Philly police have reopened 1 out of 41 exonerated murder cases

Since Larry Krasner became Philadelphia District Attorney in 2018, the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) has worked to exonerate 40 people in 41 cases. 

That means the people who were initially convicted of those crimes-- mostly murder-- are no longer considered guilty. Their verdicts and sentences have been vacated, and they walked free out of prison. 

The exonerations have left some of the victims’ families confused and in search of answers for who killed their loved ones.  

“We're shocked because now you're telling us that these are not the ones,” said Mary Flomo, the widow of slain Philadelphia Police Officer Terrence Flomo. “So, if these are not the ones now, who is?”

The NBC10 Investigators found that other than one exoneration case, the Philadelphia Police Department has not reopened or re-investigated any of the exonerated cases. 

In the case of the one that they did reopen -- the 1988 murder of 4-year-old Barbara Jean Horn – detectives came back to the same suspect who was exonerated, Walter Ogrod. 

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“At this point, everything kept leading back to the original investigation,” said Philadelphia Police Deputy Commissioner for Investigations Frank Vanore.

But that original investigation was found to be fraught with issues, including a coerced confession. 

The city settled a civil rights lawsuit with Ogrod for $9.1 million last year. 

“I'm just telling you what our investigation showed,” Vanore said. 

He said two detectives spent 18 months re-investigating the case and even had the help of the FBI in interviewing a suspect the DA’s office had identified in the case. 

“None of that information that we reviewed or we were able to see led us to believe that someone else committed that crime,” he said. 

Krasner called Vanore’s comments “nuts” and “shameful.”

“I find the evidence that Walter did not do it overwhelming. I don't have any reasonable doubt about it,” Krasner said. 

Ogrod continues to maintain his innocence.

As for the other 40 exonerated cases that haven’t been reopened by police, Krasner says he hopes the new administration will take a new look. 

“We were not seeing some kind of a robust effort on the part of PPD to look at exoneration cases, to reinvestigate them, even where it was clear that people were innocent,” he said. “The new leadership has the opportunity right now to go a different way to do the right thing.”

Vanore is already working under the new leadership of Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel. 

Vanore told NBC10 cold case detectives review every exoneration to see what the DA’s investigation found. 

“If the facts were that the wrong person was identified, that exculpatory information was left out, then that's stuff that we need to look at,” he said.

But so far none of those reviews have led to an actual re-investigation of the case. 

The Barbara Jean Horn case was reopened in 2021 after detectives watched the NBC10 true crime series “Who Killed Barbara Jean?” and saw that the DA’s office had identified two potential suspects. 

“We run that down and we can't get to another suspect, well, when it's a 30-year-old case, sometimes it's very difficult to move forward,” Vanore said. 

For the other cases, he said if new information comes up on a case, police will investigate it. 

“If there's something there, we'll reopen it and they'll look at it,” he said. 

That’s not enough for Officer Flomo’s widow. 

Her husband was shot and killed while he was in his unmarked police vehicle with his badge and gun near the corner of 20th and Cecil B Moore. His undercover narcotics shift had ended four hours earlier. 

Police arrested William Johnson and Mumim Slaughter after two sex workers said the two men had gone up to Flomo’s car and then gunshots went off. Johnson and Slaughter were convicted of third-degree murder.

The Pennsylvania Innocence Project picked up Johnson’s case and found exculpatory evidence had been withheld, including a letter from one of the sex workers saying she was pressured by detectives to identify Johnson. 

Johnson was exonerated in 2023. 

Police don’t think there is much they can do. 

“In the Flomo case, I'm told that it was a prosecutorial issue… things were not brought forward in a timely manner,” Vanore said. “ So I don't know if we found anybody else in that case that would have been responsible.”

Mary Flomo says she would like the case to be reopened so that she and her family can get some closure. 

“We would find out the truth. We would find out what happened,” she said. “But mainly truth and justice. This is what we want.”