The missing DNA evidence was a blow to Cooper's hopes to put an end to speculation about the case. "Frankly, I was thinking if I didn't do anything else at least I would put to rest these endless post conviction relief applications that seem to be coming every other year, eating up a lot of judicial time, and just raising questions that I hoped could be put to rest. But as we know, the best laid plansit did just the opposite."
In fact, as he told the Crime Library, the whole exercise raised, among those who entertain such thoughts, "all sorts of presumptions, although not just the DNA evidence in this case, the autopsy slides for a whole drawer were missing because of Hugo damage in Charleston back in 1989."
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| Former Sumter County Sheriff Parnell |
In 1998, during a hearing on the petition, Young raised hopes when he suggested that some of evidence might have found its way into the home of former Sheriff Parnell. That too, however, turned out to be a dead end.
"I got the same SLED agent who had rooted around in the basements ofthe medical university in Charleston for a good many days trying to find the slides, sent him into the attic of the old sheriff's house and he rooted around up there for a morning or two in the hot summer time," Cooper said. "He probably hasn't forgiven me yet, and really didn't find anything of significant. I mean there was nothing of evidentiary value, some articles from detective magazines and things like that, and then maybe copies of something but nothing of evidentiary value that had not been found out before."
From that point until this year, the case languished.
"I'm not really sure why it languished at that point," Cooper said. Part of it, perhaps, was that Young was pursuing other leads in the case, while at the same time personnel changes at the Attorney General's office had changed the make-up of the prosecution team.
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