The Killer of Dawn Marie Birnbaum Could Be Released On a Technicality
By: Verity Partington
Tags: Forensics, Fbi Investigation, True Crime, Murder, Indiana

The Killer of Dawn Marie Birnbaum Could Be Released On a Technicality

James Robert Cruz Jr. was convicted of the slaying more than two decades ago, but there are fears he could get a new trial. Verity Partington Dec 16, 2020·8 min read

Dawn Marie Birnbaum. Source: My Life of Crime Blog

The killing of 17-year-old Dawn Marie Birnbaum in 1993 was a crime that shocked the eastern United States. A troubled teenager, she had been hitching rides with truckers to find a boyfriend with whom she had lost contact when she had the misfortune to cross paths with James Robert Cruz.

Cruz was convicted of Birnbaum’s murder and still resides at the Fayette State Correctional Institution. However, in a shocking twist to this apparently closed case, there are fears he could stand a chance of having his conviction overturned — all because of an FBI scandal linked to microscopic hair evidence.

The shocking crime

Seventeen-year-old Dawn Marie Birnbaum from Indiana was having some issues at home and, in 1993, was attending a boarding school in Bangor, Maine that her mother hoped would rein in her rebelliousness.

However, she had run away from the school before and, on March 21 1993, she decided to take to the road again. She told a friend she planned to hitch a ride to a truck stop in the hope of finding a trucker with whom she had become romantically involved some months before.

She never made it. Three days later, a motorist in Spring Township, Pennsylvania found the partially clad body of a young girl discarded in a snowdrift at the side of a road off state Route 26. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled with a length of rope that was still tied around her neck. Beside the body — which was sunk six inches into the snow — was a set of tyre tracks.

Dogged determination by investigators to identify the victim

At first, the victim could not even be identified. She carried no purse, and all lead investigator Rockview State Police Trooper William Madden had to go on was a time of death less than 12 hours earlier. There was also writing on her hand that could be a phone number.

Determined to at least give the tragic young woman a name, investigators drew a circle on the map in an attempt to work out where she could have come from in the 12 hours before she ended up dead just outside the town of Bellefonte.

They also removed the skin from her hand and sent it to the FBI Crime Lab to see if it would be possible to enhance the faded writing and obtain a phone number that might reveal her identity.

Finally, a mortician was tasked with restoring the victim’s face so her photograph could be circulated to media and police in the hope that someone would recognise her.

The forensic work on the phone numbers was successful and — after ruling out a suspected Florida area code based on lack of proximity to the dump site — police realised the line was based in Maine. They sent the mortician’s photo and the partial numbers to police departments in all the cities that had a matching area code.

At last, just when the body could not be stored any longer, there was a break in the case. A Maine police officer had linked the photo to a missing person’s report and tracked down the girl’s former school guidance counsellor.

The man, Mark Rosenburg, identified the dead girl as Dawn Marie Birnbaum. She had called him from a truck stop payphone just days before. Concerned, he gave her his home contact details and told her to get back in touch to let him know she was safe. She wrote the numbers down on her hand — and that was the last time she was heard from.

Identifying the killer

Police located the bank of payphones and retraced Dawn’s steps to the truck stop. Although it was now two months since the murder, employees there remembered the pretty young woman making calls just a few yards from the cash desk.

Recalling the tyre tracks by the body, police requested the gas receipts from the time in question to see if they could work out who Dawn might have hitched a ride with after she left the truck stop. They did the same from three more truck stops in the 650 miles between Maine and the Pennsylvania area where the body was found to see if there were any matches.

Remarkably, there was just one. Ohio-based James Robert Cruz Jr. was a truck driver who bought gas at both the location where Dawn was last seen and at another close to where her body was dumped.

Furthermore, when investigators compared a moulding of the tyre tracks found near Dawn’s body to those on the truck Cruz was driving at the time, both were an unusual brand called XD1 Michelin Low Profile.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Even more damningly, Cruz had falsified some of the logs he was required to make for his employer’s records to hide the fact that he had been at the truck stops in Maine and Pennsylvania.

Although Cruz remained almost preternaturally calm and denied ever having met the victim, a search warrant found a long blonde hair in the cab of his truck that matched Dawn’s. A subsequent court order for his blood was found to be a match to the other biological evidence discovered on Dawn’s body, while a hair matching Cruz’s was also linked back to the crime scene.

Trial and punishment

At the murder trial, the prosecution said they believed Dawn had hitched a ride with Cruz after they crossed paths at the Maine truck stop, but that he had raped and strangled her in his compartment carrier.

After he bought gas in Pennsylvania and disconnected his load from the cab, he searched for somewhere to dump Dawn’s body, finally settling on the off-ramp near Spring Township.

On March 13 1994, just less than a year after the killing, James Robert Cruz Jr. was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for the first-degree murder of Dawn Birnbaum. Investigators also strongly suspected he was linked to a series of murders along the roads of Ohio that had stopped suddenly after his arrest, but this was never proven.

Case closed — right?

Cruz had been in prison 21 years when, in April 2015, the FBI issued a startling press release. Following a 2012 report in the Washington Post concerning flaws in forensic hair matching technology and potential wrongful imprisonments, a federal investigation had been launched.

In one of the country’s biggest ever forensic scandals, the FBI admitted that testimony provided by its analysts concerning microscopic hair analysis could be “erroneous”.

Although FBI experts had long been testifying in court to the near-certainty of matches between crime scene hairs and defendants, in reality there is no accepted standard stating how often hair from different people may appear the same.

Instead, forensic hair examination simply analyses objective characteristics and combines them with a subjective interpretation to provide a strong basis for association.

Importantly, properly trained and qualified examiners should never have been stating that hair could be attributed to an individual to the exclusion of all others and should have endeavoured to convey the limitations of the science in courtroom settings.

Photo by Michael Longmire on Unsplash

Of 28 examiners assessed, 26 were found to have overstated forensic matches in ways that favoured prosecutors in more than 95 per cent of the 268 trials reviewed, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project states.

The FBI and the Justice Department have committed to ensuring the future accuracy of hair analysis and said they will notify defendants of past errors to offer new DNA testing if this is sought by a judge or prosecutor.

What does this mean for Cruz?

Cruz did file an appeal against his conviction in 1997, but this went nowhere and he took no further action to advance his case after this.

However, just five months after the shock FBI admission on hair analysis, a letter was sent to Cruz informing him that testimony given at his trial by an FBI agent had provided erroneous statements. The justice department was forced to admit there were discrepancies with evidence at the same lab where evidence relating to Dawn’s murder had been tested.

Cruz immediately filed a fresh appeal on the grounds of newly discovered facts and, although Centre County Prosecutors have filed their own appeal, pointing out that more than just hair evidence was used to convict Cruz, the state court ruling may be enough to secure him a new trial.

As of October 2020 — when an update was last reported by Pennsylvania TV station WJAC — a Centre County judge was examining the grounds for appeal and the case is working its way through the justice system.

Is the other evidence solid?

The FBI has been quick to point out that potential errors in microscopic hair matching do not mean there is no other evidence of convicts’ guilt.

In the Birnbaum case, this brings us back to the dogged police work mentioned earlier and the step-by-step route taken to identify both Dawn and Cruz. Even ruling out the hairs that supposedly matched both individuals respectively, Cruz’s blood was compared at the time to semen discovered at the crime scene and found to be a 660 million to one match.

DNA also found in the victim’s underwear had only a one in 72 million chance of coming from another Hispanic man, while the gas receipts and tyre tracks provide further circumstantial evidence.

However, the District Attorney’s office has previously said that, were Cruz to achieve a new trial, the passage of time could make it more difficult to prosecute him.

Since his conviction, six witnesses for the prosecution in the case — lead investigator William Madden, pathologist Thomas Cawthern, deputy coroner Warren Chambers and FBI agent Gordon Johnson — have all passed away, while more cannot be located. It would not be permitted to simply read their past testimony into the record at a new trial.

In another strange twist, then-District Attorney Ray Gricar mysteriously disappeared in 2005 and has never been seen since, making the case even more difficult to retry.

Worse still, a county judge issued an order in 2003 that would allow state police to destroy evidence they had from the case, meaning evidence marked as exhibits at the trial are still in the court’s possession, but everything else is now presumably gone.

If Cruz is able to capitalise on the scandal surrounding FBI forensic analysis and get a trial against his conviction, the hard work by Trooper Madden and his colleagues 27 years ago should still have kept enough damning evidence on record to ensure the same verdict is reached.

Those who remember the tragic case of Dawn Marie Birnbaum and the persistence of law enforcement in bringing her killer to justice will no doubt be hoping any new prosecutors can once again prove beyond reasonable doubt that the right man was convicted.