Bruce Lisker Bruce Lisker
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Featured Podcast The Innocence Center “For The Innocent” The Innocence Center devoted two episodes of its podcast to my case — my own account, and the story of how it was finally taken apart. Listen now

My Story

Bruce Lisker — Wrongful Conviction Survivor

At seventeen, I was accused — and later convicted — of murdering my mother. I was innocent. Twenty-six years later, I proved it and walked free. This is my story, in my own words.

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Bruce Lisker leaving prison on August 13, 2009 — freedom after 26 years of wrongful imprisonment.
26 years wrongfully imprisoned
9,653 days until I walked free
22+ TV & film features on the case
60+ published articles
Bruce Lisker today — portrait.

About Me

On Thursday, March 10, 1983 I returned to our family home to find my 66-year-old mother beaten, stabbed, and dying. I tried desperately to save her. I called the police, the paramedics, my dad. Applied direct pressure to her stab wounds.

48 Hours Mystery: The Whole Truth — the episode examining Bruce Lisker's wrongful conviction.
Featured Full Episode 48 Hours Mystery
“The Whole Truth” CBS’s full investigation into my wrongful conviction. S23 E38 · Aired Oct 16, 2010 Full episode — best viewed on desktop.
Watch now →

Nothing could save her. She died in emergency surgery that afternoon.

While so much of the evidence pointed elsewhere and her killer walked free, I was arrested, charged, and ultimately convicted of her murder.

A life sentence was handed down. I spent the next 26 years in California state prison. An innocent man.

Then in August 2009 — after 9,653 days and heroic levels of re-investigation (notably by private investigator Paul Ingels, and LAPD Internal Affairs Sergeant Jim Gavin), the landscape-changing investigative journalism of Los Angeles Times reporters Scott Glover & Matt Lait, and relentless legal advocacy by the gifted legal dream team of Nasatir, Hirsch, Podberesky & Genego — I walked free. I had met the perilously high bar of proving my innocence in federal court. I had been given my life back.

That was more than 17 years ago. I have not stood still since.

Our family tragedy — my mother's botched murder investigation and my wrongful conviction — has been covered widely in more than 22 television and film features, over 60 published articles, and 25 radio interviews and podcasts to date.

It is all here. I invite you to explore it.

That was the case. And this is my life.
Thank you for your interest.

Featured Podcast
The Innocence Center “For The Innocent”

The Innocence Center devoted two episodes of its podcast to my case — my own account, and the story of how it was finally taken apart.

Podcast · The Innocence Center · Host: Michael Semanchik · Oct 2025
My episode Gavin, Lait & Glover

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✦  The investigator who would not quit  ✦

Still on the job · available for hire
Paul Ingels, private investigator Paul Ingels Founder & Chief Investigator Paul Ingels & Associates, Inc.

I would not be a free man today were it not for Paul Ingels — and I do not say that as a figure of speech. It is the plain truth of my life. When the courts, the police, and the whole machinery of the system had written me off and left the evidence of my innocence ignored or buried, Paul refused to look away. He brought decades of hard-won skill, a detective's sharp eye, and a bottomless, bulldog tenacity to a case everyone else had given up on — and he did not rest until the truth could no longer be denied. His integrity is absolute. His persistence is the stuff of legend. Quite simply, he helped give me my life back. Criminal defense, habeas corpus, the cases others call impossible — if you need an investigator who will not stop until justice is done, there is no finer man for the job. My highest recommendation, without reservation, without limit, and with my everlasting gratitude.

(909) 652-0945 pipaulingels@gmail.com
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California Association of Licensed Investigators (CALI) — member in good standing Licensed California PI since 1986 · former police detective · CALI member in good standing
CA PI #11881 · #24315 · AZ PI #1708931

✦  The officer who told the truth  ✦

Retired · with honor
Jim Gavin, retired LAPD lieutenant Jim Gavin Retired LAPD Lieutenant · Internal Affairs Medal of Valor · came up honest through the Rampart years

In 2003, a letter I wrote from prison landed on Sergeant Jim Gavin’s desk in LAPD Internal Affairs — and instead of rubber-stamping it, he actually looked. He read my entire trial transcript, listened to the lead detective’s old tapes, and had the bloody shoe print re-examined, something no one had bothered to do in the twenty-plus years since my arrest. It wasn’t mine. He found the other suspect the case had brushed aside, the testimony that had been overstated, the “evidence” that was simply untrue.

Then he was ordered to bury it — told, in plain words, that I would stay in prison, understood? He would not let the truth be swept under the rug. It cost him everything a department can take: accused of misconduct for telling it, pulled out of Internal Affairs, and — along with his wife, an officer herself — put through years of retaliation. He sued, and he never once backed away from what he had found.

A cop who came up honest through the Rampart years and wore the Medal of Valor, Jim did the hardest thing a good officer can do: he told the truth about his own department, for a stranger he had never met. He is retired now, and I wish him the most beautiful retirement anyone has ever had. A hero — plainly, and forever. My gratitude is permanent.

Jim is happily retired and no longer takes investigative work — this panel is here purely to honor him.
Causes Jim stands behind Tunnel to Towers Foundation One of the nation’s most respected charities — it delivers mortgage-free homes to the families of first responders and service members lost in the line of duty, and builds specially adapted smart homes for the catastrophically injured. Jim gives faithfully, month after month. Tim Tebow Foundation Fights on the front lines against human trafficking and the exploitation of children — reaching the vulnerable with rescue and hope. A cause close to Jim’s heart, and one he backs every single month.

✦  The legal dream team  ✦

The firm has since closed
Nasatir, Hirsch,
Podberesky & Genego My federal habeas, appellate, and civil rights lawsuit counsel Santa Monica, California

Proving innocence after a conviction is one of the hardest things in American law — nearly every procedural rule is built to keep a verdict standing. The attorneys of this firm fought through all of it, for years. Vicki Podberesky and William Genego led the way, matching the evidence to the law with a brilliance and a tenacity I will never forget, until a federal court finally heard the truth and gave me my life back. I owe them my freedom.

The firm has since closed its doors — its partners went on to found Andrues / Podberesky. My gratitude to them is permanent.

✦  The reporters who would not let it go  ✦

Award-winning investigative journalists
Scott Glover
& Matt Lait Investigative reporters · Los Angeles Times Heywood Broun Award winners for the reporting on my case

For eight relentless months, Scott Glover and Matt Lait did the one thing no one with the power to do it had been willing to do in more than twenty years: they actually investigated. Two of the finest investigative reporters the Los Angeles Times ever put on a story, they took the case that had been used to bury me and took it apart piece by piece — the crime scene, the bloody shoe print, the second suspect who had been brushed aside, the detective’s account — and, one by one, they showed the world how little of it was true. When they were finished, the case against me lay in ruins on the front page of one of the great newspapers in America.

Their work — which earned the Times the prestigious Heywood Broun Award — did not merely tell my story; it changed the very ground I was fighting on. Prosecutors, jurors, and readers who had never once doubted my guilt were suddenly forced to look again. The retired prosecutor acknowledged his own reasonable doubt. Jurors said that had they known what Glover and Lait uncovered, they would never have voted to convict. I believe with my whole heart that without their reporting the truth would still be buried in a file somewhere and I would still be in a cell — that it helped set in motion everything that finally led a federal court to overturn my wrongful conviction and give me back my life.

So let me say this plainly, and with my whole chest: we need this kind of journalism now more than ever. Hard, patient, fearless, adversarial investigative reporting is not a luxury — it is a safeguard of a free people, and it is often the last thing standing between an innocent person and oblivion. In an age when trust in our great news institutions has been driven to dangerously low ebb, and when the powerful would like nothing better than for no one to be looking, the work these two men did is precisely the work that keeps the innocent from disappearing. Fund it. Subscribe to it. Defend it. For me it was quite literally the difference between a prison cell and freedom. My gratitude to Scott Glover and Matt Lait is total, and it is permanent.

Both went on to distinguished careers holding the powerful to account. This panel honors what their reporting did for me — and stands as my case for the journalism our country cannot afford to lose.
48 Hours Mystery · CBS

Best watched on a computer

This full 48 Hours Mystery episode — CBS’s investigation into my wrongful conviction — streams beautifully on a desktop or laptop. But Pluto TV blocks full-episode playback on phones and tablets. That’s a limitation on their end, not mine. Open it on a computer, or send yourself the link so it’s waiting when you get there.

Email it to myself Text it to myself Open on Pluto anyway ↗