Tim Montgomery looked down and sighed as he tried to explain why he lied to police decades ago about the 1992 murder of two elderly sisters in Cleveland.
“I was not there. I said that thousands and thousands of times, but nobody will believe me. So I told them what they wanted to hear,” Montgomery testified at a hearing last year.
A prosecutor continued to press him about his past statements implicating him and Terry Ferrell in the home invasion and murders of Mary Mosberger, 82, and Loretta Fallat, 77.
“You want the truth?” Montgomery shot at the prosecutor from the witness stand. “I’m trying to give it to you. Nobody wants to hear the truth.”
Ferrell, stone-faced until then, leaned back in his seat and shot an approving glance at his wife, Jessica, in the gallery of the stuffy Cuyahoga County courtroom.
The hearing was a milestone in Ferrell’s two-decade-long effort to prove his innocence, which still isn’t over. An appeals court will hear Ferrell’s case Tuesday, highlighting the long and difficult road for people in Ohio prisons who say they were wrongfully convicted.
A task force convened by the Ohio Supreme Court studied the state’s drawn-out process for addressing wrongful conviction claims. At the top of its 2022 list of recommendations were changes to state law and procedure that would have sped up new trial requests.
But no one has enacted those reforms.
Instead, judges have continued to ignore or dismiss credible claims of new evidence. Delays in processing new trial requests for defendants who were later exonerated have cost taxpayers millions of additional dollars in wrongful imprisonment settlements.
All the while, people who actually committed crimes have not been brought to justice, and families are in court for decades after losing a loved one.
Across from Ferrell’s wife sat relatives of Mosberger and Fallat, who lived next door to Ferrell and his family on Seymour Avenue in Cleveland.
In December 1992, a relative found the sisters dead in their ransacked home. Cleveland police canvassed the neighborhood. Within days, investigators had Ferrell, 21, in jail. He was fingerprinted, questioned and released without being charged.
No physical evidence tied Ferrell, or anyone, to the crime. The case went cold.
Five years later, detectives finally caught a break after a 12-year-old neighbor led them to Montgomery. They questioned Montgomery but didn’t charge him. Another five years passed until a jailhouse informant who cut a deal to avoid prison time came forward as the state’s star witness.
At the trial in 2003, prosecutors argued that Ferrell and another man, who has never been identified, led Montgomery into the sisters’ home on the night of their murders.
Ferrell’s attorneys questioned the lack of evidence linking their client to the crime, how witnesses waited a decade to speak up, and a timeline for the murders that included hours when Ferrell was at a bar or a friend’s house.
A jury found Ferrell guilty of murder, aggravated burglary and kidnapping. The judge sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole.
Montgomery, who didn’t testify at Ferrell’s trial, pleaded guilty to aggravated burglary and served three years in prison for his alleged role in the crime.
Ferrell exhausted the regular appeals process in 2006. He filed motions from his prison cell to preserve evidence, which Cuyahoga County Judge John J. Russo denied. In 2016, Russo appointed Ferrell an attorney, who successfully pushed for DNA testing. It would take eight years to complete that testing due to crime lab delays and objections from prosecutors. Finally, in 2024, Ferrell’s new legal team convinced Russo to hold evidentiary hearings in pursuit of a new trial.
In several hours-long hearings over the course of six months, Ferrell’s attorneys presented a slew of new evidence: The jailhouse informant who had been the state’s star witness recanted his testimony. Detectives had developed alternative suspects, but they were never discussed at trial. And DNA on the murder weapons didn’t belong to Ferrell or the victims.
Despite all that, Russo denied Ferrell’s request for a new trial in January.
Ferrell appealed Russo’s decision. A panel of judges in Ohio’s Eighth District Court of Appeals is set to hear the case Nov. 10. It could be Ferrell’s best chance to have his conviction overturned.
Defense attorneys and prosecutors declined to comment while the case is ongoing. A relative of Mosberger and Fallat also declined to comment.
It can be difficult to impossible for older prisoners like Ferrell to prove that evidence was withheld in their cases.
The 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case Brady vs. Maryland enshrined the requirement that prosecutors share any evidence that might help a defendant through what is called discovery. The ruling made full disclosure through open discovery the national standard in criminal law. Well into the 2000s, though, many states allowed a less transparent process called closed discovery.
In Ohio, that meant prosecutors didn’t have to share paper copies of witness statements, police reports or other documents. They only had to read the files to defense attorneys in closed-door pre-trial meetings. Prosecutors kept no record of what was — or wasn’t — shared.
After sustained critiques in the press, Cuyahoga County judges unanimously voted in 2008 to adopt open discovery. The Ohio Supreme Court required open discovery statewide in 2010.
More than 1,000 Cuyahoga County defendants, including Ferrell, are still serving time in Ohio prisons after being convicted during the era of closed discovery, according to a Marshall Project review of state corrections department data.
“It was a very dangerous time for the possibility of wrongful convictions taking place because of the opaque nature of how discovery was conducted,” said Mike Donnelly, a former Ohio Supreme Court Justice who was trained to practice closed discovery as an assistant Cuyahoga County prosecutor early in his career.
The attorneys who filed Ferrell’s motion for a new trial have gathered nearly a thousand pages of police reports that included interviews and evidence that were not introduced at the trial. Witnesses had contradicted themselves or the prosecution’s timeline. Police had other suspects, including a man who admitted his involvement after pawning an item stolen from the crime scene.
Ferrell’s original attorneys — Jack Hildebrand and William McGinty, who each had decades of experience in criminal defense — said at the hearings last year that they no longer could remember what was shared with them during closed discovery. That made it harder for Ferrell to prove that prosecutors improperly withheld evidence. But they both testified that they would have used such exculpatory evidence during the trial if they had it.
No one knows how often Ohio prisoners seek new trials. Anecdotally, attorneys say judges often ignore such requests or reject them without ever weighing any evidence.
In 2022, local judges, defense attorneys and the few prosecutors on the Ohio Supreme Court’s task force recommended that state officials address a litany of often insurmountable court procedures that stall efforts to seek new trials.
For four years, neither the legislature nor the Ohio Supreme Court has made those changes.
“There’s a definite need for reform,” said attorney Rachel Troutman with the Exoneration Project, a legal clinic at the University of Chicago Law School that fights to overturn wrongful convictions in Ohio and other states. “A lot of innocent people get turned away by the court for procedural matters.”
To get a new trial, Ohio defendants must prove that they were deprived of a fair trial due to errors beyond their control. The most common of those errors, according to attorneys, is the withholding of evidence that could have helped in their defense. Still, the burden falls on defendants to show that it was not possible for them to uncover that evidence prior to their convictions.
Unlike in other states, credible evidence of a person’s innocence is not grounds for seeking a new trial in Ohio, and only people who pursue new trials while on death row are guaranteed attorneys. Troutman said Illinois offers a better model by ensuring legal counsel in post-conviction hearings and allowing new trial requests based solely on innocence claims.
Ohio prisoners with limited resources are forced to fumble around on their own to uncover new evidence and to fight without an attorney to convince a judge to hear what they may find. Ohio state Rep. Josh Williams, a Toledo-area Republican, reintroduced a bipartisan bill last year that would require judges to act on new trial requests with credible evidence.
“We’ve seen individuals waiting in prison without judges making decisions,” said Williams, who is also an attorney. His bill has not yet moved out of committee and its future is uncertain.
Since 2013, at least 10 people who were convicted in Cuyahoga County have been collectively awarded more than $50 million in settlements for their wrongful imprisonments. Seven of them were initially denied new trial requests before their exonerations.
One of them was Michael Buehner, who was convicted of murder in 2002. Buehner, like Ferrell, fought for about a decade from behind bars before his court-appointed attorneys discovered two exonerating eyewitness statements among 30 previously withheld police reports. Still, for years Buehner was denied motions for an evidentiary hearing and a new trial.
Ultimately, the appellate court reversed those decisions. A new jury found Buehner not guilty. Last year, he was awarded nearly $2 million for his 21 years of wrongful imprisonment.
“Because of all of those years of fighting, that’s more money that they got paid,” said Troutman. “It’s the state costing itself more money by not holding a hearing on the merits.”
In 2024, Ferrell’s new attorney, public defender Cullen Sweeney, motioned the prosecutor’s office to release all the evidence in Ferrell’s case, revealing for the first time the full scope of their investigation into the killings of Mosberger and Fallat.
The records showed that, nearly five years after the murders, a child in the neighborhood pointed police to a potential suspect: Montgomery. The boy told police he saw Montgomery, whom he could not recall by name until questioned again years later, hop a fence the night of the murders. Police took Montgomery in for questioning. He insisted that he wasn’t there.
Thinking he would avoid charges, Montgomery eventually said he followed Ferrell and another man into the home. Then he tried to withdraw that statement, saying he made it up so police would let him go, according to the detective’s summary of the 1997 interrogation.
On the witness stand in the 2025 hearings, Montgomery said that Cleveland Homicide Detective Gary Garisek and an FBI agent who was with him were laser-focused on Ferrell. Montgomery said he tried to tell the truth. “They would not believe the truth when I told them. So I told them what the hell they wanted to hear.”
Garisek died in 2009.
At the hearings last year, the state’s star witness from Ferrell’s trial, jailhouse informant Stephen Lenchak, also recanted.
Lenchak grew up on Seymour Avenue. He knew Ferrell like a “scary uncle” from the neighborhood, he said. In 2002, while awaiting trial on unrelated burglary and theft charges, Lenchak said he was starving, deprived of phone calls and brutalized daily by other men in the county jail.
Detectives told him his way out would be to testify against Ferrell and find others to do the same. Lenchak said Garisek left him alone in a conference room with a phone and the case file, complete with photos of the crime scene.
“If I can call these people and have them come in to talk to this homicide detective, he would bring me out of the dorm every day, feed me, and he would eventually get me out of this hell that I was in,” Lenchak told Judge Russo last year, even after being advised that he could be charged with perjury for recanting his trial testimony.
Lenchak, who got the lightest sentence possible on his own case, was one of three jailhouse informants to cut deals and testify against Ferrell. He also gave Garisek names of people, including Ferrell’s ex-girlfriends, who testified at the trial that Ferrell threatened to kill them like he did the sisters.
But it was all a lie, Lenchak testified. And he’d felt guilty for decades about his role in convicting Ferrell.
Judge Russo took a couple of months to consider whether any of the new evidence would have swayed the jurors who convicted Ferrell. Then, in a 15-page opinion issued in January, he denied Ferrell a new trial after applying “the utmost suspicion” to Lenchak’s recantation and discounting the newly discovered DNA and previously undisclosed records.
Before issuing his decision, Russo said he knew it was likely to be appealed by one side or the other.
Donnelly, the former Supreme Court justice, said he disagreed with Russo’s decision to deny Ferrell a new trial, but credited him for at least holding the evidentiary hearings. Because Ohio law doesn’t mandate it, too many judges simply never hold hearings on new evidence that might exonerate someone, he said.
“Look at any of these anecdotes where people have been exonerated and how long it took them to fight in a system that values finality over the truth,” Donnelly said. “Most of the time, they are fighting not that they’re innocent — it’s just for the opportunity to be heard.”