Investigators were unable to find a DNA link between tennis umpire Lois Goodman and the coffee mug police say she used to kill her husband at their home in Los Angeles on April 17. Goodman, 70, was arrested in August in New York just before she was to officiate at the U.S. Open on charges that she killed her 80-year-old husband, Alan Goodman. She is currently standing trial in Los Angeles, where she is on house arrest.
Goodman’s attorney, Robert Sheahen, told Reuters the DNA on the coffee cup “came back solely to the husband and not to Ms. Goodman, which supports our theory that the husband was holding the cup and then he fell on the cup, and that accounts for the shattered pieces of the cup being embedded in the right side of his head.”
Goodman’s lawyers say she has also passed a lie detector test, and that those results were shared with prosecutors, but under California law the test cannot be presented in court unless both prosecutors and defense attorneys agree.
“It doesn’t really matter whether her DNA was found or not,” said former FBI agent and ABC News consultant Brad Garrett, in an interview with ABC News. “In fact, it’s not uncommon for a suspect’s DNA to not be a murder weapon, whether it be a gun, a knife [or] in this case, a coffee cup.”