Douglas Warney

The Crime

On Jan. 3, 1996, 62-year-old William Beason was found stabbed to death in his apartment in Rochester, New York. Mr. Beason, also known as Solomon Israel, was a member of Rochester’s contingent in the Million Man March. He had 19 stab wounds to his neck and chest, and defensive wounds on his left hand.

Police found a bloodstained knife, towel, and several bloody tissues in his bathroom clothes hamper. Multiple rooms on the apartment’s second floor, which Mr. Beason rented to boarders, had been ransacked. An inoperable green car was parked outside.

Police concluded that the murder occurred on New Year’s Day. 

The Investigation

A few days after Mr. Beason’s body was discovered, 34-year-old Douglas Warney, a man with a history of mental health issues, an eighth-grade education with an IQ of 68, and advanced AIDS, called the police claiming that he had information about a homicide. He said he knew Mr. Beason because he had cleaned his house and shoveled snow from his driveway before the murder.

The police subjected Mr. Warney to a 12-hour interrogation, during which they applied increasing pressure that ultimately resulted in a false confession. Mr. Warney initially stated that his cousin, Brian Szymowski, had killed Mr. Beason, but as questioning continued, he changed his account to say that the two of them had killed Mr. Beason together. Finally, his story shifted to say that he alone had killed Mr. Beason, and that his cousin hadn’t been involved at all. He claimed that he needed money to buy drugs, so he robbed Mr. Beason before he killed him. 

Police contended that Mr. Warney had provided details that only the perpetrator could know — that Mr. Beason was wearing a nightgown, that he had been cooking chicken, and that the perpetrator had cut himself with a knife and wiped it with a tissue in the bathroom. 

As Mr. Warney was being formally arrested, an officer who was not involved with the investigation asked him how it was going. Mr. Warney replied, “Not good … I got a body.”

On Jan. 6, 1996, Mr. Warney was charged with capital murder.

The Trial

Mr. Warney went to trial in February 1997 in Monroe County Supreme Court. The prosecution presented his false confession as evidence. 

The defense challenged it as riddled with inconsistencies. For one, Mr. Warney claimed to have killed Mr. Beason in the kitchen, yet evidence indicated that the murder occurred in the bedroom. Furthermore, he stated that he had tossed his bloody clothes in a garbage can, but the items could not be found at the crime scene. Mr. Warney also claimed that he drove his brother’s brown Chevrolet to Mr. Beason’s house, even though the car had not been registered for at least five years. Mr. Szymowski, who he had implicated in his confession, had been in a medical facility at the time of the crime.

Mr. Warney had also confessed to cutting his index finger and wiping it with a tissue, but a Monroe County Public Safety Laboratory forensic analyst testified that neither he nor Mr. Beason was the source of the blood on the towel and tissues. The blood on the knife was consistent with Mr. Beason’s blood and enzyme types, and although blood was found under his fingernail scrapings, there was an insufficient amount of material for testing.

A number of fingerprints were recovered from the scene, including one on the bloodstained knife. Latent print examiner Robert Garland initially reported that the fingerprint on the knife contained only three friction ridge characteristics and deemed it of “no value.” However, he told the jury that he was able to determine the pattern type, and concluded that both Mr. Beason and Mr. Szymkowski were excluded as the source of that print because they lacked the pattern type on any finger.

Mr. Warney, the examiner argued, could not be excluded as the source of the print, because one of his fingers shared the pattern type, along with three other characteristics, with the fingerprint on the knife.

Mr. Garland also testified that three other fingerprints were recovered from a videotape box. Mr. Beason was identified as the source of two of the prints. Mr. Warney and Mr. Beason were excluded as the source of the third.

The defense presented evidence that Mr. Warney had a history of psychiatric issues A few days before Mr. Beason’s murder, the police had taken Mr. Warney to a psychiatric hospital after he made dozens of false calls reporting fires and car accidents and ordering pizzas. He had checked out after one day.

On Feb. 12, 1997, the jury convicted Mr. Warney of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

The Exoneration

In 2004, the Innocence Project and attorney Donald M. Thompson began working on Mr. Warney’s case. They filed a motion seeking DNA testing of blood from the fingernail clippings, the knife, the towel, and the tissues. The prosecution opposed the testing and the judge denied the motion in December 2004. 

While the ruling was being appealed, the prosecution, without notifying Mr. Warney or the defense, arranged for DNA testing. The Monroe County Public Safety Laboratory concluded that the DNA testing excluded Mr. Warney from the crime. Instead, it found the DNA profile of another man.

The DNA profile was submitted to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), the agency’s national database of DNA profiles to assist with unsolved crimes. It matched Eldred Johnson, Jr., a man from New York state who was already serving a life sentence for two robberies involving nonfatal stabbings.

Latent print examiners then compared an unidentified print on the victim’s video box to Mr. Johnson’s prints, and concluded that he was the source. When prosecutors interviewed him, Mr. Johnson admitted that he had acted alone in killing Mr. Beason and that he did not know Mr. Warney. On December 16, 1995, a few weeks before the crime, he had fatally stabbed his landlord, Doris Parmenter, and wounded her husband, Clifford, in Utica, and then fled to Rochester. There, he met Mr. Beason, who Mr. Johnson said had solicited him for sex. He then stabbed Mr. Beason to death. During the struggle, Mr. Beason bit him on the finger. Mr.  Johnson had stolen $30 to $35 and fled out a window.

On May 16, 2006, Mr. Warney’s conviction was vacated, the case was dismissed, and he was released from prison.

In May 2007, Mr. Warney filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Rochester. The lawsuit alleged that the prosecution knew of the exculpatory DNA testing report as much as two and a half months before disclosing it to the defense. 

As part of that litigation, Ron Smith, a fingerprint analysis expert, reviewed the print on the knife and concluded that Mr. Warney could be excluded as its source based on an “absence of feature correlation.” Mr. Smith opined that Mr. Garland had tried to “bolster the fingerprint evidence in the eyes of the jury.”

In 2011, Mr. Warney settled the lawsuit for $3.75 million. In May 2012, Mr. Warney settled a claim with the New York Court of Claims for $400,000.