You’ll Never Eat Brunch In This Town Again

Photo by Davey Gravy on Unsplash

I was trying to find the website for David Thorne, the humorist, and instead I found the website of David Thorne, the (allegedly) wrongfully incarcerated prisoner who’s serving a life sentence for the murder of a 26-year-old woman named Yvonne Layne in 1999.

Of course, that’s one of the big problems with the internet. You can’t control what you might see. And you often can’t unsee whatever it is you never wanted to see in the first place.

Since I’m always up for a good crime story, I proceeded to read David Thorne’s page on a website called Actual Innocent Prisoners (not the world’s greatest name for a website, but hey, everybody’s a critic).

The facts of the case are spun to play on the reader’s sense of outrage and injustice. If you take the page at face value, the man was clearly railroaded. And maybe David Thorne actually is innocent. I have no idea. He certainly wouldn’t be the first and he won’t be the last actual(ly) innocent prisoner in America.

But the point of all this isn’t David Thorne. The point is that, as I read, I finally came to the line where Thorne’s parents paid $100,000 for “the best criminal defense attorney in the county”, Jeffrey Haupt.

I knew Jeffrey Haupt. But I didn’t remember knowing him until I went in search of David Thorne, the humorist…