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the wife of a respected police officer was murdered in her home but the motive was unclear
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the crime went unsolved for more than a decade until a cold case unit took a fresh look and found evidence on the
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nine one one call that had previously been overlooked i got a call felt man stay on the line
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with me [Music] [Music] [Music] most everyone in the small town of springboro ohio knew jim and vicki
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barton jim was a lieutenant in the local police department a rising star who many
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believed would one day be chief of police he's always been very thorough very
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professional easy to to work with and easy to get a hold of his wife vicki was a nurse supervisor at
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the local hospital she loved her work she was a very compassionate person so i knew she was very good at what she did
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one night after work jim returned home and found everything in disarray in the bedroom
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he found his wife she had been shot to death my 911 has just been killed i think
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where she is this is the senate there was a pill over her head and she's not breathing and she's got
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her clothes off i don't know what's what's going on but give me some give me
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some help out here dispatch right now [Music] just getting there was the first thing i
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wanted to do a lot of things were going through my mind knowing jim was a policeman did
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someone did someone try to hurt him hurt his family when paramedics arrived they pronounced
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vicky barton dead at the scene she had been shot three times in the head execution style
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i found that odd two behind the ear that was different we never did really come to a full
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understanding of was it overkill we just don't know in what order they occurred
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the motive didn't appear to be robbery vicky's jewelry was still in the bedroom
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and jim's gun collection had been ransacked but nothing was missing investigators found no foreign
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fingerprints in the house they dusted four feet high on those walls all the way back
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and nothing they dusted the bedroom nothing at the autopsy the medical examiner identified the murder weapon as a 22
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caliber he also found evidence that vicky had been sexually assaulted during the
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attack and bitten i had swapped this area and collected saliva and that was in the next lab they
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were able to recover dna of the person who had bitter this dna did not match anyone in the
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database of known criminal offenders as a precaution investigators also compared the dna to vicki's husband jim
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and it also didn't match who would do something to her she was the most likable person
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she could get along with anyone earlier on the day of the murder vicki called her husband to say that a
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young man had come to the door needing help because his car had run out of gas and jim didn't like that and he said
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what'd you do i hope you put a gun in his head she goes no and you know it was
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okay jim he just won a gas he was a very polite young man and you know i got him some gas
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he left was it possible that the man was actually casing the barton home and was the one who committed the murder
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it could have been planned the whole thing i mean they could have targeted jim and vicki
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or it could have been totally random i don't like to arrive at a decision too
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quick but i didn't like what i was seeing i'll leave it at that the execution-style murderer vicki
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barton a police lieutenant's wife rocked the small town of springboro ohio when
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we're talking about a woman being murdered in her home in the middle of the day in warren county
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that was big news that was country that's where people went to get away from bad things so it was big news
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police had to consider whether someone jim barton once arrested had sought revenge
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there has never been a murder of anyone connected to a law enforcement officer in this county
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that i can remember we've had officers killed but never a family member and never a
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homicide investigators checked ex-convicts from jim's case files but didn't come up with
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any leads days passed then weeks and no new information surfaced on the one-year anniversary of vicki's
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murder the case remained unsolved the case was worked very heavily especially because it was a police
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officer's wife that was murdered and they went through every lead that they had
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jim barton went on with his life i offered to just lend an ear if he needed a friend to talk to that had
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known her and he asked me for my phone number he wrote it down said i will probably call
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you and he did the very next night fifteen months after vicky's murder he married marianne lacy vicky's childhood
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friend and the bridesmaid at their wedding but the marriage was in trouble from the
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start within months marianne started noticing strange behavior she said jim spent hours alone in the
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darkened basement it was very quiet and i never knew what he was doing and that just that really put me into a
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panic after 17 months the couple divorced meanwhile investigators never gave up the search for vicki's killer
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this was something that haunted that community out there it was haunting a scary mystery and
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and people known to the community and loved and respected it needed to be resolved then four years after the
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murder police got their first real break gary henson a small-time criminal was arrested on a drug charge
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during police questioning he said he knew something about vicki barton's murder
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he kind of started crying and broke down to the detective and said i have something i need to tell you and he told
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him that his brother was involved in the murder of the police officer's wife
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henson's half-brother william phelps told him about the crime phelps said it was supposed to be a
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robbery but his accomplice probably high on drugs lost control sexually assaulted
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vicki barton then killed her a background check revealed william phelps was not at work on the day vicky
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was murdered unfortunately he was unavailable for questioning phelps killed himself just three months
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after vicki barton's murder he acted strange that he actually went through a paranoid stage
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sleeping with a gun and making sure the windows were locked every night and he put traps outside his window to make
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alarm in case somebody would come up he acted like a guy that was very afraid after the homicide
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and gary henson said that phelps never revealed the identity of his accomplice as a result of what gary henson told
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them they then exhumed the body of his brother will phelps to try to determine if the dna that was found on vicki's
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body was the same forensic pathologist dr lee lehmann relied on will phelps teeth for the dna
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the reason we extract teeth for dna is because inside the teeth the cells are held in calcium
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very firm hard materials in the enamel and it's not contaminated by bacteria
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and decomposition william phelps dna did not match the saliva on vicki barton's body
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gary henson's dna didn't match either we have evidence that he was in jail at
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the time of her murder and there was no way he could have been that person it was another
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dead end i got up and took a long walk in fact i left the office i drove around for a
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while thinking where do we go next another four years went by then a cold case unit reopened the
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investigation of vicki barton's murder they were particularly interested in jim
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barton's comment to his colleague at the murder scene he told me he said they killed her man
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those murdering bastards they killed her but how did jim barton know there was more than one perpetrator you
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don't talk about them and they unless you know who them and they are [Music]
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eight years after vicki barton's murder the warren county sheriff's office in
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ohio formed a cold case unit specifically to reopen the investigation they started at the very beginning by
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listening to the jim barton 911 after finding his wife's body i'm checking the rest of the house
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[Music] all my stuff's laying out in here there oh man i gotta call phelp man stay on the line
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with me we were beginning some realization here that there's something to this or
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something more to this did he say he had to call for help or that he had to call phelps i got a call
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man an informant identified william phelps as one of the men involved in vicki barton's murder
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and it sounded like vicky's husband jim mentioned phelps name on the 911 call
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oh man i got a call man jim barton still a lieutenant with the springboro police insisted he said he
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needed to call for help he said he didn't know anyone named phelps he was already on 9-1-1 so there's no
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reason or need to call for help and again the word that i heard was phelps to find out what jim barton said on the
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911 tape investigators turned to dr robert fox a faculty member of ohio state university
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a linguist and expert on acoustic phonics speech recognition is a science we put a
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lot of money into it but nothing is good as the human ear and the human perceptual system in understanding
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speech in part because human listeners are also human speakers and there's a
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very close connection between those two dr fox was asked if he could determine if jim barton said
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phelps or for help and to eliminate any potential bias that was all he was told [Music]
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911 my wife has just been killed i think where she is dr fox took the 911 call and broke it
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down into wave forms visual pictures that detailed the energy of voice and cadence
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he was particularly interested in two groups of sounds vowels which are soft and fricatives or hard sounds
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fricatives include sounds like f as in frank and the reason it's interesting is
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that in this particular call one of the critical issues with whether he said f as in phelp or fine or farm or
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whether there was an h in there that might have indicated that he said help give me some
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dr fox used a computer program to perform a spectrum analysis of the sounds associated with individual
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letters in the recording after i had isolated a number of different f's for example in mr barton's
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voice i then compared these different f's in a systematic way one to another i
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also excised several examples of mr barton saying h and i compared those to the fricatives give me some help
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give me some help when the key part of the tape only two and a half seconds was analyzed
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the result was clear i got a call man barton was saying a simple f sound as in phelps
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he was not saying something more complex such as for help i must admit that this 911 tape was the
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clearest tape i'd ever heard of that fashion very easy to understand very easy to analyze
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and the audio analysis also showed something unexpected jim barton was moving things around the house while
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he was talking on the telephone lieutenant [Music] you shouldn't be doing this he was an
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evidence technician he's a trained evidence technician he knows he shouldn't be touching or moving anything
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in that house did you have anything to do with your home being burglarized that day no i did
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that did you have anything to do with your wife's murder that day nothing jim barton still maintained his
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innocence and volunteered to take a polygraph test jim barton failed the test when news of barton's possible
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involvement became public a local waitress came forward to say she saw jim barton and william phelps
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sitting together in her restaurant she saw jim barton talking to well felt she saw them together jim barton denied
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knowing will phelps but she testified that she had seen them together in the past
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ten years after the murder jim barton was arrested and charged with complicity to commit involuntary
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manslaughter the police informant gary henson now revealed one last piece of information
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he had previously withheld he told our investigators that jim barton had contacted his brother
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and said i needed my wife scared and could you do a burglary to scare her but why would jim barton
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want to scare his wife when that question was finally answered no one not even jim's best friends
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could believe it [Music] investigators wondered why jim barton a 15-year veteran of the springboro police
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department would hire others to intimidate and frighten his wife vicky then they remembered that jim barton had
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actively campaigned for the job of police chief but to get that position he had to live within the city limits of
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springboro and apparently vicky didn't want to move from their 10-acre farm located outside of town that's why we
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think he did this he wanted to scare his wife off of the farm they were in a remote desolate area into the city where
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he would then be able to apply for chief jim wanted to scare vicki he hired these
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people to come in and scare from some of the testimony i heard or listening to the cold case he actually
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paid these people an extra dollar amount to fire one shot above vicki's head
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investigators believe that it was william phelps who knocked on vicki's door telling her he ran out
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of gas and that he did so to make sure she was alone [Music] phelps later returned to the house with
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an accomplice intending to rob her [Music] instead his accomplice possibly high on
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drugs lost control and sexually assaulted vicky then he killed her because she could have identified them
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[Music] prosecutors believe jim barton came home expecting his wife to tell him about the robbery
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instead he found she had been murdered he called 911 but according to audio experts mumbled
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something incriminating almost as if he was talking to himself i'm checking the brush the rest of the
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house all my stuff's laying out in here there oh man william phelps killed himself three
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months after vicky's murder most likely because of his involvement in this case
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he did not leave a note and his wife wondered for years what happened and why he committed suicide
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ironically jim barton moved into springboro shortly after vicky's murder but he never achieved his dream of
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becoming police chief he was passed over for the promotion three different times
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before the trial jim barton was offered a plea bargain in return for identifying phelps accomplice
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but he refused he always insisted he knew nothing about the crime it's hard to say what jim barton knows
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and doesn't know we plan at some point to go to him and once this is all resolved the appeals are over and ask
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him if he can help us out with who that other person is but it has not happened yet
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jim barton was convicted of complicity to commit manslaughter he was sentenced to a minimum of 15
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years in prison had it not been for the forensic analysis of jim's 9-1-1 call
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the case might never have been solved jim barton is where he needs to be doesn't necessarily settle well since
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it's a cop but again it's the truth a crime was committed and justice has been served
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these are pros and when you're a pro it's real simple no one gets away with murder
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i don't care what uniform you're wearing no one gets away with murder [Music]
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[Music] [Music] you