If you read my earlier story, you know how I met Rochelle and how she helped me solve one of my cold cases. You also know that after that case, I moved from Nashville, Tennessee to Knoxville to live with her. I won't repeat all that here, but Rochelle writes murder mysteries based on actual cases and she sees cases with a different eye than a detective does. Sometimes all it takes is a different way of viewing evidence to solve a case, so her input is something I value a lot.
I'm still working on cold cases because that's the first thing Harry, the Chief of the Knoxville PD gave me to work on. Rochelle is helping on my current cold case.
On January 5,1990, a uniform was making a wellness check on a young couple in their early twenties. They'd missed going to church the Sunday before and the pastor had tried calling them three nights in a row with no answer. He asked the police to check on them and make sure everybody was all right.
When the uniform got there, the door was locked so he walked around the house and looked in the windows. In the ground floor bedroom, he saw a woman lying on a bed and though he pounded on the window frame several times, she didn't move. The officer immediately radioed for backup and the EMT's.
After the officer's backup got there, they broke in the door and searched the house. When they got to that ground floor bedroom, there was a nude woman on the bed and a man wearing all his clothes lying on the floor. Both had been shot and according to the coroner, they'd been dead about two days, but he couldn't be sure. That was because the house furnace was off and the temperature inside had dropped to about thirty-five degrees. He said it could have been up to ten days earlier.
The coroner took the bodies for autopsy and the detective in charge, Matt Wilson, started working the case. It looked to him like a robbery gone bad until he tried to identify the victims. They should have been Mr. Thomas Blair and his wife Emma. The man was indeed Mr. Blair. His face matched the driver's license in his wallet.
The woman was a different situation. Mrs. Blair's purse was on the kitchen table, but the driver's license picture wasn't the picture of the dead woman. The face was pretty close, but the dead woman had blonde hair instead of dark brown like the license photo and her face didn't match. The weight didn't match up either. The driver's license said Mrs. Blair weighed one-ten. The coroner weighed the dead woman at one forty.
Another thing the coroner found was that while the unknown blonde wasn't wearing a wedding ring, there was the telltale indentation of a wedding ring on her left ring finger. According to his report, based on the amount of skin change, he estimated the woman had probably been married at least two years and had taken the ring off within a couple weeks before her death. She could have been married longer if she took the ring off every night, but there was a slight callous where the ring rubbed her palm that indicated she didn't.
That left Matt with four questions. Who was the dead woman, where was Mrs. Blair, why did Mrs. Blair leave her purse on the kitchen table, and why did the unknown blonde not have her purse with her? His assumption was the killer had taken the unknown blonde's purse, but he couldn't figure out a motive for doing so without knowing the unknown blonde's identity.
He'd tried sending DNA samples from the unidentified woman to CODIS and hadn't gotten a match. The FBI wasn't able to match the unidentified woman's fingerprints the coroner had lifted to any they had on file.
Matt wasn't surprised that he couldn't get a match for the DNA or the fingerprints of the unidentified woman. Most crimes are committed by men, so there aren't that many samples of female DNA and fingerprints on file. What did surprise Matt was that after he interviewed most of the people who lived near the house, they were able to identify Mr. Blair, but they'd never seen the unidentified woman before.
Matt's research into the Blairs didn't reveal much in the way of any possible motives. Mr. Blair was a line foreman at a local factory and seemed to get along well with his employees. Mrs. Blair had a small at-home business selling cosmetics door to door, though the customers he found on a list in their desk indicated she hadn't taken any orders in a couple of months. The cosmetic company hadn't heard from her for about the same time, but said that wasn't unusual. Apparently a lot of women start into that business but get quickly discouraged and just stop.
Neither had any living relatives that Matt could find. Mr. Blair was abandoned as a baby and had been raised by three different sets of foster parents. Mrs. Blair's parents had been killed in a car accident when she was eighteen. She was the only child of an older couple and the rest of her family had also passed away.
Their joint checking account had about two thousand dollars in it. They had about another thousand in savings and two credit cards with small balances. Matt had watched the bank account and credit cards until Tennessee took control of the estate, but there was no activity on either the bank accounts or credit cards.
It was Matt's gut feeling that Emma Blair was at least partly responsible for both murders, but he had no hard evidence that pointed to that. Matt based that on the fact that the only DNA and fingerprints the techs were able to find other than Mr. Blair's and the female victim were probably Mrs. Blairs because the DNA matched what the techs got from hairs on a hairbrush in the bathroom. That pointed to Mrs. Blair committing both murders by herself.
That's where the case was when I picked it up in June of 2019, and it looked pretty hopeless to me. The case was almost thirty years old by then, so most of the people who were around at the time of the murders were either dead or had moved away. The house itself had been torn down and replaced with a newly built house so any evidence that might have been there was gone forever.
There were a few troubling things about Matt's investigation and his conclusion. The first problem was that according to the coroner's report, both Mr. Blair and the unknown blonde woman had been shot in the chest. Women almost never kill another person by shooting them, and fewer still kill by shooting the victim from the front. It happens in only about ten percent of murders committed by women and there's a reason for that.
Shooting someone in the chest means the shooter has to stand eyeball to eyeball with the victim and watch what happens. Most women won't do that because most women who kill know their victims on a more or less intimate basis and they don't like watching someone they know die. That's why female murderers frequently use poison or a drug overdose. They put the poison in food or in a drink or inject a lethal amount of a drug, legal or otherwise, into the victim. The victim dies sometime later when the woman doesn't have to be there to watch.
The third thing that was bothering me was that the unknown blonde was apparently lying on the bed on her back and totally nude when she was shot while Mr. Blair was standing beside the bed and fully clothed. The bullet that killed the unknown blonde was recovered from the mattress under her, and the bullet that killed Mr. Blair was found stuck in the wall of the bedroom at about chest height.
I could put together several scenarios where both had been clothed or both had been naked, but not what the evidence indicated. If both had been nude, it would could have been a situation where the killer surprised them in the act of having sex. That was what Matt figured had happened. His theory was that Mrs. Blair found her husband in bed with the unknown blonde, snapped, and killed them both. That would have made sense if they'd both been naked.
If both had been clothed, it could mean that Mrs. Blair knew what they were up to and surprised them before they could start. That would have made sense too.
For Mr. Blair to be dressed and the unknown blonde to be completely naked was something I couldn't figure out. I'd never come across a murder case with that crime scene scenario.
The recovered bullets were also a conundrum. The bullets recovered were of the spitzer type, meaning they were long and pointed instead of short and blunt. That type of bullet is usually found in rifle cartridges designed to yield high velocity and therefore a flat trajectory, but rifles are almost never used in a homicide that occurs indoors. I couldn't rule out a rifle, but I didn't know of any handgun that used spitzer bullets. A rifle didn't make sense either since handguns are much easier to manipulate in the closed space of a room.
The department firearms expert who examined the bullets measured them at 0.222 inches in diameter, and said the bullet weight was about right for a.218 Bee or one of its variants. The.218 Bee is a pretty specialized cartridge and not common because it was designed for long range target shooting. It was impossible to tell for sure because although Matt searched, he didn't find any empty cartridge cases. He also hadn't been able to find any type of firearm in the Blair's house.
There was no record of either Mr. or Mrs. Blair ever buying a gun and none of the people Matt interviewed said anything about either of them doing any shooting. If that was the case, the rifle had to come from somewhere else and the shooter was smart enough to pick up all the spent brass.
One of the possible explanations for both the use of a rifle and the lack of any brass was that the shooter had been outside the house and some distance away - in other words, a sniper. Matt had thought of that possibility, but discounted it after figuring out which direction the shots had to have come from. They would have had to come through a bedroom wall and the killer wouldn't have been able to see the victims. There were also no bullet holes in the bedroom wall other than from the bullet that had killed Mr. Blair.
Rochelle and I were a week into the case when she told me about her theory.
"I wrote a book about a similar case a while back. The wife found her husband and another woman in bed together. Needless to say, she was really mad that her husband had done that to her and she knew the husband kept a gun in the dresser drawer. Before he could stop her, the wife got the gun and killed them both. I think that's what probably happened here, though I haven't figured out why Mister Blair would have been dressed at the time.
"I also haven't come up with a reason the blonde woman didn't have her purse. No woman ever goes anywhere without her purse. I'm assuming the same thing as Matt, that Missus Blair took it. Maybe she took it and assumed the blonde woman's identity. They were about the same age and hair color isn't hard to change. They were about the same height, and if Missus Blair wasn't as heavy, she could always say she'd just lost weight. A woman could probably still pick out the differences in facial features, but for most men, weight loss might account for the facial difference too.
"What would help is if we knew who the blonde woman was. One way to do that would be to see if any blonde woman who fits her description was reported missing at about that time. The coroner's report said the woman was probably married or had been. Surely her husband or a friend would have reported her missing."
I hadn't thought about that, but it was a stretch. If the unknown blonde was married, it was a possible way to find out her identity. If she took off her ring because she was divorced, maybe not. I had no idea where my ex was or what she was doing because I didn't really care.
"That's a possibility, but you've been married. Do you know how your ex is doing?"
Rochelle grinned.
"Sure I do. He has a page on Facebook and I know his email address. He blocked me on Facebook, but I guess he was too lazy to change his email address.
He's been teaching high school English in Chattanooga since we divorced. He said I'd never do as well as he would, but I'm a published author and I make more money than he does. Every time I publish a new book, I send him an email reminding him of what he said. He always replies that he's obviously happier than I am because he doesn't feel the need to remind me that I left a perfectly good man when I divorced him."
"But if he didn't send you a reply would you report it to the police?"
