Appeals court ordered to reconsider bid for DNA testing in Christy Mirack murder

• By Dan Nephin/LNP | LancasterOnline

Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Christy Mirack.

A state appeals court must reconsider its order upholding a Lancaster County judge’s refusal to allow Raymond Rowe to have DNA testing done on items used to murder school teacher Christy Mirack in 1992.

On Aug. 1, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court sent Rowe’s case back to state Superior Court based on a June ruling in the case of an Erie County man who was also seeking DNA testing of evidence related to his conviction in the 1993 murder of his former girlfriend.

In that case, the state Supreme Court determined that the state Superior Court did not use the current version of state law that broadened access to DNA testing, recognizing advances in the technology. So the state Supreme Court vacated the state Superior Court’s order in Rowe’s case and directed it to apply the same updated law upon reconsideration.

Rowe, 56, pleaded guilty in January 2019 to raping and murdering Mirack in her East Lampeter Township townhouse in December 1992 in exchange for prosecutors dropping plans to seek the death penalty were he to be convicted of first-degree murder had he stood trial.

Less than a year later, he began appealing his conviction.

Rowe testified at an August 2021 hearing that he and Mirack had a secret relationship. The day she was killed, he said, they had consensual sex, and she was alive when he left the town house, meaning someone else killed her.

Rowe wants DNA testing done on Mirack’s sweater, which was used to strangle her, and on a wooden cutting board used to beat her. Rowe maintains the real killer’s DNA will be on them.

The items initially were not tested by Rowe’s attorneys because they didn’t want to test items that could point to his guilt. Also, according to his trial attorneys, Rowe confessed at their first meeting and said he wanted to plead guilty.

Lancaster County Judge Dennis Reinaker refused to allow the testing, ruling in April 2022 that Rowe’s new version was unbelievable.

“This court is unable to fathom that someone else entered the home between the hours of 7 a.m. and between the timeframe of 7:10 a.m.-7:20 a.m, found the victim without her clothes on, covered in semen, and murdered her without leaving any additional DNA on her body,” Reinaker wrote in his ruling.

In upholding Reinaker’s ruling, the state Superior Court wrote in April 2023 that Rowe failed to meet the legal threshold that would justify the test. It also said that Reinaker had made no mistakes in his ruling.

Rowe, a once-popular entertainer known as “DJ Freez”, was never a suspect in Mirack’s killing until 2018, when genetic genealogy led detectives to him after his half-sister uploaded her DNA to a public genealogy database.

The case was among the earliest uses of genetic genealogy, which involves comparing DNA collected at a crime scene to DNA indexed by commercial and government testing labs. Partial matches can lead investigators to other relatives and, in some cases, to the actual perpetrators of crimes.

Rowe’s current attorney, Todd Mosser of Philadelphia, was out of the office Monday and could not be reached for comment.

Erie case

The case that led to Rowe getting a new review involves an Erie County man serving a life sentence for the June 1993 murder of his former girlfriend.

Willie James Hardy has always maintained his innocence in the death of Deborah Will, according to the account the state Supreme Court gave of his case in its June 17 opinion.

Hardy and Will both worked at the same factory in Erie and had been in a romantic relationship. That relationship ended in January or February 1993.

Prosecutors theorized that Hardy killed Will at the factory on June 22, 1993, by strangling her with twine that was used at the factory and then putting her body in the back of her truck and moving the truck a block away.

Prosecutors pointed to a time gap in Hardy’s accounting of how he closed down the factory for the night based on when he and Will clocked out and when he set the alarm.

But Hardy maintained the prosecutors focused on him and excluded other potential subjects.

Even though some of the evidence in Hardy’s case was tested using DNA, a 2018 change to a law concerning DNA testing allowed someone convicted of a crime to seek additional testing using newer technology than originally used when it “could provide substantially more accurate and substantially probative results.”

“Hardy’s theory is that DNA testing of the evidence in his case could reveal the identity of a different perpetrator. It was plainly erroneous for the lower courts to disregard this possibility,” the state Supreme Court wrote.