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.

DeJac spent 13 1/2 years in prison for Crystallynn's murder before being exonerated last month by an implausible chain of events.

Now 44 and back home in Buffalo, she is settling into a new life with teenage twin sons who were just four months old when she went to prison. She married their father, Chuck Peters, while behind bars, but the couple has had little cause to celebrate, even now.

DeJac may be free but she is fighting mad - and not just over lost time.

Because as bad as it was for her - prison, separation from her infant twins and another son, the public scorn all those years ago - hearing her dead daughter's name sullied now is worse.

“She was an innocent little girl,” DeJac says, tears of frustration rising with her voice. “She doesn't deserve this.”

When DeJac was released from prison in November, she became the first woman among more than 200 men since 1989 who have been freed nationally by newly analyzed DNA evidence.

But ultimately, it was not the DNA that cleared her of charges. While that was enough for a judge to set aside DeJac's conviction, it was not enough for District Attorney Frank Clark to drop the charges.

He finally relented only after forensics experts preparing for the retrial stumbled upon a finding that would remove all doubt about DeJac's innocence. It is the very finding DeJac will not accept: Crystallynn overdosed on cocaine.

“It's not going to stay like this,” DeJac said on a day she called “bittersweet.”

“My daughter was not a drug user ... My daughter was murdered,” she said. “There's no question my daughter was murdered.”

The killer, she said, must have transferred the tiny bit of cocaine found in Crystallynn's blood from his finger.

DeJac has believed from the start that killer is the man whose DNA was found in Crystallynn's bed and body, a former boyfriend named Dennis Donohue. A man who can never be charged.

Crystallynn Girard was an honor roll student with her mother's hair and a sunny smile. At 13, she was 5 feet 6 inches, already two inches taller than her mother and a few pounds heavier.

She was a “godsend,” the way she helped get her younger brother to bed at night and off to school in the morning, her mother said.

Her mischievous side showed when it came time to do the dishes, a job Crystallynn despised. More than once did DeJac find the sink not so mysteriously clogged with a dishtowel.

One night, after DeJac scolded her daughter for not helping more with the housework, she came home to a spotless house and a rose on her pillow with a note of apology from Crystallynn.

“To me, she was an angel. She was my best friend,” DeJac said, her long hair graying now, a reminder of the years spent away.

The night before she was found dead on Valentine's Day 1993, Crystallynn and a girlfriend enjoyed a double-date dinner with two young boys.

But there had been dark times, too. Her stepfather was sentenced to five to 15 years in prison for molesting Crystallynn before she'd turned 10. DeJac admits she made mistakes as a parent but bristles at the description of her as the hard-drinking, absentee mother painted at trial.

“Was I a perfect mother? By no means,” she said. “I'm not even claiming to be. But was I the worst mother? No, I'm not claiming that either.”