A decades-old New Hampshire cold case has been solved with modern DNA testing, authorities said Monday.
Judith Lord, 22, was found dead in her Concord apartment on May 20, 1975 when a staff member entered the unit to collect unpaid rent, according to a news release from the New Hampshire Department of Justice. The staff member also heard a baby crying inside the unit, according to the state attorney general’s report.
Investigators determined that there had been a violent struggle, and that Lord had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. Her 20-month-old son was found unharmed in his crib in another room of the apartment.
Investigators recovered forensic evidence, including hair and seminal fluid, from the crime scene, authorities said. Investigators focused on three suspects: Lord’s estranged husband and two neighbors. Her husband had an alibi and no evidence tied him to the crime scene, according to the attorney general’s report. One of the neighbors was excluded as a suspect for the same reason.
The investigation began to focus on Lord’s next-door neighbor, Ernest Theodore Gable, who was 24 at the time. He lived next door to Lord with his wife, and their apartments shared a wall, according to the attorney general’s report. Multiple witnesses told police that Lord was afraid of Gable. His fingerprints were found on the outside of Lord’s windows.
Judith Lord’s apartment complex.
New Hampshire Department of Justice
Physical evidence was collected from Gable, and hairs were submitted to the FBI’s Forensic Laboratory for microscopic comparison. The test “led to an incorrect conclusion that the suspect could not have contributed the hairs found at the scene,” the news release said, contradicting other evidence in the case.
The state of New Hampshire had been prepared to indict and prosecute Gable, according to the attorney general’s report, but the FBI report “created a significant evidentiary hurdle that prosecutors felt they could not overcome.” The investigation was “effectively halted,” the report said, and the case stalled for decades.
The case was reopened decades later. DNA testing found that the seminal fluids found on towels were a match for Gable, according to the attorney general’s report. The microscopic hair comparison test results remained an issue until 2015, when the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice formally acknowledged that nearly all uses of the test had led to flawed testimony or reports. New forensic testing correctly identified the hairs as belonging to Gable.
Judith Lord.
New Hampshire Department of Justice
Gable was stabbed to death in Los Angeles in February 1987, at 36 years old, according to the news release. Lord’s case will be formally closed and classified as solved. If Gable were still alive, “the Cold Case Unit would pursue alternative charges of First Degree Murder, both for knowingly causing Ms. Lord’s death during the commission of aggravated felonious sexual assault, and for purposely causing her death by strangulation,” the news release said.
“It is my hope that this long-awaited conclusion will finally bring peace and closure to Judy Lord’s family and the entire Concord community after nearly five decades of delayed justice,” said New Hampshire attorney general John Formella. “This resolution proves that no cold case is ever truly closed until the truth is found. The original Concord Police Department investigators showed extraordinary diligence, only to be thwarted by flawed forensic technology of the era. We commend the Cold Case Unit, the Concord Police Department, and all of our partners for their commitment to resolving this case and correcting a historic injustice.”
Genetic genealogy helps solve cold cases, and the Prince George’s County Police Department used federal funds dedicated to it to solve the Sherry Crandell case.
It took nearly 28 years for police in Prince George’s County, Maryland, to determine the identity of the man detectives say killed 50-year-old Sherry Crandell back in 1998.
The case had gone cold until a few years ago, when the department turned to what’s known as “genetic genealogy” in the hopes of using DNA taken from the crime scene to look for new leads.
“Its effectiveness has led to the Department of Justice, basically expanding its grant programs so that local law enforcement can take advantage of this process, because it’s an expensive process,” said Robert Dean, a special assistant state’s attorney in Prince George’s County. “The actual laboratory work, a lot of that is done by private labs, and they charge.”
Typically, a case costs between $30,000 to $60,000. Prince George’s County applied for and was awarded a $500,000 grant in 2020 to help solve cases such as the Crandell case.
“I’m proud to say that this was the first case that was submitted for testing,” said County Executive Aisha Braveboy, who was the county’s top prosecutor at the time the grant application was submitted.
The closest genetic hit that investigators got came from a fourth cousin of the suspect. The FBI has also started providing local departments with greater resources, especially on the genealogical side.
“Our investigative genetic genealogy team started working Sherry’s case four years ago,” said Jimmy Paul, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore Field Office. “They kept at it, following lead after lead, a thorough, detailed and time consuming process, which finally paid off this year.”
It’s a process that’s worthwhile, he added.
“Through investigative genetic genealogy, investigators are able to solve the worst of the worst crimes and identify the worst of the worst criminals, even when decades have passed since the crimes took place,” Paul said.
Millions of federal grant dollars are now available to departments that apply for them to solve cases with genetic genealogy. Dean said without that support, the Crandell case would not yet be solved.
“It would have taken longer. So maybe we would be talking, instead of four years after this grant was available, maybe eight years,” he said. “The technology is there, but accessing the technology does cost money.”
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.
On a chilly February afternoon in 1953, a gangly American and a fast-talking Brit walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, and announced to the assembled imbibers that they had discovered the “secret of life.”
Even by the grandiose standards of bar talk, it was a provocative statement. Except, it was also pretty close to the truth. That morning, James Watson, the American whiz kid who had not yet turned 25, and his British colleague, Francis Crick, had finally worked out the structure of DNA.
Everything that followed, unlocking the human genome, learning to edit and move genetic information to cure disease and create new forms of life, the revolution in criminal justice with DNA fingerprinting, and many other things besides, grew out of the discovery of the double-helix shape of DNA.
It took Watson decades to feel worthy of a breakthrough some consider the equal of Einstein’s famous E=MC2 formula. But he got there. “Did Francis and I deserve the double helix?” Watson asked rhetorically, 40 years later. “Yeah, we did.”
James Dewey Watson, Nobel Prize winner and “semi-professional loose cannon” whose racist views made him a scientific pariah late in life, died Thursday in hospice care after a brief illness, his son told the Associated Press. He was 97.
Born April 6, 1928, in Chicago, he was the son of a bill collector for a mail-order school who had written a small book about birds in northern Illinois. The younger Watson originally hoped to follow his father’s passion and become an ornithologist. “My greatest ambition had been to find out why birds migrate,” he once said. “It would have been a lost career. They still don’t know.”
At 12, the brainy boy who read the World Almanac for pleasure appeared on the popular radio show “Quiz Kids.” As is often the case for the gifted, his teen years were trying. “I never even tried to be an adolescent,” Watson said. “I never went to teenage parties. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t want to fit in. I basically passed from being a child to an adult.”
He was admitted to the University of Chicago at 15, under a program designed to give bright youngsters a head start in life. It was there he learned the Socratic method of inquiry by oral combat that would underlie both his remarkable achievements and the harsh judgments that would precipitate his fall from grace.
Reading Erwin Schrodinger’s book, “What Is Life?” in his sophomore year set the aspiring ornithologist on a new course. Schrodinger suggested that a substance he called an “aperiodic crystal,” which might be a molecule, was the substance that passed on hereditary information. Watson was inspired by the idea that if such a molecule existed, he might be able to find it.
“Goodbye bird migration,” he said, “and on to the gene.”
Coincidentally, Oswald Avery had only the year before shown that a relatively simple compound — deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA — must play a role in transferring genetic information. He injected DNA from one type of bacterium into another, then watched as the two became the same.
Most scientists didn’t believe the results. DNA, which is coiled up in every cell in the body, was nothing special, just sugars, phosphates and bases. They couldn’t believe this simple compound could be responsible for the myriad characteristics that make up an animal, much less a human being.
Watson, meanwhile, had graduated and moved on to Indiana University, where he joined a cluster of scientists known as the “phage group,” whose research with viruses infecting bacteria helped launch the field of molecular biology. He often said he came “along at the right time” to solve the DNA problem, but there was more to it. “The major credit I think Jim and I deserve is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it,” Crick said many years later. “It’s true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold.”
The search began inauspiciously enough, when Watson arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in late 1951, supposedly to study proteins. Crick was 12 years older, working on his PhD. When they met, the two found an instant camaraderie. “I’m sure Francis and I talked about guessing the structure of DNA within the first half-hour of our meeting,” Watson recalled.
Their working method was mostly just conversation, but conversation conducted at a breakneck pace, and at high volume. So high, they were exiled to an office in a shabby shack called the Hut, where their debates would not disturb others.
In January 1953, the brilliant American chemist Linus Pauling stole a march on them when he announced he had the answer: DNA was a triple helix, with the bases sticking out, like charms on a bracelet.
Watson and Crick were devastated, until they realized Pauling’s scheme would not work. After seeing an X-ray image of DNA taken by crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, they built a 6-foot-tall metal model of a double helix, shaped like a spiral staircase, with the rungs made of the bases adenine and thymine, guanine and cytosine. When they finished, it was immediately apparent how DNA copies itself, by unzipping down the middle, allowing each chain to find a new partner. In Watson’s words, the final product was “too pretty” not to be true.
American biology professor James Dewey Watson from Cambridge, Nobel laureate in medicine in 1962, explains the possibilities of future cancer treatments at a Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau on July 4, 1967. Watson had received the Nobel Prize together with the two British scientists Crick and Wilkins for their research on the molecular structure of nucleic acids (DNA).
(Gerhard Rauchwetter / picture alliance via Getty Images)
It was true, and in 1962, Watson, Crick and another researcher, Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Franklin, whose expert X-ray images solidified Watson’s conviction that DNA was a double helix, had died four years earlier of ovarian cancer. Had she lived, it’s unclear what would have happened, since Nobel rules allow only three people to share a single prize.
In the coming years, Watson’s attitude toward Franklin became a matter of controversy, which he did little to soothe by his unchivalrous treatment of her in his 1968 book, “The Double Helix.” “By choice, she did not emphasize her feminine qualities,” he wrote, adding that she was secretive and quarrelsome.
To his admirers, this was just “Honest Jim,” as some referred to him, being himself, a refreshing antidote to the increasingly politically correct world of science and society. But as the years passed, more controversies erupted around his “truth-telling” — he said he would not hire an overweight person because they were not ambitious, and that exposure to the sun in equatorial regions increases sexual urges — culminating with remarks in 2007 that he could not escape. He said he was “inherently gloomy” about Africa’s prospects because policies in the West were based on assumptions that the intelligence of Black people is the same as Europeans, when “all the testing says, not really.”
He apologized “unreservedly,” but was still forced to retire as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Long Island, N.Y., institution he had rescued from the brink of insolvency decades earlier. Afterward, he complained about being reduced to a “non-person,” but rekindled public outrage seven years later by insisting in a documentary that his views had not changed. This time, citing his “unsubstantiated and reckless personal opinions,” the laboratory rescinded the honorary titles it had bestowed, chancellor emeritus and honorary trustee.
Mark Mannucci, director of the documentary “American Masters: Decoding Watson,” compared him to King Lear, a man “at the height of his powers and, through his own character flaws, was brought down.” Those sympathetic to Watson said the problem was he didn’t know any of his Black colleagues. If he had, they argued, he would have immediately renounced his prejudices.
Following his DNA triumph, Watson spent two years at Caltech before joining the faculty at Harvard University. During this period, he worked to understand the role ribonucleic acid (RNA) plays in the synthesis of proteins that make bodily structures. If the double-stranded DNA contains the body’s master plan, the single-stranded RNA is the messenger, telling the cell’s protein factories how to build the three-dimensional shapes that make the whole. Watson’s 1965 textbook, “Molecular Biology of the Gene,” became a foundation stone of modern biology.
As great as was his obsession with DNA, Watson’s pursuit of, and failure to obtain, female companionship was a matter of only marginally less critical mass. At Harvard, he recruited Radcliffe coeds to work in his lab, reasoning that “if you have pretty girls in the lab, you don’t have to go out.” He started attending Radcliffe parties known as jolly-ups. “Here comes this 35-year-old and he wants to come to jolly-ups,” said a biographer, Victor McElheny. “He was constantly swinging and missing.”
His batting average improved when he met Elizabeth Vickery Lewis, a 19-year-old Radcliffe sophomore working in the Harvard lab. He married her in 1968, realizing by only days his goal of marrying before 40. On his honeymoon, he sent a postcard back to Harvard: “She’s 19; she’s beautiful; and she’s all mine.” The couple had two sons, Rufus, who developed schizophrenia in his teens, and Duncan.
The same year, Watson finished writing “The Double Helix.” When he showed it to Crick and Wilkins, both objected to the way he characterized them and persuaded Harvard not to publish it. Watson soon found another publisher.
It was certainly true his book could be unkind and gossipy, but that was why the public, which likely had trouble sorting out the details of crystallography and hydrogen bonds, loved it. “The Double Helix” became an international bestseller that remained in stock for many years. Eventually, Watson and Crick made up and by the time the Englishman died in 2004, they were again the boon pals they’d been 50 years earlier.
After their discovery of DNA’s structure, the two men took divergent paths. Crick hoped to find the biological roots of consciousness, while Watson devoted himself to discovering a cure for cancer.
After serving on a voluntary basis, Watson became director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island in 1976. It had once been a whaling village, and the humble buildings retained a rustic charm, though when Watson arrived the rustic quality was on a steep descent toward ruination. Its endowment was virtually nonexistent and money was so tight a former director mowed the lawn himself.
As skilled at raising money as he was at solving difficult scientific problems, Watson turned the institution into a major research center that helped reveal the role of genetics in cancer. By 2019, the endowment had grown to $670 million, and the research staff had tripled. From an annual budget of $1 million, it had grown to $190 million.
“You have to like people who have money,” Watson said in explanation of his success at resurrecting Cold Spring Harbor. “I really like rich people.” His growing eccentricity, which included untied shoelaces and hair that spiked out in all directions, completed the stock image of a distracted scientist. Acquaintances swore they saw him untie his shoelaces before meeting with a potential donor.
In 1988, he became the first director of the $3-billion Human Genome Project, whose goal was to identify and map every human gene. He resigned four years later, after a public falling-out with the director of the National Institutes of Health. “I completely failed the test,” he said of his experience as a bureaucrat.
Among his passions were tennis and charity work. In 2014, the year of the documentary that sealed his fate as an exile, Watson put his Nobel gold medal up for auction. He gave away virtually all the $4.1 million it fetched. The buyer, Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, returned it a year later, saying he felt bad the scientist had to sell possessions to support worthy causes.
A complex, beguiling, maddening man who defied easy, or any, categorization, Watson followed his own star to the end of his life, insisting in 2016, when he was nearly 90, that he didn’t want to die until a cure for cancer was found. At the time, he was still playing tennis three times a week, with partners decades younger.
Besides the Nobel Prize, Watson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Eli Lilly Award in Biochemistry and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and was made an honorary Knight of the British Empire. Among his literary works were both scientific and popular books, from “Recombinant DNA” to “Genes, Girls, and Gamow,” a typically cheeky book recounting his twin obsessions, scientific glory and the opposite sex.
James D. Watson, whose co-discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped light the long fuse on a revolution in medicine, crimefighting, genealogy and ethics, has died, according to his former research lab. He was 97.
The breakthrough — made when the brash, Chicago-born Watson was just 24 — turned him into a hallowed figure in the world of science for decades. But later in life, he faced condemnation and professional censure for offensive remarks.
Watson shared a 1962 Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for discovering that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is a double helix, consisting of two strands that coil around each other to create what resembles a long, gently twisting ladder. In 2014, he became the first living prizewinner to auction off their medal, though the purchaser returned the award to him several months later.
The breakthrough discovery suggested how hereditary information is stored and how cells duplicate their DNA when they divide. The duplication begins with the two strands of DNA pulling apart like a zipper. Even among non-scientists, the double helix would become an instantly recognized symbol of science, showing up in such places as the work of Salvador Dali and a British postage stamp.
President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vladimir Fortov, right, returns a Nobel prize medal which was sold at auction to a Russian businessman, to U.S. Nobel laureate, biologist James Watson in the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, June 17, 2015.
Ivan Sekretarev / AP
The findings, based on data from Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin and other colleagues at King’s College London, were a “pivotal moment in the life sciences,” said the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island.
Watson spent much of his career at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, becoming its director in 1968 and focusing the facility’s research on DNA viruses that cause cancer. Watson, his wife and their two children lived on the laboratory’s grounds for decades.
“Watson’s extraordinary contributions to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory during his long tenure transformed a small, but important laboratory on the North Shore of Long Island into one of the world’s leading research institutes,” the institution said.
Watson continued to make scientific discoveries. While at Cambridge in England, he carried out pioneering research on the structure of small viruses, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said. He also helped demonstrate the existence of mRNA in his lab at Harvard University in partnership with researchers at Cambridge, and later discovered important bacterial proteins that control gene expression, the laboratory said. He also wrote influential textbooks and a best-selling memoir, mentored young scientists and guided the early years of the Human Genome Project.
Watson gained unwelcome attention in 2007, when London’s Sunday Times Magazine quoted him as saying he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — where all the testing says not really.” He said that while he hopes everyone is equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.”
Watson apologized for the remarks after international uproar and was suspended from his job as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and retired a week later.
U.S. Nobel laureate biologist James Watson speaks during his visit to the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, June 17, 2015.
Ivan Sekretarev / AP
In a television documentary that aired in early 2019, Watson was asked if his views had changed. “No, not at all,” he said. In response, the Cold Spring Harbor lab revoked several honorary titles it had given Watson, saying his statements were “reprehensible” and “unsupported by science.”
Watson’s combination of scientific achievement and controversial remarks created a complicated legacy.
He has shown “a regrettable tendency toward inflammatory and offensive remarks, especially late in his career,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said in 2019. “His outbursts, particularly when they reflected on race, were both profoundly misguided and deeply hurtful. I only wish that Jim’s views on society and humanity could have matched his brilliant scientific insights.”
Watson’s DNA discovery helped open the door to more recent developments such as tinkering with the genetic makeup of living things, treating disease by inserting genes into patients, identifying human remains and criminal suspects from DNA samples and tracing family trees. But it has also raised a host of ethical questions, such as whether we should be altering the body’s blueprint for cosmetic reasons or in a way that is transmitted to a person’s offspring.
“Francis Crick and I made the discovery of the century, that was pretty clear,” Watson once said. He later wrote: “There was no way we could have foreseen the explosive impact of the double helix on science and society.”
The Denver District Attorney’s Office failed to share police records with defense attorneys in as many as 756 criminal cases since 2022, potentially violating court discovery rules, a probe by the office found.
The prosecutors’ discovery software for years diverted Denver Police Department files that included a forward slash in the file name into an “error log that prosecutors were not aware of and could not access,” according to a statement from the office this week and notifications sent to defense attorneys in September.
The misrouted files were not shared with defendants — a potential violation of discovery rules, which require prosecutors to disclose evidence to defendants during a criminal case. The district attorney’s office uncovered what it called a “technical issue” with the software as it reviewed its own practices amid mounting serious sanctions for discovery violations across Colorado.
It was not immediately clear whether all of the files that were diverted into the error log were required to be disclosed to defendants, DA spokesman Matt Jablow said in a statement. But the office nevertheless notified defense attorneys and started the process of sharing all the files “out of caution and to avoid any delay,” he said.
“The DA’s office produced the files, even though, in many of those cases… the information appears to have been produced in a different format, may not have been legally required to be produced, or both,” he said in the statement.
Many of the misplaced files “contained information related to a defendant’s arrest, such as booking photos,” Jablow said. The error log issue most frequently impacted records that included dates in the file names, according to the notification sent to attorneys.
The impact of the technical glitch will vary from case to case depending on the severity of the case, the information in the undisclosed files and how far along in the legal process the case is, said Colin McCallin, a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor.
Little is likely to change for defendants who have already pleaded guilty and served their sentences in less serious cases, like misdemeanors and petty offenses, he said. But there could be a bigger impact in ongoing prosecutions or more serious cases.
“Obviously, if the evidence is exculpatory, if it suggests the person didn’t commit the crime, that is a big deal; that can lead to serious sanctions,” McCallin said. “…If it is a minor violation, like, ‘Oh, we didn’t get the person’s full criminal history or mugshot’ — that’s probably not going to be a big deal. I would imagine in most lower-level felony cases or misdemeanor cases, I don’t know if anything will happen at all. A lot of those folks will have moved on.”
If the undisclosed material includes exculpatory evidence, it could prompt judges to dismiss cases or defendants to seek post-conviction relief, he added. Judges in ongoing cases might also consider sanctions against prosecutors for the discovery violations alone, regardless of what type of evidence was not disclosed, McCallin said.
“It really does sound like this was a computer issue; it’s not like the DA’s office was sitting on evidence intentionally or purposely withholding evidence,” he said. “I don’t think anyone thinks that. But the problem is, it is still a discovery violation.”
Angela Campbell, co-chair of the Denver chapter of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, said the district attorney’s public statements about the software issue have inappropriately minimized the potential impact of the discovery violations.
“The Denver DA’s statement is concerning because it seems to fail to take accountability for the serious discovery violations committed by their office,” she said, adding that defense attorneys are just starting to investigate the missing files and it is too early to know the full impact of the misrouted records.
“Nobody is saying that every single discovery violation was tantamount to a Brady violation — a failure to produce exculpatory evidence — but minimizing the discovery violations that occurred, first of all by saying, ‘Well, it was over 756 cases’ — they’re not just cases. These are 756 human beings,” she said. “People, presumably, who went to prison and endured serious consequences for what may or may not have been material discovery violations that would have impacted the cases. The truth is, right now, that I don’t think we know. And I don’t think they know.”
In a statement, Denver District Attorney John Walsh said prosecutors took “rapid steps” to fix the discovery issue as soon as they recognized it.
“The Denver DA’s Office is fully committed to providing complete discovery to the defense in every case and understands its responsibility to ensure that software issues of this kind do not arise,” he said in the statement.
Campbell questioned why it took prosecutors three years to find the software issue, and compared the situation to the case of now-fired Colorado Bureau of Investigation scientist Yvonne “Missy” Woods, who is accused of mishandling DNA testing in more than 1,000 criminal cases during her 29-year career.
“This is the concern that every criminal defense attorney has, which is, is this going to be another Missy Woods debacle where we don’t know the extent?” she said. “And that’s the problem. When you undermine trust in a public institution, it’s really hard to get back. And that’s why accountability is so important.”
A woman is murdered in her home and the pivotal clue at the crime is a bloody footprint her killer left behind. “48 Hours” correspondent Erin Moriarty reports.
Did a father use his 6-year-old son as an alibi for murder? A son grapples with his parents’ troubled past. “48 Hours” contributor Vladimir Duthiers reports.
Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old man accused of killing Charlie Kirk with a single shot at Utah Valley University, officials announced Tuesday.
“I do not take this decision lightly,” Utah County Atty. Jeffrey Gray said during a news conference. “It’s a decision I made independently as county attorney.”
Robinson has been charged with seven counts, Gray said, including one count of aggravated murder and two counts of obstruction of justice, for allegedly hiding the rifle used in the killing and disposing of his clothes.
Share via
Robinson is also facing two counts of witness tampering after he allegedly instructed his roommate to delete incriminating texts, and asking them not to talk to investigators if they were questioned by authorities.
Kirk, 31, was an influential figure in conservative and right-wing circles, winning praise for his views on heated topics, including abortion, immigration and gender identity.
His death by a single gunshot during a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University shocked the nation and has led to vigorous debate over the motivations of his accused killer.
The FBI said it collected a screwdriver containing Robinson’s DNA on the rooftop of a building at Utah Valley University and a firearm wrapped in a towel that had been discarded in a nearby wooded area. The towel also had Robinson’s DNA on it, FBI Director Kash Patel said, adding that the firearm was still being processed for forensic evidence.
As Robinson was set to appear in court for the first time, Patel appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, where he faced harsh questioning and criticism over his handling of the agency and the immediate investigation into Kirk’s killing.
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, accused Patel of releasing incorrect information about the shooting in order to take credit for the arrest.
“Director Patel again sparked mass confusion by incorrectly claiming on social media that the shooter was in custody — which he then had to walk back with another social media post,” Durbin said in his opening remarks. “Mr. Patel was so anxious to take credit for finding Mr. Kirk’s assassin that he violated one of the basics of effective law enforcement: at critical stages of an investigation, shut up and let the professionals do their job.”
But Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) defended Patel’s handling of the Kirk probe.
“I’ve seen no reason for the armchair quarterbacks to be criticizing his performance,” Cornyn said. “I mean, it took roughly 33 hours to arrest the killer. And you know, there’s always a certain fog that goes along with emergency situations like this. So I know initially they thought they had their man, but turned out not.”
During the hearing, Patel said investigators had interviewed numerous people tied to Robinson, including relatives, friends and his partner.
Patel confirmed Robinson’s partner was transitioning from male to female.
He added that the source and reasoning behind engravings on the shell casings is still under investigation.
Officials are still examining whether “anyone was involved as an accomplice.”
Agents are also interviewing people who interacted with the suspect online, Patel said.
That includes a Discord chat that seems to have involved more than 20 people moments after the shooting.
“We’re running them all down,” Patel said.
The FBI, he said, is “going to be investigating anyone and everyone involved in that Discord chat.”
VIDEO: DNA links skull found in an Illinois home in the 1970s to a teen who died in Indiana in 1866
Updated: 10:18 PM EDT Oct 24, 2024
Coroners in Kane County, Illinois, have resolved a cold case that lingered for more than 45 years. It involves a skull discovered hidden in a home’s wall.Located in Batavia, Illinois, the house dates back to the mid-1800s. In 1978, the owner found the skull behind the drywall, leading to an investigation. However, the case went cold due to the inability to identify the remains. That’s until Kane County Coroner Rob Russell began seeking answers.”We had the means to do it. So why not do it?” Russell told WLS.ARAIM Labs in Texas, doing careful research, identified the skull as belonging to Esther Granger, who died during childbirth at the age of 17 in 1866. Her identity was confirmed through a DNA match with her great-great-grandson, Wayne Svilar, 69, who lives in Portland.”There is this sense of closure. I wish my mom was still here,” Svilar said.Authorities believe Granger died in Indiana, and they theorize that grave robbers may have taken her remains to Batavia.”Our running theory is that the skull was probably taken by someone studying medicine who needed a cadaver,” said Michael Vogan of Othram Labs.While some answers have surfaced, many questions remain.”We don’t have any names of anybody in town or relation to her. She’s kind of a mystery to us,” said Batavia Mayor Jeffrey Schielke.WLS reports that Granger’s last known address was in Indiana, and investigators acknowledge that it may never be clear how her remains ended up in Batavia, which is now her final resting place.Batavia is located around 43 miles outside of Chicago.See more in the video player above.
(Video: WLS, KANE COUNTY CORONER’S OFFICE, CNN via CNN Newsource) —
Coroners in Kane County, Illinois, have resolved a cold case that lingered for more than 45 years. It involves a skull discovered hidden in a home’s wall.
Located in Batavia, Illinois, the house dates back to the mid-1800s. In 1978, the owner found the skull behind the drywall, leading to an investigation. However, the case went cold due to the inability to identify the remains. That’s until Kane County Coroner Rob Russell began seeking answers.
“We had the means to do it. So why not do it?” Russell told WLS.
ARAIM Labs in Texas, doing careful research, identified the skull as belonging to Esther Granger, who died during childbirth at the age of 17 in 1866. Her identity was confirmed through a DNA match with her great-great-grandson, Wayne Svilar, 69, who lives in Portland.
“There is this sense of closure. I wish my mom was still here,” Svilar said.
Authorities believe Granger died in Indiana, and they theorize that grave robbers may have taken her remains to Batavia.
“Our running theory is that the skull was probably taken by someone studying medicine who needed a cadaver,” said Michael Vogan of Othram Labs.
While some answers have surfaced, many questions remain.
“We don’t have any names of anybody in town or relation to her. She’s kind of a mystery to us,” said Batavia Mayor Jeffrey Schielke.
WLS reports that Granger’s last known address was in Indiana, and investigators acknowledge that it may never be clear how her remains ended up in Batavia, which is now her final resting place.
Batavia is located around 43 miles outside of Chicago.
The Kane County Coroner’s Office said the skull has been identified as Esther Granger, a 17-year-old girl who died in Merryville, Indiana, in 1866. Authorities believe she died from complications during childbirth.
A couple remodeling their home in Batavia found what appeared to be a human lower jaw inside a wall. Police later found a partial skull inside the same wall. The bones were sent to the anthropology department at Northern Illinois University, which confirmed the bones were human, and likely dated back much further than 1978.
A hand drawn image of 17-year-old Esther Granger, who died in Indiana in 1866, and a resin version of the partial skull that was found in a home in Batavia, Illinois, in 1978. DNA testing recently confirmed the skull is Granger.
Kane County Coroner
The skull was later donated to the Batavia Historical Society, where it remained until 2021, when it was turned over to Batavia police, and then the Kane County Coroner, in hopes of identifying the remains.
With the assistance of Texas-based Othram, which specializes in forensic genetic genealogy, the coroner’s office was able to use modern DNA technology to identify the remains.
Officials tracked down Granger’s second great-grandchild, who provided a DNA sample to confirm the identity of her remains.
It’s still a mystery how Granger’s remains ended up in Batavia. Kane County Coroner L. Robert Russell theorized that the girl might have been the victim of a grave robbery after she died, or that doctors at the time of her death might have purchased her remains to learn more about human anatomy.
Some people get a lot of things from their parents. Their eye color, or the shape of their nose, or a crushing, inexplicable loyalty to a terrible sports team, which must be genetic, because why would anyone choose this agony? (Even with the heartache, Go, Habs, Go!) We also inherit some far less obvious attributes, including genetic coding that makes everything else we do possible.
Within each of our cells—indeed, the cells of most organisms that have DNA—is a structure called mitochondria, which produces a substance called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a vital component of the energy we need to stay alive. These tiny cell batteries have their own form of DNA, which is different from that found in cells’ nuclei. In nearly all animals, including humans, that mtDNA is inherited only from mothers. Why that’s the case has puzzled biologists, but new data could provide an answer, and lead to new treatments for some rare disorders.
While there are cases of humans having mtDNA from both parents, it’s extremely rare. In 2016, Ding Xue, a professor of molecular and developmental microbiology at the University of Colorado Boulder set out to find out why that is. He discovered a complicated process that causes paternal mitochondrial DNA to essentially destroy itself.
“It could be humiliating for a guy to hear, but it’s true,” Xue said in a statement. “Our stuff is so undesirable that evolution has designed multiple mechanisms to make sure it is cleared during reproduction.”
In the intervening years, Xue set out to learn what happens in the rare cases where that self-destruct sequence isn’t initiated, and paternal mitochondria is passed down to offspring. He chose to experiment on C. elegans, a tiny roundworm consisting of only around 1,000 cells, but still has some tissues in common with humans, such as a nervous system, gut, and muscles.
Describing the experiment in the journal Science Advances, Xue said the worms didn’t display any defects when it came to their sensory responses, but were affected in other ways, such as showing a reduced ability to remember or learn from negative stimuli. The altered worms were also less active in their movements.
None of this is particularly surprising. Around one in 5,000 humans are affected by a mitochondrial disease, and the symptoms can often include developmental delays, impaired cognition, muscle weakness, and poor growth. Previous experiments revealed that when mice were altered to have two different mtDNA sequences, there were a number of negative effects on their metabolism, activity level, and cognition.
What was surprising was that Xue and his colleagues were able to significantly reverse the effects, including returning ATP levels to normal. When they treated the worms with a form of vitamin K2, they found the worms’ learning and memory performance “significantly improved.”
Xue’s paper not only explained the benefits of inheriting mitochondria from a single parent—since adding a second parent’s mitochondrial DNA can lead to adverse effects—but also may have laid the groundwork for future treatments of mitochondrial disorders. He said it’s possible that delays in eliminating paternal mtDNA could be what leads to the disorders occurring in humans. “If you have a problem with ATP it can impact every stage of the human life cycle,” he said.
Roundworms are simple creatures, and it’s unlikely that simply giving humans with mitochondrial disorders vitamin K2 will fully cure their conditions. But the disorders can be hereditary, and Xue said that, while much more research needs to be done, it’s possible that giving vitamin K2 to mothers with a family history of the disease could lessen the chances of passing them on to their kids.
There’s still no hope for a cure for the annual disappointment of missing the playoffs. Thanks, dad.
Luis Armando Albino was 6 years old in 1951 when he was abducted while playing at an Oakland, California park. Now, more than seven decades later, Albino has been found thanks to help from an online ancestry test, old photos and newspaper clippings.
The Bay Area News Group reported Friday that Albino’s niece in Oakland — with assistance from police, the FBI and the Justice Department — located her uncle living on the East Coast.
Albino, a father and grandfather, is a retired firefighter and Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam, according to his niece, 63-year-old Alida Alequin. She found Albino and reunited him with his California family in June.
On Feb. 21, 1951, a woman lured the 6-year-old Albino from the West Oakland park where he had been playing with his older brother and promised the Puerto Rico-born boy in Spanish that she would buy him candy.
Instead, the woman kidnapped the child, flying him to the East Coast where he ended up with a couple who raised him as if he were their own son, the news group reported. Officials and family members didn’t say where on the East Coast he lives.
For more than 70 years Albino remained missing, but he was always in the hearts of his family and his photo hung at relatives’ houses, his niece said. His mother died in 2005 but never gave up hope that her son was alive.
Oakland police acknowledged that Alequin’s efforts “played an integral role in finding her uncle” and that “the outcome of this story is what we strive for,” the Mercury News reported.
In an interview with the news group, she said her uncle “hugged me and said, ‘Thank you for finding me’ and gave me a kiss on the cheek.”
Oakland Tribune articles from the time reported police, soldiers from a local army base, the Coast Guard and other city employees joined a massive search for the missing boy. San Francisco Bay and other waterways were also searched, according to the articles. His brother, Roger Albino, was interrogated several times by investigators but stood by his story about a woman with a bandana around her head taking his brother.
The first notion that her uncle might be still alive came in 2020 when, “just for fun,” Alequin said, she took an online DNA test. It showed a 22% match with a man who eventually turned out to be her uncle. A further search at the time yielded no answers or any response from him, she said.
In early 2024, she and her daughters began searching again. On a visit to the Oakland Public Library, she looked at microfilm of Tribune articles, including one that had a picture of Luis and Roger, which convinced her that she was on the right track. She went to the Oakland police the same day.
Investigators eventually agreed the new lead was substantial, and a new missing persons case was opened. Oakland police said last week that the missing persons case is closed, but they and the FBI consider the kidnapping a still-open investigation.
Luis was located on the East Coast and provided a DNA sample, as did his sister, Alequin’s mom.
On June 20, investigators went to her mother’s home, Alequin said, and told them both that her uncle had been found.
“In my heart I knew it was him, and when I got the confirmation, I let out a big ‘YES!'” she said, according to the Mercury News.
“We didn’t start crying until after the investigators left,” Alequin said. “I grabbed my mom’s hands and said, ‘We found him.’ I was ecstatic.”
On June 24, with the assistance of the FBI, Luis came to Oakland with members of his family and met with Alequin, her mother and other relatives. The next day Alequin drove her mother and her newfound uncle to Roger’s home in Stanislaus County, California.
“They grabbed each other and had a really tight, long hug. They sat down and just talked,” she said, discussing the day of the kidnapping, their military service and more.
Luis returned to the East Coast but came back again in July for a three-week visit. It was the last time he saw Roger, who died in August.
“I think he died happily,” she said, according to the Mercury News. “He was at peace with himself, knowing that his brother was found. I was just so happy I was able to do this for him and bring him closure and peace.”
Alequin said her uncle did not want to talk to the media. She said he had some memories of being kidnapped and being taken across the U.S., but the adults in his life never explained what happened, the Mercury News reported.
“I was always determined to find him, and who knows, with my story out there, it could help other families going through the same thing,” Alequin said. “I would say, don’t give up.”
A second defendant was sentenced in a love triangle stabbing death of a Central Florida man.
During a hearing, defendant Jaide Caporale pled to Second-Degree Murder. She was then sentenced to 35 years in prison, which is the maximum sentence in the range that was agreed upon in the plea deal.
On August 12, 2020, a dead body was found in Geneva, east of Sanford. Once the victim was identified, the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office initial investigation led detectives to Volusia County.
Caporale had dated the victim on and off for several years. She was the last one seen with him on August 9, 2020, in Sanford.
On August 10, 2020, Caporale drove the victim to the house in Deltona where she and her co-defendant, Marvin Bryant, lived. Bryant stabbed the victim multiple times in the head and torso before the two dumped the victim’s body in Geneva.
Seminole and Volusia Sheriff’s Office detectives uncovered an extensive amount of important digital and forensic evidence during a four-month joint investigation.
A search warrant was executed on the car that Bryant was renting and Caporale was driving on the day of the murder. Blood samples taken from the backseat were tested and a positive match to the victim’s DNA was made by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
It was also apparent that they had cleaned up the rental vehicle and their house in an attempt to destroy evidence.
“Love triangles never turn out good. This one turned deadly,” State Attorney R.J. Larizza said about the case after Bryant was convicted of First Degree-Murder and sentenced to life in prison in June.
The case was investigated by the Volusia Sheriff’s Office and Seminole County Sheriff’s Office. Assistant State Attorney Andrew Urbanak successfully prosecuted the case for the state. The Honorable Kathleen McNeilly presided over the case and pronounced sentence.
Human remains discovered 31 years ago south of Indianapolis have been identified as a man from South Carolina, authorities said.
Relatives of Michael Benjamin Davis said they had lost contact with him in the late 1980s, the Johnson County coroner’s office said.
In 1993, children found the remains in a field near Interstate 65 in what is now a golf course, in in Greenwood, Indiana, according to Othram, a lab that works with police to assist in human identification cases.
Michael Benjamin Davis
Othram
The remains were taken to the University of North Texas where Othram said it was determined that the individual was a male under 30 years old who stood between 4’10” and 5’4″.
“Despite extensive efforts by law enforcement investigators to identify the man, no matches were found, and the case went cold due to a lack of investigative leads,” Othram said.
Decades later, DNA testing and genealogy work helped scientists determine the identity of the remains, the coroner’s office said in a written statement Sunday.
“Although this case has long been suspected of having been a homicide, the cause and manner of death have been ruled undetermined unless more information is discovered,” the coroner’s office said.
Davis was born in Richland County, South Carolina, in 1965, and would have been in his mid-20s at the time of his death. according to Othram.
Davis’ family plans to travel to Indiana to collect the remains and speak to news media Thursday, the coroner’s office said.
The remains of a missing World War II soldier from Oregon have been identified and are set to return to the state for burial, federal authorities announced Thursday.
The remains of U.S. Army Private William Calkins, 20, were identified after being exhumed along with other unknown soldiers buried at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines, the Department of Defense said.
The department’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, tasked with recovering prisoners of war and service members missing in action, said Calkins was captured after U.S. troops in Bataan province surrendered to Japanese forces. After surviving the harrowing 65-mile Bataan Death March, he was held at Cabanatuan POW Camp #1, where records show he died on Nov. 1, 1942, at the age of 20.
In a news release, the agency included multiple Oregon newspaper clippings from the war, including one that reads: “Word has been received in Salem that Pvt. William E. Calkins, formerly employed by the Perfection Bowling alleys, is a prisoner of war.”
The remains of U.S. Army Private William Calkins, 20, were identified after being exhumed at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.
DPAA
Calkins was buried with other prisoners in what was known as Common Grave 704.
After the war, his remains were exhumed from the camp and relocated to the Philippine capital, where they were buried as “unknowns” at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, the agency said. They remained unidentified until this year.
In 2018, in an effort to identify the unknown remains associated with Common Grave 704, the agency exhumed them once again and sent them to a laboratory. There, scientists used DNA analysis and other techniques to identify Calkins’ remains.
A rosette will be placed next to his name on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery to indicate he has been accounted for, the agency said.
Calkins’ remains are set to return to Oregon for burial in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro in September.
According to the DPAA, prisoners at Cabanatuan POW Camp #1 endured horrific conditions and death rates soared due to lack of medicine and food.
“Because so many men were dying, burial parties worked every day. Each morning, the men would gather at the morgue and organize into teams to begin the march to the cemetery. The camp adopted a mass internment system, burying all that died in one day in one common grave,” the agency said. “The burial party would deliver the dead to the cemetery and then dig the mass grave for the next day.”
The remains of U.S. Army Private William Calkins, 20, were identified after being exhumed at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.
Newly discovered DNA could shed light on one of Italy’s most famous cold cases, finally revealing the “Monster of Florence” serial killer who murdered young couples in the 1970s and 80s.
More than half a century since the first shocking murders sowed terror in Tuscany, doubt over the murderer or murderers continues to cloud the case, even though three different men have been convicted and sent to prison over the years for some of the 14 or more murders.
But some are still unaccounted for and many questions remain.
Now, a new scientific finding has given hope to some of the victims’ families, even while experts advise caution.
A prominent Italian doctor practicing oncology and hematology in the United States, Lorenzo Iovino, recently studied earlier analyses of DNA samples from a .22 caliber Winchester bullet found in 2015 in a cushion belonging to Nadine Mauriot and Jean-Michel Kraveichvili, a French couple shot dead in their camping tent in 1985.
Stock pictures of Jean Michel Kravcichili and Nadine Mauriot, two french tourists found murdered in 1985 in San Casciano Val di Pesa, near Florence.
BRUNELLESCO TORRINI via AP
That same DNA was taken from similar bullets found after the September 1983 murder of two German university students, Horst Wilhelm Meyer and Jens-Uwe Rusch, who investigators believed were probably mistaken for a couple — and the murder of Italians Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci in July 1984.
The DNA could prove to be “very important,” Daniele Piccione, a lawyer who chaired a parliamentary inquiry commission into an unsolved aspect of the case that ended in 2022, told AFP.
Murder weapon never found
The “monster” or “monsters” of Florence terrorized the capital of Tuscany and its countryside between 1974 and 1985 by murdering 14 people, including six couples, most of whom were shot in their cars during or immediately following sexual intercourse.
Italy was then going through a bloody period of political violence dubbed the “Years of Lead,” in which the Red Brigades and armed groups of the extreme right, together with mafia violence, caused thousands of deaths.
The murder weapon in the cold case — a Beretta semi-automatic pistol — has never been found. Often, the assassin stabbed his victims after death, committing atrocious sexual mutilations on the corpses of the young women.
A man covers with a tent the lifeless body Nadine Mauriot, of France, killed along with her boyfriend Jean Michel Kravcicvili in San Casciano Val di Pesa, Italy, in this Sept. 9, 1985 file photo.
AP Photo/Torrini
The sprawling case was hindered by competition between two investigating authorities — the regular police and the carabinieri force — as well as between prosecutors and judges.
Investigators followed multiple leads, from a Sardinian vendetta to the Italian secret services, from a sect to a conspiracy of notables.
Finally, a poor farmer portrayed as violent and sex-obsessed by prosecutors, Pietro Pacciani — already convicted of homicide in 1951 and imprisoned in 1987 for raping his two daughters — was sentenced to life in 1994.
Pacciani, who called himself “innocent as Christ on the cross”, was acquitted on appeal two years later, but he was awaiting retrial when he died in 1998 of a heart attack at the age of 73.
Two of Pacciani’s alleged accomplices, Mario Vanni and Giancarlo Lotti, were also found guilty and sent behind bars. Both have since died.
In 2007, an FBI profile of the serial killer said the murderer acted alone, according to NBC News.
“She could have fought with the assassin”
Lawyers for the civil parties in the case are now asking for the DNA identified by Iovino to be compared.
But with whose?
Vieri Adriani, a lawyer for the families of the French victims, wants the body of Italian victim Stefania Pettini, murdered in September 1974 with her boyfriend Pasquale Gentilcore, to be exhumed.
“We know, according to the medical examiner’s report, that she could have fought with the assassin, and it’s not impossible to imagine that there remained biological traces, under her fingernails, for example,” he told La Repubblica daily this week, confirming his comments to AFP.
Under the same logic, DNA could also be taken from Gentilcore’s clothing.
According to Iovino, the new DNA does not match that of the victims nor with anyone convicted over the decades.
For Roberto Taddeo, a former lawyer and author of a compendium on “the Monster of Florence”, the new DNA could be due to contamination by investigators, technicians or forensic scientists who worked on the case.
Taddeo recommended “the greatest caution,” warning against falling into judicial “revisionism.”
Stock pictures of Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci, both shot to death in the seventh such double murder in the Florence area since 1968.
AP Photo
“Pacciani did not die innocent in the eyes of Italian law, he died before his new trial,” he told AFP.
A first murder sometimes attributed to the elusive killer or killers dates back to 1968, when a woman and her lover were murdered during their clandestine lovemaking in a car.
The deceived husband was convicted. Years later, investigators discovered that the murder weapon was the famous Beretta from the “Monster of Florence” killings.
Did the weapon change hands? Did an innocent man pay for the guilty one?
The early double homicide remains one of the many mysteries of the case.
Filmmakers and authors cover infamous case
The infamous case is the basis of a Netflix drama called “Il Mostro,” which is based on court testimony, legal documents and reporters’ investigations.
“Telling the truth, and only that, is the only way to bring justice to the victims,” director Stefano Sollima told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year.
In 2021, Deadline reported that Antonio Banderas had been cast to play Italian crime reporter Mario Spezi in a series called “The Monster of Florence,” based on the book by Spezi and American novelist Douglas Preston. In the book, the authors uncovered a series of alleged mistakes made by police during their investigation of the murders.
Spezi was arrested in 2006 by authorities in a probe that also entangled Preston, the Associated Press reported. Prosecutors accused the journalist of slander and of sidetracking their investigation into the “Monster of Florence” murders.
A rape survivor, guilt ridden after learning that an innocent man had been sent to prison in her case, brings together crime victims and exonerees to help heal those impacted by wrongful convictions.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
A former Inglewood teacher has been convicted of murdering one woman and kidnapping, then sexually assaulting, another nearly two decades ago, prosecutors said.
Charles Wright, 58, is expected to be sentenced to 50 years to life in state prison, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.
“I am pleased that this day has finally come for the victims of this horrendous crime,” Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón said in a statement. “It is particularly egregious that these crimes were committed by someone who was in a position of trust and authority. This conviction sends a clear message that we will not tolerate violence in our community.”
Wright, then a middle school teacher in the Inglewood Unified School District, was arrested in early 2022 after DNA and fingerprint evidence linked him to the killing of Pertina Epps. The 21-year-old was found strangled in a carport in Gardena on the afternoon of April 26, 2005.
Her killing remained unsolved for years, until homicide investigators with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reviewed the case in 2021 and resubmitted some of the evidence for forensic testing.
When the newer technology came back with a match to Wright, the Sheriff’s Department got a warrant to arrest the Hawthorne man.
Afterward, Wright denied any involvement, telling The Times in 2022 that his fingerprints were only on the woman’s purse because he’d been selling purses and other clothes from the trunk of his car.
“I didn’t do this,” he said, without explaining the DNA allegations. He said he had resigned from his teaching job to fight the case.
By the time his case went to trial, Wright was also facing charges in the 2006 kidnapping and sexual assault of an 18-year-old woman whom the district attorney’s office did not identify in a statement Friday.
On Wednesday, he was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping for oral copulation and forced oral copulation, prosecutors said. His sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 10.
(FOX40.COM) — Modesto resident Scott Peterson was supposed to spend the rest of his life in prison for the 2002 murder of his wife and unborn child, however, that sentence could soon change if an advocacy group has its way. • Video Above: Scott Peterson’s lawyers asking for new DNA testing
Peterson’s case caught national attention after his pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, went missing on Christmas Eve 2002. Four months later, the bodies of Laci Peterson and their infant son, Connor, washed up to a Bay Area shore. Scott Peterson was convicted in 2004 for their murders and sentenced to death – which was later changed to life in prison.
Scott Peterson was convicted in 2024 based on “overwhelming” circumstantial evidence and although he has been incarcerated for decades, innocence groups have been successful in getting hundreds of convictions overturned with the help of DNA testing.
Scott Peterson is seen on a live video feed from Mule Creek State Prison on March 12, 2024.
Here are some inmates who got out of jail after receiving support from groups like LAIP:
Los Angeles Innocence Project
After 38 years behind bars for a robbery-homicide and sexual assault in Inglewood, the Los Angeles Innocence Project reported that DNA evidence exonerated Maurice Hastings. Hastings was convicted in the 1980s and released in 2022 with the help of LAIP.
In Hasting’s case, LAIP argued that DNA from the scene was never tested – similar to how the group said crucial evidence from Peterson’s case has not been examined.
“I have been incarcerated for over fifteen years for a murder that I did not commit,” LAIP said Hastings wrote to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in 2000. “The most compelling of the evidence that has not as of yet been examined is the DNA evidence which will conclusively show that I was not the person involved with the deceased at the time of the crime.”
After DNA testing was performed, the specimen led to a convicted sex offender and Hastings was subsequently released from prison after nearly four decades served.
The Exoneration Project
The Exoneration Project has helped close to 200 people prove their innocence and be freed from incarceration, according to its website. Some clients who were exonerated include Frank Drew, who spent 24 years in prison for homicide; Harold Staten who was incarcerated for 38 years for arson and murder; and Darien Harris who was reportedly convicted for a fatal shooting at a gas station after a blind eyewitness’ testimony. He was incarcerated for 12 years before the sentence was thrown out.
Equal Justice Initiative
The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, according to its website. It aims to challenge racial and economic injustice, and to protect basic human rights “for the most vulnerable people in American society.”
One of the most notable cases is Marsha Colbey who was wrongfully convicted of capital murder in 2007 and sentenced to life after she reportedly gave birth to a stillborn baby.
Colbey went into premature labor and unexpectedly delivered a stillborn baby while at home alone. Her efforts to revive the child were unsuccessful, and she buried him in a marked grave near her home, according to EJI. Initial forensic reports stated the baby was born alive which led to a murder charge, but four years later, new testing showed evidence of life was inconclusive. She was released from prison in 2012.
Innocence Project
The Innocence Project, not to be confused with the Los Angeles Innocence Project, has been successful in freeing nearly 300 inmates since its inception in 1992.
Clients include Kirk Bloodsworth, who was reportedly the first person in the U.S. to be exonerated from death row. He was wrongfully convicted of the assault and murder of a 9-year-old girl in 1993 but released nine years later through DNA evidence.
Steven Avery was also an Innocent Project client, who inspired the Netflix documentary series, “Making a Murder.” Avery was convicted in 1985 for sexual assault and attempted murder. He was exonerated in 2003 through DNA evidence – but only remained free for two years.
After filing a $36M lawsuit and attempting to expose corruption in local law enforcement, he was charged with murder. Avery’s case has been controversial, and his legal team continues to advocate for his innocence.
