Arizona Sent an Innocent Man to Death Row

But after 10 years behind bars, Ray Krone walked out of prison a free man – the 100th time that a condemned man in this country has turned out to be innocent.

And he’d still be in prison today if his mother hadn’t sold her home and spent all of her retirement money to hire attorneys; if a persistent cousin hadn’t spent $100,000 for experts and appeals; if attorneys hadn’t kept working on their own dime; if so many hadn’t believed so firmly that he wasn’t the monster described on a national television show – “A killer whose easygoing personality belied his capacity for excessive lust and uncontrolled rage.”

“He deserves an apology from us, that’s for sure,” County Attorney Rick Romley said as Ray Krone was freed on April 8, 2002. “What do you say to him? An injustice was done and we will try to do better. And we’re sorry.”

Maybe so, but Arizona will be a lot sorrier than those 29 words if Krone’s $100 million lawsuit convinces a court that police and prosecutors did more than just make a mistake.

Krone and his mother are suing the city of Phoenix and Maricopa County. They claim that the pattern of deception in this case makes it clear that Ray Krone was framed. They cite an alarming list that reads like a horror story: hidden evidence, misrepresented evidence, non-existing evidence. They charge there was a “conspiracy” between police and prosecutors that went through a trial, a successful appeal, and then a second trial.

And through it all, Carolyn Leming knew that Arizona was “determined to execute her son if it could.”
Recently, two stunning new revelations have emerged in this case:

One, PHOENIX Magazine has discovered that before Krone was subjected to a second trial, two of the nation’s most respected experts in dental forensics personally told Arizona’s prosecuting attorney, Noel Levy, that there was “no way” the teeth marks were made by Ray Krone. They insisted that Levy’s sole dental expert was totally wrong in saying it was Krone’s bite, and they warned that he had apparently come to that conclusion using a homemade computer system that was untried and untested by others, and couldn’t be relied upon. Yet prosecutor Levy not only proceeded with the trial, but once again, he sought the death penalty.

And two, the lawsuit divulges a witness ready to testify that Levy’s dental “expert” has admitted to lying that the bite mark was that of Ray Krone.

“They arrested me first and then built a case,” Krone contends. “But somebody had to recognize this just didn’t make sense. Rational people had to say they needed to rethink this, but they blindly said, ‘Nothing is stopping us and nobody will know.'”

Krone says he hopes his lawsuit will let everyone know what abuse of power looks like and what it meant to an innocent man who lost a prime decade of his life while locked up in Arizona prisons.

“When this first started, I thought, ‘How could the system fail an innocent man?'” Krone says. “Now, I know that what happened to me can happen to anyone.”

“Your girlfriend, Kim Ancona, was murdered last night,” Phoenix Detective Charles Gregory told Ray Krone on December 29, 1991. “You mean Kim from the bar?” Krone asked. “She’s not my girlfriend.” At that moment, he didn’t even know Kim’s last name.

He was 19 days shy of his 34th birthday, an honorably discharged Air Force sergeant who worked for the post office and drove his prized red Corvette. He’d never been in trouble with the law, counted himself as a strong law-and-order guy who supported the death penalty, and saw no reason he shouldn’t “go downtown” with Detective Gregory.

“I shot darts with her at the bar and drove her to a Christmas party, but we never dated,” Krone insists. “Gregory kept saying I was her boyfriend, that I had her over to my place for dinner. My friends all told him that wasn’t true, but they were ignored.”

Krone insisted he’d been home in bed when the crime was committed, and his roommate confirmed that, but police didn’t believe them.

Instead, police quickly became convinced that Ray Krone was in the men’s room of the CBS Bar & Restaurant on West Camelback Road, stabbing 36-year-old Kim Ancona to death as she was closing up the bar. They said he attacked her because she wouldn’t have sex with him. And they decided all of this based on the fact that Ray Krone had crooked teeth.

The police had gotten to Krone’s apartment in the first place because Ancona had said to a waitress friend, “Ray is going to help me close up.” Police actually had two waitresses telling them Ancona hung out with a guy named Ray. What police wouldn’t realize until much later is that these waitresses were talking about two different men. They found two Rays listed in Ancona’s phone book. Who knows why they went to Krone’s home first, but they wouldn’t check on the second Ray until six months later – after Krone was in jail awaiting trial. In addition, police would say the “second Ray” wasn’t a suspect because he “didn’t have crooked teeth.”

“She had my number in her book, but I didn’t have hers – they searched my apartment and couldn’t find any reference to her, but they still didn’t believe I wasn’t her boyfriend,” Krone remembers.

Detective Gregory, a 19-year veteran of the Phoenix Police Department, noticed right away that Krone had uneven front teeth, and he knew from viewing the body that there was a bite mark on Ancona’s breast. On the way Downtown, he stopped at a convenience store and bought Styrofoam plates. In the interrogation room, he asked Krone to bite into it, and again, the young man didn’t hesitate.

The next day, on a second trip to police headquarters, Gregory got hair and blood samples from Krone, along with fingerprints. He’d eventually confiscate his shoes, too. And then he hit Krone with the accusation that it was time to come clean and admit he was a heartless killer. “I got really mad,” Krone remembers. “I told him, ‘You ought to go back to cop school, because anybody with an ounce of sense knows I had nothing to do with this.'”

But instead, Krone was arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping and sexual assault. “The first couple days in the county jail, I thought the intercom would say any second, ‘Ray Krone, go home.’ Within six months, I was in trial. I kept thinking they’d find the truth – now I know they were never looking for the truth.”

Krone was so sure his innocence would win out that he talked his family out of going into debt to hire an attorney. That’s why they have public defenders, he told them. But the first public attorney who came to see him in jail told him to plead guilty, and he swore at her – she ended up walking out on him. The second attorney took him to trial, but nobody would ever brag about the case he put on.

Still, there really wasn’t any evidence to tie him to the crime – nothing except that bite mark on Ancona’s breast.
And, as he went to trial – facing the death penalty if convicted – the court was told there were no fingerprints, blood or saliva at the scene to help police nab the killer. They were told that hair and shoe-prints had been found that “didn’t rule out” Krone as the culprit, but didn’t nail him, either.
But there was the bite mark that prosecutors said was a “perfect match.”
Ray Krone would spend a decade in prison, “feeling less than human,” before his new attorneys would discover there was a lot of evidence in this case that had never been revealed to the defense attorney – all of which showed that Ray Krone was not the killer.
“[Prosecutors] deliberately and intentionally ignored evidence that said Ray was not the murderer,” contends his attorney, Alan Simpson. Consider this:

• Fingerprints had been found in several places in the bathroom where An-cona’s body was discovered – on the condom machine, the water faucet and the inside door knob. None matched Ray Krone’s. His suit contends that police and prosecutors hid that finding from defense attorneys, and then, instead of trying to match the prints with known criminals, they ignored the prints.
• Blood had been found on Ancona’s underwear – blood that had dripped from above, which means it had to be the blood of the killer – but that was not revealed in the first trial. It wasn’t until the second trial, in a dramatic on-the-stand moment, that a crime-lab official was directed to test the spot, proving that it indeed was blood. But it wasn’t DNA tested to show whose blood it was. When that spot was finally tested, years later, it didn’t match the DNA of Ray Krone.
• Saliva had also been found on An-cona’s tank top, but that information wasn’t revealed to Krone’s attorney in the first trial. By the second trial, defense attorneys had learned that it existed. Prosecutors said the saliva “could” belong to Krone, although tests done years later would show that that wasn’t true either.
• Six hairs were found on and under Ancona’s body. Detectives testified that they had all the hairs tested, and they could have come from either the victim or Krone. But that wasn’t true. During Krone’s second trial, his attorneys finally discovered that two of the hairs belonged to the victim, and the other four were either “inconclusive” or hadn’t even been tested. Krone’s suit notes that when the hairs were honestly tested, they didn’t match Krone.
• Prints from Converse sneakers were found in the kitchen, where the killer had stolen the butcher knife that was used to kill Ancona – the shoes were size 91/2 to 101/2. Krone didn’t own any Converse sneakers, and his feet are size 11. The suit contends police detectives altered the report on the shoes so they’d match Krone’s shoe size.

A decade after all that evidence was first discovered by Phoenix police, a new look led to a startling discovery: All of the evidence matched a Native Ameri-can and sexual predator named Kenneth Phillips, who was living within 200 yards of the CBS Bar when Ancona was killed.
The fingerprints were his.
The blood was his.
The saliva was his.
The hair was his.
The footprint was his.

But he had never been a suspect in Ancona’s murder, and hadn’t even been questioned.

Three weeks after killing Ancona, Phillips was arrested in the same neighborhood for an attack on a 7-year-old girl. A decade later, when everyone realized that he was the real killer, Phillips was sitting in prison in Florence for some other crimes. The county is now prosecuting Kenneth Phillips for Ancona’s death.
Krone’s lawsuit contends that if police hadn’t rushed to judgment, they would have followed clues leading right to Phillips, there-fore preventing Phillips’ subsequent crimes and sparing Krone a decade of agony.
It was eventually discovered that police had at least two reports at the time suggesting they should be looking for a Native Am-erican who hung out at the bar and seemed fixated on Ancona. One said they’d seen a Native American arguing with her shortly before her murder. Another said a Native American was seen drinking behind the bar late on the night of the murder.

If police had tested the pubic hairs found under Ancona’s body, they would have found that the hair didn’t belong to a Caucasian, but to a Native American. If they’d correctly tested all their evidence, they’d have found DNA matching the saliva and blood, too, the suit notes.

At the time of the murder, Phillips was already a registered sex offender who was on probation. He’d been arrested for robbing the Fry’s grocery store a few feet from the CBS Bar, he lived in the neighborhood, and his previous crimes were similar to the attack on Ancona, Simpson adds.

Furthermore, it can be argued, if defense attorneys had known there was blood on the victim that didn’t match that of Krone, that evidence would have been powerful. Juries aren’t likely to convict when the murderer’s blood doesn’t belong to the guy on trial.

All of this is part of what the Krone lawsuit contends was “egregious and extensive investigatory and prosecutorial misconduct and misfeasance.”

And then there’s the bite-mark evidence, and that’s where the story gets particularly horrifying.

Bite marks are as unique as fingerprints,” prosecutor Noel Levy told two juries, as he presented two “experts” declaring that the bite marks on Kim Ancona’s breast were made by Ray Krone. Both juries believed him. In fact, both would say the only evidence that convincingly tied Krone to the murder were the “conclusive” bite marks.

It would shock them to hear a forensic expert like Michael Saks, an ASU law professor, call bite-mark evidence “classic junk science.”

“You can say it’s unique like fingerprints all you want, but it clearly is not true,” says the professor, who’s written a book on forensic evidence. “Don’t prosecutors have a duty to refrain from offering supposedly scientific evidence to courts unless and until they have good grounds for believing it to be valid?”

Studies have shown an alarming rate of errors in trying to match bite marks, and Saks chides the defense attorneys for not getting that point through to the two juries. “For Ray Krone, the case was a tragedy,” he tells PHOENIX Magazine. “But for the justice system, it is an embarrassment.”

The Styrofoam plate that Ray Krone obligingly bit for Detective Gregory the day after Ancona was murdered was given to Dr. John Piakis, a dentist who advised the county medical examiner. Dr. Piakis compared the bite mark in the Styrofoam to the bite mark on Ancona’s body, and thought they matched. He later made a plaster cast of Krone’s teeth.

The lawsuit contends that after that, three incredible things happened:

• Unknown to Krone’s defense attorney, “In the process of performing his analysis, Piakis either deliberately and maliciously, or with such reckless disregard and neglect for proper scientific procedure and analysis as to constitute malice, altered bite mark impressions made on victim Ancona’s left breast by jamming and/or twisting the plaster cast of Krone’s teeth….”
• Dr. Piakis, who was neither experienced nor certified as an expert in forensic odontology, sought a second opinion, and turned to his mentor – Dr. Steven Sperber, chief forensic dentist for San Diego and Imperial counties in California. Dr. Sperber concluded that the bite marks on the breast did not match Ray Krone’s. But this crucial information was kept a secret from Krone’s defense attorney.
• Instead, Krone’s suit charges, officials were “distraught by the news” and went “shopping” for another expert, finding Dr. Raymond Rawson of Nevada, a certified odontologist, deputy coroner, college professor and state senator. Dr. Rawson said the bite marks matched. And so, Dr. Piakis would get on the stand – inflating his credentials in a field where he’d never before testified – to back up Dr. Rawson. The county attorney paid Dr. Rawson $50,000, and spent about $75,000 for all of its “expert” witnesses. In comparison, Krone’s first attorney, a public defender, was allocated just $1,500 to hire experts.

It was clear that without the bite mark, the prosecution had nothing. On a national television show, prosecuting attorney Noel Levy admitted this: “Everybody recognized that the bite mark was the most compelling evidence. It was crucial because the rest of the forensic evidence was not strong enough to convict Ray Krone.”

At the first trial, the public defender didn’t offer a single witness to counter the expert odontologist from Nevada, who had testified 100 times in bite-mark cases. Dr. Rawson showed a video of his homemade computer analysis that convinced the jury that Krone had bitten Ancona while he killed her. The lawsuit contends that Dr. Rawson and his video tape were “a sham and a fraud which resulted in a persuasive politician selling a bill of goods to a jury….”

It took the jury three-and-a-half hours to convict Ray Krone of murder and kidnapping, although they acquitted him of sexual assault. The Arizona Republic reported that Krone shook his head in disbelief as the verdict was read.

The court then took the recommendation of County Attorney Rick Romley’s office and, on November 20, 1992, sentenced Ray Krone to death.

Krone’s lawsuit charges that Maricopa County “obtained the conviction and death sentence… by prosecutorial misconduct, the use of altered and manufactured evidence, expert shopping, a refusal to adequately investigate… through the concealment and destruction of evidence, through perjured documents and statements, and through the unfairly prejudicial inflammation of public opinion.”

The third day I was in prison, my neighbor was stabbed,” Krone says. A guy in another nearby cell also was killed over a $6 loan. For the two years and eight months he spent on Death Row, he was allowed outside just two hours a day, three days a week, in what he likens to a “dog cage.” He found men on Death Row weren’t afraid of dying, nor deterred by it, and a pending execution didn’t seem to faze the other condemned men. He remembers guards handing out used toothbrushes, collecting them each night so they couldn’t be used as weapons, then randomly handing them out again the next day. He also remembers a few moments of kindness, like the Death Row guard who on Christmas Eve one year let the isolated men out of their cells for a few moments so they could see each other. It was a nice Christmas gift.

Later, on June 22, 1995, Ray Krone got a break – the Arizona Supreme Court overturned his conviction because the video that Dr. Rawson had shown on the bite marks hadn’t been shared with the defense until the day the trial started. The laws of discovery stipulate that you can’t blindside the opposition like that. Although prosecutors would try to diminish this as just “a technicality,” the court made it clear that it was far more serious than that: “The state’s discovery violation related to critical evidence. We cannot say it did not affect the verdict.”

By now, Krone had a powerful new ally – a cousin he’d never met, but who became convinced of Krone’s innocence. Jim Rix of Lake Tahoe remembers taking the bite-mark charts to other experts, and finding they were astonished that anyone would think they matched the bite mark of Krone. Eventually, Rix and new defense attorneys would find four experts who all said the same thing – three of them told the second jury in March 1996 that it was impossible for the bite mark to be that of Ray Krone.

In addition, a sharp defense attorney named Christopher Plourd of San Diego, himself a forensic expert, had plenty of other points to show the jury that Krone wasn’t the murderer. This jury heard about hairs that didn’t match, and fingerprints and shoe prints that couldn’t be tied to Krone. This time, there was some DNA evidence of blood found around the body. DNA tests even showed some that absolutely excluded Krone, some that matched neither he nor the victim, and none that clearly matched Krone.

“We had a lot of evidence that pointed at someone else, and none of it pointed at me,” Krone recalls. “My family flew to Phoenix for the trial, knowing we’d win. After they convicted me, I never thought about getting out again.”

Jurors would later admit they “threw out all the experts” and DNA and used the plaster mold made of Krone’s mouth to match up to the photos of the bite – the same mold that this lawsuit claims was used to make some of the marks on the body. Jurors told Plourd they were convinced the bite marks matched, and therefore, Krone had to be the killer.

Former Judge James McDougall pre-sided over the second trial. Again, the county attorney asked for the death sentence, but the judge said he couldn’t go that far.

“There were still many unanswered questions,” Judge McDougall said in his sentencing report. “In this court’s opinion, serious issues were raised by the defense regarding the credibility of the testimony of Drs. Rawson and Piakis…. The court is left with a residual or lingering doubt about the clear identity of the killer.
“It is frightening to think that Mr. Krone did this, because it appears completely out of character. It is just as frightening to think that he did not do it and has been convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence.”
So, on December 20, 1996, Judge Mc-Dougall sentenced Ray Krone to life in prison, with no possibility for parole until he served 25 calendar years.

“This is one of those cases that will haunt me for the rest of my life, wondering whether I have done the right thing,” the judge concluded. And he had good reason to fret.

Dr. Skip Sperber first heard of the Krone case in 1992, not long after Kim Ancona was murdered. He would have no idea that being a mentor to a young Phoenix dentist would embroil him in one of the most disturbing and vexing cases he’s ever seen.

By then, Dr. Sperber had some 30 years of experience under his belt, was already one of the nation’s experts in forensic dentistry, and was chief forensic dentist for San Diego and Imperial counties in California, a position he still holds. He’d already testified in hundreds of cases – usually on the side of the prosecution.

Young Dr. John Piakis of Phoenix saw him as his mentor, and now turned to him for a seasoned opinion about the Krone case.

When Dr. Sperber saw the bite-mark evidence, he didn’t mince words: Krone’s teeth and the bite on the body don’t match.

“And I did tell John, if that’s all they have, if there’s no other evidence, stay away from this case,” Dr. Sperber tells PHOENIX Magazine. He said he thought anyone experienced in the field would easily see “there’s too many inconsistencies” between Krone’s teeth and the marks on the body. He assumed charges had been dropped.

So he was astonished when the same bite-mark evidence showed up in his office some four years later, and he learned that Ray Krone was sitting on Death Row. “I was amazed, it was so preposterous – it just couldn’t be,” he says now.

Krone had just been granted a new trial, and his new attorneys were seeking an expert opinion on the bite to present to a jury. They were shocked to discover this evidence wasn’t news to Dr. Sperber – that’s how they learned the prosecution had hidden Dr. Sperber’s opinion in the first trial.

When they showed him the computer model and video tape that Dr. Rawson had used to convince a jury of Krone’s guilt, Sperber couldn’t believe it. Neither could another expert and colleague that the attorneys consulted, Dr. Gerald Vale, the chief forensic dentist for Los Angeles County.

Dr. Sperber and Dr. Vale were so disturbed by Dr. Rawson’s interpretation, they arranged a meeting with him when the men were all at a professional conference.

“We told him, ‘Ray, it’s not even close,'” Dr. Sperber remembers. “He told us, ‘You have to see it on my computer.’ I have no idea what his computer system is. I certainly haven’t used it, and nobody else has. I don’t know what he was using.”

Dr. Sperber says he tried to make the prosecuting attorney understand that point before Ray Krone was ever subjected to a second trial.

“Before the second trial, the D.A. came to San Diego to talk to us,” Dr. Sperber says, using the generic “district attorney” label for Levy. “We spent an hour or so, and I told him, ‘It’s very simple: The upper teeth don’t match; the lower teeth don’t match.'”

He said Levy didn’t say much during the meeting, but couldn’t have left without understanding that Krone wasn’t the biter.

Dr. Sperber says the biggest shock of all was to find that the Maricopa County Attor-ney’s office was going to retry Ray Krone for the murder of Kim Ancona, and once again would seek the death penalty.
“This is so ridiculous,” Dr. Sperber says. “All the other evidence is exculpatory. It shows he couldn’t have done it, and for the prosecution to still go ahead based on a bite mark, and they know nobody agrees that the bite mark matches… it is just unbelievable that knowing what they did [know], they still went ahead with the trial.”

Dr. Sperber recoils at the suggestion that teeth marks are as unique as fingerprints, as Levy twice told juries. “That’s foolish,” Dr. Sperber says. “Bite marks are not nearly as accurate or scientific as fingerprints. They are probably the least accurate method of identifying people that we have.”

He says he was flabbergasted when a second jury came back with a guilty verdict. He and Dr. Vale and a third expert all had testified the bite mark didn’t match, while Dr. Rawson again testified that it did match. “I couldn’t believe the jury’s verdict. What were they thinking?” Dr. Sperber says in exacerbation.

The attorney representing Maricopa County in Ray Krone’s lawsuit, Michael O’Connor, says the second conviction shows the quandary the county was in. “There was a dispute between experts,” he says. “That’s why you have trials. That Noel Levy went to San Diego shows how thorough he was in performing his duties.”

Dr. Sperber also blanches at the $50,000 fee Dr. Rawson collected for the Krone case. “I’ve been in some pretty high-profile cases, and my fees have never been anywhere near that amount,” he says, citing his involvement in both the Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer cases. “I don’t know what that fee is for, but whatever he charged them, it wasn’t worth it – he was absolutely wrong.”

Dr. Sperber is left with some troubling questions.

“I can’t give any whys,” he says. “Why Mr. Levy did it. Why Dr. Rawson did it. It’s totally bewildering to me.”

Dr. Richard Souviron of Coral Gables, Florida, is one of the nation’s original forensic odontologists – his board certification number is 2. He is the chief forensic odontologist for Dade County. And he’s most famous for being the expert for the prosecution in the case of mass murderer Ted Bundy.

He was one of the experts found by Krone’s cousin, Jim Rix, between the two trials. “I got all this information from Dr. Rawson’s evaluation and found it very voluminous, very impressive and extremely misleading,” Dr. Souviron says now. “When I evaluated the marks, I concluded I would exclude Krone as the biter.”

So he wasn’t at all surprised to find that three other experts in his league had all come to the same conclusion, including the man who was then president of their professional association. But he was surprised that the unanimous agreement of these four experts hadn’t caused Dr. Rawson to reconsider his unequivocal declaration that Ray Krone had made the bite marks.

“If I saw that lineup, I’d really reassess my position,” Dr. Souviron says. “I’d sit down with these guys and say, ‘Show me why you think I’m wrong.'”

So it was natural that when Dr. Souviron ran into Dr. Rawson at a professional conference, he brought up the point.

“I said, ‘Ray, you know, there’s no way Ray Krone made those bite marks, they don’t match,’ and he told me, ‘Well, I’m in too deep.'”

Dr. Souviron tells PHOENIX Magazine he could hardly believe his ears: “I was shocked. This guy is a friend of mine. I respected him. I was speechless. I didn’t know what to say.”

Dr. Souviron has signed an affidavit for Krone’s lawsuit, attesting to that conversation. The suit contends that the comment shows that Dr. Rawson knew his testimony was false. It notes he continues to use the Krone case in lectures – still contending that Krone is a murderer.

Dr. Souviron joins the chorus in den-ouncing the idea that teeth marks are as unique as fingerprints. “Let me tell you how ridiculous… how wrong that is,” he says. “Anyone who says that is 180 degrees wrong. Dead wrong. The variables with bite marks are extremely high.”

Dr. Rawson has strenuously denied the conversation with Dr. Souviron, and de-clared in his answer to Krone’s lawsuit that he has done nothing wrong. When a complaint was filed against him with the Ethics Committee of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, he responded, “This appears to me to be the most unfair and unjust charge I have faced in 30 years of professional life.”

On primetime, Arrest and Trial is a television show presented “through the eyes of detectives who investigate crimes and prosecutors who bring them to trial.” Actor Brian Dennehy is the host. The show was created by Dick Wolf, of Law and Order fame.

The show on the Ray Krone case featured veteran homicide detectives Charles Gregory and his partner Dennis Olson, who handled the evidence collection. They had a combined service of 47 years on the force. They appeared on the show, along with prosecutor Noel Levy.

As the show explains, “Officers say Ray seemed very calm and didn’t seem concerned about anything” when he originally agreed to “go downtown” for questioning, but Gregory says he later became defensive and asked for a lawyer. “I think he was scared – he knew I was on to him,” Gregory declares.

Dennehy dramatically announces that a search warrant of Krone’s Corvette “held a particularly damning piece of evidence. In the trunk, detectives uncovered a pair of bloody sheets.” Detective Olson is shown on screen saying this: “We later found out through the crime lab investigation that the blood came back to Kim Ancona – the victim.”

What’s astonishing about that scene is that it’s a lie. There were no bloody sheets. And there was nothing in Ray Krone’s trunk that tied him to Ancona.

Krone’s lawsuit calls the fictitious bloody sheets “deliberately and maliciously false and inflammatory.”
The show dwelled on the bite marks, saying a renowned odontologist determined they “could have only been made by Ray Krone.”

Arrest and Trial officially thanked then-Police Chief Harold Hurtt and the Phoenix Police Department, along with County Att-orney Rick Romley and his office for assistance in filing its show.

“Ray got death threats after that show,” says attorney Alan Simpson, who joined the defense team in 2000. “And all those guys [police and prosecutors] know that when inmates see that kind of crap about sexual assault, you’re putting him in danger.”

Ray Krone had given up, but his cousin and mother hadn’t. Neither had the attorneys who were convinced that their client was innocent. “We essentially went back to the crime scene and started all over,” Simpson says.
Six years after the second conviction, Simpson convinced a judge to order re-testing of both the saliva on the tank top and the blood on her underwear. By now, more sophisticated DNA testing was available, and a data bank had been developed to match DNA samples. Although this order was given in October 2001, it took until the spring of 2002 for Krone’s attorneys to get the results – a delay they decry in the lawsuit.
The saliva DNA did not match Krone. The defense attorneys notified the county attorney’s office. Prosecutor Levy dismissed it as “a fluke,” according to Krone’s lawsuit.

In addition, the blood found on Anco-na’s underwear did not match Krone’s. And with that report came a real shocker.

“There was – apparently inadvertently attached to the DNA test results – information that linked the DNA to Kenneth Phil-lips,” the suit notes. The suit also says that when defense attorney Plourd took this conclusive information to Levy at the county attorney’s office, Levy told him: “Don’t get excited about it.”

As attorneys impatiently waited for the county to admit its mistake, they went down to Florence to interview the man whose DNA was found on Ancona’s body – Kenneth Phillips. They found that Phoenix Detective Dennis Olson had already been there twice to see Phillips, and had taken a bite impression.

Later, attorneys would discover that when Phillips’ bite was sent to Drs. Raw-son and Piakis – who had both been so certain that Krone had been the biter – both dentists now said that Phillips’ bite was more of a match. What’s most astonishing in that assessment is that Kenneth Phillips doesn’t have crooked teeth, which means that Phoenix PD’s insistence that anyone who “didn’t have crooked teeth” was excluded from consideration, was off-base from Day One.

But the county attorney was insisting on re-tests of all this evidence as Krone’s attorneys pushed for his release. In the meantime, they got incredible admissions from Phillips. He told Simpson that he had argued with the barmaid and was inside the bathroom, and believed she came at him with a knife. He said he woke up at home with blood on his shoes, and when he heard news reports of Ancona’s murder, he thought, “My god, could that have been me?”

Finally, on April 8, 2002, Romley called a news conference to announce that Ray Krone was being released from prison. And, at 5 p.m. that Monday, Krone walked out of the Cheyenne Unit at Yuma Prison.

As Simpson would tell the Catholic Sun, “When he was arrested, Ray Krone had the greatest confidence in our justice system. For days and days he sat in jail waiting to hear his name called over the speaker to ‘roll up.’ If you’re in jail, hearing the words ‘roll up’ means you’re to take your belongings, and you’re going to be let out of jail. Mr. Krone kept on believing that he was going to hear those words for the days that went into the weeks, the weeks that went into the months, and for 10-and-a-half years, it has been a roller coaster ride for him.”

“I was called to the counselor’s office about noon and handed a phone, and Simp-son was on the other end,” Krone remembers. “He jokingly asked what I wanted to eat, and then he told me ‘roll up.'” His voice still cracks when he tells that story.

In all, Ray Krone had spent 10 years, three months and eight days locked up for a crime he didn’t commit.
“There are too many things wrong in my case,” Krone says. “There’s no way that level of incompetence should have happened.”

Neither the city nor the county admit to any wrongdoing, and are vigorously fighting Krone’s lawsuit.

“The complaint is very creative,” chuckles attorney Georgia Staton, who’s representing the city. “It reads more like a novel than a legal complaint. Simply because someone was convicted, not once but twice, doesn’t mean prosecutors did anything wrong. It’s unfortunate.”

She’s reminded that the suit contends all kinds of misfeasance. “We’re saying baloney,” she says. “It’s just not true.”

Attorney Michael O’Connor, on behalf of Maricopa County, also denies anything was improper. “Our system isn’t perfect, but it’s the best in the world,” he says. “Unfortunately, there are situations where innocent people are convicted. That doesn’t mean we did anything wrong.”

Although he allows that Krone’s first attorney didn’t do a great job, he notes that in the second trial, Krone had “an extremely competent lawyer”; he had nationally known experts “and the jury still found him guilty. I don’t think it is fair to say he didn’t have an extremely fair trial.”

Even though the suit lays out several instances of evidence manipulation, O’Connor stresses, “They are all allegations, and we disagree with the allegations – they are simply not true.”

From a legal standpoint, he notes, Krone has an uphill battle. The law gives “absolute and qualified immunity” for police and prosecutors while doing their jobs, “which isolates us from all the claims.” For Krone to win the suit, “the court would have to determine the county attorney’s office almost acted fraudulently, and I don’t believe that occurred,” O’Connor says.

But other legal experts say some of the charges are so severe that the case can’t be ignored.

O’Connor is asked what the state of Arizona owes Ray Krone. He notes that some states provide compensation for cases like this, but Arizona isn’t one of them. He suggests the state owes Mr. Krone “an apology and a wish for the best for the future.”

“It is absolutely unfortunate that Ray Krone was in jail for 10 years, but does that mean he’s entitled to collect a tremendous amount of money?” O’Connor asks. “This is a very sympathetic case and a very sad case for Mr. Krone, but that being said, the county attorney’s office maintains we did not do anything improper in securing the two convictions.”

However, he adds that the county “would absolutely sit down with Mr. Krone and his lawyers to settle this case.”

Since his release, Ray Krone has tried to put his life back together. He’s living in Pennsylvania near his mother and stepfather. He’s become the “poster boy” against the death penalty.

Dozens of times he’s told his story, to college classes, to legal groups, to the United Nations. He’s appeared with the play The Exonerated, which tells the true stories of innocent people who have been on Death Row.
He has a whole different attitude now than he had that December morning in 1991 when his life was disrupted.

“I’m the 100th guy who was on Death Row and was released as an innocent man,” he notes. “At the same time, they’ve executed 800 – that’s one in eight. Who would want those odds for anything? Would you go on a cruise ship where it sank one in eight times?”

He says he wants to lead a normal life, but he also has a mission. “I want to sit on a rocking chair someday and tell my grandkids that I helped stop the death penalty.”