In December 1992, a man named Randy Sheridan was shotgunned to death while jogging along a gravel road less than a half-mile from his rural home south of Junction City, Kansas.Four years later, two people -- a brother and sister whose large family were members of a small, unpopular Pentecostal church -- were convicted of first-degree murder in Sheridan's death, and sentenced to life in prison.The sister, Dana Flynn, had been involved in an increasingly hostile legal battle with Sheridan over custody of their child, a daughter born out of wedlock in 1985, when Sheridan had been a married man and Dana still a teenager. During the year before the murder, a new attorney working for Sheridan had reframed the original custody dispute as an effort on Sheridan's part to "rescue" his daughter from a "cult."Dana's youngest brother, Mikel Dreiling, was convicted as her accomplice -- the one who had actually wielded the shotgun. The original police investigation had produced no evidence to place either defendant within 50 miles of the murder scene at the time of the shooting, or to place any shotgun in the hands of either. But investigators quickly became convinced of Dana's guilt, and also that her family and church were somehow involved.The four years between the crime and the conviction were taken up not with further police investigation but with a series of legal proceedings based on the "cult rescue" theory advanced by Sheridan's attorney during the civil custody procedings, and designed to prove that the little Pentecostal church was not only a "cult" but a criminal conspiracy. The entire membership of the church was subjected first to a judicial inquisition, in which they were questioned in closed proceedings not only about the murder but about their religious beliefs and practices.Following that, a grand jury (then a rare proceeding in Kansas) was convened specifically to look into alleged perjury in response to the questions about religious belief and practice. At the beginning of the grand jury, the members of the church were all given immunity for any perjury charges arising from their testimony at the inquisition, a tactic that allowed the prosecutor, Geary County Attorney Chris Biggs, to evoke new instances of "perjury," constituting a "perjury conspiracy," at the grand jury itself. This alleged conspiracy to lie about their own religious practices and beliefs, although never specifically connected to the murder, helped persuade the grand jury that the church members had also participated in a murder conspiracy, despite the absence of any actual evidence to that effect. The grand jurors indicted the entire church membership for perjury, perjury conspiracy and murder conspiracy, and also indicted Dana, Mikel, their church pastor and their parents for the murder of Randy Sheridan.Those indictments were later dismissed when it turned out that the only provable material misrepresentation at the grand jury had been made by the state, in the form of an alleged "satellite photo" showing that Dana's car hadn't been where she claimed it was, at the time of the murder. This challenge to Dana's alibi was the most solid piece of evidence ever presented by the state speaking to any element of murder beyond motive. It turned out, however, that the "satellite photo" was actually an aerial photo taken several months before the day of the murder.Biggs (who claimed to have been deceived by the supplier of the photo) made a great to-do about dismissing all the indictments because of it, while at the same time insisting that the indictments could have gone forward without the photo. A couple of local newspapers praised him editorially for his concern with the validity of the process.He then re-filed all but a couple of the indictments as ordinary criminal charges -- something he could have done in the first place. All of the perjury charges could just as easily have been based on inquisition testimony, and the grand jury had produced no new evidence to support the other charges.In fact, it had produced a piece of evidence that precluded the murder charges against Mikel Dreiling, but that was a piece of evidence that would never be seen by anyone during subsequent proceedings.At the grand jury, Mikel's wife, Jennifer, had testified that he had been at a meeting with his boss at virtually the same time the murder was being committed, 50 miles away. She knew because she had driven him to the meeting, and waited for him in the car while he went in.Because Jennifer had previously refused to be interrogated without an attorney present, this was something investigators had not heard before. They quickly checked it out, visiting Mikel's "boss" (actually not his immediate supervisor but a member of management who dealt with certain personnel issues) at his home, where they were told that the meeting had indeed occurred, although he could not be certain of the date from memory. He told them he kept records of all such meetings, and that the information would be in his files at work.Investigators subsequently appeared at his workplace, demanding the documents. He was instucted by his own superiors to hand them over, and he did so. That was the last anyone would see or hear of them. Later, it would be suggested to the supervisor that he himself might be regarded as a member of the murder conspiracy, if he became involved in the legal proceedings. In fact, Biggs issued a subpoena for him to testify at the eventual trial of Dana and Mikel, putting his name on the list of people the state expected to testify against Mikel, but never actually called him. The defense, which knew nothing about the seized documents, could not be certain whether his testimony would help or hurt, and also decided not to call him.It was not really Biggs' intent to convict a person he knew to be innocent. It was, rather, a stratgy that failed, based on the assumption that other members of the church -- particularly Mikel's parents -- would tell what they knew about Dana's involvement in the murder in order to save their youngest son from prison. It was a strategy that had, over the course of nearly four years, not produced a single piece of information helpful to the prosecution, but by the time of the trial it could not be abandoned without also abandoning the case against Dana. It appears, in fact, that virtually everyone involved in the case -- including Biggs -- expected the jury to acquit, which would take investigators and prosecutors off the hook in a case that had been going nowhere for four years, while allowing them to tell Sheridan's family (who were convinced that the "cult" had killed him) that they had tried.Unfortunately, nobody told the jury, and, after four weeks of testimony that was mostly irrelevant to the crimes charged, testimony about religious practices and about Dana's relationship with her former husband (not Randy Sheridan), but nothing placing either defendant at the scene, armed with a shotgun, they convicted both defendants on all charges.As of this writing, Mikel has been in the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing for nearly 10 years. His appeal (delayed for five years -- a state record -- by various official snafus) was rejected by the Kansas Supreme Court, in a ruling that even state judicial officials consider bizarre. The Court spend six weeks coming to a decision in the case -- an extraordinarily long period of time for upholding a murder conviction -- and released its opinion at a time when Biggs was locked in a tight election battle with a militantly right-wing Republican for state attorney general (meaning that an opinion overturning the conviction would have immediately become an issue in the campaign, while upholding it -- doing the expected thing -- attracted virtually no press attention).Biggs lost, but the contest was so close that the outcome wasn't known until all the absentee votes had been counted. He was subsequently appointed state securities commissioner by the Democratic governor, the job he holds today.He is also the subject of ongoing efforts to call him to account for prosecutorial misconduct in the Dreiling case -- efforts backed by the Defender Project at the University of Kansas, and based partly upon information discovered by this writer, in particular the testimony of Mikel's supervisor about the seizure and subsequent disappearance of documents that could prove whether or not Mikel was in the supervisor's office, 50 miles away, on the afternoon when Randy Sheridan was being murdered.The whereabouts of these documents remains unknown. They have never been returned to Mikel's supervisor. This book is not really a "true-crime" book about the murder of Randy Sheridan. The truth is, nobody knows who killed Randy, although a lot of people believe they do, and the outcome of various legal proceedings establishes Mikel and his sister as the killers, as a legal "fact." This book, in fact, is really about the way our criminal justice system produces such outcomes, in this case by prosecutorial tactics that backfired and created a clear injustice, but more generally about the way in which process has come to trump both equity and justice in our legal system, in our time, and even more generally about the processes we use to establish and agree upon the "facts" of the past, and how stubbornly we defend them, once they have been established and agreed upon. Wrote By : James Preston Girard