Evidence frees man after 39 years in prison for murder
SIMI VALLEY — Decades into a life prison sentence without the possibility of parole, Craig Coley continued to insist he was innocent.
The former restaurant night manager had fought unsuccessfully for years to overturn a conviction for a grisly double murder that had shocked Simi Valley in 1978.
But when police recently reopened the case, they faced a daunting obstacle. After Coley lost his final appeal years ago, a judge had issued an order permitting the destruction of the crime scene evidence.
A cold-case detective began what some expected to be a fruitless search. He tried to contact the two laboratories that had performed rudimentary tests on the crime scene evidence in the 1970s and found that both had gone out of business. A Northern California lab had acquired their contents.
That’s when the detective discovered that the evidence boxes had not been destroyed but were sitting forgotten, intact and in storage.
New tests found that a key piece of evidence used to convict Coley did not carry any of his DNA, investigators said.
“We had thought it was destroyed,” Michael Schwartz, Ventura County special assistant district attorney, said in an interview Thursday. “Whether we’d reached the same conclusion without that, I don’t know.”
Gov. Jerry Brown pardoned Coley on Wednesday, writing that the DNA evidence and a painstaking reinvestigation of the case proved his innocence.
Coley was 31 when he was arrested, and 70 when he was released Wednesday. A former Simi Valley police officer who was convinced of Coley’s innocence plans to help him “get acclimated to freedom” in San Diego, the officer wrote on a GoFundMe page.
It was a relative who came across the bodies of Rhonda Wicht and her son on Nov. 11, 1978. Suspicions had been raised when Wicht, 24, had not arrived for a family gettogether.
Police said she had been beaten, raped and strangled with a macrame rope. Her 4year-old son, Donald, had been smothered in his bed, presumably because he might have identified his mother’s killer.
Wicht had dated Coley for two years, but they were “in the process of breaking up,” officials said this week. Coley was arrested for questioning the same day.
He was ultimately charged with the two murders.
Defense attorneys criticized Simi Valley police for failing to investigate three other possible suspects, according to news accounts at the time. And the Simi Valley Mirror, a weekly tabloid, published reports asserting that investigators had focused on an innocent man.
At Coley’s first trial, jurors spent four weeks deliberating before announcing they were hopelessly deadlocked 10-2 in favor of guilt.
A second jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder in 1980, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
But last fall, Simi Valley Police Chief David Livingstone was going through old news clippings about his department and came across some from the Wicht murders. He reached out to a retired detective who had expressed concerns in the past about whether Coley was guilty. With his interest piqued, Livingstone decided to reopen the case.