Photographs by Phil Jung

The Schweitzer brothers see John Gonsalves everywhere now.

In the small towns on the eastern tip of Hawaii’s Big Island, everyone knows everyone, and if you’re not from here, you might never fit in. Everywhere the brothers go, they see Gonsalves’s truck. He’s a small man with a scraggly beard, and runs a business building fences on properties up and down the coast. Rumor has it the business isn’t doing so well. Rumor also has it he funded that business with the reward money he took for sending the Schweitzer brothers to jail.

Sometimes, at traffic lights or in parking lots, Gonsalves sees them too. On these occasions, he smiles a little. Sometimes he even waves. The brothers can’t believe it. He’s waving? They turn and head in the other direction, fast. If they didn’t leave, they have no idea what they might say to the man they believe ruined their lives.

Albert Ian Schweitzer is 52 now—short and wide and muscular, with Popeye forearms, a deep tan, and a close-cropped, graying buzz cut. He walks with the rugged, unfluid strides of a guy who spends most of his time at the gym, which is an accurate if incomplete way of describing how he’s spent the past 25 years of his life. Until January, he was lifting weights during every available hour in a federal prison yard in Arizona. Now he is back home, on the porch of his brother’s house, his nieces milling around him.

In idle moments, Ian, who goes by his middle name, seems to stare at his surroundings, as if trying to focus. “Three months ago I was sitting in a prison cell, you know?” he said when I visited in April. “I can’t even wrap my head around it.” He and his brother, Shawn—also muscle-bound but taller and four years younger—are dealing with the damage of the past several decades. Ian is trying to figure out how to be free after so much time. Shawn, after serving more than a year, kept on living in the area, enduring decades of stares, his employment prospects grim, the stigma surrounding him seeping out and tainting his wife and children.

Downtown Hilo

Everyone had been convinced that the brothers were the culprits in one of the most notorious criminal cases in the modern history of Hawaii: the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman named Dana Ireland on Christmas Eve, 1991. At the time, Ian was 20 and Shawn was 16. Neither had a record, and their parents were law-abiding citizens. For three years, no one came to them to talk about this case. But in 1994, the police, acting on a tip, began investigating them both, latching on to a theory that implicated them even when the physical evidence—the blood, the semen, the tire tracks—all pointed elsewhere.

Wrongful convictions can result from any number of cascading errors, blatant oversights, and outright slipups—some conscious and deliberate, some structural and circumstantial. Over 32 years, the investigation and prosecutions of the Schweitzers seem to have incorporated every possible one of them. There was intense media attention putting pressure on police to make an arrest—the “dead white girl” phenomenon. There was cultural bias against Native Hawaiians like the Schweitzers—the legacy, well known to Hawaiians, of lynchings of native men for alleged attacks on white women. There was investigative tunnel vision—going after the Schweitzer brothers even after the facts failed to support that case. There was blind faith in jailhouse informants—a slew of them, all hoping for special favors from prosecutors in return for their testimony. There was junk science—about teeth marks, and tire treads. There even may have been prosecutorial misconduct—a state lawyer misleading a judge about the outcome of one of the brothers’ polygraph tests.

[From the November 2022 issue: Jake Tapper on a Philadelphia teenager and the empty promise of the Sixth Amendment]

Now that Ian has been exonerated, he needs to reacclimate to life in the world. He had to get a driver’s license and learn how to use a smartphone. He needs to get comfortable around people again. These towns were small enough already. For decades the Schweitzers were the area’s greatest villains; now they run into people and those people are nice. At the market and at restaurants, they congratulate Ian and ask if they can give him a hug. It’s weird. He can’t help but think: Where were those people for the past 30 years? But he knows there are others out there too—people who benefited from accusing him of a crime they knew he hadn’t committed. Chief among them is John Gonsalves.

As our conversation meandered over a sunny afternoon, Ian allowed himself to wonder about Gonsalves. What must it be like for him now, to know that the lie didn’t hold? If the brothers ever did confront him, what would he say?

The place where Dana Ireland’s body was found is less than a half-hour drive from the Schweitzer family’s home, a rundown ranch house in a development called Hawaiian Beaches enshrouded by low palm trees and lush, tropical ferns. The homes are built close enough to one another that you can see and hear most anything your neighbor is up to.

The Schweitzer family always stood out here. Ian and Shawn’s parents, Jerry and Linda Schweitzer, moved to the sleepy east coast of the Big Island in the 1970s from the more populated island of Oahu, where Jerry owned an auto body shop. Linda found work at a bank and later in the local prosecutor’s office, as a victim counselor. Other families in the subdivision were on public assistance; the Schweitzers didn’t need that. Ian and Shawn were the kids whose parents sprang for equipment for the whole little league so that everyone could afford to play. Ian saved enough money from his paper route to buy his own car—a used Volkswagen Beetle—which he fixed up himself before he was old enough to drive it. The Schweitzers “just had a little more than the next person,” Ian told me. “I think we were hated on right from the gate.”

One night in June 1991, Linda and Jerry found themselves in a confrontation with their across-the-road neighbor, a known drug dealer named Timmy Gonsalves. Timmy was in his mid-20s, and had friends going in and out of his house at all hours. Some of Timmy’s younger cousins went to the same high school as Shawn. Both families were Hawaiian with mixed ancestry: The Gonsalves came from Puerto Rico, while the Schweitzer brothers have Portuguese and German ancestors (hence their last name). Linda and Jerry often heard screaming and loud music from Timmy’s house, which the police would raid now and then. Sometimes, Linda and Jerry were the ones who called the cops.

Across the street from the Schweitzers’ home (left) is the house where Timmy Gonsalves used to live (right).

On this particular night, Timmy stood in front of their house and started yelling, goading the Schweitzers to “come to the roadway and fight,” according to a police report filed that night. Once Linda told the officer that the conflict had been going on for years, Timmy was charged with harassment. An encore performance took place a few months later; Timmy and his cousin Wayne threw rocks onto the Schweitzers’ roof and beer cans at their garage. Linda tape-recorded that confrontation for the police, who heard the cousins threatening her and her family. This time, both Gonsalveses were charged with harassment.

No one characterized what was happening as anything deeper than an everyday beef between neighbors. It would come to seem significant to the Schweitzers—something that could, perhaps, explain the unexplainable—only later, after a young white woman, visiting from the mainland, was raped and left dying on Christmas Eve, and the police were desperate for leads.

Dana Ireland was just out of college when she came to Hawaii from Virginia for an extended stay in October 1991. Dana’s older sister, Sandra, had been living on the east coast of the Big Island, and their parents came to join the sisters for the holidays. That area, south of Hilo, the county seat, is not one of the most obvious tourist destinations for mainlanders, but it’s beautiful, with secluded beaches and fishing spots known only to the locals. The Irelands rented a place in a subdivision called Vacationland, a sleepy neighborhood joined by heavily forested dirt roads that are best traveled by bicycle.

Dana biked on her own a lot. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, while her parents were getting dinner ready, she biked to a friend’s house. She was seen on the way back passing the warm springs in Kapoho and open fields of lava flows. She never made it home.

Just before 5:30 p.m., someone found Ireland’s bike in the brush by the side of a road and called the police. At 5:47 p.m., someone else called the police about an injured girl in Wa‘awa‘a, a remote neighborhood several miles away. A woman making dinner in her cottage had heard an engine gunning, and then muted screams for help. She walked out to a beach-access road and saw Ireland on the ground, bleeding, her denim shorts wrapped around her ankles, her shirt pulled up to her shoulders. Wa‘awa‘a had no electricity or phone service. Flagging down a passing car on the road to ask for help took the woman almost an hour. An ambulance didn’t make it down the rutted dirt road until almost 7. Dana Ireland died at Hilo Hospital overnight.

The entire state of Hawaii seemed to erupt in outrage. A young woman raped and killed on Christmas Eve. A killer on the loose. The police spent much of 1992 canvassing the area, interviewing longtime residents—many of whom were caught up in trouble of some sort, and looking for a way out.

One was a man named Frank Pauline Jr., who happened to be a member of the Gonsalves family. Timmy Gonsalves, the Schweitzer family’s angry neighbor, was his cousin. On March 17, an anonymous tip led the police to question Pauline about Ireland. He supplied as his alibi a Christmas Eve party at his family’s house. And then he gave them something more: He said he’d been at a local park just a week earlier and had overheard someone—he said he didn’t know who—yelling at Ian Schweitzer, accusing him of raping and murdering Ireland.

Ian and Shawn both have said they knew of Pauline but never spent time with him. They say they have no idea why he brought up Ian’s name that day. But it wouldn’t be the last time he did.

In February 1993, police picked up Pauline for questioning in a burglary case and again asked him about the Ireland murder. This time he said he knew nothing about it but would keep his ears open for information. The cop applied pressure by telling Pauline that some people said he was the killer himself. “Yeah, people like to blame me,” Pauline replied.

Then, in July, Pauline was arrested and charged with the rape of a different woman. And a month later, prosecutors mounted what at the time was called the largest cocaine-trafficking case in the Big Island’s history against three of Pauline’s close relatives: his cousin Timmy; his mother, Pat Pauline; and a half-brother, John Gonsalves, whom the indictment described as “a major distributor of cocaine.”

Practically the entire Gonsalves family was in trouble, just as the Ireland family was pushing officials to make an arrest in Dana’s murder. In August 1993, her parents wrote open letters accusing prosecutors of “timidness”: “We believe the police know the identities of the perpetrators,” they declared in one. “There must be those who can supply the evidence the police need.” The family offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to a conviction.

In December 1993, a tipster told police that Pauline was saying he and a group including two brothers who were not the Schweitzers took part in the rape and murder. Those other brothers were questioned and polygraphed and eventually excluded as suspects. The following May, John Gonsalves—out on a $10,000 bail but still facing charges for the cocaine case—called the police and claimed that Pauline had witnessed the attack.

By now, Pauline had established himself as, in the words of the prosecutor working the Ireland case, a “walking crime wave.” In 1994 he’d started a 10-year prison sentence for the other rape case when he gave his courtroom guards the slip, fleeing to Honolulu for a weekend before the cops tracked him down. Now he was behind bars again. And this time, when the police met with Pauline in prison to talk again about the Ireland case, he put it all on the Schweitzer brothers.

He said that he had been along for the ride in the back of the Schweitzer brothers’ car that Christmas Eve when Ian, high on crack, ran the girl over, loaded her into the trunk, drove around with her for 10 or 15 minutes, and then pulled over and raped her. He mentioned Ireland being beaten with a tire iron. He insisted that Ian was the ringleader, Shawn was following Ian’s directions, and he, Pauline, was just a witness.

The police interviewed a few people who thought that Shawn was harmless, just a kid, but had more to say about Ian. A woman who’d once dated Wayne Gonsalves (brother to John and half-brother to Pauline, and the one who’d thrown beer cans at the Schweitzers’ garage) told police that Ian was into coke, something Ian has always denied. Never mind that Ian and Shawn said they had never partied with any Gonsalves family member. Never mind that the Gonsalveses seemed engaged in a slow-burning conflict with Ian and Shawn’s parents. The police took the rumors and, when all their other leads fell away, ran with them.

Case files and a photograph of Ireland The area where Ireland’s body was found

Over the next two years, Pauline would speak with the police at least seven times about the murder. The details changed each time. First they were driving a friend’s blue pickup truck, then a VW Bug. (The Schweitzers have owned various VWs over the years; Ian has always maintained that his only remote connection to the Gonsalves family was that he and Wayne occasionally traded VW parts.) Pauline had trouble saying exactly where they supposedly first saw Ireland, or where she was run over. The roles each of them allegedly played in the rape and murder seemed strangely fluid. And certain obvious details seemed to escape him. In June, he said that, on orders from Ian, he’d hit Ireland with a tire iron, and yet he did not remember what she looked like, apart from the “blood coming out of her eyes, her mouth, and her nose.”

The police let Pauline talk, knowing that the story implicated him more than he seemed to understand. He was focused on what he would get in return, continually making demands to improve his lot in jail. Sure enough, even after failing a polygraph, Pauline got some benefits—additional phone calls to his girlfriend, promises of special visitation rights, a transfer to a more desirable prison.

John Gonsalves would benefit from his cooperation too: He and the other family members received deals in their pending cocaine case, and late in 1994, Gonsalves was sentenced to only probation. All he had to do, it seemed, was get his brother to insert himself in one of the most high-profile murder cases in modern Hawaii history.

The police seized the Schweitzers’ car—a VW they’d bought a couple of years earlier—and interviewed Shawn, who had by then graduated from high school and was already settling down with his childhood sweetheart. A few days later, officers spoke with Ian on Kauai, where he’d found a job as a nurse at a hospital. Both brothers were stunned and denied everything, but Ian was especially indignant. When asked why Pauline would point to him, he said that he could not think like Pauline or his family—that he could not drop his mentality down to their level. “The kid got a lot of nerve,” Ian said.

By early 1995, Pauline’s story leaked out into the news. But the more the media learned about Pauline, the less reliable he seemed. Even Pauline’s own grandmother had once told a state investigator that he was “a liar, a thief, and spoiled little brat.” “The Ireland slaying case,” a columnist for the Hawaii Tribune-Herald wrote, “now rests on the memory of a man whose attorney once described him as so drunk and loaded on cocaine that he did not remember the 1993 rape incident that took him to prison.” And when Pauline himself was interviewed by reporters, he was happy to acknowledge that he’d come forward only at the suggestion of his brother John Gonsalves.

Gonsalves did his part to reinforce Pauline’s narrative. He told police he saw the Schweitzer brothers pull up to the party his family threw on Christmas Eve, the night Ireland was killed. The brothers, he said, were driving a VW Bug Ian had just bought. But the front end of the car was damaged, and the guys didn’t seem happy about it.

The Schweitzers disputed everything. They said they hadn’t even owned that car on Christmas Eve—and they produced paperwork to show that Ian had bought it later. Besides, they said they’d never be caught dead at a Gonsalves party. “Never associated with him once. Never,” Ian told me, referring to Pauline. “He said what he said to save John Gonsalves and his mom from doing prison time.”

But to the police, a simple narrative locked into place: Bad local boys, all tied up with drugs, all the same, had gang-raped and killed the white girl.

That didn’t change even when Pauline walked his story back. He seems to have belatedly realized that volunteering himself as a participant, even a minor one, in the Ireland killing wouldn’t just get him favors in prison—it might get him a new conviction too. With each interview, he’d tried to cast Ian as the coked-up instigator and himself and Shawn as cowed underlings. But of course, saying that he’d hit Dana Ireland with a tire iron, even under orders, was hardly a good look.

On April 22, 1995, Pauline said that, actually, his brother Wayne was the one who did it. The police weren’t biting. On July 6, 1996, he completely recanted, saying he’d told the police what they wanted to hear, that his story about the Schweitzer brothers was completely made-up—that John Gonsalves had struck a deal with prosecutors to persuade Pauline to talk with them about the Ireland case in exchange for them dropping his own drug charges.

The police were facing time pressure. The statute of limitations on two of the charges—kidnapping and sexual assault—was approaching. (Prosecutors had more time to bring a murder charge but feared it would be harder to prove, because Ireland had been alive when she was left on the road.) “I have now lost faith in the Hawaii County justice system,” John Ireland fumed in another letter to a Hawaii paper, “and I am now certain that those responsible for Dana’s violent murder will never be brought to justice.”

Pauline was indicted in July 1997. Three months later, the Schweitzer brothers were arrested and indicted too. By early 2000, both Pauline and Ian would be convicted of all three charges. Shawn, who by April of that year had spent two stints in prison for a total of 16 months, was offered a chance to plead guilty to kidnapping and manslaughter in exchange for time served. His parents and Ian encouraged him to take the deal. It wasn’t the truth. But Shawn had a wife and three young children. And the prosecutors were two for two.

“I thought, going into this, that there’s no way that the justice system was going to do this to us,” Shawn told me. “This whole scenario is so ridiculous that somebody’s got to be bound to see that this is wrong, you know? And I believed that all the way up until I see my brother get convicted.”

Shawn took the deal, and Ian went to prison. In the eyes of the court and the world and everyone at home, Pauline and the Schweitzer brothers were murderers.

Once upon a time, Ken Lawson was a high-powered criminal-defense attorney in Cincinnati. Lawson spent the 1990s working police-misconduct cases, civil-rights cases—change-the-world cases—and representing star clients such as Deion Sanders. He had a mansion, a motorcycle, and a yacht. He had a wife and five kids, and a career that seemed unstoppable. At the height of his success, he ran an ad in the Yellow Pages calling himself the “junk yard dog of justice.” Then it all fell apart.

He’d started drinking, and after he tore a rotator cuff at the gym, he got addicted to painkillers—first Percodan from a doctor, and next oxycontin obtained through a client, until the habit cost him $1,000 a day. Very quickly Lawson destroyed nearly everything he’d built. He was disbarred and spent almost two years in prison on a federal drug charge. His wife and family had moved to Hawaii, and after his release he moved into a halfway house on Oahu.

Lawson was starting his life over again. He couldn’t practice law, but he was invited to speak to some classes at the University of Hawaii’s law school. And through a connection there, he became a clerk for Hawaii’s Innocence Project, a nonprofit dedicated to exonerating the wrongly convicted. That’s where he learned about Ian Schweitzer.

Lawson’s background in misconduct cases gave him a fluency in the way that investigations go awry, the tunnel vision that can take over. He saw how all three men were presumed guilty before any were tried. Homemade Wanted: Dead posters with the Schweitzer brothers’ faces peppered the streets of Hilo. A local author wrote Murder in Paradise—a true-crime book about how the police finally got the killers. The brothers had a hard time hanging on to lawyers: Every time they tried to hire one, the prosecutor’s office would file a motion to have that lawyer conflicted out, based on involvement with the witnesses they planned to call. That witness list kept growing as more and more people implicated the Schweitzers, many of them in exchange for having their own legal troubles or prison conditions eased. Lawson saw in the files how everyone in the Pauline-Gonsalves circle recognized that getting the police to focus on Ian and Shawn was a way to get them off their own back.

Lawson zeroed in on the VW. He saw an engineer’s report saying a VW Bug’s bumper was too wide to make the damage seen on Dana Ireland’s bike—nor could a VW’s low-sloping front end have directly caused Ireland’s injuries. “If you go through the police reports, day by day, step by step,” Lawson told me, “you’ll see there ain’t nobody talking about Volkswagens at all for three years,” until Pauline changed his story to bring up the model of the Schweitzers’ car. The police were first looking for a small blue pickup truck, and then a tan van. Lawson couldn’t understand why the VW wasn’t more of an issue at Ian’s trial. “Based on the tread box and the tire distance, Ian would have had to customize and stretch the Volkswagen out, commit the crime, and then bunch it back to its normal size when the police came and seized it,” he said. “It’s just physically impossible.”

The prosecutors’ case had another glaring flaw—a failure to get a DNA match. In October 1998, an independent expert tested Ireland’s vaginal swab and the hospital gurney sheet that she was transported on. The sperm found on both items did not match any of the three men charged with her rape and murder. On October 20, the prosecutor dropped charges against the Schweitzers.

But within months there were whispers that they’d soon be reindicted. Ireland’s family, members of Congress, the governor, the public—all wanted the case resolved. “You can see the change,” Lawson told me. “Rather than seek justice, we need a conviction. They knew the witnesses were lying, but they wanted the conviction anyway.” Once the DNA test came back negative, they went in another direction. “That’s when they go out and get the informant testimony.” And in May 1999, the reindictment came along with a new star witness: a fellow inmate of Ian’s named Michael Ortiz, who said Ian had confessed to the murder.

For the Schweitzers, Michael Ortiz’s arrival in the case is further proof that John Gonsalves was the puppet master behind everything. Ortiz isn’t a Gonsalves. But his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his child, was married to one: John Gonsalves himself.

Gonsalves seemed so determined to follow through even after Pauline recanted that he testified against Pauline at his trial in 1999, again telling the story that Pauline now was saying was fiction. “He told me that he and Ian and Shawn was driving,” Gonsalves said, “and they saw this girl on a bike, and they were giving her gestures, and when she refused, Ian got all mad … He went and banged the girl. He ran over her, supposedly ran over her again, and they grabbed her and took her.”

Left: John Gonsalves at Frank Pauline’s trial. Right: Pauline. (William Ing/AP)

On the stand, Gonsalves insisted that he wasn’t throwing his own brother under the bus to get a deal for himself. “In Hilo, everybody talks that I turned my brother in. I’d never do that. I would never sell my brother out. But the truth is the truth,” he said, “and I feel for the family.”

Gonsalves’s testimony, along with Ortiz’s, clinched the prosecution’s case, giving the jury more of a reason to ignore the lack of DNA evidence. At trial, the prosecutors explained away the fact that the DNA didn’t match any of the three accused men by arguing that the semen must have been from a mysterious fourth participant in the killing—they called him “Unknown Male No. 1”—and that it must have “masked” semen from the Schweitzers or Pauline.

After Pauline was convicted, it became clear what else Gonsalves had been expecting from his testimony. He wrote the Ireland family a long letter asking for the $25,000 in reward money.

“I feel the reward should be released to me,” Gonsalves wrote. “If it wasn’t for me, none of this would have been settled.” He anticipated that the Irelands might not want his testimony in the two upcoming trials against Ian and Shawn to be tainted by the fact that he’d received the reward. So he proposed an elegant work-around, suggesting they put the money “under my aunty’s name.” That way, he wrote, “there would be no proof that I got it.”

He got the money.

The first few years were the worst for Ian. His appeals lawyer wouldn’t even take his calls. In time, he studied to be a paralegal and got a relatively easy work assignment in the recreation area (though in Arizona that meant some 110-degree days). As he got older, the younger guys started to call him “Uncle.”

At home, Shawn was free, but for years he couldn’t get a job. “People I’ve known my whole life just kind of laughed and said, ‘Shawn, I cannot help you. There’s no way my boss could let me hire you.’” He got a commercial driver’s license and was hired by a construction company that fired him as soon as they learned who he was. “Everybody read the paper.”

Shawn and his wife and kids moved in with his in-laws to save money. They’ve never left. He finally found a road-maintenance job, and then a construction job where the boss gave him a chance. He’s been working there ever since. The stigma has trickled down to his children. When one of his daughters was in eighth grade, her teacher assigned her class Murder in Paradise, the true-crime book. After another girl called Shawn a rapist, a fight broke out, and his daughter was suspended for five days. “Suspended for defending her dad,” he said.

“For a long time, I was angry—an angry person,” Shawn said. “And you know, you had people like John Gonsalves, waving at you and throwing it in your face.” Shawn swears he wasn’t out looking for Gonsalves, but there he was. “Like, every morning when I would go to work, I would pass him, you know? Whatever he was doing, he would wave—for years. I was just like, this guy—something’s wrong in his brain.”

Ian says Pauline once wrote to him—a letter apologizing for making up the story about him and Shawn. They had a run-in around 2005, when for a short time they both were in the same Mississippi prison. Pauline was trying to appeal. “He said something like, ‘I’m sorry, and I’m working on getting you off,’” Ian remembered. “I wanted to beat him up.”

Pauline would never get out. On April 27, 2015—his 42nd birthday—he was hit with a rock on the back of the head during a fight in the yard of a New Mexico prison. He died from his injuries. Afterward, Pauline’s mother, Pat, came to Ian’s parents’ home. Jerry and Linda Schweitzer had been crushed, Ian told me, “financially and mentally” by their sons’ convictions. Pat started to speak to Jerry: “I just want to say sorry for ruining your family and your sons’ lives.” She asked if he and Linda could “find it in your heart to forgive us, because we’re getting really bad luck.”

“I’m sure he was stunned,” Ian said of his father. “But his exact words were ‘The day my son walks out of prison, that’s the day I can start to forgive you.’”

After Ken Lawson joined the Hawaii Innocence Project, he spent years examining how flimsy the government’s case was against Ian—the jailhouse informants, the VW, the mysterious DNA. Lawson joined the full-time faculty at the University of Hawaii law school, and often took students out to the spot where Ireland was found to test out various prosecution theories. Everything about the case seemed so obviously staged. Even Michael Ortiz, who’d said Ian had confessed to the murder, subsequently received a reduced prison sentence. But how to get the convictions overturned?

Ken Lawson at the Hawaii Innocence Project offices

Lawson approached the prosecuting attorney on the Big Island, Mitch Roth, and laid out the problems he’d uncovered, proposing a joint reinvestigation of the case. Roth agreed. In 2019, his office gave Lawson’s team access to more than 100 bankers boxes of files and all of the physical evidence.

Although the Innocence Project is famous for DNA-based exonerations, this case was unusual: Here, the jury had known that Ian’s DNA was not a match for the blood or semen from the crime scene and had convicted him anyway. But the lawyers had seen this in a few other cases, the most famous being the Central Park Five. The thing to do was to apply as much new technology to the evidence as possible. That would require a new round of DNA testing. “They only were looking at nine locations on the DNA” in the late 1990s, says Susan Friedman, a lawyer with the New York office of the Innocence Project who, along with one of the group’s founders, Barry Scheck, served as co-counsel on the case. “Today, we look at between 20 and 24.”

[Read: How the ‘Central Park Five’ changed the history of American law]

The team reanalyzed everything, including all semen found on the victim and a man’s T-shirt that had been covered in Ireland’s blood. The new testing dispensed with the “masked” DNA theory, confirming that the only DNA present was Ireland’s and that of Unknown Male No. 1. Bite-mark evidence also fell away when a new expert essentially dismissed prior analyses as junk science, concluding that the mark on Ireland’s body was made not by a human but probably by an object instead.

One more domino was left to fall. In late 2022, lawyers from the Innocence Project and the prosecutor’s office met in a video conference to discuss the case. There they learned from Keith Shigetomi, who had represented Shawn during the prosecution, that something strange had happened when Shawn had entered his guilty plea in 2000. In order for the judge to accept the plea, Shawn had had to answer questions about his participation in the assault during a polygraph test. Shigetomi now told the assembled group that, in confessing to the crime, Shawn had actually failed that polygraph. Faced with this hurdle, Shigetomi said, he asked the polygraph specialist if he would designate his report as “inconclusive,” which would be just good enough to allow for the guilty plea. (“To this day, nobody can find that report,” Shigetomi told me. He’s not sure whether a report was ever formally submitted.) And in court, the prosecutor, Lincoln Ashida, told the judge that Shawn had passed the polygraph—which in hindsight clearly seems deceptive.

When this all came out in 2022, Shigetomi told me, the prosecutors were dumbfounded. “Their whole support of the case was based upon Shawn’s statement,” he said. “Nobody knew.”

On January 24, 2023, after a more than seven-hour-long hearing, Third Circuit Court Judge Peter Kubota ruled that Ian’s lawyers’ new evidence “conclusively proves that in a new trial, a jury would likely reach a new verdict of acquittal.” Ian was a free man.

His family surrounded him with hugs. Before the media, Ian was emotional, but also indignant. “I feel like they murdered 25 years of my life,” he said. “I feel like they kidnapped me away from my family.”

Ashida, who has since moved on from the prosecutor’s office into private practice, declined to comment for this story, explaining that speaking with the press is prohibited by his professional code of conduct. A spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office said, “There is no evidence to substantiate allegations against any of the prosecutors or investigators who worked on these cases,” and assured me that the office continues “to re-investigate the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Dana Ireland.” They still hope to find Unknown Male No. 1, whose DNA has not turned up any hits in CODIS, the genetic database that law enforcement uses in many rape and murder cases. “There’s still frustration we don’t know whose DNA it is,” Mitch Roth, the prosecutor who’d agreed to reopen the case and who is now mayor of the Big Island, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Left: Posters calling for the Schweitzer brothers’ death were put up all over Hilo around the time of the trial. Right: A Hawaiian flag hanging at Shawn’s house

Who killed Dana Ireland? Ken Lawson told me that most of the women and girls who are abducted on the island are native Hawaiians. Plenty of those cases have gone unsolved, and yet none have generated the same coverage as the Ireland murder. But her case seems, in one respect, not so different from the others. Whoever attacked Ireland, Lawson pointed out, made an effort to transport her from the site of the assault toward the shore. “I think whoever was driving that far with her body was taking her to the ocean,” he told me. “It’s easy to get rid of a body in the ocean.” Maybe, he said, when they got there, they saw somebody fishing. So they dumped her “and took off.”

Susan Friedman of the Innocence Project believes that the killer might not have shown up in the database for a few reasons. “One of two things could have happened,” she told me. “Either the person died, and so never went on to potentially commit another crime, or the person never committed another crime.” Dana Ireland’s parents are dead, and no one else in the family has commented on Ian Schweitzer’s exoneration. If the killer is still out there, no one is writing letters to the editor anymore to demand the police track him down.

Overnight, Ian went from being a local kid swept up in a once-in-a-generation murder case to being a Central Park Five–level exoneration star. He has traveled to the mainland for celebrations and galas in honor of exonerees. Everyone expects that the civil suit his lawyers are prepping will make him rich. But any settlement, if it happens at all, might take years. Until then, working, dating, and the other everyday aspects of a normal life all seem far out of reach to him. “This morning I lost my contacts,” he told me, laughing about his confounding new iPhone. Everywhere he goes, there are the hugs of strangers, and John Gonsalves’s truck at the stoplight.

“Personally, I’m tired of explaining myself, because they keep twisting it around,” John Gonsalves told me. “I’ve got to be careful, too, because I don’t want nothing to come back to me.”

I called him the second I left the Schweitzers’ place, expecting to leave a voicemail. When he picked up, we both were a little surprised. During that call, Gonsalves spoke more or less unprompted for several minutes, his voice growing more stressed and defiant—and, it struck me, a little fearful. Since Ian’s exoneration, many people in the area have been looking at Gonsalves the same way they once looked at the Schweitzers: suspiciously. Gonsalves is furious about this.

“This whole thing is a sham. It’s ridiculous. Ridiculous. And then I get threats! People threatening to kill me, kill my kids? … Honest to God—I mean, No. 1, if they want to try something to me, I’m game. I don’t care. I’ve always been this way. But I didn’t attack the Schweitzers.” He said he just repeated what Pauline had told him way back then.

I said I’d like to learn more. He agreed to meet three days later, at 9 a.m. on a Thursday, at a McDonald’s. He was waiting when I got there. He is in his mid-50s now, a grandfather, tough and solid, with the weathered look of someone who has worked outdoors his entire life.

Ian and Shawn have a story they tell themselves about Gonsalves—the informant who chose them for no reason, orchestrated their downfall, made money off it, got his freedom on their backs, and escaped scot-free. But as Gonsalves talked, it became clear that he is operating inside a different narrative. It’s the story of a perpetual victim, caught up in something he never really controlled.

Michael Ortiz, the jailhouse informant who testified against Ian, for instance, is the last person Gonsalves ever would consider a friend. Gonsalves may have raised Ortiz’s child, but he despises the man. If Ortiz made up stories about Ian in prison, it had nothing to do with Gonsalves. As for Frank Pauline, Gonsalves now says that whatever his brother told the police about the murder was entirely his own doing. Gonsalves was just the one who kindly encouraged him to come clean. “He said, ‘You know, John, I’ve been getting nightmares. I can’t sleep.’ He said, ‘I just need you to help me. You know, maybe you can call the detective and just tell him that I’m willing to come forward.’ And he started telling me everything and I was just—my head was just spinning.”

Gonsalves’s probation, he said, had nothing to do with any deal he may have made with the police. “I never asked for anything,” he said. “The secret deal was between my brother Frank and the state of Hawaii.” The fact that Gonsalves walked away from the island’s biggest coke-dealing bust, he said, only meant that the case was weak. He told me he never dealt drugs. “You can’t call me a drug dealer,” he said, “if I wasn’t convicted of it.”

The reward money? That, he says, was Pauline’s idea too. “He told me, ‘John, you know what, just go get the reward. Because they’re going to have to give it to you—because if not, everybody else is going to take it.’”

And what, finally, about the Schweitzer brothers? “In my heart, I believe they did it,” Gonsalves had told me on the phone when we first spoke. He said he still believed everything his brother had said in that first call from prison in 1993. Now I wanted to know more. Did he believe there was a fourth attacker, as the DNA indicated?

“Absolutely,” Gonsalves said.

But Pauline never mentioned a fourth man when he accused the Schweitzers. How could Gonsalves have believed everything Pauline said when it seemed so clear now that his brother hadn’t told the truth?

“I have no idea,” Gonsalves said. I got the sense that he’d spent 20 years not being contradicted and had no idea how to handle it. He equivocated. “When he gets mad, he doesn’t think whether it’s true or not,” he said about Pauline. “Who did it? I’ll never know.”

I asked again: Does he still think Ian and Shawn Schweitzer raped and killed Dana Ireland? He took a moment before answering.

“It’s tough,” Gonsalves said. “I mean, I hate to say yeah. And I hate to say no. So I think I’ll just leave that neutral. Because I can say whatever I want. It’s just my opinion. You know, everybody has the right to their opinion.”

The shoreline near where Dana Ireland’s body was left

It took 10 months—until this October—for the same judge who’d exonerated Ian to overturn Shawn’s conviction, too. All that time, Ian tried to stick to a routine: workouts at the gym, helping his parents out at home. Just a few weeks before the second exoneration came through, he called me excitedly. He’d run into Gonsalves at the grocery store.

“You know those glass automatic doors?” Ian said. “I met face-to-face with him coming into the store.”

He’d seen Gonsalves around town plenty, of course, but always in his truck, or across a parking lot—not up close like this. He was surprised by how different he looked from how he’d imagined: “Small, little guy. I thought he was a big guy. He’s small. Short.”

Did Gonsalves recognize Ian? “Oh, yeah,” he said. “He just fucking froze.”

So did Ian. In his fantasies, he’d done any number of things in this moment—acted out, vented his anger. Instead, he only stared. Gonsalves put his head down, Ian said. “He’s stuttering. He was like, ‘Ah-ah-ah-ah—how you, Schweitzer?’” And then he rushed past Ian, out the door. “He fucking walked away.”

Ian could hardly believe it. Twenty-five years of being blamed for murder. Twenty-three years in a federal prison. Decades of imagining a moment like this. And all for what? “How you, Schweitzer?”

“That was it,” Ian said. “He couldn’t even look me in the face.”