It goes into how the PD investigated a child murder and the things they did right and wrong , conclusion is once they locked on to a theory they looked for facts to back it up instead of finding facts then a theory...by the way their sons were taken away from them immediately...
At the police station, the Crowes were not allowed to see or talk with one another. Each of the five family members was taken into a room and ordered to undress, one piece of clothing at a time, until they were naked. They were photographed at each stage.
This is standard procedure. Detectives were looking for scratches, cuts, marks of any kind that could have been caused by either a knife or a struggling victim. They found none.
Police confiscated the family's clothes for further testing and took blood, hair and fingernail samples.
Steve Crowe resisted but was told he could either allow himself to be photographed then and there or wait, perhaps for days, in a cell while a court order was obtained. He submitted to the camera.
It is a tale of tragedy and loss, of mindsets shattered and decisions made in the quest for justice and their consequences.
Michael and Cheryl Crowe reported hearing pounding in the night, but neither got up to investigate. When police walked the perimeter, they found no broken doors or windows. A couple of window screens were bent, but in place. Dust, cobwebs and other debris indicated the screens had not been moved.
Detectives initially believed all the windows and doors were locked. Family members told them Stephanie's grandmother had a habit of making sure the house was secure before going to bed.
Later, though, there would be confusion about just what was locked. Steve Crowe was in and out of various doors that panic-fueled morning before the police arrived.
Everyone agrees now that at least two entryways were unlocked: Stephanie's bedroom window and a sliding glass door from the parents' bedroom to the back yard. But police considered it unlikely that someone would have entered through either.
The screen on Stephanie's window was one of those that was bent but appeared undisturbed; it had been pulled out in the bottom left corner and the window left unlocked so a phone line could be run into her room.
To get into the parents' bedroom from outside, someone would have had to open a sliding screen door, which police did find partly open; then open the sliding glass door, which was found closed; and then get past plastic vertical blinds, which also were found closed. Steve and Cheryl Crowe, sleeping just feet away, said they heard nothing.
Cheryl Crowe told police she remembered hearing her bedroom door push open a couple of times that night -- not the glass slider, but the door at the other end of the room, leading to the hallway. She thought it was one of the family's two cats.
All this suggested to Claytor that the killing was an inside job.
No one was surprised by that theory. Most domestic murders are committed by someone known to the victim. The FBI, in fact, trains law enforcers that, when a child is killed in the home, the parents are the first suspects.
If the parents can be ruled out, move next to siblings and others living in the house. Then move to those who had frequent access to the child, a baby-sitter, for example, and then to friends and business associates of the parents.
The final option, under the FBI's protocol, is to look at strangers.
Police investigators the world over follow this line of thinking. Detectives looked first at Steve Crowe, wondering whether maybe he was molesting his daughter and killed her to keep her quiet.
But they also wondered about Michael Crowe.
Family members had been ushered into the living room and told not to talk to each other -- standard police procedure to guard against witnesses' sharing information and contaminating the investigation.
Although the first officer at the scene reported that the Crowes "all appeared to be very upset," others found the 14-year-old boy curiously unemotional.
Claytor would testify that while the rest of the Crowes sat close together on the couch Michael played a hand-held video game. The family disputes this.
Claytor also learned that Michael had been overheard saying he got up in the early morning, about 4:30, and went to the kitchen to take a painkiller. He said he had a headache.
Michael's bedroom was directly across the hallway from Stephanie's. How, the detective wondered, could the teen have left his room and not seen his sister's bloody corpse in her doorway?
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