I subsequently went to San Quentin to interview Borders and he retained me as his attorney. In that capacity I sincerely request that the murder of Danielle Skyler be reviewed by the Conviction Integrity Unit and that the District Attorney’s Office right this wrong. Preston Borders is factually innocent and has spent more than half his life in prison under the threat of state-sanctioned death. This miscarriage of justice must be remedied.
This request is the first of many options available to Mr. Borders. I intend to explore all avenues of amelioration, but I am starting with you. I look forward to your expedited reply.
Sincerely yours,
Bosch read the letter a second time and then quickly scanned a letter of receipt from Kornbloom to Cronyn that told him his request would be given the utmost priority and urged him not to take any other action until the CIU had the opportunity to review and investigate the matter. It was clear that Kornbloom didn’t want this case spilling into the media or referred to the Innocence Project, a privately funded legal group that had a national record of overturning wrongful convictions. It would be a political blunder if the work of an outside entity instead of the district attorney’s much ballyhooed unit led to a revelation of innocence.
Bosch went back to the chrono. The letter from Cronyn clearly got the ball rolling. Soto and Tapscott pulled the files and went to property control, where the evidence box was found and opened on camera. While the forensics unit studied the contents for new or overlooked evidence, the two detectives went to work reviewing and reinvestigating the case — this time with another suspect as the leading person of interest.
Bosch knew it was not the right way to work a murder case. Rather than looking for a suspect, they started with the suspect already in hand. It narrowed the possibilities. Here they started with the name Lucas John Olmer and they stuck with it. Their efforts to confirm that he had been in Los Angeles at the time of the Skyler murder were less than conclusive. They found employment records at the billboard company where he worked as an installer that appeared to place him in L.A. but little else in terms of housing records or live witnesses who could attest to his whereabouts. It wasn’t nearly enough to take the case further, but then the lab reported finding a minute amount of semen on the victim’s clothing. The material had not been stored under today’s DNA evidence protocols, but because the piece of clothing had been in a sealed paper bag, it was in remarkably good condition and could be tested against samples from both Olmer and Borders.
Olmer’s DNA was already in the state’s offender data bank. It had been used at trial to link him to the rapes of seven different women. But genetic material had never been collected from Borders because he had been convicted and sentenced to death row a year before DNA was approved for use in California in courts and by law enforcement. Tapscott flew up to San Francisco to go to San Quentin and collect a sample from Borders. It was then analyzed by an independent lab and comparisons were made between the evidence taken from Danielle Skyler’s pajamas and the samples from Olmer and Borders.
After three weeks, the lab finally reported that the DNA on the victim’s clothing had come from Olmer and not Borders.
Just reading it in the chronological record made Bosch break into a cold sweat. He had been as sure of Borders’s guilt as that of any other killer he had taken to trial and put in prison. And now the science said he was wrong.
Then he remembered the sea horse. The sea horse put the lie to all of this. Danielle Skyler’s favorite piece of jewelry had been found in the secret place in the apartment where Borders lived. DNA could not explain that away. It might be possible that Borders and Olmer knew each other and had committed the crime together, but possession of the sea horse made Borders culpable in a big way. At his trial Borders had testified that he’d bought an exact duplicate of Skyler’s sea horse at the Santa Monica pier because he wanted one for himself. The jury didn’t buy it then, and Soto and Tapscott should not have bought it now.
Bosch switched back to the chrono and soon found out why they did. After the DNA matching came back, the investigators as a pair returned to San Quentin to interview Borders. The entire transcript of the interview was available in the documents but the chrono referenced the specific pages where discussion about the sea horse took place.
Tapscott: Tell us about the sea horse.
Borders: The sea horse was a big fucking mistake. I’m here because of that fucking sea horse.
Tapscott: What do you mean by “mistake”?
Borders: I didn’t have the greatest lawyer, okay? And he didn’t like my explanation for the sea horse. He said it wouldn’t sell to a jury. So we go into court and try to sell a bullshit story that nobody on the jury believed anyway.
Tapscott: So the story about you buying a matching sea-horse pendant on the Santa Monica pier because you liked it, that was a lie you told to the jury?
Borders: That’s right, I lied to the jury. That’s my crime. What are you going to do, send me to death row? [laughing]
Tapscott: What was the story your lawyer said he couldn’t sell to the jury?
Borders: The truth. That the cops planted it when they searched my place.
Tapscott: You’re saying the key piece of evidence against you was planted?
Borders: That’s right. The guy’s name was Bosch. The detective. He wanted to be judge and jury, so he planted the evidence. Him and his partner were completely bent. Bosch planted it and the other one went along with it.
Soto: Wait a second here. You’re saying that weeks before you were even on his radar as a suspect, Bosch took the sea horse off the body or from the murder scene and carried it around with him so at just the right moment and with the right suspect he could plant it as evidence? You expect us to believe that?
Borders: The guy was really obsessed with the case. You can check it. I found out later that his mother had been murdered when he was a little kid, you know. There was a whole psychology to it, him being this obsessed avenging angel. But it was too late by then; I was here.
Soto: You had appeals, you had lawyers, how come in thirty years you’ve never once brought up that Bosch planted the sea horse?
Borders: I didn’t think anybody cared or anybody’d believe me. The truth is, I still don’t. Mr. Cronyn convinced me to tell what I know and that’s what I’m doing.
Soto: Why did your lawyer back at the trial say that claiming the evidence was planted was the wrong move?
Borders: Remember, this was back in the eighties. Back then the cops had a free ride. They could do anything and get away with it. And what proof did I have? Bosch was like this hero cop who had solved big cases. I had no chance against that. All I know is that they supposedly found the sea horse and a bunch of jewelry hidden in my house and I was the only one who knew that I didn’t have the sea horse. That’s how I knew it was planted against me.
Bosch read the short section of the transcript again and then moved on to two amendments that were attached. One was an obituary from the California Bar Journal for Borders’s original attorney, David Siegel, who had retired from the practice of law a decade after the Borders trial and passed away soon after. The second amendment was actually a timeline constructed by Soto that showed when it was during the investigation that Bosch wrote the initial report stating that Danielle Skyler’s prized sea-horse necklace was missing. The timeline showed all the days that went by and the case developments that occurred during which he would have had to hold on to the sea horse before planting it in the hiding place in Borders’s apartment. The report was clearly an attempt by Soto to delineate the tenuousness of the claim that Bosch planted evidence in the case.