Downtown billboard seeks evidence in high-profile murder

The advertisement includes a phone number and touts a $350,000 reward.

Davis, who was among the 135 candidates in California’s 2003 recall election won by actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Atlanta businessman David Coffin Jr.

Coffin, an heir to a Connecticut chemical company fortune, was dating Davis' estranged wife when he was killed, according to prosecutors at the time. They argued that Davis committed the murder in a fit of rage.

Coffin was shot at his West Conway Drive mansion, which was doused with gasoline and set afire. The blaze destroyed much of the evidence, and police lost other evidence, such as the handgun that fired the lethal round.

Davis' defense pointed to the dozens of pieces of missing evidence, but a jury found him guilty of malice and felony murder.

A new attorney for Davis, Marcia Shein, said she hopes the billboard will stir retired police officers and others with knowledge of the case to come forward with exculpatory evidence.

Shein said Davis was convicted in part by testimony from a ballistics expert who linked the missing handgun to a bullet found at the scene. The expert testified that she tested the weapon before it was lost, Shein said.

Recently, that expert, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation lab scientist, was fired for lying in other cases, Shein said.

Without the gun, there is no way of disproving or corroborating her testimony, Shein said. She said other missing evidence, such as a gas can whose purchase could have been traced, are also gone.

Without the evidence, there is no way to prove that Davis was uninvolved, she said.

"This trial should have occurred without the use, or reference to, anything that was lost."

Davis fought the evidence issue unsuccessfully all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court. Now, Shein is preparing a motion that argues against the legality of his detention. She said she hopes information from the billboard will help.

But GBI spokesman John Bankhead said the claim of evidence misrepresentation is overblown when it comes to the GBI scientist.

Bankhead said the woman was not fired but did resign, rather than face termination proceedings, after it was discovered that she misrepresented her work in one investigation.

He said the case with her fabricated work did not go to court and that she was not found to have lied on the witness stand. A review of some of her other work turned up no other falsehoods, Bankhead said.

"She took a shortcut when she shouldn't have taken one, and it was a minor situation," he said. Lab scientists are supposed to test the trigger mechanism on guns, and she wrote on a GBI document that she pulled a trigger more times than she actually did, he said. "It's not even in the same ballpark as saying the ballistics matched when it didn't."