DNA Clears Utah Man Who Spent 41 Years on Death Row for a Murder He Says He Never Committed

Let's Run Through What Actually Happened Here

Eva Olesen was murdered in her Provo, Utah home on February 27, 1985. She was stabbed and shot, found partially undressed with her hands tied behind her back. By June of that year, police had Carter in custody in Nashville, Tennessee, where a Provo detective interrogated him and walked out with a signed confession.

Carter says he signed it to save a friend. According to CBS News, Carter and a female companion were arrested at the same time, and because the jail didn't house men and women together, Carter was held in a position where, as his defense attorney Neal Hamilton put it, he had a "front row seat of the consequences of his failure to confess." Carter has maintained for four decades that every word of that confession was a lie.

No physical evidence placed him at the scene. The jury convicted him anyway, based on the confession and two witnesses who said Carter bragged about the killing. Both of those witnesses later recanted entirely.

The Witnesses Were Paid. Then Threatened. Then Found in Mexico.

The case cracked open in 2011 when investigators tracked down those two original trial witnesses in Mexico. According to CBS News, they said police told them to lie, gave them cash and gifts, and then explicitly told them not to disclose the payments. For good measure, police and prosecutors also allegedly threatened them and their son with deportation if they didn't implicate Carter.

That is not a legal gray area. That is not aggressive but technically permissible police work. That is witness tampering, bribery, and what any reasonable person would call a frame job. It took more than a decade of legal fighting after that 2011 revelation before the Utah Supreme Court last year finally ordered a new trial, citing, in its own words, "multiple instances of intentional misconduct" by police and a prosecutor.

The DNA analysis was conducted in response to that order. Results came back September 22nd. They exclude Carter as a match to blood on a doorknob and genetic material on the handle of the murder weapon. Prosecutors dropped their intention to seek the death penalty shortly after. Carter walked into a bond hearing Monday and walked out with an ankle monitor.

There Was Another Suspect. Evidence Was Buried.

Carter's defense attorneys say this was never just a sloppy investigation. They allege that witnesses saw a White man fleeing the crime scene, and that an investigator actively suppressed evidence pointing to other suspects, including Eva Olesen's own husband, Orla Olesen.

According to CBS News, defense attorneys allege prosecutors were close to filing charges against the husband when a Provo police lieutenant intervened and asked them to hold off so he could keep investigating. Carter was identified as a suspect shortly afterward. Orla Olesen, who died in 2009, had told police he found his wife dead in their home. The victim's husband as the overlooked suspect is not a conspiracy theory Carter's lawyers invented last week. It is documented in court filings.

Prosecutors declined Monday to say whether they are using the new DNA evidence to search for other suspects with a matching profile. Read into that silence whatever you like.

What 41 Years on Death Row Leaves You With

Carter is 71 years old. He was convicted at 30. His son was adopted by another family as an infant and didn't even know about the conviction until years later. He will be placed in an extended-stay accommodation near that son's family.

Hamilton was direct about what release actually means for his client. "It's not just as simple as, 'Let's let him go,'" he told CBS News. "He's being released with 41 years of state-induced trauma and the effect it will have on him is very real." Carter will need therapy. He will need time. He is owed, at the absolute minimum, the acknowledgment that the system he was fed into was rotten from the jump.

Judge Derek Pullan, to his credit, acknowledged that the new DNA analysis further undermines the case against Carter. He also noted, with what must have been a straight face, that a reasonable jury could still conclude Carter committed the murder. A trial is still scheduled for 2027. The state of Utah has not dismissed the charges.

The Victim's Family Still Wants Him Locked Up

Theresa Olesen, a daughter-in-law of Eva Olesen, spoke at Monday's bond hearing and asked that Carter remain in jail. "By golly we were hoping for a concrete match," she told the court, per CBS News. "It doesn't mean he wasn't there."

This is genuinely hard to write about without empathy. Losing a family member to violence and never getting a satisfying answer is an awful thing. The grief is real. But "it doesn't mean he wasn't there" is not evidence. It is the absence of evidence reframed as suspicion, and it has already cost a man four decades of his life.