case that's a little bit different from the next case. so that's what make this is work so interesting and challenging. >> it was the dna, it was the cigarette butts. so once again, at any crime scene, it's very crucial, very crucial to do a good job and collect all the evidence and most crimes, most crimes are solved by the physical evidence. first, he threatened murder. then there was a murder. >> whoever had done it, had been almost a maniac. front page. >> he was convicted and put away for life. but he always claimed his innocence and was determined to prove it. >> he literally solved his own murder case from prison. >> he convinced them that wait a minute. we have an innocent man here. on the night of may 23rd, 1991, a fire broke out in a rural farmhouse in upstate new york. by the time firemen got there, it was entirely engulfed in flames. >> they realized that the

occupants was missing. daylight was coming. and then they, firemen and others were basically looking for her. >> emergency workers found sabena's body about 100 yards from the house on an overgrown footpath. >> she was naked. she had been brutally murdered, stabbed. beaten, burned, bitten. >> sabena was 49 years owed. >> became pretty obvious right away that whoever had done it is somebody that the, well, quite honestly, had to have been almost a maniac. >> the evidence showed that she was in the house when the fire started. >> at some point, sabena was alive in or about the structure when it was burning, because she did have some soot in her lungs. >> between the farmhouse and

sabena's body, police found a ready to shirt stained with sabena's blood. fire investigators found traces of accelerant inside the house and quickly ruled the blaze an arson. investigators thought the crime was one of passion. >> rage. pure rage. perhaps motivated by a desire to get revenge. >> sabena lived in the farmhouse alone. her boyfriend, ron bench lived there with her until they brick up a few months before the fire. >> by all accounts, it was an applicable break up, and they remained friends. they continued to associate with one another. but they had ended their boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. >> ron bench had an alibi for the night of the fire. he was in auburn, new york, an hour's drive away.

and friends corroborated his alibi. and police had another suspect. sabena was a social worker for the state of new york. her superiors were dealing with a disgruntled man who threatened to kill everyone in the office unless he was given custody of his daughter. >> he was angry with the child protective agency because they had placed his daughter in foster care and he did not like that. >> and i've been using the system and every paid attorney. but if i ever got a [ bleep ] gun in my hand then you'll understand what the [ bleep ] i'm all about. you can't put a dead man in jail, can you? >> roy brown spend six months in jail for making those threats and was released just six days before sabena's murder. >> his alibi was that he was

with his girlfriend the entire night, and he gave a name and gave a location where they were. and they checked on it and found out that his girlfriend actually was in jail that night. so he obviously was lying to them about his whereabouts. >> brown denied any involvement, but he was arrested for arson and murder. >> called me up the day before. told me to come over and arrest you. i said are you guys serious? and yeah, they come over to arrest me all right. 10:00 in the murder, sure, come pick me up for a murder charge. then i had to sit on the porch because they were 15 minutes late. i need proof of insurance. that's my geico digital insurance id card - gots all my pertinents on it and such. works for me. turn to the camera.

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roy brown was the prime suspect in the murder of a sabena. he earned that distinction by threatening to kill everyone in sabena's office due to a child custody dispute. >> roy was not a good guy. roy had anger management issues.

he did have a criminal record. nothing of any great consequence, but enough so that, you know, it's not the kind of guy that you'd want to really hang out with, necessarily. he was involving himself in some bad activities as far as, you know, in drinks and whatever else. and he had no real alibi for where he was at that point. >> brown insisted he had nothing to do with the arson or sabena's murder. but the circumstantial evidence was compelling. brown was offered a plea bargain but refused. >> i told them to go screw themselves, you know, i told the one lawyer, you know, i didn't do anything wrong. he said, well, it doesn't matter, they're going to send you to prison any ways. >> so roy brown went on trial. prosecutors found two witnesses who said brown was physically abusive. >> roy brown's wife and a

girlfriend, both of them stated under oath that he was a biter. they said when he was angry, he would bite them. and he used biting as a form of trying to control them. >> coincidently, sabena was bitten before she was killed. and prosecutors asked a forensic doctor to compare the bite marks to brown's teeth. >> roy brown's bite pattern matched some of the bite marks on sabena's body. >> but the forensic doctor hired by the defense claimed the opposite. he said the bite wounds on sabena's body were created by someone with six front upper teeth. and brown didn't have them. >> and he was very clear and very adamant in regard to excluding roy as the person who left those bite marks. >> the jury sided with the prosecution and convicted roy brown of sabena's murder.

he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. >> there was no real evidence that roy brown knew sabena, much less where she lived. >> when brown got to his prison cell, he refused to sleep on the bed, because he said it belonged to a killer. not him. >> i told them when i went in there the first night, i'll sleep on the floor. that bed don't belong to me. that's my desk. i turned it into an office desk. i made a chair and sat down. that's my law school. >> brown filed several appeals, and all were denied. yet, he continued to work to clear his name. >> you can't get into the law library unless you bribe somebody or pay somebody. because the person's going to beat the hell out of you to make sure you know who's in charge.

>> brown also told his lawyer, i'm learning a lot from tv shows. >> i studied law books. appeals and other cases. forensic science. anything i could try to utilize to prove my innocence. >> brown petitioned the court for dna testing of the saliva found on sabena's tee shirt, but this request, too, was denied. >> i don't know who said the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they are flat, and i'm fixing to jack them up, change the tires and throw a new spare in the trunk. >> it had to be discouraging. i would think that it would, you know, could very well say i have had enough. >> then something fortuitous happened. after spending 12 years in prison, a fire broke out in brown's parents' home, destroying all 570 pages of his case file.

and that fire changed the course of the investigation.

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lowest price, guaranteed. ♪ sleep train ♪ your ticket to a better night's sleep ♪ 12 years after his murder conviction, roy brown learned that a fire in his parents' home destroyed his copies of his case file, all 570 pages.

undeterred, brown wanted to replace it using what little money he had. >> so he went and paid his, you know, 15 cents a page that he's entitled to under law and obtained these statements. >> brown requested duplicate copies of earn who gave statements to police during the murder investigation. >> it was like $28.50 i had to send them from jail. i only made like $4 every two weeks, $4.20. >> the sheriff's office sent brown a list of everyone the police interviewed. and that's when brown realized, there were four affidavits in the file he had never seen before. >> roy got the list and looked at it and said wait a minute. who are all these people whose statements i've never seen before? >> there were several statements from barry bench who were part owners of the farmhouse.

barry behaved suspiciously when they got to the fire scene. >> look around and see if you see any evidence. >> like what? >> i don't know. just look. >> she claimed he wanted to search an area 100 yards from the farmhouse. >> we had parked down the street from the farm. and he had mentioned to me that maybe we should go down by the car and start back up on opposite sides of the road, looking for evidence or something. you know, just to see if there was anything amis or whatever. >> to roy brown, this was a critical piece of information. sabena's body was discovered in that same area around daybreak. >> they're still battling the

blaze, you know, and he's not even up there helping. you know. he's walking down the road, looking way over here. if he was so concerned, why wouldn't he be looking up there? >> and barry claimed he had an alibi for the time the fire started. he said he was drinking in a local bar until 1:30 in the morning. but a bar patron claimed bench left the bar around midnight. >> he was unaccounted for for about an hour and a half. >> my reporting on barry bench showed that the, he had, as i understood, quite a temper. >> barry bench had a prior arrest and misdemeanor conviction for physically assaulting a young girl who later got a restraining order against him. >> one neighbor that i interviewed said that she actually worked with him and was afraid of him. he had a problem with women, according to this woman. >> so taking matters into his own hands, brown wrote a letter

to barry bench, accusing him of murder. >> please get a court order to obtain dna samples from you. i still pray for you. i pray not only that you confess to killing sabena, i pray you confess to all your sins, mark my words, they will eventually find out your guilt. have a merry christmas, but don't court on a happy new year. >> brown hoped that bench might reply and licked the envelope. instead, bench walked in front of an oncoming amtrak train and killed himself. >> actually, i was kind of ticked off, because i figured the [ bleep ]'s got away.

>> brown needed to find another way to get bench's dna. he was so desperate, he considered stealing it. >> i was trying to have my family go to the funeral and clip his fingernails and cut his hair while he was in the box. figure out a way to get some dna from him. when you're where i was at, measures come desperate. consequences for getting caught don't mean anything when you're serving life for something you didn't do. your education is built to help move your career forward. here's how: we work with leading employers to learn what you need to learn so classes impact your career. while helping ensure credits you've already earned pay off. and we have career planning tools to keep you on track every step of the way. plus the freshman fifteen, isn't really a thing here. and graduation, it's just the beginning. because we build education around where you want to go. so, you know, you can get the job you want.

ready, let's get to work.

for 12 years, roy brown sat in prison for sabena's murder. after failing to get a new trial, brown contacted the innocence project in new york asking them for help. >> the project was founded a little over 15 years ago to help convicted prisoners use what was then a new technology, dna technology to prove that they were wrongly convicted of the crimes for which they were in prison. >> they accepted his case. while doing some research, the innocence project learned that before brown's trial, prosecutors contacted a doctor, a well-known owe don't toll

gist. >> i have one note that if what i was looking for was in fact an upper, i would exclude mr. brown. >> so the innocence project petitioned the court for permission to test the victim's ready to shirt found at the crime scene, thinking it might contain saliva. >> it's not impossible to find dna after a 15 year case, but it makes it a little bit more difficult. >> analyst tim goebel examined the shirt with an alternate light source. saliva and other biological materials will flores when hit with this light. >> there were a number of stains. and some of them were near the marks made by the examiner. >> not surprisingly the sustains were near the bite holes, an

indication they were left by the person who bit the victim, presumably her killer. goebel removed the fabric and performed dna testing, which is a more advanced form of pcr testing. the result, the dna profile from the saliva on the tee shirt did not match roy brown. but whose was it? barry bench's daughter kathryn offered to help out. >> his daughter was a very courageous young woman who said i want the truth. she actually contacted us after our papers were filed in court and said if you ever need me, i'll give you a dna sample. >> the dna analysis confirmed what roy brown already knew, that the saliva stains had come from barry bench.

>> the paternity testing showed that the john doe dna on the shirt came from the father of this young woman, kathryn, who is barry bench's daughter. >> unbelievably, when this evidence was presented to the court, the judge refused to grant a new trial. he said he had no proof that barry bench was kathryn's biological father. >> you would think you'd be home the next day. you wouldn't think people would drag this out. >> this is the kind of people i'm dealing with. >> with pressure mounting, the state of new york eventually exhumed barry bench's body and took a dna sample. it conclusively matched the saliva on sabena's tee shirt. and roy brown was finally row leased from prison 15 years to the day he was convicted. but the question remains. why did barry bench murder sabena.

barry bench and sabena were acquaintances. sabena lived with barry's brother ron until they broke up a month before the fire. according to friends, barry bench was in financial trouble and may have wanted to sell the farmhouse where sabena was staying. no one knows what happened that night. but the forensic evidence shows barry went to the farmhouse to speak with sabena. there was an argument. and things turned violent. the theory is that barry set fire to the farmhouse and was about to leave when he realized that sabena wasn't dead. there was another fight outside. by this time, he couldn't take her body back into the farmhouse.

the fire was too advanced. so he dragged her body to the footpath 100 yards away and left her there. this explains why barry searched that area later after firefighters arrived. he wanted to make sure she was dead. >> i have never had a case where the client solved his own crime using nothing but a pen and paper. he did all the hard work. >> they made me turn a cell into an office, a bed into a desk and a mattress into a chair. and law books. i used them instead of weapons. i used that. i beat the [ bleep ] with their own sticks. see, fifth grade education goes a long way when you're playing with a bunch of corrupt [ bleep

]. they framed people. that's how stupid them college geniuses are. my wife, she's bleeding all over the place. >> a family dog witnessed a brutal murder. >> whoever entered knew the victim, knew the dog. >> an animal expert finally got the talk to talk. just not in a usual way. ♪ there are two sides to palm beach county, florida. it's home to some of the wealthiest people in the world. but a few miles away lived people struggling, just to pay their rent. >> they have a lot of crime for