![]() Because his conviction rested substantially on Yezzo’s testimony, the Innocence Project requested her personnel file from the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Two decades later, in 2013, the Ohio Innocence Project decided to look into the case. James Parsons was found guilty of murdering his wife based in part on bloodstain evidence that prosecutors said connected the crime to a Craftsman tool. And when forensics experts testified, the jury hung on their every word.” “As a trial judge,” he told me, “I sat there for 14 years. Michael Donnelly, now a justice on the Ohio Supreme Court, did not preside over this case, but he has had ample exposure to the use of forensic evidence. Parsons was found guilty and given a prison term of 15 years to life. ![]() The words were deployed as definitive by prosecutors-“the evidence is uncontroverted by the scientist, totally uncontroverted”-and understood that way by the jury. In court, they can come across as definitive: Nothing rules out the possibility. If you are a semanticist, parsing carefully, those words mean little. But, she testified, “my opinion is that there is nothing that makes it inconsistent with this bar.” “I want to see more to be able to say it’s that bar, absolutely, to the exclusion of all others,” she said. At trial, Yezzo acknowledged that other Craftsman tools-of which there are millions-were imprinted with the same logo. Yezzo’s testimony provided a crucial physical link between Parsons and the crime. Michele Yezzo-that is, on her credibility as an expert, including her unverifiable memory of what she may have seen when she conducted her experiment. The largely circumstantial case rested in no small part on G. In 1993, 12 years after the crime, James Parsons was indicted for the murder of his wife. When asked, years later, why she had failed to photograph what she said she’d seen on the enhanced bedsheet, Yezzo replied, “This is one time that I didn’t manage to get it soon enough.” She added: “Operator error.” Moreover, the chemical process used to bring out the bloodstain markings-all of them, on both the bedsheet and the nightgown-made replication by the defense impossible. But Yezzo failed to photograph the newly visible image, and it faded. She also testified that the letter S rose to the surface of the bedsheet-likewise consistent with the appearance of that letter in the word Craftsman. She later testified that she was able to see “individualizing characteristics”-marks seemingly unique to that breaker bar-on the nightgown. She sprayed a chemical on the bedsheet and the nightgown to enhance the stains and raise any other impressions. She also believed that some stains on the victim’s nightgown-which are not easy to decipher-appeared to be similar in shape to the head area of the bar. ![]() She believed she could make out a letter N, consistent with the appearance of the same letter in the word Craftsman on the breaker bar, imprinted on a bedsheet. White then brought the matter to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, where the case was assigned to a forensic scientist named G. The technicians there examined the bedsheets and the tool, which had no traces of blood on it, and said they could not conclusively rule out the breaker bar as the murder weapon or connect it to the crime. White approached the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office, in Cleveland. White wondered if he could connect the bedsheets to what he believed might have been the murder weapon: a Craftsman breaker bar-a heavy tool with a long handle, used to unscrew tight bolts-that had been found in a car that James Parsons had once owned. The case was cold for about a decade, until Sergeant Mike White, in Norwalk, began looking into the murder. Police did not seriously investigate any other suspects. There had been marital problems, but Parsons had a strong alibi: He had picked up breakfast at a coffee shop on the way to work at his auto-repair shop, where he saw customers throughout the morning. The police in Norwalk interviewed James Parsons, Barbara’s husband and Sherry’s father. View Moreīlood soaked her mother’s nightgown and the bedsheets, and covered the walls and the ceiling. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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