The Duke Case

Lesley Stahl Talks To Parents Of Accused, Prosecution Forensics Expert

(CBS)  They all had bright futures. Reade Seligmann was an honors student; Collin Finnerty was extraordinarily talented; and senior David Evans, a team captain, was graduating, heading for Wall Street.

But it all came crashing down with their arrests last spring. They were paraded in perp walks before cameras, their mug shots on the covers of national magazines.

"Who can tell us about the very moment when they heard that their son was indicted?" Stahl asks the group of parents.

"The day the indictment came down, we were sitting in the attorney's offices in Durham, and when I heard the news at first, I – frankly – I collapsed," Phil Seligmann remembers. "Thought I'd suffered a heart attack."

Once the indictment came down, from the very beginning, the players tried to prove their innocence, voluntarily going to the police and giving samples of their DNA.

Reade Seligmann had an alibi for that night – time stamped photos, which appeared to show he had already left the party before the rape could have occurred. Collin Finnerty also had an alibi, but the parents say no one in Nifong's office wanted to hear about it.

"I mean, to this day, no one has spoken to Collin and Reade, or asked them anything about their whereabouts," says Mary Ellen Finnerty.

"Mr. Nifong, actually never even spoke to the attorney. What he did is, he sent out a messenger, or someone who works within his office to say, basically, 'I have no interest in anything you have to show me,'" says Kathy Seligmann.

At first, when the accuser identified David Evans, she said he had a moustache, which he didn't.

"Our lawyers did try repeatedly to show Mr. Nifong that our son did not have a moustache the day before, the week before, the month before the year before. Or that he had it afterwards," says Rae Evans.

The case was fueled by racial tension from the beginning; the first time the boys appeared in court, they were jeered and taunted.

And the Seligmann's felt there was danger inside the courtroom. They say their son Reade got a death threat.

"I had people standing behind me telling me that 'He's not gonna get out of this courtroom alive. You're not gonna get out of this courtroom alive.' In no uncertain terms," Phil Seligmann remembers. "'You're a dead man walking.'" … This is in a court of law."

With no DNA inking the players to a rape, the case rests largely on the credibility of the accuser. Ever since she picked the players out of a photo line-up at the police station, she has given conflicting accounts of the nature of the attack, how long it lasted, and the number of men involved.

60 Minutes has learned that she has a "long psychological history" and that she had taken anti-psychotic medications like Depakote and Seroquel.

"When I'm trying to get over the rage I am thinking about, so deeply, this young woman who has been abused by men all her life. And nobody has abused her more than Mike Nifong," says Rae Evans.