Prosecutors drop charges before re-trial begins for Cathy Woods, who had been convicted in the fatal 1976 stabbing of Michelle Mitchell

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Prosecutors are dropping the case against a Nevada woman who spent more than 30 years in prison for a 1976 murder before a judge ordered a new trial based on recently discovered DNA evidence, the district attorney said on Friday.

Washoe County district attorney Chris Hicks told reporters that there will be no retrial of Cathy Woods in the fatal stabbing of Michelle Mitchell on the edge of the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno.

A judge threw out the conviction in September after new DNA evidence linked the Reno crime scene to an Oregon inmate who now faces murder charges in California in a string of killings about the same time.

Washoe District judge Patrick Flanagan ordered the 64-year-old Woods to appear at a retrial 13 July. But Hicks said during a news conference at the county court complex that he’s filing a motion to dismiss the case.

Woods’ public defender and the FBI say DNA found on a cigarette butt at the Reno crime scene suggests the real killer is a former Oregon prison inmate recently charged in the deaths of two women among five victims in what became known as the “Gypsy Hill” murders near San Francisco about the same time Mitchell’s throat was slashed.

Woods, now 64, was convicted in 1980 and again five years later. The convictions were based largely on the confession she made in 1979 at the psychiatric hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, where her mother committed her months earlier.

Prosecutors at those trials argued that only Mitchell’s killer could have known the information Woods provided to police in her confession.

The Nevada supreme court overturned the initial conviction based partly on the trial judge’s refusal to allow defense attorneys to present evidence that Woods could have learned everything she told investigators from newspaper accounts.

Nevertheless, Woods’ lawyers were unable to persuade the jury in the second trial to disregard her earlier confession, public defender Maizie Pusich said.

“It’s very hard to argue [that] you shouldn’t believe her, because, why would someone confess to something like that?” Pusich said before Judge Patrick Flanagan granted her motion in September for a new trial.

“What we have now is significant evidence that shows that the jury should not have accepted everything that Cathy Woods said from the hospital in Shreveport at face value,” she wrote in the motion for a new trial.

Pusich said Woods doesn’t remember acknowledging the killing while hospitalized in March 1979.

“I’m told it was a product of wanting to get a private room,” Pusich told the Associated Press earlier. “She was being told she wasn’t sufficiently dangerous to qualify, and within a short period she was claiming she had killed a woman in Reno.”

Rodney Halbower, 66, was serving a 30-year sentence for attempted murder in Oregon when he was extradited to San Mateo County in California, and charged in January with murder in the 1976 deaths of Paula Louise Baxter, 17, and Veronica “Ronnie” Anne Cascio, 18, near Pacifica.

Halbower had been arrested for the rape of a 33-year-old woman in Reno in November 1975 – three months before Mitchell was killed not far away. He was released on bail and barely a month later, the series of “Gypsy Hill” murders began. Cascio’s body was found 8 January 1976 and Baxter’s on 4 February. Mitchell was killed on 24 February.