Dallas DNA

April 30, 2009

Dallas DNA chronicles a pioneering unit within the Dallas County District Attorney's office where post-conviction DNA testing is being used to clear the innocent, as well as confirm the guilty.

When Craig Watkins ran for district attorney in Dallas County, he promised to fight for justice and through an innovative and unconventional new division he founded; he's been true to his word. In July 2007, Watkins created the nation's first Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) run by a DA's office and tasked it with re-examining hundreds of petitions submitted by inmates seeking post-conviction DNA testing and reinvestigating the cases that could be possible examples of injustice.

Dallas County has more exonerations than any other jurisdiction in the nation since state law began allowing post-conviction testing in 2001. In that time, more than 40 cases have received post-conviction DNA evidence analysis and the results have stunned the nation - to date, 19 cases were found to have wrongful convictions, and under DA Watkins' leadership ten innocent men have walked free.

The legal drama and the astounding ramifications including exonerations after men wrongfully spent decades behind bars is captured in Investigation Discovery's new six-part series DALLAS DNA, which is now on Investigation Discovery Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET.

Click here to learn more about the show

Help Solve the Murders of Teenage Girls in Oregon

April 27, 2009

Kelly Disney, 17, was the first girl in a presumed series of five teenage girls to disappear under suspicious and similar circumstances.  She apparently vanished on March 9, 1984, and was last seen alive on U.S. Highway 20, east of Newport along Oregon's scenic coast.  Her skull was found 10 years later, in 1994, inside an abandoned vehicle near Big Creek Reservoir, a popular fishing area east of Newport. Kelly's cause of death has never been determined.
 
On May 3, 1992, Melissa Sanders, 17, and Sheila Swanson, 19, disappeared from the area of Beverly Beach State Park, where they had been camping.  They had last been seen making a call from a pay telephone booth.  Their bodies were found five months later, on October 10, 1992, by hunters in a wooded area near Eddyville, Oregon.  As in the case of Kelly Disney, a cause of death for the two girls has not been determined.

Jennifer Esson and Kara Leas, both 16, were last seen at approximately 1 a.m. on January 28, 1995, walking along NW 56th Street toward Highway 101, also known as the Coast Highway, in an area near Moolack Beach.  They had left from a friend's home on the north side of Newport, where they had spent much of the evening just hanging out and watching movies.  They were believed to have been hitchhiking to another residence located near downtown Newport when they disappeared.  According to Esson's father, the girls were initially planning to have a relative drive them to their next destination, but they decided to walk instead.  Never seen alive again, their bodies were found by loggers weeks later in a wooded area, covered up with brush.  Oregon authorities later determined that both girls had been strangled.

The most common elements in the cases appear to be the fact that they all involved young girls who disappeared while either walking alone or in pairs in the vicinity of the Central Oregon coast, either in or near Newport.  Earlier this year, Lincoln County District Attorney Rob Bovett decided that the cases needed to be looked at again, and he called the past and present members of the Lincoln County Major Crime Team together to review the cases again.

"They haven't been looked at for a long time," Bovett said.  "It was time to do a new, fresh look.  We brought together the old major crime team from the mid-nineties, together with the current major crime team.  There were about thirty people in the room."

Among the many things that investigators looked at during the review was the current state of DNA technology.

"Some of the crime lab technology has been massively upgraded," Bovett said.  "We were doing DNA testing twenty years ago, but the advanced DNA technology that we have today eclipses what we had even a decade ago."

Bovett said that as a result of such advancements in DNA and crime lab technology, some of the evidence that had been collected during the original investigations had been resubmitted to the Oregon State Police crime lab for another look.

"That was the first exciting piece," Bovett said.  "We can analyze some things now that we couldn't analyze back then, at a microscopic level.  There are additional crime lab tests that can be run now that couldn't be run then."

Singing Serial Killer Sentenced to Death

April 22, 2009

Now here is something you do not hear about every day -- a singing serial killer!

Self-confessed Indonesian serial killer Verry Idham Henyansyah, 31, who also goes by the name of "Ryan," not only penned a gruesome tell-all autobiography called Confessions: The Untold Story of Ryan earlier this year, but he also recorded an album consisting of 12 pop songs entitled, My Last Performance, scheduled for release this month while the singer sits on Indonesia's death row.
 
Ryan, who typically dresses in black pants, a long white robe and a black Muslim skullcap, wrote the autobiography while in prison and it was reportedly released in February 2009.  The former Koran recital teacher and would-be model has achieved a certain amount of prison popularity and is regularly visited by teenage girls who want their photo taken with him in his holding cell.  Although some people think that he is insane, he was found guilty in an Indonesian court of murdering and dismembering Hery Santoso and dumping his body parts, which he had placed inside a suitcase and a plastic travel bag, alongside a Jakarta road in 2008.  Ryan, who had stabbed and bludgeoned Santoso to death, had cut Santoso's body into seven pieces in a murder that has been described as having been motivated by jealousy -- apparently Santoso had offered Ryan a car and cash as payment for sex with Ryan's boyfriend.  One of the songs on Ryan's album, Please Understand, Beloved, was written for Ryan's boyfriend.

Santoso, however, was not the only person that Ryan has confessed to murdering.  An additional 10 bodies, including that of a mother and her three-year-old child, were found buried in Ryan's parents' backyard in East Java last year, following his arrest for Santoso's murder.  Although Ryan has confessed to murdering 11 people, the case involving Santoso was the first to have gone to trial.  Just before entering the courtroom, he sang Please Understand, Beloved for the benefit of reporters, and announced that he was ready for any sentence as he hugged his parents.  Prosecutors demanded the death sentence for Santoso's murder and dismemberment.

"His crime was sadistic and merciless," prosecutor Budi Hartawan Panjaitan said in arguing for a sentence of death.  "He was fully aware and not hallucinating when he committed the murder and is not remorseful…there was some fear after each killing, but when nobody would find out he would do it again and again…he is not a psychopath.  He knew what he was doing and knew the consequences.  He wanted Hery Santoso to die and he planned for it…he cut the body into seven parts, stuffed them into a suitcase and a plastic travel bag and threw them away."

"His acts were sadistic and inhuman and caused deep sadness to the victims' families and anxiety in the community," the chief judge said at his trial for killing Santoso.  "His acts show he does not value life, which is given by God."
 
Of course it was not surprising that the judge sentenced Ryan to death for Santoso's murder.  He appeared calm as the sentence was read, and said afterward that "everyone has to die, and I'm ready."  He smiled at reporters as he was led out of the courtroom.

"He is insane, so he should not be sentenced to death," his father said.  "I'd never gone near him.  I'd been slapped before."

An appeal of the sentence is certain.  It is not clear yet, however, whether he will be tried on the other murders to which he has purportedly confessed.  He will face a firing squad when, or rather if, his sentence is carried out.  It was not immediately known where his book or CD could be purchased.

Photo Credit: Associated Press

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