Once Bitten

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This man, Ray Crohn, was known throughout Arizona as the snaggle-tooth killer.

An unusual bite mark on a murdered woman resulted in his conviction and death sentence.

A forensic expert told the jury that he was 100% certain that it was Crohn who bit the victim.

He knew he was wrong, but he had already committed, and his comment to me was, I'm in too deep.

The CPS Lounge is one of many neighborhood bars in downtown Phoenix, Arizona.

Hank Arredondo owned the CPS Lounge.

Kim and Kona managed it for him.

In the bar business, you have to have a nice personality.

You have to be honest.

And all those qualities Kim had.

On December 29th, 1991, Kim closed the bar at the usual time, shortly after 1 a.m.

As was his custom, Hank called to make sure there hadn't been any problems.

Kim answered, he says, Hank, I know you're tired.

Go to sleep, rest, I'll take care of it.

When Hank arrived the next day to open up, he noticed the door was ajar.

I know my bartender didn't leave the door open.

I know I didn't, so something's wrong.

He first checked the safe, but none of the bar's money was missing.

He went to the kitchen, no one was there.

Then he checked the men's room.

I can close my eyes and still see that scene.

I saw her laying in the bathroom,

her eyes fixed,

dead.

The evidence suggests the killer grabbed a knife from the kitchen, forced Kim into the men's room, and stabbed her to death.

He placed the knife in a trash can under the liner.

On his way out, He left a shoe print on the freshly cleaned kitchen floor.

Forensic experts identified the print as a Converse brand sneaker, size nine and a half.

Hairs were found on Kim and Kona's body.

They were black and not hers.

It appeared that the killer had bitten through Kim's tank top, leaving a bite impression on her skin.

Two drinks were sitting on the bar, apparently poured after closing time.

Forensic scientists found Kim's fingerprints on one glass.

The other had prints not clear enough for identification.

The working theory then became she must have known who the person was and allowed them into the bar against company policy, but nonetheless, and thereafter was killed by that person.

Robbery didn't appear to be the motive.

There was no money missing from Kim's purse, but inside her purse, Police found an address book with the name and telephone number of one of the bar's regular customers, a postman named Ray Crohn.

He was not well liked.

There was something different about him that people that didn't sit well with people.

Some of the bar's employees told police that Kim had expressed a romantic interest in Crohn.

If the bite mark, the shoe impression, and the hairs could be tied to him, police were sure they had their killer.

During Kim and Kona's autopsy, forensic photographers took numerous photographs of the bite wound on her upper chest.

The photograph showed the killer had a distinctive bite pattern.

His left front tooth pointed outward beyond the line of his other front teeth.

Kim's address book contained the name and telephone number of a man named Ray Crohn, someone she had often spoken with at the bar.

Kim and Kona had told several friends that she was interested in Ray, that she liked him, you know, that she thought maybe something could happen.

And those friends in turn relayed that to detectives.

Ray Crohn was 35 years old, an Air Force veteran with no prior criminal record.

Several bar employees told police that Kim had a date with Crohn planned for the night of her murder.

When police talked to Kim's friends, the last person that they expected Kim and Kona to meet that night was Ray Crohn.

He was supposed to meet her to help close up the bar.

When questioned, Ray Crohn said the two were just acquaintances.

He denied there was any romantic relationship.

She was always a nice, congenial person, very friendly and outgoing.

And so, you know,

I

liked her personality.

I liked, you know, her bubbliness and things like that.

There wasn't a relationship.

And Crohn denied that he had plans to meet Kim at the bar, as her friends claimed.

He also had an alibi.

He shared a house with a co-worker who said Crohn was home the night of the murder.

But as police questioned Crohn, they noticed that his left front tooth protruded slightly in a way that looked similar to the bite wound found on Kim's chest.

Crohn willingly agreed to provide an impression of his teeth by biting into a piece of styrofoam, which is commonly used since it's soft but still stable.

Forensic odontologists examined a series of bite impressions from men who knew Kim Ancona.

They found only one in which the left front tooth was clearly extended, just like the bite mark on the body.

It was Ray Crohn's.

I hear, you know, brakes squealing, doors slamming.

I look over and here's a police van unloading with officers all armed, guns pointing at me, telling me to freeze.

I was thrown on the ground, handcuffed and taken off and I was charged with murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault.

That was the day of my arrest, New Year's Eve of 1991.

Crohn maintained he was innocent, but he had no explanation for why his bite impression looked like the wound on Kim and Kona.

You just say, why?

Why won't somebody listen?

Why won't somebody take a minute and look at this intelligently, responsibly?

You're going to see that there is a definite problem here.

But the bite wound wasn't the only evidence against Crohn.

The perpetrator left his saliva on Kim's clothing.

DNA tests of that saliva sample were inconclusive, but tests revealed the perpetrator had type O blood, the same blood type as Ray Crohn.

He was arrested and charged with murder.

At his trial, prosecutors believed the bite impression evidence was the most convincing.

They hired a nationally known bite mark expert from Las Vegas, Nevada to testify that it was a 100% perfect match, better than a fingerprint.

That expert was Dr.

Raymond Rawson, a forensic odontologist and also a senator in the Nevada state legislature.

At the trial, Dr.

Rawson used this video in which photographs of the bite wound from Kim and Kona's body were superimposed on Ray Crohn's bite impressions.

Based on that evidence, Ray Crohn was convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced to death.

I didn't care if I was going to be in prison for something I didn't do, you might as well kill me.

I mean, what was life?

My whole life, everything I worked for, everything I stood for, 35-year-old man, was gone.

The press called Crohn the snaggle-tooth killer.

That judge believed the bite marks were a form of torture.

And because of that, he sentenced him to death.

But if Crohn was innocent, as he claimed, how could a nationally known forensic odontologist be wrong?

Ray Crohn had spent three years on death row for the murder of 35-year-old bar manager Kim Ancona.

During that time, he formed his own opinions about the bite impression evidence used to convict him.

I mean, you basically could take a sharp object, stick it in the skin a couple places, and have somebody say, oh, yeah, that's a bite mark, and it matches him.

And you could get, if you showed it to enough people, you'd have, you know, somebody saying that, yeah, it's a match.

That's junk.

All death penalty cases in Arizona are automatically appealed to the state Supreme Court.

And fortunately for Crohn, this bite mark videotape made by the prosecution provided grounds for an appeal.

The court ruled that the defense team wasn't given enough time to review the tape before the trial.

For Crohn's retrial, his family asked Chris Plord to represent him.

Plord specializes in difficult forensic cases.

I heard the story, you know, that Ray Crohn's on death row as a result of a bite mark.

I didn't know whether other evidence supported his conviction or not.

I was originally kind of skeptical because I hear these stories all the time.

Forensic experts hired by Ploord discovered that the hairs found on Kim's body were mongoloid hairs, meaning they were from someone of Asian or Native American descent.

They also discovered that Ray Crohn wore size 10 and a half shoes.

The shoe impression found on the kitchen floor of the bar was a size 9 and a half.

The defense brought in Dr.

Skip Sperber, a past president of the American Academy of Forensic Odontologists, to look at the bite wound evidence that more than anything else convicted Crohn in his first trial.

What Dr.

Sperber told them came as a shock.

He said he'd seen this evidence before.

It had been sent to him before the first trial.

A good friend of mine, John Piakis in Phoenix, Arizona, called me, and he asked me to look at this particular case, the

People v.

Crohn.

When I first viewed that case, thought there were too many inconsistencies for that to be a positive comparison between the teeth of Ray Crohn, the suspect, and the victim's wounds.

Dr.

Sperber told his colleague working for the Arizona prosecutors that this evidence was exceptionally weak.

We say on a range of one to ten, With 10 being very good, I would have rated this around three or four on the low side.

Dr.

Sperbert took the cast of Ray Crohn's teeth and using a low-tech but time-tested method made a styrofoam impression and then traced the teeth patterns onto a transparency.

He then placed the transparency over the top of the photo of the bite mark on Kim and Kona's body.

Although the left front tooth in both marks was jutting forward, Ray Crohn does not have any separation between his front teeth.

The bite mark on the victim's body shows an obvious separation between those teeth.

For Dr.

Sperber, the results were clear.

If it's a good bite, it will really jump out at you and you will see immediately similarities.

In the Crohn case, there were no similarities.

So this was the key evidence.

And to get the initial report back that a bite mark expert said it's not me, I was like, oh wow,

something good could happen.

In the second trial, Dr.

Raymond Rawson, the same bite mark expert from the first trial, repeated his testimony.

He said there was no doubt the bite mark was from Ray Crohn.

A team of defense experts disagreed.

I could positively exclude Ray Crohn as being the biter.

I wasn't the only one.

There were three other forensic dentists that are all board-certified, highly qualified guys, and they excluded him.

But the jury disagreed.

They sided with the prosecution's expert and found Ray Crohn guilty again.

What does it take?

What is this beyond reasonable doubt?

What is this innocent until proven guilty?

It don't exist

in a just system.

The one that I've seen, it did not exist for me.

We knew that there was another person in that bathroom at the time of death.

There were unknown fingerprints that came back to somebody.

There was a person who had shoes that were inconsistent with the defendant.

The hairs were inconsistent with the defendant.

You know, the FBI

forensic people testified that these hairs were not Mr.

Crohn's.

They were not the victims.

To me, logic and common sense told me it wasn't Mr.

Crohn that committed this crime.

And the jury found the opposite result.

When I heard the verdict in the second trial, I really couldn't believe it.

It was total disbelief.

It was an absolute dog and pony show, the likes of which I've never seen before.

Ray Crohn tried to reconcile himself to a life behind bars.

But then he got help from an unlikely source, the very system he had grown to despise.

Ray Crohn

languished in prison for a crime that some of the country's top forensic experts said he didn't commit.

Just before Crohn's second trial, Dr.

Richard Suveron, one of his defense experts, sat next to the prosecution's forensic expert, Dr.

Rawson, at a scientific conference.

His comment to me was, I'm in too deep.

He knew he was wrong, but he had already committed.

And if that isn't a scary thing,

I don't know what is.

And I hated to see him get sucked in on something like this and told him, you know, get out of this deal.

Just say, I don't want to do it anymore.

Or I've changed my opinion.

Or I've listened to everybody else and, you know, I've rethought my position.

Anybody can make a mistake.

I mean, we're not, none of us are above making mistakes.

But he said, I'm in too deep.

Through a spokesperson, Dr.

Rawson denies that the conversation described by Dr.

Suveron ever took place.

It wasn't until 2001 that a new law offered Crohn's some hope.

Arizona, one of the first states in the United States, passed a new bill for post-conviction DNA testing, which allows convicted offenders access to evidence and post-conviction DNA testing if they contend that they were innocent.

So Crohn's defense team asked the state of Arizona to test every piece of Kim Ancona's clothing for DNA.

The saliva on Kim's blouse blouse had already been tested and the results were inconclusive.

But her genes had small blood stains.

The prosecution believed the blood was Kim Ancona's.

The genes were sent to the state crime lab for a new DNA test that analyzes 13 different genetic markers.

The test yielded unanticipated results.

The blood on the genes wasn't Kim Ancona's, and it wasn't Ray Crohn's.

But whose was it?

To find out, forensic scientists entered this new DNA evidence into a national DNA database with genetic profiles of more than a million convicts from across the country.

And the database came up with a match to this man.

A 35-year-old Native American, Kenneth Phillips, who is currently in prison for child molestation.

At the time of Kim Ancona's murder, Kenneth Phillips lived just 600 yards away from the CBS lounge.

He lived right behind the bar, and his nationality was an American Indian, which was consistent with some of the other DNA results we had and the hairs that was found at the scene of the crime.

When interviewed by police, Phillips made a startling admission.

He said on the morning after Kim's murder, he woke from an alcoholic blackout to find his hands covered with blood.

Then he saw news of the murder on TV.

His fingerprints were among the unknown fingerprints found in the bathroom where the murder took place.

His shoe size matched the print from the kitchen floor.

And his bite impression had the same left front tooth protruding from the rest of his teeth.

For Ray Crohn,

the ordeal was over.

After serving 10 years and four months for a crime he didn't commit, he walked out of prison a free man.

I'd spent over 10 years in prison.

I'll never forget that day I got out.

In fact, I commemorated it.

So I won't ever forget it.

Forensic odontologists say that the problem with the Crohn case was that Dr.

Rawson told jurors bite marks could match like fingerprints.

But that is rarely possible.

The best that a forensic dentist can give is reasonable certainty, and that means that that's the highest level we give.

There is always a remote possibility that there's someone else that has teeth similar that could have left the pattern.

Ray Crohn is trying to resume his life.

Experts say the lesson of his case is that bite marks are rarely definitive and should only be used to exclude, not include, suspects.

Above all, they say, bite mark analysis is more opinion than fact, and that this should always be made clear to jurors.

Interpretation of a bite mark is what convicted me.

Not the scientific, not the fingerprints that didn't match me.

They even had footprints that they couldn't match the shoes, the hair,

not the DNA, none of that stuff.

They used an interpretation of a bite mark to convict me.

That has no place in the courtroom any more than perjury has a place in the courtroom.

We shouldn't allow witnesses that lie, no matter what they say, whether it's regarding a scientific issue or any other issue.

And in this case, it was clear that some of the scientific experts were actually misrepresenting their data and the scientific validity of what they were talking about.