New DNA test implicates Broward horse track worker for murder rap he beat decades ago
A quarter century after a Broward County jury found a man not guilty of murdering a horse groomer at a Pompano Beach racetrack, new DNA evidence suggests he may have taken part in the crime, the Broward County State Attorney’s Office said Wednesday.
The new findings aren’t expected to alter the course of Robert Earl Hayes life any time soon. He’s currently serving a 45-year sentence for a different murder at a New York racetrack and isn’t up for parole until 2025. And he can’t be tried again for the 1990 murder of Pamela Albertson in Pompano Beach because of the double jeopardy statute.
Still, in a letter penned Tuesday to the New York State Parole Board, Broward County State Attorney Harold F. Pryor said he hoped the findings would be considered during Hayes’ parole hearing. Pryor also wrote that Hayes is a suspect in four other incidents involving women at racetracks in the Northeast.
“Due to the nature of these crimes, the new and novel DNA testing, and Hayes nearing parole eligibility, we thought that it was imperative that we bring this evidence to your attention,” Pryor wrote.
Pryor’s office said Albertson’s family wished to retain its privacy and refused comment. But the sister of Leslie Dickenson, the horse groomer at Vernon Downs in New York that Hayes was convicted of murdering in 2004, said in a comment passed along by Broward prosecutors that she continued to be haunted by the actions of Hayes.
“One of my biggest regrets is he took her from us and she never got to know both her nieces and great-niece and nephews,” said Donna Dickenson-Helps. “But mostly I still miss her and cry when I think of her.”
The new DNA findings — taken from hair found clutched in Albertson’s hand and swabs taken from her vagina, anus and fingernails — came from testing initiated by the Innocence Project of New York and followed up by the Broward Sheriff’s Office. The tests taken last year are much more accurate than they were three decades ago when the technology was fairly new and they were a match to Hayes, Broward prosecutors said.
Hayes, who is now 58 and who worked alongside Albertson at the Pompano horse track when she was killed in 1990, was found guilty of first-degree murder at his first trial. Albertson, who was 32 when she was killed, had also been raped and sodomized. Five years later the Florida Supreme Court overturned the ruling, noting that the DNA used in the testing was in its early stages and still unreliable.
Prosecutors tried Hayes again for the same crime in 1997 and he was acquitted. At that trial, defense attorneys painted another man, Scott Nicholas, who worked at the track and who had a criminal past, as the killer.
After the second trial, Hayes was one of the main characters in a made-for-television drama called the Exonerated, that focused on six people who had been placed on death row and later exonerated.
Then in 2004, while he was working at New York’s Vernon Downs, Hayes was charged with the death of Dickenson, which had occurred 17 years earlier in 1987. Prosecutors at first ruled her death a suicide. Witnesses said they saw Hayes with Dickenson just before she died and he claimed to have discovered her body. Before the trial concluded, Hayes pleaded guilty to manslaughter, arson and burglary. He was sentenced to 15 to 45 years in state prison.
And though the new DNA findings can’t affect Hayes’ acquittal in Florida, Pryor said he’d like to play a role in how much time he spends in prison in New York.
“We believe it is just as relevant to speak the truth about what happened in this case and try to hold Mr. Hayes accountable — to the extent possible — as it is to exonerate those who are innocent,” Pryor said in a prepared statement. “We will speak to the Parole Board in New York to try to ensure that Mr. Hayes is not released from prison and we will do this in the interests of justice and to help safeguard all communities.”
This story was originally published June 15, 2022 at 4:59 PM.
