Four decades of independent examination.

A seven-part investigative series from Pushkin, reported over years by a journalist and former lawyer, built on the original police file, the trial record, and new interviews with the witnesses, the jurors, the hypnotist, and the investigators themselves. The most complete audio account of the case that exists, and the fastest way for a newcomer to understand how this conviction happened.

Framed Season 3 is an eight-part narrative with four bonus interviews, hosted by Aaron Habel and released in 2026. Its final episode is given over to the 2010 commutation hearing, the ex-wife, the former girlfriends, and Michelle Woodworth’s email to the prosecutor’s office alleging beatings with a bamboo sword, and then states the limit of that material: “As damning as this all sounds, it is crucial to remember that this testimony, even if every word of it were true, has little to absolutely no relation to his guilt or innocence in the crime of murder of Scott Macklem” (Ep. 8, 18:01). Habel does not claim innocence. He says “We still don’t know for sure who killed Scott Macklem” (Ep. 8, 25:20), and closes on a question: “It’s easy to run with the most obvious suspect, but when the fingerprint doesn’t match and the coat has no gunshot residue, what then? I do wonder how this trial would go a second time” (Ep. 8, 34:35). Speaking unscripted in the final bonus episode he is more direct: “I’m not convinced he did it because I don’t see the supporting evidence” (Bonus Ep. 4, 26:32). Where to start: Ep. 8, “Three Sides to Every Story” (36:54), the one episode that summarizes the whole case, presents both sides at length, and ends with the host’s own position.

Between June 2023 and May 2025, Australian host Jack Laurence gave the Kensu case fifteen episodes: a six-part run titled “An impossible murder,” then interviews with Paula Kensu (“Doing a life sentence on the outside”), Michigan Innocence Clinic attorney Imran Syed, the show’s resident attorney Michael Leonard, and former FBI profiler Julia Cowley across two parts. Kensu speaks from prison in the May 2025 episode, which opens, in the show’s own description, “Recently, I caught up with Temujin Kensu.” In March 2025 the show’s Adelaide Fringe live performance included Kensu joining by call from his cell in real time.

The fullest single film on the case, made while the federal habeas was live, and the place where the scattered broadcast record is gathered in one sitting. On camera: former Chief Justice Thomas Brennan (“there was really not evidence to let the jury even hear the thing”), trial counsel David Dean answering for his own performance and conceding the decision that kept his client off the stand “was a mistake,” the recanting informant describing who approached him and who pressured him when he tried to back out, jurors, Michelle Woodworth, the polygraph examiner, and Kensu himself walking the prosecution’s weapons table (“none of these things were mine”). A juror supplies the film’s thesis in one sentence: there was physically no way to get from here to there in that amount of time, “but yet he still did it.”

The reporting that first broke the case open on television, including the on-camera recantation of the jailhouse informant.

Habel walks the Prosecutors hosts through his season while it airs: why the alibi holds (“that alibi is very, very solid”), why intimidation cannot explain nine witnesses (“that’s giving him too much credit”), why the plane arrived only in rebuttal, and what he found on the lead investigator. Worth hearing alongside the series for his working method: the transcripts first, everyone’s claims tested against them, including Kensu’s own.

Built around resurfaced 1995 WXYZ footage that most people have never seen: Bill Proctor’s original series, including Philip Joplin, terminally ill, recanting on camera, describing the coaching (“the prosecutor’s office told me… to make sure that I turned towards the jury”) and the reward, a ticket out of Jackson Prison to a halfway house, re-sentenced by the same judge who tried Freeman. Proctor, thirty years on, adds the sentence that has never been answered: no police officer, then or since, has ever explained to him how a man 400 snowy miles away did what the state claimed. With Joy Marie Mann and excerpts of her recorded prison interview. (The episode also airs theories about the murder that this site does not adopt; the footage is the reason to watch.)

The journalist closest to the man himself. Mann holds the only recorded in-person prison interview with Kensu, more than four hours from her January 2025 visit, wrote the book “Our Friend, Temujin: The Wrongful Conviction of Temujin Kensu,” and has put him on the air live from Macomb repeatedly, hours of him speaking for himself, unedited, across years. Her channel is small and her production is bare, which is part of what the streams document: one person keeping a case alive between the waves of larger coverage, with guests who went on to build that coverage, Jack Laurence, Jason Usry, Aaron Habel, appearing at her table on the way.

The opening chapter of Jason Usry’s series, amplified by another show entirely — a measure of how far the case has traveled across independent podcasting. Usry lays his cards on the table: a pro-law-enforcement producer who spent four years vetting his own bias before committing to the story, framing it as “two life sentences, one search for the truth” — one sentence being served at Macomb, the other at a grave in Croswell. The episode ends with him driving through the snow to the prison for his first face-to-face interview. The right first listen for anyone new to the case, and the rare true-crime treatment that centers Scott Macklem from its opening minutes.

A retired FBI profiler and the maker of the newest investigative series, comparing notes. Cowley restates her team’s conclusion in the plainest terms she has used: their profile of the killer does not fit Fred Freeman then or Temujin Kensu now, and the person who shot Scott Macklem is likely still out there, probably local to Croswell or Port Huron. Usry describes the fieldwork behind Inconceivable: two Michigan trips from Port Huron to Escanaba to the town of Rock, driving the route the state’s theory requires, roughly 120 locals engaged, of whom exactly one remembered the case, an older man across the street from the campus whose first words were “Isn’t that the one where they got the wrong guy?” He is open about his method: he arrived believing Kensu innocent and is hardest on that bias, “trying to prove the truth of what happened that day,” with Scott’s name spoken first because “he was the first victim.”

Two believers who refuse a friendly edit: a onetime skeptic who spent four years on the record before concluding the evidence “cannot support this case,” pressed by a veteran journalist on the hardest material — the allegations, the demeanor, why mercy runs on sympathy where courts run on proof. They take the tough questions and Scott Macklem seriously, and arrive at innocence anyway.

The deepest published account of how the case dies in the machinery: the AEDPA time bar that reversed Hood, the 2017 habeas lost the same way, and the fullest reporting anywhere on the CIU denial, including the removal of the unit’s own director from the case, the advocates’ documented claim that the new-evidence standard changed between application and denial, and the FOIA wall (a five-figure fee quote, then privileges) that keeps the unit’s report sealed. It corroborates, on its own interviews, that the prosecution’s rebuttal pilot had been the prosecutor’s own campaign pilot, undisclosed, and quotes Judge Hood’s opinion that making the defendant look like a bad person “is in direct violation of the basic concept of fairness.” Paula Kensu gives the piece its epitaph for the courts: “They didn’t say you’re not innocent… They said you’re too late. Go die in prison.”

The follow-up widens the lens: supporters on multiple continents organized around a man whose alibi sits in the station’s own viewing area. Local verification and global reach in one report.

Investigators in Delta County, the alibi’s home ground, go on Escanaba’s own airwaves asking the public for help. The place the nine witnesses came from, still working the case four decades later.

An independent analyst with no tie to the case or the campaign walks the public record for fifteen minutes and lands past reasonable doubt, at actual innocence. His return-trip arithmetic, about 145 mph average to make the state’s timeline work, matches the court record’s math almost exactly, arrived at on his own. Worth watching as a control experiment: what a neutral outsider concludes from the same facts.

Aired on Kensu’s 60th birthday — his 37th behind bars — the station that covered this case in the 1980s and 1990s returns to it as Khaliah Ali, Muhammad Ali’s daughter, visits him in prison and speaks in Ann Arbor: “the kind of fight that, if my father were still here, he’d be fighting today.” Bill Proctor appears as the veteran of the story (“I was there with the camera when he passed it,” on the polygraph), and attorney Imran Syed states the campaign’s clemency case in one line: this is exactly what clemency is designed for, “where the facts of his innocence are extremely clear.” Notable as the case’s institutional memory — the same newsroom, three decades apart.

Khaliah Ali traveled from New York, met Kensu at Macomb Correctional Facility, and stood with his legal team on camera the next day, his 60th birthday: "I'm not going anywhere until this is resolved. I plan on perfectly well being a real Ali and a bit of a pain in the butt." Imran Syed of the Michigan Innocence Clinic put the case in two sentences: independent witnesses placed him in Escanaba, "about as good of an alibi as you can get," and "we think this is exactly the sort of case clemency is designed for, where the facts of his innocence are extremely clear." Journalist Maggie Freleng, at the same event: "He just turned 60 today, and he is still in prison. That is a stain on this state." Her closing promise is the one she has kept since: "It's a fight that I refuse to give up until Temujin comes home."

The social-video giant gives Kensu the frame he never had at trial: his own voice. He describes who he was in 1986, “the wannabe 80s cool guy… leather jacket, motorcycle, guitar, heavy metal, martial arts, all the cliché stuff from every 80s action film,” and what the prosecution made of it: “they took everything in my life and tried to make it a bad thing” (0:42). His answer to why him: “It’s not that I was anything special. It’s that I was easy” (0:49). He sets the plane theory against his own wallet, a 22-year-old “with a girlfriend on welfare” recast as a man who could charter aircraft, and asks the question the theory has never answered: “I don’t know how much I would have to pay this pilot to keep his mouth shut” (1:37). Herb Welser appears: “this is the police department that I retired from… it was wrong” (3:30). Three months after the CIU closed his file, this was the case reaching a social audience of millions.

The case featured on a national wrongful-conviction platform.

Two career prosecutors, on a podcast built to defend convictions, work through the trial transcript and land somewhere they say they have never landed before: not just reasonable doubt, but innocence. “This is not a close one.” Along the way they give the clearest legal explanations of this case anywhere in its coverage: why the ninja evidence should never have reached a jury, how a five-photo array with one mismatched photo compromises a witness (“from that point forward, they’re identifying the person they saw in the lineup”), why the judge’s unprompted assurance that the informant got no benefit was improper, and why a rebuttal pilot proving a flight was mathematically possible proved nothing at all. Both episodes end the same way: the Governor of Michigan can fix this, and should.

The episode where the modern chain reaction starts. Freleng, later a Pulitzer-winning journalist and Lava for Good host, laid the case out for the true-crime audience in 2020: no physical evidence, a hypnotized witness, a jailhouse informant, and what her own episode description calls “an unsubstantiated plane flight theory.” The hosts of The Prosecutors first heard the case here, Jason Usry first heard it from them, and Inconceivable followed, so much of the current coverage traces back to this hour. Her description also carries the detail that still lands hardest with new listeners: a retired officer from the same department that helped convict him joined his team as an investigator, saying the more he digs, the more red flags he sees.

Court TV takes the case in two parts, with Kensu by phone from prison. Part 1 lays out the conviction: how the investigation began at the hospital with Crystal Merrill, the trial Kensu describes watching “implode” from the defense table, and Colin Miller, associate dean and professor of evidence at the University of South Carolina and producer of Undisclosed, on how police “never release him from their sights” despite contradictory evidence. Part 2 walks the appeal record: Judge Hood’s ruling, defense counsel’s drug history in her own words (“casts questions upon every decision trial counsel made”), and Michelle Woodworth on camera: “He is wholly innocent. I just happened to be his alibi witness that day and I was with him.” Miller states the plane problem in the plainest legal terms in the case’s national coverage: the prosecutor called “his personal pilot,” the relationship “was not disclosed to the jury,” and the theory “should have never been presented to a jury” because “there was no evidence to support that any such flight occurred.” The closing exchange belongs to the anchors: “the prosecution case is a hypnotized eyewitness, a jailhouse snitch, and a charter plane.”

Bill Proctor, 33 years on Detroit television, profiled for spending his retirement re-investigating convictions, this case foremost. The public-radio corroboration of the Experts page’s Proctor card.

The single most consequential broadcast in the case’s media history, airing as a clemency board took up the application. Thomas Brennan, former Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, on camera after reading all ten volumes of the trial transcript: had he been the trial judge, “I would have directed a verdict for the defendant… of an acquittal.” Juror Richard Pelegrand, on camera, walked through it: no pilot shown, no plane, no explanation, “no sir” three times, and then: “It was circumstantial, it was all circumstantial. We have no evidence.” The same report carries the State Police polygraph examiner on Kensu’s result and Michelle Woodworth’s account of why she never testified. Sixteen years later, most of what the newer podcasts play traces back to this nine minutes.

The only book-length account of the case, and the only place Kensu’s own voice runs at length: his telling of November 5, 1986 and the four decades since, alongside the author’s personal experience of knowing him, reproduced case documents, and contributions from podcasters who covered the case. At 556 pages it is the fullest single portrait of the man the record otherwise reduces to a defendant, written with his and his family’s participation. Readers who want the documents go to The Record on this site; readers who want to know the person start here.

The definitive current-status report, built on a series of interviews including one inside the prison. It carries the clemency history in one place (applications under Granholm in 2010, Snyder in 2018, the current one filed June 2022), reports that supporters have been told the Governor views the case as “complicated,” and quotes Kensu speaking to her directly: “I want to believe that you’re better than this, and I want to believe that you care.” Also confirms a recent heart attack, on the record.

The series’ systemic piece: what conviction integrity units were created to do, how Michigan’s has performed, and where the model breaks, reported through cases the unit declined. It gives the Take Action page’s hardest fact an independent frame.

The O’Brien Fellowship series anchor: a full retelling of the case for readers arriving cold, from the 1986 parking lot through the CIU closure and the pending clemency petition, with the Attorney General’s office on the record that the case status “remains unchanged.” The right first read for a newcomer who wants a newspaper’s account.

The people still carrying the fight after four decades: Jason Flom (“it is really, really hard to kill somebody from hundreds and hundreds of miles away”), Khaliah Ali on visiting him, David Sanders’s letter to the Attorney General, and a supporter relocating from Australia to campaign for him. It also raises a question the campaign itself never argues: under Michigan’s 2017 compensation law, exoneration would entitle Kensu to roughly $2 million.

The state’s largest conservative-leaning editorial page, on Christmas Day, calling this “Michigan’s most famous and egregious wrongful conviction case” and carrying the sentence the courts page proves: none of his appeals have been denied based on the evidence of the case. It also reports the September 2025 amendment informing the Governor of his life-threatening medical condition.

The second half of the reconstruction, carrying the case through the appeals and the clemency fight.

The fullest newspaper reconstruction of the case in print: the investigation, the alibi witness by witness, Woodworth’s account of why she never testified, and the appeals. The print counterpart to the audio series.

Kensu grew up watching Ali spar with Cosell on Wide World of Sports beside his grandfather; fifty years later, Ali's daughter announced she would visit him in prison before his 60th birthday. The piece carries the family history that makes her advocacy more than a famous name: her father campaigned for Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a boxer wrongly convicted of murder, and was himself convicted for refusing the draft, a conviction later overturned. "If he didn't have the name and power behind him," she asks, "who knows how that would have ended?" Jason Flom, who introduced the two by phone, is here too, on the flight theory: "It would be laughable if it were in a movie script. The director would say, 'Take that out.'" Her closing line has held up in the three years since: "I'm not gonna take my teeth out of it. I'm in it until the end. He's coming home."

The Proving Innocence op-ed on the conviction integrity unit’s handling of the case.

An outlet written by and for police officers argues for his release. On a page full of true-crime and public-radio voices, this is the entry a skeptical law-and-order reader cannot dismiss as the usual suspects.

News-side reporting rather than opinion, and valuable because it carries both sides: Sanders on the pattern (“everyone who looks at this case agrees”), and the current St. Clair County prosecutor’s response, dismissing the campaign’s issues as “red herrings” and calling the plane theory “a small part of the case.” The on-record version of the opposition’s position, from the office itself.

The follow-up in which aviation experts and the two retired airport officials publicly disputed the flight theory.

A student journalist spends six months on the case, sits with Kensu at Macomb on the anniversary of his arrest, and writes the single best long-form introduction to the case in print. It has the record’s spine, told cleanly: the 10.5-hour gap against a 16-hour drive, DeMars at 1:30 a.m., the plane theory, Joplin’s on-camera recantation, Woodworth never called, Hood’s ruling and the timeliness reversal. It adds reporting the record did not have in print before, including the private investigators’ finding that the pilot the prosecutor put on the stand had been the prosecutor’s own private pilot during his 1986 campaign for attorney general, a conflict the jury never heard. And it holds two voices most coverage lacks: Syed’s question, “If getting it right is not the whole point of the law, then what is?”, and Kensu’s own accounting, unprompted by flattery: “A jerk. Arrogant. And awful. I cared about all the wrong things. I hate who I was.” Every official reached, the retired prosecutor-turned-judge, the current prosecutor, and the Governor’s office, declined to comment.

Khaliah Ali met Kensu and his Michigan Innocence Clinic legal team during the week of his 60th birthday, as the clinic continued to petition Governor Whitmer for clemency. "It's the kind of thing that I know that if my father was still here, he'd be fighting today," she said. She described the man she met as "peaceful and kind and settled." The article summarizes the petition's grounds: the photo lineup, the eyewitnesses placing him in the Upper Peninsula, and the prosecution's chartered-plane theory. It also carries the state's side, quoting St. Clair County Prosecutor Michael D. Wendling's earlier statement that Kensu "attempted to manipulate these witnesses into supporting an alibi defense manufactured by him." Ali's answer is the article's last word: "Every single time, every clear, glaring, obvious, or quite frankly ridiculous fact has either been ignored or swept under the table."

Six months after the CIU closure and six months into the pending clemency petition, Kensu writes to the Governor at Christmas, and the paper runs it. His own voice, at length, asking for the one thing the record leaves: her signature.

Written in the weeks after the CIU rejection, from a prison phone call days after his 59th birthday: how the case’s supposed last legal hope collapsed and what remained. Syed lays out the options that became the current strategy, and describes letters arriving from Ireland and Denmark. The snapshot of the exact moment the fight became a clemency fight.

Detroit’s independent paper publishes what other coverage of the closure only describes: the May 17 denial letter itself, hosted in full, signed not by the unit’s director but by Valerie Newman of the Wayne County CIU, appointed special assistant to review the case after a “conflict” within the unit involving director Robyn Frankel that the AG’s office declined to explain. The piece sets Newman’s stated standard, new evidence “not at all considered at trial or during post-conviction appeals,” against what Frankel had told Proving Innocence in writing eighteen months earlier, and carries the Levin, Tlaib, and Chang letter to the Governor and Proving Innocence’s own letter to Nessel, both hosted as documents.

The national outlet that investigated the case in 2021 returns to report the state’s answer: the Attorney General’s Conviction Integrity Unit declines to pursue his release, closing a review that made no determination either way. The decision that converted the case from a legal fight into a clemency fight, on the record at national scale.

The CIU closes its file finding no new evidence, making no determination of guilt or innocence.

The national investigation that took the case from Michigan story to national one.

The Governor denies the 2020 request on the parole board’s recommendation, her spokeswoman confirming without further comment, while the Attorney General’s review was still open. The wire notes his supporters include former U.S. Senator Carl Levin.

Detroit’s NBC affiliate, in the weeks the COVID clemency push peaked, puts the two most important voices on television side by side. Michelle Woodworth, the alibi witness the jury never heard: “I was with him that entire morning, that entire day. So, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did not do this crime.” And Herb Welser, retired from the Port Huron department that built the case: “At the end of the day, he had nothing to do with this murder. That’s why I’m trying to help him.” The report notes Hood’s 52-page ruling found the prosecution “engaged in misconduct by using a perjured testimony,” that Kensu was then fighting COVID-19, and that Cleland, by then a federal judge, declined to comment.

The Innocence Project’s explainer lays the case out in five points for a national audience. Beyond the summary, the page hosts three things worth the click: the original 1986 photo lineup image itself, the filmed Joplin recantation, and the Undisclosed episode transcripts. A 2020, COVID-era piece; read it for the five points rather than current status.

The COVID-19 petition: clinic attorney Imran Syed, with Kensu sick in Macomb, writes the Governor that failing to act “could result in an innocent man dying in a Michigan prison.” The sentence the campaign has been living inside ever since.

The start of fifteen years of sustained attention from the same newsroom, including the December 2020 clemency-denial report.

David Sanders of Proving Innocence and counsel, in the window of the Bretz letter, expecting movement that did not come. Useful to the reader as a dated marker of how often freedom has looked close.

And then it stopped fighting. The verdict stood, and it is the documented floor under everything the site says about his health.

The state’s first answer to the verdict was to fight it.

A federal jury heard the evidence about his medical care and made the state pay. The only jury to hear a Kensu case since 1987 found for him.

The earliest international coverage in this collection, and a profile of Bill Proctor in which the Kensu case is the turning point of his life. The BBC verifies, in its own reporting, the spine of the Proctor story this site tells: a private investigator who could not get anyone to listen brought him the case in 1995, he reinvestigated for a year, aired a five night series on WXYZ, and found the jailhouse informant, who recanted on camera. It then records the case’s largest legacy: wrestling with it transformed Proctor, led him to found Proving Innocence, and brought him to David Moran and Bridget McCormack, whose meetings, which Proctor facilitated, created the Michigan Innocence Clinic. In McCormack’s words, he conceived it. The clinic has since freed the wrongly convicted by the dozen. Whatever the Governor decides, this case already changed Michigan justice once.

A court closes another door in three paragraphs. The brevity is the point: what reads as routine on the wire is, in the record, a man’s remaining chance.

Governor Granholm’s denial, reported weeks after a federal judge had vacated the conviction. The season the state said no twice, in one wire brief.

Governor Granholm, following the parole board’s recommendation, denies commutation two months after a federal judge vacated the conviction, while the state’s appeal keeps him in prison. Public radio recording, in real time, the season the state said no twice.

The victim’s hometown paper, editorially, on the case. No outlet has more standing with the exact readers the state answers to.

The wire item announcing the parole board would take up the case, the run-up to the September 2010 public hearing. A dated marker that the state itself once judged the innocence claim worth a hearing.