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Still, prosecutors insisted these people were guilty. and all the while two things remained unchanged. the d.a. who oversaw the prosecutions was still in office and john stoll was still in prison. jeff modahl, after his release in 1999, tried to throw a lifeline to his old friend. >> it's important to realize that john stoll had no record before this started. >> modahl's attorneys contacted this group of lawyers with the california and northern california innocence project. >> we began looking through the trial transcripts. >> each of the children were inconsistent with their own testimony. ma...

48-year sentence. and when carla at age 10 took her letter to court and begged to have her dad released, it didn't work. >> they didn't believe me. >> they only believed that story. >> what i said the first time. >> 14 years later in 1999, there was another strange twist in the modahl case. exonerating evidence surfaced. a medical examination given to carla shortly after her dad jeff was arrested said there is no evidence at the present time of sexual molestation. that information was never shared with the jury. modahl's conviction was overturned and he was released from prison. by the time he...

Years in which he's wandered the country, looking for something that felt like home. he went to nebraska, spent some time with his old cellmate, jeff modahl. >> i made some pretty nice friends that i don't mind their company at all. and john stoll is very much one of them. >> jeff modahl sued and received a small settlement after his release. he bought a farm in eastern nebraska, nearest neighbor a good mile or two away. daughter carla lives just down the road. modahl invited john to come and stay with him. >> the guy i spent a lot of years with. >> we sure did. whether we liked it or not. >> ...

Modahl's daughter, carla, had actually admitted that she had lied. here's the letter she wrote to her dad in 1985. dear dad, it says, i lied in court. i'm sorry for lying about this, dad. i'm so sorry. when we found carla modahl years later, she told us the same story. she had been fooled by a social worker and a prosecutor into testifying against her dad. at the time of the trial, she was living in a foster home she said, and wanted desperately to be reunited with him. what did you think would happen if you didn't tell them what they wanted to hear? >> i thought i would never go home or see m...

I missed their childhood. i didn't get to watch them grow up. i didn't get to watch them lose their teeth or do the little plays in school or anything like that. >> but for stoll, there was no such exonerating evidence. and normal for him, remained his 6 x 9' prison cell. in 1995, stoll was transferred to a new prison, a dangerous time in an inmate's life as he fights for position in the cell block hierarchy. >> '95, i'm walking across the yard and i see this huge guy and he goes, john. i said, whoa! >> it was stoll's old friend, big tough jeff modahl. shuttled from one prison to the next, the...