Forensic Files - Season 12, Episode 16 - Freedom Fighter - Full Episode | Forensic Files

first he threatened murder do you understand then there was a murder whoever had done it had been
almost a maniac call me charles manson big three inch letters 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 [Music] on the night of may 23 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 occupant sabina kulakowski was missing daylight was
coming and then they firemen and others were basically looking for her emergency workers found sabina
kulikowski's body about 100 yards from the house on an overgrown footpath she was naked she had been
brutally murdered stabbed beaten burned bitten sabina was 49 years old it became pretty obvious right away that
whoever had done it is somebody that well quite 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 sabine was alive in her
about the structure when it was burning because she did have some soot in her lungs
between the farmhouse and sabina's body police found a red t-shirt stained with sabina'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
sabina kulikowski lived in the farmhouse alone her boyfriend ron bench lived there with her until they broke up a few
months before the fire by all accounts it was an amicable breakup 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 sabina was a social worker for the state
of new york her superiors were dealing with the 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 i want her back and i've been using the
method and i've been using the system and i've been paying attorneys but i think that if i got a gun in my hand
again then you'll understand what the [ __ ] i'm all about a crazy man comes in there and just
starts taking them social service workers out for the helmet kills himself can't put a dead man in jail can you
roy brown spent six months in jail for making those threats and was released just six days before
sabina'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 he called me up the day before we're gonna come over and arrest you
come on are you guys serious you're not yet come over to arrest me all right 10 o'clock in the morning
would you sure come pick me up for a murder charge yeah then i had to sit on the porch
there 15 minutes late roy brown was the prime suspect in the murder of sabina kulikowski
earned that distinction by threatening to kill everyone in sabina'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
um 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 drinking
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 sabine's murder but the circumstantial evidence was compelling brown was offered a plea bargain
but refused i don't go screw themselves you know i told her i told one lawyer you know i didn't do anything wrong he
said well it doesn't matter they're gonna send you to prison anyways 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 coincidentally sabina kulakowski was bitten before she
was killed and prosecutors asked a forensic odontologist to compare the bite marks
to brown's teeth roy brown's bite pattern matched the uh some of the bite marks on sabina's body
but the forensic odontologists hired by the defense claimed the opposite he said the bite
wounds on sabina'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 sabina's
murder he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison there was no real evidence that
roy brown knew sabina kolakowski 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 him that when i went into 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 in
their mattress i took some no belt no piece of string and i made a chair out of it and sat it 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 first thing they're
going to do is beat the hell out of you for being there just to make sure that you know who's in
charge brown also told his lawyer i'm learning a lot from tv shows like forensic files
i studied law books appeals in other cases forensic science anything i could i could try to try to
utilize to prove my innocence brown petitioned the court for dna testing of the saliva found on sabina's
t-shirt but this request too was denied i don't know who said the wheels of justice are turned slowly but they are
flat and i'm fixing to jack them up changing tires and shoulders sparing the trunk
it had to be discouraging and i would think that it would you know could very end up say i've 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 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 through the state spring of information we'll obtain these statements brown requested duplicate copies of
everyone who gave statements to police during the murder investigation there was like 28.50 i had to sign him
from jail i only made like four dollars every two weeks four dollars and twenty cents
the sheriff's office sent brown a list of every one 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 looked at it and said
wait a minute what what are all these statements you know who are all these people whose statements i've never seen
before there were several statements from barry bench and his wife tammy heisner who
were part owners of the farmhouse that burned down when sabina kulikowski lived there
tammy told police that barry behaved suspiciously when they got to the fire scene
[Music] why are we stopping here look around and see if you see the evidence like what
like i don't know just look she claimed he wanted to search an area a hundred yards from the farmhouse
we had parked down the street from the farm and he had mentioned to me that maybe we
should go on 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 amiss or whatever
deroy brown this was a critical piece of information sabina kulikowski's body was discovered
in that same area around daybreak they're still battling the blaze you know and he's not even if they're
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 he had a as i understood it 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 attention barry bench
i will easily get a court order to obtain samples from you for dna testing after such a thing you did to kill that
lady sabina kulkowski and my false imprisonment for over a dozen years i still pray for you
i pray not only that you confess to killing sabino krakowski 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 count on a happy new year
brown hoped that bench might reply and lick the envelope flap in effect sending his dna sample
instead bench walked in front of an oncoming amtrak train and killed himself well actually i was kind of
ticked off because i figured it's got a way how am i going to go to court and get a test on this
guy now he's dead 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 air while he was in the box figure out everybody get some dna from him when you're where i was at
measures become desperate and consequences for getting caught don't mean anything when you're serving
life for something you didn't do for 12 years roy brown sat in prison for sabina
kulikowski's murder after failing to get a new trial brown contacted the innocence project in new
york asking them for help the innocence project was founded a little over 15 years ago
to help convicted prisoners use what was then a new technology dna testing to prove that they were wrongfully
convicted and innocent of the crimes for which they were in prison the innocence project accepted brown's
case while doing some research the innocence project learned that before brown's trial
prosecutors consulted dr lowell levine a well-known forensic odontologist but chose not to call him as a witness
we were for the first time given documents showing uh that the state's own expert dr lowell
levine had reached some very significant conclusions uh that cast enormous doubt
on roy's guilt before his case ever went to trial well i never finished my analysis in my notes
in fact i have one note on one of the photographs that if what i was looking for if what i thought was an upper was
in fact an upper i would exclude mr brown so the innocence project petitioned the court for permission to
test the victim's red t-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 goble examined the shirt with an alternate light source saliva and some other biological
materials will fluoresce when hit with this light there were a number of fluorescent
stains on the t-shirt and some of them were near the markings that were made by the previous examiner
not surprisingly the stains were near the bite holes an indication they were left by the
person who bit the victim presumably her killer gobel removed the fabric and performed
str dna testing which is a more advanced form of pcr testing the result the dna profile from the saliva on the
t-shirt did not match roy brown but whose was it barry bench's daughter catherine
eckstadt offered to help out his daughter was a very courageous young woman who said i want the truth i want
to know if my father committed this murder and if roy brown is innocent she actually contacted us after our papers
were filed in court originally 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 on sabina
kulikowski's t-shirt 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 catherine nextat 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 katherine's biological father you would think you'd be home the next
day you wouldn't think people would drag this out this is what 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 sabina kulikowski's t-shirt and roy brown was finally released from prison
15 years to the day he was convicted [Music] and i was thinking to myself i got victory see i proved my innocence
without any doubt i showed i didn't do it and i showed somebody else did do it okay
they can't take that from me you know what i'm saying they can't say open their mouth anymore about anything
i made it very clear to roy brown that i i regretted very much situation that he found himself in
but the question remains why did barry bench murder sabina kulakowski barry bench and sabina were
acquaintances sabina 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 sabina was staying [Music] no one knows what happened that night but the forensic evidence shows barry
went to the farmhouse to speak with sabine what are you doing here 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 sabina 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 from behind his
prison cell using nothing but a pen and paper he really did all the hard work dna
evidence more often than not convicts people but it can also exonerate them and now i
think what the case of roy brown serves as as a as an example of the fact that prosecutors and police now
must be must be more thorough they can't just be focused on one individual and and that's it as they lock me up
and they made me turn a cell into an office a bed into a desk and a mattress into a chair
in law books i use them instead of weapons i used that pen in that type letter i
beat the kids with their own sticks see fifth grade education goes a long way when you're playing with a bunch of
corrupt they can't even frame anybody right that's how stupid them college geniuses
are [Music]

After the suspect was convicted of arson and murder, he maintained his innocence but was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He turned to the law books in the prison library and TV about forensic science and set out to prove his innocence.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

Roy Brown was wrongfully convicted of murdering Sabina Kulakowski; DNA evidence later exonerated him and identified the real killer, Barry Bench.

Key points

Roy Brown's Conviction. Roy Brown was convicted of Sabina Kulikowski's murder, despite claiming innocence.
The Fire Incident. A fire in a farmhouse leads to the discovery of Sabina Kulikowski's body.
Barry Bench's Suicide. Barry Bench, a key suspect, commits suicide before he can provide DNA evidence.
DNA Evidence Exonerates Brown. DNA testing reveals that the saliva found on the victim's shirt did not match Roy Brown.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He really did all the hard work.

The surprising role of Roy Brown in solving his own case.

20:24WatchJan 28, 2022

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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