Читать книгу Dead Center - Frank J. Daniels - Страница 7

Foreword

This is a true story. I came upon this tale of greed, lust and violent death through my duties as District Attorney for Colorado’s Twenty-first Judicial District in western Colorado. I was called upon to head the investigation. The death happened quickly, taking perhaps fifteen seconds. The investigation spanned better than four years and resulted in eleven thousand pages of investigative reports. Though the story has remained in my memory, for the purposes of this tale, I painstakingly went through all the evidence again, including the reports, page by page, line by line, repeatedly, to distill and repair, so that as I reconstructed the story, only relevant evidence would be included. As with any major investigation, there were many avenues pursued that led nowhere. I have endeavored to keep intact the essence of the investigation, of which I was a part, while bringing out what was meaningful to the course of the prosecution I pursued or influenced the case as it unfolded. Some of the time periods have been condensed and information on investigative leads which may have come out at different points have been connected to make the narrative flow more smoothly. Some, but not all, of the grammar in reports, interviews and conversations were spruced up a bit. In addition, I have reconstructed the dialogue from the memory of participants, court testimony and police reports.

I wrote the book for two reasons: first and foremost, this was the most engrossing and intriguing case in which I ever have been involved; second, this is an excellent example of how an investigation progresses from the prosecution perspective, complete with a complex and interesting set of forensic evidence analyses and results. My intent was to put together a book that makes an enthralling read as well as an educational study of a murder unraveled (or at least as unraveled as we could get it).