By 2007, Barry Beach had spent more than half his life at Montana State Prison and similar lockups. Locked up at age 20 for the murder of Kim Nees, he'd watched his thirties come and go, and was now 45 years old. He'd never had a parole hearing, and he'd never get one. With a sentence of a 100 years, it was behind this forbidding wall of barbed wire that Barry Beach was destined to die.

Keith Morrison (Dateline NBC): You're the worst of the worst.

Barry Beach: Obviously the judge felt that I should never see society again.

Keith Morrison: You're not going to get out of here, are you?

Beach: When they gave me 100 years that means they gave me 100 years to prove that I didn't commit the crime that put me behind prison bars.

And when Barry Beach sat down with us in January, 2007, he had spent decades, literally, proclaiming his innocence. Writing letters, filing appeals that time after time went nowhere. Asking for help. Would anyone, he wondered, ever listen?

Few did. Until one of those letters reached Jim McCloskey.

“We get 11- to 1,200 letters a year from people asking for our help,” said Rev. Jim McCloskey, the founder of a group called Centurion Ministries.

Back in 1980, McCloskey -- a former business executive then attending Princeton divinity school -- went to work as student chaplain at New Jersey's Trenton State Prison. There, he became involved in the case of a convict who was later revealed to be innocent. And the experience changed his life, too.

McCloskey: I started Centurion. This is my sense of spiritual calling to do this work. But we could care less if those whom we serve, the convicted innocent in prison, it doesn't matter, if they have any religious inclination at all.

And Centurion, running with a small staff of six people paid only through donations, has compiled quite a record: over 25 years, McCloskey's group has freed 40 wrongly convicted men and women from prison or death row.

Keith Morrison: So what does it feel like when one of these people gets out of prison?

Jim McCloskey: Well, let me just say this. It doesn't get old! It's new and joyful every time.

But back in 1991, when Centurion received Barry Beach's first letter asking for help, it took six long years before a review was even begun.

Keith Morrison: Do you have to be convinced beyond any doubt that somebody is actually innocent?

McCloskey: Yes, we do. We don't take a case on unless we are convinced of the person's innocence.

So when Centurion's team, which included attorney Peter Camiel and investigator Richard Hepburn, went to work reading reports and trial transcripts, they took a hard look at any clues that might have told them Barry Beach was or was not telling the truth.

Hepburn: When I read it originally, the fact that this 17-year-old youngster, not a master criminal, was able to create this havoc and not leave one single scintilla of evidence that he was even there … I was suspicious.

Keith Morrison: Did anybody see him with the victim at all that day?

Jim McCloskey: There's no evidence to say he wasn't home. Because nobody did see him.

But before Centurion would commit to the case, its investigators wondered: what about that confession taken by Louisiana detectives back in 1983? After all, Barry Beach was read his rights, again and again. Before he admitted to murder and then offered details of the crime, police said, only the killer would have known. How in the world could any serious investigation avoid those inescapable facts?

Keith Morrison: There is a signed confession! You ask anybody around the country – “of course he did it.”

McCloskey: There have been over 200 men exonerated by DNA from sexual assaults or murder. Convicted, imprisoned, who have later been freed and exonerated. Twenty-five percent of those men have falsely confessed to that crime when arrested under interrogation.

So Centurion, knowing that false confessions do indeed occur, dug a little deeper. An expert conducted a detailed analysis of Beach's 13-page confession and made a remarkable discovery.

Beach's confession conflicted with the one thing investigators say never lies: the physical evidence at the crime scene.

What did he get wrong? Well, for one thing, Beach told his interrogators that Kim had tried to get away from him by scrambling out the -driver's- side door. But the evidence showed that she'd actually come out the -passenger- side door---right where that -still- unidentified bloody palm print was found.

Peter Camiel: All of the forensic evidence shows she was pulled out the passenger side. That's very clear from the blood spatter inside and outside the truck.

There was more: Beach told police his fingerprints weren't found on the truck because he wiped them off.

Centurion wondered: how could Beach wipe off his prints, but leave more than two dozen others undisturbed?

Then there was this: Beach told police he'd “put the body” in a plastic garbage bag “feet first” and then had dragged Kim down to the river by her shoulders. But the evidence showed Kim was dragged not by her shoulders, but by her feet.

And police found not one shred of any plastic garbage bag anywhere along the rocky trail from the pick-up to the river.

Finally, Beach told police he'd made at least three separate trips to the river to dispose of the murder weapons, then the body, then the truck keys and Kim’s jacket -- as if the river were mere yards away, rather than the length of a football field.

McCloskey: Barry's story, and that's all it is -- a story, and all the elements of the story do not comport with the forensic facts and circumstances of the case, the crime scene, and the way the crime unfolded.

And then, Centurion says it found something. Evidence, it would claim, was a smoking gun that something funny was going on. Information that suggested Poplar police were feeding information, through Louisiana detectives, straight into Barry Beach's confession.

Centurion found the transcript of a phone call that it claimed suggests Louisiana detective Jay Via believed the victim had been wearing a brown plaid shirt.

And sure enough, in Beach's confession, he described her clothes in nearly the same way. A brown sports jacket. A plaid polyester blouse.

Which would have been fine if it were true. But it was not.

In reality, Kim Nees’ shirt was blue. Her sweater, off-white.

Peter Camiel: After the confession, the Louisiana detective realizes that he heard the description of the clothing wrong from the Montana sheriff. So now they've got a problem, because Barry’s got the clothes wrong.

Keith Morrison: So what do they do?

Peter Camiel: They just discount it, maybe he didn't remember exactly what she was wearing. Explain it away.

Then, with a little digging, Centurion uncovered what it believed to be some pretty disturbing information about the Louisiana detectives.

Remember those three Louisiana murders the detectives questioned Beach about?

Well, months later, the same detectives filed charges against two men who had confessed to those murders.

But later, their charges would later be dropped. Their confessions were revealed to be false.

Camiel: So you have detectives with a track record of claiming that they've got detailed confessions with people with information “that only the killer could know.” And those are false confessions. It speaks volumes about what they claim to be the validity of Barry’s confession.

The doubts were adding up for Centurion. After coming to the conclusion that Beach's confession was false and contained facts that appeared to have been planted by police, its investigators made dozens of trips to Montana, searching for witnesses and physical evidence that might show Barry Beach was not the killer.

Remember, according to the state, the only physical evidence linking Beach to the murder was a pubic hair found on Kim Nees’ sweater. A hair an analyst said had 'similar characteristics' to the hair of Barry Beach. He didn't say it was Barry’s hair, sust that it could have been. But even that could not be introduced as an exhibit at trial, because that cop had broken into the evidence room.

So imagine Centurion's surprise when the trial transcript revealed that prosecutor Marc Racicot told the jury straight out in his opening statements that the pubic hair did belong to Barry Beach.

Keith Morrison: They told the jury there was evidence that they didn't actually have.

Peter Camiel: That's right. So saying that they had a hair that a scientist has examined, that matched the defendant putting him at the crime scene, and not just a hair but a pubic hair, which is suggestive of some sexual motive in the crime … put in the minds of the jury that there was corroboration of this confession when there wasn't.

Keith Morrison: Are you saying that that prosecutor in the trial actually crossed an ethical line in terms of what he failed to tell the jury and what he alleged to the jury that wasn't true?

Peter Camiel: There was misconduct.

Although every court that has reviewed the case has disagreed and said there was no misconduct, Centurion pressed on.

They learned first that the analyst who linked the hair to Beach had been later fired for gross misconduct and incompetence.

Then, that the hair and all the other evidence from the case had disappeared from Montana’s crime lab.

Camiel: We asked the crime lab to allow us to have an expert go in, take a look at their record keeping and try to do an inventory to see if maybe they misfiled. Misplaced it. And the word was absolutely no. Nobody's coming into our crime lab.

Keith Morrison: Any explanations?

Camiel: No. They just say we're not going to let you in there.

But what about the evidence that does exist? The fingerprints and that bloody palm print?

Remember, none of those prints belonged to Barry Beach.

So Centurion wondered: couldn't those prints be compared with all the other potential suspects in the case?

McCloskey: How many police officers in this country investigating a homicide would love to have a foot print? And a bloody palm print and unidentified fingerprints? This is stuff you see on CSI. Does anybody care who that bloody palm print belongs to? Do you guys really care? If they really wanted to discover who that belonged to, they could do it, but they won't do it. And you know why? Because they're afraid of the truth. And they're afraid it would ultimately demonstrate that Barry Beach is innocent of this crime and he's sat in prison for a quarter century for something he didn't do.

But if Barry Beach did not kill Kim Nees, then who did?

Well that's what makes this case a little different. Because Centurion's team not only believes that Barry Beach is innocent, but that it knows who is guilty.

And you're about to hear from the witnesses who say they know the real story of what happened on that night so long ago.

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