Jeff Titus, who has spent 21 years in prison for the murder of two deer hunters in 1990, is a free man thanks to evidence discovered by a true-crime series and podcast.
Titus, a 71-year old man, left Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater, Michigan, in part due to Investigation Discovery’s Killer In Question and Susan Simpson’s podcast Undisclosed.
It marks the latest innocent man to be freed as a result of the boom in interest in true-crime projects.
Titus’ conviction was overturned by U.S. Federal District Court Judge Paul D. Borman after the Michigan Conviction Integrity Unit, the Michigan Department of Attorney General and Titus’ attorneys at the Michigan Innocence Clinic submitted a joint filing requesting that the conviction be set aside, based on multiple Brady violations uncovered.
The series is produced by Red Marble Media, filmed in conjunction with Simpson’s Undisclosed podcast. It was they that uncovered the violations.
Titus said, “I’m just so happy to finally have my freedom, and so thankful the justice system finally got it right. I’ve lost a lot of my life locked-up for something I didn’t do and now I just want to focus on making up for that lost time. I’d like to thank Susan and Jacinda and the Michigan Innocence Clinic and so many others who I can’t wait to thank in person.”
Red Marble Media exec producers Jacinda Davis and Kevin Fitzpatrick began working on the series in 2019 and became intrigued with the case, which turned in to the first two episodes of Killer In Question, which airs on Discovery+.
The murders of Doug Estes and Jim Bennett occurred in the woods adjacent to Titus’ farm on the first day of deer season on November 17, 1990. The men did not know each other and were hunting separately when they were each killed with a single shot to the back. At the hour of the murder, Titus was deer hunting with a friend over 27 miles away and thus was cleared by the original detectives on the case. The murders went unsolved. But the investigation was reopened 10 years later by a newly formed Cold Case unit who quickly identified Titus as the primary suspect and arrested him in 2001. Prosecutors argued to the jury that Titus would have had enough time to drive to the murder scene and back, rendering his alibi faulty. Titus was convicted in August 2002 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Minutes after two shots were heard from within the Fulton Game area, which bordered Titus’ property, two witnesses heard a car screech off the road, landing in a ditch. They offered to call a tow truck, but the driver refused help.
Davis and Simpson discovered that two years later, the witnesses identified Thomas Dillon as the man driving the car. Dillon, a serial killer, was arrested in 1992 and charged with killing hunters, fishermen and other outdoorsmen. He died in prison in 2011, while serving a life sentence. But the fact that Dillon had been identified as the man driving the car that went into the ditch on the day of the murders was never disclosed to detectives working the case back in Kalamazoo.
Davis and Simpson also uncovered that the key witness in the case against Titus had changed her story multiple times, the last falsely placing Titus at the scene of the crime.
It marks the latest exoneration by the team following the exoneration of Cain Joshua Storey and Darrell Lee Clark at the end of last year via the Proof podcast and its producers Davis, Simpson, and Fitzpatrick.
Simpson also helped Joey Watkins, another subject of the Undisclosed podcast, be released on bond after his conviction was overturned.
Jason Sarlanis, President, Turner Networks, ID and HLN, Linear & Streaming said, “This is a perfect example of the power and purpose of what we can do as a leader in the true crime genre. At our best, Investigation Discovery’s content can right injustices in the world and allow for actual impact on our justice system. Today, we celebrate with Jeff Titus and his loved ones.”
Susan Simpson added, “I trained as a lawyer, and in my years of working on wrongful conviction cases, I’ve learned to look for the stories where the details never quite add up because they will likely take you in startling directions that you could never have predicted — and that’s exactly what happened with Jeff Titus’s case. From the beginning, it was obvious that something had gone wrong here. But what we couldn’t have known when we began our investigation was that there was a serial killer who targeted hunters living just a few hours away — and who looked exactly like a man that was seen speeding away from the crime scene in a car that was exactly like the one the serial killer owned. And who, our investigation learned, had confessed 25 years ago that he was the one who had killed the hunters in Michigan.”