COULD DNA EXONERATE A MAN WHO WAS EXECUTED 13 YEARS AGO?

Executed murderer's daughter demands DNA testing in his case because he 'couldn't remember torturing and killing a female Marine, was forced into confessing and was convicted on shaky evidence' before he was put to death in 2006

By Keith Griffith

Daily Mail
May 1, 2019

The daughter of a man executed for murder has requested a DNA test to prove once and for all his guilt or innocence, in a case that is the first of its kind.

Sedley Alley was executed by lethal injection in Tennessee in 2006 for the 1985 rape and murder of 19-year-old Lance Corporal Suzanne Collins near Naval Air Station Millington.

On Tuesday, Alley's daughter April Alley, 43, asked a judge in Memphis to grant DNA testing on the remaining evidence in the case, in order to settle the question of her father's involvement.

Sedley Alley never denied his involvement in the grisly murder of Collins by beating and impalement, but rather maintained that he had no memory of the events due to heavy drug and alcohol abuse. He insisted that his confession, which did not accurately describe the murder, was coerced under threats from the police.

'I don't want it to be like that — that he actually did it,' April Alley told the New York Times in a report on the case. 'But it would almost make it easier. Because the thought of all of that happening for no reason doesn't sit well with me at all.'

Collins' murder unfolded on the evening of July 11, 1985, when she was jogging near the base at around 11pm.

Two Marines saw a station wagon driving erratically and then heard screams of a woman in distress in the direction Collins was jogging.

They alerted base security, and about an hour later, at midnight, then 29-year-old Sedley Alley was pulled over in a station wagon with his wife, who was in the Navy.

Base security questioned the couple and determined that what the two Marines had heard was the couple arguing. Alley and his wife were sent home and MPs watched their home for the night to ensure there was no further trouble.

The following morning, Collins' body was found in Edmund Orgill Park. She had been beaten roughly 100 times and strangled, and a sharpened tree branch had been driven through her body.

Alley was immediately arrested and questioned. After denying any knowledge of the murder for hours, he eventually changed his story and confessed, but described events that clearly did not match the evidence. He said that he had hit Collins with his car and then stabbed her with a screwdriver, neither of which matched the wounds on her body.

Alley said that he had been browbeaten and coerced by the police officers who interrogated him.

The physical evidence used to link Alley to the crime was not conclusive. Napkins from the restaurant chain Danver's were found on the floor of his car as well as near the body. Type O blood, the same as both Alley's and Collins' blood type, was found on the driver's side door of Alley's car. And a stolen air conditioner pump from a home near where Collins had been running showed that Alley had been in the area.

Alley pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity at trial, with his lawyers claiming that he had multiple personality disorder. He was convicted in 1987.

Ever since the trial, the Shelby County clerk has kept exhibits that include the victim's underwear, a pair of red briefs apparently worn by the attacker and a 31-inch tree branch.

However, as DNA technology progressed, the items were never tested. Though Alley petitioned for the tests, the court rejected his requests, saying that even if another person's DNA were discovered, it would not prove his innocence.

In 2003, a private investigator turned up a note by the medical examiner estimating Collins' time of death as after midnight - when Alley had been sent home under guard by the base MPs.

The investigator also turned up mention of a romantic partner of Collins who drove a station wagon. That man fit the five-foot-eight description of a man seen near the abduction scene, while Alley was eight inches taller.

Now, his daughter April's petition raises the possibility that Alley could be the first executed inmate to be exonerated based on DNA.