The missing evidence in the laboratory endangers the case of cold mobile murder

Mobile, wing. (Wala) -A case of 37-year-old cold murder is in danger because key evidence seems to be missing.

The Mobile County Circuit Judge, Wesley Pipes, abruptly withdrew the case of Anthony Lorenzo Hayes of the file of judgment this month in the midst of questions about that evidence, a sample of a jacket that supposedly contains blood of both the accused and of the victim.

Prosecutors sent the exhibition to the Alabama Forensic Sciences Department for DNA tests. Defensor lawyer Richard Shields said that he is, with much, the most significant evidence against Hayes.

“I think it would certainly be useful for your case,” he said. “I think without that, it would be very difficult to present a case.”

The pipes established the case of an audience on May 14. The Mobile County District Prosecutor, Keith Blackwood, declined to comment until the problem is solved. The Alabama Forensic Sciences Department did not immediately respond to a Fox10 News consultation on Monday.

Stella McCrary’s son found her stabbed at her home in Burton Avenue in the North Chrichton Mobile community on January 23, 1988. The police surveyed the neighborhood and even came up with a suspect.

But no arrests were made, until 2021. That was when a large jury of the mobile county accused Hayes, who lived in Arizona at that time. Police Sergeant. Nick Crepeau, who was in charge of Cold Case Squad, attributed the arrest at that time to additional investigation.

“He simply took an additional follow -up investigation to unite all the pieces, and once it was done, we were able to obtain an accusation,” he said in May 2021.

But Shields said it was not a new evidence at all. He said that the most recent evidence that the District Prosecutor’s Office has revealed to him is about 25 years old.

“That is something strange.

Shields said the researchers tested the blood in the early 1990s and again approximately a decade later. It is not clear why prosecutors did not feel comfortable presenting charges at that time, but a new complication arose last year in the way in which a ruling of the United States Supreme Court. The judges unanimously ruled that an expert witness cannot testify about the results of a report that he did not prepare.

Shields said the expert who performed the original DNA tests has died, requiring that the test is executed again. That’s where the sample that lacks clothes is caught. Shields said prosecutors have little more without that DNA result. He said that there are some witnesses who put Hayes in the general area near the time of stabbing.

“But I mean, he lived near this person,” he said. “He was known by this person.

Shields acknowledged that Hayes had a criminal record, but said his client left that life behind him a long time. He said Hayes moved to California and then Arizona. He said prosecutors have never indicated a possible reason to kill McCary, for whom the defendant had done gardening work.

Shields suggested that the case is weak even if DNA results were admissible. He said there is a dispute about who belonged to the jacket.

“Someone who has been in this house many times, would be a jump of faith for a jury to say: ‘Ok, you kill this person,” he said. “That would be difficult.

Hayes is on bail, but he has not been allowed to leave Mobile County, which means that he has not been Arizona’s home in almost four years, Shields said. The defendant is now 69 years old, the same age as McCary was when he died.

As prosecutors try to save the case, they will have to deal with witnesses that are no longer available. Shields said that will affect the tasks as mundane as confirming that the photographs taken in 1988 precisely reflect the crime scene.

“The biggest problem, in my opinion, which they have is, you know, several of the researchers are no longer alive,” he told Fox10 News. “And if you need people to come to court to testify about certain practical things, they are no longer available because they have died.”

Copyright 2025 Wala. All rights reserved.