A former Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office investigator testified Friday that a firearm and cell phone found in a murder suspect’s home became key evidence in the case against him.
Joshua Willis, 39, of Lafayette, is on trial for first-degree murder and second-degree murder, respectively, in the deaths of Ashley Metz, 23, and Brouklynn Hill, 22, who were found shot dead on the early morning of June 21, 2016 inside burned cars near Scott and Carencro.
Willis will face life imprisonment without benefit of parole, probation or suspension of sentence if convicted as charged. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty on the first-degree murder charge.
His nephew, 29-year-old Joseph Sylvester, took a plea deal in the case in 2021 and testified against Willis last week. The Acadiana Advocate was not present for Sylvester’s testimony. Willis became a suspect after Sylvester named him to police, former Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office detective Justin Doucet testified Friday
Doucet, now an agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was the lead detective in Metz and Hill’s deaths.
Doucet testified Sylvester was identified as a person of interest after investigators gleaned Hill and Sylvester were known associates from the victims' friends and family. A family member of Hill’s reported that within a day of Hill’s death Sylvester posted a video of himself pouring out a beer at a casino beach in Lake Charles on Hill’s Instagram account. Hill’s death was not widely known to the public at that time, Doucet said.
Investigators also determined the Nissan Altima Hill’s body was found inside had been stolen; after tracking down the owner, detectives found Hill and Sylvester were seen on surveillance footage at a local business using a credit card left inside the vehicle, he said.
Sylvester voluntarily met detectives for an interview on June 23, 2016, but did not reveal anything about the killings, Doucet said. He was arrested after the interview. The following day, he was interviewed again and told detectives about Metz and Hill’s deaths and named Willis as the shooter, he said.
Doucet said Sylvester told investigators details including that a stolen red 2015 Dodge Ram that Hill was known to drive was used during the killings, ammonia was used to attempt to clean at least one of the scenes, the gun used in the killings was in Willis’s possession and Metz’s cell phone had been taken.
The red Dodge was later found at a Motel 6; a key for the vehicle was recovered from Willis’s black 1998 Dodge Ram a crime scene investigator previously testified. Several fire and police investigators reported a strong ammonia smell inside the Pontiac G6 Metz’s body was found inside.
Detectives later searched Willis’s home, prompted by Sylvester’s interview and a jailhouse phone call during which Willis told a woman to go to certain hiding spots in his home and dispose of the items found there.
Doucet said a .380 handgun, a Samsung Galaxy cellphone, two keys that investigators later determined belonged to Metz’s apartment, an ammonia bottle, a gas can, a roll of packing tape, a rifle and rifle pad, a pair of shoes and a shopping bag filled with gray pants, gray shirt and underwear were collected from the home.
The handgun and cell phone became critical evidence in the case against Willis, Doucet said.
Willis’s defense attorney Cody Brown challenged Doucet on the thoroughness of the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office’s investigation, questioning why hundreds of potential items of evidence were collected in the case but only a handful were forensically tested and why a similar search of Sylvester’s known residences was not performed.
Doucet said that probable cause to search the two residences Sylvester was connected to did not exist because investigators did not have information about specific pieces of evidence kept there.
Louisiana State Police Trooper Frank Garcia testified that he performed a data extraction on the Samsung Galaxy found at Willis’s residence and concluded the phone belonged to Metz. The data report, several thousand pages long, was turned over to LPSO investigators for review.
Two Acadiana Crime Lab DNA analysts, Chau Nguyen and Claire Guidry, testified about testing DNA swabs collected in the case, including several taken from the handgun and clothing found in Willis’s home. Nguyen said no evidence of blood was found on the clothes.
Nguyen performed the initial DNA analysis on the swabs taken from the handgun and found either the mixed DNA profiles were too complex for standard analysis or that a profile couldn’t be concluded and compared to a reference sample.
Guidry testified that she took Nguyen’s analysis of the mixed DNA profiles and ran them through TrueAllele, a software program from Cybergenetics, Inc.
The program uses complex statistical algorithms to calculate the likelihood an individual’s DNA is present on a swab compared to a random person’s DNA, particularly in cases where it’s too complicated for a human technician to manually parse out and identify the DNA in the sample because multiple DNA profiles are present.
Guidry said she found that Willis’s DNA could not be excluded at a contributor from two samples: a swab taken from the right side of the firearm’s grip and the left side of the firearm’s slide.
Willis was 310 times more likely to be a contributor to the DNA collected from the grip’s right side than a random unrelated person, and 9,800 times more likely to be a contributor to the DNA collected from the left side of the firearm’s slide, she said.
No matches were made for Metz, Hill or Sylvester’s DNA on any of the samples, she said. Multiple samples included a probable match for no one – including Willis.
Guidry said she was unable to make a conclusion about whether Willis was a probable DNA contributor on two samples, and whether Sylvester was a probable contributor on one sample.
Brown asked Guidry about the samples with no matches; with no probable match for either Metz, Hill, Sylvester or Willis among the mixed DNA profiles, some of which contained two or more DNA contributors, there were unknown contributors to the DNA found on the gun, she confirmed.