A Whole Life Later · Wrongful Convictions Collective

3 - David Camm

September 27, 2024·41 min·20 clips

On September 28, 2000, David Cam returns from a basketball game and finds Kim and the couple’s two children shot in the garage. The episode backs away from that moment and places the family in Georgetown, Indiana. David and Kim met in the late 1980s through Kim’s best friend Marcy McLeod. They married in 1989. Kim worked in accounting at the start of the marriage. David was a state trooper and later joined an emergency special weapons tactical team. After Brad was born in 1993 and Jill in 1995, the family shifted again. In May 2000, David left policing and went to work for his uncle Sam Lockhart at United Dynamics. The narrative keeps the chronology clear because the sequence matters. David says he entered the home around 9:20 p.m. after the game. He finds Kim on the garage floor and sees right away that she is gone. His children are still in the backseat of the family Ford Bronco. The prosecution centers its case on blood spatter on David’s T-shirt. Its witness, Rob Stites, is presented as an expert on the blood evidence. The episode makes plain that he was not actually qualified to testify about blood splatter. He had not even completed the basic 40-hour bloodstain course when he took the stand. The defense brings in Bart Epstein, who has more than 30 years of bloodstain expertise. Epstein says the stains fit a father trying to revive his son. He demonstrates that theory with a wig, fake blood, and a shirt, and the pattern comes out strikingly similar. Another key point is the phone call David supposedly made from home at 7:19. A Verizon employee later says the call was actually an hour earlier. The records also show the wrong date because Indiana’s time zones complicate the timing. The episode uses that confusion to show how easily a clean-sounding fact can fall apart. It keeps returning to the gap between what the prosecution claimed and what the records can really support. By the end, the emotional weight sits with David’s refusal to surrender his memories, even after losing almost everything.

As heard by us

A careful wrongful-conviction episode where blood evidence and phone records do the heavy lifting.

David Cam comes home from a basketball game and finds his wife and two children shot in the garage, and the episode stays close to the case as it moves through the family history, his work as a state trooper, and the evidence that followed.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a wrongful-conviction case built on blood, phone records, and hard dates.

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