Thursday nights were his favorite. Two hours of basketball with the same guys he had played with for years. The squeak of sneakers on a church gym floor, the kind of tiredness that only comes from doing something you love. David Cam was driving home with sore legs and a quiet mind. Windows down, cool September air.
He was already thinking about Kim’s cooking, about checking on the kids before bed. He turned onto Lockhart Road, his headlights swept across the front of the house. Everything looked normal. He pressed the remote. The garage door began to grind open. That slow mechanical rise he had heard a thousand times before.
Metal rolling on metal. The sound of coming home. The door was halfway up when he saw her feet. He didn’t understand what he was looking at, not at first. The door kept rising. And with every inch more of her came into view. Her legs were uncovered, a sign of the chaotic struggle that had occurred.
Then Kim herself was found in a devastating state. His foot hit the brake. The car stopped at an angle, half in and half out of the driveway. He was out of the car before it fully stopped. He crossed the garage in three steps and dropped to his knees beside her. He grabbed her face in both hands. He said her name, then louder, then again.
There was a stillness to her that was deeply unsettling. Her eyes were open and he looked into them. And somewhere in that moment he understood something that no husband should ever have to understand. It was clear that the worst had already happened. But the kids, where were the kids? He stood up and turned to the Bronco. The passenger door was open.
He looked through the window into the backseat and the air left his body completely. Jill was sitting upright in her car seat, still buckled. Head slumped forward into her lap, like she had simply fallen asleep. Except she hadn’t moved when the car stopped, hadn’t stirred when her father screamed. She was five years old.
She had never even had a chance to unbuckle her seatbelt. Then he saw Bradley. His seven-year-old son was draped over the back of the seat, stretched across it at an angle, like he had tried to climb forward, tried to get away from something and hadn’t made it. David reached in and touched him. Warm. There was still a faint sign of life in Bradley.
That single detail, that small impossible warmth, cracked something open inside David Cam because warmth means possibility. Warmth means maybe. Warmth means you have to try. He pulled his son out of the car. He laid him down on that cold concrete floor right next to his wife’s body. And he pressed his hands to Bradley’s chest and he pushed.
He tilted his boy’s head back and he breathed into his mouth. He pushed again, breathed again. His own breath going into lungs that no longer knew how to use it. Bradley did not come back. The warmth he felt was only a fading memory of the life that had been there moments before. David ran inside. He grabbed the phone.
He called the Indiana State Police, his former workplace, the people he had worked beside for a decade. He He hung up. He ran across the street to his grandfather’s house where his uncle was staying, pounding on the door, screaming for someone to help him. His uncle ran back to the garage. He found David in a state of shock, desperate to reach his family.
He wrapped his arms around him and held him back. Police arrived at 9:30 p.m. What they found was a crime scene that raised more questions than it answered. Three lives were tragically taken. No forced entry anywhere on the property. Nothing stolen. The killer had never even tried to enter the house. The attack had happened in that garage and only in that garage.
And then whoever did this had simply walked away. But there was one detail that stopped every officer cold the moment they saw it. Kim’s shoes. Both of them had been placed on top of the Bronco, not thrown, not knocked off during a struggle, placed there side by side, toes pointing outward, neat and deliberate like someone had taken a careful moment to arrange them.
Think about that. Three people had just been shot to death. A woman was lying on the ground. Two children were in a car. And in the middle of all of that, in the middle of that violence, someone had paused long enough to remove Kim’s shoes and set them on top of the car, carefully, calmly, like it meant something to them.
What kind of person does that? That question had no answer on the night of September 20th, 2000. It would take 5 years, a prison sweatshirt, and a DNA database to finally explain it. Before this became a courtroom battle, before it became one of the most disturbing wrongful conviction stories in American history, it was just a family, a real family with a real life on a quiet street in Georgetown, Indiana.
A street, by the way, that was named after David’s own family. Him and David had been married 11 years. Their kids were happy and doing well in school. Kim was a senior accountant at a major insurance firm in Louisville. David had left the police 4 months earlier to work for his uncle’s business and had already doubled his salary. People who knew them said this was the best the Cam family had ever been.
Everyone could see it. And then September 28th happened. And within 72 hours, the man who had just lost everything would be sitting in handcuffs, charged with killing them himself. Because the people who were supposed to find the killer had already decided the killer was standing right in front of them.
To understand what was lost that night, you have to understand what was built and what was broken long before September 28th. David Cam and Kimberly Wren both grew up in New Albany, Indiana. Small town. Everybody knows everybody. They met in the mid-1980s, and Kim saw exactly what she had been looking for. Her sister said Kim had always wanted solid, something real.
When she met David, she believed she had found it. David later said he felt it, too. Beautiful young lady, extremely intelligent, kind, huge heart. They married in May 1989, and almost immediately David’s life started moving fast. That same year, he joined the Indiana State Police. And he didn’t just blend in.
He earned his way onto the Emergency Response Unit, the team that handled the calls nobody else wanted. At some point during those years, he received the department’s Medal of Valor, not for a routine traffic stop, but jumping into a dangerous situation to try to save a drowning man, risking his own life for a complete stranger. His colleagues loved him.
Fellow Trooper Shelly Romero said he was very trusting, very loyal, extremely honest, one of the most upstanding people you could ever fathom in your life. Hero cop, loving husband, growing family. That was the version of David Cann that everyone could see. The other version was harder to spot.
In 1992, Kim got pregnant with Bradley. He was born in 1993, and somewhere in that same window, while Kim was raising their son and building their home and trusting her husband completely, David walked into a gym and met a woman named Stephanie. He didn’t hide it well. He was seen taking her to restaurants, to NASCAR, openly, as if Kim and the children simply didn’t exist when he stepped outside that front door.
Kim found out when she was 5 months pregnant with their second child. Think about that for a moment. She was carrying his baby, and he sat across from her and told her he wanted a divorce. Then he packed his things and moved in with Stephanie. Even David’s own family, his parents, his siblings, refused to stand by him. They stayed with Kim. They showed up for her.
His own blood chose her over him. That tells you everything about how wrong what he did was. Jill was born on February 28th, 1995. David wasn’t in that hospital room. A few months later, the relationship with Stephanie fell apart and David came back, said he’d changed, said he wanted his family. Kim let him come home.
What followed looked, from the outside, like a real second chance. They didn’t just stay in the same house and tolerate each other. They made a deliberate decision to start over. They began building a new home on Lockhart Road, the street that carried David’s family name, meant to be their sanctuary, their proof that the worst was behind them.
But the old habits were already returning underneath the surface. By 1997, David had started seeing another woman, then another, then more. Over the course of his marriage, investigators would eventually identify 12 women, affairs, hookups, inappropriate relationships that he kept carefully hidden from the woman sleeping next to him every night.
Here’s the thing about David Cam that makes this case so difficult to sit with. On one side of the ledger, you have a man who earned a medal of valor, who was beloved by colleagues, who his children adored, who Kim herself chose to forgive and rebuild with. On the other side, you have a man living a double life so thoroughly that 12 women had stories about him and his own wife had no idea.
Both of those men were real. And that is exactly what made him so dangerous to put on trial, because a jury that hated him for his affairs might stop asking whether he was actually a murderer. By 2000, the surface looked better than ever. David had left the police in May, 4 months before the murders.
He joined his uncle Sam Lockhart’s waterproofing business as a salesman, and in 6 months, he was making double what the force had ever paid him. More money, more time at home, more presents. Kim was thriving as a senior accountant at a major insurance firm in Louisville. She was also the treasurer of their church, the Georgetown Community Church, the same church where David played basketball every Thursday night.
Bradley was seven, Jill was five, both in school, both happy. Kim’s sister said it plainly, Kim finally had her white picket fence. But Kim herself had told something different to a close friend not long before she died. She had said that things felt like history was repeating itself. She didn’t explain what she meant.
She didn’t need to. Her friend understood immediately. Kim had noticed something, a change in David, a familiar distance, a familiar pattern. She had survived it once and rebuilt from it. She was beginning to wonder if it was happening again. She never got the chance to find out. On the morning of September 28th, 2000, the Cam family woke up like any other Thursday.
David kissed Kim and the kids goodbye and went to work. Kim dropped the children at school. Jill went to dance practice. Bradley went to swimming. Ordinary hours moving forward in their ordinary way. That evening, Kim strapped both children into the backseat of the Bronco and headed home. The drive was about 11 miles.
Nothing unusual, nothing alarming, just a mother bringing her kids home on a school night. When she pulled into that garage at around 7:30 p.m., she saw the same familiar walls, the same shadows, the same home she had fought so hard to build and keep and believe in. She had no idea someone was waiting in that darkness. And by Monday morning, the police, David’s own brothers, the men he had worked beside for a decade, would be convinced that the man who kissed her goodbye that morning was the same man who ended it all that night. The first
officers through that garage door knew David Cam personally, not professionally, personally. These were men he had eaten lunch with, trained with, trusted with his life for a decade. Detective Shawn Clements, one of the first to arrive, was one of David’s closest friends. David looked at these men the way a drowning person looks at a lifeboat. He needed them.
He was hysterical, shaking, barely holding himself together. He needed his brothers to step in and find whoever did this. But the men looking back at him weren’t seeing a grieving husband. They were looking at him like a specimen under a microscope. The crime scene raised questions from the very first minute.
As before, there was no forced entry anywhere on the property, pointing immediately to someone who didn’t need a key or someone the family knew. Nothing had been stolen. The killer had never entered the house. This wasn’t random. This was targeted, timed, and contained entirely within that garage. But, it was the physical evidence at the scene that puzzled investigators.
The long trail from Kim’s body had an uneven color, darker in some places, almost diluted in others. One investigator thought it looked disturbed. Detective Sarkisian, who would become lead investigator on the case, said it plainly, “The crime scene looked off. It looked like it had been cleaned.” A mop and bucket were found inside the house, bleach stains on the back deck, and then there was the silence in the blood around Kim’s body.
David said he had rushed to her, dropped to his knees, grabbed her face, screamed her name. He said he then reached over Jill into the back seat to pull Bradley out. He said he laid his son on the garage floor and performed CPR. All of that, every bit of it, would normally leave marks. Knee impressions, drag patterns, disturbance in the blood, footprints.
There were none. Sarkisian couldn’t let it go. If David really did all of that, where were the marks? Why was the blood so still? Why did the scene look like it had been staged rather than stumbled upon? He had a point. And for 3 days, that point drove everything. Then came Robert Stites.
Prosecutor Stan Faith called in a blood spatter specialist named Rod Englert. Englert was unavailable, so he sent someone in his place, his assistant, his crime scene photographer. A man named Robert Stites, who had never processed a murder scene independently in his life. Stites examined David’s basketball shirt. He found eight microscopic drops of blood, each about a millimeter wide, all clustered in one corner of the fabric.
Then he did something that should never happen in a murder investigation. He picked up the phone, described the stains verbally to Englert, and Englert reportedly confirmed the reading over the phone. No photographs, no in-person analysis, a phone call. Deitz declared the drops to be high velocity impact spatter, the kind that only appears when a bullet strikes a body at close range, sending microscopic particles outward.
His conclusion, David Cam had been standing within 4 ft of someone when they were shot. Eight dots, a phone call. No formal training. That became the backbone of the probable cause affidavit that sent David to prison. What nobody mentioned, what prosecutors knew and buried, was that Robert Stites had no qualifications whatsoever.
No degree in blood spatter analysis, no formal training, he wasn’t an expert. He was a photographer who had been handed a crime scene and told to make it mean something. His credentials were entirely fabricated. That truth would stay hidden for years while an innocent man’s life collapsed around it.
A neighbor had also reported hearing three sharp sounds coming from the direction of the Cam house after 9:00 p.m. on the night of the murders. “Three cracks in the night,” she said, “sharp, distinct.” But here is the question nobody asked at the time. Was she hearing the end of a family or the beginning of a frame-up? On October 1st, just 3 days after the murders, investigators brought David in for formal questioning.
The same men who had once been his brothers sat across a table from him and laid out what they believed. They showed him the blood on his shirt. They told him what Stites had concluded. They told him about the neighbor’s report. They pointed to the absence of footprints in the blood.
They told him the timeline placed the murders after he had returned home. David’s response wasn’t composed, it wasn’t rehearsed, it was fury and grief colliding in real time. “I cannot believe this. You’re going to try to blame me for killing my children?” He pushed back on every point. The neighbor was confused about the time.
The blood on the shirt came from leaning over Jill to reach Bradley. He had nothing to do with any of this. Then the investigators revealed the piece they had been holding back. Jill’s autopsy had found something that hadn’t been in any initial report. Something dark. Something that the medical examiner had flagged immediately upon removing her clothing.
The medical examiner discovered evidence of a much more sinister and personal violation against Jill. David didn’t just cry, he crumbled. It was the sound of a man losing the last piece of his soul. Through tears, through visible devastation, he said, “This is my five-year-old daughter. I had nothing to do with this horrific act.
I loved my daughter.” The investigators didn’t move. There was one thing David had that should have stopped everything cold. 11 witnesses. 11 people, including his uncle Sam Lockhart and a respected church elder named Tom Jolly, all prepared to say under oath that David Cam had been in that gym the entire evening.
Played two of the three games, sat on the baseline during the second game, and had a full conversation with Tom Jolly throughout. Never left, never disappeared, never came back acting strange. 11 witnesses is not a thin alibi. It is a wall. But investigators had already decided the wall was made of liars. Either these men were covering for David or they got so caught up in the game that they missed a 15-minute window.
That was their theory. That was what they chose to believe. On October 1st, 2000, 72 hours after David found his family, he was handcuffed and charged with three counts of murder. David was being fingerprinted and processed, the real answer to this entire case was already sitting in an evidence locker two floors away. A single gray sweatshirt.
A single strand of DNA from an unknown male. Right there, waiting. But the police weren’t looking for the truth anymore. They were looking for a conviction. David said he was innocent. He had 11 people who could prove it. But the prosecution had already made up their minds, and they were about to bury him alive.
The trial began on January 14th, 2002 in Floyd County, Indiana. By that point, David Cam had already been convicted in the court of public opinion. The headlines had done their work long before any jury sat down. In New Albany, he wasn’t David Cam anymore. He was the monster from Lockhart Road, the cop who killed his own family, the man with the stained clothing.
The cameras weren’t just outside the courthouse. They were everywhere. Every detail of his marriage, his affairs, his failures as a husband, all of it fed to a hungry news cycle that had no interest in complexity. The story was simple. Bad husband kills family. And simple stories sell. Inside that courtroom, the prosecution had a problem.
Their actual physical evidence was thin. One shirt, eight drops of blood, a neighbor who heard sounds she couldn’t confirm were gunshots, no murder weapon, no confession, no witness who placed David at the scene. So, they decided to try a different man entirely. Not David Cam the father, not David Cam the former trooper.
They put David Cam the unfaithful husband on trial, and they made sure the jury despised him long before closing arguments. 12 women took that witness stand. One by one, they described affairs, inappropriate propositions, secret relationships stretching back through David’s entire career as a state trooper. The prosecution’s argument was that David was so desperate to escape his marriage, so consumed by his double life, that he killed his family to get free.
David’s brother Donnie sat in that courtroom and said what many were thinking. If he wanted to leave, he could have just walked out the door. He’d already done it once. He wasn’t wrong. David had already left Kim once, moved out, moved in with someone else, made his choice, and then he came back of his own accord. The idea that a man who voluntarily returned to his marriage then murdered his entire family to escape it required a logic that didn’t hold together under pressure.
But, juries aren’t always deciding on logic. They’re deciding on feeling. And the feeling in that courtroom after 12 women testified about the man in the defendant’s chair was not good for David Cam. Then came the medical examiner’s testimony about Jill. The prosecution didn’t use it as medical evidence. They used it as a grenade. They threw it into the jury box and let it explode.
No charges were ever filed related to it. No evidence was ever produced proving David was responsible. An unthinkable allegation directed at a grieving parent. That was the point. The prosecution knew exactly what they were doing. Their forensic case rested almost entirely on Robert Stites. Prosecutor Stan Faith stood in that courtroom and repeatedly called him professor.
He presented Stites as a credentialed expert, a PhD candidate, a crime scene reconstructionist, a man with deep experience in blood spatter analysis. Every single word of that was a lie, and Faith knew it. Stites was a photographer, Rod Englert’s photographer. He had never independently processed a murder scene before the night he walked into David Cam’s garage.
He had no degree, no PhD, no formal training in blood pattern analysis. The title professor was a complete fabrication constructed to make a jury trust a man who had no business being in that courtroom as an expert. And yet, there he was. Testifying with complete confidence that eight microscopic drops of forensic traces on a basketball shirt proved David Cam had shot his own family.
A man who had never processed a crime scene in his life was now the primary reason a father was going to spend 195 years in a cell. The defense brought their own expert, a blood stain analyst with more than 30 years of legitimate experience. He testified that those eight drops were entirely consistent with transfer.
When David leaned over Jill’s body to pull Bradley from the Bronco, his shirt would have brushed against the blood on her hair and arms. Eight drops, exactly like those. He even demonstrated it with a wig and stage blood in the courtroom. He also pointed out something Stites had conveniently ignored.
A real gunshot at close range doesn’t produce eight drops, it produces hundreds, possibly thousands. If David had fired a weapon within 4 ft of his daughter, he wouldn’t have had eight spots on his shirt. He would have been covered. The jury heard both arguments. They chose to believe the photographer with the fake PhD. The prosecution also had a phone record they believed proved David had lied about his alibi.
Records showed a call made from David’s home landline at 7:19 p.m., right around the time Kim and the children would have been arriving home. This contradicted David’s claim that he had gone straight to basketball and hadn’t been home. One state, two clocks, and a 60-minute gap that should have ended the prosecution’s theory entirely. Indiana is one of the only states in the country that operates across two time zones. David’s home was in one zone.
The phone company’s computers were calibrated to another. A Verizon technician testified that the call had actually been made at 6:19 p.m., a full hour earlier, before David had even left for basketball. The 7:19 call was a data error, nothing more. The prosecution treated it like a footnote and moved on. Marci McCloud, a friend of Kim’s, took the stand and delivered the line that may have sealed David’s fate more than anything else.
She testified that in one of her last conversations with Kim, Kim had told her that history was repeating itself. The implication was clear. Kim had suspected David was back to his old ways. It was a chilling line, and in that courtroom surrounded by 12 women describing affairs, it landed like a verdict before the verdict. The jury deliberated for 3 days.
3 days means there was doubt in that room. It means at least some of those 12 people looked at the evidence and hesitated. For 3 days, David waited for the truth to win. It didn’t. On March 17th, 2002, the jury found David Cam guilty of three counts of murder. He was sentenced to 195 years in prison. His family erupted.
Cam’s parents sat quietly. The cameras got everything. 2 and 1/2 years later, in August 2004, the Indiana Court of Appeals overturned the conviction. The ruling was direct. The testimony from those 12 women was inadmissible. It had no legitimate connection to the murders. It’s only function had been to make the jury hate David, and it had worked exactly as intended.
That alone was enough to throw out everything. David was granted a $20,000 bond. His Uncle Sam walked straight to the bank, withdrew the cash, and had him out within hours. A new prosecutor named Keith Henderson took over. He promised a fresh investigation, fresh eyes, a clean start. But, Henderson’s team quietly pulled an old piece of evidence from storage.
cardboard box that had been sitting in that evidence locker since the night of the murders. Inside was a gray sweatshirt, ignored for 5 years, dusty and forgotten. That sweatshirt had a name written on the inside of the collar. And when the lab finally ran the DNA for the very first time, the name that came back wasn’t David Cam’s.
It belonged to a predator who had been hiding in plain sight. The defense didn’t ask nicely. They demanded. For months, they had been staring at the same gray sweatshirt that had been sitting in that evidence locker since the night of the murders, found tucked underneath Bradley’s body. Two unidentified DNA profiles, one male, one female, neither matching David, neither matching any member of the Cam family, and a handwritten name on the inside of the collar that nobody had bothered to trace.
The prosecution had assured the defense that the DNA had already been checked against CODIS, the FBI’s national database of convicted felons, and that nothing had come back. That was a lie. The DNA had never been tested, not once. Not before the first trial, not during it, not in the four years after it.
When the defense demanded the test finally be done, the prosecution refused. They refused until a judge issued a court order forcing compliance. Sit with that for a moment. A prosecution team, already holding a convicted man who maintained his innocence, actively fought against testing the only unidentified DNA found at the scene of a triple murder.
The result came back almost immediately. The match was instant, clean, unambiguous. The male DNA on that sweatshirt belonged to Charles Darnell Boney, a convicted felon already in the system, already in CODIS, already flagged. He had been sitting in that database the entire time, waiting, while David Camm sat in a prison cell.
But the DNA alone was not even the most staggering detail. Look more carefully at what that sweatshirt actually was. It was a prison-issue garment, the kind the Indiana Department of Corrections distributes to inmates. It had Boney’s DNA on it, his girlfriend’s DNA on it. The word backbone written on the inside collar in black ink, and his Department of Corrections ID number, his nickname, his prison ID, his DNA, all three on one item, left at a triple murder scene.
That sweatshirt was not just evidence. It was a confession that had been sitting in a cardboard box for five years while the wrong man served time. The systemic failure that allowed it to go untested that long is not a clerical error. It is not an oversight. It is one of the most documented examples of willful negligence in modern American criminal justice.
So, who was Charles Darnell Boney? His record followed a pattern, deliberate, escalating, always aimed at women. He attended Indiana University in Bloomington. Over the years, the charges built up, robbery, battery, armed robbery, resisting law enforcement. Each crime a little darker than the last. But the one that gave him his permanent name happened when he forced his way into a home and held three women at gunpoint.
He wasn’t after money. He wasn’t after jewelry. He wanted their shoes. That single act earned him the name that would follow him forever, the Shoe Bandit, because Boney had a foot fetish, not a passing interest. A deep, consuming obsession with women’s feet that drove his crimes with a pattern investigators would recognize immediately once they started looking.
Some of his previous victims reported receiving strange phone calls in the weeks before he attacked them. A man’s voice asking what they were wearing, asking if they had heels on. He was sentenced to 20 years for the home invasion. He served less than 10. Charles Boney walked out on parole on June 19th, 2000.
The Cam family was murdered on September 28th, 2000, 91 days apart. Now go back to that garage, back to the detail that opened this story, the one that made no sense from the very first night. Kim’s shoes removed and placed on top of the Bronco, side by side, toes pointing outward. Arranged with care and intention in the middle of a scene where three people had just been shot dead.
And Kim’s feet, both of them, had bruising and abrasions across the tops, injuries that the original investigation never explained, never connected to anything, never followed. From night one, those shoes had been the strangest detail at that crime scene. Investigators knew they mattered. They just had no framework for understanding what kind of person pauses in the aftermath of three murders to carefully place a dead woman’s shoes on the roof of a car.
Now, they had their framework. This wasn’t random. This wasn’t incidental. It was signature behavior from a man whose entire criminal history was built around exactly this obsession. The sweatshirt, the shoes, the foot injuries. Every detail that had felt wrong since September 28th suddenly snapped into focus around one name, Charles Boney’s.
On February 17th, 2005, police brought him in. He came in relaxed, talkative, almost impossible to shut up. Investigators said he just kept going, answering questions nobody had asked yet, filling silence with explanations. He admitted the sweatshirt had once been his, but said he had dropped it in a Salvation Army box months before the murders.
Investigators pointed out the problem quietly. A laundered donated shirt would not carry fresh DNA on its collar. His profile was there as if he had worn it recently. Boney moved past it. Then he said the thing that trapped him. He told investigators, calmly, confidently, that his fingerprints could not be at the crime scene.
For my prints to appear there, he said, I would have had to have been there. He failed his polygraph. They let him go and said nothing. Two weeks later, a partial palm print that had been collected from the exterior of Kim’s Bronco on the night of the murders, sitting unmatched in the evidence file since 2000, was finally run against Boney’s records.
Perfect match. The man who had sat in that chair and told investigators his prints couldn’t possibly be there had left his handprint on the car where two children were murdered. Charles Boney was arrested on March 4th, 2005. That same day, David Cam’s charges were dropped. For exactly 1 hour, it was over.
Then prosecutors came back with handcuffs and a new theory. David and Boney had conspired together, they said. A clean-cut former state trooper and a convicted shoe bandit with a history of violence against women. Two men from completely different worlds with no phone records connecting them. No financial transactions.
No witnesses who had ever placed them in the same room. And the prosecution wanted a jury to believe they had planned a triple murder together. It wasn’t about justice anymore. Indiana had spent five years calling David Cam a monster. And they were not about to stand in front of a courtroom and admit they had spent those same 5 years letting the real predator walk free.
Now, two men were charged with the same three murders, and Charles Boney was about to take the witness stand. The story he was going to tell was a lie so elaborate it would take another decade to fully untangle. Two men, two courtrooms, 100 miles apart, the same three murders. Charles Boney was tried in New Albany, David Cam was tried in Boonville.
And the state of Indiana needed both of them convicted because if only Boney went down, it meant David was innocent. And if David was innocent, it meant the system had spent 5 years destroying a grieving father while a violent predator walked free among them. That was not a story they were willing to tell.
Boney went first after changing his story multiple times during interrogation, first claiming he knew nothing, then claiming he barely knew David, then claiming he watched everything. He finally settled on a version and delivered it to the jury. He said he had met David at a basketball game in summer 2000. He said David had asked him, a convicted felon, if he could get an untraceable gun.
He obliged, $250, a MINE .380 caliber pistol. Then on September 28th, he claimed he returned to the Cam house to deliver a second weapon wrapped inside his gray sweatshirt. He said Kim pulled into the garage, David followed her in, and then Boney stood outside and listened. I heard arguing, then I heard number, then a pop, then a child’s voice, “Daddy.
” Then another pop, then a third. He said David walked back out, pointed the gun at him, and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. And then, in what may be the least believable moment in this entire 13-year saga, Boney claimed that when the gun jammed, he chased David back into the garage.
Because, apparently, when a man just killed his entire family and tried to shoot you, the natural response is to run toward him. He said that tripped over Kim’s shoes in the confusion, picked them up, and placed them neatly on the Bronco. Then he saw the children. Then he ran. The jury didn’t fully believe he was just a witness. The inconsistencies were too visible.
Wrong vehicle, wrong clothing on David, details that shifted under pressure. But they believed enough to convict him of participating in murder. On January 26th, 2006, Charles Boney was found guilty of three counts of murder and conspiracy. He was sentenced to 225 years in prison. Now here is where this story reaches a level of irony so dark it almost doesn’t feel real.
After his conviction, Boney needed legal representation for his appeals. The attorney he chose was Stan Faith, the original Floyd County prosecutor. The man who had called Stites professor. The man whose decisions had sent David to prison in the first trial was now representing the man whose DNA had been at the scene the entire time.
The same man who built the case against David Cam was now defending the actual convicted killer. Nobody in the system blinked. David’s second trial began on January 17th, 2006. His jury was never told that Charles Boney had just been convicted of these same three murders in a courtroom 100 miles away.
They were not told about the shoe bandit, not told about the foot fetish, not told about the history of violent attacks on women, the shoe stealing, the harassing phone calls to victims. The judge ruled it inadmissible. It was a legal blindfold. The jury was deliberately kept in the dark, allowed to hear that Boney’s DNA existed at the scene, but given no context for what kind of man had left it there.
They couldn’t see the full picture because the court had covered half of it. Keith Henderson had promised a fresh investigation. What he delivered was the same case with a new fictional motive. Since the affairs were gone, the appeals court had permanently closed that door, Henderson needed something else to explain why David would kill his family.
So, he built his entire case around the molestation allegation. His theory, David had been abusing Jill, Kim had discovered it, and David murdered everyone to keep it from coming out. No physical evidence, no witness, no medical confirmation, no report from any teacher, doctor, or family member who had ever seen or suspected anything.
The medical examiner herself had said she could not rule out other explanations. No abuse charges were ever filed because the evidence to support them simply did not exist. Henderson used it anyway as his centerpiece, as his motive, not evidence, a story. A fictional motive built from speculation aimed directly at a jury’s emotions.
And then a documentary crew captured something they weren’t meant to capture. Henderson, in a private moment with his team, was recorded discussing the 11 alibi witnesses. He said they needed to find a way to break one of them, not find new evidence, not follow a new lead, break a witness, force a crack in 11 consistent, unwavering accounts from people who had never changed a single detail across years of questioning.
While David was fighting for his life in a courtroom, his prosecutor was running a strategy session on how to manufacture doubt about the people telling the truth. And then the witnesses started talking about what had happened behind closed doors. Lynn Scamahorn was a DNA analyst for the Indiana State Police.
During the second trial, she took the stand and described something that had happened during the first trial back in 2002. He said that during a recess, while she was mid-testimony, prosecutor Stan Faith had pulled her into a private conversation. He asked her directly to testify that David Camm’s DNA was on Bonnie’s sweatshirt.
Her analysis had found no such thing. David’s DNA was not on that sweatshirt. She refused. Faith’s response, she testified under oath, was to scream at her. He threatened to have her fired. He threatened to charge her with obstruction of justice, a felony, if she didn’t say what he wanted her to say. A scientist doing her job being threatened with her career and her freedom for refusing to lie.
She wrote a memo about that encounter within days of it happening. That memo still exists. Fingerprint analyst John Singleton came forward with nearly the same story. He testified that Faith had pressured him to shade his testimony about the unidentified palm print on Kim’s Bronco, the very print that was later confirmed as Boney’s.
Say less than you know, soften the certainty, make it fit the narrative. Two forensic analysts, two separate threats. One prosecutor trying to reshape physical reality through intimidation. While David was being prosecuted, his prosecutor was negotiating the price of his story. Keith Henderson had signed a book deal, receiving a $4,000 advance from a publisher to write about the Cam murders while he was actively trying David for those same murders.
Justice wasn’t the goal. A bestseller was. When David’s attorneys discovered the book deal, they demanded Henderson be removed from the case. The Indiana Court of Appeals agreed. He was pulled off. A special prosecutor named Stanley Levco was brought in to start over. On March 3rd, 2006, before any of that removal happened, the jury found David Cam guilty for the second time.
Life in prison without the possibility of parole. In June 2009, the Indiana Supreme Court overturned it. Their ruling was precise. The molestation evidence was speculative, unproven, and had functioned as nothing more than character assassination without factual foundation. David found out by turning on the television in his cell.
Third trial, no affairs, no molestation, both fictional motives gone. The prosecution had burned through everything they had built over 9 years of trying this man, but they had one card left. They were going to put Charles Boney himself on that witness stand, a man already serving 225 years for these exact murders, and let him point his finger at David Cam one final time.
The stage was set for the last confrontation. No more borrowed motives, no more manipulated experts. Just two men, one courtroom, and 13 years of buried truth finally clawing its way to the surface. David Cam was going back to court one last time, and this time the whole world was watching. August 2013, Lebanon, Indiana. David Cam walked into a courtroom for the third time, same charges, same grief, but a completely different battlefield.
Stanley Levco, the special prosecutor brought in after Henderson’s removal, had inherited a case with nothing left in it. No affairs, no molestation. Both motives that had convicted David twice had been dismantled by appellate courts as speculation dressed up as evidence. So, Levco reached for the only thing left on the shelf, money.
He argued that Kim had accumulated approximately 625,000 in life insurance and retirement savings, and that David had killed his family to collect it. The defense responded with one quiet observation, David had also taken out life insurance policies on himself. If money was the motive, the logic fell apart in both directions.
But, the prosecution pressed on. What Levco didn’t know, what no one outside the defense team fully understood yet, was that this trial was not going to be a rebuttal. It was going to be a detonation. The first explosion came from science. Forensic expert Dr. Richard Eikelenboom took the stand for the defense and testified about touch DNA, genetic material left behind not through blood, but through physical contact, skin cells transferred by grabbing, striking, or struggling with another person.
He had gone back through every piece of evidence in the case and tested for it. Boney’s touch DNA was found on Kim’s underwear, on Jill’s shirt, on Kim’s broken fingernail, the kind that snaps off when someone fights back against an attacker, and above a wound on Kim’s arm, an abrasion consistent with being grabbed and restrained during a struggle.
Let that land for a moment. In every version of his story across five different accounts spanning eight years, Boni had never touched the victims. He had watched from outside. He had only glanced into the car. He had tripped over shoes. He had never laid a hand on Kim or the children. The DNA said he had touched Kim’s body in places that told a completely different story about what happened in that garage.
Then, Robert Stites walked in. But this time he sat on the defense side of the room. The man Stan Faith had paraded before two juries as professor, the blood spatter expert, the PhD candidate, the crime scene reconstructionist whose testimony about eight microscopic drops of blood had been the single primary reason David Cam was arrested in October 2000.
That man sat in the witness box in 2013 and admitted everything. He was not a professor. He was not a PhD candidate. He was not a crime scene reconstructionist. He was Rod Englert’s photographer sent to a garage he had no training to process, handed a role he had no credentials to fill. Every title Faith had used to introduce him to two separate juries was a fabrication.
And Faith, Stites testified, had helped build those fabrications. His conclusions about the blood on David’s shirt, scientifically baseless, guesswork from a man who should never have been in that courtroom as an expert witness. A photographer’s opinion dressed in borrowed credentials had been the cornerstone of two murder convictions.
And now, 13 years later, that same man was sitting in court dismantling his own testimony brick by brick. He was never charged with perjury. Then, Charles Boni took the stand. He had agreed to testify against David one final time. He delivered his story, the gun, the garage, the shots, the jammed weapon, the shoes, and then a juror asked him a question.
In this trial, jurors were permitted to submit questions directly to witnesses. One juror wanted to know something simple, something any genuine eyewitness would know without hesitation. What was David Cam wearing that night? Boney said long pants. David had been wearing basketball shorts, documented in the original police report, confirmed by every witness from the church gym.
The same basketball shorts he had put on before leaving for a Thursday night game he played every single week. The man claiming to have stood outside that garage and watched David murder his entire family could not correctly identify what David was wearing. Under cross-examination, the damage continued.
Wrong vehicle, wrong details, critical facts that any genuine witness would have burned into memory forever. Wrong. Boney’s story had never fully held together, but in that courtroom, in front of that jury, it collapsed in real time. The defense also revealed what had happened inside the investigation itself.
A police officer who had been present on the night of the murders testified in this third trial. He admitted under oath that when he arrived at the Cam garage on September 28th, before he had examined a single piece of evidence, before he had spoken to a single witness, he had already decided it was a David Cam crime scene. A juror said afterward, “We all felt he was looking for evidence to support a conclusion he had already reached.
” That is not how you investigate a case. The defense also surfaced the story of Myron Wilkinson, a police officer not assigned to the Cam case who happened to be a distant relative of Charles Boney. After Boney’s arrest in 2005, Wilkinson met with him privately at the station. Two months later, investigators discovered Wilkinson had entered the evidence room, removed Kim Cam’s phone without signing it out, and taken it to his home.
When the phone came back, every fingerprint on it had been wiped clean. Wilkinson died before the third trial. He was never charged. The jury deliberated for 10 hours, not because they were unsure, but because this case had 13 years of debris to work through. Fabricated experts, suppressed DNA, coached witnesses, wiped evidence, five versions of one man’s story, and a system that had never once stopped to ask whether it had the right person.
On October 24th, 2013, they came back. Not guilty. David heard those words, and the sound that left him was not a cheer, not a cry of relief. It was something far older and far more broken than that. He wailed. He bent forward. He stood up. He sat back down. He covered his face with both hands. 13 years of a wrongful conviction, of fighting from a prison cell while his children’s killer walked free, came out of him all at once in that courtroom.
The church elder who had sat on that baseline and talked with David during the basketball game on the night of September 28th, 2000, watched it happen. He had also been there the night David found his family. He knew what David’s grief looked like. He said quietly, “The night I found him at the crime scene, he was on the ground wailing and weeping over his family.
He wept the same way today, but for joy.” Not everyone felt that joy. Kim’s parents, Frank and Janice Wren, sat in that courtroom and heard the verdict and could not accept it. Frank said afterward, “Did I hear that right? What went wrong?” To this day, they believe David was responsible for their daughter’s death.
The system didn’t just fail Kim, Bradley, and Jill on September 28th, 2000. It failed them again every year after that, and in doing so, it fractured a family that had already lost everything, driving a permanent divide between people who had once stood on the same side of grief. That is a wound the verdict could not heal.
In 2016, David settled a civil lawsuit against Floyd County for $450,000. In April 2022, nearly a decade after his acquittal, his final civil action was settled for 4.6 million after the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled he had valid claims for false arrest against Stites, Englert, Faith, and Clements. During oral arguments in that civil case, a federal justice referenced Star Trek when the Attorney General attempted to explain how David could have simultaneously been at the basketball game and committed the murders.
The court was openly dismissive. One justice reportedly laughed. David repaid more than a million dollars of that settlement directly to the family members and friends who had funded his defense across 13 years. He paid them back before he paid himself. Today, David Cam works as a case coordinator for Investigating Innocence, a nonprofit that provides criminal defense investigations for people who may have been wrongfully imprisoned.
A man who lost 13 years to a broken system now spends every working day trying to pull others out of it. Charles Boney is still in prison. He is still serving 225 years. He still maintains his innocence. On the wall of his cell, he keeps a photograph. It is a picture of Kim, Bradley, and Jill Cam.
He looks at it every day and only he knows what he thinks when he does. Three people were murdered in a garage in Georgetown, Indiana on September 28th, 2000. Kim was 35 years old. Bradley was seven. Jill was five. They were not a case number. They were not a headline. They were a mother who finally had her white picket fence.
A little boy who felt warm to his father’s touch for a few final minutes. A little girl who never even had the chance to unbuckle her seatbelt. They deserved justice from the very first night. What they got instead was 13 years of a system that confused conviction with truth, that buried a DNA match in an untested evidence box, threatened scientists into silence, built murder cases on a photographer’s guesswork and kept trying the same man three times rather than admit it had been catastrophically irreversibly wrong. The truth didn’t win easily, but
on October 24th, 2013, it finally won. Three questions before you go. Do you believe the prosecution genuinely thought David was guilty or was this 13 years of institutional ego refusing to admit a mistake? Charles Boney has given five different versions of that night. Which parts, if any, do you think are true? And if that gray sweatshirt had been tested on October 2nd, 2000, the day after David’s arrest, how different would every single life in this story have been?
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
