A Utah man who spent decades on death row walked free on bail after DNA evidence excluded him from a 1985 killing, even as the victim’s family still demands answers.
Douglas Stewart Carter, 71, left the Utah County Jail in Spanish Fork late Monday after a judge ordered his release on bail. Prosecutors told the court that newly analyzed DNA evidence ruled him out as the source of blood on a doorknob and genetic material on the handle of the knife used to stab Eva Olesen inside her Provo home nearly four decades earlier.
Fox News reported that the DNA results arrived Sept. 22, and that county prosecutors had already withdrawn notice last week that they intended to seek the death penalty again. An aggravated murder charge remains pending. Carter must wear a GPS monitor and stay away from the Olesen family while the case moves forward.
The release came over the objections of relatives who say they still want justice for Eva. It also followed a Utah Supreme Court order last year for a new trial after the justices cited “multiple instances of intentional misconduct” by police and a prosecutor, a finding that further hollowed out a case built for years on a contested confession and witnesses who later recanted.
Investigators found Eva Olesen tied up, stabbed, and shot inside her Provo house on Feb. 27, 1985. She was the aunt of a police chief. Officers suspected a robbery. Her husband, Orla Olesen, told police he discovered her body. She was partially undressed, with her hands bound behind her back.
Court records show no physical evidence linked Carter to the scene at the time. His conviction rested on a signed confession and two witnesses who claimed he had bragged about the crime. The defense called no witnesses at the first trial. A jury sentenced him to death. After a 1992 retrial, he received another death sentence. Utah courts later denied multiple appeals.
Carter has long said the confession was coerced. Court documents show he had fled Utah by April 1985 because he believed he was a suspect in an unrelated assault case. Two months later, authorities detained him in Nashville. Under interrogation by a Provo detective, he signed a confession. He was living with his mother in Utah when Olesen was killed, his attorneys have said.
The case began to unravel years later. In 2011, the two key witnesses were tracked down in Mexico. They admitted they had been told to lie. They said police gave them cash and gifts, told them not to disclose the payments, and threatened them and their son with deportation if they did not implicate Carter.
Breitbart noted those recantations alongside the DNA exclusion and the state high court’s finding of intentional misconduct by investigators and a prosecutor. More than a decade of legal fighting followed the Mexico statements before the Utah Supreme Court finally ordered a new trial last year.
Defense lawyers have also argued that investigators suppressed evidence that could have pointed to other suspects, including Orla Olesen. Prosecutors were once close to filing charges against the husband, according to the record of the dispute, until a Provo police lieutenant urged them not to so the investigation could continue. Orla Olesen died in 2009. Carter was then locked in as the suspect.
After the Supreme Court order, authorities retested crime-scene evidence. The analysis received Sept. 22 excluded Carter as a possible match to blood on a doorknob and to genetic material from the knife handle used in the stabbing. Prosecutors responded by pulling back their death-penalty notice and telling the court that a fresh look at bail was required.
Utah County prosecutor Erwin Petilos told Judge Derek Pullan on Monday that reassessing Carter’s bail was “necessary and fair” while the state continues to examine the remaining evidence. Pullan ordered the release. The judge said the DNA findings further undermined the case against Carter, but added that a jury could still conclude he killed Olesen. A two-month retrial had been planned for next year.
Prosecutors have declined to say whether they will use the DNA profile to hunt for other suspects. Carter’s attorney, Neal Hamilton, has urged them to dismiss the aggravated murder charge outright.
"If the state of Utah had their way, he would have been executed 15, 20 years ago before we discovered the misconduct."
Hamilton said that before the bond hearing’s outcome was sealed. He also said Carter will need therapy after decades behind bars and that the state had nearly carried out a sentence built on a tainted investigation.
Theresa Olesen, Eva’s daughter-in-law, spoke at the Monday hearing and made plain that the family had serious concerns about letting Carter walk out. Relatives did not hide their frustration with a DNA result that cleared him from the tested items rather than confirming a match.
"By golly we were hoping for a concrete match."
She continued in the same remarks:
"It doesn’t mean he wasn’t there."
And she framed the family’s bottom line without soft edges:
"We just want justice for Eva. And if he had any part of it we want that to be known."
Those are fair demands. A murdered woman still has no finished accounting, and a death-penalty case that rested on a contested confession, paid-and-threatened witnesses, and now DNA that excludes the longtime defendant is not a model of clean justice. Carter’s son, Tyler Anger, adopted by another family as an infant, walked out with his father after the release. Anger said the transition will hit hard.
"This is going to be a lot for him."
Hamilton said Carter is to be placed in an extended-stay hotel near his son while the case continues under the GPS and no-contact conditions Pullan set.
Carter is Black, his attorneys have noted in describing the history of the prosecution. He spent decades on death row after the original conviction and the 1992 retrial. Appeals went nowhere for years. Only after the 2011 recantations, years of additional litigation, a Supreme Court finding of intentional misconduct, and a DNA exclusion did Utah’s machinery finally loosen its grip enough for bail.
Law-and-order conservatives should not shrug at that sequence. Secure streets require honest police work and prosecutors who can defend their evidence in daylight. When investigators pay witnesses, threaten deportation, and push a case that later collapses under DNA and court findings of intentional misconduct, the public loses twice. A defendant sits for decades under a death sentence built on sand. A victim’s family is left without a reliable accounting of who actually killed their relative.
Judge Pullan’s order does not declare Carter innocent. The aggravated murder charge is still alive. A jury may yet hear what remains of the state’s proof. But the DNA exclusion from the doorknob blood and the knife-handle material, the withdrawn death notice, the recanted witness testimony, and the high court’s misconduct findings all point the same direction: the case that put this man on death row did not meet the standard a free society owes before it takes a life or warehouses a man for most of his adult years.
Carter left jail late Monday as a 71-year-old under electronic monitoring, not as a man whose record has been wiped clean. Prosecutors say they are still examining what evidence is left. The Olesen family is still waiting for justice that holds up. Utah’s courts have already said the old path to conviction was poisoned by intentional misconduct. The least the system can do now is finish the job without another generation of excuses.
When police and prosecutors cut corners on a capital case, they do not get tougher justice, they get a broken verdict, a grieving family still searching, and a public that has every right to demand better.
