Prosecutors drop effort to retry man whose conviction was overturned in 1993 New York killing

Prosecutors in western New York on Tuesday dropped their efforts to retry a man whose murder conviction was overturned in the 1993 killing of a woman near Buffalo — right as the new trial was set to begin.

James Pugh, now 63, served 26 years in prison in the death of Deborah Meindl, a 33-year-old nursing student and mother of two who was stabbed dozens of times and strangled inside her home in Tonawanda. He was paroled in 2019 and a judge ordered a new trial in the case in 2023.

Jury selection was supposed to begin Tuesday when Erie County prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss the charges, admitting they could no longer meet the burden of proof due to “our inability to present the same evidence deemed admissible in the original trial and the unavailability of critical witnesses more than 30 years later.” The judge approved the request.

Prosecutors, however, said they are continuing the case against co-defendant Brian Scott Lorenz, who faces a second retrial scheduled for April after a mistrial was declared in the first trial in October.

Judge Paul Wojtaszek, who dismissed the case against Pugh on Tuesday, had ordered new trials for the two men in 2023 after 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 Meindl’s family agreed with the decision to drop the case against Pugh, which “was not made lightly.”

Lisa Meindl Payne, who was 7 when her mother was killed, hugged Pugh at the courthouse on Tuesday and said her family continues to seek justice for her mother.

She told Wojtaszek in court that while she could not say with certainty whether Pugh was guilty or innocent, she acknowledged a lack of evidence and other weaknesses in the prosecution’s case.

“The justice system has failed my mother,” she said. “I have only ever asked for the truth. I have believed in the justice system, but I have lost faith in the system. I just want the truth. Why did she have to die that day?”

Meindl Payne’s sister, Jessica, who was 10 when she found her mother’s body after coming home from school, died in 2020.

Pugh, who now does painting and other contractor work, said he was not satisfied with the end result of the case against him.

“Like Lisa said, there’s no justice here for her or for me,” he said in a statement released by his lawyers. “We both just want the truth, and it’s the prosecutors’ job to get it for us. They failed. They failed Lisa. They failed me. They failed Lisa’s sister. Most of all they failed Deborah Meindl.”

Deborah Meindl’s husband, Donald Meindl, was initially a suspect in the death but was never charged. He died in 2023. At the time of the killing, he had a $50,000 life insurance policy on his wife and was carrying on a relationship with a 17-year-old employee at the Taco Bell he managed, authorities said.

Police began investigating Lorenz and Pugh on the theory that they killed Deborah Meindl during a home burglary. They were charged after Lorenz, then under arrest for another crime in Iowa, confessed to murdering Meindl and implicated Pugh. Lorenz later said it was a false confession.

In 2021, then-District Attorney John J. Flynn appointed two prosecutors from his office to review the case.

Their surprising conclusion: that the real killer was Richard Matt, a convicted murderer who escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora in upstate New York in 2015 and was fatally shot by a federal agent. The prison escape was the subject of a 2018 Showtime series.

The other escapee, David Sweat, told authorities that Matt confessed to him that he murdered Deborah Meindl.

Both Flynn and Wojtaszek dismissed that theory.

In an interview Tuesday, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, one of Pugh’s lawyers, said he was urging the district attorney’s office to reinvestigate the case. The DA’s office declined to comment on that request.