A Deceitful Detective & Manipulated Evidence – The Wrongful Conviction of Bruce Lisker

Episode Notes

Transcript

Michael Semanchik:

In 1983, at just 17 years old, Bruce Lisker walked into his home and found his mother brutally murdered. Within hours, he went from a grieving son to the LAPD’s Prime suspect. Despite proclaiming his innocence, Bruce was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Bruce spent more than 26 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. His conviction was ultimately overturned after revelations of flawed forensic testimony, investigative misconduct, and suppressed evidence that pointed away from him. His case has become one of the most troubling examples of wrongful conviction in Los Angeles history, exposing systemic failures in how police and prosecutors handled evidence. Today, Bruce shares his journey not just of injustice and survival, but also of resilience and hope. His story is a reminder of both the human cost of wrongful convictions and the urgent need for reform. I’m Michael Semanchik, executive director of The Innocent Center, and you’re about to hear Bruce Lisker on for the innocent.

William Michael Dillon:

Spent most of my life in prison chasing a dream. Call justice, chasing a dream, chasing a dream. Want somebody please want somebody, please set me free.

Bruce Lisker:

I grew up in Sherman Oak, California, and in 1983, I was wrongly arrested, tried and convicted for the murder of my mom in our family home, and I served 26 years, five months, three days in California State Prison before I was exonerated and released in 2009, I had a planned job hunt. I was sort of on a perpetual job hunt. I wasn’t very good at holding jobs, slightly better at getting them, but not great. And I had just a few days prior repaired the rear shock absorber on my car, and as I was driving along, I heard this banging towards the rear of the car and I got out and looked and the work that I’d done had come loose and the shock was flopping around back there and I needed to fix it before the shock or the car was damaged. So I went to my apartment, changed into my work clothes, and went over to my parents’ house to do the job because my mom had a jack.

And so when I got there, what would normally happen was I’d pull into the driveway and our little dog would start barking and my mom would come out and investigate and say hi and see what I needed. I was going over there regularly for and to have my laundry done and stuff. Anyway, even though I was living in my own apartment, I was a 17-year-old kid. So today she didn’t come out. She normally would be right out, and she didn’t come out and it wasn’t that unusual. So I was organizing the stuff for the repair and sitting in my car, and then I went to the door. It was like, this is kind of long. I’d like to get the jack and get started knocked. I heard the dog inside and I was like, if the dog is inside, she should be inside. Okay, maybe she’s in the bathroom or something.

Waited another 30 seconds and then it’s like, I’m just going to look inside. It’s unusual at this point. It’s not like panic, but it’s like it’s unusual. So I go start walking around the house and from the back windows I look in and from the first window that I looked in, which was the living room window, I thought, but I wasn’t certain, but I thought maybe that I had seen her feet on the floor. So then I went to another window, the dining room window that I could confirm this. It was just bizarre and I doubted it. The second that I thought that I saw it, I began to doubt it. This can’t be, and I was high that day too. I should add adding to my sort of cognitive, I was most days, but at the second window, I definitely saw she was on the ground.

I saw her head. She was laying on the floor inside and I was just like, Jesus, I got to get in. And I thought there’s a spare key in this cabinet on the back patio. So I dove to that cabinet, got the key case out, and started opening it as I was returning to the front yard, but it was empty. It was just a couple steps, and I realized the key’s gone. It’s not in there. And I’m panicking now because when I left I was like, I’m independent. I’m on my own. I gave my key back, and so I didn’t have my own key. And so I remembered how I’d gotten in when I was late for curfew and stuff when I was a kid, and that was at the kitchen window. I could take out a couple of these louvered pans from the window and I could climb in.

It was easy to do because the frame was pretty loose and it was just we didn’t have locks and alarms and stuff. Nowadays I started to take the screen off to get the three panes out, but the screens were tacked into place with Brads because they’d become loose and fallen out over the years. And so I ran to the front yard and got a pair of pliers, ran back, took the Brads out, set everything down, climbed in, and I found my mom and just, I mean, it still gives me nightmares. It’s not a scene that you could ever forget. She was clinging to life. She had, when I found her, she was unconscious, laying almost face down, kind of on her left side on the entry floor. She was breathing. She had two knives in her back, which I took out, gave first aid pleading with her to say something to me to tell me who had done this.

Nothing. I called the police and I was frantic and screaming for help, and they arrived. They subdued me out in the front of the house. I was screaming, crying, screaming for the paramedics to get her to the hospital and help her do something for her. And they arrested me. They arrested me. My mom was transported to Encino Emergency, and as I was sitting in the backseat of the police car handcuffed, and I was pleading with all the officers at the scene, anybody that with an earshot, I want to go and be with my mom. I made two calls. I called for help and I called my dad to tell him what the hell was going on. He’d zoomed home from 12 miles away in Hollywood. His law office came home, and so he pulled up When I was in the back of the car, can I take my son to the hospital?

No, we’re holding him for detectives. So the detective arrived, can I go to the hospital? No. And they took me to Van Nuys and they commenced an interrogation. It’s different from an interview. An interrogation is when you believe you got the person. That was what it was from the word go. And it started at 1:00 PM and it was about an hour and a half I think. And by the end of it, he found reason to have to arrest me. He basically said, tell me what happened from the moment you woke up this morning. And I did, and I ran through it all and I was a hundred percent truthful by the end of it. He went, well, none of that fits. None of that works. I went to the scene you couldn’t see in the window like you said you did. Meanwhile, he got a call.

He talked to his partner who remained at the scene. Monsu was the detective that was interviewing me, and Rin was his partner who remained at the scene and they decided what they could poke holes in or whatever. And then he came back in and said, you’re under arrest and arrested me. And that was it. When they started to read me my Miranda rights, when you’re under 18, asking for a parent is the equivalent, a functional equivalent of asking for an attorney when they said, you have a right to an attorney. I said, my father, he raised his voice over mine and kept talking, if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed. And I’m like, okay. Kids are pretty adept, even in stressful situations like that, at what am I supposed to be doing? What am I? It was not okay for me to say anything other than listen and agree. And so he said, you’re willing to talk to me. I was like, yeah, because you always think I could just tell them the truth. I’m telling the truth. If I just explain it a little more clearly, they’ll see it. And I’ll go to the hospital and be with my mom.

My mom died at 3:27 PM in emergency surgery at Encino Hospital. And my dad came to the police station and asked to talk with me and was allowed to, and they put us back in the interrogation room and he told me that my mom had died. And it was just like the bottom fell out of my world. I mean, it was just the whole concept of death at 17 years of age, let alone after what I’d found and what had obviously happened to her, and now she’s gone forever. My dad and I immediately were like, we want a lie detector test. We want to a lie detector test right away. And he’s, well, I think we could manage that. And from four to 1:00 AM I was in the holding cell in the hallway and then they took me downtown to Parker Center and gave me a polygraph. And in my case, I told a hundred percent the truth did not lie about a single thing. And the polygraph examiner said, I exhibited deception on all questions and that I was lying. I was taken probably about three or 4:00 AM to Sylmar Juvenile Hall and dropped off by Detective Monso.

In hindsight, I can see how they definitely would’ve rushed to judge and gone, we need to take a look at this kid. I’ve said this in the past. Aaron Moriarty on 48 hours asked me, well, they have looked at, of course he should have looked at me. I would’ve looked at me. They get a call of a stabbing and kids frantic and they arrive, I’m the only one there. I have long hair. Back in the day, you were either a druggie or you were a cop or you were a clueless citizen. There were only three boxes to put a person into and pot wasn’t legal. And so I looked the part, I looked the of a stoner. So they put me in that box, shit. We got a long-haired kid at home with blood on his hands when we arrived because I was giving first aid freaking out. And then when we start talking to neighbors, we find out that yeah, they had problems. We heard them screaming, yelling all the time, but then when evidence of somebody else started coming up and coming into their radar, they shouldn’t have locked in and locked out. They locked in on me and they locked out anything that ran counter to that initial gut instinct, and that’s where they began to air.

So Mike Ryan was somebody that I met in a 12 step program when I had my apartment and he was homeless and he was looking for a place to stay, and I let him stay on the couch in my apartment in exchange for a portion of the rent or some beer or some weed or whatever those times. And he eventually didn’t give me anything. And so I was like, look, you got to go. So I kicked him out and he went back to Gulfport, Mississippi and I thought that was it. Four days before the murder, he shows back up in town and we thought he just decided to come back out. But what turned out to be the case was that he had had his probation transferred from some case that he had out there in Gulfport to California. He came out, never reported absconded. He was awol.

And then four days later, my mom was murdered and he took off again. And so people were telling my dad about this and he asked me, and I initially went, Mike R not you never think, I mean even I was so stupid and so blind. I was naive. I wasn’t stupid, but I was naive thinking people are like me. They’re not violent, they would never kill anyone. And so it slowly dawned on us that he was violent. He was obsessed with knives. He had this throwing knife that he would throw into the walls of my apartment when he lived there. He would resolve things with threats of violence or violence itself. And so it became really clear that like shit. And my dad told me something that I didn’t know until then, which was the day before the murder. Mike Ryan showed up at the house.

My dad’s at work in Hollywood. Mike Ryan shows up at the house and asked for work he can do for money at the house. And my mom didn’t have any and she had some place to go. So she was like, no, I don’t have any money. I don’t have anything. Sent him on his way the day before the murder. He’s looking for money at our house. And then the day of the crime, $150 is apparently missing from my mom’s purse and she’s murdered. And so things started falling into place. So I wrote a letter to the detective begging him to come see me.

He came out on April 1st, April Fool’s Day and interviewed me and took down all of my information and then went and found that Mike Ryan had gone back to Gulf Fort Mississippi. He was already in custody for another attempted burglary of a woman’s home. And despite all this stuff by now, the detective had authored a 13 page police report in which he lied time and time again making it seem like I was the only viable suspect. And then he signed his name to it under penalty of perjury, right? And he’d already submitted that so he could either go and interview Ryan and go, fuck, this is obviously the guy. I completely screwed this one of my first homicide cases up. I’m not a good detective at all. Or I lied. And he wasn’t going to see either of those because he’s an arrogant bastard and he to this day is just arrogant, horrible.

When he found him in custody and actually went out and interviewed him, what Mike Ryan did before being told that the murder happened anywhere near 11 o’clock in the morning. I arrived there probably 10 or 15 after 11, and I made my first call for help at like 1126. So it was right around there because her injuries were so severe, it couldn’t have been a whole lot earlier, but it was in the 11 o’clock hour or 10 something. Mike Ryan volunteers that 11:00 AM he was checking into a Hollywood motel without being told at the time and then volunteering that after he checked in, he went out and bounced around in the streets of Hollywood and he got into a knife fight with some black guy, and he stabbed this black guy in the shoulder with a little knife that he was carrying. And so thus establishing a blood alibi for anybody who saw blood on him, the detective, as shitty as the detective was, he actually did do one thing.

He went down to the motel, he found out what motel he checked into, and he got the motel registration slip. By that point in time, 3:00 PM he checked in. And so four hours is plenty of time to commit a murder, managed to find yourself 12 miles down the road in Hollywood and then establish a blood alibi and all this other stuff. And his money didn’t stretch with all the expenses that he noted making, which was not even enough really to survive on. So his story is not believable for a number of reasons. So the detective went out to go fort Mississippi, came back, told the prosecutor I convincingly cleared Mike Ryan words, the actual words he used convincingly cleared him through further investigation, total bullshit.

So I’m sitting in Somar Juvenile Hall, I’m in boys’ ICU because they didn’t have the compound there. That’s a high security place. So they kept 180 sevens in boys’ ICU and then shipped them to East Lake. The following day I was taken up front to talk to a psych and he said, so tell me how you feel about being here at Sylmar. And I was like, show me an open gate and I’ll show you how I feel about being here at somewhere. Are you kidding me? He’s like, okay. And he writes something in my file and they start putting me on mere. They start giving me medication every night at med call. They’d mix this stuff. It’s like Thorazine. And pretty soon I was like mumbling at visits. My dad’s like, what are they giving you something? What’s going? What are you? So I was unable to really work on my case other than writing that letter with my dad’s help to monsu and then telling Monsu everything that I knew.

So I was in juvenile hall until my juvenile detention and fitness hearing monsu showed up and lied and said that there was blood spatter pattern on a yellow T-shirt that I was wearing that indicated that to him with his training and expertise that I was standing over my mother at the moment, she received one or more of her fatal blows, which is total bullshit. In fact, the state’s bloodstain expert that later looked at the things found that there was no blood at all on the yellow t-shirt, just lied about everything. So got me held over, got me bound over in juvenile court, and then the juvenile court found me fit on all counts except for the seriousness of the commitment offense. It was a horrible murder. It was a bludgeoning and a stabbing, and there was a piece of yellow cord around her throat when I found her.

So it was three different modes of attack protracted throughout the house. It was a horrible, horrible crime. She must have been an incredible terror. But the court said, I order that you remain here in juvenile hall and given a haircut. So before I was given a haircut and a day or two later in the dark of night, I was taken over a superior court order out of juvenile hall and placed in the snitch tank at the adult LA County jail. 17 years old. I wasn’t an adult yet. I was placed in an adult section with four canine that’s informant classified adults, two on either side of me.

I still get kind of protective of the 17-year-old that I was. It’s like he’s a different kid, he’s a different guy, and I am really protective of that kid and those fuckers, the police, that tip what they want because that transfer order didn’t come out of. That wasn’t just a mistake. The LA County grand jury convened in 1989 on the issue of jailhouse informant testimony and they issued a report 150 pages that so clearly described what happened to me. And it details that cops on cases, detectives like Monso, not sure he did it, but it would fit if somebody called and said we’d prefer if he was placed in that snitch tank over there. Because almost invariably when somebody who’s not an informant got placed in that section of the jail, it was a signal to the informants in there that they were to try to book him, try to work on him, try to get information out of him that they could then later raise their hand and say, he confessed to me.

Oh really? Mr. Informant, what did he tell you? And they could pass muster as being truthful by having facts that so-called only the killer would know. And I fell into that one because there were three jailhouse informants that attempted to claim that I confessed to. The first two were so patently, obviously liars and just really unsophisticated, just scumbags. The police were like, nah, get out of here. And then the third one, Robert Hughes was a cunning liar who in the span of 18 months had come forward. I was his fourth homicide case that he came forward claiming that somebody confessed him. He really conned me. He was like, did this whole Jesus Bible bullshit wrap with me? We’ll Bible study together. The Lord gives me a strong feeling you’ll be going home soon. These are letters that he wrote to me that were read into evidence in my case.

He also said, I’ll help you with your case because I’ve been in and out before. I turned my life around and became an upstanding Christian. I’ve been in and out a number of times so I could probably help you with your case if you wanted. And I was like, okay. Ruled up my police reports and sent ’em through the hole in the wall. He wrote down every salient facts he wrote down. What was funny too is he wrote them down in order and the order that weapons were described to being observed in the house and the order of all these things observed in the house, which he then later claimed was the order of attack was just the order that the police encountered them when they walked through and was actually physically impossible when you looked at various, like she had defensive slash wounds to her left hand only and she had a right fractured humerus. Well logically one can infer that that happened first, otherwise why wouldn’t you have defense on both hands? And so I fell right into what was going on. I was not a savvy criminal. I was not a criminal at all, and I fell right into the traps that corrupt police and corrupt jailhouse informants sat.

So there was also a point at which I attempted a guilty plea because prior to Robert Hughes’s coming forward, I was charged with first degree murder. The penalty for that is you’re going to do 17 and two thirds years of your base, 25 before you even see the board with Robert Hughes. And all of the lies that Detective Mon were telling, I was looking at first degree murder as a pretty likely possibility. A friend of my father’s who was also an attorney came down to the juvenile hall and because it was being suggested that I entertain a guilty plea and go to youth authority, which is what the judge said that he would do for a couple of years and then go home, and I was completely resistant to that. I’m not going to plead guilty of something I’m going to do. So this attorney comes down, Bob Johnson comes down, and I remember the day it was yesterday.

It was a sunny day. There was a breeze blowing across the yard. He got permission to talk to me privately. We just sat on a bench that used to be outside under a tree underneath one of the units. My unit was having recreation over there. And we sat off to the side and he said, and I remember the words exactly, I can almost smell his breath on me. He got so close when I was saying, no, I’m not going to do it. He said, look, they’re going to convict you of first fucking degree murder unless you plead guilty to this.

And I still get chills here was my dad loved me and stood by me a hundred percent always, and so did Bob. And here he was telling me that I had to go in and say that I killed my mom to save myself. So I just went, okay, look, I have to default to trust. I have to trust my dad. I have to trust Bob. And my dad had been to war, Bob had been to war. This is my war. The normal rules aren’t implying here at all. And so I agreed to and I went and we attempted to do that. Pled guilty got sent for an observation in ya, and the psychiatric staff there just eviscerated me. First of all, if you didn’t do something and I asked, how’d you do it? You’re kind of at a loss. So I’m trying to invent a story that’s consistent with the evidence that I’m aware of exists in the police report, but I’m 18 years old.

And the elements of if you’d done something having remorse or at least looking like you had done it or whatever, something wasn’t ringing true for them. And they wrote that I showed no remorse and they wrote this terrible report. So I wasn’t amenable to treatment of the youth authority. They knew it’d be a few years and then they would’ve to release me before my 25th birthday. So they wrote a dispositive report and the judge said, well, I have no idea. I’ll allow you to take back your plea and you can go ahead the trial. I can’t sentence you to ya. I’ll sentence you to state prison or let you take your plea. So I was like, okay. So took it back, went ahead a trial, and the lying detective got on stand and the lying jail has informed me, got on the stand and they were just, my attorney was like, I’m not putting you on the stand.

And so the jury didn’t get to hear from me. I don’t know if that would’ve done any good, but I mean I could only think that it would’ve, but who knows. And then flashing forward like years later, like the footwear impressions, the detective got up on the stand and said that bloody shoe prints seen in the house and shoe prints in the mud outside quite closely resembled the soles A my sneakers. That’s not a mat. And so he skirted this and my attorney was so substandard, he had a signed order of the court authorizing funds for our own footwear impression expert never sent the evidence to them had he done so the same result would’ve come that came just before 2005. Mine were where I said they would be. And the prosecutor in closing argument said, Bruce Lisker says he didn’t do it, that it was another intruder. Where’s evidence of the intruder where there’s none. It’s only Bruce Lisker shoe prints in the mud. It’s only his shoeprints in the house. Here they are. It’s crazy.

Michael Semanchik:

Tragically that evidence would stay hidden for decades. Bruce’s case would go to trial and he would be convicted of second degree murder and carry a life sentence.

Bruce Lisker:

So what my dad did and what I did, what worked to my detriment in keeping the police reports with me when I was in juvenile hall and then going to adult, the snitch tank and having them there in the long term worked out for me because retention of everything is very important. My dad kept everything and I started having things sent into me and I started pouring over absolutely everything. So if a detective made a note, handwritten note and then wrote that into a typed up report and then went and testified to that at the Dennis H hearing and then went testified to that at the prelim and then at the trial and then at trial number two, then there’s six different places where they’re referencing the same event or observation piece of evidence. And if they’re telling the truth, there’s going to be some consistency and if they’re lying their asses off, there’s going to be some inconsistency.

And what I was able to do, it took a decade or more, was to create about a 60 page document with 700 plus footnotes called the Lisker case analysis creatively enough where I documented every discrepancy that I was able to find in my case, and it’s important not just to go, they lied. It’s important to say on or about this date. They said this in a footnote because nobody’s going to believe you sitting in a jail cell. You got to document everything. And I did. And so I had this enormous document with all these footnotes, which I was then able to authoritatively discuss my case and demonstrate what my case was about to anybody that I might be able to get some interest with and to bring onto the case. The first attorney that I hired, he since surrendered his bar credentials. It was a guy named Gary Diamond and Mr.

Diamond took $7,500 from me and said that he was writing a petition for writ of Habe Corpus on my behalf. I sent it to him Lisker case analysis, and I found that he was just wasting my time. He wasted two years of my life, and then the next attorney that I hired, I sent I think $94,000 too. So the initial amount I was going to pay him, and then the amount went up and it went up again. And then he asked for a personal loan from me and I gave him a personal loan, and then he died and he wasted another two years of my life and I was out of money by that point. But he introduced me to a private investigator who had worked on the Pomona Police Department for 10 years and then was retired and became a PI named Paul Engles.

And Paul Engles was one of the first heaven sent angels in my case. He took this case on and wouldn’t give up even after I ran out of money. But one of the things he noted was it was taking Fred a long time to file. The California State Bar, as you know, maintains something called the client security fund. It’s out of dues of attorneys that are paying the dues. They keep this fund in case clients are treated poorly by California bar certified attorneys. They could be reimbursed. So he calls Fred and he says, what’s going on? Yeah, I misused some of the funds. I used them to buy diapers and other stuff, and I’m going to get on and I’m on this thing. But he admitted some misappropriation of client funds, and so the bar’s client security fund found that he had misappropriated state funds.

They appointed the largest amount that they can, $50,000 and gave me a check back for $50,000. My third set of attorneys, another guy who with questionable morals. As it turns out, this particular attorney had somebody working for him named David Bernstein who wrote Exceptional paper, and he wrote a petition for rid of habeas corpus that got me an evidentiary hearing in 2005 and 2005 was also about the time that the LA Times were publishing their first of ultimately 50 or 60 some articles. When I ran out of money, this attorney was finally reminded that he said he was going to take me all the way and I scraped together like $9,000 and that was the last that I could afford. And I sent it to him and he said, okay, I’ll take you all the way. Well, he kept sending me these bills and he said, don’t worry, it’s just a means of me keeping track so I could be later reimbursed from the court won’t come from you.

Then he made a lien and they wouldn’t settle with me until I settled my thing with him. And so while I owed him absolutely nothing, according to our agreement, he had sent me bills in the amount of $150,000 or something and it was ridiculous. It was exorbitant. Every time I wrote to David, the boss would bill as if he read the thing and he billed. So I was paying double billable hours and he said, oh, no, no, you never have to. And then he made a claim and ultimately settled with him for a lot of money as a life prisoner. Every time you go to a board hearing, you have a right to what’s called an Olson review, which is a review of your central file for all information that they’re going to be considering during the hearing, which in effect in practical purposes is your entire file.

So you get to sit there and read everything except for the confidential entries and when you’re life prisoner. The arresting agency and the prosecuting agency are both solicited as to their opinion as to whether or not you would be a good risk of parole if paroled, and every time, invariably, no, there’s terrible risk. And mony would be solicited every time I’d go to board and he’d be like his first letters back to the board of prison terms were, because he’s a functional illiterate, he’s a malaprop. Every fifth word is misspelled. It’s like, I should never be released to prey, PRAY on society. So he’s writing these letters and one of these letters that I didn’t see until the next time I went to board said years after this crime had been committed because remember, I didn’t commit the crime, so I didn’t have any money on me when the police arrived, Mike Ryan apparently had taken it and used it for various whatever.

So this is a loose end and that doesn’t really sit well with somebody like Monsu, I don’t think. And so he lied in this letter to the parole board saying, years after the crime was committed, the new owners of the house had contacted me and said that they found $150, which was the amount believed, stolen in the attack, hidden in the attic space above Bruce b lister’s old bedroom. Thus confirming our theory of the crime and removing all doubt as to his guilt, and I’m looking at this and going, this is bullshit. Mike Ryan did not stop. We didn’t even have one of those pull down, climb up the ladder kind of attic accesses. We had a square thing. They had to go out to the garage, get a ladder, bring it in, set it up, take the square thing out, climb up in this thing, go over 20 feet to where my bedroom is and hide it over my, he didn’t do that.

This is no way somebody who just murdered my mom and is covered with blood or whatever he was and wanting to get the hell out of Dodge is going to do that. So I contacted Paul, I said, this is bs. It has to be. This is bull. He goes, I’m on it. He contacted it through a deed search all the subsequent orders of the house and interviewed them one by one, one by one. They’re like, we never found anything. Never told police that we did. Never, never, never, never, never. So he writes this letter to the parole board and I find it in my file and I get a copy of it and I send it to Paul and he does all the investigation. He gets declarations. We file a complaint of employee misconduct with the LAPD. Paul tells me to, and I’m like, they’re not going to, it’s scary to take on.

You are going to give the giant a fricking bloody nose. What’s he going to do to you? But what do I have to lose? What choice do I have? And so Paul’s like, look, you got to do it. You filed this thing and we filed it and it got assigned to an honest cop named Jim Gavin, who did almost a year’s worth of investigation. An officer with a claim against them has a statutory right to have it wrapped up within a ear. Unless he waives it, he or she waives it. He didn’t waive it. So it was a year. So approaching a year, this Gavin did really amazing work. He came up to the prison and interviewed me for hours twice with a partner. I said, I’m an open book. Anything you want, you got. And we handed everything over that we had. He had a bunch because he’s in LAPD, he’s the one who noted the thing in the photographs of the autopsy photographs and had it sent to the footwear impression expert who looked at not only the bloody shoe print in the house and the muddy shoe prints on the side of the house, but also a newly found, newly discovered in print that nobody had seen on the back of my mom’s scalp.

I was excluded from the ones that didn’t match my shoe prints in the mud, and I was excluded from the bloody ones and I was excluded from the shoe print on the back of my mom’s scalp, all of which were made by the same shoe. Nevertheless, LAPD got wind of the direction that he was going with it and yanked it from Gavin within weeks of that year and sent me a letter saying it was unfounded. My complaints were unfounded. And despite their not having been able to asai at all, the declarations of the subsequent homeowners, despite regular procedure for locating $150 from a murder case is to book it into evidence, haven’t been booked into evidence. This is a fucking lie. So Paul Ingles, the former Pomona cop, is offended by corruption, as is Gavin personally takes it real personal. He was an honest cop.

And so he went, fuck this and went to the LA Times and said, I’ve got a case that’s going to blow your doors off or are you interested? And they were like, yeah. So then they came on and started investigating things. Initially they were thinking, man, a few weeks we’ll probably have an article one way or the other. We don’t know, but it’s not going to take that long. Eight months plus later, a massive investigation, eight months interviewing virtually everybody going over thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of transcript trying to poke holes in what I was saying, in what Paul was saying. They bring me into their classes. The reporters now, they teach a journalism class at UAC and they bring me in periodically. And these guys, they tell the class, look the number one thing, we’re trying to poke a hole, find a place where he lied to us because game over, right? He’s a liar. We can’t trust anything now, never once lied to them, never would never had to open book, just like with Gavin. And they came to an amazing article A won that award. The first article just blew the doors off of this fake case that LAPD just manufactured against me.

The overturning comes in two stages, two broad stages. One is a report and recommendation that your conviction be overturned by a magistrate, and then you wait while the district judge themselves reviews the r and r and determines whether or not they’re going to sign it into the order of the district court. And so that period was mercifully short. It could have gone on. There was, I don’t know if there’s even a hard limit, but it didn’t go on a long ways, but it went on obviously too long for me. But the RR was amazing, and we were like, it’s definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely. And it’s just inconceivable that the district judge would go, no, that’s all wrong. He was sealed, all of the evidence magistrate at the point that that was done, we found out that the district attorney was going to proceed on the original information and take me back to trial.

And so I had to post federal Bond to get out. And so that was done. And then the orders to release me were going to come from, they had to go from the court to Sacramento and Sacramento had to transmit them to the prison itself. And that was like a blurry day or two or three. But I knew the night before that I was definitely going home. I knew the night of August 12th, 2009 that I was definitely leaving this place that I had lived in for 19 years. I had spent, I think I figured it out, a sum total of 53 nights for the evidentiary hearing in 2005 away from Mule Creek State Prison where I’d lived for 19 years. So it was like this 19 years minus 53 nights I’d gone to sleep in that place, that six and a half acres of sea facility and to go to sleep going tomorrow, I’m going to be walking that orange laundry cart with all my stuff in it, everything I own, walking out that gate. So I’m going to be going through that, checked out and walking out the front. I didn’t even know how to relate to that. I had started thinking of things like life prisoners who’ve been in a long time due. There’s this drift. You don’t have an active functional memory of what it feels like to be free. You have an image that drifts over time. But it was a trip.

I had a, I mean, don’t want to say easy adjustment, but I had, oh my God, I had my dad who had passed, but I had his legacy of like, Hey, Bruce is a wonderful human being and joy, her heart connection with me. I had a community of people that were their friends, chosen family that close. And I had this huge community of people who were incredibly supportive to welcome me home and to assure that I wouldn’t fall through the cracks when I had to post Federal Bond. I had my sister, my stepsister Joy’s daughter and my cousin putting up their houses in an instant. So I had it a lot easier, if that’s the right word, than a lot of people do. I had a lot of benefits that a lot of people don’t. And yet still, when I was looking for a job, I turned in 55 0 job applicant forms and I answered truthfully, have you ever been arrested for a crime?

Yes, because I had been arrested. If so, what? California PC 180 7 murder, exonerated 2009. I would write in right next to it. I didn’t get a single callback. I got a job through a relative of mine, like the son of my godparents, both of who had passed, but he was still in the film industry doing film restoration and stuff in Hollywood. And I got a job through him. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have had that job. So it’s hard. It’s hard for people who have had everything. I mean, because look what happens when you get arrested in such a situation. You are literally stripped naked and passed into this new world that you have never been less adept at dealing with everything out here goes away, including your reputation, including your good name. You exist for decades usually in there before things get made right. People have died. Everything is different. There’s that drift. It’s no wonder a lot of people don’t do as well as I did. The hardest thing is having lost people, just people are irreplaceable. Having lost my mom, having lost my dad, having lost my stepmom.

When the first LA Times article dropped on May 22nd, 2005, detective Monsu was in charge of 63 other detectives in the Wilshire Division, I believe. And he read the article and he was already on the, I think it’s called the Drop Program where you retire and start collecting it, and then you come back to work another year or two or three or whatever. And then so you get this compounding effect and you get this extra retirement. He forfeited that. He walked out and he said, I don’t need this shit. And he grabbed a uniform shirt or something and threw it in the trash can and walked out the door. And he didn’t work another day, thank God. But unfortunately, he still got his full pension, never saw the inside of a jail cell because what he did in effect, I don’t consider him an officer. I consider him a criminal who stole a badge under false pretenses saying that he was going to abide by the law and uphold the Constitution and all the things that whatever you swear in, it’s a liar.

So you didn’t deserve a dime. But that’s my opinion, and that’s not just my opinion. A lot of people feel that way, but the automatic fashion with which he just kicked into acting this way tells me it didn’t happen in a vacuum. This is his first rodeo. He’s done this before, and the league into which he fell with the informants. I mean, there are handwritten notes about what the informant likes. He likes camel, SIGs and candy bars. And the way that he was befriended by this detective, it was apparent in court, in their demeanor, in the way that they interacted. And they’re of the same ilk in my opinion. And the informant is an absolute scumbag who victimized a 17-year-old child. He’s a child abuser, and so is the detective. After I came home, I began volunteering with an outfit called Inside Out Writers that would do volunteer creative writing classes inside LA County juvenile halls. And I had a class at Los Padrinos in Downey, and my students, not surprisingly, were the same age that I was. They were like 14, 15, 16, 17. And I would look at these kids and I’d go, my God, I couldn’t. For the life of me imagine treating a 17-year-old child in one of the dozens of ways that detective and that informant treated me. It’s just inco. It’s just, I don’t know how you do that.

And then as far as Mike Ryan years later, both his mom and his dad who were estranged and not sort of on even speaking terms at that point, both signed sworn declarations saying they thought their son committed a murder that I was sitting in prison for. And you just don’t get that. Mike Ryan committed suicide in 1996, and he was living in somebody’s garage and he left a note saying Thanks to the guy who was letting him stay in his garage and sorry to his mom and fuck everyone else. And I have to think that not being mentioned in his note, I am included in that group of everyone else. So he did. He lived selfish and he went out selfish.

So when we dream, our dreams are like a nighttime churn of daily events. And my metaphor for adversity is always in the dreamscape prison. And so if I have this thing that I come up against or whatever, and it’s a challenge, I’m finding it challenging. Invariably, I don’t have a prison dream that night. They’re absurd. There’s absurd as dreams or absurd. His dreams are served and kind of with a nightmare spin on him where you kind of like, I’ve arrived at prison again and I have all my property, and I set it down for a second and I turn to talk to an officer and I turn back and it’s gone. And I’m like, and where’s my cell? And I can’t find my cell, and I got to get to my cell before count time and otherwise I’m in big trouble. And it’s weird. It’s really weird.

And then there’s this other kind of prison dream that I have, and it’s weird. It’s just a theme that kind of comes through. Yeah, I’m doing all that. Where’s my cell? Where’s my stuff? But I’ll go, why am I still in prison for this crime that I’ve been exonerated of? It’s like it never leaves. It’s like there’s an echo and an impression of being called something that you’re not, of being placed somewhere you know don’t belong. That I don’t know if I’ll ever get over that ghost of that thing that happened is probably a permanent part for better and for worse, because I never knew how strong I was until I had to be. And now I know

Michael Semanchik:

Bruce Lisker story is one of tragedy, perseverance, and ultimately redemption. Wrongly convicted as a teenager and forced to spend more than two decades behind bars. His case stands as a stark reminder of how fragile justice can be and how critical it is that we keep fighting to uncover the truth. His resilience and the work of those who helped bring his innocence to light, inspire us to continue advocating for the wrongfully convicted every day. If you like what you heard, share with your friends and tune in next time as we are joined by the LA Times reporters who broke the case. And detective Jim Gavin, who bravely exposed the flaws in the investigation. I’m Michael Semanchik, executive director of the Innocence Center. Thank you for listening to Bruce Lisker. On For the Innocent. For the Innocent is produced by myself and Adam Lockwood. Our assistant producer is Ally Kvidt Music in this episode provided by Sounds Stripe. Our theme song is by exoneree William Michael Dillon For the Innocent is a proud part of the Legal Talk Network, an InfoTrack company.