New Light on a Distant Verdict

Then he phoned for help.

The prosecutor insisted that Bruce could not have seen his mother through the windows at the back of the house, as he claimed. Police photos showed that furniture and glare from the sun would have blocked his view, he said.

"He couldn't think of everything," Rabichow said. "That is the most condemning lie that he told."

Further proof of his guilt, the prosecutor said, was that all of the bloody footprints in the house matched Bruce's shoes.

"Only his footprint is in the blood," Rabichow said.

If Lisker's story was true, he asked, "why isn't there an intruder's footprint somewhere?"

Mulcahy attacked the prosecution's case on several fronts. He said there was no evidence that Bruce wiped his fingerprints from the trophy or the exercise bar or did anything else to cover up a crime.

He challenged Rabichow's assertion that Lisker couldn't have seen his mother's body through the windows. The police photos were taken the day after the killing, he said, when the sun was brighter and the glare more pronounced.

Through patient questioning, Mulcahy pinned Hughes down to an account of the confession that he hoped would strain credulity.

Hughes said Lisker confessed during their very first conversation through the hole in the wall -- before they even knew each other's names.

In his closing argument, Mulcahy asked jurors to imagine that they were in the business of selling cars and that Hughes had come in looking to buy one on credit.

"Would you give Robert Hughes a loan?" he asked.

After deliberating three days, the jury convicted Lisker of second-degree murder. He was escorted to a holding pen, where he threw up into a trash can.

Several jurors cried that day outside the courtroom. "He just didn't strike us as a hardened criminal," said one. "But the evidence was convincing."

'I'm Not a Killer'

For a skinny kid who stands 5 feet 6, prison can be brutal. Soon after his conviction, Bruce endured a beating at the hands of a burly inmate at a juvenile facility in Ontario. He earned respect by fighting back and refusing to inform on his assailant. He told staff members he had suffered two black eyes falling out of bed.

He learned to say little and keep to himself. He studied computer programming and trained to be a paralegal. He went to church, attended 12-step alcohol and drug programs, and dabbled in poetry.

In a poem about Monsue, he wrote: