The 22-year-old eyewitness testified that around lunchtime on Jan. 9, 2007, she went to buy crack from Stefanski, who needed to grab more drugs from her stash in an alley off the 600 block of Washburn Ave.
The young woman followed her. As she crept around the corner into the alley, the eyewitness said, she heard someone yell, and she watched Golden pull a gun from his waistband and shoot Stefanski once in the back of the head.
"I glanced for a second, and I ran," she said during a pre-trial hearing.
She followed the drug world's code of silence until she was arrested on a prostitution charge and taken to the Southern District police station for questioning. Both the eyewitness and Detective Frederick W. Daum IV testified that no quid pro quo was offered. But after she gave Daum information on the murder, officers let her go without filing prostitution charges.
O'Leary, Golden's attorney, introduced the idea at trial that Stefanski's friend - the man whose DNA was later identified on her fingernails - was the real killer. The eyewitness is "not going to say [he] killed her because she's his friend," O'Leary said in opening statements. The victim's sisters were afraid and had to be locked up to guarantee their testimony "because the real killer is still out there," she said.
But with no evidence linking the friend to the crime, the idea didn't stick.
In interviews, jurors said they had focused almost entirely on the eyewitness testimony.
Two jurors, who requested anonymity because the case involves gang members, said the DNA evidence could be "easily explained away" with "a little bit of investigation." They didn't think it would have made much difference in their deliberations.
"There seemed to have been motive," one juror said. "Two or three witnesses testified that he threatened the person. One witness placed him at the scene. It just seemed pretty cut and dry, and the defendant had nothing that really counteracted that."
But a third said it would have changed her verdict because it opened the possibility of a different version of events than the one prosecutors presented.
Margaret Mead, a Baltimore defense attorney who was not involved in the Golden trial, said the DNA evidence could have totally altered how jurors viewed the case. "This screams for a new trial," she said. "It would have completely changed the trial because the nail clippings would have given the jury another suspect. ... And the problem is that the other suspect was not evaluated, not interviewed, and not investigated. It raises doubts about the conviction."
Daum, the detective, testified at trial that he had spoken with the man whose DNA was found on Stefanski, but he refused to cooperate or be interviewed. The man was convicted on gun charges and a probation violation after Stefanski's killing and is in federal prison today.
