YUBA CITY, Sutter County — Officer Nicholas Morawcznski was taking photographs of a chaotic murder scene, looking for clues, when he heard a scream from next door.

At that moment, the Yuba City police detective faced a gruesome mystery. Two days earlier, a relative who couldn’t reach 94-year-old Leola Shreves on the phone had grown concerned, drove to her home and found her facedown in her pink nightgown, dead from a massive head wound.

The small house in this city 40 miles north of Sacramento, usually neatly kept, had been ransacked. Shreves, known as “Dode” to family and friends, had been tortured before she was killed.

Police found glass shards, utensils and a smashed television on the kitchen floor. In the bedroom, the intruder had yanked photos off walls and ripped a door from its hinges. He had left Shreves next to her bed – her red aluminum walker by her side – after breaking her jaw, neck, back and 17 of 24 ribs, shattering her teeth, strangling her and almost separating her ears and scalp from her skull. It appeared he’d beaten her with her own cane.

On the petite great-great-grandmother’s hands were defensive injuries. She had fought back, investigators concluded, and likely scratched her attacker. The assailant, they believed, had also cut himself badly as he crawled through a broken bedroom window. A trail of blood was left outside the home on Park Avenue.

Police figured that Shreves, who lived alone, had been killed on the night of Jan. 18, 2013, or early the next morning. Her Jan. 19 newspaper hadn’t been touched, and she hadn’t taken her pill-box medication from that morning. After she was found Jan. 21, officers spent two days canvassing the neighborhood. News of her vicious murder shocked many in the city of 67,000.

Detectives chased a few leads. Perhaps most intriguing, a woman who lived a block away reported that on the same night police believed the murder happened, she’d seen a man peeping into her dining room, cupping his hands against the window.

But investigators had no suspects – that is, until Morawcznski heard the scream from the house next door. He and another officer walked over, knocked and encountered 20-year-old Michael Patrick Alexander.

A day earlier, Alexander, a socially awkward video-game devotee, had flagged down officers and volunteered a possible lead. He’d heard a sound the night of the crime, something like a cat climbing the wooden fence between the properties. The officers had responded doubtfully, saying the fence was too sturdy to make the kind of noise he described.

But the brief conversation had raised suspicion – enough that they had decided to look into Alexander’s past, which was marked by suspensions from middle and high school for violent outbursts, according to court records.

Now, as police spoke to Alexander a second time, they noticed that his hands were shaking and that he had a small wound just above his left knee, records show. The young man said he had scraped his leg on a door in his house. Later, he’d say he’d bit himself in anger, and that the shriek Morawcznski heard was from him getting upset playing the video game “Call of Duty.” Police photographed Alexander’s hands and knee.

A Yuba City police photo, left, shows Michael Alexander’s backyard during a nighttime search of his family’s house on Jan. 25, 2013. Another image, right, taken by detectives shows a wound on Alexander’s knee. The detectives had spoken to him after hearing a scream coming from his house. That injury made police suspicious of Alexander early in the investigation. Yuba City Police Department photos A Yuba City police photo, top, shows Michael Alexander’s backyard during a nighttime search of his family’s house on Jan. 25, 2013. Another image, above, taken by detectives shows a wound on Alexander’s knee. The detectives had spoken to him after hearing a scream coming from his house. That injury made police suspicious of Alexander early in the investigation. Yuba City Police Department photos

The encounter lasted about five minutes, but set in motion a drama that would consume many lives, including Alexander’s, for years.

Over the course of nine months, The Chronicle investigated what happened. This account is based on more than a dozen interviews and thousands of pages of documents, among them police reports, court filings, transcripts of interrogations, search warrants, autopsy and DNA results, and school and medical files.

That day, the cops left Alexander on his front porch. But they would not be gone long.

Leola Shreves had lived alone in a one-story home at 546 Park Ave. since her second husband, Merle, died in 2001.

Born in 1918 in Illinois, she loved her large family, which grew to include 22 great-grandchildren and 13 great-great-grandchildren. Fiercely independent, she stayed active, had a sharp mind and still drove a car, shuttling herself to doctor appointments, neighbors said. She insisted they call her “Grandma Dode” (pronounced DOE-dee).

An obituary for Leola Shreves appeared in the Marysville Appeal-Democrat. Jessica Christian, The Chronicle

Shreves was a skillful cook and baker, according to news reports after her death, and loved to read books on history. Family photos lined her walls, along with a sign reading, “Multiple Feline Syndrome.” Her adoring grandkids, who lived nearby, visited her after school, said her son-in-law, Ronald Smith. She fed them all.

She had little in common with her next-door neighbor.

Michael Alexander was born in northeast Washington state. He, his mother and older sister moved to Chico (Butte County) in 2000, then 10 years later to the house next door to Shreves in Yuba City. He was a quiet young man with few friends, mostly interested in video games and “Pokémon.” When he wasn’t playing video games, he was watching other people play them online or chatting about them in internet forums.

Records show that, at age 3, he received special education services for communication. In third grade, testing of his verbal IQ measured him as intellectually disabled, with a score in the first percentile. By middle school, he’d been diagnosed with a learning disability in auditory processing.

According to court records, therapists and school officials also found that Alexander had been scarred by a childhood incident, one Alexander won’t discuss. The trauma prompted an Individualized Education Program, or IEP, that prevented teachers from restraining him. A psychologist assessed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit disorder and depression.

Shreves and Alexander had rarely interacted. Shreves once offered to help the Alexanders find their lost cat. But after police spoke to Alexander about Shreves’ killing, they wondered if a prime suspect was right in front of them.

For Morawcznski, the next step was to search the young man’s home for links to the crime. To do that, he needed a judge to sign a warrant. So he set out to make the case. And so far, it was a thin one.

On Alexander’s Facebook page, Morawcznski found a grainy photo showing Alexander appearing to yell into the camera. His mother would later say she took the photo of her son when he was yawning.

He also included another Facebook post – a cartoon of a girl with her face smashed into a concrete wall with the caption: “Face wall, when a face palm is not enough.”

Yuba City police pulled a cartoon from Michael Alexander’s Facebook page and said in a search warrant application it suggested a link between Alexander and Leola Shreves, whose face was slammed into the floor. Detectives also used what they deemed a suspicious Facebook photo of Alexander in the warrant application. His mother, Audra, said she took the photo and that he was yawning. Yuba City Police Department

“For his Facebook account, Alexander uses a profile illustration of a woman's face smashed into a wall,” Morawcznski wrote. “During the autopsy of Shreves, (the doctor) noted evidence of strangulation and severe blunt force trauma to Shreves’ head and face, consistent with Shreves’ head being smashed into the floor.”

The detective also began delving into Alexander’s history. In middle school, he learned, Alexander had been suspended multiple times for fighting with students and teachers. As a high school freshman, school officials found he had anger issues and “severe outbursts,” according to school records.

At age 15, he’d been arrested and given probation after allegedly threatening to kill a Yuba City High School teacher and burn the school down after fighting with and choking another student. He was expelled from the school in 2007, records show.

Morawcznski told the judge Alexander’s cat-on-the-fence story didn’t add up, and noted the small wound on the young man’s knee. Alexander, the detective concluded, was a murder suspect because of his “conflicting statements, propensity toward violence, visible injury and proximity to Shreves’ residence.”

At 10:15 p.m. on Jan. 25, 2013, Superior Court Judge Christopher Chandler signed the warrant. Less than an hour later, SWAT officers with guns drawn woke the Alexander family and seized numerous items, including clothing, shoes, a computer, video game consoles and a baseball bat.

“I knew this was going to come down to this,” Alexander told police, according to court records. He asked if he would be handcuffed. Detectives would later say they found these statements suspicious.

“They asked me to come outside and they took me away without my family knowing,” Alexander recalled. “They said, ‘We’re gonna question you and can you come down to the station,’ and like anyone would, I said, ‘Sure.’ ”

Eighteen minutes after the warrant was served, as midnight neared, Alexander, wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, sat in the Yuba City Police Department interrogation room.

Few pieces of evidence are more powerful than a confession.

Police officers, prosecutors and jurors place immense weight on a suspect’s admissions. Such statements can change the direction of cases and lead investigators to rule out other suspects. After all, the reasoning goes, who would admit to killing someone if they didn’t do it?

But, according to the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization that seeks to free the wrongly convicted, 28% of suspects exonerated by DNA evidence from 1989 to 2016 had falsely confessed to investigators. In murder cases, that percentage was almost two-thirds. And half of the false confessions the Innocence Project identified involved suspects 21 years old or younger.

Experts in the field say police interrogation techniques place psychological pressures on suspects that can prompt an innocent person, particularly one who has a diminished mental capacity, to confess to a horrific crime. Though detectives can legally use deception – lies or “ruses” to extract information – the strategy can snare an innocent person.

According to research by Richard Leo, a University of San Francisco School of Law professor, fewer than 20% of suspects confronted by police invoke their constitutional Miranda rights to remain silent and speak to a lawyer before answering questions, in part due to fear of seeming uncooperative.

When Alexander entered the Yuba City Police Station that night as a suspect in his neighbor’s murder, he wasn’t advised of his Miranda rights. Instead, detectives used what Leo says is a common tactic – relying on a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, California vs. Beheler, that allows police to conduct voluntary interviews as long as they tell people they are not under arrest and can leave at any time.

Yuba County Undersheriff Nick Morawcznski, who in 2013 was a Yuba City police sergeant and detective, was first to investigate Leola Shreves’ brutal slaying. Chris Kaufman, Special to The Chronicle

Alexander consented to an interview. Thus began a middle-of-the-night, 3½-hour grilling by investigators. Yuba City police and Sutter County prosecutors refused to release a transcript of the session, but The Chronicle obtained a copy.

Speaking to Morawcznski and his partner, Detective Jason Parker, Alexander initially denied any involvement in the killing, according to the transcript. He told them he had never stepped foot on Shreves’ property.

“You have never walked through?” Parker asked.

“I’ve never walked through her property,” Alexander responded. He told the detectives, “She reminds me so much of my grandmother, I would never do that to my grandmother.”

Before long, Morawcznski and Parker zeroed in on Alexander’s violent past and anger issues. Alexander described experiencing a “white rage” that would lead him to black out for up to 15 seconds, forgetting what happened. He said such episodes had occurred during school fights, but that he had the problem under control. His last fight, he said, was three years earlier.

The detectives then introduced a series of ruses. First, they told Alexander the shoe print left by a broken window at Shreves’ house matched a sneaker they had confiscated from his bedroom, even though they didn’t yet have results from any evidence that was collected. Later, they would tell him his fingerprint had been found next to the broken window.

“If you’d gone over there, all right, there is evidence of that,” Parker said. “So, we’re trying to get around to the truth, so it’s OK to say, yeah, I walked through there.”

Alexander repeatedly denied stepping foot on Shreves’ property. So the detectives returned to Alexander’s struggles with anger.

There are really two sides to you, they said. The 20-year-old agreed, saying he’d had conversations with his darker side. Maybe, Parker suggested, your split personality committed the crime and you blacked out?

Why don’t you have a conversation with your other side and ask him what happened, the detectives suggested, leaving the room. When they returned, Alexander said he had spoken to his other side, who denied any involvement.

Parker countered, “I think the other Mike lied to you.” He began calling Alexander’s alter ego “Angry Mike,” comparing the young man to the Gollum/Smeagol split character from “Lord of the Rings.”

“I know for a fact that he's not lying to me because we have been together for 10 years,” Alexander said. “I can tell the tone when he's telling the truth and when he's not.”

Morawcznski then started a new line of questioning, asking Alexander to speculate on what may have happened between the killer and the victim. Alexander responded that the intruder may have knocked on the front door and asked to come in, before Shreves let him in and he killed her. How, the detective asked, did the intruder murder her?

“Bare fists, maybe,” Alexander replied.

California Department of Justice A broken bathroom window at Leola Shreves’ home was documented by state forensics officials.

Yuba City Police Department A Yuba City police photo shows shoe prints and broken glass outside Shreves’ bedroom that had been marked as evidence.

Yuba City Police Department A Yuba City police photo shows shoe prints and broken glass outside Shreves’ bedroom that had been marked as evidence.

Yuba City Police Department Blood spatter near a family photo marks a wall in Shreves’ home.

As they talked, Alexander asked the detectives for help with details of the crime scene, such as where the footprint was found in relation to the house: “Do you mind telling me what side?”

When the interrogation stalled again, Parker requested a DNA sample to compare to blood and other evidence collected from the crime scene. Alexander allowed a swab of the inside of his cheek and for a few strands of his long black hair to be plucked.

Such lab tests take days, if not weeks, to complete. But about 15 minutes later, in a staged maneuver, the detectives left the room and returned, saying the results of the test were back.

Parker asked Alexander if he thought it was good news or bad news.

“In my stomach it says that it’s bad news,” Alexander responded. “In my head, it says it’s good.”

“It’s bad news,” Parker told him.

As Alexander sat in interrogation, police were at his house 2 miles away gathering the final items from the search warrant.

His mother, Audra Alexander, a nurse, did not immediately realize Michael was gone. Officers had told her they wanted to speak to her son, she said, but only because he might be able to help them find the killer. She thought they’d taken him outside to ask him a few questions.

“The fact that he was taken and I didn’t know was very hard for me,” she recalled. “I feel like I failed him because I didn’t know and I didn’t keep him safe. My heart hurts knowing that he was there alone and so scared.”

She said she spent the night sitting on her bed, repeatedly calling police trying to reach him.

Yuba City Police Department Yuba City police detectives photographed Ashley (left) and Audra Alexander, Michael Alexander’s sister and mother, respectively, while they sat on their living room couch during a nighttime search of the family’s house on Jan. 25, 2013.

In the interrogation room, still without informing him of his Miranda rights, the detectives asked Alexander how his DNA could have gotten into Shreves’ house. Sometimes he spit gum out, he responded. Maybe his hair blew over the fence, or was carried next door by the family cat.

“I know you’ve been in the house before,” Parker said.

“I haven’t, I swear,” Alexander responded. “I would never hurt anybody.”

“There’s nobody else that could leave that DNA,” Parker insisted.

He pleaded with Alexander to trust him.

“We are police officers,” he said. “We’re trying to look out for people, help them out, protect them, keep them safe, OK?”

In the end, the specter of the DNA evidence, though fabricated, seemed to wear Alexander down. He told Parker he was scared.

“What do you think the truth is?” Parker asked.

“That I did it,” Alexander said.

He began describing how “Angry Mike” went into the house and “murdered the old lady.”

“Yeah. How do you think he did it?” Parker asked.

“Bare hands, probably,” Alexander said. “Probably with a weapon, I don’t know.”

It was, said Leo, a classic false confession. The professor, who reviewed Alexander’s interrogation after being hired as an expert for his defense, said Alexander’s disabilities made him a “sitting duck,” an “easy mark.”

“He starts to think he’s better off to stop denying,” Leo said of Alexander. “He came to believe he must have done something despite no recollection of it. … In effect, he defers to the investigators’ false evidence.”

Investigators’ photos compare a shoe print found outside Leola Shreves’ house and a sneaker seized from Michael Alexander. Police told Alexander they matched, but a lab test revealed they did not. California Department of Justice, left, Yuba City Police Department, right

It was about 2 a.m., and the questioning continued for another hour. Asked where he killed Shreves, Alexander repeatedly said it happened in her living room. Shreves was killed in her bedroom. Crime scene photos show the living room looked almost untouched after the murder, except for some blood on a wall.

Parker seemed to understand the precariousness of the confession. His suspect had implicated an alter ego.

“OK, we are going to start just talking about this as, I mean, as you,” the detective said. “So we are just going to talk about this now as you, and not him, because it is you and him, yes, but it is your body, OK, that is doing these actions, OK?”

Ultimately, Alexander confessed to the following account: He knocked on Shreves’ door and asked for money, she said no, he returned home to get a baseball bat, broke her bedroom window, crawled through, punched her in the living room, tripped her into her bedroom, kneed her in the ribs and rammed her head into the ground.

Morawcznski asked Alexander if the detectives had treated him fairly.

“Yep,” Alexander said.

“Did we make you say anything that didn't happen?”

“Nope.”

Alexander’s mother finally reached a police official on the phone and asked about her son. “He won’t be home for a very long time ma’am,” he told her. “He just confessed.”

She vomited.

Yuba City Police Department A Yuba City police detective holds a video game console collected from Michael Alexander’s house during the search on Jan. 25, 2013.

Yuba City Police Department Police seized a softball bat in addition to clothing, shoes and a computer.

Yuba City Police Department Police seized a softball bat in addition to clothing, shoes and a computer.

Yuba City Police Department Detectives photographed Alexander’s bedroom during the search.

In the days after Shreves’ murder, Yuba City police Detective Scotty Clinkenbeard wrote up a search warrant compelling five nearby hospitals to release medical information about any patient who might have sought treatment for injuries consistent with the crime.

But, as Clinkenbeard started investigating male patients with suspicious injuries, he got a call at 4:30 a.m., shortly after Alexander’s alleged confession.

“Detective Morawcznski contacted me and said the murder suspect was in custody and to discontinue the patient contacts,” Clinkenbeard wrote in a report.

Yuba City police believed they had their man. On Jan. 29, 2013, Sutter County District Attorney Carl Adams charged Alexander with first-degree murder, torture, aggravated mayhem, first-degree burglary and attempted first-degree robbery.

Three days later, Alexander, who had been assigned a public defender, asked to see Detective Parker, and was taken back, alone, to the police station. He wanted to recant his confession. This time, he was read his Miranda rights and waived them, records show.

Alexander didn’t know that the first DNA tests had come back on blood collected from several locations at the crime scene: a mirror in Shreves’ bedroom, broken glass from her back patio, her living room wall and the trail of blood outside.

The blood belonged to someone else.

Police had run the DNA profile against friends of Alexander, as well as parolees and hospital records, and compared it with a federal database of convicted felons. No matches came back.

“Have you been looking for the real killer?” Alexander asked, according to a transcript of the second interview obtained by The Chronicle.

Despite the blood evidence, investigators had not lost confidence in Alexander’s guilt.

“Who else was there?” Parker asked.

Detectives suggested he had an accomplice, and Alexander started talking again, wildly, trying to pin the killing on someone else. The murderer was East Indian, or white, black or Hispanic. He was named “Rodriguez” or “Dawg,” or perhaps “Dude” or “Tom.” He’d met the killer months earlier at a skateboard park, or he passed the guy on his way to 7-Eleven the morning Shreves died.

At one point, Alexander said he watched the attack happen from outside the home, through Shreves’ window. Later, he said he punched the assailant in a bid to stop the attack.

Morawcznski seemed to be fed up. He pivoted again.

“I want to be able to go to your mama and tell her that Mike's got some stuff he's dealing with, and he's working it out, but the one thing that I can say about him is that he's honest and that he's a man,” he said. “Men have done nothing but screw her over in her life, but her son is a good man and that man stood up and did the right thing.”

The scolding included a warning: He might have to put Alexander’s mother and sister in jail if they lied about what they knew.

Alexander became furious. He returned to his original story.

“You want to know what the truth is?” Alexander asked. “I didn't go outside. I did not leave the house during the night.”

“How did any DNA or your shoe prints get inside?” Morawcznski asked, sticking to the ruse.

“I didn't go into the damn house … I don't leave the damn house. I never leave the house,” Alexander said. “I didn't see anything. You people should be looking for the real person, not at the f–ing neighbor. … I have my computer on 24/7, sitting next to me. I go onto Facebook. I go onto YouTube. I go onto Twitch.TV. I watch porn for f–'s sake. I don't leave the goddamn house, I didn't murder her.”

Why would he need money from Shreves, he asked, when his mom let him use her ATM card? Alexander didn’t know it, but the evidence didn’t support a robbery motive. Shreves’ jewelry, purse and an unlocked safe holding $4,000 in cash were untouched, just feet from where she was killed.

After the officers left, Alexander punched a fake thermostat officers were using to hide a camera, records show. The camera broke, but audio recording continued as Alexander fumed alone, pacing the room.

“F–ing stupid-ass crooked cops. F–ing sicken me,” he said. “F–ing think you got power but you don't. You weren't given the f–ing power because you're too f–ing lazy to find a real job. Try and blame poor innocent frigging man that ain't done s–.”

A third detective entered the room, telling Alexander to calm down, or else “you’re going to get your f–ing ass kicked.”

Four days later, Alexander appeared in court for the first time. Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty.

As the case moved toward trial, the Sutter County district attorney’s office was in turmoil.

In November 2013, Adams, the state’s longest-serving district attorney at the time, abruptly retired. After leading the office for 41 years, he became a “possible suspect in an arson fire in July 2013 involving a residence owned by a woman with whom he had a close relationship,” according to a report by the county’s civil grand jury. Adams was never charged in the fire.

The grand jury report said the office had a “history of scandal, misappropriation of funds and misuse of power,” and noted that Sutter County had to pay $155,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging that Adams “condoned a sexually charged work environment.”

Adams’ top assistant, Jana McClung, who was prosecuting Alexander’s case, took the helm for about a year. In November 2014, Amanda Hopper was voted into office, and was hailed as a stabilizing force. But she did not change course in her department’s biggest prosecution.

By then, Alexander had spent 21 months in jail, his court hearings repeatedly delayed as the district attorney’s office wrestled with a case that lacked physical evidence.

At one point, movement toward a trial slowed when Alexander – who like most criminal defendants waived his right to a speedy trial – had to get a new lawyer. His public defender had bowed out, citing a conflict of interest.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, repeatedly missed deadlines to turn over evidence, known as discovery, to the defense, said Alexander’s civil attorney, David Bishop. He said they also asked for time to retest blood, in hopes of linking Alexander to the crime, but got nowhere.

All of the evidence pointed to someone else, someone who had left his DNA all over Shreves’ house.

A fingerprint on Shreves’ bedroom door did not match Alexander’s print. The shoe print found beside Shreves’ broken window matched neither Alexander’s sneakers nor his shoe size. Not a single drop of blood from the scene matched Alexander and no DNA from Shreves was found on Alexander’s clothes.

DNA found under Shreves’ fingernails was not from Alexander, neither was the hair found on her housecoat. No property from Shreves’ home was found in his possession. The trail of blood from Shreves’ home continued past Alexander’s house and down the block.

By March 2015, police records show, investigators began interviewing jail inmates to determine whether Alexander had spoken about the killing. They tapped the cell phones of Alexander’s mother and older sister, Ashley, hoping they might incriminate him or identify an accomplice. They got a search warrant for the pair’s Facebook content, and attached a GPS tracker to his mother’s car without her knowledge.

The effort to gather evidence continued until August 2016, when Hopper’s office finally presented the defense with a list of 43 witnesses who would testify at a trial the following month.

In reality, prosecutors were not prepared to take the case to a jury. On Aug. 19, 2016, two days after his 24th birthday, and after more than 3½ years in jail, Alexander was led into court. He steeled himself for yet another delay.

“The people move to dismiss this action,” the district attorney’s motion began, “in the furtherance of justice as sufficient evidence does not exist such that a jury will find beyond a reasonable doubt that Michael Patrick Alexander murdered Leola Shreves.”

Hopper didn’t attend the hearing, sending a deputy instead. But she explained in the document that her office had spent years interviewing Alexander’s relatives, friends and cellmates. They had monitored his communications, tested evidence at four crime labs and spent “dozens and dozens of hours consulting with DNA experts and reviewing Alexander’s videotaped admissions.”

“Through that investigation,” Hopper wrote, “Alexander has been excluded as the source of every bit of DNA or other physical evidence collected from the crime scene. The investigation explored the possibility of an accomplice and the possibility of a false confession.”

Hopper seemed to acknowledge the case had always been too weak, telling a reporter from the Marysville Appeal-Democrat that day, “We went into this anticipating all this extra investigation ... would make the evidence stronger, and it didn’t.”

THE CRIME SCENE Investigators collected physical evidence all over Shreves' property, but none of it linked Alexander to the crime and other findings contradicted his "confession." Scroll to view this evidence.

In Alexander’s purported confession, he repeatedly told police the killing happened in the living room. Yet that room was nearly untouched, and it was indisputable that Shreves had died in her bedroom. Dozens of blood drops collected from all around the crime scene matched an unknown male, but not Michael Alexander. Alexander told police he never entered the guest bedroom, but blood was found on the curtains in that room. A shoe print discovered in mud near Shreves’ bedroom window matched neither Alexander's sneakers nor his shoe size. DNA lodged under Shreves’ fingernails was not from Alexander. A fingerprint on Shreves’ bedroom door was not Alexander’s. Police accused Alexander of killing Shreves to rob her, yet all of her jewelry and $4,000 cash were still in an unlocked safe in her bedroom. A trail of blood leaving Shreves’ house did not match Alexander, and that bloody path continued past his house next door and on down the block.

In court, Alexander sat shellshocked. The same judge who had told him he could face the death penalty advised him he’d be freed later that day. Shreves’ family was shaken. The young man they had believed for years was the killer was going to walk free.

Outside court, Alexander’s attorney, Norm Hansen, told the Appeal-Democrat that the case “should have been dismissed years ago.” He said his “suggestible” client had been “strongly manipulated” by his police interrogators.

Neither Hansen nor Alexander’s first public defender, Mark Van den Heuvel, responded to requests to be interviewed for this story.

Back in his jail cell, Alexander packed his “Game of Thrones” books, origami, legal paperwork and family photos. As he stepped into the lobby, he dropped his bucket of possessions onto the concrete floor, wrapped his arms around his mother and wept.

Still, the district attorney made no pronouncement of Alexander’s innocence. There was no apology. Instead, Hopper told the local newspaper her office could refile charges against him in the future, reminding the public that California has no statute of limitations on murder.

“I am not convinced there was a false confession,” she said.

Courtesy Audra Alexander On Aug. 19, 2016, after more than three years in custody, Michael Alexander was released. He embraces his sister Ashley.

In April 2018, as Alexander settled into a brief job at one of Sutter County’s many rice mills, prosecutors in Sacramento announced the arrest of an infamous serial killer and rapist known as the Golden State Killer. The cold-case breakthrough would reverberate around the country.

Frustrated for years that DNA collected from the killer’s many crime scenes never matched government databases, investigators had uploaded the profile to a commercial genealogy website. They got a hit on a potential relative, just as a hobbyist building a family tree might.

Over time, they narrowed their search to an ex-cop named Joseph DeAngelo. He has been charged so far with more than a dozen murders, and authorities believe he’s responsible for many more crimes.

A month after DeAngelo’s arrest, the state crime lab developed more precise DNA testing methods. The advance allowed technicians to compare samples to a database of known offenders and search for female relatives. Before that, matches could be made only to male relatives.

Joseph DeAngelo appears in a Sacramento County courtroom to be arraigned on multiple rape and murder charges on April 27, 2018. Authorities believe DeAngelo is the East Area Rapist and Golden State Killer who committed numerous crimes in the 1970s and '80s. Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 2018

Learning of the new technology, Yuba City detectives submitted the evidence from Shreves’ murder scene to a state DNA lab in Richmond. This time, they got a hit.

The crime scene blood had a familial link to a 31-year-old woman. In late 2018, a state Bureau of Investigations specialist, using public databases, internet searches and criminal histories, narrowed the search for Shreves’ suspected killer to the woman’s two brothers and her uncle.

By February 2019, detectives had pinpointed a 29-year-old Yuba City man, according to a police search warrant affidavit. The next month, they began watching his apartment, located a half-mile from Shreves’ home.

On the night of April 2, a stakeout team followed the man on his way to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He chewed sunflower seeds as he walked, and the team collected 10 discarded shells wet with his saliva. Three days later, Yuba City police said, lab tests showed his DNA matched the blood left at Shreves’ home.

The suspected killer, authorities now said, was Armando Arias Cuadras, a man with a criminal record that included a conviction for assaulting his wife in a hospital waiting room in 2014, grabbing her by the neck with both hands while drunk.

On April 11, more than six years after Shreves was slain, Yuba City police arrested Cuadras. The Sutter County district attorney’s office charged him with the same crimes as it had Alexander, including first-degree murder.

Armando Arias Cuadras was charged with Leola Shreves’ murder on April 11, 2019, more than six years after she was slain. Yuba City Police Department

When Audra Alexander saw news of the arrest, she texted her son, who was working as a long-haul truck driver and was traveling through Texas.

She sent him a mugshot of Cuadras, asking, “Do you know him?”

“No, I don’t,” her son texted back.

“I’m just speechless,” she replied.

It’s unclear whether Cuadras could have been the man who a neighbor had seen peeping into her dining room around the time Shreves was killed. That witness, Perla Jaime, who died in a car accident in 2015, told police that the man had run off in the direction of Shreves’ home a block away. A forensic technician had swabbed the window the man had touched, collecting a DNA sample.

The Chronicle recently asked whether the sample matched Cuadras. A Yuba City police spokesman, Lt. James Runyen, said he didn’t know of any evidence pulled from Jaime’s window. After a reporter sent him copies of city police records documenting the DNA swab, Runyen said the sample was “still in evidence” and had not been tested. He said the department would send it out for analysis.

Cuadras, who has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial in Sutter County Jail, spoke briefly with The Chronicle earlier this year. Behind a partition, speaking softly through a telephone receiver, he declined to talk at length.

Asked if he knew Michael Alexander, or recognized his photo, he said twice: “No.”

In May 2019, a month after Cuadras’ arrest, Alexander agreed to an interview at his attorney’s home. Alexander, who is now 27 and studying to be an emergency medical technician, fidgeted with his cell phone and glanced over at his mother as he pondered a question: Why did he confess to killing his 94-year-old next-door neighbor if he didn’t do it?

“I felt like, why am I saying this?” Alexander said. “I know I didn’t do it, and they continue to lead me down the path, and as soon as I go down that path, you can’t get out of it. ... At the very end, I felt like I just need to tell them and get them off my back.”

Shortly after he was jailed, Alexander told Barry Roper, a private investigator for his defense team, that he made up the story about having multiple personalities.

“He thought it would help him,” Roper wrote in a report to Alexander’s attorney. “Michael said that the officers led Michael to believe that he actually committed the crime(s).”

Alexander said he struggled to move on. A couple of weeks after his release, his mom threw him a combined Christmas, birthday and Easter celebration, showering him with all the gifts she bought for him during his time in jail. They lit fireworks she had saved from each Fourth of July he had missed. But there have been few moments of joy since.

“I lost the few friends I had because they just assumed the worst and didn’t want to talk,” he said.

His family moved a few miles east from Yuba City to Marysville, near Beale Air Force Base, to avoid awkward stares from community members and uncomfortable encounters with Shreves’ relatives.

Alexander bounced from job to job. When applications asked if he’d ever been charged with a felony, he marked, “Yes,” and then often didn’t hear back. The military wouldn’t take him. He sued Sutter County, Yuba City police and the two detectives who’d elicited his confession for $10.5 million. The county settled the case for $50,000, admitting no fault.

Authorities in Sutter County could help Alexander rebuild his life. Instead, they have still not cleared his name. They also haven’t returned the property they seized from him, his mother said.

Despite Cuadras’ arrest, Yuba City police have not ruled out Alexander’s involvement in Shreves’ murder, said Assistant Police Chief Jeremy Garcia. Investigators know that Cuadras and Alexander attended the same adult education school at the same time, he said, but haven’t determined whether they knew each other. Alexander said he attended the school, which is in Yuba City, for about two months.

In an interview with The Chronicle this summer, Garcia defended the interrogation that resulted in Alexander’s confession.

“We have to see if Mr. Cuadras acted alone or with someone else,” Garcia said. “We just don’t know right now. We have a lot of work left to do.”

District Attorney Hopper declined to comment. She referred questions to McClung, the lead prosecutor, who said of Alexander after a recent court hearing, “I can’t say he didn’t do it.” Adams, the retired district attorney, said in a phone call that he had no recollection of the case. “I don’t recall the name of the victim or the defendant,” he said.

Detective Parker, who worked briefly for the district attorney’s office after leaving the Yuba City police force, could not be reached for comment. His attorney, Chris Carlos, told The Chronicle, “In my experience, Jason Parker is one of the most honest police officers I’ve ever dealt with. I can’t imagine anything wrong with his interview.”

Morawcznski, who became undersheriff of the Yuba County Sheriff’s Office in April, said in a phone interview that because the Shreves case remained open, he could not comment.

“It’s a very important case that’s very near and dear to my heart and I don’t want to jeopardize that,” he said.

The reluctance of law enforcement to clear Alexander has left Shreves’ family with lasting mistrust of the young man. The victim’s son-in-law, Ronald Smith, who found her body, said his relatives were ecstatic upon Cuadras’ arrest, but “have suspicions” that Alexander played a role.

“I just think there’s more to the story,” Smith said. “I’m sure those detectives are trying to tie it together.”

Leo, the expert for Alexander’s defense, suggested cognitive dissonance may be at play: a phenomenon that makes it difficult for people to give up on something they believe even when confronted with contrary evidence. The brain works to suppress such information.

Police and prosecutors don’t want to believe they sent an innocent person to jail, Leo said, so their minds create wild theories or reject overwhelming evidence.

Told of Yuba City police’s refusal to clear him, Alexander shrugged.

“I would love an apology, but that’s never gonna happen,” he said. “I just wish it would all go away.”

Still, in November, when Cuadras was brought to court to hear the evidence against him for the first time, Alexander’s mother considered attending, sitting in the gallery behind the prosecutor who won’t clear her son and the victim’s loved ones who can’t let go of their suspicions.

Ultimately, she stayed home, and missed an astonishing revelation.

On Nov. 21, about two dozen of Shreves’ family members and friends gathered, hugging and chatting, outside Department 4 of the sleek new Sutter County Superior Court in Yuba City. They were there for a preliminary hearing on the charges against Cuadras, who faces up to life in prison if convicted.

Several of Cuadras’ family members also attended. One gripped a green rosary in her left hand as they watched bailiffs escort into court the handcuffed defendant, who was wearing a gray sweater and black-and-white pants.

As prosecutor McClung walked a half-dozen witnesses through the facts of the case, the specter of Michael Alexander hung over the proceedings. In nearly all of his questions, Cuadras’ attorney, Mandeep Sidhu, suggested the basis for his defense: The cops had the right guy the first time.

Chris Kaufman, Special to The Chronicle Armando Cuadras enters the courtroom during a preliminary hearing on Nov. 21, 2019, at the Sutter County Superior Court in Yuba City. New DNA testing connected Cuadras, 29, to the killing of Leola Shreves in January 2013.

But police and prosecutors sought to show Shreves was killed by a man in a fit of rage and near-blind drunkenness. Not only was Cuadras’ DNA all over the crime scene – including under Shreves’ fingernails – he had offered his own partial confession, admitting to Yuba City investigators after his April arrest that he had “stomped somebody,” Sgt. Brent Slade testified.

“Continuous kicking and stomping, and he tried to erase the memory, and he didn’t think it was a female,” Slade said. “It was dark inside the residence, he was drunk, and he believed he was seen inside the residence, and he lost it.”

Then Slade made a stunning disclosure: Cuadras, he said, told police during his interrogation that he had been hospitalized once in 2013. Detectives went back and found the records.

At 3:28 a.m, on Jan. 19, 2013, Cuadras was found bleeding at the corner of Bridge and Linden streets in Yuba City, just 300 yards from Shreves’ home. He had collapsed there, drunk and badly injured. It was the night detectives believe Shreves was killed.

Police were called and an ambulance transported Cuadras to Rideout Memorial Hospital in Marysville. He had a 2-inch cut on one forearm, another cut on his other arm, an injured knee, swollen knuckles on his hand, and cuts and scratches all over his face, Slade and a second officer, Scott Rounds, testified.

MISSED LEADS

Police suspected at the time that Cuadras might have had a domestic dispute with his then-wife, Rounds said. They checked on her, finding her unharmed.

Two days later, Shreves’ son-in-law found her body. But, according to case records and court testimony, the detectives looking for her killer didn’t make the connection to the bloodied, injured man, didn’t communicate with the officers who’d responded to that call, didn’t put Cuadras on a suspect list, didn’t seek his DNA for comparison.

Police even reviewed calls for service in the area in the early days of the investigation, looking for “suspicious subjects, prowler calls, burglaries and solicitors,” investigation records reviewed by The Chronicle show. But, for some reason, the call about Cuadras went unexplored.

Runyen, the Yuba City police spokesman, confirmed after the hearing – which ended with a judge ordering a jury trial – that Cuadras was never investigated at the time.

“There was nothing reported suspicious about the injury at that time,” he said in an email. And Cuadras’ medical record from Rideout Memorial Hospital was not one of those turned over to investigators because of a coding error by the hospital, McClung said. A hospital spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

“Holy s–,” Audra texted a reporter after learning of the new information.

Her son, the suspect police had found right next door, was more measured.

“It is very upsetting that they didn’t take the time to look into those kinds of things before pursuing other leads,” Alexander said. “Everything would’ve been wrapped up right then and there.”

How this story was reported After learning of the arrest of a second suspect in the gruesome murder of Leola Shreves, staff writer Matthias Gafni wanted to understand why the first suspect, Michael Alexander, had been charged and put behind bars for more than 3½ years. He reported this story over the course of nine months. He and photographer Jessica Christian made a total of five trips to Yuba City. Gafni interviewed more than a dozen people, and he reviewed thousands of pages of documents he obtained, among them court records, police reports, interrogation transcripts, search warrants, autopsy reports, DNA results, private-investigator reports, school files and medical files. Before completing the story, Gafni took his findings back to both Michael Alexander and to the authorities who had accused him of the crime. We have made the transcript of the alleged confession available for readers.