TheTrue Story Of The First Death Row Inmate Exonerated By DNA

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TheTrue Story

Of The First Death Row Inmate

Exonerated By DNA

By:  Tim Junkin

Randi Cordes

The True Story Of The First Death Row Inmate Exonerated By DNA was written by Tim Junkin in 2004.  Tim is a lawyer and an award winning novelist, having many other books.  This book is a true story about Kirk Bloodsworth who was wrongly accused of a child’s rape and murder and put in jail for it.  There he sat an innocent man for nine years of his life, just because a few people said he looked kind of like the murderer or so they thought.  

        This book proves many points; for parents it is to watch your children, you never know where they might be or who they might be with, and for everyone else it is not to take things for granted, you never know when something like this could happen to you.  Mistakes happen every day in court, everywhere.  Bloodsworth was just like me and you and never thought anything like this would ever happen to him, but all it takes is one person to accuse you and that could be the end of it.

        Tim Junkin heard about Kirks story and immediately called him up to get his approval to write about it.  He knew it would be a great book that everyone of all ages would love to read.  This book is suspenseful, heart wrenching, and has an ending that no one could ever imagine.  Tim set out to inform the world about this amazing trial and error case that has been going on for 20 years and has finally been solved.

        I had never heard of this book or this trial.  It was amazing to me that it took so long to find a killer, when all along the evidence was right there, but no one tested it.  This all started right before I was born and just ended now that I am 20.  It’s unbelievable how the court system and legal justice system works, and that it took an innocent man who wasn’t even a police officer of homicide detective to figure out who the killer was.

It all started on Wednesday, July 25, 1984 when a nine year old girl, Dawn Venice Hamilton, went out like any other day to play with her friends.  Looking for her friend Lisa, she went down to Bethke’s Pond.  Lisa was not there but two boys she knew, Christian Shipley, ten and Jackie Poling, seven, were there fishing.  Dawn stopped to talk to them and to look at the turtle they had caught.  A man approached the kids and asked them what they were doing.  Dawn told him she was searching for her friend Lisa.  The man then told her that he was playing hide-and-seek with Lisa and asked her to help him look for her.  Little did anyone know this would be the last time they would see Dawn.

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When Dawn failed to return home that evening, Elinor Helmick, who was watching over her, went searching.  After a while she called the police in to help.  A man named Richard Gray offered to help and spotted her clothes up in a tree, and then her body about 25 feet from her clothes.  There she laid naked from the waste down, a stick protruding about six inches from her vagina, her face bloody, foot prints embedded on the back of her neck, and her purse still slung across her shoulder.  A piece of cement found near the body was bloody ...

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