HYDE PARK, Vt. (AP) – Genetic material will be allowed in the trial of a man accused in the 1991 rape and killing of Patricia Scoville in Stowe, a judge has ruled.
Scoville’s death was unsolved for years until a DNA databank that her parents helped create led them to Howard Godfrey 14 years later.
Godfrey was arrested in 2005 after police ran a sample from an unrelated aggravated assault conviction through an FBI database and matched it with DNA found on Scoville’s body and underwear.
This summer, Godfrey’s attorney filed a motion to suppress the DNA evidence, arguing that the collection of genetic material violated Godfrey’s constitutional protection against self-incrimination.
She also said police didn’t have reason to run Godfrey’s DNA through the database in 2005 because he wasn’t suspected in the Scoville case before that.
Judge Dennis Pearson last week rejected the request.
“Since law enforcement’s collection and use of defendant’s DNA profiling evidence was proper, the subsequent identification, targeting and surveillance of defendant as the primary suspect in this case” also was proper, Pearson wrote.
The judge also ruled that police violated Godfrey’s rights in some interviews and therefore some of his comments cannot be used. But police questioned him properly in other sessions and those conversations can be used, the judge said.
“I just admitted to you that I did have sex with her, but that’s without a lawyer present. I think that is as far as I should go,” Godfrey said in one interview that will be allowed at trial, according to court papers. But the judge dismissed Godfrey’s statement, “I did have sex with Patty Scoville, but she was fine when I left her.”
Scoville’s body was found in a shallow grave in the Moss Glen Falls area of Stowe, three weeks after moving to Vermont from Boston. She had last been seen before she went biking on Oct. 23, 1991.
Godfrey has pleaded not guilty to one count of aggravated murder and is being held without bail at the Northeast Regional Correctional Facility in St. Johnsbury.
The trial is expected to start in January in White River Junction.
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Information from: The Burlington Free Press, http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com
AP-ES-11-16-07 1659EST
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