A Connecticut judge declared a mistrial last week in the case against a convicted sex offender charged with the 1986 rape and murder of 11-year-old Kathleen Flynn, after prosecutors disclosed a retired detective’s email raising the possibility that key evidence had been contaminated by a used body bag nearly four decades ago.
Judge John Blawie halted the trial of 60-year-old Marc Karun in Stamford but did not dismiss the murder and kidnapping charges against him. Karun remains in custody on a $5 million bond. The Flynn family, which has waited roughly 40 years for a resolution, now faces the prospect of starting over, or watching the case collapse entirely.
The revelation that forced the mistrial came from retired Norwalk police lieutenant Robert Fabrizzio, who emailed prosecutors during the trial to disclose that shortly after Flynn’s body was discovered in 1986, a state crime lab officer told him the girl had been placed in a used body bag. That raises the specter of cross-contamination, the kind of forensic problem that can gut a prosecution built on physical evidence collected decades ago.
Kathleen Flynn was a sixth grader walking home from Ponus Ridge Middle School in Norwalk, Connecticut, on September 23, 1986, when she was attacked. Her body was found in the woods along a path to nearby Hunters Lane. The case went cold for more than 30 years.
Karun was not taken into custody until 2019, when law enforcement arrested him at his home in Stetson, Maine. Shortly after that arrest, police found nearly 90 guns inside the residence. He pleaded guilty in 2024 to federal firearms charges and is set to be sentenced this summer.
Before the Flynn case, Karun had already served 10 years behind bars after being convicted of sexually assaulting or kidnapping four other female victims throughout the 1980s. His criminal record made the Flynn prosecution all the more important to the family and the community that had waited decades for accountability.
Then Fabrizzio’s email landed.
The state crime lab officer who allegedly told Fabrizzio about the used body bag was identified by Fox News Digital, citing FOX 61, as Henry Lee, the 87-year-old forensic scientist who once headed the lab and gained national prominence working on the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Lee died last month, meaning he cannot be questioned about what he knew, when he knew it, or why the information apparently never surfaced until now.
Crime lab spokesman Rick Green told reporters the body bag disclosure caught officials off guard. “This is all a surprise to us. We stand by our testimony in the case,” Green said, adding that the agency had no further comment.
Prosecutors said they are now working with the medical examiner’s office and the state crime lab to determine whether the contamination claim is true. That verification process will shape whether the case can be retried, and whether the physical evidence collected in 1986 can still hold up in court.
Cold cases that rely on decades-old forensic evidence are inherently fragile. DNA evidence has led to breakthroughs in other long-dormant homicide investigations, but the chain of custody and the integrity of that evidence must survive scrutiny. A used body bag, if the claim is confirmed, introduces the kind of doubt defense attorneys are trained to exploit.
State Attorney Paul Ferencek expressed frustration with the outcome in a statement:
“We’re obviously disappointed by this turn of events, especially for the family members of Kathy Flynn, who have waited 40 years for justice and some degree of closure.”
Forty years. That is how long the Flynn family has lived without answers, without a conviction, and without finality. The mistrial does not end their ordeal. It extends it, with no guarantee that a second trial will produce a different result.
The charges against Karun remain in place, and the $5 million bond keeps him behind bars for now. But the prosecution’s path forward depends on whether the state can establish that the body bag issue does not fatally undermine the evidence. If it does, the case against a man already convicted of attacking four other women in the 1980s may never reach a jury verdict on the Flynn charges.
Fox News Digital reported that both the State’s Attorney’s Office and Karun’s defense counsel did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Several questions remain unanswered. What exactly was in Fabrizzio’s email? What specific evidence might have been contaminated? Why did this information surface only now, during a live trial, rather than during the years of investigation that preceded it?
And perhaps most troubling: if Henry Lee, one of the most prominent forensic scientists in American criminal justice, knew about the body bag issue decades ago, why was it never documented in the case file? Lee’s death last month means those answers may never come.
Long-running investigations that hinge on old evidence and institutional memory are always vulnerable to this kind of late-breaking disruption. Cases involving missing girls and decades-long searches remind us how much can go wrong, and how much depends on the integrity of the people and systems handling the evidence from day one.
Karun’s federal gun sentencing is still set for this summer. The murder and kidnapping charges remain pending. The Flynn family remains in limbo.
When the system takes 40 years to bring a case to trial and then fumbles it over a revelation that should have surfaced decades earlier, the failure belongs to every institution that touched the evidence along the way. Kathleen Flynn deserved better. Her family still does.
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