Attorneys trying to free convicted murderer Douglas Prade presented expert court testimony Monday from a DNA scientist who also was involved in another Summit County case that freed a man after almost eight years in prison.
Prade, a former Akron police captain, is serving a life sentence for the 1997 shooting death of his ex-wife, Dr. Margo Prade, on the morning before Thanksgiving.
David B. Alden, Prade’s lead defense counsel, said he eventually hopes to win a court-ordered exoneration or, at least, a new trial.
Defense hearings are scheduled to continue Friday in the court of Summit County Common Pleas Judge Judy Hunter, who ultimately will decide the matter.
Alden’s forensic expert, Dr. Rick W. Staub, is an independent DNA consultant with a doctorate degree in genetics from the University of Arizona. In nearly two hours of testimony Monday, Staub told Hunter that sophisticated DNA testing of several sections of bite mark evidence from Margo Prade’s blood-stained lab coat — long ago established as vital in the identification of the killer — excluded Douglas Prade as the contributor.
Staub told the judge that DNA evidence also excluded Margo Prade’s boyfriend at the time of the slaying, Timothy Holsten, as the contributor.
Autopsy results showed Margo Prade, 41, died from six gunshot wounds inflicted as she sat in the driver’s seat of her van in her Wooster Avenue office parking lot shortly after arrival for work. The original police investigation determined there was a violent struggle inside the van before the shooting.
Staub’s testimony Monday did not break new ground, because the exclusionary bite mark evidence was previously confirmed by the DNA Diagnostics Center, using technology not in existence at the time of Prade’s 1998 murder conviction.
But Staub’s testimony was the first time a court-certified DNA expert’s analysis of such testing was presented in open court.
In Alden’s questioning of Staub, the attorney stressed that the most telling bite mark evidence on the lab coat most likely was found on the underside of Dr. Prade’s left arm, near the armpit.
Staub then was asked if that evidence could have been left there by casual transfer from some other male — or from contamination, as prosecutors strongly contend. He replied: “I don’t think so.”
The test results at issue were from findings by the DNA Diagnostics Center in Fairfield, near Cincinnati, last January.
Specifically, Staub testified that those tests excluded Douglas Prade from one lab coat cutout over the bite mark. Then, when additional cutout samples were tested, Staub said, two male DNA profiles were found.
Both of those profiles also excluded Douglas Prade and Holsten as the contributors, Staub told Hunter.
“Our position,” Alden said later, during a break in the hearing, “is that one of those [profiles] was the killer’s and neither of them was Doug’s or Tim Holsten’s.”
Staub previously testified in early defense efforts to win a new trial for Clarence Elkins in the 1998 rape and murder of a Barberton woman, Judith Johnson, and the rape and beating of Johnson’s granddaughter. But that early effort failed.
However, new DNA evidence later emerged from the 1998 crime scene, tying another man, Earl Gene Mann, to the slaying.
The evidence incriminating Mann was derived from a cigarette butt, which Elkins had snatched when he and Mann were prison inmates.
Elkins was freed Dec. 15, 2005, after serving nearly eight years for the Johnson slaying.
Hunter, who also handled the Elkins case, referred to her familiarity with Staub’s testimony during Monday’s hearing, noting how testing of DNA evidence has made great strides in recent years.
“I know one thing,” the judge said from the bench: “I’m smarter about it than I was in the Elkins case.”
Prade, now 66, waived his right to attend Monday’s hearing.
Ed Meyer can be reached at 330-996-3784 or emeyer@thebeaconjournal.com.