WAUPACA, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — “They followed the evidence.”
That’s how one of the jurors in a Waupaca County double murder case explained how the group reached a unanimous not guilty verdict.
After four weeks of testimony, the jury acquitted Tony Haase of the 1992 killings of Tanna Togstad and Timothy Mumbrue.
Waupaca County District Attorney Kat Turner doesn’t believe justice was served.
“My co-counsel and I were both very disappointed in the verdict, obviously. There were investigators who had spent their entire careers working on this case, and so the disappointment was extreme,” Turner said.
The jury — made up of eight men and four women — was originally split 6-6 with regard to Haase’s guilt as they started their deliberations last week.
“You got a white board in there, and pros and cons. Just a nice, civil discussion back and forth — what this person is thinking, that person is thinking. That was a good process,” said one of the jurors who is remaining anonymous.
The juror said he was initially one of the six jurors who voted to convict Haase for the murders of Togstad and Mumbrue. But by the second vote, he’d changed his mind.
“When I first looked at it, I thought the DNA evidence was really positive, but once we delved into it a little more and had some people there that knew a little bit more about it, they helped to point out to me, okay, that kind of swayed me the other way. And then the handprints — there wasn’t a 100% match on it. There was some doubt there for me on the handprints,” said the juror.
The juror said a lack of physical evidence tying Haase to the scene, coupled with what he believes was a questionable confession, led to reasonable doubt about Haase’s guilt.
The jury asked to re-watch a recording of the police interrogation in which Haase confessed to the murders as part of their deliberations.
The juror said, “It was very good to watch it the second time. We just really paid attention and talked about it and discussed it. I don’t know if I want to say coerced, but just after five hours of just kind of telling him what to say, it’s just like eventually, he kind of said what they wanted him to say, and so it’s just what you feel.”
Turner says she hasn’t spoken with any of the jurors since the verdict, so she can only guess why they reached the decision they did.
She points to the defense’s strategy of blaming the murders on another suspect — Haase’s uncle, Jeff Thiel, who died in 1995 — and a pre-trial decision by the judge to disallow DNA connected to Thiel to be used by the prosecution, as evidence that could have swayed the jury to convict.
“It’s possible, if they had been permitted to hear Jeff Thiel, who was the maternal uncle of the defendant, had been excluded twice by DNA analysis — once in 1996 and once more recently after his body was exhumed for further testing — that might have resolved some of the doubt for them, but I don’t know if they would have made a different decision,” said Tuner.
Turner said the victim’s families are disappointed by the verdict, as they’ve been fighting for their loved ones for more than 30 years, but she believes they are ready to move on.
