In particular he noticed the unusual border. it was a five-pointed star with a greater than and less than sign shown consecutively. and corporal ayman ruminated about it and said, i know i ve seen it somewhere. the policeman immediately recognized it as the same symbol that was on the first ransom note. the owner of the store, david kopenheffer, said he made the sign with his computer and the border was one he mimicked after seeing it on other signs. kopenheffer was a friend of the weiner family, and denied having anything to do with sally s murder. they knew each other quite well. both families were members of the presbyterian church. they worshipped together, sang hymns together.
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They both sat in pews not far from each other at the church. because of the similarity between the ransom note and the sign in the store window, investigators confiscated both his home and his office computers. the preliminary search that was conducted by the state police and one of our other agents revealed exactly to me what it revealed to them. initially nothing. next, investigators wanted to know the approximate time of sally s death so they could question kopenheffer about his whereabouts. a forensic entomologist analyzed the insect activity on sally s body. by analyzing the outside temperature on the weekend of sally s murder, dr. kim estimated that the insect activity commenced on the body late on friday afternoon, the same day she was kidnaped.
when this crime was committed in 1988, there were no computer programs that could reassemble documents that had been deleted. so al johnson and his team had to do something that had never been done before. they had to do the analysis manually. it s a painstaking process that took approximately 33 days to look at two, 20-megabyte hard drives. a computer is about as secure as a wet paper bag. it never throws data away. they found bits and pieces of a document kopenheffer had deleted called the plan. it listed all of the steps necessary to carry out sally weiner s kidnapping and murder. we were able to recover 80% of the plan back off of the hard drive. 20% of that had been overwritten or altered and to a point where
The wife of a bank vice president, had been kidnapped and held for ransom. investigators learned that neither sally nor her husband harry had any known enemies. you can count on just a couple fingers the number of cases that you see where a bank employee s family member is abducted in exchange for financial gain. it just is not a common crime. police found sally s car near a church not far from her husband s bank. her car is left in that parking lot. the windows are up and the doors are locked. so there s no sign of a struggle in any respect. all day saturday, which was the day after the kidnapping, there was no further communication from the kidnappers. but on sunday, sally s body was discovered by a farmer working his land a few miles outside of