Prosecutors in western New York on Tuesday dropped efforts to retry a man whose manslaughter conviction was overturned in the 1993 slaying of a woman near Buffalo — as a new trial begins.
James Pugh, now 63, served 26 years in prison in the death of Deborah Meindl, a 33-year-old nursing student and mother of two who was stabbed dozens of times and strangled inside her home in Tonawanda. He was paroled in 2019 and a judge ordered a new trial in the case in 2023.
Jury selection was set to begin Tuesday after Erie County prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss the charges, saying they could no longer meet the burden of proof because of “our inability to present a single piece of evidence considered admissible in the original trial and the unavailability of key witnesses more than 30 years later.” The judge granted the request.
Prosecutors, however, said they are continuing their case against co-defendant Brian Scott Lorenz, who will face a second retrial scheduled for April after the first trial was declared a mistrial in October.
Judge Paul Wojtazek, who dismissed the case against Pugh on Tuesday, ordered new trials for the two men in 2023 after their DNA was not found at the crime scene, including the knife used in the attack. The judge also said prosecutors withheld some evidence that could have helped the defense.
District Attorney Michael Kane said Mindl’s family had agreed to the decision to drop the case against Pugh, which was “not taken lightly.”
Lisa Mindel Payne, who was 7 when her mother was killed, hugged Pugh in court Tuesday and said her family is seeking justice for her mother.
She told Wojtazek in court that she could not say for certain whether Pugh was guilty or innocent, acknowledging the lack of evidence and other weaknesses in the prosecution’s case.
“The justice system has failed my mother,” she said. “I’ve never asked for the truth. I’ve believed in the justice system, but I’ve lost faith in the system. I just want the truth. Why did he have to die that day?”
Meindl Payne’s sister, Jessica, who was 10 years old when she found her mother’s body after coming home from school, died in 2020.
Pugh, who now works as a painter and other contractor, said he was not satisfied with the final outcome of the case against him.
“As Lisa said, there is no justice here for her or me,” he said in a statement released by his lawyers. “We both just want the truth, and it’s the prosecutors’ job to get it for us. They failed. They failed Lisa. They failed me. They failed Lisa’s sister. Most of all they failed Deborah Mendel.”
Deborah Mindl’s husband, Donald Mindl, was initially a suspect in the death but was never charged. He died in 2023. At the time of the murder, he had a $50,000 life insurance policy on his wife and was having an affair with a 17-year-old employee at Taco Bell, authorities said.
Police began investigating Lorenz and Pugh on the theory that Deborah Mendel had been murdered during a burglary. They were charged after Lorenz, then arrested for another crime in Iowa, confessed to murdering Mendel and implicated Pugh. Lorenz later said it was a false confession.
In 2021, then-District Attorney John J. Flynn appointed two prosecutors from his office to review the case.
Their surprising conclusion: that the real killer was Richard Matt, a convicted murderer who escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora in upstate New York in 2015 and was fatally shot by a federal agent. Prison Break was the subject of a 2018 Showtime series.
Another fugitive, David Sweatt, told authorities Matt confessed to killing Deborah Mendel.
Both Flynn and Wojciech rejected that theory.
In an interview Tuesday, one of Pugh’s attorneys, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, said he was asking the district attorney’s office to reinvestigate the case. The DA’s office declined to comment on that request.
