Ashley Flowers

It

practically begs to be treated as a high-value lead.

But here's the part that gets glossed over.

According to the Des Moines Register, at the time of Tom's death, there were more than 5,000 similar blue cars registered in the state of Iowa.

So even if the sightings were accurate, it didn't exactly narrow the playing field.

Our team got a chance to look at the case file, and it was clear that investigators spent a lot of time and a lot of energy tracking down that car, or at least trying to, and trying to match the tire tracks to possible suspect vehicles.

But they came up empty.

No plate, no driver, nothing.

But police didn't take that to mean that the mystery car and the mystery man didn't exist.

Actually, they were kind of certain he did.

Former Sheriff Whitlatch puts it like this.

Over the first year of the investigation, that became the working theory, that Dawn was responsible for Tom's death with the help of a man.

That could account for Dawn's strange behavior and the evidence and sightings that pointed to an unknown man.

Former Sheriff Whitlatch tried to nod at this in an interview with the Quad City Times back in November 1992.

He was talking about the lead of a man and a woman in the Mather driveway, and he said, quote, We have our guess who the woman was, but I'd rather not say who.

More than 34 years later, the former sheriff is still a bit cagey when it comes to saying who he was talking about.

But the reports we saw show that they were clearly looking at Dawn.

And if she was involved, it's obvious that they actually had a theory in those early days about who could have helped her.

When investigators considered who the man in those sightings could have been, the first person they focused on was Tom's best friend, Dave Baranek.

When investigators interviewed Dave, they dropped a bomb on him out of the gates.