Exonerated Buffalo mother rejects finding in daughter's death

BUFFALO - Jurors didn't look kindly on Lynn DeJac. She was a tavern manager in blue-collar south Buffalo, a single woman with long hair and long nails who'd been pregnant by 15, had a couple kids, and her share of boyfriends.

When prosecutors told those sitting in judgment at her 1994 murder trial that, after a night of bar hopping, DeJac used her bare hands to choke the life out of her 13-year-old daughter, they'd obliged with a guilty verdict.

The night Crystallynn Girard died, “She's running around drinking her brains out with three different guys,” her own lawyer had said in his closing remarks.