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A Philadelphia man who spent nearly 30 years in prison for the murder of a 4-year-old girl has had his conviction overturned, Fox News reported.
Walter Ogrod, 55, convinced prosecutors his confession to the murder of Barbara Jean Horn in 1988 had been coerced by cops investigating the homicide. A judge freed him from prison Friday.
Assistant District Attorney Carrie Wood said, “First, I must turn to Mr. Ogrod and his family and friends. I am sorry it took 28 years for us to listen to what Barbara Jean was trying to tell us” about how she was killed.
“That you are innocent,” she added. “That the words on that statement came from detectives and not you. And that we not only stole 28 years of your life, but that we threatened to execute you based on falsehoods.”
From The Intercept:
On July 12, 1988, a neighbor found the naked and beaten body of 4-year-old Barbara Jean Horn partially covered by a trash bag inside a cardboard box on a curb in Philadelphia, less than 1,000 feet from her home.
She’d been missing for several hours, and shortly after her body was found, five separate eyewitnesses from the neighborhood told police about a man they’d seen outside with a cardboard box that afternoon. The descriptions were fairly similar. None of them named or described their 23-year-old neighbor, Ogrod, who lived across the street from Horn.
Despite promising leads, the case went cold until 1992, when a pair of detectives, Marty Devlin and Paul Worrell, picked up the case and ultimately set their sights on Ogrod. He would be tried twice and convicted in 1996 on the thinnest of evidence: a questionable confession Ogrod made to police after hours of interrogation, which he immediately recanted, and the testimony of a notorious jailhouse informant. Ogrod has since maintained his innocence, and no physical evidence has ever tied him to the crime.
Orgrod was a neighbor of Barbara Jean’s and he spent most of his time behind bars on death row.
Philadelphia Judge Shelley Robins-New vacated Ogrod’s conviction and death sentence based prosecutorial misconduct and new evidence.
The case was profiled on an episode of “Death Row Stories” narrated by Susan Sarandon.
Ogrod’s lawyers said Friday they are unsure whether authorities have a different suspect.
The first trial against Ogrod ended in a mistrial when one juror announced he did not agree with a not guilty verdict as the foreman was about to read it, according to the AP. He was convicted after a second trial in 1996 of first-degree murder and attempted involuntary deviate sexual intercourse.
Barbara Jean’s mother Sharon Fahy urged the judge to release Ogrod, NBC 10 reported.
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