Columbia MO - Halloween 2001 - witness to a murder (Ferguson: 2013, crime)

[IWNR]

As you likely heard if you were living there at the time, in 2001, Columbia
Daily Tribune sports editor Kent Heitholt was brutally murdered in the parking
lot shortly after he left work at 2am on Halloween night.

What followed was a decade-long legal saga that continues to this day and is as
bizarre as the crime itself. It has been featured on both 48 Hours and
Dateline. Two innocent men remain in prison for the crime that they clearly did
not commit.

There are enough strange twists, turns, angles and coincidences to fill a
trilogy of crime novels, so I will forego those there and get to the point:

Shortly after the crime, Tribune janitors spotted what they described as 2
college-aged men crouched near the victim's body. They called to these men who
then, stood up, walked forward, said "Someone's hurt here, man", then continued
east down the alley, toward the Mizzou campus.

The police concluded these two men were Ryan Ferguson and Chuck Erickson, who
killed Kent Heitholt. They were wrong on both counts. Not only were they not
Ryan and Chuck, they were not the killers. It's quite apparent from the record
that they were innocent passerby who happened onto the scene after the fact. These men
have never been identified. But they may hold the key to finally unlocking the
truth of this case.

If you have any information on who either of these men are, please come forward. It is entirely understandable why that has not happened to this point,
and it is never too late to do the right thing. This unbearably sad case has
left a wife without her husband, two children without their father, two lives
destroyed by wrongful convictions, countless other friends and family with
broken hearts, and a killer free to claim the lives of more innocent victims.

Nothing can bring Kent back, but learning the truth of what happened to him
would at least help get the wrong guys out of prison, the right guy into prison,
and allow wounds to finally start to heal.

Here is a billboard showing a composite sketch based on the description of the only witness to get a good look at the men.

[appalledatjusticesystem]

The prosecutors are idiots!!! They hate to admit when they are wrong, I do not believe either one of these men should be in prison. I do not believe in our justice system at all, it is the prosecutors job to keep people in prison regardless of what the truth is.