I personally became convinced the wounded murderer must have gone up a certain barranca to hide some of the girl's school books and personal belongings. I suggested to the district attorney that if this assumption was correct we would find drops of blood on the rocks, probably about every twenty feet apart.
Searchers were dispatched to that dry stream bed. Sure enough they found the drops of blood, a whole trail of drops, about twenty-two feet apart.
Dr. Snyder tested the bloodstains. They had been made by a wounded rabbit.
And then finally the steady, relentless pressure of publicity paid off. The wife of a man who lived only a few miles from where the body had been discovered came to the authorities in an almost hysterical state. She knew that her husband had committed the murder.
Neighbors told a very peculiar story. The day after the crime the suspect had washed his car inside and out. Then he had raised the turtleback of the car and had given that a good scrubbing. After that he had left the hose running in the car for hours and hours, washing it out thoroughly. Then he had dried the car, and when the interior of the turtleback was completely dry he had given it a good thick coating of red lead. Afterwards he had put on a second coating of red lead.
The gravel guard of chrome steel had been taken into the kitchen and scrubbed and scrubbed with a polisher until it shone like a mirror.
Yet Dr. Snyder had the answer to all that. He knew of certain scientific tests for the detection of bloodstains, tests so delicate that a cotton shirt stained with blood could be sent to a commercial laundry for seven successive times and the stain still be detected.
Officers who worked on the case told me they had never seen a car inspected for evidence the way Dr. Snyder inspected that car. He scraped away the red lead from around the bolts of the automobile, then with a wrench he carefully loosened those bolts and underneath the heads of the bolts he was able to find faint traces of blood.
He dug up the soil under the place where the automobile had been standing all the time the water was running out from the turtleback. In that soil he was able to find traces of blood. He was even able to find the telltale blood reaction on the car's polished gravel guard.
During the course of that investigation there were half a dozen false leads. There was one individual who could have been taken into custody and perhaps his entire life ruined. There were bizarre coincidences.
It was a pleasure to work with the district attorney who realized so thoroughly the responsibilities of his office, who marshalled such a deadly array of facts that the murderer was convicted despite the fact that his wife could not be called as a witness under the law of Colorado.
Yet the most important clue in the case was invisible to all human eyes. Only the lens of the camera and the super-sensitive panchromatic film picked up that circle on the girl's hip and enabled the authorities to deduce that the girl had been attacked by but one man. Knowing that fact, authorities deduced that in the terrific struggle which had ensued this man had probably been injured.
That invisible circle was really the key clue in the case.