MEDIA COURTHOUSE Testimony concluded Tuesday in a Post-Conviction Relief Act hearing for three men seeking a new trial in the murder of a 70-year-old woman in 1997.
Derrick Chappell, 41; Morton Johnson, 42; and Samuel Grasty, 46; claim they had nothing to do with the death of Henrietta Nickens inside her home on the 3200 block of West 10th Street in Chester on Oct. 10, 1997.
Chappell and Grasty each received life sentences after being convicted of second-degree murder in jury trials, while Johnson received a de facto life sentence of 99 years after being convicted of second-degree murder in a bench trial.
They were 15, 20 and 18 years old, respectively, when the crime occurred. Chappell was later resentenced to 28 years to life after the U.S. Supreme Court retroactively changed the rules for sentencing minors.
The defendants have presented what they say is new exculpatory DNA evidence, though the Delaware County District Attorneys Office maintains it is merely cumulative evidence that was already known to two juries and one judge when all three men were convicted in 2000 and 2001.
Nickens daughter discovered her mothers body on the floor between the living room and bedroom of her apartment about 2 p.m. on Oct. 10, according to petitions filed by attorneys representing the three defendants.
The apartment was in disarray and Nickens appeared to have been beaten about the face and head. There was a large amount of blood on her bed, floor and a nearby wall, and her underwear was found lying on the floor.
Dr. Dimitri Contostavlos, medical examiner for Delaware County at the time, opined that Nickens died when the multiple blunt force injures she received, likely from a fist, aggravated her underlying lung and heart disease. He estimated her time of death was between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.
Contostavlos also discovered a minor injury to the victims vagina and semen inside her rectum. He opined that the semen had likely been deposited within 24 hours, though he was unable to determine if it had been left pre- or post-mortem.
Contostavlos testified at Grastys trial that there was no evidence of trauma to the anus or evidence the victim had been anally raped, though Nickens daughter was adamant that her mother, who lived alone, did not have a boyfriend.
Investigators additionally found a green jacket at the scene on top of a television that Nickens daughter said was not there when she had visited her mother the night before. A baggie of cocaine and chewed plastic straw were found inside a jacket pocket.
No DNA or other physical evidence was found at the scene tying the defendants to Nickens murder.
Common Pleas Court Judge Mary Alice Brennan on Tuesday heard from Professor Timothy Palmbach, a crime scene investigation expert, and Pennsylvania State Police Forensic DNA Science Supervisor Jeffrey Fumea.
Palmbach, testifying for the petitioners, said that a previously unidentified stain on the bedsheet had been tested in 2022 and found to contain blood from the victim and semen from an unknown man identified as Unknown Male #1.
Though it was known when all three defendants were tried that there was DNA from another unknown person at the crime scene, Palmbach said this stain undercut prior prosecution theories that the beating and semen were not connected.
Former Deputy District Attorney Michael Galantino acknowledged during Chappells trial in 2000 that the DNA was a mystery and posited that the defendants had planted that evidence or returned later with another, unknown person.
But Palmbach said that based on his prior testing in 2006 and 2008, the blood, urine and semen making up the stain all had to be in a liquid form at the same time before soaking into and fixing to the bedsheet, undercutting the theory that the semen was left at some point before or after the assault.
Palmbach told Grastys attorney, Paul Casteleiro, legal director for the nonprofit Centurion in Princeton, New Jersey, that if the semen had been left on the sheet alone, it would have dried into a crusty stain with a peripheral edge.
Instead, he said, it mixed with wet blood and what he expected was urine, though that substance was not tested. He said urine is often expelled during assaults and that he had testified in about a dozen cases where he had seen similar stains.
They are mixed together while theyre still in their liquid form before theyve had time to soak into and then fix and dry on the bedsheet, he said. So that means with a reasonable amount of scientific certainty that at the time the victim was bleeding as a result of the beating, there was also a deposition of semen and a deposition of urine, and that all three took place very contemporaneously with one another.
Palmbach also opined that semen from the same unknown male found on the jacket was likely not deposited during the assault on Nickens, but it did contain DNA of more probative value in touch DNA left behind by the habitual wearer, identified as the same unknown man.
Palmbach said the assault likely began as Nickens was standing next to the bed. The first few blows to her head would have gotten the blood flowing, he said, which then transferred to other surfaces through impact spatter from subsequent blows, swipe transfers of a bloody object touching another object. Other directly vertical drops likely occurred as Nickens was being controlled from behind while laying prone, face-down, with her head between the bed and wall, he said.
On cross-examination by Assistant District Attorney Sarah Vanore, Palmbach acknowledged nearly all of the evidence he reviewed had been available in 2000 and 2001, except the bedsheet stain, saliva found on a straw in the jacket pocket and the touch DNA on the jacket. He said he had not reviewed any trial transcripts, spoken to any investigators or read any witness statements because they were not relevant to his examination of the scene.
Palmbach agreed with Vanore that Contostavlos found Nickens had no injuries below the neck and had testified there was no evidence she had been anally raped, but told her it was not possible in this case that the urine responsible for the majority of dilution had been deposited at some point prior to the assault due to the way the stain set.
Fumea, testifying via closed-circuit television, said that DNA samples of unknown actors in crime scenes are uploaded to a database maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
He said that the system had been updated over the years, but the sample of Unknown Male #1 would have been checked against known DNA samples in the system nearly 3,000 times over 22 years with no matches found.
On cross-examination by Innocence Project Director of Special Litigation Vanessa Potkin, representing Johnson, Fumea said there were about 1.2 million unknown contributors in that database as of November 2022. He said the fact that there had never been a hit on Unknown Male #1 did not undercut the probative value of that sample.
Brennan previously heard testimony from forensic biology and DNA expert Dr. C. Alan Keel, former director of the Forensic Analytical Crime Lab in California who retested some of the evidence in the case in 2022 using modern methods, or in some cases tested new pieces of evidence for the first time.
It was that testing approved by the Delaware County District Attorneys Office that revealed the new traces of semen on the victims bedsheet, along with DNA from that same individual on the straw in the jacket pocket and touch DNA on the jacket.
Keel previously noted Nickens underwear and nightshirt contained no traces of semen. The semen found inside Nickens was also of a fairly large quantity, he said, indicating it had been left there at or around the time of her death and had not had a chance to liquefy or leak from gravity.
Keel said there is no scientific merit to commonwealth theories presented at trial that the DNA evidence had somehow been planted or that Nickens had consensual sex at some point prior to her death. She was last seen alive about 8:30 p.m. Oct. 9 and had been on the phone with her daughter until 10:55 p.m. that night, according to the petitions filed by the defendants.
The fact that there is an abundance of semen on the anal swab which had to have been deposited at or near the time of her death and given that there is semen from the same source on her bedsheet and we have identified the source of the habitual wearer/owner of the green jacket as Unknown Male #1, and at the same time we have failed to detect any biology from any other potential person of interest as a perpetrator, in my opinion, this evidence, taken together, demonstrates that Unknown Male #1 raped and killed Miss Nickens, Keel said.
Brennan gave both sides 90 days to file simultaneous briefs for their respective positions. Both sides will also have an opportunity to respond to the others filings before she issues an order.
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Testimony concludes in hearing for three men in 1997 murder - The Delaware County Daily Times