Did Arkansas put an innocent man to death? That’s the question raised by newly tested DNA evidence. And thank you for joining us at 10. I’m Craig O’Neal. And I’m Marisa Goldsmith. Liddell Lee maintained his innocence throughout his life up to the day of his execution back in 2017.

 You’ll remember four years ago this month, Arkansas attempted something that had never been done before to execute eight death row inmates over a span of 11 days to beat the expiration date of one of the drugs in the lethal injection cocktail. Ultimately, four of them were put to death by lethal injection. The first was Liddell Lee. He’d been on death row for 22 years for the murder of 26-year-old Deborah Reese in 1993.

 But as TB11’s Ashley Godwin shows us, new test results may cast doubt on his guilt. New evidence shows that Liddell Lee died in silence on April 20th, 2017 as the needle pushed lethal drugs into his veins. He had no final words, no apology, no explanation. He lay still as the cocktail took hold, his chest rising and falling slower until it didn’t. By 11:56 p.m.

, Arkansas had carried out its first execution in over a decade. For many, it was justice. But four years later, something changed everything. They said he was a monster and maybe in some ways he was. But did the state of Arkansas execute him for a crime he didn’t commit just because the victim was white and he was black? Liddell Lee was executed by lethal injection in 2017. He never confessed.

He never gave final words. He went to his death claiming innocence. And four years later, science backed him up. DNA testing finally allowed long after his execution revealed something shocking. His DNA wasn’t on the murder weapon, the bloodied shirt, or the crime scene. An unknown man’s DNA was not his.

 So why was Liddell Lee still killed? Because in the courtroom, the evidence didn’t matter. The state had a white victim, Deborah Ree, brutally murdered in her own home and a black suspect with a violent past. That was enough. No fingerprints, no blood, no eyewitness inside the house, just hearsay and fear. And when Lee begged the courts to test the DNA before executing him, Arkansas said no. They were in a rush.

 Their lethal injection drugs were about to expire, and to them, Liddell’s life wasn’t worth the delay. Let’s not rewrite history. Lee had been convicted of serious crimes. Two separate women said he attacked them, and the jury believed them. He was no saint. But that’s not the point. The state didn’t execute him for those crimes.

 They executed him for killing Deborah Ree, a crime he may not have committed at all. So, here’s the question. Was Liddell Lee executed because of the evidence or because of his race and record? Did Arkansas want justice or just a body on a gurnie? And if this can happen once, how many other Liddell lees are waiting in line? If justice was served, why does the evidence now point to someone else? The real story begins before that execution chamber opened.

 If you want to hear more real stories of death row, last words, and controversial executions, backhand index pointing, right, like, comment, and subscribe. Your support helps us bring these untold cases to light. It was February 9th, 1993. A cold Tuesday in Jacksonville, Arkansas. Deborah Ree, a 26-year-old mother and newlywed, stayed home from work that morning.

 Her husband had just left for the day. She planned to run a few errands, then wait for him to return, but Deborah never made it out the door. Just afternoon, a neighbor noticed something strange. The front door of the Ree home stood slightly open. When police were called, they found Deborah lying in her bedroom, bludgeoned to death.

 Her body was surrounded by blood and trauma wounds. A wooden club, later identified as a tire thumper, a tool used by her husband, was found nearby, soaked in blood. She had been struck over 30 times. It was a savage killing and the brutality made headlines within hours. Police acted fast, very fast. Within 2 hours, officers zeroed in on a suspect, Liddell Lee, a 27-year-old black man who lived nearby.

 Witnesses claimed they saw someone matching his description walking near Deborah’s home. One said he knocked on doors claiming to be a maintenance man. Others described a man running through the neighborhood, but the descriptions were vague and the witnesses inconsistent. One had been drinking. Another admitted they weren’t sure. Still, Lee was arrested that day.

He denied involvement. He said he was miles away at the time of the murder, but he didn’t have a solid alibi, and the pressure to make an arrest was overwhelming. Deborah was white, middle class, and newly married. The town wanted answers and someone to blame. Police took Lee’s shoes. They ran tests. Nothing matched.

 They took his fingerprints. They didn’t match the partial prints found on the phone or door inside the house. They took hair samples. The forensic expert testified they were microscopically consistent with hairs found at the scene. But today, that technique is considered junk science. Back then, it was enough. The media had its villain.

 A poor black man accused of killing a white woman in her own home. Liddell Lee was portrayed as a monster. His face plastered across newspapers. His name was spoken with anger, with fear. There was no video, no confession, no eyewitness to the murder. But the narrative had already been written.

 Even worse, Lee’s trial would become a disaster of its own. His attorney, struggling with alcohol addiction, was reportedly intoxicated in court. He failed to challenge key forensic claims. He didn’t request DNA testing on the club or the victim’s clothes, and the judge presiding over the trial. He was having a secret affair with the prosecutor.

 Liddell’s fate was sealed in a courtroom poisoned by corruption, incompetence, and pressure to convict at all costs. No one slowed down. No one questioned whether they had the right man. The courtroom was packed. Spectators filled the wooden benches, some clutching tissues, others staring hard at the man in the defense chair.

Liddell Lee, in a cheap suit, hands folded, silent. The prosecutors told a simple story. A violent man killed a young housewife in broad daylight, then tried to blend into the neighborhood like nothing happened. They had no DNA, no fingerprints, no confession, but they had a narrative, and sometimes that’s all a jury needs.

 Lee’s defense attorney, Craig Lambert, was visibly disorganized, slurring his words. At one point, the judge asked if he was drunk. Witnesses later confirmed he was. He failed to challenge key forensic testimony. He didn’t cross-examine the state’s hair analyst, whose methods were already shaky even in the ’90s.

 The hair that looked like Lee’s wasn’t DNA tested. Neither was the murder weapon, nor the clothes, nor the blood soaked shirt left behind by the real killer. No one checked it for foreign DNA. Why? The state didn’t require it, and Lee’s attorney never asked. In the first trial, the jury deadlocked. One juror said something didn’t sit right, but the prosecution came back harder in the second trial.

 This time, they brought up two previous assaults Lee had committed in the past, one on a woman, the other on a teenager. That sealed the deal. Never mind the fact that those cases were handled separately. Never mind that none of that evidence tied him to the Reese murder. The judge allowed it all. His name was Judge Chris Piaza.

 What wasn’t revealed in court was that Piaza was in a secret relationship with the lead prosecutor while overseeing the trial. That affair wouldn’t come to light until years later. By then, the damage was done. On October 16th, 1995, the jury returned with a unanimous verdict. Guilty of capital murder. They deliberated just over 2 hours.

 The sentence was death. Lee showed no emotion, but his sister Patricia wept quietly in the back of the courtroom. She would spend the next two decades fighting for his life. As the appeals began, new evidence surfaced, but no one seemed to care. Public defenders filed motions for DNA testing. Courts denied them.

 Lee’s case bounced from one appellet court to another, each refusing to grant relief. One federal judge noted that Lee’s defense was deeply flawed and borderline ineffective, but still he ruled against a new trial. By the time Liddell Lee was arrested for the murder of Deborah Ree, he was already known to law enforcement in Jacksonville, Arkansas, and that reputation made him an easy target.

 After his arrest, he didn’t just face one murder charge. He became a suspect in a string of violent assaults spanning from 1989 to 1993. In November 1990, a 17-year-old girl came forward. She said Lee attacked her in her home while she was caring for two small children. According to her testimony, he struck her, dragged her outside, and left her unconscious in a ditch.

 A hospital exam confirmed the assault, and DNA testing later concluded that the odds of someone other than Lee being the perpetrator were 1 in 83 million. For that, he received 60 years. Less than a year later in 1991, another woman came forward. She was 50 years old, returning home from the store when she noticed someone following her.

 She said Lee strangled her, searched her belongings, and assaulted her behind a school building. He bound her hands, blindfolded her face, and left her there. A jury convicted Lee of multiple charges in that case. He was sentenced to life plus 150 years. And it didn’t stop there. Lee was also charged in the 1989 killing of Christine Lewis, a 22-year-old mother who was abducted from her home.

 Her body was discovered inside a closet at an abandoned house. Police believed she had been assaulted and killed. Lee was tried in 1994, but the case ended in mistrial after a juror was discovered to be a convicted felon and a relative of Lee’s. The state never retried him after his conviction in the Ree case.

 Prosecutors painted a chilling picture. They said Liddell Lee wasn’t just dangerous, he was calculated. They called him a predator. A judge even described him as a hunter who stalked the streets of Jacksonville targeting women. The pattern was enough to convince a jury, even without conclusive evidence tying him to Deborah Reese’s death.

 To many, Liddell Lee wasn’t just a suspect. He was already guilty in their eyes. In the court of public opinion, the past is often louder than the facts. And for Liddell Lee, his past roared. And so, by the time Liddell Lee entered court for the Ree case, the prosecution didn’t need hard proof. They had a story, a pattern, a man whose name had already become a shadow over Jacksonville.

 To the jury, he wasn’t just a man on trial. He was a storm cloud that had been hovering over their town for years. It’s like this. If someone’s caught with blood on their hands once, you start to believe they’re capable of anything. If a wolf is seen in the chicken coupe before, you don’t need to see it strike again. You just assume the feathers are his doing.

That’s how it was with Lee. The past crimes, some proven, some alleged, formed a silhouette that looked a lot like guilt. So, when neighbors said they saw a black man in the area, when a witness, possibly impaired, claimed she saw Lee near Deborah’s door, when police needed someone to charge quickly, all signs pointed to the man who already had the look of guilt, the man who fit the narrative, the man who had hurt women before.

 And that’s what made it so easy for the system to say, “He did it.” They didn’t need the DNA on the murder weapon. They didn’t need fingerprints to match. They had his history. They had his tendencies that they believed was enough. In the courtroom, the prosecution didn’t just argue facts. They argued fear. And in a world that often confuses patterns with proof.

 Fear can be as fatal as any weapon. By early 2017, Liddell Lee had spent more than two decades on death row. His appeals had failed. Courts had reviewed the case, but never the evidence. Not once had the wooden club, the murder weapon, been tested for DNA. Not the bloody shirt left behind. Not the victim’s fingernail scrapings.

 Not a single piece of biological evidence had been scientifically analyzed. And time was running out. But the pressure wasn’t just on Lee. It was on the state of Arkansas. The Department of Corrections had a problem. Its supply of mazzelm, the controversial seditive used in lethal injections, was about to expire. Without it, executions would be impossible to carry out, at least not legally.

 And with no guarantee of acquiring more, Arkansas officials made a chilling decision. They scheduled eight executions in 11 days. A mass killing spree sanctioned by the state. It was the kind of timeline you’d expect from a factory, not a justice system. Liddell Lee was placed at the front of the line. His attorneys made one final plea. Let the DNA speak.

 They asked the court to allow testing on the murder weapon, the victim’s clothes, and the hair evidence used at trial. They weren’t asking for a retrial, just science, just facts, just the chance to know for sure. But the state refused. The attorney general argued it was too late. The governor backed the decision and the court said no.

 Not because the evidence didn’t matter, but because the clock had run out. Justice in this case wasn’t blind. It was impatient. On April 20th, 2017, Liddell Lee was strapped to a gurnie inside the Cumins unit. He declined to make a final statement. His last meal was holy communion. As the drugs began to flow, witnesses said he showed no emotion. He didn’t cry.

 He didn’t resist. He just stared up at the ceiling and waited for it to end. At 11:56 p.m., the state declared him dead. But what Arkansas didn’t realize, what they couldn’t erase, was that the questions surrounding his guilt were still very much alive. And now there was no turning back.

 The rush to execute had closed the door on evidence that could have changed everything. And the door didn’t just slam shut on Liddell Lee, it slammed shut on the truth. 4 years after the state of Arkansas executed Liddell Lee, science finally did what the justice system refused to. It looked at the evidence.

 In 2021, after years of pressure from Lee’s family and civil rights groups like the Innocence Project and the ACLU, a court finally ordered DNA testing on key items from the crime scene. Items that had never been analyzed during Lee’s trial or his two decades on death row. The results devastating. The wooden club used to kill Deborah Ree, the very weapon the state claimed Lee wielded, contained the DNA of an unknown male.

 Not a partial profile, not a mix, a full DNA profile that did not belong to Liddell Lee. That man has never been identified. The bloody shirt found near the scene also contained DNA from that same unknown man. Again, not Lee’s. Forensic analysis of hairs recovered at the scene failed to link them to Lee either.

 As for the fingerprints found on Reese’s phone and door, still unmatched in national databases. The truth arrived, but four years too late. Lee’s family, especially his sister Patricia Young, had fought tirelessly to clear his name. When the results were made public, she said what many were thinking. My brother was executed by the state of Arkansas for a crime we believe he did not commit.

 And now the evidence suggests we were right. The outrage spread fast. News outlets across the country picked up the story. Legal experts weighed in. Politicians stayed mostly silent, but the public wanted answers. How could a man be executed without a single piece of tested DNA evidence? Why was science ignored in favor of speed? And who then killed Deborah Ree? Arkansas officials maintained their stance.

 They said justice had been done, but behind that cold confidence was a system that had failed. Not just Lee, but the truth itself. The DNA didn’t lie. It simply arrived too late to save the man who always said he didn’t do it. Liddell Lee went to his grave without a final word. But in the end, the evidence spoke for him. By 2021, the damage was done.

Liddell Lee was long buried. Arkansas had gotten what it wanted, its first execution in over a decade. But now the facts had shifted. The DNA left on the murder weapon and the bloodied shirt didn’t belong to him. The hair samples didn’t match. The fingerprints didn’t belong to him. None of the physical evidence tied him to the scene.

 And yet, he had been executed anyway. Still, it’s not the simple story some might want because Liddell Lee wasn’t an innocent man. Not in the broadest sense. He had been convicted of two brutal assaults. In one case, a 17-year-old girl testified that he attacked her inside her home and left her unconscious in a ditch.

 In another, a 50-year-old woman said he followed her from the grocery store and assaulted her behind a school building. In both cases, juries found him guilty. He was also charged, but never convicted in the 1989 killing of Christine Lewis, whose body was found hidden in an abandoned house. That trial ended in a mistrial.

 Prosecutors never pursued it again. So, no, Liddell Lee wasn’t innocent of everything. But that’s not the same as saying he was guilty of this. And that’s what should terrify us. The criminal justice system isn’t supposed to kill a man because of what he might have done before. It’s supposed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he committed the specific crime he’s being punished for.

 In Liddell’s case, that never happened. No one saw him inside Deborah Reese’s house. No blood on his clothes, no DNA on the weapon, no confession, not even a fingerprint. The only thing connecting him to the crime were inconsistent eyewitness claims from people who weren’t in the house. People who said they saw someone who looked like him in the neighborhood. That’s not proof.

That’s profiling. And yet Arkansas pushed forward. They raced to kill him before their drugs expired, denying every request for DNA testing. Not because the evidence didn’t matter, but because the calendar did. Which brings us to the question that still haunts this case. Was Liddell Lee executed because he killed Deborah Ree, or because she was white and he was black and had a violent past that made him easy to condemn? The facts suggest more than a legal failure.

 They suggest a moral one. When the victim is a white woman and the accused is a poor black man with a record, justice seems to move faster. Evidence becomes optional. Doubt gets ignored. The system stops asking if and starts asking how fast. Even now, no one knows who really killed Deborah Ree. The real killer may still be free.

 Her family still has no closure. Liddell Lee’s family, meanwhile, lives with the weight of knowing he may have died for a crime he didn’t commit. In the end, maybe Liddell Lee wasn’t an innocent man, but in this case, the one that ended his life, he may have been innocent after all, and the state of Arkansas will never be able to undo what it it.