Dell Crawford was 50 years old when he discovered the body of Tatanisha “Joy” Williams inside the Detroit house she rented from him in September 2007. Crawford called 911, took Williams’s young children to their grandmother, and returned to assist police. Williams had suffered several severe blows to her head and appeared to have defensive injuries on her hands. Despite injuries that should have caused extensive bleeding, investigators found no blood in the bedroom, on the bedding, or elsewhere in the house. Police initially considered Charles Rainer, who had been with Williams the previous night, a suspect. Rainer first said that he left the house at approximately 1:30 a.m. after Williams unlocked the door for him. Four days later, after police told him he had failed a polygraph examination, Rainer changed his account and accused Crawford of attacking Williams with a wrench during an argument about unpaid rent. The prosecution’s case relied almost entirely on Rainer’s changing testimony. At trial, he claimed that he heard Crawford arguing with Williams and saw him swing at her, although he also said Crawford blocked his view. Physical evidence did not support his description of an attack in the bedroom. No blood, fingerprints, or other forensic evidence connected Crawford to the killing. The medical examiner testified that Williams’s injuries would have produced massive bleeding, making the absence of blood particularly significant. Crawford’s defense argued that Rainer had killed Williams somewhere else and later placed her body on the bed. During the trial, prosecutors moved away from their original theory that the killing occurred in the bedroom and acknowledged that they could not say where Williams was attacked. Nevertheless, Crawford was convicted of second-degree murder in December 2008 and sentenced to between 20 years and 10 months and 45 years in prison. A Michigan Court of Appeals judge later dissented from the decision upholding Crawford’s conviction, finding the prosecution’s changing theory and the complete absence of blood from the alleged crime scene difficult to believe. Years later, the Cooley Law School Innocence Project and the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit arranged more advanced DNA testing of material collected from beneath Williams’s fingernails. Testing completed in 2025 detected DNA from at least two males. Crawford was excluded as the major male contributor to the DNA beneath Williams’s left-hand fingernails, an area consistent with her having fought her attacker. Additional testing also excluded Rainer from that major profile. In March 2026, prosecutors and Crawford’s attorneys jointly requested that his conviction be vacated. The court dismissed the case, concluding that the DNA results, the absence of corroborating physical evidence, and the prosecution’s reliance on Rainer’s disputed account undermined confidence in the verdict. Crawford was released after spending more than 17 years wrongfully incarcerated. (National Registry of Exonerations)