Joe Lavigne, Jr.

"She says it was someone who looks like me," Mr. Lavigne first told the 911 dispatcher who answered his emergency call. "Actually," he said, "she says it was me."

And as Mr. Lavigne expected, he became a suspect. But he cooperated with the investigation, giving hair and DNA samples and allowing the police to search his home. He willingly went with police to their station to be interviewed. He volunteered for a polygraph—which police told him he failed.

But unlike his daughter’s, Mr. Lavigne’s story never changed. Throughout the investigation and the 10 years he’s been in prison, he’s maintained his innocence.

But it was those words –"she says it was me"— that police immediately focused on and never let go of, it was those words that brought them to ignore a registered sex offender in the Lavigne's neighborhood and a mysterious red truck sitting outside their home that night. It was those words that made them believe they didn't need to fingerprint the doors in the Lavigne's house or even properly seal the crime scene before churchgoers could trample through it later that morning.

It was those words, and those words alone, that the state of West Virginia would use to convict Joe Lavigne of his daughter's rape and send him to prison for decades.

But then, at trial, those words never materialized.