March 1981 - March 10, 1981 (Tuesday)

March 10, 1981 (Tuesday)

• The eleven year controversy over Roger Coleman began when the body of Wanda Fay McCoy was discovered in her home in Grundy, Virginia. Coleman, her brother-in-law, was convicted of her rape and murder based on blood and hair evidence, as well as testimony from a cellmate, and sentenced to death. Coleman fought for a new trial and maintained his innocence all the way to his execution in the electric chair on May 21, 1992. More than 13 years later, DNA testing confirmed that the pubic hairs found on the victim had indeed been those of Coleman, and that the blood found on his pants had been that of McCoy. "
• U.S. Patent #4,255,811 was issued to Dr. Roy L. Adler under the title "Key Control Block Cipher System" for a data encryption algorithm developed by him in 1974 while he was employed at IBM. Besides being applied in cryptography, the 128-bit encoding alogrithm was also used in creating more secure keycard entry systems.
• Born: Samuel Eto'o, Cameroonian footballer, in Nkon