WTBL - Walking the Blue Line

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (00:12)
Hey, welcome again to all of our listeners out there. I'm glad that you can join us once again for another tale of murder and mayhem. In this particular week, we have a guest back with us, Detective Mike Drapeau of the Spokane County Sheriff's Office. And we're gonna get a chance to talk about a case that the two of us worked together along with a number of other detectives. Welcome, Mike.

Mike Drapeau (00:38)
Nice to be back.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (00:39)
Great. Good to have you here. so this week we're going to talk about, think one of our most interesting cases so far, in my opinion. Yeah. It has a lot of twists and a of information, and something unusual about it. We're going to call this one under the microscope.

it started out as a house fire

this was on May 26th in

at around 2 a.m., a call went out to the fire department that there was a house on fire in northern Spokane. Colbert

Mike Drapeau (01:13)
They got there right after that to start the suppression. They got in the house and found the first body inside at about 130. And I was there and I wrote the warrant and it was probably five or six o'clock before they had had it all out.

because there was a couple different fires in a couple different buildings. And so it took them that long to get it kind of out to make sure all that the installation wasn't still burning. it took quite a while.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (01:33)
Yeah.

they were able to tell that accelerant was put on to start the fire

Mike Drapeau (01:42)
Yeah, they knew right away when they got there, they had a house fire at the house and then an unrelated building was on fire also and there was no connection between the two. So they knew they had two independent starts of a fire. So they knew it was probably arson from the very beginning. The reason it took them so long to get the fire down in part is that the little hay barn ⁓ outside building was fully engulfed

they just let it burn for the most part and it was completely burned to the ground.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (02:07)
And after they got in they started realizing this was a homicide scene.

Mike Drapeau (02:12)
Yeah, they got inside during the suppression. They didn't see anybody moving around. They knew that people lived there. They went into the master bedroom of the house, which was less damaged than other parts of the house. And they found the body of a female there just off the bed. They drug her out to save her, but she was already gone. When they looked at her in the light, they found what they thought were stab wounds on her arms.

and on her body. they had a good idea then that it was probably more than meets the eye. And then right after that, somewhere in that next 30 minutes, they found a second body in the second burning building, but couldn't tell anything about the nature of it except that they were burned in the fire. So they knew there was at least two dead people. One of them appeared to have been murdered prior to the

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (03:00)
the people that were found in the fire they identified Terry Canfield, which was the husband, his wife was Lisa Canfield, and it was her son, John,

Mike Drapeau (03:13)
Lisa was found in the master bedroom. John Constable was found inside the entryway to the kitchen inside the house, which was extremely burned. And Terry Canfield was found in the outside hay barn outbuilding that was completely burned.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (03:28)
Terry was a 28 year veteran firefighter and his wife Lisa was a massage therapist.

Their college student son, John Constable, was still living at the house and there was actually supposed to be a fourth person there that night and that was Amanda Murray. But Amanda had been working her shift at the hospital and ended up staying there due to an overtime shift that she had to fill because someone had called in sick. Otherwise she would have been home probably around midnight.

So it isn't until 3.30 in the morning when Amanda gets off work and comes home to find firefighters running everywhere at around 4 a.m.

Mike Drapeau (04:14)
I knew Terry Canfield because my wife and him worked together occasionally doing EMS. So I had met him before. I had met his wife at least one time before. but we didn't know who all lived in the house and we didn't know how many people were in the house just because it was so badly burned in places and the outbuilding was completely burned down

Amanda, who goes by Mandy. gave us an idea who should be in the house, who was there, kind how the house was laid out. And we started talking about who might want to do them harm, what their state was like, what their normal living conditions were, normal day-to-day operations, where their cars were and things like that. So that's how we started.

trying to piece that together.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (04:51)
trying to determine who may have caused this, because it's obvious that you have an arson, you start going down the list of not only the people that live there, because it's not unheard of for someone to commit a murder, suicide and start the house on fire, as well as looking at people

that would want to do them harm or for instance like a drug deal maybe going bad or divorce situation all of those kind of things are looked at as well

Mike Drapeau (05:19)
isn't unusual for people to commit murder and then use arson to try to cover up the evidence of it. We've seen that a lot here in Spokane County and all over the place. It isn't that unusual to use what you've already seen as a theory of what might occur here. And unfortunately, we've seen several where

husband and wife have a DV, husband kills wife, kills everybody, kills the dog and burns the house down and then shoots himself. So that was the very first thing I thought of was that here's Terry in another building dead from some kind of gunshot wound to the family's dead in the other burning house. Is that what we've got here? that was my first thought. He was my first, suspect.

because he's separated from the family. We know it's him because he's a big guy, so we knew it was Terry in the

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (05:58)
Yeah.

And actually Terry was experiencing some problems right around that time because he had just had a shoulder surgery and his arm was in a sling and you never know how someone's reacting like when they're having to take pain medication. Maybe he saw his career slipping away from him or something like that due to an injury that he's trying to heal from. There's all kinds of reasons why a person might do that kind of thing.

Mike Drapeau (06:26)
you have what's called in the medical terms of differential diagnosis, you have a bunch of things that it could be and you're just trying to pick up things that might lead you in one way or another and just start checking off things that you know it isn't. And that wasn't one we could check right off. Terry had surgery. He was

there was some indication that maybe they weren't getting along great, which turned out not to be

But we didn't find the gun right away and that's something you should find if that's an actual scenario. that kind of ruled it out. I started doing the warrant and we started talking to Mandy and Mandy had a suspect in mind.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (06:58)
as far as what Mandy was describing, was there multiple people that she thought could have been responsible or just she went straight to one?

Mike Drapeau (07:06)
She was certain that it was one and only one person, her estranged husband, Roy Murray.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (07:13)
And did you talk with Mandy that morning or was that

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (07:17)
Detective Keyser

Mike Drapeau (07:18)
so I was there with

Mike Drapeau (07:19)
Detective

Mike Drapeau (07:21)
And while I worked in this case and you worked in this case and lots of us in the office worked in this case, this case was Kirk Keyser's case. So any credit to solve in this case goes to Kirk Keyser right? That was the Terry Canfield went crazy and killed his family theory was one of my many theories that didn't work out. Kirk's theory turned out to be the theory.

Kirk did all the heavy lifting, but Kirk and I did talk to Mandy together because I was writing the warrant we were working it together that very first day. was just the two of us from major crimes there. So Kirk and I were just bouncing ideas off each other while I was writing the warrant. And we were starting to just check boxes of people we could find. Also missing from the house, who may have been there at the time, was the twin brother of John Constable.

So we didn't know if he was dead in the fire. We didn't know which of the twins was dead. So we thought, well, maybe he's the guy who killed the family and fled. So we had to go try to get people to find him. That was another person that was missing that was not accounted for.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (08:18)
to write the warrant, what kind of things were you looking for,

Mike Drapeau (08:22)
fire had thought that her injuries were knife injuries that she'd been stabbed or cut. I hadn't seen them, so I didn't really know. But early on, on the very first warrant we want to get on the property and look around. I don't really know what I'm looking for, except some kind of homicide has occurred, So try to keep it as general as possible.

implements of murder, the more information you get, the more you can say, I want to look for a gun, I want to look for a 38, I want to look for a 22. We didn't have any of that. It was just some dead people who may have been injured and a fire. So it kept it quite broad. So we were looking for anything that might be

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (08:57)
you got the warrant, you guys go out there it took you 10 days, you and the people that were working that scene to go out there. You were basically sifting through ashes, I was assigned as the, what we call the scene lead. So once Mike had written the search warrant, we start

dividing up into various teams and tackling different tasks that have to be accomplished. I was given the charge of processing this scene, so we call for forensics and we start looking at where we might find evidence and what has to be done. Initially, of course, this is a fire scene and it's openly an

arson so we're going to team up with the fire department to find those various items of evidence that would indicate that it's an arson as well as

Mike Drapeau (09:42)
Okay.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (09:49)
a homicide, we're going to end up looking for any implements that could cause

Mike Drapeau (09:54)
blood or anything with blood on it, any ⁓ arson accelerants any firearms, any bludgens, mostly with blood on them as well.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (10:02)
So as we divide up the scene, one of the very first things is Forensics goes in and They photograph the entire scene before we do anything or disturb anything other than just making sure that the fire is out and nothing's going to pop back up.

the first day or two of this is really slow because we've got such a large area. We're still worried about fire popping back up. It's hot in there and we're mostly focused on the two bodies that we.

confined right off the bat which is Lisa in the master bedroom and Terry in the outbuilding so those are kind of the areas that we focus on you didn't find the son Right away it would took a little bit of searching in order to find him because He was covered by a bunch of debris in the kitchen area the whole ceiling

and everything had fallen in there and so he was under probably a good six to twelve inches of debris before we were able to find

Mike Drapeau (10:59)
And then initially when we were there,

we also started tracking people down. So by, probably seven o'clock, we got in touch with the other twin brother. So we knew where he was and he was not available to have committed the crime.

Once we heard about Roy, we immediately wanted to rule him in or rule him out. And he lived in Lewiston, Idaho, which is 112 miles away or so. So we knew if he came up here, he may have taken his phones with him. So we did a search warrant for his phone. We looked at his phone records for that day and it showed that his phones never left Lewiston. So we said, well, maybe it isn't Roy Murray. Let's send the guys down there to go talk to him. So we sent Lewiston PD to knock on his door and go talk to him. And they did. And he

He just said, yeah, I wasn't up there. I don't want to talk to you. So they gave us some basic information and we said, well, okay, we don't know that Roy's involved right now. We'll just keep digging. So we ruled out all of our initial suspects right away that day. So we didn't really have a suspect starting that second day, except that Roy just kept coming up.

we found from canvassing the neighbors. We found that they had heard gunshots around 20 minutes after midnight. They heard a series of gunfire, which isn't super unusual in the rural, but at

roughly 1230 in the morning, is not very usual. They reported hearing a big whooshing sound right before the fire was reported at two. So they never reported any cars coming by their houses or parking in their driveways or any weird cars

You can only get in two ways on either end of this road, because it's rural and there's houses up and down the road. And usually people are on the lookout. Nobody reported seeing a car go by. Nobody reported seeing any weird characters hanging out or any loud music or any fighting. So we thought that initially the shooting had been right after midnight. And then there was a delay of some period of time until two.

when the house is actually lit on fire,

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (12:55)
Mandy would have expected to have been home by that time because she was actually supposed to get off work I think at 1130

Mike Drapeau (13:00)
Yeah,

she worked an extra four hours overtime. and she'd have been home subsequently after that. The working theory, and I thought it was an excellent working theory because Mandy can't testify against Roy because they're married unless

she

is the victim of a crime. We couldn't find any other reason that he would wait, except that he wanted Mandy to come home and he was going to kill her too. And then possibly

put the gun in her hand and burned the house down around her, making her look like the crazy one who killed her family, which would have been an excellent plan. But he didn't take his phones with him. And then she worked over and he couldn't figure out where she was So he had to decide whether or not he was going to burn the house and leave or possibly get discovered by somebody else coming.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (13:39)
so we process this crime scene and on day one, we're basically just getting through all of our overall stuff, doing an initial check for evidence and recovering the bodies as much as we can. And then day two moves more towards the arson and then going through

trying to find shell casings and such because at this point the medical examiner has looked at the bodies and we realize that they've been shot.

Mike Drapeau (14:09)
Yeah, that is their only injury is that they were all shot to death with a small caliber, likely 22 firearm. So that what what appeared to be stab wounds on Lisa were just bullets grazing her as her arms were outstretched, And they just went past her arm, ripped the skin and went into her body. So they were just tangential gunshot wounds.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (14:29)
through the processing on the second day, the sifting starts and we set up sifting stations out in the front yard and along the north side of the crime scene where we're going to take all of the ash and debris and sift through it in order to see what we can find evidentiary

initially we think that this is only gonna take us maybe two or three days at the most. And by the end of day two, we realized that this is gonna be a very long crime scene. And so we start working shifts,

from sunup to sundown,

And so in the evening we set up security and we have these chain link fences brought in and try to secure the scene as best we can and then

reserve deputies there overnight and on the fourth evening at about 2330 they report a breach to the crime scene.

Mike Drapeau (15:22)
On the 30th, we're still working the scene and I go there the morning of the 29th and that's where we figure out how he accessed the property because he accessed the property the same way both times. I had originally walked all of the gravel on the road to see if anybody had turned out or parked or thrown a cigarette or anything out the night of the murder before while we were doing the warrant prep and looked for anywhere a car might park along that.

which is really, really open to all the neighboring houses and didn't find anything. if it wasn't somebody that parked in the driveway, which I didn't see evidence of, I didn't know where they would park to sneak in. And then once he snuck in and they saw him run back the route he took, I kind of knew how he accessed the property the first time. So I accessed it that way. And then when he was in the interview I had just got done with that when I called Kirk and said, Hey, I think I know how he got on the property.

And Kirk said, well, you couldn't tell me how the bad guys would kill him anyways and give them the map. And he said, yeah, that's how I would do

that was the night after the breach, which helped us quite a bit.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (16:17)
this area where they live actually is open fields across there. There aren't really very many trees for someone to hide in up close to that house or down the road. All the neighbors can see from one house to the next. If a car had parked alongside the road or something like that, the neighbors nearby would have been able to see it.

anybody know why he came back?

Mike Drapeau (16:39)
I don't know. think he just is that kind of guy. I think it's just part of his mindset. I think he likes it. I think he likes to be smarter than everybody else. I don't think he was looking for anything particular. But once he did breach, then that took another delay because we had to make sure he didn't plant a bomb and a bunch of others that we had to make sure that it was safe for you guys to go back and work there. So that took a day at least to completely figure out if he had left anything there, booby traps or anything.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (16:55)
yeah.

we called in the bomb squad and as far as crime scene, everything halted and we spent a full day just sitting there waiting for the bomb squad to clear everything

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (17:15)
So after Roy breaches the scene and the bomb squad is called in and they clear the scene of bombs or any booby traps, do you guys go back and start searching or sifting the scene? Yes,

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (17:29)
so as we sift down through all of the debris, there is a clear trail of accelerant that goes down the hallway to the master bedroom

Mike Drapeau (17:39)
And there was one more thing that was related that you see often with arsonists to cover up murder is that part of the burn was directly on the victim, right? So in the master bedroom, the burn was around her and on her. So whoever it was tried to burn the body. That's something you see with arson all the time when they're trying to burn up evidence.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (17:57)
then out in the outbuilding as well, there's just a main amount of damage initially is right where the body is laying inside the entryway. You could tell that that was definitely the hottest area of the fire.

You talked about Roy's interview. Was there any other interviews with Amanda or anything that you were part of?

Mike Drapeau (18:16)
I did quite a few of the interviews with Kirk. I did some with the guy from WSU and a bunch of people at WSU, his anti-government leaning friends, some of the relatives and other people that knew

Roy's name kept coming up as a suspect, even though we tentatively ruled him out the first night because his phones were still down at his hometown of Lewiston, Idaho But we did research on all the people that were possibles. And Roy Murray was an Army war veteran. He had been in the

National Guard, I believe. He'd been a combat

He won the Bronze Star for

combat. He had the Purple Heart for a combat injury. Everybody that we talked to that used to be in his unit loved him. They said that he saved all of their lives that day. But he was injured in the process. He got some form of TBI. His arm was injured in the explosion. And when he came back,

he graduated from WSU. He was part of a young entrepreneurs program. He ran for the Washington Senate in 2011, but he didn't win. He was a bright, dedicated, disciplined young man by all accounts. Everybody said that about him. And that's the guy that Mandy married.

But over the years since he was home, he started to develop some issues. He was extremely paranoid of government and government agencies. He had a lot of weird, fanciful ideas about secret service and the KGB and the Russian secret service that they were out to get him, out to recruit him.

He became more more paranoid and that just made him even more ⁓ OCD. So when he would clean his firearms, Mandy said that he always wore gloves and he always used rags that wouldn't leave lint behind so that if he ever killed anybody with those guns or was in combat, they wouldn't be able to track that gun back to him with his DNA or fingerprints or any of the screening supplies that he used. He was extremely tactically oriented.

He would drive in places so that he couldn't get followed. He always seemed to think somebody was out to get him. He was always running some combat operation or another in his mind. he wouldn't go into places he couldn't get out of. would sneak around. He would follow people, and that got worse and worse as time went on to the point where Mandy said, look, we can't, we can't do this anymore. I want to go live with my parents, with my mom. So she went and lived with.

Terry, she was living with Terry and her mom and her brother for some time and they were separated. But the big point that Mandy thought was the pushover is that Roy was always very adamant that they couldn't get a divorce. And that night before the murders, that night when she was driving to work at Sacred Heart, she called Roy on the phone and said, look, I can't do this anymore. I need a divorce. And Roy said, okay, that's fine.

And she was absolutely flabbergasted by that. She thought Roy would never allow her to do that. And that was the one thing that when she came back and found her family dead, she said, that's why he was so calm about it. He'd already decided to kill my whole family. So that was his solution, not to fight with me.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (21:16)
You mentioned that he always wore gloves and he wiped everything down. To me that kind of seems like he's thinking about maybe doing something and not being able to get caught.

Mike Drapeau (21:27)
Yeah, it wasn't so much on Mandy's mind that he was going to commit some kind of crime. It's just that he always thought he was in combat and he said, you know, I don't want the bad guys that I get engaged with the combat struggle that come and track me down. So as you look at it in retrospect, it's probably because he wanted to commit these murders and didn't want to get caught.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (21:47)
that's what I was thinking.

Mike Drapeau (21:48)
when Kirk and Marske interviewed him that first time in, Moscow, Idaho, at the side of the road, we got his DNA there because he left a straw behind of, of a pop they gave him. then when they brought him in for the second interview, they played on his ego a little bit.

to get him up into the office. And once he got there, we watched where he

then we had his car towed from where he parked it into the processing station. And we did a search warrant on it while he was talking to Kirk. when we searched the car, we found one of what we knew to be a pair of 22 caliber pistols, Walther P-22s.

in a case by itself with a little bit of lubricant in a teal top vial, which isn't that unusual to find gun lube in a gun case with a gun. But we took it as part of the search warrant and documented it. We found his little AR stubby rifle that he called his puppy, which was his carry gun for most of the time. We found

ammunition in the car. some of the 22 caliber cartridges we found were brand matches to the ones that you sifted out of the fire.

Lots of magazines, first aid equipment, stuff you would find in a combat Humvee. We found

a big box of trioxin, which is a meal heater.

Once we know what Roy's alibi is, Roy's alibi is that the Russian Secret Service is trying to recruit him and he keeps telling them no.

And so while he is with some clandestine military operations,

in a remote location and camping in Wawawai Park, his theory is that the Russian secret service killed his family to make it clear to him that he needs to come be a spy for them. He would never identify the secret agency he was meeting with in the park. And he said he had his phones with him when clearly he did not, they're still at his house.

Once we knew that

his alibi, we started to track it down. Kirk started looking at people that he knew that might know something a guy named Pavel Rodenko, who was a naturalized Russian citizen who worked at WSU and was a friend and an associate of Roy Murray. So Kirk got ahold of him on the phone and started talking.

to Pavel about where he was that day, how he knew Roy Murray, what he thought about Roy Murray, what they did together. And what they did together is they were both at WSU at the time, He had invented,

a couple of formulas for nano lubricants to lubricate machine parts, And he Roy had met at a young entrepreneurs meeting and Roy was really good with guns.

And Roy heard about his experiments with lubricant. And he said, well, you know, they charge like $5 for a quart of motor oil, but they charge like $5 for like a two ounce bottle of gun lube. He said, would it work as a gun lubricant? And Pavel didn't know anything about guns. So he said, well, that's something you could do for me. So they started to team up in this whole gun lubricant business and experimentation. So they bought two P22 Walther

pistols, they had the barrels examined with a microscope, and then they lubed the guns with them and shot them a bunch and had them re-examined to see if this would work as a gun lubricant, which it did. So Pavel had one batch of what he called Accudure was his brand name for this nanoparticulate lubricant that he had.

made. He made several batches, but this particular batch that he made that Roy Murray got, he made one batch in a kiln in a controlled environment using scientific methods. And then he kept a vial of it and he gave a small vial to Roy Murray, which turned out to be the vial we recovered in the gun case. He identified it as his and it was later chemically compared and it's the exact same lubricant.

So only two people in the world had ever had access to this lubricant that we're aware of, Pavel Rodenko and Roy Murray. Roy Murray used that to lubricate the guns that he had with him in the car, the P-22 and maybe the missing P-22. This was all information we kind of had because we're all doing different interviews and different things. And so when I was sitting next to Kirk and he was talking to Pavel,

We put it together that maybe that's the lubricant. Maybe there might be something there. We don't know anything about nanoparticulants. We're not scientists or firearms experts. So we immediately called the lab because we'd sent the cartridge cases out to compare like they normally do to put in a machine and look at them with NIBIN to see if they're related to the gun we found. Once we knew that there may be some unknown identifiable chemical on

we called the lab and told them to hold off. And so that began the whole Accudur process of trying to figure out whether I was on the cartridge cases, which it turned out to

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (26:23)
It was on the fourth day of our crime scene search when Roy Murray is Arrested and this search of his vehicle takes place and a bunch of 22 caliber is found in there But we already had suspicions that 22 caliber

ammunition was used during the murders. So we were searching the entire time. So over a number of days, we found spent shell casings of 22 caliber throughout the crime scene and they all matched Remington ammunition.

you guys found almost all the casings though, right? Out of all of the wounds that were counted from the autopsy, we found

all but one shell casing to correspond with the number of wounds that they sustained.

That's pretty amazing considering the amount of sifting you guys had to do and stuff you had to go through. Yes, some of them were found in actual sifters, but it was.

Somewhat impressive as to the number of shell casings we found that were just on the ground. this happened to be the first crime scene for one forensic technician in particular. She had never been out to a crime scene. So she came out and we were actually moving a wall, because the wall had fallen down and she bent down and she's like, here's a shell case.

But she pointed out that and so she was pretty excited because that was like the first piece of evidence that she had really found and it was a new job to her and such so it was kind of exciting. that was Kristen Phillips.

Mike Drapeau (27:53)
it seemed weird to us that he used a 22, Murray had access to military grade hardware. had a 223 and a 556. It seemed odd to me, but once you start to get inside Roy Murray's head, when you talk to the people that knew him, 22 was the perfect weapon for him.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (28:10)
when you interviewed his estranged wife, didn't she say he had all these guns and then you guys figured out one of them was missing and it was a 22?

Mike Drapeau (28:19)
the only one of Roy's that we couldn't find was the matching Walther P-22 pistol that he and Pavel Rodenko had purchased to do experimentations with. That was the only one of his guns that we couldn't find.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (28:31)
after you've gathered all of this information about the professor, the professor goes over the AccuDur, Kirk Keyser sends the shell casings that we find at the scene, or at least three of them, out to Washington State Patrol crime lab and their

scientist William Schneck takes a look at these under an electron microscope. Now he can see that something is there but he can't really identify what it is. So now the shell casings have to be sent off to one other lab in the United States, the only one that will apparently do this type of work where they have a more powerful electron microscope.

Mike Drapeau (29:10)
Bill Schneck works at the lab. So he is their firearms guy at the time. Once we realized that we may have this nanoparticulate on there and maybe identifiable, We ended up getting Bill Schneck and driving him down to meet Pavel Rodenko.

because Pavel knows the technology that he used to make it and Bill knows what they can look for at the lab. So we got them together and sat them in, I think we were in the Zips in Pullman and got them together to talk about what they might find and how they might find it and what might be there. And that started a game plan that Kirk and Bill and Pavel

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (29:34)
you

Mike Drapeau (29:44)
ended up sending it to ⁓ a private

because it's one of only a couple of places in the world that can see things that small. And in addition to seeing it, seeing it wasn't the issue. They had to identify it as this particular chemical with a particular radiographic signature. So they had not only to be able to see it, but they also had to measure what it was made from. And there's only one or two places in the world at the time, at least one in the US that could do

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (29:56)
Yeah.

Mike Drapeau (30:09)
in the end, it turned out that they were able to identify it is that it's only that and only two people that we know of in the whole history of mankind ever had access to that. And Roy Murray lubed his missing gun with it. And that's how it ended up on the cartridge cases bonded to the metal just like it's designed to.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (30:25)
And so once they get a confirmation report that it is Accudure on these, that really kind of solidifies a case where we have no fingerprints, no DNA, no cell phone records. mean, very little evidence to go on, except for this one thing that only one person, well, two people actually, but one that we can pretty well rule out. ⁓

Mike Drapeau (30:48)
Yeah, Popo

had an alibi that was rock solid for the time of the murder So he didn't do it.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (30:53)
Which kind of led to an amazing court case

Mike Drapeau (30:56)
all of the not finding things was by design. That's Roy's excellent planning. He planned really well. Um, in fact, Mandy remembers one time when he came to the house, he came in the back door and it was squeaky. So he lubed it. And she thought that was weird, but that's where he would have come in the house. He didn't want to be squeaky when he came back in. So he had planned it all out.

the prosecutor at the time, the guy who was setting up to do the case was Mark Sipola. He sat and watched that second interview with Roy Murray or portions of it anyway.

And I was standing there when Kirk came out and he said, well, what do we do with him now? We searched his car. We got a gun. There's a gun missing. That's all we got is his terrible alibi and the likelihood that he might've had a burn on his face, which turned out not to be a burn. And Mark said, book him into jail.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (31:42)
So the prosecutor tells you to book him into jail on day four after the

Mike Drapeau (31:47)
That was

the

beginning of the hard work.

yeah, six week trial, just some really new, never used before scientific

and it worked out well.

We did pretrial fry hearings for the admissibility of the scientific evidence, which took a long time.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (32:03)
a

fry hearing basically asks is this scientific information technology pattern is it generally accepted by the scientific community as a whole and

you can show evidence that yes, the scientific community as a whole accepts this, then the court will accept it as a scientific theory or procedure that can be then admitted into court.

That's the standard for the state of Washington is that it has to pass a fry hearing. So you have experts come in and they testify and they can show graphs as to like how many people in the scientific community accept this and whether the court will accept

Mike Drapeau (32:46)
And they've done that with everything over time, cell phones, medical science techniques, fingerprints, everything's had at some point a fry hearing about it.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (32:54)
Really the undoing

of Roy Murray was his kind of his own OCD and one of the things that Amanda had described to Kirk was what they called a shoot and scoot was how he wanted to be prepared and

Oiling his firearms was actually part of that Preparedness that he does and ends up being his undoing because it provides the little bit of forensic information under the microscope that is needed in order to Convict him also didn't he have something like a list that he had that's right. Yeah, he had a

mental thing not only Was he thinking about the the Russian Secret Service

trust was everything and he had what he called his list Did you did you see that or did you come across that?

Mike Drapeau (33:42)
I did see the list and after we arrested him, was pretty sure he was gonna be on the next list. And I would agree that he probably would have been.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (33:47)
Right.

And you know, a lot of people kind of discount the fact that, this guy is just in the National Guard or something like that. But this guy was a true operator in the sense he really trained military tactics and had been in a combat situation, knew how to do these things. And so it didn't just go by the wayside with

Mike Drapeau (34:13)
I think the argument that I know for a fact that once they radiographed that specific element that Pavel made it at the lab, it's made up of other things that exist in nature, right? So everything that it's made of, its component parts all exist in nature. And the argument was that what Pavel did was he took all these things that exist in nature and he heated them up and he bound them together and they became Acudir.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (34:16)
is.

Right.

Mike Drapeau (34:38)
something he made specifically for that. The defenses argument, and it's not a bad argument, looked in a certain way is that all of those things exist in your house. They're all elements that exist in nature, and they're all inside the house. And when you light something on fire and there's heat that is hot enough inside that house, it becomes like a little crucible. And their argument was that those things could have just formed inside the crucible. And the only argument I ever had to that was like, well, yeah.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (35:01)
right.

Mike Drapeau (35:05)
If you make a souffle, you make it out of flour and eggs and things you have in your house, salt, right? But you do it on purpose so that if your house catches on fire, you don't end up with a kitchen full of souffle.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (35:11)
.

Mike Drapeau (35:16)
It doesn't combine the way it does when you heat it purposefully It isn't the same

when Kirk was trying to figure out, how to make this argument with the defense, to make sense to the jury. That's the argument I

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (35:29)
Well, whatever the argument was that they made, obviously it worked very well because the jury really didn't deliberate for that long before they came back with a guilty verdict. when you talk about DNA, they always put out

an inconceivable number. to, well, this could be one person in X number. But when you say, well, there's only two people in the entire world could have this item, and this is one of them.

Mike Drapeau (35:56)
Not only that, it's so two people in the history of mankind. It's never existed before. It's never been made before. So only two people since the dawn of man have had

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (36:02)
Yeah.

Mike Drapeau (36:07)
access to that chemical component. Now could argue that Roy gave his gun to somebody and they did the murder for him, but that doesn't really make sense given the totality, right? So Roy had it and Pavel gave it to him and we collected it from Roy. So he had it when we arrested him. So only two people in the history of mankind have had that. And that's a really small number.

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (36:17)
Exactly.

Mike Drapeau (36:27)
kudos to all the people that worked that scene. They worked it super hard. They did everything I asked them to do and more. And in the end, when we did find that little bit we

a lot of hard work by lots of people at the lab and at

WTBL Walking The Blue Line (36:40)
Well. We appreciate you coming on again. Thanks, Mike.

Mike Drapeau (36:42)
Anytime.