Meet the Team
Bill Clutter
Private Investigator/Author
In 2001, Bill Clutter started the Illinois Innocence Project at the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS), which was the first undergraduate program in the country. As its director of investigation, without a law school or staff attorneys, the Project exonerated three innocent people, Keith Harris, Julie Rea, and Herb Whitlock, enlisting the help of attorneys who worked pro bono.
His investigation of wrongful conviction cases began with his work in the Nicarico case in 1988 that lead to the exoneration of Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, who were sentenced to die for a murder committed by serial killer, Brian Dugan. Bill developed tire track evidence that linked Dugan to the murder of Jeanine Nicarico, and his investigation also helped exonerate Illinois State Police Zone Commander Ed Cisowski of an unwarranted allegation made by DuPage County prosecutors that resulted in Cisowski being the target of an AG investigation. The story of this case was told Victims of Justice, by Thomas Frisbie and Randy Garrett, Avon Books, New York, copyright 1998.
In 1992, Bill developed forensic evidence that freed Randy Steidl in May of 2004, who had been convicted and sentenced to death for the 1986 murder in Paris, IL of a newlywed couple who had been stabbed to death at 4 a.m. as they lay sleeping. On Jan. 8, 2008, Steidl’s co-defendant, Herb Whitlock was released from prison. The appellate court cited Bill’s investigation, working with the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project. The case was featured on CBS news magazine 48 Hours Murder in Paris, On The Case with Paula Zahn, and CNN Death Row Stories, hosted by Susan Sarandon
His work was credited by Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn when Illinois abolished the death penalty in 2011. After moving to Louisville, Kentucky the following year, where he continues to defend those facing the death penalty, Clutter started a national not-for-profit organization of private investigators called Investigating Innocence.
He was appointed to the case of David Camm in 2011 as a consulting crime scene reconstruction expert, a former Indiana State Trooper who spent 13 years in prison, wrongfully convicted of killing his wife and two children. The crime scene reconstruction he helped conduct helped to prove that the crime was committed by a man with a foot fetish who had been released from prison months earlier, known as the “Shoe Bandit.” His work on that case was featured on the Oxygen Network in a new show called Framed by the Killer.
Bill’s investigation in the case of Curtis Lovelace, a former prosecutor from Quincy, Illinois and former team captain of the Fighting Illini football team led to his release from jail in 2017. His investigation of the Rodney Lincoln case, featured on Crime Watch Daily in 2015, produced by film maker Ron Zimmerman, led to the recantation of the witness whose testimony convicted Lincoln. In June 2018, Lincoln’s sentence was commuted by the Governor of Missouri, becoming the third exoneration of Investigating Innocence.
More recently, his investigation on the case of Christopher Vaughn is the subject of the podcast Murder in Illinois, featured on the Dr. Phil Show.
Ron Zimmerman
Investigative Journalist/Videographer
The greater part of Ron’s career has been devoted to the search for justice, using the tools of journalism and storytelling. Early in his career, Ron produced the pilot episode of America’s Most Wanted, hosted by missing and exploited children advocate John Walsh that began airing in 1988. For 21 years, Ron produced compelling stories of victim’s pleas for justice. The show shined a light on criminals hiding from the law, leading to the arrests of thousands of fugitives over the course of more than two decades.
More recently, Ron produced the story of the Rodney Lincoln case for Crime Watch Daily. Lincoln had been wrongfully convicted of the 1982 murder of JoAnn Tate, a 35-year old mother of two small girls, aged 4 and 7 who were also slashed and left for dead but survived. The episode aired in November 2015, and featured the work of Investigating Innocence, which revealed the real killer as Tommy Lynn Sells who had been executed in Texas in 2014, a notorious serial killer who was responsible for crimes that sent at least three other innocent people to prison. After watching the show, which featured private investigator Bill Clutter explaining the evidence which pointed to Sells, Melissa DeBoer, who survived the attack, recanted her trial testimony which convicted Lincoln. In a Facebook post, she declared “Rodney Lincoln did not kill my mom.” In a follow-up story, Melissa advocated for Lincoln’s release from prison, persuading Missouri Governor Eric Greitens to commute Lincoln’s sentence in June of 2018, after 36 years in prison.
Ron’s journalism career started in high school, winning the highest State of Texas awards for writing a weekly column. Ron majored in journalism at the University of Texas and at Trinity University, and worked as a college newspaper and radio reporter, and later, began working for network television affiliates, starting as a photographer and videographer, and then as a reporter and show producer at local television stations. Soon after, network news inevitably lured him away from local news, and he worked for all three major American networks as a freelance journalist and photographer. His work for documentary programs on ABC and NBC resulted in gaining entrance to the Directors Guild of America, and he also joined the Producers Guild.
Among the skills Ron developed over his career have been live productions, full feature-length documentaries, and multi-camera directing. Keeping current with new camera and delivery technologies, as well as the latest editing platforms and techniques, his work has covered all 50 states and more than 50 foreign countries in my story-gathering travels.
Doug Longhini
Investigative Journalist/Producer
Retired now from CBS, Doug spent most of his journalism career working with teams of investigative reporters and producers. These teams have been awarded just about every television journalism award, including one National Emmys, 7 National Emmy nominations and 13 Chicago Emmys. He is a long-standing member of the Investigative Reporters and Editors, an indispensable resource for digital reporting, data analysis, and investigative techniques.
As an investigative journalist, Doug worked as a producer for CBS News/48 Hours and the NBC television station in Chicago where he covered the stories of eight people freed from prison, including three from death row. In Chicago, he headed up the station's investigative reporting team for 15 years.
His coverage of the case of Randy Steidl and Herb Whitlock in Illinois for 48 Hours in late 1999 introduced him to the work of private investigator Bill Clutter, founder of Investigating Innocence. In March of 2000, Clutter mailed a letter to the Director of the Illinois State Police requesting a re-investigation of the Rhodes homicide based on newly discovered evidence that a motorcycle gang, the Sons of Silence, were involved in the murders of Dyke and Karen Rhoads in July of 1986. The production of the show that aired in May of 2000 “Murder in Paris” led to the assignment of Illinois State Police Lt. Michale Callahan, Commander of Investigations in the Champaign, Illinois office to investigate the information Clutter provided. As emails later revealed, had it not been for Longhini’s coverage of the case as an investigative journalist, the assignment of Callahan may not have occurred. Callahan’s review of the case found flaws in the integrity of the conviction, which persuaded the Illinois Attorney General not to appeal a federal judge’s order to vacate Steidl’s conviction, which led to Steidl’s release from prison, followed by Whitlock’s release four years later.
Longhini holds a Permanent Employee Registration Card (PERC) from the State of Illinois, which allows him to conduct investigations on pending cases in that state, and will be part of the team of investigators who will conduct field investigations working with Investigating Innocence.
Julie Davidson
Video Editor
Julie Davidson joined Investigating Innocence as a video editor in 2018 after reaching out to the founder because of her interest in criminal and social justice. Prior to her volunteer work for the nonprofit, Julie was a federal employee with the Department of Veterans Affairs for 7 years, editing a variety of videos produced by the Employee Education System, and won a local Telly award for her work on a PSA for Veterans Day, as well as a letter of recognition from Secretary Anthony Principi for an inhouse documentary.
Julie began her broadcast career at Maryland Public Television, after graduating in 1995 from Towson University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mass Communication. At MPT she held a number of positions on both the producing and operations sides of the station, before being hired as the editor for a nightly magazine news program – NewsNight Maryland. That was where her interest in criminal justice was first peaked when editing a story about the death penalty in Maryland and Kirk Bloodsworth, who was exonerated as a result of DNA testing.
After NewsNight Maryland, Julie worked as a freelance editor for a number of local and national news outlets, including the DC CBS News Bureau, where she was called in to work on September 11, 2001. Additionally, she was a regular freelancer with America’s Most Wanted before taking the full-time position with The Department of Veterans Affairs.