On Monday, July 7 of 1978, Mr. John Davis of Knoxville didn't show up for work at his job as an EMT for the Knoxville Fire Department. He'd not missed a day of work in three years of his employment with the force, so that was unusual. Still, that Monday was the end of a long July 4th weekend, and the Fire Chief chalked it up to Mr. Davis just recovering from the department cookout that weekend.
When he hadn't shown up for the entire week and hadn't called in, the Fire Chief called the Knoxville PD and asked them to do a wellness check since Mr. Davis was single and lived by himself in a small house out in the country.
The police officer who made the wellness check found the front door standing open, so he announced himself three times, waited a few minutes, and then went inside. He got as far as the living room before backing out and calling for the Crime Scene techs, the coroner and a detective. That detective was Harry.
When the Crime Scene techs and coroner got there, they saw what the officer had seen. In the middle of the living room carpet was a huge bloodstain and in one spot of that bloodstain was a small hole in the carpet. After cutting out that section of the carpet and placing it in an evidence bag, one of the techs probed the hole in the floor under the carpet and found something filling the hole. After digging it out, he realized it was a full-metal jacketed bullet from what looked to him like a.380 or 9mm pistol. He bagged the bullet and then assisted the coroner in measuring the extents of the blood stain.
By using some factors relative to how much blood a carpet can absorb and how quickly the stain will spread before the blood coagulates, the coroner estimated the blood stain consisted of at least two liters of blood and maybe three depending upon the injury and the time the body had lain there. His further estimate, based upon the fact that the blood was mostly dried, was that the murder had happened from two to three days prior. He couldn't be more certain than that because the air conditioner in the house was running and the relative humidity inside the house was low which would have dried the blood faster.
Harry had seen enough crime scenes were the victim was shot in the chest that he agreed with the Crime Scene tech. It was pretty obvious to Harry that somebody had shot an unknown person in the house and that that unknown person had bled out on the carpet. Then, somebody took the body somewhere else and disposed of it. His first two questions were who was that victim and where was his or her body. Without the answer to the first question, it was going to be difficult to start any investigation. Harry needed the answer to the second in order to prove the person had been murdered. Once he had that information, he would have a place to start his investigation.
The answer for who the victim was wasn't difficult to figure out. The house was rented to John Davis and the pickup truck in the drive was registered to John Davis. Since John Davis hadn't been seen in at least seven days and there were no other reports of missing persons during the week prior, there was a strong probability that Mr. Davis was the victim. While DNA testing was still in the future, the lab techs did get a blood type from the bloodstain. That blood type, B negative, wasn't absolute proof the victim was Mr. Davis, but since that blood type matched the blood type on his Knoxville Fire Department records and only about one and a half percent of the US population have that blood type, it was pretty conclusive.
The fingerprints the techs lifted from various areas of the house all matched, and were identified by the FBI as the prints taken from Mr. Davis when he joined the Knoxville Fire Department. Hairs the techs collected from the comb in the bathroom were dark brown and Mr. Davis had dark brown hair.
The TBI was able to identify the bullet as a common.380 ACP round, but was damaged to the extent that matching it to a firearm was probably not possible.
When DNA testing became available, Harry had the TBI run a DNA analysis of samples from the piece of carpet and from hairs the Crime Scene techs had collected from a comb in Mr. Davis' bathroom. The TBI tech who did the analysis said it looked to her like someone had tried to clean up the blood because it looked pretty diluted, but she was still able to get a sample. The DNA from both were identical. The fingerprints coupled with the DNA analysis pretty much proved the victim was the resident of the house, i.e., Mr. Davis.
Harry kept hoping Mr. Davis' body would turn up, but over the years between the murder and Harry's retirement, no body was ever found. That wasn't unusual since the area around Knoxville has some pretty wild country where nobody lives except animals and some of those animals are the clean-up crew for Mother Nature. If the body hadn't been in the open for very long, a hunter might have stumbled on a corpse, but if more than a year had passed there might not have been much left to find. If the body had been buried, it would be even harder to find.
When Harry turned the case file over to me, he said he was certain Mr. Davis was dead, but he couldn't prove it.
"Richard, I did the best I could with what I had, but there wasn't much to investigate. The only thing I'm sure of is that a man or woman who lost that much blood would have died. I couldn't develop a motive for the murder either. The people he worked with all said he was a hard worker who never caused any problems about anything and always volunteered for extra hours. I couldn't find any criminal record on him anywhere, so he'd probably not been involved with anybody trying to settle a score for some reason.
"I went through the house myself, and nothing looked disturbed like somebody was looking for something or that it was a robbery gone bad. He had a few bucks in his desk drawer, but it didn't look like that desk drawer had been opened.
"I kept hoping his body would turn up, but after forty years, I doubt there's much left. I stopped working on the case about ten years ago because there wasn't a case to work. Maybe you'll do better."
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I'm Detective Richard Owens, and if you've read any of my other stories, you'll know I have a helper named Rochelle. Well, truth be told, Rochelle is a lot more than a helper. She's a writer of crime novels and uses the cold cases I spend almost all my time on now as the basis for her novels. She also has these attacks of libido from time to time...well, about five nights a week if I'm honest about it, and she looks to me to help her out. I'm more than willing to do that, willing enough that we live together now. Helping Rochelle out that way is always fun, sometimes a little tiring, but always fun.
Anyway, I took the file home with me to show Rochelle. She skimmed over the few pages that were in the folder and then frowned.
"Harry was right about there not being a case to solve. Without a body, he wouldn't know where to begin."
"Well, that's where I think we are too. I don't see a good place to start given how little information we have. I just thought maybe you could base a novel on it since you can basically make up the crime any way you want."
Rochelle shook her head.
"Well, I can do that, but good crime novels have to have a solid base. I need to know more about this guy before I start to do that. If he was working as an EMT, he had to have gotten the training and certification from somewhere, but it's not in the Knoxville Police Department file. The file does say he was an EMT for the Hopkinsville, Kentucky Fire Department and before that, a medic in Vietnam. He probably got his training in the Army and was certified once he came back, maybe by the Hopkinsville Fire Department. We need his Army records and his Hopkinsville Fire Department file to know for sure. If you can get us those, maybe they'll point us in some direction."
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The next morning, I sent a request to US Army records for Mr. Davis' military file. Based upon my prior requests, that was going to take about a week. I hoped the Hopkinsville Fire Department would move at little faster.
Once I explained the reason for my call, Chief Perkins said he had joined the Hopkinsville Fire Department after Mr. Davis had already left, but he'd see if the department still had his personnel file. He said if they did it would be a paper file, so he'd have to copy it and send me a copy.
