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Stabbing, choking trial closes with focus on suspect's DNA
| Wednesday, Jun 25 2008 4:38 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Jun 26 2008 7:19 AM
The measure of a Bakersfield man’s innocence in an attempted murder case is what police didn’t find, a defense attorney argued Wednesday.
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Travell Pogue, pictured in this file photo, was convicted of stabbing and strangling his neighbor after forcing his way into her home.
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The case is about the Nov. 16, 2006, stabbing and choking of now 26-year-old Colleen Clark at her south Bakersfield home.
She was stabbed 15 times and choked so hard she pretended to be dead so her attacker would quit. Photographs show a bloody crime scene, including the assailant’s footprints in the hallway.
Clark identified her attacker as her neighbor, now 20-year-old Travell Pogue, who she said she repeatedly ignored or rebuffed his attempts to date her.
But defense attorney James Faulkner said police contacted Pogue at his home across the street within 15 minutes of the attack and they didn’t find any bloody clothes or shoes, or any scratches on Pogue.
The tennis shoes he was wearing did not match the shoe prints in Pogue’s home.
Prosecutor David Wilson, however, said Pogue had 15 minutes to change clothes and hide evidence, including turning on a washing machine to wash clothes.
A police officer testified the washing machine was running when he arrived, and no one else in his household said they turned it on.
Furthermore, Wilson said, Pogue told police he never went inside Clark’s house. But investigators found his DNA and her DNA on the knife handle left behind.
The DNA evidence was on a sock which was wrapped around the handle and then covered with electrical tape.
The chances the DNA belonged to other people were at least one in 250 trillion, the prosecutor said. The population of the earth is only 6 billion.
“Either it was him (Pogue) or he’s the unluckiest man in the world,” Wilson said.
Also a shirt that Pogue was wearing when police arrested him had a small spot that indicated both his DNA and the victim’s DNA, the prosecutor said.
That evidence was much less certain with experts only able to say neither Clark nor Pogue could be excluded from causing the DNA samples.
Faulkner said that spot could have come from an officer who touched evidence at the crime scene and then transferred it to the shirt when he frisked Pogue.
Wilson said there was no evidence of such a scenario.
The prosecutor said Clark refused as she was being taken on a hospital gurney for treatment to try to identify photographs of her attacker because she didn’t want to misidentify anyone.
Later, she did identify Pogue and stuck with that identification for the last two years, he said.
Faulkner argued the police investigation was inadequate, giving reasonable doubt about whether Pogue was responsible.
“There is no one in this room who doesn’t feel sorry for Colleen Clark,” Faulkner said.
But unless there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, Pogue should be acquitted, he said.