Bernard Pease, Jr., was convicted in 1984 for the murder of Maria Philbrick, and was released this week on parole. A key piece of evidence used to convict Pease came from hair analysis, a process since debunked by the FBI, and the Montana Innocence Project has taken up his case.
The Billings man convicted in the 1983 murder of a woman, whose body had been discovered in an alleyway east of downtown, was granted parole this week by the state parole board.
The case of Bernard Pease, Jr., who was found guilty in the stabbing death of 23-year-old Maria Philbrick, has been taken up by the Montana Innocence Project.
A key piece of evidence used to convict Pease came from hair analysis, a process since debunked by the FBI.
The Montana Innocence Project first championed Pease's case in 2008, when former Montana State Crime Lab director, Arnold Melnikoff, came under fire for his hair evidence testimony that helped wrongfully convict three men, including Jimmy Ray Bromgard, who spent 15 years in prison for a high-profile child rape case out of Yellowstone County.
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Melnikoff provided the hair analysis in Pease’s case.
The Montana Innocence Project formally considered Pease's case in 2015, after a change in state law allowed untested DNA and other forensic material collected at a crime scene to be considered new evidence and thus used to reexamine past convictions.
In 2019, the Montana Innocence Project filed a petition for DNA testing on four different samples collected from the crime scene, the suspect and the victim in 1983. The results of those tests are still pending, said a spokeswoman for the Montana Innocence Project.
Bernard Pease Jr. appears in court in 1984.
It all began when Philbrick’s body was found naked, with her throat slit and stab wounds to the chest on Dec. 1, 1983, beside a dumpster in the alley behind the Pease family stove business at 122 North 12th St.
No blood was found on site, and investigators determined Philbrick was killed in a back room of the Pease business, Fireplace Stove Specialists.
Philbrick, of Sisseton, South Dakota, had been living in Billings for only a couple of months at the time of her death. She was last seen outside of the Empire Bar around 3 a.m. on Thanksgiving 1983, a week before her body was found.
The medical examiner in the case could not determine the exact date or time of death. Prosecutors theorized that Philbrick was likely killed around 3:30 or 4 a.m. the week prior, on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 24, according to court documents filed by the Montana Innocence Project.
The case against Pease relied in part on microscopic hair analysis, which compares factors like the color, thickness and texture of hair strands to determine if evidence found at the scene matches hair samples provided by suspects. The practice has since been discredited, with the FBI announcing in 2015 that 90 percent of the cases it testified in using microscopic hair analysis were erroneous.
