Inconclusive

 

I was just stepping into the station when my partner, Sylvester, walked up to me. “We’ve got a body, Olivia,” he said.

A jogger had discovered a woman’s body in the woods during her morning run. She had reportedly seen a man fleeing the scene. The crime scene was grizzly: the victim had multiple stab wounds on her body.

As officers combed through the area, Sylvester and I questioned the jogger. Her body was trembling, and she could barely speak a word, so we sent her home. The next day, we drove over to her house to resume the questioning.

“Mrs. Senn, are you okay to talk?” I asked.

“Please, call me Sadie. And sure, I’m good.”

“Could you give us a description of the guy who fled the crime scene?”

Before she could answer, a man walked into the room and sat next to her. “I’m sorry, detectives, but my wife’s in no condition to be answering your questions,” he said.

Sadie’s demeanour changed, almost as if she feared him. Sylvester and I agreed to visit her later and gave her our cards, but her husband immediately took them from her hand and said she’d visit her when she was ready. Sadie said nothing; she only looked away. After getting into the car, Sylvester and I discussed our concerns about the husband.

“That guy’s hiding something,” I said.

“I hope she’s not trapped in there with the killer.”

“But he would’ve stopped her from calling the cops yesterday if that were the case, right?”

“Unless he didn’t know it was her at the time and panicked.”

“Either way, we need to separate them.”

“Let’s put surveillance on him.”

We ran a background check on Sadie’s husband, John. He was a former soldier, and had no criminal record. The case got more interesting when we discovered that our victim, who was identified as Audrey Miller, was a former army doctor who knew John. We checked CCTV footage and found the two of them meeting at hotels on several occasions. Our ME also found hairs on her body that matched John’s DNA.

We called him and Sadie in and questioned them separately. Sylvester took on John, while I spoke to Sadie. John had denied killing Audrey, even when Sylvester had brought up the DNA match. Sadie initially said she didn’t see who the killer was, but once I brought up the hairs, she said that her husband was the killer, and that he had threatened her life to keep her quiet.

Sadie also said that John had been maintaining relationships with several women over the past year, and that he would often beat her up when she questioned him about it. There were many scars on her body, both old and new, that supported her claims. Sadie also said that although John had thrown away the jacket he was wearing at the time of the murder into the garbage bin, she had recovered it and hidden it in the basement.

We got a search warrant and checked the basement, and there it was: the jacket smeared with blood. It was a match. When we showed John the bloody jacket, he shook his head and scoffed, looking down at the table.

“She said she’d get me, and she finally did.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“My wife… When she caught me cheating on her a couple of months ago with Audrey, she said she would punish me. This is how she does it.”

John said Audrey called him the day before and said Sadie was following her. He said when he heard the news of her death, he knew it was Sadie, and that he tried to stop her from talking to us so that she wouldn’t get caught.

“I thought killing Audrey was my punishment, but I guess I was wrong. I didn’t think she would go this far.”

What he was saying was hardly believable with all the evidence against him, but a seed of doubt grew within my mind on the small possibility of him being honest. However, John could prove his story neither to us nor the court, and Sylvester and I couldn’t find anything that could prove his innocence either. If Sadie had truly orchestrated all this, she had covered her tracks too well. John was sentenced to life in prison a week later.