Infamous Bloomington-Normal murder cases see another appellate court
Written by Joey Delahunty on February 24, 2025
NORMAL, Ill. – The Fourth District Appellate Court will soon be meeting in the Bone Student Center to decide on developments in two high profile murder cases.
Barton McNeil and Jamie Snow are both Bloomington residents who were convicted of separate murders, and both have been undergoing long fights to prove themselves innocent.
McNeil was convicted of murdering his 3-year-old daughter Christina in 1999. He and his legal team have long maintained that the murder was actually committed by Barton’s ex-girlfriend Misook Nowlin-Wang. The two broke up hours before the murder was committed and Nowlin-Wang was later convicted of murdering her mother-in-law in an unrelated case.
The McNeil Team also alleges that Nowlin-Wang confessed to the murder, which two different witnesses have testified to. The first was Dawn Nowlin, who’s married to Misook’s ex-husband. The second was Michelle Spencer, Misook’s daughter. Additionally, later DNA analysis found Misook’s DNA on the bedsheets where the murder was committed.
Last February, a McLean county judge decided that the new evidence was not sufficient for a retrial. The new hearing will once again look at McNeil’s actual innocence claim, and will decide if a retrial will happen.
Jamie Snow was convicted in 2001 of the murder of William Little, who was killed in a gas station robbery in 1991. His team is appealing a lower court’s decision to not allow DNA or fingerprint analysis.
Snow was originally convicted on testimony from jailhouse informants, who have been said to have ulterior motives, and offered useful testimony to police. Since Snow’s trial, a law has been passed in Illinois requiring jailhouse informants be approved in a hearing with a judge, but that wasn’t the case at the time.
The Innocence Project, a nonprofit that’s been representing Snow, has offered to pay for the forensic testing in the past. Despite this, the prosecution has argued that the results of an analysis wouldn’t advance Snow’s claim of actual innocence.
Both hearings are scheduled for March 25 in the Bone Student Center Prairie Room. McNeil’s hearing will start at 10 a.m. and Snow’s will start at 11 a.m.
