This story was told to me by the head of the crime lab of another police department in the Denver area.  I have no reason to doubt that it happened exactly as he related it.

The murder was a particularly brutal, thoroughly senseless, one.  Someone had entered a small store and shot an elderly woman who was working alone.  There was no indication of any kind of resistance.  It appeared the suspect had simply walked in and gunned her down before taking the few dollars that were in the cash register.

When he arrived, the crime lab supervisor tried to organize the search for evidence.  While he worked on the immediate scene in the store, other officers started a canvass of the area.  The shift was a busy one, and personnel were constantly being dispatched from the scene to handle other calls.  The crime scene chief tried to stop this drain of his resources for less important calls.  He was dealing with one of the most brutal crimes he would witness in his career, but was hampered by a lack of manpower.  When one of his officers was pulled because a little old lady demanded an officer take a report on the hit and run driver who killed her dog, he lost his temper.  It did not help his disposition when the watch commander overrode his objections.

When he finally released the crime scene, he had to admit there was not a single clue.  For one of the few times in his career, the investigator found nothing.  There were no prints, no trace evidence, no witnesses to the crime, no one who had seen a car in the area.  The neighborhood canvass had yielded no more, not even anyone who recalled hearing a shot.  He wondered if the diversion of his resources, limited to begin with, had destroyed any chance of developing any leads.

It is impossible, in light of the real tragedy of a life so uselessly lost, to ever say that this story had a happy ending, so let me just say that it had a satisfying one.  Detectives were able to identify a suspect by placing a known violent thug in the area.  He was tried and convicted of the crime, eventually dying in prison.  You see, as he fled the scene, he ran over a little old lady’s dog.