After 30 years in jail, Brian Scott Lorenz thought he might be going home. Last summer, an Erie County judge threw out his conviction in a 1993 murder that had set off a raft of accusations involving bad cops, famous killers and prosecutorial misconduct.
Nearly a year later, the crime is still unsolved and Mr. Lorenz remains behind bars.
In 1994, Mr. Lorenz and a co-defendant were found guilty of the savage slaying of a young mother, Deborah Meindl, in the Buffalo suburb of Tonawanda. Last August, a state judge set aside the conviction, citing DNA taken from the crime scene that did not match either defendant and the fact that prosecutors had not revealed evidence to the defense.
But the Erie County district attorney’s office continues to appeal the overturned convictions, raising the prospect of a second trial despite a paucity of physical evidence or potential prosecution witnesses. And the district attorney has successfully fought efforts to release Mr. Lorenz, who has spent more than half his life behind bars for a crime he insists he did not commit.
“It just seems like it’s never going to end,” Mr. Lorenz, 54, said in a recent interview from jail in Erie County. “I’m on a treadmill, in a tunnel, with the light at the end. But it’s just not getting nowhere, man.”
James Pugh, Mr. Lorenz’s co-defendant, was released on parole in 2019. But the trial judge and an appellate judge in Rochester refused to intervene to release Mr. Lorenz pending another possible trial. In late June, his lawyers asked the chief judge of the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, to intervene. A spokesman said the court would “decide the motion at a future session.”
Ilann Maazel, one of Mr. Lorenz’s lawyers, called his client’s continued imprisonment a “Kafkaesque nightmare” that is “intolerable, unconstitutional and wrong.”
“We have a man languishing in prison for over 30 years without receiving a fair trial and can’t even get his day in court,” Mr. Maazel said. “This is not the quality of justice we should expect in New York State in 2024.”
In a letter to the Court of Appeals in late July, the Erie County district attorney’s office said that Mr. Lorenz’s “current pretrial detention of under 11 months on a murder case, in and of itself, does not rise to the level of a due process violation.”
It also pointed out that while Mr. Lorenz’s conviction was dismissed, “his claim of actual innocence was rejected by the court,” and argued that bail should be denied because of “the gravity of the charges” as well as “the evidence of risk of flight and dangerousness.”
A Crime and a Theory
The Meindl murder case has been suffused with intrigue, with an array of curious characters and explosive theories. It began in a burst of sheer brutality: On the afternoon of Feb. 17, 1993, Ms. Meindl came home to her modest home in Tonawanda, just north of Buffalo, which she shared with her husband and two daughters.
A half-hour later, her eldest daughter, 10-year-old Jessica, discovered a grisly scene. Her mother had been strangled with a necktie, repeatedly stabbed with a knife and beaten, and her hands handcuffed behind her back.
Ms. Meindl’s husband, Donald, had been having sex with an underage girl he worked with at a Taco Bell and had talked to a friend about having his wife killed, according to transcripts of the 1994 trial. But investigators, led by a detective with the Tonawanda Police Department, David Bentley, soon seized on a different theory of the case, using information from a confidential informant: It was a burglary gone wrong, with Mr. Lorenz and Mr. Pugh as prime suspects.
Mr. Bentley, known as a tough and aggressive police officer, soon built a case against the men, who were acquaintances and petty thieves from the Buffalo area. Mr. Lorenz, 23 at the time, was being held in Iowa on an auto theft charge, and he initially confessed to the Tonawanda killing; he would subsequently say that he had just wanted to get out of jail, confident that the truth would quickly come out. Mr. Lorenz implicated Mr. Pugh, though his confession got some details wrong and was deemed inadmissible at his trial thanks to procedural concerns.
Despite that, Mr. Lorenz and Mr. Pugh were quickly convicted in 1994, largely because of associates who testified that they had mentioned the murder, and a single collectible coin found in the car that Mr. Lorenz had stolen. Mr. Meindl’s father-in-law said he had given the family the coin as a gift.
Both men received life sentences. In the years after, they sought to overturn their convictions, noting a lack of hard forensic evidence, and eventually caught the attention of a team of New York City defense lawyers.
The lawyers soon moved for new DNA testing on crime-scene evidence, including the knife and the necktie, a request granted in 2018. The results were stunning: Neither man’s DNA was on the items. Even more intriguing, investigators have found genetic material from another person, a male whose identity is still unknown. Lawyers noted that several witnesses said that Detective Bentley had threatened them or coerced their testimony.
In 2021, John J. Flynn, then the county district attorney, ordered a fresh investigation, appointing two experienced prosecutors: Michael J. Hillery, who ran the office’s Appeals Bureau, and David A. Heraty, an assistant district attorney in the same division.
After interviewing dozens of witnesses, the two prosecutors developed a staggering theory: Not only were Mr. Pugh and Mr. Lorenz innocent, but the real killer was Richard Matt, a convicted murderer from the Buffalo area who escaped from a maximum-security prison in Dannemora, N.Y., in 2015. Mr. Matt was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent three weeks after he escaped; his fellow escapee, David Sweat, was recaptured.
Facing a Trial Without Fear
Kicking around Tonawanda, a blue-collar town with a bootstrap attitude, Mr. Bentley and Mr. Matt were close, like father and son, despite seemingly being on opposite sides of the law. The police officer mentored the troubled youth while simultaneously using him as an informant. “You could almost say I loved the kid,” Mr. Bentley said in an interview in 2021, long after his retirement.
But the two prosecutors handling the new investigation offered a sinister story: that Mr. Bentley ordered Mr. Matt to kill Ms. Meindl. Lawyers for the two convicted men filed papers with the court, elaborating on the theory, saying that Mr. Bentley and Ms. Meindl had been having an affair, and that she had become aware of unspecified criminal activities by the detective. And in a letter to The New York Times, Mr. Sweat himself said that Mr. Matt had told him of the murder. “The cop said she had to go,” Mr. Sweat wrote, “because she was going to rat them out.”
Mr. Bentley has denied any involvement in the murder or other crimes, and has denied having an affair with Ms. Meindl. He did not return a request for comment for this article.
Mr. Flynn also rejected the theory offered by his two prosecutors, demoting one and reassigning the other. Mr. Flynn, who stepped down this year and entered private practice, declined to comment. His top deputy, Michael J. Keane, a Democrat who is now acting district attorney and campaigning for a full term also declined to comment, citing the continuing appeal.
Still, in late 2021, an Erie County judge, Paul B. Wojtaszek, convened a hearing during which Mr. Lorenz and Mr. Pugh could challenge their convictions. His deliberations lasted until last August, when Justice Wojtaszek threw out the convictions, though he rejected the men’s claims of innocence.
Mr. Pugh, now 62, says he doesn’t fear another trial. “To be honest with you, I’d rather have a jury find me not guilty once and for all, because then it’s final,” he said, adding, “I know that I’ve done nothing. And they have nothing.”
Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, a lawyer for Mr. Pugh, added that new DNA technology could solve the case, particularly the question of the mystery sample. “You can’t compare what they did back in the ’90s to what they have now,” he said.
Alexandra Harrington, who directs the University at Buffalo School of Law’s Criminal Justice Advocacy Clinic, said that overturning a conviction wasn’t always the end of a defendant’s imprisonment.
“The reality is that just because the conviction is set aside doesn’t meant the case is over,” Ms. Harrington said. A hearing on Justice Wojtaszek’s vacating of the men’s convictions is scheduled for early September at a state appellate court in Rochester.
“The appellate process is not a quick process,” Ms. Harrington said. “It certainly could mean months, but it’s not impossible that it could mean years, or more than a year of continued incarceration.”
Whether the players in the case have time is another question: Several witnesses and survivors have died, including Donald Meindl, who died in May 2023. There is a single surviving member of Ms. Meindl’s immediate family — her younger daughter, Lisa, who did not respond to requests for comment. Jessica, the daughter who found Ms. Meindl’s body, died in 2020, after years of battles with addiction.
In the interview, Mr. Lorenz said that when his conviction was overturned, he anticipated that there might be delays in his release, perhaps a week or two, as bail was set. But that wait has been nearly a year, perplexing even some of the guards he sees daily. “They’re like, ‘Why are you still here?’” he said.
He added that he believed the district attorney’s office simply “have in their minds that I’m somebody that I’m absolutely not.”
He thinks constantly about why he’s in the situation he is, wondering whether it’s punishment for something he did in another life, or karma, or “something that I don’t even recognize.”
In jail, Mr. Lorenz says he stays to himself. He reads, but has stopped exercising. He says he’s “in a bad place,” but insists he’s not a “violent dude” and “has never hurt anybody in his life, not even in here.”
If released, he said he would like to see his aging mother and have a good meal. But he’s not sure that will ever happen.
“I believe these people are going to just figure out some kind of way to stuff me back in prison,” he said. “And when them days happen, those are the days when I’m lying in here, in nighttime, and I’m like, ‘I just hope I don’t wake up in the morning.’”
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