A Massachusetts highest court has revived long-stalled forensic analysis in one of the region’s coldest cases, potentially rewriting the story of a 1988 strangulation and shedding light on a string of unsolved killings that terrified southeastern Massachusetts.
The Supreme Judicial Court unanimously decided that DNA testing ordered before his death can move forward on biological evidence from the brutal murder of 33-year-old Mary Harris in a Dartmouth motel room. The decision rejects arguments from prosecutors that the testing should be scrapped after the death of the man convicted in the case, Shawn L. Tanne.
Tanner, who spent more than three decades behind bars insisting he was innocent, died of brain cancer in September 2022 at the age of 57 — just months after evidence was shipped to a private lab but before any results could be generated. His legal team, backed by the New England Innocence Project, had pushed for modern DNA analysis that simply didn’t exist at the time of his 1989 trial.
The evidence in question includes the stocking used to strangle Harris, bedsheets and towels from the room, loose hairs, two rings stolen from her, and scrapings taken from beneath her fingernails. All of it has sat in state police storage for nearly 38 years…