PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "He (Frank) argued in a February 2019 brief to Boulder County District Court that Clark’s public defender was ineffective, in part for not pushing alternate suspects but mostly because she did not call an independent DNA expert to counter Woods’ testimony. He attached a 13-page letter from Danielson, the DU forensic genetics professor and expert in DNA, which was sharply critical of Woods' methods. He said she ignored CBI’s own internal studies and violated agency protocol. He also challenged her conclusion about Clark’s DNA inside the Carmex container.Danielson’s said, based on his analysis, the results should have been reported as inconclusive or excluded Clark completely.
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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "Separately, as part of the same brief, Frank submitted a private investigator’s affidavit that one of the former jurors admitted she had gone to the site of Grisham’s murder to “look at the layout of the complex” during the trial. Another juror said that the Carmex container “was the topic of conversation throughout the trial. If there was a conversation, it was about the Carmex.” The judge repeatedly admonished the jury during the trial that they were not to go to the scene, do any independent investigation, or discuss evidence among themselves before deliberations. The incidents were never reported to the judge. Frank asked for an evidentiary hearing on the new information, but District Judge Andrew Hartman denied the request. That decision was overturned by the Colorado Court of Appeals three years later in December 2023 and a hearing was ordered on the ineffective counsel and juror misconduct claims. A date has not been set."
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GIST: "Michael Clark has declared his innocence for 30 years; on that he has never wavered.
Even today, at age 49, serving a life sentence without parole at Colorado’s Fremont Correctional Facility, he insists that as a teenager he was nowhere near Marty Grisham’s Boulder apartment on Nov. 1, 1994.
He admits that at age 19 he had a wild streak, briefly owned a gun, ran with some sketchy characters.
He admits he stole a fistful of checks a few weeks before the murder when he was alone in Grisham’s apartment to feed his cat as a favor for the victim’s daughter whom he knew from high school.
But he is adamant it was not he who fired four bullets into Grisham’s head and chest, killing him that chilly November night so long ago.
“I didn’t do this,” Clark said in an October prison interview with The Denver Gazette. “I’m not capable of this.”
Boulder police, though, from the beginning, were fairly certain he was. They just couldn’t prove it.
For 17 years the case was unsolved. Then, they caught a break. Or so they thought.
Now nothing may be as it once seemed.
The morning after the murder police found a small jar of Carmex lip balm under the stairwell by Grisham's apartment.
It remains unknown how long it had been there.
A maintenance man would later say he cleared the area frequently leading investigators to theorize it was dropped by the killer night of the murder.
Police tucked the quarter-ounce jar away in evidence storage.
Years passed and forensic science got better.
In 2009 the case found new life. It was a time when the Boulder County District Attorney made no secret of his mission to close cases in a city haunted by unsolved murders, including the biggest of them all, Jon Benet Ramsey.
Police sent the Carmex to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and it landed with the state’s go-to-expert in DNA testing, a forensic scientist named Yvonne Woods who went by Missy.
Missy Woods was at once intimidating in her prowess and personality.
She had gained star status at CBI not only for the volume of work she took on, but also for her success in tackling tricky cases by identifying tiny amounts of extracted markers of DNA from evidence that could link suspects to crimes.
She had testified at hundreds of trials through the years.
She concluded in 2011 that Clark’s DNA matched the partial profile in the lip balm container, which pointed to him being at the scene of the crime. Clark was arrested.
Woods testified at his 2012 trial that based on her scientific analysis, “the major component of the profile developed from the inside of the Carmex container matches the Y chromosomal DNA profiled from Michael Clark.”
Where once the case was largely
circumstantial, now it felt solid.
Prosecutors ran with it. Jurors voted guilty.
Clark went away for life for first degree murder.
Back then, though, no one saw what was coming.
'Everyone's biggest fear'
On Nov. 6, 2023, CBI released a terse press release saying a lab intern had reported “anomalies” in Woods’ DNA work and analyses.
An internal investigation was already underway, the agency said, with a “meticulous review of Woods’ work.”
CBI called the allegations “extremely serious” and vowed to maintain the public’s trust.
The agency allowed Woods, who worked at CBI for 29 years, to retire.
The South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) stepped in to launch an independent review of CBI procedures, including potential criminal charges.
Almost a year has now passed.
A spokesperson for the South Dakota DCI said last week its investigation was not yet complete.
The District Attorney’s Office in Jefferson County, where the CBI lab is located, has received some files from South Dakota, but the assessment is in the early stages and no decision has been made on possible charges against Woods, a spokesperson said in an email.
In the meantime, CBI’s scandal continues to deepen.
In June, it issued a 94-page internal investigative report revealing that for years Woods intentionally deleted data, tampered with or skipped steps, misreported or omitted findings, and covered her tracks to avoid detection.
It also revealed that in both 2014 and 2018, Woods’ work had been called into question by colleagues who reported concerns to lab management.
In 2018 she was sent for mental health counseling but was cleared to resume work.
The agency has said, however, that despite vast deceptions it has no evidence that Woods ever falsified DNA matches or fabricated profiles.
Some legal and scientific experts wonder how the agency, which remains mostly tight-lipped, can be sure given the sheer volume of the problems with so much still unknown.
So far, CBI has acknowledged finding 809 irregularities in cases Woods worked dating back to 1994. Those irregularities could be minor violations of agency protocol. Or enormously consequential.
Already this year Boulder prosecutors offered a plea deal on lesser charges to a man previously sentenced to life without parole for a triple homicide after learning that forensic data they needed was compromised by Woods.
Garrett Coughlin was found guilty in 2019 of the first-degree murder of three people.
He was later granted a new trial because of juror misconduct.
But because of the CBI scandal prosecutors did not take the chance.
In June Coughlin was allowed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of second-degree murder and sentenced to 42 years in prison. With credit for time already served, he could be eligible for parole in about half that time.
Missy Woods was at once intimidating in her prowess and personality.
She had gained star status at CBI not only for the volume of work she took on, but also for her success in tackling tricky cases by identifying tiny amounts of extracted markers of DNA from evidence that could link suspects to crimes.
She had testified at hundreds of trials through the years.
She concluded in 2011 that Clark’s DNA matched the partial profile in the lip balm container, which pointed to him being at the scene of the crime. Clark was arrested.
Woods testified at his 2012 trial that based on her scientific analysis, “the major component of the profile developed from the inside of the Carmex container matches the Y chromosomal DNA profiled from Michael Clark.”
Where once the case was largely
circumstantial, now it felt solid.
Prosecutors ran with it. Jurors voted guilty.
Clark went away for life for first degree murder.
Back then, though, no one saw what was coming.
'Everyone's biggest fear'
On Nov. 6, 2023, CBI released a terse press release saying a lab intern had reported “anomalies” in Woods’ DNA work and analyses.
An internal investigation was already underway, the agency said, with a “meticulous review of Woods’ work.”
Missy Woods was at once intimidating in her prowess and personality.
She had gained star status at CBI not only for the volume of work she took on, but also for her success in tackling tricky cases by identifying tiny amounts of extracted markers of DNA from evidence that could link suspects to crimes.
She had testified at hundreds of trials through the years.
She concluded in 2011 that Clark’s DNA matched the partial profile in the lip balm container, which pointed to him being at the scene of the crime. Clark was arrested.
Woods testified at his 2012 trial that based on her scientific analysis, “the major component of the profile developed from the inside of the Carmex container matches the Y chromosomal DNA profiled from Michael Clark.”
Where once the case was largely
circumstantial, now it felt solid.
Prosecutors ran with it. Jurors voted guilty.
Clark went away for life for first degree murder.
Back then, though, no one saw what was coming.
'Everyone's biggest fear'
On Nov. 6, 2023, CBI released a terse press release saying a lab intern had reported “anomalies” in Woods’ DNA work and analyses.
An internal investigation was already underway, the agency said, with a “meticulous review of Woods’ work.”
Jailhouse prosecution witness
It was around 9:30 p.m. 30 years ago when there was a sharp knock on the door of Apartment 413 at the Fairways Apartment complex in Boulder.
Marty Grisham and his new girlfriend, Barbara Burger, sat at the dining room table after finishing dinner.
As Grisham rose, he glanced over, giving her a quizzical look as if to wonder who it could be.
She would later testify she never saw a thing as her view of the door was blocked.
She heard the door open and then the loud pops. Grisham fell, and it suddenly smelled like fireworks in the apartment.
She thought it was a joke.
Then she saw the blood.
“Stay with me,” she pleaded, holding his hand as he gasped for breath, “We’ll get help.”
She grabbed a phone to call 911, worried in her panic she would forget the address. The call was logged at 9:34 p.m. Grisham died at the hospital soon afterward.
Forty-eight-year-old Grisham was a data processing director for the city of Boulder and a divorced father of twins, Kristen and Loren, both 19 when he was killed.
That night Kristen was supposed to join her father and his girlfriend for dinner but cancelled.
Loren was across the state in his dorm room at Colorado Mountain College in Glenwood Springs.
The relationship between Grisham and his children was rocky.
So was the one with his ex-wife.Earlier that day Grisham was told by his credit union that there was suspicious activity on his checking account. Someone had called asking for his balance. He realized about a dozen checks were missing along with $4,300. He filed a police report.
A few days after the murder, Clark was arrested for stealing the checks, which he had written to himself and forged Grisham's name.
Clark admitted to police he grabbed them on an impulse when he was in Grisham’s apartment in late September.
He said he didn’t know Grisham and was only there to help Kristen who was out of town at an away University of Colorado football game.
She had given him a key so he could feed her father’s cat.
Soon the police were looking at him hard for the murder. But there were problems with the case:
Clark did have a 9 mm handgun. Bullets from that type of gun, a popular weapon, killed Grisham, but investigators could never definitively match Clark's gun to the crime because it had disappeared.
At first, Clark concocted a story that the gun was left in his car by a stranger. Police never believed it. Then later, Clark admitted he got the gun from his friend Dion Moore but threw it away because he said it made him uncomfortable.
Moore would later tell police that Clark had the gun in his car the day of the murder and two women riding with them saw it and got scared. Over the years, though, Moore has changed that story multiple times, and more than once said it never happened.
On Nov. 3, 1994, Clark was booked into Boulder County Jail. There he met an inmate named Walter Stackhouse who told deputies that Clark talked about how police would never find the gun. When Stackhouse asked if he “did it,” referring to the murder, he said Clark “kind of nodded.”
Clark has said none of that is true, calling it absurd that he would suddenly confess to someone he just met. His public defender at trial would suggest Stackhouse, who had a lengthy criminal record including giving false information, was trying to curry favor with authorities.
Then there was the timeline. Clark and a friend went to a soccer game in Lakewood the night of Nov. 1. Clark dropped off his friend afterward sometime between 8:50 and 9 p.m. in Denver, near University Boulevard and Interstate 25. To commit the murder, he would have had to drive roughly 35 miles to Grisham’s apartment in Boulder, park, shoot the victim, and then return to the townhome where he was living a few miles away, all before making a call to a girlfriend around 9:45 p.m.
Police at trial said they retraced the route twice and could make the approximately 35-mile drive in 32 minutes. They said that meant Clark had enough time to shoot the victim before the 911 call at 9:34 p.m. Later at trial, Clark's defense attorney would call the timing impossible.
Authorities thought Clark had a motive because of the stolen checks, and he had owned the right kind of gun. When he had talked to a U.S. Marines Corps recruiter, he asked how soon he could get out of town.
But with no gun, no fingerprints, no physical evidence and no witnesses, there was not enough for an arrest. The case went cold.
Guilty verdict
In October 2009, now-retired Boulder Police Det. Chuck Heidel, then part of the Major Crimes Unit, was assigned to re-visit the Marty Grisham murder. “This one was pretty cold by the time I got it,” he would later testify.
He said he was troubled by how Clark clearly misled police about where and how he got his gun, and what became of it.
The detective also focused on the jar of Carmex. He wondered if it could now be tested for DNA and sent the Carmex to CBI. “I didn’t know who was going to look at it until it gets down there,” he would later testify, “Usually it's Missy Woods and it was in this case.”
By then Clark was a 36-year-old husband and father of three small children, two girls and a boy. He and his wife, Amy, lived with her parents in Dillon. She was a teacher; he worked at a hardware store.
In April 2011 Clark was questioned twice by the FBI. At first, he thought it was about a case against his former friend Dion Moore. He said he would help. But something seemed off. By the second visit, it became clear there was another agenda.
He was told his gun was linked to the Grisham murder. It wasn’t true but law enforcement sometimes trick suspects to get a confession. Clark admitted he had previously lied about the gun. He said that in October 1994 he got a 9 mm handgun from Moore who had paid a man to buy two guns at an Aurora pawn shop. Moore kept one and Clark took the other but threw it in a dumpster. He again insisted he did not kill Grisham.
Clark’s phone was tapped. So was the phone belonging to his in-laws. A GPS tracking device was put on his Jeep. He agreed to a DNA swab. He never called a lawyer because back then he didn’t think he needed one.
On Jan. 6, 2012, with his three children in the vehicle Clark was arrested at gunpoint by police in the driveway of the family's babysitter. He was taken away with the vehicle still idling.
The trial began Oct. 9, 2012. Clark was assigned to a public defender named Megan Ring. Boulder County Assistant District Attorney Ryan Brackley prosecuted. Much of the testimony was a rehash of what police had in 1994.
Then Missy Woods took the stand.
She said when she first received the Carmex in 2011, she only tested the outside of the container for DNA. According to Heidel, when he asked why she didn’t test the contents, she said it did not occur to her to do so. She said she would try.
At trial, she told jurors when looking at the DNA extracted from the interior of the Carmex jar, 99.4 percent of the male population could be excluded – but Clark could not.
Further, she testified that although it was only a partial profile, “the major component” of what was developed from the inside of the Carmex container potentially matched Clark’s DNA.
It was only on cross-examination that she acknowledged that the tests of the outside of the Carmex jar eliminated Clark.
His DNA swab was the only one she had been given.
Years later, Phillip Danielson, a professor of forensic genetics and leading DNA expert at the University of Denver, would challenge Woods’ conclusions, and testimony, calling them oversimplified, incomplete and misleading:
Of the 17 DNA markers scientists analyze, Woods was only able to isolate five from inside the Carmex jar and those, he said, should have raised red flags about her conclusions. Four did indeed show that Clark could have been a match – along with many other males who share the same profile. “She never gave the jury the second half,” he told The Gazette in October.
The fifth marker, depending on the analysis, could have excluded him completely. So, at best her interpretations were inconclusive, at worst they were inaccurate, he said.“There are multiple reasonable interpretations, but she reported only one,” he said, adding that it was the one that implicated Clark.
The jury took two days to reach a verdict. When Michael and Amy Clark walked into court on Oct. 22, 2012, they were sure he was about to be cleared. They thought the case against him was riddled with reasonable doubt. Clark had previously been offered a plea deal, but he turned it down, refusing to say he was guilty.
Amy Clark gave her husband a quick kiss and said, “Let’s finish this.”
Then came the word: Guilty.
Clark sank to his knees and let out a long moan. “Noooooooo.”
Missy Woods was questioned on Nov. 8, 2023 for nearly two and a half hours. The lead interviewer was Kellon Hassentab, assistant director of the investigations unit at CBI.
He was joined by Cory Latham, special agent in charge at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, brought in to help.
Woods was flanked by her attorney, Ryan Brackley, the same lawyer, now in private practice, who was the lead prosecutor in the Clark case.
Brackley did not reply to requests for an interview or comment.
“Should we have any concerns about somebody being in prison that shouldn’t be right now?” asked Hassentab.
“Absolutely not,” Woods replied.
Adam Frank, a Denver civil rights lawyer and post-conviction defense attorney now representing Clark in his appeal, is beyond incredulous.
“I’m sure she’d like to believe that but it’s just not true,” Frank said, “Michael Clark and his family have spent the last 12 years in a living hell because of her.”
Frank has been raising concerns about Woods' testimony in his client’s case for as far back as 2019.
After Clark’s first automatic appeal failed in 2016, Frank joined the case two years later.
At first, the lawyer said he was just trying to determine if there were any judicial mistakes that could lead to a reversal, not whether Clark was innocent. Today he believes both are true.
He argued in a February 2019 brief to Boulder County District Court that Clark’s public defender was ineffective, in part for not pushing alternate suspects but mostly because she did not call an independent DNA expert to counter Woods’ testimony.
He attached a 13-page letter from Danielson, the DU forensic genetics professor and expert in DNA, which was sharply critical of Woods' methods.
He said she ignored CBI’s own internal studies and violated agency protocol.
He also challenged her conclusion about Clark’s DNA inside the Carmex container.
Danielson’s said, based on his analysis, the results should have been reported as inconclusive or excluded Clark completely.
Separately, as part of the same brief, Frank submitted a private investigator’s affidavit that one of the former jurors admitted she had gone to the site of Grisham’s murder to “look at the layout of the complex” during the trial.
Another juror said that the Carmex container “was the topic of conversation throughout the trial. If there was a conversation, it was about the Carmex.”
The judge repeatedly admonished the jury during the trial that they were not to go to the scene, do any independent investigation, or discuss evidence among themselves before deliberations.
The incidents were never reported to the judge.
Frank asked for an evidentiary hearing on the new information, but District Judge Andrew Hartman denied the request.
That decision was overturned by the Colorado Court of Appeals three years later in December 2023 and a hearing was ordered on the ineffective counsel and juror misconduct claims.
A date has not been set.
After the CBI scandal broke, Frank filed a motion Aug. 13 arguing that the new revelations bolstered the need to overturn Clark’s conviction:
“Mr. Clark has recently learned that before, during and after her DNA analysis and testimony, CBI DNA analyst Missy Woods was engaged in horrific, previously undisclosed misconduct that renders any opinion and testimony from her wholly incredible. CBI has known about this conduct for years but covered it up,” the motion said.
District Attorney Michael Doughtery said in the same statement: “CBI has disclosed that this misconduct, which was known to CBI, may extend as far back as 2014 and 2018.
These issues were never reported to prosecutors, defense attorneys or the courts throughout Colorado
. As a result, I expect that many closed cases will require re-examination and be challenged in court, along with the overall integrity of the processes at the state’s lab.”
While Megan Ring, Clark’s attorney at trial and now the Colorado State Public Defender, declined to comment on her former client’s case or the appeal, her office released a statement about Woods:
“We still do not know how many cases are affected. We don’t have full disclosure about all of the details of the misconduct,” adding “we have deep concern it involves presenting false statements in court under oath in at least some cases.”
During her interview with CBI investigators, Woods said she felt overworked and burnt out.
She said she pushed herself to be the best and most productive, often taking on more cases than others in the lab because as a single mother she needed the overtime.
When confronted about deletions of data and crucial skipped steps, she was vague, saying she didn’t remember or was non-committal.
“You told somebody that you just didn’t wanna do the amplification and therefore you deleted the value out? Does that sound familiar?” asked Hassentab.
“It’s possible,” she replied.
Brackley, now serving as her attorney, has said previously she would not comment on any open cases.
Chuck Heidel, retired from the Boulder Police Department in 2016, remembers the Clark case. He has never budged in his belief Clark is guilty.
"This was a circumstantial case but a strong circumstantial case," he told the Gazette in a recent interview. He does not think the DNA testimony was all that important nor was it key to convicting Clark.
He did acknowledge, though, that the CBI scandal could impact a re-trial if it came to that. He said he had known Woods for years and worked with her on numerous cases. "She did good work," he said, "this came as a surprise."
Meanwhile, Clark said from prison he has never lost hope, but admitted despair can sometimes swallow him. Every setback in his appeal feels like he is back again in the courtroom when the jury said “guilty.”
His wife, too, said she has been crushed so many times in the past 12 years. Still, she stands by her husband. “Not for one second,” she said when asked if she ever doubted him. Both do worry, though, about the toll taken on their children over the years, two now teenagers and one a young adult.
Clark sees vindication in the CBI scandal.
“The truth,” he said, “will come out.”
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
- SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
