Maurice Hastings in court
Los Angeles, October 2022
Image: Screen grab from video by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office
In 1983, Roberta Wydermyer was found murdered and locked inside the trunk of her car in Los Angeles County in California. The coroner has discovered signs of sexual assault on her body and collected a bio sample off of the assailant. At the time, of course, available technology provided very few options as matching such samples to their source.
Maurice Hastings was charged with the rape and murder of Ms Wydermyer. The case was less than bulletproof from the start. Hastings who was about 30 years old at the time, based on available sources, did not have a history of such extreme violence. Some people claimed to have seen him at a completely different location at the time the crime was alleged to have occurred thus potentially providing him material alibi. Hastings himself always denied any involvement in the crime.
But we will skip the if the adequacy of the initial investigation and court trials Mr Hastings had endured. Fast forward a number of yeas, and by about 2000 it was clear that the progress in DNA analysis technologies has a chance of either further proving Hastings as the actor or proving that it was a different man who should have been charged with the crime. Thus in 2000 Hastings requested that a DNA test be performed on the bio sample in question. His request was denied and he had to wait until the Summer of 2022 to finally see the relevant authorities relent and allow the test to proceed.
The DNA test excluded Hastings as the contributor. It did, however, provide a match to another man, a curiously unnamed serial sexual predator who had on one occasion raped a woman and locked her in the trunk of her car (see the similarity)? I wonder why this man remains unnamed. Could it be that disclosing the details would make the whole situation even more embarassing for the authorities involved? Be that as it may, the true perpetrator had eventually been apprehended for a crime similar in nature to the one that Hastings undeservedly had his life stolen from him for. The anonymous serial sexual predator died in prison in 2020. Not that he should be missed but it is unfortunate that it is no longer possible to interrogate him and learn more about the whole story, including how many crimes he was allowed to get away with by virtue of not being he one in the dock for the Wydermyer case.
Ultimately, Hastings was freed in October 2022 and is now going through a court process designed to declare him "factually innocent". That is a nice gesture but, in my opinion, fully insufficient. Officials involved in impedance of the proper investigation of the case - at the very least, those who denied the DNA testing after Hastings' original 2000 request - need to face criminal charges. These charges need to include accessory after the fact to the original crime because they were busy helping the true perpetrator evade justice. Sadly, currently our society does provides so-called qualified immunity to those officials. That is a travesty that needs to be annulled.
References
Prosecutors to ask judge to clear man wrongfully convicted in brutal rape and murder of woman whose body was found in trunk
Jason Kandel, Law & Crime, 28 February 2022
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