compared with the bottle fragments found at the death scene under a scanning electron microscope and then in an electrospectrometer with a laser attachment for elements and light refraction. The samples were identical . They could only have come from the same batch of bottles, a circumstance that indicated it was highly probable that they had come from the same bottle.
Faced with that information, the killer confessed that he had killed the victim when she refused his sexual advances.
One of the strangest cases Jim Stovall ever solved was a classic "man found shot dead in a locked room with no weapon in sight."
Investigating a report on a man who had disappeared from his usual haunts, Stovall and his partner, Sergeant John Kelly, checked the doors of the man's home and found them all locked. The front door was open, but a locked screen door prevented entry. The windows were all locked from the inside. Stovall broke the screen-door lock and stepped inside. The occupant lay facedown several feet from the front door. His right hand still clutched a nutcracker, and his mouth was full of nut meats. Until the dead man was turned over, it looked as if he had succumbed to a heart attack. But, face up, there was a small red hole in the front of his shirt, over his heart.
Stovall and Kelly looked for the gun that had to be there. An odd suicide, but then, suicides are not normal under any circumstances. Since all the doors and windows had been locked from the inside, and since the dead man was alone in the house, the only answer had to be suicide-unless one believed that a killer had arrived and left via the chimney like Santa Claus. But there was no gun anywhere on the premises, so how could a suicide be explained?
Neighbors were quick to offer a motive for murder. The dead man had been seeing another man's wife, and the other man was insanely jealous. It was not at all surprising that the victim was dead. What was curious was how .
Stovall, who takes as many as one hundred photographs at homicide scenes, shuffled through his developed pictures and stopped when he came to a shot of the screen door. He enlarged it, and enlarged it again, and again.
And there it was. A slight gap in the screen. The bullet had been a .25-caliber, quite small. When it passed through the wire mesh of the screen, it had made a hole, all right—and then the metal strands had snapped back almost as good as new. Unable to be seen by the naked eye, the piercing of the screen showed up in the photo lab. Stovall had weighed the variables, and figured that was the only way. Even if he couldn't see it, he expected to find a tear there.
Jim Stovall's main goal is to find the truth—not to put people behind bars. If the truth sets a "good" suspect free, those are the breaks; it only means that the answer has not yet been ferreted out.
One Salem husband came very close to going to jail for the murder of his wife because a pathologist skimped on the autopsy.
"Failure to perform a complete autopsy or to save material for toxicological analysis is a dangerous practice—even if you have a suitable answer at the time," Stovall says.
In murder, of all human phenomena, things are seldom what they seem. In the mysterious death of the forty-year-old victim, it looked clearly as if her architect husband had killed her because he was tired of dealing with her emotional problems. Men have shuffled their wives off for far less.
Stovall and his crew found the woman dead one summer afternoon, lying in her kitchen in a welter of blood with a wound on the top of her head. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide—probably by beating and strangling. Her throat had the hemorrhages peculiar to strangulation, and the state of rigor was well advanced when she was found. Time of death was pegged at ten A.M. because of the rigor mortis.
"There was something not quite right," Stovall recalls. "Her hands were flexed in such a way that I was suspicious."
The husband stated
Faced with that information, the killer confessed that he had killed the victim when she refused his sexual advances.
One of the strangest cases Jim Stovall ever solved was a classic "man found shot dead in a locked room with no weapon in sight."
Investigating a report on a man who had disappeared from his usual haunts, Stovall and his partner, Sergeant John Kelly, checked the doors of the man's home and found them all locked. The front door was open, but a locked screen door prevented entry. The windows were all locked from the inside. Stovall broke the screen-door lock and stepped inside. The occupant lay facedown several feet from the front door. His right hand still clutched a nutcracker, and his mouth was full of nut meats. Until the dead man was turned over, it looked as if he had succumbed to a heart attack. But, face up, there was a small red hole in the front of his shirt, over his heart.
Stovall and Kelly looked for the gun that had to be there. An odd suicide, but then, suicides are not normal under any circumstances. Since all the doors and windows had been locked from the inside, and since the dead man was alone in the house, the only answer had to be suicide-unless one believed that a killer had arrived and left via the chimney like Santa Claus. But there was no gun anywhere on the premises, so how could a suicide be explained?
Neighbors were quick to offer a motive for murder. The dead man had been seeing another man's wife, and the other man was insanely jealous. It was not at all surprising that the victim was dead. What was curious was how .
Stovall, who takes as many as one hundred photographs at homicide scenes, shuffled through his developed pictures and stopped when he came to a shot of the screen door. He enlarged it, and enlarged it again, and again.
And there it was. A slight gap in the screen. The bullet had been a .25-caliber, quite small. When it passed through the wire mesh of the screen, it had made a hole, all right—and then the metal strands had snapped back almost as good as new. Unable to be seen by the naked eye, the piercing of the screen showed up in the photo lab. Stovall had weighed the variables, and figured that was the only way. Even if he couldn't see it, he expected to find a tear there.
Jim Stovall's main goal is to find the truth—not to put people behind bars. If the truth sets a "good" suspect free, those are the breaks; it only means that the answer has not yet been ferreted out.
One Salem husband came very close to going to jail for the murder of his wife because a pathologist skimped on the autopsy.
"Failure to perform a complete autopsy or to save material for toxicological analysis is a dangerous practice—even if you have a suitable answer at the time," Stovall says.
In murder, of all human phenomena, things are seldom what they seem. In the mysterious death of the forty-year-old victim, it looked clearly as if her architect husband had killed her because he was tired of dealing with her emotional problems. Men have shuffled their wives off for far less.
Stovall and his crew found the woman dead one summer afternoon, lying in her kitchen in a welter of blood with a wound on the top of her head. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide—probably by beating and strangling. Her throat had the hemorrhages peculiar to strangulation, and the state of rigor was well advanced when she was found. Time of death was pegged at ten A.M. because of the rigor mortis.
"There was something not quite right," Stovall recalls. "Her hands were flexed in such a way that I was suspicious."
The husband stated
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