For almost four decades, Charles McCrory has been fighting the key evidence that he said wrongly put him in prison for the violent murder of his wife, Julie Bonds.

But he couldn’t be there in person when his attorneys finally told a judge in south Alabama that the bite mark expert had taken back his original testimony from 1985, and that two more dentists found it flawed. Instead, the computer scientist watched his last best hope play out from a prison room – a pandemic precaution that remained in place during the April 2021 hearing.

His son and two sisters came and sat in the courtroom in downtown Andalusia. A professor from Auburn University-Montgomery stayed for most of the hearing. And so did a man with a long salt-and-pepper beard who had driven an RV down all the way from Virginia, only to be ejected after an outburst.

That man, Keith Harward, had come to support McCrory – the only known defendant in Alabama convicted on the increasingly debunked “junk science” of forensic dentistry.

Harward’s own case had exposed flaws in the field of forensic dentistry that came to light 34 years after his wrongful conviction for rape and murder. The McCrory case shared some eerie similarities with his own. He and the others listened as McCrory’s lawyers read an astounding admission from Dr. Richard Souviron, one of the field’s founders and a key witness in the case decades ago.

Nearly four decades later, the expert was no longer sure the bite mark found on the wife’s…