M. William Phelps

As the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office waited for word on the warrant, they needed to exclude or include Mike Fole and Katie Inglis, along with the third, still unnamed person with them on that night.

I dug deeply into these two myself, interviewing friends and sifting through documentation about their lives.

Mike was 21 and had this disheveled look about him.

He wore a scraggly mustache, a bit of a goatee.

He had dark, bushy eyebrows and long, stringy, hippie hair, that 1970s Led Zeppelin look, and would have fit right in with Charles Manson's helter-skelter group of misfits.

He had been sleeping in the basement of his parents' house.

Mike's girlfriend, 19-year-old Katie Inglis, had a wiry look.

She did her best to come across as the girl next door.

Her brown eyes were wide and globe-like underneath big framed glasses.

She kind of looked like the mashup of a librarian and a girl on the run from something.

Her dirty blonde hair was straight and flat and wild.

Shy, she didn't say much of anything, except maybe after being pressed.

I spoke to a friend of Mike and Katie's over the phone.

During their interviews with Locke, Mike and Katie were fairly forthcoming about their movements the previous Saturday.

But their reason for being there took the investigation in a whole new direction.

In other words, these kids who just happened to be at the Schwartz house on the night the man was murdered were friends with Schwartz's youngest daughter and had gone to the house to see her?

It placed them not only at the scene of the murder, but also left them with a question.

Why hadn't Clara, Schwartz's daughter, mentioned this to them in her messy dorm room?

This was a connection that had to be explored.

One of the problems Locke encountered while interviewing Mike and Katie was their demeanor.