Two hundred kilometers away in a quiet suburb outside Denver, a retired defense attorney named Dorothy McBride sat alone at her small kitchen table watching the evening news. At sixty eight she had been forced into retirement after a serious heart attack three years earlier, and her days had become slow and quiet. When the broadcast showed Victor Bennett’s face and explained that his execution had been postponed because of a mysterious conversation with his daughter, Dorothy felt something tighten in her chest.
Decades earlier she had defended a man whose eyes looked exactly the same. That man had been innocent and had spent fifteen years in prison before the real criminal was found. Dorothy had never forgiven herself for failing him.
She picked up her phone and called her former assistant Frank Delgado.
“Frank, I need the entire file on the Bennett case,” she said. “Every document and every piece of evidence.”
The next morning Dorothy drove to Oakridge Children’s Residence, a quiet foster home surrounded by tall maple trees. The director of the facility, Margaret Hughes, met her in a small office filled with drawings made by children.