False Witness - Retha Welch and William Virgil
Episode Ep 960 31 min 49s

False Witness - Retha Welch and William Virgil

On April 13, 1987, 54-year-old psychiatric nurse and prison minister Retha Welch was found brutally murdered in her Newport, Kentucky home. Police quickly set their sights on William Virgil, a recently released inmate who admitted to a prior relationship with her. A jury convicted him in 1988, but decades later, the conviction unravelled amidst recanted snitch testimonies, missing rape kits, and DNA from three unknown men on preserved slides. Was William Virgil the victim of systemic police misconduct, or did legal technicalities and degraded decades-old evidence allow a killer to walk free?

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