She was an SF State junior, originally from Reno, where she’d been her high school valedictorian and a singer in the state champion choir. She was a computer science major and gamer and had already done two summer internships in Silicon Valley. Sony and Samsung were competing to recruit her after graduation. She was engaged to her high school sweetheart, and her academic scholarships meant she was debt-free. She had her whole future lined up like a row of dominoes.

Merrilyn lived with three college girlfriends in a Balboa Park apartment. Her neighbor two doors down was Darren Newman.

Frankie had seen Merrilyn’s picture in the newspaper. She was black, with straight dark hair parted in the middle and arresting, luminous blue eyes. You could see intelligence in a person’s face, and Merrilyn was smart. Her confident smile didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, regardless of her young age. Her left arm sported a Jesus tattoo, and she wore a cross around her neck. Her body was slim and tall.

Nine months ago, on a Friday night when her roommates went to a party in Menlo Park an hour away, Merrilyn stayed home to code a gaming app she’d built from scratch. When her friends arrived back at their apartment at four in the morning, they found Merrilyn naked on her bed, gagged, tied, dead of multiple stab wounds. The coroner confirmed sexual assault. The perpetrator used a condom, but he’d made a mistake in removing it, because the CSI team found a small amount of semen on the bed sheet near Merrilyn’s body.

Suspicion landed immediately on Darren Newman. He asserted his innocence to Frankie, the police, and the media—but the evidence pointed his way from the first day of the investigation. Merrilyn’s roommates told police that Darren had stalked her for months. That she’d fended off passes from him since she moved into the building. His history of assault and date-rape charges made the headlines. So did Frankie’s affidavit that had kept Darren out of jail.

Everyone knew he was guilty. The police and prosecutors were simply waiting for the DNA results to come back to prove it.

Except, when the results did come back, the DNA found at the murder scene of Merrilyn Somers didn’t match Darren Newman. Instead, it matched another man living in the same apartment building. Leon Willis’s DNA was in the California state database because of a felony conviction for mail fraud four years earlier, for which he’d served six months in prison. He had no alibi for the night of Merrilyn’s murder and no memory of the night at all. He claimed that he’d been drinking and passed out.

Faced with the DNA evidence, Leon Willis took a plea. He was serving the first year of a twenty-year sentence. Darren Newman received a public exoneration and an apology from the San Francisco Police.