Three days later, Christopher Ochoa, 22, confessed to the crime, and he became the state's star witness against his friend and co-worker, Danziger. Judge Perkins describes the testimony by Ochoa as "very compelling." Not only was it emotional, but it contained details police said only a witness to the crime could have known.

Now, Ochoa and his lawyers insist that his confession and his testimony were a fabrication coerced by police who had given him a Hobson's choice. "He was made to feel that he was doomed one way or the other," says Keith Findley, a lawyer with the Wisconsin Innocence Project who is working on the case. "His doom could either be death or it could be [life in] prison."

But with a life sentence came another ugly reality. The police were convinced that Ochoa and Danziger had committed the crime together, and in exchange for avoiding a death sentence, Ochoa had to take Danziger down with him. "That was part of the plea bargain. He had to testify against Danziger," Findley said

Danziger always refused to plead. He maintained his innocence throughout his 1990 trial, insisting he had no idea why Ochoa implicated him. The homicide detectives who testified against him were lying, he said. Ochoa maintained his innocence in conversations with family members; his attorneys say he would not assert the claim publicly for fear the state would try to execute him.

"He said 'They made me confess and how am I going to prove my innocence now? It's my word against theirs,'" says Ronald Navejos, Ochoa's uncle and closest friend.

But if Ochoa's confession and his testimony at Danziger's trial were all lies, where did he get the facts -- and the story line -- that allowed him to appear completely credible to the judge and jury? Ochoa didn't just say he and Danziger raped and murdered the victim, but described Danziger's elaborate plan for the robbery, such as how they planned to meet at a McDonald's near the Pizza Hut at 7 a.m. the morning of the murder; how they entered the crime scene by a side door using a key Danziger had obtained; their conversation with the victim, who was cutting pizza dough when they entered; and how the two men bound her, gagged her, raped and sodomized her eight different times.

Ochoa's lawyers say he got his story line and the key crime scene facts from the police. "There isn't any way [Ochoa] would have known the facts about the case unless they told him the facts about the case," says Bill Allison, an Austin attorney representing Ochoa.

Allison doesn't believe the police necessarily fabricated their case against Ochoa, but that they "violated every rule of taking down a statement that you can violate." Ochoa asked for a lawyer the first day he was interrogated but was denied one on the ground that he hadn't been charged with anything. "The invocation of asking for a lawyer should have stopped the interrogation at that point," says Allison, who claims the police were "feeding him [Ochoa] facts about the case" as they questioned him. Allison also alleges that a critical tape recording of Ochoa's interrogation, occurring just prior to the confession, has mysteriously disappeared.

Allison also likes to point out that the police sergeant primarily responsible for the interrogation, a man named Hector Polanco, "can be very intimidating." Polanco is a controversial figure who has been accused of coercing confessions from suspects in several other cases. In 1992, four years after Ochoa and Danziger were convicted, the Austin Police Department fired Polanco after an internal investigation determined he had presented perjured testimony in a murder trial.

Polanco was reinstated nine months later, by an arbitrator who attributed an alleged false statement in a murder trial to a memory lapse, and he later won a $350,000 jury judgment in a subsequent lawsuit against the department over his firing.

Ochoa told his mother, Dora Ochoa, and others in his family that Polanco threw chairs around the room during his interrogation. Ronald Navejos says Ochoa told him, "If he didn't confess they'd crush his head." His current attorneys also maintain that there were threats of physical violence. Meanwhile, Donna Angstadt, Danziger's former girlfriend, describes her questioning by Polanco and Sgt. Bruce Boardman as "the most horrific, the most horrible experience I've ever been through in my life. I had nightmares about this forever."

Angstadt was the manager of the Pizza Hut where Danziger and Ochoa worked. She says Polanco and Boardman tried to link her to the crime and threatened to have her children, then 9 and 4, removed from her custody. "They threatened that if Richard gets out, he's going to hunt me down and kill me like he did Nancy DePriest ... . They told me Richard had told Chris [Ochoa] that I'm the one who supplied the gun. Another time, Hector Polanco said, 'Your boyfriend's holding her head and you're the one who pulled the trigger for your little love interest.'"

Polanco, who is on medical leave, could not be reached. Boardman refused to comment. A source close to the investigation into Marino's claims said neither man is a subject of the current inquiry, in part because the statute of limitations would have expired on any crime they might have committed in exacting a false confession from Ochoa in 1988.

Still, if the police did coerce Ochoa into confessing a crime that Marino committed, as Ochoa's lawyers now assert, that means Ochoa is guilty of fingering another perfectly innocent man -- his friend, Danziger -- to save himself. It's a prospect, says Danziger's sister, Barbara Oakley, that haunts her and her family. "To be very honest with you, we're very, very angry," she says. "We'd like to meet [Ochoa] and know why he did this. He and Richard were supposed to be friends. I can understand, as far as he's concerned, his making a false confession. But why did he implicate my brother? Why? Why? Why not John Doe? And why hasn't he tried to contact us or his family members and tried to say something? He knows my brother's been hurt. Why not come forward after all these years?"

Today Oakley describes her brother as extremely nervous and fearful of having anyone stand or even walk behind him. "He's very intimidated. He doesn't want anyone messing with him," she says. "He's like that the entire time you talk to him." She says the last time she visited her brother, he continually mistook Oakley's daughter for Oakley. Danziger has been confined to the Skyview psychiatric prison in Rusk, Texas, since March 1997.

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