COLUMBUS, OH - A former sheriff's deputy who was part of the investigation into the killing of a postmistress nearly 25 years ago now says he has doubts about the state's case against the man sentenced to death in her murder.

"I'm not aware of any tangible physical evidence," former Hancock County sheriff's deputy Brad Bell told The Columbus Dispatch and the Ohio News Network about the investigation in the 1982 killing of 48-year-old Betty Jane Mottinger.

After all this time, he said, "Something doesn't smell right to me as far as what went on there."

John Spirko was convicted of killing the Elgin postmistress, who was abducted and repeatedly stabbed, then wrapped in a tarp and dumped in a field. Her body was found three weeks later in Hancock County in northwest Ohio. Back then, Bell believed postal inspectors had proved that Spirko was guilty, but now he has doubts.

The media organizations looked into the Spirko case, reviewing documents and conducting interviews over two months, for a story prepared for release on Sunday. Gov. Bob Taft has delayed Spirko's execution three times, most recently in January to allow more time for DNA testing. It's now set for July 19.

"All I want is justice. Period," said Spirko, 59, being held at the Ohio Penitentiary in Youngstown. "I spent 24 years now in a cage for something I didn't do."

Spirko was arrested after he contacted federal authorities about the murder. He said he only knew about the crime from reading newspapers and made the call to cut a deal for a girlfriend who had been charged with aiding him in an attempted escape from the Fulton County Jail.

Paul Hartman, a U.S. postal inspector, met with Spirko 16 times. Now 59 and retired, Hartman said he has no doubt that Spirko is guilty.

"Not withstanding all of the lies that he told, there were sprinkled among these various stories, various details, intimate details that could only have been known to the people who committed the offense," Hartman said. "Now he's trying to lie his way off of death row."

Among details Spirko told investigators were what clothes and jewelry Mottinger was wearing the day she was killed. Hartman's notes from a Jan. 11, 1983, meeting show that Spirko told him, "Lay it all on me. I killed her." Spirko was indicted eight months later on kidnapping and aggravated murder charges.

He denies making a confession. Spirko was living near Toledo about 70 miles from Elgin at the time of Mottinger's death.

He said he visited his parole officer in Toledo the day she died before driving his sister to a doctor's appointment, stopping at home and heading to the Swanton post office. He said he could not have been in Swanton and Elgin, which are about 90 miles apart, that morning.