mecks home matched robert cowan. it goes without saying that i was highly irritated and embarrassed for the department. i initially on the latent evidence being misread, i tend to believe that was probably a training issue. it just was simply a situation where the original examiner was in over his head and couldn t handle it. armed with the fingerprint evidence and the ballistic test results, robert cowan was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder. took him back to the office and i showed him where his fingerprints were definitely found inside of that house and asked him to explain that, and he just shook his head and he just kept his mouth shut and stayed silent and said he couldn t explain it. gerald cowan was also arrested for the murders, but he was later released because there
was no forensic evidence linking him to the crime scene. gerald cowan 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 cowan was one of the men seen near the mercks home by the neighbor. based on the forensic evidence, prosecutors say robert cowan and an accomplice broke into the mercks home through the back door. cliff merck probably went for his gun to defend himself and robert cowan grabbed the pistol and turned it on cliff. [ shots ] the men bound his wife, alma, locked her in the closet and left her to die.
detail. it s like an egg on a teflon frying pan. one can see that one achieves a very true representation of the interior of the barrel, plus the fine detail. he cut away the portion of the barrel imprint destroyed by the screwdriver and then compared the remainder of the cast to the bullets that killed cliff merck. in an incredible turn of events, they were an exact match. this proved that clifford merck s own gun was used in his murder and that the cowan brothers had been in possession of the gun before it had been altered. even with this discovery, it still wasn t enough to prove murder. that was good circumstantial evidence. however, it still did not place them inside the crime scene. but there was one more piece of evidence about to be
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
he had all types of jewelry. but investigators did not find a .25-caliber pistol like the one used in the murder. investigators then compared the cowans fingerprints and those of the drug dealer with the fingerprints found inside the mercks home. they were astonished to learn that none of them matched. the cowan brothers looked similar to the men seen walking near the mercks home before the murder, but the neighbor couldn t make a positive identification. all investigators had against the cowan brothers and dan jones was possession of stolen property. we just got to a certain point where there was no fresh information coming in and there was still a lack of physical evidence tying the cowans to the crime scene. we would talk and he would say the same thing, we think it s the same people, but we don t have the proof. i never lost hope.