A rush of chilly air fills the kitchen on a spring day within the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk as a person dusted in frost steps by way of the door.
Justine Paul, age 34, silently mixes himself a glass of lemonade, drops right into a chair and exhales into his lap. Quickly, he retreats to his childhood bed room, the place he stares out the window learning how briskly the clouds transfer — the way in which he’s all the time sensed a storm earlier than it breaks. A metallic baseball bat leans towards the doorframe.
When the Bering Sea wind bullies the home, Paul wonders if police pay attention by way of cracks within the partitions. Waking beneath the Michael Jordan posters in his room, he generally fears he’s dreaming. That his physique would possibly nonetheless be 100 miles away, throughout the tundra in a 7.5-by-9-foot jail cell.
Paul spent seven years in jail ready to be tried on a homicide cost constructed on unhealthy proof. The central clues that prosecutors relied on to attach him to the homicide crumbled as quickly as anybody checked. But it surely took dozens of delays, agreed to by a revolving forged of legal professionals, earlier than the state lastly dropped the case in 2022, releasing Paul. Other than one month on pretrial launch, he’d been behind bars for two,600 days.
In a state court system that allows delay after delay earlier than the accused goes on trial, Paul’s case is a reminder of why speedy trial rights exist within the first place: to forestall defendants from paying the value when police or prosecutors make errors. It is likely one of the most damning examples of Alaska’s slow-motion justice system, which takes greater than twice as lengthy to resolve essentially the most critical felonies because it did a decade in the past.
The workings of Alaska’s justice system have an outsize affect on Alaska Natives like Paul, who’re 18% of the state’s residents however 40% of individuals arrested. In recent times, they’ve edged out white Alaskans as the biggest group held in state jails and prisons.
Time misplaced whereas Paul was locked up and within the years since have left the homicide sufferer’s household ready for somebody to face a jury so the reality may be recognized.
State police solely this yr reopened the investigation into who fatally stabbed Eunice Whitman, Paul’s girlfriend. Her sister Heather Whitman mentioned she was stunned when a reporter advised her that troopers are actively working the case as soon as once more.
Whitman was unaware of the explanations cited for dismissing Paul’s case and mentioned she nonetheless assumes he’s responsible. The absence of penalties for anybody in her sister’s dying has left the household bitter.
An lawyer who helped to finally get Paul’s costs dropped mentioned the case is the primary that involves thoughts when folks ask how legal professionals can signify these accused of violent crimes. Past the truth that all people deserves protection, some defendants could also be really harmless.
“These are those which can be tremendous disturbing,” mentioned protection lawyer Windy Hannaman. “To assume that in case you mess up, this man that you simply assume is harmless may go to jail for a very very long time.”
After which there’s the crime itself: the 2015 stabbing of a joyous 23-year-old Alaska Native girl in a public place, left unsolved after the state swiftly indicted Paul on simply disproven proof. Somebody is getting away along with her homicide, and the prospect to carry them accountable slips additional away yr after wasted yr.
A Killing Like No Different
A forty five-minute flight by Cessna from Paul’s hometown, the town of Bethel hugs a curve of the decrease Kuskokwim River. Unreachable from most of Alaska by automobile, it’s dwelling to about 6,000 folks, most of them Yup’ik. Tundra stretches to the horizon in all instructions. On the city’s heart, between a comfort retailer and a baseball diamond generally known as Pinky’s Park, tilted wood boardwalks lace a number of acres of wetland.
Bethel Police investigator Amy Davis slowly walked these trails on Could 24, 2015, aiming her flashlight into the 5 a.m. gloom. What she knew up to now: 4 boys on the lookout for a spot to smoke pot had discovered a girl’s physique right here in a sunken patch of floor generally known as “the pit.” Davis arrived an hour after they known as the police.
Ponytailed and in her mid-30s, Davis made word of sodden cigarette butts among the many low cottonwood bushes and the shoe prints stamped in mud and grass. She came across the physique a number of yards away.
Though carrying the darkish blue patrol uniform of her colleagues, Davis was the Bethel Police Division’s sole detective. After 5 years in a area with the very best homicide charge in Alaska, in a state the place extra girls are murdered by males per capita than anyplace else in the US, Davis had by no means seen a killing like this.
A darkish pool of blood soaked the grass, suggesting the sufferer had been stabbed in a single location, the place many of the blood loss occurred, and dragged 10 toes away. The sufferer’s garments, additionally bloody, lay stacked in a neat pile. The killer lingered right here after the act, risking discovery.
A medical expert later concluded the girl had been stabbed 31 occasions, within the abdomen, the groin and the neck. A former Bethel prosecutor who turned Paul’s protection lawyer, Marcy McDannel, mentioned the killing is among the many most horrific she’s encountered in nearly 30 years of training regulation in Alaska.
“You solely see any such scene in a serial killer sort of case, and these are — regardless of what true crime media would have you ever consider — exceedingly uncommon,” she mentioned.
After a number of hours, Davis had no homicide weapon, no identify for the sufferer and no leads. That modified when a police dispatcher took a name from a younger man who mentioned he’d been frantically looking for his girlfriend.
It was Paul. He’d heard a physique had been discovered by Pinky’s Park. Was it Eunice Whitman?
Davis met with Paul on the police station. In a police video of the interview, the investigator didn’t speak about who died however as an alternative requested a sequence of questions on his relationship with Whitman, the place and time he final noticed her and his actions afterward. After two or three hours he advised police he was drained and needed to go dwelling. Davis let him sleep in a holding cell.
Within the meantime, the detective obtained a search warrant for the house of a relative with whom Paul was staying in Bethel. Davis wrote that police seen cuts on Paul’s cheek and hand — proof photographs present a laceration on his finger the dimensions of a paper minimize — and what she mentioned gave the impression to be a drop of blood on his shoe. She added {that a} witness had known as the station saying he’d seen a person and girl arguing on the boardwalk hours earlier than the killing.
Seven hours into Paul’s time on the station, officers had one thing. Inside the home the place he was staying was a small black backpack crammed with gadgets together with a pair of Outdated Navy denims and a tie-dyed T-shirt.
That they had blood on them.
Davis returned to the interview room armed with this new info. An investigator with the Alaska State Troopers, Austin MacDonald, entered along with her. Now, lastly, MacDonald knowledgeable Paul that Whitman, the girl Paul mentioned he meant to marry, was useless. Paul put his head down in his arms and stored it there. After a short while, he set free a wail.
Coolly asking Paul to gather himself, MacDonald leaned in. The questions sharpened. Did Paul know the place Whitman died? How she died? Paul mentioned he’d heard that the physique was discovered on the pit by Pinky’s Park. He mentioned that police advised him she was stabbed within the throat.
“So what, do you guys assume I’ve achieved it?” he requested.
“No, we don’t assume that you simply did it, Justine, OK?” mentioned the trooper. “We already know that you simply did it.”
MacDonald, like different troopers within the case, didn’t reply when requested to touch upon an in depth description of their actions.
Paul advised them they’d it incorrect. He cherished his girlfriend and wouldn’t do what was achieved to her.
He requested for a lawyer and positioned his brow on the desk, saying he was achieved speaking. MacDonald advised him investigators would cease asking about what occurred. The trooper as an alternative ready to serve a brand new search warrant, this time on Paul himself.
After a short silence, MacDonald added, “Oh, and simply so , I need you to know that we discovered your bloody garments.”
Paul lifted his brow simply barely off the desk. “What bloody garments?” he mentioned. “What are you speaking about?”
A Backpack of Bloody Garments
Paul and Eunice Whitman had been collectively for 5 months when she died.
Whitman was 23. Yup’ik like Paul, she had full cheeks, lengthy lashes like her sisters and daughters, and lengthy darkish hair and bangs. Paul was 24, a skinny, clean-shaven man with tattoos, glasses and a behavior of joking to fill silences.
Life within the city of Bethel, the place Whitman grew up, and the neighboring village of Kipnuk, the place Paul did, revolves round moose hunts and the yearly arrival of salmon in large, inexperienced rivers. The couple had recognized one another since they had been children, when Whitman visited Kipnuk to compete within the Native Youth Olympics, however solely began relationship in January 2015.
As their relationship grew extra critical and speak turned to marriage, Whitman returned to the village to fulfill Paul’s mom, Joann Paul Carl. Whitman introduced a jar of decaf espresso that she utilized in a broth for musk ox stew, a recipe Joann had by no means tried. Justine Paul — everybody pronounces it “Justin” — appeared pleased, which his mom says she didn’t take with no consideration.
One motive Davis mentioned she centered on Paul as a suspect in Whitman’s homicide was his prison document. At age 16, he was charged with tried sexual assault involving a 9-year-old boy. Paul pleaded responsible, courtroom data present, making him a registered intercourse offender whereas nonetheless a minor.
Folks talked overtly about Paul’s document in Whitman’s presence, in line with interviews carried out by police. However Whitman, who fled a violent relationship along with her prior boyfriend, in line with restraining orders she filed in Bethel courtroom, advised buddies Paul would by no means harm her.
On the night time of the homicide, a video on Paul’s telephone timestamped 12:11 a.m. confirmed Whitman on the boardwalk arguing with the individual behind the digicam, a report by state troopers says. Paul advised police the couple went in numerous instructions at 1 or 2 a.m. A dispatcher took the decision a couple of physique at 4 that morning.
Paul spent the time in between wandering round and on the lookout for Whitman, he advised the Anchorage Each day Information and ProPublica. His textual content messages confirmed him arranging to meetup with buddies and on the lookout for a spot to sleep, troopers wrote. He went to mattress at 7 a.m. at his aunt’s home and woke up later within the day to study Whitman’s household had been looking for her, he mentioned.
As Paul sat in a jail cell throughout the days after Whitman’s dying, prosecutors started working making ready to look earlier than a grand jury. They heard from a buddy of Whitman’s that she’d had a current miscarriage. The buddy advised police Paul blamed it on Whitman’s ingesting. The state’s narrative: Paul killed Whitman out of anger over dropping the newborn.
A transcript of the grand jury continuing reveals prosecutor Mike Grey delivering a grisly account. The crime had been particularly bloody as a result of, in line with the medical expert, the killer had minimize arteries in Whitman’s groin and neck. Clothes later present in a backpack belonging to the sufferer’s boyfriend, in the meantime, was stained with blood.
Grey advised jurors that beneath questioning by police, Paul had revealed “damning” information of Whitman’s neck wound. The prosecutor additionally mentioned a shoe print close to her physique was at the very least per the tread on Paul’s sneakers.
However Grey mentioned {that a} pending DNA check on Paul’s bloody clothes — wanted to confirm whether or not the blood was the sufferer’s — can be “the actual determinant of this case.”
The grand jury rapidly handed up an indictment. Paul was to face trial for first-degree homicide, with a most sentence of 99 years in jail.
There was only one downside. The blood, the state’s crime lab discovered, was not what it appeared.
Technicians examined a stain from Paul’s Outdated Navy denims and concluded it contained blood from a person, somewhat than from Whitman because the prosecution had steered. Extra particularly, the lab mentioned it was per Paul’s DNA.
A day or two earlier than Whitman died — accounts differ on the timing — Paul had fought a person in entrance of a number of witnesses. Paul advised the newsrooms that the struggle left him with a bloody nostril and that he stuffed his stained T-shirt and denims into his backpack afterward.
When Paul’s bloody denims didn’t match the sufferer’s DNA, Davis requested the lab to check extra of Paul’s bloody clothes. Emails present that crime lab officers resisted, saying the lab couldn’t check each merchandise in each case it labored on. However Davis stored at it.
Months later, the lab examined Paul’s Southpole-brand tie-dyed T-shirt and once more discovered no proof of Whitman’s blood. The stains had a lot male DNA that the lab concluded no feminine DNA was more likely to present up with a better look.
Davis, in two current interviews and by e mail, mentioned she continues to consider Paul dedicated the homicide. She cited circumstantial proof and mentioned the DNA testing didn’t go far sufficient.
Among the many different clothes in Paul’s backpack had been a tank high and boxers, which weren’t on the record of things lab data say had been examined, despite the fact that police described them as bloodstained. One other two gadgets are listed as having “switch” stains, which means they appeared to have absorbed blood from different clothes. Davis mentioned her boss advised her hiring a personal lab to check extra gadgets would value the town an excessive amount of.
“If we’re being sincere, the lab factor was a significant failure in my eyes,” Davis mentioned.
(The Division of Public Security, which runs the crime lab, mentioned in an announcement that technicians “left no viable forensic stone unturned” within the Whitman case.)
Information present the state lab dominated out the blood being Whitman’s on Could 9, 2016, rather less than a yr after Paul’s arrest. The state’s hoped-for proof, the central pillar of the prosecution’s case — that Paul stabbed Whitman, who then bled profusely on his garments — had simply fallen aside.
But it could take one other six years for Paul to go free.
Six Extra Years
Alaska’s justice system is meant to maneuver way more quickly. The state structure says crime victims have a proper to the “well timed disposition” of a case. Additional, Alaska interprets the defendant’s proper to “speedy and public trial” beneath the U.S. Structure to imply folks ought to face a decide or jury inside 120 days of being charged.
However the time to resolve essentially the most critical Alaska felonies as of 2025 was greater than three years, and a few lately resolved instances took 10. Victims have lengthy described the ache that the look ahead to justice can inflict. ProPublica and the Anchorage Each day Information this yr discovered two sexual assault cases that took so a few years to resolve, the victims died. One other case had been delayed more than 70 times.
For defendants, the gradual stroll to a courtroom carries a distinct value. Analysis reveals lengthy pretrial delays upend households, improve trauma and make responsible pleas extra possible even for individuals who keep their innocence — as a result of they need an finish to the uncertainty.
Prosecutors, protection attorneys and judges are all implicated within the torpor of Alaska’s courtrooms.
Critics have described a tradition of delay: per week right here, two months there. An lawyer could be newly assigned, backlogged with different instances or down with the flu. One aspect says, “We want extra time,” the opposite agrees, and the decide suspends the 120-day speedy trial countdown.
Quickly the record of postponements, each seemingly affordable, has grown to dozens.
These delays turned an open secret amongst Alaska courtroom observers. The state Workplace of Victims’ Rights has warned of extreme pretrial delays yearly since 2014. The pandemic solely made the issue worse. Whereas most states halted trials for eight to 12 months, Alaska’s pause lasted two years.
Courtroom officers have ordered new limits on delays to handle the issue, and courtroom knowledge reveals the time it takes to resolve misdemeanors and low-level felonies has dropped. However case durations stay stubbornly lengthy for high-level felonies.
In Paul’s case, the preliminary court-appointed lawyer had expressed impatience throughout the yr after Paul’s arrest as prosecutors stored requesting delays to check his bloody garments.
William Montgomery, a former faculty baseball participant who moved to Alaska after regulation college, was in his second yr on the job with the Workplace of Public Advocacy when he took Paul’s case. He had agreed to the postponements. In Could 2016, apparently exasperated, he advised Choose Nathaniel Peters that prosecutors couldn’t “simply proceed this out endlessly.”
Finally everybody bought the newest lab outcomes, which once more confirmed that the primary proof used to cost Paul got here up brief.
The state should have ended the case proper then, two Alaska protection attorneys unconnected to the case advised the newsrooms. Prosecutors introduced different police findings to the grand jury, however they’d so firmly emphasised the bloody clothes that they need to have dropped the indictment when this proof collapsed. Or they may have requested grand jurors in the event that they’d re-charge Paul with out it.
It’s unclear why the lead prosecutor, Grey, stood quick. He retired in 2017 and died in a motorbike accident days later. Different prosecutors immediately concerned within the case and their supervisors within the state Division of Legislation didn’t reply to detailed questions.
The Legislation Division supplied an announcement saying that as a result of Whitman’s murder stays an open investigation, the division wouldn’t “speculate, verify, or deny investigative theories, suspects, or evidentiary assessments past what is offered within the public document.”
And so the case dragged on. Prosecutors proceeded with what was left of their case.
Just a few months later, with the legal professionals considering a November 2016 trial, Montgomery requested to look at one other piece of bodily proof famous at Paul’s indictment: the crime scene shoe print that police mentioned appeared much like Paul’s Nike sneakers. An knowledgeable witness for Montgomery gave him a solution in July 2017. The 2 prints that had been clear sufficient for him to reliably look at didn’t match Paul’s, the knowledgeable wrote.
Montgomery now had a powerful argument for the jury that each the blood and the shoe proof had been defective.
However somewhat than transfer to trial, Montgomery requested for a brand new delay — to check extra proof. Montgomery was nonetheless understanding the logistics 10 months later when he was appointed to be a state decide.
Montgomery declined to talk with the Each day Information and ProPublica. His spouse, Winter, an lawyer who assisted in Paul’s protection, mentioned in an e mail that having consultants consider proof for the protection “takes money and time” and might add to delays. Nevertheless, she mentioned, it’s a matter of “making the most effective protection doable.”
All through the method, attorneys for the 2 sides gathered each few months for 10-minute hearings and located extra causes to not maintain a trial, courtroom minutes present. Protection and prosecution pulled out their calendars and knocked dates off the desk. One other trial was in the way in which. Too near moose searching season to get jurors. When ought to we meet once more?
Paul listened in from jail by telephone or video earlier than returning to his cell.
He voiced confusion at what was occurring. He wrote the decide a word at one level asking to see the proof towards him. A clerk wrote him again, saying the decide wasn’t allowed to reply. It was 4 years after his indictment, three because the blood proof had been discovered missing, two since Montgomery’s knowledgeable had undercut the shoe proof.
He says that he handed the years studying: perhaps half the jailhouse library. The Mortal Devices younger grownup fantasy sequence turned a favourite.
All advised, Peters, the decide, granted 26 delays between Paul’s arrest in 2015 and his launch in August 2022. Judges who stuffed in for Peters granted 5 extra delays. (Peters declined an interview request by way of a spokesperson, who mentioned judges can not talk about their decision-making past the courtroom document.)
As an extra indicator of how drawn out the proceedings turned, eight state-appointed protection attorneys and 11 prosecutors got here and went through the years.
“It’s only a loopy, loopy period of time to be pretrial, no matter whether or not you’re responsible or harmless,” mentioned Jacqueline Shepherd, an lawyer monitoring trial delays for the ACLU of Alaska, after inspecting key paperwork in Paul’s case. “That uncertainty and unknown is its personal type of torture for an individual.”
Case Dismissed
New momentum in Paul’s case began to construct in late 2018, three years after his arrest, when he landed a brand new protection lawyer.
As a prosecutor, Marcy McDannel was generally known as “Maximum Marcy” for her tenacious efforts to place defendants behind bars so long as doable. She’d switched sides and now labored for the Workplace of Public Advocacy. When Paul’s lawyer was appointed as a decide, his protection group requested McDannel to take the case.
Along with her bullhorn voice and penchant for profanity, McDannel struck worry in opposing attorneys. She had labored in Bethel as a younger prosecutor, strolling her black Lab, Lou, on the boardwalk the place Whitman’s physique was discovered. She knew the landmarks surrounding the crime scene and the gamers within the native police division.
McDannel reviewed Paul’s file, sizing up the issues within the prosecution’s case. She couldn’t perceive why prosecutors had caught by the fees. She additionally couldn’t see why her predecessors had taken a lot time to carry Paul’s case to trial and win.
The crime lab had lengthy since discovered the blood on Paul’s garments was not the sufferer’s. An knowledgeable witness had advised the protection group the shoe prints from the crime scene didn’t match Paul’s. (The state’s personal evaluation would later attain the identical conclusion.)
McDannel was stuffed with confidence. Whereas the overwhelming majority of prison instances finish in plea offers, not jury trials, McDannel agreed along with her predecessors’ evaluation that Paul may win a full acquittal. In contrast to her predecessors, McDannel felt, she had the expertise to do it rapidly.
“There was so little proof,” McDannel mentioned. “I promised myself and Justine we might get it to trial in six months.”
She acknowledges now that purpose mirrored her need somewhat than a practical appraisal. A jury trial was set for Oct. 28, 2019, or 13 months after she took the case.
Then, three weeks earlier than trial, the prosecution requested for extra time. McDannel had produced a last-minute knowledgeable witness. In flip, the prosecution stunned McDannel with tons of of pages of recent proof. It didn’t find yourself exhibiting a lot, but it surely required overview.
One other spherical of scheduling discussions and pretrial motions started. The pandemic struck a number of months later, in March 2020.
With courts now closed and trials on maintain, McDannel used the solitude to chip away on the state’s remaining circumstantial case towards Paul. Though he hadn’t confessed to something, she tried to exclude his assertion to police. When that failed, she discovered an knowledgeable within the Yup’ik language to interpret Paul’s demeanor throughout the interrogation.
However because the pandemic wore on, it turned clear to everybody that life was not returning to regular quickly. McDannel felt she’d proven prosecutors they’d completely no likelihood of prevailing, but they’d refused to fold. It was time to place Paul’s wait to an finish.
On Could 12, 2022, a protection lawyer named Windy Hannaman filed the movement to dismiss. Hannaman took up Paul’s trigger as a result of McDannel, like so many others concerned within the case, had switched jobs. However McDannel had already drafted the dismissal movement for her successor earlier than she left. The second appeared proper. The state, too, had simply put a brand new prosecutor on the case.
The 37-page protection movement argued that the proof the lead investigator gave the grand jury, “nearly with out exception,” had fallen brief ultimately. “Not solely has the proof didn’t implicate Paul,” Hannaman’s submitting mentioned, “a lot of it turned out to be exculpatory.”
The doc recounted how the blood work and the shoe prints didn’t match when examined. It additionally forged doubt on the remaining declare police made to the grand jury: that Paul had incriminated himself by saying Whitman was stabbed within the neck. This appeared one thing that solely the killer may know, and Paul had mentioned he heard it from police.
Hannaman described why she thought prosecutors would have a tough time proving Paul was mendacity: Police didn’t have video masking all of Paul’s time on the station, and it wasn’t clear if officers had been requested to not speak to him. (Davis advised the Each day Information and ProPublica that nobody there apart from her and the state trooper who was investigating talked to Paul in regards to the case.)
In a response a month after the movement was filed, prosecutor Jenna Gruenstein mentioned the proof introduced to the grand jurors was grounded in info obtainable on the time and there was nothing improper about it. She additionally argued that bodily proof didn’t absolutely clear Paul, noting that blood on Whitman’s denims was examined and was discovered to be per Paul’s.
However she conceded that if the state had recognized in regards to the unfavourable blood and shoe outcomes at first, it could have been obliged to share that info. In its assertion to the newsrooms, the Division of Legislation summed up Gruenstein’s response as saying “dismissal of the indictment was warranted, primarily based on info developed after the preliminary indictment.”
A Bethel Superior Courtroom decide dismissed all costs on Aug. 9, 2022.
Paul had spent a complete of seven years and 43 days in jail.
He was 24 on the day of his arrest and 31 when he was freed.
The fee to Alaska taxpayers to jail him all that point solely to drop the fees: an estimated $550,000.
Life Outdoors
On an April day in Kipnuk, a current blizzard had deepened the spring snow. A white fog hid the ocean because the sound of basketballs clanging off a netless rim echoed down the water. Pleasant village canine, wiggling on strategy, met each aircraft, and flat Starlink web antennae topped homes like commencement caps.
Justine Paul and his mom, Joann, had been dwelling within the household’s pink home. The close by schoolhouse is known as after her late grandfather, a tribal chief. {A photograph} of her father enjoying honky-tonk guitar hangs on the wall. Joann stored a stack of his data. He was blind, and the songs have names like “My Cane, My Slippers and You.”
“Each time I really feel low, I hearken to him,” Joann mentioned. She thumbed by way of the document assortment. Her son has the identical Yup’ik identify as his musician grandfather, she mentioned: Teggitgaq.
In Justine Paul’s room, a brand new Fb message arrived: “Killer.”
Whitman’s sister, Paul defined to a reporter.
Till this text, the one information tales about Whitman’s case obtainable on-line repeated the main points police used at his indictment in 2015 — the shoe prints, the bloody backpack. When prosecutors deserted the fees towards him in 2022, nobody wrote about it.
After getting out of jail, Paul mentioned, he lived on the streets of Anchorage and almost overdosed 10 occasions on fentanyl. He mentioned that on two or three of those events, he advised buddies he didn’t need them to revive him with the opioid antidote naloxone. He was trying to die. “I sort of gave up somewhat bit, slowly.”
McDannel, the protection lawyer, mentioned she anxious after his launch.
“I spent the primary couple of months after he bought out chasing him across the state as a result of he was having psychotic breaks,” McDannel mentioned. “They took seven and a half years of his life, and I feel it broke him.”
In October, the storm that Paul as soon as watched for out his window in Kipnuk lastly rolled in.
Winds from Hurricane Halong gusted 100 mph alongside the coast, driving the ocean into the streets of the village. Helicopters rescued Paul and his mom. He ended up dwelling in a village 140 miles away. She resettled in Anchorage; the pink home in Kipnuk sits empty, nonetheless stuffed with photographs.
Even now Paul fears that he could be charged with Whitman’s homicide as soon as extra.
It’s unclear how actual that risk could be. McDannel maintains he can’t be charged once more as a result of Alaska’s speedy trial clock ran out. However the state Division of Legislation mentioned such selections finally are made by a courtroom and depend upon the information of every case.
The division additionally emphasised {that a} dismissal solely displays the prosecution’s incapacity to show guilt past affordable doubt — “not an affirmative declaration of a defendant’s factual innocence.”
Whitman’s household and Davis, the police investigator, wish to see him charged once more. “He was all the time the prime suspect,” Davis mentioned by e mail.
But there stay different doable avenues of inquiry.
Police and prosecutors didn’t deeply pursue different theories of the crime throughout the 11 days that handed between Whitman’s dying and Paul’s indictment, investigative data present. As an illustration, had they widened their investigation, they may have seen one thing unusual.
One other younger girl was killed simply months earlier in a neighboring group. Murdered in a virtually similar method, stabbed a number of occasions and displayed nude on the tundra for all to see.
Editor’s word: We obtained courtroom data from bodily information in Bethel, Alaska, and compiled intensive audio of hearings by way of document requests with the state courtroom system. Justine Paul’s former lawyer additionally supplied materials uncovered by police and shared with the protection, together with a transcript of grand jury proceedings and video of Paul’s questioning by police. As a result of describing every bit of knowledge police gathered can be impractical, this story focuses primarily on proof highlighted prominently at Paul’s indictment. We used a number of channels to attempt to attain each individual the story mentions, notably members of Eunice Whitman’s household. Heather Whitman, her sister, finally sat for an interview.
