In closing argument, District attorney James Keeshan mentioned that Brandley had a second job at a funeral home and suggested that perhaps he was a necrophiliac and had raped Fergeson after she was dead — an argument that could not have been made in good faith because Keeshan had a report stating that Brandley only did odd jobs at the funeral home and had never been involved in the preparation of bodies for burial. The defense objected to Keeshan's remark as inflammatory, but Judge John Martin overruled the objection. Eleven months after Brandley was convicted and sentenced to death, his appellate lawyers discovered that exculpatory evidence had disappeared while in the custody of the prosecution, including a Caucasian pubic hair and other hairs recovered from Fergeson's body that were neither hers nor Brandley's. Also missing were photographs taken of Brandley on the day of the crime showing that he was not wearing the belt that the prosecution claimed had been the murder weapon. The missing evidence was all the more troubling in light of the pretrial destruction of the spermatozoa. Much was made of the willful destruction and disappearance of the potentially exculpatory evidence in Brandley's appellate briefs, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and death sentence without mentioning the issue. "No reasonable hypothesis is presented by the evidence to even suggest that someone other than [Brandley] committed the crime", said the court. Brandley V. Texas, 691 S.W.2d 699 (1985). Brenda Medina, who lived in the nearby town of Cut and Shoot, Texas, saw a television broadcast about the Brandley case. Saying she had been unaware of the case until then, she told a neighbor that her former live-in boyfriend, James Dexter Robinson, had told her in 1980 that he had committed such a crime. Robinson had previously worked as a janitor at Conroe High School. Medina said she had not believed Robinson at the time, but now it made sense. At the neighbor's suggestion, she went to see an attorney, who took her to see District Attorney Peter Speers III, who had succeeded Keeshan in the job when Keeshan ascended to the Texas District Court bench. Speers quickly concluded, or so he said, that Medina was unreliable, and therefore that he had no obligation to inform Brandley's lawyers. The private attorney she had consulted thought otherwise, however, and brought her to the attention of the defense. After obtaining Medina's sworn statement, Brandley's lawyers petitioned the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for a writ of "habeas corpus".