A man who has served 21 years in a Nebraska prison for the 1988 murders of a man and his pregnant girlfriend now argues that DNA indicates the killings were actually committed by a Colorado man.
DNA tests confirm that blood found on the kicked-in door to the Scottsbluff, Neb., home where Richard Valdez, 25, and his pregnant girlfriend, Sharon Condon, 19, were found shot to death did not belong to Jeff Boppre, who was convicted in March 1989 of killing them.
Instead, a match was made last year to John Yellowboy, Condon’s cousin, who is serving a 66-year rape and kidnapping sentence in the Limon Correctional Facility.
Boppre’s attorneys are seeking to quash his conviction or seek another trial, believing that if one was held, Boppre, 44, would be acquitted, said James Mowbray of the Nebraska Commission of Public Advocacy.
But while the new DNA does raise a question about whether Yellowboy was present at the murder scene, it does nothing to eliminate Boppre as part of the murder plot, prosecutors have argued.
And the evidence against Boppre, which included testimony from two witnesses and the letters “Jff Bope” written at the scene in the victims’ blood, doesn’t get any weaker with the revelation that someone else’s DNA was in the house.
A district court judge rejected Boppre’s request last year, and Boppre is awaiting a response from the Nebraska Supreme Court, which recently heard arguments for and against a new trial.
Yellowboy also had been in the home before, and it’s possible that he left his hair and blood there long before the murders happened.
Scottsbluff prosecutor Doug Warner did not return calls seeking comment.
Witnesses testified at Boppre’s trial that he killed Valdez and Condon because of a drug deal gone bad.
But one of the witnesses, Alan Niemann, who testified he saw Boppre commit the murders, later recanted, claiming that the prosecutor threatened to charge him with murder and gave him a script he was to memorize to prepare for trial.
Mowbray said Niemann had led authorities to the murder weapon in a muddy New Mexico creek, but it wasn’t Boppre’s gun, and he knew Yellowboy and could have been plotting with him to frame Boppre.
Part of the difficulty in proving that Boppre wasn’t the killer is that witnesses, including Niemann, keep changing their testimony
Another witness, Melissa Archibeque, originally said she was in the house at the time of the killings but didn’t see them occur. She then recanted her claim that she was in the house when the murders took place. After that, she changed her story again and said she was there and remembers hearing Yellowboy’s voice.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
