Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

A True-Crime Star’s Lurid Claims Sent a Man to Die. Her Key Witness Just Recanted.

The DNA expert at Jeff Prible’s trial accuses then-prosecutor Kelly Siegler of using his testimony in an “inflammatory” way.

Twenty-four years after he provided crucial testimony that helped send a man to Texas’s death row, DNA expert William Watson has recanted his opinion and called out Harris County prosecutors — including an assistant district attorney turned true-crime TV star — for distorting his conclusions to win a conviction.  

In a new court filing seeking to overturn Jeffrey Prible’s 2002 conviction for the murder of a Houston family, Watson said he would never give the same testimony today. “Based on … changes in the field and my own increased experience and scientific knowledge, if I were asked to testify today, my answers to many of the questions asked by the State at trial would be different,” he wrote in a declaration filed on August 28. “Today I would provide more thorough and nuanced explanations.”

Watson also wrote that prosecutors “misrepresented” his testimony in both their opening and closing statements, and made “inflammatory” remarks that twisted both the science and his opinions.

Prible was accused of murdering his friends Steve Herrera and Nilda Tirado, who were found shot to death at their home in North Houston in 1999. A fire was started in an apparent attempt to cover up the crime; the couple’s three young children died from smoke inhalation. Prible had been hanging out at the couple’s home in the hours before they were killed, which made him an early suspect. But there was no evidence linking him to the scene — save for a DNA sample taken from semen collected from Tirado’s mouth. Prible had an explanation for this; as he told investigators at the time, he and Tirado had been having an affair behind Herrera’s back, and she had performed oral sex on him earlier that evening.

The case went cold until Harris County Assistant District Attorney Kelly Siegler took it over, reexamining the evidence and concluding that there was no innocent explanation for the presence of Prible’s DNA. Instead, Siegler decided, the semen was evidence of a brutal sexual assault that took place just seconds before Tirado was shot in the back of the head.

The theory was central to Prible’s conviction. “I would suggest to you what the evidence indicates is that the Defendant after killing Steve forced Nilda to orally copulate him at gunpoint and executed her as soon as he finished,” Siegler’s co-counsel, Vic Wisner, told the jury during the state’s closing argument. “As horrific as that sounds, that is the only logical conclusion that you can draw from that evidence.”

Siegler reiterated the claim to maximum effect: “She left this world with his penis in her mouth,” she told jurors in her closing, “hoping to God that her babies would survive the nightmare that is Jeff Prible.”

Prible was convicted and sentenced to death in October 2002; he maintains his innocence.

Prible’s case was at the heart of a three-part series published by The Intercept in 2023. The investigation explored how Siegler, who won 19 death sentences over the course of her nearly 22-year career in Houston, went on to become a true-crime celebrity in the decades after sending Prible to death row. The series also showed how her Oxygen Network true-crime reality shows — “Cold Justice,” now in its eighth season, and “Prosecuting Evil With Kelly Siegler,” starting its third season this fall — portray Siegler as a gifted crime-fighter and compassionate crusader for victims, even as she........

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