But in the years since, many key pieces of evidence, including the blood-splatter analysis methods used by Mr. Thorman, have come under suspicion. In 2012, a test for the presence of blood on the lens was performed but came back negative. Ultimately they can offer a theory, as MacDonell did in the Simpson trial. Thank you for believing in me, he wrote. At Sheppards retrial, Kirk laid out a detailed analysis of the blood spatter in the couples bedroom, which lent credence to the defendants account. This is absolutely disappointing and makes our options limited, she said in an interview on Thursday. Blood, when expelled from the mouth or nose, for instance, may appear almost identical to the atomized blood that sprays from a wound when someone is shot. There was only one option left: to file a writ of habeas corpus, the final opportunity a defendant has, after all other appeals have been exhausted, to persuade the courts to review the case. He made timelines, pored over public records and once went through a mans trash. Joe Bryan, a former small-town high school principal from central Texas, is serving 99 years in prison for the brutal murder of his wife, Mickey, in 1985 a crime he probably didnt commit. If you dont understand the basic science, then you wont understand its limitations, he said. I am fortunate to have a place to go to, he noted, explaining that he had exhausted all his savings on lawyers for his trials and subsequent appeals. As they analyzed blood spatter, lifted latent fingerprints and examined other physical and biological evidence left behind at crime scenes, their conclusions carried the aura of infallibility. It was during one such conversation that Vanderhoof disclosed an explosive piece of information: The primary suspect in the Whitley case had been a Clifton police officer named Dennis Dunlap, who abruptly resigned and left town a month after the teenagers murder. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Smith periodically shared his findings with Jim Vanderhoof, and though the police chief agreed that Joes case was worthy of further examination, he didnt pursue it. (Thorman declined to be interviewed for this article.) exam. On the last day of class, I was given my certificate of training after receiving a 97 on my final exam. Some of them went on to train hundreds of police officers, investigators and crime-lab technicians many of whom began to testify as well. He learned everything he could about the two men who were seen with the freshly painted van at the Ford dealership, discovering that the son of one of them had been a fourth-grade student of Mickeys in the fall of 1985. July 24, 2018, 4:00 pm CDT. Fridays meeting was attended by the key figures in Bryans ongoing legal quest for a new trial: Bosque County District Attorney Adam Sibley and Bryans attorneys, Walter Reaves and Jessica Freud of Waco. Drips, spatters, smears and sprays the distribution of blood at a crime scene can provide possibly useful information about what weapon was used, where a victim was positioned and whether he or she was moved before or after being killed. As for the Bryan case, the consensus among observers on Friday was that the prosecutions job of defending the decades-old conviction had become far more difficult. The case does not set bloodstain-pattern-analysis precedent in Illinois, but it is later cited by courts in Michigan and Texas to support the admission of experts in the field. Blood-Spatter Expert in Joe Bryan Case Says "My Conclusions Were Wrong" . A veteran crime scene investigator with the Montgomery County Sheriffs Office crime laboratory in Conroe, Tex., north of Houston, Ms. Rossi frequently testifies as a prosecution witness in trials around the state. Youll be asked: How probable? Defense attorney Jessica Freud began by trying to show that some of the most damning testimony in Bryan's trial and retrial testimony that came from former police . Mr. Bryans case is often held up as a warning about bloodstain-pattern analysis, a forensic discipline that is increasingly considered unreliable and misleading, especially given the scant scientific training that many investigators receive before applying it. Bryan was tried twice, first in 1986 and then again in 1989. I didnt think Joe did it, but that wasnt enough. He had taken every detour, at one point even staking out the post office after he began receiving bizarre anonymous letters, bearing Clifton postmarks, that claimed Mickey was killed because she knew too much about local drug activity, but he never succeeded in identifying their author. I began to wonder if his assessment of the flashlight, too, was faulty when he asserted that the blood on the lens was back spatter from a close-range shooting. Barbara OBrien, a professor at the Michigan State University College of Law, said that Mr. Bryans case illustrated just how difficult it can be to persuade judges to revisit factual matters even when they are later shown to be false. One of the key pieces of evidence was blood found on a flashlight in the trunk of the man's car. In 1995, he testified for the defense at the O.J. An influential state commission said the blood-spatter analysis used to convict a former Texas high school principal of murdering his wife in 1985 was "not accurate or scientifically supported". An influential state commission said the blood-spatter analysis used to convict a former Texas high school principal of murdering his wife in 1985 was "not accurate . Born in December 1985, the preternaturally cheerful Florida native was two months younger than the case itself. Brady Mills, who heads the state crime lab, declined to comment, but the lab routinely follows the commissions recommendations. I miss encouragement, a compliment of a job well done, the touch of another human being, he said. Thomas Edison was self-taught, he added. Ex-Chief Brennand told me that I was not a suspect, Dunlap eventually wrote back. Mickey and I loved living there, he told me. (Doing so would require the district attorneys office to abandon its appeal of a 2017 court ruling, which had ordered testing to begin.) History of Blood Spatter Analysis - Blood spatter analysis began in the 1890s but wasn't much publicized until a 1950s case. Of Blues decision to hire a private investigator without his knowledge, he wondered, Why not consult me and let me go in on it with him? Joe reserved his anger for law enforcement, whom he accused of willfully ignoring clues, like the cigarette butt found on his kitchen floor and unidentified fingerprints, which he believed pointed to his wifes killer. Last week, Coffindaffer and former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Newsweek that Kohberger's trial will likely be a "battle of the experts" while speaking about the cellphone tower pings and surveillance footage that was included in the probable cause affidavit. Each had a lengthy rap sheet that included weapons offenses; one had also been charged with theft and invasion of privacy. Analysts opinions were often more subjective than scientific, its authors warned, and open to context bias. They noted that some experts extrapolate far beyond what can be supported. Moreover, the complex patterns that fluids make when exiting wounds are highly variable, they observed, and in many cases their interpretations are difficult or impossible. In conclusion, the authors cautioned, the uncertainties associated with bloodstain-pattern analysis are enormous.. Sam Sheppard is retried, and Kirks findings play a central role in Sheppards defense. Reaves decided to petition the court for DNA testing, though he doubted it would deliver the magic bullet the case needed. To secure a guilty verdict, prosecutors needed to tie the flashlight to the crime scene. In July, the commission found that the blood-spatter analysis used to convict Bryan was "not accurate or scientifically supported" and the expert who testified was "entirely wrong." The. The next chapter in the Bryan case will begin on Aug. 20, when a three-day evidentiary hearing will take place in the district court in Comanche, Texas. In 1985, a crime lab technician working before the advent of DNA analysis determined the blood on the flashlight to be type O, which corresponded not only to Bryans wife, Mickey, but also to nearly half the population. When Joe wrote back, he did not dwell on the indignities of prison life or mention his private turmoil, like his anguish over not being able to attend his mothers funeral in 2002. Judge James Morgan, who presided over both of Joes trials three decades earlier, appeared skeptical of the states logic at a hearing last August, pointing out that the use of DNA analysis in criminal investigations came about only after Mickeys murder. Whats the harm? he pressed. Another method of documenting traces of blood is drawing or sketching the crime scene. Prosecutors asked the jury to believe that between 9:15 p.m. on Oct. 14, 1985, when the Bryans spoke by phone, and the following morning, when Mickey was found shot to death, Joe slipped out of his hotel in Austin; drove 120 miles to Clifton, at night, through heavy rain, even though he had an eye condition that made night driving difficult; shot his wife, with whom he had no history of conflict; drove 120 miles back to Austin; re-entered the hotel; and stole upstairs to his room all in time to clean up and attend the conferences morning session, and all without leaving behind a single eyewitness. We were taught how to calculate the area of origin: the place, at a crime scene, where the bloodletting originated. She also drew upon decades of correspondence between W. Leon Smith, the former editor in chief of the Clifton Record, and Joe Bryan. Though he was busier than ever, he wrote to Joe when he could. Almanza, who now goes by the name Retzlaff, could not be reached for comment. Everyone now recognizes that was unsupportable work, including the expert himself, she said in an interview Thursday. But perhaps the biggest blow to Adam Sibley, the Bosque County district attorney, who has so far successfully blocked Mr. Bryans efforts to have DNA analysis performed on previously untested evidence, was Ms. Garcias suggestion that the commission may recommend that DNA testing proceed when it issues its final report. It takes some of the emotional turmoil and anger and grief away, he said. This article is a partnership between ProPublica, where Pamela Colloff is a senior reporter, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a writer at large. Tom Bevel during testimony in the 2003 trial of the real estate heir Robert Durst. As a two-part series published by The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica lays out in damning detail, there was essentially no other physical evidence or motive tying Mr. Bryan to the crime. He went off to college but then dropped out to get back into journalism, and for much of the 1970s, he worked for and then ran newspapers in small towns around North and Central Texas. David Ryder; Ted S. Warren - Pool/Getty Images, Now Is the Time for Saudi Arabia To Join the Nuclear Ban Treaty, Why the U.S. Should Give Saudi Arabia Nuclear Technology, How Life Expectancy in Republican States Compares to Democratic Ones, Nursing Home Focus of Newsweek Investigation to Close Under Fed Pressure, Fed Rate Hike in July Is Likely For Three Reasons, How Donald Trump Plans to Fix the Housing Market, School Forced to Let Transgender Student Use Girls' Bathroom. Bloodstain pattern analysis ( BPA) is a controversial subjective practice that consists of the study and analysis of bloodstains at a known or suspected crime scene. A guard had followed him outside, all the way to his car, telling him, as they walked, that many of the guards believed that Joe was innocent. Ms. Rossis assessment, which was based on more than 60 hours of research and analysis, supported and expanded upon many of the articles findings about Mr. Thormans work. Ristenbatt explained that there were many mechanisms other than gunshots that can cause similar patterns but that it would be difficult to determine how the blood was deposited on the flashlight when it was divorced from the location where the actual bloodletting occurred. A Danville police officer testifies that bloodless circles on the floor helped determine that the victim was probably sitting at a table when shot. It issued detailed findings about how to modernize arson science and improve the interpretation of DNA mixtures, and in 2014, it began the first review in the nation of state convictions based on microscopic hair analysis, a widely used technique whose accuracy has been challenged. He studies the grainy photographs, searching for the faces of his former students, softened by middle age. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/us/joe-bryan-blood-spatter.html. The United States Department of Justice publishes a report, Flight Characteristics and Stain Patterns of Human Blood, by Herbert Leon MacDonell, an instructor at a two-year college in New York with a masters degree. Though several central players in the case declined to participate, Colloff reviewed affidavits they had written, sworn testimony, and legal briefs to portray these individuals viewpoints. I had been to the Walls before to interview Joe, but what was different that morning, as we sat and talked, was the sense of momentum. Shepherd, cooperated with Reavess original request for testing, but for reasons that have never been made clear, Sibley has taken a harder stance.