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CSI Mystery
One night in Orange County, California, Leah and her boyfriend Frank were out walking in their neighborhood. A homeless man was sitting on the corner minding his own business when Frank tripped over his makeshift cardboard bed. Frank had a temper problem so he started yelling at the poor old guy. When Frank punched him, Leah couldn’t take it anymore. She told him to stop but he wouldn’t. Leah distracted him long enough that finally, the homeless man ran away. Furious, Frank dragged Leah back to their house. That was the last time Leah was seen outdoors.
The next day, the police were contacted by Leah’s neighbors because they heard screams from within the house last night. Officer Daniel was the first cop on the scene. He walked into the house and found Leah lying face down in the living room with a dagger in her chest. As soon as Officer Daniel was finished looking for DNA, he took the murder weapon to the lab to be tested for blood samples and fingerprints.
At the lab, Officer Daniel took his samples to Dr. Laura. When she received the samples, she immediately uploaded samples of Frank’s DNA to compare them. When Dr. Laura transferred the samples to slides and looked at them under the microscope. When she first looked she thought they were the same. But when Laura looked at the slides more closely, she found that they were slightly different. The sample taken from the crime scene was made up of the same structure as Frank’s sample but it wasn’t a direct match. Dr. Laura then concluded that the DNA must have been mixed together with a little of Leah’s so that’s why it wasn’t an exact match.
When the results came back from the lab, there were two sets of DNA on the murder weapon. Dr. Leah told Officer Daniel that one was Leah’s and the other was similar to her Frank’s mixed with Leah’s. Through the police data base, Daniel was able to locate Frank who had fled to New York. When Daniel got there, Frank denied killing Leah so Daniel took him back to California to be questioned.
After three days of questioning, Frank finally gave in and confessed to hiring his brother, Jacob, to kill Leah. Now everything was clear to Daniel. It wasn’t Frank’s DNA on the dagger but his twin brother Jacob’s. That’s why they confused the DNA. When Officer Daniel searched for Jacob to arrest him, he was no where to be found.
Dr. Leah entered Jacob’s DNA in the FBI database and searched for registered and illegal residents in the United States and Mexico. After searching through a long list and going from door to door asking “Have you seen this man?”, Officer Daniel got a tip from a woman in Mexico that Jacob was undercover in Mexico City as Pablo Lopez. Officer Daniel immediately took a plane to Mexico and took Jacob under arrest. The journey back to California was tiring but, eventually, they made it. It took three weeks to get a respectable judge and jury, then another two weeks to find a court house to with hold the trial. Once the arrangements were set, court was in session. Jacob decided to plea not guilty.
After a very tiring debate, it was time for the jury to decide if Jacob was in fact not guilty and what his punishment was. It took four weeks for the jury to decide their verdict. Jacob was convicted guilty of second degree murder and was told to serve a life sentence without parole. Frank had a separate trial for being involved in Leah’s murder. He plead guilty. The jury gave him a fifty year sentence with a chance of two years parole.
Near the end of Frank’s sentence, he died in his cell of lung cancer. Jacob served his sentence until he died at the age of 91 and was buried in the jail’s cemetery since he had not written a will. All of his belongings were repossessed by the government since he had no more living relatives. Justice was served on the account of Leah’s death but that gave Frank and Jacob no right to commit murder.
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This article has 20 comments.
Ashlie
I am so proud of you! I love mysteries and you did a great job on this one. You kept me reading and that's always a good sign. I hope you continue writing as I think you have a career ahead of you. Di
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