Shortly before 8:30 p.m. on May 22, 2002, Kim Battle arrived at her South Florida home and discovered her living room covered in blood.
Battle immediately called 911, and officers from the Miramar Police Department were dispatched to the tidy three-bedroom rental.
“The living room had a large amount of blood on the tiled floor,” a police report obtained by The Daily Beast said. “There was an appearance of a struggle in the living room as a chair was knocked over, a glass jar was broken on the floor, and a couch was pushed against the window blinds. Blood was present on the walls and bedspread of the master bedroom.”
When a young officer named Max Herard stepped into Battle’s daughter’s bedroom, he realized they had a murder on their hands. There, Herard found 15-year-old Farrah Carter’s body riddled with multiple stab wounds. Herard knew the teen from his patrol beat, and used to regularly give her advice.
Det. Ron Peluso was the lead investigator on the case. Now retired from the Miramar PD and splitting his time between the beaches of Florida and the mountains of Tennessee, he can still clearly picture the scene in his mind.
“I remember going through that house and you could tell there was a running battle in there,” Peluso told The Daily Beast.
The Broward County Medical Examiner’s Officer ruled the death a homicide from sharp force trauma to the neck. The attack was so violent, the funeral home had to wrap something around Carter’s neck to hide her stab wounds.
The crime scene unit gathered evidence from the home to be processed, including a bloodstained ATP Tour cap that didn’t belong to anyone who lived there. A bloody shoe print in the living room had come from a men’s size 10 sneaker made by LA Gear, detectives later determined.
A neighbor across the street told investigators that he had noticed a Black man of average build outside the home the morning of the murder. The man appeared to be speaking to a “female inside,” and was trying to convince her to let him in, said the neighbor, Herbert Rhodes, who declined an interview request for this story. Eventually, the unidentified man gave up and left, Rhodes told police.
A year later, the offer of a $1,000 reward hadn’t turned up any leads, nor did the 80-odd posters detectives put up in Miramar asking for the public’s help in solving the case. Investigators didn’t have a motive, and DNA from five men thought to have been in contact with Carter the day she was murdered—including a maintenance worker whose business card was found lying next to Carter’s remains—all came back negative. Cops assumed Carter knew her killer, since, as the police report noted, there was no sign of forced entry.
At the time, forensic DNA analysis was still in its infancy. Nevertheless, Peluso and his detectives uploaded blood samples from the scene to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, a national DNA database that was just beginning to take shape, in hopes that one day they might be useful and identify the person who killed Farrah Carter. After working for years without a break in the case, that moment finally arrived nearly two decades later.
When he retired from the Miramar PD three years ago, Peluso put notes on all of his old case files that needed to be rechecked every so often for DNA matches. One of them, he said, was the Farrah Carter homicide.
“Down the road, I was hoping this person would be arrested and a CODIS check would be run and they would connect it to my case,” said Peluso. (Det. Jonathan Zeller, the investigator to whom Peluso handed the Carter case, was unable to be reached.)
In 2019, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office DNA Analysis Unit agreed to perform additional testing on samples taken from Carter’s home, states the police report in the case.
Kevin McElfresh, a forensic DNA analyst who has testified in countless high-profile criminal cases over the years, came into the Carter case with a brand-new set of eyes, he said—in 2002, when Carter was killed, McElfresh was working for a private company helping to identify victims of the 9/11 attacks and wasn’t aware of Carter’s murder when it happened.
Cracking the case involved “a sort of perfect storm of good detective work,” McElfresh told The Daily Beast. “It was a lot of people who really cared about getting an answer, working together. The people involved, the detectives, the DA, everybody, really cared and put their back into what they were doing. And they kept it going, they kept working on it.”
When Carter was killed, the CODIS database had only been in existence since 1999, and DNA analysis was in its infancy, McElfresh explained. But everybody understood that one day in the future, there would ultimately be a match.
“These types of criminals tend to be huge recidivists,” said McElfresh, “and so it was understood that even if it didn't happen now, [the then-unknown suspect] was likely to commit another crime later. And then we would have him.”
The CODIS database began to expand significantly, and millions of new DNA profiles were subsequently entered into the system.
“That’s where the good old-fashioned detective work came in—the detective realized that new DNA was being added to the databases and kept checking back,” said McElfresh. “And that was the magic.”
Although many crimes solved using modern DNA technology can seem like something out of science fiction, McElfresh said that solving the Farrah Carter case required someone who knew how to use lab techniques from the early 2000s that are today considered virtually obsolete.
When he was called in to assist the Miramar PD, there wasn’t any fresh DNA evidence left from back in 2002 that could be re-tested with modern capabilities, according to McElfresh. However, there was a suitable amount of digital data that had been preserved, he said.
“The twist on this was that the original data from the crime scene had been run in 2002, and in 2002 we used different [methods] than we use now,” McElfresh explained. “Fortunately, I was familiar with those, so what I had to do was go back and re-read all the original data, then look at the new data from the suspect in the system, and work all that backwards.”
McElfresh pointed out that coming up with a new DNA analysis meant using antiquated systems only old-timers still know.
“It’s kind of like using MS-DOS 3.0 versus Windows 11,” he said. “I’m one of the few that’s still around who was working then, and I actually helped develop some of these systems. If you've got a 30-year-old analyst, they were 10 years old when this crime occurred. I did my first DNA case in 1987.”
Amazingly, the DNA samples from the Carter case re-tested in 2019 returned a match: 56-year-old Joseph Pollard—who, as it turned out, wore a size 10 shoe.
Joseph Lindon Pollard has a rap sheet in Florida dating back to 1983. Many of his crimes involved violence against women. His first arrest was for illegal concealed carry of a firearm and cannabis possession. From there, Pollard graduated to auto theft, cocaine possession, and burglary.
At the time of Farrah Carter’s slaying, Pollard—who had no known connection at all to Carter or any of her family members—was on probation for another crime. He was never a suspect in Carter’s murder, and two years after her death, a judge gave Pollard two life sentences plus 30 years for armed robbery, aggravated burglary, and kidnapping in another unrelated case.
Archival court documents reveal that Pollard has suffered in the past from major depressive disorder and schizophrenia. He is currently appealing his 2004 conviction, alleging that he received bad advice from his defense team. Sy Gare, a public defender who represented Pollard in at least one of his cases, died in 2007.
In September 2020, investigators obtained a search warrant for new samples of Pollard’s DNA, which they took at the prison where he was then housed. Detectives sat for two interviews with Pollard, who said he didn’t know Farrah Carter or any of her family members, didn’t recognize photos of the interior of the home, never wore an ATP Tour hat, and did not kill Carter.
The DNA results, however, said something very different.
DNA testing is not a silver bullet, and can’t solve every crime. But in Farrah Carter’s case, DNA evidence connected Pollard to the crime scene with near-certain probability, according to the police report. Pollard’s DNA was discovered on the ATP Tour hat, a bedroom door inside the house, and the kitchen door frame, it says. The door frame also contained a very small amount of DNA that belonged to a third person, but it was so limited that it was unable to be compared to a particular profile.
“Dr. Kevin McElfresh opined it is 158 trillion times more likely that Joseph Pollard and Farrah Carter and an unknown third person are the sources of the DNA in this mixture than three unknown and untested individuals,” the report states.
Joseph Pollard
Florida Department of CorrectionsPollard, who is currently serving his time at the Taylor Correctional Institution, on the eastern edge of the Florida Panhandle, was formally charged on Sept. 9 with Carter’s murder. He is scheduled to be extradited by the Broward County Sheriff’s Office on the murder charge next week, Miramar Police told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Pollard was unable to be reached for this article.
Ron Peluso’s daughter is now an officer with the Miramar PD, and he still keeps in close contact with his old colleagues. He regularly checked in with them on the Farrah Carter case, and “was always hoping that someday there would be an arrest.”
Carter’s mother, Kim Battle, declined to comment when contacted by The Daily Beast. Her father and sisters did not respond to interview requests. At a press conference the Miramar PD held to announce Pollard’s arrest, Battle said she feels some sense of relief but still has a void in her heart that will never go away.
For Peluso, the situation also gives him a bit of closure.
“I hate to walk out of a job and leave cases that are open,” he said. “I gave every case I handled 110 percent, [so]... I am very pleased, I feel very grateful… I have several other [cold] cases that, hopefully, DNA comes through.”
It’s cases like this, said McElfresh, “that remind you why you do it.”
“You know, here’s something that we were able to wrap up,” he said. “And now the person that did it is going to get the justice they deserve. I hope.”
Max Herard, the cop who found Farrah Carter’s body, retired from the Miramar PD just three months ago. To him, Pollard’s indictment in the Carter case came as nothing short of wonderful news.
“As I was leaving [the department], the DNA results came back,” Herard said. “And to close it like that, it was really, really a great gift.”
There is no such thing as an insignificant piece of evidence, according to Peluso. In this instance, a microscopic specimen from the crime scene was enough to charge Pollard with murder.
“Everything should be shared,” said Peluso. “When I would interview someone and they’d give me information, I’d always say, ‘When you walk out of this room, if you remember anything—anything—no matter how minute it may be, call me.’”
