Hard Evidence

Others brood over the killers they might have put behind bars had they known then what they know now. Tim Carnahan of Burlington, Kentucky, describes a case in which a young woman was bludgeoned to death in her garage after a wild chase that started at the front door and wound throughout the house. "We had a good idea who did it," says Carnahan. "But we didn't know how to read the blood spatter to determine the weapon, or even the number of attackers. Next time will be different," he vows. (A suspect has since emerged and Carnahan plans to revisit the blood-spatter evidence.)

Already, alumni of the academy's inaugural year, 2001, have begun to make their mark. Back in Cocke County, Tennessee, detective Derrick Woods prepares for grand jury testimony with full confidence that he has a murder conviction all but in the bag. "I told the guy flat out that it couldn't have happened that way," he says of a shooting to which he responded a week after graduating from the academy in the summer of 2002. When Woods arrived on the scene—a disheveled mobile home—he found a corpse crumpled in front of a couch and a suspect. "The individual told me he'd pointed the gun at the victim just to scare him," Woods recalls. "He claimed that the victim jumped up and grabbed the gun," which went off accidentally during the ensuing struggle.




The shot was at close proximity all right, says Woods. "But there was no blood above the couch. It was on the side wall, and when I looked closely I saw that both the direction and depth of the spatter pointed down." Woods says his academy training told him that the victim had to have been shot at an angle from above. "When I confronted the individual with what I saw, he admitted I was correct."




For session four graduate Bobby Moore, a Lynchburg, Virginia, investigator, the puzzle pieces began falling together even before he left Knoxville. Moore describes a shooting that occurred 6 months before he left for the academy. Police found the victim, a middle-aged woman, shot in the head and sitting upright on the floor in a room barely heated by a wood-burning stove. Crime-lab tests on the gloves she wore came back positive for gunpowder residue, suggesting she'd been handling a gun, though no gun was found at the scene. Even more confusing, bleeding from her massive head wound had produced a strange pattern of staining: strips of blood-soaked clothing alternating with completely blood-free fabric.




"It was one of those cases that just didn't add up," Moore says. "When I came to the academy, I left behind a lot of uncertainty as to what happened and exactly where this woman had been when she was killed." By the time Moore got back, he says, "I could see the whole scene play out in front of me."