According to a long article by Jim Keary and Ronald J. Hansen on the front page of the July 3 Washington Times, police are now theorizing that "one of the victims, Emory Allen Evans, might have prompted the shootings by scuffling with his killers in the store's office." (would you believe?)
As the Times puts it, "Investigators initially theorized the killings happened because Miss Mahoney--the only one who knew the combination--did not open the store's safe. But Mr. Evans was closest to the safe, and Miss Mahoney was farthest from it.
"Also, police originally thought a bullet found in the ceiling was a warning shot. It now seems likely that a gun was fired as Mr. Evans struggled with his killer, sources said. The bullet shot into the ceiling was in the middle of the office, not above the safe, contrary to many reports."
Whoa here! Let's restate this. Up to now we have been told by the police through the press that they concluded it was a botched robbery because there was a bullet hole in the ceiling above the safe, as though fired as a warning shot. Now they're telling us they figure it was a botched robbery--through the press again--because the hole is in the ceiling well away from the safe.
So this is how it works. You conclude botched robbery first and then you try to find some facts to fit it. The killers should have planted a gun in one of the victim's hands. Then they would have concluded murder-suicide, no doubt.
The key new facts for the public here are that former White House intern (a fact unmentioned in the latest article) Mary Caitrin Mahoney was found farthest from the safe and the bullet hole in the ceiling was not near the safe. The police knew this all along, and yet they told us through the press that the hole was in the ceiling over the safe. So why are they changing their story. Probably people at Starbucks noticed the misplacement of the bullet hole and were, shall we say, expressing a degree of skepticism about the official story.
The Times article also contains another big contradiction. The headline is "Cops eye 5 suspects 1 year after Starbucks killings." One of the suspects, they tell us, is that same former Georgetown Starbucks employee that they told us about at the beginning of the case. Just a few lines later, however, they quote a police source saying "It's a stranger-on-stranger case. Most of your cases they somehow know the victim. We don't have any witnesses, and the people who did it aren't talking. It isn't something to brag about. They can't go around saying, 'I went in and killed three people and got nothing.'"
Later still in the article, speculating on how the killers obtained entry into the locked-for-the-night store they say, "...they might have known one of the victims, who simply let them in the store. Because of that possibility, investigators interviewed former and current employees.
"One man who has not been ruled out is a former employee whom Miss Mahoney had fired."
Apparently they have ruled out former employers of Miss Mahoney, however. She, by the way, was shot five times.
And here's a final bit of new information on the case, for what it is worth:
"After the shootings, the robbers picked the pockets of the corpses and took whatever money they could find, sources said. The killers walked out the unlocked front door without touching two registers filled with cash."
If you're going to botch a robbery, you might as well botch it good.
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