An Indiana County jury heard two accounts of an Indiana County dentist’s three-year separation from his wife before he was murdered in 2006.
As the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office rested its homicide case against suspended state trooper Kevin Foley, divorce counsel for the victim, Dr. John Yelenic, and his wife, Michele, recounted the contradicting versions. Foley’s lawyers began their defense case later in the day.
Anthony Krastek, Senior Deputy Attorney General, is attempting to prove that Foley, 43, of White, killed Yelenic because he was angry over a prospective divorce settlement. Michele Yelenic, a 39-year-old dentist, was slashed and stabbed to death in his Blairsville home on April 13, 2006. Foley was living with her at the time.
Protection of abuse orders, threats, allegations of child molestation, and transfers of the couple’s 6-year-old son, J.J., in and out of public schools, according to Effie Alexander, a Pittsburgh attorney who represented John Yelenic.
Later, jurors heard Daniel Lovette of Johnstown, Michele Yelenic’s attorney. The couple’s preliminary property settlement is described as “amicable” by Lovette, but it is not final until all parties sign it.
During the negotiations, he and Alexander both stated that they had to “cool off” their customers at points.
Under interrogation by Krastek, Alexander informed jurors that Michele Yelenic accused her estranged husband of child abuse “out of the blue” in 2005.
According to Alexander, the charges were “frivolous” and “unfounded” following each probe.
She said she drew up the final papers in February and delivered it to Michele’s attorney after the couple struck a preliminary divorce settlement in January 2006. Michele Yelenic, she claimed, refused to sign.
Michele Yelenic was furious, according to Alexander, since she had started living with Foley and would lose $2,500 per month in alimony as a result of the settlement. Alexander stated that she would continue to get $1,300 per month in child support for J.J.
The couple had agreed to a 60/40 real estate split, with Michele receiving the bigger portion and keeping the Susan Drive home they had bought during their marriage.
Michele Yelenic was the beneficiary of a $1 million life insurance policy, according to Alexander, but after the divorce was finalized, J.J. would become the beneficiary.
Alexander testified that she ultimately signed the settlement agreement the weekend before her husband died after she requested a contempt hearing in family court because Michele had backed out of it. Dr. Yelenic, she claimed, was assassinated before he could sign the documents.
After Foley’s attorney, Jeffrey Monzo, raised concerns to Alexander’s depiction, Judge William J. Martin directed jurors to disregard the sabotage remark.
Michele Yelenic first declined to sign the final agreements, according to Lovette, because “John Yelenic arbitrarily withheld” her spousal support payment of $2,500 in February 2006.
Because John Yelenic did not make the money, Lovette claimed he requested a contempt hearing.
“They were respectful of one another,” Lovette added, “but they had their moments, too.”
The dueling contempt hearings were eventually canceled, according to Lovette, since both sides agreed to sign the settlement in April.
Michele Yelenic was still the life insurance beneficiary, according to Alexander, but she had not claimed it. She stated that it would go to the estate and that it would eventually be paid to J.J.
Former Indiana District Attorney Robert Bell was asked to testify by the defense. Bell said he received three phone calls from former state police crime Sgt. George Emigh, Foley’s supervisor at the Indiana station, within the first hours of the murder investigation.
Richard Galloway, Foley’s co-counsel, questioned Bell if Emigh directed him to probe Foley in any of the calls.
Emigh “was adamant” that they acquire a search warrant for Foley’s home that evening, Bell added.
According to Galloway and Monzo, detectives neglected other potential possibilities in order to focus solely on Foley. Previous witnesses testified that Emigh and Foley had a strained relationship.
What happened Jel yelenic?
Deep incisions were found all over the dentist’s body after he was viciously stabbed. In his home, his head was shoved through a window. As he died, blood pooled around him. At the time of his murder, John was nearing the end of a contentious divorce with his wife Michele Yelenic.
Where is Kevin Foley now?
A former state trooper serving a life sentence for killing an Indiana County dentist a decade ago has lost his appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
Kevin James Foley, 50, was convicted of murder by a jury in Indiana County in 2009 for the death of Blairsville dentist John J. Yelenic on April 13, 2006. The state appellate court denied his appeal in a one-sentence decision on Tuesday.
Foley was living with Yelenic’s estranged wife, Michele, and their three children in White Township, Indiana, at the time. Foley was found guilty of stabbing and fatally beating Yelenic in the dentist’s home.
Foley was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole by Judge William J. Martin.
Foley filed a petition with the state’s highest appellate court to have his conviction overturned due to incompetent counsel.
Foley’s attorneys, Richard Galloway and Jeffrey Monzo, both of Greensburg, claimed in the appeal that they failed to explore a defense at trial that a neighbor of Yelenic may have committed the murder.
Martin dismissed the appeal in 2014, and in October, the California Superior Court unanimously dismissed it.
Who killed John Yelenic Dateline?
On the NBC Television Network, “The Premonition” will be rerun tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern Time on NBC Dateline.
The show tells the true story of Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. state trooper Kevin Foley, who was accused of killing his girlfriend’s husband, Dr. John Yelenic, with a knife in the dentist’s Blairsville home in 2006.
A small bit of DNA under Yelenic’s fingernails, 6.7 percent of a two-person mixture, led to the killer.
However, failing DNA mixture interpretation methods extracted just a little amount of identification information from the DNA data a match statistic of 13 thousand.
Would the trial court, on the other hand, recognize this fresh evidence as trustworthy?
Dr. Mark Perlin, Cybergenetics’ lead scientist, presented scientific studies confirming TrueAllele’s reliability at a 2009 Frye admissibility hearing.
The better science was argued against by Foley’s lawyers.
The future of forensic DNA science was in jeopardy.
A victory in Foley on admissibility would herald in a new age of DNA combination interpretation based on science.
TrueAllele’s first court appearance might spell the end of DNA science, Cybergenetics, and the software.
“His technique had never been employed previously in a judicial or investigative context, so that was a hurdle,” prosecutor Anthony Krastek later said.
Despite the grave dangers, Krastek called Perlin to testify.
It was Perlin’s first time giving testimony in a courtroom.
On that cold February day, Judge William Martin listened.
Science was victorious.
“The Court determines that Dr. Perlin’s methodology is acceptable pursuant to the Frye rule and Rule 702 based on a consideration of the evidence,” Judge Martin wrote.
The Pennsylvania appellate court upheld the TrueAllele decision in 2012, holding that “there is no reason to ‘impede admissibility of evidence that will benefit the trier of fact in the search for truth.'”
“It was really convincing,” Krastek stated. “It was extremely beneficial to the case. Dr. Perlin was the one who tipped the scales. The fact that a DNA match had been found was… enormous. He made it plain to me that the FBI’s and every other DNA lab’s criteria were arbitrary. They weren’t scientifically founded, and that was one of the things that appealed to me.”
In his 2013 book chapter, “The Blairsville slaying and the birth of DNA computing,” featured in Andrea Niapas’ Death Needs Answers: The Cold-Blooded Murder of Dr. John Yelenic, Dr. Perlin tells the entire Foley forensic evidence tale.
Since Foley, Cybergenetics and crime laboratories have employed TrueAllele to find DNA truth in tens of thousands of criminal cases.
In over 25 Frye or Daubert admissibility challenges, TrueAllele’s scientific reliability has been affirmed.
In United States of America v. Daniel Gissantaner, the Sixth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s admission ruling on March 5, 2021.
Based on scientific testing and peer review, the appellate court deemed another probabilistic genotyping software product to be credible under the Daubert standard.
TrueAllele was referenced in two (of ten) situations where it helped exonerate innocent men, according to the decision.
Failure to assess mixed evidence when DNA is not a gold standard – The Champion
Who killed John the dentist in Blairsville?
A suspended Pennsylvania state trooper was found guilty of first-degree murder for killing his girlfriend’s estranged husband in the United States.
Kevin Foley, 43, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release for slicing to death John Yelenic, a Blairsville dentist who was about to divorce his wife, Michele. Foley’s lawyer has stated that he intends to appeal the ruling. The death penalty was not sought by prosecutors.
Foley had earlier stated that he “loathed Dr. Yelenic” and had requested another trooper to assist him in killing him. Foley claimed he was kidding and had no intention of carrying out the threat during his lengthy testimony, but the Indiana County jury rejected that defense after roughly six hours of deliberation.
On April 13, 2006, John Yelenic was discovered dead in his home, one day before he was supposed to sign his divorce papers. Foley was charged with murder in September 2007, more than 17 months after the killing.
Foley, who had been suspended from the Pennsylvania State Police, was the last witness to testify in the trial on Wednesday. During his evidence, Foley insisted on his innocence and even cracked a few jokes that the jurors enjoyed.
Under cross-examination by the prosecution, Foley stated, “I never made a threat with the aim of carrying it out.”
When asked what was amusing about asking another state trooper to help him kill Yelenic, Senior Deputy Attorney General Anthony Krastek replied, “There isn’t a joke to be found. It’s just my nature and how I interact with my coworkers.”
Prosecutors claim Foley killed Yelenic after confronting him about the divorce terms at the dentist’s home. Foley allegedly sliced Yelenic with a knife numerous times and slammed his head through a small glass, according to prosecutors. Yelenic died of a bleed-out.
Mary Ann Clark, a relative of Yelenic, told MSNBC, “John has his justice tonight.” “John deserved it because he was the most amazing person on the planet. He died the most heinous death imaginable, and tonight is his night. The system was effective.”
At the time of the homicide, Foley had been living with Michele Yelenic for two years. Foley and Michele were previously accused of aiding and abetting the spread of accusations that Dr. Yelenic assaulted their kid by prosecutors. In 2002, John and Michele Yelenic were divorced. A Pennsylvania grand jury earlier decided that Michele Yelenic stood to inherit Dr. Yelenic’s fortune and a US$1 million life insurance policy, and that she may lose around $2,500 per month in support if the divorce was finalized.
According to media sources, Michele Yelenic, who has not been at the trial, may face legal action. Foley’s sentencing hearing is set for June 1st.
Who killed John the dentist?
The conviction of a former Pennsylvania trooper in the murder of a Blairsville dentist has been affirmed by the state Superior Court.
Dr. John Yelenic was fatally beaten and slashed at his house in 2006, and Kevin J. Foley, 46, previously of White Township, was found guilty by an Indiana County jury. He is incarcerated in SCI-Retreat in Luzerne County, near Wilkes Barre, where he is serving a mandatory life term.
A three-member panel of the appellate court disregarded each of Foley’s arguments attempting to overturn a first-degree murder conviction that was handed down on April 13, 2009, after an eight-day trial.
“It’s fantastic news. On Thursday, Mary Ann Clark, the victim’s cousin, said, “It’s fantastic.”
Michele Yelenic, Yelenic’s estranged wife, was going through a tumultuous divorce with the dentist, and Foley had been living with her.
“On three times, Foley attempted to have Dr. Yelenic investigated and arrested for child abuse, and Foley was frustrated by his lack of success,” according to the court’s opinion, which was issued on Dec. 28 and released this week.
“Foley had the chance to do the crime.” He was driving home from a hockey game in Delmont to his residence in Indiana at the time of the murder, which took him through Blairsville, where Dr. Yelenic lived,” noted Judge Jack A. Panella in his judgment.
Attorneys Matthew Debbis and Bruce Antkowiak for the defense contended that President Judge William Martin erred by allowing jurors to hear testimony about bloody footprints discovered near the body.
“The shoe prints found at the scene could not be authoritatively determined to be any particular brand, model, or size of shoe,” the defense contended.
Trial evidence linked the prints to a specific Asics brand running shoe worn by Foley, according to Deputy Attorney General Anthony Krastek.
The shoe size was between 10 and 12, according to the evidence, and Foley wore a size 10. Asics product manager Terry Schalow testified that the print matched a certain Asics Gel Creed shoe or was a knock-off.
Foley switched to Nike shoes after the murder, according to troopers at the Indiana station, according to the panel, which included Judge Jacqueline Shogun and Senior Judge Robert E. Colville.
“While the shoe-print evidence seemed to bolster the conclusion that Foley committed the crime, there is no reason to assume it inflamed the jury inappropriately.” “As a result, the trial court did not abuse its discretion in admitting the shoe-print evidence,” the court concluded.
“Dr. Yelenic was sliced with a sharp object, and Foley was known among his colleagues as a ‘knife person,’ who would frequently flick open and shut a knife he carried.” When Foley was told of Dr. Yelenic’s death immediately after the murder, he was unmoved, showed no interest in the manner or cause of death, and merely inquired as to which law enforcement organization was in charge of the investigation.
“Foley’s DNA profile matches DNA found under Dr. Yelenic’s fingernail, and the most conservative assessment of the possibility that someone else would have a similar profile is one in 13,000,” says the report. Foley had no abrasion on his forehead the night before the murder, but on the morning of the murder, he had an injury on his forehead identified by three eyewitnesses as a fingernail scratch and by others as a new cut,” the appeal judges said.
Michele Yelenic was not charged with anything. According to pleadings in a civil damage claim brought by Yelenic’s heirs, she denied being involved or having any knowledge of the slaying. After he was slain, they tried unsuccessfully to get his divorce.
Where is Gilberto Nunez now?
NEW YORK >> KINGSTON >> Gilberto Nunez, the former Kingston dentist originally accused of killing his lover’s spouse but convicted of other unrelated offences, is now free after serving 18 months in prison.
Nunez, 51, was freed from the Clinton County Correctional Facility on Monday.
Nunez, who had a dentist business on Washington Avenue in Kingston, and his wife lived in Poughkeepsie at the time of his arrest.
Nunez will report to a parole officer in Dutchess County, where Poughkeepsie is located, according to the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, which declined to provide further details about where he will live. Nunez will be released on parole on October 2, 2023.
Who killed the dentist?
After attempting to run down his wife’s suspected ex-lover, an Irvine dentist, with a Mercedes-Benz SUV, an Orange County man was sentenced to 26 years to life in prison on Friday.
Hongli Sun, 43, was found guilty earlier this month of first-degree murder and felony assault for hurting a woman who attempted to interfere during the July 18, 2015 attack outside a medical building off Barranca Parkway in Irvine.
Sun divorced his wife, Cynthia Chen, after she had an affair with Liu, her longstanding employment, according to court testimony. Chen went to China for a few months, leaving Sun to look after the couple’s newborn child. Following her return, the couple reversed their divorce in an attempt to reconnect.
Sun, on the other hand, was convinced that his wife was having an affair with Liu. He drove to Liu’s office on the day of the attack to see if she was there.
Is Nunez guilty?
Nunez was judged not guilty of murder but convicted of felony forgery charges in connection with the bogus CIA documents on June 17, 2016. Nunez was found guilty of insurance fraud for inflating damage claims after a fire at a building adjacent to his Washington Avenue, Kingston, dental practice, and perjury for failing to disclose his less-than-honorable discharge from the United States Marine Corps on a pistol permit application in two subsequent trials.
What happened Susie Casey?
GLENDIVE A former Billings man was found guilty late Monday of killing and drowning his ex-wife in the Yellowstone River. In the April 12, 2008 killing of Susan Casey, a Dawson County jury found Walter Martin “Marty” Larson Jr. guilty of premeditated homicide and tampering with evidence.