officials post pictures of their most-wanted criminals on the town s website, but they needed every trick they could think of to solve the case of clifford and alma merck, a retired couple who lived on the city s south side. they loved to sit out on the front porch and they had big trees out in the front and it was shady in the summertime. one saturday morning, the mercks son, robert, stopped by his parents home for a visit. he immediately noticed something was wrong. he found a door open at the back of the house and entered and immediately detected a foul odor. i backed out of the house and told my wife, i said, something is wrong here. go across the street and call the sheriff s department. jim christopherson was one of the first to arrive at the scene. the entire residence was ransacked, everything turned upside down, chairs turned upside down.
and had obtained a lot of good information. cliff merck s .25-caliber handgun stolen during the robbery was recovered a few months later, but ballistic tests revealed it was not the murder weapon. in searching through the files, christopherson discovered that there were several other men present on the night the cowan brothers sold cliff merck s gun to the drug dealer. when christopherson reinterviewed them now ten years later, one of the men present recalled an interesting detail. he recalled hearing the cowan brothers tell the drug dealer that the gun they were selling had been used in a crime. once this drug person took possession of the gun, he put a screwdriver down the end of the barrel and reamed it out, in effect changing the rifling of the gun. with this information, greg
i just knew in my heart that the police would do their job and find the people that did this to mother and cliff. investigators confiscated every .25-caliber pistol they could find, hoping that one of them would match the murder weapon. i maintained those bullets in my secured work area. i never returned them to the sheriff s property room, knowing that i would one day get that firearm. but eventually, there were other crimes to solve, other evidence to process, and the murder of cliff and alma merck moved quietly into the unsolved file. ten years later, jim christopherson was promoted to homicide detective, but he never forgot the murder of cliff and alma merck. the case had always bothered me mainly because of the circumstances, the way they were murdered and just knowing that
there was that element out there still walking the streets that hopefully hadn t done more killings. but after a decade, the trail of the killer had turned cold. christopherson knew he needed forensic evidence to have any chance of solving the case. can a business have a mind? a subconscious. a knack for predicting the future. reflexes faster than the speed of thought. can a business have a spirit?
interviewed hundreds of people and had obtained a lot of good information. cliff merck s .25-caliber handgun stolen during the robbery was recovered a few months later, but ballistic tests revealed it was not the murder weapon. in searching through the files, christopherson discovered that there were several other men present on the night the cowan brothers sold cliff merck s gun to the drug dealer. when christopherson reinterviewed them now ten years later, one of the men present recalled an interesting detail. he recalled hearing the cowan brothers tell the drug dealer that the gun they were selling had been used in a crime. once this drug person took possession of the gun, he put a screwdriver down the end of the barrel and reamed it out, in effect changing the rifling of the gun. with this information, greg leskowski took a second look