A person who commits a crime must manufacture a fact-based statement of events, finding a level of truth that fits the crime without revealing a truth he doesn’t want told. I believe Donnell wanted to come up with a fake story, but he had none. He borrowed liberally from the truth and tried to reconstruct it to a later time, a later place. It came off sort of true, because parts of it really did happen. I just didn’t believe it happened when he said it happened.

I TOOK ALL the statements that Donnell Washington made about coming to Frank Bishop’s home in the morning when he came with his son to pick up his mother and moved them back to one a.m., when he came over to get the car.

Donnell said, “I got out of that car, and I banged on the door. I was banging hard as hell, because I’m like, what the fucking hell, she knows I’m here.”

Is that what happened at seven a.m., or is that what happened when he went to pick up the car at one a.m.?

Clearly, Donnell was mad and getting madder. He got crazy about how he would have to kick the door in. He ranted and raved about kicking the door in. Why, if it was seven a.m., didn’t he just kick the door in if he thought something was wrong? His mother might be hurt, dying, or dead on the other side. Why didn’t he kick the door in? Why did he just talk about kicking the door in?

The answer seemed to me to be that he wasn’t worried about what was going on inside, he was just mad that nobody opened the goddamn door. He was pissed off because he was being refused entry-and it probably was sometime after the hour that Frank didn’t like to open his door. It probably wasn’t the first time he had been refused entry.

SUPPOSEDLY, DONNELL CALLED his mother when he wanted to come get the car and told her he was on the way. But if that was true, when he got there, why did he have to bang and bang on the door? At some point, Frank relented and let him in, maybe because he didn’t want him waking up the whole neighborhood.

“What took you so damned long to let me in?” Donnell might have asked Frank. “Why didn’t you answer the phone when I called earlier?”

Donnell was known to have problems controlling his anger and it was possible that Frank threatened to call the police if Donnell didn’t calm down, because Frank had done it before when Donnell’s temper flared up.

Donnell wanted his mother’s car keys. He wanted to be let in; he wanted what he wanted. My hypothesis is that Donnell went over to get the car, and they were too slow, so he became pissed off when Frank wouldn’t let him in, lectured him after he did, and threatened to call the police on him if he didn’t calm down. So Donnell killed them.

Here’s another thing Donnell said in his police interview: “I know she was fighting, man, I know she was trying to hold on. I know my momma, man.”

He might have known she fought her attacker because he was the attacker. Maybe he watched her struggle. Frank went down without a fight but his mother, he knew, lasted longer.

In the early rounds of Donnell’s police interrogations, when they asked him about his mother and Frank’s relationship, he had nothing bad to say. None of the relatives had anything bad to say about Frank, either. But the longer the interview went on, the fewer nice things Donnell said about Frank. At one point he called him a coward. Why would he say that? Somebody killed his mother. Frank was the only one there, and Renee was dead, so it was Frank’s fault. He didn’t feel a bit sorry for Frank. He said Frank was the cause of it. Maybe he was telling the truth there.

Oh, and there was another great statement: “Frank was just a cool guy. All this shit I’m telling you now is shit, is just coming to me. I’m making this shit up.”

Donnell said he spit on Frank on the way out of the crime scene. Yet he told the police that Frank was a nice guy who treated his mother well. Why then would he think that this nice guy got his mother killed, and why would he spit on him?

I think he despised Frank because he felt that if Frank hadn’t antagonized him, none of this would have happened, and his mother wouldn’t be dead. In other words, Frank pissed Donnell off, Donnell killed Frank, and then he killed his own mother, and it was Frank’s fault.

Donnell also said, “I’m not fixing to go to prison behind this shit.”

Say what?

If you didn’t have anything to do with it, why would you be fixing to go to prison “behind this shit”? How was that possible? Donnell may have told the police that he could handle his mother’s death, but of course if he killed her, he wouldn’t have been too happy that her death was putting him in a bad situation. He said, “I’m trying to deal with this shit, and it’s hard dealing with it when I know what the fuck went on. I panicked. I just couldn’t stop. It’s what I did. I knew I was fucking up, I knew I was fucking up. When I grabbed her, I couldn’t control myself.”

These are statements about CPR he made, but that didn’t sound like a CPR statement. It sounded like murder.

And yet Donnell was never an official or unofficial police suspect.

I DON’T BELIEVE the police ever analyzed the double homicide crime scene.

An investigator has to go in and reconstruct a crime. Find out what happened first, second, third, and fourth. Look for inconsistencies. Discern whether all the evidence matches and not make assumptions. The detective possesses some information, he thinks it’s true, and decides to move on. Some establish a theory and then ignore or don’t listen to the evidence that fails to support that theory.

The police decided that since enough people were ticked off at Donnell Washington, one of them certainly killed his mother. So when Donnell was talking, they didn’t listen. They just let a victim’s family member talk. They did the interview, and that was the end of it.

It seemed like everybody involved had some form of drug involvement and they were all squirrelly.

This was a wonderful opportunity to put Donnell away. The police did not like Donnell. They wanted Donnell off the streets. He was a problem in their community, no question about it. He was a menace.

I honestly think they decided that this was a hit on the mother because of Donnell’s drug involvement and they simply did not thoroughly analyze the evidence or what Donnell said.

It seemed to me that the evidence was almost overwhelming that Donnell was involved in this crime. I read the interviews and to me they read like a confession. But if a detective gets his mind set a certain way, he won’t notice that. He simply won’t hear it or see it.

Most of the time, the police do hard work trying to track down the people they think are involved and gather the appropriate evidence, but if we forget to stop and analyze the crime, we’ll be wasting time, because it has nothing to do with what we are looking for. We can work hard-but for no reason.

This crime did not take me tremendously long to analyze. It was a fascinating case. There were a lot of details in it, but a week was the most I needed to profile it. I gathered all the physical evidence, went through all the interviews, and right away, these things jumped out at me, starting with Donnell’s police interviews.

The police did a great job interviewing him, because they got a huge amount of information from him that demonstrated to me that he was involved in this crime.

The downside of reaching such a conclusion was that by the time I got the case, law enforcement lost a year’s time and the knife was nowhere to be found. The police may have had a surrogate confession from Donnell but not a true one. Any blood evidence that might have linked Donnell to the killings, evidence at his place of residence for example, would be long gone. I suggested that they interview the cousin and see if they could get him to talk. When I left town, the case remained unsolved.