I do not have this story. A few others I really want:

Bird Road Rapist "final appeal"

Tony Miller "final appeal"

John Purvis "final appeal" - the update has been aired on Lifetime, but not the actual story. I can't even venture a guess as to why.

(I should mention that in all three cases, the men were actually innocent and later released).

the story about a "reverse sting operation" in Virginia that had to do with bribery of public officials. I found an update via Newsbank indicating the participants were apprehended and confirming that the story actually existed.

John Purvis "final appeal" - the update has been aired on Lifetime, but not the actual story. I can't even venture a guess as to why.

Could it be that the original segment was exclusively shown on the short-lived spin-off series Final Appeal: From the Files of Unsolved Mysteries? :confused: I speculate that because I don't recall having ever seen the actual segment on the original UM. Plus, when they showed parts of the reenactment just moments before the 1993 update, it looked like they had produced the segment with film consistent with what they had been using for the past year or so. In other words, it didn't look like a segment that was made two or three years into the show's run.

Just a thought.

I'd like to see the Bird Road Rapist segment also. I think I only saw it once, in the early '90s. Bird Road was the cruising street near my high school in Miami.

A couple of years ago I was in Miami and a story was in the Herald that a Hispanic man was cleared via DNA of old charges, maybe two decades old, regarding rapes on Bird Road. But I wasn't even sure if that was the same case at the UM segment. It's a major east-west street with three lanes in either direction and I think there have been more than one so-called Bird Road Rapist.

Seems like I started a thread on the Bird Road Rapist years ago on this forum but no one replied. I never saw the segment on Lifetime.

Awsi - the man convicted as the "Bird Road Rapist" and exonerated last year was named Luis Diaz. He was cleared by DNA evidence.

Kane - Good thinking. You may be right about John Purvis and "Final Appeal". I can't help but wonder if the Tony Miller segment was a "Final Appeal" case as well.

Could it be that the original segment was exclusively shown on the short-lived spin-off series Final Appeal: From the Files of Unsolved Mysteries? :confused:


Huh, that's weird. I guess that's totally possible. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't some of the Final Appeal cases make their way to UM, like Larry Race and Johnny Lee Wilson? Both of those segments were fairly long, longer than usual that is, so it's totally possible those were on Final Appeal. If that's true, I wonder why some Final Appeal segments made it to Lifetime reruns and others didn't. More wacky Lifetime programming I guess.

justin,

just curious, do you have a list of segments that presumably nobody has?

justin,

just curious, do you have a list of segments that presumably nobody has?

No, I have not been keeping track. But, I guess this could be a start...

Dr. David Rhodes (5/10/89)

Todd Mcafee (solved when the police arrested his housekeeper; aired 9/13/89)

"a Virginia sting operation involving charges of fraud and bribery" (4/25/90)

Bird Road Rapist (12/16/92)

Also, I did some research using old newspaper articles and found that the John Purvis and Tony Miller stories were in fact "Final Appeal" cases as Kane had suggested above, and not segments from Unsolved Mysteries as I originally thought.

To answer your earlier question, "Final Appeal" didn't premiere until the fall of 1992. Johnny Lee Wilson's case was an Unsolved Mysteries story from November 1990, and Larry Race's case aired in December of 1991 so I doubt there was any crossover there.