Father’s murder charges dropped
DA, county sheriff’s office: Investigation into death of Agua Fría woman continues
The District Attorney’s Office and the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office issued a joint statement Friday saying they had decided to halt a murder trial for 67-year-old William Kelley, who is accused in the slaying of his adult daughter three years ago outside the home they shared in Agua Fría village.
The brief statement, which came just two months before Kelley was set to stand trial, said the charges of first-degree murder and tampering with evidence had been dismissed without prejudice — meaning they could be refiled — and that the investigation remains open. But it did not explain the reason for the decision.
“Assistant district attorneys spent hundreds of hours reviewing and preparing this case, along with getting multiple experts to testify,” the statement said, “but the State and the Sheriff ’s Office have reached the joint decision that the case cannot in good faith move forward to trial.
“… The case remains an open, continuing investigation and the sheriff will treat it as such,” the statement said.
District Attorney Marco Serna did not return an email or voicemail message seeking comment on the case. Santa Fe County Sheriff Robert Garcia also did not return a voicemail seeking comment. Juan Ríos, a spokesman for the sheriff ’s office, referred questions to Serna.
Carlos Scarborough, one of Kelley’s attorneys, said he had been informed that prosecutors were dropping the case, but he wasn’t sure why.
His client is “tremendously relieved,” he said.
“He’s been dragged through this for two years, accused of killing his own daughter,” Scarborough said. “There’s a lot of relief.”
Kelley has denied from the beginning that he would ever harm his daughter, Julieanne Kelley, who was 30 when her body was found on her father’s lot in January 2015, covered with lacerations and signs of blunt-force trauma.
Shortly after her death, William Kelley told The New Mexican that his daughter, a Capital High School graduate, had spent much of her time caring for him. “She was my best friend,” he said, sobbing. “I’m disabled, and she took care of me.”
It had been a quiet night, he said of the evening before her body was found. After the two had dinner together, Julieanne took her small dog for a walk, he said, but she didn’t return. He grew worried and went looking for her. In the early-morning hours, he found her poodle crying, with its foot stuck in a gate, he said. But his daughter was nowhere in sight. He called police.
According to court documents, Kelley reported his daughter missing around 2:30 a.m. Jan. 16, 2015. Officers responding to his call launched a search of the neighborhood but failed to find her. Later that afternoon, officers returned for a follow-up visit and discovered her body outside the home, lying in a pool of blood.
Kelley told investigators he’d had an argument with her before she left the home.
Authorities immediately named him a “person of interest” in her death, but they didn’t arrest him until nearly a year and a half later, after tests of bloodstained clothing found inside his washing machine the day the body was found revealed the blood had come from a woman.
Kelley had told officers the blood was from the dog.
Since his arrest in May 2016, Kelley has maintained that he is simply too frail to have stabbed his daughter to death.
The case has taken several twists. In October 2016, one of his attorneys asked a judge to dismiss the case, accusing prosecutors of deliberately withholding from the grand jury evidence that DNA from two other men was underneath the woman’s fingernails when she died. But the judge refused to toss out the indictment.
A year ago, a prosecutor filed a motion asking a judge to allow a forensic expert to dismantle three canes that belong to Kelley and test their interior parts for DNA — two canes with hidden swords and one with a laser. But just before a hearing on the motion, the prosecutor withdrew the request.
In August, prosecutors said they had uncovered evidence of old wounds on Julieanne Kelley’s body that might have come from a cane equipped with a stun gun — like one in her father’s collection. They also asked a judge to allow testimony at his trial about heated fights that had erupted between the father and daughter long before her death.
Kelley’s attorneys filed a motion in September to suppress statements he had made to sheriff ’s detectives during questioning that was described as an 11-hour “coercive incommunicado interrogation.” The motion accused the officers of violating Kelley’s constitutional rights.
The District Attorney’s Office filed a response in October arguing, among other things, that Kelley did not state “unequivocally” that he wanted to end the questioning or get an attorney, and that because Kelley had not been formally charged at the time and was not in custody, “there can be no Miranda violation.”
State District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer was scheduled to hear arguments on the motion Wednesday, but the District Attorney’s Office dismissed the case right before the hearing, according to Scarborough.