model potential bullet trajectories and even mapped out the dimensions of the apartment in the basement of the state attorney's office.

I taped out the dimensions in the room, on the floor, in the other room there so I could get a better sense of that, the size of the room and where people had to be, you know, and and all of those things just just made it more clear that it didn't happen the way the jury was told it happened.

And the more he and Shelly Hibito dug, the less possible Nina Marshall's version of events seemed.

I don't believe she was lying. She just doesn't know what happened. She was awakened in the middle of the night by someone shooting at her. And she just, you know, she her mind put together pieces that, you know, that just weren't what happened. The Conviction Integrity Units report notes that while Nina Marshall's account was inconsistent with the evidence, quote, This was clearly a traumatic event. Victor Marshall was asleep. The bedroom was dark or dimly lit at best.

She was shot three times and bleeding profusely. She believed her romantic partner had been shot and killed. This event happened over a matter of seconds, and this would have been frightening. Nathan Myers says that during his correspondence with Shelly Tebogo and the Conviction Integrity Unit, he tried to keep his uncle, Clifford Williams, out of it. He was scared to get his uncle's hopes up, though he market.

I love where he or whatever were going for me to go for help for both of us. You know, he could be. He was getting to be old man, and he wasn't that good. So I still had an affair. So he I just went at it.

In July of 2013, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office gave Nathan Myers a polygraph test.

He was asked three questions. Did you shoot either of those women?

Did you shoot either of those women in May of 1976?

Did you shoot either of those women at 50/50 Morgan Street apartment one part of flower cutters.

He really related a good practice test like that.

That good? I see. Because I'll tell you the truth as well. A Latino LA. The detective who administered the polygraph wrote in her report, No Deception indicated. You know, it was sort of the trifecta of cases we had alibi witnesses that weren't called, we had physical evidence that supported their innocence. And then ultimately we had another man who had confessed to having committed the crime.

In February of 2009, Shelley Hibito concluded, quote, The Conviction Integrity Review Division recommends to the honorable state attorney that a determination that the office has lost faith in the convictions of both defendant Myers and defendant Williams is warranted. She wrote, These men would not be convicted by a jury in 2019 if the jury were presented with all the exculpatory evidence.

Shirley Temple asked the Innocence Project of Florida to represent Nathan Myers, and she asked attorney Buddy Schultz to represent Clifford Williams pro bono, which both of them did. On March 28th, 2019, Nathan Myers and Clifford Williams went back into court 43 years after their convictions. They were released from prison that day. All that and all I need to do is just get to where I need to get me a spot spot on a nice party and I got down on my knees, kissed the ground.

Thank the Lord Savior for their freedom. It's the lobby of prayer for the lifeblood of our prayer for my sister, my whole family. We're praying for that day and a bad thing about it. Leila, what? I'm relieved to see that day. You know, that with all the most hurting things, everything I came home to know what? He was 61 years old when he was released from prison. The state paid him the maximum amount allowed by the Florida Victims of Wrongful Incarceration Act two million dollars.

Today, he lives in Orlando with his wife, had never been in my life. I got out of prison. How do you like it? This is a. These it's pretty good people here, you know, at. Oh, my wife, familicide, you know, any real good people, you know, in. I go I go to Jeffrey, we go out shopping, go to market shopping, he goes and we go to both of you.

They love to go out to eat and stuff like that, that we do not stay together, you know? And that's not all I do. I come over to sit and watch TV. You don't say I don't go out on the street. I do not hang out with a dog at my house. Nathan's uncle Clifford Williams, was 76 years old when he was released from prison. He's been having some health issues and was content to let his nephew Nathan speak for both of them.

Clifford Williams moved back to Jacksonville, where he recently got married. Earlier this year, the Florida legislature unanimously voted to pay him two point one five million dollars, 50000 dollars for each year he was in prison.

Let me ask you something.

For those men that you were in prison with, the men that were in the law library with you and working to free themselves, what would you tell them now after it, having worked for you?

What do you tell those men who are who are still there just hoping they get a chance to prove their innocence?

I tell them, don't give up, that, you know, you are you know, some of the stuff that you fight in, you fight in that book for you.

Keep looking, keep filing.

Criminalist created by Lauren S'pore and me, Nitya Wilson is our senior producer.

Our producers are Susanna Roberson and Aaron Waed, audio mix by Rob Byers.

Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at this is criminal dotcom. We're on Facebook and Twitter at criminal show.

Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio WNYC, where a proud member of Radio Topia from PUREX, a collection of the best podcasts around.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Radio to pick from your ex.