The third trial of an ex-Baltimore City police officer convicted of killing a young woman more than 30 years ago is set to begin Tuesday in Baltimore County.

The criminal case on the 1993 death of 22-year-old Gina Nueslein has wound its way through the Maryland courts for three decades, even making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Nueslein was the mother of former police Sgt. James Allen Kulbicki’s child, a son born as a result of an extramarital affair between the two.

A man walking his dog discovered Nueslein’s body on the morning of Jan. 10, 1993, near Gunpowder State Park’s archery range in Middle River. Scheduled to work at Royal Farms the previous afternoon, she had never arrived for her shift. She was found wearing her work uniform and name tag. A medical examiner determined she’d been shot in the head.

Nueslein was scheduled to appear in court with Kulbicki days later for a hearing in a paternity suit, in which she was requesting child support. The two began a sexual relationship when she was 19 and he was in his 30s, according to court records.

Kulbicki’s attorney Natalie Finegar could not be reached for comment Monday.

Two different juries previously found Kulbicki guilty of first-degree murder in Nueslein’s death. After Kulbicki’s first conviction, Maryland’s appeals court ordered a new trial after ruling that the judge hadn’t allowed his defense team to rebut key testimony. In 1995, a jury found him guilty again after deliberating for less than three hours.

After her body was found, Kulbicki told a Baltimore County detective that while he and Nueslein were “very good friends” they “never had a sexual relationship.” Although genetic testing had confirmed the child’s paternity, he denied he was the father to detectives, according to court records.

Kulbicki’s defense in the 1995 trial mainly focused on providing an alibi, with witnesses testifying to his whereabouts on the Saturday afternoon when Nueslein disappeared.

The legal saga didn’t end in the 1990s. Attorneys for Kulbicki later successfully argued that his trial lawyers hadn’t done enough to challenge testimony based on a since-debunked form of ballistics analysis and the court now known as the Supreme Court of Maryland ordered a new trial. However, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated his conviction in 2015.

More recently, in a 2016 filing called a petition for a writ of actual innocence, his attorneys challenged two key components of expert testimony used in the 1995 trial.

FBI agent Ernest Peele had testified that a bullet fragment found in Kulbicki’s truck matched a fragment recovered from Nueslein’s body, relying on a technique called comparative bullet-lead analysis. He also compared a bullet fragment taken from Kulbicki’s gun and testified that based on the bullet’s composition, all three samples could have come from the same box of ammunition.

“Because we don’t have any witnesses who actually saw the defendant put the gun to Gina’s head, we fill in the gaps,” a prosecutor said in closing arguments in 1995, according to court records. “And the way we fill them in is with forensic science.”

After new research in the early 2000s revealed comparative bullet-lead analysis to be unreliable, the FBI stopped using the method and wrote a letter to prosecutors saying Peele had “overstated the significance” of this findings, according to filings from Kulbicki’s attorneys.

The other form of evidence that Kulbicki’s attorneys said discredited “the expert testimony at the heart of State’s case” concerns ballistics examiner Joseph Kopera, who public defenders with the Innocence Project discovered had lied about his academic credentials in hundreds of trials. Kopera subsequently left the Maryland State Police and died by suicide.

After another opinion from the Supreme Court of Maryland and a hearing in Baltimore County Circuit Court in 2020, a circuit court judge ordered a new trial for Kulbicki. Jury selection is scheduled to begin Tuesday and the trial is expected to last nine days.

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