Father Spent 13 Years in Prison While the Real Killer Walked Free 

Father Spent 13 Years in Prison While the Real Killer Walked Free 

On the night of September 28th, 2000, David Camm came home from a basketball game and found his wife dead on the garage floor. His 5-year-old daughter was still strapped in her seatbelt in the backseat, shot through the head. His 7-year-old son was twisted toward the back of the car as though he had been trying to get away.

David pulled him out and started CPR. He kept going long after there was no reason to. 3 days later, he was arrested for those murders. He had 11 people who would swear under oath they watched him play basketball when it happened. The medical examiner placed the time of death during the exact hours those 11 people had eyes on him.

Not one of them saw him leave. There was no murder weapon. Nothing inside that house connected him to what happened. None of that mattered. It would take 13 years, three separate trials, and a killer who left his name at the scene on the very first night to prove that the wrong man was in that cell. And what it took to keep him there, that is the real story.

Georgetown, Indiana, population 2,200, a small suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, where people leave their doors unlocked and wave at strangers on the road. David Camm’s roots here went back further than most. The street he lived on, Lockhart Road, was named after his mother’s family. That’s how long the Lockharts had been in this town.

David met Kimberly Wren in 1984. He said it himself, he was immediately drawn to her. Beautiful, intelligent, generous with a huge heart. They married in 1989. That same year, David joined the Indiana State Police. He was good at it. Within months, he was selected for the emergency response unit, an elite team that not everyone gets into.

Kim built her own career alongside his. She rose to senior accountant at an insurance company. David became treasurer at Georgetown Community Church, the same church where he played basketball every Thursday evening. Bradley was born in 1993. Jill arrived in February of 1995. And that same year, Kim and David broke ground on a house on Lockhart Road.

Their house, built from the ground up. In May of 2000, David resigned from the State Police after 10 years. His uncle, Sam Lockhart, offered him a position at his basement waterproofing company. Double the salary, predictable hours, home for dinner every night. Kim’s sister said it simply, Kim had gotten what she always wanted.

The house, the family, the stability. Four months later, on a Thursday evening in September, it was all gone. September 28th, 2000, started like every other Thursday. David and Kim both went to work. Kim picked the kids up from swim practice after school and brought them home. David headed to Georgetown Community Church at 7:00 in the evening.

11 men, three games, the same routine they had done dozens of times. The games ended around 9:20. David got in his car, 5-minute drive home. He was running about 20 minutes late, and he already knew Kim would have something to say about the homework routine. He turned into the driveway, hit the button for the garage door.

The door rose slowly. Kim was on the floor. There was blood. David was out of the car before it fully stopped. He ran to her, got down beside her on the concrete. Kim was in her underwear. Her shoes and socks had been removed. She had been shot through the head. He could tell from the moment he reached her that she was already gone.

He looked up. The Bronco was parked in the garage, the door slightly open. He looked inside. Jill was in the backseat, still strapped in her seatbelt. Her head was slumped to one side. She was 5 years old. She had been shot in the head. She never had time to understand what was happening. Brad was different. His body was on the driver’s side of the backseat, twisted as though he’d been trying to get away, trying to put distance between himself and whatever was happening in that garage.

He’d been shot through the torso. The bullet severed his spine. But when David reached in and touched his son, Brad was still warm. David climbed through the front of the Bronco, squeezed between the two front seats, pulled Brad out and placed him on the garage floor. He started chest compressions, mouth-to-mouth.

He kept going. Because the boy was warm, and there was nothing else to do. There was never a chance. There hadn’t been one for over an hour. David stood up and called for help. Police arrived within minutes. Three people were dead. A lead investigator would later describe it as probably the most horrific crime scene he had seen in 33 years on the job.

But two things at that scene didn’t fit. The first was Kim’s shoes and socks. She had been wearing them when she came home, but they weren’t on her feet. They were on the roof of the Bronco, side by side, toes pointing outward, neatly placed in the middle of a scene with three bodies. No one could explain it.

The second was a gray sweatshirt on the garage floor right beside Bradley’s body. Nobody in that house owned it. And inside the collar, written in faded black marker, was a single word, backbone. Both were bagged and set aside. Investigators were already forming a theory, and neither of these fit it. Floyd County Prosecutor Stan Faith arrived at the scene around 10:00 that night.

He looked at the garage. He looked at David Cam, a former state trooper standing there in blood-soaked clothes, completely falling apart. And within the first few hours of that investigation, a quiet decision was made. There was no announcement, no discussion. David Cam was not a person of interest to be considered alongside others.

He was the suspect. From that moment forward, the investigation would be built around proving that conclusion. To do that, Faith needed a forensics expert. He called Rod Englert, a well-known private blood spatter analyst from Portland, Oregon. Englert was unavailable that night. He sent his assistant instead, a man named Robert Stites.

The lead detective on the case, Jim Nymer, looked at Stites, pulled his superiors aside immediately. He said plainly that Stites didn’t look qualified to be there, and he didn’t want him on the scene. His superiors told him to stand down. Faith wanted Stites involved. That was the end of the conversation. Robert Stites, brought in to photograph and document, became the forensic authority on a triple homicide.

David’s basketball shirt went to the lab. When the results came back, eight small blood drops were found on it. Each one about a millimeter in diameter near the bottom hem. Stites examined them and delivered a conclusion that stopped the room. He called them high-velocity impact spatter. In blood spatter analysis, this is what happens when a bullet strikes a body at close range.

The impact is so violent that blood turns into a fine mist, microscopic droplets that travel backward toward the shooter. Those eight dots, Stites said, were exactly that. Gunshot blowback. Scientific proof that David Cam was standing within 3 to 4 feet of his daughter Jill when she was shot. He wasn’t guessing.

He was 100% certain. Investigators wrote that down. They built the arrest warrant around it. The sweatshirt with backbone written inside the collar went into an evidence bag. Three days after David found his family, he was arrested and charged with three counts of murder. He was taken into custody before he could attend his family’s funeral.

The prosecution was in such a rush to make an arrest that the funeral came and went without him. David had an alibi. Not a weak one. 11 men, 11 separate people who had been physically at Georgetown Community Church with him from 7:00 in the evening until after 9:00. Among them was his own uncle, Sam Lockhart, who had been playing in the same game.

The medical examiner placed time of death between 7:30 and 8:00 in the evening. David was at basketball during every minute of that window. 11 witnesses confirmed it. So, investigators adjusted the theory. They said David must have slipped out during the second game. The one he sat out as a substitute. Driven 5 minutes home.

Killed three people. Driven 5 minutes back. Returned to the sidelines without a single one of those 11 men noticing he was gone. The whole round trip, including the murders, had to fit inside 15 minutes. Eight of those minutes were driving. That left 7 minutes for a triple homicide. Not one person at that game saw him leave.

Then there was a phone record showing a call placed from the Cam residence at 7:19 in the evening. At a time when David claimed to already be at basketball. Investigators said it proved he was lying. He was home at 7:19, except Indiana straddles two time zones, Eastern and Central. The phone company’s billing system was logging timestamps incorrectly across that boundary.

When the error was corrected, the call had been placed at 6:19 in the evening, a full hour before basketball started. David had called a customer before he left the house. Completely routine. No murder weapon was ever found. Nothing inside the house connected David to what happened. The timeline was nearly impossible in practice.

The phone call proved nothing. So, the prosecution stopped trying to build a case around what happened and started building a case around who David was. Over the course of his marriage, David had been unfaithful multiple times with multiple women. It had started within months of their wedding. He had at one point moved out of the family home and in with another woman.

He had pursued female colleagues while in uniform. When the prosecution finished counting, there were 12 women. None of it had anything to do with what happened in that garage. But, that wasn’t the point. The prosecution brought all 12 women into the courtroom one by one and walked the jury through every affair, every act of deception.

And alongside that testimony, they raised something else. They told the jury Jill had shown signs of physical trauma in the hours before her death and that David may have been responsible. He was never charged with it. There was no evidence connecting him to it. But, the jury was going to hear it anyway. February 2002, the trial began in Floyd County.

Robert Steitz took the stand first. He introduced himself as a professor, a crime scene reconstructionist, and a doctoral candidate in fluid dynamics, the science of how liquids move through air. He spoke with complete authority. He told the jury about the eight dots on David’s shirt. He explained high-velocity impact spatter in technical language, then broke it down simply.

Those eight drops were gunshot blowback. Scientific proof that David Camm was within 3 to 4 feet of his daughter Jill when she was shot. 100% certain. Rod Engler followed him to the stand and confirmed every finding. He added that smudge droplets of Kim’s blood on David’s sneaker were consistent with high-velocity mist, consistent with David shooting Kim at close range.

Two experts, one conclusion. In a courtroom, science carries enormous weight. The defense pushed back. Their analyst argued those eight dots were transfer stains, not mist. When David leaned across Jill’s body to pull Brad out, his left knee had pressed into the middle of the backseat, causing Jill’s head to slump forward and contact his shirt.

Blood transferred through physical touch, not through the air. To show the jury what that looks like, the defense brought a wig into the courtroom, soaked it in blood, and dragged a T-shirt across it in the same motion David’s shirt would have made against Jill’s hair. The resulting pattern looked nearly identical to the eight dots the prosecution had called gunshot evidence.

Then 11 witnesses took the stand, one by one. Every man who had been at that basketball game told the same story with no contradictions. David was there from 7:00 until after 9:00. None of them saw him leave. None of them saw blood on his clothing during the game. The prosecution said these men were either covering for their friend or too distracted by the game to notice a 15-minute gap.

11 people all missing the same thing at the same time. On March the 17th, 2002, after 3 days of deliberation, the jury came back. Guilty. Three counts of murder. 195 years in prison. Kim was 35 years old. Bradley was seven. Jill was five. If this case has moved you, please take a moment to like and subscribe. It’s the only way stories like theirs keep getting told.

David was led out of that courthouse in handcuffs. The same system he had served for 10 years had just convicted him of three murders he didn’t commit. He later described his first months in that cell. Every time he heard keys rattling outside the door, he thought it was over. That they had figured it out. He held on to that for 6 months.

Then it stopped. He stopped waiting for someone to come and started preparing for a long fight. Because no one was coming. In August of 2004, the Indiana Court of Appeals overturned the conviction. The ruling was direct. Allowing 12 women to testify about David’s affairs had unfairly poisoned the jury. The prosecutor had never once connected those affairs to the murders.

He had simply used them to make the jury dislike David enough to convict him. New trial ordered. For a moment, the family exhaled. Then the new prosecutor arrived, Keith Henderson. He reviewed the case and announced a second trial would go forward. In January of 2005, David was granted a $20,000 bond. He was briefly free.

And then, little more than an hour after the old charges were formally dropped, police showed up and arrested him again. New charges, same murders. But before the second trial could begin, David’s defense team went back to the one thing that had never been properly explained. The sweatshirt. It had been sitting in a sealed evidence bag for nearly 5 years.

A gray prison-issue sweatshirt that crime scene technicians had missed at the scene. Only discovered when it was swept up inside Bradley’s body bag. The word backbone written inside the collar in faded black marker. Two unknown DNA profiles on it. One male and one female. The prosecution had maintained that the DNA was run through the FBI’s criminal DNA database and came back with no match.

The defense didn’t believe it. They filed motions. They pushed hard. They demanded the DNA be resubmitted under direct court supervision. The prosecution resisted at every step. A court order was required to force it through. When the DNA finally hit the database, a match came back within hours. The male DNA belonged to a man named Charles Darnell Boney.

He had been in the database since 1997. David’s original defense attorney later said he cursed Stan Faith like a wet dog when he found out. Those were his exact words. The state had the ability to identify that DNA before David was ever arrested. Now, 5 years later, they finally had a name. The question was who Charles Boney was.

Since 1989, Charles Boney had been targeting women across Indiana. He would corner them, hold them at gunpoint, and make them take off their shoes. Not their money, not their jewelry, their shoes. Law enforcement had a name for him, the Shoe Bandit, a man with a documented foot fixation and a very specific pattern of behavior.

He had stalked some of his victims beforehand, calling them to ask what they were wearing, what kind of shoes they had on. He had been convicted of three counts of armed robbery and three counts of criminal confinement against women. He had held a gun to a woman’s head and told her he would pull the trigger. He had 11 prior felony convictions for assaulting women.

His prison nickname was Backbone. He had been released on parole just weeks before the Cam murders. Now, look back at that crime scene. Kim’s shoes and socks had been removed from her feet and placed on the roof of the Bronco. The coroner’s report noted bruising and abrasions on the tops of both of Kim’s feet, marks consistent with forceful removal while she was still alive.

That was not a coincidence. That was a signature. Then, in early March of 2005, investigators found something they had missed during the original sweep of the crime scene, a palm print on the outside passenger door of Kim’s Ford Bronco. It matched Charles Boney. His DNA was on the sweatshirt. His palm print was on the car.

His exact pattern of behavior was visible in the placement of those shoes and in the bruising on Kim’s feet. In a just world, David Cam walks out of prison that afternoon. The state apologizes. The nightmare ends. But Floyd County had spent 5 years building a case against David Cam. Admitting David was innocent meant admitting the investigation had been corrupt from the very first night.

That the forensic science was fraudulent. That an innocent man had been sitting in a cell while the real killer was free. They couldn’t do that. So, instead of following where the evidence led, they changed the story. They arrested Charles Boney and they charged both men with the murders. Their new theory was that David and Boney had planned it together.

David was the mastermind. Boney provided the gun. A joint conspiracy. But no phone records ever connected them. No witnesses had ever seen them in the same place. No emails. No paper trail. No mutual contacts of any kind existed. What they had was Charles Boney in an interrogation room and a deal to offer him. When investigators first brought Boney in, he denied everything.

The sweatshirt had been dropped in a charity donation box after his prison release. Simple as that. He agreed to take a polygraph. Deception detected. He was released anyway. Two weeks later, his palm print came back from the Bronco. He was arrested. And then his story started shifting. First, he said he did know David.

They had met on a basketball court. David had asked him to get hold of an untraceable gun. Boney got it, wrapped it in the gray sweatshirt, and handed it over for $250. He had no idea what it was for. Then the story shifted again. He said he had actually been there that night, gone to deliver the gun in person.

He was standing outside when he heard arguing from inside the garage, then three shots. David came out, pointed the gun at him, and said, “You did this.” The gun jammed. Boney ran. But before he ran, Boney said he tripped over Kim’s shoes on the garage floor. And in the middle of fleeing a triple homicide, he stopped, picked up the shoes, walked to the Bronco, and placed them neatly on the roof.

The autopsy had documented deep bruising on the tops of both of Kim’s feet, caused by violent, forceful removal while she was still alive. What Boney was describing, a clumsy trip in the dark, did not match what was found on Kim’s body. What matched were his 11 prior convictions, his history, and what he had been doing to women since 1989.

Defense criminologist Kim Rossmo reviewed all 35 hours of those interrogation recordings. Her conclusion was plain. Boney was never treated like a suspect. He was treated like a resource. When his story conflicted with established facts, detectives quietly helped him adjust it. At one point, when Boney said he didn’t know David, a detective suggested maybe they had met on a basketball court.

Boney paused, then said, “Yeah, maybe basketball.” And then there was his girlfriend. Mala Singh Mattingly had been living with Boney at the time of the murders. On the evening of September 28th, he left home and told her he was going to help a friend. She didn’t think much of it. He came home after midnight, breathing hard, sweating through his clothes, a scraped knee.

And then he showed her a gun, held it out, wanted her to look at it. Investigators later concluded that gun was almost certainly the murder weapon, a Lorcin .380 handgun. It has never been recovered. Mala was frightened. She asked him to leave. The next morning, Boney insisted they sit together and watch the news, her, him, and his mother.

“Just watch and see what happened.” She left him 2 weeks later. She told investigators that something had broken in him. Nobody inside the system was going to stop this. Lynn Scamahorn was a civilian DNA analyst at the Indiana State Police Crime Lab. She had run hundreds of tests on Boney’s sweatshirt. During the first trial, Stan Faith pulled her aside and told her what he needed her to say.

He wanted her to testify that she had found David Camm’s DNA on that sweatshirt. She had not found it. It was not there. Faith screamed at her, threatened to have her fired, threatened to charge her with obstruction of justice if she didn’t say what he needed. She wrote a memo documenting what had happened within days of the incident.

She refused to change her testimony. When she took the stand during the second trial and testified about what Faith had done, she broke down on the stand. Fingerprint analyst John Singleton reported a nearly identical experience. Faith had pressured him to soften his testimony about the unidentified palm print on Kim’s Bronco, the one later confirmed as Boni’s.

“Make it seem less significant,” Faith told him. “Blur the edges.” Singleton refused, too. And then, there was Myron Wilkerson. Wilkerson was an Indiana State Police sergeant, a friend of the Boni family, and not assigned to this case. After Boni’s arrest, it was Wilkerson who went to Boni privately and told him the best decision was to be a witness.

It was after that private meeting that Boni’s story changed to include David Cam for the first time. Wilkerson also removed Kim Cam’s cell phone from the evidence room without signing it out and took it home. When the phone was recovered, every fingerprint on it had been wiped clean. Kim’s phone showed a 13-second incoming call at 7:50 on the night of the murders.

Whoever had contacted Kim in the hours before she was killed, whatever that call was about, it was gone. Wilkerson died before the third trial. He was never charged. The second trial proceeded in January of 2006. Keith Henderson introduced a new motive. He claimed David had been molesting Jill, that Kim had found out, and that he killed his family to cover it up.

There was no physical evidence to support this. The defense medical examiners said so clearly under oath. The jury convicted David again. Life in prison without parole. And while David sat in that cell, Henderson had already signed a deal with Berkeley Penguin Group to write a book about the case. He had taken an advance.

He had written portions of the manuscript. When the defense found out, they filed to have him removed. Henderson fought it for 2 years. The Indiana Supreme Court eventually removed him from the case and issued a formal public reprimand. In June of 2009, the Supreme Court overturned the second conviction. The molestation allegation was baseless.

The court’s finding was plain. There was no competent evidence in the record that the defendant had molested the child. A third trial was ordered. David would wait 3 more years in maximum security before it came. 2013 Boone County, Indiana A new courthouse far from Floyd County and the 13 years of institutional pressure that had driven this case off course.

This time, the defense came with something that hadn’t been available in any previous trial. They brought in Richard and Selma Eikelenboom, Dutch forensic scientists working from a laboratory high in the Rocky Mountains. Their specialty was touch DNA, genetic material left behind through physical contact. Skin cells.

What remains on a person’s body when someone grabs them, holds them down, forces something from them. The Eikelenbooms tested the victim’s clothing. They found Charles Bonney’s DNA on Jill’s shirt, on Bradley’s shirt, on Kim’s shirt, on Kim’s underwear, and under Kim’s fingernails. Kim Cam had scratched her attacker as she died.

And what she left beneath those nails told the jury exactly who had been in that garage and what had been done. The defense also returned to the eight blood drops that had put David in prison twice. Under high-powered microscopes, scientists examined those drops and found something no previous jury had ever seen.

Trapped inside the dried blood were microscopic fabric fibers. Fibers only get inside a dried blood drop through physical contact. The blood had not traveled through the air. It had transferred onto David’s shirt when he leaned across Jill’s body to reach his son. Exactly as he had said from the very first night.

And then Robert Stites took the stand. This time, he testified for the defense. He admitted he had lied under oath in two separate trials. No doctoral degree. Not a professor. Not a crime scene reconstructionist. He was a photographer. The Cam garage was the first homicide scene he had ever processed on his own.

Every credential he had presented to two juries was fabricated. And Stan Faith had helped him build those false qualifications from the beginning. When Charles Boney testified for the prosecution, he told the same story he had been telling for years. A juror asked him what David was wearing the night of the murders.

Boney said David was wearing long pants and a T-shirt. David had been wearing basketball shorts. On October 24th, 2013, after 10 hours of deliberation over 3 days, the jury returned its verdict. Not guilty. David Cam collapsed into his defense team and wept. His father, Donald, said afterward that he had never felt anything like it in his life.

David later described hearing the verdict. He said the word not hit him first. Then he wailed. He cried. He bent over and stood back up. He said he may have praised God. He had been in prison for 13 years, convicted twice. He had survived three prosecutors, three trials, fabricated science, suppressed evidence, and a system that chose to protect its own decisions rather than correct them.

David Cam eventually settled with Floyd County for $450,000. In 2022, he was awarded $4.6 million from the state of Indiana for malicious prosecution and wrongful imprisonment. He has said publicly that he regrets settling. He never received an apology. The three trials cost Floyd County more than $4 million, forcing county employees to go without raises and limiting road repairs to emergencies only.

Charles Boney is still in prison, serving 225 years. He still says David pulled the trigger. His DNA was found on all three victims, including under Kim’s fingernails, where she scratched him as she fought for her life. Kim’s parents, Frank and Janice Wren, still believe David killed their daughter and grandchildren.

The murder weapon has never been found. Kim was 35 years old. Bradley was seven. Jill was five. They deserved an investigation that followed the evidence wherever it led. Instead, a decision was made on the first night. And everything that came after was built around defending that decision. A photographer told two juries he was a scientist and that he was certain.

A DNA analyst was screamed at and threatened for refusing to lie. A cell phone was removed from evidence and wiped clean. A prosecutor signed a book deal while the man he was prosecuting was still in a cell. That is what happened in Georgetown, Indiana. And the fact that it took three trials and 13 years for those two words to be spoken in a courtroom.

That is the part that stays with you. There are three questions worth sitting with after this case. The DNA on that sweatshirt could have been run through the criminal database in 2001. Charles Boney’s profile had been in there since 1997. The match would have come back within hours. If that happens, does David Cam ever get arrested at all? Stan Faith knew unknown male DNA existed on that sweatshirt.

He knew Boney’s mother was a personal friend of his. He helped construct Robert Stites false credentials. He threatened an analyst who refused to lie. Is what happened in Floyd County a series of mistakes or something else entirely? And finally, Charles Boney is still in prison. His DNA was found under Kim Cam’s fingernails.

He cannot explain how it got there. He still says David Cam pulled the trigger.