Cole's lawyer wanted to present evidence at Cole's trial of a similar rape, but it was ruled inadmissible.

He argued the jury should have been allowed to hear the striking similarities between the March rape and another attack in the same parking lot in February. The woman was taken by an attacker fitting the same description and following the same methods.

The victim never identified Tim, and fingerprints recovered from the earlier victim's car didn't match. The circumstances should have raised doubt Tim was involved in almost the same crime more than a month later, Brown argued.

Cole lost his appeals. Ten years after he committed the rape, Johnson decided to confess.

"I knew that I probably couldn't be charged with the crime," he said. "And it had a lot to do with my case and my trials had a lot to do with me not coming forward before that. And that's understandable, but, pretty much I just knew that that was the time, you know, to try and free him."

He asked in a February 1995 court filing to be put in touch with Mike Brown and for a judge to consider a confession he wanted to make. Nine years after Tim went to prison, Johnson wrote the Lubbock district clerk that he had committed the rape keeping Tim behind bars.

Problem solved, right? If you think it's that easy, you haven't been reading TalkLeft for very long.

Five years passed.

Johnson wrote again to a supervising judge. He worried there was an effort to conceal a wrongful conviction. He couldn't understand why the case wasn't being pursued.

"Judge its hard to amagine attorney Mike Brown has made [no] attempt to contact me to start the process of getting information to finally prove his client was in fact innocent but wrongfully convicted," Johnson wrote. "It is more hard to amagine when you look at the documented fact that Mike Brown sought to show at the mans trial that I committed the crime."

The case was transferred in a reshuffling of the courts not long after his letter. In a one-sentence filing issued six months after he asked why nothing had been done, another judge dismissed the case.

"The cause having been transferred to this Court, it is ordered, without necessity of a hearing, that the relief requested in the petition herein is denied."

Tim never knew about the attempted confession. Neither did his family.

Tim Cole died in prison.

Prison conditions took their toll on his asthma. He never managed more than three years without a trip to infirmary units or the Galveston hospital throughout his 13-year prison stay.

Part 3 tells about his family's effort to clear his name. DNA testing finally revealed that Johnson is telling the truth.

The DA who prosecuted the case is now a judge. This is the closest he's going to come to apologizing:

"There's not a whole lot you can say to the point of someone's life being taken, knowing that probably wouldn't have happened but for the fact that he was convicted," Darnell said.