Update 8:15 p.m.: After four days of testimony and less than three hours of deliberation, a Travis County jury found Lester Ray Guy guilty of capital murder in the cold case death of Hazel Ivy.
Update 4:10 p.m.: The jury has just begun its deliberations.
Earlier: The defense in the trial of Lester Ray Guy, accused of the 1978 slaying of a South Austin woman, rested midday today after calling a single witness, a forensic DNA expert who criticized the methodology of prosecution witnesses representing labs that the state maintains led them to Hazel Ivy’s killer.
Laurence Mueller, a professor at the University of California-Davis, did not say Guy could be excluded as a match for the killer’s DNA. Much of his testimony today involved a combination of technical arcana and musing about the possibility for error when human beings do science.
“All science is subject to interpreter bias,” Mueller said.
Guy, who is already serving a 99-year sentence for burglary with intent to commit rape, is accused of raping and killing the 66-year-old woman in her South Austin apartment in September 1978. The Austin Police Department’s cold case unit revived the investigation in 2001, but the bulk of physical evidence from the case had been either destroyed or misplaced.
Prosecutors are heavily basing their case on convincing the jury that relatively new technology for reading older or degraded genetic material is accurate and reliable enough to identify Guy as the woman’s killer.
Closing arguments are expected after the lunch break.