Episode 4: Bad science

S1: I was opening mail at the project where I was working at the time. This is Paula Mitchell , who at the time was an attorney at Loyola Law School's Project for the innocent. And I came across a letter that Jane had written that sort of set forth in a summary fashion that the fact that she was maintaining her innocence , that she had been convicted of murdering her husband and that she had been advocating for herself. She didn't have an attorney , and she was looking for help from an innocence organization to help her prove that she was wrongfully convicted.

S2: At the Innocence Project. Paula Mitchell gets letters like this all the time , but Jane's letter really stood out.

S1: I thought it was really interesting. It had a lot of , um , parts to it that I found , uh , warranted further review for further inspection. First of all , she was a fairly senior executive working in a health care company. She had no criminal history. There was no , um , evidence of violence in in her past or in the marriage. And it seemed like it was just this entirely circumstantial case that , um , involved an investigation where the detectives just kind of immediately zoomed in on her and overlooked every other lead. I mean , it was just one of the worst cases of tunnel vision in an investigation that I think I've ever seen.

S2: So Paula Mitchell decided to look into her case. There is a standard process the Innocence Project usually follows. Yeah.

S1: Yeah. Well , you know , in when we investigate , um , these very old cases , her case was over 20 years old when we started looking into it. Or close to 20 years old. We go back to the very beginning and we look at all of the , um , police reports. All of the information that the police were gathering as they were investigating the crime. And in in Jane's case , there were a number of um , leads to other potential suspects that were apparent to me. Uh , and it seemed to me , should have been apparent to the investigators immediately. And rather than going and looking into those leads to see whether any of those people , uh , identified might be responsible for the crime , they they just ignored them. They they went they did backbends and gymnastics to ignore them , overlook them and stay Myopically focused on Jane. And they essentially , in my opinion , uh , worked diligently to put together a case that would convict her , uh , at the expense of any other evidence that was exculpatory. They just didn't want to look at it.

S2: Jane had already been in prison for almost 15 years when she turned to the Innocence Project. It was 2015 , the heyday of true crime podcasts like serial that made innocence projects much more well known , and stories like serial have made us all think were experts in things like DNA testing and exculpatory evidence. But there are parts of Jane's story that divert from that. It wasn't just as simple as getting a little DNA tested and finding the true killer. Paula Mitchell and her team had to do mountains of work first , to convince a judge to allow the testing. They started by listening to audio recordings of witness interviews. They heard investigators questioning the dispatch service. When Jane called to report Bob was missing.

S1: Investigators were almost myopically focused on gathering evidence of Jane and her , a how upset she was when she called the police. Was she crying ? How was she whimpering ? Was she like , did this woman express appropriate emotions when her husband didn't come home from his jog , and they did everything they could to basically say she didn't. She didn't react appropriately. They even lied to the jury in closing argument and said , you know , that she knew her husband was dead at the time they interviewed her. When the record is clear , she had no idea if he was dead yet. They hadn't found his body. They hadn't determined whether it was a homicide. And actually , they may have found the body , but they thought it might have been a car accident. She didn't know he had been murdered. She she was just reacting the way she's she reacted. Everyone reacts differently when they get shocking news involving something like this. And instead of , you know , um , looking for information that might actually be helpful to their investigation , they really wanted to show that she did not respond emotionally in the way they think. A woman should respond when she finds out her husband has been killed.

S2: They also pored through the forensic evidence. All of the crime lab reports that detailed the blood in the bedroom.

S1: Investigators had this theory that they saw these very minute traces of what looked like blood in the bedroom , and and so they they collected swabs of certain stains , although we have no idea which stains , because they didn't write anything down. They collected samples that went were sent to the lab for testing. So we start looking at these crime lab reports to see whether , um , we can , uh , kind of establish that they were right when they did their , um , testing and when they came up with this theory about how , uh , Robert was killed in his bedroom. And what we immediately realized is that , um , the jury , well , the the court and the jury were misled because the prosecution told them that the stains that they had observed , the investigators observed in the bedroom were We're all tested and we're all Bob. Dora takes blood. And that simply was not true. It was not borne out by the lab reports. There were only some fraction of the stains that were collected that were actually , um , tested. And when we years later asked for everything to be tested and everything to be looked at , we discovered that some of the stains that they assumed were blood were , in fact not blood at all.

S2: If you recall , in the last episode , the prosecutor said they had lots of science showing that Bob's blood was all over Jane's bedroom , and Jane's original defense attorney decided not to challenge that. Instead , he bought into the idea that Bob was killed in the bedroom , but decided to try to suggest to the jury that Jane's daughter Claire killed her father. Now , Paula Mitchell and her team are throwing out that defense clearly. Instead , they're digging into the science and finding that much of it in their opinion , does not hold up.

S1: Some of the stains may have been from the the household pets , the dogs that the door ticks had who slept on their bed , who had bleeding injuries , who the family members told the investigators. Some of these stains could be from the animals , and they never they never looked into it. In fact , they didn't even tell the criminalist who was responsible for doing the bloodstain pattern analysis that the that some of this blood may have been from the dogs. They , they just didn't tell him that at all. So we basically were looking over the shoulder of all of the criminalist and all of the people working in the lab to try to determine whether what they determined was accurate and whether what the jury was told was truthful and accurate and supported by the science.

S2: Something else also stood out to Paula Mitchell and her team. Here's Eliza Haney , another lawyer.

S3: Um , however , the medical examiner , um , who looked and who did the autopsy determined that Bob Doherty would have lost 2 to 3l of blood in the ensuing minutes of the injuries that he sustained. So if he was killed in the bedroom , there would be a volume of blood present that would be nearly impossible to clean up. And the evidence is undisputed that there were no swipe marks or any of the other indicia of a clean up , and even some of the prosecution witnesses admitted to to that. Um , but despite that inconsistency , they continued with this theory that did not align with the evidence or lack of evidence found in the bedroom.

S2: So Paula Mitchell was not convinced and decided to take Jane's case. Since Jane had exhausted her appeals , her only chance at freedom was to get additional DNA testing.

S1: It was at that point that I. I just decided that this this woman really is going to need help , even if we just go for the narrow purpose of of helping with the DNA testing. So that's how we started our involvement.

S2: They also had to convince a judge that the investigations and trial proceedings had been unfair and might have missed something.

S1: Well , in California , if you have been convicted and your conviction has been upheld on appeal by the Court of Appeal , and you have exhausted your , you know , appellate remedies , the next thing you have to do is try to uncover new evidence that wasn't presented to the jury. That would have made a difference in the deliberations in the jury's verdict. So we we go out and we look for that new evidence.

S2: That's what they did. But the lab reports that hadn't been tested for animal blood.

S1: Once you have what you think is is enough new evidence , you go to court , you go in this case , we went to , um , Superior Court in San Diego County. Initially , we were before judge Harry Elias. Uh , we filed our we filed Jane's petition for a writ of habeas corpus , and we simultaneously filed a motion for DNA testing to get additional DNA testing done on items of evidence. The clothing he was wearing , for example , which ultimately did have foreign DNA on it. Not Jane's , not Bob's. We filed simultaneously a discovery motion asking them to turn over all kinds of material that we saw referenced in the files and in the police reports , but which we did not have.

S2: Armed with these three filings , they went to court and a judge issued an order to show cause , which means the judge thinks Paula Mitchell and her defense team have raised valid points , and so the prosecution should have to answer those points.

S1: So at that point , the prosecution has to go to the judge and say , well , judge , you know , there's nothing to worry about. Their claims are meritless , whatever they want to say. And in this case , they they responded saying that they still had confidence in the conviction. Essentially there was nothing wrong. Meanwhile , they're continuing to turn over new discovery to us , audiotapes of witness interviews that we had never heard before. More exculpatory evidence , more information about a suspect we feel very strongly should have been looked into. And we filed a our answer to their opposition. And once that happened , the judge said , okay , we're going to have a hearing on this. I want an evidentiary hearing. I want witnesses to come in here and take the stand. I want them sworn. I want them to testify under oath. I want to find out what's going on in this case.

S2: Then Paula Mitchell and her team were able to help Jane get new DNA testing. They hired their own independent DNA expert who would do additional testing at an independent lab. And those results showed something important. So important that it paved the way for Jane's release.

S1: You know , sometimes when you get , um , DNA testing done , you end up with what's called a partial profile. So it's not enough of a profile to put it into the database to see if you can get a hit to match with some somebody who's been convicted of a felony and is in the database. But what what you can glean often from a partial profile is that you can exclude certain people because their their DNA profile has different markers than what the partial profile has at specific loci.

S2: Those results showed that DNA from under Bob's fingernails belonged not to him and not to Jane.

S1: This was foreign DNA from somebody else who may have been responsible for the crime.

S2: But who ? Well , they weren't able to get a full profile from. What they collected from Bob's fingernails.

S1: Is still an exclusion. It still shows that he was struggling with somebody who was not his wife.

S4: So clearly.

S2: The next step is to load that DNA into a database and find out who Bob's killer actually was , right ? That's what's being done more and more with these cold cases. That's how police recently tracked down the Golden State Killer. But it was not to be in this case.

S1: Yes , it's incredibly heartbreaking. When she was arrested in 2000. Uh , one of the first things she started asking for was specifically , why don't you test my husband's fingernail clippings for DNA ? So , because oftentimes , you know , at autopsy , they they collect fingernail samples. And in his case , we've seen the photographs. His hands were covered in blood. He was obviously in a violent struggle. He had defensive wounds. He was in a fight with somebody , and he had blood and other material under his fingernails. She asked for the that to be DNA tested. Her , um , trial attorney did not make that request. After she was convicted , she began writing. And her appeal , her conviction was affirmed on appeal. She began writing and trying to represent herself at making the same request over and over. Please , DNA test the evidence in my case , the rope , the fingernails , his clothing. And when you asked earlier about how I got involved in her case , it happened to be right at the time where she had Finally 15 years , 16 years later , persuaded the court to let this additional DNA testing happen. But she didn't have a clue as most people don't what to do with the test results once you get them. She can't really interpret them.

S2: And the tests used up all of the DNA , so they have a partial profile , enough to know Bob was in a struggle with someone else. Not Jane , but not enough to know who that person was. Next time , how are cultures fascination with courtroom quote unquote science impacted Jane's case. Free Jane is hosted by me , Katie Hazen. It's reported and produced by Claire Trager. Sound design by am FM music. Additional producing by Lara McCaffrey. It was edited by David Washburn and Terrence Shepard , web design by Brendan Finnerty , and our news director is Terrence Shepard.