Vsauce!
Kevin here -- Kevin Lieber, actually.
That’s my name, it’s German.
But I’m not the only one -- there are 10 other Kevin Liebers in the United States.
So… what if one of the other Kevin Liebers is connected to a murder… of another YouTuber…
3 miles from right here.
And the only surviving victim identified ME, Kevin Lieber, as the killer?
To top it all off, Mr Beast testified that I confessed to him?
And only one who knows I’m innocent!?
All of this really happened.
Not to me -- to a woman named Joyce Ann Brown.
They need a conviction.
They needed the pressure off.
Two blacks in Dallas, Texas?
In Texas period?
Walked in broad open daylight… show and killed a business man?
Somebody was gonna pay.
I’m that somebody.
On Thursday, May 8th, 1980, the Dallas Morning News published a short article buried in the
paper’s Local News section -- a shop called Fine Furs by Rubin had been robbed and its
owner, Rubin Danziger, was murdered.
His wife Ala said Rubin pleaded, “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me,” before one of
two female robbers shot him in the head.
Ala escaped by telling them she had terminal cancer with just weeks to live.
One of the women said, “We’ll just let you suffer,” and left.
As police looked for suspects, they found the getaway car -- a Datsun rented to a woman
named Joyce Ann Brown.
A police officer recognized the name as someone who’d been arrested years prior for a minor
sex work charge, so they asked publicly for Joyce Ann Brown to come in for questioning.
Joyce immediately went into the police station to clear up the confusion.
She wasn’t worried -- she knew she didn’t do it and she had an alibi.
She was at work when the crime occurred.
And this is where the incredible coincidences really begin.
Joyce worked at Koslow’s, another fur store just across town, so she’d presumably know
which valuable furs to steal.
Working nearby in the fur industry with the same first, middle and last name as the getaway
car’s renter?
Quite a coincidence.
But.
Even so, Joyce denied any involvement.
The interrogator told her, ​​“You’re lying, we know you pulled that robbery.”
She was arrested and held on $1 million bail.
Then police realized that the Joyce Ann Brown who rented the car actually lived in Denver,
Colorado -- she was a completely different person in a completely different state -- and
THAT Joyce said that she’d lent the car to a friend -- but by then it was too late.
Joyce’s mugshot from her prior arrest had been shown in a lineup to Mrs. Danziger, who
identified her as one of the robbers and she said that that woman had been in the store
to case it out in the weeks leading up to the crime.
Forget a weird name thing.
Now the police had an eyewitness identification.
Okay but what about Joyce’s solid work alibi?
There was about a 7-minute window that would’ve allowed Joyce to commit the robbery, leave
the scene, change her clothes, drive back to work, and compose herself as if nothing
was out of the ordinary before talking to a co-worker at 1:19pm -- and the police said
that must be exactly what happened.
But what ACTUALLY happened?
We’ll get to that in one second.
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Alright.
So.
None of the items recovered from police searches -- the rental car, Joyce’s apartment -- linked
her to the crime.
But when evidence starts to suggest that weird things are coincidences, it’s tempting to…
just come up with new evidence.
Suddenly a woman named Martha Jean Bruce claimed that Joyce had confessed to her while they
shared a jail cell after Joyce’s arrest.
Bruce said there was no incentive for her to testify to that, but remarkably a few months
later the DA recommended that Bruce be released over 3 years early on a 5-year attempted murder
sentence.
So yeah.
The DA’s investigator Adi Christian found her story convincing.
Well, after I talked to her a little bit in detail she began to tell me some things that
indicated to me that she would’ve had to have talked to someone involved in that crime
because of the facts she had.
About the way the furs were supposedly baggaged when they left the scene.
And Martha Jean Bruce had that information, she knew that they were in plastic bags.
But she could’ve read that in the newspapers.
Oh, and Martha Jean Bruce had already been convicted of lying to police.
But the prosecutors ignored that.
The odds of it all being the universe’s cruel joke against Joyce Ann Brown were just...
too much for the jury.
She was found guilty and sentenced -- and there was no hope the calculus was ever gonna
be in her favor.
Everything added up for the prosecution, and the pattern checked out.
Their case went like this: Joyce Ann Brown is the black former prostitute in Texas accused
of involvement in the robbery and murder of a holocaust survivor on her lunch break from
work at the same type of store a few miles away, with the surviving victim visually identifying
her, sworn testimony of a jailhouse confession, and the getaway car rented in her exact name.
Here’s a question.
What are the odds someone with YOUR name commits a crime?
Since there are only 10 other Kevin Liebers, I’m pretty safe.
But what if your name is…
Michael Stevens?
There are 2,975 total Michael Stevenses in the United States.
How about John Smith?
He’s got 48,439 other potential criminal John Smiths.
Conversely, Tanner Butt’s innocence is firmly up to him.
6 months after Joyce’s conviction, the other woman linked to the robbery and murder was
finally apprehended.
Rene Taylor.
Police found furs and the murder weapon in her apartment.
She told police that she had no idea who Joyce Ann Brown was… but she refused to give up
the name of her actual accomplice because she didn’t want to ruin that woman’s life.
Rene Taylor was convicted of murder and sent to the Mountain View maximum security prison,
where she served time with…
Joyce Ann Brown.
Guards were ordered to keep the two women apart.
Joyce is in prison.
Rene Taylor is in prison.
But It took years to determine who Rene’s real accomplice was -- a woman named Lorraine
Germany who’d also robbed an Albuquerque, New Mexico fur store with Taylor -- and an
investigator told Joyce that “Lorraine looked enough like you to be your twin sister.”
Name.
Furs.
DOPPELGANGER.
Ridiculous.
In 1984, Joyce’s appeal was denied on her birthday.
2 weeks later, her son shot himself.
His last words to her were, “Mama, when are they going to let you out?
We don’t have a family anymore.”
Most crimes aren’t all THAT different from each other, and the details usually add up.
There are often familiar patterns.
The Dallas police fell victim to the Einstellung Effect, a cognitive phenomenon detailed in
my video "Can Learning Make You Dumb?"
They had tunnel vision based on their experience.
They also had a lot of possible evidence to choose from, so they only saw what they wanted
to see -- and they wanted to see it in a certain way.
It’s the same mistake we saw with Brandon Mayfield’s fingerprint case.
And just like Sally Clark’s trial, the prosecution and jury refused to admit that long odds and
crazy coincidences really do happen -- they just do.
Or maybe they just didn’t understand that they do.
One way to combat the Einstellung Effect is to bring in people to look at the problem
who aren’t used to operating in familiar patterns.
Dallas Morning News journalists Steve McGonigal and Steve Blow started questioning the district
attorney’s narrative.
Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries in Princeton, New Jersey and his own investigator started
putting the evidence together to get Joyce exonerated.
And in 1989, just weeks after Morley Safer of 60 Minutes aired a 14-minute piece detailing
the doubt surrounding Joyce’s conviction, she was finally granted a retrial.
For the first time in 9 years, 5 months, and 24 days, Joyce was free -- and months later,
the DA dropped the case against her.
Joyce Ann Brown spent the years following her release working as an assistant to a county
official before founding an organization to assist the incarcerated and their families.
She died of a heart attack in 2015.
Joyce’s strength and character allowed her to turn her injustice into a springboard to
help other people.
But… she never should’ve had to in the first place.
Joyce wrote in her book “Justice Denied” that she, “... had faith in the system.
If you did a crime, you did the time.
If you were innocent, you went free.”
The thing is -- lives like Joyce Ann Brown’s have been and will continue to be destroyed
because we keep getting the same things wrong.
We fall prey to the same cognitive biases, analytical fallacies, and just plain thinking
errors that I’ve been exploring on this channel for years.
One day it’s the Einstellung effect -- the next day it’s confirmation bias, or any
of dozens of misinterpretations in math.
I know all of these things.
YOU know all of these things.
But not everyone else does -- and their compounding errors can determine the freedom of people
named… well, whatever your first, middle, and last name is.
And as always, thanks for watching.
Well the first thing I'm gonna do is spend some time with my daughter.
And that very night I'm gonna sleep in the bed with my momma.
I've been waitin' on that day a long time.