Court TV to feature confession in murder case
The Daily Inter Lake
The Kalispell Police Department investigation into a murder will be featured in a Court TV program.
Detective Sgt. Brian Fulford said the case against Joseph Buck in the murder of George Evans in 2002 will be part of Court TV's show "The Room," spotlighting successful interviewing techniques for police.
Buck was convicted less than a year after the murder. He was sentenced to life plus 50 years in prison, and is ineligible for parole.
A Court TV crew will be in Kalispell on Nov. 15 to interview the police interviewers, Fulford said. The crew also went to the FBI academy in Quantico, Va., to talk to Kalispell detective Roger Nasset, who is training at the academy.
Fulford said the crew is interested in the psychological aspects of interviewing suspects.
Buck appealed his conviction, based in part on his recorded confession to police that Court TV will feature. The Montana Supreme Court upheld his conviction on all seven points that Buck raised.
Police were called to Evans' Airport Road home and secondhand business in Kalispell on Oct. 25, 2002. Buck had gone there to steal guns. Evans awoke between 2 and 3 a.m., and Buck attacked him, breaking five rifles over the 64-year-old man's head and back. It appeared that Buck kicked or stomped Evans hard enough to fracture his ribs. Buck bound Evans' hands behind his back, taped his eyes, and left him to die of his injuries.
It took days for investigators to be sure that Buck wasn't shot or stabbed because his body was so brutalized.
The police investigation led to Buck, whom a witness identified as the person she saw leaving Evans' home on the morning of his murder.
When police first called in Buck for an interview, he denied being involved in the murder. He was interviewed twice, over two days in November, in six hours of interrogation that were recorded by police, Fulford said.
"One time during the second interview, it felt like we were getting close," Fulford said.
Nasset was the interviewer. Buck was answering questions, but Nasset "just couldn't get him to go any further" in admitting he was in Evans' home.
Suspects "almost never really come clean," Fulford said.
Police decided to switch interviewers and start all over again.
Buck was angered by the new inquisitors and demanded, "Get the other guy back in here."
Nasset returned and Buck confessed that he had broken into Evans' home. He did tie him up. He did beat him. But Evans was alive when Buck left, he insisted.
That confession, along with witness testimony and evidence of Buck's blood in the Evans house and Evans' blood in Buck's house, led a jury to convict Buck in August 2003.
Officers, including Fulford, worked 22 or more hours at a time. Evans' secondhand store and home were a nightmare of investigative clutter, requiring hundreds of items to be tested for evidence. Former detective Cmdr. Greg Burns canceled his vacation to work the case.
Buck's confession nailed down the case, Fulford said.
"There are so many factors to getting a good result. You have to have a good team, especially in a complicated whodunit like that," Fulford said.
"The interview was like the crowning glory" of the Buck case, Fulford said.
On Nov. 8, 2002, police interviewed Buck a second time. He admitted entering Evans' house and beating him, but he said Evans was alive when he left. After Buck confessed, Kalispell police detective Greg Burns asked for a scraping from beneath Buck's fingernails. Buck said he wanted a lawyer.
In his appeal, Buck maintained that his confession should have been inadmissible at trial because he had asked for an attorney. Lympus - and now the Supreme Court - found that Buck's request for a lawyer was related solely to the request for physical evidence from him and that he had signed a form and agreed to waive his Miranda rights.