Mar 26, 2026 · 36 min · 15 segments
A fresh look at the evidence leads to an almost unimaginable twist. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for…
Josh MankiewiczHost
Alan BloomGuestCindy SommerGuest
[gavel bangs] The judge's gavel echoed through the courtroom like a starter's gun, and defense attorney Alan Bloom knew he was now in a race against time.
With Cindy Summer's murder conviction overturned and a new trial scheduled to begin in six months, Bloom had a very long list of things that had to be done.
Chief among them was to find ways to undercut and disprove the prosecution argument that Todd Summer had died from arsenic poisoning.
They came up with results to show arsenic in amounts that has never, ever been able to be found in the history of arsenical testing before.
As Bloom saw it, the testing done by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology was riddled with problems, and back in 2003, whatever happened in the basement of that AFIP Cold War citadel had resulted in some kind of historic mistake.
These are the people who test our water and rocks to see if there's arsenic.
I don't think they've ever tested human tissues before.
I know the chemist in this case said he had never done it, using a machine that had never been done before.
Without an established standard procedure for handling human tissues, the lawyer thought it possible those tissue samples could have been mishandled, and perhaps contaminated in some way, before the actual testing began.
I don't know if they're contaminated.
Contamination is one potential.
It could be a number of different things.
But I can tell you that the results that they found are aberrational.
In fact, the findings were so extraordinary that when the district attorney's office asked other experts to validate the military lab's findings, they found no takers.
So they go to expert after expert after expert, and those experts say, "We won't sign off on this because we don't believe it."
it."That alone might be enough to raise reasonable doubt with a new panel of trial jurors.
But what Bloom really wanted was to undercut the prosecution case at its base, and prove the results from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology Environmental Division were bogus.
Turns out, the Navy pathologist who did Todd Sommer's autopsy had saved not one, but three sets of sample tissues.
One set was frozen, another was preserved in formaldehyde, and therefore untestable, and one more was kept in paraffin blocks, which can be stored without refrigeration.
Those first AFIP tests, the ones that found all that arsenic, were done on the frozen tissue samples.
So then what about the paraffin-preserved samples? Wouldn't a second round of tests on those samples definitively settle the matter? Well, maybe.
Alan Bloom says prosecutor Laura Gunn told him those paraffin-preserved samples had been lost or destroyed.
[gavel bangs] The judge's gavel echoed through the courtroom like a starter's gun, and defense attorney Alan Bloom knew he was now in a race against time.
With Cindy Summer's murder conviction overturned and a new trial scheduled to begin in six months, Bloom had a very long list of things that had to be done.
Chief among them was to find ways to undercut and disprove the prosecution argument that Todd Summer had died from arsenic poisoning.
They came up with results to show arsenic in amounts that has never, ever been able to be found in the history of arsenical testing before.
As Bloom saw it, the testing done by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology was riddled with problems, and back in 2003, whatever happened in the basement of that AFIP Cold War citadel had resulted in some kind of historic mistake.
These are the people who test our water and rocks to see if there's arsenic.
I don't think they've ever tested human tissues before.
I know the chemist in this case said he had never done it, using a machine that had never been done before.
Without an established standard procedure for handling human tissues, the lawyer thought it possible those tissue samples could have been mishandled, and perhaps contaminated in some way, before the actual testing began.
I don't know if they're contaminated.
Contamination is one potential.
It could be a number of different things.
But I can tell you that the results that they found are aberrational.
In fact, the findings were so extraordinary that when the district attorney's office asked other experts to validate the military lab's findings, they found no takers.
So they go to expert after expert after expert, and those experts say, "We won't sign off on this because we don't believe it."
it."That alone might be enough to raise reasonable doubt with a new panel of trial jurors.
But what Bloom really wanted was to undercut the prosecution case at its base, and prove the results from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology Environmental Division were bogus.
Turns out, the Navy pathologist who did Todd Sommer's autopsy had saved not one, but three sets of sample tissues.
One set was frozen, another was preserved in formaldehyde, and therefore untestable, and one more was kept in paraffin blocks, which can be stored without refrigeration.
Those first AFIP tests, the ones that found all that arsenic, were done on the frozen tissue samples.
So then what about the paraffin-preserved samples? Wouldn't a second round of tests on those samples definitively settle the matter? Well, maybe.
Alan Bloom says prosecutor Laura Gunn told him those paraffin-preserved samples had been lost or destroyed.
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