Prosecutors in Western New York on Tuesday gave up efforts to retry a man whose murder conviction in the 1993 slaying of a woman near Buffalo was set to begin, just as a new trial was set to begin.
James Pugh, 63, is serving 26 years in prison for the death of Deborah Meindl. Deborah Medel, a 33-year-old nursing student and mother of two, was stabbed dozens of times and strangled to death in her Tonawanda home. He was paroled in 2019 and a judge ordered the case to be reopened in 2023.
With jury selection scheduled to begin on Tuesday, Erie County prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss the charges, acknowledging that they could no longer meet the burden of proof because “we were unable to present the same evidence that was considered admissible in the original trial and more than 30 years later key witnesses have not been found.” The judge granted the request.
Prosecutors, however, said they were continuing the case against co-defendant Brian Scott Lorenz, who faces a second retrial scheduled for April after a mistrial was declared in his first trial in October.
Judge Paul Wojtaszek, who dismissed the case against Pugh on Tuesday, ordered a new trial for the two men in 2023 because new testing did not find their DNA at the crime scene, including on a knife used in the attack. The judge also said prosecutors withheld some evidence that could have helped the defense.
District Attorney Michael Keane said Medel’s family agreed that the decision to drop Pugh’s case “was not made lightly.”
Lisa Meindl Payne, who was 7 when her mother was killed, hugged Pugh at the courthouse Tuesday and said her family would continue to seek justice for her mother.
She told Wojtaszek in court that while she could not say with certainty whether Pugh was guilty or not guilty, she acknowledged a lack of evidence and other weaknesses in the prosecution’s case.
“The justice system failed my mother,” she said. “I just want the truth. I believe in the justice system, but I’ve lost faith in the system. I just want the truth. Why did she have to die that day?”
Meindl Payne’s sister, Jessica, died in 2020 when she was 10 years old and found her mother’s body after coming home from school.
Pugh, who now works as a painter and other contractor, said he was not satisfied with the final outcome of the case against him.
“As Lisa said, there is no justice here, either for her or for me,” he said in a statement released by his attorneys. “We all just want the truth, and it’s the prosecutor’s job to find the truth for us. They failed. They failed Lisa. They failed me. They failed Lisa’s sister. Most importantly, they failed Deborah Meidel.”
Deborah Medel’s husband, Donald Medel, was initially a suspect in the death but was never charged. He died in 2023. At the time of the murder, he had purchased a $50,000 life insurance policy on his wife and was in a relationship with a 17-year-old employee at the Taco Bell restaurant he managed, authorities said.
Police began investigating Lorenz and Pugh for killing Deborah Medel during a home invasion. They were charged after Lorenz was arrested in Iowa on a separate crime and admitted to murdering Meindl and implicating Pugh. Lorenz later said this was a false confession.
In 2021, then-District Attorney John J. Flynn appointed two prosecutors from his office to review the case.
Their conclusion was surprising: The real killer was Richard Matt, a convicted murderer who escaped from Clinton Correctional Institution in Dannemora, upstate New York, in 2015 and was shot to death by federal agents. The jailbreak was the subject of a 2018 Showtime series.
Another fugitive, David Sweet, told authorities that Matt confessed to him murdering Deborah Medel.
Both Flynn and Wojtaszek dismissed this theory.
Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, one of Pugh’s attorneys, said in an interview Tuesday that he is urging the district attorney’s office to reinvestigate the case. The district attorney’s office declined to comment on the request.
