The Hidalgo County District Attorney’s Office is appealing a judge’s order that allows the retesting of DNA evidence in the case of a man convicted of a brutal stabbing death more than two decades ago.
Prosecutors filed notice Wednesday that they will appeal 332nd state District Judge Mario E. Ramirez Jr.’s order to retest DNA on multiple items used as evidence against 55-year-old Gustavo Mireles, who is serving life in prison for killing 41-year-old Mary Jane Rebollar by stabbing her 46 times.
Mireles has maintained his innocence since his arrest and never confessed. He was convicted on Aug. 14, 2002, for the death of Rebollar, whose body was found in a red and white pickup truck on June 23, 2001, on a dirt road by a sugarcane field in Alamo.
Ramirez signed the order on Dec. 2 following a back-and-forth between prosecutors who lodged objections after a September hearing where the judge indicated he would grant the order and Mireles’ attorney, Brian Ehrenberg.
Ehrenberg, a private defense attorney who is working alongside Innocence Project of Texas Executive Director Mike Ware, has argued that the DNA evidence would actually show Mireles was not at the crime scene and in his motion for re-testing, the attorney said the only physical evidence the jury used to convict Mireles included two blood patterns on the passenger side door of the truck, some blood on her pants and a pubic hair inside her purse.
Prosecutors say all those items include Mireles’ DNA.
However, when the Innocence Project of Texas became involved in Mireles’ case, the organization’s investigators discovered a series of details that Ehrenberg believes are troublesome points that he says resulted in Mireles’ wrongful conviction.
For instance, the Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab in McAllen, which later moved to Weslaco, didn’t use new standards for testing that the FBI launched in 2001, causing a lot of the DNA not to return results due to the manner it was tested.
That lab was later shut down after a DPS audit found faulty testing in sexual assault kits. This happened around the same time the lab tested Mireles’ DNA.
Ehrenberg also said Mireles’ blood may have been cross-contaminated through tampering or mishap because the test tube containing Mireles’ sample was missing one-fourth of the blood it was supposed to contain and arrived at the lab in an open evidence bag.
There are also fingernail scrapings. DNA testing at the time only resulted in the profile of a woman and the medical examiner during Mireles’ trial testified that Rebollar had extensive defensive wounds, meaning the killer’s DNA would be in those fingernail scrapings.
That brings Ehrenberg to a man named Jesus Arce and/or a woman named Delia Rodriguez, who the attorney believes are Rebollar’s real killers.
Mireles’ jury never heard that Rebollar was in a relationship with Arce and had only recently befriended Rodriguez before her death. The jury also never heard that Rodriguez and Arce were also in a relationship, which Rebollar did not know about.
Arce died in 2015 after he was attacked, tortured and robbed in Lubbock, according to local television station KCBD.
Rebollar was from Lubbock and had only recently moved to the Rio Grande Valley before her death to start a business with Arce.
She was last seen alive on June 21, 2001, at a bar where Mireles was watching a soccer game.
The two had spoken that night and prosecutors contend that Mireles was the last person Rebollar was seen alive with, which Ehrenberg disputes.
There are no known eye witnesses to Rebollar’s murder.
A day after her murder, Mireles, who hauled grain for a living, went to work in Corpus Christi and when investigators obtained search warrants he didn’t run. He went to the police department and cooperated.
During the initial Sept. 10 hearing over the retesting, Assistant District Attorney Luis Gonzalez said prosecutors were opposed and were only contesting one matter: that a person convicted must establish by the preponderance of the evidence that they would not have been convicted if exculpatory results could be obtained through DNA testing.
He believes there will be no such results and said the blood on Rebollar’s pants, the two bloodstains on the outside of the truck and the pubic hair in her purse all match Mireles, who can’t be excluded as a contributor.
Gonzalez called the results “damning.”
“The problem here is if we were to retest everything, there is nothing here that suggests that the result that connects to Gustavo was unreliable at the first trial,” Gonzalez said. “There is no reason to believe that if we were to retest the same results today, that the result would be any different.”
As for all the other evidence that was not tested or where no DNA profile could be found, Gonzalez said retesting those items would only show the someone helped Mireles murder Rebollar, saying any DNA found that belongs to someone else would “merely muddy the waters.”
Those arguments failed to sway Ramirez, the judge, who ordered the items to be retested.
As for Mireles, his attorney said despite everything that the Innocence Project of Texas has uncovered, prosecutors are fighting the effort every step of the way.
“You would expect that the District Attorney’s office would want to make sure that an innocent man is not serving an unjust life sentence,” Ehrenberg said. “However, they have fought Gus every step of the way despite everything that has been uncovered. I, along with the Innocence Project of Texas, will do everything we can to make sure justice is done.”
This story has been updated to correct the name of the Innocence Project of Texas and to clarify Brian Ehrenberg’s role.
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