Delia D'Ambra

Police quickly identified the fifth victim at the second crime scene as Home Speech resident Robert Matske.

Robert was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who lived at a condo across from where the Dumas station wagon and boat had jackknifed.

According to what his relatives told authorities and later the press, Robert had witnessed the crash while doing yard work and immediately gone inside to tell his wife Mary to dial 911.

After that, he'd stepped back outside and saw a guy emerge from the crash station wagon, grab a bike out of the boat, and take off toward the foodway parking lot.

Concerned by the sight and likely wondering why someone would leave the scene of an accident, Robert got into his convertible and followed the stranger to confront him.

A woman who'd been shopping at the foodway told police that Robert and the unknown man had a brief exchange of words before the assailant pulled out a gun and shot the 60-year-old in the back of his head while he was still sitting in the driver's seat of his convertible.

After that, the stranger got into another vehicle that was already parked in the grocery store's lot and drove off.

To get a better grasp of what they were dealing with and to try and get some answers, detectives worked the two crime scenes as best as they could, collecting bullet fragments and dusting for fingerprints.

They were up against some challenges though, because reportedly there was no murder weapon found at either scene.

And when the Dumois station wagon and boat trailer jackknifed, it had come to rest right in the middle of some sprinklers and gotten coated in water and mud.

So, forensically, those were not ideal conditions for fingerprinting the exteriors.

Authorities ultimately ended up towing the station wagon and Roberts' car to the city's garage for further evaluation.

There, they were able to pull several latent fingerprints from those items of evidence, which they hoped to eventually compare against prints from other police agencies.

Some of the source material states that the fingerprints collected came from the Dumas station wagon and boat, but from what specific areas in or on those vehicles is a bit hard to pin down.

Annie told me that her family had always been told that police couldn't find any usable prints from inside the station wagon due to too much contamination at the crime scene.

But that explanation never made sense to her because she remembered from being at the crime scene herself that the way the station wagon had jackknifed against the boat trailer, one of the back passenger doors had been pinned against the family's boat and trailer, which only left one rear passenger door that the assailant could have escaped from.

She pointed out during our interview that in order for the killer to get out of the back seat of the car, he had to have touched the inside door handle lever to open the door.

She thinks that the rear door handle would probably have been a key area that law enforcement checked for forensic evidence, like a fingerprint.

But the only source I read that mentioned if police got prints from inside the station wagon was an article by the Bradenton Herald, which was published well after the crime.

And it didn't specify if the rear door handle on the inside was where any prints were found.