EVERETT — A Snohomish County jury could be weighing Thursday whether genetic testing and years of police work have identified the person who killed Patti Berry in 1995.
Lawyers were scheduled to make closing arguments Thursday in the first-degree murder trial of Danny Ross Giles. Once that happens, jury deliberations would begin.
Giles, 46, has denied any involvement in the killing. His attorneys contend the murder charge was spawned by a flawed investigation that suffered from tunnel vision.
Berry, 26, was last seen alive early on July 31, 1995, leaving the strip club where she worked. She left behind a daughter, then 2.
Prosecutors rested their case Tuesday with a forensic scientist’s testimony that the evidence suggests Berry was ambushed while filling a leaky tire on her car. Jurors have heard she was stabbed as many as 18 times in the throat and face, put in the backseat of her car and dumped in a patch of woods just south of the Everett Mall.
Giles’ attorneys expected to finish up with their witnesses Thursday morning. On Wednesday they called two women who had worked with Berry in strip clubs. Both spoke with police after the homicide. One of the women Wednesday offered little testimony. With the jury out of the room, she said her ability to remember details may be impaired by drugs. The other woman who testified has long since found a different career. She recalled that Berry, while drinking, had told her that she planned to blackmail some of the men who paid her for private encounters away from the club. She also testified that she didn’t take what Berry said all that seriously.
Giles, a sex offender and thief who has spent much of his life cycling in and out of prison, first became a suspect in 2008 when trace amounts of DNA on the steering wheel of Berry’s blood-stained car were matched with his genetic profile. The chance of a random match to Giles was calculated at 1 in 580 million.
Further testing found DNA consistent with Giles’ profile on the cuffs of Berry’s pants and on the driver’s seat headrest.
Prosecutors also went to lengths to demonstrate that Giles told a series of lies when detectives from the sheriff’s office cold-case unit in 2011 confronted him with DNA test results and their suspicions. Jurors heard portions of recordings made during those interviews.
Giles repeatedly told detectives he didn’t kill Berry. He said that the mere presence of his DNA didn’t prove anything. He also said it is possible that he had sex with Berry at some point, but that he may have forgotten.
Giles denied carrying knives. With the court’s approval, prosecutors presented jurors with the bare details from arrests where police found him with blades. A woman who knew Giles through her husband described the knives she saw him routinely carrying in the 1990s. She also said Giles admired the Green River killer, in part because the victims included women with prostitution histories.
Giles denied ever being where Berry’s body was found. That conflicted with testimony from people who hired Giles to work for a landscaping company in the mid 1990s. The crew that Giles was on regularly used the wooded area where Berry’s body was found as an open-air restroom and as a place to dump grass clippings, jurors were told.
The jury saw photographs of Giles from the mid 1990s. He had a mullet and a moustache. They also saw a police sketch, created in 1999. It was based on a description from a young man who recalled seeing a man with a mullet and a moustache hosing off blood at the car wash near where Berry’s vehicle was found in 1995.
Nine years after Todd Horton helped detectives prepare the sketch, DNA testing introduced Giles as a suspect, jurors were told.
Horton, now 35, testified that Giles is the man he spotted all those years ago, although he acknowledged he’d also picked out at least two other people over the years as resembling the man in the sketch.
On Wednesday, public defender Linda Coburn asked Horton’s high school buddy, Daniel Simons, whether he remembered seeing somebody washing off blood at the car wash. He didn’t, although Horton said they both saw it happening.
Simons also said Horton was no longer his friend, and among their friends he had a reputation for not telling the truth.
Deputy prosecutor Bob Langbehn asked Simons whether he’d told detectives that Horton has a “photographic memory?” Further, didn’t he also say Horton has an uncanny ability for remembering faces?
That’s true, Simons said.
As for spotting somebody hosing off blood in 1995 “you aren’t here to say that it didn’t happen, just that you don’t remember?” Langbehn asked.
That’s correct, Simons said.
Scott North: 425-339-3431; north@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @snorthnews.
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