A Kansas county will pay $12.1 million to Floyd Bledsoe, who spent 16 years in prison for a rape and murder he didn't commit. Photo / AP
A Kansas county will pay $12.1 million to Floyd Bledsoe, who spent 16 years in prison for a rape and murder he didn't commit. Photo / AP
A US man who spent 16 years in prison for a rape and murder he didn’t commit will receive $12.13 million from the county where he was arrested and convicted of the crime.
Commissioners in Jefferson County, Kansas, approved the settlement last week with Floyd Bledsoe, who was released from prison in 2015 after DNA evidence showed he could not have been the killer of 14-year-old Camille Arfmann in Oskaloosa.
Bledsoe will receive $2.43 million initially, with the rest to be paid over the next 10 years, The Kansas City Star reported.
Bledsoe, who is now 46, was 23 when he was convicted in 2000 of killing the girl. He was arrested even though his brother, Tom, confessed to the killing in 1999, turned himself in and led authorities to the girl’s body.
According to a lawsuit Floyd Bledsoe filed in 2016, Jefferson County authorities persuaded Tom Bledsoe to recant his confession and “framed” his brother by hiding evidence of his innocence.
In 2015, DNA testing revealed Tom Bledsoe was the likely source of sperm found in the victim. Tom Bledsoe died by suicide that year after writing a note again confessing to killing Arfmann.
The charges against Floyd Bledsoe were dismissed and he was freed from prison that year.
“I tried telling the truth but no one would listen,” Tom Bledsoe wrote in one note, according to the lawsuit and previous courtroom testimony. “I was told to keep my mouth shut. It tore me up doing it.”
Two days after the girl’s disappearance, Tom Bledsoe drove to the Jefferson County Law Enforcement Center and made three calls while sitting in the parking lot confessing to the girl’s death. Two of the calls were to his Sunday school teacher and one was to his parents, according to the lawsuit.
Camille Arfmann. Photo / Supplied
Tom Bledsoe and his lawyer met with sheriff’s deputies that night, when he confessed to killing the girl and said he knew where her body was buried, the lawsuit alleges. He then led investigators to his parents’ property, where the girl was found buried, and later turned over the recently purchased handgun that was used to kill her.
One of Bledsoe’s attorneys, Russell Ainsworth of Loevy & Loevy in Chicago, said Tom Bledsoe’s attorney helped concoct the story his client eventually told investigators implicating his brother.
“Floyd has had to live with the effects of being branded a murderer, a rapist, a paedophile, being ripped from his family, being taken from his two young sons and placed into a world of violence,” Ainsworth said during a news conference in 2016 when the lawsuit was filed.
“November 12th, 1.30 in the afternoon was the last time I saw my two young children for 16 years,” Floyd Bledsoe said at the time.
“It’s days like that that are always burned into your mind. It’s stuff like that that always sticks.”
Ainsworth said Jefferson County was facing up to $64 million in liability if the case went to trial.
Jefferson County Commissioner Richard Malm said the county’s annual budget is about $32 million and the commission would have had to propose a bond if Bledsoe had not agreed to have the payment spread over 10 years.
In 2019, the state agreed to pay Bledsoe $1.6 million under a mistaken conviction law.
