PORT ANGELES — The judge who presided over Darold Stenson’s double-murder trial 16 years ago believes that the Sequim man would still be found guilty despite concluding that a key piece of evidence used to seal his fate is no longer credible.
The evidence in question is an FBI test that found gun-shot residue — which are microscopic particles emitted when a gun is fired — in the front right pocket of the pants he was wearing the day of the murders.
A jury in 1994 convicted Stenson of the murders of his wife, Denise Stenson, and business partner, Frank Hoerner. Both were shot on his exotic bird farm in the Dungeness Valley in March 1993.
Stenson is on death row at the state prison in Walla Walla.
Photograph of jeans
Because of a photograph that surfaced last year — showing the lead investigator wearing the same pants shortly before the gun-residue test was conducted — the risk of contamination was too great to allow the results of the test to be used in trial, Clallam County Superior Court Judge Ken Williams found in his report to the state Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court will use the report, based on new testimony from an eight-day hearing last month, to determine if the death-row inmate should get a new trial.
The report was filed Friday.
The in-vestigator, Monty Martin, who is now a staff sergeant with the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office, posed for the picture while wearing the pants at the request of a contracted forensic examiner.
The examiner wanted to see if Stenson could have gotten blood on the pants by kneeling by the victims.
Stenson’s legal team contested the findings of the FBI’s test during the hearing in Port Angeles last month because the photograph showed Martin handling the pants without gloves, and the front right pocket turned inside out.
Based on the photograph, Williams said in his report:
“Had the ungloved handling and the turning out of the pockets been known to the trial court and an appropriate objection made, the [gun-shot residue] testimony would have been excluded.”
But, Williams added, the other evidence against him, including blood spattered on his pants, remains too strong to expect a jury to make a different ruling if the trial was held today.
‘Hurdle too high’
“The blood spatter evidence is a hurdle too high,” Williams wrote.
The exclusion of the gun-shot residue testimony, he concluded, “would not have probably changed the outcome of the trial or proceeding.”
The other evidence against Stenson — the fact that he was in financial trouble, that he and Hoerner had a dispute over the business, and that he had a life insurance policy on his wife — was circumstantial, but still pointed toward his guilt, the jury found in 1994.
Stenson claimed that Hoerner murdered his wife and then killed himself.
Investigators concluded that both were murdered, and that Hoerner was hit in the back of the head in the driveway and dragged into the home before being shot.
They said that blood splattered on Stenson’s pants when he struck Hoerner after he arrived to discuss a business matter. Stenson claimed the blood got on his pants when he kneeled by the victims after finding their bodies.
A win for victims?
Clallam County Prosecuting Attorney Deb Kelly called Williams’ report a win for the victims’ families.
“It’s time for a prompt resolution,” she said.
“It’s been too long.”
Kelly said it looks promising that the Supreme Court will concur with Williams’ report.
There is no time line for the high court to come to a decision, Kelly said.
Sheryl McCloud, one of Stenson’s two attorneys, welcomed Williams’ conclusion that the gun-shot residue evidence should not have been used in the trial.
But she disagrees with his statement that the verdict would have likely not been any different.
“I think it would have changed the outcome,” McCloud said.
But, she added:
“As to whether a new trial should be granted, that’s up to the Supreme Court.”
Even if a retrial is denied, Stenson would not be executed until his two stays of execution — one to allow for further DNA testing, and another to challenge the state’s lethal injection policy — are lifted. Both are pending.
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Reporter Tom Callis can be reached at 360-417-3532 or at tom.callis@peninsuladailynews.com.