A Bizarre Link in Murder Charge

Nearly every week, Kirk Bloodsworth brought fellow inmate Kimberly Shay Ruffner his library books. And the two men regularly worked out together in the prison weight yard.

But now, prosecutors say the two had a connection never revealed while they were behind bars.

On Friday, Ruffner was charged with the 1984 murder of a 9-year-old girl -- the very crime for which a wrongly convicted Bloodsworth served nine years.

“I’m flipping out,” Bloodsworth said after prosecutors visited his Cambridge home to tell him the news about Ruffner, who once slept in a cell one floor down from Bloodsworth. “The answer was right below me, and I never knew it.”

Bloodsworth, 43, was twice convicted of the girl’s murder and was sentenced to die. But after struggling for years to prove his innocence, he was cleared in 1993, becoming the first American freed from prison because of DNA evidence.

Ruffner was in prison at the same time as Bloodsworth for attempted rape and attempted murder. Bloodsworth, the prison librarian, remembered Ruffner as a quiet man who kept to himself.

But Bloodsworth said Ruffner knew about his attempts to win a new trial and his claims of innocence. Bloodsworth was cleared with evidence from a semen stain on the victim’s panties.

“Thank God for DNA,” said Sandra A. O’Connor, the prosecutor who asked police 18 months ago to enter the evidence into a state database to help find the real killer.

On Friday, prosecutors charged Ruffner, 45, with murdering Dawn Venice Hamilton. Ruffner has been behind bars since 1984.