Submerged

An explosive work of investigative journalism revealing the travesty of justice that sent an innocent man to prison and let the real murderer of a teenage girl go free.

For most families that have suffered the unsolved murder of a loved one, a successful cold case investigation can finally bring closure to their tragedy and, ideally, bring the perpetrator to justice. But in 2013, when LaPorte, Indiana, police detectives arrested Jason Tibbs for the murder of sixteen-year-old Rayna Rison twenty years before, they sent an innocent man to prison, and they also removed a cloud over the victim’s brother-in-law, Ray McCarty, who had previously been indicted for killing her. Three years before that, he pleaded guilty to molesting and impregnating her at the age of thirteen.

Today, Tibbs sits in an Indiana prison serving a forty-year sentence for killing Rayna Rison. His conviction in 2014 was partly due to failures in his defense and evidence that the judge would not permit in the trial. But the fact that charges were dropped against McCarty and then filed against Tibbs speaks to the remarkable influence of politics on the criminal justice system in northwestern Indiana. It also shows how notorious cold cases can be used to concoct murder charges against an innocent man.

Submerged is the first book to fully examine the Rayna Rison murder in meticulous detail, fully solving the crime through clues the police overlooked, Drawing on countless interviews and a deep examination of the legal record, Hillel Levin tells the tragic story of a girl whose family and justice system failed to protect her. It also reveals the police and prosecutorial misconduct used to convict Tibbs.

Investigative journalist Hillel Levin writes a scathing and utterly absorbing examination of an unholy alliance among cops, politicians, and lawyers in Indiana, resulting in the imprisonment of an innocent man, and the exoneration of the actual murderer of a 16-year-old girl. A powerfully written narrative that sparks both fascination with the mishandling of the case, and outrage that the wrong man still sits in jail.”
—Connie Fletcher, author of What Cops Know

Complex but passionate . . . Levin movingly relates the unfortunate sequence of missteps that plagued the 1993 case of the murder of small-town Indiana teenager Rayna Rison [which] he asserts was grievously beset with errors due to police misconduct, personal vendettas, and inconsistent case management.”
—Booklist

An eminently readable and compelling account of a murder investigation that spanned more than twenty years and which resulted in a conviction that is still being contested in the courts.”
—Robert M. Sanger, past President of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice

Hillel Levin’s reporting has appeared in The Nation, Playboy, New York magazine, Monthly Detroit magazine, Metropolitan Detroit magazine, and Chicago magazine. He was executive editor of Metropolitan Detroit and editor of Chicago magazine. In 1984, he wrote Grand Delusions: The Cosmic Career of John De Lorean (Viking). In 2004, he wrote When Corruption Was King (Carroll & Graf) with Robert Cooley about Cooley’s central role in the FBI investigation of mob influence on Chicago’s courts and political system. In 2007, for Playboy, he wrote “Boosting the Big Tuna,” about the burglars who broke into the home of Tony Accordo, the long-time leader of Chicago’s mob. His 2010 book, In With the Devil, which he wrote with James Keene, was about Keene’s undercover mission to crack a serial killer in a federal prison and was the basis for the Apple TV+ series Black Bird.