Why would someone in an Illinois State Police crime lab saw off a small section of a shotgun that was allegedly used by a Lacon man to kill his estranged girlfriend in Sparland last spring?
That was one of the questions not fully answered Tuesday by lengthy testimony and cross-examination of a crime scene investigator in the trial of Tony Smith, who faces four counts of first-degree murder in the slaying of Judith Berchtold on April 11.
The stock was found to have been broken off the 12-gauge pump model at the scene, and authorities have used that to buttress allegation that Smith beat the woman after killing her with five shots.
Jurors were shown the separate pieces during more than three hours of testimony by state crime scene investigator Matthew Vien, who also pointed to apparent blood and hair on the gun's serial number.
But only co-defense attorney Roger Bolin's later cross-examination revealed that the gun did not fully match the one in a photograph taken shortly after the incident and also shown to jurors: Someone had smoothly sawed off a section of the steel shaft that had been attached to the stock.
Vien seemed stunned, saying he did not know how or why that had happened. He had testified that the gun and all other pieces of evidence were in the same condition Tuesday as when he sealed them in evidence containers.
"But now you're sitting in front of a gun that appears to have been sawed off and is not in the condition it was when you sealed it," Bolin said.
The sawed-off piece was later found in a sealed plastic bag in the same evidence box that held the gun. A crime lab analyst apparently had sawed it off at the same time the trigger mechanism was removed for testing, Vien said, but he did not know why, and prosecutors offered no immediate answer.
"All I do is collect and bag the evidence," Vien said.
Bolin used the situation to further a broader challenge of evidence against Smith. Among the other issues raised in sometimes combative questioning were:
- There was no blood or tissue on the shotgun's stock.
- There was no evidence of fingerprint analysis of the gun or shell casings.
- A photograph showed Smith's and Berchtold's vehicles in contact at the scene, yet a detailed diagram shown to jurors showed a gap between them.
"Which is it?" Bolin asked.
"Looking at my photographs, they clearly were in contact," said Vien.
Later testimony revealed that there had been 55 calls from Smith's cell phone to Berchtold's during the five hours leading up to the incident. Prosecutors have described the shooting as an explosion of anger that built through the day.
Jurors also heard from nearby residents who heard or saw parts of the incident. Patrick McClary of Lacon said he was visiting a friend in Sparland when he saw and heard someone unidentifable engaged in acts that prosecutors allege to have been Smith beating Berchtold.
"He was swinging something down toward the ground," McClary said. "There was (the sound of) solid striking. It actually reminded me of someone smashing pumpkins or watermelons, if you ever did that as a child."
