Lisa Randall stepped into the bright sunlight Thursday morning, July 22, surrounded by family, friends, and her attorney.
photos by Michael Ratcliff
Former murder defendant Lisa Randall and her attorney David Cantor outside Superior Court after last week's dismissal of all charges.
Lisa Randall, family, and supporters celebrate on the morning of July 22.
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Randall took a deep breath and held onto the youngest of her five adult children, daughter Brenna. She pulled one of her pant legs up a few inches to expose the ankle monitor she had been wearing since a judge released her on house arrest more than two years earlier.
"I want to get rid of that thing right now," Randall said to no one in particular. "It is awful, awful — just awful."
But not nearly as awful as what she had been facing for nearly three years — which was the possibility of life behind bars or (until recently) execution by the State of Arizona.
A few minutes earlier, Superior Court Judge Mike Kemp had dismissed a first-degree murder/aggravated child-abuse case against the 49-year-old former Peoria daycare operator.
Kemp's order came a few days after Maricopa County prosecutors informed him that they didn't have the evidence to convict Randall at trial, which had been scheduled to start August 2.
"The dismissal is in the interests of justice," Deputy County Attorney Belle Whitney told the judge at the short hearing.
Any chance for a conviction ended abruptly after an expert witness hired by prosecutors to analyze the evidence concluded last month that the state's case against Randall was flawed to the extreme — he didn't think there even had been a homicide.
"I cannot support the cause of death as being blunt-force trauma of the head and neck," Dr. Cliff Nelson, a medical examiner for the state of Oregon, wrote to case prosecutors Whitney and Frankie Grimsman. "Not only is the conclusion unsupported, I feel most of the observations leading to that conclusion are in error."
It was a stunning turn of events in an emotional case that New Times had investigated for almost two years before publishing last week's cover story, "Phantom Murder," available on our Web site.
The story, which current Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley cited at a press conference later that day as a "fair and extremely thorough" guide to learning what went wrong with the case, described how it was fraught on with nagging medical questions about the tragic April 2007 death of 4-month-old Dillon Uutela.
The infant suffered a cardiac arrest at Randall's home (where she ran her daycare business) on the late morning of April 18, 2007, and never regained consciousness after paramedics got his heart going again.
Dillon died a few days later at Phoenix Children's Hospital.
Doctors there (Adam Schwartz and Jennifer Geyer) — and, later, a pathologist at the Office of the Medical Examiner (Kevin Horn) — told Peoria police with great confidence that Dillon's death came as the result of intentionally inflicted blunt-force trauma at the hands of Randall.
Those doctors said it was overwhelmingly clear to them that Dillon had sustained several injuries — retinal hemorrhages, bleeding inside his brain, and skull fractures — during his short time with Randall.
Dillon had been at Randall's home for only about an hour when she frantically called 911 after finding him unconscious and not breathing.
It should have come as no surprise that Peoria police soon tried to wring a confession from Randall during several interrogations. But Randall didn't confess to hurting Dillon, either accidentally or intentionally.
A county grand jury indicted the woman on the murder and abuse charges in November 2007.
A few months later, according to Romley, his predecessor as county attorney, Andrew Thomas, overruled a review committee of veteran office prosecutors and ordered the case against Randall to be adjudicated as a capital crime.
Randall's family scraped together the funds to pay Tempe-based attorney David Cantor to represent her. Cantor and colleagues found — and paid — medical experts who strongly disagreed with the prosecution's point of view.
One of the experts, Dr. F. Ralph Berberich of Berkeley, California, concluded, "It would appear most likely that this baby, in recovery phase from a viral illness, had a SIDS-like event leading to apnea and cardiopulmonary arrest from which he was resuscitated. There followed the physical effects, laboratory abnormalities, and organ failure associated with profound and prolonged apnea."
(Apnea, according to the Mayo Clinic's Web site, is "a potentially serious sleep disorder in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep.")
Dr. Nelson said he couldn't disagree with that analysis and added, "At this point, the cause of death remains undetermined . . . I have had other cases thought [by pediatricians] to be deaths due to inflicted head trauma by which, after complete death investigation, proved the result of a SIDS-like event."
The dismissal of the murder case against Randall was the third "defeat" suffered by Peoria police in child abuse/murder cases in recent years.
In February 2006, a county jury acquitted Delano Yanes of first-degree murder and child abuse in the horrific death of his 11-month-old son. The deputy county attorney in that case, Grimsman (who later joined the Lisa Randall prosecution team), claimed that Yanes had sodomized the infant during a 20-minute window and that the trauma had exploded the baby's heart.
But DNA was lacking, and medical experts disagreed on every important piece of evidence, including whether the baby had been sodomized.
