In the early morning of May 23, 1991, firefighters were called to a farmhouse near Aurelius, New York. Around 3 a.m., more than an hour after firefighters arrived, the body of 49-year-old Sabrina Kulakowski, a social worker, was discovered about 300 yards from the house.
The evidence suggested that Kulakowski had engaged in a struggle for her life that left her with multiple injuries and defensive wounds. Her assailant had viciously assaulted her, covering her body with bite marks. Investigators believed that because the house had not been robbed and the victim had not been raped, the motive was personal.
Kulakowski's nightshirt was found near her body. Chemical tests revealed several stains of blood and saliva. The blood from the nightshirt was tested, and the bitemarks on her body were swabbed. The results of both were inconclusive. The coroner's report said that the farmhouse had been set ablaze, and she had been dragged 300 yards from the farmhouse while wearing the nightshirt. The report said Kulakowski died of stab wounds and strangulation.
A day later, investigators began collecting statements. Four statements concerned a man named Barry Bench, who had been acting strangely in the hours before Kulakowski's body was discovered. Barry Bench was a volunteer firefighter. His brother, Ronald Bench, had been Kulakowski's partner of 17 years. He had lived with her in the farmhouse, which the Bench family owned. Ronald had lived there until he and Kulakowski separated two months prior to Kulakowski's death.
Police then questioned Barry Bench's girlfriend, Tamara Heisner, as well as the fire dispatcher, the dispatcher's wife, and a neighbor about Barry Bench's actions on the night of the murder.
Heisner said that they had gotten into a fight around 5 p.m. on May 22. Bench then left the house and went to a bar before returning home, highly intoxicated, around 1:30-1:45 a.m. This was about the same time that Kulakowski's neighbors began calling 911 about a fire at the farmhouse. Bench was believed to have left the bar around 12:30 a.m., which left a gap of 60 to 75 minutes when his whereabouts were unaccounted for.
The bar was one mile away from his house. Heisner told police that when Bench came home, he immediately went inside to “wash up” and then turned off his fire monitor before going to bed. After the couple received multiple telephone calls notifying them of the fire, Bench went to the scene where he was seen straying from the group and walking near where Kulakowski's body was later discovered.
Despite this suspicious behavior and the witness statements implicating Bench, the police stopped investigating him for reasons never explained.
Instead, the investigators turned their focus to 29-year-old Roy Brown.
Brown, a magazine subscription salesman from nearby Syracuse, had only a tenuous connection to Kulakowski. Brown had recently been released from an eight-month jail term for making threatening phone calls to the director of the Cayuga County Department of Social Services, which had placed his daughter into residential care earlier that year.
Kulakowski was an employee at that same agency, so investigators theorized that Brown had murdered her to seek revenge, even though Kulakowski was not the caseworker on Brown’s daughter’s case.
On May 26, 1991, three days after the crime, Brown was arrested and charged with murder.
In January 1992, Brown went to trial in Cayuga County Supreme Court. The prosecution’s case relied heavily on bitemark analysis.
Dr. Edward Mofson, an expert of bitemark analysis, testified that seven bitemarks on Kulakowski's body were “entirely consistent” with Brown's dentition even though one of the bitemarks showed six upper teeth in a continuous line, while Brown only had four upper teeth. Dr. Mofson explained away the inconsistency by claiming Brown could have twisted Kulakowski's skin while biting her, thus making up for the gaps left by his missing teeth.
Dr. Homer Campbell, a forensic odontologist, testified for the defense that six of the seven bitemarks were not adequate for proper analysis. He testified that the seventh mark excluded Brown because it showed six upper teeth in a continuous line, while Brown only had four. No evidence pointing to any alternative suspect was presented by the defense.
On January 23, 1992, after less than six hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Brown of second-degree murder. After his guilty verdict, Brown declared, "I never knew Ms. Kulakowski, and I had nothing to do with that woman's death ... I had nothing to do with this crime. I am truly innocent." He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Two years later, in 1995, Brown requested that the bitemark swabs be submitted for DNA testing, but he was told that there was insufficient material remaining due to earlier testing. The same was said to be true for the saliva from the nightshirt.
In 2003, Brown wrote a letter to the Cayuga County court clerk requesting a copy of his trial records under New York's Freedom of Information Law. He received four statements regarding Barry Bench's suspicious behavior during the initial investigation. These documents, implicating Barry Bench, had never been disclosed to the defense.
From prison, Brown began drafting motions with the help of his stepfather, William Murphy.
Acting without a lawyer, Brown filed a motion for a new trial in 2003. In the motion, Brown asserted that the incriminating statements pointing to Barry Bench had been withheld from his attorneys, and these statements highlighted the implausibility of Bench's claim that he had gone directly home from the bar.
In response, the prosecution contended that all statements had been given to Brown's trial counsel, although there was no evidence of their production. On September 16, 2003, the motion was denied.
On December 24, 2003, Brown mailed Barry Bench a letter from prison. The letter informed Bench about the new affidavits Brown had discovered and how they provided evidence of Bench's guilt. Brown urged Bench to confess and warned him that DNA testing would prove Brown’s innocence and incriminate Bench.
In the letter, Brown wrote: “Judges can be fooled and juries make mistakes, [but] when it comes to DNA testing, there’s no mistakes.” Five days after the letter was mailed, Bench took his own life.
In January 2005, attorneys for the Innocence Project began representing Brown and requested expedited DNA testing from the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center. They discovered there were seven more saliva samples on the nightshirt that could be tested. By November of that same year, DNA testing showed all of the DNA came from a single source and excluded Brown.
But though the DNA excluded Brown, there was no direct way to compare the DNA profile from the evidence to BarryBench. So, law enforcement obtained a voluntary saliva sample from Bench's biological daughter. Half of her DNA was consistent with the saliva on the nightshirt, which was what was expected from a child. Bench's body was later exhumed, and a sample of DNA was taken. The analysis provided further confirmation that he was the source of the saliva.
On December 14, 2006, the Innocence Project filed a motion to vacate Brown’s conviction and sentence. The motion was granted, and on January 23, 2007, Brown was released from prison.
On March 5, 2007, the District Attorney for Cayuga County dismissed the charges.
The New York Court of Claims subsequently awarded Brown $2.6 million in compensation. Brown died in 2019. He was 58 years old.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 10-03-2023
