The Pennsylvania Superior Court has reinstated the murder convictions of three men who were granted new trials after being imprisoned for nearly 25 years for a crime they say they did not commit.
Read more Dick Langman, retired award-winning editor at The Inquirer, has died at 99
The men, known as the “Chester Trio,” were convicted in separate trials in the 1997 beating death of 70-year-old Henrietta Nickens in her Delaware County home and are serving life in prison.
Derrick Chappell, 44, Morton Johnson, 46, and Samuel Grasty, 49, have insisted for decades that they were not responsible for the death of Nickens, whose battered body was found face-down in the bedroom of her Chester home, her bed and walls stained with blood.
In 2024, a Delaware County Court judge vacated the three men’s convictions, saying newly tested DNA from the crime scene cast doubt on their culpability and might have persuaded jurors to reach a different conclusion had they been presented with that evidence at trial.
But late last month, a panel of Superior Court judges disagreed and reversed that outcome.
In a 2-1 decision, the judges said they did not consider the evidence presented by defense lawyers to be new, and said it therefore would not have changed jurors’ minds.
Judges Maria McLaughlin and Megan Sullivan said in a 41-page opinion that the newly tested DNA — recovered from Nickens’ dress and bed sheet, a green jacket found at the scene, and items in the jacket’s pockets — did not offer any revelations because it matched an unknown DNA profile that had been presented to the jurors who decided the trio’s fate.
“This same information was previously considered by all three separate factfinders and rejected,” the judges said of the verdicts in three trials.
During the trials, they said, jurors were told that the DNA found at the scene was not a match for any of the defendants.
And they said the newly tested DNA did not alter the defense lawyers’ contention that someone other than the three men broke into Nickens’ home, raped her, and beat her to death.
Prosecutors relied on witnesses who testified that they had overheard the men discussing their involvement with the crime.
Their star witness, 15-year-old Richard McElwee, testified that he had acted as a lookout while the men robbed Nickens of $30. He pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in exchange for his testimony and was sentenced to six-to-12 years in prison.
The men’s lawyers have long contended that the prosecution’s witnesses were unreliable and that the investigation was flawed. And they emphasized the lack of a DNA match for the men.
Paul Casteleiro, legal director of the nonprofit law center Centurion Ministries and Grasty’s attorney, said he was dismayed by the court’s decision and, along with attorneys for Chappell, has filed an appeal.
“We’re going to fight this every way possible,” he said.
A spokesperson for Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse said the office appreciated the Superior Court’s affirmation of the jury verdicts.
As the men continued to assert their innocence, the possibility that Nickens was raped and beaten by a single assailant was central to defense arguments during 2023 hearings in which they sought to overturn their convictions.
In presentations before Common Pleas Court Judge Mary Alice Brennan, the attorneys called on forensic experts who testified that the new tests showed a sample of Nickens’ blood and semen from the unknown assailant were deposited on her bed sheet at the same time, lending credence to their theory that she had been raped and beaten by the same person.
Prosecutors rejected the contention that Nickens had been sexually assaulted, and suggested the semen found on the sheet and in her body was from an earlier consensual encounter.
Brennan sided with the defense lawyers when she vacated the murder convictions the following year.
Jack Stollsteimer, then the Delaware County district attorney, swiftly appealed that decision, leading to the Superior Court decision reinstating the convictions.
Defense lawyers, in turn, appealed that decision, saying the Superior Court panel had erred. Their arguments mirrored a strongly worded dissent by Superior Court President Judge Anne Lazarus, who said she believed the recent DNA testing constituted a new finding — and that it was exculpatory.
The evidence, she wrote, “does significantly more by excluding the petitioners from being present at all in Nickens’ home.”
But her colleagues rejected that view in the majority opinion, which was sharply critical of the lower court’s decision to overturn the men’s convictions.
Read more How one French wine region manages to keep prices steady
That decision, they said, was based on “erroneous conclusions.”
Because of that, the judges said said, “we reverse.”