Was the 1993 killing of a woman near Buffalo committed by a prison escapee? Was the detective who solved the case involved? Is there anything straightforward about this crime?
Danny Hakim and
The two men were in the yard at the state prison in Dannemora, N.Y., when Richard Matt brought up an old murder.
It was 2015. Mr. Matt and another inmate, David Sweat, were planning what would become the most famous jailbreak in decades, escaping from a fortress with 30-foot-high walls and spawning a massive manhunt, worldwide headlines and an award-winning television series.
The conversation quickly turned to how to get money “when we got out,” Mr. Sweat recalled in a recent letter to The New York Times.
Mr. Matt had an idea for a score. He knew of a judge in the Niagara Falls area — some 350 miles from Dannemora — who kept gold bars in a safe.
When Mr. Matt was “robbing and collecting extortion money from drug dealers” years earlier, a cop had taken him to the judge’s house twice to drop off money, Mr. Sweat remembered his old friend bragging to him.
Mr. Matt and the officer, David Bentley, were close friends, practically father and son, but in Mr. Sweat’s telling of the story, they had a problem: A woman had found out about what they were doing and was threatening to expose them.
So they took action.
“The cop said she had to go,” Mr. Sweat wrote, “because she was going to rat them out.”
That woman was Deborah Meindl, a nursing student and mother of two young children; she was murdered in her home in Tonawanda, N.Y., a working-class Buffalo suburb, in 1993.
Mr. Sweat’s accusation that Mr. Bentley and Mr. Matt, who was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent three weeks after he and Mr. Sweat escaped, were the ones responsible for Ms. Meindl’s death is the latest twist in a decades-old case that is suddenly drawing new scrutiny. A team of New York City defense attorneys has accused the state of getting it wrong years ago when a pair of petty thieves — Brian Scott Lorenz and James Pugh — were arrested, convicted and given life sentences for the murder of Ms. Meindl.
Though some details were revealed during a court proceeding in November, in the nine-page handwritten letter he sent to The Times, Mr. Sweat provided a more direct telling of what he described as Mr. Matt’s confession.
On Dec. 13, lawyers will be in Buffalo court to challenge the convictions of Mr. Lorenz and Mr. Pugh. The original case has unspooled with each pull of string: inconsistent witnesses, new DNA tests that fail to show any trace of the two men at the murder scene and, finally, Mr. Sweat’s explosive claims. That said, there is no hard evidence that has been publicly disclosed that links anyone else to the crime either.
The detective who led the original case complicates matters further: Mr. Bentley, who defense lawyers have suggested may have had a romantic relationship with Ms. Meindl.
Long retired from the Tonawanda Police Department, he denied he knew Ms. Meindl or had anything to do with her killing.
“It’s totally, absolutely, unequivocally insane,” Mr. Bentley said.
Mr. Matt’s involvement and questions about his relationship with Mr. Bentley were among the conclusions of an exhaustive investigation conducted by a pair of prosecutors from the Erie County District Attorney’s office this year, according to a review of their notes as well as interviews with people briefed on their inquiry.
But John J. Flynn, the county district attorney, has rejected their findings, which have not been fully released. He also demoted one of the prosecutors and reassigned the other.
Mr. Flynn has denied that there is any credible evidence to link Mr. Matt to the murder of Ms. Meindl, and he has defended Mr. Bentley. Though there was no DNA evidence connecting Mr. Lorenz or Mr. Pugh to the murder, the genetic testing that is at the heart of the men’s appeal also did not find Mr. Matt’s DNA. Investigators have discovered the DNA of another, still unknown person. The twists in the case raise a pressing question that for decades was thought to be solved: Who killed Deborah Meindl?
“WE DON’T EVEN HAVE A WITNESS”
Mr. Bentley, a veteran officer with a reputation for closing cases, crunched through a few inches of snow still visible on the ground. He was carrying a video camera and recording as he and a technician cataloged the evidence.
“Homicide,” he said. “84 Franklin Street.”
It was Feb. 17, 1993, 3:43 p.m. — the time and date are on the video. From somewhere behind him, there was a female voice howling the background. Mr. Bentley did not react to the continuing screams as he walked up the five steps to the porch and opened the storm door. He went inside and calmly detailed what he saw.
“This is the front door, this is the blanket the daughter Jessica found covering the door, partially blocking her entrance when she came in the front door today,” he said, directing the camera toward a brown and yellow stitched blanket.
The camera swept across a gruesome spectacle. “The living room, that’s the dining room, and the victim, obviously,” he said, evenly. “The blood spatter is all here on the floor. Some things were knocked out of the china cabinet, there’s a ring on the victim’s hand, a trail of blood running this way, into the dining room.”
A five-inch steak knife with blood on the handle and blade was jammed in a kitchen drawer. Blood was also left on a dog toy, a recipe book, a gravy boat. Chairs were overturned, drawers rifled through. And on the floor lay the lifeless Ms. Meindl, repeatedly stabbed, her hands cuffed behind her back, and strangled by her husband’s necktie, still looped around her neck.
The Meindls — Deborah; her husband, Donald; and their two daughters, Jessica, 10, and Lisa, 7 — lived in a small house with two entrances, one on a narrow front porch and the other at the back, surrounded by other homes. It was, as Mr. Bentley said in a recent interview, “one of the least likely houses you would think someone from Buffalo would burglarize.”
Ms. Meindl and the girls had left for school that morning, and Mr. Meindl went to his job at Taco Bell. But that day, a neighbor spotted a young man walking down the family’s driveway. A postal worker heard someone inside when she delivered the mail; the dog, Taffy, usually a noisy menace, didn’t bark.
Sometime between 2:15 and 2:30 p.m., Ms. Meindl arrived home, according to the police. And just after 3 p.m., Jessica came home from school to find her mother’s body. Her purple backpack lay on the floor and was visible on Mr. Bentley’s recording of the scene.
The detective and the technician emerged from the house around 4 p.m. They studied footprints in the snow leading to the back of the house and discovered a small rectangular cut in a screened rear window, about six feet off the ground. Investigators later determined that hole had been cut from the inside.
Later that afternoon, a uniformed officer wearing sunglasses approached from the snowy street, an old Chevrolet Caprice police cruiser behind him. He pointed out that some of the footprints on the ground were left by Lori Rank, the first officer at the scene, who was also Mr. Bentley’s daughter.
Then, walking closer, the officer asked about what was inside. Mr. Bentley said it “had to be someone strong to do what they did,” and later, in his police report that night, Mr. Bentley wrote that the crime was probably too violent for it to be a burglary gone wrong.
Just north of the Buffalo city limits, the Tonawanda neighborhood where the Meindls lived was a collection of modest homes, a quiet enclave just off the Niagara River. Two blocks from the Meindl house was an apartment building owned by a cousin of Mr. Bentley’s son-in-law, Pat Rank, who was also a Tonawanda police officer, according to the notes compiled by the two prosecutors from Erie County. One of the building’s tenants at the time was Mr. Matt.
Mr. Bentley and his team of officers quickly focused their investigation on Mr. Meindl, then 33 and a manager at a Taco Bell at a local mall. He had a friend who worked at Sicilian Delight, a pizza shop in the food court near the Taco Bell. Unhappy in his marriage, Mr. Meindl confided in his friend, discussing the idea of hiring someone to kill his wife, according to the transcripts of Mr. Pugh and Mr. Lorenz’s 1994 trial.
“It should be made to look like a robbery,” the friend recalled, according to a police report cited by the defense.
Mr. Meindl — who did not respond to requests for an interview — insisted later, during the 1994 murder trial, that he was joking and denied any plot to kill his wife.
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The Meindls had an open marriage, and Mr. Meindl was seeing a 17-year-old girl who worked for him. He kept photos of her, scantily clad, in his wallet, according to trial testimony. In the initial police report written during the initial investigation, Mr. Bentley noted handcuffs and other items found in the home that were used for “sexual bondage.”
Mr. Meindl also had a $50,000 insurance policy on his wife.
He maintained his innocence and had an alibi: The day of the killing, he was at Taco Bell, getting fired after being accused of sexually harassing his staff.
And days after the murder, a confidential informant — Nancy Hummingbird, a friend of Mr. Pugh who had a passing acquaintance with Mr. Lorenz — led the investigation in another direction: She said that Mr. Lorenz, who had left the Buffalo area, was the killer.
The police searched for Mr. Lorenz and found him in Sioux City, Iowa, where he was jailed for stealing a car.
Mr. Lorenz, then 23, was desperate to return home to New York and get out of an Iowa jail, and so he came up with a foolhardy plan to confess to the murder, Mr. Lorenz’s defense team now says. He implicated Mr. Pugh, his sometime burglary partner, to give his story more credence, the lawyers said.
The confession got some details wrong and was deemed inadmissible at his trial amid concerns that Mr. Lorenz’s right to counsel may not have been properly waived. But Mr. Lorenz and Mr. Pugh were charged with the murder of Ms. Meindl anyway.
At the trial, the prosecution conceded the case’s shortcomings. There was almost no physical evidence or signs of forced entry.
“This is not a case, ladies and gentlemen, involving a lot of forensic evidence,” one of the prosecutors told jurors. “We don’t have any fingerprints to put them there. We don’t have his blood or something to put him there. We don’t have his wallet at the scene. We don’t even have a witness to come in here and tell you, ‘I saw him there.’”
The case hinged on a series of witnesses testified that they heard the men talking about the crime, and the jury took less than six hours to return a guilty verdict.
Both men were sent to prison.
But questions about whether they were guilty continued, especially after the testimony of several witnesses at the trial was later called into question.
“MOMMY, WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?”
Jessica walked into the living room to find her mother’s slumped, bloodied body. Her mother, she said at age 11 on a witness stand in court, had “shiny things around her wrists.” They were handcuffs.
“I just screamed, ‘Mommy, Mommy, what’s the matter with you?’” she told the jury.
Over the years, the trauma would weigh heavily on Jessica. And she eased her anguish with heroin, said Neil Bennett, her ex-husband.
“She was always a bubbly person and you never knew she was having pain inside,” he added.
In 2005, she unexpectedly showed up at Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, N.Y. to visit Mr. Pugh on two occasions, and told him she was increasingly convinced that the state had mishandled the investigation of her mother’s murder.
“She told me in her own words that she didn’t believe that I was involved,” said Mr. Pugh, who is now paroled and living in the Buffalo area with his sister.
He took notes of what Jessica told him at the time, and they contain multiple jarring allegations: that her mother was having an affair with Mr. Bentley, that he knew she would be home early the day of the murder, and — most shocking — that Jessica thought that the detective was involved in her mother’s death.
“She told me that she believes Det. Bentley is the person who killed her mother,” Mr. Pugh wrote in his notes.
That same year, a Tonawanda detective, Mike Rogers, reopened the case, and at one point showed up at a restaurant where Jessica worked and started asking her questions. He also examined a new suspect, a friend of Donald Meindl’s, after he was implicated by two of his family members; Mr. Flynn’s office discounted those claims, saying they came amid a contentious child custody battle.
Mr. Meindl, now living in Virginia, said that his daughter had asked him “about 100 times whether he was involved.” He told investigators this year that he had heard from several people that his wife and Mr. Bentley had an affair, and has maintained his innocence.
For his part, Mr. Bentley rejects the entire account, including any suggestions of a romantic relationship with Ms. Meindl.
“Are you asking me if I had anything to do with Debbie Meindl in a personal way?” Mr. Bentley said in a text to The New York Times. “If so, not a chance, no, never in my worse day.”
But Mr. Bennett confirmed that his ex-wife had suspicions.
“There was something about a guy that her mom was dating or seeing on the side, maybe even a sheriff, and that he set everything up because she wasn’t going to leave Don,” he said.
But the drugs and her mental health took a toll on their marriage. “I think a lot of her life choices stemmed from having to deal with the traumatic thing as a child,” said Mr. Bennett. “She never really showed it because she was such an outgoing person. She was a people person who talked to anybody. But on the inside you could kind of tell she probably wanted her mom.”
She died in April 2020 at 37 years old.
Mr. Pugh, now 60, says he had never met Jessica before her visits in 2005, and he was nervous because “there was so much I wanted to say to her.”
“I just wanted to be able to have forever to convince her that they got it wrong,” he said recently. “To let her know that I’m not the person who did that.”
When she stood to leave the prison, he offered her his hand. She looked at it, and hugged him instead.
“THE BIGGEST LIAR YOU’VE MET”
The convicted men held out hope that they would someday be cleared, and Mr. Lorenz wrote countless appeals for help to outside groups. Ilann Maazel, a New York City civil rights lawyer, took an interest about seven years ago, struck by the lack of evidence tying the men to the murder and by the number of potential suspects.
“I met Scott for a long time,” Mr. Maazel said. “And I believed him.”
The voluminous blood at the crime scene had been tested only with basic serological techniques available in 1994. Mr. Maazel met immediate resistance from Mr. Flynn, the Erie County district attorney, who initially refused to test to see if there was any DNA that could match Mr. Lorenz’s and Mr. Pugh’s.
In 2018, a state judge ordered Erie County to test blood-splattered items from the crime scene, including the steak knife and the victim’s clothing.
Mr. Lorenz was elated when the results came back that year showing that neither man’s DNA had been found.
“I thought I was going home immediately,” he said.
Instead, Mr. Flynn appointed two prosecutors to review the case: Michael J. Hillery, who ran the office’s appeals bureau, and David A. Heraty, an assistant district attorney in the same division. They interviewed more than 50 witnesses and poked holes in the testimonies that had led to the convictions.
At the trial in 1994, some prosecution witnesses professed only passing knowledge of the case; one was a career criminal with a history of cooperating with murder prosecutions.
Some jewelry and cash had been stolen from the house, according to the prosecution, but the only physical evidence linking Mr. Lorenz was a rare coin in his possession. During the trial, Mr. Meindl told the jury that the coin was taken from his home, bolstering the theory that his wife’s killing had resulted from a burglary gone bad. But Mr. Meindl later told Mr. Heraty and Mr. Hillery that he actually wasn’t sure whether the coin was taken from his house, according to their findings.
One man, Carlos Gonzalez, testified at the trial that he had seen Mr. Lorenz say he couldn’t believe he had killed someone. Mr. Gonzalez, who was released from jail for cooperating with the authorities, told Mr. Hillery and Mr. Heraty he wasn’t sure if what he said was true.
“Said his brain is fried,” according to the prosecutors’ notes.
A key witness was Ms. Hummingbird, who had a drinking problem, according to her son Gabriel Rodriguez, and was given alcohol by Mr. Bentley during his interviews with her. He described his mother, who died in 2019, as a fabulist who spun tales from random facts.
“My mom was the biggest liar you’ve met in your life,” Mr. Rodriguez said.
Mr. Rodriguez said he saw Mr. Lorenz the afternoon of the murder. Then 14, Mr. Rodriguez said he and Mr. Lorenz went to have a shotgun sawed off at a local auto shop and visited two women at a mall. He said there was no indication that Mr. Lorenz had committed a murder just hours before, despite his mother’s testimony in 1994 that he was “hyped up.”
“He was perfectly normal,” he said.
Defense attorneys have also keyed in on inconsistencies in Ms. Hummingbird’s testimony, including the fact that she told a jury that she had overheard Mr. Lorenz and Mr. Pugh talking about murder.
But the victim, she said repeatedly, was a man, not a woman.
“YOU COULD ALMOST SAY I LOVED THE KID”
Mr. Bentley had a reputation as a tough cop, and he was the subject of at least 15 police brutality and harassment complaints. Another consistency for much of his career was Mr. Matt, whom he had known long before the jailbreak that would make him infamous.
They met when Richard Matt was 13. He made an obscene gesture at Mr. Bentley, who lectured the teenager.
He said he had a soft spot for Mr. Matt because of their similarly hard upbringings — “I was an illegitimate child, my parents were alcoholics and abusive,” Mr. Bentley said, in a text, adding, “I could relate to the lower-class people who are often criminals due to my street smarts.”
Mr. Bentley began using Mr. Matt as an informant, helping him get jobs and places to live.
“I felt bad for him,” Mr. Bentley said in an interview in early November. “You could almost say I loved the kid.”
They grew so close that Mr. Bentley helped raise Mr. Matt’s daughter Jamie, who once wrote that the detective “knew my father probably as well as anyone on the outside.”
Mr. Bentley insisted that Mr. Matt — who would later become a convicted killer, twice over — could not have killed Ms. Meindl. He “just wasn’t a candidate for a crime like that,” Mr. Bentley said, adding that the idea of Mr. Matt’s involvement had been “planted” in an attempt to exonerate Mr. Pugh and Mr. Lorenz. “Never gave it a thought,” Mr. Bentley said, of whether he ever considered Mr. Matt as a possible suspect.
The man who could help to overturn the convictions of Mr. Lorenz and Mr. Pugh agrees. Mr. Flynn, the district attorney, resoundingly rejects any suggestion that Mr. Matt was involved, and he said he would continue to oppose efforts to vacate the convictions. As for the demotion and reassigning of the two prosecutors who reopened the case, he says that he and his senior aides disagreed with their findings “due to a lack of any credible evidence.”
“Both attorneys did not accept my decision with the professionalism expected of career prosecutors,” he said.
Neither Mr. Hillery nor Mr. Heraty would comment on the case.
Mr. Sweat, who was convicted of killing a sheriff’s deputy in New York in 2002, said in his letter to The Times that after Mr. Flynn removed the prosecutors, he sent other investigators to pressure him to recant what he had said. He insisted he was not speaking out in the hopes of any deal, saying, “Clearly I’m not doing what the D.A. wants!”
“The real question,” he added, “is whether Mr. Flynn will do what’s right and free two innocent men.”
Susan Beachy contributed research.
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