Forensic Files - Season 9, Episode 26 - Fishing for the Truth - Full Episode | Forensic Files

when a ship's captain turned up dead after a raging storm some said his death was a tragic
accident an eyewitness told police it was murder but something on this videotape raised
questions about who was telling the truth [Music] [Applause] [Music] venice louisiana like its namesake in
italy is a place where life revolves around the water the small town marks the spot where the
mississippi river empties into the gulf of mexico locals call it the end of the world
everybody knows everybody's business pretty much good and bad and some people like it some people don't i
tend to like it many people in venice make their money trawling for shrimp it's hard dangerous work
the sea can either be friend or foe it's rough and the people there are rough it's not a genteel community
there's friction there there's friction there between the pleasure fishermen and the
work a day fisherman that does it for a living in july of 2000 a storm battered the louisiana coast
while the fishing boats were still at sea all the boats somehow made it back safely all except
one captain raymond liker otherwise known as tinky and his deckhand alvin latham were
missing along with their shrimp boat named the bandit the coast guard was notified they
searched the area in the gulf where tinky had made his last radio transmission but found nothing
14 hours later a vietnamese fishing trawler picked up a man in the gulf clinging to a piece of wood
it was alvin latham the deckhand he was exhausted but unharmed when interviewed by the coast guard
alvin told a horrifying tale [Music] alvin said the storm came up so fast that he and tinky were unprepared
the wind just picked up and wheels bouncing all over the place with five foot waves crashing over the
bow and the fishing nets full of shrimp still in the water the boat started to lift
it seemed like it was just sinking and then he reported may day mayday when they tried to pull the nets into
the boat tinky's foot got stuck alvin said he tried desperately to get tinky's foot out of the net but he was
unsuccessful he said he wasn't going to make it he has got to take care of his son
tinky told alvin to try to save himself so i told him i was going to go try and get some help
that's why i started swimming just moments after alvin jumped into the water the boat slipped below the surface like
that the door was just going down alvin said he managed to grab hold of a piece of wood and swam for 14 hours
until he was rescued i was doing everything i could to try to catch my keep my head above the water
now it seemed like i was swimming forever he's told his story he tried to save his
captain it was it was tender it was endearing it could have happened to anyone but alvin didn't want accolades
i don't see myself as i feel that what i was doing i couldn't get no help to get him
several days later the coast guard found tinky's body floating in the gulf of mexico
and the body told a story that was very different from alvin's story the coast guard found tinky lyker's body
in the gulf of mexico five days after the storm [Music] the only other person on the boat alvin
latham said he tried to save tinky's life but was unable to free his foot from the fishing nets
he was uh going around talking about it like he was a hero he had survived the storm and you know all that type of
thing but when the local coroner performed a routine autopsy the findings contradicted alvin's story
he had trauma to his head his left arm was partially amputated the coroner also found
five stab wounds on the arms that would be considered defensive rooms as if the victim was fending off a knife attack
someone that's trying to defend himself would raise their arms in front of their
face and then and that way they would catch the stab wounds about the forearm and that's where they was on raymond
like and the coroner found evidence of blunt force trauma to the head tinky lyker's death was ruled
a homicide someone killed raymond like alvin latham was the only one on the boat that we
know of his own self said he was the only one when the coast guard interviewed alvin
just after his rescue he said nothing about tinky being stabbed or struck in the head
so police asked alvin to come to headquarters and explain the discrepancies so we started route to the jail and he
says well uh y'all found a body and i said yeah we did you know he says well i guess i'm in trouble
investigators video taped the interrogation our laces original store when we first
picked him up he said the captain was caught in the trial net the boat was sinking and he swam off of the boat and
watched it go down he was underwater and i started swimming off for the first platform i could get to
police informed alvin latham that the story he told didn't match the forensic evidence
he had several stab marks on his body and just didn't know why why i didn't stop if raymond like her foot
was caught in the net he would have went down with that boat okay did you burn it too did you murder it
well i don't have to lock you up but i wonder what happened but i'm trying to tell you that's the best that
i can well who murdered him if you did after five hours of questioning and three more on the following day
alvin gradually began to change his story alvin started saying things like he felt
uncomfortable with raymond lyker he didn't make him feel comfortable he he was coming up with things that happened
to him on that boat as saying that raymond touched his leg made him feel uncomfortable that type of thing i'm
thinking finally we're getting somewhere with him you know finally uh we're starting to get the truth and that's
when he come around and started telling us what what he told us you know about the
stabbing alvin now said that when the boat took on water he feared for his life and
there was only one life jacket on board to get the life jacket alvin waited until tinky's back was turned grabbed a
pipe and struck him how many times alvin said when he tried to grab the life jacket tinky came after him alvin
used a knife to defend himself i guess i stabbed him in the arms and he fell overboard are you telling me the
truth yeah and with his confession alvin latham was charged with murder and the right to remain
anything you say ken and what would you do not many cases you begin with someone
being a hero and then in a matter of two or three days he was a villain he was a killer
[Music] as alvin latham sat in jail on a murder charge everyone in venice louisiana was talking
about what happened or didn't happen the night tinky lyker died everyone debated it two people one life
jacket what would you would i share you'd like to think you'd share it but would you
since alvin was a man of limited means the court appointed attorney peter barbie to defend him
barbie couldn't understand why alvin would have killed the captain over a life jacket yet wasn't wearing it
when he was found floating in the water the next day i told alvin i said whatever you do tell
me the truth i said if you did it that's all right we'll figure out how to handle
it but i said whatever you do tell me the truth alvin now told his lawyer that he didn't kill tinky
he reverted to his original story the one he told the coast guard the day after the storm that tinky's death was
an accident i had to prove to a jury that he was vulnerable and very capable of confessing to something he didn't do man
you would not believe how strong there is amongst people in the public that you wouldn't confess to something
you did wouldn't do why would you confess to something you didn't do to find out
barbie showed the entire eight hours of alvin's police interviews to dr jill hayes hammer a forensic psychologist
from the lsu school of medicine come on al what happened you don't know everything you say you know do you know
anything you couldn't swim 14 hours an hour i was very annoyed actually because it
was obvious to me as a professional that alvin was incredibly slow and that he was being taken advantage of
dr richard leo a professor of criminology and psychology at the university of california at irvine
agrees this is an awful awful interrogation i think this is shoddy poor police work
and i think these the the detectives who conducted this interrogation should be retrained and until they're retrained
should not be permitted to do another interrogation during the first day of police
interrogation alvin denied he killed tinky never come on what you gonna do say something
explain it what you saw was an incredible amount of intimidation over a hundred times alvin
said that he did not do it he was emphatic in saying that he did not do it instead
why did you stab him on top of the show you did you hit him in the throat with something
him in the head with something you didn't do nothing i don't believe that the police continued saying alvin until
you tell us what we want to hear you will not be able to go home but during the second day of
interrogation alvin started repeating what the investigators were telling him that's one of the most hostile
interrogations i've seen there's only one life jacket you wanted you didn't give a [ __ ] if he lived or died he
didn't say no damn prayer you'll liar about that interrogators are trained across the
country not to be hostile they're going against the standard training that interrogators receive
experts say another sign of a false confession is when the suspect's story doesn't match
the physical evidence so the point about the ham don't sound right you sure you're here
um [Music] he was in the water she was on the back of the boat what happened you went this for alan tell the rest of
the story and use it i don't know i'm at one point alvin literally says i hit him with a two by four and he says there
wasn't any damn two by four is a sinking boat he says uh a hammer there wasn't a
hammer on that boat he says a pipe and he goes okay you have that that could have worked so you hit them in the head
with a pipe i mean that literally is how they get the story out of them it's just
it's just so obviously stupid what they fail to see is he doesn't have any memories of doing the things that
they're accusing him of doing that he then caves in ultimately and passively accepts and that's why he's using that
language dr hayes hammer discovered that alvin's iq was 74 and he had dropped out of
school in the ninth grade you have many people with low iqs who have had rap sheets as long as my arm
alvin did not so he was very naive to what was going on in the criminal justice system and he also did not have
the intelligence to be able to cope with the questioning by the police officers false confessions do occur
one of the most famous cases happened in england when a teenager richard buckland
confessed to the rape and murder of a young girl but dna testing proved he didn't do it
most people don't understand how someone can be made to falsely confess but as an
empirical matter the fact is that they occur and they've been documented so many have been documented the question
should not be do they occur but rather why do they occur and what can we do to minimize them
most people who are questioned by police don't realize that they can leave the interrogation anytime meaning they don't
have to put up with relentless questioning but trying to explain to a jury why someone would confess to a crime they
didn't commit is always difficult confessions override lack of evidence improper
searches and everything else so if you want to prosecute somebody what's the best thing in the world you have a
confession they just got to where i just agreed with what they said just to get them off my back
because i know they would stop the questions after i agreed with them life has been very hard alvin
and i will be damned if i was going to sit back and watch the system steamroll him
out of convenience the cover for crook corrupt stupid cops and that's the only way to describe it
but there was still the matter of the coroner's report which had ruled tinky's death a homicide
[Music] peter barbie was now convinced that alvin latham's taped confession had been
coerced but why did the coroner rule tinky's death a homicide in looking at the autopsy findings
barbie discovered that the coroner did not know the depth of the so-called knife wounds
the coroner never measured them never dissected them never checked them for the angle
from the photographs dr cyril wecht an independent forensic pathologist didn't believe these were stab wounds at all
expect all or at least some of the bones to have had some significant depth of penetration we do not have that
in this case hence i do not believe that these were stab wounds but if they weren't stab wounds
what were they when you think of a propeller any portion of it is striking some part of the body then it is easy to
understand how you can get these kinds of injuries dr wecht thinks this is also what caused
tanki's fractured skull that his body was accidentally run over by a passing ship while floating in the
gulf i believe that it is most plausible to infer that those areas of apparent trauma to mr leicher's
body were sustained post-mortem when his body was floating for about five days in
the gulf interestingly the tugboat captain who picked up tinky's body agreed he says i've been a boat captain a long
time and this is not the first body i've seen and he says that man was run over by a boat
and the tugboat captain told peter barbie something else something which hadn't been made public
he said he had one boot on and one boot off well the lights went off on that one
because that was alvin's basic story was that on the boat at the end of it tinky gone down with
the ship because he had a foot stuck under a cable that's more sherlock holmes the man with one boot
he correlated with the story that the foot was caught in the trolling net that is as good a
reason as any and better than most to explain why one boat was on and one boot was not on
with these new findings peter barbie believed the coroner's ruling was inaccurate you have an incompetent
corner and that's being polite so these wounds tell me that the story that mr latham originally gave
was the correct one and that there were no injuries inflicted on mr lyker's body
by alvin latham when alvin latham went on trial for the murder of tinky liker prosecutors played alvin's confession
for the jury but later the jury watched the entire eight-hour interrogation you did how you did it
you hit the man and covered his mouth with duct tape what did you do i didn't hit him what happened i don't know
anyone that watched the tape that saw what happened any intelligent person couldn't help be
convinced that this was a a blatant case of police brutality the jury also heard from the defense
pathologist who concluded tinky's death was an accident and alvin latham took the stand in his
own defense and told the same story he told to the coast guard after the storm [Music]
that tinky's foot got stuck in the fishing nets and that his death was an accident
[Music] after six hours of deliberation the jury came back with their verdict not guilty
[Music] with modern technology today with all the learning people got i knew i had a chance
when you look at the evidence and you look at the forensics and what it shows us
alvin was telling the truth unfortunately just nobody wanted to accept it or believe it
so they just kept pushing them until they came up with something that they wanted to believe
and they wanted to believe it because they fed it to them today alvin works at the local
supermarket stacking shelves the man who conducted alvin's interrogation thinks the jury made a mistake
everybody can't be the good guy or or no one confessed a serious crime in all my years of experience i've never
known anyone to come say you know i committed this crime without it without interrogation
and uh that's just tactics you use to get confessions but peter barbie thinks interrogation should be about getting
the truth not getting a confession he wanted to pick on alvin i'd like to see him come pick on me
and you can print that one that's how badly i feel about what he did to that man he's a bully and a punk
[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

A two-man shrimp boat sank when a fast-moving, violent storm struck the Louisiana coast. The captain drowned, and the deckhand was rescued fourteen hours later. The deckhand was considered a hero until the captain's body was found.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

A shrimp boat captain's death leads to a murder charge against his deckhand, but evidence suggests an accidental drowning instead.

Key points

The Storm and the Tragedy. A storm leads to the disappearance of Captain Tinky and his deckhand Alvin.
Conflicting Stories. Alvin's account of the storm and Tinky's death raises questions.
The Confession. Alvin's confession leads to his arrest for Tinky's murder.
The Verdict. After deliberation, the jury finds Alvin not guilty.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I don't see myself as a hero.

Alvin Latham reflects on his actions during the storm.

4:32WatchJan 1, 2022

Tension

65/ 100Some tension

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