AG: DNA debunks claim of inmate’s dad
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals was told Monday that new DNA testing debunks a death row inmate’s claim that his father is the real killer of University of Oklahoma ballerina Juli Busken.
Anthony Castillo Sanchez “is clearly not actually innocent,” Attorney General Gentner Drummond and his assistants told the court in a legal brief.
The death row inmate challenged his conviction again Feb. 3. He claims his father confessed before committing suicide last year.
Busken was shot in the head at Lake Stanley Draper after being abducted from a Norman apartment complex early Dec. 20, 1996, and raped. She was 21.
Anthony Sanchez was convicted of first-degree murder at a 2006 trial after being identified as a suspect by his DNA.
He is set to be executed Sept. 21 by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
“The possibility that the DNA could actually belong to the Petitioner’s father was already explored and rejected at trial,” the state’s attorneys told the court.
The state’s DNA expert testified at trial that evidence from the victim’s underwear and pink leotard was consistent with Anthony Sanchez’s DNA at all 16 genetic loci.
The probability that the match was a mistake was 1 in 200 quadrillion for Caucasians, 1 in 20 quintillion for African Americans and 1 in 94 quadrillion for Southwest Hispanics, according to the testimony.
The father, Glen Sanchez, 68, committed suicide on his girlfriend’s front porch in April in Midwest City.
The girlfriend, Charlotte Beattie, said he confessed more than once, the first time in 2020.
“Once he said he ... enjoyed watching her die,” she wrote in a sworn declaration.
“Glen said that he regretted Anthony was on death row for something Glen did. But he said that Anthony was tough and could deal with being locked up, whereas Glen wasn’t strong enough to adapt to being incarcerated.”
In the legal brief, the AG and his assistants questioned if the girlfriend was telling the truth. “It appears highly likely these ‘confessions,’ if they were made, were simply intended to frighten Ms. Beattie,” they also told the court.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation conducted new DNA tests in February “in an effort to fully and unequivocally debunk” the new claim, the state’s attorneys disclosed.
The OSBI used a blood sample from the father obtained from the medical examiner’s office, which investigated his death. The OSBI concluded the father’s DNA “does not match” the DNA from the leotard.
It did show, though, that Glen Sanchez could be the father of the attacker.
“Put another way, this very recent lab report yet again confirms what the State and the courts have already known for many years now – Petitioner, and Petitioner alone, is responsible for the abduction, rape, forcible sodomy, and brutal murder of Juli Busken on the morning of December 20, 1996,” the AG and his assistants told the court.
The victim was abducted after taking a friend to the airport. She had completed her courses at OU and had packed to return to her parents’ home in Arkansas and enroll in graduate school.
Anthony Sanchez had to give up a sample of his DNA when he went to prison in Oklahoma in 2002 for second-degree burglary. The OSBI got a “hit” to the DNA evidence in the Busken case in 2004.