Exonerated: How DNA helped free El Dorado man and find new cold-case murder suspect

In a series of developments that El Dorado District Attorney Vern Pierson described Thursday as “surreal,” a judge freed a man convicted 15 years ago of murder and authorities announced the arrest of a different suspect in a 1985 slaying.

The events began early Thursday in Superior Court in Placerville, where Ricky Davis, convicted of second-degree murder in the July 1985 slaying of Janet Hylton in El Dorado Hills, had his conviction tossed out with the blessing of prosecutors.

Hours later, Pierson announced that the same DNA evidence used to exonerate Davis, 54, had led them to another suspect who was arrested Tuesday and booked into the Placer County Jail.

Michael Green, 51, is being held there on a count of murder.

Pierson would not name him directly as the suspect because the individual arrested was a juvenile at the time of the killing, but he confirmed that the victim’s daughter had used the name “Michael Green” in describing one of three boys she met in a park the night of the slaying.

The case, which used the Sacramento County District Attorney’s crime lab to analyze the remnants of Hylton’s nightgown, is the first in California history — and only second nationally — to both exonerate a wrongfully convicted individual and pinpoint a different suspect, Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert said.

Pierson said he personally met with Davis, who had been moved from a state corrections facility in Solano County to the El Dorado County Jail earlier this week, to tell him he believed he had been wrongfully convicted.

“It’s a surreal thing in a sense,” Pierson said at a news conference Thursday morning. “I’m not telling you we can’t prove it.

“I’m telling you Ricky Davis is factually innocent.”

‘We don’t do this very often’

In an emotional court hearing in Placerville hours before, Davis’ conviction was tossed out during a brief hearing by El Dorado Superior Court Judge Kenneth J. Melekian.

“You’re going to have to guide us,” the judge told Pierson. “We don’t do this very often.”

Pierson told the court he concluded the questioning of a witness by detectives years ago was “what I would characterize as an aggressive, confession-driven interrogation.”

Pierson said new DNA evidence led his office to look at the killing again as an unsolved cold case, rather than trying to prove Davis did it.

“We are very confident Mr. Davis was wrongfully accused and convicted of this crime,” he added.

Then, turning to Davis, who sat at a courtroom table still wearing jailhouse orange and flanked by his two lawyers, Melekian exonerated him.

“You’re now factually innocent,” the judge proclaimed.

Davis thanked Melekian, then stood and hugged family members who stood in line one by one to greet him.

Davis was found guilty in August 2005 of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 16 years in state prison. Davis had always maintained he was not involved in the slaying. Last year his murder conviction was reversed and a new trial was set for April after the Northern California Innocence Project got involved.

Melissa O’Connell, an attorney from the Innocence Project who helped win Davis’ freedom, was briefly overcome by emotion as she thanked him for his “tremendous strength and resilience and never giving up hope.”

Davis then thanked his lawyers, who noted that he is entitled to pursue compensation for the years he spent in prison wrongfully, a statement that led one member of the audience to call out, “Nice!”

“I’m confident that he will ultimately be compensated,” Pierson said.

Davis emerged from the jail at 3:07 p.m. to a crowd of about two dozen family members and Innocence Project members, getting hugs and working his way through a crowd of journalist.

“God bless the Innocence Project,” Davis said holding up a T-shirt from the project. His mother, Maureen, said they were taking him out for pizza and then later steak.

Outside the jail O’Connell said of Davis, “he just wants to live his life, you know, and put this all behind him.”

History of the case

Davis’ exoneration has been years in the making, with the Innocence Project teaming up with both Schubert’s and Pierson’s offices to make the case that he was wrongfully convicted.

Hylton, who covered social events for the Foothills Times, was found dead inside an El Dorado Hills home on July 7, 1985, according to a Sacramento Bee report. Davis, then 20, lived in the house where she was slain, as did his 19-year-old girlfriend, Connie Dahl, according to the Innocence Project, which is part of the Santa Clara University School of Law.

“Davis and Dahl told detectives they had gone to a party the night before and returned home at 3:30 a.m. where they found Hylton’s daughter waiting outside,” according to an online synopsis of the case by the project. “She told them that she had gone out with a group of boys that night and was afraid her mother would be upset with her for being out too late.

“The three entered the house together. Davis saw blood in the hallway outside the master bedroom and found Hylton’s body on the bed. Davis and Dahl immediately called 911 to report the crime. All three maintained they were not involved in the murder and did not know who committed the crime.”

The case went unsolved until detectives reopened it in late 1999, the project said, and “detectives interrogated Dahl four times over the next 18 months using techniques known to increase the chances of false confessions.”

“Dahl ultimately changed her story for police and implicated Davis as the killer,” according to the project. “She also implicated herself in the crime, telling the police that she bit the victim during the attack.”

The Innocence Project, working with Pierson’s office, later arranged for DNA testing from crime scene evidence that included Hylton’s nightgown and material under her fingernails.

During Thursday’s news conference, Pierson blamed part of the conviction on two El Dorado County sheriff’s detectives who interrogated Dahl. He said detectives nearly 20 years asked Dahl if she ever bit anyone and told her that Hylton had been bitten on her left shoulder during the attack in which Hylton was stabbed 29 times.

Dahl eventually offered that she had bitten Hylton and that Davis had killed her, both confessions that officials now say were false.

Dahl, who received a one-year county jail sentence in the case, died in 2014, and the detectives have long since retired.

But the bite evidence turned out to be crucial.

DNA techniques evolve

The Sacramento crime lab was able to pinpoint a saliva and blood spot on the left shoulder of the nightgown. For years, that evidence had not been usable, but improvements in technology led to the ability to separate the blood and saliva samples, and gave authorities a DNA result that proved Davis was not the attacker.

From there, investigators in Schubert’s office — a leading force in the use of DNA evidence to crack cold cases — employed the same technique that in 2018 led to the arrests of James DeAngelo, a suspect in the Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist case, and Roy Waller, who has been ordered to stand trial in the NorCal Rapist case.

They plugged the DNA into a genealogical website and got a list of potential relatives, then started building family trees to get to a suspect whose DNA matched.

Pierson would not say whether investigators followed Green to obtain fresh samples of DNA, but that is the technique was used in other cases.

He and Schubert also emphasized that they worked closely with the Innocence Project lawyers despite the fact that they are prosecutors.

“Our mission is to find the truth,” Schubert said, adding, “DNA evidence, in my opinion, is the greatest tool ever given to law-enforcement.”

This story was originally published February 13, 2020 at 10:01 AM.