About Face

Sometimes Kim Ancona would serve him beers. They talked, she once rode with him to a Christmas party that a group from the bar was attending.

But they were never romantically involved, he says.

"[The trouble] all came from her hitching a ride with me to a party," he says. "[The cops] heard that, they looked at my teeth, and they ran from there."

For most of the past 15 years, Ray Krone has focused most of his bitterness toward police and prosecutors.

In the past two years, though, he has come to increasingly realize that, even though the cops and county attorneys screwed up and apparently tried to cover their tracks, they were also being badly misguided by police scientists.

To the extent they knew they were being misguided may never be known.

The most damaging and shoddy work in the case was done by Phoenix police crime lab technician Scott Piette.

Piette, who is now studying osteopathic medicine at a college in Philadelphia, did not return phone calls from New Times for comment on this story.

From a New Times analysis of his work in the case, it's clear that Piette had in his hands in early 1992 the means to both immediately exonerate Krone and immediately indict Kenneth Phillips.

Instead, he at best ignored the evidence pointing to Phillips while focusing on bits of hair that, analysis showed, actually could have come from any Caucasian in the world.

But Piette stated that fact differently. He said these Caucasian hairs were "consistent" with Krone's hair.

The devil is in the details of Piette's work.

For example, 17 human hairs were taken from Kim Ancona's body and turned over to Piette at the police crime lab.

The hairs were given designations of 15A through 15Q.

The ones labeled 15A through 15L, according to a police diagram of Ancona's body, came from her chest and belly. Three -- 15N, 15O and 15P -- came from her lower back.

The 17th hair, 15Q, should have screamed at investigators.

It was a long, straight black hair, clearly different from the others. It was found along the crease of her left buttock.

Its location suggested it had clung to her body after her clothes were removed. The floor had been cleaned before the attack, so its location would suggest it came from the killer.

Unlike the other hairs, 15Q also had what investigators call a "root sheath" or "skin tag," material from the follicle that could -- even in 1992 -- be tested for DNA.

Piette's lab notes, reviewed by New Times, are terse and mundane.

At the top, Piette writes "item #A-Q."

He then writes an inventory and analysis of each item below:

The report ends at P.

Q was never analyzed by Piette at the time, or at least never reported.

It was not analyzed until 11 years later, on August 11, 2003, when new crime lab investigators reexamined the evidence from the case, found the hair, and determined that it came from Phillips.

None of these hairs analyzed by Piette matched Krone's. They were, however, deemed to be hair from a white person (at the most basic level of analysis, hairs are identified as Caucasian, Negroid or Mongoloid).

Piette and then his Phoenix police supervisors described their finding as such: Analysis "found the hairs matched victim and Krone." Piette said the hair was "indistinguishable" from Krone's, even though it could have come from any white person.

Piette's words were what the jury heard before convicting Krone of the murder in 1992.

Piette also analyzed, or was supposed to analyze, any blood from the scene.

On Piette's official report, dated February 21, 1992, he stated that he examined Ancona's panties, and "No blood was detected on the woman's underwear."

So jurors in the first trial were led to believe there was no blood evidence.

In 1995, though, a second analysis of the panties by FBI scientists showed droplets of blood. The blood, the FBI proved then, didn't come from Ancona or Krone.

(That blood was again tested seven years later against a database of Arizona prison inmates. The blood matched that of Phillips, who was in prison for attempting to molest a child shortly after Ancona's murder.)

The fact that the blood didn't match Ancona's or Krone's was presented at Krone's second trial in 1995, which he got because the first conviction was thrown out on a technicality.

But the blood evidence apparently didn't matter to the jury.

That's because Ray Rawson swore again at the second trial that Krone's teeth matched the bite mark on Ancona's breast.

Since his release, knowing what he now knows, Krone has also grown to loathe Ray Rawson.

He says, "I don't know how the guy sleeps at night."