WASHINGTON COURT HOUSE, Ohio (WCMH) -- A petition with more than 1,800 signatures aims to transfer the investigation into an 8-year-old girl’s homicide out of Fayette County, as organizers allege “conflicts of interest” and “mishandlings” have stalled the case.
In April 2006, Mackenzie Branham died in a fire at her mother’s residence in Jeffersonville, which the mother shared with her live-in boyfriend. The Ohio Fire Marshal’s Office ruled the blaze was arson, and the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office discovered male DNA on Mackenzie’s body, indicating she was sexually assaulted before her death.
Marion dryer factory part of Whirlpool’s $300M Ohio expansionOver the 19 years since the homicide, the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office has had investigative authority over the case, but not without controversy. The latest pushback against the office comes in the form of a petition attempting to reassign the investigation to a new agency.
“We're not gonna stop what we're doing,” said Donald Branham, Mackenzie’s father, who supports the petition's effort. "My daughter deserves this. She surely didn't deserve to be set on fire and raped that night and there is somebody out there accountable for it.”
The petition was created on Oct. 9 by Shawn Wilson, a friend of Donald’s, and Melissa Sandberg, a cold case podcaster investigating Mackenzie’s homicide. Wilson also created a petition to suspend Fayette County Sheriff Vernon Stanforth over the investigation in 2018, which Donald said reached about 200 signatures. See NBC4’s previous coverage in the video player above.
Sandberg and Donald pointed to multiple incidents as reasons for the effort, including the fact that the sheriff’s office did not obtain the results of Mackenzie’s rape kit until 2012, about six years after it was administered. Additionally, a now-deceased sergeant who was seen at the scene of the fire was the brother-in-law of Mackenzie’s mother’s boyfriend, which the pair have called a conflict of interest.
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However, Stanforth told NBC4 his office has worked “diligently” on the case since the beginning. He said the sexual assault kit – which rendered a “poor quality” DNA sample that has not produced a suspect – may have been misplaced by Montgomery County resulting in the delay, but his office never got a full answer on what happened. Stanforth also claimed the brother-in-law was never allowed access to any investigative materials and that the case was not discussed in his presence. Stanforth did, however, admit he may have been at the scene, as “dozens and dozens of people” were.
“I've lived this case for 19 years as a sheriff,” he said. “That's nothing compared to what the families had to go through. … The worst of the tragedies is we have an 8-year-old girl that lost her life.”
Tension over the case escalated when episodes of Sandberg’s podcast, "Dog with a Bone," published earlier this month, containing audio of an interview she conducted with Stanforth. In the recording, Stanforth can be heard saying “we don’t know that” after Sandberg said the girl was sexually abused. He also discussed multiple ways the fire could have started, including the possibility that it was accidental.
“You have a sheriff who's still 19 years later questioning, do we have a sexual assault and do we have an arson?” Sandberg said. “That's unacceptable to me. If you don't even believe those two things, you're not investigating.”
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Stanforth denied disbelieving that Mackenzie was sexually assaulted and said he was trying to convey that they did not know that information in the early days of the investigation, when a pathologist initially found no signs of sexual assault.
“This is the complexity we have, is that one day it wasn't, and six years later, it is,” Stanforth said. “Now we have a very complicated case to be able to prove that it's a sexual assault."
Stanforth also said that since the fire marshal ruled the incident as arson, they have been treating the case as such.
While the petition called for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office to intervene and reassign the investigation to a different agency, a spokesperson with the department said it does not have authority to take a case from a local jurisdiction.
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In light of the recent controversy, on Tuesday, Fayette County Prosecutor Jess Weade sent a letter to the Ohio Attorney General’s Special Prosecutor Unit – consisting of seasoned prosecutors who help with local investigations – asking it to review the case and allegations against the sheriff's office.
The Special Prosecutors Unit and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation have reviewed Mackenzie's case in the past and have not found enough evidence to charge anyone, according to Stanforth. He said he is not against outside agencies looking at the case and has welcomed them throughout the investigation.
“It's not for the public or not for social media to decide who's going to be charged or how they're going to be charged because it's got to be able to be presented to a jury and we have one shot at this,” Stanforth said.
However, Donald and Sandberg believe there is plenty of evidence for prosecution, and that Sandberg’s digging has uncovered even more. They are continuing to push the Ohio attorney general to investigate the sheriff’s office and exploring options to have the investigation reassigned.
“I've been fighting this for 19 years,” Donald said. “I want it out of this county.”
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