Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, Sheila Berry was the director of victim assistance in Outagamie and later Winnebago counties. Berry said she originated the use of victim impact statements in Wisconsin in which survivors and loved ones describe the toll of a crime for a judge to consider in sentencing.
In 1991, Berry was in the Winnebago County District Attorney’s Office, working on a case against Mark Price, who was convicted of murder.
“I thought he really did it,” she said.
But some years later, Price told Berry his side of the story. And she started to have doubts.
“He’s one of the most painfully honest people I’ve ever encountered,” Berry recalled. “Kind of crude around the edges, but he doesn’t make stuff up. And when he tells a story, he tells it the same way every time because he tells the truth.”
By this time, Berry had lost her job after accusing her boss, Joe Paulus, of misconduct in the infamous 1991 Multiple Personality Rape Case. As previously reported in Open and Shut, Paulus is the former Winnebago County district attorney who spent six years in prison after he was convicted in 2004 for taking nearly $50,000 in bribes.
But when she blew the whistle on Paulus, Berry said, “Nobody believed me. For years, everyone thought he was wonderful.”
Berry left Wisconsin and became a true crime author. And she started a nonprofit called Truth in Justice, which highlighted wrongful convictions and the factors that contribute to them.
One day, Berry said she received a letter from Price, “going on page after page about how his rights had been violated, and I wrote back and I said, ‘I don’t want to hear about your rights being violated. I just want to know what really happened.’”
Price claimed Paulus had prosecuted him for a murder he did not do.
She thought, “‘Oh my God, what have I done?’”
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