. a background check revealed some startling information about david kopenheffer. he had been turned down for a $25,000 business loan by harry winer less than a year earlier. kopenheffer was now the prime suspect in the kidnapping and murder of harry winer s wife sally. so the fbi put david kopenheffer under surveillance and watched as he took some trash out to the dumpster behind his store. when the fbi seized it. they found some suspicious items.
officer. he got into the car and laid down in the backseat with the 12 gauge shotgun. when harry arrived at the railroad bridge, no one was there. so he waited with the sharp shooter in the backseat. and with fbi agents hiding in the woods nearby. you just sit there very quietly. you don t move and you listen. and you listen for any kind of footstep, any kind of noise, hoping that he might contact us. but thinking that he s probably within 100 yards of us watching with a rifle. after waiting for several hours, the fbi agents told harry to go home and await further word there. the next day at sunrise, the fbi performed a grid search of the drop site. and neither railroad underpass they found a second ransom note attached to a metal rod with a crepe paper flag.
ransom. investigators learned that neither sally nor her husband harry had any known enemies. you can count on just a couple fingers the number of cases that you see where a bank employee s family member is abducted in exchange for financial gain. it just is not a common crime. police found sally s car near a church not far from her husband s bank. her car is left in that parking lot. the windows are up and the doors are locked. so there s no sign of a struggle in any respect. all day saturday, which was the day after the kidnapping, there was no further communication from the kidnappers. but on sunday, sally s body was discovered by a farmer working his land a few miles outside of town.
prosecutors believe it was david kopenheffer who had disguised his voice and called sally on thursday night with the bogus story that her husband harry was chosen as man of the year. he set up a time the next day for the two of them to meet to plan the award ceremony. then kopenheffer placed the ransom notes in the various locations outside of town and put one of them in the gym bag underneath harry s car. when sally arrived at what she believed to be the planning meeting, she would have recognized kopenheffer from church. hi, sally, how are you? he somehow talked her into
she had been killed by a single gunshot wound to the head. i just i remember being in shock. i felt i felt guilty and helpless. she was executed. the killer used a glaser type bullet that exploded on impact, making it impossible to determine the weapon s caliber. next, the fbi analyzed the ransom notes. all were typed with a computer word processer program, and all were printed with the same font. on one note the word exactly was misspelled. investigators got their first real break from the case from a police officer who was walking in the shopping center near harry winer s bank. he noticed a sign in a bookstore window listing the sunday