Kenya and Sahara Prade remain strongly in their father’s corner and insist he was never capable of killing their mother.
“That’s not in his character,” Kenya Prade said.
During a Dec. 28 phone interview with the Beacon Journal, the sisters said that they have never wavered from their belief since the day Dr. Margo Prade was shot to death inside her van soon after arriving at the parking lot of her Wooster Avenue medical office on the morning before Thanksgiving 18 years ago.
Investigators said it was clear that her killer was familiar with her route and knew she would be there.
Her ex-husband, former Akron Police Capt. Douglas Prade, now 69, remains in a state penitentiary awaiting a Summit County court ruling that could result in a new trial.
The pending decision rests with Judge Christine Croce’s findings from a second round of hearings conducted in early November to review the latest DNA evidence in the case.
A decision could be announced sometime early this year.
Testimony at those hearings by forensic scientists excluded Prade’s genetic markers from the most scrutinized evidence in the case — a bite mark impression left under two layers of a lab coat worn by Dr. Prade on the morning of the slaying.
Family support
Kenya Prade, who was 12 years old at the time, says there is no doubt about what that evidence means.
“The person who killed my mom is the person who bit her,” she said. “My dad’s DNA is not there. It’s not present, which means he did not kill her. I’ve known that all along. That’s not in his character.
“I never could imagine that my dad could do something like that. I think about all of the good times that we’ve had together, all of the fun family vacations, all of my gymnastics meets that he attended — just being a supportive father.
“There were so many things that I remember, I can’t imagine that he would ever hurt us and do that to our mom. That’s just not something I can even fathom.”
Kenya Prade, now 30, is a nurse practitioner living in Dallas and raising a 9-year-old daughter. She arranged the conference call with her sister, Sahara, 27, who is a professional singer living in Las Vegas.
Temporary reversal
The former police captain was found guilty of aggravated murder and other crimes by a Summit County jury in 1998. In January 2013, he was freed from prison after Summit County Common Pleas Judge Judy Hunter ruled new DNA evidence proved his innocence. An appeal by prosecutors ultimately sent him back to prison in October 2014.
Hunter, now retired, heard four days of forensic testimony in November 2012 on what is, to date, the most advanced testing of the bite-mark evidence. After a review of the lengthy case record, she concluded that the exclusion of Douglas Prade’s DNA from small swatches of cloth from the lab coat where Dr. Prade was bitten was “clear and convincing” evidence of his innocence.
Prade’s DNA also wasn’t found on any other sections of the lab coat.
No jury today would convict Prade of the slaying, Hunter asserted in her decision, and she ordered state prison officials to release him.
After prosecutors challenged the ruling, the 9th District Court of Appeals in Akron reversed Hunter and sent Prade back to prison in what Croce has called a legal pingpong match.
The case has reached this point, perhaps more contentious than ever, because Hunter also issued a conditional order that Prade should get a new trial if her decision was overturned on appeal.
Sahara Prade said that she believes the case has become “a witch hunt” by authorities.
“Prosecutors say they’re pursuing this case for the family, but when my dad was out, he did nothing but spend time with us,” she said. “We really haven’t had that family element since he went back to prison.
“It was nice to have our parent there with us, and if they were really doing this for the family, then they would stop pursuing this case forever.”
Prosecutors should have concentrated their efforts “on what they need to concentrate on – which is the main evidence that they presented in the first trial, saying that the person who killed my mother put that bite mark on her arm,” Sahara Prade said. “They need to pursue that evidence and let my dad go so he can be back with his family.”
Jury foreman reflects
Beacon Journal stories from the jury’s decision in the 1998 trial reported that prosecutors based their case “almost solely on circumstantial evidence that was so compelling, jurors needed only four hours to return a guilty verdict.”
David Kelly, 56, a marketing director for a restaurant equipment firm in Columbus, was the Prade jury foreman.
During a recent interview, he said he didn’t know whether the advanced DNA test results would have changed the trial’s outcome.
“If the trial was today,” he said, “everyone would obviously be of a different mind. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. But from what we had in 1998, we felt 99.9 percent sure he was guilty.”
During Prade’s trial, DNA test results that were much less scientifically accurate than today’s testing technology didn’t link him to the doctor’s heavily blood-stained lab coat.
“To us,” Kelly said of the panel’s verdict, “I don’t think DNA was ever a factor.”
The cumulative effect of the state’s circumstantial evidence, he stressed, carried the day, “and we went through everything when we deliberated.”
He also pointed out that Prade had loose-fitting dentures for his upper teeth.
“The fact that his lower teeth matched the bite mark fairly well – it sure looked like his teeth – played in as a factor,” Kelly said.
In modern criminal trials, however, identifying a perpetrator by a bite-mark impression alone has been discredited by court rulings in many cases of wrongful arrest and conviction, his lawyers maintain.
Croce has no timetable for a decision on whether Prade should get a new trial based on the latest DNA findings.
Case records show that she also might consider holding another evidentiary hearing next month on the defense’s request for further documentation on why the courts no longer rely on “bite mark identification” from teeth impressions.
“The hardest thing,” Kenya Prade said, “is that this has destroyed our family. My sister and I have been put in the middle of this, and we did nothing wrong.
“It’s just sad, because we love both sides of our family very much. There are some family members who make us seem like outcasts and don’t want anything to do with us because we are still communicating with our father.”
“Basically,” Sahara Prade added, “it’s all because we love our father.”