Follow The Truth: The end of Daniel Green's story remains unwritten
As a television reporter for three decades, I have covered more cases than I could possibly ever count. Starting with the crimes, throughout the investigations and the trials, I have seen many cases through from beginning to end. Often this process takes years. I have probably sat through hundreds of hours of court testimony – more than most attorneys will ever see in their careers. But at the end of the day, a television news report is about a minute and a half long, so unless you watch the live stream of the trial, you are basically getting headlines from us. We can barely scratch the surface.
I’ve written several nonfiction books about cases I’ve covered. I’ve pored through court filings, re-listened to testimony and done new interviews. It’s a lot like putting a podcast together in terms of the amount of research that goes into it. But I don’t think I’ve ever simultaneously researched, written and investigated a story in such depth and for so many months. And to be honest, with the number of layers in this case, you could go much deeper. You could spend years diving into dark rabbit holes hoping for one more shred of evidence that brings more clarity.
But, at some point, you have to stop and show people your cards and let people decide for themselves what the cards mean. This is not a case I will ever forget, not just because it’s complicated, not just because people are still talking about it so many years later, but because all the people on both sides of this case are so sure that they’re right. And this is ultimately what makes the truth so hard to discern.
Liking a person isn’t a good reason to believe him. Not liking a person isn’t a reason to disbelieve him. It’s not about liking Daniel Green; it’s about the facts. And so, like the reporters who’ve also gone down this winding road, like Scott Raab and Dan Wiederer, I’m left with this uneasy feeling. There’s just something wrong with this case, period, for all of the reasons we have laid out in these 10 episodes.
I feel like we didn’t just do this for Daniel Green. We did this for all the Daniel Greens sitting in prisons across the country. Once boys, now men, with cases you will never hear about because they didn’t kill the father of a famous man. For Daniel, it’s a double-edged sword – he’s getting attention because James Jordan was Michael Jordan's dad. But would he have been convicted without the Michael Jordan connection? We’ll never know.
Episode ten is available now. It's the end of the original series, but we'll be back with new episodes and case updates when they happen.
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