Practice to Deceive

pool?”
    “Yes. He brought the gun—a Bersa—over to my house. I showed him how it worked—broke it down to show him how to clean it and how to fire it.”
    Huden said he needed some way to silence the noise it made because he and Peggy lived in an upscale residential area in Henderson.
    “I taped a one-quart plastic bottle over the muzzle and shot once. Then we tried it with a pillow,” Ogden testified. “That made it very quiet.”
    Jim Huden was obviously an amateur with a gun, but Ogden hadn’t been concerned that he now owned one. Jim and Peggy Sue did have a pool and they did live in an exclusive neighborhood where gunfire wouldn’t be condoned. Ogden explained how the investigators from the Island County Sheriff’s Office had located the slugs and casings in the ground. Both he and his wife, Donna, had witnessed that.
    The murder gun itself was probably worth between $250 and $300. But Jim Huden hadn’t been able to simply throw it away where no one would find it; he didn’t want to lose that much money.
    Detective Bill Farr had taken DNA samples from Huden after he was captured in Mexico—but it was impossible to match those to the gun.
    Mark Plumberg had obtained DNA from Peggy Thomas in February 2004, and he rolled the defendant’s fingerprints in May 2012.
    Peggy’s DNA wasn’t helpful, either, although top criminalists from the Washington State Crime Lab, Margaret Barber and Lisa Collins, worked on microscopic evidence analysis that might link their bodily fluids, hairs, and fibers.
    Kathy Geil, of the Washington State Patrol firearms exam team, had hit a bonanza and she testified that the bullet found in Russ Douglas’s head had tool marks identical to the bullet dug up in Keith Ogden’s backyard—where he and Jim had fired it long ago.
    Jill Arwine of the WSP Latent Prints Unit in Olympia, Washington, had found something almost as valuable. Arwine, who has testified well over fifty times as an expert witness, gave the jurors a fast lesson in how to lift latent prints from both a hard surface and a soft surface such as paper. She also explained AFIS: Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which includes a massive volume of fingerprints.
    “Did you process a .380 casing?” Banks asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Did you find any prints?”
    “No.”
    “Did you find any prints on the car [the yellow Tracker]?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did you do a comparison of the prints?”
    “Yes—they belonged to Russel Douglas.”
    Arwine had also found fingerprints belonging to Brenna Douglas, but that wasn’t significant. Brenna had long since told detectives that she often drove Russ’s car.
    Greg Banks asked her if she had been provided other items to test.
    “Yes—a gun and a gun manual, magazine, and paperwork.”
    “Were you able to obtain prints from the gun?”
    “No.”
    “How about the manual?”
    “Yes, I processed each page and I made digital images of the prints found.”
    “Were you able to compare images, and if so, to whom?”
    “Yes—James Huden and Peggy Thomas: exhibit 92 belongs to Peggy Thomas, and exhibits 99 and 100 belong to Huden. There were nineteen prints identified—thirteen belong to Huden, and one on page fourteen of the manual belongs to Peggy Thomas.”
    * * *
    J IM DIDN’T BLINK. THROUGHOUT his trial, Huden had maintained a stoic presence. He occasionally wrote something on the yellow legal pad in front of him, or whispered briefly to Matt Montoya, but he didn’t make eye contact with anyone else in the courtroom.
    The spectators behind the rail kept their hopes up that he would testify in his own defense. That, however, is a very risky endeavor. Once a defendant testifies, he opens himself up to cross-examination by the opposing attorneys. Prosecuting Attorney Greg Banks is a shrewd lawyer, and throughout the trial, he caught every inference or odd statement that the defense made. He would have a field day jousting with Jim Huden.
    And what excuse would Huden have for the many times he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time? Although he and Peggy Sue Thomas had been seen (or not seen) by people who could validate where they showed up on the day of Russ Douglas’s murder, there appeared to be too many connections that led back to Huden. Banks had shown the link between the bullet in the victim’s head to the gun that the defendant owned. How could that be if Huden had no involvement in the homicide?

C HAPTER T HIRTY-SIX
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    M ATTHEW MONTOYA HAD