weapon. the pistol used to kill cliff murke had been sold by a drug dealer of the cowens but for some reason the cowen s fingerprints did not match those at the crime scene. the person who attempted the comparison, was unable to make a match and he failed to have another examiner verify his conclusions. this was a breach of protocol. the standard operating procedure in all crime labs requires a fingerprint examiner to have someone verify his or her conclusions. so the fingerprints were resubmitted for analysis and this time the results were verified by a supervisor. the fingerprints found in the murke s home matched robert
once this person took possession of the gun he took a screwdriver down the barrel changing the effect of the gun. with this information, he took a look down the barrel of cliff murke s gun and saw evidence of what the informant was talking about. the land impressions at the very mussel or crown of the barrel appeared to have been altered. it wasn t obvious at first because it was an old gun but there was something about the crown and land impressions at the mussel that were different than the remaining impressions further down the barrel. since only the end of the barrel had been altered, he needed some way to examine just the portion of the barrel that was unaltered. no one in the forensic establishment could help him. i kcontacted a number of known
as we slid it back one could see there was a body paced in this closet. he told me that my mother, they found her in a wardrobe with a telephone cord tired around her neck and strangled. alma s jewelry and cliff s handguns were apparently stolen during the attack. investigators found two foreign fingerprints inside the home one at the back door, the other on a sowing tray in the living room. in a search for suspects, a neighbor told police that he saw two men lurking around the murke s home a few days earlier. he kept an on on them until he lost visual contact with them because of trees on struskting his view. that was the last he saw of them. the murke s had no known enemies and no one saw or heard anything unusual around the time of the
he was later convicted of manslaughter for killing his father-in-law. he served only two years in prison for that crime before he was released on parole. prosecutors believe robert cowen was one of the men seen near the murke s home by the neighbor. based on the forensic evidence, prosecutors say robert cowen and accomplice broke into the murke s home through the back door. cliff murke probably went for his gun to defend himself and robert cowen grabbed the pistol and turned it on cliff. the men bound his wife alma, locked her in the closet and left her to die. robert cowen left his fingerprints on a tray found in the living room and by the back door as he left. the cowen s pawned some of alma murke s jewelry and then sold the gun to a drug dealer who
25 caliber bullets from his skull. coincidentally one of cliff s .25 caliber pistols was stolen during the robbery. investigators wondered whether cliff had been numurdered with s own gun. we had been evaluating every .25 caliber gun seized to see if it matched the .25 caliber bullet that s were removed from the skull of clip ard murke. two months later investigators found cliff murke s gun. it was in the possession of a man we will call dan jones amount the time he was arrested on a drug charge. it was easily identifiable because cliff s initials had been carved into the handal. it was cliff. he had his name on practically everything he had owned.