#470 Jason Flom with Chris Vaughn

[Music] Just before sunrise on June 14th, 2007, Kimberly and Christopher Vaughn packed their three kids into the car and headed to a water park in Springfield, Illinois. But the road trips soon turned deadly. Kimberly Vaughn was fatally shot under the chin in the front passenger seat and gunfire from that direction also killed their three children. Christopher Vaughn was discovered limping alongside the road, suffering from two gunshot wounds. His first words were, "I think my wife shot me. Could a mother possibly have done this to her own family?" Police theorized that Christopher Vaughn must have staged the scene to appear like a murder suicide, sending him away for the rest of his natural life. But this is wrongful conviction. Wrongful conviction has always given voice to innocent people in prison and now we're expanding that voice to you. Call us at 833-207-4666 and tell us how these stories make you feel and what you've done to help the cause, even if it's something as simple as telling a friend or sharing on social media. And you might just hear yourself in a future episode. Call us 833-207-4666. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. Me joining us from a correctional facility in Illinois, we have a man that should have but never was able to grieve the loss of his wife Kimberly and their three beloved children, but instead would snatch it away from their funeral. And blamed for their deaths, Christopher Vaughn, I can't, none of us can begin to understand your pain or your resilience, but we're very honored to have you here with us today. Well, I appreciate you guys taking the time and interest. I really do. You're very welcome and joining us today as well as Chris is attorney Keith Altman, whose expertise in pharmaceutical side effects will help shed light on this unspeakable tragedy and Keith, thanks so much for being here. You're welcome, you're welcome. Later on, we're going to speak with one of our wrongful conviction hosts, Lauren Bright-Pacheco, whose podcast Murder in Illinois was the first time that almost anyone heard Chris's side of the story. But before he ever needed or ever thought he would need any sort of advocacy, he grew up pretty much like anybody else. Yeah, I was born in Indiana. We moved to Missouri. I've got two younger brothers. We spent a lot of time on sports, Cub Scouts. I did reasonably well in high school. I graduated in '93, went to the University of Missouri, Rala, focused on an electrical engineering degree. And I had met Kimberly this summer before college. To be frank, I mean dating was one thing, but we didn't have consistent pictures of what the future looked like. At the end of that first year of college, we found out she was pregnant and went ahead and got married. Abby was born in December, providing for Kimberly and the baby was my number one focus. So I went ahead and dropped out of college and was focusing on getting a local job. I had started down a technology career path as the internet was really growing in the mid to late '90s information risk management. That's where my focus was. So I worked for a variety of different consulting companies. There was significantly more work out there for consultants in my niche market. So I started my own consulting company. Chris's successful private cyber security firm eventually got him hired by a large international firm out of Chicago. This success allowed the family to grow from Abby to Cassandra just a year later and then Blake three years later on. Meanwhile, the stress of parenthood on this young couple who were seemingly more chosen by fate than by each other. Well, that stress began to take a toll. Living together was rocky. We both early on were really trying to make it work. And we had pretty much come to the understanding that we were both happy being part of the family. And for the kids we'd stay together and we provide the happiest and most nurturing home possible for them. But as soon as they were out of the house, we would find our own path. It was fully my intention to continue to help her out in any way form or fashion I could. I'd centered a school and tried to incorporate her into the work I was doing. But it was still fully my intention to pursue other avenues personally. And I believe it wasn't something that she was looking forward to. So Kim is very unhappy and having mental health details and she's being treated. One of the medications that she's been given as a drug called to pyramid trade name is Topomax, which is really an anti-convulsant. It's normally given to people with epilepsy, but people had been using it from mental health treatment as well. But what neither she nor her doctor knew at the time is that Topomax had an increased risk of suicidal and self injurious behavior. Now Johnson and Johnson knew this and they didn't tell the FDA. But nevertheless shortly before the incident her dosage was changed of this drug. And one of the things that these drugs and notorious for is that when you change the dosage that can lead to increased negative mood and behavioral disturbances, the kind of things that could cause you to take actions that you might not have normally taken. Which brings us up to June 14th 2007 when the couple woke up before sunrise and packed the kids half asleep into the car for about three hour drive to a water park in Springfield Illinois. The night before was one of Kimberly and I's many disagreements and it turned more into a spiteful argument of well, I don't spend enough time at home with the kids. She doesn't spend enough time helping out and participating with the family and back and forth and eventually led to well, let's just do something together as a family tomorrow. And in the morning got the kids up and out to the truck and we sat in the truck and waited for her to come out. I remember particularly that morning I had to go back up to the front door and holler up the stairs. Eventually she did come down through her stuff in the truck. We left the house. It wasn't after the point we got on the highway. She said she wasn't feeling well. So I found a place off the side of the road after I parked the truck. I asked her, you know, is she still feeling bad? She needs a few minutes and she really just didn't say much of anything. So I opted to give her a few minutes went ahead and jumped out. Kids were asleep in the back and I went around and just did miscellaneous things, checked the luggage rack, looked at the tires. And that's when I heard just a horrendous racket and I was heading for my door to get in and find out what was going on. I pulled the door open and I was looking, I came holding the gun. She looked at me and she said, "You won't take my kids away from me." She says, "You killed them." And then she starts firing the gun at me. And I was tumbling backward and trying to come forward and not making much progress doing anything. And that's when she turned the gun on herself. In the backseat of the vehicle, the three children were all shot twice. The ballistics show that all six shots of the children converge over the passenger sheets left shoulder as if somebody had turned around from the passenger seat and fired the gun. The passenger seat of the vehicle, Kim was shot under the chin straight up. The driver of the vehicle, Chris, was shot in the hand and through the leg. The shots are not fatal, but he is seriously injured. So there you are on the side of the road. Had you actually looked in the car and seen what she had done? No more than a glance, probably. I was just too horrified to do anything. The vehicle had that eerie stillness to it, to stillness when you're in a place by yourself. And the only thing I could think of was that I need to get help knowing that I wasn't walking distance from anywhere close. I thought, well, I'll just drive the vehicle. And the way she was slumped, I needed to not unbuckle her, but to buckle her. But I was just shaking so uncontrollably, trying to buckle her and failing. On the seatbelt, blood was found. Now, one would think that if she had been shot by Chris as what was alleged that her blood would have been on the seatbelt, but it turns out that it is not her blood that's on the seatbelt. It's Chris's blood. However, before the blood test, police theorized that Chris, who had run a private security firm, never mind that it was cyber security, but ignoring that they came up with this theory that he must have somehow been an expert in staging crime scenes. According to prosecutor Chris is such a criminal mastermind that he was able to make the scene look like she had committed the crime. He did that down to blood spatter and all of these things. It is just simply perpast. But what it is is an admission from the prosecution that the physical evidence does not support that Chris committed the crime. It supports that she committed the crime. Nevertheless, they alleged that Chris, who's, by the way, just under five foot nine, somehow reached into the passenger side of a large SUV, shot Kim from under her chin, then reached over her left shoulder, shooting each child twice, then proceeded to unbuckle the seatbelt, staying with what they believe was Kim's blood, to make it appear that Kim had been free to make the shots. The theory continued to Chris somehow inflicted two survivable gunshot wounds, one to his left hand and one to his thigh. But since the blood on the seatbelt actually belonged to Chris, it meant two things. One, the belt was not buckled when Kim was shot, and the belt was stained after Chris had been shot, like he said, when he reached across her, his left hand bloody. Pulled the belt, leaving a stain, and then it retracted when he was unable to buckle it. And then I focused on the driving, but I was just shaking so uncontrollably and just not thinking clearly enough that driving wasn't going to be an option either. So at that point I decided, okay, I just need to find somebody that can make a phone call for me. Chris then stumbled down the side of the highway, obviously the state of shock with two gunshot wounds, both, by the way, without stippling. A burn injury associated with close range gunshots. So the shots had to have been fired from at least 18 inches away, if not 30. And the one in his thigh almost castrated him. So we'd have to believe that he risk taking a distant shot to stage a near miss with his testicles. Luckily someone stopped to help him. There was a man in a pickup truck and he pulled up a side and asked something to the effective, have you been in an accident? And without thinking the first thing that came out of my mouth was, I think my wife shot me. It wasn't that much longer that ambulances and police cars showed up, took me to the hospital, released me back to the police station. And that was the multi-day interrogation. The stress of the situation kept me in an imploded state unable to think and still horrified, confused, because I don't think anyone in their right mind could do anything like that. If I had suspected that she was violent at all, I would have taken steps years before that, but that was not the Kim that I knew. And I remember saying that in the interrogation, what Kim could not have done that, that that doesn't make any sense. And the missing piece that I didn't have at that point right after the tragedy was the medication. It wasn't obvious to him, aha, it must have been the Topomax. He just knew he had a wife who was in pain, she was still the mother of his three children who had done these terrible things. And I think when you combine all of that together, he just decided to say nothing. Which is his right, but as we so often see in cases like these, there are judgments about what is the right way to react. Here, they already suspected Chris. And when he was only expressing his bewilderment over what Kim had done, the next question is, then, who did it? At which point, one might expect that he vehemently defend himself. I can only sum it up in the word "implosion." Quite frankly, I was ashamed that I had failed my children and not seen things ahead of time, been better prepared or reacted in a better fashion. The physical and the emotional pain was overwhelming to the point where I just couldn't string words together to make a sense, let alone draw conclusions or be of any type of productive help to my own defense. [Music] You're listening to wrongful conviction. You can listen to this in all the lava for good podcasts one week early and add free by subscribing to lava for good plus on Apple Podcasts. After I lost my kid, I lost my identity. I saw myself as a dad working and paying for a house and taking care of the kids. At that point, I lost meaning and purpose. The part that hurt even more was that I was still here. I thought that there had to have been a reason for that because I shouldn't be. Had she completed what she had started, I wouldn't have left that truck either. But the fact that I did must mean that there's more meaning than I'm supposed to be here. I've got a purpose. I think that's what provided me with that little bit of strength. I needed to kind of start picking myself back up. So with no confession and a crime scene indicating Kim's guilt, Chris was released into a cab wearing nothing but a hospital gown. Meanwhile, there was even more at the scene that supported Chris's innocence. For instance, the vans usually stored their gun a tourist 9mm in a closet in a terry clock towel. There were crime scene pictures that showed a small white towel covered in blood on Kim's leg. And when the crime scene was processed, it was taken and washed and sanitized and essentially destroyed his evidence. Also, Kim's hands tested positive for gunshot residue. And while a positive gunshot residue test has limited value, a negative test can be used to exclude a suspect. But Chris's hands were never tested. At least the crime scene investigator Bob Deal was actively challenging the state's theory, citing the bullet trajectory, the issue of Chris's smaller stature, the fact that there were no signs of a struggle with Kim, as well as the way the blood had hit her hand. All of it, serving as clear indications that she and she alone had shot that gun. But Bob Deal, the investigator was ignored and they continued to seek death penalty even after the DNA testing revealed that the blood on the seatbelt indeed belonged to Chris. Before the grand jury was in panel, they knew the blood on the seatbelt was Chris's. We know this because there's a phone lock where the forensic examiner detailed that she told the state's attorney that the blood was not Kim's. When the grand jury was to decide whether Chris would be indicted or not, the question over the blood was presented very craftily. The officer is never asked whose blood was on the seatbelt. But when you look at the transcript, it is clear that the way the questions were asked, it was meant so that the jury would infer reasonably infer. That the blood on the seatbelt was Kim's and not Chris's. The following is a quote from the exchange between states attorney Leah Norbert and the lead investigator, Sergeant Gary Lawson. Quote, they looked at the seatbelt, right? Yes. As if the seatbelt were pulled to be seatbelting someone in? Correct. There was blood on that seatbelt. Was there not? Yes. And when Kimberly Vaughn was found by the paramedics and by the police, she was not wearing a seatbelt? Correct. And that is significant because she was wearing that seatbelt when she was shot. That's correct. End quote. If she had been wearing the seatbelt when she was shot, it would have had to have been her blood, but it wasn't Kim's blood. It completely refutes the prosecution's allegations as to what happened in this case. It's all documented. The other thing that was interesting is that before the grand jury, the forensic report was marked draft. And then the day after the grand jury comes out with its finding, the forensic report, it's changed from draft to final. And that examiner was asked, why did she do that? And her response was, I was told to do it. And she wouldn't answer any further. It appears that marking the report final, the day after the grand jury indictment offered an appearance of plausible deniability to the assistant state's attorney and Sergeant Kerry Lawson. But now they had their indictment. And they had chosen to arrest Chris while he was at the funeral of his wife and children, the cruelty of the whole thing be damned. And effectively preparing for a capital trial. Well, we know that can take quite some time. I didn't go to trial until 2012. So I was in the wheel county jail from 2007 to 2012. He was treated very poorly because of what's alleged that he had done. But he was under the death penalty at the time. And there were funds provided by the state to get the best attorneys, get the best experts. And when I first became exposed to the case, which is actually I had just been sworn in as an attorney, but I had been doing the farmer's provigilance safety surveillance of drugs. That's how I got involved in the case in the first place. And I remember sitting in a room in Clayton near St. Louis with what I considered to be the dream team of criminal defense lawyers. And the Ballistics expert had shown how it just was totally inconsistent with Chris having shot the gun. And then when you combine that with the Topermax, and at the time, I had seen a document from Johnson and Johnson, where they had concluded that Topermax increased the risk of suicidal and self-injurious behavior, but they never told the FDA. So it was only after I petitioned the FDA for action that things started to happen. And I remember sitting there and saying, "There's just no way this happening." Chris's dream team continued to develop their defense, even deposing the crime scene investigator Robert Deel in January 2011, about the investigation and Deel said, "Every time that I offered up something that was contrary to what they said, they had some reason why I didn't know what I was talking about, or they would change their theory of what happened to try to match the evidence rather than letting the evidence dictate the events that occurred." And, quote, "I know he was taken off the case and once again the confirmation bias, get rid of anybody that may have an alternate explanation as to what happened." It's this horribly flawed human element that makes abolishing the death penalty and absolute moral imperative. And then that's exactly what happened. Illinois abolished the death penalty in March 2011. But this had paradoxically an unintended and ultimately tragic consequence for Chris. When the death penalty got taken off the table, the funds for his defense also evaporated. It was going to continue to be so expensive to finish out what needed to be done. And my attorney there in Illinois, he showed up and he just apologized. It just wasn't possible. And the case was assigned to a public defender and they're overloaded, overworked. They don't have the resources. I remember the public defender spending about five minutes with me on the phone. And that was the last time I ever heard from the public defender. I think he did ask me if I would appear pro bono that there were no funds. And I wasn't on my own. I was working for somebody and I had just been told to stop what I was doing. We hadn't done a report yet. And so it is clear that the substantial evidence that was being developed of Chris's innocence was not going to be available to him. The public defender team had to become fully steeped in everything that had been developed over five years to combat the state's team, which had been working together for just as long. It's like going to the world series and removing one of the teams, getting them from a little league park and throwing them in and say, "Oh, go ahead and do your pass." You were also facing a situation where I have to believe you were one of the most hated people in the state of Illinois. I know the state's attorney was very vocal and they used the media to the end to agree to make sure that the stage was set for their advantage. So the scales of justice were certainly tipped all the way to one side as the trial was set to begin in August of 2012. But as we so often see when the physical evidence is weak, the state focuses on circumstantial evidence. So they dug into the Vaughan's marriage and the arrangement that they had presenting bombshells like Chris had gone to strip clubs. A lot of men go to strip clubs. A lot of women go to strip clubs. A lot of men who are happily married go to strip clubs. The fact that somebody goes to strip club doesn't speak anything as to the state of their marital relationship or lack thereof. It means absolutely nothing. The other situation Chris was into, survival type things, hunting, being out in the woods, stuff he had grown up with his whole life. They took the fact that he had a friend who talked about these things, going to go off grid, meant that he was planning to do this crime, go off grid and live his days out. It's hard to believe that he'd choose to begin that life with two debilitating gunshot wounds, but okay. It's just preposterous. During the trial, I think the prosecution presented 700 exhibits. They had about 50 witnesses. The public defender put on a limited defense here. Did not have the tools to properly defend Chris. First of the prosecution who had effectively unlimited resources. He had not really presented the drug issue. I know it was mentioned lightly during the trial, but the experts that had been retained were not consulted. And the jury found him guilty and what? An hour or so with all of that information. How could they possibly have reviewed that information? Jury Foreman, Dan Lacheh, expressed that there was no doubt in the jurors' minds of Vaughan's guilt and that they never even considered the defense's argument that Kimberly Vaughan had actually committed the murders. The drug issue was not effectively raised. A forensic expert did not effectively expose the state's nonsensical theory and the jury bought what they'd already heard in the media. And Chris was found guilty on four counts of first degree murder for which he received four consecutive life sentences. To have been convicted of this was beyond my comprehension. I've been raised to believe in the courtroom and the judge and the jury and they're going to find justice. I've been raised to open-minded people, fit or there to look at the facts. And it wasn't until that very end that I realized that everything that I had believed in and that trust that I had placed in that system was all for not. It's nothing like you see on TV. It's not like you see in the movies. There's parts of it that are more grotesque and more violent than they're probably allowed to show on TV. But there's a lot of good people in here. There's a lot of people that have definitely committed crimes, but there's a lot of people that have learned their lessons. When I got to prison, I really didn't know what to expect. I was frankly scared out of my mind. But early on, some of the older guys with life sentence just pulled me aside and they advised that they gave me was that the quicker that I can accept my sentence and the quicker that I can get adjusted to this being home for the rest of my life, they said, it's just going to be that much easier on you. They said, don't trust in hope. All I did going to do is wear you down, make your sick and eat you up. They said, make the best of each day and find things that you can do to stay productive, find things that you can find meaning in. And for the first four or five years, that's what I really did. I was still in contact with my parents and they still come up once a month no matter where I am, no matter where they are. They still come and visit me in person. And I talked to the monophone, but essentially I made prison life first four or five years assuming that's where I was going to be. It was quite some years before a very open-minded person came and decided to do a podcast on me. And that podcast was called Murder in Illinois, hosted by our very own Lauren Bright-Pacheco. I had been covering crime in New York for a national show for a decade. And I'd never heard of this case until the 10 year anniversary came up. And so I started digging a little bit deeper. And it became very obvious that it's because this case unfolded under the same state's attorney in the same courtroom across the hallway as another very infamous case, which was the police sergeant, Drew Peterson, who had more than one wife go missing under dubious circumstances. And that just sucked all the national bandwidth. And that's too bad because more people would have seen what I saw. There was tremendous reaction to the podcast, both positive and negative. People wish death on my children that they hoped that I would experience the loss that Kim had experienced. And again, I wasn't anticipating that revisiting this case to see if justice was served would just produce such incredible personal blowback. But there is a very real pivot that happens when you know that someone is innocent, where you no longer care, that you are criticized for being their champion. And that's the way I feel for Chris. I have tremendous sympathy for Kim for her family. But keeping an innocent man in prison is not going to bring the kids back. And it's not going to bring Kim back. And so the only semblance of justice left in this case is correcting this, agree this wrong. She told us about the reinvestigation, which started with somebody who our listeners might remember Bill Clutter from the Rodney Lincoln story, which will be linked in the episode description. Now, Bill's work as a private investigator led him to found an organization called investigating innocence and also the Illinois Innocence Project. And he had been hired as part of Chris's original dream team. And so, Bill Clutter had already done a lot of work in terms of forensics and the medication she was on. So when we joined forces and set out to make murder in Illinois, one of the things that we were working towards was a crime scene reconstruction, which unfortunately is an arduous end. expensive undertaking. And so Jason, I reached out to you. Sure enough, you saw what I saw. You so graciously step forward and made the crime scene reconstruction take place. Bill Clutter enlisted a former CSI named Katie Hartman, who was meticulous in her approach. And she went through Bob Deel's initial report with a fine tooth comb and was so impressed with the work that he had done. She said she could see exactly everything within that SUV. And let's not forget how deeply Bob Deel disagreed with the lead investigator and prosecutors on this case. Bob Deel claims that within an hour that detective Gary Lawson had come up with this, in my opinion, Asa 9 theory that Vaughn shot his wife through the passenger window. Explain then how there is no blood on the exterior of the car in the front or the back. If he leaned through this window of this gigantic SUV, and Vaughn keep in mind is five foot nine, maybe in dress heels. You know, he is not a large imposing man. And for him to have gotten the trajectory didn't work. And Deel himself said, basically, that's Jack Assyrie, show me how we did it and Lawson couldn't because it was physically impossible, which is what we then proved when we did the crime scene reconstruction. But before the reconstruction, Lauren won Chris' trust. He wrote a letter to his parents, finally explaining what had happened that day, which he in turn shared with Lauren. And it all matched up with what we were to discover through the crime scene reconstruction. We enlisted actors who were roughly the same size as Kim and Chris and put it in an identical vehicle and played out the state's theory and played out Chris' theory again and again. And only one of them worked. Only one of them was backed by the forensics by the blood in the car. And that was Christopher Vaughn's. And the moment when the actor recreating Chris' movements reached forward and pulled that belt to try to get it over the actors who was playing Kimberly's body, you see exactly where his blood ended up by her foot, where the blood smeared across the center console, all of it. And it was such an eye-opening astounding moment of undeniable proof. And with all of that, you still have an innocent man who's lost everything rotting in prison in Illinois. Lauren also interviewed Keith for the podcast, which brought him back onto Chris' team. It had been haunting me about how he had been convicted. And when she called me in and we talked about it when she told me about the letter and about him talking about what had happened. And there was an opportunity for me to get involved. I jumped on it. You know, there were things afoot internally that we were not ready to release yet. But I can tell you, we're blaming the third person in the car. There was Chris, there was Kim, and there was Topomex. That is what it's all about because it does provide an explanation as to what happened here. We intend to talk about the misconduct by the prosecution during the grand jury, combined with the psychological impact of what took place preventing him from really assisting in his defense and the goal is to get him a new trial. We believe very strongly that's going to lead to a different result. Well, we certainly hope so. And if anyone in our audience has moved to act, what can we ask them to do? I would say to go to Keith Altman's website because he has links on there. You know, I think we're going to start another outreach of writing Governor Pritzker. Governor Pritzker is a fair just man. I sent him stuff on Instagram constantly just messages imploring him to take another look at this case. And we're going to leave ways to reach both Governor Pritzker and Chris with messages of encouragement in the episode description. And with that, we're going to go to closing arguments. It's where I thank you again, Keith, Lauren and Chris for being here and sharing this unreal story. But it's all too real. So I'm going to now turn my microphone off and just listen to anything else you want to share. Keith, why don't you kick it off then Lauren and then Chris, if you would, please take us off into the sunset. This is a tough case. Three kids killed, a mother shot. This is one that doesn't sit well with anybody. Chris is as much a victim here and prosecutors. Number one, they need to have an open mind. They need to find out what might have happened instead of deciding what happened. And then altering the investigation to fit that. It's important that people have open minds that they wait for the evidence to come through because sometimes things are just not quite as they see. And Huckham's Razor really does play a role here. The simplest explanation tends to be the right one. And so we are very hopeful that we will be able to get Chris a new trial. And we're highly confident that we will be able to present a very different picture as to what had happened. I would just say, please do not take my word for it. Don't take Jason's word for it. Don't take Keith Altman's word for it. Just look into it. I guarantee you you will very quickly see the patterns that we all know to be true. It's a heartbreaking misery onion. And the layers just keep building with every single day we can hear that Christopher Vaughan is incarcerated. He needs to be released and begin the process of healing. This is not just about me. This is about a lot of people and about a system that's not working like it should be. While I've been in here, I've met a lot of people that have claimed innocence. When I was in the outside world, I assumed that anybody locked up because guilty of the crime. I believe what was in the media, if they got locked up, you know, good riddance, you know, they were out of sight and not in mind. That's just not the case. There's good people in here that deserve second chance. There's good people in here that are innocent of the crimes that they've been accused and convicted of. And overall, out of sight, out of mind, doesn't work because there's still human beings in here. And I hope if nothing else that this starts building awareness for what's going on in these prisons. Thank you for listening to "Rontful Conviction." You can listen to this in all the Lava for Good Podcasts one week early by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Clyburn. The music in this production was supplied by three time Oscar nominated composer, J. Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Rontful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at its Jason Flamm. Rontful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company number one.