Elana Wells didn’t know much about her dad growing up. Though they corresponded regularly when she was young, she had no idea the letters were coming from prison, where Anthony Apanovitch was awaiting a death sentence for the 1984 rape and murder of Mary Anne Flynn.
Born just 10 days before the murder, Wells had been shielded from her father’s past by her mother, who legally changed her last name before she started kindergarten. That all changed the day a Cleveland police officer spoke to her sixth-grade classroom for an anti-drug presentation, telling a story about a man he went to school with who had abused drugs and alcohol and ended up in prison. Then he held up a local magazine with the former classmate on the cover, his wrists in handcuffs.
The man in the picture was Wells’ father.
At home, she began asking questions about the crimes he was convicted of and was horrified when she heard the answers. She stopped responding to his letters. Then, when she was 13, her father successfully sued her mother for visitation rights.
Though the prison visit had been ordered by a judge, the two began to form a real bond when they met in person. It was easy to believe him when he proclaimed his innocence.
“I always dreamed of having a father,” Wells told HuffPost.
Meanwhile, her father’s case, as is typical for death penalty cases, bounced around the courts, each reviewing the circumstantial evidence that led to his conviction just 73 days after he was indicted. But then in 1991, someone cleaning up a desk at the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office in Cleveland found an old key. It unlocked a cabinet drawer where three slides of material from Flynn’s autopsy had sat for years. Suddenly, authorities had DNA — and the technology to test it.
For years, experts for the prosecutor’s office and Apanovitch’s defense disagreed about exactly what the slides showed — after all, they’d been made before the rigorous protocols of a modern crime scene investigation, and the samples were old. But in 2016, a state trial court judge was convinced: Apanovitch’s DNA was not found in the slide created from a vaginal swab. He threw out the rape charges, granted Apanovitch a new murder trial and released him on bail.
For 2 1/2 years, he lived as a free man, marrying an old flame and helping to raise her grandchildren. Then, just as suddenly as his release, the Ohio Supreme Court ordered him back to death row. They ruled that DNA testing had been conducted by prosecutors, not Apanovitch’s defense, so it failed to follow the state’s law regarding postconviction innocence claims.
“I immediately went from my front yard to death row,” Apanovitch told HuffPost in a phone call from Ohio’s Ross Correctional Institution. “I didn’t get arrested for a crime. I didn’t go back to trial. There was no evidence presented against me. I was still as innocent that day as I was the day they cut me loose.”
Apanovitch’s supporters, who included a number of relatives, anti-death penalty activists and even a Republican lawmaker, were outraged at the decision, which they considered a “legal loophole” that could lead to the execution of an innocent man. But Wells wasn’t so sure. Over the years, she’d developed a fraught and complicated relationship with her father, whom she described as both charming and manipulative. She didn’t trust him not to lie.
Now a 40-year-old mother of three, Wells had also worked as an insurance investigator.
“I loved picking apart cases, listening for clues and trying to solve them,” she said.
She believed she could set aside her feelings about her father and the many arguments made by prosecutors and his supporters. But could she find out the truth herself?
On Aug. 23, 1984, Flynn had been visiting her brother Martin Flynn and his wife, Kate, looking for houses for sale in their neighborhood. A former Army nurse who went on to help launch a midwifery program at Case Western Reserve University, Flynn had, by one count, delivered more than 800 babies at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital.
Always independent and adventurous, at age 33, Flynn was planning to become a mother on her own, Marty Flynn told HuffPost. He and his wife had recently adopted a baby from India, and Flynn was in the early stages of adopting a baby from there herself.
“The early plan was that she was going to move to Cleveland Heights, on the east side of Cleveland, where we were, and live near us, so that our Indian babies could be raised as cousins,” Marty Flynn said.
Still, she loved her duplex in west Cleveland, half of which she shared with two cats, Chester and Little Kitty, while the other side was rented to tenants she trusted. When Apanovitch, who was working on other houses in the neighborhood, offered to paint its exterior, she hired him for the job.
“She felt sorry for Tony,” Marty Flynn said, mainly because Apanovitch’s wife was heavily pregnant — with Wells — and she wanted to help them out.
“He was kind of a neighborhood handyman, besides also being the neighborhood lothario,” Marty Flynn noted.
Mary Anne Flynn was one of the women Apanovitch, then 29, hit on, Marty Flynn said, adding Apanovitch even once called her drunk from a bar.
“It was just like, ‘How absolutely disgusting. I can’t believe he did this,’” Marty Flynn said she complained to him.
“That was it,” Marty Flynn said. “She didn’t like Tony. She thought Tony was a pig, basically.”
Six people would go on to testify that Mary Anne Flynn told them she was afraid of Apanovitch, “although most of them could only describe him as ‘the painter’ or ‘a big man’ with a ‘wife that was pregnant,’” according to court documents.
On the afternoon of Aug. 23, Apanovitch was working on the house across the street when he approached Flynn and offered to paint her windowsills.
He returned about 10 minutes later to the house where he’d been working with another man, telling him that Flynn was a “foxy lady” and that he “would like to get into her pants,” according to a detective who interviewed the work partner.
At trial, however, the man denied saying that. Instead, he testified, Apanovitch told him she was a “nice lady.”
That night, around 10 p.m., a neighbor saw Flynn walking from her Toyota Tercel to the back door of her home after her visit to her brother and his wife.
Hours later, she was dead.
The next day, concerned that Flynn hadn’t shown up for work and unable to reach her, a fellow nurse at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital called Marty Flynn. The two met at the duplex and got in through an unlocked door on the tenants’ side of the basement, according to court documents.
They found Flynn’s front door locked and chained from the inside. They called for her, but the house was eerily quiet.
Marty Flynn then walked upstairs to his sister’s bedroom and made a gruesome discovery.
His sister was lying facedown on her bare mattress, nude, badly beaten and bloodied. Her wrists were bound behind her back with what appeared to be a torn strip of the bed sheet, which was also tied around her neck and the bed’s headboard.
Marty Flynn ran downstairs to call the police. He was so shaken by what he had seen that he couldn’t remember his sister’s street address, so he unlatched the front door, ran outside to check, and then summoned help.
When Wells began really delving into the case a few years ago, she visited the Cuyahoga County courthouse and learned disturbing details about Flynn’s death in the records there. She recalled how grisly the crime scene photos were.
“Seeing the photos definitely put into perspective just how violent the crime was,” she said. “That whoever did that did it with intent.”
Flynn had been stabbed in the back of the neck, leaving a 4-inch deep laceration, a pathologist testified. Tiny pieces of wood were embedded deep inside the wound, consistent with pieces of wood in her bedroom — which investigators determined were from a missing basement window sill.
In addition to “significant” internal injuries, bruises and swelling across her face and hands, the pathologist noted multiple scrapes on her face and the inside and outside of both thighs.
The pathologist said that Flynn’s face and chest were “soiled by large amounts of blood” and found “many small and large pieces of wood chips on her face, lying on the surface of her face, her neck, her chest, her abdomen and tangled in her blood-matted hair and on her back.”
Based on her stomach contents, the pathologist determined that she had died between midnight and 6 a.m., and her cause of death was found to be strangulation.
Sperm was found in Flynn’s vagina and mouth; according to court filings, a police detective could see the semen in her mouth.
The coroner created a number of slides using swabs taken from her oral and vaginal cavities; then they were put away in a drawer — and forgotten.
Early in the case, police suspected Apanovitch, known to authorities as a heavy-drinking ex-con who’d served time for sexual battery and burglary. He’d been ousted from more than one bar for fighting.
On Aug. 25, the day after Flynn’s body was found, detectives searching the house found a handwritten receipt on her kitchen table for house painting, signed by Apanovitch and dated July 10. Flynn’s checkbook was also on the kitchen table, with two canceled checks made out to him for the previous paintwork.
The police arrested Apanovitch three days later.
“They focused on Tony right away,” said Dale Baich, Apanovitch’s longtime attorney who has continued to represent him pro bono even as he’s otherwise retired. “And tunnel vision set in.”
Baich believes a number of men — including an exterminator who borrowed Flynn’s house key, male guests at a wine and cheese party he said she hosted at her house with a friend, or ex-boyfriends — should have been questioned more closely by police.
Some of Apanovitch’s supporters also believe Flynn could have been a victim of serial rapist Ronnie Shelton, who was convicted for scores of assaults between 1983 and 1988 in Cleveland’s West Park neighborhood.
But Shelton, who was sentenced to thousands of years in prison before he killed himself in 2018, adamantly denied killing Flynn.
“I’m not capable of murder,” he told the Cleveland Scene in 2000. “Tell them I’m willing to give my DNA, my hair … I had nothing to do with that.”
Apanovitch also said he was innocent, and Baich pointed to his early cooperation with police as proof.
“When Tony was taken into custody, he voluntarily provided hair, blood and saliva samples to the police, and he waived his right to counsel,” Baich told HuffPost.
“He had done a previous stint in prison, he would know that you say, ‘I’m not talking until I have a lawyer.’ … He would have to be stupid if he actually did the crime to think that he would not leave evidence at the scene,” Baich added.
Apanovitch was indicted just over a month after his initial arrest, on Oct. 2, on charges of aggravated murder, burglary, and two counts of rape; prosecutors would allege at trial there was an oral and a vaginal rape. Investigators had not found any physical evidence directly connecting Apanovitch to the crime scene but noted that he could not reliably account for his whereabouts that night. In addition to his alleged sexual advances toward Flynn, she had reportedly expressed fear of him, and then there was the conversation they had had the afternoon of her murder. The investigation yielded a list of circumstantial evidence which was presented by prosecutors at trial, and then recounted across multiple state and federal appeals. Over decades, the case became so convoluted, even by capital case standards, that federal appeals Judge Danny Boggs remarked on its “tortured procedural history” in a 2006 opinion — a decade before Apanovitch was freed and then sent back to death row.
A number of arguments have been made by Apanovitch’s defense, then dropped over the years or knocked down under a judge’s scrutiny, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office spokesperson Lexi Bauer told HuffPost. According to her, that doesn’t change the facts.
“Anthony Apanovitch was, is, and always will be guilty of the rape and murder of Mary Anne Flynn,” she said, adding that police went “above and beyond” in their investigation. “Evidence of his guilt was compelling at his 1984 trial and remains so today.”
The alibi
Apanovitch’s trial lawyer acknowledged to jurors that he’d gone on a “boozy and blurry odyssey” at several bars on the night that Flynn was raped and murdered. Today, security cameras might have been able to confirm Apanovitch’s movements with more precision. Instead, investigators were forced to rely on the foggy memories of people who had been drinking heavily. Still, Apanovitch didn’t have an alibi for a key time period, detectives said: Sometime between 9:15 and 10 p.m., he was seen leaving the Brookside Inn — within walking distance of Flynn’s house. He returned around 12:45 a.m., detectives said, with a scratch on his face that hadn’t been there before.
The scratch
Apanovitch allegedly asked a bar manager, two waitresses and a go-go dancer at another bar, the Comet, to tell police that he had gotten the scratches in a fight outside. None of the Comet staff remembered him even being at the bar that night, prosecutors said.
Apanovitch told police that he received the injury — described by a pathologist who examined it as a “Y-shaped scrape mark” measuring about 2 1/2 inches long — the night of the murder. According to court documents, some of his different explanations to investigators were: that he had been in a fight, that he had been cut by broken glass from a bottle, and that he had been scratched by glass when the hood of a car he was working on came down and broke a glass bottle.
But when police searched the area where Apanovitch said he was scratched by broken glass, they “found nothing to support [his] story,” said Bauer, the prosecutor’s office spokesperson.
While the pathologist said the injury was consistent with a fingernail scratch, she could not say for sure what caused it. She testified that it could have also come from the tip of a knife or other sharp object.
Apanovitch’s defense noted that no bodily tissue was found under Flynn’s fingernails. Blood or skin might end up under a victim’s nails if they scratched their attacker, the pathologist said, but it’s also “very common” to find nothing.
The window
Prosecutors also argued that Flynn’s killer would have had to be familiar with her duplex’s unusual floor plan. The front and back doors were chained from the inside, and prosecutors said the killer would have had to know about a basement window, obscured from the street by bushes. A detective testified that the window was ajar when police arrived and pieces of wood were lying nearby. It appeared to have been forcibly opened, and one of the window sills was missing — one that prosecutors said Apanovitch had offered to paint and was later used by the killer to strike Flynn.
Baich disputed there was evidence that Apanovitch had broken in, pointing to the lack of footprints on the basement’s dusty floor and several storm windows stacked by the open window.
“Tony, being as drunk as he was that night, if he tried to crawl through that window, being 6 foot 6, he would have fallen, made a racket,” Baich told HuffPost. “There would have been footprints.”
The hair
One piece of evidence presented at trial would go on to be the focus of years of arguments from Apanovitch’s defense that he was, in fact, innocent.
Barbara Campbell, a technician with the Trace Evidence Department of the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office, testified that she had found a single strand of hair on one of Flynn’s hands that did not belong to either Flynn or Apanovitch.
In later court filings, Apanovitch’s defense accused prosecutors of withholding reports from a lab technician and police that raised questions about whether the hair was found under Flynn’s bound hands — where the defense argued it could only have been left by the killer. Meanwhile, prosecutors argued about the placement of the hair and said it could have been lodged there as her body was transported to the coroner’s office.
However, a judge ruled in 2009 that “confusion about the location of the hair” and “any discrepancies between the trial testimony and the reports would have easily been explained by the examining lab technician.”
“The fact that the technician and or officer may have inartfully used the terms ‘back,’ ‘behind,’ and ‘under’ does little to nothing to undermine the reliability of the verdict,” U.S. District Court Judge John R. Adams said.
The blood type
Prosecutors assured the jury that Apanovitch’s blood type was consistent with vaginal and oral swabs taken during Flynn’s autopsy, and they argued that whoever raped her was also the murderer. The blood type finding was cited in rulings against Apanovitch in various appeals and requests for postconviction relief over the years.
It was far from a smoking gun, however. In fact, a key detail about Flynn’s blood type was not disclosed to Apanovitch’s defense attorneys — and called into question whether the vaginal swabs had any evidentiary value at all.
Based on the swabs, the perpetrator was determined to be a blood type A “secretor” — meaning that their blood type could be determined from their bodily fluids, including semen.
While Campbell testified that roughly 340,000 of the men in Cuyahoga County were blood type A secretors, Flynn’s blood type was also A.
But the fact that she was also a secretor — which was known to investigators — was not presented at trial or disclosed to Apanovitch until 1992.
In other words, Flynn herself could have been the source of the blood antigens found on the vaginal swabs collected at autopsy.
In their rulings over the years, the courts acknowledged a number of prosecutorial missteps raised by Apanovitch, including the withholding of police and evidence reports from his defense.
But the rulings disputed Apanovitch’s allegations that prosecutors had acted deliberately and determined that the blunders would not have affected the outcome of the trial.
However, not all judges were convinced that the evidence was so compelling that Apanovitch should be sentenced to death.
In fact, two state Supreme Court justices had expressed concern about Apanovitch’s conviction based on the evidence presented at trial. In a dissenting opinion after the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed Apanovitch’s verdict and death sentence in 1987, Justice Herbert Brown wrote, “There is a substantial possibility that Mr. Apanovitch may not be guilty.”
Nearly a decade later, in February 1996, Craig Wright, one of Brown’s fellow Supreme Court judges — who had upheld Apanovitch’s conviction during the 1987 appeal — sent a letter to the Ohio parole board saying, “There is no question there is some residual doubt in this case.”
Over the years, as the courts considered questions and doubts surrounding the evidence that had convicted Apanovitch, DNA technology was steadily advancing. With the ability to identify DNA profiles in small — and even degraded — evidence samples, attorneys around the U.S. were proving their clients were wrongfully convicted and winning exonerations.
But in Apanovitch’s case, DNA testing could not be performed on the vaginal and oral swabs. That evidence, prosecutors said, had been accidentally lost — or destroyed.
Then in April 1991, a trace evidence scientist with the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office made a discovery that would change the course of the case.
While moving a typewriter away from Campbell’s former desk, the scientist found an old key she recognized in the bottom desk drawer, she later testified in court. She inserted it into the lock of a nearby file drawer, and it opened. Inside, she spotted a file labeled with Flynn’s name and case number.
It contained a carrier with three slides made from a swab of Flynn’s vagina and two from her mouth. It was a shocking discovery. And one that held the possibility of finally scientifically proving the identity of her killer.
Without telling Apanovitch’s attorneys, the coroner’s office sent the three rediscovered slides to a California lab for testing.
One year later, in May 1992, Forensic Science Associates, or FSA, issued a report to the coroner, saying that the amount of sperm on the vaginal slide was “insufficient for analysis” but that genetic typing analysis on one of the two oral slides could be used to either eliminate or include Apanovitch as a potential source of the sperm — if they received a sample of his DNA for comparison.
Initially, Apanovitch wanted to agree to the request, Baich told HuffPost, but the defense lawyer persuaded him to “put the brakes on it.” So Apanovitch refused, citing concerns about chain of custody, contamination and withholding of evidence by the prosecution.
“I did not know where that sample came from. And to this day, it’s still a little murky,” Baich said.
Then, in September 2006, at the request of the coroner’s office, FSA performed another genetic analysis using more advanced techniques on the oral slide. They could now determine the DNA came from not just a man, but a very specific one: a profile expected to occur in one out of 285 million members of the population.
In 2007, a federal district court ordered Apanovitch to provide a DNA sample for comparison, which was then sent to FSA.
The lab found it was a match.
Specifically, FSA concluded, Apanovitch could not be excluded as the source of the sperm from one of the oral slides. And the chance that it belonged to another individual remained 1 in 285 million — more than double the U.S. male population of 126 million. An expert for prosecutors went on to interpret the results and said it was irrefutable: Apanovitch was the source of the sperm collected from Flynn’s mouth. Additional material on the slide could be a mixture of their genetic material or a sign of some contamination, the expert said.
The finding put to rest any lingering questions Flynn’s family harbored about Apanovitch’s conviction.
“That was pretty specific, and once we heard that? Well, a couple of things happened,” Marty Flynn said. “One, my parents knew for sure they were able to start on their kind of forgiveness journey. But at the same time, we also knew, so any possible doubts that could have existed before then … they vanished. They vanished. Looking at the oral slide, looking at that DNA evidence — that’s it. And you can talk about all the other stuff all you want. Doesn’t matter.”
A defense expert acknowledged the DNA could match Apanovitch but questioned why Flynn’s DNA profile wasn’t more clearly found in the sample from her mouth. And Apanovitch continued to insist he’d never had sexual contact with Flynn and that his sperm must have found its way onto the slide through an error in the lab — or a conspiracy.
The courts rejected that idea soundly in a later ruling, with Adams, the federal district judge, writing in 2009: “His argument regarding tampering would appear to hinge upon a conclusion that someone was able to enter the coroner’s office, somehow deposit his sperm on the slide or switch slides that contained his sperm, and somehow know that [the trace evidence scientist] would be opening the drawer that contained the slides. This scenario is beyond belief.”
Meanwhile, as experts debated the value of the DNA on the oral slide, the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office managed to track down another set of slides from Flynn’s autopsy that had been kept by the Pathology Unit. They quietly had them and the other slides tested in 2000-2001, a fact that would once again send the case in an extraordinary new direction.
In yet another court proceeding, Apanovitch’s defense said they only learned about the additional DNA testing in 2008 when it was mentioned in one of the federal lawsuits involving Apanovitch’s case. They demanded a hearing, and in October 2014, a state trial court heard from a biologist hired by Apanovitch’s defense and a state expert witness who’d reviewed testing of the three original slides and the three more recently found pathology slides. Apanovitch’s witness testified that five of the six items had “insufficient data from which to draw any conclusions.”
A vaginal slide, however, contained Flynn’s DNA and DNA from two other males, he said — neither of whom was Apanovitch.
Prosecutors did not contest the finding. Their expert noted, however, that the sperm in the vaginal sample could be up to five days old, potentially from consensual sexual partners in the days leading up to the murder. But, given the fact that the sample lacked Flynn’s own DNA, the slide was likely contaminated, she said.
In their expert’s report, prosecutors continued to highlight the earlier finding that Apanovitch was a clear match for the DNA found on one of the oral slides. But in that October 2014 hearing, the judge only heard the experts testify about the vaginal slide. Evidence related to the oral slide was not reintroduced by the prosecutors, who later said they considered the matter already settled in the court record.
But the judge, Robert McClelland, didn’t consider it. And so, four months later, in February 2015, McClelland ruled that, based on the vaginal slide findings alone, Apanovitch was actually innocent of rape.
The judge threw out Apanovitch’s rape convictions and ordered he get a new trial on the murder and burglary charges.
Against prosecutors’ objections, he was released on $100,000 bond, subject to GPS monitoring.
On May 6, 2016, Apanovitch walked out of prison and began a new life.
Wells said she was excited when she first heard her dad was going to be released.
“I just wanted my dad, the vision I had of what it would be like to have a loving father, to be in my life and protect me from stupid guys and give me the example of how I should have expected to be treated,” she said.
Apanovitch was living a few hours away, but she tried to visit him when she could, and they spoke often. After his release, he had reconnected with a woman he calls “the love of his life,” and they got married. He said he “quickly transitioned to home life,” getting to know his grandchildren, doing chores, running errands and going fishing.
Though Apanovitch and his growing cadre of supporters took the DNA evidence and judge’s opinion as proof he was innocent, Wells remained less certain. She said it concerned her that her father had consistently opposed the DNA testing until the results seemed to help his case.
“He always told me he would never take the DNA test because the DNA was contaminated,” Wells said. “That’s what he told me for years and years and years. … I can’t speak on [the forensics]. I don’t know if that means that there were two people there, because I still feel like unless there’s this random person out there that really fits, everything points to him.”
But she still wanted to build their relationship. She began to open up to him and ask questions about his past.
She said he never acknowledged the mistakes she knew he had made as a young man: the drinking, the womanizing, how he treated her mother and his criminal history before his arrest for Flynn’s murder.
“As much as I really wanted a dad and really wanted to be able to have that connection with him, it all just seemed fake, like it was a show, so that he could be like, ‘See, I’m a great guy. You should let me out, and I should be able to be free, because I’m a great guy,’” she said. “And I just didn’t trust it.”
One Saturday, he came to her church, speaking to a captivated congregation.
“People came and listened, and he gave his spiel, and he had the people that had been advocating for him for years there,” Wells said. “And the whole time, I just kept feeling like, ‘Oh, you guys don’t really know everything, and he’s fooling you.’”
Baich, who has represented Apanovitch for 34 years, disagrees.
“He’s a different person than he was in 1984, but I don’t believe that that person in 1984, Tony, committed that murder. He was a drunk, he was obnoxious. He wasn’t the nicest guy in the world, but that’s not something that he would do,” Baich said.
Meanwhile, prosecutors hadn’t given up their conclusion that he was guilty of a particularly brutal crime and “an extreme and unnecessary risk” to the safety of the community. They took the trial court’s decision to free Apanovitch to the Ohio Supreme Court.
In November 2018, the Ohio Supreme Court issued a stunning reversal based on a procedural formality: the trial court that set him free lacked the jurisdiction to hear his petition. Under state law, the defense — not the prosecution — is required to request DNA testing after a conviction. In Apanovitch’s case, prosecutors had the autopsy slides tested for DNA without even informing his defense. The court ordered him back to death row, accepted his acquittal of one count of rape but reinstated his conviction on the other, and told the trial court to reconsider whether he should receive a new murder trial.
Apanovich was sent back to death row on Nov. 29, 2018.
The last time Wells spoke with her father was in a phone call from prison a few years ago, when he said something nasty about her mother, she said.
“I hung up on him and have not spoken with him since,” she said. “There was never a reason to talk about her and definitely no reason to call her names.”
Apanovitch characterizes their relationship differently, saying that “it’s on hold” because he’s in prison.
“That’s all there is to it,” he said.
He said that he enjoyed visiting with her and her kids when he was out, but “that all ended” when authorities took him back to prison.
When asked how he feels about Wells’ belief that he isn’t being genuine, Apanovitch said they haven’t had a chance to really talk.
“We were trying to connect as father-daughter, and nobody knew they were going to kidnap me and put me back on a technicality,” he said. “So we had plenty of time to worry about talking about it later. And so we never did, and I’ve never been there. I haven’t been able to talk to her about it, because now I’m fighting for my freedom.”
Meanwhile, the fact that a man was sent back to death row based on a “legal loophole” outraged Apanovitch’s supporters and galvanized state lawmakers.
A bipartisan bill aimed to rewrite state law, expanding who can request DNA testing postconviction. Though it didn’t pass in two previous legislative sessions, its sponsor, Republican Ohio state Rep. Jean Schmidt, told HuffPost she intends to reintroduce it.
A self-described “hardcore conservative,” she has been a vocal advocate for Apanovitch since he wrote her a letter asking for help after he returned to death row. She believes the DNA evidence proved he is innocent.
“Look, if that evidence proved that Tony was guilty, I’d walk from Tony,” she said. “I’d still do the bill, but I would walk from advocating for Tony. ”
Whether a person is unjustly accused — as she believes is the case with Apanovitch — or guilty, Schmidt opposes the death penalty for the expense of the process and the sake of the victims, who relive a nightmare with each appeal.
“I’m pro-life. And if I’m pro-life with the baby, I gotta be pro-life at the end of life as well … right is right, and everybody has the right to life, including horrific individuals,” she said.
The Flynn family thinks lawmakers like Schmidt are “misinformed” about Apanovitch’s case.
“We think they’re lazy,” Marty Flynn said. “We don’t think they did the research. We think they bought the wrong narrative. I don’t think a lot of the lawmakers, to tell you the truth, because they haven’t done their homework.”
The Flynns have also changed their opinion of the death penalty in the decades since Apanovitch was convicted. Initially, when prosecutors sought the death penalty, they considered it justified. But since then, Marty Flynn said the family’s position has evolved.
“We don’t have any issue with anybody who is against the death penalty,” Marty Flynn said. “In fact, we agree with them. What we want is just for him to stay in jail for the rest of his life.”
Yet Apanovitch’s supporters firmly believe he is innocent.
“I think I’m the most blessed man on death row with all the support, all the different people working hard trying to get me back home,” Apanovitch told HuffPost. “I’m very blessed.”
Ohioans to Stop Executions, or OTSE, has rallied behind him, promoting the Justice for Tony Apanovitch movement and a flashy website that proclaims his innocence and advocates for his freedom, with links to petitions, detailed accounts of his legal efforts and court documents.
Kevin Werner, the executive director of the group, believes that when the rape charges were dismissed against Apanovitch in 2015, it effectively proved his innocence.
“The state’s theory was always single actor — rape, then murder,” he told HuffPost. “And so if you don’t have the rape, then you cannot have the murder.”
Regardless, in July 2019, McClelland — the judge who had freed Apanovitch — denied him a new trial. He ruled that although Apanovitch was acquitted of one count of rape, it was unlikely that a new jury would find him not guilty on the second count of rape and the burglary and murder charges.
But one recent ruling favors Apanovitch: In April 2024, a federal appeals court ruled that he can challenge his conviction in the district court. In its ruling, the court reiterated a note it made in a 2011 decision on prosecutors’ handling of the case: “The state’s conduct was unquestionably improper and, in the context of a capital trial, egregiously so.”
It’s now been 40 years since Apanovitch was sentenced to death. An execution date has not been scheduled; Ohio has had an unofficial moratorium for years on executions as it could not obtain lethal injection drugs.
The matter now also has a new urgency since President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January directing the Justice Department to help states obtain the drugs. So far, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has said he doesn’t expect any executions to take place while he’s in office.
Paradoxically, that’s created another technicality keeping Apanovitch’s case in a holding pattern. After filing an application for clemency with the Ohio parole board in April 2022, Baich said his attorneys were told that because Apanovitch doesn’t have an imminent execution date and “has something pending in court,” the board won’t look at his case.
“We can’t wait 10 years for the legal process to play out,” Baich said with obvious frustration. “But the board won’t budge.”
After delving into years of developments in her father’s murder case, it was another case entirely that Wells felt gave her the closest thing to an answer about who her father is.
When Flynn was murdered, Apanovitch already had a criminal history that included a sex crime: he had been found guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl in April 1976, when he was 21. The conviction was overturned on appeal because prosecutors in the trial had called his attorney as a witness, and he then pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of sexual battery.
Wells obtained the original 390-page trial transcript, and it was hard to read. The girl testified, and Apanovitch’s attorney pounced on minor inconsistencies, accused her of promiscuity and lying about being a virgin, and suggested that she had hallucinated the attack because she’d smoked marijuana or misremembered it because she had been drinking.
The girl testified that while hanging out with Apanovitch and another man, watching TV and smoking marijuana, she’d gotten up to use the bathroom. Apanovitch had barged in, yanked her off the toilet and raped her on the bathroom floor, she said. She described being terrified, crying hysterically and asking him to stop, and that in response, Apanovitch threatened to beat her up.
“He put his fist to my face, and he said I’d better shut the fuck up or he would beat the shit out of me,” the girl said on the witness stand.
Decades later, when Wells asked her father about it, she said he “brushed it off.”
He said it “was no big deal” and suggested it was consensual, Wells said. “I’m like, ‘This is a 16-year-old girl!’ It was horrific what she went through, and she was so brave to go straight home and call the police immediately and testify in front of you people, who were trying to pick her apart and make her sound like she wasn’t credible.”
When asked about the 1976 case — because it matters to his daughter — Apanovitch got angry.
“I’m on death row, and you’re asking me about something that has absolutely nothing to do with me being here,” he said. “I spent 32 years proving my innocence. The DNA proved I’m innocent, and you want to talk about some stuff that has nothing to do with this, and I’m back on death row. Ain’t nobody in the United States of America ever proven their innocence, been released from death row and then put back on the technicality, and you want to talk about that stupid stuff?”
But Wells said that case is central to how she views her father’s character.
Reading the rape trial transcript and learning about his violent history made the possibility that he raped and killed Flynn “more real for me,” Wells said.
“It all tied in,” she said. “You were that monster. Maybe it was because you’re drinking, I don’t know, but you became that monster. So I could absolutely see you doing this to this woman.”
Apanovitch doesn’t expect people to rely on his word when he denies raping and killing Flynn.
“Just because I said it, doesn’t mean you’re going to believe it, or anybody else will, but look at the DNA, look at the facts, look at the evidence,” he told HuffPost.
Wells wishes the evidence were more clear-cut than what her father and his supporters have made it out to be. She feels that they’ve spent so much time holding up Apanovitch as a victim of the system that the suffering of Flynn and her family has been forgotten.
But, when pressed, she still can’t say with certainty that her father killed Flynn or that he deserves to die for it if he did.
“I still don’t know what to believe and don’t feel I’ve been given all possible evidence or been able to dive into it all,” Wells said. “There’s also so much more I wish we had that we don’t. I believe he was capable of it for sure, and that it looks pretty likely that he did. I don’t necessarily doubt that he didn’t do it, I just don’t think I have enough concrete evidence to be 100% sure.”