Thirty-two years after a woman was brutally murdered in a Buffalo suburb, a jury said on Monday that it was unable to come to a verdict in the retrial of a man accused in the crime.
The man, Brian Scott Lorenz, had been charged with strangling the woman, Deborah Meindl, in 1993 and was convicted the next year, along with James Pugh, an associate. Both he and Mr. Pugh received life sentences, despite repeatedly declaring their innocence, and embarked on a lengthy effort to seek their exoneration.
That effort gained momentum in 2023 when the convictions of Mr. Lorenz and Mr. Pugh were set aside by Justice Paul B. Wojtaszek of New York State Supreme Court, who noted that none of the genetic material taken from the crime scene matched the defendants’ and that prosecutors had not revealed certain evidence to the defense.
Closing arguments in Mr. Lorenz’s new trial were made last week, after two weeks of jury selection and testimony. But after nearly five days of deliberation, the jury said on Monday it could not reach a verdict, even as Mr. Lorenz, imprisoned for more than three decades, sat just feet away.
“After considerable discussion, we have not been able to come to a unanimous decision,” the jury wrote, adding that “no amount” of continued deliberation would help.
Justice Wojtaszek said the parties would reconvene this month to determine how to proceed. Mr. Lorenz, 56, was composed and quiet during the trial; he did not testify. After the jury’s announcement, he shook hands with his lawyers, shrugged, and left the courtroom for his holding cell in the courthouse.
It seems, however, that it will not be his last day in court. On Monday afternoon, the Erie County district attorney, Michael J. Keane, indicated he would pursue a third trial for Mr. Lorenz.
“My office is committed to obtaining justice for Deborah Meindl,” Mr. Keane said in a news release. “We will present the evidence again at trial.”
Ilann M. Maazel, a lawyer for Mr. Lorenz, said he was disappointed by the mistrial but would “keep fighting.”
“He is an innocent man,” Mr. Maazel said of his client, adding, “He’s living a nightmare.”
Mr. Lorenz and his lawyers had believed they had a strong case for acquittal.
There was, they noted, no physical evidence linking either of the two men convicted in 1994 to the crime: no DNA, no fingerprints, no hair or fiber samples. There were no eyewitnesses to the murder.
Prosecutors said the crime was a burglary gone wrong, and that Mr. Lorenz had told several people about killing Ms. Meindl, in sometimes gleeful terms.
The case drew widespread interest because of its sudden violence in a working-class suburb and the tortuous search for a culprit, a path littered with wild accusations from a famed criminal and an official re-examination of the case that led to unexpected conclusions about who was to blame.
One initial suspect, Ms. Meindl’s husband, Donald, died in 2023. Around the time of the crime, Mr. Meindl had mentioned to a friend that he wanted to have his wife murdered; he was also having sex with a 16-year-old girl he worked with at a Taco Bell at the time of the slaying. (Mr. Meindl later said he was joking about killing his wife.)
The trial’s end leaves open the question of who was responsible for the murder, a crime that was stunning in its savagery.
On the afternoon of Feb. 17, 1993, Ms. Meindl, a mother of two young daughters, returned to her small home in Tonawanda, N.Y, north of Buffalo. Once inside, Ms. Meindl, 33, was beaten, stabbed and strangled with her husband’s necktie, her hands cuffed behind her back. The crime scene bore evidence of a mad struggle and other small mysteries, with broken glass and overturned chairs, and a window screen cut out — from inside — at the rear of the house.
“She fought for herself; she fought for her girls,” Rebecca L. Schnirel, an Erie County prosecutor, said during her closing argument on Tuesday, while graphically describing the murder. “She wouldn’t go down.”
But defense lawyers had painted the state’s witnesses as nonsensical, inconsistent, unreliable and often coaxed by a detective, David Bentley, who is retired but testified at the trial. The lack of any of Mr. Lorenz’s genetic material at the scene was exculpatory, said Earl S. Ward, one of his lawyers.
“He wasn’t there,” Mr. Ward said during his closing. “Because he had nothing to do with this murder. The DNA does not lie.”
Despite a paucity of physical evidence and the age of the case, the district attorney, Mr. Keane, went ahead with the retrial, using the testimony of a small coterie of witnesses to argue that Mr. Lorenz had repeatedly bragged about killing Ms. Meindl.
“He confessed, over and over again,” Ms. Schnirel said.
Several of those witnesses have died since the original trial, so their 1994 testimony was read into the record in front of the jury, which was made up of four men and eight women. Some audio recordings of the initial investigation were also heard in court.
Efforts to exonerate Mr. Lorenz and Mr. Pugh date to at least 2018, when a group of New York City-based lawyers for the men persuaded a state judge to order new DNA testing.
The results were a shock: Evidence taken from the scene showed no DNA from either man. Genetic evidence of another unknown person, however, was on other items used in the murder, including a knife, Ms. Meindl’s bloodied clothes and the necktie used to strangle her. (In the retrial, prosecutors had posited that the perpetrators had used gloves to explain the lack of fingerprints and DNA.)
In 2021, John J. Flynn, then the county district attorney, ordered a new investigation, giving the job to two veteran prosecutors.
The prosecutors came to a stunning conclusion: that Ms. Meindl had been murdered by Richard Matt, a killer from the Buffalo area who became infamous when he escaped from prison in Dannemora, N.Y., in 2015. Mr. Matt was fatally shot after a three-week manhunt, while another escapee, David Sweat, was recaptured.
Mr. Sweat would play an outsize role in the re-examination of Mr. Pugh’s and Mr. Lorenz’s cases, suggesting to prosecutors that Mr. Matt had told him he was involved. In his 2023 decision setting aside the verdicts, Justice Wojtaszek was skeptical, calling Mr. Sweat’s account “patently incredible” and saying the new theory was “nothing more than speculation, conjecture and surmise.”
Mr. Lorenz remained in custody even after his conviction was set aside, having been denied bail.
Mr. Pugh, who was released on parole, attended Mr. Lorenz’s new trial, as did Ms. Meindl’s surviving daughter, Lisa Payne, who sat in the front row of the courtroom, sometimes shaking her head.
Her sister, Jessica, who found their mother’s body in 1993, died in 2020 at age 37 after struggling with drugs and the trauma of her mother’s death, according to her ex-husband, Neil Bennett.
One of the two prosecutors who had re-examined the case, David Heraty, who has since left the district attorney’s office, also attended.
Mr. Pugh, now 63, is scheduled to be retried in December, also in front of Justice Wojtaszek.
Leaving the courthouse, Joanne Lorenz, the wife of Mr. Lorenz, called the mistrial “devastating” and said she and his family would continue to support her husband.
“We’re just going with it, trying to keep his spirits up and make sure everything goes smooth on this end,” Mrs. Lorenz said. “There’s kind of nothing else we can do. Just kind of wait. Sit and wait.”
Camille Baker and David Andreatta contributed reporting from Buffalo.
Jesse McKinley is a Times reporter covering politics, pop culture, lifestyle and the confluence of all three.
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