By Virginia Hennessey
Monterey County Herald
MONTEREY, Calif. — Scientists have identified four DNA profiles from evidence in the 1985 slaying of Paula Ann Durocher of Monterey, and none of them belongs to the man who has spent more than 20 years in prison for her murder.
All the profiles are of different men, and two came from vaginal swabs and scrapings from beneath Durocher’s fingernails, according to Rhonda Donato, supervising attorney for the Northern California Innocence Project. The group plans to seek a new trial for Jack Edward Sagin, 62, who is serving a life sentence.
Sagin said the evidence proves his innocence.
“Like the polygraph I took in 1986, I pass and the DA’s informants failed,” Sagin wrote in a letter to The Herald. “This shows again I’m innocent of this crazy murder.”
Assistant District Attorney Berkley Brannon agreed that the test results are “suspicious,” but said they fall far short of proving Sagin’s innocence.
Brannon said there are a number of plausible explanations for how another man’s DNA was found in and on Durocher. He said Sagin’s prosecutor, the late William McCardle, indicated in court documents there was evidence two people may have been involved in the killing.
“I certainly would say we take (the results) seriously and we’re going to work the case,” Brannon said. “It’s not a question of wondering if Mr. Sagin did this, but determining all the circumstances in the matter.”
Donato has requested that prosecutors submit the DNA profiles to state and federal DNA databases in an effort to find matches among known profiles. Brannon said the state Department of Justice has informed him it will not upload DNA profiles developed by private laboratories and will have to retest the evidence itself.
Brian Wraxall, executive director of Serological Research Institute, which conducted the tests, said the department’s position is nonsense and a waste of time and resources.
Numerous Southern California law enforcement agencies outsource their forensic testing to Serological, he said, and their results are routinely run by those agencies through Department of Justice crime labs.
Jury convicts
Durocher’s daughter found her dead in her Dela Vina Avenue apartment on July 15, 1985. According to autopsy findings, the 40-year-old woman was smothered to the point of blacking out, then stabbed in the back of the head, the neck and three times in the heart.
McCardle said in 1989 there was evidence one person held Durocher down and smothered her to mask her screams while the other stabbed her.
The forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy said there was no evidence of a sexual assault and police concluded she was killed during a burglary, though nothing but the murder weapon was taken from her apartment.
Sagin was a junkie with a $400-a-day heroin habit and a history of criminal convictions dating back to the 1960s. Most of his convictions were for burglary, though he was convicted in 1980 of voluntary manslaughter in a Santa Clara County case that was originally charged as murder.
He was arrested and jailed five months after Durocher’s murder when he tried to stab Seaside police officers who were attempting to detain him for a parole violation. It was during that stay in the Monterey County Jail that Sagin allegedly told two inmates he killed Durocher.
The informants, who were in the jail at different times and did not know each other, told police that Sagin said he and Durocher’s ex-boyfriend went to burglarize the apartment that morning. Durocher, who was supposed to be gone, surprised them and took a swing at Sagin, who then stabbed her.
A jury convicted Sagin of murder during the commission of a burglary after little more than four hours of deliberations, and he was sentenced to life without possibility of parole.
Rape-murder
Based at Santa Clara University Law School, the Northern California Innocence Project agreed to look at Sagin’s conviction because it was based largely on testimony by jail informants. The group is part of the national organization of lawyers and law students that has exonerated more than 225 wrongfully convicted people, most through DNA testing.
Fifteen percent of those cases involved jailhouse informants. As a result, prosecutors’ offices across the country, including the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office, have established tough policies regarding the use of such witnesses.
In January, Judge Terrance Duncan granted the project’s request to run evidence from the Durocher case through DNA testing, which was not available in the 1980s. Serological, an accredited lab, identified DNA from semen and the fingernail scrapings as well as from a marijuana roach and hair found on a cushion.
“I think under the fingernails is pretty suspicious,” Donato said. “It’s male DNA under her fingernails. That and the rape kit ... I think it probably means (Sagin) is not the perpetrator.”
While the local expert concluded Durocher was not sexually assaulted, Donato submitted declarations from a criminalist and another pathologist concluding the slaying was a rape-murder.
“What we want to do is to run the profiles through the FBI’s national system to see if we can find out whose profile it is,” she said. “The DA says there could have been two perpetrators, but you’d think you’d want to know.”
Jailhouse informants
Brannon agreed and said his office will send evidence to the Department of Justice for testing so results can be compared to profiles in the national database.
“Now that we have the DNA, we want to take a look. I don’t think we’d run all four (profiles). I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from the joint and the hair,” which could have been left at the scene at any time. “The ones of interest are the (vaginal) swab ... and fingernail scrapings.”
Even the DNA from the semen, which also was found on Durocher’s robe, proves nothing, Brannon said, because Durocher had sex with her boyfriend the night before the murder.
In this case, Brannon said, there’s much more than DNA to convict Sagin. The jailhouse informants knew details of the crime that only the killer could have told them: the number of stab wounds to Durocher’s heart; the fact that a 7-inch knife was used in the slaying; the name of the ex-boyfriend who’d previously taken him to Durocher’s apartment.
Police purposely withheld details of the murder, including Durocher’s wounds, from the public.
The informants also said Sagin told them Durocher was not supposed to be home that day. In fact, the victim had planned to attend motorcycle races with her boyfriend but stayed home suffering with arthritis pain.
“The information he gave the informants was almost in the nature of fingerprints,” Brannon said.
Copyright 2009 The Monterey County Herald