The results of a recent DNA test involving a woman killed over 30 years ago implicates a man previously found not guilty of the crime, prosecutors say.
The Innocence Project of New York requested the DNA test to seek to clear his name.
Pamela Albertson, a groomer at a Pompano Beach, Florida, horse track, was murdered in Broward County, New York, in 1990.
A local man named Robert Earl Hayes was charged and went to trial for the murder. Hayes claimed to have found Albertson's body while working on the track, and he was seen with Albertson before her murder.
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A jury in Florida convicted him of murder on the basis of some of the first DNA testing of its kind in the state, and he was sentenced to death. But the conviction was overturned by the state Supreme Court in 1997 after the DNA evidence was found to be unreliable.
Hayes was later arrested and convicted for a 1987 burglary, arson and manslaughter case after killing a woman named Leslie Dickenson. He will be eligible for release in 2025.
Now, Broward State Attorney Harold F. Pryor is hoping to stop any early release after newly conducted vaginal swabs and DNA tests have linked Hayes to Albertson's murder.
"The new DNA test results from the vaginal swab point to Hayes’ involvement in the Broward murder of Albertson, despite the fact that a jury acquitted him of the state homicide charge in the 1997 retrial," the Broward County State Attorney's Office said in a press release Thursday.
Regardless of the new evidence, Hayes cannot be tried again due to double jeopardy.
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