This has been posted elsewhere but maybe someone here can offer something new. If you want a link to something specific ask. Sorry if the tone of some of it is sarcastic but the investigation seems to have been an obscenity.
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In April 2006 Hser Ner Moo, a 7 year old Utah girl, was murdered.
Hours after the body was found, po!ice had a suspect and a full confession. They said an older neighbor boy, with whom she had been friendly, abused, tortured and killed her.
~On May 14, 2014 Esar Met was sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole~
But is he actually guilty?
His confession was enough for most people, even though
almost nobody had actually seen it.
Warning. Some of the material is offensive.
False confessions are a serious problem in America. Almost any child or teenager, and most adults, can be made to give a convincing confession to a crime they did not commit, if the interrogator has the appropriate skills.
The following are the full confession videos unedited. They contain discussion of major crimes and offensive material.
each about 70 mb~
Please compare the confession to the prosecutor's closing statement at trial, that
Hser was "sexually assaulted, repeatedly beaten, strangled, had her arm bent and broken, and ultimately killed by a massive blow or blows to her chest,"
Those injuries did occur. And Met did confess. But something doesn't add up.
The translator also seems to be doing a lot more than simply translating.
Can you figure it out?
http://esarmet.com/video/1.avi
http://esarmet.com/video/2.avi
http://esarmet.com/video/3.avi
http://esarmet.com/video/4.avi
http://esarmet.com/video/5.avi
Esar Met confession audio
If you only want the audio here are the audio tracks from the videos.
http://esarmet.com/audio/1.mp3
http://esarmet.com/audio/2.mp3
http://esarmet.com/audio/3.mp3
http://esarmet.com/audio/4.mp3
http://esarmet.com/audio/5.mp3
If you snatch someone off the street and hold them captive for 6 years you will get life in prison.
But if a police officer snatches someone out of their family's home and force them to confess to a crime they did not commit, so he can solve a high profile case ... he gets a promotion.
And his victim goes to prison.
- - - -
Please look at the evidence carefully.
Each item used to convict Mr Met is not quite as it seems at first glance.
In both cases the suspects have been expertly managed, so the appearance of guilt can be maintained.
Esar Met admits his confession was false. But nobody outside the court system had seen his confession til now.
Craig Gregerson has refused to discuss the case and his confession, saying only that he believes *advertiser censored* is bad and he is sorry for what he did. He has expressed excitement about prison, believing it will allow him to get a good education.
Each suspect has limited education and possible developmental issues. Esar Met has been described as
possibly retarded.
~Two murders in two years. In the same Salt Lake neighborhood~
Both victims very small children, ages 5 and 7.
Both cases involved massive searches with hundreds of people and police conducting door to door searches.
Both bodies were eventually found about 100 feet from where the children lived, in the basements of neighbors.
Both involved extremely unusual acts of violence.
Both bodies found in or near large plastic bags.
Two people arrested.
Both confessed to FBI interrogators.
The focus here is on Esar Met, because his confession is available, but here are some basics of both cases.
July 16, 2006. Destiny Norton, 5 years old, disappears in a fenced area used as a yard by several neighbors.
At the time, it was claimed all of the houses had been searched repeatedly, including with a speciallly trained dog.
After the body was found the FBI claimed that Gregerson had consented to a search of his home but when an agent had smelled something dead Gregerson had said it was dead rats, so the agents did not pursue the search.
Other witnesses claim the FBI did search the entire house more than once.
Numerous people were brought in for polygraphs while Destiny Norton was missing. The polygraph operator wrote a book about his experiences in the case, called Heaven's Hammer. In the book he indicates that he felt Gregerson was guilty and decided to extract a confession.
Other interviews this FBI agent conducted that day were videotaped but he did not videotape the confession.
The FBI agent managed to obtain a written confession from Gregerson, detailing over two pages of his account of what was done. The confession is in Gregerson's handwriting.
However it contains legalistic expressions that Gregerson would not be aware of and other indications that the words are not his.
The confession has never been made public, except for brief excerpts published in the FBI agent's book, much of it information that
was later specifically left out of reports about the crime.
The details of the injuries to Destiny Norton are not known. That material was withheld initially to avoid tainting a jury and no details were released after Gregerson agreed to a guilty plea in order to avoid the death penalty.
During the search for Destiny Norton there was significant criticism of how the police and FBI handled the investigation. When the body was found more than a week later, about a hundred feet from where she disappeared, there was more.
The FBI said that Gregerson had never consented to a search of his basement.
But neighbor Dylan Wood said he watched as police searched his and Gregerson's apartments, just after Destiny vanished. They were questioned by FBI agents.
"We're sitting out here at the picnic table talking with him and the federal marshals and everything,"
he said. "We all filled out questionnaires together."
March 30, 2008, Hser Ner Moo, 7 years old, disappears about 15 blocks from where Destiny Norton disappeared.
Police and FBI agents searched every single apartment in the building complex over the next 24 hours. Except one, where no one seemed to be home.
When the body was found in the basement of that apartment,
near a large bloody plastic bag, another wave of public anger hit authorities.
But authorities were quick to pacify the public by announcing that they had caught a suspect and he had confessed.
In the fifth video above, near the end, you can see a man come into the confession room and announce he needs photos A.S.A.P. and he needs to get them printed.
Newspaper print deadlines were only minutes away.
Unlike the Destiny Norton case, this time the police were not able to keep all of the evidence under wraps.
There was a huge amount of forensic evidence collected in Hser Ner Moo's murder. Fingerprints. DNA. A bloody plastic bag found near the body. And much more.
Almost none of it was used. In fact most of it seems to have disappeared. So what evidence was used to convict Met?
Esar Met was known for giving bicycle rides and piggyback rides to neighbor children. In the days before she died, Hser Ner Moo had a cut on her finger. Apparently 4 drops of that blood fell onto the back of Esar Met's jacket. The crime scene was a bloodbath and the killer left a bloody footprint. He would have been fairly covered with blood. The only blood evidence that could be found involving mr Met were those four drops, arranged in a linear pattern, as with gravity, on the back of his jacket.
Blood evidence not used at trial included a sample of the victim's blood from the crime scene mixed with a small amount of the blood of an unknown male, not mr Met.
Under Hser Ner Moo's fingernails were microscopic skin cell traces, DNA, from a number of people she had contact with before she died, including her family members and Esar Met. This was the second and last piece of DNA evidence used to convict Esar Met.
But when Hser Ner Moo was found she was clutching a handful of hair she had ripped out of her attacker. It's a pretty safe bet there were some roots in that hair that could be tested. But that material ~vanished~
A small amount of DNA from a rape kit swab was also deemed unsuitable for testing.
In the confession, above, Esar Met repeatedly insists that he did not even know the child was dead. But with a little help from the FBI agent he eventually comes around.
He admits that Hser Ner Moo stopped by his apartment around 9am.
But wait.
She had been home all morning and did not disappear until around 2pm.
So the FBI agent reminds him that she came back to his apartment around 2pm.
Now it looks like the confession is on track. The FBI agent asks him how long she was there and Met says a few hours.
But wait.
It is known that the latest Met could have left to go to visit his uncle was an hour after the little girl disappeared.
And on and on.
Met is trying to create a confession that he thinks will satisfy the FBI agent. He is taking events from the previous few weeks that really did happen, like Hser watching tv there, and weaving them into a story. Is there any indication that Met feels undue pressure to confess? Near the end of the confession Met is asked if he has any questions.
He does.
He wants to know if he will be able to say goodby to his mother before they kill him, if that is what they are going to do.
In his closing statement to the jury, the prosecutor was graphic.
Then he said "Use your own common sense, and try not to get too caught up in little details that would make you miss the forest through individual trees... A doubt is not reasonable if it's based on purely speculation or remote possibility.... Don't get caught up in the little details that are not important or significant in this case... When the defense suggests there should be witnesses, that's ridiculous."
Uh... no one ever asked for witnesses. Only evidence.
After Hser Ner Moo's body was found a medical technician checked her. He said she was completely stiff, rigor mortis had not yet begun to recede.
It is likely that she was still alive when the police started searching, long after Esar Met had left to visit family.
She may even have still been alive well into the night. That's the simple truth.
The police and FBI were under a lot of pressure. Two very small dead children in two years. A lot of serious mistakes made in the first few hours.
They needed to improve their image quickly.
They needed a quick confession and they got it.
- - - -
Six videotaped interviews were done that night. The four roommates, an unknown 5th person and Esar Met.
I got only one of the interviews, the so called confession, and have not seen the others.
But I do have a copy of the police report with details of the interviews with the five others. They are a mix of inconsistencies and absurdities.
One of the roommates came home about an hour eartlier than the others that day, about 4 pm. He says the four of them watched music videos til 9 pm.
Another was asked if he knew why they were being questioned and he said maybe because one of the roommates spit something on the carpet, betel juice, that looks like blood. In fact the stain was blood, it would be learned later.
One says he knew the girl was missing but didn't want to check the basement.
Another didn't know anything about Hser Ner Moo being missing.
The mysterious 6th person, it turns out, was a friend of the roommate who arrived home before all the others, who supposedly was going to teach him English. He claimed he arrived in the apartment after the scene had been sealed off, so the interviewer let him go. The interviewer who let him go interviewed one other person that night. Esar Met.
The police had set up a perimeter around the apartments on the night of the first. Through that night and the next day the only apartment where no one answered the door was the apartment where the four roommates were. Esar Met was visiting relatives. He had only arrived in the country a few weeks earlier. Others knew he was going to be gone.
Much of the police report seems to have been purged. I have what was called "the complete police report". Even with all the problems so evident in what the police report does have, what is missing is much more worrying. What are they hiding?
lease:
