Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
Come on a ride along with a Veteran Homicide Detective as the twists and turns of the job suddenly end his career and nearly his life; discover how something wonderful is born out of the Darkness. Embark on the journey from helping people on their worst days, to bringing life, excitement and smiles on their best days.
Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
Typical Tuesday: " Meth Labs, Guns and a Vanishing Trail: When Footprints Disappear in the Snow
A frigid Alaskan morning at five AM. A broken window at a gun store. Dozens of stolen firearms. For most, this might seem like an extraordinary crime, but for veteran law enforcement, it was just another Tuesday.
Take a journey through the meticulous work of small-town policing as a former Alaska officer reveals how seemingly insignificant evidence – a tiny triangular piece of rubber and a partial shoe print on glass – eventually connected a cold gun store burglary to a dangerous meth lab operation hidden in the woods over a year later.
Working in a community of just 8,000 people during the height of America's methamphetamine crisis, our narrator brings us into a world where everyone knows everyone, where undercover work means growing your hair out and adopting an alter ego despite the obvious challenges, and where attention to detail separates cases that get solved from those that remain mysteries.
The storytelling pulls you through every stage of the investigation – from crawling on hands and knees collecting glass fragments at zero degrees, to the dramatic discovery of stolen weapons alongside drug manufacturing equipment, to a courtroom scene where full hazmat gear demonstrates the dangers of meth production to a captivated jury. Through it all runs the thread of persistence and thoroughness that defines quality police work.
More than just a crime story, this account offers genuine insight into forensic techniques rarely understood by the public: the difference between class and individual characteristics in evidence, the limitations of fingerprint and DNA analysis, and how microscopic evidence can provide the vital link between seemingly unrelated criminal enterprises. It's a reminder that real police work bears little resemblance to the quick solutions portrayed in television crime dramas.
Want to hear more stories about what happens when dedication meets opportunity in law enforcement? Follow the Murders to Music podcast for more tales from behind the badge where everyday police work leads to extraordinary results.
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Murders to Music podcast. My name is Aaron, I'm your host and you guys are in for a typical Tuesday kind of show. If you're not familiar with a typical Tuesday show, what that is is I'm going to tell you guys about something that happened in my career and for those of you who aren't involved in law enforcement, you might think man, I had no idea that kind of stuff happens in my community. And as cops we're like that is a typical Tuesday at 10 am. Right, that's what we deal with every single day. So I'm going to tell you guys one of those stories. This story is going to take us all the way back to about 2005.
Speaker 1:In 2005, I'm a police officer in Alaska, and I'm a police officer in a town of about 7,500, 8,000 people, and there's definitely some benefits to being a small town cop. There's some drawbacks and shortfalls as well, but one of the benefits is you get to know everybody. You know who's sleeping with who. You know who the baby daddies are. You know who's got suspended license. You know who's driving stolen cars. You know who's running drugs. You know who's running guns. You know who's got suspended license. You know who's driving stolen cars, you know who's running drugs, you know who's running guns, you know who's running girls, you know all of those things. So it makes it almost like shooting fish in a barrel. You know, you're driving down the road one day and you see Isidore Shagnasty driving the other direction in his mom's car and you're like dude, he's suspended. So you turn around, either you stop him and arrest him or he takes off on you and then the pursuit's on. Back in those days we could chase everything. If it was a broken taillight, we were chasing it till the wheels came off. And now this whole like risk liability, risk reward thing they took all the fun away from law enforcement. But back in the day it was a really good time.
Speaker 1:Working in the small town had its shortfalls because it was slow. There wasn't a whole lot of action going on. There wasn't a whole lot of big city crime. If you had that one armed robbery a year or maybe every two years, that was a big deal in town. Right In the town that I just worked in here in Oregon, we would have armed robberies every single day and it got to the point where sometimes we wouldn't even respond to him. We'd like respond with a phone call. Is everybody okay? Did he give me a thing? Okay, have a good day, and that's kind of the way that it went. But that's the difference between a small town and a big town.
Speaker 1:And I, in my small town I was a go-getter, I was the kind of guy that overturned every rock and I always wanted to be a cop. I always wanted to impress somebody with either my skills or my arrest status or my dog or whatever it was right. Pride was huge, ego was huge and that was always my, my kind of goal. And now I enjoyed solving crime and I enjoyed when the pieces of the puzzle came together. But you know, and I enjoyed when the pieces of the puzzle came together, but you know, I knew I studied law enforcement, I studied criminal forensics, I studied crime scene processing and I would do everything I could to get myself in the middle of a crime scene where I got to take, you know, dental impression tool marks off of a door jamb. And when I would do that, sometimes people would make fun of me or they'd be like Aaron, really it's a dump, stolen car, why are you taking casting foot impressions in a gravel parking lot for a crime that nobody cares about and the person got the car back. And my simple answer is because I can and I know how. You know they taught me this and I want to use it, so that's why I would do it.
Speaker 1:Working in a small town, it gives you time to do those things. It gave you time to dig into those cases and overturn those rocks and, you know, expand your knowledge base. It gave you time to become experts in certain fields if you wanted to. There are people who are experts in drug recognition. There's people that are experts in drug not drug use, but drug manufacturing, drug selling, distribution, narc guys. You know, and I was one of those for a short period of time. By no means would I call myself an expert in general drug stuff. There's people who find their niche in DUI investigations because they want to save lives by taking drunk drivers off the road. All of those things are good In my world.
Speaker 1:I never really wanted to climb the ladder and promote. I enjoyed street level crime. I enjoyed chasing drugs. I enjoyed the idea of getting a dog one day. And in the drug world you know about that time 2003 was kind of the peak of the methamphetamine manufacturing across the United States, but also in Alaska. Alaska small town Alaska, was not immune to big city problems when it came to drug manufacturing and meth labs. As a result of that, I got to specialize in labs and I got to become a site safety officer, which means I got to go and manage crime scenes of meth labs, dress up in all the gear, go inside, dismantle everything, explain what it was, how it worked, what kind of lab it was, and then ultimately go testify in court. So I got to do that. That was a ton of fun, right, it was a specialty for me. About 2003 to 2007,. 2008 was really the prime time for those meth labs because in 2008, they enacted legislature that said, if you're going to go in and buy Sudafed, which is a primary precursor to make methamphetamine, if you're going to go in and buy Sudafed, you have to give your license and those things are tracked and law enforcement can look at those lists. So about 2007,. 2008 is when the methamphetamine production locally diminished. But what increased was methamphetamine coming out of Mexico Super labs in Mexico that make 10, 15, 20, 50 pounds of meth at a time that methamphetamine was starting to come into the state.
Speaker 1:It's super easy for somebody to go to the likes of Phoenix and get an eight ball of methamphetamine or an eight ball of heroin which is three and a half grams or one eighth of an ounce, and take that and shove it up their keister and then fly back to Alaska with it. Right, let's just talk black tar heroin. In those days, a 10th of a gram of black tar heroin which let me put that in perspective for you A small piece of heroin about the size of a Mead number two pencil eraser that tiny little piece of heroin on the street was worth $100 in about 2005. That was a street value for heroin. Now you could go to Phoenix, arizona, and buy an eight ball of heroin for a thousand000 at the time. Now you bring that eight ball, you bring it back and you cut it up into small eraser sized pieces at a hundred dollars a piece. You only have to sell 10 of those to make your thousand dollars back. Everything else is pure profit. So that is what was going on during that timeframe. They would do the same thing with methamphetamine. So it kind of changed the way that we investigated drugs in the state. Same thing with methamphetamine. So it kind of changed the way that we investigated drugs in the state and about 2000 and oh I would say 2006 to 2007, I went into the drug unit as an undercover drug investigator and it's tough to be one of those in a small town because everybody knows you right, but you still get the fake name and you grow out your hair long and you think you're super cool, but really you're the same dude you were the day before and everybody knows that you're an undercover cop now and they're still not going to sell weed to you at the bar.
Speaker 1:And back then, yeah, weed was illegal, right? How many people have sent to jail for weed? It's crazy. Now I see billboard signs that say, hey, hiring delivery drivers. That used to be a crime in my day, so I spent my time in the drug unit and then came out to go do canine stuff. So that's going to bring us. That's kind of what was going on during that period of my life and that period of law enforcement in this small town.
Speaker 1:Now the small town is in South Central Alaska, so it is down on the Kenai Peninsula, and I remember I was working late one or sorry, I was working early one morning. It was late at night, early in the morning, about five in the morning one night, whenever we got a call of an alarm ringing at a local strip mall, and that alarm was ringing specifically at a gun shop. So I respond out there. There was two of us on duty that night, myself and my female partner. She was in another car. I responded out there that early that morning and I parked a ways away.
Speaker 1:Now let me let me paint the scene for you. It's a dark, cold, crisp, clear night. It's probably zero degrees. Outside. It's a clear sky. The moon is shining bright. It is dark. However, that moon is lighting up the surface of the snow. So in those environments, when the light comes down, reflects off the snow. You can see it's. It's not daylight, but you can definitely see what's going on. You're not in pitch black.
Speaker 1:So as I approach the back of the gun store, I can see that the door is cracked and I can see footprints that either seem to be walking to or away from that door in the snow. And these footprints were unique to me because they were fresh. I could tell they were fresh. This was virgin snow crusty and there's a single set of footprints coming out of this back door. So I make my approach, check through the windows. Nobody's inside.
Speaker 1:We go in and we clear the building and then we got a crime scene to process because this was a burglary. Somebody broke in by smashing the front plate glass window of this strip mall and they smashed the window. They climbed through the broken window frame, they went inside, they smashed all of the gun counters and they stole a ton of guns and I can't remember the number, but it was a lot of guns 10 of them, 15 of them, whatever it was. And then they left and out the back door. We see that single set of footprints going out the back door and we were able to determine, based on the crime scene, that entry was made through the front, exit was made through the rear. The person exit through the rear went to a car that was waiting nearby on the street and you could see that because where the exhaust had been going, running out of the car, there was a you know area of melted snow right. So while the person is inside committing the crime, they have a getaway driver waiting outside for them.
Speaker 1:So that's what we're able to put together with that crime scene. There's no video, there's no witnesses, there's an alarm, there's broken glass, there's missing guns. You have some wet, you know kind of puddly footprints inside on the linoleum, but then it's carpet, so you really don't get a fingerprints or footprints off of that. So you don't have a whole lot to go on, but you've definitely got a major felony crime. And what is what? Are these guns going to be used for? Are these guns going out to the drug market? Are they going to be sold? Are they going to be used to commit murders or crimes? Well, we don't know that.
Speaker 1:So it's important to try to figure out who did this, who was responsible for this heinous act. And I say that tongue in cheek because as I progressed in my career I really realized what a heinous act was in this gun store burglary. You know, at the end of my career it might have not even got my attention, but it did year three on the job. So my partner's there with me and she's like hey, what are you going to do? It's your call. And I said, well, I'm going to stay and run a process crime scene. And she's like well, what are you going to process? And I said I've got no idea, but I'm going to find something. So she said, all right. So she left.
Speaker 1:Well, this wasn't the first time I'd been to a crime scene with broken glass all over the floor. So I went and got my police car, pulled it up to the front, and in my police car I had knee pads like construction workers wear. Right, it wasn't for promotion purposes, it was strictly for crime scene stuff. That's what I use them for. So I'm on my hands and knees and I got to start at that point of entry. So I'm on my hands and knees and I'm literally looking through every piece of glass that is bigger than a dime and I'm looking for fingerprints, I'm looking for blood, I'm looking for hairs or fibers. I'm looking for something that tangible that I can say okay, this is going to link. You know Lockhart's theory Every time a suspect goes into a crime scene they leave trace evidence behind. So I'm looking for that trace evidence. Well, it's not too long searching that.
Speaker 1:I find a piece of glass about the size of the palm of my hand and it's got a partial shoe print on it. And I know that people don't typically walk on windows when they're in the upright position. So that's a clue to me, even in my relatively new police world, that maybe this is from the suspect when they're in the upright position. So that's a clue to me, even in my relatively new police world, that maybe this is from the suspect when they stepped inside the building. So I collected that piece of glass. I also located a piece of glass that had some black fibers on it and they were just cotton-ish type fibers, maybe polyester, I don't know. I didn't do the taste test, but there's some fibers hanging off of this. They're about an inch long, inch and a half long, so I collected those as well. So now I've got a partial shoe print and I've got a fiber and I collect some broken glass, some pieces of broken glass, just for glass analysis, if we ever need to go back and say, you know, if we find glass later down the road, right, and this is all stuff that I saw on some crime show, I'm sure, and I'm trying to like save the day and be, you know, expector cluso in small town USA.
Speaker 1:But should I got nothing else to do, it's five in the morning, I'm getting paid to do something. I might as well overturn these rocks. So I go on into the gun store. By this time the RO has responded. I meet with them. I'm going to have them give me an inventory in a second.
Speaker 1:But I got to finish processing the crime scene. So I go into the crime scene and as I'm taking a look around I can kind of tell the order that these things were broken in, because, you know, some of the cases had different colored glass on them and I could see where the shaded glass or the tinted glass was on top of the clear glass, which told me the clear glass was broken first and then the shaded glass was broken. Right now, as I stand there in the middle of that crime scene, columbo would have been proud, he would have been proud and monk would have been proud. They would have been like man, the way you're allowing this crime scene to talk to you and just speak into your soul. Anyway, it was just a crime scene and uh got to process it.
Speaker 1:So I go through all this and I'm on my hands and knees and I'm looking through the glass on the floor in front of all these broken cases and I find a piece of rubber and it's a triangular piece of rubber about half the width of a dime, but it's a long triangle, so it's probably half the width of a dime across the top and then there's the triangle portion and it's a long triangle so it's probably half the width of a dime across the top. And then there's the triangle portion and it's a long triangle tail. So I don't know what it's for, I don't know what it's from. It doesn't look like shoe material. So I collect this little piece of rubber. It's out of place and that's all I know.
Speaker 1:So I collect the piece of rubber and finish processing the crime scene, get inventory on the guns and finish processing the crime scene, get inventory on the guns, turn the building back over to the RO and I go on about my merry way and I'm pretty excited with myself because I got a bunch of evidence. That's never going to amount to nothing, but at least I collected it and I can prove that I can do a crime scene investigation right, because one day maybe I'll get to be a detective. So that is where my mind was. I go back, I process all the evidence and I write up the report. Well, knowing that guns and drugs oftentimes go together, I've reached out to the drug unit and said hey, if you guys have any informants, this is what I got. I'm looking for somebody to tell me something If these guns end up on the street, you know, get your informants to give us some info and I'll track them down. I'll follow up on the leads. Well, this is winter time. Winter time turns to spring, spring turns to summer. I hear nothing. These guns never appear. We never like find a gun and run it and come back as one of these stolons. So these guns just kind of vanished. I didn't know where they went.
Speaker 1:So I move on with life and, uh, you know 2006, I joined the drug task force. That's when I become that long haired hippie that I was. My name was Darren Wall, darren D-A-R-R-I-N. Why was I called Darren? Well, because I'm a small town and if somebody says, hey, aaron, and I'm talking to a potential drug user or buyer or something like that, you can mistake Aaron for Darren or Darren for Aaron and it sounds right. So that was my name Darren Wall. Why Wall? Because it's law spelled backwards. So that was my undercover name During that day.
Speaker 1:As an undercover, I identified as a pimp. I'm not going to lie to you. I had the hat, the fur hat. Have you ever seen Kramer when he's walking down the street with that big hat on and the cane and the long coat. That is pretty much what I looked like. In this small town of 7,500 people, I blended right in. You know, nobody knew that I was out of place. I could walk into the bar and, just you know, walk into the bowels of hell and buy drugs from them because I, just I was a pimp. That's the way I rolled.
Speaker 1:So I move on with this drug unit. Forget about the gun case. It's been a year, year and a half, something like that, and don't really think a whole lot about it. So we ended up working some case and I ended up getting home really, really late. And I get home late at about, I want to say, eight, nine o'clock in the morning and I lay down to go to bed and about one o'clock in the afternoon I get a knock on the door. The knock on the door is my sergeant from the drug unit and he's like hey, we got a tip on a meth lab. And I'm like, all right, I said, well, I just got home. He's like, well, suit up and let's go. I need somebody on the team, all right. So I get all my stuff, I get suited up and I'm like, as we're driving to the meth lab, I'm like, all right, where's this at? He says, well, it's out in the woods, in kind of a outside of town, rural part of the city, still within the city limits, but it's, uh, at a campsite in the middle of the woods, and by this time it's probably late summer.
Speaker 1:So we make our way into the woods, we get our search warrants and all that and I said, do we have anybody associated with this? And he's like, yeah, he said this could be related to you know, and he named the name. Let's call him the Smiths. It wasn't Smith, but let's say the Smith. It's related to the Smith brothers potentially. And I'm like, all right, well, the Smith brothers were known for a little bit of drug dealing, but just being general punks, right, they were the kids that would always get into fights or maybe be driving suspended or you know, just kind of being a toolbox. The older Smith brother he ended up being pretty cool. But the younger Smith brother was just a cocky kid and that's what he was known for, right, didn't like law enforcement, probably didn't like himself, and as a result he was kind of a general prick. So that's what we're dealing with.
Speaker 1:So we make our way out into the middle of the woods and, sure enough, we find a meth lab. I can look at it from 50 feet away and I'm like, okay, there's your hydrogen chloride generator, there's your cooking vessels, there's your heating element, yep, we, we got a meth lab. So we all kind of put pause, we suit up and we go in and process this lab and, as luck would have it, it was shut down. It wasn't an active lab, but it had been recently. But we found the meth, we found the precursors, we found all the stuff.
Speaker 1:In a meth lab it's really hard to get physical evidence off things because of the volatile chemicals that are used during the production process. So, as a result, we can look all day long for fingerprints on those glass mason jars they used to cook the meth in. But us finding a fingerprint is very, very slim. And let's talk about fingerprints anyway. You know, if you watch TV, you would think that every case in the world is solved off of a fingerprint or DNA. But the truth is that very few cases are ever solved off of fingerprints or tool impressions, because they're just not One. They're either not processed for or they're not collected correctly, or there's too much air in them or smudges, or whatever it may be.
Speaker 1:If you're talking about the latent prints that you collect from crime scenes, but then you get into the um, you know, database side of it, you have to have certain criteria to run that fingerprint through the database to even try to see if there's a suspect. So even if you have a crystal clear fingerprint, you may not be able to run that against the database. Therefore, you may not ever be able to tell if it belongs to or who it belongs to. But TV in the crime scene world that we live in and the true crime world would have you to believe that every single case is solved with a fingerprint or a cigarette butt. Those are the things that solve cases, don't you know?
Speaker 1:Well, in this case we process the crime scene for the meth lab stuff and uh, then we look around and there's a little camp area, a little makeshift tent, and then this is obviously somebody, somewhere they just go to cook meth and then they leave and go somewhere else. And then there's a black duffel bag and there's a black Adidas duffel bag. You know gym size. It was a foot and a half, two foot long, 12 inches tall, 12 inches deep. And uh, this rectangle. So I searched this, open up this duffel bag and there's a gun in this duffel bag and I'm like, oh sweet, we got a gun. So I pull it out and it's still got tags on it from the gun store where we had the burglary a year and a half earlier. And I'm like bet, low key bet, that's what my kids would say today. Like bet, you know, skibbity riz. So I think that means excited. So I, uh, I'm excited and I'm like we got a gun and we got another gun and another gun. We recovered five or six guns out of this duffel bag and I'm like that's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1:So I keep looking through the duffel bag I find a black face mask and I'm like, well, that crime scene. This face mask has got like fibers and I remember I got a fiber off that piece of glass off the entryway where the suspect entered. I wonder if these two are related. So I seize the ski mask. As I keep looking I see a pair of shoes and I'm like so I look at the bottoms of the shoes Now, that shoe print impression that I found, that partial latent print that I found on the piece of glass about the size of the palm of my hand a year and a half earlier, at a crime scene, at five o'clock in the morning at zero degrees outside, with a full lit moon, when I'm on my hands and knees using my promotion pads to get down there and look through all this glass, those that latent print.
Speaker 1:I look at it and that print is ingrained in my mind. And I look at this shoe print and I'm like this is it? So I collect those shoes, knowing that people wear shoes and people that wear ski masks oftentimes sweat, breathe or slough off DNA. So there's a good chance that I've got DNA in this evidence which is going to tell me whose face the ski mask was on right. So I'm well on my way to success, to solving that burglary.
Speaker 1:So I keep digging and in the bag I find a ball peen hammer and this is a fiberglass shaft ball peen hammer that has a rubber handle on it and right at the top of the rubber handle there is a missing gouge. There's a gouge out of black rubber that's missing and it is a triangle shape as liquid have it about half the size of a dime and it's longer than it is wide, and I'm like that looks like the chunk of rubber that I found at the crime scene outside of the gun case when I'm on my hands and knees so I collect the hammer, but we're not done. The bottom of this bag has hundreds of pieces of broken glass tempered, broken, shattered pieces of glass, just like the ones outside the point of entry. So in my mind, this is the bag that was used to commit the burglary, to carry the guns away. I'm like this is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Now we take all this evidence back. Right, we process the guns, we process the meth lab stuff and we got to try to figure out who's responsible for this. Well, the word on the street the Smith brothers are responsible for all of this. That's what our informants are telling us. But what you think and what you can prove are two different things. Right, sometimes what you know and what you can prove are two different things, but let's work about proving this case. So we prove that we start by taking a look at who's responsible for this meth lab, and we can do that in a very easy way.
Speaker 1:Remember 2007,. 2008 is when they started requiring you to give your ID if you were going to buy pseudofedrin, which is again, the primary precursor for methamphetamine. So there's only about five or six pharmacies in our area and crooks aren't smart, so they literally go every other day and they present their ID and get two boxes and two boxes and two boxes. Well, I mean, if you buy 12 boxes of Sudafed in a two week period, then you've probably got a bigger issue and should go see the doctor, right? So we're really just doing a welfare check when we come, knock your door to make sure that you're not dead in there with some head cold because you got enough pseudoephedrine to kill a cow. But you know, oh my gosh, we stumble into a meth lab is a lot of times. What would happen? So we start going out and looking for who has been buying all this pseudoephedrine and in a stunning turn of events, we found the Smith brothers have been buying copious amounts of pseudoephedrine. I know it blew my mind, but that was breaking news and it was just like a stunning turn of events. That's what we found and it was right there.
Speaker 1:In black and white we can't even make this stuff up. So with this case we were able to take that latent shoe print and send it off to the Alaska State Crime Lab. We were able to take the hammer and the piece of rubber, send it off. We sent off the ski mask and the fiber. We sent it off to the Crime Lab. All these things go to the Crime Lab. The methamphetamine goes off and about six months later we get lab reports back. When we get those lab reports back, they say this they say the methamphetamine is methamphetamine. They say that the fiber on the piece of glass matches and is consistent with the fibers in the ski mask. They say that there is glass residue and shards and microscopic pieces of glass in the ski mask as well. That is from when the window got broken. Then they take the latent shoe print and they look at that and they say, yes, the shoe print on this piece of glass matches in class characteristics to the shoe print on the sole of the shoe that you located.
Speaker 1:Now let me tell you about class and individual characteristics. A class characteristic means that every pair of Adidas Nighthawk running shoes have the same sole pattern on them. That is a class characteristic. It is a characteristic that is common across a large class of items or evidentiary samples. That is a class characteristic, an individual characteristic. Mr Smith buys those shoes and he wears them to his job site and at his job site. He steps on a nail and the nail gouges the rubber on the bottom of that shoe and then he walks across the glass right where the nail mark is. Now, that individual mark, that individual scar tattoo, if you will caused by the nail in the sole of the shoe. That is the only pair of shoes in the universe that have that mark at that exact location, because there's only one, mr Smith, stepping on one nail right. That is an individual characteristic, it's a fingerprint, it's an identifying mark or feature that sets this pair of shoes apart from all the other shoes out there made by Adidas.
Speaker 1:So as they took a look at the, they already said okay, your class characteristics match on this piece of glass versus a shoe that you found. But then they take the shoe and they look and they find individual characteristics on the sole of the shoe and then they match them up to the same individual characteristics found on that piece of glass. So what that tells us is whoever broke in to the gun store was wearing that ski mask, was wearing that exact pair of shoes and used that hammer to commit the crime. So now we have to identify who it is that is wearing all this stuff, right. So we start looking at DNA and, as luck would have it, mr Smith 1 and Mr Smith 2 have DNA on file, so we're able to take a look at the DNA. We collect DNA from the ski mask and we collect DNA from the shoes and they come back to one the same person little brother, mr Smith. Little brother Mr Smith is the person that's responsible for wearing the shoes, wearing the ski mask and likely carrying the hammer that went into commit this burglary.
Speaker 1:So, with that said, we now have to go find little Mr Smith. So we have all the evidence. It's come out. Finally, I get to say look at me, the little bit of rocks I overturned actually paid out this time, and the fact that we made a case on DNA trace evidence, microscopic evidence, sole shoe pattern evidence this is huge, right, this is awesome. This is a pretty solid case. So we go out and we find little Mr Smith, but he tells us to piss off, like he does every time, and tells us to prove the case. So we're like, all right, we got this. So he gets to go to jail on the probable cause for this meth lab and this burglary, and he won't give up who it is. We suspect it's his older brother that was waiting in that getaway car, but we don't know for sure. Again, what we know and what we can prove are two different things. Right, and it didn't really matter. We had the person responsible and the evidence that the original burglary only showed that one person entered. It didn't show two people. Why do you know that? Because there's only one set of footprints coming out the back door. It's pretty simple math, right? Unless they were carrying them on their shoulders, piggyback style, there's no way that two people walked out of that door. So one person committed the burglary. We know who. It is little Mr Smith.
Speaker 1:Now, finally, the trial comes for little Mr Smith, and the trial process looks like this We've got a couple of different cases that we are putting together, right, and we can choose to either what's called bifurcate the cases, meaning separate them and try them as individual cases the gun store and the meth lab. However, when you start mixing guns and drugs together in the commission of a crime, now you have potential for federal charges, and you now have gun crimes that are related to misconduct involving a controlled substance, and you now have gun crimes that are related to misconduct involving a controlled substance. So the fact those two are together, we decided to try this case as one. So both counts are going to come in and our state's theory is going to be that these guns were used in the commission of manufacturing distributing methamphetamine. We don't think that it is a far stretch to do this, so we go to trial and that day at trial the you know I'll tell you about the DA. The DA in this case was a complete bulldog. She was older. I don't know how old she was at the time, but she was definitely older. She was the main district attorney for the Kenai Peninsula and she would stop at nothing to win her cases, so she wanted me.
Speaker 1:Now, this rural area where the meth lab was found. There were houses around. It was within 100 yards of a trailer park. There was people around, there was kids around. So the state's theory is guns and drugs go together to commit a crime. We got kids in the area. This meth lab is in the middle of a residential neighborhood. If it exploded, just like you see on TV, it's going to level the city block.
Speaker 1:All that stuff is a state's theory and they got to bring somebody in as an expert in meth labs in order to testify about this. Well, that's where I come in. So I got certified as an expert in meth labs and I was already an expert in it. When I say I got certified, if you're going to testify as an expert in something in court, then you have to go through a Verdier process, meaning the state has to ask you questions where you get to qualify what it is that you're an expert in. Then defense gets to ask you questions to disprove that you're an expert and the defense can actually bring in their own expert if they want. So it can be expert on expert and the battle of the wits and the wills. And then the judge gets to determine is this person a credible expert in meth labs in this case? And in fact they found that I was. And all of this happens outside of the jury. All of this happens before we ever get to that trial process. So we go back to the drawing board with the DA. I'm now an expert in meth labs in the state of Alaska court system. We've got this meth lab. If it exploded it's going to lower, flatten a city block. So we need an impactful way to impact the jury in order to really get the point across about the danger of this.
Speaker 1:So what we decided to do was dress me up in my full meth lab gear from now we're talking a Tyvek suit from head to toe, all encapsulated, scba, which is the same air pack that firefighters wear that put on duct tape all the way around the outside of my mask that held that white Tyvek suit that I have chem suit onto and seals the air mask in place. I had two layers of gloves on, big yellow look like dishwashing gloves with silver, uh, duct tape around them, one on each hand. My boots had bright yellow booties on them, much like those dishwashing gloves, but for your feet. So those were on there. Those were silver taped. Air pack was on and I walk into the courtroom. You know, stomp, stomp. Have you ever seen that part of Men of Honor where he's got to walk cookie? You need to walk 15 steps. One step cookie, two step, cookie. That is kind of what I felt like when I walked into that courtroom and, uh, you know. And so I'm walking in and I'm like that's my air pack, right. So I'm making all this noise and I step up there and I step up on the stand and she swears me in while I'm still wearing my gear. So she's like do you saw my swear? And I'm like I do and I'm breathing again. So I get sworn in while wearing all this gear.
Speaker 1:This is in front of the jury. The jury's like holy shit, what is going on? So I start stripping, pulling all this tape off. And the point of this is to show how devastating and damaging methamphetamine can be. Right, because a little bit can go a long way and kill you. So I'm stripping all this stuff off, I sit down, I end up testifying as an expert in this case and we go. You know we go about.
Speaker 1:It's a three or four day trial. We get about halfway through the trial and there's a sidebar meeting between the defense counsel and the prosecution and they come to a plea agreement, mid-trial. So mid-trial. Defense says we're losing our ass on this. We need to come to a resolution so we don't turn this over to the jury. Because we turned it to the jury, our guy's going to get hung. So they come to an agreement. A plea agreement is reached A plea agreement for those of you who don't know, but I'm sure most of you do. Right. Prosecution their job is to charge you with a crime. Whatever's applicable Defense is. Their job is to get you off of a crime if you truly didn't do it, or, if you did do it, get your crime numbers reduced. So in this case, let's say the state says we're going to charge you with 10 different crimes. Defense can say okay, we'll plead a five of them. We've made five of them go away. State says, yeah, it's pretty good. They do a handshake, they sign the paperwork, the guy gets convicted for whatever those five charges are and the trial is over. So that's what happens in the middle of trial A plea agreement is reached and this kid goes off to jail.
Speaker 1:Then the feds took a look at him because there's a federal drug crime. When you start involving guns and drugs and, to be honest with you, I don't know if he ever got charged with a federal crime or not. I never testified in a federal crime for him. I did testify in a federal crime once, multiple times, but that's another story for another day, I think. But in this case, I don't know if he ever got charged with a federal crime, but I did know he spent a lot of years in jail and when I left Alaska in 2010 to come down to the Portland, oregon area. He was still in jail so he got his time At the end of the day.
Speaker 1:We identified who broke into the gun store on that lonely morning in the middle of winter. We identified who broke into the gun store on that lonely morning in the middle of winter. We identified who was making the methamphetamine. We recovered the guns. We attribute this case to trace evidence good solid police work, crime lab work, latent footprints, tool impression marks this is the stuff that solved the case. This case made the media. Tens of people liked it and they actually this is what they based the movie Ozark or the show Ozark around was this case, you know Now, I tell you this because my dad always told me that if you're going to do something, you might as well do it right and do it 100%.
Speaker 1:And that is what I did, working my career hundred percent. And that is what I did working my career, whether I'm working a gun store, burglary, a meth lab, a child abuse, a child rape or a murder, whatever it was, it got done a hundred percent. And when it got done a hundred percent, we solved the case. We brought people to justice. But at the end of 21 years it took its toll on me and therefore I needed to leave before it literally killed me in my cubicle.
Speaker 1:So, uh, that's my story, guys. That is the story. That is a typical Tuesday in Alaska in the middle of the night that drags on for years, and solid police work and doing things right the first time, a hundred percent. I wish I could get my kids to figure that out. I can't get them to brush their teeth a hundred percent, but so I don't know, I don't know I was scared of my dad. These kids aren't scared of me. So doing it a hundred percent right the first time, uh, and I thank my dad for beating that into me. Anyway, guys, that is it. That's a typical Tuesday, right, that's just what we do. So now you know, educational, entertaining, provide value. You just got to listen to about 40 minutes of a fun story about something that happened in my career, and now you know what happens behind the scenes.
Speaker 1:Ladies and gentlemen, I really appreciate you guys all being out there. I appreciate you guys continuing to listen to the numbers. Share it with your friends. If you need to get a hold of me, get a hold of me at murderstomusic at gmailcom. That's the number two. Please find the Instagram murderstomusic like it become a part of the conversation. This show is for you. Send me some fan mail, communicate with me. I love you guys. I'll see you on the next show that is a Murderstomusic podcast.
