defense s request to test other items. i can t imagine a judge in a civilian court not allowing that. you had the evidence. why not test it? without dna results pointing to a different suspect, hennis lawyers decided to offer an alternate explanation for the incriminating sperm. at the very end they threw out there the theory that tim hennis had consensual sex with mrs. east burn within a day or so of the homicides. when he said that, you could feel the love leave in that room. i mean, everybody went, i don t believe he said that. i mean, there are certain things you can do in front of a jury and there are certain things you can t. it would not have been how i would have done it. the 14-person court martial jury declared unanimously that timothy hennis was guilty of murdering katie east burn and her children. their next task would be to decide whether hennis deserved
rape took place. what is male dna doing under mrs. east burn s fingernails? it s not tim s. there s dna under the daughters finger nail and it s not hennis. underneath the fingernails, that s not timothy hennis. but what is that vaginal swab? to me male dna under the finger nail of a woman who is raped is pretty damaging evidence. who is it? the finger nail scrapings weren t enough for a full dna profile so the defense asked to test all the crime scene evidence that might point to a different perpetrator, including a blood-soaked towel. now, whoever had sex with her didn t necessarily kill her, but you can t argue that whoever cleaned up the blood didn t have something to do with it. let s find out what happened. in the military, if you need a test done, you have to ask a judge to make the army do it for you. the judge, though, denied the
in 2010, timothy hennis went on trial for a third time for the murders of katie east burn and her daughters. but a scandal rocked the state lab that identified hennis dna. the lab had been skewing results to help prosecutors. the woman who handled the sample back in the 80s got in trouble for mixing up some dna samples in another case and almost put an innocent guy in prison. they didn t do a good job of preserving the evidence. three people had been arrested for evidence tampering. hennis lawyers asked for a postponement to investigate the lab. the judge refused. meanwhile, military prosecutors found a second smear from the rain k rape kit. they sent it to a lab and the
results pointed to hennis. the evidence came back to every marker of the defendant tested by army crime lab. you had two chains of custody. the defense could not attack the slide. for prosecutors, the dna results swept away all previous doubts. they went back and replayed the first two trials, some of the old discredited inferences. patrick cone, seeing timothy hughes coming down the driveway, hennis took a members only jacket to the dry cleaners, using the atm card. you had numerous pieces of evidence that tied him to this crime. for hennis defenders, the prosecution s case had serious flaws and their top priority was getting their own evidence in front of the jury. there is a ton of physical evidence in the house that they still can t explain. they found a head hair in ms. east burn s bed. it s not tim hennis. there is a pubic hair where the