The lawyer of a man accused of killing an 81-year-old woman more than 23 years ago told a state jury Monday that DNA evidence in the case can at best show only that his client had sexual contact with the woman.
"The evidence will not show you that he killed her," Edward Aquino, deputy state public defender, said in opening statements at Gerald. L. Austin’s murder trial. "The evidence will not show you that he strangled her."
Austin, 54, is accused of strangling Edith Skinner in July 1989. Austin was 29 years old at the time.
Deputy Prosecutor Scott Bell told the jurors that the building manager and a maintenance worker of the Makua Alii state senior housing complex in the Kaheka area found Skinner’s body in her seventh-floor apartment after the woman’s neighbors reported they hadn’t seen her since the day before.
Skinner was strangled. Bell said there were also signs of possible sexual assault.
Austin is not on trial for sexually assaulting Skinner; the statute of limitations has long expired. There is no statute of limitations for murder.
Skinner’s son Stephen testified Monday that his mother’s purse, a box containing her important papers and jewelry, and a cross that his mother wore around her neck were missing from the apartment.
Bell said even though the Honolulu Police Department was not capable at the time of analyzing DNA evidence, it took samples from Skinner’s body and preserved them for later comparison.
State lawmakers passed a law in 2005 requiring all convicted felons to submit their DNA for placement by HPD into a database. By then HPD’s crime lab had gained accreditation and found that there was DNA from two people in the Skinner sample: Skinner and an unknown male.
Then in 2011, Bell said, HPD matched the DNA sample with Austin.
Austin would have been required to submit his DNA because of a 1984 burglary conviction. He was on parole at the time of Skinner’s murder.
He denied having knowledge of or contact with Skinner during a January 2012 interview with police, Bell said. During that same interview he said police took a new DNA sample from Austin that confirmed the earlier match.
Makua Alii is a secure building to which Austin had access because his grandmother lived there, Bell said.
Because Skinner was at least 60 years old, the state is seeking the state’s harshest penalty for Austin, life in prison without the possibility of parole. The normal penalty for second-degree murder is life in prison with the possibility of parole.
