Carmin Ross Case: Murray’s Trial, Evidence, and Appeals

Carmin Ross was killed in her home outside Lawrence, Kansas, on November 13, 2003, and her ex-husband, Kansas State University linguistics professor Thomas E. Murray, was convicted of her murder in 2005. The Carmin Ross murder case was built almost entirely on circumstantial evidence: a bitter custody fight, a computer full of searches like “how to kill someone quickly and quietly,” a shifting alibi, and a single drop of blood in the victim’s bathroom that could not exclude Murray as its source. A Douglas County jury found him guilty of first-degree murder, and he received life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.¹

What Happened at the House

Larry Lima, Ross’s fiancé, was living in California and could not reach her on November 14, 2003. He asked the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department to check on her. Deputies arrived at her home at 1860 East 1150 Road shortly after 1 p.m., saw blood and a knee through a window, entered through the back door, and found Ross dead in the living room.²

The room had been torn up. A potted plant lay on its side, the coffee table was flipped onto the couch, and blood was on the floor, walls, and ceiling.³ The autopsy counted 11 blunt-force lacerations, 13 stab wounds to the neck, and defensive wounds on her arms. Investigators concluded the attacker beat her first, then grabbed a knife from her own kitchen. A knife was missing from her block, and no weapon was ever recovered.²

Nothing had been forced, nothing was stolen, and there was no sign of sexual assault. Her car sat in the driveway. A bloody print consistent with a work boot marked the front porch, but the matching shoe was never found.² The killing looked like the work of someone Ross would let into her home.

Why Murray Was the Suspect

Ross and Murray had been married 18 years before divorcing in June 2003. They had a four-year-old daughter, Ciara, and they were fighting over where she would live.⁴ On November 11, 2003, two days before the killing, Ross and Murray sat down for a custody mediation session. During that session Murray learned that Lima was moving to Lawrence and that Ross planned eventually to take Ciara with them to California.²

A neighbor testified that Murray had told him he “would be better off if [Carmin] weren’t alive.”² In emails read at trial, Murray described himself as feeling “like an animal that’s been backed into a corner.”³ Prosecutors argued the mediation was the trigger, and that Murray drove the roughly 90 miles from Manhattan to Lawrence and back on the morning of the 13th to kill her.

The Evidence That Convicted Him

Murray came in voluntarily on the night the body was found and sat through a police interview at the Riley County Police Department that ran about nine and a half hours. He was told he could leave or ask for a lawyer at any point; he did neither. Everything was recorded.⁵ Detectives noticed cuts on his right hand and bruises on his wrists and arms. He offered explanations for the injuries and, before investigators had told him how Ross had died, volunteered reasons why his blood or hers might turn up in his car or home.²

His alibi did not hold. He first said he had spent the morning of November 13 at home grading papers. Several of his students then told police he had been grading their papers in class as they turned them in. He changed his account and said he had driven to Paxico, Kansas, that morning to look at antique pillowcases.¹

His computer was worse. Between October 8 and November 10, 2003, someone using it had searched for “colorless and odorless poison,” “murder for hire,” “how to hire an assassin,” “how to kill someone quickly and quietly,” and “the best way to kill someone.”² On November 12, the day after the mediation, the computer was used to look up driving routes from Topeka to Lawrence that avoided the Kansas Turnpike and its toll-booth cameras.⁵

The physical evidence was thinner but pointed the same direction. All the blood in the house belonged to Ross except for one drop on the baseboard of a downstairs bathroom. That drop was a mix of her DNA and an unknown male’s. The sample did not clear the lab’s quality-control threshold for a conclusive match, but the state’s analyst testified that Murray’s DNA was consistent with it and that he could not be excluded. Lima was excluded.²¹

Detective Doug Woods spent nearly a year building the case. Murray was arrested on October 4, 2004.⁴

The Trial

The case went to trial in Douglas County District Court in February 2005 before Judge Robert Fairchild and ran about five weeks.⁶ Assistant district attorney Angela Wilson led the prosecution, joined by special prosecutor Tom Bath, hired by the Ross family under a Kansas law that allows a victim’s family to add private counsel. District Attorney Charles E. Branson and Attorney General Paul J. Morrison were also on the brief.¹

The state opened by playing the entire police interview for the jury and stacked the case from there: the searches, the shifting alibi, the injuries, the DNA drop, and the neighbor’s testimony. Murray’s friend GayLynn Crossley-Brubaker described his behavior after the murder, including remarks about cuts on his hands that seemed consistent with gripping a knife blade and his repeated fixation on blood. She acknowledged on redirect that she had suspected Murray and had gone to the sheriff. In closing, the prosecutor told the jury that Murray’s “best friend thinks he’s a murderer.”¹

Murray’s Topeka defense team, Pedro Irigonegaray and Robert Eye, argued the state had no direct evidence. Eye told jurors in a 90-minute opening that there were no fingerprints, fibers, hair, or blood conclusively tying Murray to the house that day, that prints from at least seven unidentified people had been found in the home, and that neighbors had seen unfamiliar vehicles in Ross’s driveway. The internet searches, Eye said, were research for TV crime-scene screenplays Murray was working on. “Who killed Carmin Ross?” Eye told the jury. “You’re not going to know at the end of this trial because of these gaps in the evidence.”⁷ A defense expert pointed to two bloody shoeprints and a bloodstain on the kitchen sink as signs another person had been there, though the prosecution attacked his qualifications.

Some of Murray’s own words to detectives worked against him. He had called himself a “thinking man” and said that if he were to commit a homicide he would use “airborne poison or something really slick.” He also described his role in the investigation as “having fun with this from a CSI perspective.”²

The jury deliberated for three days. On March 17, 2005, it found Murray guilty of first-degree murder.³ He was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 25 years.¹

Appeals

The Kansas Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the conviction on January 18, 2008. Murray had argued prosecutorial misconduct in closing, including the statement that his blood was in the victim’s bathroom and the characterization of Crossley-Brubaker’s testimony. The court held these were reasonable inferences from the record and that the defense had opened the door to the disputed testimony on cross-examination.¹

In 2013, represented by court-appointed attorney Adam Hall, Murray filed a civil challenge claiming his trial lawyers had been ineffective. He said Irigonegaray and Eye should have hired an independent DNA expert and should have challenged the search warrants for his home, car, and computers. On April 9, 2013, Judge Fairchild rejected both arguments. The lawyers had reasonably feared that further DNA testing could turn up more evidence against their client, and any warrant challenge would have failed because Murray had signed consent forms and been videotaped giving police permission to search.⁶

Where Murray Is Now

Murray is incarcerated at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Butler County, Kansas. His earliest possible parole date is October 4, 2029.⁸

1
FindLaw. State v. Murray, No. 94,619
2
Kansas Supreme Court. State v. Murray
3
CBS News. A Mind for Murder
4
CNN. Murray Background
5
CBS News. Book ‘Em: Language of Evil
6
Lawrence Journal-World. Court Rejects Convicted Murderer Thomas Murray’s Challenge
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Lawrence Journal-World. Opening Statements Bring
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Lawrence Journal-World. Convicted Ex-Wife Murderer Thomas Murray in Court