On September 27, 1981, two teenagers collecting firewood stumbled upon the decomposed remains of Thomas Kinser in a sinkhole in the woods near State College, Pennsylvania. Kinser had been shot in the head.
Kinser was 19 years old when his parents reported him missing on December 18, 1980. His friend, Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam, told police at the time that he hadn’t seen Kinser since December 14, when they traveled to the nearby town of Lewistown. Vedam and Kinser were friends from high school and had briefly lived together in the summer of 1980.
The police combed the area where Kinser’s body was found, recovering a .25-caliber shell casing. In addition, a .25-caliber bullet was found with Kinser’s remains during the autopsy.
Nearly five months later, on February 9, 1982, Daniel O’Connell told police that he had sold a .25-caliber handgun to Vedam about a week before Kinser was last seen. O’Connell also said that Vedam had test-fired the weapon behind a Wendy’s in State College. Police searched the area near the restaurant and found a shell casing and bullet. These items, along with the evidence found in the woods, were sent to the FBI’s Crime Laboratory and analyzed by Agent William Albrecht.
Police charged Vedam with first-degree murder on June 28, 1982. At the time, Vedam was already in the Centre County jail, facing unrelated charges of theft and drug possession.
Vedam’s trial in the Centre County Court of Common Pleas took place in early February 1983. The jury convicted him of first-degree murder on February 8, 1983, and Judge Charles Brown Jr. sentenced him to life in prison without parole.
Vedam appealed, arguing that there had been insufficient evidence to sustain the conviction, and that Judge Brown had erred in allowing the state to introduce evidence of other bad acts. In January 1984, while the appeal was pending, Vedam entered a plea of no contest to four counts of delivering LSD and a single count of receiving stolen goods. He received a sentence of five to 10 years in prison.
On December 27, 1985, a three-judge panel of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania ordered a new murder trial. The appellate court said that although the state had presented sufficient evidence of Vedam’s guilt, Judge Brown’s decision to allow evidence of Vedam’s unrelated misconduct had been “highly prejudicial.”
Despite the ruling, Vedam remained in prison. Although Vedam had served the minimum sentence on the theft and drug charges, the state’s parole board declined to release him.
Vedam’s second trial in Centre County began on February 22, 1988. Because of pre-trial publicity in State College, the jury’s members were drawn from Northumberland County, 60 miles away.
The state did not have a clear motive for the crime and built its case on circumstantial evidence.
“They met and drove in a van to Lewistown, and we don’t know what happened after that,” District Attorney Ray Gricar said in his opening statement. “Subu Vedam was the only one who lived to tell the story.”
Charlene Kinser testified that she called Vedam after she couldn’t reach her son. She said Vedam told her that he hadn’t seen Kinser since Kinser dropped him off after the two men returned from Lewistown.
Several witnesses testified that Kinser and Vedam had been involved in low-level drug dealing. One witness said that Vedam told him that he had given Kinser 10 doses of LSD as payment for taking Vedam to Lewistown. Another friend, Christian Swanson, said “Subu was buying the LSD. [Kinser] was merely giving him a ride.”
O’Connell testified that he sold Vedam a .25-caliber handgun and ammunition for $75 about a week before Kinser disappeared. He had stolen the gun from his father. O’Connell also testified that police threatened to charge him with burglary in an unrelated crime if he didn’t cooperate with the investigation.
During cross-examination, Vedam’s attorney asked O’Connell, “Since 1981, have you ... been convicted of any criminal offenses?” O’Connell answered “No.”
Although no murder weapon was recovered, the state’s case centered around showing a connection between the firearm evidence collected outside the Wendy’s, near the sinkhole, and from Kinser’s autopsy.
Dr. Thomas Magnani, who performed the autopsy, testified that Kinser’s skeletal remains came in four large plastic bags, each containing remains, clothing, and forest debris, “dirt, leaves, and grass, things that you would normally identify as being out in the woods on the ground. Twigs.”
Although Magnani found a .25-caliber bullet with Kinser’s shirt, he said there was no way of knowing where the bullet was when the remains were found in the sinkhole.
Magnani said he had measured the bullet hole in Kinser’s skull, and Gricer asked him: “How do the dimensions of this hole compare with the dimensions of the bullet which you said you had recovered earlier?”
Magnani answered: “Well, they will never be exactly the same. They will be approximately the same, but the hole in the skull will be larger than the size of the bullet because as the bullet goes through, it destroys tissue, and it destroys bone, and it just excavates some of the bones.”
During cross-examination, Magnani said he measured the hole in Kinser’s skull as 10 millimeters by 6 millimeters. He said that meant the bullet could not be larger than 6 millimeters.
Vedam’s attorney asked Magnani, “Would you say that one basic fact you could say is for sure, and that is, that the size of the bullet cannot be larger than the hole?”
Magnani answered, “That’s absolutely right, yes.”
During his direct testimony, Albrecht testified that he had measured the hole in the top of Kinser’s skull. He also said he was familiar with the size of a standard .25-caliber round.
He was asked: “Did you find anything inconsistent between those two measurements?”
Albrecht answered: “In my opinion, no.”
During cross-examination, Vedam’s attorney asked Albrecht about the size of a .25-caliber bullet. Albrecht said it measured .251 inches in diameter, or 6.35 millimeters.
Albrecht also testified about the relationship between the bullet and casing found near Kinser’s body with the bullet and casing found near the Wendy’s, where O’Connell said Vedam had tested the gun.
About the casings, Albrecht said, “These cartridge cases ... were both fired by the same gun ... In my opinion there was no other firearm but one that fired these two cartridge cases.”
Albrecht testified that the casings featured Remington headstamps that were discontinued during the 1960s.
About the bullets, Albrecht testified that he could not give an opinion about whether the two bullets were fired from the same gun, in part due to the corrosion on the bullet found with Kinser’s remains. But he said they “very well could have been fired from the same barrel” given their rifling characteristics, physical design, and caliber. Albrecht also testified that based on a process called Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis (CBLA), “We can’t say whether it was part of the same batch, but it could have been in the same box.”
Albrecht also testified about chemical testing for lead and gunshot residue he performed on the entrance wound on Kinser’s skull.
He said the testing did not reveal the presence of lead and that it would have been more likely to find lead with a .22-caliber bullet.
“We are talking about lead bullets as opposed to .25 auto caliber, which is a copper jacket, a copper jacket over a lead core. You don’t have the lead coming in contact with whatever the bullet is passing through. So, you would not see a lead reaction when you have a copper jacketed bullet."
Vedam testified that he did not kill Kinser. “Tom got me a job,” he said. “We were pretty good friends … We both used and sold drugs, not for profit at first, but later in the summer of 1980.”
He said that he never saw Kinser after getting dropped off on December 14, 1980, and that until Kinser’s body was found he and others just “thought that Tom had disappeared.” He admitted to buying a gun from O’Connell but said the purchase took place after Kinser was reported missing.
During its closing argument, the defense told jurors that the hole in Kinser’s skull was too small to be made by a .25-caliber weapon. The defense also said that O’Connell was a convicted burglar out to cut a deal for himself.
Gricar told jurors that Albrecht had testified that there weren’t any inconsistencies in the firearm and forensic evidence. “[Albrecht] will tell you when you put those casings side by side under a comparison microscope and compare them, it was clear to him as an expert that the very same gun had fired both of these .25-caliber casings,” he said. “And is it a coincidence that that casing matches the casing found at the test firing scene? Hardly.”
Gricar said he couldn’t identify a motive for the killing and didn’t need one to prove Vedam’s guilt. He said, “[Vedam] was a drug dealer … Tom Kinser was the new kid on the block.”
The jury convicted Vedam of first-degree murder on February 25, 1988, and Judge Brown again sentenced him to life in prison without parole.
Over the next 35 years, Vedam filed three petitions for post-conviction relief, in 1994, 1996, and 2013. The courts rejected them on their merits or for technical issues.
In 2021, the Criminal Appellate and Post-Conviction Services Clinic at Penn State Dickinson Law and the Pennsylvania Innocence Project began a review of Vedam’s case, reaching an agreement with the Centre County District Attorney’s Office to allow a full review of its files. The law clinic, led by Gopal Balachandran, began representing Vedam in 2023.
On October 13, 2023, Vedam’s legal team filed a new motion for post-conviction relief. It said the state had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence and failed to correct false statements by its witnesses. Among the claims:
A hand-written note by Gricar referenced FBI measurements of the hole in Kinser’s skull as being smaller than a .25-caliber bullet. The FBI reports given to Vedam’s defense did not include any of these measurements, and they appeared to undermine Albrecht’s testimony that there was nothing inconsistent in a large bullet making a small hole. Because Gricar was aware of the actual measurement recorded by Albrecht, the motion asserted that he violated Vedam’s rights by failing to correct Albrecht’s false testimony.
A drawing of the sinkhole indicated that investigators found five shell casings and one bullet near Kinser’s body. Four of the casings were .22-caliber; none were .25-caliber. While several officers had testified about the crime scene and the recovery of some of these items, they were never questioned about the full inventory, which the motion said pointed to a weapon other than a .25-caliber gun being used to kill Kinser.
O’Connell had testified falsely about his criminal record. He had seven convictions, all in California, between 1981 and the time of his testimony in 1988. The petition said Gricar might have been aware of this perjury because his post-trial notes said that O’Connell was convicted for petty theft in 1983. (Part of this issue had been previously litigated in an earlier petition for post-conviction relief.)
On March 10, 2024, Vedam amended his petition. The FBI had disclosed additional records about the firearms analysis—including Albrecht’s bench notes.
William Tobin, a former manager of forensic metallurgy operations at the FBI, reviewed these records. He said in a report included in the amended petition that Albrecht’s testimony about the bullets didn’t square with the results of the CBLA testing, which used a process called Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA).
“The compositions in [the Vedam case] are so disparate that it increases the likelihood that the bullets are from different boxes of bullets, thereby weakening the claim that a single firearm was responsible for the firing of both, as alleged by the Commonwealth in its theory of prosecution,” Tobin wrote. “In none of the materials provided to me do I find that defense counsel had an opportunity to cross-examine Albrecht on the potentially exculpatory and dramatic differences in bullet compositions.”
Tobin also said Albrecht had given misleading testimony about the significance of an absence of lead on the bullet hole. First, Tobin said, plenty of .22-caliber bullets had copper jackets. Equally important, any lead could have been washed away or dissipated during the months Kinser’s body lay in the sinkhole.
Tobin also said that Albrecht had overstated the apparent similarities between the casings recovered at the Wendy’s and in the woods. “The claim used [by Albrecht] in this case: ‘to the exclusion of every other gun’ has been determined to be so patently unacceptable that the claim is no longer permitted or used by practitioners.”
Albrecht’s bench notes said that the smaller bullet hole was consistent with a larger bullet after accounting for “shrinkage.” Tobin said Albrecht provided no explanation for how he arrived at this conclusion, and it was “nothing more than speculation by a witness.” Tobin said that if Vedam’s defense had been provided with these bench notes, it would have allowed the attorneys to effectively cross-examine Albrecht.
Later, in August 2024, Vedam’s team again amended the petition to include a report from Dr. Ann Ross, a board-certified forensic anthropologist at North Carolina State University. Ross examined the FBI’s report and said the hole in Kinser’s skull was irregularly shaped, typically produced after a bullet fragments upon entering the skull and part of the slug exits the wound. She said the bullet found among Kinser’s clothes was intact and could not have produced that wound. Ross said she measured the hole and found its minimum diameter to be 4.7 mm.
“Because the entrance site is a ‘keyhole’ defect where there is a bullet fragment entering and exiting the cranial cavity, it cannot be established whether it is from either a .22 or .25 caliber handgun with any absolute certainty, “Ross wrote. “[B]ecause low-velocity handguns do not generally produce exit sites and that it was a ‘keyhole’ defect, it is unlikely the perforating gunshot wound would have been produced by a .25 jacketed bullet using a handgun. It is my opinion that a .22 caliber non-jacketed bullet from a .22 rifle ultimately caused Kinser’s death.”
After the state responded, Judge Jonathan Grine granted its request to dismiss Vedam’s motion for post-conviction relief, with the exception of claims related to the FBI records, Gricer’s note on the measurement of the hole in Kinser’s skull, and the undisclosed FBI records on the NAA analysis. He held an evidentiary hearing in February 2025.
On August 28, 2025, Judge Grine granted Vedam’s motion for a new trial.
He said that the state had failed to disclose the FBI’s measurement of the skull hole, that Albrecht had falsely testified about the lack of consistency between the hole and purported bullet, and that Gricer had known the testimony was false but failed to correct it.
Judge Grine also said the state had failed to disclose the FBI firearms CBLA analysis, which indicated a much weaker connection between the bullets than Albrecht testified to. Judge Grine said that this lack of disclosure required granting Vedam a new trial, but he didn’t find that Albrecht had testified falsely in this instance.
Judge Grine wrote in his ruling: “It is true that there was a passing reference to the FBI measuring the hole in Kinser’s skull during the testimony of FBI Agent William Albrecht. That a measurement was made and what the measurement was are two distinct facts. The Commonwealth was in possession of the specific measurements and failed to disclose them. The same is true with the fact that a neutron activation analysis was done but the NAA data itself was not disclosed.”
After the ruling, Vedam’s niece, Zoë Miller-Vedam said in a statement: “The case against Subu, which was always blatantly unfounded, completely crumbles in light of the evidence we now know the prosecutor concealed. A fair trial, where this evidence would finally have its day in court, will unequivocally show that Subu was convicted for a crime he didn’t commit.”
Centre County District Attorney Bernie Cantorna dismissed the case on October 2, 2025. He said a retrial was not possible because witnesses had died, and evidence had been lost. He also noted that Vedam had spent more than 40 years in prison. “It is not a decision made lightly,” Cantorna said. “Nevertheless, given everything that has happened thus far, I believe it is the just decision to make.”
Although Vedam was released from prison the next day, he was not free. He was taken immediately into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, based on a 1988 detainer issued at the time of his conviction, and then transferred to a processing center to await deportation back to his native India.
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 10-15-2025
Last Update Date: 10-15-2025
