Murder charge dismissed against North Texas man, but sheriff says he’s still a suspect
Charges that never should have been filed against a Wise County man accused of a woman’s brutal murder were recently dismissed, the attorney representing him said.
The attorney has a number of concerns that are addressed in a lengthy letter posted on his website. Chief among those concerns is that a killer still roams free, attorney Barry Green’s letter says.
On the morning of July 5, 2019, Lauren Whitener was stabbed 18 times and set on fire in her Lake Bridgeport home. Lake Bridgeport is about 60 miles northwest of Fort Worth.
Two months later, Whitener’s neighbor, Rodney Aric Maxwell, was arrested and charged with her murder.
The DNA evidence that would later trigger the dismissal of the charges filed against Maxwell had yet to be tested when he was arrested, Green said. Maxwell’s DNA was not found in any of the DNA samples from the crime scene that were tested, Green said.
Once authorities had the DNA tested, received the results and understood the importance of the DNA evidence, they agreed to drop all charges against Maxwell on Thursday, Green said. The process should not have taken that long, he said.
“The charges were based on guesswork, speculation, and flat-out fantasy,” Green’s letter said. “Today’s dismissal simply confirms what I knew from the start: It was a charge, devoid of any evidence, brought against an innocent man who was serving as a scapegoat when the crime could not be solved.”
Wise County Sheriff Lane Akin says Green is mistaken and that the DNA evidence does not exonerate Maxwell. The probe continues as investigators seek to determine the unknown source of the DNA identified by laboratory analysis, Akin says. And there is other evidence that points to Maxwell as a suspect that is not explained away by the DNA test results, Akin said.
Akin declined to be specific about what other evidence implicates Maxwell in Whitener’s murder.
“We at this moment do not believe there was anyone else involved in the murder of Lauren Whitener,” Akin said. “We agreed to dismiss and take the case back to the grand jury in the not too distant future.
“We had five possible suspects and we narrowed that down to one and we are confident in that,” Akin said. “To say we are ignoring potential suspects is wrong because that is not the way we do our business. The evidence still indicates that Maxwell is the suspect.”
That is unless new evidence is uncovered during the course of the investigation that sheds light on a suspect who may have been previously overlooked, according to authorities.
Wise County District Attorney Greg Lowery says he met with the investigators in the Whitener case and that they have a plan to retrace her steps and find out the owner of the DNA that was sent to the lab.
Based on the facts available to law enforcement at the time of the arrest, the district attorney’s office decided it was appropriate to go forward with the case against Maxwell, “and a grand jury agreed with us,” Lowery said.
The DNA tests results have cast doubt on those facts and a decision was made to drop charges against Maxwell and investigate further. The standard of proof required for a jury to convict in a murder case is beyond a reasonable doubt, Lowery said.
“We will not go forward until we are convinced we can meet that standard,” Lowery said. “We have to find that unknown male and find out what, if anything, they did.”
Still, Green says the authorities involved did not react quickly enough to address the charges levied against Maxwell, who spent six months in jail before getting his bond reduced. And even though Maxwell’s bond was reduced from $850,000 to $250,000 and he was able to get out of jail, his father spent almost every penny he had to get his son freed from jail, said Green, a former Wise County district attorney.
No arrest should have been made prior to the receipt of the definitive DNA tests results, Green argues.
“If the DNA evidence did not exist, there is no doubt Aric would have been forced by prosecutors to stand trial for capital murder where they would have begged a Wise County jury to convict him and, thus, automatically banish him to the hell of a Texas prison until his last breath was taken,” Green’s letter said. “That should terrify you. It certainly horrifies me.
“A mere arrest ruins lives. An indictment ruins lives. Those with the responsibility of making those decisions should only do so after overturning every stone, understanding what is underneath, and then, and only then, searching their souls and asking themselves, ‘Am I sure— am I absolutely sure — that I’m right?’ That wasn’t done here.
“As a result, Aric Maxwell’s name and the words ‘accused capital murderer’ are forever fused together. A dismissal today doesn’t magically bring his reputation back.”
Lowery says this is a complex case that required a lot of investigation and a case which still remains open. Authorities may have wished they had all the information they now have at the time of arrest, but they made the best judgments they could have with the information they had available, Lowery said.
Akin said it has been his experience that investigators do not always agree with defense attorneys or prosecutors.
“It’s just something that you have to suffer,” Akin said.
Whitener, 32, had a son who was 8 at the time of her death. She was an Army veteran and worked as a surgical tech at Wise Health System hospital.
