Two words sprang to mind. Fat Chance. What were the odds on a crime scene being this neat? The victim, a message written in his own blood, and the murder weapon all within a few yards of each other. My gut told me something was wrong.
The boys in blue were happy enough to sign off on it. Even though the accused had a cast iron alibi, but I smelt a rat.
I went over the evidence again. There was only one fatal blow to the victim’s head. He’d have been dead before he hit the floor. The baseball bat had been wiped clean. The question was how could a dead man write his killer’s name in his own blood?
“Follow the money”, my instincts shouted. “Who was set to gain by this murder?”
The alleged killer, John Bartton Sen. was a business partner of the deceased. I picked up the phone and contacted the wife of the victim. She wasn’t buying it either.
“John was like family. He and my husband had been friends since childhood, I would trust John with my children’s lives.”
A dead-end as far as I was concerned, the police were definitely holding the wrong man.
I sent a photo of the scrawled blood message to the forensics handwriting department, it was a long shot, but I didn’t have much to go on.
This case was worrying me, I knew the answer was staring me in the face, but I just couldn’t see it.
I rechecked my interview notes, it clicked that the wife referred to the accused as John Bartton and not as John Batonn Sen. I realised that old friends would never add a suffix to each other’s names.
I picked up the phone again and contacted the accused family, and hit the jackpot.
John Bartton had an estranged son, John Bartton Jnr. A nasty piece of work who had a wrap sheet that included multiple charges of GBH. His mother told me he definitely had a grudge against his old man.
He’d gone to ground, but rats like him have to surface sometime. I waited.
Sure enough his coke habit forced him out. I followed my information and tracked him down before he could re-submerge.
His revenge on his father hadn’t been sweet after all.
