This brief fact sheet sets forth several troubling aspects of the prosecution’s case against Derek:


1.  Several men confronted the victim at a toga party at the 48th Street house in the days or weeks before her death and used physical force to attempt to get her into an upstairs bedroom in the house.  The men had to be forcibly removed from the party.  Derek was not involved in this incident.

2.  In the days or weeks before her death, the victim had spent at least one night in the bed of another housemate (Michael Bain) with that housemate.

3.  In another case, the Virginia Court of Appeals granted a defendant in a murder case a rare full hearing after allegations that Shaun Squyres, the lead investigator in the Barnabei case, essentially bribed him into signing a statement implicating two other individuals in the murder by conditioning a prison visit by his girlfriend on his willingness to sign the statement.

4.  One of the other housemates, David Wirth, was arrested in 1997 in Schaumburg, Illinois, on charges of aggravated assault for threatening a woman honking a car horn outside of his home with a shotgun.  Wirth pled guilty to the charge and was sentenced to supervision in September 1998.

5.  Serious questions have been raised about whether certain evidence in the case was planted.  For example, certain items were allegedly found on shore near where the victim was located.  However, testimony concerning the tides in the Lafayette River suggests that she was not placed in the water near the place she was found.  This raises the specter of evidence planting.

Untested Evidence