Our Sheriff for Life and his posse deputies saw no reason to run DNA from under the dead woman’s fingernails. Neither did our DA till January. Of course, after the case was dismissed the Sheriff did not return phone calls on the case, why should he, it wasn’t a virgin getting chatted up by a creep from South Carolina we could bring on down.
Sheriff doesn’t care about DNA, look at the HEFELE case, 40 years old and HE doesn’t care because our Sheriff is kind of a perv it seems to me, if there’s no young girls involved, to hell with it.
THIS poor guy sat in jail forever for nothing.
No one seems to want to question our Sheriff for Life either, why, because he’s getting scarier by the day as his deputies quit not wanting to be around this incredible place of injustice and law by who you are.
Tell your kids not to get into trouble here…………….nope, there is only the law they are making up as they go along in their incompetence.
H
WACO, Texas (KWTX) – The McLennan County District Attorney’s Office dismissed the murder case against Charles Emory Sedigas on Friday, more than a year after prosecutors learned that DNA evidence excluded him in the 1984 stabbing death of his grandmother.
Sedigas, 58, was arrested in December 2018 by McLennan County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Unit detectives in the death of Vera Jean Burleson, who was found beaten and stabbed to death at her Bellmead home in June 1984.
Sheriff’s office detectives said at the time that they arrested Sedigas after they found a “critical witness,” who identified Sedigas as the killer.
Sedigas’ attorney, Alan Bennett, said DNA analysis of biological evidence under Burleson’s fingernails was done at the request of the defense – not investigators or prosecutors.
“Chuck Sedigas insisted from day one that he was innocent of this charge,” Bennett said. “I have tremendous respect for the work the Cold Case Unit does, and it is very important. But they dropped the ball here. The team traveled to several states interviewing potential witnesses with second-hand information. But they never tested the biological evidence that had been in their possession from the beginning. The fingernail scrapings taken from the victim Vera Burleson were analyzed by the local DPS lab at our request.”
Bennett said the DNA results exclude Sedigas as the murderer, adding that the DA’s office has had those lab results in their possession for more than two years but only agreed to dismiss the charge on Friday.
“We hope that Chuck can get on with his life now, but it has been terribly disrupted since his arrest in 2018,” Bennett said. “We also hope that the Cold Case Unit will one day be able to solve this horrible crime and bring Vera Burleson’s killer to justice.”
First Assistant District Attorney Sharon Pruitt filed the dismissal motion on Friday, writing that the evidence is insufficient because “laboratory results excluded the defendant as a DNA contributor to the physical evidence analyzed.”
Sedigas was set for trial in Waco’s 54th State District Court in June 2021. Bennett asserted his client’s right to a speedy trial despite the fact that he had already been in jail at that point 881 days under $1 million bond. Prosecutor Anthony Smith asked Judge Susan Kelly to postpone the trial, but agreed to recommend in May 2021 that Sedigas be released on a personal recognizance bond. Kely approved the PR bond but required Sedigas to wear a GPS monitor.
Documents filed in the case said a witness told Cold Case Unit detectives Sedigas had “a large amount of blood on his clothes” following his grandmother’s death. When asked by the witness what happened, Sedigas replied, “I killed Grandma. I stabbed her,” according to a 2018 arrest warrant affidavit.
Sedigas threatened to kill the witness if the witness told anyone about his alleged statements, the affidavit states.
McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara and Capt. Steve January, the Cold Case Unit commander, did not return phone messages Friday. Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy David Kilcrease declined comment on the dismissal.
Tell your kids not to get into trouble here…………….nope, there is only the law they are making up as they go along in their incompetence.
-Except if their parents have a lot of bucks!
Or belong to the Masons or Shriners, or gave Par an antique car or some such shit. BarryJohnson and his peeps are just inept, Par is a stone cold crook, desperate for money. He can’t keep a nickel, spends like a sailor. Living in the Bosqueville Civic Center and saying he’s going to fix up the old Smacknamara place for 97K? Sure, buddy………….he’ll be 77 in May.
Good post Bernadette. He’s a piece of s***
So imagine being a detective working a murder from 1984. You have DNA evidence and a witness who came forward with new information after 30+ years.
Would you test the DNA evidence or just just run with 30+ year old memories?
Is it just extreme incompetence almost the vaunted Cold Case Unit? Or deliberate indifference? I mean, did they know the DNA would hurt their “case”?
These are the people Parnell continually brags on in the press
Guess it now makes sense why they usually wait til their “suspect” is dead before “solving” the case
Also, so weird how suddenly Parnell is camera shy