Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Winona, Mississippi, was tried six times for the same crime. Season 2 of In the Dark examines the case against Flowers, who spent more than twenty years fighting for his life, as a white prosecutor tried just as hard to execute him. Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts.
Trailer
Curtis Flowers has been tried six times for the same crime. For twenty-one years, Flowers has maintained his innocence. He has won appeal after appeal, but, every time, the prosecutor just tries the case again. What does the evidence reveal? And how can the justice system ignore the prosecutor’s record and keep Flowers on death row?
Episode 1: July 16, 1996
On the morning of July 16, 1996, someone walked into a furniture store in downtown Winona, Mississippi, and murdered four employees. Each was shot in the head. It was perhaps the most shocking crime ever carried out in the small town. Investigators charged a man named Curtis Flowers. What followed was a two-decade legal odyssey in which Flowers was tried six times for the same crime. He remains on death row, though some people believe he’s innocent. For the second season of In the Dark, we spent a year digging into the Flowers case. We found a town divided by race and a murder conviction supported by questionable evidence. It all began that summer morning in 1996, with a horrifying crime scene that left investigators puzzled.
Episode 2: The Route
The case against Curtis Flowers relies heavily on three threads of evidence: the route he allegedly walked on the morning of the murders, the gun that investigators believe he used, and the people he supposedly confessed to in jail. In this episode, we meet the witnesses who said they saw Flowers walking through downtown Winona, Mississippi, on the morning of the murders. Some of their stories now waver on key details.
Episode 3: The Gun
Investigators never found the gun used to kill four people at Tardy Furniture. Yet the gun, and the bullets matched to it, became a key piece of evidence against Curtis Flowers. In this episode, we examine the strange history of the gun and the man who owned it.
Episode 4: The Confessions
Over the years, three inmates have claimed that Curtis Flowers confessed to them that he killed four people at the Tardy Furniture store. But they’ve all changed their stories at one time or another. In this episode, we investigate who’s really telling the truth.
Episode 5: Privilege
No witness has been more important to the prosecution’s case against Curtis Flowers than Odell Hallmon. He testified in four trials that Flowers had confessed to him while the two men were in prison together. Hallmon has an astonishingly long criminal history that includes repeated charges for drug dealing, assault, and robbery. So how reliable is his testimony and did he receive anything in exchange for it? In this episode, we investigate the veracity of the prosecution’s star witness.
Episode 6: Punishment
Odell Hallmon, the state’s key witness in the Curtis Flowers case, is serving three consecutive life sentences. We wondered what he might say now that there are no deals to cut, and he will spend the rest of his life in prison. Would he stick to his story that Flowers had confessed to the Tardy Furniture murders? We wrote him letters and sent him a friend request on Facebook. Weeks went by and we heard nothing. And then, one day, he wrote back.
Episode 7: The Trials of Curtis Flowers
There’s one critical aspect of the Curtis Flowers case that we haven’t looked at yet—the makeup of the juries. Each of the four times Flowers was convicted, the jury was all white or nearly all white. So we decided to look more closely at why so few Black jurors had been selected. And it wasn’t always happenstance.
Episode 8: The D.A.
After investigating every aspect of the Curtis Flowers case, we were nearly ready to present what we’d found to District Attorney Doug Evans. But first, we tried to learn all we could about him: his childhood, his years as a police officer, and his record as District Attorney. Then, finally, we met the man who’s spent more than two decades trying to have Flowers executed.
Episode 9: Why Curtis?
After reëxamining the case, we found no direct evidence linking Curtis Flowers to the murders at Tardy Furniture. But we had one lingering question: How did Flowers become the main suspect? Why would investigators focus so much on Flowers, based on so little evidence? In short, why Curtis? We decided to find out.
Episode 10: Discovery
Prosecutors have always said that Curtis Flowers was the only serious suspect in the Tardy Furniture investigation. But we found a document showing that another man, Willie James Hemphill, had also been questioned just days after the murders. Who was he? Why was he questioned? When we finally found Hemphill, living in Indianapolis, he had some very surprising things to say about the case.
Episode 11: The End
For the last episode of the season, we went to meet Jeffery Armstrong, who, a few years after Curtis Flowers first went to prison, found what might have been a key piece of evidence. What he found—and where he found it—offers hints that someone else may have committed the Tardy Furniture murders. Armstrong turned the evidence over to the cops. And then, he says, it disappeared.
Update: Back to Winona
Two months after the season ended, we return to Winona to see what has changed. Curtis Flowers’s mother has died. The whole town is talking about the case. Flowers’s defense lawyers are including our findings in their legal filings to the Supreme Court. Citizens are trying to file bar complaints against the District Attorney, Doug Evans. One man has gone into hiding after his personal safety was threatened because he spoke to us. In this update episode, we look at what’s happened in Winona since our last episode, and what happens next in the Curtis Flowers case.
Update: SCOTUS Takes the Case
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Curtis Flowers’s appeal. Now the Justices will examine whether District Attorney Doug Evans had a history of racial discrimination in jury selection.
Update: Q. & A., and A Fire in Winona
We answer your questions and report on a fire in Winona.
Episode 12: Before the Court
We resume Season 2 with the U.S. Supreme Court weighing Curtis Flowers’s case. We preview oral arguments and delve into the allegations at the heart of the appeal: that Doug Evans tried to keep African Americans off the jury in Flowers’s sixth trial.
Episode 13: Oral Arguments
After nearly nine years of appeals of his sixth trial, Curtis Flowers finally had his case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. At issue was whether District Attorney Doug Evans tried to keep African Americans off the jury in the 2010 trial. Flowers wasn’t at the Supreme Court—he remains on death row in Mississippi—but the In the Dark team was. This is what we saw.
Episode 14: The Decision
On Friday, June 21st, after months of deliberation, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its opinion in the Curtis Flowers case. In a 7–2 ruling, the Justices threw out the conviction from his sixth trial, in 2010. The decision about what happens next—whether to release Flowers or begin a seventh trial—now lies with the same prosecutor who has pursued him from the beginning: Doug Evans.
Episode 15: Revelations
It’s been eleven days since the U.S. Supreme Court threw out Curtis Flowers’s conviction. But the story didn’t end there. In recent days, there have been three other significant developments, including new details from a key witness, that may determine Flowers’s fate.
Episode 16: A Hearing
After nearly twenty-three years locked up, Curtis Flowers has a chance to get out on bail—if his lawyers can convince the judge to rule in his favor.
Episode 17: Home
After almost twenty-three years, Curtis Flowers is no longer behind bars. For his family, it’s a long-awaited reunion. But not everyone in Winona is happy.
Episode 18: The Recusal
District Attorney Doug Evans has prosecuted Curtis Flowers across twenty-three years and six trials. Now he says he’s done.
Episode 19: Freedom
After twenty-four years, the case against Curtis Flowers is finally over. Mississippi attorney general Lynn Fitch asks the judge to dismiss the charges against Flowers for lack of evidence. Flowers is released from house arrest and free—truly free—at last.
Episode 20: Curtis Flowers
During three years investigating the Curtis Flowers case, we’d talked to nearly everyone involved: lawyers, witnesses, jurors, family members, investigators, politicians, and many, many people around town. But there was one person we hadn’t yet interviewed—Curtis Flowers. That is, until one day in early October, a few weeks after he’d been cleared of all charges. For the final episode of Season 2, we talk at long last to the man at the center of it all.
Update: Five Years Later
After nearly twenty-three years behind bars, Curtis Flowers was freed, in part due to In the Dark’s reporting. Now he’s back in Winona, Mississippi, where his saga began. What brought him home, and how is he doing? We visited him to find out.
About In the Dark
In the Dark is among the most respected programs in long-form audio journalism. The show is a two-time Peabody Award winner and, in 2019, became the first podcast to win a George Polk Award, one of the top honors in investigative journalism. The show’s first season, launched in 2016, asked why the murder of eleven-year-old Jacob Wetterling went unsolved for nearly twenty-seven years. Season 2 examined the case of Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Mississippi who faced execution after being tried six times for the same crime. In 2019, after In the Dark revealed prosecutorial misconduct at the heart of the case, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Flowers’s conviction, and he was freed. Season 3, about a crime committed by a group of U.S. Marines, is available now.
