“Nor did you find gunshot residue on anything else among his possessions in the southwest corner of Franzen Park, correct?”
“We did not.”
“So you didn’t find any physical evidence that Tom Stoller fired that weapon, did you?”
“We didn’t find any GSR, as you said.”
Equivocation. Dumb. A chance for me to repeat and emphasize.
“GSR or anything else, Detective-you didn’t find a single shred of physical or forensic evidence that Tom Stoller fired the murder weapon, did you?”
“That’s correct, sir.”
I paused for a segue, and to let that quick rat-a-tat of favorable information soak into the jurors’ minds.
“Now, in the course of collecting evidence that night, you found the spent shell casing from the Glock 23 on the sidewalk, in the soil of the planted tree?”
“That’s correct, Mr. Kolarich.”
“A distance of ten feet and one inch from where the victim was lying dead.”
“That’s correct.”
“A Glock semiautomatic expels its casing to the right, true?”
“True.”
“Not forward or backward.”
“Correct.”
“So it’s likely that the weapon was fired from ten feet away.”
Danilo shrugged. “Hard to say. A shell casing could be moved.”
I looked at the jury. “You’re saying someone might have moved the shell casing?”
“It’s possible, I’m saying.”
“Well, did you find a fingerprint on the shell casing?”
“No, sir. But it was wintertime. People wear gloves.”
“Did you find gloves on my client’s hands when you arrested him?”
He paused, then smiled. “No, we did not.”
“So you have no evidence that the shell casing was moved, do you?”
“Just as you have no evidence it wasn’t.”
“But I’m not trying to prove my client innocent beyond a reasonable doubt, am I? You’re trying to prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Isn’t that your understanding of how this works, Detective?”
“Objection. Argumentative,” said Wendy.
The judge overruled. Danilo conceded the point. “I have no evidence the casing was moved.”
“And if the shell casing wasn’t moved, that would mean that the shooter was ten feet away from Kathy Rubinkowski when he shot her.”
“If the casing wasn’t moved, yes.”
“Detective, have you ever fired a Glock weapon?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Hitting someone with a shot between the eyes from ten feet away with a Glock pistol-that’s no easy feat, is it?”
“It’s good marksmanship,” he agreed.
“It’s excellent marksmanship, wouldn’t you agree?”
He gave that a moment. “Yes,” he said.
“And the street lighting on Gehringer Street was rather weak, wasn’t it?”
“I’m not sure I would characterize it that way.”
I walked him through the high-powered flashlights and the remote-area lighting equipment he brought in to conduct the crime scene investigation that night. I drew it out in a series of questions to overstate my point, which was that the shot from the Glock was not only impressive because of the distance but also the relative darkness.
“But since you raised it, Detective.” I moved from the podium now. I didn’t even feel my knee. “In your experience, why would someone move a shell casing?”
Danilo thought for a moment. He probably hadn’t expected that question. “To throw off the measurements,” he said. “Criminals alter crime scenes to make the story look different than it was.”
That was what I needed. “Criminals try to alter things to hide their crimes, yes?”
“Of course.”
“For example, some killers pick up their shell casings after firing their weapon. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“And in your experience, you’ve seen instances where killers robbed their victims after killing them to make their motive appear to be robbery. You’ve seen that, haven’t you? They had a different motive but they wanted to conceal it, so they made it look like a robbery? In your twenty-two years on the force, you’ve seen that?”
Danilo had no way out of that. “I’ve seen that happen. It’s not the norm.”
“But you’ve seen people use a purported robbery to cover up their real motive.”
“Objection, Your Honor. Asked and answered.”
“I’ll withdraw,” I said. “Kathy Rubinkowski was a paralegal at a law firm, wasn’t she, Detective?”
“Correct.”
“Do you know how many criminal cases she worked on?”
“I don’t, no.”
The answer was zero, but I don’t know was what I wanted.
“Well, then describe for us generally what cases she worked on.”
He shook his head. “I’m not able to do that.”
“You didn’t investigate the cases she worked on?”
“I didn’t consider it necessary, no.”
“Did you check her e-mails?”
“No, sir. I didn’t consider it necessary, given that your client was found with the victim’s personal items and the murder weapon, which he claimed as his own.”
“Did Tom say how long that gun had been in his possession?” I asked. I asked it as an open-ended question only because I knew the answer; the entire conversation was captured on tape.
“No, he didn’t,” Danilo conceded.
“He didn’t say, ‘I’ve owned that gun for ten years.’”
“No, sir.”
“He didn’t say, ‘I’ve owned that gun for ten hours.’”
“No, sir, he did not.”
“Detective, you’ve had some experience with homeless people as both a beat cop and later a detective, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And isn’t it fair to say that homeless people are often possessive of their things?”
“They can be. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but I take your point.”
Nice of him. “So isn’t it possible that when Tom said, ‘That’s my gun,’ that he had only possessed that gun for an hour before he was arrested?”
“That would surprise me.”
“But it’s possible.”
“Possible, I suppose.”
“So it’s possible that someone dumped that gun over the fence-the closest fence to the crime scene-and Tom was there. He picked it up, and in his mind, voila, it was now his gun.”
“Objection. Calls for speculation.”
“It’s no more speculative than the prosecution’s theory,” I protested. That wasn’t a valid response to the objection, and every lawyer in the room knew it. It was my closing argument.
The judge sustained and admonished me.
Good enough. I wanted to get back to my larger point. “Did you talk to Kathy’s co-workers about whether
