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In the mid-1990s, Steve Armstrong confessed to the 1980 murder of a UW-Madison student for which his brother Ralph Armstrong was convicted, according to a new filing with a state appeals court. Police, it says, failed to investigate and the prosecutor took steps to destroy evidence that could have proved Ralph Armstrong’s innocence.
“[T]he state deliberately suppressed and withheld, for approximately the last thirteen years, information that a known third party confessed to the rape and murder of the victim in this case,” states the brief, filed on April 17 by Armstrong’s defense attorneys, Jerome Buting of Brookfield and Barry Scheck of New York. The brief to Wisconsin’s Dist. 4 Court of Appeals calls this confession “exculpatory evidence supporting the claim of Ralph Armstrong that he is innocent of this crime.”
It goes on to say that former Dane County assistant district attorney John Norsetter, Armstrong’s original prosecutor, was personally contacted by one of the individuals to whom Steve Armstrong confessed. But Norsetter, who retired from the office last year, allegedly not only failed to investigate or notify Armstrong’s defense attorneys of this confession, he subsequently ordered a test that destroyed evidence that could have established Steve Armstrong’s guilt.
“To even attempt such a test without telling the court or the defense about the third party’s confession was at best reckless, at worst, a deliberate attempt to manipulate the truth and frame an innocent man,” the filing states.
Ralph Armstrong, now 55, was convicted in 1981 of killing UW-Madison freshman Charise Kamps, 19, in a downtown Madison apartment; he has always maintained his innocence. In 2005, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned his conviction, after tests excluded him as the source of crime-scene DNA. The Dane County District Attorney’s Office is preparing to retry the case.
The filing (see attached document) from Buting and Scheck, the latter a nationally known criminal defense attorney and co-director of the Innocence Project at Cardoza Law School, is accompanied by two affidavits, from Texas residents Fawn Elaine Cave and Debbie Holsomback. Both give nearly identical accounts of an encounter with Steve Armstrong that took place in the summer of either 1994 or 1995. (Holsomback recalls that it was 1995; Cave says it was either 1994 or 1995.)

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