Judge & court reporter (wife) implicated in years of transcripts vanishing possibly thousands of tainted convictions and evidence of tampering with indictments and records to obtained false conviction/s

Brief:

While helping someone dig into old records, we uncovered what looks like one of the most blatant examples of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct we’ve seen: a forged indictment, missing court transcripts, and a man who was framed after cooperating with law enforcement in a capital murder case.

Here’s what happened:

In 1978, Muhammad Ali Vahdat — a Houston ice cream truck driver — was kidnapped sexually assaulted and murdered. One man, John Henry Quinones, was convicted and sentenced to death. But another man, Richard Wayne Collins, who helped investigators by wearing a wire to secure a taped confession, ended up being charged after the fact.

Documents we uncovered show: • Two “original” indictments: one for Quinones, and one altered carbon-copy with Collins’ name typed over Quinones’, and scribbled in and initialed by the same judge, Sam Robertson. • That judge’s wife was the court reporter for the trial — and after her death in 98, several years of transcripts mysteriously vanished, including Collins’ proceedings. • Police lied about how they recovered the murder weapon, claiming they seized it during Collins’ arrest for an unrelated crime and Collins confessed to the murder. But this is fake a call-for-service log shows Collins voluntarily called it in to be picked up as found property and it was tagged and logged as such he was not even a suspect at the time and the log shows he’s clear of warrants and a complainant. • Collins was threatened into signing a stipulation of evidence, with prosecutors telling him he’d be found guilty for “failing to stop” the murder, despite his role being nonviolent and under duress and over half a dozen witnesses had ample opportunity to call police .

He served his sentence and was released — and only years later, after digging through the case file, did we realize what really happened.

And there’s more:

A local man (“P”) came forward recently, remembering another unsolved murder from the same summer involving a .30-30 rifle stolen from a funeral home, committed by a man we suspect was nick named “Little Ray,” for the murder of another man. This murder happened within 48 hours of the Vahdat case. Witnesses disappeared. Suspects were never pursued.

This may not just be a single case of misconduct — it might be part of a pattern of unsolved homicides that HPD buried during the 1970s.

We’re sharing this now because the truth only surfaced after Collins was out — and he never got a chance to appeal what was done to him, because the evidence was buried, altered, or “lost.” This isn’t just injustice — it’s obstruction, tampering, and fraud committed by the very people meant to uphold the law.

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TL;DR: A man helped police catch a murderer in 1978, then got arrested himself. After serving his sentence, over 40 years later we now discovered he was framed for the murder and not even charged by the law of parties although half a dozen individuals party to the crime who failed to come forward walked free. They used a forged indictment, transcripts are missing, police lied in the chain of custody of the murder weapon. We believe this may be part of a broader cover-up involving other unsolved killings in 1970s Houston.