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Noura Jackson

2020/8/10
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Noura Jackson was arrested for the brutal murder of her mother, Jennifer, despite a lack of forensic evidence linking her to the crime.

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One of the rarest types of homicides in the United States, and even in the world, is matricide. The killing of one's own mother. Children who murder their own mother represent less than 2% of all homicides in the U.S., where the relationship between the offender and the victim is known.

In 2005, 18-year-old Nora Jackson was arrested and charged with her own mother, Jennifer Jackson's brutal murder. Jennifer was found inside of her Memphis, Tennessee house, stabbed over 50 times. Although there was no forensic evidence linking Nora to the murder, she did have a large cut on one of her hands.

Crime scene investigators recovered an unknown DNA sample on top of Jennifer's bedsheets that didn't match either Jennifer or Nora. Is Nora Jackson a wrongfully accused teenager charged with killing her own mother? Or is she a cold-blooded killer guilty of committing one of the most heinous types of homicide?

This is Forensic Tales, episode number 32, the story of Nora Jackson.

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell.

Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast that discusses real, bone-chilling true crime stories and how forensic science has been used in the case. Some cases have been solved through cutting-edge forensic techniques, while other cases remain unsolved.

If you're interested in supporting the show and getting access to exclusive content and bonus material, consider visiting our Patreon page at patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. I want to give a huge shout out to the show's newest patron, Joseph F. Thank you so much for supporting the show, Joseph.

Every contribution, big or small, helps me to continue to produce the true crime content you love. Please consider supporting the show on Patreon. Now, let's talk about the story of Nora Jackson. Hey, Forensic Tales listeners. I know I say this about every case on the show, but this one I'm even more excited to talk to you guys about.

And that's because it's a case where the accused, a teenage girl at the time of the crime, spent almost 10 years in prison for a murder that she says she didn't commit. It's a case of matricide, the killing of your own mother, one of the most rarest types of murder in our society.

She wasn't released from prison until it was discovered that the prosecution withheld key evidence in the case that just may have changed the outcome of the entire case. In June 2005, 18-year-old Nora Jackson lived with her mother Jennifer Jackson in Memphis, Tennessee.

Jennifer Jackson was 39 years old and acting as a single mother to Nora after Nora's father was shot and killed inside the business he owned about 15 months earlier in January 2004. Now, even though Nora's parents divorced when she was just a kid, this was really traumatic for both Nora and her mom.

Nora's father had been shot in cold blood, and the case still remains unsolved even today. Even though she was a single mother, Nora's mom, Jennifer, worked really hard to provide the best life possible for not only herself, but also for her daughter. During the day, she worked as a bond trader, and she was really, really good at it.

She was described by pretty much everyone who knew her as really being the best mother she could to Nora. That's why no one could have suspected what would happen next to the beautiful, hardworking, super friendly single mother.

On Sunday, June 5th, 2005, at 5 o'clock in the morning, 18-year-old Nora Jackson called 911. On the 911 call, Nora pleaded for an ambulance. She said someone broke into the house and that her mom was bleeding. She said, quote, she's not breathing. She's not breathing. Please help me. There's blood everywhere.

Police and paramedics arrived at Jennifer Jackson's house as quickly as they possibly could. The police had absolutely no idea what they were walking into. They had no idea whether someone was still inside the house.

When police get into the house, they find Jennifer on the bedroom floor. She was naked, she was covered in blood, and she was pronounced dead right there at the scene. Jennifer's body was at the foot of her bed and stab wounds were everywhere. The medical examiner in the case would find that she was stabbed more than 50 times.

It was pretty clear that this was a rage killing. That whoever killed Jennifer, this was personal. This was overkill. Besides the amount of stab wounds, police suspected that Jennifer's killing was personal because when police arrived at the house that morning, the killer had placed a wicker basket over Jennifer's head.

This is a possible clue that the killer knew Jennifer and that they didn't want to look at her in the eyes as he or she brutally stabbed her to death. Police also found additional evidence that the killer knew Jennifer, that this wasn't just some stranger who broke in. They found a broken glass window on a door between the kitchen and the garage of the house.

But what was strange was the fact the window had been broken towards the upper left-hand side of the door window, nowhere near where the door handle was. What was the purpose of breaking the glass if not to use the door handle to break in? So it kind of looked like the window was broken as some sort of ruse.

that the killer already knew how to get inside Jennifer's house. The news about Jennifer's death spread quickly. No one could understand who or why anyone would want Jennifer dead, especially in such a brutal way. But the first suspect in the case came pretty soon. Police looked into Jennifer's ex-boyfriend, Mark Irving.

Not only was Mark a guy that Jennifer had dated on and off, phone records showed that Mark Irving called her on the night of her murder. But when police asked Mark about the night of her murder and the phone call that he made to Jennifer's house, he provided them with an alibi, even though it wasn't a very airtight alibi.

Mark Irving told police that, yes, he did call Jennifer the night of the murder, but he was at home. He was asleep at the time that she would have been killed in the city of Jackson, which is over 90 minutes away from Jennifer's house. Now, the I was at home asleep alibi is pretty hard to prove for anyone, right?

When you live alone and you're asleep in your bed, there's no one there to say, yeah, that's correct, he was sound asleep the entire night. So the Memphis police knew that they needed to continue investigating. And that's when another suspect emerged in the case. Jennifer's 18-year-old daughter, Nora.

a suspect who just so happened to have a large cut on her left hand. When police first spoke to Nora on the night of her mother's murder, they noticed that she had a cut that was covered up in a bandage on her left hand. When they questioned her about the cut, she said that she cut it the night before at a community festival.

She basically said that she fell on a broken beer bottle at the festival and that's how she got the cut on her hand. But it wasn't just the cut that made police look harder at Nora Jackson.

The Memphis Police Department started asking around to neighbors, to friends of Nora and Jennifer's, about what they knew about Nora and her relationship with her mother. Neighbors told police about a number of different times in which they remember hearing them fighting, them having arguments inside the house, and

that they had some pretty bad fights in the months and weeks leading right up to Jennifer's murder. In fact, one of Nora's own friends, Kirby McDonald, told police that just hours, just hours before Jennifer was discovered dead, Nora was at a party saying, "'My mom's a B and needs to go to hell.'"

This was just mere hours before the murder. In the months prior to Jennifer's death, she had confided in several of her friends that she was having some concerns about her daughter Nora. That she wasn't going to school. She didn't really seem to have much of a direction in her life. There was no purpose. She was kind of just floating in the wind.

which at 18 years old would be concerning to probably every parent if they were in a similar situation, especially Jennifer, because she really wanted what was best for her daughter. After the murder, Jennifer's friends and those who were close to her told police that Jennifer always had been kind of reluctant to punish Nora.

But Jennifer's friends told her, look, she's at a super crucial stage in her life. She needs discipline. She needs direction. So that's what Jennifer started to do. She started to really crack down on Nora and her behavior just weeks before her death.

Memphis police believe that Jennifer was murdered sometime between 1 o'clock and 3 o'clock in the morning. On the night of the murder, Nora was last seen at a party around midnight. Nora said she left the party, stopped at a gas station to purchase cigarettes, stopped at a Taco Bell, and just drove around for a while.

But what Nora told police about that night wasn't nearly as important as what she didn't tell police about that night. When Nora told police her whereabouts the night her mother was murdered, she left out a very important stop she made.

On the night of the murder, Nora stopped by a Walgreens store where she's seen on surveillance footage purchasing medical care items. This is a really important discovery because Nora never told police she went to Walgreens that night. She said she bought cigarettes, went to a Taco Bell, and then just spent the rest of the night driving around.

The police only found out about the trip to Walgreens when they found the receipt inside of her car and they tracked down the store's security footage. In the footage, Nora is seen purchasing medical care items like bandages, and she's also seen receiving paper towels from the store clerk.

Later on, the store clerk told police that Nora came into the Walgreens and asked him for the paper towels because she had this cut on her hand. The cut that Nora told police she got the night before. A search of Nora's cell phone records revealed that just like any other teenager her age, Nora practically lived on her cell phone. She was on her cell phone all day, all night.

But that wasn't a surprise to the police. What was a surprise was the fact that Nora's cell phone had zero activity between 1 and 3 o'clock in the morning, the same exact time that police believed Jennifer had been murdered.

Based on the information police received from neighbors and from friends of Jennifer and Nora's, police theorized that Nora and her mom got into some sort of fight earlier that night. That around 3 o'clock in the morning, Nora started using her cell phone and she drove to her friend's house to try and establish an alibi.

Then she drove back home and called 911. What's interesting about the 911 call was that the operator asked Nora if her mom had been shot. Now, on the phone call, Nora was adamant, saying, no, no, no, my mom wasn't shot. So the police wondered, how would Nora even know her mom had been shot or not?

When paramedics and police arrived that morning, Jennifer was covered in blood. Remember, she had been stabbed over 50 times all over her body, from head to toe. You wouldn't even be able to tell what happened to her just based on the condition of her body that day. So how would an 18-year-old know for a fact her mother hadn't been shot?

By this point, the Memphis police are certain they have their suspect, Nora. But here's a problem. They haven't found any solid forensic evidence linking her to her mother's murder. There was no DNA, no hair, no fingerprints. There was nothing linking Nora to this murder.

However, crime scene technicians did find an unknown DNA sample on Nora's bed sheet. When forensics tested the DNA sample, it was not a match to Nora. It wasn't a match to Jennifer. It was a completely unknown DNA sample. This unknown DNA sample is huge.

We know it didn't belong to either Jennifer or Nora. And why was it on Jennifer's bed? Exactly where her body was discovered. Anytime there's DNA evidence at a crime scene that is unknown, meaning we don't know the origin, that opens up so many different possibilities and potential suspects.

And it could provide some sort of proof that Nora wasn't the only possible suspect here. So let me just go ahead and say it. No one wants to believe that an 18-year-old teenager, a girl, would kill their own mother. And not just kill, overkill. Stab her over 50 times all over her body.

Matricide is the crime of killing one's own mother. Now, in the terms of frequency, matricide is really, really rare. It only makes up less than 2% of all types of homicides in the United States. And for girls to kill their mothers, it's extremely rare.

So even though the police are starting to zero in on Nora as the prime suspect in Jennifer's murder, there's this dark cloud hanging over pretty much everyone in the case, including the police. We just don't want to believe that a teenage girl is capable of something like this. We just don't.

But three months after Jennifer's murder, Nora is arrested and charged with the killing. Nora was picked up by the police as she walked out of a babysitting job. She was completely blindsided. Despite the fact Nora had no history of violence, she became the prime and in fact the only suspect in Jennifer's murder.

Even though there was a lack of forensic evidence tying Nora to the murder, her whereabouts that night, the cut on her hand, the comments she made about her mother at the party that very night, just all added up to a mountain of circumstantial evidence against her.

When Nora was arrested, the judge assigned to her case set her bail at $500,000, which no 18-year-old could afford. And honestly, $500 is a huge bail amount for anyone to be able to post. So Nora would remain in jail for a little over three years before her case would go to trial.

This is quite common for people who are awaiting murder trials. It takes a long time for both parties, the prosecution and the defense team, to be ready to move forward. And unfortunately, if you can't make bail, then you're going to have to sit in jail until your case is ready to go to trial or if you're going to accept a plea deal sometime before then.

Now, when you are guilty, it's like, who cares, right? All the time served sitting in jail will eventually just get applied to your sentence. But if you're innocent or you claim that you're innocent, that's a really, really long time. Time that you don't get back in life. So Nora gets a defense attorney by the name of Valerie Corder, who 1,000% believes in her innocence.

Now, at first, Nora had a lot of supporters. She had a lot of people in her corner. She had family. She had friends of Jennifer's, in fact, who believed in her. By the time the trial came around three years after the murder, Nora had nobody. Everyone who originally thought Nora was innocent completely switched sides by the time the trial started.

Nora's defense attorney wasn't worried. Not only was there no forensic evidence linking Nora to the murder, but her attorney believed she had proof that Nora couldn't have committed her mother's murder. This one might actually surprise you.

Nora's attorney, Valerie Corder, believed that the one piece of evidence the police had against Nora actually proves her innocence. And that's the cut on Nora's hand. The night of the murder, Nora had a pretty large cut on her hand that, if you remember, she claimed she got from falling on top of a beer bottle.

And remember, she was also seen at Walgreens picking up medical supplies like Band-Aids and was seen literally right after Jennifer's murder asking the Walgreens clerk for paper towel because her hand was still bleeding. The Memphis police say she got the cut on her hand from stabbing her mother over 50 times. But Nora's attorney...

points to Nora's manicure on the night of the murder. Yes, I said manicure. Her fingernails were perfectly manicured. Like, there wasn't even a chip on her nail polish. Nora's attorney argued that how can someone, a teenage girl, stab an adult over 50 times with a knife and

and not even chip their fingernail polish. Nora's attorney said her hands actually pointed towards her innocence, not her guilt. Okay, now I can follow this argument at least a little bit, but honestly, I've gotten manicures before that practically chipped 2.5 seconds after I left the nail salon.

And then I've had manicures that I swear lasted a month. So to say that a manicure proves that she couldn't have attacked her mother, I don't know. It's a little bit of a stretch in my opinion. To be fair though, I've seen the photo that was taken the night of the murder. It's a police photo taken of Nora's hands where it's like her hands just spread apart.

And her manicure does look flawless. There are no chips. It looks like a brand new manicure. I will post a picture to our website if you want to check it out for yourself. Now, besides the hand and besides the manicure, Nora didn't have any other injuries on her body.

her body or her hands didn't appear to police or anyone else really that the teenager had been involved in hand-to-hand style combat that night. But again, there's a big problem for the state, right? There's zero forensic evidence linking Nora to her mother's murder. And we already know about the unknown DNA sample found on Jennifer's bed, right?

And another problem, police never recovered the murder weapon. No knife was ever recovered either inside of the Jackson house or anywhere else for that matter. And when Jennifer's body was discovered, she had several, several, a small clump, strands of hair that

inside clutched in one of her hands. Like, maybe she grabbed onto someone's hair while she was being attacked. But when the clump of hair was sent to the forensic lab for testing, this is what the test found. The test revealed that it, quote, might be Jennifer's hair, but it didn't appear to be Nora's hair. But that was it.

The forensic tests didn't reveal any definitive or solid conclusions about who the clump of hair belonged to. And what's worse is that the Memphis police didn't run any further tests on the hair. So even to this day, no one can say whose hair it was that was found basically clumped up in a ball inside of Jennifer's hand.

Nora's supporters also couldn't believe that the police really didn't look into the possibility that Nora's father's murder may somehow be linked to Jennifer's. Nora's father had definite ties to drug trafficking. He was also linked to prostitution.

and he was found shot execution style inside of the convenience store that he owned. After his death, Jennifer received a pretty good amount of his estate. So maybe her murder was somehow linked to Nora's father's murder? This was never really brought up as a possible theory, either before trial or during trial.

So let's talk about the trial. Nora's criminal trial began in February 2009 and was aired live on Court TV. By this point, Nora is no longer a teenager. She's 21 years old when she goes on trial for murdering her own mother.

And at just 21 years old, she's also facing the possibility of being sent to prison for the rest of her life. Nora's trial lasted for a total of two weeks. Now, if the jury in this case were looking for solid forensic evidence that was going to prove Nora's guilt,

They weren't going to get any because we already know there wasn't any. But the prosecution still felt very confident in their case against her. As I mentioned before, at trial, any supporters Nora had early on vanished. There was literally no one sitting behind her in the courtroom.

All of Jennifer and Nora's family turned against her, and several members of the family even took the stand against Nora. One person who took the stand against Nora was Jennifer's sister, so Nora's very own aunt.

And she took the stand and told the jury that just one week before the murder, Jennifer had called her to say how much her and Nora had been fighting lately.

Nora's uncle also testified for the prosecution and basically said that right before Jennifer's death, Nora started asking him questions about how much money Jennifer had and asked if she had any life insurance policies. According to Nora's uncle, she was trying to find out exactly how much money she would get in the event of her mother's death.

Now, maybe these were just genuine questions, but it looks pretty bad when your mother ends up stabbed to death over 50 times just a few weeks after asking these types of questions. So Nora's friend, Kirby McDonald, also took the stand.

The friend, if you remember, that overheard Nora curse her mom at the party just a few hours before the murder. Which, again, just like the money questions, the life insurance questions, looks really, really bad for Nora. The prosecution presented Nora's phone records to the jury.

Nora told police that she didn't get home that morning until 5 o'clock in the morning, and that's when she discovered her mom's body. But her phone records show she was inside her house much earlier than that, around the same exact time Jennifer was murdered, which would have been sometime between 1 and 3 o'clock in the morning.

Jennifer's neighbor, Joe Cock, also took the stand. And this is the neighbor that Nora ran to to call 911 that morning. The neighbor testified that he was woken up by Nora pounding on his door around 5 o'clock in the morning. He said he grabbed his gun and that he ran back to Jennifer's house with Nora.

Now, he says that Nora went inside of the house before him. And he thought that was odd because he's the one with the gun. Nobody knows if the killer is still inside the house or not. But yet she runs into the house before him. He really found that to be just odd.

Despite the lack of any solid forensic evidence, the prosecutors still believed that the key piece of evidence was the cut on Nora's hand. The cut they believed she got when the knife she used to repeatedly stab her mother slipped. The state called witness after witness who were all at the party with Nora that night.

And every single one of them didn't remember Nora having any cuts on her hand that night. So the story that she cut it the night before on a beer bottle really wasn't shaping out to be very likely. And another problem for Nora in her defense was that several people also testified that Nora told different stories about how she got the cut on her hand.

One time she said her cat did it and then she told someone else that she burned it while making mac and cheese. So it wasn't just the story about falling onto the beer bottle. Although Nora claims that she's only told one version, the one about the beer bottle. She has maintained that she has never told a different story.

So when it came time for the defense to put on their argument, they again called out the lack of forensic evidence pointing to Nora in the case.

And when the crime scene investigators who handled the scene took the stand, Nora's defense attorney grilled them. In fact, Nora's attorney spent two whole days questioning the crime scene investigators and basically pointing out what a poor job they did of collecting evidence inside of the house. They pointed out that they still haven't found a match to the unknown DNA found on the bedsheets.

that they didn't properly test the clump of hair found clutched in Jennifer's hand, they had no murder weapon, they had practically nothing. And you can't send a defendant, a young woman, to prison for the rest of her life based on nothing. Or so they argued.

So near the end of trial, the prosecution introduced the only witness who placed Nora at her house in the time that they believed Jennifer was murdered. Andrew Hammack.

was one of Nora's friends. And Andrew testified that Nora called him sometime between five, well, about between four and five in the morning and asked him to meet her at her house. She basically wanted him to come over, which Andrew said was completely out of character for Nora, that she had never called and asked him that before.

which meant to the prosecution that Nora was trying to establish an alibi for herself, that she didn't want to be alone when she discovered her body because, in fact, if she did murder her, she already knew that she would have to walk into the house and pretend to have discovered her mom's body. So she wanted to say, hey, look, I wasn't alone when I found her.

After nine days of testimony, the prosecution rested. It was now time for the defense to call any witnesses or even allow Nora to testify in her own defense. But at the advice of counsel, Nora didn't take the stand. And in fact, the defense didn't call a single witness to the stand.

And that's because Nora's attorney was confident, 100% sure, that the state didn't put on a strong enough case, that there was no forensic evidence linking her to the murder, and that the evidence they did have, the cut, actually more likely proved her innocence than her guilt. So, let's be clear.

In criminal trials, the defense doesn't have to call any witnesses. They don't really have to prove anything, in fact. That's not their job. In our criminal justice system, the burden of proof is solely on the state, the prosecution. The defense doesn't have to offer anything. Now, of course, a good defense is one that can poke holes in the prosecution's case,

But they really don't need to do that in order to get an acquittal. The sole burden rests with the state proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt and having a jury panel reach a unanimous decision. Well, after nine hours of deliberation, the jury came back with a verdict and it sent shockwaves through the courtroom.

The jury found Nora Jackson guilty of second-degree murder. She didn't receive first degree like the prosecution requested, but the jury still believed that Nora was the one who stabbed her mother over 50 times that night. Nora was sentenced to 20 years and nine months behind bars.

But this isn't where the story ends for Nora Jackson. Not even close. Just five days after the guilty verdict, Ann Nora was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Stephen Jones, who was the assistant prosecutor on Nora's case, filed a motion with the court to submit an omitted statement saying,

Now, the statement was a handwritten note from Andrew Hammock, Nora's friend who testified at trial that Nora had called him that night in order in attempt to basically establish an alibi. Remember, he testified that Nora called him and say, hey, hey, come over, which was completely out of character for Nora.

Well, Andrew had actually written a letter to the police a few days after Jennifer's murder, saying that the night of the murder, the same night Nora called him, he was, quote, rolling on XTC. Which, true or not, raises a huge problem with the credibility of his statement about the night.

If this kid was truly Roland on XTC, how much can we really trust his testimony about what happened that night? How can he even remember? He was the only witness for the prosecution that could place Nora at her house at the same exact time of her mother's murder. But if his testimony about that night can't be believed because he was higher than a kite...

then that's something that Nora's defense needed to know about. But unfortunately, this letter was never sent to Nora and her defense attorney during the trial, which is clear prosecutorial misconduct. So when Nora's attorney found out about the letter that was omitted during trial,

She filed an appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court to have Nora's murder conviction overturned. And well, that's exactly what happened. On August 22nd, 2014, the Tennessee Supreme Court unanimously overturned Nora's conviction.

In the court's ruling, they basically said it's hard to ignore this letter that the prosecution failed to turn over to the defense and Andrew Hammack's testimony. Andrew's note about being high that night calls into question whether or not Nora told him to come over that night. Now,

Even though phone records proved they spoke that night. So we do know that Nora did call Andrew that night. There were no text messages between the two. So we really don't know what Nora said when she called Andrew. And if we only have Andrew's testimony to rely on in which he said she called him to tell him to come over...

But if we know from a handwritten note from Andrew himself admitting to being super high that night and on drugs, then we really don't have any solid evidence to show that that's why Nora called him that night.

Now, the Supreme Court also took issue that no DNA or forensic evidence linked Nora to the murder. And remember, we still have that unknown DNA sample that was right there on Jennifer's bedsheets. The Tennessee Supreme Court really called out the two prosecutors in Nora's case, saying,

saying that the failure to disclose the note was, quote, a flagrant violation of Nora's constitutional rights. But the letter wasn't the only reason the court overturned the murder conviction. They also cited that the state violated Nora's constitutional right to not testify.

So during closing arguments at trial, one of the prosecutors stood up, pointed towards Nora, and was yelling and demanded, quote,

So this kind of statement that was directed right at Nora, right? The prosecutor stood up, looked Nora in the eye, pointed her finger at her, is considered a violation of her right to remain silent and not to testify. Because the prosecutor was saying, tell us where you were, tell us where you were, kind of what the prosecution would do if Nora did in fact take the stand. But she didn't.

So it's important to mention here that this isn't the first time the Memphis District Attorney's Office had been cited for their prosecutors making these types of statements in court. So this wasn't the first time they've had this issue, which is probably why in this case the appellate court came down so hard on the prosecutor's office.

So Nora learned about her conviction being overturned in August 2014 by watching television in her prison cell. She had no idea. So by this point, she had already been locked up for over nine years, which is insane to think about. She finds out about her case not from her attorney or from anyone else, but from watching the news while sitting in prison.

Now, even though Nora's conviction was overturned, that doesn't mean that the prison gates just come wide open for her. She was still charged with murder. It was just that the conviction was overturned. So she was moved from prison back to a jail, which was a little bit closer to the courthouse, and she waited another five months for anything to happen in her case.

So in May 2015, the new prosecutor assigned to Nora Jackson's case basically came forward and offered Nora a deal.

Just because her conviction was overturned, the state absolutely was going to try and convict her again. When the Supreme Court overruled the conviction, the prosecution basically came right out and said, yes, we are going to retry her. So the new prosecutor offered a plea deal in order for Nora to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter.

Now, this was a really tough decision for Nora. She didn't want to plead guilty for a murder that she says she didn't commit. But she also didn't want to spend 20 years behind bars for it. Was pleading guilty for stabbing your mother to death worth your freedom? On May 20th, 2015, Nora Jackson made up her mind.

On May 20th, 2015, Nora Jackson accepted the prosecutor's deal and she entered an Alford plea. Now we've talked about an Alford plea in our two-part episode on the staircase murder. Basically this means she's agreeing to enter a guilty plea, but she isn't willing to admit guilt.

Which, in the eyes of the law, an Alford plea is treated the same way as a guilty plea. When Nora signed her plea deal, she was under the impression that her lawyers assured her that she would have credit for time served in her case. And that once she pled guilty, she would be released from prison. Well, it turns out,

Someone didn't do their math correctly. And Nora didn't have credit for time served. She was actually required to serve more than one more year behind bars. Nora Jackson was finally released in the summer of 2016 after spending almost 10 years in prison. She's a convicted murderer, a convicted felon charged with killing her very own mother.

She makes up one of the smallest crime statistic figures, a girl, a teenager who murdered her mother. So where's Nora now? When Nora Jackson was released from prison, she moved to Nashville with her girlfriend, a woman who she met in prison.

According to a 2017 article in the New York Times, Nora works as a receptionist in an auto body shop. Now, by the recording of this episode in 2020, she's in her early 30s and she will forever be a felon. She'll forever be a convict and she will always be remembered for being convicted of matricide.

There is still little known about the unknown DNA sample found on Jennifer Jackson's bedsheets. The Innocence Project, who has recently decided to support Nora, has made a bid to use DNA advancements over the last decade to help find out who killed Jennifer and possibly be able to identify the unknown DNA sample.

Of course, if there are any updates to Nora Jackson's case or if there are any updates on the unknown DNA sample, I will be sure to bring it to you in a future episode of the show. All right, guys, this is another one that I would love to hear your thoughts on. What do you think about Nora Jackson's case?

Do you think she's guilty or do you think she's yet another wrongfully accused person in our criminal justice system? And what do you think about the defense's argument about the manicure? Does a perfectly good manicure suggest that Nora couldn't have stabbed her mother over 50 times? And if Nora didn't do it, who did? Connect with the show on Instagram at Forensic Tales to share your thoughts.

You can also email me directly at Courtney at ForensicTales.com to share your thoughts on this week's case. ♪

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