PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Statham says the officers told her that District Attorney Robert Tew has opened a new investigation into the 1993 death of her two-year-old daughter, Haley Oliveaux. Chris Duncan, Statham’s live-in boyfriend at the time, was accused of brutally raping and murdering the child. He was convicted and sent to Louisiana’s death row. After three decades insisting he’d been wrongfully convicted, he was declared innocent by a state judge and released from prison last November."
-----------------------------------------------
PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "I’m in the midst of publishing a three-part series about Duncan’s case. You can read the backstory in Part One here, and Part Two here. Although the Louisiana Supreme Court unanimously upheld the innocence finding in June, effectively exonerating Duncan, the state has continued to defend its case. Tew immediately vowed to put Duncan on trial again."
----------------------------------------------
PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "This was always farfetched. There is video footage of forensic “expert” Michael West manufacturing the evidence used to convict Duncan. There is ample evidence that Steven Hayne, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Haley, lied on the witness stand and gave testimony wholly unsupported by science. Hayne and West were the only two forensic experts who examined Haley’s body. Hayne is now dead and discredited. West is alive, but even more discredited. Most of the other witnesses at Duncan’s trial have died too. And the evidence that Haley was not murdered but, in fact, drowned in the bathtub after having a seizure is even stronger now than it was at Duncan’s trial."
--------------------------------------------
PASSAGE FOUR OF THE DAY: "But it gets weirder. According to Statham, the officers also said that the state plans to exhume Haley as early as today. She says they told her that a lab in Shreveport is ready to receive and examine her remains. I don’t really have words to convey how crazy and unusual this is."
---------------------------------------------
COMMENTARY: "Breaking: DA demands DNA from Chris Duncan and Haley Oliveaux mother, by Radley Balko, published by The Watch', on September 17, 2026. (Investigative journalist. Proprietor of The Watch newsletter. Ex-Washington Post. Author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, co-author of The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist.")
PHOTO CAPTION: "Allison Statham and Chris Duncan, at the premiere of a documentary about his case."
GIST: "Yesterday afternoon I received a frantic phone call from Allison Statham. She said a detective and patrol officer from the West Monroe Police Department were outside her home in Louisiana. They were demanding a DNA sample. When she refused, she says they threatened to arrest her.
Statham’s partner, Mark Dellingham, told the officers that Statham wouldn’t be giving a sample without a warrant. They said they would return the next day with a court order.
I can’t begin to describe how nuts this is. But I’m going to try.
Statham says the officers told her that District Attorney Robert Tew has opened a new investigation into the 1993 death of her two-year-old daughter, Haley Oliveaux. Chris Duncan, Statham’s live-in boyfriend at the time, was accused of brutally raping and murdering the child. He was convicted and sent to Louisiana’s death row. After three decades insisting he’d been wrongfully convicted, he was declared innocent by a state judge and released from prison last November.
I’m in the midst of publishing a three-part series about Duncan’s case. You can read the backstory in Part One here, and Part Two here. Although the Louisiana Supreme Court unanimously upheld the innocence finding in June, effectively exonerating Duncan, the state has continued to defend its case. Tew immediately vowed to put Duncan on trial again.
This was always farfetched. There is video footage of forensic “expert” Michael West manufacturing the evidence used to convict Duncan. There is ample evidence that Steven Hayne, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Haley, lied on the witness stand and gave testimony wholly unsupported by science. Hayne and West were the only two forensic experts who examined Haley’s body. Hayne is now dead and discredited. West is alive, but even more discredited.
Most of the other witnesses at Duncan’s trial have died too. And the evidence that Haley was not murdered but, in fact, drowned in the bathtub after having a seizure is even stronger now than it was at Duncan’s trial.
Statham says the officers who came to her home yesterday told her they have “new evidence,” and that this new evidence requires her to give a DNA sample. They told her they would also be obtaining DNA from Duncan. The new evidence has apparently been sitting at the West Monroe police department for 33 years. Statham says one officer told her that it was a piece of clothing.
Needless to say, I’m extremely dubious of this claim. The state has insisted for decades that all the biological evidence in the case was destroyed. Setting aside why this evidence would suddenly be found now, it’s hard to fathom anything that would (a) implicate Duncan to the point of meriting a new investigation, or (b) require a DNA sample from both Duncan and Statham.
Duncan’s DNA profile should already be on file. He was convicted of murdering a child and sentenced to death. But also, Duncan and Statham lived with Haley. Duncan made her breakfast and gave her a bath on the morning she died. The only possible evidence that would incriminate him at this point would be semen or blood. But the investigating detective said in sworn statements decades ago — including at Duncan’s trial — that police found no blood anywhere at the crime scene. They also found no blood in the apartment, on Duncan’s clothes, on Haley, or on a towel Duncan wrapped around her after finding her in the tub. They also found no evidence of anything used to clean up a murder or sexual assault. Hayne testified that he ran a rape kit on Haley and found no semen or pubic hairs.
To explain all of this away at trial, the state claimed that Duncan furiously scrubbed Haley clean after raping and killing her.
But it gets weirder. According to Statham, the officers also said that the state plans to exhume Haley as early as today. She says they told her that a lab in Shreveport is ready to receive and examine her remains.
I don’t really have words to convey how crazy and unusual this is. If you read Part Two of my series, you know Duncan’s defense team wanted Haley exhumed before his trial. They wanted to have their own expert review Hayne’s claim that she had been abused. They also wanted to run toxicology tests on her blood. Hayne had failed to order those tests, and the state crime lab then inadvertently destroyed her sample. But the DA’s office pushed back, and the trial judge sided with them. Haley was not exhumed.
A proper exhumation and exam would only further vindicate Duncan at this point. But given everything the state has already done in this case, there’s little reason to trust that any of this would be done correctly — or in good faith. This is a case in which the state already used manufactured evidence to send a man to death row — and continued to defend that evidence even I exposed It’s not hard to imagine that they could try again.
As for why Tew might be doing this, there is some context worth mentioning. Tew is retiring at the end of this year. One of the candidates running to replace him is the judge who declared Duncan innocent. The other is a prosecutor who worked for Tew’s predecessor — the man who sent Duncan to death row in 1998. Although that candidate has yet to say anything about the case in public, those who know him have told me they think he’d be reluctant to re-try Duncan. So perhaps Tew thinks he only has until the end of the year to re-indict Duncan.
For most of the last 30 years, Allison Statham has kept quiet about Duncan’s conviction. She has told me she always had doubts about his guilt, but the evidence seemed overwhelming and prosecutors assured her that he was guilty. But two years ago, she heard for the first time about the video of West creating bite marks on Haley’s body that he claimed were a match to Duncan, along with other details about his conviction that had been kept from her.
Statham began to believe Duncan really could be innocent. And the more she saw and read, the more certain she was. She finally went public last year, telling Mississippi Today that she supported both his exoneration and his release.
Since then, she says, she has been harassed by law enforcement. At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of her accounts, which at times sounded paranoid and conspiratorial. But the more I have talked to her, the more plausible it all seems.
So when Statham called me yesterday to say that there were cops outside her door demanding her DNA, I was worried for her. And she herself was terrified.
I do have independent confirmation that Tew has reopened his investigation and has requested DNA samples from both Statham and Duncan . So far, I only have what Statham and Dellingham told me about the rest — that the alleged new evidence is an article of clothing, and that the state plans to exhume Haley as soon as today.
Tew’s office has not responded to my request for comment. But I’m submitting an open records request for the body camera footage from the officers’ visit to Statham’s home. I suppose it’s always possible that the cops were messing with her, or got something wrong, or that there was some miscommunication.
Whatever is happening right now, it’s one of the most bonkers attempts to save a bad conviction I’ve ever seen. It’s also needlessly cruel, both to Duncan and to the mother of the little girl they continue to insist was murdered.""
The entire commentary can be read at:
breaking-da-demands-dna-from-chris
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. 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. 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; 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!
--------------------------------------------
PASSAGE FOUR OF THE DAY: "But it gets weirder. According to Statham, the officers also said that the state plans to exhume Haley as early as today. She says they told her that a lab in Shreveport is ready to receive and examine her remains. I don’t really have words to convey how crazy and unusual this is."
---------------------------------------------
COMMENTARY: "Breaking: DA demands DNA from Chris Duncan and Haley Oliveaux mother, by Radley Balko, published by The Watch', on September 17, 2026. (Investigative journalist. Proprietor of The Watch newsletter. Ex-Washington Post. Author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, co-author of The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist.")
PHOTO CAPTION: "Allison Statham and Chris Duncan, at the premiere of a documentary about his case."
GIST: "Yesterday afternoon I received a frantic phone call from Allison Statham. She said a detective and patrol officer from the West Monroe Police Department were outside her home in Louisiana. They were demanding a DNA sample. When she refused, she says they threatened to arrest her.
Statham’s partner, Mark Dellingham, told the officers that Statham wouldn’t be giving a sample without a warrant. They said they would return the next day with a court order.
I can’t begin to describe how nuts this is. But I’m going to try.
Statham says the officers told her that District Attorney Robert Tew has opened a new investigation into the 1993 death of her two-year-old daughter, Haley Oliveaux. Chris Duncan, Statham’s live-in boyfriend at the time, was accused of brutally raping and murdering the child. He was convicted and sent to Louisiana’s death row. After three decades insisting he’d been wrongfully convicted, he was declared innocent by a state judge and released from prison last November.
I’m in the midst of publishing a three-part series about Duncan’s case. You can read the backstory in Part One here, and Part Two here. Although the Louisiana Supreme Court unanimously upheld the innocence finding in June, effectively exonerating Duncan, the state has continued to defend its case. Tew immediately vowed to put Duncan on trial again.
This was always farfetched. There is video footage of forensic “expert” Michael West manufacturing the evidence used to convict Duncan. There is ample evidence that Steven Hayne, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Haley, lied on the witness stand and gave testimony wholly unsupported by science. Hayne and West were the only two forensic experts who examined Haley’s body. Hayne is now dead and discredited. West is alive, but even more discredited.
Most of the other witnesses at Duncan’s trial have died too. And the evidence that Haley was not murdered but, in fact, drowned in the bathtub after having a seizure is even stronger now than it was at Duncan’s trial.
Statham says the officers who came to her home yesterday told her they have “new evidence,” and that this new evidence requires her to give a DNA sample. They told her they would also be obtaining DNA from Duncan. The new evidence has apparently been sitting at the West Monroe police department for 33 years. Statham says one officer told her that it was a piece of clothing.
Needless to say, I’m extremely dubious of this claim. The state has insisted for decades that all the biological evidence in the case was destroyed. Setting aside why this evidence would suddenly be found now, it’s hard to fathom anything that would (a) implicate Duncan to the point of meriting a new investigation, or (b) require a DNA sample from both Duncan and Statham.
Duncan’s DNA profile should already be on file. He was convicted of murdering a child and sentenced to death. But also, Duncan and Statham lived with Haley. Duncan made her breakfast and gave her a bath on the morning she died. The only possible evidence that would incriminate him at this point would be semen or blood. But the investigating detective said in sworn statements decades ago — including at Duncan’s trial — that police found no blood anywhere at the crime scene. They also found no blood in the apartment, on Duncan’s clothes, on Haley, or on a towel Duncan wrapped around her after finding her in the tub. They also found no evidence of anything used to clean up a murder or sexual assault. Hayne testified that he ran a rape kit on Haley and found no semen or pubic hairs.
To explain all of this away at trial, the state claimed that Duncan furiously scrubbed Haley clean after raping and killing her.
But it gets weirder. According to Statham, the officers also said that the state plans to exhume Haley as early as today. She says they told her that a lab in Shreveport is ready to receive and examine her remains.
I don’t really have words to convey how crazy and unusual this is. If you read Part Two of my series, you know Duncan’s defense team wanted Haley exhumed before his trial. They wanted to have their own expert review Hayne’s claim that she had been abused. They also wanted to run toxicology tests on her blood. Hayne had failed to order those tests, and the state crime lab then inadvertently destroyed her sample. But the DA’s office pushed back, and the trial judge sided with them. Haley was not exhumed.
A proper exhumation and exam would only further vindicate Duncan at this point. But given everything the state has already done in this case, there’s little reason to trust that any of this would be done correctly — or in good faith. This is a case in which the state already used manufactured evidence to send a man to death row — and continued to defend that evidence even I exposed It’s not hard to imagine that they could try again.
As for why Tew might be doing this, there is some context worth mentioning. Tew is retiring at the end of this year. One of the candidates running to replace him is the judge who declared Duncan innocent. The other is a prosecutor who worked for Tew’s predecessor — the man who sent Duncan to death row in 1998. Although that candidate has yet to say anything about the case in public, those who know him have told me they think he’d be reluctant to re-try Duncan. So perhaps Tew thinks he only has until the end of the year to re-indict Duncan.
For most of the last 30 years, Allison Statham has kept quiet about Duncan’s conviction. She has told me she always had doubts about his guilt, but the evidence seemed overwhelming and prosecutors assured her that he was guilty. But two years ago, she heard for the first time about the video of West creating bite marks on Haley’s body that he claimed were a match to Duncan, along with other details about his conviction that had been kept from her.
Statham began to believe Duncan really could be innocent. And the more she saw and read, the more certain she was. She finally went public last year, telling Mississippi Today that she supported both his exoneration and his release.
Since then, she says, she has been harassed by law enforcement. At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of her accounts, which at times sounded paranoid and conspiratorial. But the more I have talked to her, the more plausible it all seems.
So when Statham called me yesterday to say that there were cops outside her door demanding her DNA, I was worried for her. And she herself was terrified.
I do have independent confirmation that Tew has reopened his investigation and has requested DNA samples from both Statham and Duncan . So far, I only have what Statham and Dellingham told me about the rest — that the alleged new evidence is an article of clothing, and that the state plans to exhume Haley as soon as today.
Tew’s office has not responded to my request for comment. But I’m submitting an open records request for the body camera footage from the officers’ visit to Statham’s home. I suppose it’s always possible that the cops were messing with her, or got something wrong, or that there was some miscommunication.
Whatever is happening right now, it’s one of the most bonkers attempts to save a bad conviction I’ve ever seen. It’s also needlessly cruel, both to Duncan and to the mother of the little girl they continue to insist was murdered.""
The entire commentary can be read at:
breaking-da-demands-dna-from-chris
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. 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. 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; 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!
