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Court Rejects Re-trial For Man Convicted In 1971 Killing

N.H. Department of Corrections

 

A man convicted of killing an 18-year-old New Hampshire woman more than four decades won't get a new trial.

Seventy-seven-year-old Robert Breest claims he was wrongly convicted of beating Susan Randall to death and tossing her partially nude body onto the frozen Merrimack River in Concord in February 1971. He has tried to clear his name through DNA testing as technology and collection methods improved, but a Merrimack County Superior Court judge this week rejected his latest request for a new trial.

Breest's lawyers argued he deserved a new trial based on a 2012 test that revealed a second male source of DNA in tissue taken from under Randall's fingernails. But prosecutors argued that neither the most recent DNA tests nor previous results exclude Breest as the killer.

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