Jeanette Popp cried and gasped and tried to keep her trembling legs from buckling.
She could not stomach Christopher Ochoa’s courtroom testimony confessing to the rape and shooting of her 20-year-old daughter, Nancy DePriest, she writes in her memoir.
DePriest, a mother and restaurant manager, was robbed, raped, shot in the back of the head and left for dead in an Austin Pizza Hut in 1988. She died later in a hospital.
Ochoa, an El Paso native, confessed to the killing and spent 12 years in prison — but he didn’t commit the crime.
Ochoa, now a lawyer in Wisconsin, was released in 2001 through work done by the Wisconsin Innocence Project, a college course at University of Wisconsin-Madison, which investigates possible wrongful convictions.