She was a Texas Tech University sophomore on her way back to her dorm.
You have several nice girls that have been raped by some unknown black guy in a really brutal way.
There was a so-called tech rapist at the time and students that had been assaulted had given a description.
As this student began parking her car, a black man approached her.
He put a knife to my throat and pushed me over into the passenger seat and started to drive away and started telling me,
stop screaming or I'm going to kill you.
And he drove her to a vacant lot where he raped her.
This car is the public frenzy. It was the front page news, the tech rapist on the loose again.
How can he be caught? When will he be stopped?
They need to find somebody.
They looked like they were incompetent, but they need to calm the citizens.
I mean, they have to get somebody right.
Two weeks later, a detective spoke to Timothy Cole outside a restaurant near campus and Tim became a suspect in the crime.
Officials arrested him.
He never had run-ins with the law before.
If you have a police force who is looking for somebody that they can't really find and they just find somebody to substitute.
Yeah, I'm going to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
He was the oldest child, our family, he was our big brother.
They'll arrest that person, construct quote-unquote evidence.
And then went off to the army, returned, get started at college.
Get him off the street and everybody goes back to what they're doing.
Tim was a good guy. There was no evidence against him to speak up. He had one big problem.
He was black.
Tim said, no, I'm not playing guilty somebody.
I'm innocent, haven't done anything, have nothing to hide.
We were always brought up to believe that, you know, if you tell the truth, you'll be okay.
Your son always maintained his innocence.
Yes, always. There was no evidence that linked him.
That case depended a lot upon witness identification.
He was selected by a victim who earnestly thought she was selecting the right person.
I really honestly believe that they had, you know, found the right guy and I had picked out the right guy.
What they told her was, that's the guy we're certain of.
No, he's a bad guy. We got him on a whole bunch of other rape cases.
They pretty much manipulated the line up.
I mean, I didn't ever ask questions. I just assumed that, you know, that they had other physical evidence.
And then they told her, if you don't identify him, he'll go free and more women will be raped and it'll be your fault.
But the evidence didn't add up.
Witnesses said Cole was with them at a party at the time and no physical evidence tied him to the rape.
There's so many of his constitutional rights being violated.
None of us ever thought that, you know, he would get convicted of something that he didn't do.
The all white jury returned with a guilty verdict.
Sometimes zeal to get a conviction overcomes objectivity and evaluating evidence.
And away Tim went to prison. It destroyed his family. It destroyed him.
An innocent man whose life is ruined.
To our family apart.
It's an abuse of authority and power.
Timothy Cole became the face of wrongful convictions.
He becomes an example and he also becomes a cause.
I'll never forget that day when my mother walked the hallway saying, why did they do this to my son?
You know he didn't do it.
I won't forget that. I can't.
In the lineup he was holding his number plate. He was smiling.
Why? Because he knew he didn't do it and somebody was going to get him out of this.
I prayed the prayer that one day whoever did it would come forward.
In 1995, nine years after Tim Cole's rape conviction,
another man started writing letters to the court, confessing to the crime.
A guy named Jerry Wayne Johnson committed.
A man who was already serving a life sentence for two other rapes.
I've taken responsibility for that. It just troubles me. I don't have a day when I don't think about it.
But no one responded to Johnson's letters.
They just threw them away. No one ever read one.
And Tim Cole never learned of Johnson's confession.
It's a photograph about five years later.
He looked as if he had gone crazy.
Five years in prison for something you didn't do. He looked totally insane.
After spending 13 years in prison never giving up on the justice system himself, Tim died behind bars.
He died of asthma. He suffocated in a prison cell and then had a heart attack as a result of his asthma.
An absolute tragedy.
A year later, Jerry Wayne Johnson's letters reached Cole's family.
We always knew he was innocent.
And the Innocence Project of Texas saw newly available DNA tests on the rape evidence. Tests that implicated Johnson.
My first reaction was, oh my God. And cleared Cole.
I felt guilty. I felt horrible. You know, I felt this was all my fault.
And I've learned that the police did a lot of things that they shouldn't have done.
It is common. It is shameful. It is evil. What they did to him.
I stood up and told the truth. And the people involved in this happened.
The police and the district attorney's office. No one has spoken. It's been evaded.
The truth needs to be told.
Can you know the truth just set you free?
State of Texas killed him Cole.
The Innocence Project of Texas
