“No Contest” Plea For Suspect In 1985 El Dorado Hills Slaying; DNA Evidence Freed Original Suspect
LUCY HODGMAN, Sacramento Bee
(PLACERVILLE, CALIFORNIA) July 22, 2022 — Michael Green, a Roseville man pleaded no contest Friday to the 1985 slaying of an El Dorado Hills woman in her home, over two years after DNA evidence exonerated the man originally convicted of the murder.
In 2005, Ricky Davis, 57, was found guilty of killing Jane Hylton. Although he had always maintained his innocence, Davis was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
But in February 2020, improved DNA technology used to analyze a saliva and blood spot found on the shoulder of Hylton’s nightgown proved that Davis was innocent, and he was released from prison. The same evidence led authorities to Green, 54, who was arrested that same week.
Because Green was 17 years old at the time of Hylton’s murder, the case had to move through juvenile court before it reached El Dorado County Superior Court in South Lake Tahoe, El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Savannah Broddick said.
Green pleaded no contest to second degree murder on Friday, according to Broddick. He will be sentenced Sept. 20, and faces 15 years to life in prison.
Hylton was found dead from 29 stab wounds in the El Dorado Hills home where she lived with Davis, then 20, and his 19-year-old girlfriend, Connie Dahl. According to the Northern California Innocence Project, which is part of the Santa Clara University School of Law and advocated for Davis’s exoneration, Davis and Dahl returned from a party to find Hylton’s body.
“Michael Green” was one of the names mentioned by the victim’s daughter in describing one of three boys who she met in a park the night of the murder.
The case went unsolved until 1999, when detectives reopened their investigation. Over the course of four interviews, Dahl reportedly changed her story for police, implicating Davis as the killer. The Innocence Project alleged that detectives used “techniques known to increase the chances of false confessions” in their interviews.
In 2020, the case was the first in California’s history, and the second nationally, to both exonerate a wrongfully convicted individual and lead authorities to a different suspect.