DNA evidence tied Chanthakoummane to Sarah Walker’s murder at a model home in Collin County. In last-minute appeals, his attorneys argue the evidence was not conclusive.
But analysts also determined his DNA was on Walker’s fingernails and elsewhere at the crime scene, and that evidence largely has convinced the courts they have the right man. In his last appeals to Collin County and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals filed last week, Chanthakoummane’s attorneys argued that the DNA evidence is also questionable.
After Walker was killed, police initially looked at people close to her. Friends pointed to her ex-husband or romantic partners, and others reported foreign investors were upset with her for big losses in real estate deals, according to Chanthakoummane’s latest filing. Walker was also robbed and attacked at her home several months earlier, while Chanthakoummane was incarcerated in North Carolina for an armed robbery committed when he was 16.
“Contamination and transfer are and always have been a consideration in the interpretation of mixtures,” the prosecutor wrote in her filing. “And even if the review’s conclusions constituted ‘new’ science, Chanthakoummane presents no evidence that the lab misinterpreted the DNA mixture on the victim’s fingernails – or any other mixture, for that matter.”
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