PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Investigators said the distinctive misalignment of Krone’s teeth matched bite marks on the victim’s body. Media reports would soon derisively refer to Krone as the “snaggletooth” killer. As was the case with Ajamu, there was no forensic evidence linking Krone to the crime. DNA was a fairly new science, and none of the saliva or blood collected at the crime scene was tested for DNA. Simpler blood, saliva, and hair tests were inconclusive. Exculpatory evidence was available but ignored, such as shoe prints found around the victim’s body that didn’t match the size of Krone’s feet or any shoes he owned.
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STORY: "Sentenced to death but innocent: They are stories of justice gone wrong," by Philip Morris, published by 'National Geographic Magazine, on Feb. 18, 2021. (Thanks to Dr. Michael Bowers of 'CSIDDS Forensics and Law in Focus' for bringing this article to our attention.)
SUB-HEADING: "Since 1973, more than 8,700 people in the U.S. have been sent to death row. At least 182 weren't guilty - their lives upended by a system that nearly killed them."
INTRO: Ray Krone: Mariscopa County, Arizona. Ten years in prison, four of them on death row, exonerated in 2002, Krone, now 64, became known as the 100th man to be exonerated from death row. He'd been convicted of murdering a 36-year-old bar manager who was killed in a bathroom of a Phoenix lounge that Krone frequented. Krone had given her a ride to a party a few days earlier. DNA at the crime scene went untested; the prosecution relied on faulty bite-mark evidence. When the DNA was submitted as evidence in a retrial, Krone was cleared. The actual killer identified by the DNA was already in prison for sexually assaulting and choking a seven-year-old girl.
GIST: Before Ray Krone was sentenced to die, his life bore no resemblance to Ajamu’s. From tiny Dover, Pennsylvania, Krone was the eldest of three children and a typical small-town American boy. Raised a Lutheran, he sang in a church choir, joined the Boy Scouts, and as a teenager was known as a fairly smart kid, a bit of a prankster. He pre-enlisted in the Air Force during high school; after graduating, he served for six years.
Having received an honorable discharge, he stayed in Arizona and went to work for the U.S. Postal Service, a job he planned to keep until retirement.
That career dream—and his life—were abruptly shattered in December 1991, when Kim Ancona, a 36-year-old bar manager, was found stabbed to death in the men’s bathroom of a Phoenix lounge that Krone frequented.
Police immediately zeroed in on Krone as a suspect after learning that he’d given Ancona, whom he knew casually, a ride to a Christmas party a few days earlier. The day after her body was discovered, Krone was ordered to provide blood, saliva, and hair samples. A dental cast of his teeth also was created. The next day he was arrested and charged with aggravated murder.
Investigators said the distinctive misalignment of Krone’s teeth matched bite marks on the victim’s body. Media reports would soon derisively refer to Krone as the “snaggletooth” killer. As was the case with Ajamu, there was no forensic evidence linking Krone to the crime. DNA was a fairly new science, and none of the saliva or blood collected at the crime scene was tested for DNA. Simpler blood, saliva, and hair tests were inconclusive. Exculpatory evidence was available but ignored, such as shoe prints found around the victim’s body that didn’t match the size of Krone’s feet or any shoes he owned.
Based on little more than the testimony of a dental analyst who said the bite marks on the victim’s body matched Krone’s misaligned front teeth, a jury found Krone guilty. He was sentenced to death.
“It’s a devastating feeling when you recognize that everything you’ve ever believed in and stood for has been taken away from you, and without just cause,” Krone told me. “I was so naive. I didn’t believe this could actually happen to me. I had served my country in uniform. I worked for the post office. I wasn’t perfect, but I had never been in trouble. I’d never even gotten a parking ticket, but here I was on death row. That’s when I realized that if it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone.”
The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office spent upwards of $50,000 on the prosecution, centered on its bite-mark theory, while the consulting dental expert for Krone’s publicly funded defense was paid $1,500. This discrepancy in resources available to prosecutors and defendants in capital cases has long been replicated across the nation, leading to predictable outcomes for defendants staked to under-resourced and often ineffective legal counsel.
Krone got a new trial in 1995, when an appeals court ruled that prosecutors had wrongly withheld a videotape of the bite evidence until the day before the trial. Again, he was found guilty. Prosecutors relied on the same dental analysts who’d helped convict Krone the first time. But this time the sentencing judge ruled that a life sentence was appropriate, not death.
Krone’s mother and stepfather refused to give up on their belief in their son’s innocence. They mortgaged their house, and the family hired their own lawyer to look into the physical evidence collected during the original investigation. Over objections by the prosecution, a judge granted a request by the family’s lawyer to have an independent lab examine DNA samples, including saliva and blood from the crime scene.
In April 2002 the DNA test results showed that Krone was innocent. A man named Kenneth Phillips, who lived less than a mile from the bar where Ancona was killed, had left his DNA on clothes Ancona had been wearing. Phillips was easy to find: He already was in prison for sexually assaulting and choking a seven-year-old girl.
When Krone was released from prison four days after the DNA test results were announced, he became known as the hundredth man in the United States since 1973 who’d been sentenced to death but later proved innocent and freed.
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: National Registry of Exonerations:
The Registry of Exonerations entry (Curtesy of The Innocence Project) can be read at the link below:
Ancona had been fatally stabbed, and the perpetrator left behind little physical evidence. Blood at the crime scene matched the victim’s type, and saliva on her body came from someone with the most common blood type. There was no semen and no DNA tests were performed.
Krone was the 100th former death row inmate freed because of innocence since the reinstatement of capital punishment in the United States in 1976. He was the twelfth death row inmate whose innocence was proven through postconviction DNA testing. Prior to his arrest, Krone had no previous criminal record, had been honorably discharged from the military, and had worked in the postal service for seven years."
