A Boulder County triple murderer will have the opportunity to leave prison during his lifetime in part because of misconduct by a Colorado Bureau of Investigation analyst who intentionally deleted DNA data in his case, attorneys said in court Thursday.
Garrett Coughlin, 31, pleaded guilty Thursday to second-degree murder in the 2017 killings and was sentenced to 42 years in prison with seven years of pre-sentence credit, avoiding the mandatory life imprisonment that accompanies a first-degree murder conviction.
Prosecutors said they offered the plea deal in part because of misconduct by former CBI scientist Yvonne “Missy” Woods, who deleted DNA data in the case, and because of years of inaction by the agency’s leadership to correct the misconduct, which Woods’ peers repeatedly warned superiors about.
“The CBI has proven to us that, as an agency, they have failed,” defense attorney Mary Mulligan said. “That this rot we believe we have discovered about Missy Woods has actually spread throughout that agency, all the way to the top.”
In addition to Woods’ misconduct, a now-retired CBI analyst who linked the gun used in the murder to Coughlin has refused to cooperate with prosecutors, going to great lengths to avoid accepting a subpoena in the case, prosecutors said in court. Together, those issues prompted prosecutors to offer the plea agreement to second-degree murder.
“Standing alone, the (prosecution) could have individually overcome these obstacles and presented a case at trial,” prosecutor Catrina Weigel told the judge. “But the combination of them is troubling, and, frankly, unprecedented in Colorado jurisprudence.”
Coughlin was convicted in 2019 of killing Wallace White, Kelly Sloat-White and Emory Fraker on April 13, 2017, at the Whites’ home in Coal Creek Canyon in Boulder County. Coughlin, a longtime family friend of the victims, was addicted to drugs at the time and killed the trio in order to rob them of money and marijuana.
He was sentenced to life in prison, but that conviction was overturned in 2020 because a juror on the case lied about their background. The case against Coughlin was largely circumstantial, and one key piece of evidence was an analysis by a CBI gun expert who testified in the original trial that a gun Coughlin possessed had been used in the murders.
But when prosecutors began to prepare to retry the case, the CBI gun expert had retired and refused to cooperate, Weigel said. She did not name the gun expert in court.
Prosecutors had to obtain a warrant to ping the location of his cellphone in order to track him down and serve him with a subpoena to testify, she said.
An investigator for the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office waited outside his house, then followed him when he drove away — even as the gun expert tried to lose the investigator by driving through parking lots — until eventually serving the subpoena as the gun expert sat in his car in traffic, Weigel said.
“The motivation for his behavior is unclear,” she said. “He is not just uncooperative, he is obstructionist. …His credibility is compromised because of his behavior. …In all the time I have been a prosecutor I have never seen a professional person, an ex-law enforcement, ex-CBI agent act the way he did. The extraordinary lengths we had to go through to get him under service is striking.”
Coughlin’s DNA was found at the crime scene, Weigel said in court Thursday. Woods testified to that in the original jury trial, and also testified that she did not find Coughlin’s DNA on the murder weapon, but did find trace amounts of DNA belonging to another man.
Weigel said Woods failed to mention at the time that she’d deleted and manipulated data in the DNA profile collected from victim Sloat-White, part of what is now known to be her common practice of deleting data in DNA testing, according to a CBI internal investigation made public Wednesday.
“We had no idea this was going on,” Weigel said, adding that the manipulation creates “serious issues with credibility” that would prevent prosecutors from relying on her work in a trial.
“When we learned about this, as time goes on, it just gets worse,” Weigel said, “There are concerns about the failure of CBI to act when they learned and knew what was happening with (Woods) years and years ago.”
Weigel added that she understands the CBI has opened additional internal investigations into the supervisors and managers who failed to act when the concerns about Woods’s work were initially flagged. CBI director Chris Schaefer said in a statement Wednesday that the agency is “auditing the work of all current and previous DNA scientists to ensure the integrity of the lab.”
Family members of the three people Coughlin killed expressed outrage and disappointment over the plea agreement in court Thursday, saying they’d lost faith in the justice system.
“This outcome is a complete failure to hold him responsible for his crimes,” said Ben Sloat, brother to Kelly Sloat-White.
Twentieth Judicial District Judge Nancy Salomone acknowledged their position before accepting Coughlin’s plea.
“I understand that those of us who work as part of the system have put you all in a situation where, had the people that you had trusted to do (their) jobs done their jobs, it’s got to feel like you wouldn’t be here at all,” she told family members, who watched in the courtroom and online.
Coughlin hesitated before pleading guilty to second-degree murder and later told the judge he was pleading guilty because of “the threat of life in prison.” He said he wanted to take account for his guilt, but also suggested other people were involved in the crime and that he has not turned them in because of threats to himself and his family.
“There is so much I wish would have come to light but didn’t,” he said.
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