Carlson had been found guilty of the 1984 murder of 14-year-old Tina Faelz.įaelz of Pleasanton was killed by 44 stab wounds while on her way home from school on April 5, 1984. The horror that struck still echoes-a faint remembrance, the edge of nightmare, cloven footsteps in the distance.PLEASANTON, CA-A San Francisco state appeals court reduced the sentence for Stephen Carlson from first to second-degree murder. There are no confessions, no tying up of loose ends. Events build up to a climax and then just dwindle away. “Real life produces an outcome so unlike fiction.

Could they have convicted Stanford, just as blood spotsĬonvicted Steve Carlson thirty years after the fact? We’ll let Randall have the Of evidence years later, and that whatever remained was so badly compromised as Wristwatch, the blood-soaked clothing, and strands of hair were all cleared out By the time DNA testing became available, the murder weapon, Stanford’s That history will never answer is whether that evidence was in fact circumstantialĪt all. In early 1975, Alan Stanford walked away a free man, acquitted on the grounds of To be an open-and-shut case for the prosecution gradually turned upside down, and Society commit such a grisly deed? As Randall details, what appeared at the outset The local Episcopal church-how could such an upstanding member of polite And Stanford himself-a longtime member of Possibly deteriorating mental health: any number of people, including random The defense pressed furthermore, was prone to derangement, flights of fancy, John’s County police ransacked Stanford’s home in the days after the murder, it was not beyond a reasonable doubt that the overzealous cops took evidence that they later planted to be suddenly, miraculously, found in a city dump? Witness testimony from the day faltered under cross-examination, and key evidence-bloody clothing and a rusted machete, suggested as the murder weapon-came under scrutiny given its poor handling by local investigators.

Yet once the trial began-there were no other immediate suspects, certainly none with a motive as clear as Stanford’s-the defense began a systematic unraveling of the prosecution’s case.

The evidence found in the swamp by the city dump off Riberia Street.

Tina faelz cold case files