Three men who maintain their innocence in the 1997 murder of 70-year-old Henrietta Nickens have asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to review a lower court’s ruling that overturned their grant of new trials.

Derrick Chappell, 44; Morton Johnson, 47; and Samuel Grasty, 50, were each found guilty of second-degree murder in separate trials in 2000 and 2001 for Nickens’ death inside her home on the 3200 block of West 10th Street in Chester on Oct. 10, 1997.

Chappell and Grasty each received life sentences, while Johnson received a de facto life sentence of 99 years. They were 15, 20 and 18 years old, respectively, when the crime occurred. Chappell was later resentenced to 28 years to life after the U.S. Supreme Court retroactively changed the rules for sentencing minors and will soon be eligible for parole.

Delaware County Common Pleas Court Judge Mary Alice Brennan issued an order in March 2024 that the men be granted new trials due to advances in DNA that seemed to exclude them from the crime scene while implicating an unknown male, as well as other crime scene evidence that appeared to undercut prosecution theories of what happened that night.

The Delaware County District Attorney’s Office appealed that decision to the state Superior Court, arguing the “new” evidence was merely cumulative of what was already known when the three men were convicted.

In the meantime, the case garnered the attention of noted author John Grisham, who chastised the DA’s Office for the appeal, and the foreman of Chappell’s original trial, who said he would now vote “not guilty” if shown the evidence that has since been developed.

The majority of a three-judge Superior Court panel overturned Brennan’s order in July 2026 and defense attorneys sought a review by the entire Superior Court.

That review was denied last month and the trio have now filed petitions for allowance of appeal to the state Supreme Court to determine whether the Superior Court erred in its conclusions.

New filings

In a new filing from New Jersey-based Centurion, representing Grasty, attorneys Paul Casteleiro and Kimberly Weston make many of the same arguments that the petitioners pitched for the full Superior Court review: That the majority of the three-judge panel misconstrued Brennan’s findings and largely ignored the importance of expert testimony at the PCRA hearings in concluding the newly presented evidence was simply “more of the same” that was available at trial.

Brennan noted in an opinion accompanying her order that a jury could reach a different conclusion based on that evidence, which she found established that Nickens was likely killed and raped at or around the same time by a single unidentified person.

This was due to a large amount of semen matched to an unknown male found in Nickens’ rectum that had not liquefied or leaked out prior to her death, as well as a stain on a bedsheet reexamined in 2021 that found the victim’s blood, the unknown male’s semen and what was likely urine from the victim had attached to and dried on the sheet at the same time.

Further bolstering this argument was the fact that no DNA from any of the defendants was found at the scene, while other DNA matched to “Unknown Male 1” was also found on an XXXL green jacket and a chewed cocaine straw in a jacket pocket that had been left behind, Brennan found. Additional testing of that jacket identified “UM1” as the “habitual wearer” due to advances in testing for “touch DNA,” or scant traces of DNA.

The jacket is of particular evidentiary value due to that new finding and the prosecution trying to tie it to two of the defendants at their trials, the petitioners argued. Combined with all of the other evidence and the credible expert testimony at the PCRA hearings, defense attorneys argue the new evidence is of a “higher grade or character” than what was previously available.

Brennan appeared to agree in 2024.

“This new evidence would have allowed petitioner to make a strong, scientifically based argument that the murder was committed by a single perpetrator and he was not involved,” she wrote in opinions for each of the three men. “This single perpetrator defense was not available to petitioner at his trial. The court finds that the new DNA results, if adopted by a jury, would likely compel a different verdict.”

The petitioners argue that the Superior Court wrongly contended that “the” defense of a single perpetrator was available at time of trial, rather than “this” single perpetrator as Brennan had written.

The Superior Court additionally found Brennan based her decision on the PCRA testimony rather than the entire record, despite Brennan’s statement that she conducted an “exhaustive review” of the “full record” in reaching her conclusions.

Attorneys for the defendants additionally argue that the Superior Court appeared to base its decision to overturn Brennan’s order largely on inculpatory testimony at trial while ignoring the credibility of those witnesses, many of whom were teenagers facing their own serious charges or who had been questioned long after the murder took place.

The jury foreman in Chappell’s case also noted that one witness, a low-IQ 15-year-old who claimed to have acted as lookout for the defendants, could not have seen the rear of Nickens’ apartment from where he claimed to have been standing.

The prior appeal for a full court review indicated the majority of the Superior Court had also impermissibly co-mingled evidence presented at different trials to reach the same conclusion for all three defendants.

Supporting brief

The Innocence Network, in a supporting brief for Chappell, noted that after-discovered evidence is cumulative only if it is “of the same character and to the same material point” as the evidence at trial.

“Evidence of a ‘different and “higher” grade or character, though upon the same point,’ is not cumulative,” the brief stated. “Whether new evidence would likely produce a different verdict depends on ‘the totality of all of the trial circumstances.’ The Superior Court majority quoted both standards, but applied neither, evaluating the new evidence one item at a time without considering its cumulative impact.”

That brief, from Ballard Spahr attorneys Thomas W. Hazlett, Stephanie Morriss, Karli Tellis and Erin Blasberg, along with Katherine H. Judson of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Science, provided the example of several blind men each touching a different part of an elephant and coming to the wrong conclusion about what animal it was.

In context, the brief argues the jury trial “touched” the fact that the DNA came from a single unknown male, but the prosecution offered various explanations, such as Nickens maybe having a boyfriend who deposited semen in her rectum earlier, or the possibility that the DNA was somehow planted by the defendants or left afterward by a necrophiliac.

It went on to say that the Superior Court “touched” on the DNA inside Nickens body, the DNA on the sheet and the DNA on the jacket and straw individually, then wrongly reached the conclusion that each was simply “more of the same” without connecting them to the whole “animal.”

“Neither necrophilia, nor a planted sample, accounts for the jacket and the straw, and a ‘fourth person’ theory cannot account for finding only that fourth person anywhere at the scene,” the brief stated. “The Commonwealth responded that the jacket carried none of Ms. Nickens’ DNA, so its owner likely did not wear it during the assault. Taken alone, the jacket proves little; alongside the other DNA evidence, it becomes highly compelling. That is the parable’s lesson: No single item proves the case, but together, the items leave no room for the Commonwealth’s theories.”

The Innocence Network brief additionally points to the Superior Court dismissing the absence of the petitioners’ DNA with the maxim that “an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” but notes that the same court held in the 2025 case of Commonwealth v. Hardy that that maxim is not universally true.

“If one finds an absence of evidence in a place where the evidence certainly would be expected to be found, then the absence of that evidence can be suggestive of absence,” the court found in that case.

“The Commonwealth’s theory was that three men entered a small apartment and beat a 70-year-old woman to death with their fists,” the brief states. “The crime scene expert testified that if she had been killed that way, the assailants’ trace DNA would be expected on items such as her dress and sheets. The same modern testing that repeatedly found one man’s DNA found none of theirs, and, under Hardy, that absence should not have been dismissed as the Superior Court did.”

Unlike other appeals courts, the Supreme Court may choose the cases it decides to hear. Attorney David Hasse with Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP, who has been working on Chappell’s case for years, said the attorneys might expect a decision within about four to six months.