The Trials of Walter Ogrod: The Shocking Murder, So-Called Confessions, and Notorious Snitch That Sent a Man to Death Row
About this audiobook
The horrific 1988 murder of four-year-old Barbara Jean Horn shocked the citizens of Philadelphia. Plucked from her own front yard, Barbara Jean was found dead less than two and a half hours later in a cardboard TV box dragged to a nearby street curb. After months of investigation with no strong leads, the case went cold. Four years later it was reopened, and Walter Ogrod, a young man with autism spectrum disorder who had lived across the street from the family at the time of the murder, was brought in as a suspect.
Ogrod bears no resemblance to the composite police sketch based on eyewitness accounts of the man carrying the box, and there is no physical evidence linking him to the crime. His conviction was based solely on a confession he signed after thirty-six hours without sleep. “They said I could go home if I signed it,” Ogrod told his brother from the jailhouse. The case was so weak that the jury voted unanimously to acquit him, but at the last second—in a dramatic courtroom declaration—one juror changed his mind. As he waited for a retrial, Ogrod’s fate was sealed when a notorious jailhouse snitch was planted in his cell block and supplied the prosecution with a second supposed confession. As a result, Walter Ogrod sits on death row for the murder today.
Informed by police records, court transcripts, interviews, letters, journals, and more, award-winning journalist Thomas Lowenstein leads readers through the facts of the infamous Horn murder case in compelling, compassionate, and riveting fashion. He reveals explosive new evidence that points to a condemned man’s innocence and exposes a larger underlying pattern of prosecutorial misconduct in Philadelphia.
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About the author
Thomas Lowenstein is the founder and director of the New Orleans Journalism Project, which works with advanced journalism students on stories related to criminal justice. He was formerly policy director and investigator at Innocence Project New Orleans, an editor at DoubleTake magazine, and a teaching fellow at Harvard. He has published nonfiction in the American Prospect magazine and the Philadelphia City Paper and was a grant recipient from the Fund for Investigative Journalism in 2004.
Chris Andrew Ciulla is a versatile performer with over 50 audiobook credits to his name. The genres of his titles range from mystery/thriller to sci-fi, to fantasy and romance. He also excels at sports-related nonfiction, being a former sports radio host and frequent show guest. He's a boxing expert who is a commentator for professional matches. In addition to frequent film, television, and on-camera commercial work, Chris has voiced characters for the popular video game titles Fallout 4 and Mafia III, and can be heard in national commercial campaigns. AudioFile magazine reviewed a recent performance: "Narrator Chris Ciulla adopts a slight accent to illustrate her Lithuanian roots and adds a slight tremulousness to his timbre so that Ona sounds old but still spry and spirited... Ciulla's open performance and slightly hurried pacing for the boy perfectly translate his unfiltered but sweet nature... Quinn didn't always fulfill his parental responsibilities but Ciulla makes his fundamental decency and kindness clear to the listener."
