It’s the nightmare from which you can’t awaken.
It’s the horror of being not just accused, but convicted of a murder, rape or other heinous crime you had nothing to do with.
On Monday night, Investigation Discovery (ID) premieres a new series, narrated by Chris Noth, about innocent people who were convicted and, in some cases, sentenced to death — and how, against insane odds, they solved the crimes themselves, leading to their releases.
With eyewitness accounts, victim testimony, interviews with the convicted people themselves and, of course, reenactments (it is ID, after all), the stories are laid out.
We get to hear from the released ex-convicts and how they did what cops, prosecutors and defense attorneys couldn’t do: solve the crimes themselves.
Unlike most cheesy true-crime shows, this one actually is very well-written.
Monday night’s premiere opens with a Noth voiceover saying, “Burlington, North Carolina is an old Southern town divided by historic railroad tracks and lingering color lines.”
I mean, seriously, how often have you heard sentences like these read by a somber voice on ID? Oh, right. Never.
In place of cheap dames in barely-there lingerie — and dinner-theater actors wearing glued-on mustaches — we have actors who actually look like the people involved. And they can act, to boot.
The first episode, “Shadow of Doubt,” details the case of Ronald Cotton who, in 1984, was accused by student Jennifer Thompson of breaking into her apartment and brutally raping her.
Thompson said that during her ordeal she promised herself to remember every facet of her attacker’s face — and she did.
The perp also wore white gloves, a blue striped windbreaker and rode a bike.
After Thompson escaped, the rapist then raped another young woman in another part of town. Cotton wore white gloves to ride his bike, had the same jacket and, yes, almost the same face as the rapist.
But he didn’t do it. Beyond belief is the fact that another man who looked exactly like Cotton was the actual rapist.
Cotton managed to solve the crime while in prison. His retrial ended with his getting an even longer sentence, but still he refused to give up.
It’s a remarkable tale, in which his defense attorney, the prosecutor, the detective and the victim herself talk about the horror of their mistake.
“I was small,” Cotton says of entering prison, “very little facial hair — they’d tell me I was prettier than their girlfriends. I used to tell my mother, that prison turned me into a madman.” Don’t miss it.