Practice to Deceive

mistaken.
    Commander Mike Beech and Ed Wallace were on a plane for Las Cruces, New Mexico, early the next morning. They took custody of the possible murder weapon from the Doña Anna County sheriff. Keith Ogden had turned in a two-tone Bersa Thunder, .380 caliber—serial number 573168. Its manufacturer and the caliber could well be a match; the Bersa was one possible gun pinpointed by ballistics experts.
    How it ended up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, was a mystery.
    Mike Beech and Ed Wallace phoned Keith and arranged to meet him and his wife, Donna, at their home in Radium Springs, New Mexico.
    They learned that Ogden’s connection to Jim Huden was through Keith’s cousin, Preston Collier.* Ogden was a retired police officer from Multnomah County, Oregon. He and Donna had known Huden when they were living in Las Vegas.
    “My cousin called us after he read information in a press release,” Ogden said. “He told us that there was a search on for a Bersa that was missing after a homicide up in Washington.”
    It took less than twenty-four hours before Keith Ogden went to his local sheriff and handed over the gun. “Keith hated to do it—we both liked Jim,” Donna said. “But we both agreed that we had to go to the police with that gun.”
    The Ogdens weren’t positive about when they met Jim Huden, but believed it was sometime in mid-2003.
    “Let’s see,” Ogden said. “We met Jim about three weeks before the Johnny Rivers concert at a casino in Henderson, Nevada.”
    (Mike Beech contacted the concert promotions manager for casino artists, and was able to pin down the date of the Rivers concert as August 29, 2003.)
    “Several months after that,” Ogden continued, “might have been six months, maybe less—Huden called me and asked if I had any guns to sell because he was looking to buy one.”
    Keith Ogden didn’t have any guns for sale, but Jim Huden had shown up at his house in Las Vegas a few days later with a .380 Bersa pistol he’d purchased.
    “I taught him how to clean it and operate it.”
    The two men had then taken it to the Ogdens’ backyard near Las Vegas where Keith and Donna test-fired it into the dirt there.
    “We fired it into a pillow to cut down on the noise.”
    “Do you recall just where that was in your yard at your last place?” Beech asked.
    “I do,” Donna Ogden said. “You walk out the back patio door. There’s a pool facing you. Then you would turn left onto the grassy area, past two clumps of ornamental grass plants set in gray gravel. Just about two feet beyond that was where we were firing into the ground.”
    Asked to isolate the time this happened, Keith and Donna Ogden thought it had been more like four months rather than six after Huden was first looking for a gun in August.
    They were positive the test-firing had occurred before Jim and his girlfriend, Peggy, had left to go to Washington State in December.
    After the couple came back from their Christmas trip, Keith said that Jim had contacted him again. Now that he thought about it, Jim said he was worried about having a gun in their house because of Peggy’s young daughters.
    “He asked me if I would take care of the gun for him, and I agreed,” Keith said. “We were over at Jim and Peggy’s house for lunch, and I remember that Peggy’s mom called that day to tell her that someone on Whidbey Island had died or was killed. Come to think of it, it was right after that that Jim called me and asked me to keep the gun for him.”
    As far as Keith knew, the test bullet rounds that were fired were still in the ground at their former home.
    “We moved to New Mexico on July 6, 2004,” Ogden said.
    “Did you do any landscaping in the backyard before you moved?” Detective Ed Wallace asked.
    “No, sir. But, if anyone dug a shovel in there, they might not even touch the rounds. They penetrated several inches down.”
    The gun that Jim Huden had left with Keith Ogden might be worth its weight in gold. If it was the right Bersa Thunder. Mike Beech treated it tenderly as he hand-carried it back to Whidbey Island for ballistics tests.
    Mark Plumberg delivered the .380 Bersa pistol to the Washington State Police lab. There it was swabbed for DNA testing. That didn’t yield a match, but within a day, he received a fax from criminalist Evan Thompson.
    The gun that Keith Ogden had turned in microscopically matched the extractor and ejector marks on the shell casing recovered from Russ Douglas’s yellow Tracker.