The ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Murder: 3 Famous Crime Stories With Follow-Ups That Changed Everything

3 The Oldest Cold Case Murderer Turned Out to Be Innocent

The Story You Heard: Occasionally, a murder case gets solved long after police originally abandoned it. No cold case spent longer on ice than the murder of Maria Ridulph, whose killer was convicted 55 years after she died. 

Someone abducted and killed seven-year-old Maria in 1957. The kidnapper introduced himself as “Johnny” before vanishing with her, so police took a look at men named John in the area, including an 18-year-old named John Tessier. Tessier said he hadn’t actually been in the area at that exact time, as he was in Chicago at an Air Force recruiting station. His alibi checked out, and he also passed a lie detector test. 

Forty years later, Tessier’s mother died. Fourteen years after that, his sister said that their mother’s dying words had been that Tessier was the culprit. Police now reopened the case and dug up an old train ticket that had supposedly proven Tessier had taken a train to Chicago. They now observed that the ticket was unused. Instead of proving he’d taken that train, it actually proved he hadn’t taken that train. 

John Tessier (who now went by “Jack McCullough”) was found guilty of the murder and was sentenced to life. Now 73 years old, he wouldn’t take very long to complete that sentence.

But Then…: The guy didn’t do it. The state’s attorney later looked over the case, and a judge vacated the verdict four years later, granting McCullough a certificate of innocence. 

Even though courts give dying declarations special importance, allowing them when the testimony would otherwise count as hearsay, someone claiming a mother 14 years ago said her son did a crime really doesn’t count as proof. As for the train ticket, we don’t know why it appeared unused (we’ll put that down to a conductor simply not stamping it), but the ticket never should have mattered. Phone records put McCullough in Chicago exactly when he said he was there. Police had those records back in 1957, which was one reason they’d ruled him out as a suspect back then, and prosecutors withheld these records from his 2012 trial. 

This all provides an important lesson about a little something called the statute of limitations. If you ever hear that a suspect can’t be tried because the statute of limitations has passed, you probably gnash your teeth, figuring this is because we live in a corrupt world. But there’s a good reason we stop prosecuting a crime many years later, and it’s not just because we think it’s time to forgive and forget.

It’s because, once enough time has passed, it becomes too burdensome on the defendant to come up with exculpatory evidence and prove their evidence. Of course, the burden’s officially on the state to prove guilt, and the defendant shouldn’t need to prove anything, but cases like this show the flimsiest of evidence can sometimes persuade juries, particularly very long after a crime has taken place. 

McCullough sued the state of Illinois and won $4 million for the three years he spent in prison for his wrongful conviction. Much like with his life sentence, we can say he doesn’t have many years left to spend it. When he received the settlement, he was 77. 

2 The Suspicious Case of the Guy Who Created a Flood to Party

The Story You Heard: In 1993, the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers flooded, causing one of the most expensive disasters in American history. The way natural disasters work, we generally end up blaming both the unpreventable whims of Mother Nature and the people whose job it is to predict and prepare for those whims. With this flood, the failed preparations came in the form of a thousand river levees that broke. In Quincy, Illinois, blame for their levee’s failure fell on one man: James Scott.

When the levee broke, Scott appeared on the news, talking to a passing reporter about how he’d scrambled to move sandbags in a failed attempt hold the river back. This caught people’s eye because the guy’s shirt looked remarkably clean for someone who’d just been fighting a river barehanded. 

Police recognized Scott as a ne’er-do-well, who’d been accused of burglary and who — in his youth — had set multiple fires. This was a man who created disasters, not one who fought them. Then, when police interviewed the many volunteers who’d worked at shoring up the levee, one revealed that Scott had said he’d wanted it to break. His motive? His wife lived on the other side of the river, and by flooding the area, he’d keep her away, giving him more time to himself.

Scott was found guilty of “causing a catastrophe,” an unusual state offense for which no one else had been convicted — before or since. 

But Then…: Unlike McCullough, Scott was never declared innocent. He remains behind bars on a life sentence, with his next parole hearing next year. But his initial conviction was overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct, and at his next trial, multiple scientists testified that that levee was going to break under those flood conditions, with no human sabotage necessary. Indeed, there was no evidence of sabotage, other than Scott’s own admission to his colleague. 

One expert did testify that it was sabotage. This guy was the chair of the District Levee Commission, which sounds like a person who knows what he’s talking about. But it came out later that this guy also happened to be the biggest property owner on one side of the flooded river. He had no federal flood insurance. What he did have was an insurance policy that refused to pay out for acts of God but did pay out on damage caused by vandalism. In other words, he had a huge incentive to get the flood declared a human-caused disaster. 

Scott’s absurd motive in this crime was one big reason his case caught so much attention. But the thing we need to point out about that motive is, well, it was absurd. It doesn’t make sense as a reason for someone to flood a river. 

Scott had told that colleague, “If that levee breaks, I hope it strands Susie over in Taylor, so I can party here without her.” Using your knowledge of how the human mind and language works, you should realize that that was obviously a joke. It was an I-hate-my-wife joke, which is a treasured genre of joke, particularly among men who don’t actually hate their wives. It never meant he seriously planned to sabotage the very levee that witnesses otherwise saw him helping to bolster. If he did plan on sabotaging it to keep his wife away, he wouldn’t have divulged this to anyone.

He told another colleague that if the levee broke, they’d have “good catfishing in West Quincy.” This was similarly introduced as evidence against him at his trial. That line was also a joke, an I-like-fishing joke. 

As for the clean shirt, Scott was never called upon to explain that, because it wasn’t evidence of anything. His shirt would be dirty whether he was optimizing sandbags like he said or if he was maliciously yanking them like the prosecution said. It was probably so white just because he’d had the presence of mind to clean up and throw on a fresh shirt before going on camera. 

Few people who look at his case today think he’s guilty. But Scott’s been in prison for 30 years for this crime, because when something bad happens, we need someone to blame. 

1 The ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Alibi Didn’t Get the Suspect Off

The Story You Heard: In 2003, police arrested Juan Catalan on suspicion of killing a 16-year-old girl, Martha Puebla. Witnesses described a suspect who looked like him, and the victim had been planning to testify against Catalan’s brother. Catalan was innocent and even had an alibi — he’d been at a Dodgers game during the murder. But police didn’t trust his ticket stubs as proof, nor did they trust the grainy security footage of him that the stadium provided.

Catalan spent five months in jail. He was facing trial for capital murder, which meant he could end up executed for this crime he didn’t commit. 

But it turned out Dodger Stadium’s cameras weren’t the only ones on him that day. HBO was there as well, filming an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and though Catalan didn’t make it into the episode, unused footage did capture him. Thanks to this stroke of luck, he proved his alibi and escaped death row. 

But Then…: Upon seeing the Curb footage, prosecutors didn’t let up. They conceded that he’d attended the game but said they still believed he’d murdered Martha Puebla.

The timestamped clip showed Catalan at the game at 9:01 p.m. Remember, this wasn’t continuous surveillance footage but simply a shot that HBO happened to snag, so no camera evidence existed of him after this point. The shooter killed Martha a whole hour later. Catalan could have gone to the game, appeared on camera, left the stadium and still reached the girl in time to kill her, argued prosecutors. In fact, perhaps he’d gone to the game and made sure to appear on camera precisely because he wanted to arrange an alibi. 

Then Catalan’s lawyer dug up that ol’ reliable form of evidence for proving whereabouts: phone records. Cell phone records tied the man to the stadium later in the evening. This now convinced the judge to dismiss the case.

Note that the Curb footage was still essential. Without it, the prosecution would have argued that someone else carried Catalan’s phone while at the game to create those records. But the Curb footage wasn’t sufficient. Catalan needed to provide both that and the phone records to prove his innocence. That doesn’t sound terribly fair, since people needn’t prove their innocence at all. Like we said before, the burden of proof is on the state, which is one reason Catalan went on to win a settlement for wrongful imprisonment. 

Because of the strange involvement of Larry David and his pal Marty Funkhouser, this case received more attention than a lot of similar murders do. As a result, journalists examining records discovered something else. Had the LAPD acted properly, they could have prevented Martha Puebla’s death. In fact, you might well go further and say that they caused Martha Puebla’s death.

Like we said, someone apparently murdered Martha because she was going to testify in another murder case. But what made any criminals think she was going to testify? It was because the LAPD took in a suspect in that case (named Jose Ledesma) and showed him a collection of mugshots, one circled to represent that a witness had picked it out. “Those is the guy that shot my friend’s boyfriend,” was written beside the photo, along with the initials “M.P.” Martha Puebla was later murdered by a member of Ledesma’s gang.

That would be shamefully indiscreet of the police, if they disclosed the identity of a witness like that. However, the truth is darker than that. Martha Puebla wasn’t really a witness. There was no witness at all. The police had assembled those mugshots, circled Ledesma’s photo and wrote that message themselves, to trick Ledesma into thinking the case against him was stronger than it was.

After he saw those photos, Ledesma made a phone call from a payphone in the jail. “Do you know the slut that lives there by my house?” he said. “Her name starts with an M. I need her to disappear. She is dropping dimes. But low-pro. Stay on your toes, homie. And don’t get caught.” 

The jail recorded this phone call. Jails always record phone calls, just in case the inmate does something crazy like ordering a murder. But no one in the station acted on the recording or even allegedly listened it for two years. 

This sort of preventable tragedy deserves to be marked by some mournful tune. 

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