On the morning of June 16, 1998, 3-year-old Christina McNeil was found dead in her bed in Bloomington, Illinois. Today, her now 65-year-old father, Barton McNeil, is serving a life sentence after being convicted of her murder. Beyond those two facts, the story of Christina's death is anything but clear cut, as Matthew Bremner details at Esquire. McNeil insists he's innocent, and his cause has been championed by the Illinois Innocence Project. "There was just no evidence against Bart," says one of his attorneys. One defense expert, a former medical examiner, looked over the case files and came to the "stunning conclusion" that Christina wasn't smothered as detectives maintained but may have died of natural, or at least unexplained, causes, writes Bremner. Another defense expert similarly rejected prosecutors' claims the girl had been sexually assaulted.
"Suddenly it seemed possible that the little girl hadn't been murdered or abused, that perhaps she'd died without suffering," writes Bremner. He adds that he took up the story when his own baby suffered an accident (from which the child recovered), and he realized that "losing a child was not the worst thing that could happen to a person: Being unjustly locked up for it was." The expected ending to all this didn't materialize, however: McNeil's bid for a new trial was rejected last year, and he now expects to die in prison. In McNeil's view, his daughter was murdered by an ex-girlfriend of his, Misook Nowlin, and the story details her violent past. Her own daughter says Nowlin not only regularly beat her but admitted to killing Christina. Nowlin denies it—from prison. She is behind bars after killing her mother-in-law in 2011. Read the full story. (Or check out other longform recaps.)
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