Facts of the Case

Significant evidence that would have exonerated Colin was misrepresented, overlooked at trial, or was never presented to the jury.

The Basics

Colin's father (Craig Rideout) was murdered in the basement of a recently rented townhouse in Penfield, NY, a suburb of Rochester. Per the medical examiner (Dr. Nadia Granger), the cause of death was asphyxiation and blunt force trauma; a carefully constructed garrote was used to strangle him and he was struck twice in the head with a blunt implement. His murderers took his body to a rural roadside two counties over, where they opened three bottles of drain cleaner and poured them over his face, leaving the tabs from under the caps of the bottles on or around the tarp. The tarp and bungee cords were identical to ones which Colin's mother (Laura Rideout) and her boyfriend (Paul Tucci) had purchased earlier that night, along with three bottles of drain cleaner.

Prosecution Theory

Without suggesting any motive, the prosecution theorized that Colin was part of Laura's plan to murder Craig. They paid a consultant (Paul Kish) over $23,000 to testify at trial and claim that two drops of what may have been blood on the rear left pocket of a pair of Colin's jeans indicated his proximity to the murder; strangely, the prosecution left no time for laboratory testing to determine if it even was blood. Kish's opinion was the only support for their theory that Colin was near his father when he was murdered.

Lawyers often compare the evidence presented in court to the pieces of a puzzle, arguing that while we may never have all of the pieces, we can put together a good enough picture to be certain "beyond a reasonable doubt". In order to justify the prosecution's desired conclusion, several inconvenient pieces of the puzzle had to be ignored. Critically, one piece of the prosecution's claim didn't actually fit any other evidence -the bloodstains on the jeans had to be forced into Kish's interpretation.

Reconstruction of the Murder

The prosecution theorized that a wild struggle in the basement caused these two droplets to somehow land on Colin's jeans. Based on the following facts, we can reconstruct a sequence of events to approximate how Colin's father was attacked and killed, and also debunk the prosecution's claim that Colin was in the proximity of that attack.

First, there would have been no blood spatter produced by the initial blow to Colin's father's head. According to Kish himself, only the second blow produced spatter because it needed to strike an existing source of liquid blood in order to throw out droplets of spatter, and there was obviously no blood present before the first blow.

Second, we know that Colin's father was down on his knees when the spatter was created, because the blood droplets which impacted the nearby shelf at right angles were produced at a height of approximately 30-36 inches, consistent with someone on their knees or doubled over being struck in the head.

Third, the garrote was applied before the blows were struck. Dr. Granger testified that the fractured hyoid bone and damage to the strap muscles of the neck indicated resistance to the garrote, rather than passive asphyxiation. This implies that Colin's father was strangled while still conscious, prior to the blows that produced the blood spatter.

Fourth, we know that a substantial quantity of liquid blood ended up on the basement floor and was wiped up, since Deputy Technician Schillaci observed wiping patterns in an area where Luminol reacted with blood residue under a black light. It is important to note that the blood from Colin's father's injuries does not appear to have run down his torso, since the front of his clothing was relatively free of bloodstains. Instead, it seems that the blood must have run directly off of his face and onto the floor while he was being held up with the garrote, without running down his body and saturating his clothing.

Fifth, the upward angle of the ligature mark around Colin's father's neck is consistent with him being held up by the garrote after he was dropped to his knees. This explains how he could bleed directly onto the floor without the blood running down his shirt or onto his shorts.

Therefore, whatever struggle took place while his father was being garroted ceased before any blood spatter was created, leaving liquid blood on the floor that was later wiped up. It is just not possible for the prosecution's imagined "wild struggle" to have produced the two stains on the jeans.

Key Facts Overlooked

While the prosecution tried to avoid committing themselves to any specific theory of what they believe took place, we can consider several scenarios, and show why each one in turn is false.

I. Colin never wore any of the gloves associated with the murder.
DNA samples were obtained from the inside of seven of the eight gloves which had Colin's father's blood on them (the eighth glove was swabbed but no results were obtained). Colin was excluded as a contributor from every single one of those samples. While the prosecution speculated that maybe his DNA was present and just couldn't be detected, perhaps because it was "masked" by the heavy bloodstains on one of the gloves, this fails to account for the fact that DNA from two unidentified males was detected inside that glove despite the bloodstains.

II. He was never in Yates County and never handled the shovel near the body.
There are none of Colin's fingerprints or DNA on any of the objects associated with the murder, most especially the shovel which was apparently used to make an abortive attempt at digging near the body and then conspicuously abandoned by the roadside.

III. The drain cleaner he checked out with on Monday was never used in any crime.
Colin's mother placed two bottles of drain cleaner in the cart Colin was pushing at the Macedon Walmart on Monday, before she and Colin's sister deliberately separated from him to avoid being recorded by the cash register surveillance camera. Of the five bottles later recovered, three were empty (and missing the liners from under their caps), while two were either full or partially full (and had their liners intact).

Additional Evidence

The garrote used to strangle Colin's father was constructed with distinctive left-handed bowline knots; of all the people of interest in this case, only Laura's boyfriend is left-handed. A length of cord with several knots similar to the ones used in the garrote was located in the backseat of the car he rented the week of the murder.

Laura's clothing was covered with hundreds of droplets of blood, ranging in size from microscopic to ones comparable to those scattered across the walls, shelving, and boxes in the southwest corner of the basement. Significantly, droplets also appear to have landed under her right arm, consistent with her swinging a weapon and striking Colin's father to produce the blood spatter.

When Colin purchased the shovel and gloves from Walmart, he bought a square-headed gardening spade with a short handle -not what someone planning on digging a grave would choose. Given that from ages 3-15 he lived on a forested six-acre property, and was a Boy Scout for many years, it is much more logical to conclude that, rather than buying the wrong type of shovel for digging in the woods, he purchased the short-handled gardening spade under the belief that it was for edging up the yard and flowerbeds around the Tucci residence before his mother and Paul Tucci sold the house and moved to North Carolina.

Furthermore, if Colin never wore the gloves, then it makes no sense to assume that he used the shovel to try and dig near his father's body without leaving any DNA or fingerprints on the shovel, much less that he would abandon it over fifty feet away from the site of the digging. Instead, it seems that Laura and her boyfriend deliberately placed the shovel where it would be found, knowing that the security footage from Walmart would point to Colin instead of them. This is consistent with their other efforts to avoid detection and use Colin as a scapegoat so that they could get away clean to North Carolina.