RD20190301

W

When the DNA results came back,

even Lukis Anderson thought he

might have committed the murder.

“I drink a lot,” he told public de-

fender Kelley Kulick as they sat in an

interview room at the jail in Santa

Clara County, California. Sometimes

he blacked out, so it was possible he

had done something he didn’t re-

member. “Maybe I did do it.”

Kulick shushed him. “Lukis, shut

up,” she said. If she was going to

keep her new client off death row, he

couldn’t go around saying things like

that. But she agreed. It looked bad.

“Let’s just work through the evidence

to really see what happened.”

Before he was charged with mur-

der, Anderson had been a 26-year-old

homeless alcoholic with a long rap

sheet who spent his days hustling for

change in San Jose. The murder victim,

Raveesh Kumra, was a 66-year-old in-

vestor who lived in Monte Sereno, a

Silicon Valley enclave ten miles and

many socioeconomic rungs away.

Around midnight on November 29,

2012, three men broke into Raveesh’s

7,000-square-foot mansion. They

found him watching CNN in the liv-

ing room, tied him up, blindfolded

him, and gagged him with duct tape

decorated with pictures of mustaches.

They found his ex-wife, Harinder

Kumra, asleep upstairs, hit her on

the mouth, blindfolded her, and tied

her up next to Raveesh down in the

kitchen. Then they rummaged for

cash and jewelry.

After the men left, Harinder, still

blindfolded, felt her way to a phone

and called 911. Police arrived, then

an ambulance. One of the paramedics

declared Raveesh dead. The coroner

would later conclude that he had been

suffocated by the mustache duct tape.

Three and a half weeks later, the

police arrested Anderson. His DNA

had been found on Raveesh’s finger-

nails, suggesting that Raveesh had

struggled as the intruders tied him up.

Anderson was charged with murder.

Kulick was appointed to his case.

Anderson tried to make sense of a

crime he had no memory of commit-

ting. “Nah, nah, nah. I don’t do things

like that,” he said. “But maybe I did.”

Months would pass before anyone

figured out what had really happened,

which was that Lukis Anderson’s DNA

had found its way onto the fingernails

of a dead man he had never even met.

The volunteers hadn’t

touched one another,

yet their DNA ended up

on each other’s hands.

108 march 2019

Reader’s Digest National Interest