The first inconsistency that struck me was the claim that Jimmy was beating the couple and that he smashed Earl’s girlfriend into a window. Earl stated that Jimmy attacked him and Heidi in the bedroom, and he described a violent assault.
“Jimmy was hitting Heidi,” he told the police. “I could hear her screaming… I heard glass breaking. I saw Jimmy push Heidi into the bedroom window.”
But there was no evidence of a broken window. And there wasn’t a single picture of the supposedly brutalized Heidi. Despite the “beating” she says she sustained, Heidi did not go to the hospital. Unless the police were incredibly sloppy, she probably did not seem injured.
Then I looked for photos of Earl’s bodily injuries. How damaged was Earl?
There were two pictures of him. One was a front-facing photo. Earl had his shirt up so you could view his upper body for any damage. I could see none on his chest. There was a slight scrape on the bridge of his nose and a slightly dark spot under his eye. That’s it.
Earl also signed a release declining to go to the hospital.
Jimmy, by the way, was a big guy, six feet tall, 220 pounds, and probably drunk.
Earl, by contrast, was a little guy, about five foot five, 130 pounds. And this disparity of force is where he could have had a credible defense. Earl could have said, “We were scared to death of this big guy who was attacking us, and I had to save my girlfriend’s life. I had to protect her.” His excuse for shooting Jimmy was good, but where was the proof that Jimmy did anything to them? There was no sign of a fight or even a struggle. All we saw was Jimmy dead on the floor with a shotgun wound to his chest.
Before Jimmy was shot, Earl’s son, Joey, was there. Joey saw Earl and Jimmy chatting in the kitchen before he left. Joey went past them in the kitchen, went to his bedroom, picked up a change of clothes, and talked to Heidi in her bedroom, the bedroom that Heidi and Earl later said they were attacked in. He asked if she could take care of his animals, because he was going away for a while.
In recounting what happened, Earl said that while Joey was still in the house, Jimmy went into Heidi’s bedroom and started yelling at her.
But Joey didn’t say a word about it in his statement.
Earl and Heidi claimed that there was an escalation between the men in their argument. Then their story became confusing. Earl said that Jimmy charged back into the bedroom after some papers, but Heidi said she brought those papers to Jimmy in the kitchen, so they already weren’t making sense, because I believe they weren’t telling the truth.
THIS IS WHAT I think happened:
I don’t think Heidi was ever in the room. Heidi stated that she went to the bathroom when Jimmy supposedly started punching Earl. She said that when she came out of the bathroom and entered the bedroom, the altercation was already going on. But Earl said Jimmy attacked him and Heidi in the bedroom. He indicated Heidi was already in the bedroom when the physical violence began. I believe Heidi was never in the bedroom, which is why she seemed to have no bruises on her.
Earl decided Heidi had to be in the bedroom, too, so he had somebody to protect. Earl probably pressured Heidi to support his story, so she reported, “Yep, I was in the bedroom, too, and he attacked me, too.”
That made her a witness and a victim as well, giving Earl cover for committing this act of murder.
I believe Heidi was probably in the kitchen when Earl shot Jimmy. I think he coached her to say what she said. They both claim Jimmy said these exact words: “You think you are going to shoot me, motherfucker? I have a gun in my car!”
This was kind of weird, because if Jimmy says, “You think you are going to shoot me, motherfucker?” you would think he was being threatened with a gun at the time. And if he was being threatened with a gun at the time, it’s kind of a strange thing to say. “I’ve got a gun in my car.” It’s not going to do you a lot of good if your gun is not in your hand. How can you threaten a person with a gun that’s not even around? It’s a stupid statement.
It didn’t make sense, but I do think it’s possible that such a statement was made in the kitchen. If Earl threatened Jimmy and said, “I could shoot you, buddy,” and Jimmy said, “You think you are going to shoot me, motherfucker? I have a gun in my car! Yeah, you get your gun in the bedroom, I’ll get mine in my car!” But they probably were just saying stuff, and I don’t think Jimmy believed Earl was serious.
I think Earl went to his bedroom, and I think Jimmy followed him in to talk to him.
Here’s where it gets fascinating:
After Jimmy was shot in the chest, both Heidi and Earl said he fell onto the bedroom couch. This was true; I could see blood all over the couch, so the police photographs confirmed that, yes, that did happen.
Then Heidi stated that after Jimmy clutched his chest and fell facedown on the couch, she beat him with a baseball bat. Yes, she felt it necessary to hit a defenseless, dying man in the head with a baseball bat that she conveniently found in the corner, where she was trapped. According to her account, she was in the corner of the bedroom, saw Jimmy get shot in the chest and as he fell to the sofa, she thought, That’s not enough, let me hit him in the head with a baseball bat, because I’m scared of him.
I don’t know about you, but if I just saw somebody get blown away with a shotgun, I’m not worried that they will be coming after me at that point.
Except… I believe Heidi is trying to make some point about this baseball bat. There is a reason for that, and I’m coming to it.
Heidi claimed not to remember how many times she hit Jimmy. In one report, she supposedly told somebody twenty to thirty times-but Jimmy didn’t even have the slightest concussion! No damage to his head at all!
She also said that after she hit Jimmy on the head, he got off the sofa and fell to the floor, then never moved again.
Jimmy was found on the floor next to the sofa. He was dead right there, that’s for sure. But what she said was curious: “He never moved again.”
Earl said that Jimmy fell on the couch and then straight to the floor. He also said that Heidi hit Jimmy with a baseball bat after he got to the floor, so their stories didn’t quite agree.
At that point, they both checked on Jimmy and then they left the house. That was their claim.
I say that Heidi was never in the bedroom at all. It is my belief that Heidi never touched the baseball bat, never struck Jimmy, and was merely repeating a story given to her by Earl to account for his use of the baseball bat on Jimmy.
Here’s where the photos made such a difference to the plausibility of their stories. There was only one set of bloody footprints leading from the bedroom into the kitchen. One. Of course, the police never said to whom those bloody footprints belonged. They should have been able to look at their feet and make an easy match, but that was never in the notes. There was one foot that stepped into the blood but, I wondered, if there were two people running around going crazy, beating people with baseball bats and checking on the dead guy on the floor, then why were there not two sets of footprints leaving? It seemed obvious to me that Heidi was never, ever, there.
Earl said that when Jimmy fell to the floor and was dead, he and Heidi left the premises. No mention was ever made of coming back to check on the dead man.
Heidi, however, maintained that she and Earl came back with a handgun and went to the bedroom and saw that Jimmy hadn’t moved at all. She said they went back to check after they got a handgun. The guy was shot in the chest and beaten twenty times with a baseball bat, but Heidi thought they needed another gun to make certain he was 110 percent dead.