Mark Dawson.net

The following is just the first 3 paragraphs of a very strange journey.... 

FULL EXPOSURE

 By

Mark Dawson

Packing my suitcase, I was trying to think of everything I would need for the next four days.  I was sure there were things I was forgetting. My mind would not stay focused. What the hell was I getting myself into?  Was I the only person alive who believed in standing by a friend who had been deserted by everyone else because he had been arrested and charged with the most heinous crime imaginable - first-degree murder?

             Things in my life had really started to look up. I had just ended a fifteen-year-old marriage, been single and then met a wonderful girl who was the best thing to happen to me in a long, long time. Our relationship was new and fresh and full of all kinds of promise, but here I was going off to Arizona for God knows how long, to try and find out the truth about what really happened in a sixteen-year-old murder case. Who really had bludgeoned Hogan’s Heroes Television star, Bob Crane, while he slept and why did it take fourteen years to finally make an arrest? I was a tangled ball of mixed up emotions. I was helping out someone who was in the jam of his life, while I put my own on hold. I had attended a three-week preliminary hearing one year ago.  While I was sure that the circumstantial evidence that the state had presented, as well as my friend’s word that he had nothing to do with killing his best friend had appeased me, still, in the back of my mind I wondered, could I be wrong? What if he was responsible for the murder and the stress of the trial proved too much for him? Would he snap and do something to himself or, worse yet, would he take me with him? What if I got to close to finding out something he didn’t want me to know? He had, after all, given me full access to the case files and police reports. Would I feel better locking my door of the two bedroom apartment we would share in Phoenix at night?

             It hadn’t really sunk in yet that I was actually going this time.  There had been so many delays, so many continuances, motions for this and motions for that.  Prosecutors in the Maricopa County district attorney’s office all hoped that their names would not be called to head the case. And what a case it was; a black hole of a case if ever there was one.  A sixteen-year-old murder that the two previous Maricopa County Prosecuting Attorneys in the 1970’s and 80’s had refused to prosecute because of the lack of evidence, and in one County Attorney’s words concerning the Scottsdale Police Department’s investigation of the murder, “The worst I’ve ever seen.” But now, thanks to an overzealous “book cop”, and a new County Attorney, Rick Romley, the prosecution was now in full swing.  Romely, who was up for re-election, had a mountain of problems that had sullied his office: AZ Scam, crack sales at a bar owned by a relative, constituents caught up and busted in a nudie bar raid and the infamous Tucson Temple Murders case in which Romley and his office still insist the four men cleared of wrongdoing had been involved. But the Crane Murder was a murder coming back from the mists of time.  It was a case that had everything one could want. A real “Whodunit”;  sex, lies, pornography, videotape, celebrity and murder.

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