James Robert Bell Auburn Ny Why I Jail Again
He Escaped Prison in 2015. Did He Impale a Immature Mother Decades Before?
A bid to exonerate two men in a Buffalo-area murder centers on the possible role in the law-breaking of Richard Matt, a notorious New York killer.
TONAWANDA, N.Y. — In Feb 1993, Deborah Meindl walked into her house in this working-grade Buffalo suburb on a blustery Midweek afternoon, and never left.
Police reports recount what happened: Ms. Meindl, a nursing educatee with ii young daughters, was stabbed dozens of times, her hands cuffed behind her dorsum, and strangled with a human's tie that was left around her cervix.
Suspicions rapidly fell on her husband, who had spoken about having his wife killed, co-ordinate to courtroom records. But the investigation before long pivoted to ii petty thieves who were later bedevilled of murder despite a lack of forensic evidence linking either to the crime.
Now, an explosive new claim is at the center of a renewed effort past defence lawyers to clear the ii: The existent killer was 1 of New York's nearly infamous criminals, Richard Matt, whose 2015 escape from a country prison ready off a nationwide manhunt that ended when he was fatally shot past a federal agent.
The new theory emerged from a monthslong investigation by 2 prosecutors from the Erie County, North.Y., district attorney's office, who presented their findings — and their belief in Mr. Matt's interest — to their boss, John J. Flynn, the district attorney, in August.
Only Mr. Flynn rejected the findings, demoted one of the prosecutors and reassigned the other. He said he could not annotate on personnel issues, merely said the two men had been removed because they "did not have my decision with the professionalism expected of career prosecutors." His office said that despite the lack of forensic evidence there was still aplenty trial testimony to support the convictions.
Lawyers for the convicted men make another incendiary claim in court filings: Non merely did Mr. Matt kill Ms. Meindl; he may have carried out the murder at the behest of the lead detective who investigated the offense, David Bentley.
On Tuesday, Mr. Bentley adamantly denied whatever function and offered to take a lie-detector test.
"It'southward totally, absolutely, unequivocally insane," Mr. Bentley said, calculation that he had not known Ms. Meindl and had testified against Mr. Matt in a different murder case.
"I could never say that stuff," Mr. Bentley said of his testimony in that case, "and have hired him to murder somebody."
In a move filed in Land Supreme Court in Buffalo last month, the defense lawyers said there is evidence that Mr. Matt confessed to killing Ms. Meindl in 2015. He made the confession to his fellow escapee, David Sweat, according to another document. Mr. Sweat is imprisoned in Ulster County.
Adding more than mystery to an already perplexing example, recent DNA sampling of crime scene evidence has excluded both men convicted in the murder — and Mr. Matt.
On Midweek, in a Buffalo court, lawyers for the men convicted in the killing, James Pugh and Brian Scott Lorenz, cited the Deoxyribonucleic acid evidence, Mr. Bentley'southward ties to Mr. Matt and inconsistencies in prosecution witnesses' accounts as reasons their clients should be cleared.
Mr. Pugh, who was recently paroled later 25 years in prison house, was there; Mr. Lorenz appeared via video from the state prison in Auburn, N.Y., where he remains. Ms. Meindl'southward daughter, Lisa Payne, sat in the front end row.
Justice Christopher J. Burns seemed inclined to favor a deep re-examination of the case — "I'd like to go an answer to this," he said — raised the prospect of an boosted hearing.
"I knew, in my heart, that I didn't commit this law-breaking," Mr. Lorenz said in an interview final calendar month, adding, "Simply I never gave upward."
In a argument, Mr. Flynn, a Democrat, flatly denied that in that location was any apparent bear witness "to link Richard Matt to the murder of Deborah Meindl." He also defended his response to the findings of the prosecutors who revisited the case.
"I, forth with my entire senior leadership squad, several of my senior agency chiefs and most experienced trial attorneys, disagreed with their conclusions due to a lack of any credible evidence," he said.
Because the two prosecutors accept not detailed their findings publicly, it is non fully clear what they believe implicates Mr. Matt. Neither human would comment, although one is seeking to evidence in the case, court filings testify. Both still work for Mr. Flynn.
Mr. Bentley helped enhance Mr. Matt's daughter Jamie, who once wrote that the detective "knew my father probably too as anyone on the outside." In an interview and text letters, Mr. Bentley, who retired in 2003, acknowledged having had a close relationship with Mr. Matt — whom he used as an informant — bordering on that of begetter-son.
"I related to Rick: I felt bad for him," Mr. Bentley said. "Y'all could nearly say I loved the child."
But he does non believe Mr. Matt — a convicted killer — could take murdered Ms. Meindl, proverb, "he was just a punk" and "wasn't a candidate for a crime like that."
"Somebody planted the thought virtually him only to defend Pugh and Lorenzo," he said.
Mr. Bentley as well suggested that Mr. Matt "was known to brag almost all sorts of stuff that never existed."
After Ms. Meindl was killed, suspicion initially cruel on her husband, Donald Meindl, who was in his early on 30s and a Taco Bell director at the time. A friend told the police force that Mr. Meindl had once sought his advice about hiring someone to kill his married woman. "It should be made to wait like a robbery," the friend recalled Mr. Meindl saying, courtroom records show.
Mr. Meindl, who did not reply to interview requests, insisted that he was joking and has ever maintained his innocence. Constabulary and court records depict an open marriage and Mr. Meindl's involvement with a 17-yr-old daughter who worked for him. He had an excuse: The mean solar day of the murder, he was at work getting fired for sexual harassment.
After a tip from an informant, investigators at the time shifted their focus to Mr. Lorenz, a 23-year-old with a history of modest crimes who was in Iowa after being arrested for car theft.
Desperate to return home, Mr. Lorenz concocted a bizarre plan to confess to Deborah Meindl's murder, according to his defence squad, and implicated Mr. Pugh, his sometime burglary partner, thinking it would bolster his story. He told a police officer he was innocent, but was willing to plead guilty to a manslaughter accuse, according to a prosecution filing.
Mr. Lorenz's confession got details wrong — for instance, he said a hogtie was used when one was not — and information technology was deemed inadmissible at trial. Still, the jury returned a guilty verdict in less than vi hours. (Mr. Lorenz's name was listed as "Lorenzo" in court records although his legal name is Lorenz.)
Mr. Pugh was in his 30s when the slaying occurred. "I was a criminal," he said in an interview. "Only I certainly wasn't somebody that would kill somebody. I'm not capable of that."
Mr. Lorenz, who is all the same in prison, recalled being incredulous at the verdict. "I can't believe, I can't believe this," he said in an interview. He added: "Anger turns into bewilderment, and so the low sets in."
And so in 2018 a state judge forced Erie County officials to comport Dna testing of blood-splattered items from the law-breaking scene. Neither man'south DNA was establish.
Mr. Lorenz was elated.
"I thought I was going habitation immediately," he said.
Instead, before this twelvemonth, Mr. Flynn's office appointed two prosecutors to review the case, Michael J. Hillery, who ran the office's appeals bureau, and David A. Heraty, an assistant district chaser.
After interviewing more than 50 witnesses, Mr. Hillery chosen Ilann Maazel, a civil rights lawyer representing Mr. Lorenz, and told him that the prosecutors believed his client was innocent. Moreover, they suspected Mr. Matt.
"I well-nigh vicious out of my chair," Mr. Maazel said.
Mr. Pugh'south lawyer, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, said he was "gratified that honest, courageous prosecutors followed the evidence."
In a court filing final month, Mr. Lorenz's lawyers said Ms. Meindl had been having an affair with Mr. Bentley and had become aware of unspecified acts of corruption by the detective. The detective, the filing said, had "sent Matt to murder her to ensure that she would not tell anyone else what she knew."
During his career, Mr. Bentley was the field of study of at least fifteen police brutality and harassment complaints, The Buffalo News has reported. But in interviews, he defended his record, proverb he was tough but never corrupt.
"I solved more crimes than the whole department did considering I was savvy," he said on Tuesday. "But I was non crooked."
He as well insisted he had been non in a romantic relationship with Ms. Meindl, a denial that Mr. Flynn echoed.
In a filing this week, Mr. Flynn's office assailed Mr. Heraty, suggesting that he had essentially fed details of the crime to Mr. Sweat, the onetime fugitive. Mr. Heraty has declined to sign an affidavit agreeing to those findings, and has said he wants to evidence in the matter.
On Wednesday, Mr. Maazel and Mr. Margulis-Ohnuma suggested than Mr. Sweat'southward testimony would about likely be included at whatever future hearing, possibly as soon equally Dec. xiii.
In a tardily September letter of the alphabet to Mr. Heraty that was turned over to the defense, Mr. Sweat suggested that he could offering another plausible caption to who had killed Deborah Meindl.
"It's been 6 ½ years since he told me and until y'all showed up it wasn't real to me," Mr. Sweat wrote, adding that he was concerned virtually the prosecutor beingness removed from the case and angry about "the two guys being in prison likewise who didn't do it!"
"I hope," he wrote, "someone is working on that."
Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed enquiry.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/nyregion/richard-matt-buffalo-murder.html
0 Response to "James Robert Bell Auburn Ny Why I Jail Again"
Post a Comment