While Brown sat in prison, he never stopped trying to prove his innocence. For 11 years, he petitioned for an appeal and requested specifically that DNA tests be performed on evidence collected at the crime scene. On each occasion, the judge denied his request. Finally, in 2003, Brown filed a Freedom of Information Act request from prison to obtain copies of all documents relating to his case. That’s when he made a surprising discovery.
The additional evidence included four affidavits collected by the cayuga county sheriff’s Department the day after the murder—documents that neither Brown nor his lawyers had ever seen. In the affidavits, four people described the suspicious behavior of another man: Barry Bench. Bench was the brother of Kulakowski’s former boyfriend. The Bench family owned the farmhouse in which Kulakowski had been living.
The affidavits, which included sworn testimony from neighbors as well as from Bench’s then girlfriend, Tamara Heisner, stated that on the day of Kulakowski’s murder, Bench argued with Heisner, went to a local bar, and returned home between 1:30 and 1:45 A.M.—the same time the victim’s neighbors alerted the fire department that the farmhouse was ablaze.
The statements further noted that Bench, who came home highly intoxicated, had left the bar at approximately 12:30 A.M. That left 60 to 75 minutes unaccounted for until he arrived home—although he lived only a mile from the bar. When Bench came home, he immediately went inside to “wash up,” according to Heisner.
Brown realized that Bench would have had to drive by the farmhouse to get home from the bar and thought it strange that Bench would not have noticed the raging fire on his own property. While not conclusive, this new evidence was enough to prompt Brown’s lawyers to contact the Innocence Project for help.
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Meanwhile, Brown decided to write Bench a letter detailing what he had found and urging him to confess. He warned him of his intent to obtain a DNA test on evidence from the murder. “Judges can be fooled and juries make mistakes,” he wrote, “[but] when it comes to DNA testing there’s no mistakes. DNA is God’s creation and God makes no mistakes.”
Five days after Brown mailed his letter, Bench threw himself in front of an Amtrak train and died instantly.
DNA PROFILE A visual representation of a person’s unique DNA sequence.
Soon after, the Innocence Project team took on Brown’s case and filed a motion to have Kulakowski’s nightshirt tested for DNA at a New York State crime lab. The nightshirt had been found in some tall grass near the body. It was not only bloodstained, it was also stained with saliva. Since both saliva and blood contain cells that carry DNA, scientists could chemically extract the DNA from the cells to create a DNA profile of the perpetrator.