Ross Goldstein recants (and the curious case of 'Snake')

It looks like we might finally get the Nassau County DA's report in the next month or so. In the run-up the Village Voice is revisiting the case.

One thing that I saw that was new is that Ross Goldstein has apparently finally talked to the commission (www.villagevoice.com/2013-05-29/news/jesse-friedman/full/):

But last month, after decades of silence, Goldstein walked into the same D.A.'s office where he had been pressured to testify against his friend 25 years before. He told the review panel of how he'd been coerced into lying, how prosecutors coached him through details of the Friedmans' computer lab, which he'd never even seen, and how he was imprisoned for something he'd never done.

Arline Epstein was a member of a group of other mothers who met regularly over lunch to discuss the most recent developments in the Friedman investigation. She recalls learning one day that the children of one of the mothers in the group had admitted to being abused in the Friedmans' computer class -- but not by the Friedmans.

"He said there was a slightly older helper who came to the classes and had upper-body tattoos and was like 21," Epstein says. "His nickname was Snake."

Seizing on this new detail, the mothers deputized Arline to try to identify Snake. She went to the public library, and began thumbing through recent high school yearbooks. To her amazement, she found something: "In the back of the yearbook, where a family says we love you, there was a dedication: 'We love you Snake, from the Lorber family!' I'm going, 'Holy Toledo, Snake!'" But when she found the yearbook page of the person nicknamed Snake, it turned out to be a girl. The mysterious figure was soon forgotten in the flurry of other developments.

Only years later did anyone realize that the childrens' description of Snake perfectly described Kurt Russell's character in the 1981 action movie Escape from New York, popular among the boys in the computer class. Pressured to tell stories they knew weren't true, the boys had drawn on one of their favorite fictions to provide the details that police and therapists were asking for.