Defense Attorney Sharisse O’Carroll questions what really happened to the homicide detective’s lab request.

“This is a first-degree murder case, so you’d have to believe that Cook never followed up on his lab request, nobody said anything, he didn’t care,” she said. “He never called and said, ‘Hey, I’m kind of waiting on that.’ ”

If that test wasn’t done in 1995, following through on it in 2014 also did not seem to be a priority for Tulsa police or Harris.

Murphy’s legal team asked earlier this year to test the state’s existing samples of William’s blood and tissue, and attorneys for the state and city fought those requests, records show. The state eventually turned over samples for testing.

“Every single day we would find something new that was exculpatory that proved her innocence, and every single day throughout, we would try to get the state to try to negotiate with us and the state continued to fight us, the city fought us at every stage,” O’Carroll said.

The tests seemed to move slowly in 1995, too. Though Harris requested in June the OSBI lab test comparing Murphy’s blood to samples found at the scene, results took several months and arrived the day before the trial began.