A True-Crime Star’s Lurid Claims Sent a Man to Die. Her Key Witness Just Recanted.

Twenty-four years after he provided crucial testimony that helped send a man to Texas’s death row, DNA expert William Watson has recanted his opinion and called out Harris County prosecutors — including an assistant district attorney turned true-crime TV star — for distorting his conclusions to win a conviction.  

In a new court filing seeking to overturn Jeffrey Prible’s 2002 conviction for the murder of a Houston family, Watson said he would never give the same testimony today. “Based on … changes in the field and my own increased experience and scientific knowledge, if I were asked to testify today, my answers to many of the questions asked by the State at trial would be different,” he wrote in a declaration filed on August 28. “Today I would provide more thorough and nuanced explanations.”

Watson also wrote that prosecutors “misrepresented” his testimony in both their opening and closing statements, and made “inflammatory” remarks that twisted both the science and his opinions.

Prible was accused of murdering his friends Steve Herrera and Nilda Tirado, who were found shot to death at their home in North Houston in 1999. A fire was started in an apparent attempt to cover up the crime; the couple’s three young children died from smoke inhalation. Prible had been hanging out at the couple’s home in the hours before they were killed, which made him an early suspect. But there was no evidence linking him to the scene — save for a DNA sample taken from semen collected from Tirado’s mouth. Prible had an explanation for this; as he told investigators at the time, he and Tirado had been having an affair behind Herrera’s back, and she had performed oral sex on him earlier that evening.

The case went cold until Harris County Assistant District Attorney Kelly Siegler took it over, reexamining the evidence and concluding that there was no innocent explanation for the presence of Prible’s DNA. Instead, Siegler decided, the semen was evidence of a brutal sexual assault that took place just seconds before Tirado was shot in the back of the head.

The theory was central to Prible’s conviction. “I would suggest to you what the evidence indicates is that the Defendant after killing Steve forced Nilda to orally copulate him at gunpoint and executed her as soon as he finished,” Siegler’s co-counsel, Vic Wisner, told the jury during the state’s closing argument. “As horrific as that sounds, that is the only logical conclusion that you can draw from that evidence.”

Siegler reiterated the claim to maximum effect: “She left this world with his penis in her mouth,” she told jurors in her closing, “hoping to God that her babies would survive the nightmare that is Jeff Prible.”

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Prible was convicted and sentenced to death in October 2002; he maintains his innocence.

Prible’s case was at the heart of a three-part series published by The Intercept in 2023. The investigation explored how Siegler, who won 19 death sentences over the course of her nearly 22-year career in Houston, went on to become a true-crime celebrity in the decades after sending Prible to death row. The series also showed how her Oxygen Network true-crime reality shows — “Cold Justice,” now in its eighth season, and “Prosecuting Evil With Kelly Siegler,” starting its third season this fall — portray Siegler as a gifted crime-fighter and compassionate crusader for victims, even as she left a trail of questionable convictions in her wake.

In Prible’s case, as The Intercept’s reporting showed, Siegler built her prosecution not only on questionable claims about the DNA evidence, but also on the highly dubious account of a jailhouse informant who claimed that Prible confessed to him. This witness, it turned out, was part of a ring of snitches who cooperated with Siegler in exchange for assistance getting their own sentences reduced. During Prible’s federal appeals, multiple members of this snitch ring testified that informants offered Siegler false evidence against Prible — and one said that Siegler actually provided him with details about the case.

At best, Siegler was careless about scrutinizing the information they provided. At worst, as Prible’s lawyers argued to a federal district court, she actively conspired to win a conviction despite knowing the case wouldn’t otherwise hold up — framing an innocent man for murder.

In 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Keith Ellison overturned Prible’s conviction, finding that Siegler had withheld key information about her dealings with the informants from Prible’s defense. “Without question, the prosecution in this case engaged in a pattern of deceptive behavior and active concealment. And the evidence suppressed sufficiently serves to contravert the primary basis for Prible’s conviction,” Ellison wrote. “Siegler intentionally and knowingly withheld information,” he went on, and “was deceptive about her efforts to do so.”

Texas appealed the ruling to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Rather than considering the evidence that Siegler had violated Prible’s constitutional rights, the court instead reinstated Prible’s conviction based solely on procedural grounds. In the new state court filing, Prible’s legal team, led by Austin attorney Gretchen Scardino, reupped their previous allegations while also arguing to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that Watson’s recent recantation further undermines Prible’s conviction.

“This Court has not had the opportunity to review the trove of new evidence that came to light during the federal habeas proceedings, until now,” they wrote. “And even beyond that new evidence, there has been a significant development in Prible’s case.” Watson’s declaration cites “significant changes in the field of forensic biology, in the progression of the scientific methods used to analyze the evidence in Prible’s case, and in his own scientific knowledge,” they continued. “This new evidence shows that Prible is actually innocent.”

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Watson first expressed misgivings about his trial testimony and the way it was weaponized in an interview with The Intercept in 2023. His answers were more definitive than they should have been, he said, and he certainly did not intend to endorse the state’s insistence that there was “no way in the world that semen wasn’t deposited either moments before or seconds after Nilda died.” “‘No way in the world’ is not something I would have said,” Watson told us.

The DNA from Tirado’s mouth was one of three samples collected after the murders. DNA matching Herrera, Tirado’s boyfriend, was also found on vaginal and anal swabs. At Prible’s 2002 trial, Watson testified he’d never before been able to extract a male DNA profile from an oral swab, and that his understanding was that sperm wouldn’t persist in the oral cavity absent Tirado’s murder. Siegler crudely emphasized these findings during her closing argument. To believe Prible’s claim that he and Tirado had engaged in consensual sex, she declared, jurors would have to believe that he had “some kind of magic semen … that somehow lives longer than any of y’all’s or any other man’s in this whole universe.” Moreover, “you’ve also got to believe that his semen is so tasty that she walked around savoring the flavor of it in her mouth for a couple hours. That’s the only way it’s going to end up still in her mouth after she’s dead.”

In his new declaration, Watson took exception to Siegler’s closing. “I never testified to this, nor would I,” he wrote. “These inflammatory remarks are not only scientifically baseless, but also highly inappropriate.” Not only has his original understanding changed, Watson wrote, there is also no way to determine which of the three DNA samples was left first. In other words, while the state’s case was built on the assumption that Prible’s DNA was deposited last, in reality it was not scientifically possible to make such a claim.

Central to Prible’s new filing is a Texas law that explicitly offers defendants an opportunity to challenge their convictions based on new scientific evidence. “Although there was little available literature on the subject at the time, the scientific consensus today is that spermatozoa can survive in the oral cavity of a living person for up to fifteen hours — and even longer in a deceased person,” his legal team wrote. Their argument is supported by a new report from a second DNA expert, who explains that recent scientific advancements show that Watson’s testimony was, as Prible’s attorneys write, “wholly unsupportable.”

How the Harris County DA’s office responds to the new evidence remains to be seen. Kelly Siegler did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, Assistant Federal Public Defender Nat Lombardo wrote, “Jeff Prible has spent nearly half his life on death row for a crime he did not commit. … This evidence supports Jeff’s account, from the very beginning, of what happened that night. Put simply: if Jeff were tried today, the State would have no case. We hope the DA and the courts do the right thing and give Jeff Prible his life back.”

Prible, who has been on death row for nearly 24 years and has seen dozens of his neighbors taken to the execution chamber, remains hopeful. “The way I see it, it is a true test of faith,” he wrote in a message to The Intercept. “I know in my heart of hearts my best days in this life are still yet to come!”