This was kind of weird, because if Jimmy says, “You think you are going to shoot me, motherfucker?” you would think he was being threatened with a gun at the time. And if he was being threatened with a gun at the time, it’s kind of a strange thing to say. “I’ve got a gun in my car.” It’s not going to do you a lot of good if your gun is not in your hand. How can you threaten a person with a gun that’s not even around? It’s a stupid statement.

It didn’t make sense, but I do think it’s possible that such a statement was made in the kitchen. If Earl threatened Jimmy and said, “I could shoot you, buddy,” and Jimmy said, “You think you are going to shoot me, motherfucker? I have a gun in my car! Yeah, you get your gun in the bedroom, I’ll get mine in my car!” But they probably were just saying stuff, and I don’t think Jimmy believed Earl was serious.

I think Earl went to his bedroom, and I think Jimmy followed him in to talk to him.

Here’s where it gets fascinating:

After Jimmy was shot in the chest, both Heidi and Earl said he fell onto the bedroom couch. This was true; I could see blood all over the couch, so the police photographs confirmed that, yes, that did happen.

Then Heidi stated that after Jimmy clutched his chest and fell facedown on the couch, she beat him with a baseball bat. Yes, she felt it necessary to hit a defenseless, dying man in the head with a baseball bat that she conveniently found in the corner, where she was trapped. According to her account, she was in the corner of the bedroom, saw Jimmy get shot in the chest and as he fell to the sofa, she thought, That’s not enough, let me hit him in the head with a baseball bat, because I’m scared of him.

I don’t know about you, but if I just saw somebody get blown away with a shotgun, I’m not worried that they will be coming after me at that point.

Except… I believe Heidi is trying to make some point about this baseball bat. There is a reason for that, and I’m coming to it.

Heidi claimed not to remember how many times she hit Jimmy. In one report, she supposedly told somebody twenty to thirty times-but Jimmy didn’t even have the slightest concussion! No damage to his head at all!

She also said that after she hit Jimmy on the head, he got off the sofa and fell to the floor, then never moved again.

Jimmy was found on the floor next to the sofa. He was dead right there, that’s for sure. But what she said was curious: “He never moved again.”

Earl said that Jimmy fell on the couch and then straight to the floor. He also said that Heidi hit Jimmy with a baseball bat after he got to the floor, so their stories didn’t quite agree.

At that point, they both checked on Jimmy and then they left the house. That was their claim.

I say that Heidi was never in the bedroom at all. It is my belief that Heidi never touched the baseball bat, never struck Jimmy, and was merely repeating a story given to her by Earl to account for his use of the baseball bat on Jimmy.

Here’s where the photos made such a difference to the plausibility of their stories. There was only one set of bloody footprints leading from the bedroom into the kitchen. One. Of course, the police never said to whom those bloody footprints belonged. They should have been able to look at their feet and make an easy match, but that was never in the notes. There was one foot that stepped into the blood but, I wondered, if there were two people running around going crazy, beating people with baseball bats and checking on the dead guy on the floor, then why were there not two sets of footprints leaving? It seemed obvious to me that Heidi was never, ever, there.

Earl said that when Jimmy fell to the floor and was dead, he and Heidi left the premises. No mention was ever made of coming back to check on the dead man.

Heidi, however, maintained that she and Earl came back with a handgun and went to the bedroom and saw that Jimmy hadn’t moved at all. She said they went back to check after they got a handgun. The guy was shot in the chest and beaten twenty times with a baseball bat, but Heidi thought they needed another gun to make certain he was 110 percent dead.

Earl, on the other hand, didn’t mention returning with another gun.

Was Jimmy really dead when they claimed he was?

However, one photo showed that there was blood from Jimmy’s body all the way from his right side to the entrance of the room.

This was blood that spread out from under his body after he was shot; but it was not just a solid, expanding pool of blood. Something had come in contact with that blood. The photo showed smeared blood, and a dead man doesn’t smear blood. If he had lain there and hadn’t moved, there would be no smearing.

The picture of the blood going to the right side of the room was one of the regular pictures. But it was the Polaroid that linked it all together. In the spread blood, you could see two interesting things. There were four lines parallel to each other through the blood, and then there was kind of a muck mark, a spot where a palm pressed on the floor. I looked at that and thought, Hmmm. I looked at his fingers, and there was blood on them. It looked like somebody’s hand dragged through that blood, like a person trying to push himself up, trying to get off the floor. Was that indeed what I was looking at?

A little bit further down in that blood there was something else interesting. There was a crescent, a bloody area with a little crescent moon shape missing out of it. I wondered, Where did that go? It was lifted out of there somehow. Why was that spot of blood missing?

Something had been in that blood and then was pulled off it. I looked at that. The extra Polaroid picture showed Jimmy lying on his stomach on the floor. There were other pictures, better pictures showing Jimmy on the floor, but this was the only picture that showed his shoe. This picture showed the bottom of Jimmy’s right shoe, and it showed Jimmy’s heel. At first glance, one would think there was no blood on his shoe. And there shouldn’t be, because, after all, the guy fell and was lying on his stomach, so the blood would not be on the soles of the shoes. But then I looked closer and I saw it, blood; blood on the bottom of Jimmy’s heel. There was a small crescent of blood, a curved area of blood on his heel that matched exactly the missing part in the pattern on the floor.

This evidence contradicted the accounts of Earl and Heidi.

I believe that Jimmy was not dead on the floor. He lay on the floor, alive, and tried to get up. He dragged his hand through the blood, put his palm down, got his knee up underneath him, and stepped in the blood. There was some blood spatter on the door. I think he picked up his hand and cast off the blood onto the door, and that’s as far as he got when somebody or something made him step back, fall down, and never move again.

That somebody was probably the returning Earl, who came back with the baseball bat, pushed Jimmy with it, and knocked him down.

But when Earl and Heidi both said, “He never moved again,” that was probably a lie, because I believe the photo shows that Jimmy moved.

Continuing with my hypothesis, I believe the two of them left the room thinking he was dead, and then they heard Jimmy moving around. Oh crap, Jimmy’s alive and he’s getting up!

One of them went for the gun and one went for a baseball bat. And they both thought, That guy better be dead. But he wasn’t dead. He was dying. I don’t think they had to do more than push him, and then he collapsed and never moved again.

As for the bat? If you hit somebody with a bat twenty to thirty times, wouldn’t you have blood spattered all over that bat? But there wasn’t any blood on the bat except for where it looked like someone laid the bat in some blood and rolled it around.

It’s also possible that Earl asked Heidi to hit him-Earl-in the nose with the baseball bat just enough to look like Jimmy caused some damage to support their assertion that Earl was assaulted. Maybe Earl did it to himself.