VANCOUVER, Wash. — A Clark County man who was charged with a 1994 murder and spent three years in jail, only for the charges to be dropped just before the case would have gone to trial, is suing the Vancouver police detective who identified him as a suspect and arrested him in 2019.
Police found the body of 26-year-old Audrey Frasier, also known as Audrey Hoellein, in her Vancouver apartment on July 17, 1994. She had been strangled to death. No arrests were made at the time, but the cold case was revived when detectives submitted data from DNA at the crime scene to a DNA analysis and genealogy database company, which pointed them to Richard Knapp.
Knapp was arrested in 2019 and charged with the murder, and he was held in jail for nearly three years. But just a few days before his trial was set to begin in late 2022, prosecutors dropped all charges and admitted that new evidence had cast doubt on the case, and he was released. He was 60 years old at the time of his release.
Knapp's lawyers said that another suspect in the case, a neighbor of Frasier, had changed his story and admitted to having sex with her the night she died. The defense said they also tracked down a witness that they said police had known about but never interviewed.
The lawsuit, filed in mid-February in U.S. District Court in Tacoma, names Vancouver Police Detective Dustin Goudschaal as the sole defendant. It argues that Knapp should not have been arrested based on the evidence available at the time, and that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated.
"Plaintiff spent over three years in jail. His wife died while he awaited trial. His efforts to be with her before she died were denied in a two sentence order. Plaintiff has suffered severe emotional distress. His career and relationships with friends and family were destroyed. He lost his home. He remains a pariah in the community, as the cloud of Frasier’s murder follows him wherever he goes," the lawsuit states.
Goudschaal became a lead investigator on the unsolved Frasier case in October 2018, according to the lawsuit, and conducted new witness interviews and sought out new forensic analysis.
After Knapp's arrest, a Clark County Superior Court judge initially denied him bail and then later set his bail at $1 million, according to the lawsuit, which was more than he could afford. Another judge granted Goudschaal's request for a search warrant to collect Knapp's DNA for analysis. Both of the judges' rulings were based in part on a Declaration of Probable Cause filed by Goudschaal, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit goes through Goudschaal's declaration paragraph by paragraph, with annotations added where the lawsuit alleges that the declaration included false statements or omitted information, and states that each of the annotations is based on information that was available to police before Knapp's arrest.
Many of the annotations concern information from police interviews with Frasier's neighbor shortly after her body was found. The lawsuit also disputes the way the Goudschaal's declaration summarized a report from Frasier's autopsy.
The lawsuit asks for compensatory damages, punitive damages and attorney fees, but does not list a specific monetary amount.
