Listen to this excerpt of the conversation, or see the transcript below.
Hall: “I maintain my innocence. Doesn’t that sound like lawyerese? There’s just a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem to make sense to me about this case, but … [Hall trails off and sighs].
Pitch: “Did you know [Kelsey Smith] at all?”
Hall: “No. I didn’t. I just, I mean, I saw her in the store.”
Pitch: “So you were there.”
Hall: “Yeah, I was there. I mean, that’s not a denied fact. I turned myself in because I was there.”
Pitch: “I didn’t realize you turned yourself in.”
Hall: “Yeah, see, they don’t really let that out on the news.”
[Recording breaks in: “This call is subject to monitoring and recording.”]
Hall: “Technically, I mean, I was arrested, technically.”
Pitch: “But you made yourself available to be arrested?”
Hall: “No, it was, ah, I had, when I found out that they wanted to speak to me, I went and I sought legal counsel, and me and legal counsel had sat down and we had called the detectives, and we had said that, ‘Hey, look, he wants to come in and he wants to talk to you,’ but because of my lawyer’s schedule I couldn’t do it right away. We had scheduled a time at, like, 1:30 that day to go and meet with them, like, right after he got done with his court appearance. We were all going to go down to the police station and meet with them. Around 1 o’clock, they picked me up. I went back to my house to get my medication. So I’d already planned to come in. I was going to take my insulin and head down to the police station.”
Pitch: “You were going to take your what?”
Hall: “I’m a diabetic. I was going to take my medication and then go down to the police station. And then they picked me up.”
Pitch: “Gotcha.”
Hall: “So it’s actually on record that I’d made plans to turn myself in. I mean, I don’t know, I’d like to think that people who do these kinds of things don’t turn themselves in, and don’t, all sorts of other … [trails off].
Pitch: “It shows some good will toward helping the investigation. Do you regret that?”
Hall: “Do I regret turning myself in? I’m gonna say no comment on that one. [Laughs.] Obviously I’m sitting in this jail and it’s not pleasant and everyone thinks I’m some kind of a monster now, so, yeah, in that respect I do, but if I had to do it again, knowing what’s happening here now, I would still do the same thing.”
Pitch: “What were you doing at Target?”
Hall: “Idly just bumbling around. Like, really nothing, killing time. I was lookin for an anniversary present, er, not an anniversary present, but a graduation present for my wife. I don’t know, I shop kind of funny, I just let stuff kinda bounce out at me. I don’t think I even stopped and looked at almost anything. I think I looked at a picture frame, that was about it. Yeah, apparently I looked at this girl and that was enough.”
Pitch: “You drive a truck. That was the other thing, right?”
Hall: “And that was my truck, I left it there. There’s some coincidences. I left my truck at Target. The news got that part right.”
Pitch: “What did they get wrong?”
Hall: “A lot. A lot. You’ve probably – ”
[“This call is subject to monitoring and recording.”]
“-- to be honest with you.”
Pitch: “I didn’t catch that.”
Hall: “You’ve probably gotten more news coverage on this than I have. I get it from the people who I care about, the people who are there to support me. They come back and they say, ‘They’re saying all this stuff about you and it’s not true,’ you know? It’s all like media hype, bringing up my past and my childhood and stuff like that. Yeah, I’m actually really displeased because they have cut me off from all support. They’ve confined me in pretty much solitude. It’s not people in here. I’m not too worried about that. But my friends, my family, I can’t talk to anyone -- they’re all on my witness list. I can’t have contact with witnesses. There are over 1,200 people on my witness list. Some of them are on there once, twice, three times. My wife is the one exception. She’s on there, but the judge made an exception on that.”
[The prison phone cut us off shortly after this.]
Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline announced that he will seek the death penalty if Hall is convicted. – Nadia Pflaum
Bottom line...Edwin Hall has too much stacked against him. He was "targeting" the evening that he went to Target in "Overland Park".
Posted at: August 1, 2007 11:50 PM