A decades-old murder mystery in Saginaw

The defense had raised the question: How could Gabriel Ferris, a natural blonde with a normal sperm count, have raped and murdered Cheryl Miller when forensic experts working the case back in 1974 had told detectives to look for a dark-haired killer who was sterile?

Prosecutors had a chance to explain. And in the age of CSI, when so many believe that criminal science is infallible, and that the evidence always points to the “guilty,” the state was about to admit that the original detectives and scientists on the case misread the evidence and followed the wrong leads.

First to the stand: The former crime lab scientist who had examined the hairs found on the victim’s body. Even though for years he had told police they were looking for a dark-haired killer, similar to original suspects Esfehani and Alverez, he now said that the Miller could have picked up hairs on her body from a rug. In other words, prosecutors now argued that those dark hairs found on the body, long thought to have been left by the killer did not come from the killer at all. The expert testified the hairs were not pulled out in a fierce struggle, but had been left behind by people who’d simply been in the house, and shed the hairs naturally. And when Cheryl Miller struggled with the killer, the expert testified, the hairs came off the rug and stuck to her body. As further proof the hairs came from the rug and not the killer, some of the hairs, he testified, came from an animal.

But what about the startling defense claim that the killer was sterile… and Ferris was not?

Prosecutors now had a new explanation for that evidence as well. Saginaw County’s Chief Medical examiner testified that the pathologist who told police they were looking for a sterile killer 30 years before was simply wrong. In fact, the medical examiner testified that the substance was not even semen at all, but came from the victim instead.

And that conclusion was backed up by another scientist who’d examined slides of the substance taken from the victim’s body.

Prosecutors wanted to put Ferris in prison for life without parole. In order to do that, they had to convict him of what in Michigan is called ‘felony murder’ --  a murder committed during the course of a felony, in this case, rape.

The question for prosecutors: without semen, how could they prove that a rape even occurred?

"If the rapist doesn’t ejaculate, you have no semen sample. In this case our supposition was that Mr. Ferris was choking Cheryl Miller to get her to participate in this act, and he killed her and in that instance he may very well have lost the desire to complete the act," says Saginaw county prosecuting attorney Michael Thomas.

Countering the prosecution
The defense had one last chance to respond, blasting the prosecution experts. First, the medical examiner who disputed findings by the original pathologist— now dead— that the killer was sterile.

Defense attorney Willman defends the original medical examiner: "Who you gonna believe? You gonna believe some guy they’re gonna bring in 30 years later, saying 'Hey this clown must have been mistaken?' Or are you gonna believe the guy who’s done thousands of autopsies, who actually saw it? the man who took it out of the woman’s body? He knew what he had. He knew it was semen!"

And finally, the defense closed its case by asking jurors this question: If there was such a violent struggle… how come none of Gabriel Ferris’s hairs ended up on the victim’s body?

For Moran, this doesn't make sense. "When you have a violent struggle with an especially hairy defendant, you would expect to find at least some of his hair at the scene. And you wouldn’t expect that all of the hair found on the body is dark hair, which doesn’t match her and it doesn’t match him."

Each side had made its arguments. It was now time for the jury  to decide if Gabriel Ferris would walk free or spend the rest of his life behind bars.

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