'One Juror Who Refuses to Listen to the Law': the Clancy Defense Wants Them Removed, Forty-Two Years to a Conviction in the Killing Fields

0:09 Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Shark Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Friday, September 4th, 2026. Yesterday afternoon in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the foreperson of Lindsay Clancy's jury sent the judge a note saying that one of the 12 people in that room is not following the law. What happened next was one of the strangest scenes of this entire trial. Lindsay Clancy was wheeled up to the judge's bench for the first time in five weeks. And then, one at a time, each of the 12 jurors was brought in and asked a question, in front of her, in front of both legal teams, in front of the court officers. Her lawyer then stood up and demanded that the judge throw that juror off the case. The judge refused, and he gave a reason that I want you to hear, because it is the whole ballgame. In Galveston, Texas, a man named Tim Miller spent 42 years looking for the truth about his 16-year-old daughter.

1:05 He founded a search organization that has recovered more than 400 bodies for other families. And on Wednesday, a jury finally convicted somebody. And in Colorado, a private citizen sent an email to a judge. As a direct result, Barry Morphew, who is awaiting trial for the murder of his wife, is now not permitted to leave his house for any reason short of an ambulance. Let's get into it. On the evening of January 24th, 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children with exercise bands in the basement of their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Nine women and three men have been deliberating since a week ago Thursday. They are past 36 hours. They have told the judge twice that they cannot agree. And on Wednesday, he read them the dynamite charge, the last resort instruction Massachusetts judges use before declaring a mistrial. And then yesterday, this happened. Around mid-afternoon, the foreperson sent Judge William Sullivan a note. The note said that one of the 12 is not following the law as it pertains to reasonable doubt. Sullivan called a sidebar, and then he did something I have not seen in this trial. He had Lindsay Clancy wheeled up to the bench so she could participate. She has sat at the defense table for five weeks. This time she was there in her wheelchair at the judge's elbow. Then he brought the jurors in one at a time, 12 people one after another, each one walking into a courtroom containing the defendant,

2:37 both legal teams and court officers, to be asked a single question at the bench. Can you follow the law as I have instructed you? By all accounts, every one of them said yes. Sullivan then brought the whole panel in and re-instructed them on reasonable doubt. He told them they are required to follow his instructions on the law. He reminded them the burden is on the Commonwealth to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. He walked them through moral certainty, the highest degree of certainty possible in human affairs, based solely on the evidence. And he told them again that if they evaluate everything and a reasonable doubt remains, the defendant is entitled to the benefit of it and must be acquitted. Then he sent them back out. And Kevin Reddington came unglued. Reporters described him gesticulating and banging papers down at Sidebar. Then, in open court, he said it out loud. He told the judge the court has an instruction from the foreperson of a jury that has been working for a week saying there is one juror who refuses to listen to the law on reasonable doubt.

3:43 He argued that the soft question Sullivan asked at Sidebar, essentially, can you follow my instructions, did not focus the issue and did not build any foundation for removing that juror. And then he said that if they come back in half an hour with a mistrial because a juror spurned this court's instructions, it is a real shame. He moved to have the juror removed. Jennifer Sprague opposed it, and her argument was short and correct. There is no way to determine what is happening inside those deliberations. No way to know who is right and who is wrong. And nobody should be trying to find out, because that is what deliberation is. Sullivan refused. And here is the line, and it is the most important sentence anybody has said in that courthouse this week. He said he does not feel it is proper for him to side with one side or the other in deliberations. Now, let me explain why that is not a dodge, because it would be very easy to hear it as one. A judge can remove a juror. It happens. If a juror is drunk or has been researching the case at home or has talked to a reporter or is refusing to deliberate at all, That is misconduct and off they go. And a judge can remove a juror who genuinely refuses to apply the law, a person who says out loud that they do not care what the instruction says. But a judge absolutely cannot remove a juror for reaching a conclusion the lawyers do not like. And here is the problem, which is one of the genuinely unsolvable problems in American criminal law. From

5:13 outside that room, those two things look identical. A holdout who has honestly applied reasonable doubt and landed somewhere the other 11 have not is doing exactly what a juror is supposed to do. That person is the entire reason we have 12 instead of 1. And to the other 11, exhausted, 7 days in, that person looks like somebody who will not follow the law. The 4-person's note is not a finding. It is one juror's characterization of an argument they are losing or cannot win. That is not a criticism of the foreperson. It is just what a note like that is. So when a judge starts pulling jurors off a panel because the majority reports that the minority will not get in line, you have not fixed a deadlock. You have replaced the unanimity requirement with a vote. Sullivan will not do that, and he is right not to. Now, I want to be careful about something because it is everywhere this morning. There is reporting of an alleged 11 to 1 split. Nobody outside that room knows that. Not me.

6:14 Not Court TV. Not anybody. It is an inference drawn from a note about one juror. It might be exactly right. It might also be that two or three people are unpersuaded and one of them is simply the most vocal. Deliberations are secret for a reason. And everything we think we know about what is happening inside is guesswork built on a piece of paper. What I will say is this. If it is one person, that person has now sat in a room for seven days while 11 others push, has been the subject of a note to a judge, has been called into a courtroom to be asked in front of the defendant whether they can follow the law, and has had a defense attorney demand their removal in open court. And they went back in and kept going.

6:59 Whatever you think this case should come out to, that takes a spine. And I want to be equally fair to the other 11, because they are not villains in this either. If 11 people have genuinely worked through five weeks of testimony and arrived at the same place, and one person will not engage with the law as the judge gave it to them, that is a real and maddening thing to sit inside for seven days. Their frustration is legitimate. A foreperson who writes that note is not scheming. They are asking for help. Both of those things can be true, which is exactly why Sullivan cannot referee it. There is also a practical reality here that nobody enjoys saying out loud. This jury has been at it for seven days. They are not sequestered, but their lives have been on hold for six weeks. On Tuesday afternoon, they asked to go home early, which they had not done before.

7:52 Reporters have described them walking in looking down, stoic, not talking to each other the way they had earlier in the trial. One juror winced and shook her head when told to keep going. That is what exhaustion looks like from a press bench. And exhaustion is precisely the condition under which a dynamite charge does its work. It is not designed to change a mind. It is designed to make holding out feel unreasonable. Massachusetts wrote its version specifically to soften that pressure. And Sullivan paired it with a reminder that the Commonwealth carries the burden and that doubt means acquittal. He has handled this carefully. But there is no version of an instruction like that which does not lean on the person standing alone. Where it stands. Sullivan has read the dynamite charge once. He can read it one more time. After that, a mistrial. And a mistrial is not an acquittal. It is not a finding of anything.

8:52 And Reddington has already said he would absolutely try this case again. Lindsay Clancy would stay committed to the state hospital where she has been for over three years while the district attorney decides. Cora Clancy was five and in kindergarten. Dawson Clancy was three. Callan Clancy was eight months old. Twelve exhausted people go back in this morning. Someone has to say their names. When we come back, a father spent 42 years looking for the truth and the man who had it called his phone. Segment two 42 years Laura Lynn Miller was 16 years old on September 10th 1984 in League City, Texas She was wearing a blue one-piece jumpsuit flip-flops and a gold cross necklace Before her father left for work. She asked whether her boyfriend could come over that night. He told her he would see her later When he came home that evening, she was gone.

9:55 Her father's name is Tim Miller. He is 79 years old now, and this week, he sat on a witness stand in Galveston County and told a jury that Laura was Dad's girl. He described what happened next, and he called it the place where the nightmare started. He said he had the worst time of his life. That he begged and pleaded for somebody to do something. That he knew something had happened to Laura. He just did not know what. Seventeen months later, in February of 1986, he was reading the Houston Post and saw that the remains of two women had been found in a field off Calder Road in League City. Testing determined one of them was his daughter. That field became one of the most notorious places in this country. Four young women were found there between 1984 and 1991. Laura Miller, Haida Fai, Donna Prudhomme, and a fourth woman who lay unidentified for more than three decades until DNA technology finally gave her name back in 2019. She was Audrey Lee Cook, and she was 30 years old. People started calling it the Texas Killing Fields, and Tim Miller could not leave it. In December of 1986, a week before Christmas, he went out to that field to dig a hole and set a cross in the ground for his daughter. While he was digging, he found one of her bones. He testified that he asked her to forgive him. He said that place made him crazy, that he almost lived out there in that damn field.

11:25 In the year 2000, Tim Miller founded an organization called Texas EquiSearch to go find other people's missing children because nobody had come to find his. He testified about what it has done. Searches in 42 states and 11 countries. More than 400 deceased people recovered and returned to their families. Many more found alive who he says would otherwise be dead. He described the organization as Laura's legacy. Now here is where this story becomes something almost impossible to believe. In April of 2022, a man named James Elmore called Texas EquiSearch. He had two reasons. The first was that his own daughter was missing and he needed help finding her. The second was that he wanted to talk about Laura Miller and get something off his chest. Tim Miller helped him with his daughter. That got sorted out quickly. And then, over a series of meetings, James Elmore started telling Tim Miller what happened to Laura. Miller testified he was skeptical at first. He had spent almost 40 years getting false leads.

12:29 But Elmore drove him to the field. And then Elmore pointed at a nearby cemetery and said that was where a man named Clyde Hedrick used to hide and watch Laura when she came down there. Hedrick had lived two houses from the Miller family. He had been publicly identified as a possible suspect for years, and Tim Miller had long believed he was responsible. And Elmore knew things. Prosecutors say he described details that had never been made public, including a shirt found with Laura's remains and the truck allegedly used to move her body. Miller testified that Elmore eventually described the night she died. In that account, Hedrick sexually assaulted Laura, and Elmore prepared cocaine and handed it to Hedrick, who administered it to her. Elmore said he told Hedrick not to do it, and then he described watching her stop breathing. I am going to leave the rest of what Elmore said out of this show, because it is genuinely one of the more repellent things I have read in a transcript this year, and it does not add anything you need. James Elmore, 61, of Backliff, Texas, was charged with manslaughter and tampering with evidence in Laura Miller's death and with a separate count of tampering involving Audrey Cook. He pleaded not guilty. His trial started Tuesday.

13:43 Tim Miller was the state's first witness. The defense did not submit a witness list and did not call anybody. And on Wednesday, a jury of six men and six women convicted him. And I want to stop on the thing that makes this story different from every other cold case we cover. The break in this case did not come from DNA. It did not come from a database or a genealogy match or a detective reopening a file. It came because a man built an organization to find other people's missing children. And 22 years later, the one person who knew what happened to his own daughter needed that organization's help. James Elmore called Texas EquiSearch because his daughter was missing. He got Tim Miller on the phone because Tim Miller answers those calls. That is the only reason any of this happened. If Laura Miller's father had done what almost anybody would do after burying a 16-year-old, which is to grieve privately and try to survive it, there is no trial this week. There is no conviction.

14:40 Elmore has no reason to ever pick up a phone. Now, I want to be honest with you about the complications here, because there are two, and they matter. The first is that Tim Miller paid James Elmore money. roughly $ 33, 000 in cash over the years, which he described as reward money for information about his daughter. A father paying a man for the truth about his dead child is a completely human thing to do. And it is also exactly the kind of fact a defense attorney lives for. That jury heard it and convicted anyway. The second is Clyde Hedrick. In Elmore's account, Hedrick is the one who assaulted Laura and gave her the drugs. Hedrick died in March of this year. He was never tried for Laura Miller's death and he never will be. And everything just described about him comes from the account of a man now convicted in the same case. So that is not settled and it is never going to be settled and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I would also note what the charge actually was. Manslaughter, not murder. The state's theory was never that James Elmore killed Laura Miller with his own hands. It was that he supplied the drugs and helped conceal what happened. 42 years on, with the man Elmore blames now dead, a manslaughter conviction and a tampering conviction may be the entire available accounting. That is what justice looks like when it arrives four decades late. It is partial. It comes with an asterisk. And it is still enormously better than nothing, which is what this family

16:11 had for most of my lifetime. What is settled is this. On Wednesday, 42 years after his daughter disappeared, Tim Miller sat in a courtroom and heard a guilty verdict. He said afterward that it has been a long 42 years and that in the last two days, he did not think they were going to get there. From the witness stand looking at the defendant, he said two words, damn you. Laura Lynn Miller was 16 years old. She had a boyfriend and a gold cross necklace and a father who never once stopped. Audrey Lee Cook was 30. She lay in the ground without a name for 33 years. Nobody was paying attention to any of them. Four women in one field in Texas, and it took a grieving father building a national search organization out of his own grief to get one conviction four decades later. Someone has to say their names. When we come back, a citizen sent an email and Barry Morphew got locked in his house.

17:17 Suzanne Morphew was 49 years old. She was a mother of two daughters, and she disappeared on Mother's Day in May of 2020 after reportedly going for a bike ride near Salida in Chaffee County, Colorado. Her remains were found in September of 2023, 45 miles from her home, by investigators searching for something else entirely. Her death was ruled a homicide, caused by unspecified means in the setting of intoxication by three drugs commonly used as animal sedatives. Her husband, Barry Morphew, 58, was arrested and charged in 2021. That case was dismissed in 2022. After her remains were found, a grand jury indicted him again. He is pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, he denies any involvement, and he is presumed innocent. His trial is set for July of 2027.

18:10 He was released on a $ 3 million bond over the objection of prosecutors who argued he had the means to run. The conditions were that he stay home except for medical appointments and emergencies, work, meetings with his lawyers, and court. He wore GPS monitoring. His monitoring reports had shown no violations. And then on Wednesday, District Court Judge Amanda Hopkins got an email. It was from a private citizen, telling her about a hit and run in Denver on August 26th. Hopkins pulled up the news report about it, which included cell phone video shot by one of the drivers. And in her order, she wrote that she watched it and identified the man in that footage as a person who is very clearly the defendant. Here is what the court says that video shows. A truck driving aggressively, then striking two vehicles. The man refusing to give his name or identification.

19:03 Saying he does not have insurance. Offering one of the drivers $ 300 in cash for the damage to her car. her refusing it, him then trying to buff the scratches out of the paint with his hand and his t-shirt. And then when she told him she was calling the police, he left. According to the judge's order, he nearly struck another person on his way out and drove over a curb to do it. Prosecutors also noted that the truck carried the same Indiana license plate that Morphew is alleged to have used on more than one vehicle across multiple states, which is a detail they had already raised when they argued against his release in the first place. Their line in the filing is the sharpest thing in this whole story.

19:44 They wrote that his driving appears to put others at risk, that fleeing would be a new consideration for community. safety, and that driving away in direct response to impending police involvement indicates a willingness to flee police specifically. Hopkins did not revoke his bond, she revoked everything else. Barry Morphew may not leave his house at all. No medical appointments, no work, no exceptions. If he has a medical emergency, he calls 911 and goes out in an ambulance. She also ordered his GPS monitoring company to hand over its monthly report and any record of permission he had to be away from home that evening. According to the court, the company did not comply. Sit with that one. A man is on a $ 3 million bond in a first-degree murder case, wearing a device paid for by a private contractor, and when a judge orders that contractor to produce records, They simply do not. That's not a mistake. That's a choice.

20:41 Somebody made a business decision about a court order. And this is not a small thing procedurally. Electronic monitoring is the entire justification for releasing people charged with serious violent crimes before trial. The argument judges make, and it is often a good argument, is that a defendant does not have to sit in a cell for two years awaiting trial because technology can watch them instead. That argument only works if the technology actually watches them, and if the company running it answers a judge. In this case, prior monitoring reports had reportedly shown no violations at all. Whatever happened in Denver on August 26th, the system that was supposed to flag it did not flag it. A stranger with an email address did. A hearing on the alleged bond violation is expected next week, and I want to be precise. Barry Morphew is presumed innocent of murdering his wife, and as far as the public record shows, he has not been charged with anything arising from the August 26th incident.

21:42 What happened this week is a judge tightening release conditions, not a conviction of anything. But here's the part I keep turning over. The GPS said nothing. The monitoring company said nothing. The bond, all $ 3 million of it, said nothing. What worked was a woman with a phone who filmed a man who hit her car and a stranger who watched the news and decided to email a judge about it. Accountability doesn't have a legal department. Sometimes it is just a person who paid attention. Suzanne Morphew was 49 years old. She has been dead for six years. Her body spent three of those years in the ground before anyone found her.

22:22 And the man charged with killing her will not go to trial until the summer after next. Someone has to say her name. That's the show for Friday, September 4th. If this was useful, send it to one person. That is the whole engine on a show like this. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment because I want to hear you on the juror. If 11 people are convinced and one is not, is that one person a problem to be solved or the entire point of the system? I have a view. Tell me yours. That Plymouth jury is back in the room this morning, and Judge Sullivan has one card left. When it breaks, we will be here. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing and timing. This episode was recorded before court opened Friday morning. The Lindsay Clancy jury ended a sixth day of deliberations Thursday without a verdict at roughly 36 hours. If a verdict or a mistrial came after we recorded, this episode does not reflect it. Outlets have counted deliberation hours differently throughout, ranging from 35 to 36 as of Thursday evening. The contents of jury notes and what individual jurors said at sidebar were not made public.

23:39 Our account of the foreperson's note and of the request to remove a juror comes from what attorneys said in open court and from reporters present in the room. Reports of an 11 to 1 split are inferences drawn from that note and have not been confirmed by the court, and we are not treating them as fact On the Galveston case, James Elmore has been convicted of the charges he faced and remains entitled to appeal. The account of what happened to Laura Miller in 1984 comes from statements Elmore made to Tim Miller, relayed in Miller's testimony. Clyde Hedrick, who Elmore's account identifies as responsible for the killing, died in March of this year, was never tried for Laura Miller's death and never had the opportunity to answer these allegations in court. Tim Miller testified that he paid Elmore roughly $ 33, 000 over several years as reward money. On the Colorado case, Barry Morphew has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and is presumed innocent. He has not, on the public record, been charged in connection with the August 26th incident in Denver. The description of that incident comes from the judge's written order and from a prosecution filing. The judge's identification of him in the video is her own statement in that order. His bond was not revoked, his conditions of release were tightened, and a hearing on the alleged violation is expected. This episode discusses child deaths, suicide, postpartum mental illness, sexual assault, and the killings of young women.

25:09 If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifelines. For postpartum mental health specifically, the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is available by call or text at 1-833-TLC-MAMA. If you or someone you love has experienced sexual violence, the National Sexual Assault Hotline is available at 1-800-656-4673.