By Janice Morse
The Cincinnati Enquirer

HAMILTON - A prosecutor detailed a 30-year-old homicide of a retired school principal for jurors Tuesday, saying new evidence - including DNA - would prove Donald L. Korn killed the woman.

Mildred Ruth Doench, 72, was raped and stabbed to death in her Fairfield Township home on July 13, 1974. Doench was Korn's former landlady at the time of her death.

Korn, 59, is being retried in the case after an appeals court overturned an earlier conviction and death-penalty sentence, saying police wrongfully obtained his confession.

Korn's lawyer, J. Gregory Howard, made no opening statement.

Assistant Butler County Prosecutor Dan Eichel, though, outlined the brutality of Doench's death for jurors:

"She lay dead after all of this, and he chopped her twice in the face with a mattock," he said. Korn, who has been imprisoned on an unrelated rape conviction in Indiana since 1976, faces a possible life term if convicted in Doench's death.

Although Korn was sentenced to death in the killing, Ohio's death-penalty law in effect at the time was declared unconstitutional. Korn's conviction was overturned because an appeals court ruled that his confession was wrongfully obtained by detectives who ignored his requests for a lawyer.

Jurors were not told of Korn's prior conviction. Common Pleas Judge Patricia Oney told them they are forbidden from reading newspaper reports, seeing television broadcasts or discussing the case.

The trial is expected to last through this week.

E-mail jmorse@enquirer.com