Excerpt from When Truth Is All You Have by Jim McCloskey, Philip Lerman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

At that same moment, the noise level at my house was pretty high. I was living in a ranch-style home in the suburbs of Philadelphia, about twenty-five miles west of the city, in a town called Paoli, a nice, quiet, upscale place. I'd been at a management consulting firm called Hay Associates and making north of $50,000 a year, pretty good money for 1979, but had decided to give that up and make a big change in my life, and tonight was my going-away party. It was male only—twenty high school and college buddies—and it was getting about as raucous as you'd expect. But we'd saved a little surprise for them: One of the guys who helped me organize the party had said, "Hey, Matt"—the nickname came from my great-uncle Matthew McCloskey, who'd been JFK's ambassador to Ireland and was probably the most well-known guy in town—"Hey, Matt, I got a great idea. Why don't we bring in a stripper?"

So we worked out the details, and about nine o'clock that night, the same time that Jorge de los Santos was sitting quietly in his cell, listening to the subdued voices of the most dangerous men in the state echoing down the long hallways, I was drinking Maker's Mark with twenty good friends as Sandy the Stripper walked in the front door.

She was about thirty-five, brunette, couldn't have been more than five feet five, with a pretty, open face. She strode in the door with a boombox and a pink rug, and you should have seen the looks on the guys' faces. I took her in a back room and we negotiated the details—$150 for half an hour, one lap dance per customer.

So she came out and put on her music, and everyone was hooting and hollering, and she got naked except for her panties and sat on everyone's lap, and did a dance on the pink rug, and then went in the back room to get ready to leave.

Then one of the guests dragged me into the back room with her, and he said, "Sandy, do you know who this guy is? And what he's doing?" And she said, "No, I have no idea."

"This is his going-away party," he told her. "He's going away. To the seminary."

She stared at me, long and hard, trying to figure out if we were putting her on.

"You're going to be a minister?" she finally asked.

"Yes," I said sheepishly.

She looked over at my friend and then back at me.

"Get back in the other room," she said, pulling her shirt off. "I'll give you guys one more round."

How Jorge de los Santos would become the most important person in my life and how, I say humbly, I became the most important person in his still leave me with a sense of awe and wonder. All the odd occurrences that led us to each other, and put me on the path that I have followed to this day, leave me with no way to think about it other than that this is what God wanted me to do. You may think of it in any way you choose, and I'll be the first one to say that my faith has been shaken many, many times—shattered, even—but to this day I can only look back on the day Jorge came into my life, and I into his, as a matter of divine providence.

The party with Sandy the Stripper happened in late August 1979, and I did enter the seminary right after that. But by chance—or not—my seminary work would soon lead me to become a student chaplain behind prison bars, and sometime after that I would take a year's leave of absence from the seminary and dedicate myself to proving that Jorge de los Santos was an innocent man.

Out of my battle to liberate Jorge grew my life's work. I went on to found Centurion Ministries, dedicated to freeing the innocent. We have now freed sixty-three innocent men and women, all of whom were serving life sentences or were on death row, had collectively spent 1,330 years falsely imprisoned for the violent crimes of others, and were indigent and had no other path to freedom. They had only one other trait in common: I believed, in my heart, that they were innocent, and my colleagues at Centurion believed it as well; and we believed, truly and deeply, that we had no choice but to work to set them free. Despite our name, it mattered not a whit to us if those whom we served, or those who worked with us, had any religious affiliation or interest. All that mattered was the truth.

Excerpted from When Truth Is All You Have by Jim McCloskey and Philip Lerman. Copyright © 2020 by Jim McCloskey. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.