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The Case of Kirstin Blaise Lobato
📻 Episode #53
🎙️ Hosted by Jason Flom
📅 Apr 16, 2018
About This Episode
Kirstin Blaise Lobato was twice convicted of the gruesome murder of a 44-year-old homeless man named Duran Bailey, whose body was found behind a dumpster off the Las Vegas Strip just after 10 p.m. on July 8, 2001, covered in a thin layer of trash. Bailey’s teeth had been knocked out, and his eyes were…
The Case
Kirstin Blaise Lobato was twice convicted of the gruesome murder of a 44-year-old homeless man named Duran Bailey, whose body was found behind a dumpster off the Las Vegas Strip just after 10 p.m. on July 8, 2001, covered in a thin layer of trash. Bailey’s teeth had been knocked out, and his eyes were bloodied and swollen shut; his carotid artery had been slashed, his rectum stabbed, and his penis amputated. Despite a crime scene rich with potential evidence, Las Vegas detectives Thomas Thowsen and James LaRochelle ignored obvious leads. Instead, they focused their investigation on 18-year-old Kirstin Blaise Lobato, based solely on a third-hand rumor. Lobato became a suspect because of an attack she fended off in Las Vegas in May 2001. A man attempted to rape her, and she fought him off with a knife, slashing him in the groin area before escaping in her car. In July, police drove up to the small town of Panaca to interview Lobato about the incident. On the day of the crime, she was at home with her parents in Panaca, which was nearly three hours northeast of Las Vegas near the Utah state line. She was forthcoming with police and described an incident entirely different from Bailey’s murder. When the police told her that the man had died, she mistakenly believed it was the same man that had attacked her, and she expressed remorse, which the police took to be a confession. Even though there was not a shred of physical evidence linking Lobato to the crime scene, on May 18, 2002, she was convicted of first-degree murder and sexual penetration of a dead body and sentenced to 40 to 100 years. The state’s theory of the crime fell apart in October 2017, when Vanessa Potkin, Director of Post-Conviction Litigation at the Innocence Project, and a team of attorneys presented nearly a week’s worth of testimony from several renowned entomologists and a medical examiner, each of whom demonstrated why the state’s narrative never made any scientific sense. On December 19, 2017, the judge vacated Lobato’s conviction and ordered a new trial. Ten days later, the prosecution dropped all charges, and Kirstin Blaise Lobato was freed after serving almost 16 years in prison. In this episode she is joined by two of her Innocence Project attorneys, Jane Putcher & Adnan Salter.
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In Their Own Words — transcript excerpts
Short excerpts from the episode's official published transcript, with timestamps — listen from these moments, or read the full transcript via the podcast's own platforms.
00:06:59“Speaker 4: And there was a little bit of back and forth Speaker 4: in there. I can't remember exactly the dates and times, Speaker 4: but I know that I came back to Vegas for Speaker 4: a very short period of time and called my dad Speaker 4: and made him come get me so that I could”
00:25:06“Speaker 4: Oh, there were absolutely happy moments. I encountered some really Speaker 4: beautiful people while I was in there, and I encountered Speaker 4: some really horrible people. You know, it's like anywhere you go, Speaker 4: there's good and there's bad. But there were some experiences Speaker 4: that I had that were unique in that I had”
00:43:54“Speaker 6: So right before Christmas we knew that we were going Speaker 6: to have a new trial, and that the sort of Speaker 6: in the prosecutor's court whether or not they actually wanted Speaker 6: to have a third trial on this or whether or Speaker 6: not that we're going to dismiss the charges. Same prosecutor, yes,”
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