Tornado Alley (PROG)

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NRA's Murder Mystery

July 29, 2014
Shortly before dark on the evening of April 17, 1963, Robert J. Dowlut went looking for a gun inside the city cemetery in South Bend, Indiana. Making his way through the headstones, he stopped in front of the abandoned Studebaker family mausoleum. He knelt by the front right corner of the blocky gray monument and lifted a stone from the damp ground. Then, as one of the two police detectives accompanying him later testified, the 17-year-old "used his hands and did some digging." He unearthed a revolver and ammunition. As Dowlut would later tell a judge [ http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1235917-dowlut-testimony.html#document/p14/a168068 ], the detectives then took the gun, "jammed it in my hand," and photographed him. "They were real happy."
Two days earlier, a woman named Anna Marie Yocum had been murdered in her South Bend home. An autopsy determined she had been shot three times, once through the chest and twice in the back, likely at close range as she'd either fled or fallen down the stairs from her apartment. Two .45-caliber bullets had pierced her heart.
Less than an hour after her body was found, two police officers had gone to Dowlut's home and asked him to help locate Yocum's 16-year-old daughter, whom he'd dated. After a short, fruitless search, the officers took him to police headquarters. Though Dowlut was booked as a material witness, investigators soon came to suspect that the tall, polite Army private, home on a two-week leave, had killed Yocum. After a day of intense questioning, Dowlut allegedly broke down and confessed in detail to the murder as well as to a botched robbery attempt earlier the same night in which the owner of a pawnshop was seriously wounded.
At first, Dowlut insisted that he'd thrown his gun into the St. Joseph River, but the detectives kept pushing. One officer, Dowlut later testified [ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1235917-dowlut-testimony.html#document/p12/a168066 ], "just grabbed me by the shirt, told me that I was a son of a bitch, and that I'd better show them where the gun was really at." Not long afterward, Dowlut told [ http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1235917-dowlut-testimony.html#document/p13/a168067 ] his interrogators that he'd lied: "I said the gun was in the city cemetery." According to one detective, Dowlut reeled off the weapon's serial number from memory.
The gun Dowlut unearthed less than a half mile from the murder scene was a Webley Mark VI [ http://www.nramuseum.org/the-museum/the-galleries/world-war-i-and-firearms-innovation/case-57-world-war-i-allies-the-world-at-war,-1914-1918/webley-mk-vi-revolver.aspx ], a British-made six-shot military revolver commonly sold in the United States after World War II. The Indiana State Police Laboratory determined that it had fired a bullet recovered from Yocum's body, one retrieved from her apartment, and another found at the pawnshop.
The following morning, Dowlut was charged with first-degree murder. A year and a half later, a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder. Before the judge handed down a life sentence [ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1235950-sentence.html ], he asked the defendant if there was any reason why he shouldn't be put away. Dowlut replied, "I am not guilty." A day later, the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City registered Dowlut, now 19, as prisoner number 33848.
Less than six years later, Robert Dowlut would be a free man—his murder conviction thrown out by the Indiana Supreme Court because of a flawed police investigation. The court ordered a new trial, but one never took place. Dowlut would return to the Army and go on to earn college and law degrees. Then he would embark on a career that put him at the epicenter of the movement to transform America's gun laws.
[(much more)...]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/robert-dowlut-nra-murder-mystery [with comments]