Michael Clark was released from custody on Monday after spending 12 years in prison for a murder he has said for 30 years he did not commit.

He remains charged with the 1994 Boulder murder of Marty Grisham and it is now up to the Boulder County district attorney’s office whether to retry him.

His release on $100,000 bond comes after his original murder conviction was set aside Friday, making it the first vacated conviction in the wake of the continuing scandal at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s forensic lab.

Clark, 49, wearing a black hoodie and sweatpants, walked out of the Boulder County Jail at 7:44 p.m. and immediately enveloped his wife, Amy, his son Kernan, 16, and daughter, Kylie, 19, into a group hug and wept. His other daughter is out of state at a college.

As they clung together in the twilight, few words were spoken between them except, “I love you.”

Earlier Monday Clark was released from Fremont Correctional Facility in Florence and arrived at the county jail around 4 p.m. His wife, children, and other family members and friends waited nervously in the lobby of the jail for more than three hours.

Around 7:30 p.m., the group, including his defense attorney, Adam Frank, moved outside to gather around a door they expected him to emerge from. Then, in a comical moment, he strolled up on the group, having exited from another door.

“I don’t have the vocabulary to say what I’m feeling right now,” Clark told reporters, adding that he is grateful for the love and support from “everybody who has stuck with us through the years.”

Clark was arrested and convicted years after the 1994 Boulder murder of Marty Grisham, in large part on the strength of a DNA analysis by Yvonne Woods, the former CBI forensic scientist in the middle of the lab scandal. 

Woods, who goes by the nickname Missy, concluded and testified at Clark’s 2012 trial that his DNA was found in a small jar of Carmex lip balm found outside Grisham’s apartment, placing him at the scene of the crime.

Last month, a retest of that evidence by an independent lab in Virginia revealed different results and that he could be, in fact, “statistically excluded,” according to a court filing by the Boulder County district attorney’s office on Friday.

With new results, the prosecution said it no longer objected to having Clark’s conviction set aside. Boulder District Judge Nancy Salomone then quickly ruled to vacate it.

Woods is accused — and has partly admitted — to years of mishandling DNA evidence, skipping steps in her analysis and manipulating results. She is now awaiting trial on 102 felony counts of cybercrime, perjury, forgery and attempting to influence a public servant.

CBI acknowledged it has identified 1,003 problems in the more than 10,780 criminal cases Woods has worked on in her 29-year career at the lab, or roughly one in 10.

The Clark case was not among those identified with problems by CBI.

Frank, Clark’s attorney, said Monday, that alone raises serious questions about the true toll of her alleged misconduct.

“The scope of cases that were impacted by Missy Woods goes well beyond the 1,003 cases CBI has identified which means we’re only scratching the surface,” he said.

Clark, a teenager at the time, was a prime suspect in the 1994 slaying, but authorities did not arrest him then because the case was circumstantial and seen as potentially shaky. While Clark admitted to stealing some checks from the victim, and he once owned the same kind of gun used in the crime, there were no witnesses, no physical evidence and the murder weapon was never found.

The case went cold for 15 years. Boulder police then revisited it in 2009 and eventually sent the jar of Carmex that had been tucked away in evidence to CBI where Woods tested it.

She said her analysis showed that Cark’s DNA was consistent and a major contributor to what she had found within the jar of Carmex.

Prosecutors used that finding as a key piece of new evidence, saying it put Clark at the scene of the crime — something he has long denied.

Clark was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.

His lawyer, though, argued as far back as 2019 — four years before the CBI scandal broke — that Woods’ conclusions were wrong and that her testimony misled jurors.

That argument was bolstered by an affidavit from a University of Denver forensic genetics professor, who reviewed Woods’ work and testimony for the defense and found both to be flawed.

But the judge back then denied the defense’s request for a hearing to introduce the questioning of the DNA results, as well as the allegations of juror misconduct. The Colorado Court of Appeals overturned the denial in 2023 and ordered a hearing which had been scheduled for late May.

As the CBI scandal unfolded throughout 2024, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty agreed to have the DNA retested. The results by Bode Technology, an independent lab in Virgina, was unable to replicate Woods’ findings in two of three tests, seen as crucial in science.

A decision on whether to retry Clark is expected by summer. Frank said he will push to have all charges dropped.

After his release Monday, when asked what he would do first once he got home, Clark grinned and said, “whatever they want,” nodding towards his family.