police? no, i absolutely not. i never washed my hands until they said, go wash your hands. reporter: conrad s attorneys were working hard to establish reasonable doubt, and the state medical examiner s shifting opinion on heidy s manner of death only helped them. that s your case right there. you would think. reporter: i mean, if he has reasonable doubt, hard to argue a jury shouldn t. exactly. reporter: the medical examiner told the jury that in the final analysis, he didn t know the manner of heidy truman s death. i finalized the autopsy report with the cause of death as gunshot wound and the manner of death as could not be determined. reporter: the m.e. also testified how, in his experience, a contact wouldn t like heidy s is rare in homicide cases. with the contact gunshot wound, it would be consistent with a wound that s self-inflicted. reporter: after 15 days of testimony, the jury began deliberations.
extra. heidy and truman had a bond envied which others. but in one tragic even, a gunshot rang out, and in the blink of an eye, heidy was on the floor clinging to life. conrad s behavior in the minutes and hours that followed would be highly debated for years. detectives would focus on the grieving husband, but were they looking at the wrong man? here s josh mankiewicz. they seem so incongruous, the soaring majesty of utah s wasatch mountains, and the story of a beautiful woman, struck down in her youth. it was a lot of things. tragic. crushing. stunning. but was it an accident? or a suicide? or a murder? police felt they knew, but as most cops will tell you, both the evidence and the jury have their own stories to tell.
when you have gunshot residue in a location and in a quantity that is absolutely consistent with her firing a semiautomatic weapon, one of the possibilities is that she fired a gun. you can t discount that. the deeper moffat and taliaferro got into the case, the more it seemed to them heidy s fatal wound was self-inflicted. they believe the head wound, a contact wound, ruled out homicide. a contact gunshot wound to the right temple are the most common site of self-inflicted gunshot wound that there were. moffat and taliaferro decided to take their findings to the m.e. hoping to sway his ruling on the manner of death once again just as police did prior to conrad s arrest. we gave him a bunch of information, then he, on his own, with his investigator, went to the home to look at it. and the result was just what they d asked for. heidy truman s manner of death,
heidy wagner truman could not be saved. it was pain, it was misery. it was why, how? in a neighboring town heidy s mother janet would soon agonize over those very same questions. it was after midnight when two police officers came to her door. what must that be like? the most horrendous thing ever. and i would never want anybody to have to feel that and that pain, that agony of knowing that your daughter, for whatever reason, is dead. is gone. the officers wouldn t give janet any details. only where her daughter had been taken. i m driving down to the hospital, and i make a comment to my daughter. i go, you know, autumn, as hard as it is that we lost heidy, we re going to have to be supporting conrad because he must be overwhelmed with grief. conrad s sister colette was
measurements. lead detective tom wallace. in the process of transposing numbers, numbers were just transposed wrong. wallace admits the error but says it was minor, that conrad truman did not deserve a new trial. it s not that significant as they made it out to be. did those incorrectly entered measurements change your opinion of conrad s guilt, should they change anyone s opinion? it didn t change my opinion. nor did it change the opinion of the deputy da tim taylor who decided to take on the task himself of prosecuting conrad once again. i still felt there was enough to go forward, but we know going into it, it was going to be tough. at trial the prosecution s case was familiar starting with the officers who testified about