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first he threatened murder do you understand then there was a murder whoever had done it had been
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almost a maniac call me charles manson big three inch letters front page he was convicted and put away for life
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but he always claimed his innocence and was determined to prove it he literally solved his own murder case from prison
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he convinced them that wait a minute we have an innocent man here [Music] on the night of may 23 1991
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a fire broke out in a rural farmhouse in upstate new york by the time firemen got there
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it was entirely engulfed in flames they realized that the occupant sabina kulakowski was missing daylight was
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coming and then they firemen and others were basically looking for her emergency workers found sabina
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kulikowski's body about 100 yards from the house on an overgrown footpath she was naked she had been
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brutally murdered stabbed beaten burned bitten sabina was 49 years old it became pretty obvious right away that
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whoever had done it is somebody that well quite quite honestly had to have been almost a maniac
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the evidence showed that she was in the house when the fire started at some point sabine was alive in her
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about the structure when it was burning because she did have some soot in her lungs
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between the farmhouse and sabina's body police found a red t-shirt stained with
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sabina's blood fire investigators found traces of accelerant inside the house and quickly
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ruled the blaze an arson investigators thought the crime was one of passion rage
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pure rage perhaps motivated by a desire to get revenge sabina kulikowski lived in the farmhouse
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alone her boyfriend ron bench lived there with her until they broke up a few months before the fire
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by all accounts it was an amicable breakup and they remained friends they continued to
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associate with one another but they had ended their boyfriend girlfriend relationship
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ron bench had an alibi for the night of the fire he was in auburn new york an hour's drive away
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and friends corroborated his alibi and police had another suspect sabina was a social worker for the state
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of new york her superiors were dealing with the disgruntled man who threatened to kill everyone in the office unless he
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was given custody of his daughter he was angry with the child protective agency because they had placed his
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daughter in foster care and he did not like that i want her back and i've been using the
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method and i've been using the system and i've been paying attorneys but i
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think that if i got a gun in my hand again then you'll understand what the [ __ ] i'm all about
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a crazy man comes in there and just starts taking them social service workers out for the helmet kills himself
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can't put a dead man in jail can you roy brown spent six months in jail for making
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those threats and was released just six days before sabina's murder his alibi was that he was with his
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girlfriend the entire night and he gave a name and gave a location where they were
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and they checked on it and found out that his girlfriend actually was in jail that night so
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he obviously was lying to them about his whereabouts brown denied any involvement
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but he was arrested for arson and murder he called me up the day before we're gonna come over and arrest you
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come on are you guys serious you're not yet come over to arrest me all right 10 o'clock in the morning
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would you sure come pick me up for a murder charge yeah then i had to sit on the porch
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there 15 minutes late roy brown was the prime suspect in the murder of sabina kulikowski
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earned that distinction by threatening to kill everyone in sabina's office due
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to a child custody dispute roy was not a good guy roy had anger management issues he did have
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a criminal record um nothing of any great consequence but enough so that you know
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it's not the kind of guy that you'd want to really hang out with necessarily he
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was involving himself in some bad activities as far as you know drinking and whatever else and
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he had no real alibi for where he was at that point brown insisted he had nothing to do with
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the arson or sabine's murder but the circumstantial evidence was compelling brown was offered a plea bargain
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but refused i don't go screw themselves you know i told her i told one lawyer
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you know i didn't do anything wrong he said well it doesn't matter they're
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gonna send you to prison anyways so roy brown went on trial prosecutors found two witnesses who said
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brown was physically abusive roy brown's wife and a girlfriend both of them stated under oath that he was a biter
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they said when he was angry he would bite them and he used biting as a form of trying to control them
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coincidentally sabina kulakowski was bitten before she was killed and prosecutors asked a forensic
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odontologist to compare the bite marks to brown's teeth roy brown's bite pattern
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matched the uh some of the bite marks on sabina's body but the forensic odontologists hired by
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the defense claimed the opposite he said the bite wounds on sabina's body were created by
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someone with six front upper teeth and brown didn't have them and he was very clear and very adamant
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in regard to excluding roy as the person who left those bite marks the jury sided with the prosecution
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and convicted roy brown of sabina's murder he was sentenced to 25 years to life in
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prison there was no real evidence that roy brown knew sabina kolakowski much less where she lived
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when brown got to his prison cell he refused to sleep on the bed because he said it belonged to a killer
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not him i told him that when i went into the first night i'll sleep on the floor
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that bed don't belong to me that's my desk i turned it into an office desk in
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their mattress i took some no belt no piece of string and i made a chair out of it and sat it down that's my law
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school brown filed several appeals and all were denied yet he continued to work to clear
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his name you can't get into the law library unless you bribe somebody or pay
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somebody because the first thing they're going to do is beat the hell out of you
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for being there just to make sure that you know who's in charge brown also told his lawyer
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i'm learning a lot from tv shows like forensic files i studied law books appeals in other cases
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forensic science anything i could i could try to try to utilize to prove my innocence
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brown petitioned the court for dna testing of the saliva found on sabina's t-shirt
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but this request too was denied i don't know who said the wheels of justice are turned slowly but they are
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flat and i'm fixing to jack them up changing tires and shoulders sparing the
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trunk it had to be discouraging and i would think that it would you know could very end up say i've had
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enough then something fortuitous happened after spending 12 years in prison a fire
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broke out in brown's parents home destroying all 570 pages of his case file and that fire
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changed the course of the investigation 12 years after his murder conviction roy brown learned that a fire in his
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parents home destroyed his copies of his case file all 570 pages undeterred brown wanted to replace it using what
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little money he had so he went and paid his you know 15 cents a page that he's entitled to under
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law and through the state spring of information we'll obtain these statements
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brown requested duplicate copies of everyone who gave statements to police during the murder investigation
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there was like 28.50 i had to sign him from jail i only made like four dollars every two
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weeks four dollars and twenty cents the sheriff's office sent brown a list of every one the police interviewed
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and that's when brown realized there were four affidavits in the file he had
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never seen before roy got the list looked at it and said wait a minute what what are all these
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statements you know who are all these people whose statements i've never seen
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before there were several statements from barry bench and his wife tammy heisner who
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were part owners of the farmhouse that burned down when sabina kulikowski lived there
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tammy told police that barry behaved suspiciously when they got to the fire scene
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[Music] why are we stopping here look around and see if you see the evidence like what
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like i don't know just look she claimed he wanted to search an area a hundred yards from the farmhouse
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we had parked down the street from the farm and he had mentioned to me that maybe we
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should go on down by the car and start back up on opposite sides of the road looking for
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evidence or something you know just to see if there was anything amiss or whatever
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deroy brown this was a critical piece of information sabina kulikowski's body was discovered
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in that same area around daybreak they're still battling the blaze you know and he's not even if they're
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helping you know he's walking down the road looking way over here if he was so
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concerned why wouldn't he be looking up there and barry claimed he had an alibi for
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the time the fire started he said he was drinking in a local bar until 1 30 in the morning
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but a bar patron claimed bench left the bar around midnight he was unaccounted for for about an hour
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and a half my reporting on barry bench showed that he had a as i understood it quite a
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temper barry bench had a prior arrest and misdemeanor conviction for physically assaulting a young girl who later got a
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restraining order against him one neighbor that i interviewed said that she actually worked with him and
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was afraid of him he had a problem with women according to this woman so taking matters into his
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own hands brown wrote a letter to barry bench accusing him of murder attention barry
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bench i will easily get a court order to obtain samples from you for dna testing
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after such a thing you did to kill that lady sabina kulkowski and my false imprisonment for over a dozen years
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i still pray for you i pray not only that you confess to killing sabino krakowski i pray you
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confess to all your sins mark my words they will eventually find out your guilt have a merry christmas
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but don't count on a happy new year brown hoped that bench might reply and lick the envelope flap in effect
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sending his dna sample instead bench walked in front of an oncoming amtrak train
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and killed himself well actually i was kind of ticked off because i figured it's got a way how am i going
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to go to court and get a test on this guy now he's dead brown needed to find another way to get
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bench's dna he was so desperate he considered stealing it i was trying to have my family go to the
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funeral and clip his fingernails and cut his air while he was in the box figure out everybody get some dna from
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him when you're where i was at measures become desperate and consequences for getting caught
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don't mean anything when you're serving life for something you didn't do
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for 12 years roy brown sat in prison for sabina kulikowski's murder after failing to get a new trial brown
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contacted the innocence project in new york asking them for help the innocence project was founded a
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little over 15 years ago to help convicted prisoners use what was then a new technology dna testing to
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prove that they were wrongfully convicted and innocent of the crimes for which they were in prison
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the innocence project accepted brown's case while doing some research the innocence project learned that
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before brown's trial prosecutors consulted dr lowell levine a well-known forensic odontologist but
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chose not to call him as a witness we were for the first time given documents showing uh
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that the state's own expert dr lowell levine had reached some very significant
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conclusions uh that cast enormous doubt on roy's guilt before his case ever went to trial well
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i never finished my analysis in my notes in fact i have one note on one of the photographs that if what i was looking
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for if what i thought was an upper was in fact an upper i would exclude mr brown so the innocence project
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petitioned the court for permission to test the victim's red t-shirt found at
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the crime scene thinking it might contain saliva it's not impossible to find dna after a
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15 year case but it makes it a little bit more difficult analyst tim goble examined the shirt with an alternate
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light source saliva and some other biological materials will fluoresce when hit with
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this light there were a number of fluorescent stains on the t-shirt and some of them were near the markings
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that were made by the previous examiner not surprisingly the stains were near the bite holes
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an indication they were left by the person who bit the victim presumably her killer
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gobel removed the fabric and performed str dna testing which is a more advanced form
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of pcr testing the result the dna profile from the saliva on the t-shirt did not match roy brown
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but whose was it barry bench's daughter catherine eckstadt offered to help out
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his daughter was a very courageous young woman who said i want the truth i want to know if my father committed this
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murder and if roy brown is innocent she actually contacted us after our papers were filed in court originally and said
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if you ever need me i'll give you a dna sample the dna analysis confirmed what roy
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brown already knew that the saliva stains on sabina kulikowski's t-shirt had come
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from barry bench the paternity testing showed that the john doe dna on the shirt came from the father of this young
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woman catherine nextat who is barry bench's daughter unbelievably when this evidence was presented to the
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court the judge refused to grant a new trial he said he had no proof that barry bench
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was katherine's biological father you would think you'd be home the next
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day you wouldn't think people would drag this out this is what kind of people i'm
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dealing with with pressure mounting the state of new york eventually exhumed barry bench's body and took a dna sample
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it conclusively matched the saliva on sabina kulikowski's t-shirt and roy brown
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was finally released from prison 15 years to the day he was convicted [Music] and i was thinking to myself i got
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victory see i proved my innocence without any doubt i showed i didn't do it and i showed somebody else did do it
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okay they can't take that from me you know what i'm saying they can't say
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open their mouth anymore about anything i made it very clear to roy brown that i i regretted very
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much situation that he found himself in but the question remains why did barry bench murder sabina
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kulakowski barry bench and sabina were acquaintances sabina lived with barry's brother ron
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until they broke up a month before the fire according to friends barry bench was in financial trouble and
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may have wanted to sell the farmhouse where sabina was staying [Music] no one knows what happened that night
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but the forensic evidence shows barry went to the farmhouse to speak with sabine
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what are you doing here there was an argument and things turned violent the theory is that barry set fire to the
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farmhouse and was about to leave when he realized that sabina wasn't dead there was another fight outside by this
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time he couldn't take her body back into the farmhouse the fire was too advanced
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so he dragged her body to the footpath 100 yards away and left her there this explains why
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barry searched that area later after firefighters arrived he wanted to make sure
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she was dead i have never had a case where the client solved his own crime from behind his
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prison cell using nothing but a pen and paper he really did all the hard work dna
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evidence more often than not convicts people but it can also exonerate them and now i
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think what the case of roy brown serves as as a as an example of the fact that prosecutors and police now
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must be must be more thorough they can't just be focused on one individual and
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and that's it as they lock me up and they made me turn a cell into an office
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a bed into a desk and a mattress into a chair in law books i use them instead of weapons
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i used that pen in that type letter i beat the kids with their own sticks see fifth grade education goes a long way
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when you're playing with a bunch of corrupt they can't even frame anybody right
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that's how stupid them college geniuses are [Music]