Can Forensic Science Be Trusted?

The story of a forensic analyst in Ohio, whose findings in multiple cases have been called into question, reveals the systemic flaws in American crime labs.

- By Barbara Bradley Hagerty

On February 12, 1981,16-year-old Sherry Parsons returned home from high school in the small town of Norwalk, Ohio, and found a strangely quiet house. She called out for her mother, Barbara; hearing no response, she climbed the stairs and walked into her parents’ bedroom. “Then my eyes focused on the blood on the bed,” she recalled when I spoke with her recently. “I saw my mother on the floor, bludgeoned to death. I dropped my schoolbooks and started screaming.”

Blood soaked her mother’s nightgown and the bedsheets, and covered the walls and the ceiling. The police in Norwalk interviewed James Parsons, Barbara’s husband and Sherry’s father. There had been marital problems, but Parsons had a strong alibi: He had picked up breakfast at a coffee shop on the way to work at his auto-repair shop, where he saw customers throughout the morning. Police did not seriously investigate any other suspects.

The case was cold for about a decade, until Sergeant Mike White, in Norwalk, began looking into the murder. White wondered if he could connect the bedsheets to what he believed might have been the murder weapon: a Craftsman breaker bar—a heavy tool with a long handle, used to unscrew tight bolts—that had been found in a car that James Parsons had once owned. White approached the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office, in Cleveland. The technicians there examined the bedsheets and the tool, which had no traces of blood on it, and said they could not conclusively rule out the breaker bar as the murder weapon or connect it to the crime.