Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 23, 1994 TAG: 9408230107
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
Paul B. Ferrara said DNA evidence found on the victim does not support Honaker's contention that he did not commit the crime.
Instead, Ferrara said, the sperm could have come from a lover the victim only recently disclosed. ``It doesn't eliminate him, and it doesn't prove he did it either,'' Ferrara, director of the Virginia Division of Forensic Science, said of the latest test.
Honaker, 44, had counted on the DNA testing to win his freedom after 91/2 years. He is serving three life sentences plus 34 years for the 1984 rape. The chief prosecutor in Nelson County, where Honaker was tried, agreed that genetic testing cast doubt on his guilt and joined in asking Gov. George Allen to release him.
Ferrara's new report was sent to the governor Monday.
``He is in the process of evaluating those findings and will make a determination in the near future,'' Allen's press secretary, Ken Stroupe, said Monday night.
Honaker's supporters called the latest report unfair and unbelievable. ``I find it to be preposterous that at this late date, they come up with something like that,'' said Jim Michalski, founder and director of Centurion Ministries, a New Jersey-based group championing Honaker's cause.
``We had suspected they might come up with something like this, but [I'm] stunned and shocked that they did. I don't believe it for a second.'' The victim identified Honaker as her abductor and attacker.
At the time of his trial, DNA testing was not used in criminal cases. Last winter a California laboratory analyzed the sperm sample found on the victim and determined it did not match the victim's boyfriend, the only man with whom she said she had consensual sex.
Since Honaker had a vasectomy seven years before the rape and does not ejaculate sperm, the conclusion drawn was that the sample came from a third man: the real rapist.
The Washington Post reported in today's editions that state police investigators went back to the woman after Honaker filed his clemency petition in June. During questioning, unidentified sources told the newspaper, the woman said for the first time that she had another lover at the time, someone unknown to her boyfriend. If true, that man could be the source of the sperm.
The lover, whom she later married and then divorced, confirmed her story and provided saliva for a genetic test, the sources said.
The state lab's analysis of her ex-husband's genetic characteristics matched the evidence from the 1984 rape, Ferrara said, but the test cannot conclusively prove that it came from him.
by CNB