Submerged

In 2013, detectives in LaPorte, Indiana, arrested Jason Tibbs for the murder of sixteen-year-old Rayna Rison, who had been killed twenty years earlier. Hillel Levin argues that the arrest of Tibbs, a man he considers innocent, was the product of a flawed cold case investigation. The case also cleared a long-standing cloud over Ray McCarty, Rayna's brother-in-law, who had earlier been indicted for her killing. Three years before the arrest, McCarty had pleaded guilty to molesting Rayna and getting her pregnant when she was thirteen.

Tibbs was convicted in 2014 and is serving a forty-year sentence in an Indiana prison. Levin attributes the verdict partly to failures by his defense team and to evidence the judge would not allow at trial. He sees the dropping of charges against McCarty and the filing of charges against Tibbs as a sign of how strongly politics shapes criminal justice in northwestern Indiana. He also shows how a notorious cold case can be used to build a murder charge against the wrong person.

Levin presents this as the first full, detailed examination of Rayna Rison's murder, and he says he solves it using clues the police overlooked. His account draws on a great many interviews and a close reading of the legal record. It tells the story of a girl whom both her family and the justice system failed to protect, and it documents the police and prosecutorial misconduct behind Tibbs's conviction.