Douglas Stewart Carter walked out of Utah County Jail in Spanish Fork late Monday under a GPS monitor, freed on bail after prosecutors said newly analyzed DNA evidence excluded him from key items tied to the 1985 killing of Eva Olesen. The 71-year-old still faces an aggravated murder charge and a planned retrial, but county prosecutors have already withdrawn their notice that they intended to seek the death penalty.

Fox News reported that the DNA analysis arrived Sept. 22 and ruled Carter out as a possible match to blood found on a doorknob and genetic material recovered from the handle of a knife used to stab Olesen inside her Provo home. Judge Derek Pullan ordered the release over objections from the victim’s family, while making clear a jury could still find Carter responsible.

The case now sits at a hard legal crossroads. A man who spent decades under a death sentence is free pending trial, the capital option is off the table, and the state must decide what remaining evidence can carry an aggravated murder prosecution after years of misconduct findings and collapsed witness testimony.

Bond conditions and the state’s posture

At a Monday bond hearing in Provo’s 4th District Court, Utah County prosecutor Erwin Petilos told the judge that reassessing Carter’s bail was “necessary and fair” as the state continues to examine the remaining evidence. Pullan ordered Carter not to contact Olesen’s family and required the GPS monitor as a condition of release.

Carter’s attorney, Neal Hamilton, said his client would be placed in an extended-stay hotel near his son, Tyler Anger, and would need therapy after so many years behind bars. Anger walked out with his father Monday after waiting for the release.

Hamilton pressed prosecutors to dismiss the aggravated murder charge outright. He framed the timing in blunt terms for a system that long sought Carter’s execution.

"If the state of Utah had their way, he would have been executed 15, 20 years ago before we discovered the misconduct."

Breitbart carried the same attorney warning while noting that no physical evidence originally linked Carter to the crime scene and that the conviction rested on a signed confession plus two witnesses who later recanted.

The bail fight echoes other high-stakes post-conviction fights over capital cases, including coverage of how Utah dropped death-penalty pursuit against the same 71-year-old after DNA exclusion reshaped the state’s charging stance.

What the DNA did and did not settle

Prosecutors said the Sept. 22 results excluded Carter from the doorknob blood and the knife-handle material. That finding drove the bail reassessment and the decision last week to withdraw the death-penalty notice. The aggravated murder charge remains active.

Pullan said the DNA findings further undermined the case against Carter. He also said a jury could still conclude Carter killed Olesen. Prosecutors have declined to say whether the DNA will be used to search for other suspects.

The New York Post reported that the newly analyzed DNA does not link him to the crime and that Carter awaits a new trial after decades on death row. A two-month retrial is planned for next year.

Family members of the victim did not treat the lab result as closure. Theresa Olesen, Eva Olesen’s daughter-in-law, spoke at the bond hearing and described “serious concerns” about the release.

"By golly we were hoping for a concrete match."

She added a second point the family wants kept in view.

"It doesn’t mean he wasn’t there."

Theresa Olesen also said the family still wants answers about Eva’s death.

"We just want justice for Eva. And if he had any part of it we want that to be known."

Those statements leave the public record split between exclusion on specific items and an open question about any role at the scene. Investigators have not publicly confirmed how the remaining non-DNA evidence will be weighed at retrial.

The 1985 killing and the confession path

Eva Olesen was found tied up, stabbed, and shot inside her Provo home on Feb. 27, 1985. Investigators suspected a robbery. Her husband, Orla Olesen, told police he found her dead, partially undressed, with her hands tied behind her back. He died in 2009.

Court documents show that by April 1985 Carter had fled Utah, believing he was a suspect in an unrelated assault case. About two months later he was detained in Nashville. Under interrogation by a Provo detective, he signed a confession. He has maintained innocence and argues the confession was coerced.

He was convicted and sentenced to death. The defense called no witnesses at that trial. In 1992 he was sentenced to death again after a retrial. Utah courts later denied multiple appeals.

Long capital cases often turn on whether old confessions and witness accounts can survive modern scrutiny, a tension also seen when America’s oldest death row inmate died at 101 after dodging execution eight times without a final resolution on the underlying conviction’s strength.

Recanted witnesses and the misconduct ruling

Two original-trial witnesses claimed Carter had bragged about the crime. In 2011 they were tracked down in Mexico and recanted. They said they had been told to lie, received cash and gifts from police, were told not to disclose the payments, and faced threats of deportation against them and their son if they did not implicate Carter.

More than a decade of legal fights followed those recantations. Last year the Utah Supreme Court ordered a new trial, citing “multiple instances of intentional misconduct” by police and a prosecutor. DNA testing followed that order and produced the Sept. 22 exclusion.

The defense has also argued investigators suppressed evidence that could implicate other suspects, including Orla Olesen. Prosecutors were close to filing charges against the husband until a Provo police lieutenant urged them not to, the defense account holds. Authorities have not publicly confirmed a full alternate-suspect theory in current charging papers.

Tyler Anger, Carter’s son, was adopted by another family as an infant and learned of his father’s conviction years later, Hamilton said. After the Monday release, Anger offered a short assessment of what freedom will demand.

"This is going to be a lot for him."

Hamilton’s hotel plan near Anger is meant to give Carter a controlled landing while the aggravated murder case continues.

What still must be decided

Prosecutors are reassessing the remaining evidence. They have not said whether they will dismiss, proceed to the planned two-month retrial next year, or expand DNA work to other people. The death-penalty notice is already withdrawn. The GPS monitor and no-contact order bind Carter while he remains free on bail.

For victims’ families, bail after decades of capital litigation can feel like a second trauma even when lab results shift the state’s case. For defendants who always claimed a coerced confession, DNA exclusion on core items is the first concrete break in a narrative that once seemed locked. Readers tracking sentence outcomes after violent convictions have also watched cases such as the Kentucky man who stabbed a sleeping six-year-old and later walked free after serving half his sentence, where post-conviction results reset public expectations about finality.

Pullan’s dual message still frames the legal field. The DNA further undercuts the state’s proof, yet a jury could still find Carter killed Olesen. That gap is exactly what a retrial is built to test, under rules that now sit on top of a state high-court finding of intentional misconduct by police and a prosecutor.

Carter left jail as a 71-year-old man who once lived with his mother in Utah when Olesen was killed, fled the state by April 1985, confessed in Nashville, and spent decades under death sentences that Utah courts long refused to unwind. The charge remains. The capital notice does not. The family still wants justice for Eva. The defense wants the case dismissed.

When DNA knocks a condemned man off the evidence map and a supreme court has already branded intentional official misconduct, the public is entitled to a clean accounting of what proof is left and who is accountable for the years that cannot be returned.