Part 1

The Prosecutor and the Snitch Ring

“Cold Justice” star Kelly Siegler relied on jailhouse informants to win convictions despite reasons to doubt their credibility.

by Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith.

Originally published on December 17, 2023. Republished with permissions from The Intercept, an award-winning nonprofit news organization dedicated to holding the powerful accountable through fearless, adversarial journalism. Sign up for The Intercept’s Newsletter, https://theintercept.com/newsletter/.

1 - Secrets of Stardom

Only a few bones remained and there was no clear cause of death.

In the realm of murder cases gone cold, this was a challenging one — even for Kelly Siegler, a veteran prosecutor from Houston, Texas, with a nearly perfect conviction record and an evangelical fervor for solving cold cases using circumstantial evidence.

There were a few facts to start with. Twenty-nine-year-old Margie Pointer had disappeared in 1987. What was left of her was found in a ravine near Alamogordo, New Mexico, 17 years later. Despite the best efforts of a local cop haunted by the case, it remained unsolved. The Alamogordo Police Department needed help, and Siegler, star of the true-crime reality show “Cold Justice,” was there to answer the call.

Siegler arrived in town with her co-stars, Yolanda McClary, a former Las Vegas crime scene investigator, and Johnny Bonds, a retired Houston homicide detective. They had their work cut out for them, but there was an additional hurdle: “The statute of limitations for second-degree murder has run out,” Siegler explained at the start of the episode. “So our job this week is to see if the evidence warrants a first-degree murder.”

“A first-degree murder in New Mexico has to be committed in a willful and deliberate way,” she went on. “Since we don’t have a crime scene or any DNA, we’re gonna need to find witnesses who can show that it was committed in a willful or deliberate way.”

In other words, determining what happened to Pointer wasn’t the aim so much as ensuring they landed on a scenario that would make her alleged killer eligible for punishment.

In the world of “Cold Justice,” identifying new suspects isn’t what Siegler and her team are there to do. Instead, they arrive in town with the objective of wrapping up a cold case within a week. They always have a couple of suspects in mind, individuals the local cops have previously investigated. In Alamogordo, they quickly latched onto Pointer’s former co-worker, a man with whom, rumor had it, she was having an affair. The day Pointer went missing, he showed up at a friend’s cabin 4 miles from where her bones were later found with a hurt thumb and a scratch on his cheek. In the absence of a body, cause of death, or any other physical evidence, these injuries convinced Siegler that she knew how Pointer had met her demise.

At the Alamogordo Police Department, Siegler reenacted her theory of the murder. She and Bonds demonstrated how Pointer could have been strangled to death and her attempts to fight back could have produced the injuries found on their suspect. With his hands around Siegler’s neck, Bonds explained that Pointer would have tried to pull the killer’s thumb off her throat. Siegler, pulling his thumb with one hand, reached toward his cheek with the other. “Scratch, scratch,” she said. Bonds said it would take 15 to 20 seconds for Pointer to black out and at least another minute to kill her.

“A minute and a half of consistent pressure without letting go, never changing your mind,” Siegler said. “How is that not deliberate?”

“All right, sounds good,” the police investigator said. They decided to take it to the district attorney.

The DA was less convinced and declined to seek an indictment. Siegler and the investigator returned looking crestfallen. Bonds sunk his head into his hands.

“Here’s the good news: Your case is strong, your case is great,” Siegler told the investigator. “It might be circumstantial, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s ready to go right now. But she doesn’t want to do it yet.”

The episode, titled “Sunspot Highway,” aired in July 2014 as part of the show’s second season. Although “Cold Justice” had been running for less than a year, Siegler had already attracted a devoted following, and the Alamogordo DA’s decision did not go over well. Fans were convinced that Pointer’s co-worker had killed her and Siegler had figured it all out. “This is a slam dunk case for everyone except the DA,” one viewer wrote on the show’s Facebook page. “WTF is with that idiot DA,” another wrote. “You guys handed her the killer on a silver platter and she refused to charge him!”

That a case so lacking in direct evidence could convince Siegler’s fans of the man’s guilt was a testament to her skill in crafting a narrative, whether for a TV audience or a real-world jury.

As an assistant district attorney in Harris County, Texas, Siegler was known for her courtroom theatrics. She once famously straddled her colleague atop a bloody mattress at trial to reenact for jurors how the defendant had stabbed her husband 193 times. Siegler’s flair for the dramatic was perfect for TV, while her reliance on circumstantial evidence allowed her to spin bare facts into a compelling theory that might or might not be supported.

While “Cold Justice” often boasts about its track record — it has helped bring about 49 arrests and 21 convictions over six seasons, the Oxygen network reported in May — the show has also weathered a series of defamation lawsuits. Many of the cases Siegler assembled eventually fell apart precisely because there was too little direct evidence to convict whomever she identified as the killer.

Siegler’s TV career has not suffered for the controversies. In September, she took the stage before a cheering crowd in Orlando, Florida, as one of the headliners at CrimeCon, an annual conference for true-crime fans and creators. She was there to promote two shows. Not only had “Cold Justice” begun taping its seventh season, but she would also be starring in a new series, “Prosecuting Evil With Kelly Siegler.” The program, which premiered on November 18, takes her back to her home state to examine “the most harrowing homicides and toughest trials in Texas history — all told with Kelly Siegler’s unique insight and unparalleled access.”

“Prosecuting Evil” will revisit some of Siegler’s old Harris County cases, offering fans a behind-the-scenes look at the celebrity prosecutor’s “superhero origin story,” as one of her fellow speakers put it. “Both of our shows are about reality. There’s no faking,” Siegler told the crowd. “We’re the real deal.” She waxed nostalgic for her years in the district attorney’s office. “All those big cases,” she said, “no one’s ever told those stories.”

On paper, Siegler’s record as a Harris County prosecutor is far more impressive than the stats boasted by the Oxygen network. Over her two decades in Houston, Siegler handled more than 200 trials, securing more than 60 murder convictions and 19 death sentences. But the stories behind some of those convictions raise serious questions about their integrity. While Siegler’s formula for closing cold cases might make for great television, it has left a trail of wreckage in its wake.

As Siegler’s TV star has been rising over the last decade, a parallel reality has been playing out in Texas courts, where allegations of prosecutorial misconduct have tarnished Siegler’s reputation. Appellate litigation in murder cases handled by Siegler has exposed a history of withholding exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys, including in death penalty cases. One prominent criminal defense attorney has called on the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to review all of Siegler’s convictions.

Some of the most disturbing evidence of Siegler’s conduct is documented in the files of a case that has largely gone unnoticed: the 2002 conviction of Ronald Jeffrey Prible. Prible was sent to death row for the murder of a Houston family. The evidence tying him to the crime was entirely circumstantial. He has maintained his innocence for more than 20 years.

In 2020, a federal district judge overturned Prible’s conviction on the basis of Siegler’s suppression of evidence, ordering the state to retry or release him within six months. Instead, Texas fought the order, persuading the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate Prible’s death sentence on procedural grounds. The court did not address Siegler’s actions. Prible appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in June, the justices declined to intervene.

Today, Prible faces execution despite the fact that the case against him has unraveled. A monthslong investigation by The Intercept — including a review of thousands of pages of court records — shows that Prible’s case contains numerous hallmarks of wrongful convictions, from a shockingly inept police investigation to unsupportable junk science peddled by prosecutors at trial.

But particularly alarming is the way Siegler weaponized a network of confidential informants to construct her case against Prible, as the federal district judge found.

The star witness was a man named Michael Beckcom, who testified that Prible confessed to the killings while they were imprisoned together in southeast Texas. Beckcom, who was doing time for the audacious murder of a federal witness, was part of a ring of informants at the same lockup in Beaumont, each trying to game the system in an effort to shave time off their sentences. Several informants offered information to Siegler before they had even met Prible, according to a petition challenging his conviction filed in federal court. The petition details how Siegler encouraged Beckcom to extract details from Prible that would help her convict him and hid the extent of the informants’ involvement at trial.

To Harvard law professor Alexandra Natapoff, author of “Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice,” the role of informants in Prible’s case is emblematic of a deeper problem that corrupts the criminal legal system. “American criminal law has essentially created an underground market in which we permit the state to trade leniency for information,” she said. Prosecutors have wide discretion to avail themselves of informants who have an obvious incentive to lie about what they know — a leading cause of wrongful convictions.

“Because so much of these negotiations and transactions take place under the table, the likelihood that anyone will ever find out is extremely low,” Natapoff said. “And because we reward police and prosecutors for arrests and convictions, we have a baked-in, dysfunctional incentive for them to use bad witnesses, bad evidence, over and over again.”

Court records reveal that Siegler repeatedly used informants in murder cases despite reasons to doubt their credibility. Details of the Beaumont snitch ring only came to light after Prible and another man Siegler sent to prison realized that she had relied on the same network of informants in both their cases. Despite strict limits on communication between incarcerated people, the two men, whose cases were otherwise unrelated, managed to connect the dots.

Siegler not only gained a reputation as a prosecutor who was willing to help informants seek sentence reductions, but she also advocated for them even when she didn’t consider their information reliable, court records show. Taken together, the records paint a damning picture of a prosecutor who cut corners and betrayed her professional obligations in order to secure convictions in weak or shaky cases. At best, Siegler was reckless in her use of informants and careless about scrutinizing the information they provided. At worst, as Prible’s lawyers argue, she actively conspired to use dubious testimony from a ring of snitches to win a conviction despite knowing the case wouldn’t otherwise hold up — framing an innocent man for murder.

Siegler has denied any wrongdoing. She declined to be interviewed for this investigation. “A second grader could see that you are biased and in no way inclined to listen to the truth or appreciate what really happened with these prosecutions,” Siegler wrote in response to questions from The Intercept. “I took an oath to seek justice and justice is what these defendants got.”

2 - House Full of Bodies

Gregory Francisco lifted his garage door before sunrise on Saturday, April 24, 1999, and immediately smelled smoke. As he rushed across the street toward the home of his neighbor Steve Herrera, Francisco could see it too, billowing from the turbines on the roof and curling out from the garage doors.

The night before, Herrera had invited Francisco to one of his regular get-togethers to drink beer, play pool, and listen to music inside the two-car garage. Francisco didn’t make it, but as far as he could tell, things looked like they usually did: The music was on, and the garage doors were raised to shoulder height. By the time Francisco headed to bed around midnight, the gathering appeared to be winding down.

Now, however, as Francisco rang Herrera’s doorbell, he could hear music blaring — “maxed out,” he later testified. No one answered, so he rushed to a side door, which was hot to the touch. Francisco kicked it open. Inside the garage, he found Herrera face down on the floor between the pool table and a washer and dryer. Francisco yelled for Herrera to wake up, but then he saw blood. His neighbor was dead.

Firefighters were the first to arrive on the scene. In a den just beyond the garage, they made a grisly discovery: Herrera’s girlfriend, Nilda Tirado, was slumped on a smoldering loveseat. Next to her charred body was a can of Kutzit, a volatile solvent; on the floor was a red gas can. The walls were covered in soot, and the couple’s big screen TV had melted.

First responders found the children in the bedrooms. In one, Herrera’s 7-year-old daughter, Valerie, was face down on a bed; Tirado’s 7-year-old daughter, Rachel, was nearby on the floor. In the master bedroom, firefighters found the couple’s 22-month-old daughter, Jade. The medical examiner determined that Herrera and Tirado had been killed before the fire was set, each shot once through the back of the neck in what she called an “assassin’s wound.” The children, whose airways were full of soot, had died from smoke inhalation.

Word of the murders spread quickly. Relatives of Herrera and Tirado gathered outside the brick home as investigators processed the scene. The house was tidy, and there were no signs of forced entry or a robbery gone wrong. Herrera’s wallet, with approximately $900 inside, was found in the back pocket of his shorts. No weapon was found, nor any shell casings, which led investigators to believe a revolver had been used to shoot the couple. They gathered bottles and cans from the garage to process for fingerprints but failed to preserve what appeared to be blood stains on the wall and washing machine — evidence that could have been left by the perpetrator.

Curtis Brown, a detective with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, led the investigation. Court records reflect it was a less than robust inquiry. At trial, Brown confirmed that he spoke to just four people the day of the murders, including Herrera’s brother Edward and his brother-in-law Victor Martinez. Those interviews led him to Jeffrey Prible, who had been a friend of Herrera’s since grade school. From there, Brown looked nowhere else.

According to Edward, Herrera and Prible were at the house playing pool Friday night and had paged him looking to score an eight ball of cocaine. Edward and Herrera were both dealers, Edward told investigators, and Herrera was a regular user. Edward said he tried to find some but never did.

Martinez had been at Herrera’s that night. He told Brown that he picked up cigarettes and a 12-pack of Bud Light on his way to the house, arriving around 10 p.m. Later, with the beer almost gone, Herrera and Prible loaded into Martinez’s white Ford Escort, and the three men made their way to Rick’s Cabaret, a nearby strip club. Prible was friendly, Martinez said, and nothing seemed off. After several drinks, the men headed back to Herrera’s around 2 a.m. They smoked a joint outside before Martinez headed home. Prible and Herrera went back into the garage to continue playing pool.

On Saturday afternoon, Brown and Deputy Ramon Hernandez made their way several blocks west to Prible’s home. Prible, then 27, had been honorably discharged from the Marines in 1995 and was living at his parents’ place along with his 7-year-old son. The deputy said Prible was shocked to learn about the murders. He agreed to go down to the sheriff’s station to provide a statement.

Prible’s statement largely mirrored Martinez’s. After Martinez left, Prible said, he and Herrera played pool until Tirado came into the garage, fixing Herrera with a “look” that Prible took as a sign it was time to wrap things up. He said Herrera drove him home around 4 a.m. Prible went straight to bed and slept until early afternoon. He was hanging around the house, playing with his son, until the cops came knocking.

The deputy later testified that he believed Prible’s statement to be “truthful.” Nonetheless the cops asked Prible to take a polygraph, the results of which indicated deception. They read Prible his rights, and he sat down to provide a second statement. There was something he’d left out, he told them: He and Tirado were involved in an affair and had sex in the bathroom after the men got home from the club. He failed to mention this, he said, because he worried it would “ruin” Tirado’s reputation.

Prible provided a DNA sample and let the cops photograph him naked. They did not find any soot, burns, or other wounds on his body. Investigators searched Prible’s parents’ house, collecting the clothes he’d worn Friday night, which had no traces of blood, smoke, or any accelerant. They collected firearms, magazines, and ammunition. They found paperwork related to a .38 revolver but didn’t find the gun. DNA collected from Tirado was soon matched to Prible, but given his story about their sexual tryst, there was an explanation for that.

On Monday, police took a statement from Cynthia Garcia Flores, a childhood friend of Tirado’s. It was the first in a string of statements that raised new questions, not only about Prible, but also about Herrera — and what the two were up to in the weeks before the murders.

Flores said Herrera had told her husband that he and Prible were involved in a bank robbery and Herrera’s take was $12,000. Herrera had paid her husband, Vincent, for a “job” with some of the cash from the heist. Vincent said Herrera used the money to pay him for cocaine. Another woman, who said she’d been having an affair with Herrera, told police that a month before the murders, Prible handed Herrera a bag full of money. And Edward, Herrera’s brother, said that he’d seen both Prible and Herrera with large amounts of cash.

As it turned out, Prible had robbed six banks since March. The robberies went down the same way: Prible donned a ball cap and drove his mother’s car to a bank carrying a stack of manila envelopes and a note for the teller. One read, “This is a robbery,” while later iterations included a warning that he had a gun or a bomb, though he never brandished a weapon. Prible would instruct the teller to put the cash in an envelope and wait 15 minutes before “doing anything,” he later told a detective with the Houston Area Bank Robbery Task Force, which had dubbed the serial robber the “15-Minute Bandit.”

The robberies were part of an absurd scheme Herrera and Prible had devised to come up with enough money to buy their own nightclub. Prible would rob the banks, then Herrera would launder and grow the cash by buying drugs that he would sell for a profit. “After we bought one club, we would then open some more,” Prible told a task force investigator. “I trusted Steve. … I thought he could use his drug connections to make us a lot of money. Steve was a smart guy when it came to things like that.”

In all, the robberies netted the friends about $45,000. In the wake of the murders, the cash disappeared and has never been found.

On May 21, 1999, Prible confessed to the robberies. Three months later, he was sentenced to five years and shipped east to the federal correctional institution in Beaumont.

The investigation into the murders of Herrera, Tirado, and the three children went cold.

3 - A Real Trial Tiger

The day after Christmas in 1999, the Houston Chronicle published a glowing profile of a star prosecutor at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office: 37-year-old Assistant District Attorney Kelly Siegler. Titled “One shrewd cracker-barrel lawyer,” the article traced her evolution from a small-town girl from Matagorda County to a gifted prosecutor who’d shot through the ranks to “symbolize the aggressive and colorful spirit of a powerful office in a county that sends more people to death row than anywhere else.”

Born Kelly Renee Jalufka, Siegler grew up in tiny Blessing, Texas, “a wart of a town on State Highway 35 … surrounded by rice farms,” as Texas Monthly described it in a 1977 feature highlighting her mother’s homestyle cooking. Siegler’s father, known as Big Billy, ran a barbershop and worked as the local justice of the peace; he “went shoeless and held court between haircuts,” the Chronicle reported. Siegler played high school basketball and was valedictorian of her graduating class. At the University of Texas at Austin, where she graduated early after studying international business, she was known in her dorm as “the hick.”

Siegler joined the DA’s office straight out of law school in 1987. As an intern in the office’s family criminal law division, she had come face to face with domestic violence cases, which fueled a desire to seek justice for victims. The issue was personal for Siegler, who was just a child when she urged her mother to leave her abusive stepfather and watched helplessly as the system protected him. “I grew up in a world where ladies walked around all the time with black eyes,” she later said in a clip from “Cold Justice.”

Siegler arrived at the DA’s office as legendary District Attorney Johnny Holmes was becoming famous for seeking the harshest possible punishments. Before long, she was making her mark as an overachiever. Evaluations contained in her personnel file show that Siegler quickly gained a reputation as “a real trial tiger,” in the words of then-supervisor Chuck Rosenthal, who would eventually replace Holmes as DA. “I have seen her try a murder case based solely on circumstantial evidence and get a life sentence from the jury,” another supervisor wrote.

Siegler won her first death sentence in 1992. Her mother sat in the courtroom as Siegler urged jurors to send an alleged skinhead with a low IQ named Brian Edward Davis to death row for a crime he committed when he was 22. Despite her victory, Siegler cried and was sick to her stomach after the trial. “He was like every boy I grew up with,” she told the Chronicle.

But if she had any reservations about seeking the ultimate punishment, there was no hint of it in her record. Siegler was repeatedly lauded for securing convictions when the evidence was thin, or as Rosenthal put it, for her ability to make “a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Investigators and police detectives sent letters to Holmes praising her talent. “No average ADA would have gone to trial under the heading ‘Murder,’” one letter read. “‘Luckily, you don’t have an average ADA in Kelly Siegler.’”

Jurors were won over by Siegler’s folksy appeal and knack for weaving compelling stories from circumstantial evidence. She spent a ton of time preparing her witnesses — and it showed. Siegler credited her humble roots for helping her relate to jurors. “I practice every argument and time it out like I’m in that barbershop,” Siegler told the Chronicle. “I figure if I can talk to a jury like I’m explaining it to Daddy and his buddies, then I’m doing OK.”

At the start of the new millennium, Siegler was at the top of her game. Holmes, who retired in 2001, had transformed the DA’s office, putting Houston on the map as the most aggressive death penalty jurisdiction in the country. Siegler was both a product of the office and a trailblazer: a woman who thrived in a good ol’ boys club while pushing the boundaries of prosecutorial performance. She estimated that she’d won “at least 80 percent of the 150 felony jury trials” she’d handled, according to the Chronicle, although co-workers said the number was “much higher.” If there was anyone who could resurrect the cold case murders of Herrera and Tirado and win a conviction, it was Siegler.

It’s not entirely clear when Siegler first decided Prible was guilty of murder.

Brown, the lead detective, testified that he first brought his file on the murders to her office in late 2000. But it was another detective who helped Siegler revive the cold case: Harris County DA’s investigator Johnny Bonds, who would later become Siegler’s co-star on “Cold Justice.”

Like Siegler, Bonds started his career as an overachiever. Once the youngest Houston Police Department officer ever assigned to the homicide unit, he was immortalized in “The Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit,” a 1983 book chronicling his quest to solve a triple murder. After leaving the police force, Bonds did short stints working private security and home remodeling but quickly returned to detective work. In 1989 he joined the Harris County DA’s Office.

On March 1, 2001, Bonds received a fax from a Dallas-based DNA analyst named Bill Watson, who had examined forensic evidence submitted by the sheriff’s department, including the blood, hair, and saliva samples taken from Prible. The fax was a copy of Watson’s original two-page report from 1999. His findings were not revelatory. Scrapings taken from beneath Tirado’s fingernails had yielded only her DNA. A pair of white tennis shoes belonging to Prible was tested for blood, but Watson found none.

Still, one part of the report interested Siegler. Two male DNA profiles had been obtained from semen collected from Tirado’s body. Vaginal and anal swabs showed sperm that came from Herrera. Sperm from an oral swab was linked to Prible.

In his statement divulging the affair, Prible told detectives that Tirado had performed oral sex on him in the bathroom, which would explain the presence of sperm in her mouth. But Siegler was skeptical. Although Prible said the two had been “messing around” for some time, friends of Tirado’s rejected the notion that she was cheating on Herrera with Prible. Flores, the friend who told police about Herrera’s involvement in the bank robberies, said she’d known Prible since middle school and he gave her the creeps. Another friend said Tirado shared this opinion. “Nilda told me that she always thought Jeff was creepy,” the woman told detectives.

When these statements were first collected in 1999, the DA’s office did not consider the evidence strong enough to form the basis of a murder case. But with Siegler in charge, things changed. By the summer of 2001, Siegler had concluded that the DNA evidence from the oral swab could only be the result of sexual assault. In the absence of any other physical evidence against Prible, this would be a linchpin to her case.

In a probable cause affidavit, the DA’s office laid out the evidence against Prible, describing the bank robbery scheme and noting that Prible was the last person known to have seen Herrera and Tirado alive. The affidavit mentioned the weapons and paperwork recovered from the home of Prible’s parents; records from a local firearm retailer showed that Prible had purchased a .38 Taurus revolver in 1998, yet this weapon “has yet to be found among the defendant’s possessions.” A firearms examiner said that a projectile recovered next to Tirado’s body was “consistent with a .38 caliber.” The affidavit suggested that Prible shot Herrera and Tirado with the .38 Taurus, then successfully got rid of it.

Finally, the state cited the DNA evidence taken from sperm on the oral swab and the woman who said Tirado found Prible “creepy.” She “does not believe the complainant was having any sort of affair with the defendant based on what she thought about him.”

On August 29, 2001, a grand jury indicted Prible for capital murder.

4 - Texas v. Prible

Opening statements in the State of Texas v. Ronald Jeffrey Prible Jr. took place on October 14, 2002, at a courthouse in downtown Houston. Presiding over the trial was District Judge Mark Kent Ellis, a former Harris County prosecutor-turned-defense attorney who was elected to the bench on a Republican ticket. Siegler was accompanied by Vic Wisner, an ex-cop and veteran of the DA’s office with whom she’d teamed up in previous death penalty cases.

Siegler kicked off the state’s case with a provocation: “‘What kind of a man can go in a house and take out a whole family and come out clean?’” she began, over an objection from Prible’s lawyers. “‘That kind of person is a bad motherfucker — and I’m that kind of motherfucker.’ Those are the words of this defendant. … That’s what this man said about what he did on April 24, 1999.”

Prible’s words, Siegler told jurors, had been revealed by a man named Michael Beckcom, who was incarcerated at the federal prison known as FCI Beaumont. “And I’m going to stand here today and tell you he’s a vile, disgusting man himself,” she said. “He’s going to make you sick to your stomach.” But his testimony was crucial. This man would describe how he befriended Prible at Beaumont — and how Prible ultimately confessed to the crime.

Siegler previewed the state’s other key piece of evidence: the DNA taken from sperm found in Tirado’s mouth. A forensic expert would prove that Prible assaulted Tirado just moments before he shot her, set her on fire, and left her children to die, Siegler said. That’s the kind of man Prible is, she declared. “And he’s guilty of capital murder.”

The trial lasted two weeks, with the first several days focused on the fire and the deaths of the three little girls. Amid repeated warnings from the judge, who urged people in the courtroom to control their emotions, prosecutors introduced autopsy photos showing soot and mucus on the children’s faces, emphasizing their struggle to breathe before they died. Yet basic elements of the fire remained unclear, including precisely how or when it was set. Also puzzling was the missing murder weapon. Despite the affidavit arguing that Prible had used a .38 revolver, the same ballistics expert now testified that the weapon had likely been a 9 mm pistol.

But perhaps the most confounding testimony came from Brown, who said that he’d never considered any other suspect apart from Prible, a fact Siegler saw fit to reiterate. Yet the detective could not explain why his investigation justified such a singular focus. He didn’t pay attention to Prible’s interrogation, he said. Nor did he remember the names of anyone he interviewed in the aftermath of the murders.

Among the people Brown apparently did not recall was the most critical witness for the defense: a 12-year-old girl named Christina Gurrusquieta, who lived next door to Prible’s parents. She told police that she had seen Prible and Herrera arriving before dawn on April 24, 1999. Although there was no record of her eyewitness account in the police reports — Brown said he did not document their conversation — Gurrusquieta’s testimony lent credence to Prible’s claim that Herrera had driven him home around 4 a.m.

Gurrusquieta had turned 15 by the time she took the stand. She said she knew both Herrera and Prible; Herrera used to curse at her and her siblings when they played kickball and accidentally hit his car. In the early morning hours of April 24, she said, she got out of bed to use the bathroom and spotted the two men from her window, which faced the front of the house. It had to be after 1 a.m., since that was when her parents came home after working at the Mexican restaurant they owned. Gurrusquieta and her sister waited up for them on Friday nights. That night, Prible and Herrera “were just standing outside beside Jeff’s dad’s truck talking. And then I saw Jeff walk into his house and I seen Steve leave.”

Siegler did her best to pick apart Gurrusquieta’s account. “Is it possible, Christina, that the night you’re remembering was Thursday night instead of Friday night?” No, Gurrusquieta said. Did she “look at the clock to write down or memorialize forever what time it was when this all happened?” No, Gurrusquieta said. “Because a 12-year-old little girl would never do that, right?” Siegler said.

Siegler asked Gurrusquieta to read part of Prible’s statement aloud. “I then asked Steve to take me home. It was about 4 a.m.,” she read. So if Herrera did drop Prible off, Siegler said, “you wouldn’t have been awake to see if Jeff snuck back out of the house to get back over to Steve’s house anyway, would you?”

If it seemed like a stretch for Prible to have left Herrera’s place after a night of heavy drinking only to return to murder the whole household, Siegler and Wisner didn’t push this scenario very hard. Instead, they left the timeline vague. Jurors sought clarity during deliberations, asking the court to read back testimony about what happened when. The jury also seemed intrigued by Gurrusquieta, requesting more detail on when she was first interviewed by Brown.

But in the end, the alibi provided by Gurrusquieta was no match for the two witnesses at the crux of the state’s case: Beckcom, the jailhouse informant, and Watson, the DNA analyst.

A 41-year-old former bodybuilder who once managed a Gold’s Gym, Beckcom was a smooth talker, fit and confident in his prison uniform. Siegler was upfront about Beckcom’s incentive to testify, asking him to describe his deal with the state. “We have an understanding that if I testify truthfully to this court that you will reciprocate by calling my federal prosecutor,” he said. The prosecutor would file what’s known as a Rule 35 motion to Beckcom’s judge. Under the federal rules of criminal procedure, the judge could reduce Beckcom’s sentence if he was satisfied that Beckcom had provided “substantial assistance” in the Prible case. But he had to be truthful, Siegler emphasized, or else no deal. Right, Beckcom said.

Beckcom testified that he’d gotten Siegler’s name from his cellmate at Beaumont, Nathan Foreman. After getting in touch with Siegler in the fall of 2001, Beckcom met with her and Bonds. She seemed skeptical of “another inmate maybe spinning a yarn,” Beckcom said. But after he laid out everything he knew in a letter, Siegler was convinced.

Beckcom said he’d met Prible through his exercise partner at Beaumont. Prible used to stop by while they worked out. One day he struck up a conversation with Beckcom directly. “I was sitting on the bleachers in the rec yard just catching some sun, listening to my radio, and Prible approached myself and Nathan Foreman,” Beckcom said. According to Beckcom, Prible was seeking advice on his case. Before long, they were discussing it every day, while also making plans to go into the asphalt business together.

Beckcom said that Prible’s account evolved over time. At first he said, “I didn’t do it.” He conceded that his DNA had been found on the female victim but said everyone knew they were having an affair. Did he say anything about a weapon? Siegler asked. Yes, Beckcom said. Prible said the cops were looking for a .38 caliber revolver he owned but that he’d sold it. That wasn’t even the murder weapon, Prible told him. Instead, he intimated that he’d successfully gotten rid of the weapon, telling Beckcom, “Asphalt’s good sometimes for hiding things.”

Eventually, Beckcom decided to get as much information as he could from Prible, thinking he could use it to his advantage. After becoming aggravated by Prible insisting on his innocence, Beckcom said, he told him, “I know what you did. … I don’t care.” After that, Prible spilled everything. The details Beckcom shared on the stand could only have come from Prible, Siegler told the jury. “How would Mike Beckcom know all the things that he does know unless the killer told him?” When Beckcom asked Prible how he got in and out of the house without being seen, he said Prible pointed to his time deployed as a Marine. “It’s a typical high-intensity, low-drag maneuver,” he said, in what was presumably special ops speak. “It was over money,” Beckcom said Prible confessed. Herrera “fucked me out of my money and then he was going to kill me, so I handled my business.”

To illustrate the level of trust that had developed between the informants and Prible, Siegler displayed a photograph taken at the Beaumont visiting room in November 2001. It showed Prible with his mother, Beckcom with his mother, and Foreman with his parents. “He called us his brothers and said he loved us,” Beckcom said. Still, Prible was aware they might betray him. At one point he told them, “You’re the only ones that could convict me,” Beckcom said. “If you do that you’ll have to live with it. I’m prepared to die.”

He used those words? Siegler asked. “He used those words,” Beckcom said.

Prible’s lead attorney, Terry Gaiser, asked Beckcom if he had ever lied under oath. “Yes, I have,” Beckcom answered. In fact, Gaiser continued, hadn’t a federal judge in California explicitly found that Beckcom lied in a different case? “That’s correct,” Beckcom said. Yet Gaiser did not elicit further details about Beckcom’s apparent history of perjury.

If Beckcom’s testimony filled the gaps in the state’s case against Prible, Watson, the DNA analyst, gave prosecutors the tools they needed to conjure a final harrowing image of Tirado’s death. “Have you thought about what Nilda went through in the last moments of her life?” Siegler asked the jury. According to Siegler, DNA had unlocked this story.

Watson, 36, had spent two years as a forensic analyst for the Fort Worth Police Department and one year at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office before moving to a lab called Gene Screen. In his years testing swabs for the presence of semen, Watson testified, he’d found that anal and vaginal swabs could retain usable quantities of sperm for roughly two to three days. But he couldn’t recall ever getting even a partial male profile from an oral swab, even in cases where the evidence was submitted quickly.

Watson drew a damning — and highly speculative — conclusion from this: Given the large amount of sperm on the swab, Tirado had not had a chance to eliminate Prible’s semen by spitting or swallowing before she was shot. Would the evidence “be consistent with the male depositing the semen in Nilda’s mouth moments, if not seconds, before she was killed?” Wisner asked. “It certainly would be consistent with that,” Watson said.

In his closing, Wisner exaggerated Watson’s testimony for maximum effect. “There is no way in the world that that semen wasn’t deposited either moments before or seconds after Nilda died,” he said. Prible shot Herrera, then “forced Nilda to orally copulate him at gunpoint and executed her as soon as he finished. As horrific as that sounds, that is the only logical conclusion that you can draw from that evidence.”

Siegler was even more dramatic: “She left this world with his penis in her mouth, knowing her husband was dead, hoping to God that her babies would survive the nightmare that is Jeff Prible.”

On October 23, Prible was convicted of murder. Two days later, jurors sentenced him to death.

It was another signature Siegler victory. “Her ability to do what few others can is a continual amazement to some, but not to those who watch her work,” her supervisor wrote in her next performance review. But while her colleagues in the DA’s office celebrated, others watched with a growing sense of alarm. For one man sitting in a Beaumont prison cell staring at a life sentence, the secret to Siegler’s success was starting to come into focus — and the picture looked eerily familiar.

Trading Favors

How Two Men Convicted by Kelly Siegler Uncovered the Dark Secret to Her Success

Part 2

The Prosecutor and the Snitch Ring

“Cold Justice” star Kelly Siegler relied on jailhouse informants to win convictions despite reasons to doubt their credibility.

1 - Invisible Man

Hermillo Herrero, 35, had been stuck inside the Harris County jail for months. He was bewildered and angry. He’d been serving a drug sentence at the federal correctional institution in Beaumont, Texas, when he was indicted for a cold case murder he swore he did not commit, then dragged to Houston to face trial. There was no evidence linking him to the crime save for a pair of informants enlisted by prosecutor Kelly Siegler. On the stand, they claimed that Herrero had confessed to the 1995 murder of his friend Albert Guajardo. In April 2002, Herrero was sentenced to life.

Herrero was awaiting transfer back to FCI Beaumont when he saw that a man named Jeffrey Prible was about to stand trial down the road for murdering a family in Houston. The case was familiar — Herrero had read about it in the Houston Chronicle. Prible was charged at almost the exact same time as Herrero, and both cases involved murders gone cold. But the more Herrero learned about Prible’s case, the more disturbed he was by the parallels. As in Herrero’s case, an informant claimed Prible had confessed to him at Beaumont. And as in Herrero’s case, the informant made a deal with Siegler that could get him out of prison early.

Herrero had seen his share of legal trouble. But Siegler turned him into a cartoon villain at trial, comparing him to the notorious mobster John Gotti. Siegler told jurors that after running into Guajardo at a bar, Herrero had attacked him from the backseat of a moving van, slitting his throat and beating his head with a hammer. He rolled Guajardo’s body in a rug, Siegler said, and threw it on the side of the road. Although the lead investigator, Harris County homicide detective Curtis Brown, bluntly conceded on the stand that he’d found no evidence implicating Herrero, Siegler and her snitches convinced the jury that he had committed the brutal murder.

The informants who testified against Herrero were also at Beaumont on drug crimes. Their convictions came out of a tough-on-crime era that saw the federal prison population explode. Spurred by the war on drugs, sentences grew longer, and for those convicted after 1987, the sweeping Sentencing Reform Act eliminated federal parole altogether.

For people serving long sentences with no end in sight, providing information to the government became one of the only ways to win early release. Although Rule 35 had been part of federal criminal procedure for decades, the drug war transformed it from a provision that merely gave judges a chance to show mercy to one that required incarcerated people to provide “substantial assistance” to prosecutors for any chance at leniency. Informing on their peers was a deal many were willing to make — even if it meant lying on the stand.

Within such a population, men like Herrero and Prible were sitting ducks. Not only were they facing new charges while in federal prison, but both had been charged with murder — the kind of high-stakes prosecution that could yield significant benefits for anyone who offered intel.

Herrero knew the men who testified against him: Jesse Moreno and Rafael Dominguez. Moreno was the star witness, “pretty much the crux of this case,” Siegler said in her opening statement. Although she told jurors that she would only vouch for Moreno’s Rule 35 motion if he told the truth, to Herrero, this was a cruel joke. Like Prible, he swore the case against him had been blatantly fabricated.

It was only when Herrero was finally being transferred out of Houston, waiting in the holding tank to go back to Beaumont, that he happened to meet someone who had insight into just how connected the two cases were. The man was Black, in his late 20s, stocky and bald. He went by Brother Walker.

“He told me he knew everything about what happened to me and a guy named Prible,” Herrero recalled. According to Walker, Beaumont was home to a ring of informants who gave Siegler information to use against defendants in state cases in exchange for her help in their federal cases. Moreno and Dominguez were part of this ring, as was Michael Beckcom, the star witness against Prible. The head of the operation was a man who lurked in the background of both Prible’s and Herrero’s cases, someone who supposedly heard both men confess yet was conspicuously absent from both trials: Nathan Foreman.

A relative of the legendary boxer George Foreman, Nathan Foreman arrived at FCI Beaumont in early 2000 for federal drug crimes. He was placed in the Special Housing Unit, nicknamed the SHU, where he worked as an orderly. The job gave him some freedom of movement, allowing him to visit different cells. Some knew him as “Green Eyes.” Others called him “Bones.” To Herrero, Foreman was the “invisible man.” He was convinced he’d never seen him. Yet at trial, Siegler repeatedly characterized Foreman as one of Herrero’s associates in prison.

Walker told Herrero that he had firsthand knowledge of the Beaumont snitch ring: Foreman had recruited him too.

Herrero asked if he would be willing to put what he knew in a statement. But Walker was hesitant to get involved. Not long after their return to Beaumont, Herrero was transferred to a different prison. Although he lost touch with Walker, Herrero was determined to share what he’d uncovered with Prible.

Texas death row is located at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, some 70 miles north of Houston. The state has long been notorious as the execution capital of the country. By the time Prible arrived in November 2002, 29 men had been executed that year alone. Four more would be killed before Christmas.

As Prible tells it, he arrived on death row convinced that it was only a matter of time before somebody realized a mistake had been made. “As bad as this place was, I thought this would all get straightened out,” he said. Growing up on the border of Houston’s north side, Prible had not been raised to mistrust the criminal justice system. His parents were “just middle class, working people,” Prible’s aunt, Cheryl Peterson, said. “We used to believe the police were all righteous and good.”

Nevertheless, Prible would be the first to say that he wasn’t a model citizen. As a teenager, he partied and ran from the cops. “We were stupid as fuck when we were young but goddamn we had fun,” he said. Things got more serious as he got older. At the punishment phase of his trial, his ex-wife said he used cocaine and steroids, which compounded his mood swings. “He could be happy, completely happy one minute, and completely hysterical, crazy mad the next.” At his worst, she said, he was physically and emotionally abusive, threatening to hurt himself or her.

“Jeff was a handful from the time he was little,” Peterson recalled. She said there was a history of bipolar disorder in their family, which she suspected Prible shared, although he was never diagnosed or treated. This was the kind of mitigating factor that might have persuaded a jury to spare his life. But Prible’s lawyers focused instead on portraying him as a loving son, father, and uncle who would never hurt a child. That much was true, according to Peterson, who never believed Prible committed the murders.

Peterson carried guilt over her own unwitting role in the case. While awaiting trial, Prible asked her to send him a copy of the probable cause affidavit laying out the state’s evidence against him. He then recklessly showed it to his neighbors at Beaumont. “That helped set him up,” Peterson said. One man who was incarcerated alongside Prible testified at trial that he’d warned Prible to stop discussing it. “I told him to shut up.”

Not long after Prible arrived at Polunsky, a neighbor on death row named Jaime Elizalde asked him if he’d ever done time in federal prison. Prible said yes, he’d been at Beaumont. Elizalde responded that his good friend, Hermilo Herrero, was locked up at Beaumont. Herrero was innocent, Elizalde told Prible, and he knew this for a fact — because he was the one who had murdered Guajardo.

Herrero’s wife had recently visited Elizalde at Polunsky, and she recognized Prible in the visitation room. Prible said he almost fainted when Elizalde showed him paperwork from Herrero’s case and he saw the people involved: Kelly Siegler, Curtis Brown, and a pair of informants from Beaumont. Elizalde also shared a letter from Herrero, who described meeting a man who knew the whole story of how he and Prible had been set up. Herrero did not know much about the man, only that he was Black and went by Walker.

Correspondence between people incarcerated at different facilities is strictly forbidden. Most communication happens illicitly or by word of mouth, so there is no record of the information Herrero shared. Nor was there a way for Prible to write Herrero directly — any letters would be swiftly confiscated. Nevertheless, from his death row cell, Prible set out to find Walker.

It would not be easy. For one, he didn’t know Walker’s first name. And he got nowhere when he tried to tell his lawyers what he’d learned. After his direct appeal was rejected in 2004, Prible was assigned a new attorney to represent him in state post-conviction proceedings: longtime Houston criminal defense lawyer Roland Moore III. It might have been a reason for optimism; Moore had just won a new trial for a man who was misidentified by a woman coming out of a coma.

Prible was certain that Walker was the key to exposing the conspiracy against him. But to his dismay, Moore seemed unmotivated to find him. Instead, the attorney set about proving that Prible’s trial attorneys had been ineffective, often the most promising path to relief for people on death row.

Among Moore’s claims was that the lawyers had failed to challenge the state’s forensic evidence. A well-respected DNA scientist named Elizabeth Johnson provided a declaration disputing the testimony of Bill Watson, the analyst who claimed that sperm found in Nilda Tirado’s mouth must have been deposited right before she died. Watson did not conduct the microscopic examination necessary to support his conclusions, Johnson wrote. Nor was he apparently aware of studies showing that sperm could be found in oral samples of live individuals many hours after being deposited, including those who rinsed their mouths. Had Prible’s attorneys challenged Watson’s unscientific testimony, it could have been kept out of the trial.

Moore included Johnson’s declaration in a state writ challenging Prible’s conviction. But Prible was furious upon learning that Moore had filed the writ without finding Walker.

“What I don’t understand is what anybody could say that would help,” Moore wrote in a letter to his client. “If the ideal witness came forward like you would dream up in a movie and said, ‘Yes, Kelly Siegler told me to say all those things about Prible’s confessing,’ … then we could have a hearing where this dream witness would say all that. But nobody would believe it. I mean nobody.”

Prible decided to take matters into his own hands. It was one of his neighbors, after all, who provided the tip that could break the case open. Now he just needed someone on the outside to run it down.

2 – Stroke of Luck

Ward Larkin doesn’t remember exactly when he received the first letter from Prible. As an activist involved in leftist causes, Larkin had been visiting Texas death row for almost a decade by the time they met. Some of the men just wanted someone to talk to. But from the beginning, Prible insisted he was innocent.

Larkin knew better than to roll his eyes. By that point, he’d grown close to a number of condemned men he believed were innocent. At least one had already been executed. Others would eventually be released.

Prible told Larkin that he needed help with something specific. There was a man in federal prison with the last name Walker. He was Black. And he had been incarcerated at Beaumont around 2001. That was all he knew.

Larkin, a computer programmer, scoured the Bureau of Prisons’ public database. He put together a list of men with the last name Walker. One of them, Larry Walker, seemed like a promising match. Larkin sent the man several letters but did not hear back.

He had found the wrong Walker. But by a stroke of luck, his letters made their way to the right man anyway. In 2005, Hurricane Rita pummeled the Texas coast, forcing the Bureau of Prisons to relocate hundreds of people previously housed at Beaumont. Carl Walker ended up at the federal lockup in Yazoo City, Mississippi. It was there, on the rec yard, that he spotted a friendly acquaintance he knew as Smiley. Smiley said that his cellmate, Larry Walker, had been receiving letters from someone trying to help a man on Texas death row. Smiley suspected the letters might actually be meant for him. Carl Walker said he immediately guessed what this was about. “I knew the whole thing.”

As 2007 came to a close, so did Siegler’s final cold case murder prosecution for Harris County, with the conviction of David Temple, a high school football coach accused of killing his pregnant wife, Belinda.

The investigation into Belinda’s murder had been dormant for years before Siegler dusted it off and, without any new evidence, got a grand jury to indict Temple, who was sentenced to life in prison. It was business as usual for Siegler, but that was about to change.

Siegler’s longtime mentor, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal, who had announced his intention to run for reelection in 2008, became embroiled in a scandal after the release of emails from his work account, which included intimate messages he’d sent to a co-worker. Rosenthal withdrew his candidacy at the request of the local GOP. That same day, Siegler tossed her hat in the race, casting herself as a reform candidate. A campaign ad billed her as a “bulldog in a chihuahua’s body.” During a candidate forum at the Old Spaghetti Warehouse, Siegler acknowledged there were problems in the DA’s office but insisted that she was the one to fix them. “I am the only one who has worked there for the last 21 years,” she said. “I know how it operates.”

Reminders that she was part of the office’s entrenched culture peppered her campaign. Days after she announced her run, a new cache of Rosenthal’s emails, some involving racist jokes and explicit images, made headlines. A video of men forcibly stripping off women’s shirts in public had been sent by Siegler’s husband, who was Rosenthal’s doctor. Siegler brushed it off. “His sense of humor is crude, to put it mildly,” she said of her husband, but he could do what he wanted on his own computer because “he’s the boss.” She dismissed the incident as a distraction: “I would hope the voters are more concerned about qualifications of their DA than some inappropriate emails.”

Siegler’s qualifications were impressive, but the emails weren’t the only problem. Early in her career, she’d apologized for using the word “Jew” as a synonym for “cheat” in front of prospective jurors. She said she didn’t know it was a slur because she hadn’t grown up around many Jewish people. There was also an allegation that she’d struck a juror in a death penalty case because he was Black. Not true, she said; she’d struck the man because he was a member of the megachurch led by televangelist Joel Osteen. Its congregants were “screwballs and nuts,” she explained. She later apologized and said that by striking the juror, she was just trying to weed out those who would shy away from imposing a death sentence. “You don’t think an aggressive prosecutor hasn’t offended just a few people?” she asked.

Siegler’s campaign amassed a number of law enforcement endorsements, which pushed her through a crowded four-way Republican primary and into a runoff. But it wasn’t enough: She lost to the former chief judge of the county’s criminal courts. On the heels of defeat, Siegler resigned from the DA’s office. “All that this office stands for will always be a part of my heart,” she wrote in her resignation letter. She left her job feeling beaten up, she later told Texas Monthly. She’d imagined spending her career at the DA’s office, and now she was wondering if there would be a second act.

For a while, Siegler maintained an uncharacteristically low profile before blasting back into the headlines in 2010, when she was appointed special prosecutor in the case of Anthony Graves, who’d spent 12 years on death row for a crime he swore he did not commit. After years of legal wrangling, Graves’s conviction was overturned; Siegler was hired to determine whether the state should retry him. That October, she declared that Graves had been the victim of prosecutorial misconduct, “the worst I’ve ever seen.” It was an unexpected conclusion from a woman who for so long had been a poster child for the state’s aggressive and unreflective criminal justice system. And it came just as things were beginning to heat up in the case of Jeffrey Prible.

3 – Birthday Cake

As an attorney in Houston, James Rytting was familiar with Siegler’s courtroom theatrics. Her most famous stunt, tying her colleague to the headboard of a victim’s bloody bed, expanded her brand beyond Texas’s borders. A TV crew shadowed her during the trial, and the bed scene was reenacted in “The Blue-Eyed Butcher,” a Lifetime movie about the case. “I was actually surprised that the scene caused as much uproar as it did,” Siegler said. “It was just something that seemed to be the right thing to do at the time.”

Rytting taught university-level classes in philosophy and logic before turning to law. Gracile in appearance and earnest in demeanor, he quickly developed a reputation for taking on some of Texas’s most difficult death penalty appeals. In 2008, Rytting was appointed to represent Prible as the case moved into federal court.

Prible had long stopped trusting his appointed attorneys. He’d filed a series of unsuccessful motions on his own behalf arguing that Siegler had colluded with a ring of informants to send him to death row. He sought material in the state’s file related to Beckcom, Foreman, and Walker, along with one of the informants in Herrero’s case. “Siegler went to great lengths to hide her ties to jailhouse informants in Beaumont,” Prible wrote.

On their own, Prible’s motions sounded desperate and conspiratorial. But Rytting took his new client’s claims seriously. “James Rytting was the first one that ever gave us hope,” Peterson, Prible’s aunt, recalled.

Prible’s trial featured some of Siegler’s dramatic charms, which Rytting equated to the talents of a B-rate actor. She’d played up what little evidence she had in a prosecutorial style equivalent to a radio shock jock, all while apologizing for being crude. To believe Prible’s claim that he and Tirado had engaged in consensual sex, Siegler said, “you’ve also got to believe that his semen is so tasty that she walked around savoring the flavor of it in her mouth for a couple hours.”

But as Rytting prepared to challenge Prible’s conviction, he saw beyond the cinematic reenactments and blustery rhetoric to something far more insidious.

Although several years had passed since Carl Walker learned Prible was looking for him, he remained reluctant to get involved. In early 2009, however, Rytting’s investigator managed to get Walker on the phone, documenting their conversation in an affidavit. Prible had been set up, Walker confirmed, and he believed Siegler was in on it. According to Walker, Siegler fed information about the crime to Foreman, who passed it to Beckcom, Walker, and others. As Walker understood it, Siegler was concerned about getting around Prible’s alibi: the next-door neighbor who saw Steve Herrera drop Prible off at home several hours before the murders.

Interviews Rytting conducted with other defendants Siegler had prosecuted in the early 2000s revealed additional allegations that supported Prible’s theory and suggested that Siegler’s reliance on jailhouse informants extended beyond Beaumont.

William Irvan was housed next to Prible at the Harris County jail while they were both awaiting trial. In an affidavit, he said that Siegler had offered him a deal via his lawyer: If he informed on Prible, she would agree to a 35-year sentence. Irvan refused. Siegler went on to deploy an informant at Irvan’s trial to help convict him of a cold-case rape and murder, sending him to Texas death row, where he remains.

In a separate affidavit, Tarus Sales told Rytting that while in jail, he was repeatedly placed in proximity to a man he didn’t know. At Sales’s trial, the man testified for Siegler that he and Sales were great friends and Sales had confessed to murder, all of which Sales denied. Sales was also sent to death row, where he remains.

A third man, Danny Bible, recalled seeing Beckcom at the Harris County jail in advance of Prible’s trial. Beckcom approached various men to ask about their cases, gathering notes in a folder, Bible said in an affidavit. He watched as Beckcom talked to Siegler outside court one day, handing her some papers from his folder. Bible, a serial killer who confessed to a 1979 slaying in Houston, was executed in 2016.

And then, of course, there was Herrero, who was serving a life sentence based on the dubious testimony of two informants from Beaumont. Were it not for Herrero’s efforts years earlier to alert Prible to what he’d learned about the snitch scheme, Rytting might never have gone looking for information about Siegler’s use of informants.

With the new intel in hand, Rytting filed a petition in federal court challenging Prible’s conviction. He argued that a band of snitches inside FCI Beaumont, seeking to reduce their prison terms, had conspired to frame Prible using information that Siegler provided to Foreman. But because a state court had never addressed Prible’s informant claims, U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison paused the federal action to allow the Texas courts to weigh in. The case landed back in front of the judge who had presided over Prible’s 2002 trial.

In the meantime, Rytting finally arranged to meet Walker in person. On an August morning in 2010, he waited in a room at a low-level federal prison in Oakdale, Louisiana, tape recorder in hand. Walker, wearing his prison-issued khakis, strode in, sat down, and laid it all out.

Walker was just 26 when he got popped on federal crack charges. Thanks to the racist sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. When Walker arrived at Beaumont in the summer of 2000, he was scared and depressed, he told Rytting, according to a transcript of their meeting. “That’s more time in prison than I’ve actually been alive.”

Seeking solace, Walker gravitated to the prison church, where he sang in the choir. His devotion earned him the nickname “Brother Walker.” Being pious, a Houston native, and in prison for the first time put Walker on Foreman and Beckcom’s radar. It was a choice mix of factors that would signal credibility to a prosecutor vetting an informant. Foreman and Beckcom approached Walker with an opportunity, a “blessing,” he said. A guy named Jeff Prible would be coming to their unit. If Walker informed on Prible, he’d likely be able to get his sentence reduced. “That’s the pitch,” Walker explained.

Rytting intervened: Foreman and Beckcom knew Prible was coming to the unit before he arrived? “How could they possibly have known that?” he asked.

Walker replied that he didn’t know for sure, but “from what I understand, they were all in cahoots with the prosecutor.” Foreman handed out Siegler’s number to guys at Beaumont like mints after a meal. Walker wrote the number in his address book. Siegler was worried about the case, Foreman and Beckcom told him; where evidence was concerned, she had “little to none,” and she needed a confession to link Prible to the murders.

Foreman and Beckcom gave him details of the crime, Walker said, including where the bodies were located and the fact that DNA was found in Tirado’s mouth. They also told him that while Prible had an alibi, he had supposedly returned to Herrera’s house to slaughter the family.

“All of this was discussed before you even laid eyes on Prible?” Rytting asked.

“Before I even seen the man,” Walker said.

Walker was conflicted. Having been ratted on himself, he had little respect for informants, and being tagged a snitch in prison could be dangerous. At the same time, the crime Prible was accused of was heinous. If he was behind the deaths of three kids, then he deserved what was coming to him.

Walker decided to go along with the scheme. He joined Foreman, Beckcom, and several others in befriending Prible. They staged photos with him during visiting hours. Seven of them surrounded Prible in one shot, standing in front of a backdrop illustrated with palm trees and fluffy white clouds. In another, Foreman and Beckcom smiled broadly alongside Prible, all three accompanied by family members. The idea was to show how chummy they were — evidence that could go a long way toward corroborating their account of Prible’s confession.

Beckcom also scored some wine, expensive contraband made from commissary grape juice, and they got Prible drunk on the rec yard, trying to loosen his lips. It didn’t work; Prible got so inebriated they had to help him back to his cell. As far as Walker knew, Prible never did confess to the crime. But it didn’t really matter. They had enough details to sink him without Prible ever saying a word. “That’s the thing,” Walker told Rytting. “If I know your favorite color is blue, and I go through all this trouble to make you tell me blue, whether you tell me blue or not it still don’t change the fact that I know what your color is.”

Foreman and Beckcom instructed Walker to send Siegler a letter expressing his willingness to testify against Prible. Walker didn’t write the letter, which someone else typed up for him in the law library, but he did sign it. He didn’t know if it was ever sent because in the end, he decided to withdraw from the plot. “Can I live with knowing that I am going to openly lie about information I have no idea about and send this man to death?” Walker asked. “I concluded that I could not do that.”

Rytting told him that in Beckcom’s version of events, Prible had confessed to Beckcom and Foreman on the rec yard. “That’s bullshit,” Walker replied. There are only three things to do in prison, he said: Watch, listen, and do your time. Private conversations are generally confined to cells, not public spaces. For Foreman and Beckcom, that posed a problem, Walker said. They lived in a different housing block than Prible, so there was no way to allege they’d ever had an intimate conversation with the man. Instead, they’d have to say Prible confessed in the open, among a throng of others, which, Walker said, was nuts to anyone with any clue how prison works. “Who talks about murdering somebody when any ears in the surrounding area could hear? It’s just not logical.”

Walker said he’d been apprehensive about coming forward, but the situation still weighed on him. He knew there could be serious repercussions for helping someone who might be guilty — and he didn’t have any idea if Prible was guilty. “Nobody’s going to give you a pat on the back for releasing somebody who was suspected of such a horrendous crime,” he said. “And it’s not that I am looking for a pat on the back. I just don’t want something else in the back.” But the bottom line was that he believed Prible had been set up, and that was wrong. “I just know these guys is guilty of conspiring against him,” he told Rytting. “I know that for a fact. I do know for a fact that Kelly Siegler was involved.”

“Prible was dead the day he hit the yard,” Walker said. “They had already baked a cake for the man. He just didn’t know it was his birthday.”

Back in Houston, Rytting asked Mark Kent Ellis, the state judge who presided over Prible’s trial, to inspect Siegler’s files for any materials that should have been disclosed to defense lawyers. Among the items Harris County prosecutors handed over was a sealed envelope marked “attorney work product.” Inside were three letters from would-be Beaumont informants, including Walker.

The sequestered letters were strikingly similar. Each referenced previous communications with Siegler and reinforced the idea that Prible had killed Herrera in a dispute over money. The formatting was identical, and all three contained the same misspelling of Prible’s name as “Pribble,” suggesting a common author.

As Siegler might remember from “previous conversations with Nathan Foreman,” Walker’s letter began, he and several other guys from Houston had grown close to Prible; sharing a hometown put Prible at ease. “At first Jeff would only talk about the bank jobs he had pulled, but later he began to open up about the murders and how he did what he thought he had to do. It was business, not personal,” the letter read. “I’m more than willing to testify to these things in court. … I will help you in any way I can and would appreciate any help you could give me.”

“Steve had screwed him out of some money so he did what he had to do,” read a letter signed by Jesse Gonzalez, who enclosed a photo of himself with Prible.

“Pribble confided in me of Steve owing him some money from the banks they were robbing together, and how he had gone back that night to get what belonged to him,” the third letter, from a man named Mark Martinez, read. “I am more than willing to testify to these things in court.”

Martinez later told his prison counselor that “some dudes” at Beaumont had “been pressured” to write letters to Siegler. He neither wrote nor signed the letter, he said, but would not elaborate. The counselor confirmed that Martinez’s signature did not match the one on the letter he purportedly signed, according to a defense investigator’s affidavit.

Rytting tried to persuade the judge that the state had gone to great lengths to conceal the plot to frame Prible. Only now, with the information Walker provided and the documents discovered in Siegler’s files, were facts emerging that could prove the conspiracy. But Ellis was unmoved. While he concluded that Walker was “present during the planning of the alleged conspiracy” to inform on Prible, he quickly dismissed the revelation. Prible’s allegations were “unpersuasive” and full of “speculation,” he ruled, noting there was no evidence that Beckcom had recanted his account of Prible’s confession.

After an unsuccessful appeal, Rytting prepared to revive his case in federal court.

4 – Show on the Road

TNT aired the inaugural episode of its first reality show, “Cold Justice,” in 2013, starring Siegler and former crime scene investigator Yolanda McClary. Produced by “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, the pilot investigated the case of a woman in Cuero, Texas, who died of what appeared to be a self-inflicted bullet to the head. In the span of a week, Siegler and her co-stars concluded that the woman had actually been killed by her husband; he was charged and pleaded guilty to murder.

“Cold Justice” was a hit. Fans were drawn to Siegler and McClary for their gumption, expertise, and empathy toward victims’ families. Critics liked that the series focused on small towns rather than big cities. “Siegler and McClary are attractive and photogenic, yet never ham it up on camera or glamorize their jobs,” one reviewer wrote. “They’re eminently professional.”

The show was Siegler’s idea. In her years as a Harris County prosecutor, she had served on a committee that reviewed cold cases across the state. “I realized that a lot of these agencies have cases that are really close to being solved,” she told Texas Monthly. “That’s where the idea started, and after I left the DA’s office, I tried to sell it to a couple of people out in the LA world, and one day I got hooked up with Dick Wolf. … He immediately loved the idea.”

The real-world impact was mixed from the start. After the pilot aired, an article titled “Lukewarm Justice” was printed in the professional journal of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. Authored by the DA who handled the Cuero case, he described how the publicity created a nightmare when it came to selecting a jury, leading to a mistrial. While he praised Siegler and her co-stars, he was disgusted with the producers, who refused to push the air date until after the trial. “‘Justice’ was out the window and ‘cold’ was all that remained,” he wrote.

Coverage of the show steered clear of such controversies. In interviews, Siegler pushed the lesson she wanted audiences to take from her work. If “Cold Justice” had a mantra, she said, it was: “There is nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence cases, oh my God! People, would you quit thinking that!”

By the time “Cold Justice” finished its third season, however, Siegler and TNT were facing the first of several defamation lawsuits. A man Siegler accused of murdering his wife, who was later acquitted, alleged that the show used coercive tactics by telling the local DA’s office that the episode would not be televised if the DA declined to seek an indictment. The producers denied the allegation, and the lawsuit was eventually dismissed. (To date, the other defamation suits have also been unsuccessful.)

In another episode, a Georgia prosecutor decided to move forward with the case Siegler assembled only for a judge to issue a scathing ruling years later, dropping all charges against the defendants and barring the state from pursuing them in the future.

“It is doubtful defendants would have ever been charged based on the record of this case in the absence of interest from a California entertainment studio 10 years after the crime was committed,” the judge wrote. The studio profited from the “scandalous allegations” but had “no burden of proof in a court of law,” he continued. “This order is the outcome that results naturally when forensic inquiry and the pursuit of truth are confused with entertainment.”

TNT canceled “Cold Justice” after the third season. After a brief hiatus, the show found a new home on Oxygen as part of the network’s pivot to true-crime programming.

In the meantime, Siegler’s record in Texas started to come under scrutiny for the first time. In July 2015, a district court overturned the conviction of David Temple, the high school football coach Siegler had put on trial for killing his pregnant wife. The judge found that Siegler had withheld evidence dozens of times in violation of Brady v. Maryland, a landmark Supreme Court decision requiring prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense.

Siegler’s justification of her conduct was almost as stunning as the violations themselves. “Of enormous significance,” the judge wrote, was her testimony insisting that she was only obligated to turn over exculpatory evidence that she believed to be true.

“If Kelly’s bizarre interpretation … were ever to be the law, then all a prosecutor would ever have to do to keep any witness statement away from the defense is say, ‘Well, I didn’t believe it,’” Paul Looney, an attorney who worked on the Temple case, told the Houston Press. “If Kelly Siegler’s a lawyer in five years, I’ll be shocked.”

Before long, Siegler’s conduct in other cases was being questioned. The Houston Chronicle published a story citing similar allegations in the death penalty case of Howard Guidry. “Here it is — the same patterns and practices,” Guidry’s lawyer told the paper. She argued in court that Siegler had withheld critical evidence from Guidry’s trial attorneys, including fingerprints found at the crime scene that belonged to someone other than their client. Guidry’s appeals have since been denied.

For Prible and his neighbors on death row, the questions suddenly swirling about Siegler’s conduct were woefully overdue. While Siegler was promoting “Cold Justice” to a friendly press, an incarcerated writer at Polunsky named Thomas Whitaker published a sprawling series about Prible’s case on his blog, Minutes Before Six, with the help of supporters on the outside. Drawing on case records as well as conversations with Prible, Whitaker wrote in exhaustive and vivid detail about Prible’s legal saga.

While Siegler was basking in TV stardom, Prible was languishing, talking about his case to anyone who would listen. “I’ve watched his mental state deteriorate over the years,” Whitaker wrote. He recalled hearing thumping from outside his cell, only to discover that Prible had been slamming his head against the wall. “That is how I see him in my mind’s eye these days, alone, on his hand and knees, the wall splotched crimson, a dull knocking sound echoing down the run. And no one, no one, is listening.”

5 – Ticket Out of Jail

As Rytting peeled back the layers in Prible’s case, he became convinced that it was inextricably linked to that of Hermilo Herrero. Herrero’s innocence claim had gotten a temporary boost in 2005, when Jaime Elizalde, Herrero’s friend on Texas death row, gave a sworn statement confessing to being the real killer in the case. Elizalde later pleaded the Fifth, refusing to answer questions on the matter in court. He was executed in 2006. But the records Rytting obtained supported what Herrero had long suspected: that he and Prible were set up by the same ring of Beaumont informants. Rytting took on Herrero’s case pro bono.

Some of the most important records were related to Jesse Moreno, the star witness at Herrero’s trial. As it turned out, it was Moreno who gave Siegler Foreman’s name in the first place. Moreno had a history of cutting deals with the state. In 1997, while he was serving a federal sentence for drug crimes, Siegler put him on the stand to testify against another man on trial for murder. Siegler wrote a Rule 35 letter on Moreno’s behalf, but it did not result in a sentence reduction.

In 2001, Moreno got back in touch with Siegler while at Beaumont, reminding her of his previous assistance, which he felt had gone unrewarded, and offering “some info that can be helpful for you on an unsolved case.” In a tape-recorded, in-person conversation that July, he told Siegler that Herrero had confessed to him more than a year and a half earlier, in 1999. Foreman and Rafael Dominguez were both present for the confession, he said. There was one problem: Foreman wasn’t at Beaumont in 1999.

By the time Moreno took the stand at Herrero’s trial, Foreman had disappeared from his account of Herrero’s confession. Meanwhile, Dominguez, the second informant Siegler called as a witness, testified that Foreman was present for two subsequent confessions by Herrero.

Although Siegler told jurors that Moreno had put his life on the line to share what he knew, Moreno testified that he didn’t have much of a choice: Herrero had put a hit on him after discovering that he had assisted authorities in other cases. The threat was so dire that Moreno was put in protective custody and eventually transferred away from Beaumont. Cooperating with Siegler in the hopes of receiving a time cut was the only way to get out of federal prison alive, Moreno said. “Either that or I’m dead.”

But memos Rytting obtained from the Bureau of Prisons dismantled this story. Records documenting Moreno’s transfers made no mention of Herrero, suggesting instead that Moreno feared for his life because he’d crossed a prison gang for which he’d been smuggling drugs. He was shipped out of Beaumont after cooperating with officials investigating the illicit activity. As Rytting later argued, Siegler allowed “false and misleading testimony from Moreno about when and why he decided to turn state’s witness against Herrero.”

As he worked to untangle the web of informants, Rytting realized he needed help and enlisted a civil lawyer named Gretchen Scardino. Born and raised in Texas, Scardino had worked on death penalty litigation as a summer law clerk at the California State Public Defender’s Office. “My eyes were opened enough to know that I didn’t know what I was doing and that I might be getting in over my head,” she recalled. After graduating law school, she turned to civil practice.

But the desire to return to capital litigation didn’t go away. She had never understood the logic behind the death penalty, that punishing someone for murder should mean committing murder in response. She’d also learned from a young age that deadly violence was rooted in complex problems, and those who killed were often vulnerable themselves. A family friend had murdered his parents after becoming schizophrenic. “Knowing him before he became mentally ill and before he did this crime probably had a pretty big effect on me as a young person,” she said.

Prible’s case was Scardino’s reintroduction to death penalty work. She started out by reading the case record and trial transcripts. “I really thought that there must be a volume of the transcript missing,” she recalled. “I couldn’t believe that someone could be convicted of such a horrible crime and sentenced to death based on what I had seen.”

Although the Prible case presented a steep learning curve, her lack of experience also served her well: Unlike civil litigation, which involves obtaining large amounts of discovery as a matter of course, in federal death penalty appeals, “you don’t automatically get discovery,” she said. A judge has to grant permission every step of the way. But Scardino didn’t know this at the time. “I just approached it as, ‘Let’s ask for everything that we would ask for if it was a regular civil case,’” she said. “And that’s kind of what broke it open.”

In early 2016, a critical piece fell into place. After leaving Beaumont, Foreman had been sentenced to decades in state prison. Thirteen years after his role in the snitch ring first came to light in a chance encounter between Walker and Herrero, Foreman decided to talk. The result was a pair of affidavits, one in Prible’s case and one in Herrero’s.

The affidavits did not address whether Foreman had been the leader of the snitch ring, as Walker described. But contrary to the claims made by the informants in both cases, Foreman said he never heard either man confess. “Prible did not brag in my presence about killing an entire family,” Foreman said. “Prible did not tell me that he was the kind of man who can go in a house and take out a whole family and come out clean or say that he was a bad motherfucker.” When Prible talked about Steve Herrera, “he talked about him like he was a friend he had lost.”

Foreman confirmed something Walker said: that men incarcerated at Beaumont joked about how Prible would be their “ticket out of jail.” Although Prible discussed his case with Foreman, “I learned information about his case from Kelly Siegler too,” he said in his affidavit. She “knew that FCI inmates wanted to testify against Prible in return for help getting their federal sentence reduced.” According to Foreman, his first meeting with Siegler took place in August 2001. “I think it was before I even met Prible,” he said.

Soon afterward, Prible’s attorneys asked U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison to order the Harris County DA’s office to hand over any trial material that was “withheld from the defense on the basis that it is work product, privileged, or otherwise confidential.” The DA’s office eventually agreed to submit hundreds of pages to Ellison for a determination on whether they should have been disclosed.

Almost five months later, Ellison issued his order. He had identified a number of records that “possibly contain exculpatory information,” including 19 pages of handwritten notes. The notes were written by Siegler and her investigator Johnny Bonds. Some were hard to decipher, but a few things jumped out immediately.

The notes confirmed that Siegler and Bonds had met with Foreman to discuss the Prible case on August 8, 2001. At the meeting, Foreman had positioned himself as an informant, offering intel about an apparent confession by Prible. One note said Prible showed “Ø remorse.” The notes suggested that Foreman might not have had his facts straight. He seemed to be under the impression that Prible’s own family had been murdered. But if Siegler was skeptical at the time, there was no hint of it in the records, which showed that she met with Foreman again in December.

The notes dramatically undercut the scenario Siegler presented at Prible’s trial, in which Beckcom and Foreman met Prible through a casual encounter on the rec yard. In reality, Siegler had discussed the case with Foreman before Prible was even indicted. “Oh my god. I cannot believe that this has been hidden,” Scardino remembers thinking. “This puts the lie to the whole story about Beckcom and Foreman just coincidentally coming into contact with Jeff.”

Just as damning were notes that appeared to undermine key forensic evidence Siegler presented at Prible’s trial. Prosecutors had elicited testimony from a DNA analyst who claimed that the sperm found in Tirado’s mouth had to have been deposited shortly before she was murdered. But the notes showed that Siegler had consulted a different forensic expert, the director of the police crime lab in Pasadena, Texas, whose analysis did not support the inflammatory theory she presented at trial. “Pamela McInnis — semen lives up to 72 hours,” Siegler had written.

“So much of the trial was just this really horrific narrative spun by the prosecution,” Scardino said. In her closing argument, Siegler asserted that Prible had shot Tirado moments after forcing her to perform oral sex. But Siegler’s own notes made clear that the evidence didn’t support this.

To Scardino, the revelations were a bombshell. “I thought, ‘Oh wow. We’re gonna win this case.’”

by Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith. Originally published on December 17, 2023. Republished with permissions from The Intercept, an award-winning nonprofit news organization dedicated to holding the powerful accountable through fearless, adversarial journalism. Sign up for The Intercept’s Newsletter, https://theintercept.com/newsletter/.

Editor’s note: The conclusion will appear in the August 2024 issue of CLN. 

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