Larry and Calvin Ollins, Omar Saunders, and Marcellius Bradford were convicted of the October 1986 kidnapping, rape, and murder of twenty-three year-old medical student Lori Roscetti in Chicago, Illinois. The four teenagers allegedly jumped into her car as she drove home late one night, took her to a secluded location, and proceeded to rape her, rob her, and beat her to death. In 1988, the two Ollins cousins and Saunders were each convicted of the crime and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Bradford pleaded guilty to aggravated kidnapping and was sentenced to twelve years in prison in exchange for testimony at Larry Ollins’s trial. Murder, rape, and armed robbery charges against him were dropped. None of the teens were old enough to be eligible for the death penalty.

At trial, Bradford testified that the four teens abducted Roscetti and drove her to a remote location, where he and Saunders got out of the car to act as the lookouts while the two cousins assaulted her. When she tried to escape, according to Bradford, Larry Ollins crushed her head with a chunk of concrete, carried her back to the car, and he and Calvin raped her. A friend of Bradford’s provided additional testimony, recounting a confession by Saunders with substantially similar facts. Bradford later recanted his statements, saying police coerced him into falsely confessing and that he did so to avoid a life sentence.

Crime lab analyst Pamela Fish testified that semen found on the victim’s body could have belonged to the Ollinses, but a recent examination of her notes by a DNA expert showed that none of the four men’s blood types matched the crime scene samples. Fish, whose testimony helped convict several innocent individuals in the Chicago area, has since been transferred to an administrative post.

In December 2001, the convictions against all four men were vacated and charges dropped, after DNA tests on spermatozoa and hairs found on Roscetti’s body and in her car proved that none of the men were the assailants. Calvin and Larry Ollins, age twenty-nine and thirty-one respectively, and Omar Saunders, age thirty-two, were released from prison after spending more than fourteen years - nearly half their lives - incarcerated. Bradford was released after serving six and a half years of his sentence.

To hear more about this case in the words of the defendants, listen to the This American Life episode “Perfect Evidence”