Lengthy reviews mean justice delayed for convicted killers with cases in question
Lengthy reviews continue in Dr. McGee cases
The Ramsey County Attorney?s Office announced an independent review of seven homicide cases last September because of potentially tainted testimony from the county's medical examiner.
ST. PAUL, Minn. (FOX 9) - The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office announced an independent review of seven homicide cases last September because of potentially tainted testimony from the county's medical examiner.
Tainted convictions?
Justice delayed?:
But those seven prisoners and their families don’t seem to be any closer to a potentially life-changing conclusion. Kyle Kelbel has spent almost 25 years in custody since police arrested him for the murder of 2-year-old Kailyn Montgomery.
He was 19 at the time and taking care of his girlfriend’s daughter when the toddler stopped breathing.
"I've always maintained that it was from a fall down the stairs," Kelbel told us in August 2025. "And I definitely landed on her."
Prosecutors argued Kelbel’s explanation of her injuries changed from what he initially revealed to police and dispatchers.
"Yeah, hi," he said in the 911 call from Dec. 2000. "My girlfriend’s kid got hit in the head with a cup today by her little brother. And she has a bruise on her head, and like, she is, like, not breathing right now."
But without any witnesses, prosecutors tied the case together with an autopsy and testimony from Dr. Michael McGee, the Ramsey County Medical Examiner from 1985 until 2019.
He said the girl had suffered 84 soft tissue injuries to her body, most of them recent, and not possibly caused by a person who fell down the stairs.
"McGee's testimony, like, that's basically what they had against me," Kelbel said.
Inaccurate examiner
Unreliable witness:
FOX 9 first uncovered questions about Dr. McGee’s work in 2010, about a decade before a federal judge labeled his work "unreliable, misleading and inaccurate."
Judges have thrown out at least two murder convictions based on his testimony.
The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office announced a review of seven McGee-connected homicide convictions last year, but hadn’t said anything since then until we asked.
"Each of the remaining seven files are voluminous. Our staff has needed time to transmit them to the experts and the experts have needed time to carefully and thoroughly review the material that they have been given. We believe that justice requires nothing less."
Kyle Kelbel and his family and friends are wishing justice could come more quickly.
"It's just been kind of exhausting, just having to wait for answers that we don't seem to get," said his girlfriend Kristin Smith.
Freedom can't come
Not even exoneration:
But Kelbel’s case comes with another twist.
Even an exoneration wouldn’t set him free because he murdered Steven Patchen, a convicted child molester who was Kelbel’s cellmate at the Lino Lakes prison in 2023.
"Why should people believe that if you are the type of person who would kill a cellmate, that you're not the type of person who would kill a two-year-old child?" a reporter asked Kelbel.
"That is a good question," he said. "And what I would say is that when I came to prison, I was not the type of person that could kill a child or kill anyone. I felt like I was being preyed upon like I was this man's next victim."
He says a violent prison mentality infected him over the course of the last 25 years, but he wishes he could take it back.
"I 100% regret it," he said. "Yeah, I 100% regret it. That's like, because you gotta think, like, that just shot like everything that I was working towards, like I just sabotaged all of it."
Losing help
No Innocence Project:
His conviction for that murder apparently cost him help from The Great North Innocence Project, which is working on several cases related to Dr. McGee.
After his guilty plea in the jailhouse murder, he got a letter saying they couldn’t help him because they wouldn’t be able to get him released from prison.
The organization generally doesn’t reveal who they’ve turned down as clients, but they told us "As a non-profit organization with limited staff and resources, we cannot take on every meritorious case, and as a result we frequently decline representation for a number of reasons, many of them having nothing to do with whether the person's conviction was appropriate."
Kelbel insists his first conviction was not, but now he’s fighting that battle on his own and hoping the Ramsey County review changes the final chapter of his story.
"It would mean that, uh, number one, that the truth is out there because I didn't maliciously murder any child," Kelbel said.
"You know, Kyle can't get that time back," Smith said. "I mean, yes, he has this other sentence to finish, but it’s been too long already."
"It gives me a chance at freedom, even though I just got another 198 months. But it still has a date," Kelbel said.
But without a resolution in his original case, he’s stuck at Oak Park Heights, possibly for the rest of his life.