VIRGINIA, MINN. – After seven days of testimony, the defense called its final surprise witness in what was, until 2020, an Iron Range cold case — the rape and killing of Nancy Daugherty, a 38-year-old mother of two teenagers found dead in her Chisholm home July 16, 1986.
Michael Allan Carbo Jr., accused of killing Daugherty, was sworn in Thursday morning at the St. Louis County Courthouse and was on the stand for more than an hour. This is the first time he’s spoken publicly since he was arrested in 2020 based on DNA evidence that did not exist when Daugherty was found strangled to death in her waterbed.
Carbo testified he does not remember having sex with Daugherty, though his DNA was found in places that indicate he did, and he insisted he did not kill her. He was asked by his attorney JD Schmid how he knows for certain he did not kill Daugherty.
“I’m not capable of murdering nobody,” Carbo told the jury. “It’s not me. No way.”
Carbo did not testify in his last trial, where he was found guilty of the crimes related to her death. The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled last year that Carbo should have been allowed to use an alternate perpetrator defense that would point to Daugherty’s friend Brian Evenson, who was long a suspect but never charged.
Now with a microphone, Carbo — whose row of supporters overflowed into a second row — told the jury about his high school years and beyond. In 1986 he was sometimes a blackout drinker who smoked marijuana, but hadn’t yet moved on to harder drugs. Over the years he had fallen behind on his classes and dropped out of Chisholm High School midway through his senior year. He eventually got his GED.
Carbo was shy and struggled with talking to girls, he testified. When he drank, he said, he felt like a “badass because I could drink more than anyone else.”
In the decades before Carbo was arrested, he worked as a janitor and on circuit boards, he welded, and he prepared salmon and rainbow trout for shipping while working at a fish farm. Most of his career has been working with residents of group homes.