she missed her afternoon class. everyone agreed ken did an extraordinary job cleaning the scene, but he couldn t clean everything. luminol revealed the extent of the clean-up. and the autopsy results left no doubt. he thought, i ll make it look like an accident. nobody is going to believe i committed the crime. one year after the murder, ken fitsue was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to a minimum of 15 years in prison. ken still maintains his innocence, but the forensic evidence left no doubt he was christine s killer. you get the luminol and you see that there s, you know, this clean-up. you know, you ve got somebody lying about where they were, you ve got evidence pointing to no one but him.
didn t tell ken fitsue that the autopsy findings indicated christine s death was a homicide. ken remained under the impression her death would be ruled an accident. during questioning, ken had difficulty playing the role of bereaved husband. i must have told her six times to get rid of the black shoes. and then she bought some red ones just like them. and she would get dressed and she would say how do i look? i would say fine, but i wouldn t wear those damn black shoes, you re going to fall. and there they were on the stairs. he was doing a bad job of acting because he was overacting. then i saw the black shoes. the god damn black shoes! i think he was acting the whole day.
have a storybook marriage. ken and christine inherited a large sum of money from ken s family and rarely had to worry about finances. by the time they moved to palo alto, they had about $2 million in real money. but investigators learned the troubling fact about their finances. because of failed business ventures and overspending, they were virtually bankrupt. they had financial problems. they were not going to make their mortgage. christine s closest friends told police the stress of impending bankruptcy was eating away at their marriage. christine was thinking of leaving ken and taking her half of the house and separating herself from his life completely. but there was something else
ken fitsue denied any involvement in his wife s murder. police found no evidence of his involvement inside the house, but when they got a search warrant for ken s suv, that was another story. we found bloody shoes and a bloody shirt underneath the driver s seat of the suburban. there was also a paper towel soaked in blood, blood that matched christine s dna. ken said there was a simple explanation. he tells me that this blood came from a gardening accident. he said christine and him were in the backyard the previous week and she had hit her hand with a gardening tool. christine s body was still in the morgue. investigators asked pathologists
to check her hands. there was no wounds on her hands. and even though there was no blood on the souls of ken s shoes, this luminol pattern made it clear he had stepped in christine s blood in the kitchen before it had been cleaned. the shoe print patterns shown in the luminol were consistent with the pattern of the bottom of the shoes that were found in mr. fitsue s vehicle. the blood stains found on ken s shirt and shoes were medium velocity blood spatter. this definitely didn t support ken s story. the stains are all consistent with being near the source of blood at the time that the beating took place. even more damning was the fact that the blood and the sides and tips of ken s shoes had been diluted, consistent with standing nearby as blood was being cleaned with water. dilute blood is often easy to