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After 33 Years and Three Trials, a Conviction in a Grisly Murder

And it was vindication for the Meindl family, represented in court by the victim’s sister... “This outcome is not just a legal victory: It is a testament to the persistence of truth and the...

NYTIMES 입력 2026.04.25 00:02 0

After 33 Years and Three Trials, a Conviction in a Grisly Murder

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After 33 Years and Three Trials, a Conviction in a Grisly Murder

Brian Scott Lorenz was convicted of murdering Deborah Meindl, a 33-year-old nursing student, in her Tonawanda, N.Y., home in 1993.

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The third trial for the 1993 murder of Deborah Meindl ended in the conviction of Brian Scott Lorenz, right.

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Derek Gee/The Buffalo News, via Associated Press

Jesse McKinley

Jesse McKinley has been covering the Deborah Meindl murder case since 2021, and reported from the courtroom in Buffalo.

April 24, 2026

Updated

2:24 p.m. ET

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A jury on Friday convicted a man of the brutal 1993 killing of a woman outside Buffalo, closing the latest chapter in a winding, decades-long saga, with a swift guilty verdict on all counts.

The defendant, Brian Scott Lorenz, was facing

his third trial

for the murder of Deborah Meindl, a 33-year-old nursing student who walked into her Tonawanda, N.Y., home on a cold February afternoon and encountered a terror.

Ms. Meindl was murdered in her own dining room. She was strangled, stabbed and handcuffed, and her bloodied body was discovered by her young daughter returning home from school.

Mr. Lorenz, 56, was originally convicted of Ms. Meindl’s murder in 1994, alongside another man, James Pugh, though the two long denied any involvement in the killing. Their pleas of innocence eventually found the support of several legal advocates, defense lawyers from New York City, who lobbied for new DNA testing in the case.

That testing, performed in 2018, resulted in stunning findings: There was no genetic link to either Mr. Lorenz or Mr. Pugh at the crime scene. Nor was there any other physical evidence — like hair or fiber samples — or any eyewitnesses linking either man to Ms. Meindl’s murder.

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