most significantly, heidy grew up not knowing the identity of her father. that really bothered her. you know, she did not know her dad. and she had always wanted that. it bugged her tremendously. enough to take her own life? had she ever attempted suicide before? never to my knowledge, no. she never talked about it. no. it s very hard to believe that what was going on in heidy s life at the time, what seemed like a pretty happy marriage to you, she s going to spur of the moment decide to commit suicide like that? well, that s a tough question. it s like how do you really know when someone s going to do that, you know? as he lived his life behind bars, conrad continued to speculate. he also tried to stay hopeful. i was just like, this is going to work out. it has to because i didn t i didn t do this. conrad s family never gave up on him. so they scraped together the money to hire conrad some new attorneys. mark and annie looked into
but one detail in particular kept gnawing at her. it had to do with the diagrams used by the state depicting the area where heidy s body was found. i remember thinking, well, that s strange. that s that couldn t be right. post-verdict, colette shared her concerns with conrad s new attorneys, mark moffat and ann taliaferro. they decided to visit the truman home to see for themselves if the state s diagrams were accurate. we later made that same trip with moffat who showed us what they discovered. this is the area in question, and it s pretty small. it is. it s really small. we immediately started measuring, and we knew right away that there was a big problem with their diagrams and the measurements. the problem? all those measurements were off. instead of 139 inches, somebody took the figure 139 and interpreted it to be 13.9 feet.
for sure, police were wondering about her husband. after all, conrad truman was in the house when heidy was shot, and there was no evidence of an intruder. i felt like they thought i did something. soon after he arrived at the scene, sergeant bill crook did begin to have his suspicions. we re telling him, conrad, back off. the paramedics are here. back off. and he wouldn t. he was what, moving around? yes. keeping paramedics from being at the body? yes, sir. there were other scenarios that needed to be explored, like accident and suicide. that s where detective tom wallace came in. there had been a number of theories. we obviously are going to exhaust them. that s going to happen. the medical examiner didn t make wallace s job any easier. his preliminary finding heidy s manner of death could not be determined. so wallace tackled each theory one by one. accident seemed hard to believe.
this guy s drinking, there s firearms in the house. so he must have shot her. why couldn t it be exactly that simple? this wouldn t be the first time that mixing alcohol, an argument and a handgun led straight to a prison sentence. conrad told us what he told police. it isn t that simple. sure, he and heidy had been drinking and, yes, they had been arguing, but he said neither was an explanation for what happened. i could have upset her with some of the things i ve said or the way i acted with not being attentive, you know, to her. i know i do that sometimes when i drink. i don t pay a lot of attention. you know? this still doesn t seem like grounds for a gigantic fight. no. it got to the point where i think she was i upset her. i was really i just know she went to go take a bath. which is what she did when she was a little irritated? yes.
hold up. when you walk in the house, there s no way that there s even 12 feet there. what s more, according to the defense team, conrad never told the police heidy shot herself in the bathroom. instead he told them he had no idea where she was when he heard the shot. tell me your theory of what happened here. we believe that heidy truman shot herself in this very area, and we believe that she fell right in the area directly in front of me on the ground, and that s the very area where she was found when law enforcement entered the home that night. which they also said was completely consistent with the m.e. s testimony that heidy would have fallen after only a step or two. she would have gone to the ground immediately. your argument is she did fall down. exactly! and she fell right about here. yes. that s exactly what our argument is. according to moffat, this was not a simple mistake. is this just a case of a smalltown police department