Murder On Lockhart Road

Bizarre Twists And Evidence Keep Turning Case On Its Head

(CBS)  David Camm has always insisted he had nothing to do with the murders and spoke exclusively with 48 Hours about being convicted.

Camm says he didn't expect to be acquitted and that he saw it coming; he says he knew early on that his defense team never had a chance. "We were outmanned," he says,

Nobody expected what came next: the Indiana Court of Appeals made a bombshell decision, throwing out the convictions and slamming the judge in the Camm trial for allowing in evidence of adultery. The court said all those women could have unfairly persuaded the jury to turn against Camm. It was a stinging opinion. The court called the case against Camm "far from overwhelming."

Prosecutor Stan Faith knew the case was controversial but he never expected such a harsh ruling.

The court also strongly warned prosecutors that if they tried Camm again, and presented evidence that Jill was molested, they would have to prove that it was Camm who molested her.

Camm soon learned that he would face trial again. Both he and his new attorney Kitty Liell braced for an uphill battle, vowing to keep the molestation evidence out of the new trial.

"In reality, they were never able and still have not been able to come up with any evidence that the blunt force trauma suffered by Jill was caused by David Camm," Liell says.

Camm’s new defense team would face a new prosecutor, Keith Henderson. His first priority was to take a closer look at Camm’s alibi, those 11 men who say they were with him at the time of the murders. They looked at the story each man in the gym that night told.

Prosecutors started to believe Camm’s alibi might not be so strong after all.

"They don’t know how many games they played, they don’t know what they were wearing, they don’t know just lots of things, I think that’s where our cross examination could be built - their inability to remember things," a prosecutor said during a strategy session, which 48 Hours was allowed to attend.

Henderson’s case was starting to take shape, even though he would not be permitted to present large chunks of evidence the jury in the first trial heard.

From the beginning Camm always insisted that the grey sweatshirt, which never was fully investigated, could answer a lot of questions. "That was one of the primary elements of our defense was that sweatshirt," Camm explains. "And the state simply dismissed it."

The sweatshirt held two important clues: there were blood stains on it that contained DNA; and the word "Backbone" was written inside the collar.

DNA analyst Lynn Skamerhorn, from the Indiana State Police lab, tested the sweatshirt before Camm's first trial. Besides Bradley's blood, Skamerhorn says she was able to identify other blood stains, most yielding "very good results as far as DNA was concerned."

In fact, there was a lot of DNA on that sweatshirt. Some of it matched Brad and his mother, Kim, but the rest of it belonged to at least two unidentified people, a man and a woman. None of it matched Camm.

Amazingly, that mystery DNA was never run through the federal data bank of known felons before Camm’s first trial. Faith did ask to have the profile run through the DNA database but that didn't happen. "I think somebody dropped the ball," he says.

It was a huge error and Kitty Liell believes the mystery DNA would reveal the truth about what happened on the night of the murder. She was right: the results would eventually blow the case wide open.