A Murder Acquittal Headed Back to Trial, New Leads in Savannah Guthrie's Missing Mother, and Scott Peterson's Lawyer Cries Innocence

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. Good morning, you're listening to Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher and this is Wednesday, June third, twenty twenty six. Here's the question on the table this morning. If a jury looks you in the eye and says not guilty of murder, can the state turn around and put you on trial for the same night all over again in Connecticut. That's not a hypothetical. That is exactly what's about to happen to a young man named Raoul Vale. And on Monday, his lawyer stood up in a courtroom in Milford and basically told the judge this is a rerun nobody asked for. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. There's a teenager at the center of this who never got a retrial, never got a do over, never got anything. His name was Jimmy McGrath. He was seventeen.

1:00 And before this turns into a debate about double jeopardy and legal theory, I want you to hold on to him because he is the reason any of this is happening at all. Then we're going to Las Vegas to Crime con the Big True Crime Convention, where two cases we follow closely on this show just had real news drop on a stage in front of a live audience. New details in the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of today's show hosts Savannah Guthrie and Scott Peterson's old defense attorney Mark Garragas standing up to say his client is innocent and the proof is coming. Three stories, one verdict that wouldn't stick, one woman who's still missing, and one of the most famous convictions in American history getting picked apart again. This is Daily Crime and Justice. Let me set the scene, because if you haven't followed this one, you need the whole picture to understand why Monday's hearing matters so much. Fourteenth, twenty twenty two, Shelton, Connecticut. It's the tail end of the school year. There's a house party for kids from Saint Joseph's High School over on Lazybrook Road. Teenagers, alcohol, no adults paying close attention. The kind of night that's supposed to end with everybody going home and nursing a hangover the next morning. Instead, four people got stabbed and one of them died. His name was James McGrath. Everybody called him Jimmy. Seventeen years old,

2:30 a junior at Shelton High, a lacrosse player, the kind of kid his friends describe as the one you actually wanted around. One of his closest friends testified later that on that very night, before any of this happened, Jimmy had pulled her aside and told her how happy he was, how good things were going in his relationship. That was the conversation. That's where his head was. A seventeen year old talking about being happy, and then he was gone. How a stolen beer became a body. Here's how it spiraled. And I want you to notice how small the spark was. At that first party on Lazybrook Road, a kid named Jack Snyder grabbed another kid's beer. That's it. That's the inciting incident. The other kid, Ryan Hines, said, in effect, I'll fight you for my beer, and it turned into a brawl. Snyder Raoul Vale, a friend named Tyler da Silva, all Saint Joseph's kids against the Shelton crowd. That fight broke up, everybody got kicked out. And this is the part that should have been the end of the story.

3:35 They could have gone home, but there was a group chat and here's a detail that tells you everything about how dumb and how preventable this was. That group chat had originally been set up to organize pickup basketball games basketball. By the night of May fourteenth, it had curdled into a trash talking war room between two groups of teenage boys daring each other to show up, and somebody said, slide, come over, let's do this. So a car load of them, seven kids in a Honda Pilot drove about a mile to a second party, Tyler Rich's house on Laurel Glenn Drive, about thirty Shelton High kids in the yard, and when that suv pulled up, the two groups went at each other.

4:16 Before anyone even got out of the car. Kids surrounded the Honda. They rocked it, They threw things. Somebody threw a bottle out of the car and it shattered. Witnesses said the suv circled the block three or four times before coming back and inside that car. According to multiple witnesses, Raoul Valet was, in their words, going pretty insane about the damage to his friend's vehicle, and he was asking for a knife jack, where's your knife? Snyder testified he reached into the center console and handed Valet a black folding tactical knife. They drove back, and in the brawl that followed, four people were stabbed. Ryan Hines, the kid whose beer started the whole thing, took wounds to the chest and torso his lung collapsed. A doctor testified he heard a bubbling sound from his own chest and thought he was going to die. An emergency chest tube saved his life. Tommy Connery stabbed in the leg, Faison tele stabbed in the arm, didn't even realize it until someone pointed out the blood. And Jimmy McGrath stabbed once in the left side of the chest. The blade, between two and a half and three and a half inches deep, punctured the left ventricle of his heart. The medical examiner's word for whether he could have survived it was impossible unless it had happened on an operating table with surgeons standing over him. Jimmy said, I've been stabbed, and he collapsed.

5:46 And here's the detail that several eyewitnesses hammered on over and over. Jimmy McGrath wasn't fighting anybody. One witness said she watched volley go right towards Jimmy. Another, a kid named Charlie Connery untestified, he yelled he has a knife, and then watched Volley turn and stab Jimmy, who he said went after him with a purpose. The defense disputes that, but the picture of the prosecution's witnesses painted was of a bystander, a kid standing there who is now dead. After the stabbing, witnesses say Valet got back in the car distraught and said I think I just stabbed four people, and then as they drove off, he threw the knife into the woods near a cul de sac. Police searched for that knife. They searched for it repeatedly, as recently as last year. They never found it. Vale, who was sixteen at the time, left for Florida with his mother and brother. Came back a few days later when the arrest warrant came down. He turned himself in four days after Jimmy McGrath died. Now there's another side to this, and I'm going to give it to you straight, because the jury heard it and it clearly landed. Vale took the stand in his own defense. He told the jury he never wanted to fight, that the group was just looking for another party, that the car was surrounded by a mob banging on the windows and rocking it, that somebody sprayed w D forty in his face, that he got hit so hard he blacked out at one point, and that Jack Snyder, not him, produced the knife and

7:20 tossed it to him. He said he stabbed without any real direction, that he was terrified, that he just wanted to get people away from him self. Defense. That was the whole case. And here's the thing about that defense. Some of it was genuinely messy for the prosecution. There were two kids who testified under immunity and non prosecution deals, Jack Snyder, who handed over the knife, and Tyler Da Silva. Their families refused to let police interview them for six months. Six months. So when Valet's lawyer told the jury there was so much stupid running around that night and that his client was the only one of all these kids actually sitting in courtroom, that argument had teeth. The verdict that didn't finish the job. So in July of twenty twenty five, after a thirteen day trial, the jury came back and the result was the kind of split that satisfies absolutely nobody. On the top charges murder, first degree assault, not guilty across the board. The jury would not convict Raoul Valet of intentionally murdering Jimmy McGrath or intentionally assaulting the others, but on the lesser charges reckless manslaughter reckless assault, they deadlocked, couldn't agree hung, so the judge declared a mistrial on those counts, which means, in the eyes of the law, those charges are still alive, unresolved, which means the state can try them again. And that's the box everyone's been stuck in for almost a year, acquitted of

8:51 the worst of it, never cleared of the rest, and a family that buried their son with no finish line in sight, which brings us to this past Monday, June first, in a courtroom in Milford, Connecticut. Valley is twenty Now he has a new attorney, a man named Darnell Crossland, and Crossland came in swinging to get these remaining charges thrown out before any retrial can happen. His argument has a few layers. First, double jeopardy, he told the judge the court has no business trying this case again, same act, same night, same individuals. Second, and this is the more interesting one. He argued that when the jury acquitted Volley of murder. They necessarily decided that Valet acted in self defense.

9:36 And if self defense cleared him of the big charges, it has to clear him of the small ones too. You can't slice it. And third, he leaned on time, four years, four years since Jimmy McGrath died, and the state still hasn't finished. And then Crossland gave the line that put this hearing in headlines. He said, and I'm quoting him, if we tried this case at three o'clock this afternoon, the exact s, the same victims, the exact same defense, the exact same burden on the state, it would be Groundhog Day all over again, same movie, same ending. Why run it twice? Here's where it got good because the judge, Judge Kevin Russo, did not just nod along.

10:18 He pushed back, and he pushed back with the exact question a sharp judge should ask. He said, isn't it possible the jury never even got to the self defense question. Isn't it possible they acquitted simply because they didn't think the state proved intentional conduct beyond a reasonable doubt, which is a completely different thing from finding self defense. Because if that's why they acquitted. Then the recklessness charges are wide open. Reckless isn't intentional. You can fail to prove someone meant to do it and still have a real question about whether they did it recklessly. That's not a small distinction. That is the entire case balanced on the difference between he didn't mean to and he was justified, and the defense needs door number two. The judge just reminded everyone door number one exists. The father standing next to the prosecution outside the courthouse, Jimmy McGrath's father, Kevin McGrath, stood next to the prosecutors, and he didn't talk like a man looking for revenge. He talked like a man who is exhausted. He said nobody wants a speedy trial more than the McGrath family. He said, all they've gotten for four years is delay. He said, we'd like to get this behind us. Sit with that for a second.

11:32 The defense is in court arguing that a retrial would be a pointless rerun, a waste groundhog day, and the murdered boy's father is standing on the courthouse steps saying, please run it, finish it. We've been waiting four years for somebody to put a period at the end of this sentence. Both things can be true here, and that's what makes this hard. Raoul Vale was a sixteen year old who was acquitted of murder by a jury of adults who heard everything. He has presumed innocent on what's left, and he is entitled to every protection the Constitution gives him, including protection from being hauled back into court for something he's already been cleared of. That's real, that matters. The double jeopardy clause exists for a reason. And also, a kid is dead, a kid who by most accounts wasn't even in the fight, and his father has spent four years driving to hearings instead of watching his son grow up.

12:26 The legal system's job is to resolve that, not to let it dangle indefinitely. Because the first jury couldn't finish the sentence. Judge Russo says he'll issue a written ruling in the coming weeks. So this isn't over today. But whichever way it breaks, it tells you something about how our system handles the cases it can't cleanly resolve, the ones that end in a hung count. Instead of a clean answer, somebody has to say Jimmy McGrath's name in that courtroom until it's actually finished. We'll be watching for the ruling when we come back. We're going to Las Vegas to Crime Con, where a panel of reporters and investigators just dropped new details on two cases we've been following for months, the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie's mother and the conviction of Scott Peterson. Stay with me, Welcome back.

13:28 You know this case. Nancy Guthrie, eighty four years old, the mother of Today's show hosts Savannah Guthrie, vanished from her home in Arizona back in the winter. A doorbell camera was disabled, there was a search, there were reported ransom notes, the FBI got involved, and then, like a lot of these cases, it went quiet. We're now more than one hundred days out. She is still missing. This past weekend at Crime Con in Las Vegas, there was a panel devoted entirely to her disappearance. Reporters, a defense attorney, investigators, and a few things came out of that room that are worth your time. First the News. A Fox Digital reporter on the panel, Michael Ruiz, said he'd heard from a federal source minutes before walking on stage that investigators are now discussing bringing new tools into the case, technological tools specifically. He didn't say more than that, but after one hundred plus days of stall, any signal that the investigation is escalating is something second, and this is the one that got my attention. A defense attorney on the panel, Donna Rotano, said she's learned that Savannah Guthrie has now spent half a million dollars of her own money hiring private investigators. Rotuno's read on that she's not satisfied a daughter does not spend five hundred thousand dollars on private investigators if she has faith that law enforcement is going to bring her mother home. And then the panel got into something more uncomfortable, whether this case was at the

15:00 very beginning. Rotno said that initially everyone treated this as a missing person case and that investigators, in her words, probably didn't walk in with the right set of lenses. They're describing a crime scene that wasn't locked down. Reporter Michael Ruiz said he was able to walk right up to the front door of Nancy Guthrie's house. When somebody questioned that, his answer was, the deputy told me to. There's a specific piece of evidence at the center of this a hare found at the home, potentially a source of DNA, potentially the thing that cracks the whole case. And according to a former NYPD inspector on the panel, Paul Morrow, the local sheriff's office wanted to send that hair to a lab in Florida rather than straight to the FBI's lab at Quantico. Marow's blunt assessment was that it looked to him like agencies weren't cooperating. He said, the FBI even sent a plane to fly the hair to Quantico, and it still took eleven weeks for federal agents to get access to it. Eleven weeks on the single piece of physical evidence that might identify whoever walked up to that door. Look, I wasn't in that investigation.

16:06 And these are the panelists characterizations, not a court finding. But if even part of that is accurate, a turf fight between agencies costing eleven weeks on the key piece of forensic evidence in the disappearance of an eighty four year old woman, that's not a mistake of resources. When you've got the plane and you've got the lab, and the hold up is who gets to be in charge. That's a choice and it's the kind of choice families end up paying for one more thing. The panel agreed on those ransom notes. The consensus was that they were almost certainly not written by whoever took her. As one investigator put it, the last place a real kidnapper goes is a tabloid tip line. The notes had no urgency, no proof of life. That's someone chasing attention, not a ransom.

16:55 So where does that leave us? One hundred plus days, a daughter spent her own fortune because she doesn't trust the official effort, a key piece of evidence that sat for eleven weeks, and a family that just wants the one thing nobody can give them yet, an answer. Nancy Guthrie. Someone has to keep saying her name. We will last story today and we're staying at Crime con for it because Scott Peterson, Yes that Scott Peterson was back in the conversation this weekend in a big way. Quick refresher for anyone. New Christmas Eve two thousand and two, Lacy Peterson, eight months pregnant, vanishes from Modesto, California. The following April, Her body and the body of her unborn son, Connor wash Ashore in San Francisco Bay, right near where Scott told police he'd gone fishing. He's convicted of in two thousand and four, sentenced to death. That sentence later gets overturned.

18:05 He's now serving life without parole, and he has never stopped claiming he's innocent. Here's the news at crime. Con Mark Gurragas, the high profile attorney who defended Peterson at his original trial, got on stage with a retired LAPD detective and a legal analyst to argue more than twenty years later that his client should be exonerated. Gerrigo said, flatly, Scott is innocent. Scott is not good for this crime. He said he knew the evidence better than anyone in real time and has never wavered, and he laid out what he calls the problems with the case. He pointed at the jury, said one prospective juror admitted on social media she planned to lie her way onto the panel.

18:49 He pointed at the deliberations, said that after seven days, the jury for person told the judge he was being threatened by another juror and couldn't continue, and over gets objection, that four person was replaced with an alternate. Ninety minutes later, the new panel returned a guilty verdict ninety minutes. Then there's the piece the Los Angeles Innocence Project has built its petitions around. Girago says that on the very day of Peterson's conviction, he was handed new discovery about a van, a van connected to a burglary across the street from the Peterson's home around the time Lacey disappeared. He says he later learned that van was stolen, was found torched in Modesto two days after Lacy vanished, had a mattress in the back, and that the evidence from it was, in his words, deep sixth. For decades, the Innocence Project wants DNA testing on that evidence. Prosecutors have opposed it, and Giragos, making the point that Land's hardest, has offered to pay for the testing himself. His question to the state, what are you afraid of? The other prong is what Giragos calls junk science. The prosecution's expert used ultrasound measurements to argue Lacey was killed on December twenty third. Garragas called that expert, I'll keep it clean, a pompous windbag, and the Innocence Project says its own experts using newer technology put the date of death somewhere between December twenty eighth and January third. Why does a few days matter

20:23 because if Lacey was alive after December twenty fourth, Scott Peterson's entire timeline, the fishing trip, the alibi, all of it changes shape. Now. I want to be careful here and you should be two. This is the defense talking. Mark Garragos has believed in Scott Peterson's innocence for twenty five years. That's not new, and he's not a neutral party. None of this is a court ruling. Peterson is still convicted, still serving life, and there was a mountain of circumstantial evidence that twelve jurors found persuasive enough to convict the affair, the lie, the bodies in the bay where he said he was fishing. That didn't evaporate because there's a documentary coming out, And there is a documentary coming out. Garagos and his panel are featured in a new A and E special Scott Peterson The New Evidence, premiering July sixteenth.

21:18 So you can decide for yourself how much of this is genuine reasonable doubt and how much is a very good lawyer with a very good camera crew. Both things, as always, can be true either way. The people who can't weigh in are Lacey and Connor Peterson. Twenty three years later, someone still has to say their names too. That's Daily Crime and Justice for Wednesday, June third, twenty twenty six. Quick recap. In Connecticut, Raoul Valet, acquitted of murdering seventeen year old Jimmy McGrath, is fighting to block a retrial on the reckless charges the first jury hung on.

21:59 His lawyer calls it groundhog Day. Jimmy's father calls it four years of delay he'd like to end. A judge will rule in the coming weeks. Out of Crime con new movement and old failures in the Nancy Guthrie disappearance, including a key hair sample that reportedly sat for eleven weeks, and Scott Peterson's former attorney is back claiming new evidence ahead of a July documentary. If this episode taught you something, do me one favor. Tell one person about this show. One text a friend who loves true crime, Send them the episode, Tell them where you listen. Word of mouth is the entire reason a show like this grows, and it cost you nothing but ten seconds, and if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. I read them. Tell me where you land on the Valet case. Should the state get to retry him or did that jury say enough?

22:51 I want to hear it. You can leave a comment wherever you're listening, but on Spotify it's right there under the episode, so use it. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow. This is Daily Crime and Justice. A note on our reporting today. The details in the Raul Volley case come from Court TV's trial coverage and from the June first hearing. Volley was acquitted of murder and first degree assault and is presumed innocent on the remaining reckless charges, which ended in a mistrial. The weapon was described by one witness as a pocket knife and characterized elsewhere as a folding tactical knife. It was never recovered in the Nancy Guthrie case. The claims discussed today, including the reported half million dollar private investigation, the possible use of new investigative tools, and the eleven week delay on the hair evidence, were made by panelists at Crime Con twenty twenty six and have not been independently confirmed by this program or by official sources. In the Scott Peterson case, the assertions of new evidence come from Peterson's former attorney and the Los Angeles Innocence Project as part of ongoing appellate efforts. They are not court findings. Scott Peterson remains convicted and is serving life without parole. Where reporting was incomplete or contested, We've told you so. Daily Crime Injustice is a production of Calaruga Shark Media