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Steven Downs was charged with sexual assault and murder after DNA from a genealogy website helped match him to DNA from the crime scene.
“The current posture of that is that we are not connected to the internet, intentionally, and this may exist for another few days to a couple of weeks,” Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Thomas Temple said Wednesday in a teleconference call from his courtroom. “I don’t know what the result is,” he said, but noted, “we will not be able to have a Zoom hearing this week” as planned. Aside from a week’s worth of hearings in February in which the attorneys appeared in the courtroom, more recent pretrial hearings in the case have relied on videoconference, with only the judge appear...
Living a quiet life and working as a nurse in Maine, 44-year-old Steven Downs was surprised to receive a knock on his door from police about an Alaska murder.
The bullet that killed Sophie Sergie in 1993 could have been fired by a pistol owned by Steven Downs â and possibly a million other guns â according to testimony heard Tuesday. Two firearms experts testified via videoconference in the rape and murder trial against Downs, 46, who had been a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks at the time of the brutal crime. On Tuesday, Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Thomas Temple heard testimony from witnesses presented by prosecutors and the defense who reached the same conclusion, that the .22-caliber bullet removed from 20-year-old Serg...
Gillis said she tested three guns taken from Downs’ Auburn home during a February 2019 police search. She ruled out a rifle as being the possible murder weapon. She said she couldn’t eliminate a Ruger and an H & R pistol owned by Downs as the gun that fired the lethal bullet, but said the Ruger was less likely. Asked by Assistant Attorney General Chris Darnall whether the H & R pistol could have fired the bullet, Gillis said, “Yes, the individual characteristics and class characteristics that I see all correspond.” But, she added, “it’s not enough for an identification” due to t...