Barry Beach

Barry Allan Beach (born February 15, 1962) is an American who was sentenced to 100 years in prison without parole in 1984 for the 1979 murder of Kimberly Nees in Poplar, Montana.

During the years following his conviction, Beach gained support from influential state and national advocates who said his murder confession, the lynchpin of his conviction, was coerced.

In the early morning of June 16, 1979, 17-year-old Kimberly Nees was brutally murdered outside Poplar, Montana.

Later that morning, police found her family's pickup truck at a well-known party spot half a mile outside of town.

They followed a trail of blood from the truck to the Poplar River, where they found Nees’ body.

An autopsy revealed she had suffered 20 or 21 blows to the skull.

There was no indication that a robbery or sexual assault had taken place.

Nees’ sweater was found folded neatly near the back of the truck with her purse and a pack of cigarettes placed on top.

More than two dozen fingerprints were found on the vehicle, as were multiple footprints in and around the trail.

A bloody palm print was found on the passenger door.

An FBI investigation later determined that the palm print must have been left by the killer.

Nees was the graduating valedictorian from Poplar High School that year and was described as pretty and popular.

Residents of Poplar rumored that the murder was a "jealousy killing" and that three or four peers in town were involved in her death.

Beach, then 17, was Nees’ neighbor and had previously dated Nees’ sister.

Beach was one of the people questioned by police for the murder but no charges were filed against him at the time.

After the murder, Beach moved to Louisiana to live with his father.

In 1983, Beach's stepmother called the police, claiming Beach had helped his stepsister skip school.

Police in Monroe, Louisiana, arrested Beach for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Police discovered that Beach had been questioned for Nees’ murder and interrogated him about the local murder of three women.

Initially, Beach denied involvement in Nees’ murder, but after two days of questioning, he confessed to murdering Nees and the three Louisiana women.

He was later cleared of the Louisiana murders because he was not in the state at the time of the crimes.

According to the group Montanans for Justice, all three of the Louisiana homicides were later determined to have been committed by others.

Beach was charged with first-degree murder.

He pleaded not guilty during his trial in 1984 in Glasgow, Montana, arguing that his confession was coerced.

During the case, the prosecutor, Marc Racicot, argued that the detailed confession that Beach provided was one that only the killer could have made.

Poplar's police chief revealed a police officer broke into a sealed room where evidence from Nees crime scene was stored that the night after the murder.

The police officer was the father of one of the original suspects who was not charged.

Because of his entrance, the evidence stored inside, including a strand of pubic hair recovered from the crime scene, was inadmissible in court.

However, prosecutor Marc Racicot told the jury that a pubic hair had been found on Nees’ sweater and was "in fact, the defendant’s."

Racicot reiterated this mistruth during his closing statements.

Crime lab scientist Arnold Melnikoff had claimed that the hair had "similar characteristics" to Beach's hair.

At a subsequent job, Melnikoff was found incompetent and fired by the State of Washington for his inability to analyze hair.

Melnikoff had testified against at least two other men in the state of Montana who were wrongly convicted of murders of which they were later exonerated.

Evidence from the crime scene that did not implicate Beach in the murder was minimized at trial.

Racicot claimed that footprints found at the scene, which did not match Beach's, could have been left by police, even though the prints indicated bare feet and sandals.

He also said that the bloody palm print found on the truck might have belonged to Nees to explain why the print did not belong to Beach.

However, multiple police reports concluded that the print belonged to neither Nees nor Beach.

The tape of Beach's confession had been erased and thus could not be heard during Beach's trial.

In 2015, his sentence was commuted to time served, plus ten years on probation.

His case was partly responsible for the development of Montana House Bill 43, passed on January 23, 2015, which grants the Governor of Montana the right to approve clemency for convicts without approval from the Montana Board of Pardons and Parole.