Two women with critical testimony about Twila’s uncle Robert Donnell. First, Mrs. Ellis testimony has never been investigated. Within days of the murders, Robert Donnell dismantled his vehicle to give it an almost fanatically thorough cleaning. Shortly after the murders Ms. Ellis saw Donnell, on a cold day, stripping the interior of his truck down to the metal floorboards and giving it a vigorous cleaning.
“He had taken all the carpet out of the truck and was out there with one of these big old five-gallon buckets containing a solution of “Pine Sol” or something that smelled like it.” Donnell’s intense activity drew Ms. Ellis’s attention because Donnell was normally anything but fastidious about his truck; not only had she never seen him clean it this thoroughly before, she had never seen him clean it at all in the several years she had lived next door.
Donnell spent “a few hours” at the task, which involved taking “everything out of the truck, all the seats and everything. Anything that would come out of the truck, he took out”
After Donnell had removed everything above the floorboards, he scrubbed the entire interior of the truck cab with the Pine Sol solution and then hosed it out thoroughly. Although he replaced the seats he never put the carpet back in. Within two weeks of giving his unremarkable pickup truck this extensive cleaning Donnell repainted it, using “a paint brush and a spray can.”
Ms. Vickie Broadstreet, a close friend of Twila’s, described Donnell as a “scary” man who drank regularly. She had seen Donnell with a knife and was afraid of him. Perhaps most shocking, Ms. Broadstreet revealed that Twila had once confided in her that she and Donnell were involved in a sexual relationship and that Donnell was jealous of Twila’s romantic relationships with other people.
All the information can be read on the Innocence Project’s Blog where all the court documents in the Skinner case are listed.