explosive residue on the metal fragments we submitted. reporter: so it was a bomb, a murder. then the very next day i m sitting in my office talking about what we re going to do next and the civil deputy walks in with a big manila envelope and he says, i think this is for you guys. it says colusa county sheriff s office, colusa, california, no street address, and in the upper left-hand corner it says ayala case and then there are eight stamps on it. it was pretty light. it was way too much postage. reporter: because inside was just a single sheet of paper. an open letter to the cops. what did that letter say? reporter: basically it was claiming responsibility for the bombing. the letter full of misspellings and bad grammar had been written on a labelmaker photo copied. its author claimed to be a military trained contract killer
did a thorough search. so he cobbled together a team of investigators from various law enforcement agencies. before we served the search warrant we had a briefing. reporter: one of the cops helping him was a detective from a neighboring town, jose chewy ruiz. actually showed us a diagram of the bomb and that s pretty much what we are instructed to look for. reporter: anything related to that. yes. exactly. anything related to bomb making. reporter: they arrived en masse right after daybreak. unannounced of course. paul waited outside while each investigator took a piece of the house. and in they went. i found some manila envelopes, copier, and also a printer. reporter: the problem though was that paul s home, owned by the moore family, doubled as the farm office. there were printers and copiers, envelopes, expected to be there, too. as you went around and found those things what were you thinking?
for war birds. dave s stepdaughter had once been married to paul. this is a video from their wedding day. a messy divorce followed a few years later. so david and susan moore came into our office. susan moore is dave s wife. what did they say when they got into the office? the first thing they told us was a wiretapping incident. wiretapping? yes. dave and sue claimed paul tapped his wife s phone to spy on her during divorce negotiati negotiations. sure enough, here are the court documents. in 1997 paul was arrested on four counts for tapping his wife s and in-laws phones. he pleaded guilty to one count of wiretapping, a felony, the other charges were dropped. paul served no jail time of the wiretapping story was just a prologue to what they were really there to talk about. who do you think is capable for actually setting up an explosive device in that panel?
Transcripts for MSNBC Dateline 20190921 08:24:15 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
i think they just to me, my opinion was they wanted it to be him. reporter: four weeks into the investigation, peter moore was not just the top suspect. he was the only suspect. they had no physical evidence, though, that a murder had even occurred. but they continued to watch and wait and the weeks slipped by. then a month after the explosion there was news from the atf crime lab. they had found something. there was the presence of explosive residue on the metal fragments we submitted. reporter: so it was a bomb, a murder. then the very next day i m sitting in my office talking about what we re going to do next, and the civil deputy walks in with a big manila envelope, and he says, i think this is for you guys. it says colusa county sheriff s