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who work with us each year.ey in Ed’s commissary account so the
inmate could phone him. Ed called but
nervously hung up before Ruff could
answer. Then he called back. “I believe
you’re an innocent man,” Ruff told him.
Finally, Ed began to tell Ruff his story.
Ruff liked Ed immediately. He spoke
with an East Texas drawl and was laid-
back and restrained, carefully keeping
his anger in check. The two chatted
again a week later, and Ruff recorded
the conversation. In the next episode of
Ruff ’s podcast, titled “Hope,” he played
the interview, immediately followed by
Adele’s heart-tugging ballad “Hello,”
performed by a Zimbabwean singer.
Then listeners heard a conversation
Ruff had had with Snow. “I would like
to tell Mr. Ates that I’m sorry for what
happened,” Snow said. “If I can help in
any way I can, I will be at peace with
myself.” Ruff alternated the soaring,
sentimental music with the apology. It
was maudlin, over-the-top. Listeners
loved it.
Soon Ed was calling Ruff every Tues-
day morning at ten, giving more de-
tails of his life and his time in prison.
He began to feel comfortable enough
to reveal his festering anger. “Fuck
Kenny Snow!” he’d say when Ruff
brought him up. “David Dobbs can go
to hell!” An energized Ruff contacted
Mike Ware, the executive director of
the Innocence Project of Texas. Ware
said he’d be happy to look into Ed’s case
but that he needed trial transcripts. So
in April, Ruff returned to Tyler, armed
with a portable scanner given to him by
a listener. It took him five days to make
copies of 27 volumes. He shared many
of the documents, as well as crime scene
photos, on his website.
He made more trips to Texas, learn-
ing the basics of the criminal justice
system and researching other wrongful
conviction cases from Smith County,
including that of Kerry Max Cook, the
Tyler man tried multiple times for mur-
der, who spent almost twenty years on
death row before being freed, in 1997.
The more Ruff researched, the more
he learned about Ed, this supposedly
brutal killer. For example, Chris Scott, afellow inmate who was later exonerated,
told Ruff, “He’s friendly, he don’t want
to fight nobody, he don’t want to be a
part of nothing physical.”
Ruff was basically crowdsourcing an
investigation—“Two hundred thousand
minds are better than one,” he said in
an episode—and doing so in real time,
week after week, asking listeners for
help. He did this by posting on Twitter
and Facebook, where the podcast fan
page had 6,500 active users leaving
20,000 comments a week. A serolo-
gist examined data from a 1993 report
on blood found under Griffin’s finger-
nails and said she thought there were
two different types. Amateur photo
enthusiasts tried to discern a footprint
in the alleged feces clump in the kitch-
en. When Ruff needed help figuring
out who had a certain unlisted phone
number, a listener volunteered to go to
the Kilgore city library and pore over
old phone directories.
Ed explained to Ruff two of his case’s
biggest mysteries. Yes, he had lied about
how he got to Bush’s apartment: he hadTEXAS MONTHLY 101