Evidence in the 1995 Silk Plant Forest assault case that went untested for years only provides matches to the victim, Jill Marker, authorities said today.
Police Chief Scott Cunningham said at a press conference that testing of a piece of cardboard with blood and hair on it, as well as clothing belonging to Marker yielded only DNA links to her, and those links were only from the blood, not the hair. There was no link from the evidence to the man convicted of assaulting Marker, Kalvin Michael Smith, nor anyone else.
The evidence was sent for testing to the State Bureau of Investigation laboratory in March after an internal review into the police investigation showed that those materials had never been tested for the presence of DNA. The evidence, which was not admitted at Smith's trial in 1997, was listed on inventory sheets of physical evidence seized in 1995.
Because the evidence slipped through the cracks for so long, Cunningham has had the police put new procedures in place requiring detectives to document interviews in supplemental reports. And under the new guidelines, interviews with suspects and witnesses will be recorded from start to finish. Recorders will not be turned off at any point during interviews.
Smith was convicted of beating Marker and is serving 23 to 29 years in prison. He has maintained his innocence and is appealing his case in the federal courts.
The case has come under intense scrutiny over the past few years, from the Innocence Project at Duke University, in a five-part series in the Winston-Salem Journal in 2004, and from the Silk Plant Forest Citizens Review Committee, which re-examined the police investigation.
The committee's final report, released in August 2009, concluded that it didn't have any faith in the police department's work on the case. Separately, the committee voted 7-2 in favor of a statement that said it found no credible evidence that Smith was at the scene of the crime.
A key issue in the case has been why former police Detective Don Williams, the lead investigator in the case, dropped the original suspect in the case, Kenneth Lamoureux. Several witnesses identified Lamoureux as having been in the store on Dec. 9, 1995.
Lamoureux knew Marker because she used to work at Today's Child, a day-care center where he took his children. He was dropped as a suspect in April 1996 when he moved to Charlotte.
An affidavit recently filed on behalf of Smith in connection with his federal appeal said that Marker telephoned a friend "upset and anxious" after Lamoureux came into the store the night she was attacked, asked her out and stormed away angrily when she refused.
Marker, a manager of the Silk Plant Forest store, made the call to Jeana Schopfer about 8:45 p.m. Dec. 9, 1995, mere minutes before she was attacked.
Schopfer, who had supervised Marker at Today's Child and was a friend, was part of his attorneys' response to a state motion to dismiss Smith's federal appeal.
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