At about 5:45 p.m., on September 18, 1985, 16-year-old Kimberly Simon left her home in Marcy, New York, walking to meet a high school friend. When she did not come home by 11 p.m., her parents called police and reported her missing.
The next day, at about 12:30 p.m., police found her body near the side of a dirt road off Mohawk Street near the Mohawk River. She had been raped and strangled to death.
The police set up roadblocks to question people who drove past the scene. Ultimately, 900 people would be questioned in the investigation.
Two days later, several people told police that they had seen Simon walking along Mohawk Street between 5:30 and 6 p.m. Others said they saw Simon sitting in the passenger seat in a truck parked on that road around the same time. Police received a tip that the truck was owned by 19-year-old Steven Barnes.
Barnes was questioned over 12 hours on September 21, three days after Simon was last seen. He said that he had driven to a bowling alley at 6 p.m. on the night of the crime and didn’t know anything about the murder. He was given a polygraph test, which investigators said was inconclusive. The police checked his truck for fingerprints and trace evidence. He was released without being charged.
More than two years later, however, investigators were still working on the case and, at their request, Barnes submitted blood, saliva, and hair samples.
On March 25, 1988, two and a half years after the crime, Barnes, now 22 years old, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder, rape, and sodomy.
He was jailed briefly and then freed on a $100,000 bond.
In May 1989, he went to trial in Oneida County Supreme Court. One man, who was being transported in a police car, testified that he saw Simon walking on Mohawk Road and saw a truck similar to Barnes’s truck parked nearby.
A police officer said he saw a young man matching Barnes’s description parked alongside the street that night.
Much of the forensic evidence did not incriminate Barnes.
A forensic analyst testified at his trial that the victim’s fingerprints were not found in Barnes’s truck.
A police officer testified that tire tracks near where the body was found were compared with Barnes’s truck tires and investigators determined that his truck did not make the tracks.
Dr. Elaine Pagliaro, the supervising criminalist at the Connecticut State Police Forensic Laboratory, testified that seminal fluid was detected on the victim’s underwear and on swabs taken from her body. She said serology testing identified the victim’s blood type, but not Barnes’s. Barnes was a non-secretor, meaning that his blood type could not be determined by testing of his body fluids. DNA testing conducted before trial was inconclusive.
Pagliaro testified that she conducted a photographic overlay of fabric from the victim’s jeans and an imprint on Barnes’s truck and concluded that the patterns were similar.
The state presented testimony from a self-employed manufacturers’ representative who said that the stitching on the brand of jeans the victim wore was unique, but that as many as 200 pairs may have been sold in Oneida County in 1985.
Pagliaro also testified that two hairs collected from Barnes’s truck were microscopically “similar” to the victim’s hairs and dissimilar from Barnes’s hair. She added that no hairs similar to Barnes’s hair were found on the victim’s body.
Pagliaro testified that the laboratory also compared soil samples taken from Barnes’s truck with dirt samples taken from the crime scene a year after the murder. She said the samples had “similar characteristics.”
Robert Stolo testified that he was in the Oneida County Jail awaiting sentencing on a forgery conviction when Barnes was arrested. He said that during a conversation with Stolo and another detainee, Barnes responded to a question about a girl by saying, “You mean the one that I killed—You mean the one that I’m accused of killing?
During cross-examination, Barnes’s attorney, Salvador Capecelatro Jr., noted that Stolo was housed for that week several cells away from Barnes and that Stolo, in his initial statement, said they were talking about Barnes’s girlfriend at the time.
A sheriff’s deputy testified that a day after Simon’s body was found, he and his partner were in a gas station not far from where Simon’s body was found when Barnes drove his truck into the station lot, but after seeming to spot them, quickly drove off. The deputy said they followed him and stopped him. Barnes had “no explanation” for his quick departure, he said. When asked about mud on his truck, Barnes said he had been four-wheeling. The deputy noted that the truck was not a four-wheel drive vehicle.
Barnes’s brother-in-law testified that he saw a young woman getting into a truck along the road that was clearly not Barnes’s truck. Others said they saw Barnes at Riverside Lanes, a local bowling alley in Marcy throughout the evening of the murder.
On June 2, 1989, the jury convicted Barnes of second-degree murder, rape and sodomy. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
The Innocence Project began representing Barnes in 1993 and secured DNA testing on his behalf in 1996. The Oneida County District Attorney consented to DNA tests on evidence from the crime scene. Those tests were inconclusive because the DNA technology available at the time did not yield a profile.
In 2007, the Innocence Project reopened the case, and Oneida County District Attorney Scott McNamara agreed to conduct a more sophisticated DNA testing method that had not been previously available.
The new tests yielded conclusive results on sperm cells from the victim’s body and clothing. The results excluded Barnes.
His convictions were vacated and he was released on November 25, 2008. On January 9, 2009, the prosecution dismissed the charges.
In December 2010, the New York Court of Claims awarded Barnes $3.5 million in compensation for his wrongful conviction.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 03-20-2026
