DNA tests from 1991 rape-murder point to a new suspect

For more than two decades, Anthony Wright has insisted that he did not rape and kill 77-year-old Louise Talley in Nicetown.

He was working construction at the time of her death, he has said, adding that his confession came only after coercion from police, who he says threatened him while he was handcuffed to a chair.

And the bloodstained clothes that police removed from his house? Not his either, he has maintained.

He has made these claims from behind bars, where he is serving a life sentence for the 1991 slaying.

DNA testing sophisticated enough to exonerate him was not available in 1993, when a jury found him guilty, but it is now. And so for nine years his attorneys have pushed to see if advances in technology would support his case.

The results of those tests are back. They show it was someone else's DNA found in bodily fluids taken from the victim, say his attorneys, with the Innocence Project at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School.

That DNA, the attorneys say in court pleadings, belonged to a career criminal and crack addict named Ronnie Byrd, who died early last year in South Carolina.

The bloodstained clothes, they say, turn out not to bear Wright's DNA either. The garments belonged to the woman who was killed.

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DNA tests from 1991 rape-murder point to a new suspect