At 7:08 a.m. on November 10, 1997, police in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, entered a house on North Judson Street and found the body of 73-year-old Essie Thomas lying on her living-room floor.
Thomas’s body was covered in dried blood. The city’s Office of the Medical Examiner later said she had been beaten and stabbed to death. Investigators found hair fibers clutched in Thomas’s hand and defensive wounds on her hands. They also found blood spattering in the living room and smeared blood on the kitchen floor. A knife lay on the living-room floor, but the police only took pictures of the item and did not take it into evidence.
The upstairs of the house appeared undisturbed, and the back door was ajar. A windowpane was missing from the front door, near the lock. A relative told police that several items—a Bible where Thomas kept money and lottery tickets, a debit card, a strong box, and a revolver—appeared to be missing. But the relative also said he hadn’t been inside Thomas’s home in more than a year.
Eric Palmer, Thomas’s great nephew, said he had gone to Thomas’s house that morning and seen her on the floor after peering through the broken window. He said that he kicked in the door and called the police when Thomas didn’t respond to his shouts.
According to neighbors, Thomas was vigilant about security and privacy. Her front door could not be opened, even from the inside, without a key, and she rarely let visitors into her house. Police found the front door key on her upstairs nightstand.
The police initially focused on Palmer, who was from Baltimore and had a history of drug abuse. Detectives held him for 12 hours, questioning him about his actions.
The police also collected reference hair samples from Palmer and noticed injuries to his body. Palmer said they were from a motorcycle accident. In a statement, Palmer said he had arrived in Philadelphia on November 9, a Sunday. He said he called Thomas several times but didn’t go to see her until Monday. Steven Lee told police that he ran into Palmer on Sunday night and that Palmer said that he had stopped by Thomas’s house but couldn’t get in because nobody answered the door.
On November 14, the police received a tip that Wadia Brown, who lived across the street from Thomas, had information about the crime. Brown told police that at around 10:45 p.m. on November 8, she was locking up her house when she saw three Black men leaving Thomas’s house. She said two of the men were already on Thomas’s porch, and the third man reached through the broken window to lock the door before turning to the others and saying that he left the back door open.
Brown told police that she did not know the men by name, but they hung out a few blocks away, at the corner of Bonsall Street and Indiana Avenue.
A detective drove to the corner and saw a young man standing there. An officer asked him for identification, and 18-year-old Jermel Shuler told the officer his name.
After learning Shuler’s name, the police created several photo arrays that Brown viewed on November 15. She identified Shuler and 19-year-old Rasheed Turner as two of the men she saw on the porch.
Later that day, Brown said she remembered that the third man’s name was Mark and that he had bad skin. A detective used a computer program to sift through mugshots and create photo arrays of young Black men who were either named “Mark” or had acne. Brown identified 19-year-old Marc Brittingham as the third person she saw on Thomas’s porch on Saturday night.
Shuler had been arrested on an unrelated traffic stop on November 14, 1997. Turner and Brittingham turned themselves in on November 16, 1997. (Court records refer to Turner as Rasheed Smith.)
The three men provided blood and hair samples to the police, although no serology or DNA testing was performed on this evidence. Their shoes and clothing tested negative for blood. Police did not find any physical or forensic evidence connecting the men to the break-in or the murder.
The joint trial of Brittingham, Shuler, and Turner began on November 18, 1998, in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas, with Judge Steven Geroff presiding.
In his opening statement, Assistant District Attorney Carlos Vega said that Thomas had recently hit a winning number in a “street” lottery and received a settlement in a lawsuit against a casino. Word of these payoffs had gotten around, Vega said. While several witnesses testified that Thomas played both legal and illegal lotteries, the state never introduced any evidence supporting Vega’s statement that Thomas had recently come into a lot of money.
Brown was the only witness connecting the defendants to the murder. In her statements to police, Brown had not mentioned seeing anyone else the night that she said she saw Brittingham, Shuler, and Turner. But she testified that she talked with a neighbor, Craig Brown, who was of no relation, just after she saw the men leave Thomas’s house. During cross-examination, she changed that account, now testifying that her conversation with Craig Brown occurred while the men were leaving the house.
Wadia Brown also testified that she saw Brittingham put a brown envelope in his pocket as he left the house. This detail was not in any of her statements to the police.
Brown testified inconsistently about her knowledge of the defendants. She had told police that she saw the men all the time, “at least 4 to 5 times a day.” But during cross-examination, she said she had seen Turner a maximum of six times. She also testified inconsistently about whether her boyfriend, Lenny Cunningham, was in her house when she said she saw the defendants. She testified that she was a habitual drug user and that she was high at the time she identified the defendants.
Brown had additional credibility issues. Immediately after the arrests, Brown told officials that Turner had approached her on the street and asked her how she could jeopardize herself and her family by talking to the police. The district attorney’s office moved Brown and her family to a location that Brown called “lovely,” and Vega called “quite luxurious.” Four months later, Brown was moved again, this time to a more modest apartment, and she began calling police and prosecutors to report ongoing harassment by the defendants’ families. After an investigation, the district attorney’s office reported that Brown was lying about these alleged incidents.
Brown acknowledged her lies in court. Vega told Judge Geroff during a sidebar conference: “The point is, when they finally locate housing appropriate for the income level, she’s sent there, when she’s sent at that new location, where it’s in keeping with her lifestyle, she then tells the police she has been threatened or somebody banged on the door, she was afraid. This was a lie. She had admitted to us that it was a lie, it was done for the purpose of going back to the dream home.”
Craig Brown testified that he did talk with Wadia Brown that Saturday night, but he said the conversation took place around 9:30 and that he did not see anyone outside Thomas’s house. He said he remembered the night because he had guests over to watch a boxing match on TV.
Robin McDonald, Thomas’s second cousin, testified that Thomas called McDonald’s mother at 7:11 p.m. on Saturday evening, establishing Thomas’s last-known contact. She also testified that Thomas kept her doors locked and would not allow anyone inside unless they called ahead.
Carlton Lawrence lived next door to Thomas. He said the wall separating their two rowhouses was thin and he could normally hear what was going on in her house. Lawrence said he did not hear any noise from Thomas’s house on Sunday, November 9, although he said he was ill that day and slept a lot in the afternoon.
Palmer testified about discovering his great-aunt’s body. His account of how he received the injuries on his body changed. He had told police they were from a motorcycle accident, but he testified that they were “passion marks” from his girlfriend.
Dr. Bennett Preston, an assistant medical examiner, testified that Thomas’s death could have occurred on Saturday, bolstering Wadia Brown’s account. Preston said Thomas had been stabbed eight times and been hit at least nine times in the head with a blunt object. Based on those injuries, Preston said that Thomas would have died within an hour of the attack.
Preston said that Thomas died between 24 to 48 hours prior to 10:30 a.m. on November 11, 1997, when her body arrived at his office for an autopsy. “It’s consistent with her having been killed [on] Saturday night,” he said.
The autopsy did not give a precise time of death, but Preston testified how he arrived at his conclusion. “I can give an approximate,” he said. “On my death certificate I didn’t put a date down but based on the amount of decomposition and according to my report … we mention passing rigor mortis is broken in the extremities, [and] no appreciable livor mortis.” Livor mortis is the pooling of blood after the heart stops.
During cross-examination, Shuler’s attorney asked Preston if Thomas could have died on Sunday night. Preston said no, because the autopsy showed that the rigor mortis stage was already passing, “meaning it had already set up and takes one to two days for it to start disappearing.”
None of the defendants testified. Two character witnesses testified that Brittingham had a reputation as a peaceful person. The state and defense stipulated that the hair found in Thomas’s hand was consistent with her own hair and inconsistent with the hair of the defendants.
In their closing arguments, attorneys for the three men argued that their clients were innocent and that Thomas’s attacker or attackers must have been someone she knew, based on the door key being upstairs and the condition of her house, which did not appear to be ransacked.
They said that Palmer was a more likely suspect and that Wadia Brown was an unreliable and uncorroborated witness.
Shuler’s attorney said that Shuler was 6’ tall, but Brown had told police that the men she saw on Thomas’s porch were no more than 5’9” tall. Noting the knife left on the living-room floor, Brittingham’s attorney said the investigation was incomplete and lacked thoroughness.
In his closing argument, Vega acknowledged that Wadia Brown was a flawed witness. He called her a “big liar.”
“If this were central casting you would have a professional, someone to testify, but it happened in real life and people get involved, sometimes they are good people, hardworking people, and sometimes they are junkies, that is what [Wadia] Brown is,” Vega said.
Vega said Wadia’s testimony was corroborated by Preston and Craig Brown.
The jury broke for the Thanksgiving holiday but returned on November 30, 1998, and convicted all three men of second-degree murder, burglary, conspiracy, and possessing an instrument of crime. Judge Geroff later sentenced Brittingham, Shuler, and Turner to life in prison.
The three men appealed. In 1998, the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed their murder convictions, but threw out the burglary convictions. It said, “The eyewitness testimony, together with the evidence establishing the victim’s time of death, were sufficient to establish guilt in this case.”
In 2003, Cunningham, also known as Michael “Truck” Thomas, said in an affidavit that he was with Wadia Brown on the night she said she saw the three men on Thomas’s porch. He said he and Brown had been watching the boxing match at a bar, and there was no way that Brown saw what she said she saw. Cunningham said he asked Brown why she made up her story, and she said it was because she owed money to the three men, and this was the easiest way to take care of that problem.
Brittingham filed a motion for a new trial based on this affidavit, and a judge denied his motion on May 12, 2004.
In 2012, the men jointly filed a petition seeking DNA testing of several pieces of evidence, including broken pieces of a broom handle, fingernail clippings from Thomas, her clothing, and blood stains. The state opposed the request, arguing that the defendants could have sought DNA testing at the time of the trial. A lower-court judge granted the men’s request. The state appealed, and the Superior Court of Pennsylvania affirmed that ruling, writing: “Here, the jury convicted Appellees based solely on the testimony of one witness, whose credibility was later called into serious question. No physical evidence ever linked any of the Appellees to the crime. Were DNA testing to reveal the absence of [the defendants’] DNA, and the presence of the DNA of some other person … it seems exceedingly unlikely that a rational jury could have convicted [the] the appellees.”
The testing was performed, but it was inconclusive.
In 2021, attorneys for the three men asked the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) of the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Office to review the convictions. Nilam Sanghvi of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project and Amelia Maxfield of the Exoneration Project represented Brittingham. Tara Thompson of the Exoneration Project, later joined by Angie Louie of the Innocence Project, represented Shuler. Brian Robinson, an attorney with DLA Piper, represented Turner. As part of the review, the CIU provided open file discovery.
On April 19, 2022, the men filed a new motion for post-conviction relief, based on documents in the district attorney’s files and the police department’s files that they said had not been disclosed to the defense. The records included:
Police files regarding another potential suspect, Mark L., who detectives interviewed on November 14, 1997. Police had initially found Mark L. at the same corner where they encountered Shuler. He was the same approximate height and weight as Brittingham, and a photo of Mark L. suggested he had bad acne. (Brown viewed Mark L. in a photo array and told detectives that she knew him, but he was not involved.)
A request to give a polygraph test to Palmer and photographs of Palmer’s injuries, which seemed to run counter to his claim that the injuries were six years old.
An undated note in police files from an interview with Brown that said she saw only two men running from Thomas’s porch on Sunday night.
Other assorted potential leads in the investigation, including one that loosely connected Thomas’s murder with a murder a few weeks earlier at a store three blocks away.
On May 3, 2024, the men amended their petitions to include a report from Dr. James Filkins, a pathologist in Illinois and the former deputy medical examiner in Cook County, Illinois. After reviewing the records from Thomas’s autopsy, Filkins said Preston had erred in his conclusions and testimony regarding the time of death, mistakenly believing that Thomas’s rigor mortis was waning rather than still developing.
“This determination is based on an analysis of both positive and negative post-mortem findings, the recognition of a misinterpretation by one of the pathologists who performed the postmortem examination of the significance of the ease with rigor mortis was broken, and the recognition that decomposition changes would have continued until 10:30 a.m. on Monday November 10 th , 1997 when Ms. Thomas was placed in the refrigerator of the medical examiner facility—roughly 3.5 hours after being dead in her home. Considering those findings, Ms. Thomas could not have died on Saturday, November 8, 1997.”
Filkins said that Thomas most likely died early on Monday, November 10.
Based on that filing, the CIU hired Dr. James Gill, Connecticut’s chief medical examiner, to review the state’s evidence, trial documents, and Filkins’s report. In a report dated April 23, 2025, Gill said Thomas most likely died on Sunday, November 9, between 5 p.m. and midnight, with his best estimate at around 9:30 p.m. Gill said that although there was nothing in the evidence to support a death on Saturday, he could not rule it out but considered it was “extremely unlikely” and an “unreasonable possibility.”
In a response dated May 12, 2026, the CIU agreed that the convictions of Brittingham, Shuler, and Turner should be vacated.
It said the state had used “unreliable scientific findings” in obtaining the convictions, and this evidence had corroborated the already shaky testimony of Brown, the only purported eyewitness. The response noted Brown’s lack of consistency during her testimony as well as her out-of-court conduct, which included lying to officials in an attempt to secure better housing.
The response did not address the defendants’ claims that the state had withheld exculpatory evidence about other potential suspects.
On May 26, 2026, Judge Jennifer Schultz granted the motions to vacate and separate motions to dismiss the charges. She also noted disciplinary issues regarding Preston that were discovered after the trial. Those issues are redacted in court records.
Matthew Stiegler, the CIU’s supervisor, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Preston’s work had come under scrutiny in recent years.
Shuler and Turner were released from prison that day. Brittingham was released the next day, greeted at the state prison in Chester by Shuler and Turner.
In a statement, the men’s attorney said: “Today’s ruling confirms what should have been clear from the outset: These convictions lacked reliable evidence and rested on deeply flawed forensic testimony. For nearly three decades, Mr. Shuler, Mr. Brittingham, and Mr. Turner maintained their innocence while serving time for a crime they did not commit. The absence of physical evidence, along with new evidence discovered during the joint investigation, makes clear that this wrongful conviction should never have occurred.”
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 06-10-2026
