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Appeals court upholds judge’s refusal to give killer Danny Hill new trial
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
The 11th District Court of Appeals has affirmed a ruling that killer Danny Lee Hill, 51, cannot have a new trial on the grounds that bite mark evidence used at his 1986 trial has since been found unreliable.
The Warren-based court refused to overturn the October 2016 decision by visiting Judge Thomas P. Curran in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court that refused to grant a new trial.
In order to overturn the judge’s decision, the appeals court would have needed to find that there is a “strong probability that [the new evidence would] change the result if a new trial is granted.”
Judge Curran said Hill’s attorney failed to show that removing the bite mark evidence linking Hill to the September 1985 murder, torture, rape and kidnapping of Raymond Fife, 12, of Warren would change the outcome in a new trial.
Hill and Timothy Combs, who died last month in prison, were convicted of committing the crimes along Palmyra Road as Raymond rode his bicycle to a Boy Scouts meeting.
Hill is still waiting to hear whether the U.S. Supreme Court will review a decision from a federal judge that takes away Hill’s death penalty related to Hill’s claims of intellectual disability.
The 11th appellate court noted that circumstantial evidence alone may be sufficient in proving guilt in a murder case. The ruling detailed numerous pieces of circumstantial evidence showing Hill’s guilt, including many attempts to place blame for the crimes on other people. His accounts of where he was changed numerous times, the court said.
By looking at the evidence at the trial, “it cannot be reasonably doubted that Hill was present during the kidnapping, assault, rape and burning of Fife,” the court said.
It recounted the testimony of Matthew Hunter, a student at Warren Western Reserve High School who saw Hill and Combs together while Hunter was cutting grass on Jackson Street Southwest about 3 p.m.
About 5 p.m., he walked through a wooded area on Palmyra Road Southwest and saw Hill and Combs together in the parking lot of the Valu King store on Palmyra. A short time later, he saw Fife riding a bicycle into the parking lot.
Two other students said they saw Combs on a trail near the Valu King at 5:30 p.m. and heard a child’s scream about 30 seconds later.
Yet Hill told police the next day after the attack that he had not seen Combs since Combs had been released from juvenile detention and had not been near the Valu King.
Hill later admitted he was present during the attack on Fife, but he said he did not participate.