After serving time for murder, man tries to clear name

BELLEVILLE, Ill. (AP) - Forty years ago, Mark Fair came home from work to find his fiance dead in the basement of the small Wood River house they were preparing to move into after they were married.

Karla Brown had been beaten, strangled and placed head first in a large barrel of water. She was 22 years old and a student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

John Prante, a 29-year-old man who had been drinking and smoking marijuana on the porch next door, was arrested four years after the crime. He had also attended SIUE.

The police investigation turned to emerging technologies in the 1980s to finally link a suspect to the 1978 murder.

Prante, now 70 years old, walked out of prison in December after serving 36 years for Brown's murder still proclaiming his innocence, as he had at his sentencing in 1983.

'œMy only guilt is that of being at the neighbor's home next door to the crime scene,'ť Prante had said, according to a Sept. 28, 1983, Belleville News-Democrat report.

His attorneys from the Exoneration and Innocence projects are trying to clear his name by arguing the forensic technique used to tie Prante to the crime scene has been discredited by scientific research in the three decades since his trial.

Madison County Associate Judge Neil Schroeder rejected Prante's latest appeal Feb. 11, but his lawyers say he will appeal again, even though he has served his sentence.

Prante has until March 12 to let the Illinois Fifth District Appellate Court know he wants Schroeder's decision reviewed.

Lindsay Hagy, an attorney for the Chicago-based Exoneration Project, said it could be months before the actual appeal is filed. Through his lawyers, Prante declined to be interviewed by the BND until then.

Don Weber, the prosecutor in Prante's trial, said he still believes Prante is guilty.

'œI don't have any doubt in my mind,'ť Weber said in a recent interview. 'œ... Instead of trying to clear his name, he should try to clear his conscience.'ť

Karla Brown was killed June 21, 1978. The murder case stalled until 1980, when authorities decided to use some unconventional investigation methods.

One expert in forensic dentistry and image enhancement thought he saw bite marks on Brown's neck in a black-and-white autopsy photograph. Another compared the dark areas in the photo to casts of the three main suspects' teeth. John Prante was the only one whose teeth were 'œconsistent'ť with the marks, the expert determined.

Today, those comparisons are considered unreliable because 'œeven determining what is a bite mark is little more than guess work,'ť Prante's court filings in Madison County state.

The same analysis had been used in serial killer Ted Bundy's 1979 trial. Bundy confessed to at least 30 murders.

Prante's trial in 1983 was the third or fourth in the country after Bundy's to present bite mark evidence, according to 'œSilent Witness,'ť a book about the case. It was written by Weber and Charles Bosworth, a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who covered the investigation. The case was also featured in an episode of 'œForensic Files.'ť

Besides the bite marks, there was no other physical evidence used against Prante.

Prante's most recent appeal in Madison County states that the dentists who testified for the prosecution in his trial were involved in five separate convictions or indictments based on bite mark evidence that have resulted in exonerations or dropped charges. In most cases, DNA evidence eventually pointed to other suspects.

In 2017, Prante's lawyers tried to test DNA and identify the source of a fingerprint from the crime scene, but the results were inconclusive, according to Hagy, one of Prante's lawyers.

Judge Schroeder said the jury in 1983 heard testimony from experts who disputed the bite mark evidence, according to his Feb. 11 order denying Prante's request for either a new trial or for his conviction to be reversed.

The defense experts argued they couldn't be sure the dark areas in the enlarged photograph were bite marks. But they didn't offer opinions on whether bite mark comparisons were junk science. Still, Schroeder wrote that it's possible the jury 'œdisregarded the bite mark comparisons entirely'ť because of circumstantial evidence against Prante.

Appellate judges in the fifth district, where Prante's appeal will soon be heard, previously considered arguments from Prante about the bite mark evidence and other aspects of the trial. The district handles appeals for 37 counties in central and southern Illinois, including Madison County. In the last appeal, the judges affirmed Prante's conviction.

'œ... The jury could have believed, and by its verdict plainly did believe, that the defendant not only had the opportunity to commit the crime but also was privy to information knowable only by one who had participated in the commission of it,'ť the appellate judges' 1986 opinion stated.

Prante's friends testified that, in the days after the 1978 murder, he talked to them about bite marks on Brown's shoulder and other details of the crime scene before that information was made public. Prante denies those accusations.

Authorities didn't begin to investigate the marks on the body until two years later, in 1980.

During the trial, Prante's attorneys argued - as they continue to today - that his friends' memories could have been influenced by media coverage at the time, because they didn't come forward until four years after the murder when the bite marks were highly publicized, according to court filings. The friends said at the trial that they didn't understand the significance until they read media reports.

Weber said what convinced him of Prante's guilt was the testimony from Prante's friends as well as the similarities between Prante and the psychological profile of the perpetrator by John Douglas, a well-known FBI agent at the time.

Douglas helped develop criminal profiling as a new investigative technique. A character in the Netflix series 'œMindhunter'ť is based on him. He co-authored a book with the same title.

After looking at photos of the Wood River crime scene in the 1980s, Douglas described the kind of person he thought committed the crime with details about the kind of car he might drive, and he predicted how the man might act, according to 'œSilent Witness.'ť

Douglas said the perpetrator likely killed Brown out of anger for rejecting his advances and that the man had a history of rejection.

Weber said Prante matched much of Douglas' description. Prante's lawyers argue the description better matches another suspect: Prante's friend who lived next door to Brown. Investigators considered that but turned their focus to Prante when forensic dentists excluded the other suspect because his teeth were not a match to the presumed bite marks on Brown's neck.

One of Douglas' predictions was that the perpetrator would call to learn more about the investigation if authorities publicized that they were close to making an arrest.

Weber said Prante is the only one who called him about the case. To him, the call solidified Prante's guilt, Weber said.

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Source: Belleville News-Democrat, https://bit.ly/2VTrHz4