Free Tyrone Noling

The Portage County Sheriff's department, with the assistance of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification (BCI), conducted an extensive investigation of the crime scene, the Hartig home. The bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Hartig, and the state of the Hartig home when the Sheriff's deputies arrived after the bodies were discovered by Jim Davis, son of next-door neighbor Marianne Davis, were captured on videotape. The videotape was played to the jury at trial and was admitted into evidence. The videotape shows the bodies of the Hartigs resting near each other near their kitchen table. The videotape also shows drawers and cabinet doors opened throughout the house in what appears to be a careful search for something. The videotape shows in an open drawer in one bedroom an open watch case containing a watch and throughout the house televisions and radios and other such items remain in place. Sheriffs' reports indicate that nothing was taken from the house, including the Hartigs' rings and wallets, which were still on the bodies.

Despite the obvious evidence of a careful and extensive search of the Hartig house, no fingerprints of Tyrone Noling and his alleged accomplices were found by law enforcement officers on any of the innumerable surfaces the assailant must have touched, including doors, drawers, tables, and shell casings.

Law enforcement officers recovered a cigarette butt in front of the Hartig property and had it analyzed for a DNA comparison with the DNA of Tyrone Noling and his alleged accomplices. No match was found. The Hartigs did not smoke.

A witness called the Portage County Sheriff's department and said that on 4/5/90 at approximately 4:40 p. m. he witnessed a white male in his early thirties, with black hair driving a light blue mid sized car at a high rate of speed away from the general area of the murders. This information was not used at Tyrone Noling's trial.

A .25 caliber Browning automatic pistol was taken by Tyrone Noling during his robbery of the Hugheses on April 4, 1990. He used the Browning in his robbery of the Murphys on April 5, 1990. In fact, the Browning accidentally discharged during the Murphy robbery and left a slug in the floor and a discharged cartridge on the floor, both of which were recovered by the Alliance Police Department.

Tyrone's alleged accomplices provided statements and, ultimately, trial testimony concerning the alleged murder weapon. Pretrial statements by Gary St. Clair and trial testimony from Butch Wolcott suggested that the murder weapon was the Browning stolen in the Hughes robbery. However, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (BCI) performed tests comparing the slugs from the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Hartig and shell casings found at the scene with the slug and shell casing recovered from the Murphys and test slugs and shell casings from the recovered Browning. BCI determined that the Browning that Tyrone robbed from the Hugheses and used in the Murphy robbery was NOT the Hartig murder weapon.

Alleged accomplice Joey Dalesandro was the prosecution's key witness on the issue of the murder weapon. Faced with incontrovertible forensic evidence that the Browning was not the murder weapon, Prosecutors invented evidence. Prosecutors got Joey to testify that Tyrone had two .25 caliber automatics. He did not testify where the second gun came from. Joey testified at trial that it was not the Browning but a mysterious, phantom second pistol that was used by Tyrone to murder the Hartigs. However, examining Joey's testimony carefully, and tracing the chain of custody of the purported murder weapon, one can only conclude from Joey's trial testimony that Tyrone had only one gun--the Browning he got from the Hugheses and used in the Murphy robbery--and that that gun could not have been the murder weapon.

Joey Dalesandro testified at trial that when Tyrone and Gary St. Clair emerged from the Hartig residence after supposedly murdering the Hartigs, the murder weapon was smoking and that Tyrone put the smoking gun in the glovebox of Joey's car. Since Tyrone's conviction, Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter, Andrea Simakis interviewed Alliance Ohio retired police detective William Mucklo. Det. Mucklo told Andrea that after the boys were arrested for the robberies, his department conducted a thorough search of Dalesandro's car and no weapons were recovered. Joey testified that a couple weeks after they all were arrested for the Hughes/Murphy robberies, and after he was released from jail after being cleared of involvement, Tyrone called him from jail and instructed him to dispose of the murder weapon. Joey testified that he took the murder weapon out of his glovebox, took the gun to a fence by the name of Kenneth "Chico" Garcia and gave or sold the gun to him. A Sheriff's Department report states that Chico Garcia told investigators that he sold the gun to a Ray Rose. Another report states that Ray Rose confirmed that he bought the gun that Joey Dalesandro sold to Chico Garcia and this gun was then recovered by Chief Detective Kaley. The recovered gun--supposedly the murder weapon--turned out after testing by BCI to be the Browning from the Hughes/Murphy robberies. The murder weapon put in Tyrone's hands by Joey Dalesandro's testimony could not have been the murder weapon. The BCI test results led Prosecutors to coach Joey to invent another gun as the murder weapon. Unfortunately for the prosecution, Joey's testimony concerning the glovebox gun actually exonerates Tyrone. Unfortunately for Tyrone, defense counsel did not bring this out at trial.

The videotape of the crime scene shows some papers dumped out of a desk in the Hartigs' living room. A Sheriff's report states that investigators found a spent shell casing underneath this pile of papers. The significance of finding a spent shell casing under the pile of papers cannot be overemphasized. The prosecution's theory of the case, as presented through the testimony of alleged accomplices, was that Tyrone held Mr. and Mrs. Hartig at gunpoint while Gary St. Clair ransacked the Hartig home looking for valuables, and that while Gary was supposedly tearing up the Hartig home in a frantic search for valuables, he heard Tyrone shoot the Hartigs and they both then immediately ran out of the Hartig home. The spent shell casing under the pile of papers shows that the murder could not have happened in the manner portrayed by the prosecution. The shell casing under the pile of papers shows that the Hartigs were first shot and killed and then their assailant went into the living room and dumped papers out on a spent shell casing and conducted a careful and extensive search throughout the house.

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ANOTHER SUSPECT