| Post Trial Juror Interview - Ray Diss |
| Saturday, 12 September 2009 19:36 |
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Click the link to watch this interview - it's 20 minutes long but after the first minute, this injustice will start to make sense on how it happened. This juror has a son that works for Hamilton TWP - directly linked to the EMT Services that worked on Sarah that night. http://www.wlwt.com/video/19090080/index.html Transcript of Ray Diss Interview: DISS: Yeah, we watched...we watched his expressions and such when a... different testimony was brought up and pictures and that and he was....he was totally expressionless, I mean he didn't show any...any expression to us...you know...to me. REPORTER: Is that how a lot of the jurors felt? DISS: Yeah, I think so. REPORTER: What was it....kind of...if you can kind of sum up.....I know you can't sum up....but as much as you can.....these last two days.... DISS: Uh huh.... REPORTER: Um...first you went into deliberations....what was it like? Was it completely divided?.....um... DISS: Well, we sort of had three categories....we had undecided...and..and...some that were leanin' toward guilty...and some.....that's mostly the way we did a...a beginning vote....just to see where everybody stood....ya' know?...and made it like a ya' know...a secret ballot kind of thing. So probably half and half was...ya' know....one way or the other but...uh...and some just not decided one way or the other. REPORTER: Was there anyone that went into it saying he..he's not guilty? (1:15) DISS: No...No........I don't....I don't think....well.....yeah....I guess you'd have to say that because they uh....they uh....hadn't made up....they were the ones that were undecided one way or the other. REPORTER: But there was no.....was there anyone there that when you guys went into the room that said he's not guilty? DISS: No, because there was suspicion....there was.....from the 911 tape...the....the things that went down on the 911 tape...we read.....we listened to the tape...we timed the tape....ya'know...and we started a little timeline there....we started zero when he....when he called...and how....ya' know...at what point....so many seconds later...and so many....ya'know....and we went all through the different things that happened on the 911 tape....uh.....I don't think anybody felt they would have left their wife in that water, called 911 and said "my wife's drowned, she fell asleep in the bathtub and left her in the water. He reached around....he said she was face down under the faucet and he would have had.... it had a little stopper kind of gizmo in the bottom that you had to lift up and turn a part of a turn and that's how the drain worked...ya'know...you didn't have a little thing on the wall that you flipped so uh....he had to reach around her head, if her head was in that end of the tub, which was the wrong end for her head to be in....uh...you just don't sit on that end of the tub...uh...and...pull the drain. Why would I pull the drain without lifting my wife up?....ya'know.....and then the 911 operator asked him...uh...where is she now? Well it..well the water's draining....and he said "get her out of there, get her on a flat surface". Now from that point on we made that.....when he said to get her out of the tub, get her on a flat surface, 29 seconds later he came back....Ryan came back and said "she's on a flat surface". Okay? From that point on it was two and a half minutes and a Warren County policeman was standing at her head. She was bone dry except for her hair. The...a minute or so later, the other township police came in....uh...Sgt. Elliott was standing at his feet...she noticed and he noticed too that there wasn't any pruning of the fingers where you lay in the water awhile....and.....ya' know your fingers and toes wrinkle up and....just the color of the body, the body being dry....they had to log roll her right away to put the patches on, you can't put the patches on even with perspiration. They didn't have to dry the body under her, ya'know, or to put the patch on the front of her. And when the medics tried to do the intubation, her head kept pulling forward...ya' know.....and left...a little...the little thing in our mind that's telling us....rigor mortis was setting in. It takes....temperatures vary...okay?..temperatures, room whatever, I mean...but basically you can say like 30 minutes for rigor mortis to start....uh....after death, ya' know after complete death. That was a sign to us that rigor mortis had already started so we're not talking about 3 minutes before she was in the water or 3 minutes before she had died ....we're talking at least 30 minutes before that she had died...ya'know...at least 30 minutes...uh...things didn't add up.....we basically....all them little bottles sitting on the bathtub...there was uh.....4 arm prints under the bottles and then the bottles had been placed back on top the floor up there when they did the prints. There was two sets of prints on the back of the tub that were like this....(demonstrating two hands moving downward palms open)....from a small hand...ya'know, the two small hands....and ya' know, all of that plus..like I say...we took all the testimony....we took every witness, that more or less threw the....ya'know she had dry clothes down here....dry magazines on the tub, no water laying on the tub, no water laying on the ceramic floor, ya'know, pap...magazines on the floor that are dry, carpet dry, she's dry,...ya'know....was it 30 minutes before that he got her out of the tub?...was it an hour before that he got her out of the tub? We felt like he orchestrated the whole half of the 911 tape. When he did CPR, supposedly on the 911 tape, all he did was hold the phone up here and go...(demonstrating 4 blown breaths)....that's not what it sounds like to do CPR. Ya'know, you could actually just hear him blowing in the phone. All that was orchestrated. Why do you orchestrate that if you're not trying to hide something? Why do you put the bottles.....the door.....when you opened the door it covered half the tub....ya' know....uh....he had a small area a small tub, anyway, to get her out of there....the 144 lbs. of dead weight, a wet body, getting her up out of there and everything....there wouldn't have been 28 or 9 seconds of dead silence on the phone, you'd have heard him grunting and...you know,...Whatever. .....bathtub squeaking, you'd a heard somethin' and....all the articles that were on the tub wouldn't have been there, like I say water on the tub ya' know....all that didn't make sense to us...uh....we went....like I say....we went through every....every uh....everybody that was on the stand....we went through all their testimony and we....we wrote the person's name down and we put down there what they had said....we had notes....everybody took notes....some really good notes....and uh....everybody was very serious about this. It wasn't taken lightly at all. REPORTER: When....when was your mind made up? (7:58) DISS: Uh...Like I said, I didn't want my medical background to tell me that rigor mortis had set in....it was a done deal. No...uh...Probably the afternoon of the second day...ya'know....maybe lunch time. I pretty much..... yeah....I'd pretty much convinced myself that...... the sleep lady came in there and she went through her stuff and all that stuff and you couldn't.....she convinced all of us at that point, I think, that you couldn't go to sleep and drown....or it's highly unlikely. Ya'know...what's probable and what's possible is two different things, ya'know. REPORTER: So what do you think did happen? (8:44) DISS: Uh.... REPORTER: That's one thing to me sitting through it....the prosecution said, they could of.....she could have drowned in the bathtub.....she could have drowned in the sink....she could have drowned in the tub....I..I wasn't a juror but I would think I'd have to visualize, How did she drown? like was there....(garbled)....come to a conclusion? DISS: When they're trying to prove a child abuse case...okay....they have a dead child here, they put her in a cooler for a day, and when they get her out, all these bruises show up that you couldn't see before. Why it does that? I don't know why it does that, but when they took her out of the....the uh...ya'know, thing they keep 'em in overnight, these bruises showed up on her neck (pointing to area of adam's apple), she had almost like a thumb print here, (pointing to right side of neck) she had a bruise across here, (wrapping fingers around throat to left side of neck)...all right?....she had 3 bruises on the back of her head (pointing to back, right crown area), and she had just a slight bruise on her forehead at the hairline, and a bruise on the back of her neck (pointing to neck below base of skull). Uh...to bruise, you have to be alive. If you're heart's not beating you don't bruise. The bruises on her arms (pointing to both arms at inner elbow area), and the bruises on her neck (pointing to back of neck), and went down into here (pointing to left chest area), that was just blood draining from vessels and arteries. It was a blood bruise; it wasn't a compression bruise. Well....we think he held her under the water. Uh....either he walked in, and she was asleep in the bathtub, and he shoved her down, and....ya'know....she got a big gulp of water...of course...because she was surprised, and...instead of being able to push herself right back up, her hands were on the bottom of the tub trying to push...uh...she couldn't do it because somebody was holding her down and of course once you get that first good gulp of water in your lungs, you're pretty much down and it takes 30 seconds to drown...maybe. So...I mean something like that could have happened...her hair was combed...or appeared to be combed with a uh, pick type thing...ya'know. She could have been bending over the tub washing her hair ya'know...had... ya'know, gotten up somehow and somebody shoved her back down in the tub that's why the two hand prints were down the back of the tub.... Uh...that could have happened and it still could have caused these bruises too, (pointing to front of throat). Like I say, we don't think...or we have no doubt...er..we didn't have any reason to assume that he was not in love with that lady. We think he had some beers; he admitted to four; he had that beer tap...so....when you have a beer tap, you never drain the glass....I mean that's just a.....you just don't do it when you're watching a Bengals game. You run back in there, the glass is half full and it's gettin' a little warm, there's a commercial....you fill it up...you know? So....to say he had four beers or six beers...ya'know....you don't know....and nobody ever actually ever...ya'know.. did a sobriety test on him or anything, and...and...ya'know, if you're drinkin' you get angry..easy. He had a...he had a problem with watchin' everything...we felt he was controlling...even though nobody said that, what convinced us of that...he had to be at work on Friday. He was at work...her and her mom was out shopping, and her mother said this on the stand that uh, she bought something with the credit card, he called her on the cell phone right away, almost as soon as she swiped it and said, "Do you really need that?" So he had to be on the computer at work, keeping tabs on his wife. You know....uh...I felt they were probably under a fin....not...they probably weren't.... ready to file bankruptcy or anything like that but house payments up there in these new homes and stuff are pretty dear....uh...they were probably breakin' even. REPORTER: What about a motive? They never mentioned a motive. Every person who took the stand said they had the greatest marriage, they said that there was no financial problems. They said that....friends said that there was never fights between them. (13:17) DISS: I don't.....I think it was just a love spat...you know....I really do...I think it was a....ya'know....and I think he realized what he had done and then he tried to cover it up somehow, to make it look....ya'know....I mean, they come up with all these things that were...uh... one chance in two billion of her having a first seizure....uh.....the same way a falling asleep drowning...ya'know...there was just too much...too much....too much evidence that pointed at...something happened. And he was the only one there. The police had gone all around the home, checked all the doors and windows...uh...previous..ya'know...right after they had taken her to the hospital and they taped the house off and stuff so they know nobody broke in...ya'know...and him and that puppy was the only one in the house. And we just feel like they had....and we don't feel like he was downstairs watching TV. The downstairs TV was on 5...uh...the Bengal's game's on ESPN, the TV upstairs was on ESPN...uh....maybe they were up there exchanging words back and forth and he got mad and just grabbed her and threw her...ya'know..in the tub...ya'know...that's a possibility. But....there was no motive, there was no insurance or anything like that. That's why we didn't go with..uh..aggravated murder...ya'know...If we had more choices we might have considered them, but we had two choices. Uh....Either turn somebody lose that was uh...obviously hiding something, ya'know...and and we felt beyond a reasonable doubt that he helped cause her death. REPORTER: You mean that if there was even a lesser charge than murder, you might have considered that? (15:25) DISS: Possibly..ya'know...but...ya'know...having the...like I say, we don't feel between uh...uh...I can't say that for sure. But.... REPORTER: (Garbled) Is that what...That's what the last day or most of the deliberations consisted of, was deciding between not guilty and murder? DISS: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah,.... REPORTER: You had ruled out..... DISS: The last day we started out, we even worked through lunch, we worked through supper, we just sat there and ate some sandwiches or whatever...uh...that's the day that we actually put every witness up on that stand that they had out there with the paper; we put every witness on there and we voted whether that was a credible witness or not. If we believed what they said, and we wrote down from all our notes exactly what each witness had said, ya'know, and then....and then after we went through the 37 witnesses, or whatever there was, the 30 some, ya'know, we went back, ya'know. Now what part of what this witness said, ya'know, without a doubt do we believe, ya'know, and we would vote on that, ya'know and put that up on this other board. REPORTER: It took a lot of...... (16:43) DISS: Oh absolutely, it was very stressful and I want people to know..ya'know... that this wasn't done lightly, it wasn't done...uh...ya'know...the decision wasn't done because we didn't like the fellow...ya'know...or whatever...uh...uh... REPORTER: Emotionally, when you came out last night... DISS: Everybody was upset. REPORTER: You heard.... DISS: You mean after the verdicts? REPORTER: You heard the cheers for "Not Guilty", you heard two seconds later that was taken away. What was going through your mind? DISS: Well, it kind of tore my heart out when I heard that. It tore my heart out to vote Guilty. It really did...I mean...there was nobody...uh...I mean no one walked in there and said, "Cut and Dry, this is it" ya'know. Uh...still like I say, the last little bit, we come...went over all the reasons...ya'know...there was just so much compelling stuff there that said that he was covering it up...ya'know...he was covering it up...he...ya'know..things couldn't happen the way..... REPORTER: Did you hear what he said about his wife? His last statement? (17:59) DISS: He said he loved his wife. I love my wife and I didn't have a chance, they arrested me the day after she died. REPORTER: What are your thoughts on that? DISS: Uh....that's the only words that we've ever heard him say...uh....I believe he loved his wife. I really do, and I think it was a uh...ya'know...I hate to say my own opinion but, ya'know....what I gathered from it, it was a lover's spat. REPORTER: If he had taken the stand, do you think that would have changed anything? (18:41) DISS: Maybe. It may have. You don't know, ya'know, people have children...uh...ya'know we all have our own children...I probably have a child his age, I've got one about every other age, ya'know....and....if he actually s...yeah...I think it would have....uh...it would have been another....another thing...ya'know...another thing to consider. REPORTER: Did it come down to just one person not being convinced or was it pretty much....because that's what everyone's wondering, is it one person that's holding this up. Why is it taking...? (19:22) DISS: No...No...Like I said, it was....we had the folks that were probably convinced that he was guilty, and then we had folks...ya know....that hadn't made their mind up yet. REPORTER: Would you say it was kind of split, half and half? DISS: Yeah, yeah, and even the folks that probably thought he was guilty...thought he had done something, they uh...it was tough...it was tough, uh...you're sittin' on that fence the whole time. REPORTER: Are you comfortable with the decision that was made? DISS: I think so, yeah, yeah (20:05) |