Murder On Lockhart Road

This broadcast first aired on Dec. 9, 2006. It was updated on July 10, 2008.

On the evening of Sept. 28, 2000, former Indiana state trooper David Camm came home to find his 35-year-old wife Kim and his five-year-old daughter Jill murdered, both shot execution-style in the head; his seven-year old-son Brad died after being shot in the chest.

Just three days later, Camm, 36, was arrested and charged with the murders. Camm has adamantly denied any involvement in the murders.

Correspondent Richard Schlesinger has spent years investigating the case, one with bizarre evidence and many unusual twists that would lead to an ending that no one expected.

"I started to pull my truck in, I get up to the threshold and that's when I saw the first stream of blood," Camm told Schlesinger. "I get down in her face and yell 'Kim, Kim!' And her eyes - I could tell she was gone."

His children, Brad and Jill, were still inside the family SUV. "I looked in the back and I looked to the right, that's when I saw Brad, kind of like he was stretched over the seat and his little eyes-I could just barely see his little eyes," Camm recalled. "I could see little Jill, she was still sittin' there in her seat and her head, her little head was down in her lap."

Up until four months before the murders, Camm had been a trooper with the Indiana State Police and a lot of people were stunned when he was charged with the murders.

It's basic police work to look at the surviving spouse as the number one suspect, but to those who knew Camm, it seemed like a rush to judgment. He is from a large and influential family and had no obvious motive. And there was one other thing: he had what appeared to be an airtight alibi.

"David was at the gym at the time his family was killed. He was at the Georgetown Community Church playing basketball," says Camm's uncle Sam Lockhart, who from day one has insisted his nephew did not do it.

Lockhart says he was at the same gym at the same time, watching his nephew play. Ten other people say they can prove it too; they say they were all at the basketball game that night with Camm.

All of the men said they saw Camm at the gym and that he sat out the second game that night at approximately 7:30, around the same time police believe the murders occurred. Several players said they remembered seeing Camm on the sidelines. Another man at the gym that night also says he spoke with Camm.

If Camm snuck out of a basketball game at the gym, raced home, killed his family and raced back there without anyone noticing, he's either very clever or very lucky. Did he have time to do it? To find out, 48 Hours drove the exact same route prosecutors believe Camm took that night.

It took all of 15 minutes, investigators say, for Camm to commit the crime. It took Schlesinger eight minutes to make the round trip which means, if you believe the prosecution's theory, Camm had roughly seven minutes to kill Kim, Brad and Jill.

But to this day, investigators are still not sure what happened inside the garage that night. There are all sorts of strange things about the crime scene. For one, it seemed much too clean. And on top of the Ford Bronco, Kim's shoes had been neatly positioned.

So was the murderer tidy? A little compulsive? And there was more: an unidentified palm print on the Bronco door and a grey sweatshirt tucked neatly next to Brad's body.

Camm has always insisted that he could never have killed his wife and kids, and that he was a happy family man from the moment he met Kim. It all started out beautifully when they married in 1989. It wasn't long before Bradley was born.

But Kim and David were headed for trouble. When Kim was pregnant with Jill, he had an affair. "It's sheer stupidity on my part, I allowed myself to get caught into something that you know, that never should have happened. And you know I take full responsibility for that," Camm admits.

The couple eventually reconciled and a few years later, just months before the murders, things seemed to get even better. Camm quit his job with the police and began work at the family business. The new job gave Camm what he said he wanted most: more time with his family and more money.

But as this case unfolded, police said they started learning about more dark secrets. It looked like Camm had been leading a double life. As one woman put it, Camm was "very flirty with the women," and Camm acknowledges "there had been a few incidents over the ten-year-period."

One woman, who asked not to be named, met Camm in the early 1990s. She says their relationship lasted for about six months, and ended abruptly when she learned Camm was married.

But Camm, she says, was persistent and there was one phone call she'll never forget. "It was more or less screaming at me. You know, 'Who told you!'" she recalls.

Prosecutor Stan Faith believes Camm's adultery was a motive for murder. "If you are wanting to lead a lifestyle that he seemed to want to lead, you may want to get rid of your spouse. This happens all the time."

In Jan. 2002, a little more than a year after the murders, Camm's trial began. Prosecutors planned to present dozens of witnesses, including a parade of women saying Camm propositioned them for sex

In addition to the women, there was a pile of forensic evidence including that grey sweatshirt, which he insists was left there by the real killer.

On that point, prosecutors had to admit that Camm was right: the DNA on the sweatshirt was not his. And they didn't know whose palm print it was on the Bronco, either. But they still had plenty of plenty of powerful evidence to throw at Camm, including an explosive autopsy report that would turn the trial on its head.

Dr. Tracy Corey performed the autopsy on five-year-old Jill Camm. "When we began to remove her clothes, we immediately noticed blood," she remembers.

It was where they found blood that alarmed Dr. Corey and her colleagues. "Personally I think that Jill Camm was the victim of sexual abuse. What I can say as far as professionally, when asked what my professional opinion is, I can say that she has blunt trauma, that that blunt trauma is consistent with sexual abuse, but it might be consistent with something else. It's just, I haven't been presented with a scenario that explains that to me," she says.

Dr. Corey's discovery stunned and sickened Kim's family. If Jill had been molested then who did it? Prosecutors thought they knew: David Camm.

But Camm denies molesting his daughter and says he didn't know anything about a sexual assault.

The most important question for Camm's defense was: when was Jill molested? Dr. Corey believes it was within hours of her death, between 12 and 24 hours.

By all accounts, Camm didn't see Jill after 7 a.m. on the day she died. So if she was molested within 12 hours of her death, Camm didn't have access to her and couldn't have done it. But, if it was within 24 hours, that's another story.

It is very tough to prove Camm molested his daughter and he has never been charged with it.

While Kim and Jill had been shot in the head, Brad had been shot in the chest and Dr. Corey says the little boy bled to death internally. Before he died, Corey says Brad would have been able to hear, see and speak. And she believes the pattern of his injuries shows Bradley was likely face-to-face with his killer.

On Camm's T-shirt, investigators found eight tiny blood drops, which prosecutors claim got there when he pulled the trigger.

Investigators hoped blood stain expert Rod Englert could connect the dots. Using stage blood and a piece of paper, Englert shot a blank at the blood, demonstrating how it would splatter.

"You cannot create that pattern. This is very indicative of high velocity mist," explains Englert, who was hired by the prosecution.

Englert examined Camm's shirt and identified the stains as what's called "high velocity impact spatter," caused by a bullet hitting a body. But that's just one theory. The defense says those drops of blood actually back up Camm's version of what he did when he discovered the bodies.

"I grabbed Brad, picked him up," Camm explains. "I was gonna try to do CPR on him."

Bart Epstein, a blood stain expert for more than 30 years, was hired by the defense and believes those eight droplets on David's shirt got there when he leaned over to remove his son's body from the SUV.

Epstein says those tiny drops of blood were made when Camm's shirt brushed against the tips of Jill's bloody hair. Using a wig and some stage blood, Epstein demonstrated how these blood stains could have gotten on the shirt.

He believes these stains can look like high velocity impact spatter to some people. But in this case, the number of blood stains could be as important as their size.

"Gunshot will produce hundreds of stains coming back. I've never seen, I believe the other experts for both the prosecution and the defense have indicated that they've never seen just seven small or eight small stains from a gunshot. I've never seen that," says Epstein.

Camm's lawyers believe if he had pulled the trigger at point blank range, his clothes would have been covered in blood.

After roughly two months of arguments and testimony, the jury finally got the case. On a Sunday night, three days after they began deliberating, jurors reached a verdict: guilty.

Jurors believed Camm molested his daughter and murdered his family at least partly to cover that up. They believed the forensic evidence more than the 11 men at the gym, who said they were with Camm the night of the murders.

He was sentenced to 195 years in prison.

Kim's father Frank Renn says he felt relieved by the verdict, but not better. "I think he did it. I want him behind bars. I guess it makes me feel comfortable that he's behind bars," Kim's mother Janice added.

The Renns thought Camm would be in prison for the rest of his life, but this story turned out to be far from over: a new defense attorney was determined to uncover the truth about some old evidence, including the grey sweatshirt.

David Camm has always insisted he had nothing to do with the murders and spoke exclusively with 48 Hours about being convicted.

Camm says he didn't expect to be acquitted and that he saw it coming; he says he knew early on that his defense team never had a chance. "We were outmanned," he says,

Nobody expected what came next: the Indiana Court of Appeals made a bombshell decision, throwing out the convictions and slamming the judge in the Camm trial for allowing in evidence of adultery. The court said all those women could have unfairly persuaded the jury to turn against Camm. It was a stinging opinion. The court called the case against Camm "far from overwhelming."

Prosecutor Stan Faith knew the case was controversial but he never expected such a harsh ruling.

The court also strongly warned prosecutors that if they tried Camm again, and presented evidence that Jill was molested, they would have to prove that it was Camm who molested her.

Camm soon learned that he would face trial again. Both he and his new attorney Kitty Liell braced for an uphill battle, vowing to keep the molestation evidence out of the new trial.

"In reality, they were never able and still have not been able to come up with any evidence that the blunt force trauma suffered by Jill was caused by David Camm," Liell says.

Camm's new defense team would face a new prosecutor, Keith Henderson. His first priority was to take a closer look at Camm's alibi, those 11 men who say they were with him at the time of the murders. They looked at the story each man in the gym that night told.

Prosecutors started to believe Camm's alibi might not be so strong after all.

"They don't know how many games they played, they don't know what they were wearing, they don't know just lots of things, I think that's where our cross examination could be built - their inability to remember things," a prosecutor said during a strategy session, which 48 Hours was allowed to attend.

Henderson's case was starting to take shape, even though he would not be permitted to present large chunks of evidence the jury in the first trial heard.

From the beginning Camm always insisted that the grey sweatshirt, which never was fully investigated, could answer a lot of questions. "That was one of the primary elements of our defense was that sweatshirt," Camm explains. "And the state simply dismissed it."

The sweatshirt held two important clues: there were blood stains on it that contained DNA; and the word "Backbone" was written inside the collar.

DNA analyst Lynn Skamerhorn, from the Indiana State Police lab, tested the sweatshirt before Camm's first trial. Besides Bradley's blood, Skamerhorn says she was able to identify other blood stains, most yielding "very good results as far as DNA was concerned."

In fact, there was a lot of DNA on that sweatshirt. Some of it matched Brad and his mother, Kim, but the rest of it belonged to at least two unidentified people, a man and a woman. None of it matched Camm.

Amazingly, that mystery DNA was never run through the federal data bank of known felons before Camm's first trial. Faith did ask to have the profile run through the DNA database but that didn't happen. "I think somebody dropped the ball," he says.

It was a huge error and Kitty Liell believes the mystery DNA would reveal the truth about what happened on the night of the murder. She was right: the results would eventually blow the case wide open.

David Camm hoped, after five years in prison, that he would finally go free. With the help of an angry appeals court and his attorneys, Camm's case was transferred to another county, where the judge set bond at $20,000.

Sam Lockhart wasted no time and went straight to the bank to get the money he needed to get his nephew out and take him home to await his next trial.

The key to finding the killer, or killers, could be that mysterious grey sweatshirt.

Prosecutor Keith Henderson pushed to finally get some answers and ordered the lab to look at everything. What they found changed just about everything.

Five years after the murders the DNA found on that sweatshirt was run through a data bank of convicted felons; almost immediately there was a hit.

The DNA matched to a man named Charles Darnell Boney, a convicted felon who was recently released from prison. It turns out Boney has a nickname, "Backbone," the same name written on the collar of that sweatshirt.

But there was one more mystery. Investigators were unable to identify the female DNA found on the sweatshirt. Who was this mystery woman?

Camm thought this would be the end of his legal trouble. "We got the killer. That's the guy who killed Kim, Brad and Jill. That's the guy," he said

Boney grew up in the same town as Camm. Once police knew who to look for they found him right away, just across the Ohio River in Louisville, Ky.

Boney wasn't officially a suspect, yet, but he was a person of interest to the police and the media. He had no problem talking - in fact, it was hard to shut him up.

"I will be on every station. I don't have anything to hide. I stand true to my word," he said during an interview.

Just four months before the murders, Boney had been released from prison, where he had served time for armed robbery.

Boney never tried to deny his nickname, Backbone. He was proud of it. "As you know my nickname's Backbone, all it means is I'm not spineless," he said during a TV interview.

Boney denied any involvement in the murders and seemed especially eager to help defense investigators, who were videotaping their interviews. He appeared relaxed, and at times even chatty.

It quickly became obvious that Boney had what could only be described as an odd fascination if not an obsession: he really liked shoes and feet. His interests had gotten him into trouble with the law.

In the late 1980's, when he was a student at Indiana University in Bloomington, Boney was known to authorities by another name, "The Shoe Bandit." It's a fact he doesn't deny. "I mean. I'm guilty. I did it," he told police during an interview.

Boney's dramatic entrance into the Camm case seemed to answer a lot of questions about the crime scene, especially the bizarre placement of Kim's shoes on top of the Bronco.

But Boney denied being the killer. "I would rather kill myself than kill kids," he told investigators.

Camm's defense attorney immediately checked into Boney's background. "Well I learned he has a history of violent crimes against women," Liell says. "Like tackling women and punching them in the face and stealing one shoe."

Donna Ennis knows first hand Boney is a dangerous man. In Oct. 1992, she and her college roommates were robbed at gunpoint by him.

She says his demeanor quickly changed from calm to angry and agitated. "He told us if we did anything he was going to kill us. If we tried to run, if we tried to scream he was going to kill us," Ennis remembers.

Luckily, a neighbor saw the commotion and called the police; Boney was arrested.

Five years after David Camm's family had been murdered, the pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place. And Boney was a man with a lot of explaining to do, starting with that sweatshirt.

Boney claims he got rid it shortly after he was released from prison, saying he threw it into a Salvation Army drop box.

He was quick to point out his DNA wasn't the only DNA on the sweatshirt, saying that, "There's also unidentified female. Everyone knows that. Everyone that's followed the case."

He insists he doesn't know how his sweatshirt got to the crime scene and he insists he didn't even know David Camm. Boney wasn't doing himself any favors by continuing to talk, especially when the subject turned to fingerprints.

"My fingerprints would not appear at that crime scene, because first and foremost, once again, I would have to have been there in for my finger prints to appear at the crime scene," he told police.

But Henderson says the palm print on the outside of the Bronco matched Boney's fingerprints.

The more Boney talked, the more he implicated himself. "If something of mine was there at the scene, that means that I would have been there," he told police.

And police could not have agreed more. His sweatshirt, his DNA and his palm print at the scene of the murders made their case. Boney was arrested and charged with murdering Kim, Brad and Jill.

Shortly after Boney's arrest Camm and his father Don could hardly believe what happened next: the murder charges against David had been dropped. David's father had never seen his son so happy. "Oh gracious, he was nervous, he was shakin', he was beside himself," he remembers.

But the euphoria didn't last. For the first time in years there were no charges against David Camm. That changed about 60 minutes later.

Armed with warrants, officers arrested Camm, telling him he was being re-charged and would face an additional charge of conspiracy.

After a tiny taste of freedom, Camm was whisked back to jail. Keith Henderson had a new theory: Camm and Boney were partners and he couldn't let Camm remain free, fearing he might flee.

Henderson said Boney made this an entirely new case, so now Camm and Boney would face not just murder charges but also the new conspiracy charge.

"After discovering Charles Boney my belief now is that that this was planned well in advance," Henderson says.

But Camm says he never met or knew Boney, even though they both grew up in the small town of New Albany.

Prosecutors suspected Boney stayed behind to clean up after the murders so that Camm could race back to the basketball game.

Boney couldn't very well deny being at the murder scene anymore, with the sweatshirt, his DNA and the palm print putting him there. So he started cooperating up to a point; he always denied firing any shots that night.

Just days after Boney was arrested, he told police an almost entirely different story. He now said he knew Camm. He said he had met him at a basketball game and that he had told Camm he was an ex-con who dealt in drugs and guns. Once again, Boney was talking and investigators tape recorded every word.

Boney told prosecutors that Camm approached him with a special request. "He asked me specifically 'Do you still deal with getting firearms,'" Boney told police.

Henderson says Boney claimed Camm had approached him to obtain a clean, untraceable gun for $250.

Boney's attorney Patrick Renn, who is no relation to Kim's family, argues his client had no idea why Camm wanted the gun. "Charles Boney sold a weapon to David Camm. He did it for financial gain. Period. He never asked David Camm what he was gonna do with the weapon," he says.

And while Renn says Boney was at the murder scene, he says his client is a witness, and not a co-conspirator.

"He hears an altercation," Renn says. "And then he hears the female voice say, 'No' and then there's a shot and then he hears a young male voice saying 'Daddy' and then there's a second shot."

And, according to Renn, Camm turned the gun on Boney and tried to kill him. But the way Boney tells it, the gun jammed, and he pursued Camm back into the garage.

"After tripping over the shoes, he picked up the shoes, placed those shoes on top of the Bronco and then looked inside the vehicle. Saw the children. Saw they had been killed and then he left," Renn says.

Camm insists Boney's story is fiction. "He just makes this stuff up on the fly, trying to put things together, what he knows and what he doesn't know to make it fit to give them what they want," he says.

The murder investigation would lead authorities from rural Indiana to the Carribean island of Trinidad and a young lady named Mala Singh Mattingly.

She was Boney's girlfriend at the time of the killings. Their "romance" was short, so Mala was surprised when the police came looking for her five years later, trying to match that unknown female DNA on Boney's sweatshirt.

It turned out Boney still remembered her. "She would be the perfect, second perfect alibi," he told police.

Boney may have believed Mala would help his case, but he was very wrong. She tells Schlesinger she saw Boney leave on the night of the murder. "He told me he was going to help a buddy," she says.

Investigators say that "buddy" was David Camm.

At the time, Mala didn't think much of it. But a few hours later, Boney came home and woke her. Asked to describe what he was like on his return, Mala says, "Excited trying to catch his breath and panting … I see the scrape on his knee."

She was still sleepy, but she says Boney insisted on showing her a gun. Detectives aren't sure if Mala saw the murder weapon, which they have never found, but she is the only witness who will say she saw Boney night of the killing.

Boney and Camm would be tried for the same crime at the same time but on different sides of the state: Boney in New Albany, Camm 100 miles away in Boonville.

As the trial began, Boney's attorney faced every defense attorney's worst nightmare - a smorgasboard of forensic evidence, not to mention his client's own words taped and written.

Prosecutor Henderson laid out a devastating case: Mala Singh Mattingly's testimony about seeing Boney with a gun on the night of the murder, Boney's DNA and palm print at the crime scene, topped off with his own words, including some he thought he could take back.

After agreeing to write a statement for the police, Boney apparently had second thoughts about a few lines and crossed them out.

Unfortunately for Boney, the prosecution had a powerful weapon: forensic document examiner Diane Tolliver. She has been uncovering hidden messages for 30 years.

Tolliver had low expectations for deciphering the crossed out words but using a high tech gizmo, called the Video Spectral Comparator 2000, she was able to reveal the message.

"The original text was 'David Camm asked me to follow him to a secluded area. He wanted to talk to me about something that could help me financially he said,'" Tolliver read.

It was very strong evidence, even though David Camm says it's all a lie. "He was writing on the fly. He was making it up as he went along," he insists.

But Boney's attorney believes the statement helps prove Boney's claim that all he did was sell David Camm a gun.

It's was a tough defense to sell to a jury. After three days of deliberations, jurors found Charles Boney guilty on all counts.

Jurors quickly decided that Boney was guilty of Kim's murder; that decision took less than an hour. But the jury still had to decide about Brad and Jill's murders. Did Boney know the kids would also be killed that night? That's what troubled Kristy Litch, who was the last hold out.

"I don't know if it was the fact that I knew we was gonna have to find a man guilty of murder. Or if it was the fact I didn't want to convict 'em of the kids murders when I didn't have enough proof that he knew that they were gonna be murdered," she explains.

Camm's uncle Sam Lockhart saw the Boney verdict as a victory for David. "We're ecstatic that they finally got the killer. Our next deal is get Dave Camm free," he said.

And Kim's family worried that there was not nearly as much evidence against Camm as there was against Boney. "David Camm murdered these three people and he's the one we got to get," her father said,

With Boney behind bars, all eyes focused on Camm's re-trial. Camm's legal team believed when jurors would hear about Boney's violent past they would be convinced that Boney killed Kim, Brad, and Jill, not David Camm.

But the jury would hear very little about Boney - the judge ruled jurors could only be told that his DNA and palm print were found at the scene. But they would not hear about his recent conviction in this case, his previous crimes against women, or his foot fetish.

It was huge a blow to the defense and left Camm "extremely frustrated."

Still, Camm had the appeals court decision working for him. The ruling said all those women who testified about his adultery in the first trial would not be allowed in this one.

But the appeals court left the heart of prosecution's case untouched: the eight tiny blood stains on Camm's T-shirt, which prosecutors insist got there when Camm shot his family.

Asked why the blood stains don't implicate David Camm, Stacy Uliana, a member of the defense team says, "They fit perfectly with what Dave has said from the very beginning. He reached over his daughter when he pulled his son out of the car."

For weeks, Camm had had to sit through all the evidence a second time. He watched the blood experts tangle again and watched the gruesome crime scene photos, again.

It got more difficult. The judge decided prosecutors would be allowed to present some evidence that David's daughter Jill was molested, even though the appeals court set limits.

At the first trial, experts said Jill's injuries told them she was molested within 12 to 24 hours of her death. But at this trial, a new prosecution witness widened that window of opportunity in which David could have abused his daughter.

"The jury has learned that Jill Camm was sexually abused, two days prior to her murder," Henderson said.

But with almost every setback in this trial, Camm got some good news. After the prosecution rested, the judge ruled there was too little proof of a connection between Camm and Boney. There was no evidence of phone calls or meetings, hardly any evidence the men had a plan. The conspiracy charge was dismissed.

Camm's defense team hammered away at every prosecution witness, trying to raise as much doubt as possible.

A big part of the defense's case rested on the testimony of the basketball players, including Camm's uncle, who say they saw David on the night of the murders.

But prosecutor Keith Henderson thought he could punch a big hole in Camm's supposedly air-tight alibi. One of the basketball players who swore at the first trial that he saw Camm in the church gym for the entire evening, now said he wasn't sure.

How damaging is the testimony? It's hard to say because 10 other men still insist David was at the gym all the time.

"What's relevant here is was Dave Camm in that gym or not. The evidence shows that Dave Camm was in that gym that night when Charles Boney was murdering his family. And that's what counts," says Kitty Liell.

During closing arguments, Henderson argued Camm not only had the opportunity to kill his family, he had a motive. "Well the motive was Kimberly was leaving David Camm and she was leaving him because of the child molesting," he said.

"What they want to do is throw anything they can up against the wall," Liell argues. "It's character assassination. If they had any evidence of it they would have charged him."

But Camm's lawyers pointed the finger at Boney, whose DNA and palm print were at the crime scene; they said police botched the investigation and from the outset were determined to get Camm, despite his alibi.

Jurors got the case. On the fourth day of deliberations, the jury found David Camm guilty of murder, again

Camm says he was "dumbfounded" and "shocked" by the verdict.

Jurors meticulously went through all the evidence and decided the defense didn't add up, for the same reasons as the jury in the first trial. They believed those blood stains proved Camm was the killer.

Camm was sentenced to life without parole.

"Another thing that makes it more difficult is the fact that I did have that taste of being back with you know my brothers, sisters, cousins nieces nephews and being back with my family," Camm says of his brief taste of freedom. "And the bottom line is, one of the things that makes it the most difficult is the fact that I'm doing Charles Boney's time."

But Camm has had two chances to prove his innocence and has never been able to persuade a single juror that he's not a murderer.

"People have formulated an opinion, and they either believe in me or they don't. The people that believe in me are the same people that have always believed in me, and they require no convincing," he says. "There's one group of individuals that I'm concerned with right now, and that is the Indiana Supreme Court."

Camm's lawyers are asking for a third trial but even he knows that's a long shot.

For the Renn family the latest victory provides little comfort. They've always known who killed Kim, Brad, and Jill. They've never been sure why and even after six years and three trials, they still don't. They still have trouble understanding what happened in the garage that bloody night.

"You always wonder, you want the whole puzzle put together," says Kim's father Frank Renn. "There's a part missing and I'm not sure we'll ever know the whole truth."

Charles Boney was sentenced to 225 years. His appeal was denied.

It has cost more than $2 million to prosecute the Camm murders.

Produced By Marcie Spencer and Shoshanah Wolfson