it would make sense that somebody like lee furrow would have killed the ryans. he was a convicted murderer. he had strangled to death a young woman and throwed her body into a canal. but san bernardino police waited 11 months before questioning lee furrow. and when they did, they never asked him about his missing ax. they also seemed to accept furrow s word that he didn t own any overalls. tom parker thinks he knows why. the cover alls in fact had been destroyed. a deputy had taken them and thrown them in a dumpster behind the sheriff s department because it was unfounded that they were connected to the case. of course there had never been any blood testing or whatever to come to that conclusion. hiel now raised this destruction of evidence with judge huff. in a criminal prosecution, the prosecution is required to turn over to the defense any evidence that might be
he went into hiding when he became the most wanted man in california. norm hiel hired fbi agent tom parker to look into cooper s case. when you re conducting an investigation, especially as one complex as this one, you essentially collect the evidence and let the evidence lead you to a suspect. what they did in this case was exactly the opposite. as word of the murders got out, the sheriff s department learned that kevin cooper had escaped and that started what we refer to in law enforcement as tunnel vision. sheriff tidwell held a big press conference. they started with a suspect and they didn t start collecting evidence to prove their theory. but if kevin cooper wasn t the killer, why did the hatchet and the prison issued tobacco link him to the murders?
piece of evidence, provided by a woman named laurel epler, who lived near the canyon corral bar. here was a log that shows that laurel epler called in to the sheriff s department the day after the murders, saying she had found a short-sleeved blue shirt that she thought had blood on it, on the road near the canyon corral bar. one of the bar employees testified that one of the men in the bar that night might have had on a blue shirt. the criminal bulletin showed that they were looking for three white men and one of them was wearing a blue shirt. hiel would argue that the neighbor s eyewitness testimony along with the testimony of christine and josh ryan s original account all pointed to three suspects. and in the new documents released by the prosecution, hiel was about to discover the name of one of the three suspects. and that man also happened to be
was an ex-marine with loaded guns in the bedroom suggested to hiel that there had been more than one killer. for a time, san bernardino police apparently agreed with that conclusion. the sheriff s department was told by two different bystanders that the night of the murders, around the time that the murders had occurred, they had seen a car that matched the description of the ryans station wagon speeding down the road from the ryans house and that in that car were white men. as it turned out, josh ryan, the sole survivor of the attacks, also reported seeing multiple intruders. deputy dale sharp interviewed josh ryan just hours after he was rushed to the hospital. it wasn t good. he had at least one hatchet wound to his head.
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