The case of "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

          Throughout the years that I have worked on cases, I have not run into a case where someone crossed the path of one of our escaped convicts. In the case of A Good Man is Hard to Find, I found many different pieces of evidence that brought me to a narrow list of suspects. In the beginning, we talked to many family-friends of the family that was brutally and hatefully murdered on the spot. Once we found out that they were going on a vacation and that the Grandmother had already began talking about running into the misfit, we thought that the odds of them running into each other was slim if not close to impossible. However, in an investigation, you cannot rule-out a suspect on the "odds" of things happening. We, me and my squad, analyzed every inch of the crime scene and even looked under the mass amounts of leaves. Once we found a piece of gum, we knew that we could get the DNA off the gum. As we were sending that to the crime lab, we also found many different shotgun shells with finger prints all over them. After many hours of searching for more clues, we hit a stand-still. There was not much else to do other than send in the evidence we have found and wait for it to get back to us.

          A few days later, we got our results. The gum was being chewed by a man named Bobby Lee. Quickly, we ran background checks and got information that he was one of the men caught on camera helping The Misfit escape from jail along with a guy named Hiram. My team and I figured now, "this has to be The Misfit and his crew." We knew now that Bobby Lee had at the very least been there. With this information in mind, we got the analysis of the shotgun shells we had eagerly been waiting to receive. We noticed that Hiram was the one with his finger prints all over it. Now we had probable cause to grab our suspects and begin questioning them.

         We spent weeks trying to find The Misfit's crew, however, we got a call that they got arrested in Atlanta, Georgia trying to rob a bank. Now that we had them in custody, we could question them. After reading them their Miranda Rights, we asked the question everyone wanted to know, "was The Misfit at the crime scene?" After hours of questioning, they seemed to be a tight bunch, and they stuck to their friend and wouldn't say if he had been there. In my profession I've seen many dead people. It is a part of what I do for a living. I've also interrogated many people, yet this one subject, The Misfit, didn't seem to change his emotion from a careless face. I just couldn't understand how someone could brutally murder an entire family, even the little girl whom they left with a hole through her chest cavity. I knew once I placed my then tearing eyes on that little girls body that I had to figure out who did this and why they did it. At this moment in the investigation, I had began to lose hope. The longer I stared into the eyes of a mentally, puzzling suspect, I got even more frustrated. I went back to the stacks of evidence, and there just seemed to be nothing to place him at the scene of the crime.

          I went back to the crime scene checking for anything else that may lead me to evidence placing The Misfit on this old plantation, yet there seemed to be nothing. I walked up to an old cabin up the road from the crime scene that appeared to be unused in several years. I placed a note on the window with my number so that I may ask the owner of the property some questions of who he might have seen on his land. Anxiety began to settle in my chest as I waited on a call for hours. Finally, the owner called, and I, full of excitement in my voice, asked him question after question. Tom Jimmy, the owner of the property and an older man who has been living off the grid for several years, finally stated that he has some vital evidence. After listening I told him to come in and show me what he's talking about. Later, Tom came in and showed me pictures that were taken with deer cameras set up on the trees taking a picture every time there was a movement. Now I had entire flip-books full of how the crime went on. I even had a close up of The Misfit's face in one of them.

          I returned to the questioning room and didn't say a word. I just looked at the man that I now knew was involved in killing a whole innocent family. As I sat down,  with a calm voice I asked, "Sir, I'm going to give you one more chance. Were you involved in the killing that took place on the old plantation?" All The Misfit did was stare at me with a blank stare, until he rolled his eyes and shook his head "no." I then slapped the pictures I had just received from Tom on the table showing him I knew everything that happened. Now I only needed to ask one more question: What was his reasoning? All he could reply with was, "Why not?" I looked him in the eyes telling him that his criminal career is now over. He belongs to the state of Georgia.