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The trauma detective who combs through killers’ pasts to help them find mercy [theguardian.com]

 

Sara Baldwin’s job was to mine James Bernard Belcher’s past for information that might sway a jury towards mercy after he killed Jennifer Embry. Photograph: Melanie Garcia/The Marshall Project

By Maurice Chammah, The Guardian (co-published by the Marshall Project), March 2, 2023

The first mystery was who could have done such a thing, who could leave someone like that.

Jennifer Embry was found in her bathtub in January 1996. She was 29. Her younger brother Ricky had come looking for her after she failed to show up for her shift as an X-ray technician. “The door just came open,” he later testified. “I hoped it was all a dream.”

The autopsy said Embry had been raped, strangled and drowned in her Jacksonville, Florida, townhouse. There were no obvious culprits. But near her body, police found a green slipper with the DNA of an unknown male. Her family waited two years before analysts had a match: James Bernard Belcher. He was 39 and had spent much of his life behind bars.

[Please click here to read more.]

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