On February 17, 1993, 10-year-old Jessica Meindl came home from school and found the body of her mother, 33-year-old Deborah Meindl, on the dining room floor. Meindl’s arms were handcuffed behind her back, and she had been stabbed several times and strangled with a necktie.
The Meindls lived in Tonawanda, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. The first police officer on the scene would later testify that blood and glass were on the floor and the furniture was tipped over. Another officer noticed that a window screen appeared to have been cut and the window slightly open. He said Meindl’s coat was soaked in blood. The Tonawanda police found the steak knife used to stab Meindl, and they collected other items for blood samples and fingerprints.
Norma Richau, a neighbor, told police that she had seen Meindl return from nursing school between 2 and 2:30 p.m. The neighbor also said she had also seen a young man, about 5’10”, walk up the Meindl’s driveway around 10 a.m. that morning, open a gate and walk behind the house.
Officers with the Tonawanda Police Department, led by Detective David Bentley, pursued several angles in their investigation. The first involved Deborah’s husband, Donald Meindl. Although he had an alibi for the time of the murder, a friend named Michael Vento told police in March 1993 that Meindl had frequently complained to him that he wanted to divorce his wife and move to California to open some pizza restaurants but was unable to move on this plan because his money was tied up in the house and with Deborah. Vento also said that Meindl asked him how much it would cost to hire someone to kill his wife.
Police also looked at David Oravec, who worked with Donald Meindl. They had Oravec walk up the driveway, and Richau said that Oravec “looked like the guy she had seen going up the driveway.”
Separately, in the weeks after the murder, the police received a tip from a purported “FBI informant” that 22-year-old Brian Scott Lorenz might have been involved in the crime.
On May 1, 1993, Lorenz and James Baglio were arrested near Sioux City, Iowa, while in a stolen vehicle. The police found 263 half dollars and 35 silver dollars in a duffel bag. One of the coins was a 1921 Morgan S silver dollar in a cardboard sleeve. Donald Meindl later identified that coin as a gift from his parents and said it had been stolen during the attack on his wife.
In a statement made to police on May 7, 1993, Lorenz implicated himself and 30-year-old James Pugh in the crime, but placed the blame on Pugh, saying his friend planned the burglary, killed Meindl, and abandoned Lorenz at the scene. At the time, Lorenz and Pugh were drug users who supported their habits through burglary and other crimes in the Buffalo area.
Lorenz would later say that the confession was false and that he gave it to return to New York and avoid a possible lengthy incarceration in Iowa for auto theft. His statement said Meindl had been hog-tied with a cord and made no mention of a knife, handcuffs, or a necktie.
Bentley interviewed Baglio in Iowa on May 9, and two months later, on July 23, 1993, Baglio gave a statement implicating Lorenz and Pugh in the murder.
Pugh had been arrested on an unrelated burglary charge on May 16, 1993, and placed in the Erie County Jail in Buffalo. Bentley interviewed him at the jail in the days after his arrest, and Pugh gave two statements implicating Lorenz in the crime. Pugh would later say that Bentley provided him with information to make his statements more credible and placed $20 in his commissary account.
On August 3, 1993, a grand jury indicted Lorenz and Pugh on charges of murder, burglary, and menacing.
After Pugh was indicted, the state offered to reduce his charge to manslaughter if he would implicate Donald Meindl in the murder. Pugh refused the offer.
Their joint trial in Erie County Supreme Court began on March 7, 1994. Justice Mario Rossetti presided over the trial. Joseph Terranova represented Lorenz, and Michael Clohessy represented Pugh. Assistant District Attorney Jonathan Coughlan served as the prosecutor.
The state did not introduce Lorenz’s or Pugh’s statements to police. There were no eyewitnesses. The state built much of its case around witnesses who said they heard Lorenz and Pugh talk about the crime in its aftermath. The only physical evidence said to connect either defendant to the crime was the coin found on Lorenz that Donald Meindl said had been taken from his house during the burglary.
In his testimony, Meindl admitted that he had been having an affair with a 17-year-old co-worker at the Taco Bell he managed at the Galleria Mall and that he had been fired the day of his wife’s death for “alleged sexual harassment” of female employees. He acknowledged that the police had considered him a suspect but said that he didn’t kill his wife or arrange for anyone else to kill her. He said he had received a $50,000 life-insurance settlement after Deborah’s death.
Meindl also identified the silver coin found with Lorenz and Baglio in Iowa. He testified that his parents had given it to Deborah as a Christmas present in 1992. He said he recognized the writing on the cardboard sleeve and said it was the same writing as on two other sleeves in his coin collection. Meindl said he did not know whose handwriting it was.
Jessica Meindl also testified that the silver coin belonged to her mother and that she remembered seeing the coin on her mother’s dresser prior to the murder.
After Donald Meindl testified, Bentley and another officer testified that Vento, Meindl’s friend and potential business partner, told police that Meindl had tried to hire him to kill his wife. According to a statement introduced at trial, Vento said that Meindl told him he “would make it easy by either leaving a door open at his home or supplying a key and make sure it was when his wife was alone. He also said that it should be made to look like a robbery.” (Meindl had testified he was only joking.)
Vento did not testify, but the officers testified and said they asked Vento to record several conversations with Meindl. After his wife’s death, Meindl paid Vento $300. (Meindl said the payment was to find out what Vento knew about the murder.)
Officer James Clark of the Sioux City Police Department testified that he remembered the 1921 silver dollar because it was old and rare. “Those types of coins are few and far between,” he said.
Nancy Hummingbird, a long-time friend of Pugh’s, testified that Lorenz and Pugh left her house early on February 17 to “do a scam” in Tonawanda. She said the two men returned at around 4 p.m., and that she noticed red stains on Lorenz’s sweatshirt. Later that night, Hummingbird testified, Lorenz told her that a person had surprised them while he and Pugh were committing a burglary. She said that Lorenz said the victim was a “big dude … 250 pounds, like a tank.” (Deborah Meindl weighed 230 pounds.) Lorenz said the victim wouldn’t stop screaming, so he punched them in the face and strangled them with a tie. Instead of shooting them, he stabbed them with a knife. According to Hummingbird, Lorenz said the murder was the “ultimate rush.”
Hummingbird said that while Lorenz talked, Pugh paced and shook his head. The next day, she said, the men returned to her house and asked her for advice on fleeing the state.
During cross-examination, Hummingbird said that Bentley threatened to implicate her son, Gabriel Rodriguez, known as Doobie, in the murder if she didn’t cooperate. A defense attorney asked her: “Let’s get down to brass tacks here. You told him you would do anything to help Doobie out of this situation, didn’t you?
Hummingbird answered: “If you say I said it, I must have said it. Any mother would.”
Jeffrey Oryszak testified that he saw Pugh and Lorenz the day after Meindl’s death, and that Pugh told him that Lorenz had gotten carried away during a burglary and killed someone. He testified that the defendants bragged and said the victim was big and kept coming back for more. He also said that Lorenz described the murder as “an ultimate rush.” Oryszak testified that Pugh called him prior to Oryszak’s testimony before the grand jury. He said that Pugh denied his involvement in the crime and threatened Oryszak, saying he had “people on the outside.”
Baglio testified that he was with Pugh and Lorenz when they were discussing what happened during the burglary. Baglio testified that Pugh said, “the fat bitch came through the door, we beat the fuck out of her, took all her shit and left.” He also said that Lorenz later threatened a female acquaintance with a gun, telling the woman, “Don’t you ever diss me, or I’ll kill you just like I did that bitch from NT.” (NT was shorthand for North Tonawanda.)
Baglio said Lorenz wanted to turn himself in, but Pugh told Lorenz that “he would take care of him.” Later, Baglio and Lorenz left Buffalo for Iowa. Baglio testified that by then, Lorenz was already in possession of the silver dollar in the cardboard sleeve. Baglio said he did not receive any benefits in exchange for his testimony.
Carlos Gonzalez said he met Lorenz in March 1993. He testified that Lorenz said he needed a place to stay because the police were looking for him. Gonzalez testified that Lorenz said he had killed a person and showed Gonzalez a duffel bag containing stolen jewelry. Gonzalez testified that he offered to testify against Lorenz in exchange for his release from jail.
Dennis Wagner had met Pugh in 1988 and was in jail with Pugh after Pugh’s arrest in 1993. He testified that Pugh “said he was doing a burglary with a friend of his, and that when he was doing the job, I guess the lady came home that lived there, and when she came home, he said the guy he was with grabbed her and [Pugh] said that he found a set of handcuffs in the bedroom.”
According to Wagner, Pugh told him that the person he was with strangled the lady with a cord.
Wagner had an extensive criminal record, and this was the third time he had testified in a murder case based on a purported confession he had heard while in jail.
Annette Rowe said she met Lorenz at a party in the weeks after the murder. She testified that Lorenz and a man named Scott Fish told her about an incident at a house in Tonawanda, where a woman walked in while Lorenz was committing a burglary. Lowe said that Lorenz said he punched the victim and stabbed her. She said Lorenz displayed some coins that he said he had stolen during the crime and also demonstrated on Fish how he killed the victim. Lowe testified that she thought that Fish was Lorenz’s accomplice. “All I heard was what Scott Lorenz and Scott Fish had told me they had done to a woman in Tonawanda.” She said she “believed” and “didn’t believe” their story.
James Catherwood was at the Iowa Reformatory with Lorenz, prior to Lorenz’s extradition to New York. He testified that Lorenz told him that he had killed a “fat pig” by cutting her throat and that “doing somebody is the ultimate rush.” He also said that he heard Lorenz say that the victim was “tied up with electrical cord and her throat was cut and she was slashed up, burnt with cigarettes.” His testimony did not match the physical evidence. In addition, Catherwood testified that he initially told investigators that he knew nothing about Lorenz’s involvement with the crime.
Dr. John Simich, a senior forensic scientist at the Erie County Central Police Services Forensic Laboratory, testified that blood found under Deborah Meindl’s fingernails was her own. He testified that rudimentary DNA testing “could not eliminate [Lorenz] as contributing to” the blood found under Meindl’s fingernails. Later in his testimony, Simich appeared to contradict himself, saying that further testing eliminated Lorenz as a contributor to that blood sample. Terranova stipulated to a finding that “there was further testing of the fingernails, and we have been advised orally over the phone by the lab that they’ve only found Deborah Meindl’s blood under the fingernails.”
Coughlan had said in his opening remarks that he didn’t have to explain how Meindl’s attackers entered the house. Investigators said that a screen window had been cut, but a state expert testified that the screen had been cut from the inside, as if to make it appear that a break-in occurred.
Neither Lorenz nor Pugh testified.
During his closing argument, Coughlan said his expert on the screen might have gotten it wrong. “Now, you heard that the screen was cut from the inside,” he said. “Yep, that’s what the lab said, yes. Let me ask you this. You take a knife, you’re on the outside of that screen, you push in you pull out. It looked like it was cut from the inside ... That’s just a possibility. Remember, I don’t have to prove how they got in the house.”
Coughlan referred to the silver dollar 15 times in his closing. He said that Donald Meindl had identified it. “Do you really think it’s just a coincidence that if [Lorenz is] innocent, [a] totally innocent man, [he] is going to have this coin with him when he’s out in Iowa? Do you think that’s just a coincidence?” Terranova agreed, saying “The prosecution has structured its proof around this coin … The only link to the crime scene with Scott Lorenz is this coin.”
During deliberations, the jury asked to review Simich’s testimony. Justice Rossetti first read back the stipulation, which said that only Meindl’s blood was found under her fingernails. The jury then asked to review Simich’s entire testimony, which included his initial statement that DNA testing didn’t eliminate Lorenz as a contributor.
On March 17, 1994, the jury acquitted Pugh of first-degree murder and convicted him of second-degree murder and first-degree burglary. Lorenz was convicted of first-degree murder, second-degree murder and first-degree burglary.
“How can you find me guilty of something like that, Pugh said, according to the Buffalo News . “I can’t listen to this anymore,” Lorenz said, as the jury was being polled.
Prior to sentencing, Lorenz said Pugh had nothing to do with Meindl’s death. He said that he and Baglio had killed the woman during the burglary. Lorenz also claimed that Donald Meindl had approached him about killing his wife and then paid him $15,000 up front and another $5,000 after the death. “This was written for the sole reason that Donald Meindl and James Baglio are not going to get away with murder, and I’m not going to prison alone,” Lorenz said in a letter to his attorney. Clohessy initially moved to set aside Pugh’s verdict, but that effort fell apart because Baglio had a strong alibi and the woman whom Lorenz said could corroborate his story recanted her supporting affidavit.
During this period, prosecutors offered to recommend a reduced sentence for Pugh if he would implicate Meindl in his wife’s death. Again, he refused.
Justice Rossetti later sentenced Pugh and Lorenz to life in prison, with Pugh eligible for parole after 25 years, and Lorenz eligible after 37 ½ years.
Both men appealed their convictions.
Lorenz argued that there was insufficient evidence and that the state needed to establish a chain of custody for the 1921 silver dollar. The Supreme Court’s Appellate Division affirmed his conviction on February 2, 1996.
Pugh argued that Lorenz’s post-conviction statement was new evidence of innocence, that he had been convicted based on insufficient evidence, and that he had been prejudiced by the witnesses who testified about Lorenz’s incriminating statements. A panel from the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, including three of the justices who ruled on Lorenz’s appeal, affirmed Pugh’s conviction on February 7, 1997.
On May 20, 2004, the ex-wife of David Oravec called the sheriff’s department in neighboring Niagara County in connection with a fire that she believed might involve Oravec. In a statement, Maria Oravec said that prior to their marriage, Oravec told her that he had killed Deborah Meindl for $10,000.
Maria Oravec said: “David said Don was upset about his wife holding money back and that he wanted to open some type of pizza or sub shop. David told her that he killed Deborah with a knife, he said that he tied her up with like a clothesline, ransacked the house to make it look like a burglary and stabbed her.”
Two weeks later, on June 4, 2004, Oravec’s brother, Daniel, told police that Oravec had admitted to helping kill Deborah Meindl at Donald Meindl’s request, “because Don wanted to open up his own pizza shop” but his wife was against it.”
A year later, Detective Michael Rogers of the Tonawanda Police Department asked to interview Oravec at the police department. After Oravec arrived, Rogers read him his Miranda rights. Oravec said he wanted a lawyer and left the meeting after five minutes.
In 2017, attorneys for Pugh and Lorenz moved for post-conviction testing of the DNA evidence in the case. Pugh was now represented by Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, and Lorenz was represented by Ilann Maazel. A judge granted the motion on August 21, 2018, and the Erie County Department of Police Services Forensic Laboratory conducted testing on the knife blade, necktie, socks, and clothing worn by Meindl, comparing this evidence against buccal swabs provided by Pugh and Lorenz.
On December 13, 2018, the crime lab reported that Pugh and Lorenz were eliminated as contributors to the genetic material found on these articles. In almost every instance, the testing said the DNA found on these items included Deborah Meindl and an unknown contributor.
Pugh was released from prison on April 10, 2019. In its decision, the state parole board wrote: “As noted during the interview, the panel did not retry the case and does not take a position on …your claims of actual innocence, but we do note that you have maintained your innocence all along and that you continue to make progress in your efforts at exoneration.”
On March 11, 2021, Lorenz filed a motion for a new trial, which Pugh later joined. Along with the DNA results, the two men said there was other new evidence of innocence.
Cyril Meindl, Donald Meindl’s father, did not testify, but he told a defense investigator in 1995 that he had “told the police he could not identify that coin” and that over the years he had given numerous coins away as gifts. The motion also noted that the 1921 silver dollars were not rare. The U.S. Treasury minted 21.6 million of them, and it was likely that millions were still around, the motion said. In addition, the motion said that Donald Meindl did not mention the silver dollar in his initial itemization of stolen items.”
In 2011, Hummingbird had said in an affidavit that she was drunk when she spoke with Bentley, that he fed her testimony, and that she didn’t know what she was signing. She said that Bentley always brought sangria when he came to speak with her and “offered to help me financially … if I told him things he wanted to hear.”
A month after the trial, the motion said, Hummingbird’s daughter, Destini Rodriguez said in a sworn statement that Bentley plied her mother with alcohol to get her to talk. “It wasn’t right to take a statement from my mother while she was in this condition,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez was Oryszak’s fiancée, and she had initially given a statement inculpating Pugh and Lorenz, but she later told Bentley that statement was false. Pugh couldn’t have been involved, she said, because the two of them were having an affair and Pugh didn’t leave her house until around 2 p.m. on the day of the murder. Had Rodriguez testified, the motion said, she would have provided Pugh with an alibi and contradicted Oryszak’s testimony.
Oryszak told Pugh in a recorded conversation in 2005 that he testified falsely because Bentley pressured to take his children away. He said that Bentley fed him details about the crime, including the use of the necktie and the number of times Meindl was stabbed. Oryszak said on the recording that after the trial he reported Bentley’s conduct to another Tonawanda police officer. “Bentley was filling in, filling in shit—how many times she was stabbed or whatever,” Oryszak said. “How it happened and stuff. He was actually telling us this.”
Pugh had joined the motion on March 22, 2021. His filing said that Baglio had recanted his testimony, telling Margulis-Ohnuma on September 18, 2020, that neither Pugh nor Lorenz ever made any inculpatory statements about the Meindl murder. Baglio also said he didn’t understand the significance of the 1921 silver dollar, but that the police “pushed him” to falsely say Lorenz had the coin when Lorenz and Baglio left Buffalo.
After the motions for new trial were filed, Erie County District Attorney John Flynn agreed to conduct a reinvestigation of the case, assigning Assistant District Attorney David Heraty and Michael Hillery, the chief of appeals, to the case. They interviewed more than 50 witnesses and concluded that Lorenz and Pugh were not involved in the murder and that Bentley coerced witnesses to testify against the men and coerced helpful witnesses to not testify.
Donald Meindl told the investigators that he was “he was never sure whether the coin was taken from [his house], but Bentley pressured him to say that it was.”
The investigators interviewed Teresa Derylak, a friend of Lorenz’s at the time of the murder. She said that she had told Bentley in 1993 that Lorenz had dropped her and a girlfriend off at the Galleria Mall at around 2 p.m. on February 17. Based on the distance between Meindl’s house and the mall, this created a plausible alibi for Lorenz. Derylak said Bentley threatened to charge her as an accomplice because Lorenz was driving her car. Derylak didn’t testify at the trial.
Wagner, one of two jailhouse informants, told the investigators that Pugh never confessed to him, and Gabriel Rodriguez corroborated his sister’s account that Bentley gave Hummingbird alcohol.
Carlos Gonzalez told the investigators that he was “not sure whether his testimony was true.” He said he remembered seeing Lorenz with stolen jewelry and hearing a TV story about Meindl’s death and “assumed that the two events were related.”
Bentley’s conduct came under intense scrutiny during the reinvestigation in two important ways. First, Jessica Meindl told Officer Rogers that her mother had been having an affair with Bentley. She also visited Pugh in prison and told him the same thing, adding that her mother had told Bentley to come over to the house on the afternoon of February 17. Donald Meindl told the investigators that he had also heard about the affair.
Bentley denied any relationship with Deborah Meindl. He said he didn’t even know her.
The investigators unearthed a police report from February 17, 1993. A woman who said she was the wife of a police officer had called Deborah Meindl’s nursing school and tried to leave a message for her. A secretary explained the difficulty with leaving a message, and the woman said, “Whatever is going on is serious.” This report was not turned over to the defense.
Second, the reinvestigation uncovered a troubling relationship between Bentley and Richard Matt, a violent criminal who grew up in Tonawanda and gained national attention when he and David Sweat escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Dannemora, New York, on June 6, 2015. Using tools obtained from two employees, the two men cut holes in their cell walls to access the prison’s utility area and made their escape through the sewer system. Matt was shot and killed on June 26. Sweat was shot and captured two days later.
In 1993, Matt would have been 26 years old. According to the reinvestigation, Bentley befriended Matt when he was a teenager and used him as an informant. Other officers said that Bentley had likely tampered with evidence in a 1989 rape case against Matt and later helped him evade arrest for a murder in 1997. (Matt was extradited from Mexico in 2007 and sent to Dannemora after his murder conviction.)
At the time of the Meindl murder, Matt lived two blocks away in a house owned by a relative through marriage of Lori Rank, the first officer on the scene and also Bentley’s daughter. The prosecutors used police notes to recreate the initial efforts to interview neighbors and wrote that it appeared the police canvass went in every direction except the route from the Meindl house to Matt’s house.
In late August 2021, Heraty and Hillery were to make a presentation on their findings to Flynn and his leadership team. The meeting was canceled, and the men were asked to summarize their findings. Flynn then demoted Hillery and transferred Heraty.
Lorenz and Pugh later received a heavily redacted version of the report.
In a supplemental motion filed on October 15, 2021, that incorporated the district attorney’s reinvestigation, attorneys for Lorenz and Pugh wrote: “The case against Pugh and Lorenzo, soft to begin with, has crumbled: DNA exonerates Lorenzo and Pugh; the coin evidence linking Lorenzo to the scene is phony; the lead detective is corrupt, knew the victim, and steered the investigation away from his friend. For twenty-eight years, the People have failed Lorenzo and Pugh, failed the public, and worst of all, failed Deborah Meindl’s family and her legacy. Only the court can now begin to make this right.”
Along with the recantations, the motion also said the state had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defendants’ trial attorneys. This included Meindl’s uncertainty about the coin, Bentley’s efforts to pressure him, Bentley’s coercion of Derylak, and Bentley’s relationship with Matt, a viable alternate suspect.
During Bentley’s interview with the investigators, he said that Hummingbird was the FBI informant, and that he received the tip on February 22, 1993. Hummingbird didn’t make her most damaging statement against Pugh and Lorenz until June 23, 1993. The supplemental motion said that the state didn’t disclose Hummingbird’s informant status, which would have allowed the two men’s trial attorneys to cross-examine her about the four-month delay between the tip and her statement.
The state opposed the motion. In its response on November 1, 2021, the state said the new DNA evidence had no effect on the credibility of the jury’s verdict. “The jury heard numerous times that there was no forensic evidence tying either defendant to the crime scene and yet, they still decided both defendants were guilty,” the response said.
The response said the recantations were unreliable and that Maria Oravec’s statement about her ex-husband should be viewed through the lens of a battle over custody and child support. The response also denied withholding exculpatory evidence but said that the evidence in question wouldn’t have altered the verdict.
Finally, the response said that Bentley’s relationship with Deborah Meindl was unsubstantiated and that the suggestion that Matt committed the murder was based on “speculation and hearsay.”
Between December 13, 2021, and May 17, 2022, Justice Paul Wojtaszek held an 11-day hearing in Buffalo. Catherwood, Rowe, and Hummingbird were dead, but other witnesses for the defendants testified about the pressure Bentley applied to them, either to implicate Pugh and Lorenz or to remain silent about providing a potential alibi for the men. Attorney Tess Cohen had now joined Margulis-Ohnuma in representing Pugh, and Emma Freeman had joined Maazel in representing Lorenz.
Sweat, Matt’s partner in the prison escape, testified that Matt had told him about several of his past crimes, including the murder that caused him to flee to Mexico and another murder that occurred after Bentley approached Matt because a woman was going to “rat them out.” According to Sweat, “[Matt] had choked her with a tie trying to get information out of her, trying to see if she had told anybody else anything. He told me that he had stabbed her, that they had gone through the house looking to see if she might have wrote anything down on anything. He told me that they stole stuff, that they took money, jewelry, some kind of collectible and some other stuff.”
Donald Meindl didn’t testify at the hearing, but he had told a state investigator in 2021 that he recognized the handwriting on the coin sleeve as his father’s. At trial, he had testified he didn’t recognize the handwriting.
Meindl’s new, contradictory statement became an issue at the evidentiary hearing after the state disclosed on January 27, 2022, that it had found additional files in the district attorney’s office. The new documents included a handwritten note by Coughlan dated June 24, 1993, that said “Father did not ID coin nor able to do so.” Coughlan testified at the hearing that he had written the note about Cyril Meindl but did not disclose it to the defense. “My handwritten notes are my work product,” he said. “I don’t turn those over.”
Former FBI Agent Bob Wittman, an expert on rare coins, testified that there were between 2 million and 4 million 1921 S Morgan silver dollars in circulation in 1993. He said the lay testimony at the trial was wrong. The coin was not rare. Moreover, Wittman said, it was impossible to identify one 1921 silver dollar from another by eyesight alone. The police should have asked Donald Meindl to view an array of coins, similar to the viewing of a photo array of potential suspects, he said. “[T]o show one coin would be very suggestive,” because “the witness is only looking at one coin, [a]nd that would create an assumption that that would be what the detective wants him to say,” Wittman said.
Pugh testified at the hearing. He said that at the time of the murder, he had missed a court date on an unrelated burglary charge and was trying to avoid arrest. He admitted to committing burglaries during this period, including one in South Buffalo on the day of the murder, but said the Meindl house would not have been a target because it was too small and too close to other homes. (Rogers, the Tonawanda detective, testified at the hearing that he found it hard to believe that professional burglars would rob the Meindl house, because it was the “ugliest house in Tonawanda” and next to an active construction site.”)
Pugh testified that he, Lorenz, Derylak, and another man executed a home invasion on a drug dealer’s apartment on the night of February 17, taking cash and marijuana. They returned to Hummingbird’s house and discussed their crime, referring to the victim as a “bitch.” Attorneys for the defendants would later write, “The conversation that night had to do with a violent crime, but it had nothing to do with the Meindl murder, the City of Tonawanda, or a female victim.”
On August 23, 2023, Justice Wojtaszek vacated Pugh’s and Lorenz’s convictions. He said that the DNA results were new evidence of innocence and rejected the state’s argument that Simich’s trial testimony had already excluded Lorenz as a contributor of blood found at the crime scene.
Justice Wojtaszek also said that the state had failed to turn over evidence related to Cyril Meindl’s inability to identify the silver dollar. He rejected the state’s contention that this was a harmless error and noted Wittman’s testimony regarding the problematic nature of Donald Meindl’s identification of the coin and the incorrect testimony at trial about the coin’s rarity. “The significance of the coin cannot be overstated and in the view of this Court the verdict turned on the value of the identification of the coin,” he wrote.
The ruling rejected a claim of actual innocence based on the assertion that Matt, working with Bentley, killed Deborah Meindl. Sweat’s testimony was “patently incredible,” Justice Wojtaszek said. “The theory of Assistant District Attorneys Heraty and Hillery although investigated, explored, and pursued is nothing more than speculation, conjecture, and surmise without any substantiation or corroboration.”
After the ruling, Lorenz remained in prison. The state appealed, and the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division affirmed the lower court ruling on September 27, 2024.
Lorenz’s retrial ended in a mistrial on October 6, 2025. (He was convicted at a retrial on April 24, 2026.)
The state dismissed the charges against Pugh on December 2, 2025. Prosecutors said in a motion that there was not enough evidence against him and several key witnesses were no longer available.
Jessica Meindl died in 2020, but Lisa Meindl Payne, her younger sister, said in court that she wanted closure and feared she would never find the answers about her mother’s death.
“Please allow her death to mean something,” Meindl Payne said, “and at the very least be an example to show the world that our justice system does not always provide justice.”
“What they done to me I can’t change,” Pugh told the New York Times . “They’ve been blaming the wrong person for 30-something years.”
He also said in a statement: “Like Lisa said, there's no justice here for her or for me. We both just want the truth, and it’s the prosecutors’ job to get it for us. They failed. They failed Lisa. They failed me. They failed Lisa’s sister. Most of all they failed Deborah Meindl.”
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 12-20-2025
Last Update Date: 04-24-2026
