By Mark Gutglueck
William Richards, who after four trials in 1997 was wrongfully convicted of his wife’s 1993 murder and spent 23 years in prison, this week prevailed in a federal civil rights action against San Bernardino County and was awarded $25.4 million in total damages for what he endured.
The Richards case has grown infamous as a demonstration of the degree to which the law enforcement structure in San Bernardino County will go in stretching facts and utilizing questionable and even manufactured evidence to obtain a conviction.
It took the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office and prosecutor Michael Risley four tries to convict Richards, changing the approach and some of the facts alleged each time, with the first three go-rounds ending in mistrials or deadlocks in which the jury was unable to reach a verdict. In the fourth trial, the eight-man and four-woman jury again deadlocked. It was only after the judge requested that they deliberate further that on July 8, 1997, Richards was convicted.
From the outgo, Richards’ story has never changed.
He claimed he had returned the evening of August 10, 1993 from his machinist’s job in Corona at about 11:50 p.m. to find the motorhome in which he and his wife lived on the five-acre Summit Valley property they owned dark and empty. The couple was living in the motorhome while efforts to construct a house on the property were ongoing. He went to look for his wife and found her dead in a pool of blood on another part of their property between the motor home and the Santa Fe railroad line.
He claimed he turned his wife’s body over and cradled her before summoning assistance.
Then-Deputy District Attorney Mike Risley prosecuted Richards each time.
In all of his prosecutions of William Richards, Risley suggested there was strife in the Richards’ 22-year long marriage, an allegation it is now acknowledged was made up out of whole cloth and which was never backed up with any evidence of substance. Risley put on an expert witness who testified splatters of Pamela Richards’ blood that were found on William Richards’ shoes and clothes were tell-tale evidence indicating William Richards had wielded the cinder block used to crush his wife’s head.
Risley marshaled further evidence, accumulated by sheriff’s deputies and detectives, showing no car tracks or footprints other than those of Richards, his wife or the detectives and deputies or their vehicles were present on the property.
As the prosecution of Richards evolved, Risley displayed for jurors a “bite mark” on Pamela Richards’ hand and then followed that up with testimony from a forensic expert who claimed that by his analysis the bite could have only come from two percent of the population, including Richards, who had a certain peculiarity to their teeth.
The coup-de-grace was a tuft of 15 light-blue fibers found in a tear in the victim’s fingernail. According to Risley, the fibers matched those of the shirt Richards was wearing the night of the murder.
But there were some major discrepancies with the case, despite Risley’s ostentatious show of confidence in front of the jury. The first of the four times Richards was to be tried, the judge declared a mistrial before the matter was presented to a jury. In 1994, the first time the case went the distance, a jury deadlocked 6-6. A second full trial netted what has been variously recorded as a 10-2 or 11-1 verdict for conviction. On the last complete go-round, Richards was convicted.
As in the first two complete trials, the third jury to hear the entire case reported that it too was deadlocked after seven full days of deliberation. The jurors, encouraged to return to deliberations, delivered a unanimous guilty verdict on the eighth day.
Richards, who had had been in custody since his arrest shortly after his wife’s death, was remanded to prison upon sentencing and there he remained until he was provisionally released in 2016. Four years later, after the case and all that it consisted of was reexamined in depth, Richards was declared factually innocent of the charges, a resolution that goes well beyond the standard of “not guilty” in which it is deemed that the prosecution did not establish guilt, but a determination that Richards, in fact, was not his wife’s murderer, despite the consideration that he had spent two decades in three years incarcerated on the basis of the accusation that he had done just that and jury’s finding of guilt in 1997.

There was very little about the Richards case that was clearly cut, other than that Pamela Richards was murdered and the entire circumstance lacked clarity. With the prosecution’s introduction of what has since been demonstrated as discredited evidence, the case is now widely recognized as a textbook example of prosecutorial overreach bordering on, or outright crossing the line into, prosecutorial misconduct. Nevertheless, the district attorney’s office on an official level has refused to acknowledge that anything improper occurred, despite the court’s eventual arrival, after a tortuous and circuitous journey, at a finding of Richards’ actual – factual – innocence. For years, Risley, who retired in 2001 and then was briefly brought out of retirement in 2017 to consult with regard to what the prosecutor’s office should do with regard to the Richards case – suggesting that the case should be reopened so that Richards could be convicted once more, this time without the benefit of the evidence that had been manufactured and used against the defendant previously.
The Richards case was beset with a myriad of difficulties from the outset, which in and of themselves resulted in the three mistrials. While Richards was serving his 25-years-to-life sentence, further information emerged which cast, according to San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Brian McCarville and subsequently the California Supreme Court, grave doubt upon his guilt, his conviction and the validity of much of the evidence used to obtain that conviction, exacerbated by evidence that indicated the presence of a person or persons unknown at the murder scene.
An obvious complicating factor was that for more than eight hours after Richards discovered his wife dead, investigators with the sheriff’s department failed to secure the scene of the crime, such that Pamela Richards’ body was disturbed by coyotes before a team of detectives accompanied by deputies arrived there the next morning. After their arrival, they left footprints and tire tracks around the scene that made ascertaining whether there was anyone else there around the time that Richards was murdered a virtual impossibility. They then made misrepresentations about that very fact when the matter went to trial.

Even more problematic was the inexplicable delay – which was ultimately explained away as sheriff’s investigators adhering to their department’s protocol – in initiating while they had Pamela Richards’ fresh corpse at their disposal a simple forensic analysis that would have provided a reliable determination of the time of death.

As a consequence of the wider temporal window that Risley was able to allege as the timeframe within which Pamela Richards died, investigators established that it was possible for someone to drive the nearly 56 mile distance between Richards’ workplace in Corona to the Richards’ property in Summit Valley, what would normally at that hour of the evening be a 61-minute drive, at breakneck speed, exceeding the speed limit the entire way, to arrive there in just under 48 minutes, within what Risley claimed, falsely it is now known, the span of time that would have allowed for the possibility that it was Richards who killed his wife.
At the 1997 trial as at the previous ones, Risley built upon the foundation of the strife in the Richards’ marriage that he, it is now acknowledged, fabricated as part of his false narrative of Richards’ guilt. He brought in forensic experts to tell the jury that a “bite mark” on Pamela Richards’ hand could only have come from two percent of the population that included William Richards.
Also at that fourth trial, Risley presented to the jurors the coup de grâce, the most crucial piece of evidence needed to convince jurors to convict Richards, a tuft of fibers lodged into one of Pamela Richard’s fingernails.
Risley used the tuft, consisting of 15 light-blue fibers said to match the shirt Richards was wearing that fateful night and found in a crack in the nail of Pamela Richards’ right middle finger, to allege William Richards was the perpetrator of the vicious attack that killed his wife, and that she, from the grave, was pointing directly at her killer.
Upon the reading of the verdict, Richards was whisked away pending sentencing, which was subsequently set as 25 years to life.
Despite the verdict and the sentence, there was a core of individuals who knew Richards and his wife who insisted the verdict had been a terrible miscarriage of justice.
Among those passionately inveighing against the verdict was Pamela Richards’ sister, Kathy Olejnik. Olejnik went to her grave in 2003 swearing her brother-in-law did not murder her sister, leaving behind multiple notarized affidavits asserting her conviction “that William Richards did not kill or murder my sister.”
In 1999, the California Innocence Project was founded at the California Western School of Law in San Diego, and was dedicated to reviewing in depth convictions, in particular those in murder cases, where it appeared there had been a miscarriage of justice. As one of its first projects, it took up Richards’ case in 1999. It would take lawyers and staff members 17 years to unwind what Risley and his support network had done. Risley’s team included sheriff’s deputies, lab technicians, and a set of expert witnesses who made a convincing show at the final trial. Some of those now acknowledge they were mistaken or overly accommodating of Risley, or both.
Five years after he obtained the Richards conviction, Risley acceded to the position of assistant district attorney in San Bernardino County, the second highest ranking official in the office. The Richards conviction was a stellar feather in his cap and he had particular and personal reason to not want it overturned. When the Innocence Project began pressing for a reexamination of the case and asked for forensic tests such as the analysis of DNA present on the murder weapon, the district attorney’s office resisted those requests, asserting such verifications were unnecessary and improper, a curious position to take given the prosecution’s expressed confidence in the accuracy of the jury’s verdict.
Slowly, the Innocence Project, in the continuing face of strident opposition from the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, was able to get court authorization to have some forensic tests undertaken, such as the analysis of DNA on the cinderblock used to crush Pamela Richards’ skull. That DNA did not match the victim nor that of her husband. In 2009, the Innocence Project was able to obtain a hearing before San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Brian McCarville to reexamine the evidence used at Richards’ trial and the validity thereof.
Innocence Project lawyers demonstrated that Risley had provided prosecution and defense experts with incomplete information and poor photos of the injuries to Pamela Richards and withheld from them other exculpatory evidence. The more comprehensive evidence demonstrated the “bite mark” was similar to other injuries on Pamela Richards’ body and the shape of the injury matched tools found at the crime scene.
In January 2009 two of the dental forensic experts that had testified for the prosecution during Richards’ 1997 trial were subpoenaed to testify in the hearing before Judge McCarville and acknowledged the testimony they gave at trial was “scientifically inaccurate.” Both testified that Richards could not have made the alleged bite mark on the victim. A third dental expert testified that Richards was not a match and that the mark found on the body might not have been a bite mark. A fourth forensic expert asserted that if the wound on the victim’s hand was a bite mark, it could not have been made by Richards. He also questioned whether the wound was even a bite mark.
Innocence Project attorneys then turned to the fiber evidence Risley had relied upon.
Photos of Pamela’s body taken just after the autopsy clearly show no fibers present in the crack in her fingernail. Days later, when several of her fingers were severed and delivered to criminalist Daniel Gregonis for tests, Gregonis made a video which shows him removing a rather large light-blue fiber from Pamela’s nail. “That fiber evidence was critical to Richards’ conviction and it was not present on Pamela’s fingernail when it was initially examined,” California Innocence Co-founder Jan Stiglitz told McCarville.
After the Innocence Project’s presentation, which included the questioning of witnesses by Stiglitz and lawyers Mario Conte and Alex Simmons, a request to throw out Richards’ 1997 conviction was made. McCarville on August 10, 2009, sixteen years to the day after the murder of Pamela Richards, found that the new evidence pointed “unerringly to innocence” and he granted the petition for a writ of habeas corpus, the vacation of the conviction and a new trial.
The district attorney’s office, however, appealed McCarville’s decision. The appellate court reversed McCarville, and California Innocence Project appealed the matter to the California Supreme Court. The California Supreme Court found the case every bit as difficult as had the jurists who previously considered the evidence. Three of the State Supreme Court’s members found the Innocence Project’s arguments compelling and persuasive, determining that Richards’ conviction was based on faulty or erroneous information, testimony, evidence or presentation of that evidence. The other four members of the court, however, signed an opinion that “the petitioner has failed to establish that any of the evidence offered at his 1997 trial was false” and further that “his newly discovered evidence does not ‘point unerringly to innocence or reduced culpability.’”

Since the defense did not reach the threshold of proving to a majority of the California Supreme Court that the evidence used to convict Richards was “false,” the court majority reasoned, the new evidence did not reach the point of indicating innocence, and the habeas corpus relief therefore was not be granted.
The Innocence Project went back to the drawing boards, this time taking its battle on behalf of Richards out of the Halls Of Justice and directly to the California Legislature, where its representatives lobbied for the passage of a new California law that would allow expert witnesses to recant their testimony and such a recantation to be deemed indicative of “false evidence.” Such a law was sponsored and signed into law.
The Innocence Project then utilized the new tools at its command to reapply for the vacation of the conviction, based upon having established that the bite mark testimony was false evidence and that the fibers were planted into Pamela Richard’s fingernail during the process of the criminal investigation or otherwise ended up there by some form of gross mishandling of the evidence.
Under the parameters of the new law, the California Supreme Court took up the case again and reversed the conviction in a 7-0 decision handed down on May 26, 2016. Richards, who had been removed from the California State Prison in Tehachapi to the West Valley Detention Center, was released from that jail on June 21, 2016, walking free for the first time in nearly two decades.
On June 28, 2016 Richards was present in Judge Lisa Rogan’s courtroom, at which point the murder charges were formally dismissed against him.