LOS ANGELES—A man who served 38 years in prison for the 1983 abduction and killing of a woman in Inglewood is a free man Oct. 28, with authorities saying newly tested DNA evidence exonerated him of the crime and identified a different person as the culprit in the slaying.
“I’m not pointing fingers. I’m not standing up here a bitter man,” Maurice Hastings, 69, said during a downtown Los Angeles news conference. “But I just want to enjoy my life while I have it. And I just want to move forward.”
Working in conjunction with the Los Angeles Innocence Project at California State University–Los Angeles, the District Attorney’s Office filed a motion to vacate Hastings’ 1988 conviction for the abduction, sexual assault, and slaying of 30-year-old Roberta Wydermyer, and the attempted murder of Wydermyer’s husband, Billy Ray, and his friend George Pinson….