In 2019, Newsday investigative reporter Tom Mayer shed light on the wrongful conviction of Keith Bush, a Bellport man who spent 32 years behind bars.

The judge would ultimately vacate Bush's murder conviction.

Watch Newsday's award-winning documentary, Proving Innocence.

This is where Keith Bush's life at 17 changed forever.

In January 1975, Bush was brought here by police to what was then the headquarters of the Suffolk Homicide Squad.

A few days earlier, his friend, 14-year-old Sharice Watson, had been stabbed to death.

Bush was devastated.

Sitting in the back of the patrol car, he thought he was helping detectives search for her killer.

Instead, he would soon learn that Police suspected that he was the killer.

[MUSIC] Yeah, I was playing basketball and someone came by and we heard a sirens and they were saying that they have found a body over there by Meade Avenue.

And this is where Sharice Watson's body was found.

When I got here, she was laid down, roped around her, and they had a cloth or something over her.

Authorities determined Sharice had been strangled and sexually abused.

Her clothes were torn.

Across her back and torso were many small puncture wounds.

The brutal death of this girl horrified the community.

The public wanted cops to find her killer as quickly as possible.

I kept telling them over and over that I didn't commit this crime.

Bush insisted he was innocent and that the real killer got away.

But his young life was about to transform into an unthinkable nightmare.

A nightmare that would last for decades.

One of the longest running innocent man cases in U.S.

history.

By Tuesday, January 13th, three days after the murder, police went looking for Keith Bush.

They pulled him out of Belport High School and took him to the homicide office for questioning.

But Bush says the questioning was more like torture.

He says they kicked him in the groin and hit him on the head with a telephone book, until he finally gave in.

One guy is, he's using a tough guy tactic and the other guy is using a I'm trying to help you tactic and they're going back and forth.

They got different ones coming in and, you know, jumping in my face and held me down and started hitting me upside the head with a phone book, you know, and they say, you're going to sign a statement.

You have to understand that he was just a kid.

He was 17 years old.

He had no experience other than his little world of Bellport.

He didn't even know where Hoppag was that they sent him to interrogate him.

And he had been interrogated for at least 10 hours.

And he just wanted to go home.

The whole community was insulated as a black community.

And then he's confronted by this whole white power structure.

When I came to this building, I initially came with trust to try to help somebody, to try to do something that was, what I thought was just, because it was a friend.

When it came to authorities, I was just taught, you know, to respect authorities.

So my mindset was completely different.

I felt betrayed.

I felt hurt.

Detectives didn't bother to alert Bush's mother about the interrogation of her teenage son.

He's not 18.

I want to know why wasn't he represented, you know, with a lawyer, and why didn't I know that they had my son?

The whole idea of policing is supposed to be somewhat professional, that they're not going to rush to judgment, that they're going to look carefully for evidence before they decide that they're going to target a particular suspect.

Bush himself was bewildered about why cops had zeroed in on him.

I constantly kept telling them that I didn't commit the crime and they kept telling me about this witness they had that had me leaving the party with Sharice Watson.

That witness was Maxine Bell, only 14 years old.

She was a runaway who had been living in an abandoned building on the same street where Sharice Watson's body was found.

Maxine told police she was at the house party on the night of the murder.

She said that she saw Watson leave together with Bush.

One problem with that story, Maxine now says it was all a lie.

I wasn't there.

I wasn't at that party.

I said I was there, but I wasn't there.

She comes back and she says, "Gee, I've really got to tell you something.

It was a lie.

The police told me what to say.

I was a scared girl.

I was 14 years old.

I was a runaway.

They told me to say that I had seen him leave the party with her, and that's what I did.

But it wasn't true.

At that time, the Suffolk County Police Homicide Squad had developed a startling reputation.

In over 90 percent of murder cases, they somehow managed to get their suspect to confess.

But not everyone was impressed.

a state investigation commission questioned their methods.

The panel took aim at Dennis Rafferty, the key investigator in the Bush case.

They said that they were "disturbed" by Rafferty's "convenient talent for producing crucial testimony and evidence at the 11th hour."

Historically, Suffolk County has had 94% of confessions.

Any expert who looks at this has got to say, "That is not possible."

94% of suspects do not confess.

Court records show Detective August Stahl also interrogated Bush.

And according to DA Investigators, who this year filed a report recommending Bush's exoneration, Stahl described him with an obscene racial slur.

Stahl denied any bias and Detective Rafferty refused to be interviewed.

Both are long retired from the force.

Today, Suffolk police and prosecutors say there is zero tolerance for those who act improperly towards defendants.

But in 1975, things were different.

Keith Bush was on his own.

At age 17, he found himself under arrest for murdering a high school friend.

He would spend an entire year in jail, just waiting for his trial to begin.

I was watching my life just slowly but surely just being taken away from me.

And there was very little I could do about it.

I'm always haunted by that whole trial experience.

But if Bush was innocent, who did murder Sharice Watson?

Ironically, as the accused teen sat in jail, a series of events took place, which experts believe could have pointed to the true killer.

But for decades, that part of the story, the part that could have freed Keith Bush, would remain a secret.

In April 1975, police engaged in a wild chase involving a car with three men wanted for questioning in a burglary.

The chase ended in a crash on Deer Park Avenue in Dix Hills.

In the back seat was John W. Jones Jr., a 21-year-old with a long rap sheet.

Initially, police charged Jones with unauthorized use of an automobile, but soon Jones placed himself at the scene of Watson's murder that night.

In a statement to Detective Rafferty, Jones admitted he attended the house party on the night of the Watson murder.

He said that on his way home he tripped over a girl's body but never alerted police.

A black plastic comb had been found near the body.

Jones admitted that the comb was his.

This guy was actually saying in his statement that he, you know, he left the party around the time Sharice was found, you know, deceased and he tripped over her body and dropped his pick and ran home.

He think he dropped his pick there and they showed him a picture, "Yo, that's my pick," that he dropped it and everything.

And so that information came to them like five months after I was incarcerated.

And I think they felt like they had a serious problem on their hands.

Detectives now had a new murder suspect.

Detective Rafferty and homicide prosecutor Gerard Sullivan arranged to give Jones a lie detector test.

The results found "slight indications of truthfulness" which experts today say would be considered inconclusive.

Rafferty and Sullivan did not reveal publicly the existence of Jones, nor Jones' self-incriminating statement and other evidence.

All of it would remain buried in a homicide file for another 40 years.

They knew it and they intentionally hid it because they did not want disinformation brought out.

They knew about it and that's why they covered it up because they wanted everything to remain focused on me.

In March 1976, Keith Bush went on trial for murder.

During the run-up to the trial, Suffolk authorities never told Bush's defense lawyer, Harold Seligman, about the other suspect, John Jones, or his statement to police.

Seligman says the Homicide Division knew full well that if the Jones information came out, the case against Keith Bush would collapse.

When you think about it, he would have been the linchpin of a defense to set my client free because he was the first person to find the body and he never told anybody that he found the body.

And the Jones information would have been devastating to that prosecution.

I believe my client would not have been found guilty.

I think that the real perpetrator's fingerprints, as it were, were in this case right from the beginning.

And the defense was never told.

When you become a prosecutor, you take on the mantle of the role of Minister of Justice.

And that means that your job isn't just to seek convictions.

After four days, then the longest deliberation in Suffolk's history, a jury with only one Black member found Bush guilty.

There was pandemonium in the gallery.

You know, I was shocked.

I was hoping that because the jury had been out for so many days that they would come back with an acquittal.

And they was taking my brother out.

He said, "They don't got me.

Calm down.

You take care of Mommy."

He said, "They don't got my mind.

They just got my body."

I remember him saying that to me.

And I was so upset that they took me out of the courtroom.

Bush was sentenced to 20 years to life.

I don't think no one could really imagine what it's like when someone takes your life from you at 17 years old.

Five years after his conviction, Keith Bush earned his high school diploma at an upstate prison, far from his former schoolmates in Belport.

He still clung to his hope of one day being exonerated.

But the bleak monotony of life behind bars, the loss of all his dreams, was taking its toll.

That time when you're a young man or a teenage boy and put you inside of a cage where you will remain for 33 years of your life for something you had nothing to do with, the fear, the frustration, the rage, the anger, the hurt, the pain, all these things come alive and they start to eat away at your core.

I had to always talk positive when I got in there because I didn't want him to feel, you know, the pain that I felt.

He always told me, you know, we always got to be strong for mommy and, you know, and him as well.

I had And I didn't want him to know that, but it used to kill me.

You know, it was difficult because I lost everything.

Everything.

I lost all of my teens, all of my twenties, all of my thirties, all of my forties.

And I'm still losing.

You know, I'm at that age now where I'm in the last chapter of my life.

Every time he came up for parole, and he would come up for parole every two or three years, he refused to admit.

And I'm sure it was proposed to him, if you just admit it, they'll let you go home.

So he spent probably another 10 to 15 years in jail that he didn't have to.

If I had to die in prison, then I'm going to die in prison.

But when I leave here, I'm leaving with my innocence.

I'm not walking out here with hopes of making release and walking with this shame of guilt when there's no way in the world I'd do something like that to anybody.

From behind prison walls, Bush conducted a decades-long campaign to prove his innocence.

During one appeal, the prosecution's star witness, Maxine Bill, admitted she lied at trial, but the judge refused to believe her about-face.

Meanwhile, unknown to Bush and his lawyer, evidence pointing to the possible real killer, John Jones Jr., continued to sit in a police file.

It's not clear whether prosecutors even bothered to look at it.

In 2007, 30 years after his conviction, Keith Bush was released on parole.

There was no way that I'm going to stand before anybody and say I committed this crime.

Bush still maintained his innocence, and now he had someone new to help him win back his life.

New York law professor Adele Bernhard has devoted her career to freeing innocent people from jail.

My clinic is designed to try to sort through all of the different requests for assistance that we get and try to look for people who we think may in fact be innocent and wrongly convicted.

Bernhardt persuaded then District Attorney Tom Spoda to agree to DNA tests on evidence from the murder scene.

They showed male DNA underneath Sheree Watson's fingernails, but the DNA did not belong to Keith Bush.

Somebody was there, somebody struggled with her, and that person wasn't Keith.

Spota still refused to reconsider the Bush case, calling it a "phishing expedition."

But then, the New York law team came up with another bombshell.

Through the Freedom of Information Law, they finally obtained a copy of the criminal file with a John Jones statement.

My first reaction was just to be astonished that it was there and we didn't know about it.

And my second reaction was, hey, look, here's more evidence that we're right.

And knowing that the who the perpetrator is makes it much more convincing that your client's innocent.

Bernhardt felt she had the evidence she needed to exonerate Keith Bush.

Now she needed a district attorney willing to consider it.

We are announcing the creation of an independent review panel composed of leading members of the bar that will help review our investigations of wrongful conviction claims.

D.A.

Sini announced his new Conviction Integrity Bureau, headed by prosecutor Howard Master.

One of the first cases Master dove into was that of Keith Bush.

Originally there was contact from Adele Bernhardt, again Keith Bush's attorney, to the district attorney.

She again alleged that there was an alternative suspect whose identity had not been made known for over 40 years.

That obviously struck me as very disturbing, if in fact that was the case.

Master and his team reviewed the forensics in the case, as well as the Jones evidence.

They agreed to give Newsday unprecedented access into their investigation of the 1975 Watson murder, and their probe into whether Bush had been wrongly convicted.

Essentially, we're trying to discover the truth.

Master and his team visited the murder scene in Belport.

44 years later, there are buildings and structures and possibly other substantial changes to the environment that the crime was committed in.

But even now, I think we're learning something from our observations.

Three blocks away, they looked at the house where the party took place on the night of the murder.

One immediate takeaway?

The scene raised questions about John Jones' claim that he tripped over Sharice Watson's body while on the way to his sister's house.

This is where we are.

Jones' house would have been, Jones' sister's house probably would have been in that direction, and the body was in the opposite direction.

The team gathered many other disturbing facts pointing to Bush's innocence.

And after months of investigation, they were ready to brief D.A.

Sini on their findings, including star witness Maxine Bell's admission that she lied about seeing Bush leave the party with Sharice Watson.

- She's a very good person.

and she recants, surprising everyone.

Keith Bush filed motions about this, but no one ever used that as a reason to overturn the conviction.

- What we're learning is that some of what was introduced at trial is not reliable or perhaps not true.

Eventually, it was time for Bush to tell his own story to the DA.

With permission from his parole officer, Bush and his new fiancée took the ferry from Connecticut on a mission to prove his innocence.

He was telling me, you know, word for word about what happened, the night of the party, everything.

And I just couldn't believe, like, you know, "Well, why didn't you do this or why didn't you do that?"

He was like, "Dorothy, I was a teenager.

I was 17."

If you knew Keith, you'd know that he was not the type of person that could commit this crime.

It just saddened me.

It just really saddened me.

See, this is Port Jefferson, right?

Right up the hill is the talking.

Grandma's, Mommy's grandmother had a house over here somewhere.

The memories are, you know, they're psychological scars.

They never go away.

Bush's lawyer, Adele Bernhard, joined him in Hobhog at the DA's office, right across from the red brick building where police said he confessed.

The experienced DA investigators paid as much attention to Bush's demeanor as his words.

One of the more notable parts of the interview was, you know, what drew emotion out of Mr.

Bush?

Was it talking about the day that the victim was murdered?

No.

It was the confession.

It was his reaction to accounting, his version of what happened, which is essentially that they beat the confession out of him.

In May 2019, Keith Bush finally heard the words he had been hoping to hear for decades.

On behalf of the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office and law enforcement community, I'm sorry.

We believe Keith Bush did not commit this murder.

At age 62, Bush was exonerated by a judge, more than 40 years after he was falsely accused of murder.

It's sad that there was possibilities at that time that would have enabled those authorities to look at this case and objectively seek out the truth and ultimately bring proper closure for Cherise and for her family.

But because they deliberately and intentionally undermine the duties and responsibilities entrusted in them, their family left the courthouse hating me for decades, something I had literally nothing to do with and that's an injustice in and of itself.

It's shocking, it's disturbing and it's unimaginable that someone who's innocent can spend that amount of time in prison.

Unfortunately he's not the only one, unfortunately New York has a significant number of exonerations and Suffolk County being high up among them.

I felt that we were never going to find the real perpetrator but Keith always had a sense that somehow that information would come to light and it turns out that he was right.

44 years is more than a lifetime of suffering.

And I know that that cannot be brought back.

But there is opportunities to learn and to grow.

And believe me, I've learned and I've grown as a result of that.

(somber music)