MCGREGOR, Minn. — Brian Pippitt is still in prison, four months after the Minnesota Attorney General’s Conviction Review Unit (CRU) recommended his full exoneration in a 1998 murder case.
His release has been delayed because the Aitkin County Attorney is challenging the CRU’s findings.
The dispute has triggered a new legal battle about whether to free a 62-year-old man who has already served 23 years in prison for a murder he insists he did not commit.
KARE 11 Investigates has obtained never before seen crime scene video, the recorded recantation of a key witness and reports by forensic experts who reviewed the case. All of which call into question whether Brian Pippitt actually murdered Evelyn Malin.
Malin owned a roadside convenience store in rural McGregor, Minnesota. The 84-year-old woman lived in a bedroom in the back of her store. She was found beaten to death in February 1998, a brutal murder that shocked that small town.
Pippitt and four other men were arrested and charged with the crime. While three of them received plea deals and one was acquitted by the judge during a trial, Pippitt fought the charges, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
But a re-examination of the evidence by forensic experts – and the recantations of two key witnesses who linked Pippitt to the crime – are now calling his conviction into question.
“No part of the state’s case holds up at all,” said Jim Cousins, an attorney who has been working for years to free Pippitt. “Pippitt had nothing to do with this, he’s completely innocent.”
Cousins convinced the attorney general’s office to conduct a detailed review of the evidence.
“It does not add up”
When the case went to trial, prosecutors claimed Pippitt and four other drunken men broke into the store through a small basement window looking to steal beer and cigarettes. They said Malin was beaten to death during the robbery.
But experts who reviewed the evidence for the CRU found the crime couldn’t have happened that way.
The first problem: the basement window – the alleged point of entry.
Linda Netzel, an expert crime scene investigator, says when she reviewed the evidence she had major questions right away.
She was struck by the small size of the window and the fact that despite jagged glass and nails, there were no traces of clothing or human blood on the frame.
“If they went through the window, how did they manage not to scrape their clothing or stir up a bunch of material inside the window well?” she wondered.
What’s more, crime scene photos show cardboard boxes stored directly below the window weren’t damaged – even though someone climbing through the window likely would have landed on them.
Netzel also said the glass didn’t break in the way she would expect if someone had kicked it in from the outside.
“It does not add up,” she told KARE 11. “I definitely does not add up.”
A second expert also concluded that entry through the basement window “was not plausible.”
And what about the beer and cigarettes – the alleged motive for the break in? Crime scene photos and videos cast doubt on that, too.
“If it’s true that these gentlemen went to the store to steal beer and cigarettes, then why were there no beer and cigarettes missing from inside the store?” asked Tom Murtha who served as Pippitt’s public defender at his trial. “The only room that was trashed was Evelyn Malin’s.”
Under-experienced and overburdened
Murtha, who went on to serve as the Aitkin County Attorney and now works in private practice, spoke with KARE 11 about the case.
He says it was his first homicide trial. He was just two years out of law school and trying the case alone, three hours away in International Falls.
The CRU report concludes Murtha was too “under-experienced and overburdened” to successfully challenge the prosecutor’s theory. He says he would have liked access to the experts and analysis the CRU did when he tried the case more than 20 years ago.
“As a public defender at the time, we were you know working on a shoestring budget,” he recalled. “So, you rely on the fact that the state isn’t going to pull a fast one on you. And I think the Minnesota Attorney General’s office proved that that’s what happened.”
Murtha says the state withheld important evidence, including information about the deadbolt lock on the front door. In fact, the CRU found evidence suggesting the prosecutor deliberately kept the door “out of the sight of the jury.”
According to the Review Unit, the prosecution presented “unreliable testimony”– suggesting the murderers could have escaped through the front door even though a crime scene photo shows a deadbolt lock still in place.
A key was needed to lock the deadbolt from inside or out experts said. That means if the men left through the door, they would have needed a spare key to lock it as they left. When authorities searched the murder scene, Evelyn Malin’s key to the deadbolt was found still hanging inside the store in its normal place.
“Did Brian Pippitt get a fair trial?” KARE 11 Investigates asked. “No,” Murtha said definitively.
Recanted testimony
Because there was no physical evidence linking Pippitt to the crime scene, prosecutors relied on witnesses who placed him at the murder.
But those two key witnesses have since recanted their testimony.
The first, Raymond Misquadace, was one of five men arrested for the murder. Misquadace agreed to plead guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a five-year prison sentence. He testified that Pippitt was one of the men involved in the killings.
The Attorney General’s review called his testimony the “most damning piece of evidence against Pippitt” during the trial.
However, in an interview with the Attorney General’s office last year – and in a separate signed statement – Raymond recanted. He claimed he was pressured into making false statements by the original investigators on the case.
Now, he says he was not present at the convenience store on the night of the murder and has no first-hand knowledge of the crime.
The second witness who has since changed his story is Peter Arnoldi.
Arnoldi testified Pippitt confessed to him while they were both held at a mental hospital. But in a 2020 videotaped deposition Arnoldi said he got it wrong.
“I now believe that Brian Pippitt, at the time, was telling me what he was accused of,” Arnoldi said in the recorded statement obtained by KARE 11 – not what he actually did.
What’s more, the CRU concluded the physical evidence at the crime scene didn’t match what Arnoldi had described to police.
Fighting Pippitt’s release
The Aitkin County Attorney’s Office is challenging Pippitt’s petition for post-conviction relief arguing the CRU’s report does not qualify as “new evidence.” Rather, they argue it’s just “a different theory of the case.”
The Aitkin County Attorney declined to comment on camera – but pointed out that the Minnesota Court of Appeals and the state Supreme Court both reviewed the case years ago and upheld Pippitt's conviction.
In court filings, the county alleges that Arnoldi, who has since died, changed his mind only after being “pressured by Pippitt’s counsel.”
The county argues that Raymond Misquadace’s original testimony at trial was supported by other evidence.
About the front door and its deadbolt, the county denied it concealed evidence, writing that a decision “not to emphasize to the jury a particular piece of evidence is hardly bad faith.”
As for the window, and the CRU’s finding that it is unlikely drunken men in the middle of the night could have entered that way without leaving evidence behind, they point to a recently conducted BCA re-enactment.
In it, two men were videotaped climbing through the basement window. Proof, prosecutors say, that a person can enter the store that way.
KARE 11 obtained a copy of that re-enactment. It shows the man successfully enter the store. But one of the videos shows a man’s clothes catch on the window twice – exactly what Linda Netzel, one of the CRU’s experts – predicted.
“That window in my opinion is not the point of entry,” she said.
“Awful memories”
Evelyn Malin’s children have passed away in the years since the trial. Her son’s wife, Mary Malin, says the crime was traumatic for the family and this new examination of the case “brings back a lot of awful memories.”
Mary Malin recalls sitting through each day of Pippitt’s trial. She and her husband were angry about the other men’s plea deals. She hasn’t read the CRU report which recommends Pippitt be exonerated, but she opposes his release from prison.
“I feel that justice was done. You can’t come back this many years later and start digging back in,” she told KARE 11.
The case is now in the hands of an Aitkin County judge who will likely hold an evidentiary hearing to determine if Pippitt is entitled to post-conviction relief.
No hearing has been scheduled yet. Pippitt’s attorneys want the county attorney to hand over physical evidence for DNA testing.
In the meantime, Pippitt who has maintained his innocence for a quarter century, remains in prison, waiting.
“There’s a lot of emotion wrapped up in this. A lot of frustration and there’s some anger involved as well,” his attorney Jim Cousins said.