North Texas man confessed to murder in 2015. This new podcast suggests he may be innocent

In 2015, an Aledo man confessed to the 2005 murder of a sex worker and dumping her body in Parker County. A new podcast from the Marshall Project, “Smoke Screen: Just Say You’re Sorry,” questions the validity of that confession drawn out by Texas Ranger James Holland with, at one point, the assistance of the Secret Service.

Larry Driskill, now 61, is nearly eight years into a 15-year prison sentence for the murder of 29-year-old Bobbie Sue Hill. Authorities in 2015 said Driskill strangled Hill to death and dumped her body in a Parker County creek bed the night of March 6, 2005.

But Driskill has maintained his innocence since the confession, and his pleas for help caught the attention of the Innocence Project of Texas, an organization of Texas criminal defense attorneys working to free people convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.

The Innocence Project believes Driskill, as does the Marshall Project.

In the series, Marshall Project podcaster and writer Maurice Chammah reviews audio from interrogations, expert opinions on the ethics and efficacy of the tactics used, the background of the Texas Ranger who got Driskill to confess, the details of the crime and Driskill’s life.

Chammah says in the podcast that he reviewed more than seven hours of tape from the interrogations. It includes common tactics such as lying about the evidence authorities have, a polygraph test administered by a Secret Service agent and minimizing the severity of an accused crime in order to get a confession. Questioning in the case also included less common techniques like hypnosis and repeated attempts to have Driskill “just say you’re sorry” before he confessed to anything.

In the confession, Driskill told the Texas Ranger that he picked up Hill, who was working as a prostitute, at a convenience store near East Lancaster Avenue in Fort Worth, according to an arrest warrant affidavit obtained by the Star-Telegram in 2015. He told police he thought Hill was trying to rob him and put his hand on her chest, then choked her to death before driving away, putting her body in a bag and dumping it in a creek bed in the 1300 block of Jenkins Road in Aledo, about eight miles from Driskill’s home.

So far in the ongoing series, Chammah has interviewed a psychologist who has questioned the validity of the details uncovered during hypnosis of a witness who described the suspect to create an updated police sketch, and other experts who call into question both the methods used in the interrogation and its legality.

The Parker County district attorney and the Texas Department of Public Safety did not immediately respond to Star-Telegram requests for comment.

According to the Innocence Project, after two and a half years in jail awaiting trial when he could not afford to pay his bond, Driskill chose to plead no contest in exchange for the 15-year sentence.

Chammah and the experts on the podcast question the efficacy and legality of the Texas Ranger’s interrogation tactics, such as leading questions that could confuse the memory of the single witness before he was hypnotized, and asking Driskill multiple times to talk about what he would have hypothetically done if he had committed the murder. Driskill repeated the story enough times that he stopped saying “hypothetically” when he discussed the details of the killing, according to the podcast.

Chammah notes that a description of the suspect in Hill’s murder provided by the only witness to her abduction changed his recollection of the man from someone who “could be Latino,” didn’t wear corrective lenses, had a wider face and didn’t look like Driskill to a white man with a buzzcut and glasses who somewhat resembled the man convicted of Hill’s murder.

A sketch based on the second description is what led a local pawnshop owner in Aledo to call authorities and suggest it was Driskill, Chammah says in the podcast.

In the latest episode, released Monday, Chammah examined similar interrogation tactics used by the same Texas Ranger in a different murder case. Based on audio from eight hours of questioning, the podcaster questioned how the Texas Ranger manipulated a suspect’s feelings, describing it at one point as gaslighting, to make him more emotional. At one point in the interrogation audio, the man asks the Texas Ranger to just shoot him.

The Ranger got the man to talk in hypotheticals and tried to get him to question his own memory, Chammah says in the podcast. Facing capital murder charges, the man planned to go to trial. But before the case could go before a jury, DNA tests came back that pointed to another man originally suspected of the murder who died in a car crash.

In the latest chapter of the series, Chammah says massive pieces of the recording in Driskill’s case were missing and that the Texas Ranger violated Driskill’s constitutional rights multiple times.

Chammah hints in the latest episode that in Driskill’s case, DNA evidence was either not collected or was too poor to be useful and promises to discuss that more in the next episode. According to the Innocence Project, the Parker County District Attorney’s Office agreed to DNA testing of numerous items collected from the crime scene and that analysis is underway.

The fifth part of the podcast series is expected to hit Spotify and Apple Podcasts on May 29.

This story contains information from the Star-Telegram’s archives.