Proof: A True Crime Podcast · Red Marble Media

Murder at the Bike Shop | Ep. 9 – The Dilemma

·1 hr 9 min·5 clips

Detectives tell Andrew Miller everyone else has confessed, forcing him into a false confession to avoid life in prison.

Proof: A True Crime Podcast examines the Kalamazoo County, Michigan cold case unit, a team of detectives who closed a remarkable number of old homicide cases in a short period of time. This episode focuses on the Polderman case, a horrific triple homicide of three elderly people killed in their own home, which went unsolved for seven years until the cold case unit took it over. Before presenting the Polderman case, the episode recounts the concerns raised by Scott Baldwin, a prisoner who had been convicted by the same cold case unit and who died claiming innocence. Baldwin believed the unit had also wrongly convicted Jeff Titus in a separate case — and Titus was later exonerated. Baldwin's thesis was that if Titus was wrongly convicted and he himself was wrongly convicted, the pattern suggested the cold case unit's methods were systematically flawed. The episode notes that what happened in the Polderman case may be the most troubling example of all. Cold case detective Mike Werkema used Richard Vindaville as an informant. Vindaville had himself been the lead suspect in the Polderman murders for five years. He was then granted use immunity by prosecutor Scott Brower, which meant his statements could never be used against him but could be used against whoever he accused. Vindaville then named five people who had supposedly committed the crime, claiming he watched from a distance on a dirt bike. The physical evidence at the scene is described as contradicting the account. All five people named by Vindaville were ultimately convicted. The episode questions how a man who was himself the lead suspect for five years was made the prosecution's star witness, and what due process protections were bypassed in the process.

As heard by us

A murder case, a recantation, and a suspect story that keeps collapsing under scrutiny.

The episode centers on Richard Vandeville's attempt to implicate Joe Williams in the Polderman murders, then follows how that account starts to break apart through Brandy Miller's changing statements.

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Why you'd press play

You want a murder case where the accusation starts eating its own tail.

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