24-year-old Cathy Ulfers, married to an NOPD officer, was shot seven times in her New Orleans home on October 7, 1979. The home had been ransacked. NOPD detectives Martin Venezia and Sam Gebbia investigated the case for months without developing any serious leads. Ballistics determined that all of the bullets recovered at autopsy had been fired from the same gun. Talk on the street led to the names of Reginald Adams and two other men. All three were arrested for an unrelated burglary in July 1980. Though later acquitted of that burglary, Mr. Adams remained a suspect in the Ulfers murder.
Det. Venezia, after interrogating Mr. Adams for over four hours, secured a confession and claimed that Mr. Adams directed them to the scene and walked police around it. Det. Venezia claimed that Mr. Adams confessed a second time after they returned to the jail. The two men arrested with Mr. Adams for the burglary were named in the confession. Their charges in the murder case were dropped after both men denied involvement and police were left with only the confession of Mr. Adams as evidence against them. At both of Mr. Adams’s trials, the state contended that Ms. Ulfers was killed after interrupting a burglary. Police testified that none of the items listed as stolen were recovered and that the murder weapon was never found. They claimed that there were no viable suspects until Mr. Adams confessed.
Mr. Adams maintained his innocence and told the first jury that police wanted him to implicate the two other men, plying him with beer and a downer. Det. Venezia had drawn Mr. Adams a map, allowing him to lead police to the scene. He’d been promised release for making a statement. A jury convicted Mr. Adams of second degree murder in August 1983, and again in July 1990. He was sentenced to life.
Innocence & Justice Louisiana’s investigation uncovered much Brady evidence – exculpatory evidence never turned over by the police or prosecution, including that police actually located the murder weapon within three weeks of the crime, though they and the prosecution claimed that it was never found. The gun was not only linked to people with no connection to Mr. Adams, it was tested at NOPD’s crime laboratory and determined to be the murder weapon. These results were communicated to the lead detectives, who had also connected a man who tried to sell jewelry stolen from the Ulfers home. This man had also been arrested and found with a bracelet stolen from the home; he was charged with being an accessory to murder. Ms. Ulfer’s husband was initially considered a suspect in this murder and was later convicted of killing his second wife.
Innocence & Justice Louisiana presented evidence of police perjury and the state’s obfuscation of exculpatory evidence to the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office in May 2014. OPDA agreed that the conviction should be vacated. Mr. Adams was exonerated on May 12, 2014, after serving over 33.5 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. No one has since been convicted of the murder of Cathy Ulfers.
