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Nine, 10, like maybe a dozen steps away where this truck is parked. yes. so, that s close, yeah. it s very close. huh. so if if the back of truck, it would ve been, how how far from the door? like, right up to the door like that? that s correct. and and in this general area, on the outside track, tire track, was found the hair ribbons. way out here? right out here. okay. so suggesting that they put her in the back of the truck and the hair ribbons came loose as they were driving away or putting her there or something? that would be a pretty good explanation. well, well, well. this makes it all the more real when you see how close this must have been. the woman said she didn t actually see what the men were doing, because the cab of the truck blocked her view. but still, this was way more than they had before. finally, 14 years after tara vanished, barr and mcmannis were going on ....
They had really were lingering suspicions about the workmen who went to tara s house the day she vanished. phil barr, the guy who owned the septic tank business, his helper that day, dave mcmannis, and their buddy peewee st. john, but nothing in this huge trove of investigative material proved anything. kurt, we call him the scribe. he organized it in in such a way that it was easier to understand. what had been difficult to understand? it was confusing to the point where you didn t know what we were gonna be able to get into court. the context was in there. you couldn t figure it out because it was a mess. the majority of it was in there, yes. we had to try to do the analysis on it, and that s what took so long. an awful lot of detective work amounts to reading. thousands of pages of reports and witness statements, and this and that, all were followed up, everyone of them. detective mehl chased down a 2001 walmart receipt, a minor, forgettable purchase, except that ....
Barr s lawyer, mark de sisto. we contended that those conversations never took place. some of those witnesses were inmates, too, snitches. i never met a confidential informant that s gonna inform just cause he wants to be a nice guy or a good citizen. there s always something in it for him. that woman, the star witness found by the cold case team, who said she saw the two men coming and going from tara s house? could it be she made herself believe this over so much of a time to make sure the bad guy goes away? dave mcmannis s attorney, michael bross, said his view those detectives focused on the wrong man. said phil barr s accomplice must have been peewee st. john, the man who d turned in jewelry three days after tara went missing. there s enough circumstantial evidence to believe that he was involved if not in the murder, but definitely in the complicity to cover it up. the only thing that dave mcmannis was guilty of, said bross was being a sarcastic guy. the majorit ....
Around noon, four hours before veronica arrived home from school, the men most likely knocked on the door and tara let them in, unaware they had robbery not work on their minds. dave mcmannis was taking the property while barr was distracting her in the bathroom. we believe she found out. she heard something or saw something that mr. mcmannis was doing, where he was in a place he shouldn t have been and she confronted him. and two people with impaired minds do things that normal people wouldn t do. and their solution to that was to kill her. the woman who d been sitting out in the front yard told the jury how the two men had been laughing and joking when they arrived, but later when she saw them backing their truck up to tara s front door breaking that small palm tree in the process. it was almost like they had a mission, that they had a plan. and one went straight to the tailgate and put the tailgate down out the truck and ....
Soaked gossip. there wasn t enough certainly to support charging peewee. but, thought the prosecutor, maybe he could find a way to go after barr and mcmannis. and he had an idea. bring some of the key witnesses before a grand jury just to see who passed the credibility test and who didn t. i ve prosecuted over 100 homicide cases and the complexity, and the amount of information that we had to review to determine if we could prosecute this case was the most i d ever seen. the idea worked. the grand jury indicted both phil barr and dave mcmannis for tara s murder. they were arrested in late 2012, 11 years after tara vanished from her home. dave mcmannis was arrested in maryland, where he grew up, while u. s. marshals mounted a manhunt for phil barr. kinda lost track of him. we were actually then able to to locate phil in the vermont ....