On the 28th of September in the year 2000, David Cam arrived home to find that his entire family, his 35-year-old wife Kim, his seven-year-old son Bradley, and his 5-year-old daughter Jill had been murdered in cold blood at the home in the family garage.
The case that unfolded over the next 13 years took twist after turn after twist after turn.
And honestly, it is some of the worst police work that I have ever come across.
Listen, I’ve been researching these videos for 9 years now, so that’s saying something. On the morning of the 28th of September, 2000 in the small town of Georgetown, Indiana, David Kim left for work at around 7 a.m.
Kissing his wife Kim, his son Bradley, and his daughter Jill goodbye for what would turn out to be the very last time.
Get everybody out here TO MY HOUSE NOW. OKAY. All right. My wife and my kids are dead.
From the outside, it appeared, like it always does, that the Cam family lived an idyllic life.
They had two beautiful children. They both had great jobs earning good money. They lived in a house that they had purchased and that they owned.
And they had a great network of family and friends. So everything seemed to be almost perfect.
Kim, who was 35 years old at the time, was born in New Albany on the 14th of March 1965 to parents Frank and Janice Ren.
And she was raised in a loving family alongside her sister. She met David in the late8s and he came from a very close and very influential family.
They were very well respected in the area. So much so that I actually read that David’s there was a street in Georgetown that was named after David’s mom’s side of the family.
Those that knew him as well had nothing but good things to say. One of his colleagues described him as very trusting, very loyal, extremely honest.
He could be trusted with anything. Just one of the most upstanding people you could ever fathom in your life.
Kim’s family also loved him. Kim’s sister said, “Being a little sister, I thought he was nice and he was cute.
And to me, he seemed to bring Kim out more as a person. And for Kim and David as well, it was love at first sight.
David said, “I was just immediately very attracted to her. Beautiful young lady, extremely intelligent, kind, huge heart.”
They got married in 1989, and pretty soon after that, David got a job as a state trooper for the Indiana State Police.
By 1992, Kim was pregnant with their first child, their son Bradley. And it wasn’t long before she found out she was pregnant with their second child, a daughter named Jill.
By the 2000s, Kim was working as a senior accountant for an insurance company, and she was also a member and treasurer of the family’s local church, which was the Georgetown Community Church.
Then, in May of 2000, David actually quit his job as a state trooper, and he began working as a salesman for his uncle’s construction business.
And this was the best decision he could have made for himself and his family because he was earning more money, he was working less hours, and so he was able to spend more time with his family.
So, it really just seemed like everything was getting better and better for the Cam family.
And even Kim’s sister said that, you know, Kim had gotten what she wanted. She had gotten her white pickup fence.
But on the 28th of September, 2000, it all came to a horrific end. David and Kim both had work that day, and both Bradley and Jill had school that day.
Then afterwards, Bradley had a swimming lesson. So, Kim and Jill went and picked Bradley up from his swimming lesson at around 7:00 p.m.
And they headed back home. This was also a Thursday afternoon. So, every Thursday, David would play basketball at the local church with a bunch of his friends at 7:00 p.m.
And he would play there for a few hours before heading home and having a little bit of family time before bed.
And that’s exactly what he was expecting when he got home at 9:20 p.m. That night.
But instead, he found his wife lying on the floor of the garage in a pool of blood.
Immediately, as soon as he saw her, he jumped out of his car. He ran straight over to her.
He held her in his arms and he was saying her name over and over and over again, but he said that he could tell in her eyes that she was gone.
And at that point, it hits him. Where are the kids? Where are his kids?
He gets up. He starts looking around and the children are still in the family SUV, which is there in the garage where his wife is.
She’s lying on the floor next to the family car. They were both found still sitting in the backseat of the car.
Jill was sitting in her seat with her head slumped over into her lap as if she’d never even had a chance to move.
Bradley was stretched over his seat and he was still warm to the touch. So David leans over Jill and he grabs Bradley and lifts Bradley out of the car to try and give him CPR to try and resuscitate him, but it was too late.
35-year-old Kim, 7-year-old Bradley, and 5-year-old Jill had all been shot and killed execution style.
Can I say police radio? Patrice, can I help you? Patrice, it’s Dave Cam.
Let me talk to police command right now. Okay, he’s on another line right now.
Let me talk to Hold on. You’re my only truth. I need you. Dave, get everybody out here to my house now.
Okay. All right. My wife and my kids are dead. Get everybody out HERE TO MY HOUSE.
Go to Dave’s house now. See where we’re at. Okay, David. We’re going We got people on the way.
Okay. Get everybody out here. Come here. Everything’s going to be okay.
All right. We’re going to get Remember, everything’s not okay. Get everybody out here.
They’re coming. Go to Dave Cam’s house now. Okay. Do you know what happened, David?
No. They’re dead. I just got to go play back. 4548. Oh my god.
What am I going to do? Huh? David, they’re on their way right now.
Okay. I got everybody coming. Listen, I’m going to let you talk to Patrice while I get people coming across the street.
I got to get some help. Okay. David, do you need an ambulance? Across here.
Do you need an ambulance? Get [clears throat] everybody out here. I’m going.
DO YOU NEED AN AMBULANCE? DAVE, he hung up. The first thing I want to say about this 911 call that I just feel like I had to know because I just thought it was insane and it was something that I had never thought about in my life is the hold music.
It is the first thing I noticed when I was listening to this 911 call.
I mean, I guess normally there probably wouldn’t be hold music, but because he used to be a state trooper, he’d only quit being a state trooper 4 months earlier.
So I guess he he called up and he immediately was like let me talk to the supervisor and so they had to patch him through and that’s why the whole music but he is completely distraught.
He is hysterical. He is standing there with his whole family having been murdered and he’s got to listen to this whole music.
I don’t know. I just felt like I had to mention it cuz I thought that was insane.
But the second thing listening to that call obviously is how incredibly hard it is to listen to because he is so devastated.
He is so distraught. He is so hysterical and it is just really heartbreaking to hear all of those emotions in that call.
He [snorts] was my son, my only son. When the police arrived to the home and they start taking a look at the crime scene, they find that all three victims had been shot once execution style.
Both Kim and Jill had been shot in the head and Bradley had been shot in the chest.
The lead investigator on the case said, “This was probably one of the most horrific crimes I’ve seen in my 33-year career.”
And not only was it horrific, but as they started to look more into the crime scene, they also started to realize that it was also a little bit odd.
The lead investigator said, “For some reason, it just didn’t look right. It just looked too clean.
For such a horrific crime of three murders execution style, you would have thought there’d be a lot more of a disturbance or physical evidence.”
Kim was found lying on the floor of the garage with her pants and her shoes removed.
And strangely, her shoes had been placed on top of the family car. They’d been placed there very neatly, you know, toes together, side by side, pointing out.
So, someone had taken the care to place them there very neatly. And it wasn’t Kim who did it because the kids were still in the car.
So, she hadn’t even gotten a chance to get them out of the car yet.
Wouldn’t step out, take her shoes off, place them neatly on the top of the car for some reason before getting her children out of the car.
So, obviously, it had to have been the killer that did that. Forensics found a palm print on the side of the SUV.
They also found a sweatshirt which was tucked next to Bradley’s body, and this had two identified pieces of DNA on it, one belonging to a male and one belonging to a female.
And then it also had the word backbone written on the inside of the collar of the sweatshirt.
And neither of these unidentified DNA, none, none of the DNA on the sweatshirt, none of the DNA on the palm print on the car belonged to anybody in the family.
So, it didn’t belong to Kim, Bradley, Jill, or David. Now, the first person that they look to as a potential suspect, of course, is going to be David because he they always look at the person closest to the family or the spouse first.
And he is also the only one in an entire family that wasn’t murdered and wasn’t even targeted in these attacks.
You know, they purposely took place when he wasn’t home. David insisted that he loved his family, that he would never ever harm them.
And everybody in the family’s life agreed. Kim’s family, David’s family, their friends, you know, their siblings, they all agreed that David would never harm his family.
His uncle, David’s uncle, Sam Lockheart, especially knew that David wouldn’t do this and didn’t do this because he had an alibi.
He was with David at the time that the murders took place and so were 10 other men.
So there was 11 witnesses who were at this basketball game with David that corroborated that he could not have committed these murders because he was there with them.
It was estimated that Kim, Bradley, and Jill were murdered at around 7:30 p.m. And as we know, David’s basketball game went from 700 p.m.
Until about 9 9:15 p.m. Like I said, 11 people were there at the time, and they were there for that basketball game.
And every single one of them corroborated that David was there for the entire time.
But despite this, despite his airtight alibi, despite the DNA that was at the scene that didn’t match him, just 3 days after the murders took place, David was actually arrested and charged with the triple homicide of his family.
And that’s when I saw the long stream of blood. And I get down in her face and I’m yelling at her, “Cam, Kim, Kim.”
In her eyes, I could tell she was gone. I didn’t I had no idea what had happened.
And it just hit me. We’re the kids. We’re the kids. My name is David Cam.
I’m the husband of Kimberly, father of Brad and Chill Camp. And I’m not guilty.
Everyone is completely shocked when he is arrested. Everybody in his life, everybody in Kim’s life, everybody that knew them, everybody in the town were shocked.
Nobody, nobody believed that he could do something like this. And it was especially shocking when you think about the fact that he had worked as a state trooper with the Indiana police who arrested him until 4 months before these murders.
And when you think about how, you know, police normally protect their own, it was very shocking.
So the fact that they arrested him after 3 days was just crazy. Even one of the first officers on the scene, Detective Sha Clemens, was one of David’s closest friends.
And he said, “I always considered David a friend. I thought I knew Dave. I thought he was a good person.
Detective Sam Sarinson said that he became suspicious of David when David spoke about how he tried to revive his son Bradley.
And he said, “Usually if you have someone come upon a crime scene and they talk about rendering aid or being involved in the crime scene, then there’s footprints.
I didn’t see any footprints.” What investigators also learned is that in a surprise to nobody, this seemingly perfect family was not so perfect and there were quite a lot of issues.
And those issues all stemmed from David. So what they found out is that over the last 10 years of their marriage or over the course of their 10-year marriage, David had multiple multiple multiple affairs.
They found a dozen women who he had either had inappropriate relationships with or had had full-blown affairs with throughout the course of his marriage, which started in the early 90s, so just months after he and Kim got married, when they spoke to the first woman that he had an affair with.
So the woman that he started seeing months after his marriage, she said that the relationship lasted for about 6 months and it ended when she found out that he was married.
She said that he was a liar, he was a player, he was a love bomber, and that he was very persistent.
She even claimed that when things ended, he called her and he was yelling at her and he was so angry asking, “How did you find out?
Who told you that I’m married?” And she was truly frightened of him during that phone call.
Then when Kim was pregnant with their second child, he began an affair with a woman that he had met at his gym named Stephanie McCarthy.
Apparently, he didn’t even try and hide this relationship. He was, you know, seen taking her out to restaurants.
He was seen taking her out to the NASCAR. All the while Kim was at home with the kids [clears throat] and he was just very blatant about it.
When Kim found out and confronted him about it, he told her that he wanted a divorce.
Mind you, she is 5 months pregnant when that happened. He fully moved out of the house and moved in with Stephanie.
Kim’s parents and even David’s parents’ family, his whole family were very supportive of Kim throughout this whole thing.
They just, it was just crazy, right? But after a few months, he and Kim decide to work things out.
He ends things with Stephanie. He moves back into the family home and he and Kim decide to reconcile and be a family again, raise their two children together.
And again, their families were very supportive. You know, they were supportive of Kim throughout the breakup or throughout the separation, throughout his insanity, and then they were also very supportive of them getting back together and being a family again.
After they get back together, Kim gave birth to their daughter Jill in February of 1995.
And David and Kim decide to start building their dream home on Lockheart Road, which is actually the road that I was telling you about that is named after David’s mother’s side of the family.
So, it’s a street in Georgetown. David’s uncle that was with him at the basketball game was a huge supporter of him throughout this whole thing.
His name is Sam Lockheart as well. Anyway, so after all of this, June of 1997, David starts another affair.
So he starts seeing this woman named Michelle. She was an old friend. He described their relationship or they described their relationship as friends with benefits.
And he would sleep with her in the back of his police car until eventually she found out that he was married and she ended the relationship.
He then goes and starts seeing another woman named Lisa. Lisa was also in a relationship and her relationship with David or her affair with David ended when she actually got married in 1999.
David slept with one of his co-workers in the backseat of one of his other co-workers police cars.
One of his colleagues who he worked with when he was a straight state trooper named Andrea Craig said he was very flirty.
He rubbed my leg under the squad table. He was always asking me if I wanted to hook up.
And then another one of his colleagues said it was a given that he was going to hit on you.
He was going to propose an innocent kind of liaison or something like that. Obviously, there were multiple other stories like this of David either having a one-off hookup or, you know, a full-blown affair.
And all in all, they found about 12 women that had stories like this about them and David.
Then on top of that, right, so on the night of the murder, they took David’s basketball clothes that he had been wearing that night.
They sent them off for forensic testing. When that testing came back, they found eight microscopic drops of blood on his shirt that belonged to his daughter Jill.
When they had a blood spatter expert named Robert Stites look into this, he concluded that these were high velocity impact spatter stains and they had been caused by a bullet hitting a body at close range.
So basically, he’s saying that it’s this high velocity miss. That’s what the drops are on his shirt.
And that could only be caused by shooting somebody at a close range like within four feet.
He did a bunch of tests on this and he concluded that these blood stains were so unique and so separate from other stains that it couldn’t have been anything else.
They couldn’t have been caused by anything else. This is so unique and so separate from other stains that one can say with confidence that this is from high velocity miss that the person uh that got this on him would be in close proximity within 4 ft.
He is looking at least in the direction of the gun when the gun is fired.
When the autopsies on the bodies were conducted as well, they found even more devastating evidence.
As the medical examiner removed Jill’s underwear, she found blood around her genitals, which was caused by blunt force trauma.
The medical examiner, her name was Dr. Tracy Corey, and she said that in her personal opinion, this blunt force trauma was consistent with sexual abuse, but in her professional opinion, she couldn’t rule out other forms of trauma, though she hadn’t been presented with any other scenarios that would explain it.
It was also said that this trauma could have happened just hours before she was murdered or all the way up to 12 to 24 hours before her murder.
And this was huge as well. This was a real turning point in the case because when this came out, even Kim’s parents, Frank and Jennis Ren, started to suspect David.
Janice said that Jill was a very headstrong little girl. And so if anyone other than David, had done this, she would have told somebody.
She would have said something. But David was her dad and she trusted him and so she believed that he was really the only person that would have been able to get away with something like this.
Frank Ren also said, “I don’t consider him anymore as a son-in-law. I don’t consider him as a friend or nothing.
And because I know he’s done this, he’s going to have to take it to his grave with him because he’s not going to admit it.”
I wake up, you know, every night with that in my mind. So Devon’s trial began in February of 2002 and he pled innocent.
He maintained that he could never and would never harm his family. The prosecution kind of, you know, had a few different motives that they couldn’t really pick which one to go with, but eventually they decided on the affairs.
So, they had those 12 women who they had come in and testify about their affairs with David.
And what they said the motive was is that David was unhappy in his marriage.
And so, he decided to kill his entire family to get out of it. So he could go and he could sleep with all of these women and not have to worry or not have his wife or his kids sort of holding him down.
David’s brother, Donnie, said the prosecution can’t decide what his motive is. They’ve been bouncing around on different motives and they can’t find one to stick.
Now they’ve gone to, well, he killed his wife and kids so he can pursue extrammarital affairs.
My question would be, if he was so successful at doing that, why does he have to kill his family?
Which is obviously awful, but also he’s not exactly wrong because I mean really he fully left his family once to go and be with another woman and then he decided to get back with Kim.
So it’s not like he was incapable of leaving. He’d already done it once and then he’s with Kim and he’s still having all of these affairs but at the same time he had many of these women end these affairs with them with him because they found out that he was married.
So, the theory about how all of this played out and went down and how David managed to do it is they were claiming that he managed to leave that basketball game that he was at for about 15 minutes.
And within that 15 minutes, he managed to drive home, kill his entire family, take off Kim’s pants and her shoes and place them neatly on top of the family car, molest his daughter, and then drive back to the church all within that time frame and act completely normal with everybody at the church.
There was a test that was done which showed that just driving back and forth from the church to his house, then from his house to his church took 8 minutes, right?
And that doesn’t even include getting out of the car and going into the driveway.
So, the driving portion alone would leave only 7 minutes for him to do everything I just said and complete the murders.
David’s sister Julie said, “Now we’re saying he left the ball game, went home, sexually abused his daughter, then murdered his family, and somehow got them the kids conveniently buckled back in his car.”
That’s crazy. I mean, that’s ridiculous. The prosecution was suggesting that the 11 eyewitnesses David had from the basketball game that said he was there for the entire time were either lying, covering for him, or simply misremembering that they got caught up in the game.
So they just didn’t realize or didn’t notice that he had kind of slipped out for 15 minutes.
They played three games that night. So David played in the first game and the third game and he sat out for the second game.
So their theory is that he managed to do this during that second game. He slipped out for 15 minutes there and back and nobody realized because they were playing and he was on the sidelines.
But multiple players said that they were 100% certain that he was there throughout that whole second game.
There were also people there that weren’t playing basketball and they said that he was there sitting on the sidelines.
A man named Tom Jolly said that he wasn’t playing. And throughout the second game, he actually had a conversation with David.
None of these 11 men ever wavered on their story. None of them ever slipped up on a detail.
None of them ever said, “I don’t know, maybe he wasn’t there.” They never doubted their stories.
They were always very firm on what had happened and the fact that he was there.
And there was 11 of them. So, that’s a lot of people to get to cover for you and to stick to one solid story without ever changing it or getting a detail wrong.
So, then the prosecution brings up the eight tiny blood drops that were found on David’s basketball shirt.
And the defense when this was brought up brought an expert witness to the stand to testify.
He had been an expert blood spatter witness for more than 30 years at this point.
And he said that he actually concluded, he did his own test and he concluded that those droplets actually got there when David leaned over his daughter Jill in the car to get his son Bradley.
She had blood on her arm hairs is what he was saying or on her body hairs.
And so when he lent over her, he brushed up against them and that’s how they transferred onto his shirt.
Grab bread and picked him up. Why did you grab him? I I was going to try to do CPR on him.
Did he look like he was alive? I didn’t know. I mean, I didn’t I didn’t know.
I had to do something. That’s the first thing that came to my mind. The contact stains and transfer stains that were found on his t-shirt are all consistent with what he said he did.
He also said that a gunshot would produce way more blood spots than just eight.
If he was shooting a gun at close range, he would have hundreds, if not thousands of blood dots and blood spatter on his shirt.
And this expert also said that neither he nor any of the other experts in this case had ever seen high velocity mist or high velocity blood spatter from shooting a gun at close range produce just eight drops of blood.
If David had pulled the trigger at point blank range, he would be covered in blood.
And not to mention, there was no blood found that belonged to Bradley or Kim on his shirt.
In defense of the molestation, the prosecution was actually never able to prove that it actually happened.
They weren’t able to prove who did it, and they weren’t able to prove when it happened, which is huge because there was such a big time window of it happening within hours before her murder all the way up to 24 hours before her murder.
David left for work at 7:00 a.m. That morning and he got home from the basketball game at 9:20ish p.m.
That means if it did happen within hours or within 12 hours before the murder, he actually wasn’t physically able to do that because he didn’t see her.
If it happened more than 12 hours, if it happened within 24 hours, then there is potential that he molested her the night before or before he left for work or something like that.
But they weren’t actually able to prove when it happened. And they weren’t able to prove anything like that.
There was no evidence on any of her bed sheets, on any of her underwear.
Nobody in her life had ever suspected anything or heard anything, which I know doesn’t rule it out, of course, but there was no evidence whatsoever that this is this had actually happened.
Even the medical examiner couldn’t say for sure that she was actually molested. She said that there are other scenarios that could explain what had happened, that she just hadn’t been presented with those scenarios.
David had always been adamant that he had never and would never molest his daughter.
And he said at one point through tears, “This is my 5-year-old daughter, and I did not molest her, and I did not kill her.”
The defense claimed that the prosecution was basically just using this to demonize David and to turn the jury against him so that if they didn’t like him, then they would be more likely to convict him of murder cuz they didn’t actually have any real evidence against him.
I look at the evidence and I look what the evidence tells me. Uh he didn’t do this.
There were mistakes made. He should never have been charged. He didn’t do it. The trial lasted for about 2 months and at the end of this 2 months, the jury deliberated for 3 hours before returning with a verdict of guilty.
So, David was found guilty of all three murders and he was sentenced to 195 years in prison.
The thought of having to come to prison for crimes that I knew that I didn’t commit and had no involvement in, frustrating anger, you know, it was pretty an overwhelming situation.
So after his conviction, David gets a new defense team and they of course appeal immediately and 2 and 1/2 years after the original conviction, the Indiana Court of Appeals actually overturns his conviction.
The court of appeals also criticized the judge, saying that really he shouldn’t have allowed any of the 12 women that David had affairs with to testify because it just kind of turned the jury against David and made them not like him for being a sleas ball instead of being a murderer.
And just because he’s a sleas ball doesn’t mean he’s a murderer. They also strongly warned the prosecution that if they wanted to present evidence of David’s daughter Jill being molested again that they really needed to prove when she was molested and that David molested her.
So with the help of David’s new defense team and with the help of the Indiana Court of Appeals, his case was transferred to a new county and he also had bail this time.
So his bail was set at $20,000. His uncle Sam Lockhart immediately goes to the bank, gets $20,000 out, and he bails David out of prison.
I’d been locked up for a while, and um in such a dramatic fashion being put back out into the real world.
It was uh you know, the the transition is is not an easy thing. There’s also a new prosecutor that is assigned to the case now.
So, the new prosecutor is a guy named Keith Henderson. He says that he’s going to come in, he’s going to look at it all with fresh eyes and do a whole new reinvestigation.
And David is thinking, “Thank God.” You know, this guy’s going to come in. He’s or he’s hoping that he’s going to look at all of the evidence and he’s going to say, “We actually don’t have any evidence.
So, let’s not even bother trying him again.” That is not what happened. He does decide to prosecute David again.
And this time, because he can’t talk about David’s affairs and his cheating, he decides to focus on David molesting his daughter as the main motive for this murder.
His theory was essentially that David had been like it had been an ongoing thing that he had been sexually abusing his daughter and his family was about to find out.
So, he decided to murder them all to keep it from getting out. There’s also a clip in one of the documentaries I watched of him and, you know, his whole prosecution team chatting about all of the evidence and they start talking about the 11 witnesses at the basketball game and he’s saying, you know, we’ve got to we’ve got to get one of them.
We’ve got to break one of them down and say that they don’t remember or say that, you know, slip up and say something that shows that one of them was lying.
We’ve got to, you know, that these 11 witnesses, they’re not reliable. That’s what he’s saying.
And again, he thinks they’re either misremembering, they’re lying, they’re covering for David. And it just becomes very clear very quickly that he is not doing what he said and coming and looking at this case with fresh eyes.
He’s very much just using the same tactics that the last prosecution used as well.
He’s not doing a thorough re investigation. He’s not putting the proper effort in to reinvestigate.
And and we’ll get into this later, but there’s you can tell because there’s just so much that he missed.
There’s so much that they skimmed over. There’s so much evidence that they ignored. What you may have noticed from the first trial is that, you know, I mentioned at the crime scene, there was a palm print found on the SUV and there was a sweatshirt.
They didn’t know who it belonged to. David said didn’t belong to him. None of his DNA was found on it.
And there was two unidentified DNA that was found on it, which belonged to a man and a woman.
Neither of which matched to any of the victims or to David. And so, you may have noticed that none of this was brought up in the first trial.
David’s defense assumed that the reason this didn’t come up is because they ran it through the database and it didn’t come back, you know, it didn’t match to anything.
And that’s because the prosecution actually told the defense that they had run it, that they had put it through the database of known convicts, known criminals.
And so the defense just kind of assumed, well, it must have not had a match, and that’s why it didn’t come up in any of the court documents, didn’t come up in in the trial because there was no match.
Well, as it turns out, the prosecution never ran the the DNA through the database.
They never ran it through the database of known criminals, probably because having DNA that wasn’t a match to David at the crime scene didn’t fit this narrative that they were like so hellbent on sticking to.
The original prosecutor from the first court, from the first trial, he claims that he asked somebody to submit it and said, “I think they dropped the ball.”
Whoopsies. I didn’t follow up, but whoops. I mean, it’s crazy because they can’t even take accountability.
The police work in this case is just so bad. You’ll see more and more as we get further into the case.
It’s so bad. I mean, dude, there is no there’s no whoopsie about something like that.
You dropped Nobody dropped the ball. You dropped the ball. You need to follow up on it if you don’t want to because it doesn’t fit your narrative.
He doesn’t even he like can’t even come up with an explanation for it because in an interview, you know, he said it was misunderstood what he he asked them to put it through the database and it and they misunderstood it.
Someone must have misunderstood. And then he gets asked in this interview, okay, you asked the police to run it through the database.
How is that misunderstood? How could that be misunderstood? And he just says, I don’t know.
David’s defense attorney, his first defense attorney, also said that the prosecution actually told him that there was no match.
So that doesn’t really sound like a whoopsie if you ask me. So when David’s defense team figure this out and they find out it had never been run through this database, they finally after 5 years after the murders took place run this unknown DNA through the database of known criminals.
And what do you know? Immediately they get a hit. They get a match to a guy named Charles Bernet.
This guy had been released from jail shortly before these murders took place. And you will never guess what his nickname is.
His nickname is Backbone, which is the word that was written on the inside of that sweatshirt at the crime scene right next to Bradley’s body.
As they look into Charles Benet, what they find is that he has an extensive criminal history.
He grew up in the same town as David and went to Indiana State University where he studied education.
This was in the 80s when he was studying and that is where his crimes began.
Over the years, he had been convicted of robbery, attempted robbery, armed robbery, resisting law enforcement, battery.
He had assaulted multiple women, tried to kidnap three women by gunpoint. He had a history of being violent towards women, and get this, he was known to steal women’s shoes.
He had a shoe fetish or a foot fetish. When he was arrested for kidnapping those three women at gunpoint and stealing their shoes, mind you, he actually became known as the shoe bandit.
So, if you put this together with the fact that Kim’s shoes were removed and then placed very neatly toe to toe facing out on the top of the car, it all kind of starts piecing together and starts to explain a lot of things.
They go and track after finding this out track down and they pick him up in Kentucky just over the border from Indiana and they bring him in for questioning.
He says he had no involvement. He didn’t even know who David Cam was. And the reason his DNA was on that sweatshirt is because as soon as he got released from prison, which was shortly before the murders, he dropped it in a Salvation Army box.
He also points out that it’s not just his DNA on the shirt. There’s also DNA of an unidentified woman or an unidentified female on the shirt as well.
And they didn’t tell him that. So he kind of says to them, you know, everybody knows that.
Everybody who’s followed the case knows that. And as soon as they came to talk to him as well about a murder, he knew exactly what case they were questioning him about.
And he said it was because he’s from that town and everybody in that town knows about these murders.
Never ever encountered uh Mr. David Cam. Honestly, this guy just talked and talked and talked, they almost could not get him to stop.
At one point, he says, “If something of mine was there at the scene, that means that I would have been there.”
And police couldn’t have agreed more. His sweatshirt was there. His DNA was there. He also says to police, “My fingerprints would not appear at that crime scene because first and foremost, once again, I would have had to have been there for my fingerprints to appear at the crime scene.”
But the catch is that his fingerprints, and I guess he didn’t know this, his fingerprints were found at the crime scene.
That palm print that was found on the side of the SUV, that was also a match to Charles Benet.
So, at the end of the interview, Charles Bernay was arrested and charged with the murders of Kim, Bradley, and Jill.
My initial presumption was, “We’ve got the guy. It’s over.” Now, shortly after the arrest of Charles Benet, the charges against David were actually dropped.
And David’s dad said that he had never in his life seen David happier. He said, “Oh, gracious.
He was nervous. He was shaking. He was beside himself.” And really it all just seemed too good to be true.
He had been released on bail. He had been able to spend time with his family after so many years.
He was able to, you know, take a little bit of time to actually grieve what had happened because he was able to go for 3 days before he was just chucked into fighting for his innocence.
And after all this time, they also finally caught the man who was responsible for murdering his family.
And then also on top of that, the charges against him have been dropped. But as it turns out, it was too good to be true because just an hour or less than an hour after he found out that the charges against him had been dropped, the police showed up to his house to charge and arrest him once again.
So what happened is that the prosecution decided to file charges against Charles Benet as well.
And they also decided to charge them both as co-conspirators. So in order to do that, they had to drop the charges against David and then recharge him with these new charges and charge charge both of them, Charles and David.
So now they were both facing three counts of murder and also a conspiracy charge.
David’s second trial begins in January of 2006 and both David and Charles Benet are being charged or their trials are happening simultaneously in different counties.
Now, at David’s second trial, they had a new theory that they wanted to present to the jury.
Basically, just days after Charles Venet was arrested and charged, he completely changed his story.
So, originally, he’s saying doesn’t know David, you know, has no involvement whatsoever. But then he very quickly realized he couldn’t deny being at the scene cuz he said all these things and his fingerprints there and then his sweatshirt’s there and it’s got his nickname on it.
So his story had changed to now say that he had met David at a basketball game.
And he told David that he was a convicted felon who dealt in drugs and guns, which is exactly what somebody would do when they meet an ex-state trooper.
I lied about not knowing David Cam in the very beginning. I lied about not being at the crime scene.
I gave Pinocchio a run for the Oscar. Anyway, he claims that once he told David this information, David asked him if he could help him get a clean, untraceable gun for $250.
Claims he had no idea why he wanted the gun. Didn’t ask. All he cared about was the money.
When he goes to drop off the gun, he claims he gives David the gun.
David turns and just shoots his entire family, then turns the gun on Bernay and tells him that he’s going to frame him for the entire thing.
Bon’s defense attorney said he hears an altercation and then hears a female voice say no.
Then there’s a shot and he hears a young male voice saying, “Daddy,” and then there’s a second shot.
He claims then that when David turned the gun on him, that the gun actually jammed.
So he, you know, as you do when somebody kills their entire family in front of you and then threatens to frame and kill you, he runs straight for David.
Kim’s shoes are off for whatever reason. He trips over Kim’s shoes and then he decides to pick up the shoes and place them neatly on top of the car, which again just makes so much sense given the situation.
That’s exactly what I would do, too. Why David didn’t come at him while he was tripped over on the ground and neatly placing the shoes up on the car.
Couldn’t tell you where David even was during that time. Couldn’t tell you, which makes a lot of sense, right?
His attorney says after tripping over the shoes, he picked up the shoes, placed those on top of the Bronco, and then looked inside the vehicle, saw the children, saw they had been killed, and then he left.
And also remember that all of this is meant to have taken place in just 7 minutes, right?
That’s what the prosecution has been saying. That’s the window, that’s the time or window of opportunity that they had.
It honestly, his story sounds like a skit. And how does that whole situation end as well?
David says, “Oh, well, gun jammed. Didn’t manage to kill you, so I’m just going to take off.
I’m going to leave you here with all of this.” Jumping over to Benet’s trial for a quick second.
So, at his trial, they managed to track down the woman that the female DNA belonged to that was also found on his sweatshirt.
They traced it to a woman named Mara Mattingley, who was in Trinidad. She was Benet’s girlfriend at the time of the murders, and she said they weren’t together for very long, to be honest.
So when they tracked her down, she was shocked. When they did manage to track her down, Benet was excited.
He thought, you know, this is perfect. She’s going to help with an alibi. He literally called her the perfect alibi, but it was actually the complete opposite.
She told investigators that she saw she was with Benet the night of the murders and he left and he told her that he was going to help out a buddy.
Few hours later, he comes home and he is just really excited. He’s got a lot of energy.
And she said he was excited and trying to catch his breath and panting. She also said that she saw a scrape on his knee and that Benet insisted on showing her a gun.
This gun is now believed to be the murder weapon, which has never been found.
Mara said that she was terrified and she said that she asked Charles to leave the house.
The next morning, she remembered that he had been telling her to watch the news and he really wanted her and her mom and all three of them to watch the news the next day.
Two weeks later after this happened, she broke up with him because she just thought he was a freak and she was the only person who saw him on the night of the murders.
All evidence leads to him. There’s no evidence against David. There’s just evidence against Bonet.
None of his stories add up. His DNA is all over the crime scene and it’s just very, very clear that he was involved.
So, at the end of his trial, he was convicted of all three murders, and he was sentenced to 225 years in prison.
David and his family saw this as a massive win. They thought that once jurors in his trial found out that a convicted criminal, a a convicted violent criminal who was known for attacking and assaulting women and having a shoe fetish and stealing shoes had been convicted of this crime that they would realize that it was Charles Benet that killed his entire family, killed Kim, Bradley, and Jill and not David.
There was no evidence tying Benet and David. There was no text. There was no emails.
There was no phone calls. There was no letters through a carrier pigeon. There was no evidence whatsoever that these two had ever interacted or knew each other or even knew of each other.
In fact, Bernay’s original story was that he didn’t know who David was. But once again, this isn’t how it played out.
In fact, the jury heard very little about Charles Benet. The judge ruled that they would be able to hear about his fingerprint and his DNA found on the sweatshirt, but they wouldn’t hear about his conviction for the same crimes and they wouldn’t hear of his past convictions and his past crimes against women and his shoe fetish.
And to make matters worse, although the prosecution weren’t able to talk about David’s affairs and bring these 12 women to testify about the affairs, they were still able to testify about Jill’s sexual abuse, despite the fact that the Indiana Court of Appeals disallowed them doing this or disallowed this to happen without any evidence against David for the sexual abuse, which they still didn’t have.
And yet this was their entire motive that they were kind of basing their case against David on.
In closing arguments, the prosecution said the motive was Kimberly was leaving David Cam and she was leaving him because of the child molesting.
David’s defense tried to point the finger at Charles Benet, but at the end of the trial after the jury deliberated for 4 days, they came back and they found David guilty once again of all three matters and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
After his sentencing, David said, “Another thing that makes it more difficult is the fact that I did have that taste of being back with, you know, my brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, and being back with my family.”
And the bottom line is one of the things that makes it the most difficult is the fact that I’m doing Charles Bernay’s time.
So, David’s defense team appeal once again. This time they appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court.
And in 2009, the Supreme Court overturns his conviction once again, his second conviction. They basically ruled that the jury was unfairly influenced by the unproven theory of Jill’s molestation because there was no evidence whatsoever that David had molested his daughter.
I also thought I would mention I just thought it was interesting that David found found out about his conviction being overturned through the TB.
In December of that same year, so 2009, the same prosecutor from the second trial goes ahead and refiles those charges against David.
It’s honestly crazy considering their lack of evidence against him. They’ve already got a guy in prison for the murders.
All this evidence against this other guy, no evidence against David whatsoever, and yet they’re coming back for a third trial.
I guess the court of appeals thought it was crazy as well because they eventually make that prosecutor stand down from the case.
Trial 3 begins in August of 2013. This time the prosecution have lost both of their motives.
So they can’t talk about the affairs. They can’t talk about the molestation. And so this time the motive they’re going with is life insurance.
Kim had about $625,000 worth of life insurance and 401k. And they’re saying this is why he murdered her, which can I just say doesn’t explain why he would murder the children if that’s if that was his motive.
They’re kind of just flip-flopping from whatever motive they can come up with at the time, really is what it seems.
During this trial, they actually had Charles Benet take the stand and testify against David.
Testify that he watched David kill his entire family and then tried to turn the gun on him and kill him as well.
Also, during this trial, interestingly, the jury was allowed to ask witnesses questions. So, one of the jurors asked Charles Benet what David had been wearing on the night of the murders, and he answered incorrectly.
He answered that he was wearing long pants, which he wasn’t. He was wearing basketball shorts.
Now, also during this trial, they had the defense had a new expert testify. His name was Richard Illanboom.
He was a touch DNA expert. And he testified he went through and went through all of the evidence in the case and he re-examined it for touch DNA.
And he testified that he had found Charles Bernay’s DNA on both Kim and Jill’s shirts, Kim’s underwear, on one underneath one of Kim’s fingernails, which had broken off, and also above an abrasion on Kim’s arm, which was believed to have happened or she got that abrasion in a struggle with the killer, which basically discredits his entire story that he wasn’t involved, didn’t touch any of the victims, and he was just kind of a witness and an onlooker.
Ikeland Broom also testified that the state police could have found this if they had just looked a little harder, which we already know they didn’t.
They didn’t want to look harder probably because they didn’t even run the most obvious DNA through the database.
I heard that there was not any DNA under the fingernail. No, there was there was I heard that there was not.
I’m telling you that there was. And so, I mean, that’s if you were me, wouldn’t you think that that was pretty damning evidence?
It does raise a question. So, the craziest thing about this trial is if you remember Robert Stites, the original blood spatter expert for the prosecution in the first trial.
He also testified in the second trial. He’s the one that testified, who who did his tests, who did all these like demonstrations and said that the eight blood dots on David’s shirt were a result of high velocity blood spatter from him shooting a gun within 4 ft of Jill.
He comes back in this trial and he testifies that he committed perjury in the first two trials.
He said that he had fabricated credentials. He said that he was a PhD candidate and that he was a crime scene analyst, both of which he wasn’t.
A man named Rod Anglet was the real blood spatter expert. He couldn’t get out to the original crime scene.
So he decided to send his photographer, which was Robert Stites. So all of his blood spattered testimony, which the prosecution had relied very heavily on because it was the only evidence they had against David, he said was essentially all guesswork and that several of his conclusions that he came to were scientifically baseless and inaccurate.
And he also said that the first prosecutor from that first trial, his name was Stan Faith, he said that he had helped him basically falsify those credentials.
That pretty much left the prosecution with no evidence against David at all. And not to mention, it’s a really bad look.
I mean, that’s messed up. And things just kept getting worse for the prosecution. They had a state police officer testify at this third trial and he testified that he thought it looked like a David Cam crime scene before he even stepped foot in the garage.
One juror later said, “We all felt that he was definitely looking for evidence to support the conclusion he’d already come to, and that’s not the way you should investigate a case,” which is also what the defense argued as well.
They argued that all of the state’s investigators basically ignored evidence that David was innocent, especially after they found Charles Benet.
David’s defense attorney said when they got him in that interrogation room, they didn’t say, “You’re a violent convicted criminal who attacks women.
You did this. Tell us what happened.” They said, “Well, it’s better to be a witness than actually a defendant.
Tell us what you saw. Give us David Cam. Tell us the connection. We don’t think you shot anyone.”
They’re not searching for a murderer. They’re searching for evidence that David did it. This third trial lasted for 8 weeks.
The jury deliberated for 10 hours at the end of it. And on the 24th of October 2013, they came back with a verdict of not guilty.
After 13 years, three different trials, and many different theories and motives against him, David was finally free.
I wailed, I cried, I bent over, I stood up, I may have praised God, I thanked the jury over and over and over again.
There were two people though that were not happy about David’s acquitt and that was Kim’s parents Frank and Janice Ren.
Frank said, “I heard not guilty. I go, my gosh, did I hear that right?
What went wrong? What made this jury believe he’s not guilty?” They actually launched a civil suit to prevent David from receiving Kim’s $625,000 life insurance policy.
The suit was dropped in 2014, though they said they aren’t giving up on efforts to keep David from profiting from his family’s deaths that same year.
So in 2014, David went ahead and sued Floyd County as well as the state of Indiana for $30 million which was settled for $450,000.
He also filed another action and in 2022 he received $4.6 million for this. The prosecution and the state police have obviously been heavily heavily criticized for the way that they handled this case.
The investigation was botched right from the start. It was full of critical mistakes. There was the way that they mishandled evidence, the way they ignored evidence to fit their narrative.
They have been accused of witness tampering, such as with Robert Stites. David’s lead defense attorney also accused the prosecution of basically feeding Charles Benet a story implicating David, which is why his story changed so drastically from his first interview of never met him, don’t know anything about him to testifying at his trial that he had witnessed this whole thing go down.
Then there’s the evidence tampering and the mishandling of evidence or the straightup lying. For example, they took no fingerprints or forensic evidence from inside the Cam family house.
The evidence file also said that Kim’s purse was found inside the house on the kitchen table, but the crime scene photos showed that it was in the car on the passenger seat, which in itself is a small thing, but there’s just so many inconsistencies in their stories, in their evidence, things that they clearly missed or didn’t even look into.
Another allegation that came out is that a man named Myron Wilkinson, who was a distant relative of Charles Benet, he was a police officer, but he wasn’t assigned to this case.
There was an allegation that he met with Charles Benet privately after he was arrested for the murders.
2 months later, it was found that Wilkinson had actually gone into evidence, taken Kim Cam’s phone out of evidence without signing it out, and then took it back to his house.
And when people finally found out and got him to bring the phone back in, it had been completely wiped clean of any fingerprints.
Wilkinson, the reason that he wasn’t charged with tampering with ev evidence or anything like that is because he passed away before that third trial.
I mean, truly, I could talk about this forever. I could talk about the inconsistencies in this trial, in this investigation forever because there was just there genuinely was no evidence.
And for some reason, they just kept trying him and trying him and trying him.
Even when they convicted Charles Benet, even after they convicted somebody else for the matters, they still just kept trying him without any evidence.
I mean, in the last trial, what evidence did they actually have? Their blood spatter expert who said, “Yeah, those drops of blood that belong to his daughter, that’s because he shot his daughter.”
The witness that said that was proven to be not even a blood spatter expert.
Like, he falsified all of the information about that. So, I don’t even know what evidence they actually were going off when they decided to take him for a third trial.
I don’t know if someone in this prosecution team or in the police force just really hated this guy or what.
Maybe he pissed someone off when he was working as a state trooper. I don’t know, but it is crazy.
So, as of today, David Cam is the case coordinator for Investigating Innocence, which is a nonprofit organization that conducts criminal defense investigations for inmates and provides assistance to people who have been wrongfully imprisoned.
He’s actually also now friends with members of the jury from his third trial. He still lives in Indiana and he has since remarried.
Charles Benet did attempt to appeal his conviction, though his appeal was denied and he’s still serving his 225 year prison sentence.
But yeah, that’s everything for this case. That is all the information I have. But let me know your thoughts on this one, guys, because I mean, do you think there’s any chance that David was involved in this?
It definitely is a red flag or it’s strange that his entire family was murdered, but he wasn’t.
I mean, generally, I think when you see cases like that, it is the husband that’s involved.
I don’t know if that’s why the police got tunnel vision, but I’ve never seen tunnel vision that intense before.
I mean, the way they mishandled evidence, the way they just ignored evidence, the way they didn’t test the evidence, they didn’t send the sweatshirt away.
They didn’t test the palm print, the witness tampering with the fake blood spatter expert.
That’s crazy. The witness tampering with Charles Bernet. Allegedly, David’s first defense attorney also said that they were coercing Bernay into testifying against David to, I guess, try and get him a lesser sentence or whatever it was.
I just think there’s no evidence against David at all. There is nothing to say that he did it.
Kim was the best thing that ever happened to me. She had extraordinary love for me, and I know that Kim knew that I loved her.
I mean, clearly, he wasn’t involved, right? He was he has 11 witnesses unless he hired Charles Benet.
That’s the only explanation I can see for him being involved because he couldn’t have physically committed the murders.
But that seems extremely unlikely because there is no evidence whatsoever that they ever even knew each other, ever even crossed paths.
And considering how badly the prosecution wanted to convict David for this for whatever reason, whether he pissed off a former colleague or whatever it was, they they wanted to get him so bad.
Considering how badly they wanted to convict him, I feel like they would have dug and dug and dug and tried to find some sort of text, some sort of message, some sort of email, some sort of letter, some sort of witness or something to prove that David and Charles had ever met.
But there was none of that. There was no evidence whatsoever. There was no transactions.
There was no weird bank, you know, getting cash out. There was none of that.
You would think they would at least try to prove that he bought the gun off Charles Bernet, but they couldn’t.
They couldn’t prove anything. I can’t even believe that they tried to push that story that Charles Benet gave.
Within 15 minutes, he he drove all the way there, gets out of his car, gets the gun off Charles Benet, shoots his entire family, attempts to shoot Charles Bet, and it conveniently jams after he’s just used it three separate times.
Jams Charles Bet runs after him, trips over shoes, and decides to pick the shoes up and place them neatly on the hood of the car.
I mean, that is the you you actually can’t make it up. You can’t make you can’t make up that this happened.
I couldn’t write a story like this because what do you mean? That’s the best you could come up with.
And then he has to drive all the way back to the basketball game and act like nothing happened.
And 11 witnesses didn’t see any change in his demeanor at all. Not to mention, if he has 7 minutes to actually be there and commit the murders, it was theorized that Kim, Bradley, and Jill were all murdered as they got home.
That’s why the kids are still in the back seat. That’s why it all happened in the garage.
So, he would have had to time it so perfectly to get there right as they’re getting home and then all of this takes place.
And considering all of that, it’s so sad that this man lost 13 years of his life for again whatever reason.
I actually can’t understand what the prosecution was thinking. He lost his entire family and then he lost 13 years of his life in prison.
Instead of being able to grieve his family, he gets three days and then immediately has to fight for his innocence and fight for his freedom and fight to try and get justice for his family and find the real killer for 13 years.
I mean, obviously, he was a sleas having cheated on his wife at least a dozen times, but he’s not a murderer.
So, it’s just a really, really crazy situation. David and Charles Vanet have also done interviews since all of this has happened, kind of going back and forth.
They obviously hate each other. I don’t know what Charles Bet’s reason is, but they’ve been on these interviews just like talking about each other.
David called him a psychopath, rightly so, because what on earth? They know he’s a psychopath during the time basically that I’m a trooper out there trying to do good.
He’s either violating people or doing time in prison. Yet, he’s their guy. 24 jurors found him guilty, Mr.
Cam, guilty. They heard the same evidence and they believed that it was possible. But yeah, that is everything.
That’s everything for this case. Let me know your thoughts, guys, because clearly I have a lot.
