A Texas judge recommended last year that Reed be denied a new trial before sending the case back to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. In agreeing to review Reed’s appeal, the Supreme Court will consider the merit of Reed and his lawyers’ claims that untested crime-scene evidence will help clear him.
Stites was reported missing after failing to turn up for her shift at a grocery store in Bastrop, Texas. A passer-by discovered Stites’s body on a rural road. Reed was arrested primarily on the basis of DNA tests, but has always maintained his innocence. Reed argued he had an affair with Stites, which explains the presence of his DNA on her. Reed’s lawyers say they have talked to witnesses who have corroborated that the pair was intimately involved.
The lawyers also contend that new evidence has come to light in the past few years that suggests Stites’s fiancé, former police officer Jimmy Fennell, is involved or implicated in her murder.
Fennell, who the Innocence Project said served a ten-year prison sentence for a sex crime and kidnapping while he was a police officer, has denied killing Stites.