Other Convicted Innocents
Frederic Saecker
Year of Incident: 1989
Jurisdiction: Wisconsin
Charge: Rape, Kidnapping
Conviction: Sexual Assault, Kidnapping, Burglary
Sentence: 15 years
Year of Conviction: 1990
Year of Exoneration: 1996
Sentence Served: 6 years
Real perpetrator found? Not yet
Compensation? Not yet
In June of 1989, a 39 year-old woman wearing only her underwear was
kidnapped from her home in Bluff Siding, Wisconsin. The woman's
assailant raped her several times and finally abandoned her along the
side of the road.
Police questioning focused on Fredric Saecker, who was found near the
victim's home wearing a blood stained T-Shirt. He gave inconsistent
versions of his whereabouts on the evening of the assault and made
several incriminating statements. Although Saeker did not at all
resemble the victim's description of the attacker, he was charged and
convicted of burglary, second-degree sexual assault, and kidnapping.
Saeker was sentence to fifteen years in prison.
In 1993 Saeker's mother paid for DNA testing by Genetic Designs, a
private laboratory in North Carolina. Although the tests concluded that
Saeker could not have possibly been the source of the semen found in
the victim's underwear, his request for a new trial was denied until
1996. When the case was finally revisited, the district attorney
dismissed all the charges against Saeker based on the new evidence and
the insignificant amount of time left on the original sentence. DNA
testing proved that Fredric Saeker was imprisoned for six years for a
crime he did not commit.