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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. ....
The gun was test fired into a tub of water. as bullets go through the barrel, the lands and grooves which make the bullet spin leave marks on the outside of the bullet. they will design the barrel to have a certain direction of twists, a certain number of lands and grooves, a certain measurement for those lands and grooves, so those are intentionally put in by the manufacturer. surprisingly, when the bullets from cliff s gun were compared to the guns from cliff s autopsy, they did not match. investigators checked all of the local pawn shops and discovered that the cowan brothers had pawned some of alma merck s jewelry. with a search warrant, police found several other items belonging to the mercks in the cowans possession. he had a wallet, he had two social security checks which he was trying to sell. ....
As bullets go through the barrel, the lands and grooves which make the bullet spin leave marks on the outside of the bullet. they will design the barrel to have a certain direction of twists, a certain number of lands and grooves, a certain measurement for those lands and grooves, so those are intentionally put in by the manufacturer. surprisingly, when the bullets from cliff s gun were compared to the guns from cliff s autopsy, they did not match. investigators checked all of the local pawn shops and discovered that the cowan brothers had pawned some of alma merck s jewelry. with a search warrant, police found several other items belonging to the mercks in the cowans possession. he had a wallet, he had two social security checks which he was trying to sell. he had all types of jewelry. ....
Most-wanted criminals on the town s website, but they needed every trick they could think of to solve the case of clifford and alma merck, a retired couple who lived on the city s south side. they loved to sit out on the front porch and they had big trees out in the front and it was shady in the summertime. one saturday morning, the mercks son, robert, stopped by his parents home for a visit. he immediately noticed something was wrong. he found a door open at the back of the house and entered and immediately detected a foul odor. i backed out of the house and told my wife, i said, something is wrong here. go across the street and call the sheriff s department. jim christopherson was one of the first to arrive at the scene. the entire residence was ransacked, everything turned upside down, chairs turned upside down. ....
Closet. he told me that my mother, they found her in a wardrobe with a telephone cord tied 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 sewing tray in the living room. in a search for suspects, a neighbor told police that he saw two men lurking around the mercks home just a few days earlier. he kept an eye on them until he finally lost visual contact with them because of trees obstructing his view. and that was the last he saw of them. the mercks had no known enemies, and no one else in the neighborhood saw or heard anything unusual around the time of the murders. investigators hoped that either ....