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Leah Freeman/Nicholas McGuffin murder case

Chris_Halkides

Penultimate Amazing
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Dec 8, 2009
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Fifteen year old Leah Freeman was murdered in 2000 in the state of Oregon, but the body lay undiscovered for more than a month. Her eighteen year old boyfriend Nicholas McGuffin was convicted of manslaughter in 2011 on a 10-2 jury vote. There were no eyewitnesses to the crime, and there no forensic evidence against him. It was unclear to me what the motive was. He was said to be talking fast and acting jumpy the night of her disappearance, but it is acknowledged that he used meth, which makes me wonder if his behavior was the result of using this drug. His conviction was just overturned on the strength of DNA evidence from a bloody shoe:

“We consulted with a DNA expert,” [Janis] Puracal said. “She reviewed the charts, graphs, and raw data from the DNA testing in 2000. She was the one who saw that there was unidentified male DNA on both of the victim’s shoes that had not been reported by the state lab. There was unidentified male DNA in the victim’s [spilled] blood and it was never reported.”

Several things stood out for me in the investigations. One is luminol.

"Police then reexamined McGuffin's Mustang, even though it had already been sprayed with a chemical called luminal to test for the presence of blood during the initial investigation in 2000. 'There was nothing in there,' said police chief Mark Dannels. 'It had been cleaned. It had been wiped.'"

Did Dannels see streak marks or anything else that indicated a clean-up had occurred? If not, then this sounds like the absence of evidence being claimed to be evidence. Besides this car, an old Mustang, there was also a Kia that Mr. McGuffin had borrowed, and that car had been cleaned, but it is unclear when or by whom.

There is also the question of a paint chip found on the victim's clothing. "Microtrace found several hairs and a gray paint chip on Freeman's shirt. The paint chip did not match paint on either McGuffin's Mustang or his parents' Thunderbird." Based on this, the defense cast suspicion on other people.

A third thing that I noticed was that two of the witnesses seem to have altered their descriptions of events. One initially said she had seen a car pull up next to Ms. Freeman, but some details did not match. I do not have an opinion yet on the witnesses.
EDT
This case was mentioned here in an old thread. The Charles Smith forensic blog has a recent entry. My initial impression is that this was a weak case in 2011 that is weaker in 2019; however, I don't really have a strong opinion on his factual innocence or guilt yet.
 
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Was this another case of the forensic lab that withheld DNA evidence being too closely aligned with the police/prosecution? The blog seemed to imply that.
 
more data would help

It is a little bit difficult to tell without more information. The articles that I have read implied that the peak heights in the electropherogram (which has a complex relationship to the concentration of DNA in the sample) were small and that the lab had discretion about whether or not to report the information. It would be interesting to find out what this lab did with potentially inculpatory DNA evidence having the same peak heights. If they provided inculpatory but not exculpatory information, one could be confident that there was a problem.
 
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It takes a village

Mr. McGuffin has been released and will not be retried. "Lawyer Janis Puracal championed the case from the very beginning. She told FOX 12 that she examined the case and the timeline of events and McGuffin’s whereabouts the night of Leah’s death raised red flags for her...Puracal estimates that at least 20 people have worked on the case."
 
David Herbert article

In 2023 by David G. Herbert wrote a long article for The Intelligencer about Richard Walter, a faux criminal profiler. I was unaware of who he was or what his involvement was in this case until now: "Yet Walter’s fingerprints were all over [district attorney Paul] Frasier’s eventual case at trial. In his closing argument, Frasier parroted Walter’s entire theory." The author interviewed Mr. McGuffin, "For two hours, McGuffin was composed. Then I asked if I could read from Walter’s deposition, in which the profiler struggled to recall McGuffin...[Mr. McGuffin] entertained every permutation but the most devastating: that Walter didn’t think about him at all."

I was also unaware of the fact that the ABC series 20/20, which did an episode that was sympathetic to Mr. McGuffin a few years ago, had previously helped to convict him. Both of these aspects of the story leave me with a feeling of unease, despite Mr. McGuffin's exoneration.
EDT
"According to today’s suit, former Chief of the Coquille Police Department, Mark Dannels, led a team of inexperienced investigators on a quest to implicate McGuffin, made up blood evidence that did not exist, falsely reported that McGuffin cleaned his car to destroy evidence, and buried evidence that corroborated McGuffin’s alibi." Loevy and Loevy
 
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This case in the context of flawed investigations

There are several things about this case which follow a pattern of possible or actual wrongful convictions. This investigation started off with a blunder: they treated Leah Freeman's disappearance as if she had run away, as opposed to investigating the possibility that she had been abducted. Her shoes were recovered separately about six and seven days later. It was not until about four weeks after her disappearance her body was found, IIRC. Some cases start off with a poorly handled crime scene; JonBenet Ramsey, Michael Skakel, and Luke Mitchell come to mind. The initial misstep forces the investigators to rely upon dubious evidence or analysis. In this case the dubious analysis came primarily from Richard Walter. At some point tunnel vision sets in. One thing that may accompany tunnel vision is a stubborn desire to close a case, whether or not the evidence is fundamentally strong enough to support such an outcome.

Frequently witness accounts change, and I see hints that this might have happened in the McMuffin case: ""We re-examined the evidence with newer technologies now available to us, and certain witnesses, due to maturity and time, have been able to come forward and provide more information about that night," Dannels said." CNN I am not sure whether Mr. Lindegren's testimony changed over time. The Oregon Innocence Project wrote, "Other witnesses testified they saw Freeman walking alone. However, one witness, John Lindegren, testified that he saw McGuffin with Freeman at about 9 p.m.—two hours after McGuffin had said he dropped Freeman off at her girlfriend’s house...The judge also faulted McGuffin’s trial defense lawyers for failing to investigate a police report of an interview with Nick Backman. Backman told police that he saw Freeman by herself about 9 p.m. near an ATM—about the same time that Lindegren claimed he saw McGuffin with Freeman in the area of the ATM."

Innocuous events take on pseudo-significance: "Police also learned from neighbors that the family held a bonfire in their yard the day after Leah disappeared." There was a backyard log burner that Corrine Mitchell used the same day that Luke Mitchell's girlfriend Jodie Jones disappeared. I question whether either the bonfire or the log burner were used to destroy evidence.

""Review of the results show that unknown male DNA was found on both shoes, not belonging to Petitioner [McGuffin], and those results were known in 2001 and 2002 when the reports were generated," Malheur County Circuit Court Judge Patricia Sullivan said in her ruling." link All I can to is to point out the obvious, that many wrongful convictions are overturned partially on the basis of forensic evidence. It is frequently the case that this evidence was known to the prosecution yet not disclosed.
 
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