hello and welcome to Outlaw Podcast i'm Ellen O'Neal and in today's episode we're in San Antonio in 1994 where four young women were accused of an unspeakably horrific crime something so vile I can't even mention it this early on in the episode for fear that it could be taken down these women were thrown behind bars for nearly two decades despite a lack of proof that the crime even took place and the reason why they were so hastily thrown in the slammer was because they were lesbians in a time and place that was rampant with homophobia these women had one hell of a fight ahead of them not only to defend themselves against these accusations but to defend the whole LGBTQ plus community against blatantly homophobic scapegoating this is the story of the San Antonio 4 outlaw happy Pride Month everybody this is the first episode that we're bringing you in the month of June the gayest time of the year all year round I couldn't be prouder to be a part of the LGBTQ plus community but Pride Month just hits different it's a very emotional time because not only are we coming together to celebrate the progress and the achievements of our community but we're also acknowledging the continued struggles we're honoring resilience and giving a voice to the stories that often go unheard so throughout June Outlaw Podcast is going to be zoning in specifically on LGBT stories and this case is one hell of a ride spanning decades four women's lives were shaken up and practically ruined on the basis of homophobia and satanic panic but before we get too far into it a couple of content warnings this episode will cover a lot of sensitive topics including discussions of homophobia satanic rituals child SA wrongful imprisonment and rape as always viewer discretion is advised so the women at the center of today's case are often referred to as the San Antonio Four they're four Latina lesbians based in would you believe San Antonio Texas growing up LGBTQ in Texas is not easy even still to this day our community are metaphorically speaking subjected to a steady diet of holy water and homophobia in 1973 Texas passed a law that made homosexual conduct a crime simply being gay could land you in prison or at best with a few thousand in fines and that law was still around when this case happened it wasn't until 2003 that it was finally struck down by the Supreme Court 2003 is mental like that is not history that happened in my lifetime but we're getting slightly ahead of ourselves this case takes place through the 1980s and 90s a time when San Antonio was super conservative and super Catholic so being openly gay wasn't just not accepted it was considered a sin by most people in town so let me introduce you to the quote unquote sinners at the center of this case anna Cassie Liz and Christy were four best friends and they were all super young when this case kicked off they were all adults but barely liz was 20 Christy was 21 and Anna and Cassie were just 19 years old all four of them were still figuring life out still growing up most of them couldn't even order an alcoholic drink in a bar and then one day these young girls were accused of committing a heinous crime and they were thrown behind bars for years and somehow that is only the beginning of their story so let's get to know the girls first and pinpoint how they all met each other we'll start with Anna Vasquez who was kind of like the heart of the friend group she was the one that brought them all together and actually before I do start introducing a bunch of different names I have to warn you there are so many different people and different names flying around in this case so bear with me I am going to try and make it as simple as possible so that you don't get lost in fact if you have the option I would probably recommend watching the video version of this episode since we'll be using a bunch of visuals that should help you to keep track of who's who anyways Anna was the heart of the friend group she grew up in San Antonio and she came out as a lesbian when she was around 18 years old she worked at Little Caesar's Pizza Place saving up money to go to college when one day in 1991 her life changed completely a girl her own age walked into the restaurant and her beauty stopped Anna in her tracks it was love at first sight and this hot new bombshell was Cassandra Rivera Cassie for short anna and Cassie got chatting and they immediately clicked and they began dating soon after for Anna it was a total no-brainer this was the woman of her dreams but Cassie was a little bit hesitant to fall head first see they were in very different phases of their lives when they met even though they were practically the same age but Cassie was actually a divorced mother of two at 18 or 19 years old and when she met Anna she had only just left her ex-husband it was a very confusing time for Cassie her two kids were still really little and being a single mother was very demanding and on top of all of that she didn't know how to feel about suddenly being attracted to this woman from the pizza shop but the more time that Cassie spent with Anna the more she realized that this was the person she wanted to spend her life with and with that the two of them let themselves fall madly in love with each other they moved in together and Anna helped to raise Cassie's kids like they were her own together they created a really beautiful and loving home cassie's kids would grow up with two great moms but not everyone was supportive of their relationship both of their families were very Catholic and neither of their mothers approved of their relationship at first hello over time Anna's mom did come around and she accepted them but Cassie's mom was sadly the complete opposite she said some really vile stuff to Cassie and called her some awful names cassie could no longer go home and be herself without ridicule or argument she was no longer accepted by the one person who is supposed to love her unconditionally and as heartbreaking as this is this arrangement led Cassie and Anna to forming their own chosen family which turned out to be a million times more loving and supportive than the family that she was born into so introducing the final two members of the San Antonio 4 Elizabeth Liz Ramirez we're going to be calling her Liz throughout this episode and Christy Mayhew both of them knew Anna from school and at the time that they all became close Liz and Christy were just friends but not for long they moved in together as friends when Liz found out that she was pregnant and she was planning to keep the baby the dad wasn't going to be fully in the picture i mean she wasn't with the dad but the dad was going to care for the baby you know and Christy being a good friend decided that she would move in with Liz to help with the bills and the housework but soon enough Christy and Liz fell in love the same way that Anna and Cassie had and now we have two couples so this group would hang out mostly at Liz and Christiey's apartment that was like their safe space their home away from home as Anna called it the girls were so young and just trying to figure life out together none of them could have imagined that this apartment that they felt so safe in would soon become the center of something much darker so now you've met the core four let me introduce you to the villain of this story but to do so we have to go back in time just a little bit we're going to zone in on Liz Ramirez she was 20 years old at the time of this case but she first came out to her mom when she was 16 years old and sadly her mother didn't accept her in fact she did more than just not accept her she fully went down to the courthouse and declared that she was no longer legally responsible for her own daughter and that is just so cruel after being traumatically kicked out of her own home Liz moved in with her older sister and her husband Javier Leon the two of them had two daughters together Liz's nieces and Liz felt a lot more comfortable and accepted in this house that was until her sister's husband Javier started getting creepy with Liz let me remind you Liz is still a child at this point she's 16 javier is likely in his like early 20s to mid20s we couldn't quite pinpoint it but he begins getting really affectionate with her he would write her letters he would call her my angel and other pet names he was fully coming on to his wife's teenage sister the legal age of consent in Texas is 17 and we can't be sure just how old Liz was when Javier started coming on to her but the only place that that distinction matters is in a court of law in the Court of Outlaw podcast Javier is a massive weirdo either way for sleasing on a vulnerable teenage girl that vulnerability and trauma from being kicked out of her family home only adds a whole other layer to how [ __ ] up this was eventually Liz moved out of her sister and Javier's home and into her own apartment her safe haven as we mentioned earlier somewhere along the way Liz's sister and Javier get a divorce we don't know what grounds that was on but personally if I found out that my husband was flirting with my teenage sister that would be enough for me to file for divorce i'll tell you that much but basically that brings us back to where we left off in the case liz is now pregnant and living with her girlfriend Christy in her own apartment she still sees her two nieces a lot javier often brings them to see Liz at her apartment or she'll take the girls out on playdates and then Javier finds out that Liz is pregnant in a normal family this wouldn't be a big deal or it'd be a cause for celebration even but Javier had always had a weird obsession with Liz so he didn't take this news very well he turned up at her apartment and told her that he wanted to be involved with the child he wanted to help her raise her baby bit weird no he just kind of assumed that she wouldn't be a capable mother on her own liz politely declined the offer but Javier almost won't take no for an answer he insists that she needs help from a man the child needs a constant father figure liz said to him that the baby will have a father figure again I don't know too many details about the baby daddy but I do get the impression that even though Liz was in a relationship with Christy now the father of the baby still wanted to be involved but again Javier will not take no for an answer he insists that he needs to be involved and even suggests that he and Liz should get married they should live together he should father this child he sounds like a raging weirdo she assured him that she really didn't need his help she had the baby's father and she had Christy who was going to help her through motherhood and that's what really tipped Javier over the edge he always knew that Liz wasn't really into men but this was confirmation that she was dating Christy and this really did a number on him his ego couldn't take it this wasn't just rejection it felt like humiliation and Javier didn't handle humiliation well so instead of moving on like a normal person would he found another way into Liz's life through manipulation and revenge and from here out it's lies on lies on lies it all started in the summer of 1994 liz was about 4 months pregnant when a detective showed up at her house and told her that she needed to come down to the station liz thought someone must have died because why else would a detective be at her door asking her to come to the station this was so unexpected when they got down there the detective told her that her two beloved nieces aged just seven and 9 years old had accused Liz and her friends of sexually abusing them they had apparently gone home after a week-l long stay at Liz's house and told their grandmother that the women Liz Christy Anna and Cassie had pinned them down and sexually assaulted them on two occasions well hearing this Liz was in complete and utter shock this was the last thing she expected to come out of the detective's mouth she felt sick at such an accusation and immediately denied everything she loved her nieces she would never dream of abusing them an interrogation begins and you'd think that the detectives would be drilling her about this horrific thing that she had just been accused of but no practically all the questions were about her sexuality as if that was the crime at hand they were asking her had she ever been in a lesbian relationship had she ever left her nieces alone with her friends were her friends lesbian too that she had left her nieces alone with liz said yes to all of these questions because that was the truth she thought she was just helping to clear up what looked like a massive misunderstanding but the second that she admitted that she and all of her friends were lesbians it was like the detectives decided that that was all the evidence that they needed but this wasn't your usual homophobia the detectives prejudice came from some top tier conspiracy theory [ __ ] during one of the biggest moral freakouts in American history this was the era of the satanic panic it happened during the 80s and the '9s mainly in North America and people were losing their damn minds it's so crazy to look back on like so many people that you would have trusted to be levelheaded intellectuals fed into this conspiracy panic people genuinely believed that there was an international satanic cult that had infiltrated daycarees and preschools all across the country and were committing mass satanic ritual abuse on the kids believers of satanic panic thought that the mission was to sexually abuse children in order to destroy their minds and then later when those children grew up the belief was that someone would literally snap their fingers and suddenly all of these kids that had been abused would join the cult and the cycle would continue they would then go on to abuse children who would grow up and then someone would snap their fingers that is literal as well when we were looking into it I was asking my research girls i was like "Is this a metaphor that someone snaps their fingers and they join a cult?" And they were like "No." They genuinely believed that someone would snap their fingers i don't know who but anyway this was all just so insane you even had cases of vigilante parents digging up the underneath of preschools looking for secret tunnels the police also lost their minds over it they started swapping tips with each other on how to spot pagan symbols and at one point a toothpaste and soap company even had to publicly deny that they were secret agents of Satan because that's what they were being accused of it's mental but the maddest part is that all of this widespread moral panic began with the publication of one book called Michelle Remembers it was written by a Canadian psychologist and his former patient about her memories of child abuse at the hands of Satanists this book came out when there was already a lot of fear bubbling under the surface and it gave people a villain to blame for all of it and that was Satanists or at least people that they could accuse of being Satanists this was also around the time that women were joining the workforce the economy was also very rough and old school family values were being quote unquote threatened by women gaining independence and to make things worse the religious farright were basically everywhere now preaching about how everyone needed to stick to the good old man wife baby blueprint anything else was suspect the whole thing made parents feel like [ __ ] for leaving their kids at daycare that guilt had to land somewhere it had to be taken out on someone and so thousands of innocent people especially those who worked in daycarees or nurseries ended up behind bars based on no real evidence and it wasn't random who got targeted it was very common for the defendants to either be gay or even just suspected of being gay and that made them satanic apparently in 1994 when the San Antonio case broke most of the satanic abuse hysteria of the 80s had started to fade but not entirely it was lingering its way into the '9s enough to latch on to this case massively as you guys probably already know in pretty much any sexual assault case there's usually a medical exam involved and it's one of those awful yet necessary steps that victims have to take to prove the truth and these two little girls in this case had to go through a medical exam so they were taken to a pediatrician but this doctor wasn't exactly what you would call unbiased cuz once she learned that the accused women were lesbians she wrote in her notes that there were indeed signs of possible satanic ritual abuse and we'll come back to that in just a second but it was that one sentence in the doctor's notes that started the total [ __ ] storm that followed for the San Antonio 4 the police became convinced that some dark twisted thing had happened here so what was it that this doctor had supposedly seen that led her to write that on the file well I'm going to walk you through it because it is key to the case but I'll do so without going into anything too graphic the doctor claimed to have found tiny scars on the girl's private areas that were only 2 to 3 cm really quite tiny but the doctor determined that this showed signs of sexual abuse something you need to know is that about 15 years leading up to this case there was like a new area of knowledge about what children's bodies should look like and if a child didn't match that model it was sometimes seen as signs of sexual abuse these two little girls didn't match that model these days we have a much better understanding that every woman's body every girl's body is different we don't all develop in the same way but back then if a woman or a girl didn't look exactly like the diagrams then something must be wrong and in this case it was determined that the girls must be a victim of sexual abuse but evidence like that can be really powerful in front of a jury because it's physical evidence it's the CSI effect jurors will be more likely to believe a side if they have more physical forensic evidence because that kind of evidence is seen as infallible even though that is not the case so between that and the two young girls testimonies which we're going to get into next it was starting to look like something really perverse had actually taken place even though the science behind it was shaky at best the girls were just seven and 9 years old back then the younger one was called Stephanie and her older sister was called Vanessa so I'm going to tell you one part of Vanessa's testimony she said that she was staying at her aunt Liz's apartment for a whole week in July and on this particular day she was outside playing with her sister when the door opened it was her aunt Liz she said "Come in come inside." She beckoned to them sweetly but then suddenly once they got inside Liz started shouting and screaming it was like she transformed into this monstrous figure vanessa said that inside the apartment on the floor were three topless women they all got onto the bed and started touching Vanessa and then they started putting things inside her but supposedly the three women didn't say anything they were silent the whole entire time vanessa's testimony is full of imagery like this like you can picture the scene itself quite clearly but what's missing is her emotions we don't know how she felt as this was happening we can imagine sure but that's something that Vanessa didn't mention at all in her testimony it's almost a dreamlike sequence and the San Antonio 4's defense attorneys caught on to this very quickly they'd seen this kind of thing before fabricated stories all start to sound the same at a certain point they follow almost like a kind of script with a particular pattern and when there's any kind of pressure applied from the police or from parents or whoever that pattern becomes even clearer and I want to be really clear here that it's only easy for me to speak like this and be suspicious of a child's testimony because we're looking at this case retrospectively i have no doubt that at the time everyone believed these little girls because why on earth would any child concoct such a horrific story and go through a physical examination if none of this was true and hearing the girls testimony is always going to be hard even knowing what we know now because the stuff that they claimed happened is absolutely horrific and even if you know it's not true there's still this part of you that wonders well what if and that's normal it gets in your head so if you're feeling like that I get it it's It's really [ __ ] up it's a really unsettling case to dig into and without going on a tangent it's for that exact reason that I really wanted to tell the San Antonio Falls story because most people would find this whole thing way too uncomfortable to think about but I just think there are so many lessons to be learned from this case and the four women and by proxy the whole LGBT community deserved better in this case so anyway my little disclaimer out of the way let's carry on with Vanessa's testimony she said that she tried to run away from the women but the door was locked and then there was a gun first it was Anna Vasquez that was the one that pulled it out and then Vanessa changed her mind and she said it was Liz that had the gun not Anna first there was one gun and then when she recounts the events again suddenly there were three guns and then a knife there were so many inconsistencies in what she was saying and it just didn't make a lot of sense but the thing is and bear with me on this cuz it might sound icky at first but there is a point here if you were to take the two little girls out of this story and put a man in their place this story starts to sound like some twisted adult fantasy topless women lounging around comforting each other and then slipping into the bedroom to make out it sounds like a straight man's fantasy of lesbians it sounds like what they imagine women do all day when they hang out together but the reality of what happened was far less sensational so let's look at the San Antonio 4's version of events between the 24th and the 31st of July 1994 Javier had left his daughters in Liz's care at her apartment she didn't mind her nieces staying over at all she was really close with them and she was always happy to help out with the child care and stuff her friends Anna Cassie and Christy came and went from the apartment as they usually would none of them remember that much about that week and that's kind of the point it was a very normal week boring even nothing really happened but a few months down the line Liz had a detective at her door and all four of them were being accused of committing one of the most heinous crimes known to man but not all of the women were approached by the police and detectives at the same time about a month after Liz was first taken to the station Anna and Cassie met up for a park date and usually when the girls would go out in public they would keep the PDA to an absolute minimum you'd barely even be able to tell that they were a couple keeping a low profile was just part of surviving in such a homophobic city they barely ever held hands or even kissed in public but that morning something was different anna didn't seem to care who was watching she just really needed to be close to Cassie she was really publicly affectionate to a point where Cassie was a bit suspicious you know that gut feeling that you get when your when you can just tell that your partner is not telling you something cassie felt exactly that and she asked Anna what was going on anna responded with something strange along the lines of they don't have much time left together so she doesn't care anymore cassie was obviously like okay what the hell does that mean and Anna finally told her the truth that they were being accused of sexually assaulting Liz's nieces too and that they needed to start preparing for the worst everything happened so fast things got really serious and before they knew it all four women were headed for trial before they even went in for the trial all four of them had been offered a plea deal for a lighter sentence but they all refused to take it they were innocent and they weren't about to lie just to get off a little easier and the women didn't exactly have the best legal support either they had public defenders and while I appreciate the hard work that public defenders do seriously like they take on massive cases with barely any resources but this case it needed way more than what the system gave them liz's trial began in February 1997 almost 3 years after the accusations were made and it turned very ugly very fast they went after Liz hard but it wasn't about getting justice it was about who she was about making the jury believe that Liz being a lesbian somehow explained everything that the little girls had said her sexuality is essentially what made her guilty liz's whole trial was so targeted it was so personal it was like she had lost before it had even started even during the jury selection they genuinely had a hard time finding jurors who weren't blatantly homophobic at the end of her trial Liz was convicted of aggravated assault of a child and indecency with a child and for that she was sentenced to 37 and a half years in prison liz said that she fainted when she heard that verdict and as she was coming back around the baiff leaned down to her and told her to get up because they were letting her go like go home and for half a second she believed him but it was all just a ruse he had lied to her to get her back up on her feet so that he could cuff her and take her away to jail and that was the moment that it hit her that she wasn't going home she wasn't going back to her son of course by now she had had that baby that she was pregnant with all the way back in the beginning of the case she had bonded to this little boy and now that boy's mother was being taken away for 37 and a half years liz was only 23 years old and she would be 58 by the time she got out her life would never be the same again in fact most of her life would be gone so Liz was in jail and one year later in February 1998 the other three women's trials began cassie Anna and Christiey's public defense attorneys decided to band together pulling all of their resources all of their defense together and they were going to go to trial as a group but Anna's attorney even admitted that she was probably gonna lose because nobody wants to stand up in court and tell a seven and nineyear-old girl that they're lying about something so horrific these three women were painted as sick twisted satanic witches who had tried to sacrifice these two little girls well because they were lesbians that was the literal motive argued that they are lesbians according to people in that courtroom this is just what gay people do what do you even mean just when you think it can't get any more insane or blatantly homophobic they say that this is just what gay people do man like I just could not believe my eyes reading these kind of quotes and if you're wondering like I was how did the jury manage to overlook so many contradictions in the girls testimonies how did they not question why the stories kept changing and why there was one gun and then three guns and then a knife well in both trials prosecutors argued that none of that actually mattered because the pediatrician's testimony her notes from the medical examination apparently proved it that was all the evidence that they needed the prosecutors would argue that that was basically enough to cancel out everything else that didn't quite make sense and again I can't [ __ ] believe my ears you can't just tell a jury to ignore evidence that seems inconsistent or flaky just because just because there's supposedly stronger evidence in your arsenal aside from the fact that the doctor's testimony will soon be proven to be just as weak as the rest of it on the 14th of February 1998 Cassie Anna and Christy were all convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child and indecency with a child they were each sentenced to 15 years in prison this was never going to be a fair trial people would rather believe satanic gay cults were committing mass abuse across America rather than just accept that queer people existed and were not out to hurt anyone and because of that twisted kind of prejudice it cost four innocent women their freedom liz took the verdict really hard she blamed herself for the other three ending up in prison too she carried a lot of guilt but obviously none of this was her fault and once they were all behind bars she had no way of reaching out to the other women each of them had been sent to a different prison they were completely cut off from one another they can't write to each other cassie and Anna had been in a relationship for 7 years before they went to prison they never actually broke up they didn't separate by choice the prison system tore them apart they were physically separated not allowed to communicate and so they lost all contact with each other cassie and Anna never got that closure and they aren't together anymore but Cassie believes that if none of this had happened they would still be a couple they would still be raising their two kids and living the life that they were supposed to live now to tell the rest of the story we're going to have to fast forward about a decade the San Antonio four are still locked up and they are still fighting to prove that they are innocent meanwhile on the outside the two little girls Vanessa and Stephanie aren't so little anymore they're growing up and with age comes a very different version of events so in 2006 this biologist from Canada was doing research on female sex offenders when he stumbled across the case of the San Antonio 4 by this point the women had been in prison for about 8 years and this biologist starts by writing to them in prison asking questions digging into the details and he pretty quickly realizes that these women are clearly innocent and so two years later in 2008 he reached out to the National Center for Reason and Justice for some help they're an organization that helps people who have been wrongfully convicted in totally messed up cases like this one oh and one of the co-founders literally wrote a book on satanic panic so the biologist brought this case to the right people in 2010 they decided to reach out to the Innocence Project of Texas to start reinvestigating the case and if that name rings a bell it's probably because we've talked about the Innocence Project before on this channel where big fans of the Innocence Project here at Outlaw a while ago we did an episode on the case of Angie Dodge in 1996 18-year-old Angie Dodge was raped and stabbed to death not long after her friend Christopher Tap was wrongfully found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison but Angie's mom Carol knew that something didn't add up she kept digging and with the help of the Innocence Project they eventually got Christopher exonerated and the real killer was finally caught but there are still so many stories just like this the US puts more people behind bars than any other country in the world and according to recent studies around 4 to 6% of people in prison right now are most likely innocent so if we put that at 5% right in the middle of that estimate that means that one in every 20 people in prison have been locked up for something that they didn't do and that's why organizations like the Innocence Project are so incredibly important they help to free innocent people prevent future wrongful convictions and fight to make the justice system well actually just so far they have helped to overturn 253 convictions but their clients collectively have spent over 4,000 years behind bars for crimes that they did not commit now you don't have to be a lawyer or an expert to get involved with the Innocence Project they have lots of ways that you can help to make a difference you can sign petitions about ongoing injustices you can learn more about wrongful convictions and if you're able to you can donate to support their work if you're from the US there's a local innocence project in every state that you can offer to volunteer at and it's not just in the US the Innocence Network includes 73 organizations from around the world with branches in the UK in Canada in Australia in the Netherlands etc there are so many different ways that you could help to reshape this system that has taken freedom from innocent people and be a part of building something more fair and compassionate and just as always the link to their website will be down below in the description please do look into the Innocence Project like I said we're big fans over here at Outlaw they do some amazing work so the Innocence Project of Texas started reinvestigating the case of the San Antonio 4 but they had to start from square one and that meant going back to where it all started with Vanessa and Stephanie's testimonies it was the 4th of August 2012 when Stephanie the younger of the two girls who was now 25 years old made a decision that would change everything she agreed to meet up with the Innocence Project and after 18 years she was ready to make things right stephanie recanted her trial testimony which basically means that she admitted that what she said back then wasn't true and now she was finally ready to tell everyone why she had lied she said that she and her sister had made up the whole story because their dad Javier Lemon and their grandma pressured them into doing it and the way that she explains her real side of the story is heartbreaking she remembers it all starting with her and her sister playing with some Barbie dolls she said "We're young we're stupid we're going to experiment." I get the impression that they were doing what I'm sure every little girl has done with her Barbies before maybe they were making them kiss or making them do other [ __ ] i don't know but the point is that grandma walked in saw what they were doing and flipped out locking the girls in a room she tried to make it seem like the girls must have learned whatever she saw from somewhere and it just so happened that the girls had recently spent a week at their aunt Liz's house and that's when the questioning starts what happened there who touched you and even though Stephanie and Vanessa kept saying that nothing happened nothing happened their grandma and Javier just wouldn't let it go and then came the threats you're going to get taken away you're gonna end up on the street no one's going to want you i swear to God I'll beat you if you don't listen and do exactly what I tell you that is the level of pressure that little Stephanie and Vanessa were under it was absolutely terrifying for two kids to hear that they could be taken away or abused if they don't comply and so they did as an adult Stephanie started putting the pieces together she said that if there was any inappropriate behavior that they were exposed to as a child it would have been from their dad not from her aunt Liz and her friends apparently Javier would bring women home and do inappropriate things in front of his daughters stephanie didn't give any specific examples but holy [ __ ] apparently Stephanie had even tried to tell her dad on multiple occasions "I don't remember anything happening to me like about the whole sexual assault situation." But instead of listening to his daughter he shut her down he told her "It did you're stupid you don't know." Stephanie was scared of her dad then and she's still scared of Javier now but when the Innocence Project got in touch she told the truth anyway she did what she could to make it right and to help free her aunt and her friends vier had a lot of control over his daughter's lives vanessa and Stephanie were too scared to speak out and even now as far as we know Vanessa hasn't recounted her testimony stephanie said it herself that she won't talk javier even threatened to take Stephanie's children away from her or have them taken away from her if she ever told the truth and you might be thinking surely he was just trying to scare her but I mean we've already seen the lengths that this man will go to in order to destroy someone's life and in November 2012 he made good on that threat to Stephanie javier went to court and tried to get Stephanie's kids taken away from her her own father is trying to ruin her life all because she was brave enough to tell the truth but that's the funny thing about telling the truth it has far more power than lies ever do the truth might have scared her but the lies are what kept her chained to her father the lies were always his and by telling the truth Stephanie could finally free herself too stephanie won the custody case and she kept her children i really actually don't even know what Javier was trying to accuse her of i think he'd just taken her to court just to try and make up that she was an unfit mother of course the courts did not agree and just like that Javier Lemon lost he failed to silence her in 2012 three of the San Antonio four are starting to get released from prison but even though it coincides with the Innocence Project getting involved they weren't being released because the court agreed that they were innocent yet anna Vasquez was released on parole first she'd already served 14 years in prison which was most of her sentence and so now she was being let out a little bit early for good behavior the other two Christy and Cassie we're going to leave Liz out of this for a while cuz of course she had a much larger sentence but Christy and Cassie weren't granted parole for some reason and honestly we're not entirely sure why cuz their sentences were the exact same as Anna's but they had to wait until their case was reopened by a judge and only then could they be released on bail now if you don't know the distinction between parole and bail don't worry I didn't either before this case um I'm actually a bit embarrassed to say that I've always been using those words interchangeably but they are different anna was out on parole where the other girls were waiting for bail so what does that mean parole basically means that you're getting out early usually for good behavior but you are technically still serving your sentence you're just doing it outside of prison there are rules that someone on parole would have to follow like check-ins and such and if you mess up then you'll be sent straight back to prison bail or bond means that you've been released while you're waiting on a trial or a legal decision to be made it doesn't mean that you've been found innocent yet it just means that a judge thinks that you don't need to stay locked up while the courts figure out whether or not you're guilty so I hope that makes sense cassie and Christy were hoping to get out on bail soon and they wouldn't have to wait very long because luckily Stephanie had admitted to her false testimony and that would change everything over the next year while Anna is free and the other girls weren't she was doing everything in her power to help to free them and what's crazy is that it had been 14 years since they last seen or spoken to each other and that's one thing that I do love about this story is the bond that these women had prevailed despite it all anna knew that they were in this together and she was not about to leave her girls behind she was campaigning telling their story getting the media involved and it was all paying off the Innocence Project of Texas managed to get a hold of the original photos from Stephanie and Vanessa's medical examination in 1994 and they handed them over to an independent expert who reviewed everything and found that there were no signs of sexual trauma there was nothing that they could identify as scarring like the original doctor had said and when these new findings were released the original pediatrician who had performed those exams actually recanted her testimony as well she admitted that she was wrong that her interpretation of a so-called scar was nothing but a normal anatomical variation medical science had advanced a lot since then and what she had once thought was a sign of abuse was something completely normal with what she knows now the pediatrician said that she would have never taken the stand in this case so that was it there was no longer any physical evidence left against the San Antonio for the testimony the science everything that they were convicted on none of it was ever true on the 18th of November 2013 Cassie Liz and Christy were all released on bail watching them step out of prison and into the arms of their families is possibly one of the most heart-wrenching reunion scenes I've ever seen cassie held her granddaughter for the first time she'd become a grandma while she was in jail liz hadn't seen her son since he was 5 years old he was now a teenager that's how much time had been stolen from all of these women and their families but they still had a long way to go to be legally declared innocent in April 2015 their exoneration hearing began and this is basically their chance to prove in court that their conviction was wrong to show that they were innocent but if they lost there was a real chance that they could actually be sent back to prison to finish the rest of their sentences and for Liz that would mean another 21 and a half years in prison so clearing their names wasn't just about closure it was still about freedom life on the outside hadn't been easy either remember these women had been locked up for most of their adult lives it had feel like being frozen in time the world around them would have changed so much since the last time they lived in it like texting for example that was a whole new thing for them to try and get their heads around when they were locked up in the '9s texting was hardly a thing and now everyone's on Instagram and Snapchat and there's emojis there's little [ __ ] pictures in the text now it sounds silly but I can imagine it'd be really jarring to try to adapt to this new way of communicating and living that everyone else around you is so natural with they'd been through something that no one else could understand no one else could relate to they checked in on each other every single day and romance even blossomed once again christy and Liz ended up together again they tried to ignore their feelings at first but eventually they found their way back together it's adorable but I do have to say unfortunately they didn't end up together forever that would have been a little too perfect wouldn't it um but yeah I think it's nice that they had that reunion anyway but the real challenge was trying to rebuild their whole lives after everything that they lost even after they were released they were still on the sex offender registry that meant that they couldn't be around kids it made finding a job nearly impossible so they had everything riding on this hearing going well but there's another plot twist of course there was i swear luck has never been on their side in a cruel twist of fate their exoneration decision rested in the hands of the exact same judge who convicted Cassie Anna and Christy back in 1998 how is that even allowed his name was Judge Pat Priest and let me tell you the name is where the holiness ends because Judge Priest wasn't exactly known for his forgiveness he reviewed the entire case the outdated science that's been proven wrong Stephanie's retraction of her testimony and the fact that there was no evidence left to hold this case together but none of that seemed to matter to him because admitting that they were innocent would also mean admitting that he had got it wrong all those years ago and God forbid Judge Priest showed any mercy now in February 2016 he ruled that while the women were entitled to new trials their assertion of proof of actual innocence falls short of the mark so even though all the evidence has been deemed useless he's still saying that that's not enough to declare them actually innocent in the eyes of the law the San Antonio 4 were still guilty but they weren't about to give up now they had come way too far to give up now on the 23rd of November 2016 they took their case to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and this time nine different judges would review the evidence thank you and then in a very long overdue decision the court finally ruled in their favor cassie Anna Liz and Christy were officially declared actually innocent it was the validation that they had waited for for over two decades after years of prison separation and public shame they were finally and fully cleared of all charges the fight was over the San Antonio 4 had proved what they knew all along and that's that they were innocent although they were once put on trial because of their sexuality the San Antonio 4 are now celebrated as lesbian icons of justice they were once feared and judged and locked away for who they are but now they're martyrs of a broken system they turned all of that pain into power and now they're symbols of strength in the face of systemic hate anna is now the outreach and education director at the Innocence Project of Texas she has continued to fight for others who have been wrongfully convicted and she uses her own story her own experiences to create change and she's not the only one cassie Liz and Christy have also been using their voices too in 2023 the four of them came together to advocate for James Henry Ryos who has spent 40 years behind bars or on parole for a murder that he didn't commit james is an Apache Native American from the Hickory Reservation in Northern New Mexico and he's also a gay man he was convicted after giving a false confession that I'm assuming was pulled out of him and for what the jury called his characteristics which we all know is code for him being gay and Native American the San Antonio four saw themselves in James' case and they really wanted to help liz said "We all know what it's like to be incarcerated pulled away from our family behind lies crimes that never happen they're fighting to make sure that no one else is ever wrongfully convicted again for a justice system that won't throw innocent people behind bars because of who they are or because of who they love or the color of their skin that no one else has to lose their freedom because of fear or bias or ignorance we care a lot about these kind of stories at Outlaw stories that need justice and just don't get told enough wrongful convictions don't just ruin people's lives they erase them so that's why we need to tell their stories and if you guys have any other examples of cases like this that you would want us to cover please do let us know in the comments and hopefully we can cover those too but thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Outlaw Podcast if you're watching on YouTube don't forget to subscribe leave a like and leave us a comment so that we can continue the conversation if you're listening on a podcast platform please rate us five stars and I will see you in the next episode