The DNA tests, conducted over the past several weeks at a lab in Toronto, lend weight to the men’s claims that they were wrongly convicted after police allegedly coerced two of them into giving detailed confessions to the murder and sexual assault and implicating the others.
The findings also call into question claims by Chicago detectives and Cook County prosecutors that the four men ambushed Roscetti as she drove home after a late night of studying, then forced her to a remote railroad trestle where she was repeatedly sexually assaulted, kicked and bludgeoned to death with a piece of concrete.
“The DNA tests completely destroy the theory … on which these four men were convicted,” their attorney, Kathleen Zellner, said Friday after learning of the test results. “The case is really in shambles.”
A Tribune investigation published May 2 detailed how the case against the four defendants was unraveling while the DNA tests were being done. Key witnesses recanted critical testimony, and two of the defendants told the Tribune they falsely confessed–one to avoid a life sentence and the other because he believed Chicago police when they allegedly told him he could go home if he gave a statement.
The tests identified DNA from two individuals on Roscetti’s underwear, and one of those DNA profiles also was present on a vaginal swab, according to the report. Neither of those DNA profiles matches any of the four men, the report states.
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Zellner said she would urge authorities to compare the two unidentified DNA profiles against blood taken from suspects who were questioned and released during the early weeks of the Roscetti investigation as well as against the state police DNA database of sex offenders.
Though the DNA on the swab, according to the report, appears to have come from sexual intercourse around the time Roscetti was murdered, the second DNA found only on her underwear could have been there for some time and be unrelated to the attack, experts said.
Testing will be reviewed
A spokesman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office said Friday that prosecutors would review the test results before deciding on a course of action, including whether to submit the DNA to the state database. The tests “will be analyzed in reviewing all the evidence in the whole case,” spokesman John Gorman said.
Chicago Deputy Police Chief James Maurer, who was commander of the homicide unit that investigated Roscetti’s murder, said Friday that he remains convinced of the four men’s guilt even though the purported confessions said that only four people were involved and that three of them sexually assaulted Roscetti.
Indeed, at the trial, the lead detective in the case–James Mercurio–had called the possibility of a fifth assailant fiction, court records show. Mercurio could not be reached for comment.
The absence of any DNA link to the four men, Maurer said, shows only “that they didn’t leave any seminal evidence.”
“It doesn’t mean that they didn’t kill her,” he said. “Perhaps they wore condoms. Or perhaps they didn’t ejaculate in her. Whether they left evidence, that I don’t know. I’m very confident they got the right guys.”
And, for the first time, Maurer suggested there could have been other assailants–again contradicting police and prosecutors’ theory at trial.
“There could be two other guys,” he said.
Three of the defendants–Omar Saunders, Larry Ollins and his cousin, Calvin Ollins–have been locked up since their arrest in early 1987. After being convicted in separate trials, they were sentenced to life in prison without parole; all were too young to face the death penalty.
The fourth defendant, Marcellius Bradford, pleaded guilty after making a deal with prosecutors to testify against Larry Ollins and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. He completed that sentence but was later sent back on a burglary conviction and is scheduled to be released next month.
Reached at the Joliet Correction Center, Calvin Ollins, who was 14 when he was arrested and has not seen his family in more than a decade, said Friday, “I want to try to get back with my family and try to find a way to get my life back in shape. I always believed God would take care of me; that it was something I had to go through–a learning experience–and now it’s going to come out for the best.”
Lab analyst accused of fraud
The tests were ordered after Zellner filed a motion seeking a new trial. The motion alleged that former Chicago police crime lab analyst Pamela Fish misrepresented test results in the Roscetti case. One expert has called her trial testimony “scientific fraud.”
If the four are cleared of the charges in court, they will bring to seven the number of exonerated defendants whose convictions were based in part on testimony from Fish. Three other men–John Willis, Donald Reynolds and Billy Wardell–were previously exonerated. All have filed lawsuits seeking damages for their wrongful conviction and imprisonment.
Zellner, who also represents Wardell, began assembling cases in which Fish testified and sent them to Dr. Edward Blake, one of the nation’s foremost DNA experts, for analysis. Blake concluded earlier this year that Fish had testified falsely in the cases of 10 men, including the four convicted of killing Roscetti.
Fish, who has since been promoted to supervisor of the biochemistry section of the Illinois State Police crime laboratory in Chicago, has declined to comment on the cases.
Lora Roscetti, the victim’s mother, said she was disappointed.
“I was praying for the truth, and if this is the truth, then we’ll live with it,” she said. “I’m just sorry that these four had to be in jail all this time if they actually didn’t do it. … I’d like to know who did do it.”
Roscetti, 23, was last seen alive driving to her West Side apartment about 1 a.m. on Oct. 18, 1986, after studying for exams. Four hours later, her battered body was found along railroad tracks on a desolate access road near Loomis Street just south of 15th Place.
A little more than three months later, detectives said Bradford confessed and implicated the others. Then they said Calvin Ollins confessed after he was arrested.
Earlier this year, after the disclosure of Blake’s analysis, the Tribune examined more than 3,000 pages of police reports and trial transcripts and interviewed the defendants, police, witnesses and others involved in the Roscetti case.
Key witnesses recanted, including Bradford, who said he confessed to avoid a life prison sentence, and Calvin Ollins, a learning-disabled youth who said he believed detectives when they allegedly told him he could go home if he gave them a statement.
Bradford, 31, and Calvin Ollins, 28, said police gave them pieces of paper containing facts of the case and told them to memorize the facts for their statements.
Two other prosecution witnesses also told the Tribune that they testified falsely at the trial. One said he lied in an attempt to collect a $35,000 reward; the other said he sought a reduced sentence on a burglary conviction in return for his testimony.
City believes report is flawed
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Dave Sanders, a spokesman for the Illinois State Police–where Fish now is a supervisor–declined to comment. He referred calls to city Law Department spokeswoman Jennifer Hoyle, who said she could not speak to the facts in the Roscetti case but said the city believes Blake’s report is flawed and has hired an expert to review the cases.
“Based on the information we have reviewed in other lawsuits, it is our position that Dr. Fish never lied on the stand or ever misrepresented any evidence in the cases in which she testified,” Hoyle said.
Thomas Allen, who represented Saunders at the trial and is now a Chicago alderman, called the case against Saunders “one of the weakest from an evidentiary point of view” where prosecutors still achieved a guilty verdict.
“God bless DNA,” he said in an interview Friday. “They had some horrible facts, but they had no credible physical evidence. What happened was you had a heater case and it was unsolved for some period of time. There was a lot of pressure and, like many other cases that we’ve come to learn about over the last decade, it turns out it was the wrong guys.”
Calvin Ollins said that he was watching a Cubs baseball game when Zellner called him with the test results.
“I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “I was anxious to hear what she had to say. I knew I was going to be cleared, but I had never met Bradford or Saunders before and I didn’t know about them.”
“I lost 15 years of my life and that’s something I’ll never get back,” he said. “That’s a long time, even for a young person.
“I still got a lot of years left.”