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A man died in his home after a long history of heart disease.

It was assumed that this was the cause of his death.

A few weeks after the funeral, rumors surfaced that the death was no accident.

When the body was exhumed, scientists needed to know whether the dead could tell tales.

On a January night in 1990, a woman called for an ambulance saying her boyfriend was unconscious and barely breathing.

Emergency personnel were at the home in Westport, Massachusetts within minutes.

We arrived on the scene, went into the house, and we found a male

sitting in a chair.

He was just kind of slumped forward, unresponsive.

The man's girlfriend said he had a long history of heart trouble.

As soon as I took his robe apart, I saw that he had a scar from a past cardiac surgery, which she indicated that he had had a bypass surgery at some point in time.

And we began CPR.

But the CPR brought no response.

61-year-old Richard Alfredo was pronounced dead an hour later at a nearby hospital.

Because of his heart disease, the local medical examiner decided not to perform an autopsy.

Mr.

Alfredo had a long history of severe heart disease, which necessitated a coronary bypass procedure.

So at the time of his death, he had every reason to die.

from his heart disease.

Richard Alfredo was buried four days after his death.

All of his assets, worth about $25,000, went to his estranged wife and children.

Alfredo's girlfriend, 39-year-old Christina Martin, continued to live in the house the couple shared along with her two children from a previous marriage.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until Westport police officer Mike Roussel started hearing rumors.

We heard rumors that Mr.

Alfredo's death was due to poisoning, and this was just facts that we couldn't prove at that time, was just information.

And as a police department, we had the obligation to start looking into this.

The rumors emanated from some students at a nearby high school.

Richard Alfredo's girlfriend, Christina Martin, had a 14-year-old daughter, Tisha, who attended Westport High School.

Tisha allegedly told school friends that Alfredo had made sexual advances towards her on numerous occasions.

And she admitted that she and her mother were angry about it.

The teenagers were telling us Miss Martin was trying to locate anything that would take the life of Mr.

Alfredo, whether it was some type of a medication or pills, or

she even tried to get some of the teenagers to, if he would, they would take him out with a weapon.

She was going to provide the gun for them, which was Mr.

Alfredo's guns.

Investigators now wondered whether they made a mistake burying the body without an autopsy.

Four weeks after Richard Alfredo's death, rumors circulated that his death was no accident.

The daughter of Alfredo's girlfriend, Tisha, allegedly told friends that Alfredo had made sexual advances towards her.

And she also said that her mother put the drug LSD in Alfredo's gelatin dessert in an effort to kill him.

They made the jello.

They made it two separate dishes.

They ate jello, but his dish was kept to the side.

At that time, they fed him the jello, and then they went out of the house, and they came back, and he He was basically dead at that time.

They called rescue, and he was transported to St.

Luke's hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

LSD is a powerful hallucinogen known on the street as acid.

A dose or hit usually comes in tablets or in liquids soaked into paper.

A single drop can cause hallucinations for six to ten hours.

And LSD can also cause a rapid increase in heart rate.

A local drug dealer admitted selling 30 doses of LSD to a small group, which included Alfredo's girlfriend, Christina, and her daughter, Tisha.

They identified Miss Martin as sitting in the vehicle, and they brought the drugs to her, and they left the area at that time.

During police questioning, Christina denied buying LSD or giving Richard Alfredo any harmful substances.

To see if LSD had caused Alfredo's death, the medical examiner exhumed his body six weeks after the funeral.

In a living person, LSD leaves the body within 36 hours of use.

But in a dead person, the drug can stay indefinitely.

although the embalming process can complicate matters.

The process of embalming is such that all the blood in the body is removed and replaced with embalming fluid, a preservative, so that

any attempt at trying to find poisons is hampered because there is no blood left in the body.

But they found some other tissue samples to test.

There was some urine.

There was some intestinal contents.

There were some some stomach contents.

The samples were sent to two different labs for testing, the state crime lab and another private laboratory.

Dr.

Louis Amaruso performed the testing at the private lab and used what is called a radioimmunoassay test, or RIA.

It's similar to the test used at sporting events to screen athletes for the presence of performance-enhancing drugs.

Dr.

Amaruso took a sample of LSD, then mixed it with a radioactive compound, then added samples from Alfredo's body.

If LSD were present in Alfredo's body, he would have formed antibodies to fight it.

Those antibodies will bind to the radioactive LSD sample, producing a positive result.

Both the private lab and the police lab found two drugs present in Alfredo's system.

One was diphenhydramine,

a common over-the-counter cold medication.

The other was LSD.

The more important compound, as far as we were concerned, was LSD because there are no prescriptions for LSD, and that would indicate something that would not be found except under illicit conditions.

LSD causes the heart to beat more vigorously.

The stresses placed on the very diseased heart

caused a fatal heart attack,

thereby the cause of death, heart disease, and LSD poisoning.

Richard Alfredo's death was no longer considered an accident.

It was now murder.

A heart attack brought on by acute LSD intoxication.

When police went to arrest Christina Martin and her daughter Tisha, they found that they had both fled the country.

Miss Martin leaving town led us to believe that she definitely had some involvement in his death.

That's what made us look even more closely to her, even though we were on that track anyway.

Telephone records indicated they fled to Montreal, where they were apprehended.

Was it true?

Did you do it?

Christina Martin was charged with first-degree murder.

No charges were filed against her daughter, Tisha.

At the trial, prosecutors presented the toxicological evidence of LSD in Richard Alfredo's system, and a drug dealer testified that Christina was present when he sold LSD to Tisha's high school friends.

That was all the prosecution needed.

Christina Martin was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

And that's where the case stood for seven long years.

That is, until it came up for a routine appeal, where Christina's lawyer found something in the case file

he wasn't supposed to see.

Christina Martin had served seven years in prison for the murder of her boyfriend, Richard Alfredo, before her case came up for a routine appeal.

Christina's new lawyer was a public defender, Kevin Mahoney.

His first task was to go to the courthouse to pick up the case file.

While I was standing at the counter waiting for the evidence to be brought to me by the clerk, I struck up a conversation with the gentleman next to me, who wound up being an assistant DA.

He turns to me and he says, Counsel, you're representing Miss Martin?

I said, yes.

The assistant DA told Mahoney to look very closely at Richard Alfredo's official cause of death.

Well, I was stunned that a prosecutor would make such an admission to me.

I definitely took it as a red flag, and this is something I should follow through with.

This was the first murder case Mahoney ever handled.

And he read every page of transcript of Christina's first trial, paying particular attention to anything related to how Richard Alfredo had died.

At first blush, it seemed that the evidence was overwhelming because these toxicologists, these chemists are getting in there and they're testifying that there's massive amounts of LSD, Jesus, it didn't sound good.

But then

he came across this document, Richard Alfredo's death certificate, stating the cause of death as acute LSD intoxication.

Mahoney made a telephone call to Dr.

David Benjamin, a highly respected clinical pharmacologist.

There had never been a case reported where a person had died from the direct effects of LSD.

So right away, that allegation was inconsistent with a whole body of scientific information dating back to the mid-60s.

And Dr.

Benjamin noticed another potential discrepancy.

The RI8 test was designed to work only on fresh urine samples, which the medical examiner didn't have after the body was autopsied.

The labs tested tissue samples and degraded blood, all of which had been embalmed.

I called the manufacturer and I asked, Do you have any experience with using this test in samples other than fresh urine, in particular forensic samples obtained from exhumed bodies or from dead people?

And they said, absolutely not.

And even if the urine tests positive for LSD, the RIA test is only for screening.

Any positive results must then be retested to confirm the results.

On the RIA test kit outer box, the manufacturer makes this clear.

It states that all RIA results are preliminary and that a specific alternative must be used to get a confirmed analytical result.

Even the scientist who conducted the original RIA test for the prosecution agreed with that assessment.

In order to say with 100% certainty that it was LSD that was present in the body, one would have to go to a confirmatory test.

The gold standard, the test that is considered to be the most dependable, is the one that's called gas chromatography mass spectrometry.

For whatever reason, Christina Martin's first lawyer never questioned the test results.

The defense attorney at the trial was so incompetent incompetent and his performance was so bad that the judge called him up to sidebar and asked him,

you're not doing very much examination of these witnesses.

Is that intentional?

Is that deliberate?

And the attorney tried to reassure the judge and tell him, oh, don't worry, it law come out in my defense case, but it never did.

If the scientific tests were only preliminary, why wasn't a confirmatory test ever performed?

Kevin Mahoney found the answer to that question in the evidence file.

Information prosecutors never presented at the first trial.

Information prosecutors thought would remain a secret.

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When Kevin Mahoney examined the case file from Christina Martin's first trial, he found an important piece of evidence.

It was evidence that prosecutors never presented at the first trial.

Prosecutors had commissioned a confirmatory test on Alfredo's tissue samples using a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer.

It's a test that can identify every substance in the sample.

That test detected no LSD in any of the samples.

Even though they tested and retested and retested, they were desperate to confirm

what they had learned from the interassay test.

But they weren't able to do that.

Mahoney discovered that this exculpatory forensic evidence was not given to Christina Martin's defense attorney before the trial.

This violated a legal provision known as the Brady Doctrine.

The Brady Doctrine says that the prosecution has a duty to turn over all exculpatory evidence to the defense without even being asked for it.

In this case, the prosecutor played hide the ball with the exculpatory evidence.

The gas chromatography, mass spectrometry evidence should have been disclosed to the defense attorney.

It never was.

This may explain why an assistant DA told Mahoney to look carefully at the official cause of Richard Alfredo's death.

And this new forensic evidence was put before an appeals court judge who was unusually qualified for this particular case.

99 out of 100 judges.

Eyes would have just glazed over when they started hearing G.C.

Massback and all this other stuff.

The judge in this case, Judge Gordon Dorfer, was a chemistry major in college.

How lucky were we?

In his decision, Judge Dorfer cited defects in the scientific evidence and the prosecution's failure to disclose critical exculpatory evidence as grounds for a new trial.

But prosecutors decided not to retry the case.

Christina Martin agreed to plead guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a sentence of time served.

In other words, Christina Martin was a free woman.

Moments after leaving the courtroom, Christina Martin told the press that despite the plea bargain, she had nothing to do with her boyfriend's death.

I pleaded guilty because of the plea bargain and the chance that I might go back to jail.

I didn't want that.

But if Christina Martin was innocent, why did she flee to Canada shortly after Alfredo's death?

She may have had a guilty conscience about some of the things that she was thinking about doing and maybe some of the things that she had done.

Plus, there was also the possibility with her daughter involved that her daughter might have done some things to this gentleman without her knowledge.

But while science rules out LSD,

it reveals another possibility.

When Alfredo's body was exhumed, the medical examiner found groundwater in the casket.

The water mixed with the embalming fluid may have contaminated the tissue samples.

Basically, LSD has a chemical structure, and that chemical structure is not unique to LSD.

There are many substances in the body and in nature in general that possess similar chemical structures.

Two of them that we would find in the body would be the amino acid tryptophane and the neurotransmitter serotonin.

There are also ergot derivatives that are in the grass and in the ground and in

fungi and fungomaterial that could have been washed into the coffin when all all of the water seeped into the coffin.

Dr.

Benjamin also believes it may have been the cold medicine, diphenhydramine, that Alfredo was taking for his cold that caused his death, since it can increase one's heart rate.

Officially, prosecutors still maintain that Christina Martin killed Richard Alfredo.

Defense experts say LSD has never killed anyone.

Today, Richard Alfredo's tombstone is not engraved with the date of his death.

Perhaps a metaphor for the uncertainty that still exists in this case.

Bad science and bad ethics resulted in Miss Martin being sent to a prison cell.

It was good ethics and good science that got her out of the prison cell.

So bad science put her in and good science got her out.