A new Audible original centres around the 1985 murder in California of a British DNA scientist, Dr Helena Greenwood.
Trace of Doubt investigates the murder, which was solved 15 years later using DNA science. The dead woman had pointed at her killer from the grave… or had she?
Author and journalist Samantha Weinberg has been following the case since 2000, when she was living in the same village in California where Helena Greenwood died.
She was there at the trial and spent time with everyone involved in the case – including numerous jail visits to David Paul Frediani, the man who was convicted of murdering Greenwood. She wrote an award-winning book about how DNA had brought certainty into the courtroom.
Then, in 2018, she received a letter from Dustin, a jailhouse lawyer who, working from his prison cell and based on a piece of evidence that Samantha had found, had uncovered troubling inconsistencies in the investigation. He believed these suggested that Frediani could have been framed, as he’d always claimed. Nearly forty years after Helena’s death, the case was reopened.
Narrated by Samantha, with original archive material from the trial, and based on hundreds of hours of phone conversations and prison visits with both Dustin and Frediani, Trace of Doubt attempts to find out what happened back in 1985 and whether Frediani’s claim to be innocent could be true.
Trace of Doubt is available on Audible now.
