What happened to Stacey Stites?<\/h2>\n
The 19-year-old was due at work early in the morning of 23 April.<\/p>\n
She never turned up to the grocery store in Bastrop, near Austin.<\/p>\n
Within a few hours, the truck she drove was found abandoned.<\/p>\n
By that afternoon her body was discovered. She had been strangled with her own belt.<\/p>\n
Investigators found a very small amount of sperm cells – three in total – in her vagina.<\/p>\n
The semen came from a young black man, Rodney Reed.<\/p>\n
Police had his DNA on file because he had been investigated – but found not guilty – over a different sexual assault case.<\/p>\n
He claimed that he was having a secret relationship with Stacey.<\/p>\n
What is the evidence?<\/h2>\n
The murder weapon was never tested for DNA. None of Reed’s fingerprints were found on the truck Stacey was driving.<\/p>\n
The case against him was mainly built around his semen.<\/p>\n
He said he’d had consensual sex with Stacey the day before she was killed.<\/p>\n
Expert witnesses told the murder trial that could not be true.<\/p>\n
They argued that sperm could not possibly have survived in Stacey’s body for so long.<\/p>\n
Instead, they believed that she must have been raped shortly before being murdered.<\/p>\n
This was enough for an all-white jury to convict Reed.<\/p>\n
Reed’s lawyers have been fighting to change this and have\u00a0submitted new evidence.<\/a><\/p>\n The evidence focuses partly on the claims by forensic witnesses in the original trial that sperm could not survive for more than a day after sex.<\/p>\n One of those medical experts, Dr Roberto Bayardo, has put out a sworn statement explaining that he is now aware that sperm can stay intact for days after death.<\/p>\n And so, he says, there is no evidence that Stacey Stites and Rodney Reed had anything other than consensual sex.<\/p>\n Stacey was engaged – due to marry a white former policeman called Jimmy Fennell.<\/p>\n But now witnesses have come forward with statements about the couple’s relationship.<\/p>\n One woman talks about him saying that if his girlfriend ever cheated on him, he would strangle her.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n An insurance salesperson remembers Jimmy Fennell threatening to kill Stacey Stites if he ever caught her “messing around” on him.<\/p>\n Another statement comes from a former policeman.<\/p>\n He says he remembers Jimmy Fennell looking at Stacey Stite’s body at her funeral and saying something about her getting what she deserved.<\/p>\n Jimmy Fennell went on to serve years in prison for kidnapping and sexually assaulting another woman. He was released in 2018.<\/p>\n One of the new witnesses is a man who was in jail with him.<\/p>\n Arthur Snow was the leader of a white supremacist prison gang. He claims that Jimmy Fennell told him that his fianc\u00e9e had been sleeping with a black man behind his back.<\/p>\n In a sworn statement he says: “Toward the end of the conversation, Jimmy said confidently, ‘I had to kill my n-word-loving fianc\u00e9e’.”<\/p>\n What does Jimmy Fennell say?<\/strong><\/p>\n His lawyer, Bob Phillips, says there is “absolutely not a scintilla of merit” in this claim.<\/p>\n He told\u00a0CBS Austin<\/a>\u00a0that Arthur Snow is a “career criminal” who is “trying to save his own scalp”.<\/p>\n He also calls the other new witnesses “laughable” and questions why they waited so long to come forward.<\/p>\n He maintains that it’s “absolutely untrue” that Stacey Stites was having an affair with Rodney Reed.<\/p>\n Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prison cell confession?<\/h2>\n
![\"Jimmy](\"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/624\/cpsprodpb\/14054\/production\/_109540028_f4e997db-881b-4461-b4e1-2ef979244374-large16x9_jimmyfennell.jpg\")
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