So, Dad, the police went over the area with a fine-toothed comb and somehow missed this backpack. Did they fuck up?
I don't know the ground there; I don't know what kind of a search the Seattle police conducted in terms of going through garbage cans and looking under bushes. And there's no way of knowing how long that backpack was there. Maybe that backpack wasn't there during the search; it could have been there two hours before that passerby found it. Until the suspect tells you when and where he dropped the backpack, you have no way of knowing that the police overlooked it during their search.
Is it common for a murder suspect to return to the scene of the crime weeks later and dispose of the murder weapon?
No, it's not. So, yeah, I would assume the backpack has been there for a while, but I don't know how your police department conducted their ground search, so I don't want to criticize. But if a murder weapon is somewhere within four blocks of the crime scene, well, I would suggest that a good expanding area search, block by block, should have recovered the murder weapon sooner.
Did you ever overlook a murder weapon at a crime scene?
I've done those kind of searches, and sure, you miss stuff. You look in yards, under bushes, in trees, on rooftops, and you could miss something in a heartbeat. Cops are human. Then a jogger or a biker comes along and finds something you missed. That's quite often how we turn cases. You exhaust your leads, and something just turns up weeks, months, and sometimes years later. It's not like TV, you know.
COP TALK
