Family of man wrongfully accused in 1987 Vallejo cold case speaks on exoneration, new suspect
VALLEJO -- The man now accused in a decades-old cold case will find himself back in Solano County court this Thursday for further arraignment on charges of murder, kidnapping and sodomy.
Fred Cain III was arrested in September and extradited back to California from Oregon for his connection to the 1987 disappearance and death of 6-year-old Jeremy Stoner of Vallejo.
Nearly four decades after the crime, the family of Shawn Melton, the man wrongfully accused of killing the child, can breathe a sigh of relief.
Shawn lived and died under a cloud of suspicion surrounding Stoner's death. So the news of Cain's arrest, for the Melton family, is bittersweet.
Wrongfully accused
Shawn Melton spent 19 months in jail and went to trial twice for a crime he never committed. After both trials ended in two hung juries, Shawn's murder charges were dismissed.
"All the time this witch hunt was going on the true person who did the crime was going scot-free," said Chris Melton, younger brother to Shawn.
So what led Vallejo police to point the finger at Shawn Melton?
Shawn wanted to be a police officer but physical health limitations caused by suffering severe asthma made that dream seem unlikely. Instead, he set his sights on becoming a private investigator and starting his own company.
When Stoner went missing, one of the highest profile crimes in Vallejo's history, Shawn offered his skills to police and the Stoner family as an investigator to help build a name for himself.
When Shawn presented police with his theories, investigators thought he knew things only the killer could know.
"Even though they had other evidence at the time, all that got brushed aside. They focused on him," Chris said.
Prosecutors built a case that Shawn even had split personalities and that his "evil" persona killed Stoner. Chris, close with his brother throughout his entire life, denies that Shawn struggled with any serious mental health condition.
"He was an outsider. He pretty much had to be. Nobody wanted to be around him because he was different," Chris said of his brother's childhood.
Shawn was bullied as a child and was considered a loner, but Chris said his brother was smart and had dreams of making something of himself.
"He always wanted to be a bigger person than he was. He always tried to help people," he said.
Evidence for exoneration
Shawn never lived to see the day his name would be cleared. He died in the year 2000 in Southern California from lifelong health complications with asthma.
He was never officially acquitted of the crime after the two mistrials. Chris said this left the door open for Shawn to be followed by his presumed "past" his entire life.
"Shawn, our entire family, we were basically condemned by everybody around us," he said. "We all lost jobs and friendships over it."
In the court of public perception, Chris said his brother was perceived to be a guilty man until the day he died.
"It never went away. It followed him to the grave," he said.
Chris said some of his final conversations with Shawn before he died centered around Stoner. Shawn carried with him a lot of regret surrounding the decades of emotional baggage that weighed his entire family down.
"He couldn't turn back the clock. He just wished that things could have been different and the family, that Jeremy Stoner's family could find some peace, that the right person would be found," Chris said while choking back tears.
Shawn remained married to his wife, Laura, his entire life. The couple never had children.
Shawn's immediate family supported his claims of innocence and never abandoned him.
After decades of feeling the truth would never come to light, bittersweet news came for the Melton family in September.
Chris got a phone call from Solano County cold case investigators saying Shawn had been exonerated by DNA evidence.
"How would he have responded to that news?" asked CBS13 reporter Ashley Sharp.
"Oh, he would have been jumping for joy on that. Ecstatic. Hugging everybody. Probably crying," said Chris.
"After all this time, we are so grateful someone didn't give up on pursuing this and that, finally, somebody got smart and decided to look into other suspects," said Sharon Melton, Chris' wife and Shawn's sister-in-law.
The DNA evidence that exonerated Shawn is also what led Solano County investigators to Fred Cain, who they now believe is Stoner's true killer.
Cain was interviewed as an original suspect back in 1987 but walked free for nearly four decades.
"I'm grateful that we finally have some closure to Shawn's involvement, but I will be so much more happy when the Stoner family has their closure of the entire thing," Chris said.
It is a chapter closed for the Melton family, but a new one is just beginning for the loved ones of Jeremy Stoner.
