Fingerprint re-examination cracked cold murder case, police say

By Brendan Kirby

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    MOBILE, Alabama (WALA) — It was May 2, 2011, when 62-year-old William Willett suffered a fatal blast from a shotgun during a carjacking on Duval Street.

Mobile police found Willett’s Toyota Corolla a few hours later, but they had no suspects and leads dried up. Eventually, the case got put with the dozens of others in the cold case file.

Recently, Sgt. Nick Crepeau took a fresh look at the file. Since September, he has been the sole homicide investigator assigned to the Mobile Police Department’s cold case unit. While DNA evidence often leads to breaks in cold cases, Crepeau said in this case, it was old-fashioned police work – a re-examination late last year of fingerprints taken from the crime scene got a hit.

“Fingerprint evidence is one of the, you know, one of the oldest forms of identifying suspects,” he said. “And so, yeah, just to kind of come back to the basics of solving the crime.”

A Mobile County grand jury issued a secret indictment earlier this year charging Labaron Tyrell Lockhart with murder in the 10-year-old case. Police arrested Lockhart, 26, on Wednesday.

Lockhart was just 16 in 2011 and was not in the system when police initially examined fingerprints. He has been in the system plenty since, with arrests between 2013 and last year on charges ranging from distribution of drugs to possession of a forged instrument to carrying a gun without a permit.

In February, Mobile County Circuit Judge Jay York revoked Lockhart’s probation on a drug conviction after hearing testimony that he moved without informing his probation officer. The judge sentenced him to the time he already had served at Mobile County Metro Jail and then released him.

Lockhart was connected to a different homicide, in 2016, in Theodore. Someone in that case shot a 19-year-old man named Deon Dickinson on Dan Williams Road. Authorities never charged Lockhart, but he testified for the prosecution against the man who was charged, Demarrius Lamontez Lott. The jury in that case found Lott not guilty.

Court records indicate that a witness told investigators that a couple of days before the shooting, he overheard Lockhart and the defendant discussing a plan to rob the victim. That witness also told investigators that Lockhart gave the defendant his gun.

In the Willett case, Crepeau said, there was nothing tying Lockhart to the killing until the recent fingerprint hit.

“He was not on the radar originally,” he said. “It wasn’t until this fingerprint match was made that he became a suspect.”

Making the arrest is only half the job, though. Prosecutors now have to get a conviction, a task Mobile County Chief Assistant District Attorney Keith Blackwood acknowledged is harder with the passage of time.

“That does present some unique challenges. However, these are things that are accounted for when we reopen the case and re-investigate. We make sure that all of that evidence from 10 years ago is preserved.”

Blackwood said the District Attorney’s Office has taken measures to ensure witnesses will come to court.

“Witnesses are always an issue in every case, especially with the passage of time,” he said. “It does take witnesses to prosecute crime. And that’s something that we deal with every day in trying to get witnesses here to testify.”

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