IAPE Evidence Blog

Worces­ter Telegram & Gazette Corp., telegram.com
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Web­ster, MA

WEBSTER —  A man who allegedly left behind a cig­a­rette dur­ing a June 2010 bur­glary has been arrested after DNA from the dis­carded butt was matched to him.

Joshua Piehl, 24, of 34 Worces­ter St., Charl­ton, on a war­rant Wednes­day and charged with break­ing and enter­ing in the day­time with intent to com­mit a felony and two counts of wan­ton destruc­tion of prop­erty. He was arraigned in Dud­ley Dis­trict Court and released on per­sonal recognizance.

Police were called to the home of an elderly woman on Gore Road on June 27, 2010, after she reported hear­ing strange voices in her base­ment. Offi­cers found the home had been bro­ken into and dis­cov­ered the cig­a­rette butt, which was sent to the state police crime laboratory.

Police were recently noti­fied that the DNA matched Mr. Piehl and they got a war­rant for his arrest.

Web­ster police Detec­tive Gor­don D. Went­worth Jr. wrote in a news release that Mr. Piehl con­fessed to the break-in in Web­ster and to a sim­i­lar inci­dent in Douglas. 

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

DigitalJournal.com, digitaljournal.com
BYLINE: Kevin Fitzger­ald
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Maine

kjetil_r

DNA left on a dis­carded cig­a­rette butt was the smok­ing gun that finally led author­i­ties in Maine to make an arrest in a mur­der case dat­ing back to 1980.

Court doc­u­ments just released show that author­i­ties used DNA left on a cig­a­rette butt to arrest Jay Mercier back in Sep­tem­ber, accord­ing to the Asso­ci­ated Press (via Boston.com). He has now been charged with the bru­tal slay­ing of 20-year-old Rita St. Peter.

St. Peter had been killed after she left a bar to walk home on the night of July 4, 1980. It is also believe that she may have hitched a ride. The young victim’s body was found par­tially nude along the side of a road the next day. She had been blud­geoned and run over by a vehi­cle. She had also been sex­u­ally assaulted.

Mercier was orig­i­nally a per­son of inter­est in the crime when wit­nesses had reported see­ing him sit­ting alone in a truck around the time St. Peter left the bar, although author­i­ties could not find suf­fi­cient evi­dence at the time to arrest him after an investigation.

Detec­tives still had inter­est in the case sev­eral years later. Accord­ing to Reuters, they inter­viewed Mercier out­side his house in Jan. 2010, where Mercier was smok­ing a cig­a­rette. After dis­card­ing the cig­a­rette butt, author­i­ties col­lected it to be sub­mit­ted into evi­dence. Author­i­ties were later able to obtain an oral swab from Mercier when a search war­rant was served.

After sev­eral months, results finally showed a DNA match between Mercier’s saliva and semen sam­ples col­lected from St. Peter’s body.

Mercier, now 56, entered a plea of not guilty while in court on Mon­day. He has con­sis­tently denied guilt through­out the years. A judge has denied him bail.

His trial is set to begin some­time in the mid­dle of next year.

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

DETROIT FREE PRESS, freep.com
BYLINE: TRESA BALDAS, DETROIT FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
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Detroit, MI

Evi­dence destroyed in unsolved ’72 slaying

Merry Wil­son, 50, of Detroit holds a photo of her sis­ter Laura Wil­son, 16, who was raped and mur­dered in 1972. / August photo by KIMBERLY P. MITCHELL/Detroit Free

It was Nov. 10, 1972. Laura Wil­son, a shy teenager from the Her­man Gar­dens hous­ing project on Detroit’s west side, walked to a nearby con­ve­nience store to buy a car­ton of Oleo and two bot­tles of Pepsi for her mother.

She had pleaded to go alone.

Nine days later, her body was found in some bushes just blocks away from home. She’d been raped and beaten. Her head was smashed in with a brick.

Nearly four decades later, her fam­ily still has no answers.

Short of a con­fes­sion, it’s likely they’ll never know who killed the 16-year-old because all of the evi­dence was destroyed or lost.

Her blood­stained cloth­ing was ordered destroyed in 1977; the Pepsi bot­tle fol­lowed in 1978. A brick and a chunk of con­crete marked with blood and hair strands were destroyed in 1984. The fin­ger­nail scrap­ings and rape evi­dence — swabs taken dur­ing the autopsy — are nowhere to be found.

Her story illus­trates what legal experts say is a per­va­sive prob­lem nation­wide — the mis­han­dling of crim­i­nal evi­dence largely because of a lack of uni­form stan­dards for retain­ing evidence.

Law enforce­ment doesn’t track how often evi­dence gets lost or destroyed, but experts con­cede it’s not uncommon.

“It hap­pens,” said Joe Latta, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence, who helps over­see 18,000 police depart­ments nation­wide. “I track all the head­lines. Miss­ing guns, money and nar­cotics. If it’s your son or daugh­ter, it’s a huge deal.”

A con­fes­sion is family’s only hope in solv­ing a 1972 mur­der after evi­dence was destroyed

Merry Wil­son was just 11 years old when her sis­ter was mur­dered in Detroit in 1972 — one of more than 600 homi­cide vic­tims in the city that year.

It was 5:30 p.m. on Nov. 10, 1972, when 16-year-old Laura Wil­son left her home in the projects to walk to a nearby con­ve­nience store. She was wear­ing her flared, blue-and-brown-striped Wran­gler jeans, a tan coat with fur trim, pur­ple turtle­neck and white sneak­ers with her name writ­ten in the soles.

She had 63 cents in food stamps with her.

She never returned.

Her case is among more than 19,000 unsolved homi­cides in the city, dat­ing to 1917. In the past decade, the city’s homi­cide clear­ance rate has aver­aged from 35% to 45%, but climbed to 54% in 2010.

Short of a con­fes­sion, the Wilsons will likely never find Laura’s killer because the evi­dence was ordered destroyed and some remains missing.

Experts say that’s a com­mon prob­lem, espe­cially among big city depart­ments han­dling large vol­umes of evi­dence. They say no national stan­dards exist, leav­ing it up to police depart­ments to decide how to store key items that could make the dif­fer­ence in solv­ing a case.

A nee­dle in a haystack

Legal experts say no laws exist that man­date evi­dence in unsolved mur­ders be pre­served indef­i­nitely. A fed­eral law requires bio­log­i­cal evi­dence be pre­served in a mur­der case where there’s been a con­vic­tion, should the defen­dant wish to pur­sue an appeal. And 33 states, includ­ing Michi­gan, have sim­i­lar laws.

But when it comes to pre­serv­ing evi­dence in unsolved cases, that’s up to police departments.

“Stan­dards are hit and miss from depart­ment to depart­ment,” said Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan law pro­fes­sor Dave Moran, who runs an inno­cence clinic. “We’re often look­ing for old evi­dence, and it’s very hard to find.”

Detroit police offi­cials would not talk about their evi­dence reten­tion poli­cies. Offi­cials directed the Free Press to file a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request, which is pending.

Over the last decade, crime lab scan­dals involv­ing lost, destroyed or tainted evi­dence have sur­faced in cities nation­wide, includ­ing Hous­ton, Den­ver, Boston, Bal­ti­more, New Orleans and New York.

The scan­dals can prove costly.

In New York City, for exam­ple, a Bronx man last year won an $18.5-million jury award after a rape kit in his case finally sur­faced in a ware­house — 10 years after he asked for it. The man had served two decades in prison, but DNA evi­dence ana­lyzed from the rape kit exon­er­ated him.

Joe Latta, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence, who has helped train Detroit police on evidence-handling meth­ods, said it’s not unusual for large police depart­ments to be clut­tered and unor­ga­nized, mak­ing find­ing items extremely difficult.

“Think of Costco. They’re that size,” he said of evi­dence rooms. “And if you’re look­ing for some­thing that’s the size of an iPhone or the tag came off or it’s under­neath some­thing … the stuff could be there.”

Evi­dence but no solid leads

Nine days after she dis­ap­peared, Laura’s par­tially nude body was found in some bushes at 8426 Met­te­tal St. on the city’s far west side. She had been raped, and her head was smashed with a brick, almost beyond recog­ni­tion. Her body was found by a group of boys play­ing football.

“It didn’t look real,” recalled Low­ell Mur­doch, who was 15 when he, his brother and a friend found Laura’s body. “It was shock­ing. At first we were scared. Luck­ily, we knew the guy who lived next door, and he got help.”

Police col­lected evi­dence: a brick and a chunk of con­crete that had blood stains and hair strands on it; a prayer book that was found near Laura’s body, also stained with blood, and her cloth­ing. They also recov­ered the items she got at the store — mar­garine, a bot­tle of pop and the receipt.

They had numer­ous tips, includ­ing sev­eral reports that Laura got into a red car. And police had suspects.

Accord­ing to a 183-page police file on Laura’s case, which the Free Press obtained from the fam­ily, one man was arrested fol­low­ing a traf­fic stop, but was released when his alibi was confirmed.

Laura’s boyfriend also came under sus­pi­cion, but police never ques­tioned him. Accord­ing to police records, the boyfriend, who drove a maroon car, was arrested on the morn­ing that Laura went miss­ing for dri­ving with­out a license. He was jailed overnight.

“This would kind of negate him as the assailant,” police wrote in their report. “How­ever, our inter­est was in the maroon car (could have let a friend use it while he was incarcerated).”

Police ulti­mately went to the boyfriend’s apart­ment. They found it had been vacated. They inter­viewed his fam­ily mem­bers and ruled him out.

The case went cold.

For years, Merry Wil­son and Linda Pat­ter­son, the eldest of the Wil­son sis­ters, called police to check on their sister’s case. Each time, they got the same response: no new leads.

Since Laura’s death, at least two of the offi­cers who inves­ti­gated the case have died. So have her parents.

One of the detec­tives told the Free Press he couldn’t recall the case, but that’s not so for retired Police Offi­cer Ronald Atkin­son, who nearly 40 years later still remem­bers the details. “It star­tled me,” Atkin­son, now 68, recalled. “I’m kind of a softie, and it may have shook me up a lit­tle bit dis­cov­er­ing that it was a young person.”

Atkin­skon, who was among the first on the scene, said he never knew that the evi­dence was destroyed.

“I’m sorry the chain of evi­dence is bro­ken, and my con­do­lences prob­a­bly have lit­tle mean­ing for the fam­ily,” he said, unable to offer an expla­na­tion. “It’s a shame that this happened.”

He added: “I don’t think this would hap­pen nowadays.”

Still search­ing for answers

Merry Wil­son has tried for years to put her sister’s death behind her.

But every time she learns of a cold case get­ting solved or hears about crime lab scan­dals and evi­dence get­ting lost, she gets fired up again and asks questions.

“I get con­sumed in it,” she said of her sister’s death. “It doesn’t let me go.”

In 2006, she started ask­ing about the evi­dence after wak­ing up from a dream in the mid­dle of the night. She had seen Laura, just star­ing at her and say­ing nothing.

“It just froze me,” she said. “I thought, ‘I gotta do something.’ ”

Wil­son learned in 2006 that much of the evi­dence was destroyed in the late 1970s. On Oct. 22, 2008, Wil­son received a let­ter from Wayne County Exec­u­tive Robert Ficano’s office stat­ing: “After a com­plete search of all files, it has been deter­mined that no slides or tis­sue sam­ples exist. I offer my most sin­cere con­do­lences for your loss.”

Detroit police would not dis­cuss Wilson’s case and would say only that they are review­ing the matter.

Pat­ter­son, who had to iden­tify her sister’s body when she was 22, is baf­fled and outraged.

“I always assumed that if it’s an open mur­der case, you can­not destroy the evi­dence,” said Pat­ter­son, who now lives in Tennessee.

The Wil­son fam­ily is plead­ing for a more thor­ough inves­ti­ga­tion. They don’t blame the Police Depart­ment for past mis­takes, but they say they deserve a more thor­ough review of the case — and an apology.

“I want them to explain why this stuff was destroyed. Some­body has to answer for that,” said Merry Wil­son, who still lives in the city.

“Some­where along the line this shouldn’t have to hap­pen to any­one else.”

Pat­ter­son said she won’t stop look­ing for her sister’s killer.

“I loved her so much that I want peo­ple to know that she was loved and cared about,” Pat­ter­son said. “I’ll never give up because there is always some­body out there who knows something.”

Merry Wil­son, 50, of Detroit holds a photo of her sis­ter Laura Wil­son, who was raped and mur­dered in 1972. Laura was 16 years old. The case has never been solved, and Wil­son learned in 2006 that much of the evi­dence in the case was ordered destroyed by police in the late 1970s. August pho­tos by KIMBERLY P. MITCHELL/Detroit Free
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Wil­son sits at home look­ing over doc­u­ments about her sister’s mur­der that she has col­lected from Detroit Police through the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act. The Police Depart­ment would not dis­cuss Wilson’s case. pho­tos by KIMBERLY P. MITCHELL/Detroit Free
 

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org