Update: The Reversal

April 22, 2024·33 min·1 clip

After 17 months fighting for DNA testing, New Hampshire reverses course on the eve of the hearing.

Bear Brook Season 2 returns with a major procedural shift in the Jason Carroll case. Attorney Cynthia Mousseau of the New England Innocence Project has spent 17 months fighting to get court-held evidence DNA tested. The state had previously argued there was no scenario in which testing could exonerate Jason. Three days before a December 2023 hearing, prosecutor Charles Buka phones Cynthia. She expects an agreement; instead he reveals a second box of evidence was found in the basement of the former New Hampshire Department of Justice headquarters as the building is being demolished. The hearing is postponed and converted to a status conference before Judge William Delker. Cynthia presses the state to recheck Bedford PD, the State Police, and its own offices. That recheck surfaces three more boxes at Bedford PD and roughly 400 pages of state lab documents. Inside the new material is a stained white men's long-sleeve undershirt found in August 1988 about two and a half miles from Sharon's body, oddly labeled victim's shirt despite Sharon last being seen in a maternity shirt with teddy bears. A long wooden-handled knife found by another passerby less than a mile from the scene also turns up. The lab file reveals that in 2004 — 16 years after the murder and 13 years after charges against Ken Johnson were dropped — state police generated a DNA profile from Ken's stored blood, with no documented reason. Cynthia adds the shirt and knife to a list of about a dozen items she wants tested, including fingernail clippings, Sharon's clothing, cigarette butts, samples from her body, and bloody soil. She lines up expert witnesses including former Connecticut forensic lab head Tim Palmbach, biochemist Carl Reich, false-confession expert Haley Cleary, and genetic genealogist Barbara Rae Venter. The night before the rescheduled April 2024 hearing, the state withdraws its objection to testing while reserving the right to fight any exoneration argument. Cynthia describes how late-night reversals happen in court more than people think. The state lab will run quantitative testing first, choosing where to swab or cut each item, with a six-month judicial check-in. The lab has a 10-month backlog and degraded DNA is a real risk. Jason, reached by phone, calls it the best news in 35 years. Cynthia outlines best-case and tricky scenarios: a CODIS hit on an unknown perpetrator would be cleanest; finding Ken's or Tony's DNA could be ambiguous given their relationships to Sharon; finding Jason's DNA she considers a remote possibility. The episode ends with Moon framing the result as the locked gate finally opening.

As heard by us

A tense Bear Brook update on Jason Carroll's DNA fight and the evidence that may still complicate the case.

Bear Brook returns to the box of evidence now sitting at the center of Jason Carroll's push for DNA testing in Sharon Johnson's murder case. The episode has its charge in the physical details: fingernail clippings with blood on them, clothes from the investigation, and items…

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Why you'd press play

The state said DNA testing could not exonerate Jason Carroll. Then a long-missing evidence box changed the temperature of the room.

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