A man who was convicted of the murder of a bar owner and two nightclub dancers in 1994 spent 16 years on death row. Appeals, crowdfunding and intense public interest from Europe all paved the way for a third trial for Pablo Ibar earlier this year.
Ibar was found guilty in January, and was recently sentenced to life in the Florida prison system, despite the defense’s contention that surveillance camera footage and the DNA evidence were not conclusive.
DNA-mixture interpretation, involving a complex probabilistic genotyping software called TrueAllele, made the difference when it came to identifying key data: the material on a blue T-shirt recovered from the crime scene, which had covered the face of the gunman, according to court proceedings.
The triple homicide left three victims bound and executed by multiple gunshots in a home in Miramar, Florida, the morning of June 26, 1994. Casimir “Butch Casey” Sucharski, the owner of a business called Casey’s Nickelodeon, and two of the dancers there, Sharon Anderson and Marie Rogers, were brutally beaten, bound and slain.
Surveillance footage from a hidden video camera showed the killer firing multiple shots into three bound bodies on the floor. And in one critical moment, one of the killers removed the T-shirt covering his face. The grainy footage showed Ibar, according to homicide investigators.
Ibar, who is the son of a relatively famous athlete in the Basque sport pelota, was initially tried in 1997, resulting in a hung jury. The 2000 trial resulted in a guilty verdict and a death sentence. (A co-defendant named Seth Penalver was originally sentenced to death for the crime—but later acquitted at a 2012 retrial. A key part of that reversal was due to testimony from a forensic anthropologist who bolstered the argument he was not one of the killers captured on the surveillance video, according to court documents.)
Spanish media outlets have blasted the case against Ibar, even speculating the U.S.-based mafia could have framed the Spanish national. European-based groups have also pushed the case for Ibar’s innocence, and crowdfunded for his considerable defense tab.
Ibar requested independent DNA testing of the shirt, which had been used as the gunman’s mask. A comparison made with another man didn’t match, according to court records.
But in 2016, the Florida Supreme Court granted a retrial, based on shortcomings in the court-appointed defense counsel’s representation. The state’s highest court also determined there was a lack of physical evidence.
The crime laboratory found a partial match between a genetic profile on the shirt and Ibar. But Broward County prosecutors wanted further confirmation, so the lab data was sent to Cybergenetics, the Pittsburgh-based maker of TrueAllele. Mark Perlin, the company’s founder and creator of the software, testified in the middle of the trial, on Dec. 20 of last year.
Three areas of the blue shirt were initially tested against the known DNA standards of Ibar and the three victims included in the analysis, according to court proceedings. Follow-up confirmatory testing sampled other parts of the shirt, as well.
Ultimately, the results showed one of the areas of the shirt held key data. That showed a mix of two or three contributors—including Ibar and Anderson. The match between the genetic traces on the shirt and Ibar was 353 trillion times “more probable than coincidence.”
The surveillance footage is what originally led to Ibar’s arrest, according to court records. Frames from the hidden videotape resulted in a flyer sent to law enforcement agencies. The Miramar police received a call from the Metro-Dade Police Department that they had a man in custody on a separate and unrelated drug charge who resembled the photo on the flyer. That person was Pablo Ibar.