Nevada Woman Freed After 30 Years in Prison Thanks to DNA Evidence

A Nevada woman will go free from future prosecution after spending more than 30 years in prison for a 1976 stabbing at the University of Nevada, reports the Associated Press.

Washoe County District Attorney Chris Hicks told reporters on Friday that there will be no retrial of Cathy Woods in the fatal stabbing of 19-year-old Michelle Mitchell.

Officials now believe the real culprit is a man also charged in a long-unsolved string of killings in California.

Last year, a judge ordered a new trial for Woods after DNA found on a cigarette near Mitchell’s body pointed instead to Rodney Halbower, who has since been charged in two of the “Gypsy Hill” killings during the same time.

Mitchell also resembled those victims, the FBI has said: She was attacked after her car broke down, as they were, and her long brown hair was parted similarly.

Woods, now 64, was twice convicted for the killing, after the initial conviction was overturned by the Nevada Supreme Court. She confessed to the crime while a patient at a Louisiana mental hospital, though later recanted, according to her lawyer, Maizie Pusich.

“I’m told it was a product of wanting to get a private room,” Pusich told the AP. “She was being told she wasn’t sufficiently dangerous to qualify, and within a short period she was claiming she had killed a woman in Reno.”

Woods is in treatment in Southern California, Pusich said, and is “doing well.”

“She is delighted,” Pusich told the Reno Gazette-Journal. “She is having probably the best day of her life because she knows that this is all over.”