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SC Death Row’s Edward Lee Elmore May Be Exonerated After 30 YearsWe are praying that Edward Lee Elmore, who has spent nearly 30 years on death row in South Carolina, may go free soon. It was a single strand of hair that could have him exonerated.

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The hair does not exonerate Edward Lee Elmore, a handyman, in the stabbing death of a widow he worked for, but it has raised enough doubt to win him a new trial — and a bail hearing Friday. The chance to leave prison after three decades comes after numerous appeals and his sentence being overturned three times, including a reduction from death to life in prison.

In 1982, Elmore was convicted of killing Dorothy Edwards. Her body was found in a closet in her home, stabbed 52 times. She had numerous broken ribs, head wounds and internal injuries.

At the bond hearing, Elmore faces murder and sexual assault charges.

“There aren’t a lot of people on death row who are factually innocent,” Bonner said. “Edward Lee Elmore is factually innocent. He did not commit that crime. … He was framed.”

Elmore was convicted in a brief trial in Greenwood, a former textile town of about 23,000 people in the northwest part of the state. As with most death row cases, his appeals made their way through a variety of courts.

As other death row inmates were exonerated because of new DNA testing technology, Elmore’s attorneys asked a judge in 2000 to overturn his convictions because a blond hair found on Edwards after her death did not match her or Elmore.

Elmore’s lawyers thought the blond hair may have belonged to Edwards’ next-door neighbor and they asked a judge to exhume the man’s body to test his DNA, but a judge denied the request.

It wasn’t until 2010 that Elmore began to see his fate turn around. A South Carolina judge ruled he was mentally unfit and could not be executed, per a 2002 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

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