DOUBT
out to Ken Winter, the executive director
of the Mississippi Association of Chiefs
of Police, and then to Sam Howell, director of the Mississippi State Crime Lab.
Howell said there wasn’t much he
could do without the victim’s name and
the number the crime lab had assigned
to the case. McIntosh went back to the
Humphreys County clerk. This time he
spoke with Deputy Clerk Sharon Neal,
who remembered the case well and said
she’d set out to find the complete file.
“She found it upstairs, in a nasty
One former state
official who had
visited Hayne’s
operation on
several occasions
likened it to “a
sausage factory.”
courthouse attic in a dusty file cabinet
with junk all around it,” McIntosh writes
via email. That file contained enough
information to allow Howell to find the
case at the crime lab. To everyone’s surprise, the biological evidence was still
stored at the lab.
“That was remarkable,” Carrington
HUFFINGTON
02.03.13
says. “The evidence usually gets sent
back to the prosecutor or the police department [where DNA evidence isn’t
necessarily well preserved], especially in
a case that hasn’t been closed. For whatever reason, in this case no one asked for
it back, so it stayed at the lab.”
Howell created a DNA profile and uploaded it to CODIS, the FBI database.
The program spit back a match. Kathy
Mabry had been raped and murdered by
37-year-old Michael Johnson, a former
resident of Belzoni.
There would be no manhunt to track
Johnson down. Five years after he killed
Mabry, he beat a man to death with a
hammer in Rankin County, Miss. He was
convicted of murder in 2003, and had
been in prison ever since.
Ken Winter says he’s never seen anything quite like it. “You don’t normally
see defense attorneys go out of their
way to solve a murder like that. I was
just tickled to death when I heard that
they got him. It speaks to the integrity of
Tucker and that office.”
When Roseman learned the results of
the Innocence Project’s investigation, the
first thing he did was call up Julie Mae
Wilson. She had just returned from putting flowers on her daughter’s grave.
“Thank you, Jesus,” she said.
After hanging up with Wilson, Roseman says he quietly closed the door to
his office. He stops talking for a moment,
and looks away.
“I just sat at my desk and cried,”
he says.