Utah Judge Grants Bail to Death Row Inmate After DNA Fails to Match

A Utah judge has ordered the release on bail of a 71-year-old man who spent decades on death row for a 1985 killing, after prosecutors said newly analyzed DNA evidence did not match him.

Douglas Stewart Carter was convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 for the murder of Eva Olesen, an aunt of the Provo police chief at the time. He has consistently maintained his innocence, saying a signed confession was coerced.

The Utah Supreme Court ordered a new trial last year, citing misconduct by investigators. Judge Derek Pullan had scheduled a two-month retrial for 2027, but Utah County prosecutors last week withdrew their notice that they intended to seek the death penalty.

Prosecutors said a DNA analysis received on Sept. 22 excluded Carter as a possible match to blood found on a doorknob and to genetic material recovered from the handle of a knife used to stab Olesen, who was also shot. At a bond hearing on Monday, Utah County prosecutor Erwin Petilos told the judge that reassessing Carter's bail was "necessary and fair" as the state continues to examine the remaining evidence.

No physical evidence tied Carter to the crime scene. The jury convicted him based on the confession and on two witnesses who said he bragged about killing Olesen. In 2011, those two witnesses were tracked down in Mexico; they said they had been told to lie in court and had been given cash and gifts by police who instructed them not to disclose the payments. They also said police and prosecutors threatened them and their son with deportation if they did not implicate Carter.

More than a decade of legal wrangling followed before the state Supreme Court ordered a new trial, citing "multiple instances of intentional misconduct" by police and a prosecutor. The DNA analysis was conducted in response to that order. Prosecutors declined on Monday to say whether they are using the DNA evidence to search for other suspects with matching DNA.

Carter's defense attorneys have said witnesses saw a white man fleeing the crime scene and that an investigator suppressed evidence pointing to other suspects, including the victim's husband, Orla Olesen. They allege prosecutors were close to filing charges against the husband, but a Provo police lieutenant asked them not to so he could continue investigating. Carter was identified as a suspect soon after.

Orla Olesen, a painting contractor who died in 2009, told police he found his wife dead in their home, partially undressed and with her hands tied behind her back.

Defense attorney Neal Hamilton said Carter will be placed in an extended-stay accommodation near the family of his son, who was adopted by another family as an infant and did not learn about the conviction until years later. Carter will also need therapy to cope with his long incarceration, Hamilton said.

"It's not just as simple as, 'Let's let him go,'" Hamilton said. "He's being released with 41 years of state-induced trauma and the effect it will have on him is very real."

Theresa Olesen, a daughter-in-law of Eva Olesen, told the bond hearing that her family had "serious concerns" about Carter's release and said he should remain in the Utah County jail, where he was being held pending a new trial.

"By golly we were hoping for a concrete match," she said of the DNA analysis. "It doesn't mean he wasn't there."

"There are other factors and hopefully the investigation will continue," she added. "We just want justice for Eva. And if he had any part of it we want that to be known."

Carter, a Chicago native, had been living with his mother in Utah at the time of Olesen's killing on Feb. 27, 1985. Court documents indicate the investigation eventually focused on him as a suspect in a killing during a robbery. By that April, he had fled Utah believing he was a suspect in an unrelated assault case, and he was apprehended that June in Nashville, Tennessee, where he signed a confession while under interrogation by a Provo detective.

He was convicted and sentenced to death after a trial in which the defense called no witnesses, and was again sentenced to death after a 1992 retrial. Utah courts rejected numerous subsequent appeals.