The night of Feb. 5, 1985, started with a party for Bruce Allen Smith.

It ended with a murder.

After a night of drinking at a Beatrice bar, he drove with friends to an after-hours party in the nearby town of Blue Springs. When a woman at the party refused Smith’s sexual advances, he threatened to rape her.

He took what he wanted, he said.

To diffuse the situation, a friend drove Smith back up to Beatrice. Smith got out of the car  one block from the downtown apartment of Helen Wilson, a 68-year-old widow who lived alone.

The 22-year-old man got into her apartment — and took what he wanted.

He beat her.

He raped her multiple times.

And he suffocated her.

Beatrice police investigators quickly developed Smith as a suspect. They even tracked him down in Oklahoma and obtained samples of his blood, saliva and pubic hair.

But blood tests done in 1985 cleared Smith.

So police looked elsewhere, eventually pinning the murder on six people, all of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison.

But recent DNA tests done on Smith’s 23-year-old samples matched DNA from blood and semen found in the victim’s apartment.

Smith died from AIDS in 1992 at an Oklahoma City hospital. But  at least police now know the true killer’s identity, said Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning as he announced the discovery at a Friday news conference.

More importantly, the case marks the first time DNA tests have exonerated someone convicted of a crime in Nebraska.

“There's no doubt today that six innocent people convicted of this crime have indeed suffered,” Bruning said.

DNA tests have already set free two of the three who were still in prison — Joseph White, 45, and Thomas Winslow, 42. On Monday, Ada JoAnn Taylor, who is serving time at the Omaha Community Corrections Center, will go before the parole board for her release.

Bruning said Friday he will work  to obtain full pardons for all six. The others are James Dean, Debra Shelden and Kathy Gonzalez.

He directed blame for their wrongful convictions on former Gage County Attorney Richard Smith and several investigators who were too eager to solve a crime that had terrorized their community.

The authorities conducted multiple interrogations in which the threat of the death penalty bullied confessions out of four of the defendants, Bruning said. They also showed the defendants crime scene photos in an effort to plant details the defendants could later describe in court.

The interrogation methods have since been discredited and discarded, Bruning said.

“In plain language, we don’t do it that way anymore,” he said.

In exchange for lesser charges, the four who confessed testified against White, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. The possibility of a similar fate prompted Winslow to plead no contest to his charges; he was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

“Because of the well-intentioned but misguided actions of a handful of people, the noble goals of our judicial system were twisted and perverted and turned upside down,” Bruning said.

Attempts to reach Richard Smith for comment Friday were unsuccessful.

Friday’s developments came about for two reasons: the high quality of evidence preserved by the Beatrice Police Department and White’s dogged persistence in proving his innocence. He never stopped looking for an attorney who would seek DNA testing on his behalf.

“It’s about time,” White said Friday when reached in Holly Pond, Ala., where he has been living with his parents since his Oct. 15 release.

Since that day, the remote possibility that the state could file new charges hung over White. The discovery of Bruce Smith as the lone killer ended that possibility.

“It’s really a relief that it happened this quickly,” White told the Journal Star.

Legally, the exonerations came about because of a 2001 state law that allows people convicted of serious crimes to seek DNA testing. The law was sponsored by Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha, who attended the news conference alongside Bruning.

“In this case, justice was wounded, she had a lacerated face, the blindfold had tipped akimbo,” Chambers said.

“Well now, justice is probably dancing,” he said, adding that he can never recall a time in his public life that he has felt such elation as he did Friday.

Finally, Chambers said, he will look into ethics charges against the former county attorney.

Jerry Soucie, a lawyer with the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy, represented Winslow in the DNA case. On Friday, he praised the swift manner in which the identity of the real killer was determined.

In coming months, Soucie said, he plans to meet with legislators to discuss introducing a bill that would provide compensation for those who were wrongly imprisoned.

When asked who should apologize to the wrongly convicted, the attorney general said he had to be careful with his answer. He suggested he likely will be defending the state in future lawsuits over the matter.

Soucie also provided insights as to how the case went so wrong.

For example, the prosecution employed a psychologist who told the accused that they had committed crimes so heinous they had blocked what they had done from their memories. One of the women sentenced in conjunction with the case, Debra Shelden, still believes she was somehow involved, even though the evidence overwhelmingly points otherwise, Soucie said.

“That’s a terrible thing to do to somebody,” Soucie said.

And in 2006, when White and Winslow first requested to have their DNA tested, Richard Smith, who was county attorney at the time, refused — a move that delayed their release by at least 14 months, Soucie said.

Upon learning that Helen Wilson’s real killer had been identified, Winslow said Friday he felt mainly relief.

Both Winslow and White said they did not know Bruce Smith.

Randy Ritnour, the current Gage County attorney, helped lead a law enforcement task force that identified Bruce Smith as Wilson’s killer. He said he met with Wilson’s children and grandchildren on Friday before the news conference to brief them on the developments.

“The main emotion that I detected there was relief,” he said. “They were glad to know this was finally over and finally resolved. They were saddened to know the six people who were in prison were innocent.”

Beatrice Police Chief Bruce Lang  headed the task force that included the Gage County Sheriff’s Office and the Nebraska State Patrol. He said almost everyone who worked on the Wilson case in the 1980s has retired. But the former investigators were interviewed.

“We had to go through a period of time where we said, ‘How can this possibly have happened?’” Lang said. “To this day, it’s a difficult thing to process.”

The task force started with a list of about 10 suspects developed more than two decades ago. The new DNA evidence gave them an efficient way to winnow the list.

Smith wasn’t their first priority, because the previous blood tests had excluded him in 1985. But when DNA technicians saw the root of a pubic hair collected from Smith, they knew they would have a good sample.

“We got lucky,” said Assistant Attorney General Corey O’Brien, who worked on the case.

In yet another twist in the case, the Nebraska investigators learned an Oklahoma forensic  chemist named Joyce Gilchrist handled the original testing of Smith’s blood.

Years later, dogged by allegations that she gave misleading testimony in criminal cases, Gilchrist was fired.

On Friday, officials stressed that they didn’t know whether the error with the blood type came from that lab. The hair that incriminated Smith had been stored at the Beatrice Police Department.

Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com.

Reach Cara Pesek at 473-7361 or cpesek@journalstar.com.

Journal Star reporter Margaret Reist contributed to this report.