Submerged: How a Cold Case Condemned an Innocent Man to Hide a Family's Darkest Secret
In March 1993, sixteen-year-old Rayna Rison was abducted outside the La Porte, Indiana, veterinary hospital where she worked. A month later, her body was found submerged under tree limbs in a rural pond. Police targeted her brother-in-law, Ray McCarty, as the prime suspect. Although a grand jury indicted him for the murder in 1998, prosecutors later dropped the charges. Then in 2013, county officers arrested Jason Tibbs, Rayna's middle-school boyfriend, convicted him, and sentenced him to forty years in prison.
After a two-year investigation, drawing on dozens of interviews and more than a thousand pages of police files, author Hillel Levin completes the case against McCarty, following clues and leads that detectives overlooked. In the process, he reveals startling new information about the killer's murder weapon and accomplices, and uncovers the politics and misconduct that enabled the prosecutor to convict Jason Tibbs. Although cold cases are celebrated in popular culture, Jason's trial shows the perils they can pose for innocent defendants.
At the heart of Submerged is the tragic story of Rayna Rison, an exceptional young woman with a promising future whose family and justice system failed to keep her from harm. Ironically, the person now held accountable for her murder is the friend she most saw as her protector.
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Investigative journalist Hillel Levin writes a scathing and utterly absorbing examination of an unholy alliance among cops, politicians, and lawyers in Indiana, resulting in the imprisonment of an innocent man, and the exoneration of the actual murderer of a 16-year-old girl. A powerfully written narrative that sparks both fascination with the mishandling of the case and outrage that the wrong man still sits in jail. Shocking and absorbing from start to finish.--Connie Fletcher, author of What Cops Know
An eminently readable and compelling account of a murder investigation that spanned more than twenty years and which resulted in a conviction that is still being contested in the courts.--Robert M. Sanger, past President of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice
