Saturday, April 18, 2015

Bashara pushes appeal forward, sends email insisting he is innocent

I received another email from Bob Bashara this week, the fourth since he was sentenced to life in prison in January.
He continues to maintain his innocence and notes that he has filed some motions that he hopes will bring what he insists is truth to the situation.
In a previous email I asked him about the 472 phone calls between he and Joe Gentz, the man who confessed to killing Jane Bashara.  The calls took place, according to testimony, between August 2011 through January 2012.
Bashara says that almost 70 percent of those calls were under 25 to 35 seconds, which would indicate there was no connection made.
According to Stan Brue, the federal agent who analyzed the phone records for the prosecution, the calls originated with Gentz two-thirds of the time through December 2011. In January, Bashara made 67 calls to Gentz as opposed to 32 from Gentz to Bashara.  Jane was murdered January 24, 2012.
His appeal is moving through the system and it will take a long time.
The trial transcripts are trickling in, including the 40 days of trial. The analysis of them will be part of the work of Ronald Ambrose, who is Bashara’s appellate lawyer. 
"I will never, ever stop fighting for justice and the truth, until my hands are raw, blood comes from eyes and I take my last breath, " Bashara said at his sentencing hearing in January, when he received a mandatory life sentence for first-degree murder.
I’ve also talked on the phone with Gentz, who told me of his life as something of a wanderer. He said he worked as a civilian for the military for a while and as an AB, which is an able-bodied seaman in the Merchant Marines. As you can imagine, there's more to it than that. 
The book, Murder in Grosse Pointe Park: Privilege, Adultery and the Killing of Jane Bashara (Penguin/Berkley), is scheduled for a fall release.