The Witness

Small Town Big Crime

The night after brutally stabbing a homeless man in Roanoke, Virginia in 1985, William Shifflett and Robert Albright checked into a nearby emergency shelter called the RAFT. In 2018, a volunteer from the RAFT wrote a letter to the Virginia governor and to one of the original investigators in the Haysom murders stating she believed Jens Soering was wrongfully convicted. She cited incriminating conversations volunteers at the shelter overheard between Shifflett and Albright including reference to a "rich bitch" who'd refused to pay. She has refused all interviews since writing those letters until now. For the first time, that volunteer, Sandra Thornton, talks publicly about the night the two men checked into the RAFT.
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Written and Reported by Rachel Ryan and Courteney Stuart
Hosted and Sound production by Jaclyn Piermarini
Sound engineering by Taylor Thomas

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