Bad Evidence Got Him Indicted for Murder. He Waited 7 Years to Walk Free.
A rush of cold air fills the kitchen on a spring day in the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk as a man dusted in frost steps through the door.Justine Paul, age 34, silently mixes himself a glass of lemonade, drops into a chair and exhales into his lap. Soon, he retreats to his childhood bedroom, where he stares out the window studying how fast the clouds move the way hes always sensed a storm before it breaks. A metal baseball bat leans against the doorframe.When the Bering Sea wind bullies the house, Paul wonders if police listen through cracks in the walls. Waking beneath the Michael Jordan posters in his room, he sometimes fears hes dreaming. That his body might still be 100 miles away, across the tundra in a 7.5-by-9-foot jail cell.Today: A man spends seven years in jail as the flawed evidence against him falls apart.Next: The unfinished search for justice in the murder of Eunice Whitman.Paul spent seven years in jail waiting to be tried on a murder charge built on bad evidence. The central clues that prosecutors relied on to connect him to the murder crumbled as soon as anyone checked. But it took dozens of delays, agreed to by a revolving cast of lawyers, before the state finally dropped the case in 2022, releasing Paul. Apart from one month on pretrial release, hed been behind bars for 2,600 days.In a state court system that allows delay after delay before the accused goes on trial, Pauls case is a reminder of why speedy trial rights exist in the first place: to prevent defendants from paying the price when police or prosecutors make mistakes. It is one of the most damning examples of Alaskas slow-motion justice system, which takes more than twice as long to resolve the most serious felonies as it did a decade ago.The workings of Alaskas justice system have an outsize impact on Alaska Natives like Paul, who are 18% of the states residents but 40% of people arrested. In recent years, they have edged out white Alaskans as the largest group held in state jails and prisons.Time lost while Paul was locked up and in the years since have left the murder victims family waiting for someone to face a jury so the truth can be known.Joann Paul Carl gives her son Justine Paul a cup of soup in their Kipnuk, Alaska, home. Joann said Justine was suspicious and hypervigilant of his surroundings when he returned to Kipnuk after being released from jail. He felt cursed, she said. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsState police only this year reopened the investigation into who fatally stabbed Eunice Whitman, Pauls girlfriend. Her sister Heather Whitman said she was surprised when a reporter told her that troopers are actively working the case once again.Whitman was unaware of the reasons cited for dismissing Pauls case and said she still assumes he is guilty. The absence of consequences for anyone in her sisters death has left the family bitter.An attorney who helped to ultimately get Pauls charges dropped said the case is the first that comes to mind when people ask how lawyers can represent those accused of violent crimes. Beyond the fact that everybody deserves a good defense, some defendants may be truly innocent.Those are the ones that are super stressful, said defense attorney Windy Hannaman. To think that if you mess up, this guy that you think is innocent could go to jail for a really long time.And then there is the crime itself: the 2015 stabbing of a joyous 23-year-old Alaska Native woman in a public place, left unsolved after the state swiftly indicted Paul on easily disproven evidence. Someone is getting away with her murder, and the chance to hold them accountable slips further away year after wasted year.A Killing Like No OtherA 45-minute flight by Cessna from Pauls hometown, the city of Bethel hugs a curve of the lower Kuskokwim River. Unreachable from most of Alaska by car, it is home to about 6,000 people, most of them Yupik. Tundra stretches to the horizon in all directions. At the towns center, between a convenience store and a baseball diamond known as Pinkys Park, tilted wooden boardwalks lace a few acres of wetland.Bethel Police investigator Amy Davis slowly walked these trails on May 24, 2015, aiming her flashlight into the 5 a.m. gloom. What she knew so far: Four boys looking for a place to smoke pot had found a womans body here in a sunken patch of ground known as the pit. Davis arrived an hour after they called the police.Ponytailed and in her mid-30s, Davis made note of sodden cigarette butts among the low cottonwood bushes and the shoe prints stamped in mud and grass. She came upon the body a few yards away.Although wearing the dark blue patrol uniform of her colleagues, Davis was the Bethel Police Departments sole detective. After five years in a region with the highest murder rate in Alaska, in a state where more women are murdered by men per capita than anywhere else in the United States, Davis had never seen a killing like this.A dark pool of blood soaked the grass, suggesting the victim had been stabbed in one location, where most of the blood loss occurred, and dragged 10 feet away. The victims clothes, also bloody, lay stacked in a neat pile. The killer lingered here after the act, risking discovery.A medical examiner later concluded the woman had been stabbed 31 times, in the stomach, the groin and the neck. A former Bethel prosecutor who became Pauls defense attorney, Marcy McDannel, said the killing is among the most horrific shes encountered in almost 30 years of practicing law in Alaska.You only see this type of scene in a serial killer type of case, and these are despite what true crime media would have you believe exceedingly rare, she said.Heather Whitman and Eunice, her 8-year-old daughter, stand at the end of a Bethel boardwalk near where Heathers sister Eunice Whitman was found murdered in 2015. Heather named her daughter after her sister. She said law enforcement hasnt talked to her family about the case in years. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsAfter several hours, Davis had no murder weapon, no name for the victim and no leads. That changed when a police dispatcher took a call from a young man who said hed been frantically searching for his girlfriend.It was Paul. Hed heard a body had been found by Pinkys Park. Was it Eunice Whitman?Davis met with Paul at the police station. In a police video of the interview, the investigator didnt talk about who died but instead asked a series of questions about his relationship with Whitman, the place and time he last saw her and his movements afterward. After two or three hours he told police he was tired and wanted to go home. Davis let him sleep in a holding cell.In the meantime, the detective obtained a search warrant for the home of a relative with whom Paul was staying in Bethel. Davis wrote that police noticed cuts on Pauls cheek and hand evidence photos show a laceration on his finger the size of a paper cut and what she said appeared to be a drop of blood on his shoe. She added that a witness had called the station saying hed seen a man and woman arguing on the boardwalk hours before the killing.Seven hours into Pauls time at the station, officers had something. Inside the house where he was staying was a small black backpack filled with items including a pair of Old Navy jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt.They had blood on them.Davis returned to the interview room armed with this new information. An investigator with the Alaska State Troopers, Austin MacDonald, entered with her. Now, finally, MacDonald informed Paul that Whitman, the woman Paul said he intended to marry, was dead. Paul put his head down in his arms and kept it there. After a short time, he let out a wail.Obtained by Anchorage Daily News and ProPublicaCoolly asking Paul to collect himself, MacDonald leaned in. The questions sharpened. Did Paul know where Whitman died? How she died? Paul said hed heard that the body was found at the pit by Pinkys Park. He said that police told him she was stabbed in the throat.So what, do you guys think Ive done it? he asked.No, we dont think that you did it, Justine, OK? said the trooper. We already know that you did it.MacDonald, like other troopers in the case, did not respond when asked to comment on a detailed description of their actions.Paul told them they had it wrong. He loved his girlfriend and wouldnt do what was done to her.He asked for a lawyer and placed his forehead on the table, saying he was done talking. MacDonald told him investigators would stop asking about what happened. The trooper instead prepared to serve a new search warrant, this time on Paul himself.After a brief silence, MacDonald added, Oh, and just so you know, I want you to know that we found your bloody clothes.Paul lifted his forehead just slightly off the table. What bloody clothes? he said. What are you talking about?A Backpack of Bloody ClothesPaul and Eunice Whitman had been together for five months when she died.Whitman was 23. Yupik like Paul, she had full cheeks, long lashes like her sisters and daughters, and long dark hair and bangs. Paul was 24, a thin, clean-shaven man with tattoos, glasses and a habit of joking to fill silences.Life in the town of Bethel, where Whitman grew up, and the neighboring village of Kipnuk, where Paul did, revolves around moose hunts and the yearly arrival of salmon in wide, green rivers. The couple had known each other since they were kids, when Whitman visited Kipnuk to compete in the Native Youth Olympics, but only started dating in January 2015.As their relationship grew more serious and talk turned to marriage, Whitman returned to the village to meet Pauls mother, Joann Paul Carl. Whitman brought a jar of decaf coffee that she used in a broth for musk ox stew, a recipe Joann had never tried. Justine Paul everyone pronounces it Justin seemed happy, which his mother says she didnt take for granted.Joann Carl cries when describing fallout from the murder case against her son. He was not my son, Joann said of Justine after his release. He was a totally different person. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsOne reason Davis said she focused on Paul as a suspect in Whitmans murder was his criminal record. At age 16, he was charged with attempted sexual assault involving a 9-year-old boy. Paul pleaded guilty, court records show, making him a registered sex offender while still a minor.People talked openly about Pauls record in Whitmans presence, according to interviews conducted by police. But Whitman, who fled a violent relationship with her prior boyfriend, according to restraining orders she filed in Bethel court, told friends Paul would never hurt her.On the night of the murder, a video on Pauls phone timestamped 12:11 a.m. showed Whitman on the boardwalk arguing with the person behind the camera, a report by state troopers says. Paul told police the couple went in different directions at 1 or 2 a.m. A dispatcher took the call about a body at 4 that morning.Paul spent the time in between wandering around and looking for Whitman, he told the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica. His text messages showed him arranging to meetup with friends and looking for a place to sleep, troopers wrote. He went to bed at 7 a.m. at his aunts house and awakened later in the day to learn Whitmans family had been trying to find her, he said.As Paul sat in a jail cell during the days after Whitmans death, prosecutors got to work preparing to appear before a grand jury. They heard from a friend of Whitmans that shed had a recent miscarriage. The friend told police Paul blamed it on Whitmans drinking. The states narrative: Paul killed Whitman out of anger over losing the baby.A transcript of the grand jury proceeding shows prosecutor Mike Gray delivering a grisly account. The crime had been especially bloody because, according to the medical examiner, the killer had cut arteries in Whitmans groin and neck. Clothing later found in a backpack belonging to the victims boyfriend, meanwhile, was stained with blood.Gray told jurors that under questioning by police, Paul had revealed damning knowledge of Whitmans neck wound. The prosecutor also said a shoe print near her body was at least consistent with the tread on Pauls sneakers.But Gray said that a pending DNA test on Pauls bloody clothing needed to verify whether the blood was the victims would be the real determinant of this case.The grand jury quickly handed up an indictment. Paul was to stand trial for first-degree murder, with a maximum sentence of 99 years in prison.There was just one problem. The blood, the states crime lab found, was not what it seemed.Technicians examined a stain from Pauls Old Navy jeans and concluded it contained blood from a man, rather than from Whitman as the prosecution had suggested. More specifically, the lab said it was consistent with Pauls DNA.A day or two before Whitman died accounts differ on the timing Paul had fought a man in front of several witnesses. Paul told the newsrooms that the fight left him with a bloody nose and that he stuffed his stained T-shirt and jeans into his backpack afterward.When Pauls bloody jeans failed to match the victims DNA, Davis asked the lab to test more of Pauls bloody clothing. Emails show that crime lab officials resisted, saying the lab couldnt test every item in every case it worked on. But Davis kept at it.Months later, the lab examined Pauls Southpole-brand tie-dyed T-shirt and again found no evidence of Whitmans blood. The stains had so much male DNA that the lab concluded no female DNA was likely to show up with a closer look.Davis, in two recent interviews and by email, said she continues to believe Paul committed the murder. She cited circumstantial evidence and said the DNA testing didnt go far enough.Among the other clothing in Pauls backpack were a tank top and boxers, which werent on the list of items lab records say were tested, even though police described them as bloodstained. Another two items are listed as having transfer stains, meaning they seemed to have absorbed blood from other clothing. Davis said her boss told her hiring a private lab to test more items would cost the city too much.If we are being honest, the lab thing was a major failure in my eyes, Davis said.(The Department of Public Safety, which runs the crime lab, said in a statement that technicians left no viable forensic stone unturned in the Whitman case.)Records show the state lab ruled out the blood being Whitmans on May 9, 2016, a little less than a year after Pauls arrest. The states hoped-for evidence, the central pillar of the prosecutions case that Paul stabbed Whitman, who then bled profusely on his clothes had just fallen apart.Yet it would take another six years for Paul to go free.Paul said in April that he struggles with the effect of his girlfriends murder and the time he spent locked up. Its going to be a battle thats going on in my head, he said. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsSix More YearsAlaskas justice system is supposed to move far more rapidly. The state constitution says crime victims have a right to the timely disposition of a case. Further, Alaska interprets the defendants right to speedy and public trial under the U.S. Constitution to mean people should face a judge or jury within 120 days of being charged.But the time to resolve the most serious Alaska felonies as of 2025 was more than three years, and some recently resolved cases took 10. Victims have long described the pain that the wait for justice can inflict. ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News this year found two sexual assault cases that took so many years to resolve, the victims died. Another case had been delayed more than 70 times.For defendants, the slow walk to a courtroom carries a different price. Research shows long pretrial delays upend families, increase trauma and make guilty pleas more likely even for people who maintain their innocence because they want an end to the uncertainty.Prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges are all implicated in the torpor of Alaskas courtrooms.Critics have described a culture of delay: a week here, two months there. An attorney might be newly assigned, backlogged with other cases or down with the flu. One side says, We need more time, the other agrees, and the judge suspends the 120-day speedy trial countdown.Soon the list of postponements, each one seemingly reasonable, has grown to dozens.These delays became an open secret among Alaska court observers. The state Office of Victims Rights has warned of excessive pretrial delays every year since 2014. The pandemic only made the problem worse. While most states halted trials for eight to 12 months, Alaskas pause lasted two years.Court officials have ordered new limits on delays to address the problem, and court data shows the time it takes to resolve misdemeanors and low-level felonies has dropped. But case durations remain stubbornly long for high-level felonies.In Pauls case, the initial court-appointed attorney had expressed impatience during the year after Pauls arrest as prosecutors kept requesting delays to test his bloody clothes.William Montgomery, a former college baseball player who moved to Alaska after law school, was in his second year on the job with the Office of Public Advocacy when he took Pauls case. He had agreed to the postponements. In May 2016, apparently exasperated, he told Judge Nathaniel Peters that prosecutors couldnt just continue this out endlessly.Eventually everyone got the latest lab results, which again showed that the main evidence used to charge Paul came up short.The state ought to have ended the case right then, two Alaska defense attorneys unconnected to the case told the newsrooms. Prosecutors presented other police findings to the grand jury, but they had so firmly emphasized the bloody clothing that they should have dropped the indictment when this evidence collapsed. Or they could have asked grand jurors if theyd re-charge Paul without it.After 10 years, the state has still not brought anyone to trial in the murder of Eunice Whitman. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsIts unclear why the lead prosecutor, Gray, stood fast. He retired in 2017 and died in a motorcycle accident days later. Other prosecutors directly involved in the case and their supervisors in the state Department of Law did not respond to detailed questions.The Law Department provided a statement saying that because Whitmans homicide remains an open investigation, the department would not speculate, confirm, or deny investigative theories, suspects, or evidentiary assessments beyond what is available in the public record.And so the case dragged on. Prosecutors proceeded with what was left of their case.A few months later, with the lawyers contemplating a November 2016 trial, Montgomery asked to examine another piece of physical evidence noted at Pauls indictment: the crime scene shoe print that police said looked similar to Pauls Nike sneakers. An expert witness for Montgomery gave him an answer in July 2017. The two prints that were clear enough for him to reliably examine didnt match Pauls, the expert wrote.Montgomery now had a strong argument for the jury that both the blood and the shoe evidence were faulty.But rather than move to trial, Montgomery asked for a new delay to test more evidence. Montgomery was still working out the logistics 10 months later when he was appointed to be a state judge.Montgomery declined to speak with the Daily News and ProPublica. His wife, Winter, an attorney who assisted in Pauls defense, said in an email that having experts evaluate evidence for the defense takes time and money and can add to delays. However, she said, it is a matter of making the best defense possible.Throughout the process, attorneys for the two sides gathered every few months for 10-minute hearings and found more reasons not to hold a trial, court minutes show. Defense and prosecution pulled out their calendars and knocked dates off the table. Another trial was in the way. Too close to moose hunting season to get jurors. When should we meet again?Paul listened in from jail by phone or video before returning to his cell.He voiced confusion at what was happening. He wrote the judge a note at one point asking to see the evidence against him. A clerk wrote him back, saying the judge wasnt allowed to respond. It was four years after his indictment, three since the blood evidence had been found lacking, two since Montgomerys expert had undercut the shoe evidence.In 2019 after four years of being in jail without a trial Paul wrote the judge saying he had still never seen much of the evidence prosecutors used to accuse him of murder. Obtained by Anchorage Daily News and ProPublicaHe says that he passed the years reading: maybe half the jailhouse library. The Mortal Instruments young adult fantasy series became a favorite.All told, Peters, the judge, granted 26 delays between Pauls arrest in 2015 and his release in August 2022. Judges who filled in for Peters granted five more delays. (Peters declined an interview request through a spokesperson, who said judges cannot discuss their decision-making beyond the court record.)As a further indicator of how drawn out the proceedings became, eight state-appointed defense attorneys and 11 prosecutors came and went over the years.Its just a crazy, crazy amount of time to be pretrial, regardless of whether youre guilty or innocent, said Jacqueline Shepherd, an attorney tracking trial delays for the ACLU of Alaska, after examining key documents in Pauls case. That uncertainty and unknown is its own form of torture for a person.Paul returns to his job after a lunch break in Kipnuk this April. After he was released, he returned to Kipnuk, where he said he mostly kept to himself in his mothers home. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsPauls hometown of Kipnuk, a village of about 700, is located on the Kugkaktlik River near the Bering Sea. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsCase DismissedNew momentum in Pauls case started to build in late 2018, three years after his arrest, when he landed a new defense attorney.As a prosecutor, Marcy McDannel was known as Maximum Marcy for her tenacious efforts to put defendants behind bars as long as possible. Shed switched sides and now worked for the Office of Public Advocacy. When Pauls attorney was appointed as a judge, his defense team asked McDannel to take the case.With her bullhorn voice and penchant for profanity, McDannel struck fear in opposing attorneys. She had worked in Bethel as a young prosecutor, walking her black Lab, Lou, on the boardwalk where Whitmans body was found. She knew the landmarks surrounding the crime scene and the players in the local police department.McDannel reviewed Pauls file, sizing up the flaws in the prosecutions case. She couldnt understand why prosecutors had stuck by the charges. She also couldnt see why her predecessors had taken so much time to bring Pauls case to trial and win.The crime lab had long since found the blood on Pauls clothes was not the victims. An expert witness had told the defense team the shoe prints from the crime scene didnt match Pauls. (The states own analysis would later reach the same conclusion.)McDannel was full of confidence. Whereas the vast majority of criminal cases end in plea deals, not jury trials, McDannel agreed with her predecessors assessment that Paul could win a full acquittal. Unlike her predecessors, McDannel felt, she had the experience to do it quickly.There was so little evidence, McDannel said. I promised myself and Justine we would get it to trial in six months.She acknowledges now that goal reflected her desire rather than a realistic appraisal. A jury trial was set for Oct. 28, 2019, or 13 months after she took the case.Then, three weeks before trial, the prosecution asked for more time. McDannel had produced a last-minute expert witness. In turn, the prosecution surprised McDannel with hundreds of pages of new evidence. It didnt end up showing much, but it required review.Another round of scheduling discussions and pretrial motions began. The pandemic struck a few months later, in March 2020.With courts now closed and trials on hold, McDannel used the solitude to chip away at the states remaining circumstantial case against Paul. Although he hadnt confessed to anything, she tried to exclude his statement to police. When that failed, she found an expert in the Yupik language to interpret Pauls demeanor during the interrogation.But as the pandemic wore on, it became clear to everyone that life was not returning to normal soon. McDannel felt shed shown prosecutors they had absolutely no chance of prevailing, yet theyd refused to fold. It was time to put Pauls wait to an end.The type of 7.5-by-9-foot jail cell in Bethel where Paul was held for much of his seven years in pretrial detention. Courtesy of Alaska Department of CorrectionsOn May 12, 2022, a defense attorney named Windy Hannaman filed the motion to dismiss. Hannaman took up Pauls cause because McDannel, like so many others involved in the case, had switched jobs. But McDannel had already drafted the dismissal motion for her successor before she left. The moment seemed right. The state, too, had just put a new prosecutor on the case.The 37-page defense motion argued that the evidence the lead investigator gave the grand jury, almost without exception, had fallen short in the end. Not only has the evidence failed to implicate Paul, Hannamans filing said, much of it turned out to be exculpatory.The document recounted how the blood work and the shoe prints failed to match when tested. It also cast doubt on the remaining claim police made to the grand jury: that Paul had incriminated himself by saying Whitman was stabbed in the neck. This seemed something that only the killer could know, and Paul had said he heard it from police.Hannaman described why she thought prosecutors would have a hard time proving Paul was lying: Police didnt have video covering all of Pauls time at the station, and it wasnt clear if officers were asked not to talk to him. (Davis told the Daily News and ProPublica that no one there other than her and the state trooper who was investigating talked to Paul about the case.)In a response a month after the motion was filed, prosecutor Jenna Gruenstein said the evidence presented to the grand jurors was grounded in information available at the time and there was nothing improper about it. She also argued that physical evidence did not fully clear Paul, noting that blood on Whitmans jeans was tested and was found to be consistent with Pauls.But she conceded that if the state had known about the negative blood and shoe results at the start, it would have been obliged to share that information. In its statement to the newsrooms, the Department of Law summed up Gruensteins response as saying dismissal of the indictment was warranted, based on information developed after the initial indictment.A Bethel Superior Court judge dismissed all charges on Aug. 9, 2022.Paul had spent a total of seven years and 43 days in jail.He was 24 on the day of his arrest and 31 when he was freed.The cost to Alaska taxpayers to jail him all that time only to drop the charges: an estimated $550,000.Life OutsideOn an April day in Kipnuk, a recent blizzard had deepened the spring snow. A white fog hid the ocean as the sound of basketballs clanging off a netless rim echoed down the water. Friendly village dogs, wiggling on approach, met every plane, and flat Starlink internet antennae topped houses like graduation caps.Justine Paul and his mother, Joann, were living in the familys pink house. The nearby schoolhouse is named after her late grandfather, a tribal chief. A photograph of her father playing honky-tonk guitar hangs on the wall. Joann kept a stack of his records. He was blind, and the songs have names like My Cane, My Slippers and You.Every time I feel low, I listen to him, Joann said. She thumbed through the record collection. Her son has the same Yupik name as his musician grandfather, she said: Teggitgaq.The first time Joann met Eunice Whitman, the younger woman brought a jar of decaf coffee and used it in a broth for musk ox stew, a recipe Joann had never tried. Joann says she didnt take for granted how Justine seemed happy at that time. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsIn Justine Pauls room, a new Facebook message arrived: Killer.Whitmans sister, Paul explained to a reporter.Until this article, the only news stories about Whitmans case available online repeated the details police used at his indictment in 2015 the shoe prints, the bloody backpack. When prosecutors abandoned the charges against him in 2022, no one wrote about it.After getting out of jail, Paul said, he lived on the streets of Anchorage and nearly overdosed 10 times on fentanyl. He said that on two or three of these occasions, he told friends he didnt want them to revive him with the opioid antidote naloxone. He was looking to die. I kind of gave up a little bit, slowly.McDannel, the defense attorney, said she worried after his release.I spent the first couple of months after he got out chasing him around the state because he was having psychotic breaks, McDannel said. They took seven and a half years of his life, and I think it broke him.In October, the storm that Paul once watched for out his window in Kipnuk finally rolled in.Kipnuks school named after Joanns grandfather, the late tribal chief surrounded by damage wrought by Typhoon Halong, which hit Alaska in October. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsWinds from Typhoon Halong gusted 100 mph along the coast, driving the sea into the streets of the village. Helicopters rescued Paul and his mother. He ended up living in a village 140 miles away. She resettled in Anchorage; the pink house in Kipnuk sits empty, still full of photos.Even now Paul fears that he might be charged with Whitmans murder once more.Its unclear how real that threat might be. McDannel maintains he cant be charged again because Alaskas speedy trial clock ran out. But the state Department of Law said such decisions ultimately are made by a court and depend on the facts of each case.The department also emphasized that a dismissal only reflects the prosecutions inability to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt not an affirmative declaration of a defendants factual innocence.Whitmans family and Davis, the police investigator, would like to see him charged again. He was always the prime suspect, Davis said by email.Yet there remain other possible avenues of inquiry.Police and prosecutors failed to deeply pursue other theories of the crime during the 11 days that passed between Whitmans death and Pauls indictment, investigative records show. For instance, had they widened their investigation, they might have noticed something strange.Another young woman was killed just months earlier in a neighboring community. Murdered in a nearly identical manner, stabbed multiple times and displayed nude on the tundra for all to see.Eunice Whitmans grave. She would have turned 34 this December. Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily NewsNext: The unfinished search for justice in the murder of Eunice Whitman.Editors note: We obtained court records from physical files in Bethel, Alaska, and compiled extensive audio of hearings through record requests with the state court system. Justine Pauls former attorney also provided material uncovered by police and shared with the defense, including a transcript of grand jury proceedings and video of Pauls questioning by police. Because describing every piece of information police gathered would be impractical, this story focuses mainly on evidence highlighted prominently at Pauls indictment. We used multiple channels to try to reach every person the story mentions, particularly members of Eunice Whitmans family. Heather Whitman, her sister, ultimately sat for an interview.The post Bad Evidence Got Him Indicted for Murder. He Waited 7 Years to Walk Free. appeared first on ProPublica.
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