MrBallen

And they had found out that that story was true.

He really had been in Iowa.

And so this made Shepard's theory that Kurt had assembled the bomb in Kem's basement a lot less likely, since Kem was home all week and Kurt wasn't there.

Plus, Kem's babysitter had given police two additional pieces of information that really widened the suspect pool.

First, she said that the spare key to Kem's house had recently gone missing.

The second thing was, because the spare key was gone, Kem had gotten locked out at some point and had to cut a hole in the screen in the back door to get inside.

And so this meant that basically anybody could have gotten inside of Kem's house to build the bomb if they just went in through the back door or if they, you know, had the key, if they stole the key.

So Shepard's suspect list effectively had gone from Kurt to all of Bloomington.

Just before lunchtime, Shepard walked into the station's interrogation room where Kem's ex-husband, Todd Wenger, was sitting waiting for him.

With Kem's fiance, Kurt, looking less and less likely as a suspect, the detectives had set their sight on Kem's exes.

Both Todd, who was the father of Kem's daughter, and Dale Fosdick, who was the father of Kem's son, not only had obvious motives, but they also knew Kem's schedule because each of them had been watching one of her children over the weekend before she was killed.

Shepard's partner had actually already spoken to Dale, basically a couple of hours after the explosion he had spoken to him, while Shepard himself had been busy questioning Kurt.

And during that exchange, Dale had seemed shocked by Kem's death, and he'd made what seemed like a good faith effort to answer the detective's questions, although his son kept crying and interrupting them.

Dale did admit to having some tension with Kem, but he also had an alibi.

He'd been with family in the morning and doing yard work in full view of his neighbors in the afternoon and the evening.

He'd given Shepard's partner names and phone numbers of potential witnesses that could have witnessed this, and a preliminary round of calls to those witnesses had suggested that Dale was telling the truth.

But the detectives were conducting all their interviews with very little information about the crime itself.

because they didn't really know how the bomb that killed Kem actually worked.

They weren't sure if the killer had to be, you know, right nearby to detonate it, or if maybe it had been remote-operated so the killer could be farther away, or maybe the bomb was just set to some kind of timer.

Scientists at the ATF were trying to reconstruct the bomb from all the shrapnel, but until they did that, Shepard and his partner would not know exactly when the killer would have been at Kem's house.