‘Vindicated’: El Dorado court throws out conviction for woman pressured into false confession

Brothers Nick and Jarred Lange sat Friday in an El Dorado County courtroom, hearing what they had waited so long to hear: the exoneration of their departed mother, Connie Louise Dahl.

Dahl — under duress of what the district attorney called deceitful and “aggressive” law enforcement interrogations — falsely implicated her then-boyfriend, Ricky Davis, in the July 1985 slaying of Janet Hylton in El Dorado Hills. In her false confession, Dahl also implicated herself in the murder and spent a year in county jail after testifying against Davis.

Davis, who always maintained he was not involved in Hylton’s murder, spent more than 15 years incarcerated and wrongfully convicted for her death until DNA evidence revealed another man killed Hylton. Davis was cleared of all wrongdoing in the murder case four years ago and freed.

Dahl, however, died in 2014. She never got to see Davis walk as a free man again. But her name was cleared Friday morning, when El Dorado Superior Court Judge Larry Hayes vacated Dahl’s August 2005 voluntary manslaughter conviction under factual findings of her innocence.

After Hayes offered Dahl’s family a chance to speak in court, Nick Lange stood up and said his mother struggled in life for most of the time that he spent with her. He said her exoneration should’ve happened sooner and she should’ve received the help she needed.

“I just wish she could’ve been here for this,” he said. “She’s been gone for more than 10 years now.”

El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson, whose office filed the motion to toss out Dahl’s conviction, also stood in the courtroom Friday and apologized to the woman’s sons and the rest of her family for what he called “a tragic mistake,” telling the judge that Davis and Dahl “had nothing to do with this.”

Pierson said in court his office is working to train detectives differently, so the interrogation tactics used to obtain the false confession from Dahl are never used again.

He had said investigators should use a rapport-based, information-seeking approach in interviews with suspects and witnesses because the scientific research shows it’s more effective. Since 2020, Pierson has hosted training sessions on these interview techniques for 107 different California law enforcement agencies and seven other agencies in the United States and Canada.

In September 2022, Pierson announced his office will limit the filing of criminal charges on any case in which the primary evidence against the suspect consists of a confession obtained through the use of threats, deception or psychologically manipulative interrogation tactics.

“There has been an urban myth within policing for decades that the only way to obtain information is to use interviewing tactics that employ pseudoscience and psychological coercion, and that urban myth is finally being debunked,” Pierson said Friday in a news release.

Wrongfully convicted man speaks in court

Davis, who was freed from custody in February 2020, also attended Friday’s court hearing. He stood up and told the judge that his and Dahl’s wrongful convictions were not simply some “judicial mistake” as characterized by prosecutors. He said the investigators who obtained Dahl’s false confession were “nefarious” people who were out to take away his and Dahl’s lives.

He’s glad to see changes to law enforcement interrogations are being made, but he believes not enough changes have been made to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

“It’s nice to see Connie vindicated, finally,” Davis said Friday in court.

The initial murder investigation

The murder investigation began July 7, 1985, when Hylton, who covered social events for the Foothills Times newspaper, was found dead inside the El Dorado Hills home.

Davis, then 20 years old, lived in the house where Hylton was slain, as did his then 19-year-old girlfriend, Dahl, according to the Northern California Innocence Project, which is part of the Santa Clara University School of Law and worked extensively on Davis’ case to free the wrongfully convicted man.

Davis and Dahl told investigators they went to a party that night and returned home at 3:30 a.m., when they found Hylton’s daughter outside, according to the Innocence Project. Hylton’s daughter told the couple she had been out with a group of boys and was afraid her mother would be upset for being out too late.

The three of them entered the home. Davis saw blood in the hallway outside the master bedroom and found Hylton’s body on the bed, according to the Innocence Project. Davis and Dahl called 911. All three of them maintained they were not involved in the murder and didn’t know who killed Hylton.

The case went unsolved until detectives reopened it in late 1999. The Innocence Project said detectives interrogated Dahl four times over the following 18 months, “using techniques known to increase the chances of false confessions.”

At a 2020 news conference announcing new findings in Hylton’s murder case, Pierson partly blamed Davis’ wrongful conviction on two El Dorado County sheriff’s detectives who interrogated Dahl.

Pierson said the detectives asked Dahl if she ever bit anyone and told her that Hylton had been bitten on her left shoulder during the attack in which Hylton was stabbed 29 times. At the time of the 2020 announcement, the detectives had long since retired.

Dahl eventually changed her story for the detectives, implicating Davis as the killer and implicating herself in the crime, telling the detectives she bit the Hylton during the attack. The Innocence Project said Davis’ conviction was based almost entirely on Dahl’s false testimony.

DNA evidence led to exoneration

The bite evidence, however, turned out to be crucial in clearing Davis and identifying the man who killed Hylton.

The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office crime lab analyzed remnants of Hylton’s nightgown. Analysts were able to pinpoint a saliva and blood spot on the left shoulder of the nightgown. For years, that evidence had not been usable, but improvements in technology led to the ability to separate the blood and saliva samples, and gave authorities a DNA result that proved Davis was not the attacker.

Sacramento DA investigators then used entered that DNA evidence into a genealogical website and got a list of potential relatives, then started building family trees to get to a suspect whose DNA matched. They used the same investigative techniques a few years earlier to arrest James DeAngelo, the suspect convicted in the Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist case, and Roy Waller, the suspect convicted in the NorCal Rapist case.

Then Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said the Davis case was the first in California history — and second nationally — to both exonerate a wrongfully convicted person and identify a different suspect.

The evidence in 2020 led investigators to identify Michael Eric Green, a Roseville man suspected of stabbing Hylton to death 35 years earlier. Green in July 2022 pleaded no contest to second-degree murder in Hylton’s death.

In September 2022, Judge Suzanne Kingsbury sentenced Green to 15 years to life in prison for the deadly stabbing. Green, 56, remained incarcerated Friday at San Quentin State Prison. He will become eligible for parole in January 2029.

In court on Friday, Assistant District Attorney Lisette Suder said the detectives who questioned Dahl more than 20 years ago used deceit and manipulation, tactics that widely accepted in law enforcement circles get people to talk. And now, she said the DA’s Office was asking the court “to legally undo a wrong” that was committed against Dahl and Davis.

Suder told the judge that they can’t give back the time Dahl spent in jail, they can’t relieve the trauma she and her family suffered and they can’t even give Dahl herself the satisfaction that justice has finally been served.

But the prosecutor said what they could do for Dahl Friday is to finally “clear her name.”