An Oregon man will get more than $14 million as part of a series of settlements after he was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned.

In 2011, a Coos County jury found Nicholas McGuffin guilty for the death of his girlfriend, Leah Freeman. McGuffin was released in 2019 and last month became the first person in Oregon history to be granted a certificate of innocence.

As part of the deal made public in a court filing Monday, the Oregon State Police forensic lab agreed to pay $9 million after failing to disclose DNA evidence in the decades-old homicide. The city of Coquille and its police department, which led the investigation, also agreed to pay $5 million.

The settlements come after allegations that state and local law enforcement conspired to implicate McGuffin in the murder of Freeman and undermined potential evidence that could have led to other suspects, all while courting national media attention.

“I’m still trying to put my life back together after all this time,” McGuffin said Monday. “I just don’t want anyone to forget about Leah because her killer is still out there.”

None of the defendants immediately responded to requests for comment.

As part of the agreement, neither the police nor the state lab admit to any wrongdoing. But a federal civil rights lawsuit McGuffin filed in 2020 documents a host of alleged errors by investigators. That lawsuit accused police and forensic scientists of fabricating and suppressing evidence, dubious criminal profiling from a self-proclaimed expert and engaging in a conspiracy to convict McGuffin while ignoring DNA evidence that may have pointed to Freeman’s killer.

“Nicholas McGuffin was not in any way involved in the kidnapping and murder of Leah Freeman and is completely innocent of the crime,” attorney Janis Puracal wrote in court documents on McGuffin’s behalf. “Nonetheless, McGuffin has been subjected to more than 20 years of hardships, including nearly a decade of incarceration, for a crime that he did not commit.”

Freeman’s disappearance

On June 28, 2000, 15-year-old Leah Freeman was hanging out with her friend Cherie Mitchell at her house in downtown Coquille. She’d planned to meet up with her 18-year-old boyfriend, McGuffin, later that night for a double date. But when McGuffin went to pick her up, Freeman wasn’t there. Mitchell told him that she and Freeman had gotten into an argument, and Freeman stormed off on foot sometime before 9 p.m.

Coquille is a small city in Coos County, Oregon. It sits up against the Coquille River, just a few miles from the coast, and is surrounded by forest.

When Freeman left her friend’s house, she walked in the direction of the high school on the north side of town. It was a summer evening, with teenagers hanging out all across the city.

McGuffin checked her house, spoke with her mom and sister, went into local businesses where their friends would frequent, and searched back and forth across town for hours trying to find her. A number of people saw or encountered McGuffin during his search, according to court records and testimony, including two Coquille police officers who pulled him over that night as he searched for Freeman.

After five hours with no signs of her, McGuffin drove past Freeman’s house again and finally saw something that gave him hope: a light on in her bedroom window. Assuming she’d gone home, McGuffin drove to his place and went to bed around 2:30 a.m.

The relief was short-lived. The next morning, McGuffin got a call from Freeman’s mother — Leah still wasn’t home. He got back into his car and began searching again, this time with Freeman’s family in tow. The group went to the Coquille Police Department to report her missing, but officers waived them off. She’d been missing for less than 12 hours, and there was still a possibility that she’d turn up.

It would take law enforcement days after her disappearance to begin their search in earnest.

The afternoon of June 30, 2000, McGuffin gave his first official statement to police about Freeman’s disappearance, recounting his search two days earlier.

“I didn’t know if she was mad or if she was depressed or what was going on,” McGuffin said, according to a transcript of the interview. “I just don’t get it. She doesn’t walk off.”

Shortly after Freeman disappeared, a passerby found her right tennis shoe near a gas station in Coquille. Days later, her left shoe was found by Coos County Sheriff’s Deputy Kip Oswald near Hudson Ridge, a forested area miles away from where the first shoe was found. Investigators noted the left sneaker had bloodstains on the shoelace, exterior sole, and the interior heel and ankle area.

On Aug. 5, 2000, some five weeks after she went missing, Freeman’s body was found in a remote, wooded area on an embankment of the Coquille River. She was clothed, but missing her underwear, shoes and one sock. By the time she was found, Freeman’s body was significantly decomposed — making it challenging to recover forensic evidence.

As part of the investigation, law enforcement sent Freeman’s shoes to the Oregon State Police crime lab. It was the early years of DNA analysis, and testing was much less advanced. The lab analyst tested Freeman’s shoes but didn’t report back anything that could contribute much to the case.

Law enforcement quickly honed in on McGuffin as their primary suspect, his attorneys said. They interviewed him, her friends and family, but without any eyewitnesses to Freeman’s disappearance and lacking forensic evidence, the investigation stalled out.

The case languished for about a decade before Mark Dannels took over as Coquille’s police chief in 2008 and pledged to solve Freeman’s murder. Dannels soon connected with the Vidocq Society. The Philadelphia-based group of sleuths is made up of people with law enforcement backgrounds who help police work on cold cases, according to its website.

Richard Walter, a founding member of the group and a self-proclaimed expert in forensic psychology, traveled to Oregon to consult on the case. He soon developed a theory of the events around Freeman’s death that pointed to McGuffin.

ABC’s 20/20 television program was also given behind-the-scenes access to the investigation by police. The episode, which aired ahead of the trial, amplified law enforcement’s version of the case, and the show’s producers even tagged along with police, recording as officers arrested McGuffin. Walter’s assessment of the case was included in the 20/20 episode.

In July 2011, a jury rendered a non-unanimous verdict against McGuffin, voting 10-2 that he was guilty of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and three years of post-prison supervision.

Years later, Walter was profiled in New York Magazine, which discredited his bona fides as an expert cold case investigator. The article alleges he fabricated evidence in other cases and falsified his credentials. Walter sued the magazine for defamation and lost.

The Vidocq Society also settled with McGuffin for an undisclosed amount on Monday.

‘Scandalously incomplete’ DNA testing

When Freeman’s tennis shoes were sent to the Oregon State Police crime lab in late August 2000, analyst Mary Krings conducted DNA testing on both sneakers.

On the right shoe, Krings took cuttings from inside, running the sample through a series of machines and analyzing the results. In her report, Krings noted that she only found Freeman’s DNA.

On the left shoe, Krings found DNA from Freeman and an unidentified male. In her final report, she said the male DNA came from Deputy Kip Oswald, the officer who found and handled the shoe as it went into evidence.

Susan Hormann, another analyst at the lab and Krings’ supervisor, reviewed the analysis of both shoes.

When the case was reopened a decade later, prosecutors entered those written reports into evidence. That, along with testimony from a lab criminalist and Coquille Police Chief Dannels, cemented the theory that there was no evidence to tie any other suspects to the case outside of McGuffin.

But it wasn’t true.

After his conviction, McGuffin filed a 2015 appeal for post-conviction relief, a last option that people have to challenge their conviction under certain circumstances. During that case, his defense attorneys and Coos County District Attorney Paul Frasier would learn the Oregon State Police crime lab had suppressed information about the DNA it collected.

According to a review of the lab’s records by McGuffin’s legal team, Krings found unidentified male DNA on both shoes. The DNA didn’t match McGuffin, Deputy Oswald or anyone else interviewed during the course of the investigation. The unexplained DNA never made its way into any report and was never shared with McGuffin’s defense team.

After this information came out as part of the post-conviction case, Frasier took the unusual step of having an outside expert review the lab’s data. In his report, California-based DNA consultant Thomas Fedor excoriated the Oregon lab’s actions and called its analysis of the right shoe “scandalously incomplete.” Fedor found that the omission of the male DNA from the report was in conflict with the lab’s own casework protocols.

Not only was that DNA report problematic, Fedor noted, but he could not find documentation that Hormann — the supervisor — reviewed her employee’s work.

On the left shoe, Fedor said the lab’s report should have excluded Deputy Oswald as a possible DNA contributor.

“I’m flabbergasted at the depth of bad judgment times three that was exhibited in the 2000 report,” Fedor wrote in an email to Frasier. “Maybe the analyst continued to be negligent or incompetent. That the technical reviewer also missed the exclusion, however, is inexcusable.”

Despite Fedor’s criticisms, the lab argued in 2017 emails to Frasier that it could not say if Krings and Hormann made a mistake in their analysis.

“It’s difficult to understand the conclusion that was made, as none of our current staff was here at the time the analysis was completed,” DNA Supervisor Stephenie Winter Sermeno wrote to Frasier. “Science continues to evolve and improve, and the interpretation of the [DNA] profile based on our current knowledge led to a different conclusion in regard to that profile. Again, I can’t say that the original interpretation is an error.”

Hours later, Fraiser responded, questioning the lab’s distinction.

“We have to remember that when I tried this case back in 2011, the evidence presented was that male DNA on that shoe was consistent with Oswald,” Fraiser wrote.

“We created at trial the impression that there was no unknown DNA in the case. Now we know it is not true. We do have unknown male DNA in the case, and the defendant is excluded.”

Frasier said that investigators would try to find the source of the unknown male DNA on the shoe. If they could not, he suspected, a judge would likely toss out McGuffin’s conviction and order a new trial.

“I doubt OSP will want to see that in the press,” he wrote.

By late 2019, when Senior Circuit Court Judge Patricia Sullivan ruled to vacate McGuffin’s conviction, the judge found prosecutors and the defense attorneys at trial had effectively made the same mistake: not scrutinizing the results from the Oregon State Police crime lab.

“Male DNA was detected on the victim’s shoes during testing in 2000 that was not the defendant’s,” Sullivan wrote. “This information was not disclosed at trial. DNA from another male is material and exculpatory.”

Sullivan wrote that the prosecution’s expert, Kathy Wilcox, a criminalist for the state police, testified that Freeman’s DNA was the only DNA the lab found on the right shoe. Wilcox also told jurors the only DNA found on Freeman’s left shoe came from the victim herself and Deputy Oswald, who found the shoe.

“These conclusions were incorrect,” Sullivan wrote, noting that male DNA on the shoes that didn’t belong to McGuffin was known as early as 2001.

In 2017, the lab issued yet another report on Freeman’s shoes, “and determined there was additional unknown male DNA in the tested materials,” Sullivan stated. “There is a possibility that the same unknown male contributed DNA to both the left and right shoes.”

Oregon’s forensic lab falls under the purview of the state police. Despite that close relationship, staff at the crime lab often note that they aren’t beholden to any outcome in an investigation. McGuffin’s attorneys have argued that his case is a prime example of the blurred lines between forensic science in the state and law enforcement. Puracal has leveled similar complaints about the state crime lab in the cases of Robert Atrops, who was convicted of a cold case murder in July, and Jesse Johnson, who served decades in Oregon prisons before having his murder conviction thrown out.

In 2010, nearly a decade after Freeman’s case stalled, the state forensic lab recovered several hairs from the clothes she wore on the night she died. Investigators wanted them analyzed.

In a March 15, 2010, email, Hormann warned a Coquille police lieutenant about the potential ramifications should they move forward with getting the hairs tested. Hairs can be easily transferred, she noted, and there’s no way to tell when or how the hairs got there. Hormann also foreshadowed the result’s possible negative effects for the case.

“You are almost guaranteed to find foreign hairs in a trace exam,” Hormann wrote. “This ends up giving the defense the bushy-haired stranger they are looking for.”

The test, Horman seemed to suggest, could weaken the case law enforcement was building against McGuffin by pointing to another person.

Attorneys with the Oregon Department of Justice, which defended Hormann, Kriggs and others in the case, argued in court filings that the email was not intended to stop new evidence from being developed.

Ultimately, the federal judge overseeing the case wasn’t convinced. The judge ruled in favor of McGuffin by allowing his civil rights lawsuit to advance toward trial.

Years passed before McGuffin’s attorneys eventually got the hairs tested as part of his post-conviction case. They were Freeman’s hairs.

“Many other states have some kind of oversight body that is there as a check on the lab, precisely because of cases like Mr. McGuffin’s,” Puracal, his attorney, said in a statement. “We are seeing more and more wrongful convictions because of a lab culture that is controlled by the police, rather than the science.”

A case left unsolved

In the final minutes of ABC’s 20/20 special, television producers show McGuffin’s arrest in 2008. He’s standing on the side of the road, in front of his house, with officers surrounding him. As they cuff him, they ask if he knows what this is about.

“Well obviously, it’s about the murder of Leah Freeman,” McGuffin responds.

“Did you do it?” an officer asked.

“No, I didn’t do it,” McGuffin replied. He said the reason he was being arrested was because “they have nothing else to go on and I’m the boyfriend.”

Law enforcement from the Coquille, Coos County and state have spent years trying to find out what happened to Leah Freeman. Outside groups have stepped in to provide assistance, and community members have pushed investigators to hold someone accountable.

Monday’s settlement raises a question about the results of all those efforts. So far, it has amounted to at least a $14 million settlement, with potentially more on the way. And today, Oregon law enforcement is no closer than they were 25 years ago to getting justice for Freeman.

On Aug. 1, an Oregon judge granted McGuffin the state’s first certificate of innocence for a wrongful conviction, stating that he was “innocent of all crimes” before sealing reams of trial documents that had tormented McGuffin for decades — police reports, witness statements, DNA lab results — forever.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/22/oregon-police-crime-coos-county-nicholas-mcguffin-lawsuit/