This case has been so poorly reported by the mainstream media. Just going to quote a couple other sources about the case and Ledell Lee. AK Supreme Court[1]:
At approximately 10:50 a.m. on the morning of the murder, Katherine Williams, the victim's mother, received a phone call from her daughter, who lived some four or five houses away. A man had just knocked on the victim's door, asked if her husband was home, and inquired about borrowing some tools. When the victim replied that she had no tools, the man left. According to Katherine, her daughter told her that she was scared and “did not trust this guy.” The victim promised her mother that she would be at her house as soon as she finished curling her hair. Her daughter never arrived.
Andy Gomez lived across the street from the victim, and was also home on the morning in question. While looking out his front window, he saw a man standing at the front door of the victim's residence. He watched the man grab the screen door and “make a B-line inside just real fast.” Approximately twenty minutes later, the man exited Debra's residence. According to Gomez, the man made rapid-head movements, as if he was checking to see if he was being watched. Suspicious, Gomez got in his car to follow the man. He caught up with him on a nearby street, where he observed the man talking to a female with spirals or braids in her hair.
Glenda Pruitt lived at 128 Galloway Circle on the date in question. A man she had seen four or five times and knew as “Skip” walked up her street. Glenda, who wore her hair in long braids, had a short conversation with Skip as he passed by her house. McCullough, Gomez, and Pruitt identified Lee in a photographic lineup as the man they had seen in the victim's neighborhood on the morning of her murder.
Debra's body was discovered in her bedroom at approximately 1:38 p.m. that same date. Three one hundred dollar bills that Debra's father, Stephen Williams, had given to her were missing from her wallet. This money had been part of a larger stack of crisp new bills Williams received in sequential order from the Arkansas Federal Credit Union. At Lee's trial, the State offered evidence that, at 1:53 p.m. on the day of the murder, Lee paid a debt at the Rent-A-Center with a one-hundred dollar bill. Of the three one-hundred dollar bills that the Rent-A-Center received on February 9, one of the bills bore a serial number that was two bills away from one of the bills that the victim's father had turned over to police.
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AK Supreme Court in Lee's previous rape case[2]:
Evidence -- evidence of rape overwhelming -- trial court did not err in denying motion for directed verdict. -- There was overwhelming evidence of the rape and kidnapping from the testimony of the victim and the emergency-room physician; moreover, the evidence linking appellant to the assault was substantial and included fingerprints taken from the place of attack that matched appellant's and semen in the vaginal swabs taken from the victim and appellant's blood that matched, with the chance of an identical match being one in eighty-three million; the evidence was sufficient to support appellant's conviction for the crimes charged; the trial court did not err in denying his motion for directed verdict.
Lee was convicted of the kidnapping and rape of a seventeen- year-old girl in Jacksonville, Arkansas. The victim was abducted from her sister's home on the night of November 27, 1990, and was raped in a wooded area behind the house. The victim described her attacker as a tall, black male, but was unable to identify him because he prevented her from seeing his face during the attack. Evidence from a rape-kit examination performed on the victim was submitted to the state crime laboratory for analysis. Hair combings from the victim's clothing contained two Negroid hairs, and semen was identified in vaginal swabs taken from the rape examination. After the analysis, the rape-kit evidence was stored by the state crime lab in a secure freezer in May, 1991. Also, two days after the rape, Jacksonville police officers processed the victim's home for evidence and took latent fingerprints from inside and outside the residence. The case remained in an inactive status until Lee became a suspect in February, 1993.
Hand prints and fingerprints, hair samples, and a blood sample were taken from Lee in February, 1993. Lee's palm print matched a palm print found on a bedroom window at the victim's home. Lee's blood was tested along with the victim's blood and the vaginal swabs from the rape kit. The FBI agent who performed the DNA analysis concluded that the probability of the assailant being someone other than Lee was one in eighty-three million from the black population. The palm print and the DNA profile evidence essentially comprised the state's case against Lee.
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The irony here is what actually happened was eye witnesses and direct evidence of the $100 bill connected Lee to Reese's murder ... after that arrest his blood/DNA was sampled and that connected him to additional unsolved cases of raping two women and raping and murdering another woman. He was convicted of both counts of rape, and the murder charge only dropped after a hung jury since he had already been sentenced to death for Resse's murder.
The DNA evidence examined by ACLU/Innocence project absolutely doesn't demonstrate he was unjustly convicted in this case, and if you examine the totality of the evidence I don't think it even raises a reasonable doubt. They even found moderate support for his DNA on the murder weapon and the victim's blood on his shoe. Finding someone else's DNA is being dramatically overstated in importance.
[1] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ar-supreme-court/1322909.html
[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/arkansas/supreme-court/1996/cr9...
