lise olsen s reporting about texas possibly executing an innocent man in ruben cantu sent shock waves through the state and district attorney, susan reed, responded by going on the offensive. susan reed, she went after lise first. they wanted to know her sources, and lise called me and said, they are going to take me before the grand jury. if i don t disclose my information, i think they are going to jail me. so i said, lise, just feel free to give them my name. that s okay. we have nothing to hide. richard agreed to meet with reed s investigators and shared his materials from the case. what we discovered was that juan moreno was literally manipulated by the investigator, the investigator worked on his wife and he would send her flowers and he would phone call. he was taking them out to dinner. he was making payments to the family. it was an extremely manipulative investigation.
and understand today that i didn t understand at that point. ruben came from south san antonio in what was a very tough neighborhood. his parents split when he was a young kid and his mother left and he stayed with his father. he was a pretty good older brother to me. he would look after me and everything was fine up until this happened. a cousin of mine called and said he had been on the news, that he had been arrested for murder. i was just, like, devastated, in disbelief. on death row ruben wrote a letter claiming he had been framed by police. that got the attention of the naacp, who hired richard reyna to investigate. as a former cop, reyna had heard claims of innocence before. naturally, not all the time are you going to run into people that are innocent. but what got my curiosity on this case is that they didn t really have any evidence connecting ruben to that house, no fingerprints, no physical
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it it is all [ bleep ]. i was ready for just about anything. when i was contacted by lise olsen, whom i did not know, i had no idea that there had ever been a question about the result in the cantu case or that anybody was looking at it for that matter. i met with him in his office in a quiet room. we spent an hour. i took him through it step by step slowly. i showed him the fact that juan moreno had said that he had never believed that ruben cantu was the shooter. that he felt that he had to identify cantu because that s who police wanted him to identify. lise had also uncovered information about officers bill ewell and joe de la luz, who both had a vested interest in fingering ruben cantu as the killer. both bill ewell and joe de la luz had a history of disciplinary problems.
they said, yes, he was. they kept telling me they knew that it was him. i knew in my heart it wasn t him. but i was pressured and pressured all the time. so i used the name ruben cantu. in addition to not speaking english, juan moreno was an illegal immigrant. the fact is that he was in the country illegally. he was apparently concerned as anyone would be about deportation. so to claim that he felt pressure is entirely credible. richard now felt certain that san antonio police had pressured juan moreno into fingering the wrong man. but after seeing how the texas courts had handled ruben s case, richard turned to investigative reporter lise olsen for help. lise reported on crime and corruption at the houston chronicle. i got a tip that a private detective, who i later learned