Two brothers have been exonerated of murder after spending 25 years behind bars.
David Bintz, 69, and Robert Bintz, 68, have been released from prison after DNA tests cleared them of any wrongdoing.
The brothers were jailed for killing Sandra Lison, 44, in August 1987.
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The mother-of-two disappeared from her job as a bartender at the Good Times Bar in Green Bay, Wisconsin, US, before her body was found 30 miles away in Machickanee Forest.
The victim has been sexually assaulted and strangled to death.
At the time, the police quizzed both brothers, who were at the bar on the evening in question.
David was seen arguing with Sandra over their bill, according to reports.
However, the case went cold until 1998 when David was serving a prison sentence for another crime.
A cellmate told the authorities that David confessed in his sleep to killing Sandra.
Despite a lack of physical evidence linking them to the crime, both brothers were sentenced to life in prison for her murder in 2000.
They were also charged with robbing the victim before she was killed.
Their luck changed when the Great North Innocence Project of Minnesota began looking into the case in 2018.
The project’s legal director Jim Mayer reached out to the Investigate Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College in New Jersey to assist with the case.
Last year, investigators assembled a genetic profile of DNA found at the crime scene and uploaded the information to consumer databases such as GEDmatch.
They narrowed down the matches to three brothers from Green Bay.
One of the brothers was William Hendricks, a convicted rapist who passed away back in 2000.
The investigative team obtained a DNA sample from his exhumed remains in April this year, as reported by Need To Know.
Tests then showed that there was a one in 329 trillion chance of the sample at the crime scene belonging to anyone other than Hendricks.
As a result, Judge Donald Zuidmulder granted a motion to release David and Robert Bintz from prison on 27 September.
The judge said: “Today, Sandra Lison will rest in peace because her true murderer is now known.
“It is therefore my bounded duty to exercise and follow the law, well satisfied that I will sign judgments vacating the convictions in both of these for both of these defendants and save them free.”
Under Wisconsin state law, anyone wrongly convicted of a crime can receive compensation of $5,000 per year spent in prison, up to a maximum of $25,000.
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