Ralph Armstrong

The Crime

On June 24, 1980, Charise Kamps, a 19-year-old University of Wisconsin student, was found sexually assaulted and murdered in her Gorham Street apartment in Madison, Wisconsin.

Her body was discovered by Jane May, who had been partying with Ms. Kamps the night before. Ms. Kamps was in her blood-soaked bed. She had been strangled and beaten.

The Investigation

Police questioned Ms. May’s fiancé, Ralph Armstrong, a 27-year-old student at the university. Mr. Armstrong had been released from prison in New Mexico in 1979.

Mr. Armstrong told police that he, Ms. May, Ms. Kamps, and others had been at a restaurant the night before, then went to Ms. May’s apartment. Mr. Armstrong said that he spent the night with Ms. May. He gave hair samples and agreed to allow a crime lab analyst to take scrapings from his fingernails and toenails. When a presumptive test identified blood under all of his fingernails and some of his toes, he was arrested.

 Police also questioned Mr. Armstrong’s brother, Steven, who was visiting at the time. Police discounted Steven as a suspect and released him.

 Riccie Orebia, who lived across the street from Ms. Kamps’ apartment, told police that at about 12:30 p.m., she was on her front porch when she saw a white car with a black top drive by on Gorham. Ms. Orebia said the driver had dark, shoulder-length hair. She said the car passed a second time and parked out of view across the street. 

About five or 10 minutes later, Ms. Orebia saw a lean and muscular man walk from the direction of the parking lot, cross the street, and enter Ms. Kamps’ apartment building. About five to 10 minutes later, the same man left the building and headed back toward the parking lot. Ms. Orebia said that after five minutes, the man entered the building a second time. He emerged shirtless five minutes later. Ms. Orebia said that after another five minutes, the man ran back to the building a third time, was inside for about 20 minutes, and then ran out. She said he was “shining” as if he were sweating. Ms. Orebia said the black-over-white car then sped away from the parking lot. 

Several days after the murder and prior to any police identification procedure, Ms. Orebia underwent hypnosis. Dr. Roger A. McKinley performed the hypnosis and Madison Police Detective Robert Lombardo was present. 

In the early morning hours of July 1, 1980, after Ms. Orebia had undergone hypnosis, police arranged a line-up procedure at Ms. Kamps’ apartment building involving Mr. Armstrong, who was still in custody. Mr. Armstrong refused to cooperate upon instruction from his attorney. The police then returned Mr. Armstrong to jail.

At about 4:00 a.m. on July 3, police told Mr. Armstrong to put on a shirt, a pair of jeans, and a pair of cowboy boots to match other line-up participants, but Mr. Armstrong refused. Police took Mr. Armstrong and four other line-up participants to Gorham Street, intending to have each man walk up to the porch of Ms. Kamps’ apartment and then back in the opposite direction. Mr. Armstrong was second but went limp as soon as he and the two officers accompanying him came into view of Ms. Orebia’s porch. Two officers dragged him to the porch of Ms. Kamps’ apartment and back again. 

Around sunrise, the five men were held by police officers in front of a police van and Ms. Orebia came down. From 25 feet away, she picked Mr. Armstrong. 

Later that day, July 3, 1980, Mr. Armstrong was charged with murder.

Months later, on Nov. 5, 1980, Ms. Orebia gave a statement under oath at Mr. Armstrong’s attorney’s office in the presence of a court reporter and an investigator. Ms. Orebia recanted her identification of Mr. Armstrong. Ms. Orebia said that Mr. Armstrong was not the person she saw running in and out of Ms. Kamps’ apartment building. 

Ms. Orebia gave a second statement to the defense on Nov. 10, 1980, reaffirming the recantation.

The Trial

In March 1981, Mr. Armstrong went to trial in Dane County Circuit Court. The hypnotist, Dr. McKinley, testified that prior to hypnosis, Ms. Orebia described the man she saw as having shoulder-length hair and a muscular build, and said he was running and sweating. Dr. McKinley testified that, during the hypnotic session, Ms. Orebia described particular features of the attacker’s face, including that the attacker had a long nose and bushy eyebrows.

Dr. McKinley admitted that if Ms. Orebia would not have been able to make out the detail of Mr. Armstrong’s face because of lighting conditions, then any description she gave of Mr. Armstrong’s nose, eyebrows, and other features would have to be “confabulation.” 

Dr. McKinley testified that although, during the session, he and Detective Lombardo exchanged photographs of Mr. Armstrong and the vehicle in front of Ms. Orebia, she saw them. Dr. McKinley asserted his hypnosis was non-suggestive.

However, Mr. Lombardo testified that Ms. Orebia saw photographs of Mr. Armstrong’s vehicle when he handed them to Dr. McKinley and that Ms. Orebia had also seen photos of the car prior to hypnosis.

Ms. Orebia testified and recanted her recantation. Now, she said that she was positive that Mr. Armstrong was the person she saw enter and leave Ms. Kamps’ apartment building three times that night. Ms. Orebia testified that upon seeing Mr. Armstrong’s head come into view during the first portion of the line-up, she gasped and mentioned to police officers standing with him that Mr. Armstrong was the person she saw leaving the building. 

Ms. Orebia also stated that she realized that two line-up participants, including the first participant, were wearing shoulder-length wigs and mentioned that observation to the officers standing nearby. Ms. Orebia testified that the police told her that they had a man in custody who would be in the line-up, however, the police also instructed Ms. Orebia not to pick anyone unless she was sure. Ms. Orebia admitted she told Mr. Armstrong’s attorney that she thought the line-up was fixed. 

Ms. Orebia testified that the statements she gave to the defense were purposely untruthful and designed to undermine her credibility as a witness in the hope that she would not be called to testify at trial.

A forensic analyst testified that several head hairs collected from a bathrobe belt draped across Ms. Kamps’ body and the bathroom sink were “consistent” or “similar” to Mr. Armstrong’s hair. In the closing argument, the prosecutor exaggerated the importance of these findings, saying “two of the defendant’s hairs were on this robe.”

Similarly, another forensic analyst found a positive reading for the presence of chemicals in human blood on several of Mr. Armstrong’s fingers and toes, but she wasn’t able to determine any characteristics of the blood. The prosecutor exaggerated this finding as well in his closing argument, saying it was Ms. Kamps’ blood.

The analyst also testified that semen was detected on the bathrobe, and that it came from a Type-A secretor. Mr. Armstrong was a Type-A secretor.

Although Mr. Armstrong’s fingerprints were also found on a bong in Ms. Kamps’ apartment, the defense argued that he had moved it when he was in the apartment earlier on the night of the murder.

The defense called Dr. John Fournier, an ophthalmologist, to rebut Ms. Orebia’s ability to make certain observations. Dr. Fournier measured the distances and lighting conditions from Ms. Orebia’s porch to the route of the person she observed. Dr. Fournier testified that night vision acuity is about one-tenth that of daytime vision, and that given the conditions under which Ms. Orebia made her observations — a distance of 100 to 134 feet and under low illumination from the street lamps with glare in the foreground — it was physically impossible for anyone to make out facial features. 

Dr. John F. Kihlstrom, a psychology professor, testified for the defense that while hypnosis could be used to access memories not ordinarily memorable in the awakened state, the hypnotist also runs an equal risk of confabulation. Dr. Kihlstrom stated that precautions to limit inadvertent suggestion include keeping the hypnotist blind to the facts of the case, and to conduct the session without an investigator. 

Dr. Kihlstrom presented excerpts from the videotaped session, noting that Ms. Orebia initially described the suspect as 5 feet 3 inches to 5 feet 5 inches tall, but after Dr. McKinley suggestively inquired about a height of 6 feet, Ms. Orebia agreed with that height. Mr. Armstrong was 6 feet 2 inches tall. 

Mr. Armstrong was convicted by a jury on March 24, 1981, and sentenced to life plus 16 years in prison. His appeals were denied.

The Exoneration

After DNA testing became available, Mr. Armstrong began petitioning for testing of the evidence. In 1993, the Innocence Project became involved, along with Wisconsin attorneys Jerome Buting and Keith Belzer. 

DNA tests were conducted on the two head hairs found on the belt of a bathrobe lying on Ms. Kamps’ body and showed that the two hairs described at Mr. Armstrong’s trial “similar” and “consistent” with Mr. Armstrong’s hair, were not Mr. Armstrong’s hair.

In 2001, a judge refused to grant Mr. Armstrong a new trial, ruling that the evidence would not have changed the verdict.

But in July 2005, the Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed Mr. Armstrong’s conviction, saying that the DNA evidence was sufficient to grant a new trial. 

While a new trial was pending, a woman testified at a hearing that she had called Dane County Assistant District Attorney John Norsetter in 1995 to report that Mr. Armstrong’s brother, Steven, confessed that he, not Mr. Armstrong, was guilty of the crime. The woman said that Steven said he feared that if Mr. Armstrong were exonerated, Mr. Armstrong would come after him. The woman said she had described Steven’s detailed confession to Mr. Norsetter, who had not reported this evidence to defense attorneys and had not pursued the lead. Steven had disappeared shortly after the crime and never again contacted Ralph. Steven died in 2005.

In 2006, more testing was done – including mitochondrial (mtDNA) testing, an advanced technique that can develop DNA profiles from degraded samples and hair follicles. These tests of hairs excluded Ralph Armstrong. Because mtDNA is inherited from one’s mother, Ralph and Steve Armstrong would be expected to have the same mtDNA profile.

Six pubic hairs found on Ms. Kamps’ bedspread were tested and Ralph Armstrong, Ms. Kamp, and her boyfriend were excluded. A DNA test on a semen stain on Ms. Kamps’ bathrobe belt excluded Ralph Armstrong and Ms. Kamps’ boyfriend. Even so, the prosecution said it would retry Mr. Armstrong. 

Then, despite a court order requiring prosecutors to notify defense attorneys any time evidence in the case was moved or analyzed, Mr. Norsetter secretly ordered additional DNA tests. These tests consumed the biological evidence, preventing any further testing. Moreover, the Y-STR DNA testing Mr. Norsetter ordered had focused on the Y chromosome and would not have distinguished genetic material between males with the same father.

The defense did not learn about the woman’s 1995 call to Mr. Norsetter until 2007. At that point, the defense argued that Mr. Norsetter’s decision to order Y-STR tests suggested he was trying to get a conviction against Ralph Armstrong even if his brother’s indistinguishable DNA was found. At a subsequent court hearing, Mr. Norsetter admitted under oath that he did get a call in 1995 from a woman claiming to have heard a confession in a big case, and that it could have been about Ralph Armstrong, but his memory was vague. He said he never told the defense or any court because he didn’t believe the information was credible.

Based on the destruction of evidence and the prosecutor’s suppression of potentially exculpatory evidence for more than a decade, a judge ruled Mr. Norsetter had acted “in bad faith” and dismissed the case against Mr. Armstrong on July 30, 2009. 

On Aug. 19, 2009, the charges were dismissed. Mr. Armstrong, who was wanted for parole violations in New Mexico, was transferred to prison there. His parole was revoked in September 2010, and he was ordered to resume serving a 30 to 150-year sentence he had received for his conviction in 1972.  In 2013, he was released on parole again.

Mr. Armstrong subsequently filed a civil rights lawsuit against Mr. Norsetter and two crime lab workers, Karen Daily and Dan Campbell. A defense motion to dismiss the lawsuit on immunity grounds was denied. In May 2015, the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld that ruling.

In February 2017, the state of Wisconsin, Dane County and the city of Madison settled Mr. Armstrong’s lawsuit for $1,750,000.