r/ForensicFiles

Just thought you all should know! One of the few episodes that my husband watches. Also the one with those sneaky onions! I'm in for the day alternating FF with How It's Made 🙂

I know this isn't from FF, but since so many of you watch other shows, where do I know this piece of crap from? I just saw him on Finally Caught, but I just started watching that, so where else have I seen him? Thanks in advance!

This case makes me so mad. What a POS Maynard is... . this episode is on right now. Poor Michelle, I am so glad she exposed what he did to her.. This case is heartbreaking.

I just saw this episode again and that's always something I've wondered. RIP Tina.

On Tubi's streaming service it's season 8 episode 38: Honor Thy Father if you're interested in watching it for yourself and it's also on YouTube in full as well. It's one of the most interesting episodes of Forensic Files imo and also one of the most disturbing as well imo.

I actually bought that Guarding The Secrets book for my birthday this year after seeing that episode the first time and it's a pretty good book imo.

EDIT: Sorry I actually meant how Forensic Files themselves obtained the audio of her being murdered for this episode. I did personal research on my own about this case since I found it very interesting and wanted to know as much as I could about it. I can't edit the post title for some reason so... yeah I apologize for the confusion about what I actually meant.

This was just heartbreaking. Her parents seem like such nice people- I got teary eyed when she said her friends didn’t want to hang out with her because she only talked about her daughter. How could you not? Also seeing them in the court room ugh that was a tough watch.

But boy was this super frustrating because WHY was this bastard out of prison?? He was caught raping a teenager he bound and got a 4 year sentence but only served 2 years WTF. That was so frustrating. Also all the womens sweatshirts they found in his backyard- was that just a dead end? I feel like there’s more this guy probably got away with.

Shannon seemed like a lovely person- truly awful stuff ):

Okay this episode frustrated me. Not just because the killer only served 3 years for stabbing his brother before getting released but also the victim herself. I know we're not supposed to trash the victim but, Jesus Christ, how irresponsible of a human being can you be??? I grew up poor and nothing annoys me more than people who keep popping out kids when they can't afford to give them a good life. How do you have four children and no job? You're living in a motel, you're relying on welfare, you're feeding your children dinner at 11:00 at night because for some reason they're still awake, and you're not even giving them good food but crap like Ellio's Pizza. I don't know. I'm tired of seeing children suffer for the mistakes of their parents. Personally, at 31 I'm still struggling to overcome the trauma and the financial strains of poverty that I did not bring on to myself but was born into. I mean, seriously, you can get free contraception at clinics all over the country. Be responsible!! 🤦🏻‍♂️ people are wondering why her mother didn't help out more and it's probably cuz the mother was fed up with her daughter's b*******. I could see if it was one time but four kids and no plan or career or anything? yeah no it's not fair to the family.

[Forensic Files adjacent] I can’t remember if Dr. Michael West was involved with an FF case, but I think this case really highlights how terrible forensic odontology is for suspect identification.

I think forensic odontology could be used to differentiate between animal & human bite marks or non-bite injuries that might look like bite marks, or maybe even help narrow a suspect pool, but I do not trust bite mark evidence to positively identify anyone.

Here's the article:

"Former Louisiana death row inmate Jimmie “Chris” Duncan is officially a free man following a unanimous ruling Monday by the Louisiana Supreme Court. In the opinion, justices upheld a lower court’s decision to toss out Duncan’s 1998 conviction for killing his former girlfriend’s toddler, Haley Oliveaux, citing flawed forensics practices used to convict him.

Justice Cade R. Cole wrote on behalf of the seven-member court that new evidence presented by Duncan’s legal team left no doubt that his conviction should be overturned.

“The post-conviction evidence undermined the core factual premises on which the state depended,” Cole wrote in the official opinion.

Two other justices, including Chief Justice John Weimer, issued opinions concurring with Cole. 

“I am flooded with relief,” said Chris Fabricant, a member of Duncan’s legal team and director of strategic litigation with the Innocence Project in New York, in an interview. “It would have been a moral outrage for the conviction to be reinstated.”

The court’s ruling came after a 2025 Verite News and ProPublica investigation examined the reliability of the key forensic evidence used to convict Duncan, now 57. At the time, he faced the possibility of being put to death as Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, made moves to expedite executions after a 15-year pause.

Duncan’s conviction was based largely on now-discredited bite mark evidence presented by forensic dentist Michael West and pathologist Steven Hayne. Their analysis, which was critical to Ouachita Parish prosecutors securing Duncan’s conviction, claimed to match marks on Haley’s body to Duncan’s teeth.

But experts have since deemed such evidence, fairly common at the time of Duncan’s 1998 trial, to be junk science. Meanwhile, the longtime partnership between West and Hayne has come under scrutiny from civil rights attorneys, forensic experts and the courts over concerns about the validity of their techniques.

In the 28 years since Duncan’s trial, nine other prisoners have been set free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence given by West and Hayne. Three of those men were on death row. Duncan was the last person awaiting an execution based on the pair’s work.

In his opinion, Cole reexamined the use of supposed bite marks, which were the only physical evidence tying Duncan to the alleged crime. Cole pointed to a video of West’s 1993 examination of Haley, which was not shown to jurors at trial. In that recording, West can be seen taking a mold of Duncan’s teeth and grinding it into and across the girl’s body, seemingly creating bite marks where none previously existed. Referencing previous testimony from a defense expert, Cole wrote that “it was ‘scientifically indefensible’ to identify those marks as having been made by Duncan, and that the angles shown in the West Video were physically impossible for a human bite.”

West has previously said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique — in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks.

Weimer wrote in a concurrence that the bite mark evidence used to prosecute Duncan was similar to “trial by water” tests used by witch-hunters in the 17th century, in which suspected witches were bound with rope and lowered into a body of water. If they floated, they were considered guilty of witchcraft, while those who “passed” the test by sinking often drowned.

“We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd, since those who fell victim to those practices often did not survive, regardless of whether they were found guilty or innocent,” Weimer wrote. “The bite mark evidence and the sexual abuse evidence used in the trial against the accused has proven to be similarly specious.”

Duncan’s prosecution “demonstrates we cannot be too careful in determining whether the death penalty should be implemented in cases such as this case because of the finality of the sentence and the impossibility of rectification,” Weimer wrote, “Such an irreversible and tragic consequence is inimical and deleterious to our system of justice if carried out based on evidence that is devoid of legitimacy.”

‘This should be the end of this case’

Police arrested Duncan on Dec. 18, 1993. He was babysitting Haley that day in the home he shared with the girl’s mother in West Monroe. Duncan told law enforcement he had put the child in the bath, then went downstairs to wash dishes. When he heard a noise coming from the bathroom, he rushed upstairs to check on her and found Haley floating face down in the water. She was pronounced dead a few hours later.

Duncan was initially booked for negligent homicide, but prosecutors upped the charge to first-degree murder after Hayne and West conducted Haley’s medical exam and claimed they discovered evidence, including the purported bite marks, that she had been sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. Following two weeks of testimony during the trial in 1998, the jury found Duncan guilty and sentenced him to death.

While Duncan awaited an execution date, his new team of postconviction attorneys uncovered evidence that pointed to his innocence, including an expert witness who said that the child’s death was not a homicide but the result of an accidental drowning. In addition, investigators working for Duncan’s legal team interviewed a jailhouse informant who recanted his earlier trial testimony that Duncan had confessed to the crime.

Duncan’s conviction was overturned in April of last year by former Ouachita Parish Judge Alvin Sharp. He was let out of prison on bail in December, but he continued to await a final decision on his case after prosecutors appealed Sharp’s ruling.

Steve Tew, district attorney for Ouachita and Morehouse parishes, has never wavered in his insistence that Duncan was guilty of murder and that he should be put to death. His office appealed Sharp’s decision to the state Supreme Court.

During oral arguments in April, Tew said that since Duncan was the only person with Haley at the time of her death, his guilt could not be debated. “We don’t need the bite mark evidence to put Mr. Duncan in the apartment alone with this child,” Tew said.

Haley’s mother, Allison Layton Statham, has publicly supported Duncan’s release from prison and the overturning of his conviction; so have family members of Haley’s father, Lloyd Donald Oliveaux, who died in 1996. They have excoriated the state’s tactics, claiming they repeatedly asked for a meeting with prosecutors to express their concerns, but never received a response.

Tew, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday, said at the April hearing that should the Supreme Court refuse to reinstate Duncan’s conviction, he would retry him, though he did not say what charge he might pursue.

When asked about the prospect of Duncan being retried for murder, Fabricant, the Innocence Project attorney, said, “If there is any sense of fairness and justice left, this should be the end of this case.”

In addition to the Innocence Project, Duncan’s legal team includes the Mwalimu Center for Justice in New Orleans and the Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner law firm in Atlanta."

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20k as the motive has been the lowest I've seen so far.

Somehow that feels more insulting than the multiple instances from Killer Chronicles where someone got murdered over a debt of $600 or less