The most hotly contested technical issue in the 1993 Murder and Arson trial of Patrick Bradford was whether or not the plywood panel of the bedroom door could have burned through in eight minutes or less. Because that panel did fail at some point during the fire, and Patrick did not arrive until eight minutes before the fire was extinguished, Patrick must be innocent if the panel would take longer than eight minutes to burn through.
Experts for the State asserted that the panel would have failed within 2-4 minutes. The defense argued that this was impossible, given the oxygen-starved fire conditions: a large, gasoline-fueled fire in a small, closed space. But neither side provided any scientific support for their position.
The first scientific examination of the question was done between 1997 and 2001, when three prominent fire scientists undertook (pro bono) to test the State's theories under the exact conditions as specified in their own case. In several full-scale fire recreations, comparable plywood panels did not burn through in anything close to eight minutes.
There is reason to believe that local officials got wind of these experiments. They were conducted in a neighboring county with many area firemen in attendance. Immediately afterward, the prosecutor attempted to rush a pending appeal through court which was under an indefinite continuance for investigation purposes.
But the cat was all the way out of the bag soon after, when 48 Hours Mystery aired an episode in which the test results were revealed. Two of the fire scientists declared unequivocally that the State's theory was "impossible".
At this point, prosecutor Stan Levco must have reasoned that the only possible defense against such proof would be to maintain that the test panels were not necessarily comparable to that in the actual bedroom door. (This would be a weak argument; there was an extreme disparity between the test results and the State's assertion.) He must have thought that the only hope was to do away with the actual door (which was locked away in secure evidence) so that the comparability of any test panel could never be established.
What we know as a fact is that, after the 48 Hours episode aired, experts did attempt to examine the remaining lower panel in the door, but the door was missing from the rest of the evidence from trial. Stan Levco had ordered that the door be destroyed--critical evidence in a murder trial officially under review. Levco's written order was produced in open court, but the evidence custodian could find no documentation as to who had removed the door, or when. It was simply gone.
Although foul play should be obvious at this point, there is a further aspect which removes all doubt. Levco had no authority to remove the evidence. His actions and those of his anonymous accomplice(s) were directly in violation of a very specific court order. In 1997, Judge Richard Young had ordered that no item of evidence in this case was to be removed from holding without the consent of both parties or a hearing before the court.
But there is an ironic twist. There were original doors remaining in the house where the crime occurred. These were identical to the bedroom door. These other doors were donated by the home's current owner and sent to a lab in Maryland. There, it was determined by a top fire scientist in a closely controlled laboratory testing that the bedroom door panel could not have burned through in anywhere close to the eight minutes required by the State's case.
Levco's malfeasance gained him nothing--except to prove his own corruption.
Final Note: Although Stan Levco is no longer officially in office, current prosecutor Nicholas Hermann has effectively endorsed his corrupt actions. In the October Post Conviction Relief hearing, Hermann's deputy, Suzan Garbers, attempted to argue against live testing results because the original door is not available for comparison...exactly Levco's plan all along.
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