Bob CollinsJust a week after he was diagnosed with lung cancer, Billy Glaze died this morning, the Star Tribune reports.
He was convicted of a series of murders of American Indian women in Minneapolis in the 1980s.
Last year, a KARE 11 and MPR News investigation raised the possibility that he didn’t do it.
There wasn’t a lot of physical evidence presented during the trial, which was widely covered at the time. And DNA evidence appears to have shown he was not guilty of the murders.
That’s something he’s maintained since his arrest, and something he repeated in a 2007 interview.
Glaze has been in prison since 1990.
“We are devastated by his loss. We were confident that he would be exonerated in 2016, and he would walk out of prison a free man,” his attorney, Ed Magarian, tells the Star Tribune.
“His dying wish was that we clear his name,” Magarian said. “If we can go forward we will, whether it’s this forum or another forum.”
Kathy Bullman, 19, Angeline Whitebird-Sweet, 26, and Angela Green, 21, were killed by a serial killer, investigators said at the time.
There was no such thing as DNA testing then, however.
“You look at the evidence that they were able to present against Billy Glaze at the time of trial. It was the best they could come up with, with the tools they had available at the time,” Julie Jonas, an attorney with the Innocence Project of Minnesota, told reporter Trisha Volpe last year.
“If they would have had what they have now against this person who really did the crimes, he would have been the one who was arrested. He would have been the one on trial,” she added. “Billy Glaze would never have gone to prison for all those 27 years.”
