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[Music] with no forensic evidence found at a murder scene investigators were baffled
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but they suspected that the victim's dog had witnessed the crime if she had forensic scientists needed
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some way to find out what the dog had seen [Music] [Music] north liberty iowa is such a small town
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it doesn't take much effort to know your neighbors but one resident the town's people
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seldom saw was 28 year old john hebel john was somewhat of a recluse john kind of
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stayed to himself it wasn't unusual if we didn't see him for a month he'd be doing things at his home or
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repairing things or out with his friends at one point in time in john's life
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he was a narcotics user and very possibly also a narcotics dealer in february of 1999 john's mother was
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really worried she hadn't heard from her son in over two months we'd been trying to reach my son
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and that he wasn't answering and we were afraid something was wrong so she called the local sheriff who
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found john's van parked in his driveway but no one answered the door they smelt an odor coming from inside
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the trailer he described that odor as being the owner of death the officers forced their way through
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the trailer door and found hebel dead slumped in a chair the body appeared to be in a position of
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someone who had been watching tv and had laid their head down on their arm on their pillow and gone to sleep the body
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was completely covered i had a blanket over the entire body over the head over all the body
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he had been shot twice in the back of the head with the 22-caliber pistol the advanced date of decomposition
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revealed the murder happened weeks earlier [Music] there were no signs of forced entry
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and the trailer doors were locked that indicated to us that someone actually left the residence and took the
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time to use a key to bolt that door shut again keeping other individuals from being able to easily
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access and enter the trailer in the home police found a small amount of marijuana
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and some drug paraphernalia john didn't deserve to have this happen to him he may not have been the perfect
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person in the world he may not have had the best lifestyle in the world but i could almost guarantee you would
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give you the shirt off his back but john's prized collection of guns was missing
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including a uniquely customized gold cup 45 semi-automatic pistol this colt gold cup was described to me
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from one of john's friends is you would have to pry that gun away from his cold dead fingers
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he was able to take guns apart and work on them repair them customize them put fancy gold on them things like that
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it sounded as if john had been killed for the gun collection and another one of john's prized
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possessions was missing his three-year-old husky keisha [Music] oh he loved his dog his dog was his life
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she was his baby she had a lot of hamburgers a lot of pizza hot dogs things like that i think she ate mostly
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people food she was very spoiled [Music] police soon learned that a dog matching
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keisha's description was found a month earlier wandering aimlessly several miles away
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she was just standing in the middle of the street days looking around like where am i what
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am i doing here john's parents identified keisha the evidence suggested she had been
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driven there and dropped off keisha was found during january when the roads are typically dirty and muddy that
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keisha's condition was was pretty clean the crime scene showed that the dog's
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leash which normally was kept inside the trailer next to the door was actually in
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the victim's van it suggested the victim's van had been used to transport
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the dog and dispose of the dog this was just one unusual detail in an investigation that was to become even
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more bizarre an autopsy on 28 year old john heppel revealed he had been killed long before
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his body was found but the medical examiner was unable to determine exactly when he was killed
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without an idea as to when the time of death is it obviously becomes very much more difficult to determine who are
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suspects and who are people that you can rule out hebel's dog kisha was found on january
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22nd hebel's telephone answering machine had messages not yet listened to the
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earliest unheard message was left that same day january 22nd john would not use the answering machine
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to screen his telephone calls if someone called john one to talk to him so therefore we knew that
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january 22nd 23rd john was dead with this information authorities questioned john's friends
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and family we had three primary suspects in this case mike harding andrew rich and sharon snyder
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the first suspect mike harting was a friend of john hebels a witness recalled seeing harding's truck parked near
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hebel's home around the time of the murder mike harding was good friends with john
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we knew that john and and mike had some narcotics business together but harding had an alibi for the time of
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the murder and he passed the polygraph test [Music] the next two suspects andrew rich and
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sharon schneider were friends of john's who lived about an 18-hour drive away in
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grey bull wyoming [Music] we learned from a good friend who saw andrew rich and john heppel together on
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january 18th of 1999 that in fact andrew rich had been at the trailer house of john hebel
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but andy said john was alive and well when he and sharon left to return home police searched the couple's apartment
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and found marijuana methamphetamine and several 22-caliber bullets the same caliber used to kill hebel
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these bullets along with the slugs from hebel's body were sent to the fbi lab
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for a neutron activation test that's where the lead is shaved off of the bullet
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it's melted down and atoms are counted counted then compared but the atomic composition
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of the bullets recovered from john hebel was not what investigators had hoped for
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the results showed us that the bullets that we had recovered from john were not the same bullets that was
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removed from andy rich's house in grebel wyoming investigators found smudge marks on the
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inside windows of rich's jeep similar to those caused by animals when pressing their noses against the glass
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[Music] was it possible that rich used his car to transport hebel's dog across town after the murder
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police took kisha's nose print in the same way they collect human fingerprints
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each dog's nose print is as unique as a fingerprint unfortunately we weren't able to get the
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type of smudges or prints actually from the vehicle that would enable us to do that but it certainly was an interesting
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element that we pursued for some time after several months with no forensic evidence and very few leads
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the investigation into john hebel's murder was starting to turn cold so investigators turned
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the hebel's dog for more information as it turns out that dog was going to play a very important part in
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solving john's death a year after john hebel's murder police suspected hebel's best friend andy rich
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was somehow involved in his death but they had no proof all investigators knew was that rich had
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some unusual career aspirations we knew that his lifelong goal was to be a hitman for the mafia we had
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interviewed past girlfriends we had interviewed other associates of andy rich and he always
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portrayed himself as a tough guy that's that's how andy rich wants to be
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remembered we were concerned that sharon snyder the girlfriend of andrew rich had
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information that she was fearful about telling us the impression was that she was being guarded out of fear her fear
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of andrew rich that was a good punching bag for him he abused me a lot there was a lot of abuse
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not just physical there was a lot of verbal abuse police looked into sharon's background
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to see if she had ever been involved in illegal activity and they found something
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sharon snyder was purchasing guns in a different location she would give those guns to andy rich
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some of those guns went to john hebel we had a violation of the federal statute the federal firearms narcotics
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statute was the wedge that we used to split andy rich and sharon snyder [Music] sharon told a different story about that
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visit with john hebel i honestly couldn't live with myself anymore i had to face up to whatever was going to happen
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to me sharon said she dropped andy off at hebel's home about three days before the
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murder then left to visit her daughter about an hour's drive away a few days later andy arrived driving
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john's van they put some of his guns into their car took john's van to his home and then
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drove their car back to wyoming i had no idea that john was dead now i had no idea about that i had wonders of why
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he had these guns after a brief stay in wyoming sharon said that andy left alone with the guns
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took off in the middle of the night or around four o'clock in the morning and
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headed to texas he was gone three weeks it was andy's own stupidity for telling
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me where he was going we started to learn things from sharon that we had suspected all along
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and at that point in time it became really important for us to find any information that we could that
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was going to corroborate what sharon had to say police visited the man andy richt stayed
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with during that trip to texas he said rich had given him an unusual gold cup 45-caliber semi-automatic
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pistol to pay off a drug debt but by this time a year later he no longer had the gun
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investigators then located a second man rich visited on that trip who still had in his possession a box of ammunition
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richard sold to him inside the box investigators found several short black and white hairs
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microscopic analysis confirmed that the hairs were from an animal but there were
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no roots attached so nuclear dna testing was impossible but they were able to extract
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mitochondrial dna from the hair mitochondrial dna is passed to animals and humans only from the mother
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joy halverson a california veterinarian specializes in animal dna it will not be as
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unique a profile as i might get from blood or saliva or hair with a root but it will still allow me to say
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yes this sample matches the reference dog or it doesn't match the reference dog breeds of dogs and to
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some extent cats today are really only a few hundred years old and so they don't differ that much
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that you could definitively say for example well that's a dalmatian halverson performed a pcr test which
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stands for polymer race chain reaction it's basically like taking one page out
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of a book and ignoring the rest of the book and xeroxing that page a million times
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and now you have that page in so much quantity that you can see it then the sample was sequenced to get a
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visual representation of the dna type when she compared the dna from the hair in the ammunition box to a sample of
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keisha's hair she found a haplotype in both sets that was extremely rare occurring only in 1 in 300 dogs
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[Music] the chance of having that match just by random was pretty low combined with i'm sure the circumstances
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of the case if i were sitting on the jury i would find that to be a compelling piece of evidence
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in the case this was forensic proof that rich was in possession of an item stolen from john
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heppel then investigators got another break the man who was given the gold cup pistol said he still had the gun box
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inside was a note listing all of the custom alterations made to the pistol as well as the costs
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doug van noyk asked me if i thought that was john's handwriting and um i thought it was
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but to be sure investigators needed an expert for that they turned to gary licht a
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forensic document examiner he compared the note to known samples of hebel's handwriting
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the question material was written with somewhat heavy pressure in the known writings
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that was also written with that same sort of pressure they were also all hand printed and his known writings also
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relied heavily on printing and not cursive he looked for unique features in individual letters in john's known
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writings features he then tried to locate in the question document in the creation of other letters such as
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a lowercase d i look to see if it's made with one stroke in other words the pen moves down
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on the stem back up slightly and counterclockwise motion forms the loop on the lowercase d
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based on his comparisons licht was able to draw a definitive conclusion i was able to identify the writer of the
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question material as john hebel proof that it was hebel's gun and no other that andy took with him to texas
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based on the handwriting analysis and the dog dna andy rich was arrested and charged with
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john hebel's murder he was nothing he was a user of people he would manipulate he would use them
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um for his own gain he didn't care about anybody didn't care about anybody but
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himself in court rich had an interesting response to the forensic evidence against him
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the forensic evidence showed that andy rich was in john hebel's home around the time of his murder
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based on the position of the body prosecutors believe rich killed hebel after he fell asleep in the living room
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watching tv the motive was apparently money rich wanted to sell hebel's gun collection for either cash or drugs
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the shooting may have agitated hebel's dog to stop the barking rich put keisha in
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hebel's van then drove her several miles away before letting her out in a strange
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neighborhood little did he realize that keisha's hair would be found in the stolen box of ammunition
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and that canine dna testing would prove it came from hebel's beloved dog andy hated that dog andy could not stand
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keisha i don't know why he spared her i have no idea how can you spare an animal and shoot a
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human [Music] when rich sold hebel's prized pistol in texas he left the note inside with
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handwriting that matched hebble's known handwriting samples the witness testimony and the forensic
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testimony piled together just added up like bricks in this case and it was because of the two and putting those two
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together that we were able to be able to solve this case in the first place on the day before his murder trial was
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to start andy rich made a surprise announcement he said i killed john hebel for his guns
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but he never turned around and never addressed the family never apologized for what he had done or
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or showed any remorse for what he had done i was somewhat stunned by that i thought that that was the point in
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time where he would accept responsibility and do the right thing the parents and family of john hebel
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were sitting behind him it was his chance to try to make amends he failed miserably in doing that
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even at andrew rich's own admittance john was one of his five best friends in
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this world and he's he's so much a piece of trash that he killed one of his best friends
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rich pleaded guilty to first degree robbery and voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 35 years in prison
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in exchange for her cooperation sharon schneider was charged for drug possession and was sentenced to six
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months in a halfway house and two and a half years probation sharon was not a witness to the crime
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sharon had pieces of the puzzle that she gave us that we could put together to solve the
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crime i think it's very interesting how keisha helped ultimately to be able to solve
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the crime of the homicide of her master i feel that keisha solved the case along with the detectives
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she provided the evidence against andrew rich she got her man [Music] [Music] [Music]
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you