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In 1995, twenty-year-old Navy SEAL Dusty Turner watched the man he trusted most — his SEAL Team “swim buddy” — murder a young woman in the back seat of his car. What followed was 31 years in a Virginia prison for a crime Turner didn’t commit: two trials, an 82-year sentence, a 2008 ruling that called him “actually innocent” (the first of its kind in Virginia history), and a Virginia Supreme Court reversal that sent him back to prison for 18 more years on what he calls a legal technicality.
Paroled in March 2026, Turner sits down with Rachel Uchitel for his first extended interview since walking free — the SEAL “code” that kept him silent for a week, the polygraph strategy he used so the truth could surface without him breaking that code, what three decades inside 13 different facilities does to a person, and why he’s still fighting for full exoneration while living under sex-offender-registry restrictions for a crime he was never charged with.
In this episode:
• The night of June 18, 1995, and how it unraveled in under two minutes
• Why Turner didn’t go to police — and the polygraph gambit he used instead
• Learning years later that Billy Brown had confessed to the murder
• Being ruled “actually innocent” in 2008 — and losing it again in 2011
• Training rescue dogs and growing an apple tree from a windowsill in solitary
• Walking out of prison after 31 years, and what “paroled, not pardoned” really means
• His new work with Veterans Healing Veterans, helping other wrongfully convicted vets
Learn more and support Dusty’s fight for exoneration: https://www.freedusty.com/
Veterans Healing Veterans from the Inside Out: https://veteranshealingveterans.com/index.html
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