The Odyssey of James Pugh

By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma

When Jeff Hetzel and I first spoke to our prospective client in the summer of 2015, it seemed like a lost cause. The case was way up in Buffalo, the client was in Cape Vincent on the Canadian border, and seven witnesses had testified that James Pugh, our client, and Scott Lorenzo, his co-defendant, had confessed to the murder of a young mother in 1993. Pugh and Lorenzo had already lost numerous post-trial motions. Lorenzo had confessed on the record twice, implicating Pugh the first time and exonerating him the second time and withdrawing both confessions right after they were made. There was a coin found on Lorenzo months later that the police said had been taken from the crime scene. It did not seem like there was anything we could do for James.

ZMO Law takes the case

But Jeff dug into the file. He read the transcripts with the eye of the Stanford Law School student and federal law clerk he would become a few years later. He picked apart the seven “confessions” and the coin evidence. He realized that most of the trial evidence actually pointed to the victim’s husband and that the husband was the one who was claiming that the coin came from the scene of the murder. Each and every one of the confessions was made to a sketchy character, easily manipulated by aggressive police. The People’s star witness was an alcoholic named Nancy Hummingbird who was plied with liquor by the case detective, and gave a vague story about Pugh and Lorenzo beating up a “dude” the day of the murder. You could hear the slur in her speech on tapes made by the lead detective, a David Bentley of the City of Tonawanda Police Department.

So we took on the case and ran with it. Scott had great lawyers, Ilann Maazel and Alanna Kaufman of the civil rights firm Emery Celli, who were committed to his case. It was clear that if Scott was innocent, so was Jimmy. After months of investigation, we filed joint motions for DNA testing (we actually obtained DNA from a third suspect we thought might have been hired by the victim’s husband to commit the murder). The prosecutors resisted tooth and nail. They could not see the issues with the trial evidence and argued DNA testing would be pointless. We won that motion. The judge found that if DNA testing of evidence from the crime scene excluded Pugh and Lorenzo, there was a reasonable probability that the verdict would have gone the other way, which is enough to both require DNA testing and vacate the conviction under New York’s DNA laws. The DNA was ordered to be tested.

The DNA excludes our client

So what was the DNA evidence? A little bit of background about the murder. On February 17, 1993, 10-year-old Jessica Meindl came home after school to find the dead body of her mother, Deborah Meindl, sprawled out on the dining room floor of their little house in Tonawanda. The home had been ransacked. Deborah’s body was shackled with handcuffs that belonged to her and her husband, Donald Meindl. A necktie used to strangle her was still around her neck. Blood was everywhere. The police theory—the theory that prevailed at the trial a year later—was that there had been a burglary and Deborah walked in on the burglars and was killed to keep her quiet. But a strange young man had been seen going into the house hours earlier and was not seen leaving. The dog seemed to know the young man, who took in the mail when it was delivered, but did not say hello to the letter carrier like Deborah always did. A screen had been cut, but from the inside, apparently to make it look like a burglary. There had clearly been a vicious struggle and it looked like someone had gone through the family’s papers and drawers, looking for something.

We wanted DNA testing of everything: the tie around Deborah’s neck, the bloody knife found nearby, the plastic drawer divider the knife came from, Deborah’s clothing, her purse, and papers smeared with blood. It took almost a year, but the Erie County Central Police Services Forensic Crime Lab came back with stunning results. DNA from another person or other people had been found on all the key pieces of evidence including the knife, the tie, and the victim’s clothes. The DNA was mixed with the victim’s DNA but the lab was able to compare the mixtures to DNA swabbed from the cheeks of James Pugh, Scott Lorenzo, the third suspect we had identified, and the whole local Erie County DNA database. Pugh and Lorenzo were excluded from the DNA mixtures. In other words, someone else, at least one “unknown male donor,” had used the tie to strangle Deborah Meindl and the knife to stab her.

James goes home on parole

The DNA results were amazing, ample proof to vacate the convictions under New York law. James had been denied release on parole in 2018, after 25 years in prison with a stellar record. In the Spring of 2019, we sent the DNA results to the Parole Board and he was released a month later. He went to live with a family member and now works building fences.

Witnesses recant

But we wanted more evidence before going back to court. We found a tape of one of the “confession” witnesses (a friend of Hummingbird’s) recanting to James Pugh while James was in prison. The witness said that Detective Bentley threatened to take his children away if he did not say what Bentley wanted to hear. We tried hard to speak to the witness, but he never emerged.

After Jeff had gone to law school, paralegal Sophia Lattanzio (who had meticulously organized the DNA evidence) and I went to see another one of the “confession” witnesses imprisoned upstate for an unrelated string of robberies and burglaries. The witness told us the same thing: he had been pressured and manipulated into falsely claiming that Scott and Jimmy had “confessed” to the Meindl murder. We hired a private investigator to interview the third “confession” witness, a jailhouse informant who had since discovered religion.

Now we had more than enough to go back to court. Scott Lorenzo’s attorney’s filed the first set of papers last spring highlighting the DNA exclusions and the other evidence exonerating their client. We followed suit a week or two later, amplifying what they said. We thought we had a strong case but we fully expected the Erie County District Attorney’s Office to continue to fight us every step of the way.

The District Attorney agrees to re-investigate

We were wrong. Judge Burns summoned us to virtual court, and we were greeted by ADAs David Heraty and Michael Hillery, who was the office’s Chief of Appeals at the time. ADAs Heraty and Hillery had obviously read our papers with care and said they needed to time to do their own independent investigation. We reluctantly agreed. Scott Lorenzo's lawyers especially were skeptical since their client was rotting in jail and the DAs office or done nothing to re-investigate up to this point.

We kept in touch with ADA Heraty and Hilary through the summer. One after another, groundbreaking revelations emerged. As got the attention of the press this week, it turned out that notorious murderer and Dannemora escapee Richard Matt lived a block away from the house where the murder took place. The victim’s family told the ADAs that they knew Bentley, and he had some sort of undisclosed relationship with Deborah Meindl before the murder. Bentley denied knowing Deborah Meindl. Perhaps most tellingly, Bentley admitted that he had a close relationship with Richard Matt. Bentley ran the canvas of the neighborhood in the hours after the murder, but police never followed the path from the Meindl’s home to Richard Matt’s, which was a block or two away.

By the end of the summer Hillery and Heraty told us they were persuaded that our clients were innocent. Among other things, the victim’s husband told them he had been pressured to say that the coin came from his house but he really was never sure of it.

A celebrity suspect emerges

Hillery and Heraty did thorough interviews of both Pugh and Lorenzo which did nothing but confirm their conclusion that both men had been wrongfully convicted. They brought their findings to the executives who run the Erie County District Attorney's Office and were met with nothing but hostility. An elaborate PowerPoint presentation presentation they had prepared for the decision makers was never given. The accusations against Detective Bentley, even though they were not part of the conclusion that Pugh and Lorenzo were innocent, were just too incendiary for the Office to countenance. Michael Hillery was demoted from his job as a chief of appeals, and David Heraty was taken off the case.

But things got even worse for Detective Bentley after elected District Attorney John Flynn’s cynical attempt to protect him by ruining the careers of two courageous prosecutors. When Matt famously escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora New York, he was joined by an inmate named David Sweat. Sweat wrote a letter which he sent to the home address of one of the ADA's. Based on that letter, ZMO Law attorney Tess Cohen and investigator Stephen Abreu visited Sweat in prison. Sweat told us the whole story and eventually signed an affidavit claiming that Richard Matt had told him that he had committed the murder of a woman in Tonawanda at the behest of a police officer. In other words, Sweat was prepared to accuse Det. David Bentley of not only framing our clients—which he clearly did—but in fact of engineering the murder of Deborah Meindl at the hands of his old friend Richard Matt.

The case is in the judge’s hands

We were back in court before Judge Burns last week. With the DNA excluding both Pugh and Lorenzo, the reams of evidence implicating other potential suspects, and the multiple accounts of clear misconduct by Bentley, we argued to the judge that he should summarily grant our motion and vacate both convictions without a hearing. Lorenzo should be freed. Jimmy’s name should be cleared once and for all. Right away.

The DA’s office agreed to a hearing, not, they said, because they think it is necessary, but to clear up any suggestion that they acted inappropriately. So, come December, we anticipate either Judge Burns will vacate the convictions or hold an evidentiary hearing where James Pugh finally gets a fair shake in court.