Seventeen years after the crime was committed, Richard Wilbern was sentence to life in prison without parole.
Wilbern was sentenced Tuesday in the 2003 Xerox Federal Credit Union robbery and murder. He was convicted of holding up the credit union in Webster and shooting two people. Raymond Batzel, who had walked into the credit union during the holdup to pay his car loan, was killed.
Wilbern was caught after a tip 13 years after the crime led police to focus on Wilbern. They were able to get his DNA from a envelope that he licked, and match it to DNA from an umbrella the criminal left behind at the crime scene. The jury foreman at the trial last fall said it was the key evidence that convicted Wilbern.
Wilbern himself continues to maintain he was railroaded by a faulty DNA collection and a judicial system rigged against African Americans. He told the court “I did not murder, I did not kill or rob Xerox.”